It really depends on the perspective you bring and what you're comparing it to. If the equivalent alternative to working at Google on AdSense sales is working as a consultant at McKinsey or at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, then no it may not necessarily be the "opportunity of a lifetime".
To someone in the Silicon Valley bubble comparing a PMM role at Google to a PMM role at Uber or Airbnb, it may be difficult to see the real value of Google on a resume.
However, to most people in the world those roles are all opportunities of a lifetime. If you look at my peers in every job I've held since working at Google and treated Google as a neutral company (i.e. not having any real career boosting value), I would have been by far the least qualified individual in many of those roles. Having Google on my resume landed me interviews and job offers I would not otherwise have gotten.
It also suggests a credibility to employers in the non-engineering world because many believe that an employee at Google must be super intelligent and highly competent. Believe it or not, I'd venture to say that this is more so true outside of Silicon Valley (where Google isn't as common of a former employee among job applicants) than inside. But I think it boosts your career prospects either way.
The key, like most things in life, is how the individual chooses to leverage the name recognition on their resume and supplement that experience with other experiences.
Have you been to the eastern part of Michigan? The Detroit suburbs like Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Bloomfield Hills, etc. are absurdly affluent. Not to mention that places like Ann Arbor, and even Royal Oak and Dearborn Heights are doing fairly well. I'd attribute it to suburban flight more than an East/West divide.
I didn't mean to make the point "that a business benefits off another's hard work does not nessecary deprive the worker of their income". Sorry, I guess it was lost in translation somehow. My point is that Google profits disproportionately off the work of others relative to the value it creates, and that its network effects tip the scales towards a more top-heavy, power law distribution that's not sustainable in the long-term under the guise of "openness" because, hey, we get everything for free. And that this is propogated as "free" and "open" when in reality it just represents a shift in who controls what.
May not necessarily be a popular opinion on here, but I'll state it anyway:
Google may not directly profit from Google News, but they still manage to extract value from it. We exist in a top-heavy paradigm where giant servers profiteer off the work of everybody else, capturing a disproportionate percentage of the total value created.
It's unfortunate but not unexpected that Google's response is this snarky blog post. But I wish people wouldn't pretend this is somehow a giant government tipping the scales against "openness".
I see this more as an institution in charge of making sure our collective greed not getting the better of us trying to distribute wealth to those who create it proportionate to the value being created.
Is it a futile attempt, likely unaware of its own vision? Sure. I just wish Silicon Valley would get its head out of the sand and realize that the current paradigm isn't necessarily sustainable for anyone -- whether you're the one sitting atop Mt. Server enjoying crazy network effects or the person contributing value for peanuts (if you're lucky).
If you're a startup founder accepted into Detroit Tech Stars (or even a YC) who lives in a foreign country, there should be a policy in place to give you an accelerated visa to work / live in the US provided you base your startup out of Detroit. Could be a good policy experiment on urban renewal.
For the same reasons that a healthcare startup is willing to take on arguably more risk and longer lead times to sales compared to any other industry -- there's so much human impact that can be made (and money at stake) that even a small dent in the healthcare space represents thousands of lives (and billions of dollars). A company like Google or Apple can make more than just a small dent.
From a macro perspective, the US has an aging population with the Baby Boomer generation entering older adulthood. Older population = greater health needs. Financially, it makes a lot of sense for a large company with vast resources like Google or Apple to make a splash in healthcare. And now's the time to do it.
They also have a distinct advantage over startups when it comes to introducing change from outside the healthcare industry. They can withstand the long sales cycle that it takes to get approvals without needing to balance fundraising in the process. Not to mention their unique ability to reduce the length of those sales cycles. They're more likely to win pilots and scale, and faster, because of their brand recognition -- a key competitive advantage when you're talking about a risk averse space like the healthcare industry. Not to mention, you typically need to get a lot of stakeholders together (providers, payers, patients) and align incentives in order to get anywhere. Large companies have a huge advantage here and can influence change relatively quickly. Healthcare institutions are constantly discussing the need for technological disruption (and have the budget / financial incentives to foot it), but by nature they are highly risk averse to any major changes. Large tech companies are uniquely positioned.
SOURCE: I once worked on a healthcare startup, have been through a healthcare startup incubator program, have friends who are doctors and healthcare administrators, am familiar with healthcare investor thinking, and am connected to a spectrum of healthcare startups (both successful and early stage).
This could be a good content marketing play as well for qualified lead gen outreach on other platforms -- offer clear value to developers in exchange for their e-mail addresses and accompanying data points about those developers.
It probably depends on what kind of a company you are trying to start. Groupthink or an approach that over-emphasizes engineering in place of value prop / understanding the market you are serving can hinder you, and that could be a competitive advantage for NYC.
One thing I will point out: most investors in NYC are looking for Series A or later. Or proven profitability. It's a more conventional community; the type of investors you'll see in New York made their money in PE/finance/investment banking and not tech. NYC as a market is very much a place to build a company where your primary metric is not MAU's or an innovative idea but rather something that moderately takes a linear approach in helping an established industry innovate. Or already profitable. I'd be surprised to see the next Amazon, Google, or Tesla ever come out of New York. The next DoubleClick or Travelocity? Sure.
"Yet because ugliness is harder to define than race or sex, some argue that anti-discrimination laws are impossible to maintain." Anybody else find the premise to that statement a bit short-sighted? I just read an interesting book called "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, where he cites scientific studies that prove many of our prejudices occur not at the conscious level, but rather unconsciously. In other words, even if you personally do not consider yourself a racist, a sexist, or a looks-ist (need a real word for that last one), you can easily be swayed by such factors -- even if you are aware that you could be influenced.
To assume it all happens consciously, and to consider legislation as the primary way of preventing discrimination, is a bit short-sighted in my opinion. Being aware of this concept is a first step, but efforts should be made to control for unconscious bias as well. Companies have an incentive to do this as they may be passing up better qualified candidates. Perhaps developing a way to implement blind performance reviews or conducting non-soft skills, technical interviews that test a person's cognitive ability behind a screen could be one way to curb the trend.
To someone in the Silicon Valley bubble comparing a PMM role at Google to a PMM role at Uber or Airbnb, it may be difficult to see the real value of Google on a resume.
However, to most people in the world those roles are all opportunities of a lifetime. If you look at my peers in every job I've held since working at Google and treated Google as a neutral company (i.e. not having any real career boosting value), I would have been by far the least qualified individual in many of those roles. Having Google on my resume landed me interviews and job offers I would not otherwise have gotten.
It also suggests a credibility to employers in the non-engineering world because many believe that an employee at Google must be super intelligent and highly competent. Believe it or not, I'd venture to say that this is more so true outside of Silicon Valley (where Google isn't as common of a former employee among job applicants) than inside. But I think it boosts your career prospects either way.
The key, like most things in life, is how the individual chooses to leverage the name recognition on their resume and supplement that experience with other experiences.