[HN Gopher] Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
Author : whiplashoo
Score : 1113 points
Date : 2023-11-22 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ln.hixie.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (ln.hixie.ch)
| blakesterz wrote:
| I think this link should point to the post at
| https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
| dang wrote:
| Yup. Changed from https://ln.hixie.ch/. Thanks!
| markdog12 wrote:
| > Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department
| that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter,
| Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy,
| but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never
| figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing
| her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is
| minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are
| completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as
| commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people
| against their will in ways that have no relationship to their
| skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive
| feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it).
|
| As someone who's very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off
| to hear.
|
| I guess that's what this tweet is alluding to:
| https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273
| tyingq wrote:
| If true, it does sound terrible. Though, I would focus not so
| much on one named person. The culture is allowing it, leaders
| above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and
| so on.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Yep. It usually is a ship leaking from the top. I have seen
| it (not from Google).
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't agree with the author's complaint about the culture
| changing, it's just that the leadership is weak and
| directionless, which was also mentioned.
| ryandrake wrote:
| OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important
| bit:
|
| > I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy
| than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off
| their backs, feeding her just the right information at the
| right time.
|
| I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this
| in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's
| exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward".
| Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second
| job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting
| status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision,
| making sure you or your team are _invisible_ rather than
| visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying
| to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her
| gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets
| dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you 're going
| to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at
| worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> but have worked with many like her in my career_
|
| Haven't we all? Unfortunately, in most corporate jobs, your
| main job is looking good in front of your boss, and making
| your boss look good in front of his boss, who further
| perpetuates this theatrical shit-show. Your actual work
| comes a distant second.
|
| I burned myself once or twice by keeping my head down just
| focused on doing quality work and helping others, but
| without taking care that it also had the right upward
| visibility to my boss and the right people above him, and
| ended up getting laid off, while people who were experts at
| pretending to work and glorifying every little achievement
| kept getting the laurels and promotions.
|
| Such is the case in very large orgs with rotten culture and
| lack of transparency, and you need to withstand the heat if
| you're gonna be working in the kitchen.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Absolutely, it's hard to overstate the importance of the
| theatrics and performance art. In many places, it's far
| more important that you "socialize" and "self-promote"
| than that you actually do your work. If I could go back
| 25 years and deliver one message to my old working self
| starting fresh out of college, it would be: "Buy lots of
| bitcoin and sell it in October 2021." But if I had a
| second message, it would be: "Concentrate on self-
| promotion and managing upward. You'll never get promoted
| just doing your job really well."
| gowld wrote:
| Tacky to sling accusations without evidence or examples.
| potatopatch wrote:
| Pretty silly thing to do whether or not you have perfect
| examples, and strange to follow that up with the fact that
| you've been offering career advice..
|
| There's not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion
| out of something like that compared to the pretty personal
| ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the
| most constructive attempts look vindictive.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's very little to be gained by making a post like that
| focus on an individual. I do think there are often changes
| in companies over time as they age and grow--but it really
| isn't so much about some specific individual much of the
| time. To some degree, it's inevitable.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I also noticed the bit about offering career advice to
| people in Google, but I found it odd for a different
| reason. How can someone who's spent 18 years of their
| career (and I'm guessing, almost all of it) at Google
| possibly be qualified to give career advice? They can give
| excellent advice for working _at Google._ But if they haven
| 't left the company in 18 years, then surely they don't
| have the experience to give useful career advice that isn't
| at least heavily biased toward the idiosyncrasies of their
| one job. Even if they had a decade of experience prior to
| Google, how useful is pre-2005 career advice now?
|
| That's not to say the author couldn't give valuable advice,
| especially in more generalized areas like the craft of
| programming, or even navigating office politics. It's just
| that any advice will inevitably be specific to Google. It
| seems strange to offer career advice when you've not had a
| "career" per se - more like you've had one really long job.
|
| And who's asking him for this advice? Did people get wind
| that he might be looking for other jobs, and so he became
| the "career guy?" If so, that's a revealing insight into
| the culture at Google, evocative of flock animals asking
| their least risk averse member what he saw on his adventure
| beyond the paddock...
| munificent wrote:
| _> They can give excellent advice for working at Google._
|
| My understanding is that that's the kind of mentoring he
| offerred, yes.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| IMO the leader in question doesn't have a coherent strategy
| because she's likely trying to justify her org (and keep jobs!)
| in the face of a lot of developers who just don't care a whole
| lot about her portfolio. Her org could probably function with
| less people and achieve the same outcomes, but instead of
| getting rid of them, she's probably trying to make something
| happen by moving people around.
|
| In an environment like that, your correct insights about "where
| we're headed" don't matter. The only thing that matters is that
| the leader can keep their org and not face layoffs. If that
| means shoving people around and not listening to what folks are
| saying, then that's what happens.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Slightly above that comment is this line:
|
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
|
| I've been calling that out for years as it is obvious from the
| outside: Pichai is not a leader but a care taker. He has no
| vision that anyone can seem to articulate. And apparently he's
| restructured the company to not have any people reporting to
| him that have one either. Shocking to get some inside
| confirmation of what is clear to see from the outside.
|
| I was reading Hixie's blog when he was working on WhatWG. He
| was one of the main authors of the HTML 5 spec. Always had
| great respect for how he communicated. Him being this explicit
| is a message in itself. He was juggling highly opinionated
| people arguing all sorts of things when he was writing that
| spec. Part of the reason why that worked was his pragmatism and
| ability to stay calm. This is a really strongly worded message
| and people at Google and in their board would do well to take
| note of it and take action.
|
| My recommendation: time for some leadership changes. Doing more
| of the same isn't going to work. Do it more smartly than
| OpenAI. But don't wait.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Thanks for the post. I for one would love to experience the early
| Google culture. I'm not competent enough but as a middle-aged man
| I believe I have more fire than many of my peers.
| kens wrote:
| That post is a very good description of Google and matches my
| experience at Google (2004-2016), both the good and bad. There is
| a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN, so
| hopefully this post will help. (Note: you need to scroll down a
| bit on the page to get the post.)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| hi Ken. I don't think I mentioned you in the Enterprise
| article!
| kelnos wrote:
| > _There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on
| HN_
|
| Is there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google
| (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but
| this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the
| company and what happened there over time.
|
| (Of course I can't speak for all HNers...)
| politelemon wrote:
| Having spent a vast amount of time reading comments, there
| certainly is. HN can frequently become an echo chamber,
| though pretends not to be; and has very clear favorite tech
| darlings and near-immovable, predefined villains (Google
| being one of them).
| lesuorac wrote:
| > one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie
| warnings we have to wade through today.
|
| Hey if you're cool with me using your hardrive to store data I
| have a bunch of chia coins that need mining. Its weird how
| getting somebody's permission before using their stuff is
| considered unnecessary.
| Chabsff wrote:
| I think you might be confusing cookies and local storage.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Where do you think cookies get stored?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Not localStorage.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Non-sequitor.
|
| If you look back the at the original post I say "Hard
| drive" not the "localStorage object".
|
| And they are indeed stored are your system and not the
| servers.
|
| https://allaboutcookies.org/what-is-a-cookie-
| file#:~:text=In....
| LargeTomato wrote:
| You do say hard drive but you also imply that permission
| to store cookies is as good as permission to mine
| cryptocurrency simply because the user allowed access to
| storage.
|
| The argument these other commenters are trying to make
| hinges on the idea that the type of storage for cookies
| wouldn't work that well for crypto mining.
|
| You're calling that argument nonsequitor and I don't
| think it is. It's immediately applicable to explaining
| the gap in your reasoning. That gap, for the record,
| being Cookies Storage == Crypto Mining.
|
| Finally, let me give an example. "I own my house and my
| land so therefore I'm a sovereign citizen." That's a bad
| argument for largely the same reasons.
| Chabsff wrote:
| The distinction, and this is an important one, is that
| cookies have a hard cap of 4Kb of data per domain, making
| them nigh-useless for that purpose. All they are good for
| is recognizing a given user server-side across multiple
| page loads and storage of a few handful of user
| preferences. Cookies also get sent with every request, so
| using them as storage is just asking to balloon your
| bandwidth costs.
|
| On top of that, using localStorage for storing large
| amounts of data rarely involves anything like a cookie
| warning because it's 100% client side unless manually
| sent back to the server. And even then, if you anonymize
| the data (i.e. you don't care who's storage you are
| using), you still don't technically need any warning.
|
| All this to say: There is basically no relationship
| whatsoever between pervasive cookie warnings and the
| usage concerns you are voicing. Both are valid concerns,
| both are important stakes, but they have nothing to do
| with one-another.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Well they're two different APIs. Most people aren't
| concerned about a few KB to store things like sessions.
| Most people don't even know what cookies are.
|
| So the cookie warnings have basically become the Prop-8
| warnings of the internet, where they're so prevalent people
| just ignore them, but the cookie warnings are more annoying
| since they require active dismissal.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Your understanding of web technology is incredible. You should
| run for congress.
| icedchai wrote:
| It is weird to focus on storage, considering the cache for the
| HTML/CSS/JS generating the warnings likely takes up _much_ more
| storage space than the cookies themselves.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| I noticed that comment also. It seems like the point of view of
| an engineer that doesn't really think about security.
|
| Reminded me of when I first discovered that major browsers
| allow third party cookies by default. And thinking I can't
| believe they allow this massive privacy leak.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| You don't need to show a "cookie warning" to store a cookie.
| You only need to show a warning if you're tracking a user,
| regardless of the technology used (cookie, local storage...)
| But if you want to store someone's language choice, username,
| or credentials in a cookie, no banner is needed. In fact, this
| website is the perfect example.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| A lot of glorified companies are completely filled with corrupt,
| inept management. I hope this recession destroys this management
| culture and brings back the ethos of innovation in engineering
| and product.
| financltravsty wrote:
| Be the change you want to see.
|
| I'm not holding out. Public companies all turn into this.
|
| One solution is to make greed and going public a shameful
| thing; but who's going to do that?
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > Be the change you want to see.
|
| I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who
| will always prioritize a mix of business needs and
| engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And
| then, to shame/call out other "leaders" throwing their people
| under the bus.
|
| I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only
| way to maintain company culture in the direction of
| innovation.
| pkasting wrote:
| As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't
| speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I
| agree with every other word of this.
|
| It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely
| well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often
| viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this
| point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term,
| and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
|
| I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But
| the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured,
| reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the
| importing of "business focus" and the "bottom line" (read: short
| term share price) to Google's management structure wholesale.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.
| pkasting wrote:
| Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give
| Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our
| motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of
| the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely
| anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms.
|
| Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out
| ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which
| side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what
| matters is what the actual consequences will be.
|
| If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak
| up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is
| advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that
| position would have in practice.
|
| Google's size and power mean that causing harm is
| exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices.
| Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at
| the times we were trying our best makes that more
| challenging.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as
| foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the
| product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is
| good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
| pkasting wrote:
| Having been in the room on a number of these occasions, a
| don't think this description is remotely accurate.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| What's the mood in the room when-
|
| "I have a change to propose to the http standard that
| doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification
| attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!"
|
| or
|
| "I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all
| of the google image search results instead of any other
| website in the world!"
|
| or
|
| "Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few
| sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are
| okay?"
|
| Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-
| sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I
| don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day
| with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider
| any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
| stephenr wrote:
| > genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly
| (and often viciously) critical of the motives of
|
| If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over
| your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't
| make it any less of a duck.
|
| Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of
| Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the
| motives of abattoir workers [1].
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733
| jorvi wrote:
| > It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of
| genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly
| (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the
| (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the
| long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of
| Google.
|
| This sentence is an oxymoron.
|
| How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at
| the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
| akprasad wrote:
| > How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and
| at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the
| user"?
|
| I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-
| intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2)
| indifference to the user from upper management. It's
| institutional misalignment.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and
| at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the
| user"?
|
| Only the first was a description of _the work_ , the other
| was a description of the culture to which those doing the
| work are subjected to _from above_.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| It is only an oxymoron in the worst possible interpretation
| to the point of maliciousness.
| spdif899 wrote:
| I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling
| frustrated that public perception isn't able to match your
| privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I
| feel my eyes roll involuntarily here.
|
| From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-
| serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent
| decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity
| and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.
|
| The only difference we can see recently is they are more
| interested in short term profit than long term, which makes
| their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.
|
| Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone
| could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and
| objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster
| child of capitalism
| debatem1 wrote:
| The point being made is exactly that your inference about
| Google's motives early on was wrong. Common. But wrong.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "Our motto is "Don't be evil"" is not an inference. It's a
| quote.
| debatem1 wrote:
| The inference you made is that Google actually was evil
| all along.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I haven't made any inference at all.
|
| You seem to be telling the GP that they made a (common)
| mistake in thinking that early Google had non-evil
| motives.
| debatem1 wrote:
| Well, given that you aren't who I thought I was talking
| with at least one of us is confused, but I suspect both
| of us are now.
|
| The post I replied to was stating, essentially, that in
| their opinion Google had always been evil and only the
| timescales had changed.
|
| My point is that multiple insiders (including myself) can
| confirm that Google took "Don't Be Evil" really seriously
| for a long time and that the cynics were wrong then to
| believe otherwise.
| spdif899 wrote:
| I'm the one you originally replied to, and yes that's
| roughly what I'm saying - maybe the individual engineers
| and designers that built features were trying their best
| not to be evil, but the company as a whole always had
| dark motives.
|
| They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always
| drove people to use their versions of things with overly
| pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry
| than necessary.
|
| They bought Android and turned it into a profit center,
| bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time
| making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird
| algorithms.
|
| Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google
| the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-
| opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the
| grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always
| stretching every one of them to suck more private data,
| more telemetry, and more ad value.
|
| Just because they invest in an open source programming
| thing (that gets people to use their platforms and
| ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the
| motives of
|
| Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to
| being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what
| Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives.
|
| This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the
| engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good
| people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change
| the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.
| kibwen wrote:
| Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And
| regardless of the intentions of the engineers, Google is run
| by its executives, not by its engineers. We don't have the
| luxury to extend the benefit of the doubt to
| ultramegacorporations.
| piva00 wrote:
| > It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of
| genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly
| (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the
| (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the
| long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of
| Google.
|
| Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us
| customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty
| clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt
| betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust
| fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over
| any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious.
|
| How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't
| anymore.
|
| Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much
| less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away
| from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account
| from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.
| trout11 wrote:
| Her linkedin profile is 'winner' if it helps provide any
| backstory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winner/
| chubot wrote:
| What projects you would you say the public has been
| unfairly/viciously critical of the motives of?
|
| I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly
| remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more
| of a difference of opinion.
|
| For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the
| lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important
| content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the
| publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain
| control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.
|
| ---
|
| I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten
| ENOUGH flack for.
|
| The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the
| beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about
| privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.
|
| Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of
| the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change
| to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the
| SSISD database.
|
| A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements
| paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022,
| which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track
| your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that,
| but it's unsurprising.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w...
|
| Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there,
| or the company was unfairly prosecuted?
|
| I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY
| consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark
| patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where
| current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is.
| It's just cultural now.
|
| There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people
| don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has
| bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct.
|
| If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google
| Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC,
| Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on),
| but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose
| explicitly.
|
| That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that.
| IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public
| hasn't been unfair.
|
| (There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in"
| -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested"
| thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware
| they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the
| culture -- what's rewarded.)
|
| Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and
| it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will
| continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to.
| There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to
| find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on
| that one, and got a response from the product manager. They
| didn't change anything.
|
| ---
|
| When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was
| at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more
| money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that
| comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 )
|
| But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall.
|
| Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus
| even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions
| on many products. You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the
| company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a
| mandate from the top.
|
| Products that were poorly executed, violated the law,
| dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early
| promises, etc.
|
| There's a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at
| this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The
| company simply isn't user-centric, full stop. I can't see
| anyone argue otherwise.
|
| What's the most user-centric improvement from Google in the
| last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped
| paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago.
| My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great
| content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by
| with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated
| rapidly.
|
| In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| is this criticism reasonable though? Look at Waymo, for
| example. Investing in that is very visionary. I mean, someone
| has to work on the stuff that pays the current bills, right?
| Or, what about Bard? Sure, Bard kinda sucks compared to chat
| gpt 4, but it's really at worst number 2 in the most exciting
| current field?
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| I think what's been said, and the description of the general
| ineptness of that particular manager, has been 100% spot on.
| Middle management as a whole has basically gotten worse, meaner
| and generally less technically capable since 2018.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| > " _It 's frustrating to continue to see both the level of
| genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly
| (and often viciously) critical of the motives of..._"
|
| It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads
| of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon,
| Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.
|
| That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most
| (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its
| revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the
| online world.
| eh_why_not wrote:
| _> ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the
| public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the
| motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of
| concern for the user, the long term..._
|
| If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how
| can work be "well-intentioned"?
|
| Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as
| good?
| t8sr wrote:
| Around 2016 at Google, my entire reporting chain, from manager to
| CEO, changed. Literally not a single person was left. Laszlo,
| both Erics, Patrick and the rest of the L team all left in quick
| succession. I think the old Google of < 2015 and the current
| Google are two companies that have almost nothing in common.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I guess it was the Alphabet saga? It's all like this. I have
| decided that if given the chance, I'd never work in companies
| with more than 1,000 persons.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Not even if they pay well enough that you can quit and still
| afford having a family in only 5 years, instead of 20?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Can't speak for OP, of course, but for me -- no, not even
| then. There really are things money can't buy.
| t8sr wrote:
| Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And
| it was still completely open internally and had a real
| community feel to it.
|
| One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal
| reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the
| Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random
| project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR
| a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of
| culture going for much longer than people think.
|
| Conversely, I've worked at companies with 500 employees that
| were the blandest kind of "enterprise business company firm"
| you can imagine. :)
| cbozeman wrote:
| > I walked into the Google office there, made some friends,
| worked on a random project they were doing and ended up
| collaborating on an OKR a year later.
|
| This is the coolest shit I have ever read.
|
| Now that's a company culture of which people would want to
| be a part.
| skisatwork wrote:
| I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT
| department and we have this culture. The IT department
| alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past
| weekend I found myself in a different region needing a
| desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the
| nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk
| cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and
| ideas of them for process improvements. This communal
| culture is hard to find and I have no intention of
| leaving until the culture dies.
| antupis wrote:
| Is there currently companies where you can do this?
| t8sr wrote:
| The industry has changed in a few important ways that I
| think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain.
|
| First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software
| problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but
| nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more
| specialized.
|
| Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-
| averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed
| optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things
| are more locked down and organizations less trusting.
|
| Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed.
| It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage
| industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech
| company. The people making their start in the 90s
| generally went into computing because they loved it, not
| because it was a good job.
|
| I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google
| have been going to, and I know people at some others.
| They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very
| different. And there are reasons to think that the
| current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not
| newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and
| regulation.
|
| This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's
| possible in this industry at this moment.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Ok, but you also just non ironically said "collaborating on
| an OKR".
| wbsun wrote:
| I like the old times when you could assume everyone around
| you is smarter than you, so collaboration and communication
| were never an issue. They never rely on "experts" in other
| teams to collaborate, they quickly and easily pick up how
| other systems work in depth themselves. Smart people just
| shine and work together to create amazing stuff.
|
| Nowadays, you need to explain to people why unit test is
| needed, why you can't use production as the first place to
| try a risky experiment, and rely on 20 experts, one in each
| tiny service, to figure out and to deliver a tiny feature
| with bloated timeline and messy quality.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| This sounds interesting. Maybe it's just me, but all 5000+
| people companies (I actually only worked with 200+ or
| 5000+, never the middle so could be BS) I worked for are a
| lot of BS and politics. Again this is probably because me
| not good enough so that I don't get to do deep technical
| things that I want to do.
| mepiethree wrote:
| conversely, I'm a boomerang Googler who worked there in
| 2015 and again now. In 2015, I felt like no one cared, that
| Googler engineering skills were overrated, and 17/23 people
| on my team quit in a year. In this stint, however, I'm
| amazed by how smart and passionate people are about a
| variety of different technologies, and enjoy collaborating
| across many teams on different things.
|
| I think the takeaway for me is that, in a company of
| hundreds of thousands of people, these experiences are more
| situational/random/based on what energy you bring to a
| space/team-based/seniority-based than they are a symptom of
| universal company culture.
| alberth wrote:
| > _"Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google."_
|
| Ouch.
|
| I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who
| spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| I think Pichai tries his best within his abilities, maybe it's
| time to pay attention to the ones who had chosen him?
| paxys wrote:
| The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader.
| That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a
| bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and
| increasing Google's share price.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don't
| even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom,
| OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder.
| Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves
| faster than we do!
|
| I remember the discussions around the office right when
| ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more
| ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yes, Microsoft really re-invented itself. Maybe Google can
| turn itself around too after a decade or two of malaise.
| antipaul wrote:
| But Microsoft reinvented itself with precisely leadership
| change in Satya, right?
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but consider that MS came from Ballmer, whom many
| of us blame for Microsoft's badness of the 00s (granted,
| Ballmer of course came from Gates, who probably set back
| general-purpose computing by decades due to his greed). I
| do believe Nadella has made MS a much better, likeable
| company, but I don't think I'll ever trust them to do
| right by humanity.
|
| Google has gone the other way: Page and Brin seemed to be
| well-liked outside of Google, as they were the
| visionaries who started it all. They made the choice to
| go with Pichai, who cares more about ad revenue than
| doing anything great. And Page and Brin, sadly, seem to
| be happy with their choice so far.
| duped wrote:
| ime Googlers/Xooglers have this egotism that needs a sharp
| kick in the butt to remedy.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Well they're getting that kick now.
| aquova wrote:
| And, as the article postulates, that sort of bean counting
| goes directly against what used to excite Google's employees,
| and is leading to their continued disillusionment.
| hshsbs84848 wrote:
| Yeah that's what I don't understand, what is the incentive to
| preserve the culture?
|
| Outcomes follow incentives
| jrmg wrote:
| 'Shareholders' can't do anything. Different classes of shares
| confer different voting rights, and Larry Page and Sergey
| Brin still own shares controlling over 50% of shareholder
| votes.
| Elof wrote:
| IDK, if you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under the
| leadership of Satya over the last 9 years it's obviously
| possible to innovate and bean count at the same time
| izacus wrote:
| Yes, but that happened after they had Ballmer which was
| their own bean counting CEO.
|
| And they noticed that that's a problem - something VERY FEW
| corporations figure out.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Having spent two decades at a far, far less known company, I
| think it's common for long-timers to look back with fondness
| and a feeling that their early days were Camelot, that the
| current days are worse, and that the fault lies with a specific
| leadership change.
|
| It's way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place
| growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it's growing
| 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.
|
| I don't have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I'm not at all
| surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and
| engaging place to be than 2023 Google.
| away271828 wrote:
| I've had that experience at a different company. Was really
| exciting when I joined and I had a very long leash to do
| pretty much whatever I thought was the right thing. Long-time
| manager left and did some new interesting stuff for a while.
| But then I bumped around a bit and I really just counted a
| couple years until my last major vests and retired.
| kelnos wrote:
| I sorta agree with you, but sorta don't. While I don't think
| you can squarely lay the blame on any one person, culture
| comes from the top. The board/CEO (but mostly the CEO) sets
| the culture, and hires (or molds) other executives and
| leadership positions into their vision of that culture.
|
| Page and Brin chose Pichai to succeed them. They, and the
| rest of their board, share blame as well.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| It feels like tech generally has a CEO vision problem.
|
| Andy Jassy + Sudar for example.
|
| off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and
| maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator
| than visionary.)
| paxys wrote:
| Tech started to have a vision problem the moment big money
| (and people with big money) entered the picture and started
| calling the shots. Sundar, Jassy, Satya, Tim Cook are all cut
| from the same cloth. Their job is to appease the shareholders
| and not much else.
|
| Zuckerberg is probably the only founder/majority shareholder
| still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar
| company day to day and executing his vision, and you have to
| give him kudos for that. He could easily go buy multiple
| countries instead and live out his life with a lot less
| stress.
| hshsbs84848 wrote:
| It's a tale as old as time
|
| The kid inherits the company built by the parent
| sokoloff wrote:
| Jassy was at AWS and in a senior role essentially since its
| inception. Retail predates Jassy, but I give Jassy a lot
| more credit than presiding over a company that someone else
| built.
| geodel wrote:
| > I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone
| who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.
|
| Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is
| a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes
| Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay
| same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically
| over same period.
|
| And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which
| most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of _visionary
| leadership_ would have been be great for employees and users is
| like saying _we can all live happily and peacefully on earth_.
| Sounds excellent but not really happening.
| omoikane wrote:
| I personally felt the best icon of original Google culture was
| Craig Silverstein, whose departure greatly affected the various
| intergrouplets that were holding the company culture together.
| In that sense, I wouldn't place all the blame on Sundar,
| although he didn't necessarily help.
|
| But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work
| environment might change from big family to big company to big
| factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size
| where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among
| themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what
| carries the culture forward.
| aappleby wrote:
| I'm the "12 years at Google" commenter from below.
|
| Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at
| Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my
| work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after
| that. Good guy.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google
| (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying
| "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs
| greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like
| "oops, my bad, wrong person".
|
| They intended to message someone else with my first name,
| so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to
| start the chat, and that person was no longer the first
| option in the auto-complete since I joined.
|
| (side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have
| been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )
| glimshe wrote:
| Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate
| history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most
| inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the "Dream Team" of
| Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is.
|
| Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite
| having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I
| know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the
| best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company
| to one uninspired direction after another.
|
| Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our
| species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to
| go.
| nrb wrote:
| I would rather the people go, and use their considerable
| intellect on things that have interests more aligned with
| societal benefit. Do we really want a re-ignited Google?
| glimshe wrote:
| If creates new things with the impact of Chrome, Maps and
| Gmail, but with less spyware? Hell, yeah!
| lannisterstark wrote:
| If it means it fuels more competition than the late
| stagnation in tech that was pre-LLM stuff? (and arguably in
| a wide variety of fields than just ML)
|
| Absolutely.
| chatmasta wrote:
| > Google hasn't created a new major product in years
|
| Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you
| might think. All their best products came from acquisitions:
| Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly
| original Google products that I can think of, other than
| Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by
| WebKit anyway).
|
| But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products.
| Maybe that's where their strength lies: in throwing a massive
| amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that
| can't be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way
| to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products _need_
| a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a
| good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What
| they 've been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a
| new project from zero.
|
| And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually
| almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it's
| unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more
| than once, or a handful of times if they're really lucky.
|
| The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they've got one
| flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads,
| and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has
| Facebook really innovated since their original product?
| rrdharan wrote:
| ~Chrome was an acquisition.~
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome (Edit: I
| misremembered / misstated, this is incorrect.)
|
| Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Spanner were not.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I would bet that the average tech-savvy outsider has a higher
| opinion of Sundar than the average Googler does.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yet another "famous" Googler whom I didn't know. He joined one
| month before I did. I did know Chris DiBona, at least. Didn't
| know this Jeanine person.
|
| I wrote a number of articles about working there in the early (or
| earlier) days. Chronologically:
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterp...
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads-co...
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps-c...
|
| As well as three others about the best part: the non-work
| activities.
| g-b-r wrote:
| He was famous (or infamous) way before joining Google
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Now that I think of it, the name IS vaguely familiar.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| If you were involved with W3C around the time of XHTML 2.0
| through to HTML 5.0 via WHATWG Ian is a well known person.
| gregw134 wrote:
| "At any rate, after exploring this, I naturally wondered if
| there wasn't some easier way to do it; not as statistically
| valid, maybe, but adequate for the advertiser who just wants to
| improve his performance. I won't go into the details here, but
| let's just say that everyone wanted a Super Deluxe version even
| if it did require changing every part of the Ads system. No one
| wanted something quick-and-dirty that just did the job. This
| was Google, after all; "quick and dirty" would not get you
| promoted or get your talk accepted at a conference. It did not
| make me popular to suggest this."
|
| I had a similar experience at Google--simple improvements such
| as parameter tuning are looked down on and rejected for being
| mere tinkering, even if the metrics are good. Meanwhile super
| complicated deep learning projects keep being added, even if
| they barely improve metrics. In the short term the complexity
| looks like hard work and leads to promotions, but long term it
| makes the system hard to maintain and understand.
| fidotron wrote:
| This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about
| the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of
| someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than
| they should have been.
|
| For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into
| the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views
| the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the
| truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other
| companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I
| recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at
| one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was
| at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between
| Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away
| with it, although that effort has now been effectively
| squandered). There have been other units that also fail to
| assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai
| never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way
| on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you
| wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed
| elsewhere.
|
| Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google,
| and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross
| his mind.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from
| the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was
| acquired by Google:
|
| https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early
| Android team.
|
| Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device
| to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to
| launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta
| throw everything in the trash and start over from the
| touchscreen perspective.
|
| Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better
| either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in
| hotels next to the office to save time, while having their
| marriages ruined according to some of them.
|
| The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a
| Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as
| much marketshare as quickly as possible.
| swetland wrote:
| The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over"
| thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement
| absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there
| was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the
| roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to
| ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a
| touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial
| launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely
| changed.
|
| Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back
| in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon
| to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work
| to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway
| before iPhone was announced.
|
| Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows
| Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed
| mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there
| was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular
| carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching
| themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s,
| possibly including a more successful attempt to control the
| browser/web experience.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way
| they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a
| more successful attempt to control the browser/web
| experience_
|
| That fear was kind of overblown. In those days of Steve
| Balmer, Microsoft was far less focused and organized, too
| high on its success with Windows and Office, for such a
| slow, large and bloated ship to react quickly and
| precisely enough on this.
|
| Just look at what they did with Zune before that. It was
| not a bad product at all, but it was too little too late
| for consumers to give up on Apple and jump ship to
| Microsoft.
|
| They did react here as well, but just like before, by the
| time they had a desirable and competitive mobile OS,
| Apple and Google had already reached critical mass
| adoption that no matter how good Microsoft's offering
| was, they wouldn't have been able to recoup the lead lost
| to Apple and Google both with consumer and developer
| adoption.
| swetland wrote:
| Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently
| "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also
| with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the
| Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to
| Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from
| constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting
| us get shit done and ship.
|
| I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months
| before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased
| here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't
| think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14
| years there in the end.
|
| Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics
| successfully really does not happen without dealing with
| external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.
|
| No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it
| became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined
| Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in
| 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton
| because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org
| projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with
| Material/Hardware.[2]
|
| Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any
| environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was
| due to those issues.
|
| Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people
| in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing
| L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of
| it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and
| attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of
| Android.
|
| As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I
| can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about
| myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic
| _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific
| products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out
| doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that
| focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at
| an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how
| little blowback there was externally. The justification is,
| as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what
| Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning
| cycle.
|
| [1] https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-
| googl...
|
| [2] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-material-you-
| interview-...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while
| people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they
| were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not
| understanding any of it_"
|
| Sounds like every org I worked in at Google, though it got
| worse as time went on. I started there end of 2011, and
| left end of 2021. This kind of bullshit is endemic to the
| tech culture at Google, but was the worst inside smaller
| sites or in teams with "sexy" products.
|
| And might have been arguably worse when they had explicit
| "up or out" policies around L4s.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Seems like most of the people who want to join google these
| days, "why do you want to join google", "for the tc and
| prestige"
| ghaff wrote:
| Doesn't seem like the worst plan in the world.
| mepiethree wrote:
| Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years
| to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid,
| generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a
| day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on
| Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to
| visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking
| about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the
| mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now
| that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out,
| walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools
| and learning new things while still generally having enough
| focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google
| doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving
| weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with
| enough compensation to treat them all to great food.
| voiceblue wrote:
| I just joined because I've always wanted to, and when I had
| the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions
| about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the
| fealty of a public corporation lies.
|
| Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door
| at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given
| me a reason to leave yet.
|
| The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals
| about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave
| sooner than I intended as a result.
| acheron wrote:
| Surely they could do something better for humanity, such as
| selling heroin to middle schoolers.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots
| within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on
| it, then it's understandable why he'd stay at Google even if he
| didn't like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he's still
| working on Flutter now, so clearly it's a passion project for
| him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he
| could?
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| He spent the last 9 years in competition with Android so it's
| not surprising that he has some biases about it
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although
| that effort has now been effectively squandered
|
| Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the
| world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-
| market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on
| top.
|
| I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately
| Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than
| iOS and Android.
| bane wrote:
| Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the
| mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS
| can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty
| well.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Is Google the new Microsoft?
| chpatrick wrote:
| Yep. I quit after a year in 2015 because it already felt like
| that.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Eh, I interviewed for both a GCP and multiple Azure teams
| simultaneously and the difference in talent level was
| astounding.
|
| The latter team leads were anywhere from disinterested, asking
| basic level leetcode questions I could breeze through, to
| fucking incompetent who didn't even understand the coding
| questions they were asking. I was shocked at how different they
| were in terms of thoughtfulness and intelligence.
| cbozeman wrote:
| It's a little scary that Azure team leads are that clueless.
|
| I would really, really love to hear more about this if you
| would indulge us. If not us, then certainly send me an email,
| please.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| Did you pass the Azure ones then?
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| lol no, I got into a big argument having to explain
| recursion, tail call recursion, etc.
|
| The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen
| before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't
| understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent
| with the exception of stack space.
|
| But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the
| experience.
|
| My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first
| interview rescheduled the time and no one told me, etc.
|
| It was a fucking joke.
|
| Also, I interviewed at Netflix as well, and I didn't get
| the job (passed technical interview but didn't get selected
| after Director level interview. Just wasn't a good fit in
| terms of interests) and I can't say enough good things
| about netflix, everyone I met there, and the overall
| interview process.
|
| So I'm not just annoyed at Azure folks because I didn't get
| the job. I'm annoyed cause they're mostly morons.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| Sounds like you were rejected due to your snippy
| attitude.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| This was my experience too as well as some of my college
| friends who work at MSFT and GOOG. Microsoft engineers aren't
| stupid (of course they weren't) but there tends to be more
| dumb people and fewer very very smart people.
|
| This could also be incentives at the companies. I have a
| buddy who went to Microsoft, worked 30hr weeks, and was
| bored. Dude is brilliant and level headed. The team was lazy
| AF. Worked there for 5 years and went to Facebook and is
| thriving, going from Senior to Staff rather quickly.
| jes5199 wrote:
| and Microsoft the new Google?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Looking at the innovation of the former and the lack thereof
| of the latter, it sure seems that way. Even after almost half
| a century, Microsoft still endures.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Yup, sounds like a classic company that became manager'd to
| death. Explains silly features or changes we see all the time.
| Move on, Google's dead.
| js2 wrote:
| The submitted link is missing the query params (or HN stripped
| them) that lead directly to the post:
|
| https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now. Thanks!
|
| Btw HN didn't strip them -the submitted URL was
| https://ln.hixie.ch/. No doubt this was the top post at the
| time.
|
| We do strip some query strings, but only for larger/known
| sites.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Flutter is a leading framework? Maybe in some niche. It's not
| even in the top 10 for me.
| tyingq wrote:
| I believe it's quoting a survey where you had to pick from
| "frameworks". Meaning "use the native tools" wasn't a choice on
| the list. Choices were things like Flutter, React Native,
| Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, etc.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I'm also curious what he meant by that statement. By leading
| does he mean most used?
| liveoneggs wrote:
| "Flutter is amazingly successful. It's already the leading mobile
| app development framework" ???
| wg0 wrote:
| Where is that happening? I want to move there.
| munificent wrote:
| There are a lot of reasonable metrics one might use to define
| "leading mobile app development framework":
|
| * Number of developers using it on some daily/weekly/monthly,
| etc. cadence.
|
| * Number of apps published (to iOS, Android, both).
|
| * Number of jobs available using the framework.
|
| * Various subjective desirability metrics from developers
| survey like the StackOverflow ones.
|
| It's anyone's guess as to which is the best metric or how they
| should be combined. Also, it's very hard to actually get
| accurate data on it.
|
| But, according to Statistica at least, yes Flutter really is
| the most popular mobile app framework as of 2022:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar...
|
| It looks like that's based on a developer survey. I don't know
| more about its methodology.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| When filtered to "cross platform mobile app frameworks"
| anyway, which is a huge reduction in scope - 1/3rd of
| respondents in that study in fact.
|
| So 46% of 33% of mobile app developers that aren't building
| mobile websites use Flutter. That's not bad at all, but
| hardly supports a claim of being the "leading mobile app
| development framework" as you're down to ~15% of mobile app
| developers using it. And only then since mobile web is being
| excluded, who knows what it'd be if that was included.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Another article that highlights Vic Gundotra's arrival and rise
| at Google as the beginning of their decline.
| bipson wrote:
| I almost forgot about Vic! He hasn't been relevant for quite
| some time though, right?
|
| Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...Vic Gundotra...
|
| Please, let's honor the man's fiercely-defended policies.
|
| He is Vivek "Vic" Gundotra. His Real Name is Vivek, and we
| should refer to him by it.
| guiomie wrote:
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
|
| That's an interesting observation considering Sundar is where he
| is because of early-Google cultural norms.
| wg0 wrote:
| Seems like Google is being managed by consuming lots of
| managerial literature.
|
| Also, coming from Flutter camp, blog is barely readable on mobile
| without zooming.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| _> We also didn 't follow engineering best practices for the
| first few years. For example we wrote no tests..._
|
| Tests are not a best practice but more of a necessary evil for
| production systems and/or businesses incapable of retaining their
| best for many years.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Ehm no tests _are_ a best practice
| dbg31415 wrote:
| These paragraphs really pack a punch, and having worked in tech
| for 20+ years now (but not at Google) I feel this. Every shitty
| company eventually has layoffs that ruin the culture, and end up
| with a "Jeanine Banks" manager type. This article was really well
| written.
|
| > Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error
| driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would
| keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's
| erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that
| led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil").
| The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might
| focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing
| the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not
| strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can
| no longer trust that their company has their back, and they
| dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are
| guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself
| irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from
| future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The lack of
| trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing
| trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate
| policies. In 2004, Google's founders famously told Wall Street
| "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become
| one." but that Google is no more.
|
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A
| symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle
| management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the
| department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other
| things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally
| has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I
| literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even
| after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what
| her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes
| requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She
| treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising,
| reassigning people against their will in ways that have no
| relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to
| receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even
| acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more
| politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to
| keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information
| at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this
| new reality depressing.
| aappleby wrote:
| 12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze
| internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which
| put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd
| find a way to get it done.
|
| Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and
| "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the
| culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.
|
| The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and
| Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched
| one in years by the time I left.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely
| chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar
| locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on
| memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list
| of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6
| things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how
| crazy it was.
|
| I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian
| gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute
| like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.
| throitallaway wrote:
| GCP has also been bringing in Oracle execs to run things. The
| results are very much so affecting our relationship with
| Google to the negative.
| tazjin wrote:
| > affecting our relationship with Google to the negative
|
| If you're paying them more money now then your relationship
| is affected to the positive (from Google Cloud's
| perspective).
| marssaxman wrote:
| > Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful"
|
| That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but
| before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock
| and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely
| because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to
| one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...
|
| This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very
| tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a
| straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google
| management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.
| tdeck wrote:
| And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and
| nobody was held accountable for that failure.
| shaftway wrote:
| There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen,
| search for the phrase "vicg" among others.
| tdeck wrote:
| (un?)fortunately I haven't had access to Memegen since
| 2020.
| sawyna wrote:
| Why don't you have access? I'm curious
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Great post, epic that he calls out his idiotic upper management.
| I've only been at Google a little over a year and while I'm
| mostly happy with my management chain, I have run into directors
| who clearly should have been fired for overselling and
| underdelivering huge projects that impact my team.
|
| I am surprised just how 'bottom up' so much is done at Google,
| and I wonder if that is why Sundar ended up where he is. Unlike
| so many other large companies, engineers who build consensus have
| way more influence on upper management's priorities than other
| places.
|
| So being someone who is good at building consensus is a good way
| to built clout at google, more so than any other place. But this
| isn't alawys good. Sometimes I miss old boring "F500" companies
| where I can go to the _one_ principal engineer (or director or
| whatever) and show them my idea, and how it doesn 't get in
| anyone else's way, and boom they either approve or deny it.
|
| No spending months convincing everyone and their mother to make a
| small (but significant) change.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| I find it refreshing that this post actually calls out specific
| problems and people. IMO, too many of these company culture posts
| keep the complaints somewhat vague which makes them harder to
| evaluate.
| suddenexample wrote:
| What an amazingly well-written article. It's incredible how well
| it describes the feelings that I've struggled to vocalize on my
| own.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's
| mission statement (to organize the world's information and make
| it universally accessible and useful).
|
| I'm not sure if I agree. That mission seems to be largely
| achieved. And maybe has something to do with the decay in
| Google's overall culture.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Was that mission achieved by Google, or by Wikipedia?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Mostly Google.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Of course Hickson was behind Flutter
| Osmose wrote:
| This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of
| honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with
| unnecessary external criticism.
|
| People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any
| particular project as being run only by the individuals currently
| working on it--those particular people may leave the company or
| change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's
| making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have
| to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from
| now.
|
| No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-
| intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome
| from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and
| leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's
| one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large
| company--the support and knowledge and compensation are great
| boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're
| _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by
| others, and external people will view and criticize your work
| accordingly.
| dazzlefruit wrote:
| The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use.
| It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how
| it has drifted since then.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Has it drifted?
|
| I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to
| become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say
| goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech
| people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because
| it got much faster too.
|
| Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast
| in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they
| achieved that. Kudos.
| dazzlefruit wrote:
| Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I
| stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it
| was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few
| seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox
| with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over
| Chromium) didn't.
|
| The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to
| the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became
| much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their
| performance improvements or did hardware get better faster
| than they grew?)
|
| Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together.
| Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources.
| That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.
| raincole wrote:
| That's the beauty of mega coporations. 99% of employees can be
| genuinely trying to improve the lives of others and it still
| does evil as a whole.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often
| can't see the forest for the trees. They look at their
| immediate team/group, love the autonomy/transparency/"don't be
| evil"-mandate/etc. that they have and follow, and look around
| and see some of that in other groups, and think, "wow, this
| company is great, doesn't care about all that big-bad-company
| stuff".
|
| But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its
| revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also
| building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is
| inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team
| initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to
| not care about what's best for that company, there's no way
| that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.
|
| (And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was
| told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project,
| and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a
| new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best
| way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least
| for now.)
|
| It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team
| couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on
| the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment
| Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users
| want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know
| if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again:
| completely unsurprising result.
| mepiethree wrote:
| > and of course management knows that when you're
| bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users
| fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for
| the user... at least for now
|
| This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I
| think that it's funny that many engineers care so little
| about business that they stop listening after the "do what's
| best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least
| for now" part kicks in.
| kccqzy wrote:
| In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it
| is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term
| strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything
| like that. It should be the management's responsibility to
| clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management
| completely fails at that.
| poszlem wrote:
| It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not understanding
| it."
| foobar_______ wrote:
| Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been
| getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-
| millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much
| easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that
| company released under an appropriate license, meaning
| free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.
| titzer wrote:
| When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity
| that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't
| register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and
| inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking
| about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the
| cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity
| hell-bent on derstruction, you'd probably not have even
| conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent. And
| you were busy with something huger and way more important! You
| were on your phone negotiating a really important business
| deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you?
|
| Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their
| worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make
| money from.
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -
| Stanislaw J. Lec
| aeturnum wrote:
| Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg's admonition to
| Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]:
|
| "[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about
| two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily
| intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to
| whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more
| closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there
| ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware
| only of the fact that you have it now and most others
| don't....and that all those other people are fools."
|
| [1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-
| ellsbe...
| fragmede wrote:
| 5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't
| manage to find product-market will equally be gone and
| unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the
| same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people
| from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair
| or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately
| Google has tapped into.
| sib wrote:
| Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is
| risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you
| are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is
| that they are doing their best to stay in business and
| deliver and improve that tool. It's all they have. So your
| incentives are credibly aligned.
|
| Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about
| is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to
| imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad,
| what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on
| their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom
| line.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts
| before completely relying on the services of startups.
| Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly
| rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate
| instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are
| worried about shutting down even if the product itself is
| compelling.
|
| But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so
| many things down that talking about Google shutting something
| else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny
| meme.
|
| I seriously think anything Google launches in the future
| should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on
| google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC
| with ownership obscured.
| jmkd wrote:
| It's not often discussed but there is a cultural gulf between
| pre-IPO and post-IPO Googlers that still impacts almost 20 years
| later.
|
| To put it crudely, one dwindling set of idealistic millionaires
| vs a growing set of capitalist thousandaires, each set with very
| different motivations to login to their computer each morning.
| scamworld wrote:
| Most large tech companies grew by >30% during the covid
| lockdowns, so I don't think company culture is much of a priority
| for them.
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of
| these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is
| always to go back in time.
|
| I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a
| disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you
| have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a
| new kind of a company" or "the user comes first."
|
| But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities _have to_
| shift. It 's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do
| the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the
| nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and
| incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
|
| Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too.
| When you have people who have been running processes or
| departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they
| have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not
| necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A
| cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the
| future of your job?
|
| I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-
| school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be
| different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they
| rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up
| operating in a particular way.
| vkou wrote:
| Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of
| priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors
| (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant
| influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of
| engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested
| in doing anything about it.
|
| > She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is
| dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways
| that have no relationship to their skill set
|
| This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly
| banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads,
| and picking up the pieces.
|
| The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-
| layoffs.
| southwesterly wrote:
| A good manager does not always a good SWE make.
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also
| keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every
| department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world
| where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a
| world where you have to constantly justify your own
| existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so
| forth.
|
| It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of
| a deal.
| vkou wrote:
| Sure. It's an incentives problem. It's very difficult to
| align the incentives in any organizations with six levels
| of reporting chain so that people with the most day-to-day
| power over the direction of the firm (mid-level directors)
| are marching in the right direction.
|
| I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say
| that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback
| from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor
| job.
| ghaff wrote:
| And the degree to having some level of org structure
| ossification is to have lots of people sort of going off
| and doing their own thing. Which probably worked at Google
| for a longer time than is often the case just because they
| were printing money. So what if they were doing projects
| and then just killing them, living with duplication, or
| having a bunch of random activities that led to nowhere.
|
| Even if it's a bit frustrating it can also be more fun to
| be in an environment where it's more of a make your own
| adventure sort of thing. Mature companies though mostly
| have to be very structured about how they operate.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts
| there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was
| never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from
| ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has
| matured from that.
|
| Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded
| but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work.
| Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to
| business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I
| have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches
| might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other
| projects. Great, market has matured from that._
|
| Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via
| ads and everything else is a loss leader.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yes Google is still less diversified than its peers. Cloud
| and YouTube (edit: and Pixel phones?) are profitable afaik.
| The overall tech market has matured is what I meant; it's
| no longer time to loss-lead everything.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Not sure I'd characterize YouTube as a diversification
| from ads.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It is though. Being an ad supplier is different from
| being an ad exchange. Or would you describe the New York
| Times or HBO as "ads businesses"?
| hot_gril wrote:
| Also, they sell Premium
| js4ever wrote:
| That's probably less than 1% of YouTube revenue (number
| came out of my hat)
| JohnFen wrote:
| In 2022, premium subscribers accounted for a bit less
| than 9% of YouTube's audience (and 67% of premium
| subscribers were in the US), according to this:
|
| https://www.mediagistic.com/blog/how-many-youtube-users-
| will...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| To use a googlism: I'm surprised Google can count that
| low.
| kmlevitt wrote:
| 8-9% is actually a pretty impressive conversion rate
| considering close to 100% of people use YouTube. They
| have like 97.6% market share.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I'm not into watching streaming services or TV for that
| matter, but that would be news to me. Does YT now produce
| own exclusive content? I think they don't 1. to keep
| content producers running their stuff on YT rather than
| acting as competitor 2. to avoid _yet another reason_ for
| antitrust action (ie. the bad looks of extending their
| monopoly)
| emodendroket wrote:
| There was something called "YouTube Originals" that's
| been discontinued but I didn't consider that central to
| the point I was making.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| It is not. Think about it. Diversification ensures that
| if one of your assets degrades in value, you have an
| unrelated asset that can still do well. Back to Alphabet,
| if ads revenues disappears overnight, Youtube becomes a
| dead project. Simples
| kmlevitt wrote:
| At least they have alternate ways of selling ads, though.
| For example there has been a lot of talk about how their
| search business ads are threatened by LLMs that answer
| questions directly instead of giving search results that
| include paid placements, etc. But even if that happened,
| it likely wouldn't affect YouTube ad revenues much.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| By that standard, Search is also a diversification from
| ads.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I was about to correct you about GCP profitability, but I
| just looked it up, and TIL that GCP became profitable for
| the first time in 2023 Q2. Interesting.
| hot_gril wrote:
| And before, it might've been in that "profitable if we
| want it to be" situation where they're just reinvesting
| the revenue.
| wavemode wrote:
| Which is precisely why profit is a red herring. What
| matters is market share (which for GCP is still 10%, not
| amazing but gradually increasing) and, ultimately,
| revenue growth.
| detourdog wrote:
| I loved old google they refused to share a business model.
| Google ~2006 I think is just past peaked google. I think
| they developed ads because it was the only model that fit
| their valuation.
| khazhoux wrote:
| You have the history backwards.
|
| Ads in early 2000s > Mega-valuation
| JW_00000 wrote:
| Are the Android app store and GCP loss leaders? I assumed
| those two would be profitable at least.
| Andrex wrote:
| Google has been trying very hard to diversify, mostly
| through Cloud.
|
| How well they are succeeding at that is up to
| interpretation but they are chipping away at Ads'
| percentage of revenue. It used to be higher than 85% but as
| of 2022 it's down to only being 58% of operating
| revenue[0].
|
| 0. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/18/how-does-google-
| make-mon...
| rileyphone wrote:
| That's an article from 2021 that says ads were 80% of
| revenue
| esafak wrote:
| Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt
| yourself somebody else will.
| chatmasta wrote:
| So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's
| talking to Google?
|
| It's not just that Google _can_ take risks because they have
| margins. It 's more that they _need_ to take risks to
| diversify their source of margins before they disappear to
| someone like Bezos.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Amazon is already there.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-
| th...
|
| Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to
| coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-
| to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the
| SEO wasteland of Google search.
| eslaught wrote:
| When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest
| lecture from a business professor who described exactly this
| process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course
| none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But
| literally every single prediction of his came true, and I
| witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even
| in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years
| that followed, though I was no longer with the company).
| cbsmith wrote:
| "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too
| innovative."
|
| I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other
| than sarcasm.
| capableweb wrote:
| Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for
| laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip
| since people were taking it seriously.
| tobinfricke wrote:
| "Present company excluded"
|
| It's a polite fiction.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Exactly.
| hinkley wrote:
| I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a
| silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and
| concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire
| staff.
|
| This was not news to one of the other two people. He
| confessed he was doing it "for sport" and thought we were in
| on it. Only sort of.
|
| I think this statement might have been his little way to
| entertain himself.
| pas wrote:
| can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like
| everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the
| only login, no need for password for the first iteration,
| we will fix it later, or ... ?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none
| of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."
|
| Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he
| winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and
| looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?
| praptak wrote:
| The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum
| tsss"
| benvolio wrote:
| Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen's Where
| Does Growth Come From? talk:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg
| w4yai wrote:
| Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it
| was illuminating.
| miohtama wrote:
| This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be
| distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large
| companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
|
| However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance,
| search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super
| confusing that no other entity has been able to create a
| matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to
| Visa Mastercard.
| antupis wrote:
| 5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using
| more chatgpt than Google.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Hard agree. Sold Google stock after realizing I'd more or
| less replaced Google Search with chatgpt...
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Yeah, it's hard to go back to wading through SEO-
| optimized BS after just getting a decent answer (which,
| to be fair to the AI-sceptics, you do have to think about
| before using blindly).
|
| It's an interesting mental shift - I wasn't googling
| because I wanted to find a web page, I was googling
| because I wanted an answer to a question. An AR or mixed-
| mode personal assistant is going to be a game changer.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or
| because when it returns results, it wraps them in words
| that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as
| better
| janalsncm wrote:
| Personally it's because there's no ads. Google's UX is to
| choke the user half to death with cookies, popups,
| reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner
| ads. And that's before we even get to the content, which
| is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point
| before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-
| whom.
|
| (And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part
| of Google's UX because this is exactly the behavior their
| algorithm and business model are encouraging.)
| whstl wrote:
| For me it's because ChatGPT ignores _less_ of what I type
| than Google currently does, plus it doesn 't return
| spammy SEO results.
|
| Google has become a search engine for advertisements,
| "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO
| spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus.
|
| Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry
| of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with
| Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's
| Spotlight is better for that.
| fragmede wrote:
| instead of Googleing and getting a forum post from 2009
| where you have to read the whole thread and then
| interpret the results, ChatGPT just gives you the answer
| directly. ChatGPT could be shitty and rude about it and
| it would still be better because it's a direct smart to
| your direct question.
|
| what's hilarious is the conversation that must have
| happened inside google about linking to pages vs giving
| the answer on the search result page, and now where we
| are with ChatGPT.
| miguno wrote:
| That's what the AI robots will use as an explanation when
| they have f*cked us up. :-)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by Visa/Mastercard duopoly,
| there's a lot of regionality so the picture could be fsirly
| different depending on what you have in mind.
|
| To me Bing as a minority competitior in search, and
| facebook on ads for instance would be candidates to the
| same kind of duopoly.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| There's a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of
| Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I'm really
| enjoying it. It's called Same as Ever.
|
| Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our
| DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting
| wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell
| ourselves is that each business is different, but each
| business is powered by the same human engine. That engine
| evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When
| I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in
| Mesopotamia that can't get good quality copper from his
| suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it's all the
| same.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
| anonacct37 wrote:
| I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same
| mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the
| default position that "oh we modern innovative companies
| won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe
| for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to
| solving a problem is admitting you have it.
|
| Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history
| unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people
| were fundamentally no different than you.
| concordDance wrote:
| But we _have_ created new types of social institutions
| despite having the same DNA as our ancestors! Most notably
| the corporation and the nation-state.
| e_y_ wrote:
| On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-
| sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google
| Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts
| of the company to innovate while keeping the core products
| stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations
| (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to
| keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow
| beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big
| company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a
| startup.
|
| This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's
| internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that
| they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that
| isn't somehow AI-related.
| teen wrote:
| I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one
| did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of
| the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe
| 3 "successful" projects.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Pretty standard rate of failure for early stage startups.
| 121789 wrote:
| I think this is why these teams are really hard to have
| in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one
| of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it's
| impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some
| variant of "this team is able to bs and show no value,
| while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?"
|
| I think the incentives would have to be much different
| for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards
| for success).....but at that point just join a startup
| seraphsf wrote:
| Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience,
| presuming you have tight filters such that all of your
| projects are plausibly potentially great, you really
| don't know until you try. That's the point of an
| incubator.
|
| It's not that hard to evaluate when something is working
| (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not
| false positives).
|
| In Area 120's case there was no coasting - if anything
| there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down
| underperforming projects.
| mk89 wrote:
| 3 successful projects can totally justify what you call
| waste of money.
|
| I sometimes wonder what people expect innovation is. You
| try and try and try. One thing is good and you must know
| how to use it - it can make history.
|
| If I understood right, chatgpt comes from one of such
| ideas.... so the question is also: who evaluates the
| ideas? How come that Google was not able to capitalize on
| that idea?
|
| So yeah, instead of treating the cause they treat the
| symptoms, like usual.
| skygazer wrote:
| I agree. Where does this come from? I guess maybe it's an
| attempt at economy but with only a superficial grasp of
| the constraints imposed by reality? It's like people that
| only want to fund the breakthroughs and not fundamental
| science -- when all the "hey, that's odd" breakthroughs
| come through "does what we think hold true" fundamental
| research. Maybe ungrounded narratives are just more
| seductive.
| gedy wrote:
| I think these type of teams are a good way to give
| talented devs a break from the grind at bigger companies,
| even if the chances of a new product is low.
|
| Not every company can afford these "paid vacations", but
| they do have some use at times.
| seraphsf wrote:
| I ran one of the successful projects in Area 120.
|
| I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung
| and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn't
| reach its potential - largely because it was encased in
| Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.
|
| But to my surprise almost all of the projects were
| impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the
| people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I
| worked with in my decade at the company.
|
| Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and
| politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Google Inbox
|
| Still so damn bitter about that death.
| htrp wrote:
| > at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.
|
| If you can't innovate at the base level of app design ....
| how do you have any hope of innovating for AI apps that
| require research/engineering/product/marketing
| collaboration?
| al_be_back wrote:
| >> at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor...
|
| sounds like Clayton Christensen
| esafak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
| chatmasta wrote:
| > what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
|
| Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe
| that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just _tell
| themselves_ they 're in a cut-throat environment, even though
| in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a
| cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the
| weak employees fail out of the industry.)
|
| > And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old
| companies always end up operating in a particular way.
|
| This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it
| generalizes to other industries.
|
| I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are
| emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you
| put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an
| organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to
| manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop
| into something resembling IBM.
| ghaff wrote:
| >perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into
| something resembling IBM.
|
| So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of
| dollars?
| chatmasta wrote:
| Sure. But people in this thread aren't complaining that
| Google's profitable. They're complaining about the culture.
| Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable
| path to growth or retained profitability. And it's even
| less sustainable when the company is dependent on an
| undiversified revenue stream, since they need to be
| innovating to mitigate that risk, and a poisonous culture
| is toxic to innovation.
|
| But yes, Google is a money printer, and it's printing at a
| higher speed than it was ten years ago. But in that same
| ten years, Microsoft has grown at a faster rate and even
| displaced Google in some areas, like developer tooling and
| AI. In fact, Google has lost its ability to innovate to
| such an extent that a startup was able to beat them to
| market by productizing research that originated _from
| Google_! And now Microsoft basically owns that startup.
| That 's an embarrassing failure of leadership.
| ghaff wrote:
| Microsoft has certainly had a pretty amazing
| transformation. After they lost mobile and the client OS
| market was clearly stagnant to declining, it seemed they
| were toast if you looked at where their revenue came
| from. (And their early hybrid cloud strategy was sort of
| a mess too.)
|
| Whereas, as you suggest, Google's cloud strategy has been
| marginal except for Google Docs and they're still mostly
| an ad company.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a
| sustainable path to growth or retained profitability.
|
| Are you sure? This feels a little bit like when I read
| the American capitalism is going to collapse because
| there are a lot of homeless people. Just because
| something has the effect of making some people miserable
| doesn't mean that it's unstable or doomed to fail. IBM,
| GE, Boeing, or any number of other "dinosaur" companies
| haven't gone anywhere. And Microsoft itself shows that
| even a conservative culture can manage to adapt to
| changing circumstances when it's necessary.
| chatmasta wrote:
| But Google doesn't intentionally have a conservative
| culture. They're _trying_ to innovate, since they need to
| mitigate the existential risk of their undiversified
| revenue stream. But they 're failing to innovate.
|
| So perhaps such a conservative culture does have its
| merits, but claiming that Google sought those merits is
| post-facto rationalization of their failure to innovate.
| Google never _intended_ to turn into IBM (which, btw,
| they havent - at least IBM has more diversified sources
| of revenue!).
|
| That said, you make a good point that Microsoft itself is
| a counterexample. So maybe there is still hope for
| Google. But IMO, that hope is not aligned with the path
| they're currently traveling. They need to fire Sundar and
| make some drastic cultural changes if they want to
| outcompete Microsoft between now and 2035.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sure, they're not achieving everything they want, but I
| think most people would be pretty happy if they just
| achieved a huge money-printing machine through an app
| store and ad exchange.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Yeah, hence why Larry and Sergei don't care that the
| company they founded is currently on a downward
| trajectory...
| emodendroket wrote:
| A cutthroat environment is going to encourage plenty of
| people to behave conservatively so that their rivals do not
| seize on their failures, real or perceived.
| ivancho wrote:
| Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around
| culling people producing less value than their salary. But
| once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in
| exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in
| career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how
| you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same
| responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates
| other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.
| zem wrote:
| > someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for
| $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career
| growth
|
| that probably describes a lot of people in tech megacorps
| too
| 3seashells wrote:
| It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If
| worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping
| block..
|
| One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye,
| is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each
| other to get junior a good start in life.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Having children can awake antisocial impulses in people but
| it can awake prosocial impulses just as easily and just as
| strongly.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Sure, if I look at their kids and think to myself "hey,
| those might make good husbands/wives for my own kids when
| they grow up".
| emodendroket wrote:
| Should I take it to be some kind of Freudian slip that
| you've written "myself" rather than "themselves" here?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I'm half senile, and so when you replied I wondered if I
| did that.
|
| But re-reading it several times now, I don't see it. When
| I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, they might
| make good husbands/wives for my own kids" where is the
| Freudian?
|
| I am on the lookout for my kids. I can't tell them who to
| marry, but I can put them in circumstances where there
| are people their age that I approve of, such that
| familiarity might blossom into something more. I've seen
| how it turns out with other people's kids when they act
| like that's none of their business and actively avoid the
| thinking, and I don't much like the outcomes.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get
| territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil,
| corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.
| 3seashells wrote:
| Really? What about people not in the in-group, not in your
| tribe?
| sage76 wrote:
| Idk why you are downvoted. It's become a cultural trope to
| use "I did it for my family" as an excuse to justify
| absolutely heinous stuff.
| 3seashells wrote:
| To close to home for many? Then again this is what life is
| about from moralphilosophical view. A body horror show with
| a "what have I become" at the end? Spoilers not welcome?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This presumes that people with no children are somehow
| less horrible.
|
| In truth, all humans are equally worthless.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was
| young, energetic, and didn't know any better, I got very, very
| lucky getting many or most of them through. As I've gotten
| older I've found more things that I "need" to improve and
| there's been more time for me to forget how I need to justify
| things I consider "the right way" and so I don't always win
| those arguments.
|
| But the bigger thing I'm coming to grips with is that I have to
| stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an "I can
| fix them" vibe because I will only be able to fix half the
| things I know to fix before everyone else decides they've
| changed "enough" and would I kindly shut up now. Hello
| ossification.
|
| Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts
| and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they
| are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching
| 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to
| give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was
| talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an
| intervention.
| busterarm wrote:
| I feel so much exactly what you're describing here...
| tazjin wrote:
| This reminds me of the "Explore/Exploit" chapter from
| "Algorithms to live by" :)
| henham wrote:
| How do you distinguish "I can fix them" companies that will
| not improve because they are where they are because of
| organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual
| improve and are ready for you?
| metanonsense wrote:
| Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every
| growing / successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so
| with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse,
| but even at our size being disruptive / staying innovative gets
| harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the
| product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having
| capable people taking bets on new products, even when you know
| that such a product (if successful) is possibly years from
| making a dent in your revenue stream.
|
| That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates
| a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a
| once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic
| even with their resources.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It was easier to thread this needle in an easy-money
| environment than now, when everyone has suddenly grown much
| more conservative.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and
| things feel like ground hog day.
|
| After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+
| employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies
| since.
|
| There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big
| place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I
| suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast
| into retirement..
|
| But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to
| deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.
| yojo wrote:
| I think "rediscovering" the old ways of operating is a
| charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these
| patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don't benefit
| the company, they benefit the professional managers that are
| using them to grow their careers.
|
| I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful
| companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are
| personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align
| with the company goals/mission.
|
| Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the
| organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass.
| Unless you've got diligent leadership at the top rooting these
| people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the
| top?) you get this cultural death spiral.
|
| This is also why "founder led" companies are more dynamic.
| Founders by definition aren't ladder climbers, otherwise they
| would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.
| closeparen wrote:
| Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and
| trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit
| physically near each other to put their heads down and
| execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are
| broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes
| valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time
| zones and Process and _maybe_ if you're lucky one person in
| your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a
| straight answer or get something done that wasn't formally
| planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project
| is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it,
| especially engineers who don't share priorities, timelines,
| conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally
| also the best way to get promoted at a large company that
| believes in breaking down silos.
| ghaff wrote:
| Silos and fiefdoms are normally seen as negative things.
| And that's not entirely wrong.
|
| But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc.
| teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference
| or having to constantly coordinate with every other
| organization in the company.
|
| It can go both ways.
| esafak wrote:
| Silos are also good for sheltering and nurturing high
| performing teams, especially when the broader
| organization is bad.
| marklar423 wrote:
| I feel like you're working with a different definition of
| "silo" than the parent. My understanding of a "silo" is
| "closed off teams that aren't allowed to work with
| outsiders" who have their own culture that may be at odds
| with the company.
|
| It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and
| cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.
| closeparen wrote:
| Building in silos is when you get something done by
| yourself or with your direct teammates. Cross team
| collaboration involves e.g. a weekly sync, coauthored
| design documents, code changes made in modules you've
| never seen before reviewed by people you don't know,
| tasks that are critical blocking dependencies for you but
| totally irrelevant to the decision-makers of the teams
| that need to allocate time for them. The extent to which
| a company is siloed is the extent to which its engineers
| are talking to their desk neighbors and getting things
| done vs. navigating communication overhead and being
| blocked on people quite remote from them and their goals.
|
| It's hard to believe you could have a nimble and cohesive
| team at the scale of a large corporation, because the
| number of communication edges gets silly. Dunbar's number
| and all that. You can have team nimble and cohesive teams
| _within_ large corporations. But having several distinct
| networks is otherwise known as being siloed.
| yojo wrote:
| High process and high collaboration/coordination is not the
| only alternative to silos.
|
| Google in the mid aughts still had tightly aligned teams
| with clear priorities. But they were also transparent in
| what they were doing, and open to collaboration where it
| made sense. Teams felt empowered to reject requests that
| would trip them up, but _also_ empowered to do small things
| to help another team (and got rewarded for doing so).
|
| The reality at a large org is you're going to have
| dependencies. In my experience, highly-siloed orgs have
| tremendous coordination barriers to even the smallest
| request across teams. Your one-line API change didn't make
| it onto your dependency's roadmap this quarter? Too bad,
| try again in three months.
|
| And I'm not sure we have the same understanding of
| "fiefdom." I'm talking about the pattern where middle
| managers try to grow their headcount as large as possible
| without a clear purpose other than building status within
| the org. This often manifests as disparate and disjoint
| teams aggregated under a leader who has little
| understanding or care as to what exactly it is they're
| doing. It is hard to find value in this arrangement.
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and
| trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and
| sit physically near each other to put their heads down and
| execute with extraordinary speed and quality._
|
| ...for things that align with that silo structure. If you
| try to build new things that necessitate conceptual
| integrity across org boundaries, then teams that think this
| way will first debate ownership and responsibility
| breakdown before it 's even clear how the thing should work
| at a high level. I've seen too many examples of horrible
| engineering done by silo'ed teams, where they build down
| blind alleys that turn out to be unmaintainable and net-
| negative producing over time because they approached it
| based on what services they could touch rather than what
| made sense from an overall system and UX perspective.
|
| Obviously "breaking down silos" involves greater
| coordination and communication overhead, and thus is harder
| to pull of successfully, so it's a tradeoff that should be
| weighed carefully in the context of business needs.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| And this is another reason why managers growing their
| fiefdom to make big teams is bad for the organization.
|
| Most of the most successful projects and incredible feats
| of engineering happen by tiny teams full of very talented
| people NOT a 4-layer management pyramid of people who are
| here for a nice stable 9-5. Not to say you can't be
| successful with WLB but you need a certain fire in your
| gut and a hunger to execute as a small and efficient
| team.
| closeparen wrote:
| I don't disagree. But I have also seen situations where
| middle managers are highly attuned to and proud of cross-
| team projects, and basically don't pay any attention or
| give any weight to value delivered for end-users within
| teams, so everyone is encouraged to structure their
| projects to maximize communication overhead (even line
| managers, since doing so gives them the opportunity to
| grow their directs).
| dasil003 wrote:
| Absolutely. There are a lot of failure modes. This is why
| true IC leadership with teeth is needed. The whole point
| of staff+ engineer roles (outside of specialist research)
| is to navigate the right technical decisions that span
| across teams.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's Coase's theory of the firm [1] in synecdoche. Silos
| escape the political transaction costs around them at the
| expense of access to external resources.
|
| They can famously work, _e.g._ Skunkworks. But they also
| decay into fiefdoms.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently
| bad. Indeed, in a large company, they're necessary to avoid
| dysfunction. You _want_ stable groups of competent people who
| share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the
| business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for
| their thing.
|
| "Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because
| they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they
| will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
| yojo wrote:
| Maybe? I'm having a hard time finding a contemporary
| example. Bezos bowed out (though Amazon culture was
| famously bad for years), and even Facebook doesn't have
| 100k employees.
|
| My point though is there is a difference between having a
| leader who got there by politicking versus a leader who got
| there by building a great company. They're both going to
| have different strengths and weaknesses, but there's at
| least a chance the founder isn't going to tolerate the
| sycophants.
|
| An example: I was at Google 2005-2008. My manager's
| manager's manager was one of the early empire builders. He
| hired like crazy with no plan at all for the people he was
| hiring, and kept getting promoted for managing such a
| rapidly growing org. Eventually he rose high enough up that
| someone near the top realized what was going on, and
| promptly fired the guy, leaving behind a fair-sized mess as
| folks tried to figure out what to do with all his hires.
|
| From what I've read lately, if this guy had just shown up
| to Google a few years later, he'd still be getting
| promoted.
| esafak wrote:
| Executives need to observe the whole organization, not
| just their direct reports. How far from the top was he
| when he started empire building? You make it sound like
| it has already very hierarchical, when Google always
| advertised itself as a relatively flat company.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well-said. I think this is all pretty well encapsulated in the
| truth that "we tend to become what we hate", or "if you gaze
| into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| > ... what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
| where you're never sure about the future of your job?
|
| No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated
| a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture
| Capitalist with the teams of people they control.
|
| So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just
| give access to the company resources and let the teams come up
| with a business model.
|
| So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your
| team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside
| in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing
| financial results.
|
| You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting
| axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company
| at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Some companies do something like this with some success, but
| this was also the theory of the guy who drove Sears into the
| ground.
| throwboatyface wrote:
| The guy who drove Sears into the ground also did the
| classic private-equity self-dealing to carve off all the
| valuable bits and saddle the company with debt. Berkshire
| Hathaway is an example of a company that owns lots of
| businesses which are mostly independent
| emodendroket wrote:
| I'd theorize it has something to do with whether the
| separation actually makes sense. Berkshire Hathaway owns
| separate businesses that have zero to do with each other
| and may spin off or bring in new ones anytime. Sears had
| different departments of the same store trying to beggar
| each other which is counterproductive.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Gonna be awfully hard to comply with all the consent decrees
| and regulatory scrutiny with zero bureaucracy.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| This is a good way to be biased towards the most lucky and
| the most cutthroat. Also, why would the best talent look to
| work for you if they have to take so much personal risk
| without the possibility of the upside of stock options of a
| startup?
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Then what's your incentive to work at the company instead of
| starting the project externally? If the product is a
| sustainable business model in isolation, surely it's
| sustainable without the external resources.
| Laremere wrote:
| > But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have
| to shift.
|
| This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required
| shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's
| problems today.
|
| A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and
| experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift
| is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming
| "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".
|
| Just because they're following the same path as other large
| tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead
| it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling
| comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is
| special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been
| "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on
| preventing that from happening".
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose.
| When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000
| employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus
| is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to
| reconcile that with what your users might want.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
|
| Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People
| get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People
| don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money
| taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people
| to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact
| that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your
| project is very different than not being sure about the future
| of your job.
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen.
| They happened because the leadership was concerned that in
| the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead
| weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that
| the managers never had to deal with because they could always
| hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary
| one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more
| than that.
|
| For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online
| ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the
| user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could
| literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon
| selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at
| making solar panels.
|
| Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example,
| Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without
| all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away.
| They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then
| launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with
| ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it
| loose.
|
| All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more
| when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose.
| When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't
| the same.
| Eridrus wrote:
| > Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example,
| Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok
| without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats
| right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way
| and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same
| story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom
| to let it loose.
|
| I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken
| a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if
| their hand had not been forced, but I don't think
| pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was
| not done before TikTok.
|
| I think short form video is just hard to monetize in
| comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that
| has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if
| it does succeed?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| You're giving Google too much credit. They couldn't even
| _conceive_ of short videos. Why? See earlier in the
| thread.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance)
| didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money
| they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that
| TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the
| company's other products like Toutiao.
|
| If Google were to try this early, it is uncertain that
| Google will discover a monetization strategy before the
| product joins the Google graveyard.
|
| Let's not even talk about short form video, just YouTube.
| How many years did Google subsidize YouTube with Search
| money before it really turned up advertising on YouTube?
| Do we know how much effort Google expended in
| experimenting with monetization strategies for YouTube?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance)
| didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money
| they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that
| TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the
| company's other products like Toutiao.
|
| Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the
| perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives
| destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas
| supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a
| direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal
| just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how
| little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the
| YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever
| reason there's almost _zero_ attention to TikTok.
|
| [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-
| study-o...
| summerlight wrote:
| Yes, Google couldn't find a good way to scale out its early
| model. Talents are not something easy to scale out.
| Transparency is inherently in tension against confidentiality,
| and when you have lots of eyes then the latter tends to win
| unless you're comfortable of spending your daily life with all
| those media outlets. If you want to do the right thing, then
| you'll figure out that there's too many "right things" at its
| scale because there are too many people with different,
| conflicting goals. The list goes on.
|
| Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and
| Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide
| to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going
| back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied
| by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but
| it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as
| well.
|
| But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of
| clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal
| alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but
| Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in
| Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal,
| logical connections between their daily works and company-wide
| OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad
| organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects
| since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is
| something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a
| particular way
|
| In a word: momentum
| ra7 wrote:
| > I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these
| old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can
| be different just because they "get it." And then, over time,
| they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up
| operating in a particular way.
|
| This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry
| Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:
|
| _As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11
| years ago, "Google is not a conventional company. We do not
| intend to become one"_
| ren_engineer wrote:
| logical move is to get better at splitting off their research
| and innovation into startups by licensing or funding employees
| who leave. Spinoff anything risky into an independent company
| so it can move faster and isn't slowed down by Google's risk
| aversion and bureaucracy. Basically what Microsoft did with
| OpenAI, give them cash and compute resources but have plausible
| deniability if things go wrong
| WalterBright wrote:
| You've described why older companies do not inevitably grow
| into monopolies and take over the world. They get so set in
| their ways and bureaucratic that they get destroyed by the next
| wave of upstart companies.
| stillwithit wrote:
| > People will get hurt.
|
| Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.
|
| I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected "screw you
| got mine" who then find themselves in a similar position.
|
| It's just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in
| vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of
| reality.
|
| Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production
| norms and educated us such was "normal", so we normalized it in
| code for money, regardless of the externalities.
|
| Elder generations need to have their authority over the next
| generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some
| aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.
| rkagerer wrote:
| You're never too big put the user first.
|
| When you stop doing that, someone else will and in time your
| customers will go there instead.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This is provably false. Customers are anything but rational,
| and pick things out that play against their best interests
| all the time.
|
| Be it due to fashion, social pressure, brand recognition,
| cultural norms, et cetera and so forth.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up
| operating in a particular way
|
| The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture
| regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior
| level, it has a big negative effect.
| andromeduck wrote:
| But that's what equity driven comp is supposed to resolve -
| give them small refreshers until they leave.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| >But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to
| shift.
|
| And shift they did.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| If google's mantra had been "Don't rock the boat" since they
| achieved market dominance, we would still have xmpp.
| 01100011 wrote:
| > what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
|
| No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain
| folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that
| is what's commonly done.
|
| C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through
| reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way
| facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to
| periodically make to stay relevant.
|
| I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems,
| I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't
| easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture
| overall.
| Animats wrote:
| > C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through
| reorganizations.
|
| The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The
| Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A
| activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the
| corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite
| executives can do themselves. For most other things, they
| have to work through others, managing rather than doing.
| ajross wrote:
| > I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these
| old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can
| be different just because they "get it."
|
| How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on
| HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter
| from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and
| DEC didn't?
|
| Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's
| who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in
| this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly
| over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.
| zepearl wrote:
| > _But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have
| to shift. It 's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's
| do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk
| the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers
| and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt._
|
| I don't get this.
|
| Why did they kill so many products which were running on
| standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)
|
| If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example
| "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those
| projects would not conflict with their current main activities
| being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is
| involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but
| it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's
| not that budget for existing depts would have to be
| reduced...).
| deckard1 wrote:
| I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-
| capping each other and so forth.
|
| But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's
| size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or
| perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the
| needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
|
| There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit
| or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of
| people eating the existing pie.
|
| All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic
| offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl
| film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for
| market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
| yashap wrote:
| I honestly think it's possible to have large/mature companies
| that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid
| internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It's
| just really, really, really hard.
|
| You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of
| slowdowns, because they'll keep appearing. For tech companies
| this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt,
| slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means
| reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units
| small and independent.
|
| You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only
| keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start
| strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest
| part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative
| consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of
| ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons
| companies slide into mediocrity over time.
|
| I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but
| I don't think it's impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.
| esafak wrote:
| Which companies did you have in mind?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the prescription is always to go back in time_
|
| I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as
| business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly
| during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains
| adequate buffers shouldn't have to lay people off. Ever. The
| advantages of that haven't been well explored. Ian makes a
| compelling argument that it should be.
| johngossman wrote:
| This is spot on. I'll only add that the necessity of showing
| perpetual growth in the quarterly income report strongly
| incentivizes big companies to act this way, especially where--
| as in most tech companies--the employees have equity.
| stillwithit wrote:
| Has nothing to do with Google "being bad" and everything to do
| with emerging social trends questioning the corporatization of
| everything.
|
| Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer
| boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across
| contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we're
| out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts,
| politicians. Knives aren't out yet but the sharpening stones
| are.
|
| The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in
| deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate
| their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice
| but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the
| fiscal cliff!
|
| People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later
| they'll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their
| needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.
| alliao wrote:
| kind of interesting how bell was able to spun off so much while
| modern companies aren't able to do so
| ljm wrote:
| Google fought against Microsoft's EEE strategy until they could
| do it themselves. Enter Chrome.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Google has entirely become a corporate capitalist driven by
| short term profit.
|
| If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd
| be really confused as to how poor the search results are.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Your username is genius, BTW. Assume you are a regular on HN
| but decided to post with a new account?
| eikenberry wrote:
| > But once you achieve market dominance [..]
|
| Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust
| kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more
| conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept
| in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR
| checkbox.
| sidcool wrote:
| The following is a pretty damning statement.
|
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A
| symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle
| management.
| debatem1 wrote:
| Completely accurate IMO.
|
| He wasn't the snake in the garden of Eden-- google completed
| rather than began its transition with his ascension-- but he
| would definitely have been Team Snake once he saw the fig leaf
| sales figures.
| occz wrote:
| Sad times. If not Google, what's the place to be nowadays? Has
| high interest rates killed tech as a great place to work in
| entirely, or is there any oasis left?
| riku_iki wrote:
| it is also industry maturing, there are tons of people came to
| the industry in the latest years because of money and not
| because of passion about tech.
| jhaenchen wrote:
| I'd say startups. At the very least, it seems like companies
| where the founder stays on after getting rich tend to do
| better. Avoid Day 2 companies.
| occz wrote:
| Startups are shit on pay and as an early tech employee you
| are basically the one that gets screwed the hardest of all. A
| huge gamble with very little upside even in the best of
| cases. I'm gonna have to pass.
| paxys wrote:
| Agree with everything he said, but then again nothing written
| here is unique to Google. Every company starts off with a
| coherent vision, competent leadership and bought-in employees,
| and then as the valuation goes up into the tens/hundreds of
| billions/trillions and employee count balloons to hundreds of
| thousands, it all inevitably goes to shit. It is impossible to
| have any semblance of "culture" at that scale. Google isn't the
| first to run into this and will not be the last.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Glad to see Hixie still working on Flutter though, as I'm a big
| user of it. For the Google specific parts, I can't comment much
| on the internal development structure of the company, having not
| worked there, but as a user of their products over the past 20
| years or so, there really has been a slowdown of innovation from
| them. I mean, what did they really create in the last decade that
| endures?
| silenced_trope wrote:
| I literally came in here to say I'll probably stop using it
| given all the people at Google who Flutter depends on.
|
| I suspect a few high level departures more and it'd be dead.
|
| Do you mean he's going to continue working on it or just that
| he had been for the past 8 or 9 years?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Read his latest posts, he's still working on Flutter, but now
| he doesn't have to answer to its boss, which seems like why
| he left based on a paragraph in this blog post.
| lapcat wrote:
| Don't Larry and Sergey still have 51% of the voting shares?
| (There are different classes of shares.) If so, then everything
| that happens at Google now is with the consent of the company
| founders.
| okdood64 wrote:
| I had the same thought.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| > The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people
| might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that
| doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's
| not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people
| can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they
| dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are
| guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself
| irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from
| future layoffs.
|
| Well said. Just watched exactly this happen after some surprise
| layoffs in an entirely different industry.
| drevil-v2 wrote:
| This is not going to be popular but I have noticed the same
| phenomenon at other companies where hiring decisions (especially
| for management hires) is a diversity quota exercise.
|
| The decline is slow at first but compounds rapidly. Smart and
| lazy people leave first. Average but ambitious employees leave.
| Smart and hard working folks are the last to leave. Leaving the
| grifters and dumb & lazy to pick through the remains.
| lins1909 wrote:
| What the hell
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in
| ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights have
| had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most
| annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have
| to wade through today.
|
| If you don't track users and store personal info about them,
| there is no need for a banner. You could have an opt-in link for
| being tracked to hell and back in the footer. It is _amazing_ to
| me how many "engineers" and "webmasters" cannot understand
| something so simple.
|
| Might as well say all those boneheaded laws made by people who
| aren't even professional rapists require you to ask random
| strangers if it's okay if you spike their drink; yes, you might
| say they do, but if you're the kind of person who doesn't spike
| drinks, you will never even know, the issue will not come up
| once, it will not take one second out of your life. Even just
| scrolling by the FUD _still_ spread by people against the GDPR
| takes more away from me than the GDPR does.
| drubio wrote:
| > _Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department
| that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter,
| Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy,
| but I couldn 't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never
| figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing
| her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is
| minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are
| completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as
| commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people
| against their will in ways that have no relationship to their
| skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive
| feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I
| hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I)
| have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs,
| feeding her just the right information at the right time._
|
| What a shellacking. I never heard of her, so did a quick search,
| she's on X/Twitter https://twitter.com/femtechie ; and yes, her
| Linkedin vanity url is, get this: https://linkedin.com/in/winner
| emodendroket wrote:
| It sounds like the generic complaints of everyone who doesn't
| like their manager ever and frankly I would have thought twice
| before attaching my name to a broadside that attacks a former
| manager by name. But hey, what do I know, I never worked at
| Google.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Even in my "I quit Google" post I was careful to make it
| impossible for an outsider to determine who I was complaining
| about, even scrubbing my team info from LinkedIn.
|
| But I think 18 years at Google means the author has plenty of
| "fuck you" money.
| emodendroket wrote:
| You are probably right; I just don't really see what's to
| be gained by going public with it considering the
| complaints are pretty inside-baseball and not that
| interesting to outsiders (I mean, hard to imagine someone
| thinking "I'm not going to deal with Google because so-and-
| so's subordinates say they don't understand her strategy").
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I will certainly not use Dart if a person in charge of
| its direction doesn't know what they're doing even at a
| basic level. I can't just blindly hope her team does
| what's best and doesn't listen to her.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It'd be hard to find an org where you couldn't find
| someone to make similar complaints.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I'm in one. This is a pretty specific dressing down from
| a senior engineer. It's disturbing, and consistent with
| Google's output
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's just venting. A person in the author's position must
| feel that the mediocre management robbed them of a core
| part of their identity.
| sage76 wrote:
| You are implying that every manager is competent and
| every criticism from a subordinate is baseless.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Not at all. This is a false dichotomy
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I mean, hard to imagine someone thinking "I'm not going
| to deal with Google because so-and-so's subordinates say
| they don't understand her strategy"
|
| I'm not quite there, but as a heavy Firebase user who
| generally loves the product but who has been _incredibly_
| frustrated with a lot of the (lack of) direction of new
| features over the past 4 years or so, reading this post
| made me think "Ohhh, now it makes sense."
|
| That is, there are basic, presumably easy-to-implement,
| features that have languished for _years_ in Firebase.
| Part of me has wanted to go interview with Firebase just
| so I can get hired to fix some obvious missing feature.
| Now, granted, it 's obviously impossible to pin this
| directly on this manager, and this is also a Google-wide
| problem, but I think the author's point is that a lot of
| this "directionless-ness" is a result of poor middle
| management.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Once I got inside Google it wasn't long until I had the
| "Aha moment" and understood why Google's new products are
| in turmoil.
| mmkos wrote:
| Oh well. Maybe it's about time incompetent people were
| named and shamed, maybe that would put a stop to failing
| upwards for people who really shouldn't be there.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It's doubtful.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > But I think 18 years at Google means the author has
| plenty of "fuck you" money.
|
| And the balls! Dunno whether I read your generic "why I
| quit Google" essay, but author's post was the first that I
| liked due to his willingness to throw punches.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Keeping quiet about perceived problems is exactly the kind of
| toxic political lack of transparency that Ian is calling out
| here.
| emodendroket wrote:
| How much is it really doing if you're making the criticism
| after you left?
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Infinitely more than never talking about it, at the very
| least. It definitely will empower others to talk about it
| by validating their perceptions and concerns.
| 93po wrote:
| I would guess he's been advocating for this for years
| before he left.
| chatmasta wrote:
| While I'd never do that either, I did find it refreshing to
| read from someone else. It certainly makes this post unique
| amongst the many "I left Google" diary entries.
|
| Frankly the fact he was willing to include that paragraph
| probably indicates that there's a few thousand more
| paragraphs he resisted including...
| pyb wrote:
| A 18-year veteran like OP shouldn't be complaining about
| their manager's lack of vision ; they should have realised by
| now that it's also their job to enact the vision. He was
| probably paid too much to behave as a passenger.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| What is a problem with being an IC?
| ska wrote:
| Nothing wrong with being an IC. A senior IC role includes
| some responsibility for this sort of thing, that's most
| of what makes it senior...
| scamworld2 wrote:
| Who exactly at Google isn't a passenger? Jeff Dean? There
| aren't many pilots there.
| mathattack wrote:
| I would never name names but I don't have 18 years of Google
| equity. I suspect he didn't have any non-disparagement
| clauses to sign.
| jimbob21 wrote:
| And her summary is literally a list of corporate buzzwords
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Nothing kills motivation more than bad management, I can
| totally feel his pain.
|
| In saying that, I don't think public, targeted statements like
| this are ever the right thing to do. She's just a person, doing
| a job.
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| You know people can be evil or at the least they can be bad
| people. Do you think this person is bad or good? My point is
| that when you say something like "She's just a person, doing
| a job." you're defending the bad rather than calling it out.
| KerryJones wrote:
| I don't know her (nor do I presume to know her), but if I
| take your definition of "bad" as in "morally bad" (you used
| it in the context of evil), that feels pretty presumptuous,
| and then fairly attacking to assume the commenter is
| "defending the bad". There are so many people who end up
| half-assing their jobs in various ways, I think it's a
| pretty slippery slope to start calling those people "bad".
| They may be bad at their job, but I wouldn't call them bad
| people.
|
| I also don't have enough information to say she's "not" a
| bad person, but with the information given, I don't see
| anything that would indicate she is one.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| This is exactly my point. There is no way the public has
| information about whether the person is bad or good, just 1
| disgruntled employee's impression of their job performance.
|
| There's more to life and a person than a job. That's all.
| Even the worst managers I've had have been good people.
| They're good dads and mums, enjoy hiking and camping.
|
| Public statements like this one are easy to make,
| impossible to verify or challenge, and only cause hurt
| bruce343434 wrote:
| What good does that do when they ruin a workplace? If I
| were bad at my job, it's not like I wouldn't get fired
| because I'm just such a great person outside of the
| workplace...
| sage76 wrote:
| Since private complaints routed through internal channels
| don't generally work either, this is a good thing he has
| done.
|
| And no, public statements can make you a public target.
| These are not easy to make.
| layer8 wrote:
| > just 1 disgruntled employee's impression of their job
| performance.
|
| And what's wrong with that, if that's their honest and
| informed impression?
| wavemode wrote:
| I guess it depends on how you view work. I can dislike
| someone's work as a colleague, but like them as a person.
| And vice versa. Work is just work - it's not our entire
| life. And someone being bad at a job (even if we accept
| that this person is truly intrinsically incompetent, and
| not just a byproduct of a dysfunctional org, as is often
| the case) doesn't automatically mean, to me, that they have
| some personal moral failing or personality flaw.
|
| So, in that vein, I think I'd hesitate to publicly
| embarrass someone merely for being bad at a job, since that
| crosses over to affecting their personal life. If someone
| asked me about that person in a professional context (to
| make a hiring decision, for example), I'd be frank about
| their weaknesses. But I don't think the whole world has to
| know about it.
| screye wrote:
| > I don't think public, targeted statements like this are
| ever the right thing to do.
|
| As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree.
| (even if I am too chicken to do it myself)
|
| Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people.
| They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective
| at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces.
| When an org, leader, employee or associate taints every
| single private avenue for criticism, you are left without
| much recourse.
|
| People quit bad managers. But bad managers are often amazing
| as appearing amazing. As long as management has zero
| accountability within the org structure, sub-optimal signals
| like these must do.
|
| > Those who make private criticism impossible will make
| public tirades inevitable
|
| - John F. Kennedy reincarnated in 2023
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The consequences of naming someone in such a manner, in an
| article that makes its rounds on the Internet, can be
| actually quite dire. Public harassment, etc. There are some
| pretty unhinged people out there, and in particular some
| rather ugly people who in particular get especially
| unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc.
|
| I think it's in very bad taste in this case.
| justin66 wrote:
| And weirdly superfluous to the point he was trying to
| make. Did anyone _really_ need the name of someone with
| whom he has an axe to grind in order to believe the
| larger point about Google 's organizational ossification?
| tcbawo wrote:
| I have come to the opinion that being an executive at any
| sufficiently large company revolves around building a cult of
| personality. Any contribution they make would be nearly
| impossible to compare against what a possible replacement
| candidate would make. This might be a fair or unfair
| characterization -- it might even be both! Building a personal
| brand by being a cheerleader for your company/organization,
| maintaining the image that you have everything figured out and
| everything is under control, while taking credit for building
| the world class team underneath you is essential.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I don't think that's quite accurate.
|
| There are genuinely amazing, highly respected executives in
| some (most?) tech companies.
|
| I do agree though that the public facing image of a lot of
| them is a lot of hype. A lot of the big companies want to
| build an aura of infallible leader extraordinaire's for their
| management team.
| tcbawo wrote:
| I didn't say that they weren't talented or deserving
| people. But at some point, managing perception is essential
| to surviving and excelling. There are plenty of geniuses
| that fail to get their due. The hagiography (especially on
| this site) is particularly strong and often paints these
| people as larger than life. Based on the downvotes of my
| opinion, I seem to have struck a nerve.
| znpy wrote:
| I noticed that and it's a very strong point.
|
| Taking such a strong stance is not something would so light-
| heartedly, i really wonder what went on to drive this person to
| write such harsh words about her.
|
| Considering the amount of people the author has likely seen
| over 18 years and how many of them he could have complained
| about... It must not be a chance it's her _specifically_.
| kradroy wrote:
| There's no greater source of professional resentment than
| suffering under a manager who's incompetent and a narcissist
| (my summary of his blurb). After 18 years at Google he
| probably feels safe burning that bridge.
| ghaff wrote:
| But why? I could legitimately IMO rag on a handful of
| former managers who I think mostly meant well but I'm not
| going to do it in a blog post.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > But why? I could legitimately IMO rag on a handful of
| former managers who I think mostly meant well but I'm not
| going to do it in a blog post.
|
| Maybe he doesn't think that she mostly meant well?
| lannisterstark wrote:
| But you could.
| pseg134 wrote:
| Well that is because you live your life from a place of
| fear. Not everyone is like that.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Good for you. It might save someone from taking a job
| under what appears to be an awful manager though
| Fordec wrote:
| After 18 years at Google he's likely at a stage in his
| life where he's at f-you money in his bank account.
|
| If he cares more about the company culture than being
| rehired by the people that disagree with his outlook, why
| not let it fly? If it instigates a culture change, he
| wins at the cost of a professional bridge he doesn't
| value anyway.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| One great way to lose the f-you money in your bank
| account is to get involved in a harassment or slander
| lawsuit because of some offhand things you said that got
| pasted all over the interwebs.
|
| I'm not saying that will happen here, but if I were
| writing this blog post I would have deliberately avoided
| specifics like this because of that, in part.
|
| It's one thing to legitimately trash Sundar Pichai;
| another to name some middle-level manager like that.
| utopcell wrote:
| Since when is a VP middle-level management ?
| justin66 wrote:
| Pretty much half the people who work at any given bank
| have some sort of "VP" title. "Middle-level" would be
| overestimating the standing of many with that title.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| People who never had the misfortune to work with a truly
| toxic manager or co-worker are often oblivious to the
| damage they can cause. I'm speaking of psychological
| damage, burn out, anxiety, stress, depression, health
| problems. Naming their abuser can be helpful to people
| who had to endure such a thing.
| layer8 wrote:
| He grew up in Europe, which may have given him different
| sensibilities.
| starkparker wrote:
| The only thing I know her from is I/O, where she kicks off/MCs
| the dev keynotes. Her I/O bio says "VP and GM of Developer X"
| and "Head of Developer Relations", but I have no idea if
| "Developer X" is developer experience, or a reference to the
| old X skunkworks, or something else entirely.
|
| EDIT: Dug a little more and it's the group formerly known as
| Developer Product. So Firebase, etc. makes sense. Successor to
| Jason Titus.
| throwaway678808 wrote:
| I worked in the org that Jeanine now runs. It had a series of
| bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level.
|
| To call out Jeanine and only Jeanine in language this harsh
| feels wrong. From my recollection and from what I have heard
| from people still working there, she is par for the course.
|
| Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing
| up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in
| leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
| sage76 wrote:
| > there aren't a lot of other black women in leadership at
| Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
|
| Are people of specific races to be put beyond criticism?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Not beyond criticism, some criticism is fine. It's just not
| a very good look to savagely take them down when you barely
| have any representation of said group.
| namtab00 wrote:
| Post author never mentioned her race, HN commenters did.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| If she is in fact "par for the course" and the failures of
| that department were at multiple levels then that type of
| criticism is certainly suspect. I give you a C- at
| attempted strawman though.
| alargemoose wrote:
| This seems like a bizarre mid-representation of GPs point.
| They sated she was "par for the course" for that
| department. Meaning everyone was bad, not just her. And
| found it concerning she was the only person they singled
| out.
| heyoni wrote:
| The author worked under her at least during their time
| working on flutter; which was their most recent
| experience at google.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The department could be one of those "wilderness" assignments
| where you send somebody you don't wanna fire but also don't
| want to have a big impact. A useful place to help someone
| develop their executive leadership skills, or keep those with
| really bad skills from wreaking havoc.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| Thank you - also why target someone who has been there for
| only 2 years.
| ludwik wrote:
| It seems she, being his direct manager, was a large part of
| the reason he decided to leave after 18 years. There is
| probably a lot of anger and frustration. I do agree this
| part of the post could have been phrased better.
| mpalmer wrote:
| While I don't think mentioning her by name was necessary
| (she's just an example of the culture of bad middle
| management he's calling out), I do think highlighting her
| race as a meta-criticism does neither the OP nor Banks
| herself any favors.
|
| My rule of thumb: unless given an obvious reason not to,
| assume good faith on the part of individuals.
| jLaForest wrote:
| Pretending racial disparities doesn't exist (particularly
| in tech) doesn't do any favors either.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Acting like race determines everything isn't exactly the
| healthiest strategy either.
|
| Ultimately we're discussing assuming someone is a racist
| because they said something negative about a person of a
| different race. That assumption is also a racial
| stereotype.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| No, there's two levels to this.
|
| The dickishness/meanness of singling someone out by name
| in a public article on the Internet, which is what the
| comment here was primarily about.
|
| And then the second level, which the commenter
| deliberately downplayed as a minor second point (but
| people here jumped on it...) that said person is a
| minority, so it makes one extra-suspicious about motives.
|
| So I'm not sure where you got this "acting like race is
| about everything" point, because that wasn't in the
| comment.
| mpalmer wrote:
| I'm not pretending anything like that. I assume good
| faith on the part of individuals (intentional word
| choice), because individuals are not systems or
| institutions and they really do tend to be decent and
| well-intentioned.
| screye wrote:
| > series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP,
| and SVP level
|
| Isn't that exactly the job of an org executive? To hire and
| align competent senior leadership ?
|
| I don't think he is criticizing her in particular as much as
| the archetype that she represents. She is a person who has
| never had a coding job & spent her early career quite far
| from the people who write code. I can't for the life of me
| figure out why you would put someone like that in charge of
| google-dev relations. That's a premier-IC-turned-leader
| position if I've ever seen one.
|
| No wonder she doesn't have a strategy. That's a terrible
| match for a hire.
| chatmasta wrote:
| > I can't for the life of me figure out why you would put
| someone like that in charge of google-dev relations.
|
| One possibility is that the person who put her in that
| position has an incentive for Flutter/Dart to fail.
| ruszki wrote:
| They just don't care.
|
| Btw, it's very funny to see projects, which were
| predestined to fail, because they send their shittiest,
| and somehow they became better, and slowly more important
| than the executives star projects. There are meetings in
| such cases (I was part of such projects and meetings,
| several times), after almost everybody should be fired
| immediately, if you want anything good for the company.
| But of course, most of the employees of large, and old
| companies don't care anymore about products, or their
| respective companies.
| 93po wrote:
| > They just don't care.
|
| This seems likely. Google makes 90% or some very high
| percent of their money from ads. I doubt there is any
| focus on on comparatively small side projects
| caskstrength wrote:
| > Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of
| thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in
| leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
|
| Unless I misunderstood the author she was his manager. It is
| not like he chose some random "black woman in leadership at
| Google" to attack.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Seems more reasonable to me to focus on the head of the
| division since she has ultimate authority over it. Any
| incompetent people below her in the org structure are her
| responsibility. If they're so bad, why didn't she realize
| that and remove them? If you don't ever want to be criticized
| then you shouldn't seek out top management positions. He was
| also very critical of Sundar, is that also wrong because it
| could hurt his feelings? As for why he felt the need to air
| his dirty laundry like this, he must feel extremely
| aggrieved.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Which race would have made the "targeted attack" better?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You're being disingenuous. The commenter clearly was saying
| any "targeted attack" is wrong, and that "targeted attack
| where the target is a minority" then brings up even more
| suspicions about the underlying motives for the attack.
|
| At least it does for me. But you sound like you have other
| axes to grind.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I had the same reaction. I'm ex-Google, but never worked in
| that org or heard of her ever but it seemed in profound bad
| taste (or just mean?) to me to be pinpointing people by name
| like that. I'm not sure what it accomplishes, unless there is
| a vendetta at work here?
|
| Also seemed out of tone with the rest of the article, which I
| agreed with the substance of and enjoyed reading.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Why is there a presumed intent to "accomplish" anything?
| It's a blog post.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Calling her out by name felt a bit harsh within the context
| of the post. Sure, call out Sundar as he's a public figure,
| but this lady, never heard of her, never seen her.
|
| He could have made the point by writing "I had this terrible
| boss who had no idea about anything and...", her name is
| irrelevant to demonstrate the issue of decline at Google.
| progbits wrote:
| Maybe it was too much, but one counterpoint: if horrible
| managers never get called out how are you supposed to know
| to avoid them / how will they face consequences?
|
| I understand authors frustration, I've experienced the same
| in the past but could not voice this beyond just some close
| friends and coworkers (who knew it already anyway), for
| fear of repercussions. I've since left but of course this
| person remains, and from what I hear is still as bad.
|
| Outsiders might join that organization unaware of this.
| Others working with those teams might not know this and can
| get burned by it.
|
| Was this particular call out justified? I don't know. But I
| don't think it is inherently bad.
| jjiij wrote:
| I don't really see how naming the specific individual improved
| the argument, unless there is true malfeasance, like sexual
| harassment, I don't think it's ethical to publicly name-and-
| shame somebody for the crime of being bad at their job.
|
| LOTS of people are bad at their job.
| leoh wrote:
| She probably makes $10M a year, don't worry about it.
| cobertos wrote:
| Doing so head-on solves the problem faster. Talking directly
| to someone or about the problem as it is has felt to me like
| people can understand and act quicker. Less malcontent is
| felt by those affected by such a person's incompetence.
|
| Capturing the subtleties in such a black/white call-out
| usually is lost though to the reader/listener. It also
| doesn't lend to this to do this so publically, for the entire
| internet.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It doesn't really matter as the poster is in the "clueless"
| cohort of the company and she's a sociopath. He thinks that
| the company exists to do whatever he said it was earlier when
| in fact the sociopaths running it at that time just said that
| to attract people that can do work to make them rich.
|
| He thinks she is bad at her job and it's clear she's not. She
| know precisely how to move people around to take blame for
| failures while staying clean and clear to brag about the
| wins. To the clueless she might look dumb but she's not at
| all. She knows how to secure her millions in comp per year
| and retire early. She's very smart.
|
| To be fair he seems to be waking up to the fact the
| sociopaths are in it for themselves, 18 years later.
| yonran wrote:
| > I don't really see how naming the specific individual
| improved the argument
|
| I disagree. Good articles should make specific propositions
| about specific exemplars. The alternative is to make
| generalities that are hard to falsify.
| pseg134 wrote:
| If she doesn't want to be publicly shamed for being bad at
| her job she could always try to be good at it.
| kenjackson wrote:
| His critique of his manager doesn't paint him in the most
| positive light either. The fact that she seems to articulate
| the strategy but he doesn't understand it is something I've
| seen on a few occasions where people effectively refuse to
| acknowledge the strategy because they disagree with some aspect
| of it.
|
| His lack of specificity on almost all counts but her name also
| makes me question his judgment.
| wg0 wrote:
| Stadia. Bought studios, games, pumped up hiring, custom
| controller - Promising 60fps 4k game streamed in real time.
|
| Wrapped it up all in just three years. Discontinued.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| "I see you've been working for 18 years in a corporate
| environment, do you have startup experience?"
| dekhn wrote:
| There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment
| of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor
| leadership and become utterly banal.
|
| It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring
| system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the
| infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing
| scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with
| 3d printing and making and stuff (like Hixie, all thanks to Chris
| Dibona) as well as a number of state of the art machine learning
| systems. There really was an amazing feeling being surrounded by
| so many highly competent people (many of whom I see in this
| post's comments) who had similar vision to mine. But ultimately,
| so many things started to chip away at my enjoyment that I had to
| leave. Middle management was a big part of that.
|
| Once you're on the outside, so many things that seem obvious
| (borg, beyondcorp, flume, google3, etc) aren't. It's almost like
| the future is here, it's not evenly distributed.
| yifanl wrote:
| The word would be "Kwisatz Haderach" ;)
| gregw134 wrote:
| Ex-googler here as well. What are you guys using instead of
| flume for data pipelines? Beam on Spark?
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| That experience sounds so great. How did you get hired?
| paxys wrote:
| Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at
| Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its
| Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research,
| and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the
| outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they
| figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own
| companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success
| they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or
| be the ones calling the shots.
|
| This example is the perfect microcosm of the economics of
| innovation at large companies. Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and
| the like have zero incentive to continue to be the companies they
| were 20 years ago. They don't need to take risks. They don't need
| to disrupt anything. They instead need leaders like Pichai who
| will keep the ship steady and keep the shareholders happy, and
| will keep investing in or purchasing smaller companies that are
| either a threat or an opportunity for growth, all while keeping
| their existing revenue streams flowing.
|
| If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the
| early days of such a company then you should realize that it is
| not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own
| childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company
| instead.
| chubot wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your larger point, but Google paid $40M+
| for the 3 people from U Toronto responsible for AlexNet
| (according to Cade Metz's book).
|
| Google might deserve more credit than any other company, but
| there were 20-30 years of innovation at universities
| beforehand.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Google is getting beat badly on multiple fronts, even Search,
| and has pissed away a mountain of goodwill. It's living off of
| declining 15 year old achievements. I wouldn't call Sundar a
| steady hand, he has destroyed much more potential than he has
| created, even if the stock has continued to go up it won't for
| much longer. I sold a significant position in GOOG a few years
| ago and I'm certain it was the right call.
| paxys wrote:
| They are getting "beat badly" only if you read tech blogs and
| not their financial statements.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Like I said, I put my money where my mouth is. GOOG's
| monopoly-fueled glory days will soon be behind it. In tech,
| if you stand still for too long you will eventually be left
| behind.
| bane wrote:
| Microsoft under Balmer did great financially IIR.
| paxys wrote:
| Their stock price was flat for a decade, so no. The
| company was a wreck financially under Ballmer.
| izacus wrote:
| Yeah, and they're still around, relevant and profitable.
| What's your point?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at
| Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its
| Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of
| research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So
| what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had
| struck gold they figured they 'd rather go join startups or
| found their own companies instead, because regardless of the
| amount of success they achieved at Google they would never
| 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots._
|
| And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who
| worked on this research and technology believed that they'd
| have a better chance of doing something life-changing and
| making some bank _outside_ of Google! While that isn 't all
| that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken
| steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a
| huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this;
| Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at
| least lucrative _enough_ ) to stay. But they didn't.
|
| > _If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in
| the early days of such a company then you should realize that
| it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own
| childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company
| instead._
|
| Couldn't agree more. Our brand of capitalism isn't set up to
| allow for such corporate-culture time travel.
| away271828 wrote:
| Just the other week had a team meeting that was partly to
| discuss a possible round 21 of team charter/organization
| changes. Personally, I basically have bounced around multiple
| rounds of managers/teams/responsibilities in just the past
| few years. As the team lead philosophically said, many of you
| (senior) folks have seen maybe 10x employee growth since you
| joined and it's just a different company and the old one
| isn't coming back.
| paxys wrote:
| It's not an indictment of Google but every large company in
| existence. That's just how our current corporate structure
| works, and is the reason entrepreneurship is a thing.
| mepiethree wrote:
| Yeah, and the other side of the coin is that there are tons
| and tons of people who left Google to pursue their passions
| and failed. And the third side of the coin is that there
| are many people who invented things within Google, were
| successful in doing so, and have stayed (e.g. Google Meet)
| thethethethe wrote:
| > many people who invented things within Google, were
| successful in doing so, and have stayed
|
| Yeah there are tons of people like this that are L7-L8
| collecting around 1M TC. You'll always have a boss but
| you can carve out a little kingdom for yourself, which is
| much more appealing to more risk adverse people than
| starting or joining a startup
| nvrmnd wrote:
| While it's easy to agree with you, I find that my opinion here
| has shifted after leaving a large tech company for a seed stage
| startup. Competing against these giant companies is really
| challenging, you have to me more than 2x better to get a
| customer to look at you a second time.
| jra_samba wrote:
| I used to "share" an office with Hixie at Google. Hixie used to
| store his board game collection in the office we nominally
| "shared", but he himself very rarely visited. I liked that just
| fine (let's just say I'm not a fan of "open" shared office
| spaces). My fondest Google office memories were sharing an office
| with Hixie, and "Mr Big Printer" which the Google Open Source
| Team used to print posters. We made an office CD label for "Mr
| Big Printer".
| codewiz wrote:
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
|
| I left 3 years ago for the same reason: I couldn't stand seeing
| Google continue to decline under Sundar's leadership.
| okdood64 wrote:
| > it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear
| malicious
|
| Seems just like the recent news where YouTube was intentionally
| throttling Firefox, which turned out to be a not accurate
| representation.
| hcks wrote:
| << Google workers are nice humans therefore the company is doing
| good (tm) things >>
|
| Maybe it's time to stop drinking the koolaid.
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| Wouldn't be surprised if he receives a subpoena to testify in
| Google's anti-trust case
| scamworld2 wrote:
| Most large tech companies grew by >30% during the covid
| lockdowns, so I don't think company culture is much of a priority
| for them.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| None of this surprises me as an outsider. Google has been in
| obvious, uncontrolled freefall for several years now. Search
| barely works anymore, they squandered a massive lead in AI, they
| are losing in cloud services, Android is so awful it kills me
| when I have to use it for more than a few minutes. I can't think
| of any good new projects or services that were created under
| Sundar's tenure (maybe Colab was cool when it came out, but it
| hasn't improved at all in years and is now badly lagging). And
| their propensity to kill services without a thought has made it
| so that any new service they introduce is met with eye rolls from
| people who have been burned way too many times.
|
| The solution seems clear to me: they should acquire a really well
| run, innovative smaller company and then replace all the top
| executives with the new team. Sundar should be removed
| immediately before he destroys even more value. And then they
| need to do relentless cleaning up, quickly getting rid of
| unproductive middle managers like the person described in this
| post. That should give a burst of energy to demoralized devs.
|
| Then they need to desperately work to fix search so that it
| doesn't suck so much that you need to add "reddit" to every query
| to not get 100% blog spam. And they need to get their act
| together and start very rapidly releasing impressive AI tools
| that aren't worse than stuff from companies that are 1/100th of
| the size. No matter what they do, I can't help but think their
| sustainable earnings trajectory is headed downwards for the next
| few years (they can continue to push short term earnings in
| various ways but that will run out of steam soon enough); the
| question is whether they can stop the decline.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| >It's definitely not too late to heal Google.
|
| Yes, it is. This was inevitable. It's due to 3 factors:
|
| * Becoming publicly traded
|
| * Size
|
| * Scale of public and private use of products
|
| You cannot have a "don't be evil" company when these 3 are like
| they are for Google and there is no going back.
| jhaenchen wrote:
| Says something rather concerning about our economy's ability to
| innovate. Short term profits always end up eating at the core
| like this. I see why Elon has kept several of his companies
| private. The market lacks vision.
| znpy wrote:
| > The oft-mocked "don't be evil" truly was the guiding principle
| of the company at the time
|
| It is oft-mocked precisely because it "was".
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| I think the post is spot on, but I don't agree with naming names
| especially when the other person doesn't get an opportunity to
| tell their side of the story. What if Ian's manager posted her
| own nasty missive criticizing him as an employee? Such things can
| damage someone's future career without any fair process to sort
| out the facts. I wouldn't at all be surprised that such manager
| exists and is not being held accountable internally, but it would
| be unfair to make conclusions based on unsubstantiated
| accusations,
| compiler-guy wrote:
| In the past, such criticism of a leader would show up
| internally via Googlegeist and the leader and their reports
| would all know and possibly adjust.
|
| Cutting Googlegeist has knock on effects that create problems
| like this. The rank and file no longer have a way to
| communicate back up the chain honestly and things like this
| come out.
| antipaul wrote:
| Snippets that stood out to me:
|
| Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the
| benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of
| whoever was making the decision
|
| The effects of layoffs are insidious... people can no longer
| trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically
| dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded
| jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself
| irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from
| future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now
| rantee wrote:
| Xoogler here - Totally agree that the bulging middle management
| layers and lack of crisp CEO vision have dismantled the company's
| ability to weather the changes of "growing up". Had a few
| managers and multiple reorgs in my < two years there, during a
| time of record profits. Peers said that wasn't an uncommon thing.
| Who cares about vision or management so long as the ads money
| printer goes brrr?
|
| Still, there are definitely people trying to do the right thing
| for users despite frequent bu$iness side overrides, and IMO still
| some best-of-breed products amongst the sprawling
| graveyard/zombies. I could even get through to a real person at
| Nest customer support a few weeks ago!
| ainzzorl wrote:
| When did it become acceptable to write things about other people
| as he writes about Jeanine Banks? Even if everything he says
| about her is true, it still feels incredibly rude to say it in
| public.
| artzmeister wrote:
| You see a lot of people here in the comments, as well as the
| author in the article, talking about how "there are good and
| well-meaning people working at Google" and "it sucks that people
| unfortunately hate us =(". A genuine question: if one is a good,
| well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and
| ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much
| worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the
| leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all?
| No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals
| and their society for money. People think of a dystopia as if it
| would come from an evil dictator, or a greedy corporate man, but
| the reality is that the dystopia will come with a charismatic
| smile and a promise of something better. You'd perhaps be right
| to criticize my calling of it a "dystopia" (for now), but my
| point stands.
| munificent wrote:
| _> A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human
| being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively
| contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is
| that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!"
| or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled
| up with all the others that sold their morals and their society
| for money._
|
| The challenge is that we are all simultaneously part of many
| groups whose behavior we don't always agree with.
|
| Should you be piled up with all the others because you're a
| member of a species that is destroying the planet's natural
| resources? Should you be piled up with all the others because
| you pay taxes to a country that used that money to build
| weapons that killed innocents? Should you be piled up because
| you live in a city whose cops commit police brutality? Should
| you be piled up because you bought a product and gave money to
| a corporation that uses child labor?
|
| Life is not so black and white. We have some responsibility for
| the behavior of the groups we are part of, but only fractional.
| We should exert our agency towards good when we can, but
| believing that we have _all_ of the stains on our hands of
| every community or group we 've ever touched or participated in
| is not a path to a better world, it's just a path to individual
| shame and misery.
| artzmeister wrote:
| You're right, and it makes sense. Let me propose another
| perspective then: would a well-meaning, good person not be
| liable to culpability if he or she worked on a feature that
| actively monitored its users for data to sell to advertisors,
| much more than if such a person was working with something
| like Flutter or Go, since the latter workers are doing net
| positive things?
|
| I suppose I got a bit carried away originally, but the point
| is just that - can one truly be well-meaning if he works in
| such a feature as that of the first example?
|
| Moreover, when it comes to the examples you cited, I agree
| that we all share fractional culpability, some more than
| others. But we do not have a choice in being humans, or in
| paying taxes to our governments. We do, however, have a
| choice when it comes to working for Google.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I think the conclusion is really interesting. Maybe this was just
| well written, but I was thinking "What _should_ the CEO of Google
| be pursuing as a strategy ", and then he drops the mission
| statement. I don't know if the mission statement is the best
| articulation of the goal. But it's a clear goal. And it's a goal
| that Google aren't pursuing. It's an interesting goal in the
| context of large language models. Now, more than ever, having a
| accessible and organised store of credible information would be
| incredibly valuable to me. I was literally saying this to someone
| earlier today - the web today sucks. I google something, I click
| the first link it's popup hell. I click through all the links on
| the first page, half of them are the same information re-garbled
| for Google. Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010.
| Just let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes
| anything published in the last 15 years. Well this post turned
| into a rant...
| xigency wrote:
| > Well this post turned into a rant...
|
| You aren't wrong. Frankly, it's embarrassing. I could throw in
| a bunch more complaints and the kitchen sink but the point is
| we should expect better things from these companies and they
| should expect more from themselves as well.
| hbn wrote:
| > Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010. Just
| let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes
| anything published in the last 15 years.
|
| I mean, you can add before:2011-01-01 to your search.
|
| But I'm not sure how accurate the publishing dates on every
| page are.
| neilv wrote:
| I didn't see them mention rank&file careerism culture.
|
| Are they attributing the root cause to leadership, and believe
| the old culture is merely dormant, or could be inspired in people
| who never saw it, and who weren't hired for it?
| neilv wrote:
| Which companies today are the Google of 20 years ago?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The stuff people say plagued google i've seen in much smaller
| companies in the last few years. It's not Google it's the whole
| damn industry
| neilv wrote:
| The industry has a lot of problems, but I remember when
| Google was just starting, and it was obviously a place to go,
| and for years after that it was obviously the place to go.
| Hopefully there are some other obviously the place to go
| companies now?
| jhaenchen wrote:
| Start by filtering out every publicly traded company. Eliminate
| every company not still run by the founder. Nothing that's
| about to IPO. Nothing involving ads. That's a start.
| asim wrote:
| "...She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is
| dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that
| have no relationship to their skill set..."
|
| You know, I remember a time I said, management just think of
| engineers as a resource and refer to us as such. But when the
| word "dehumanising" is used it strikes me a lot clearer. When
| this disconnected occurs between different layers of the same
| corporation people just become a resource, they are no longer
| humans , they are a means to an end, and that end doesn't even
| serve the purpose of the company but the merits of that
| individual. I really wish developers had a way to empower
| themselves out of this hellscape.
| jhaenchen wrote:
| It's called a union. This is what will always happen as long as
| the employees do not collectively bargain. Their strength in
| numbers is completely neutered by a lack of organization.
| janmo wrote:
| "Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error
| driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would
| keep growing quarter-to-quarter"
|
| Seems like they fired the Google Adsense support team. I have
| been using Google Adsense for many years, and since last year
| there is no way of contacting any support, there IS NO WAY, I
| have lost over 10k in revenue because of it, and was only able to
| get my problem fixed after 2 months by joining a third party
| publisher network.
|
| Keep in mind that Adsense is one of Google's main sources income,
| and that they take a 32% cut as an intermediary (So they have
| ample money to pay for a 5 star support)!
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I doubt that retail adsense is very large - it's probably
| mostly large enterprise deals where you do get your personal
| poc for support and whatnot
| janmo wrote:
| You are probably right, because once I got accepted in the
| network, they were able to get to talk to the Google
| MCM/Adsense support and within one week I got MCM approved
| and my Adsense account was reinstated. Hadn't they be there I
| would still be stuck.
| worik wrote:
| A very interesting article
|
| Very interesting they were working on Flutter
|
| I have just spent 18 months with Dart, supporting Flutter
| development
|
| I formed the view that Fludder (as I called it) was built by
| brilliant engineers who were directionless. As a replacement for
| Javascript it is an utter failure, sadly
|
| Made this a very interesting read
| cubefox wrote:
| He doesn't mention it, but it is curious that Google has
| apparently also lost the lead in the AI race to OpenAI, after
| being unquestionably on top for many years. PaLM 2 was inferior
| to GPT-4, despite being younger, and Gemini is set to release a
| whole year later. What's going on?
| afjeafaj848 wrote:
| Does it really matter though? Whatever OpenAI does google will
| just copy and incorporate into GCP, similar to how they lost
| the race with AWS
| lapcat wrote:
| > I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately
| actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without
| prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with
| cynicism in the court of public opinion.
|
| > For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related
| standards (https://whatwg.org/). My mandate was to do the best
| thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good
| for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google's interests).
|
| I feel as though Hixie is lacking in self-awareness here.
| Googlers tend to be biased toward themselves and their own power.
| Have Googlers considered the possibility that the best thing for
| the web, and the world, is for Google to keep its grubby hands
| off the web? Is Google Search's dominant market share good for
| the web? And the market shares of Android, Chrome, and Gmail? I
| would answer no, no, no, no.
|
| It's funny that Hixie mentions WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application
| Technology Working Group) as a "good" example. What actually
| happened is that Hixie was a ringleader in a coup d'etat by the
| browser vendors to overthrow the W3C and take over the HTML
| standards. Is that good for the web, and the world? Here I would
| also say no.
| mkozlows wrote:
| I think this criticism of WHATWG forgets how moribund and
| ossified W3C was at the time, up its own ass with semantic web
| nonsense and an imaginary suite of XHTML 2.0 technologies that
| had no path to reality.
|
| Hixie's criticisms of it were correct, and WHATWG was the kick
| in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things
| again.
| lapcat wrote:
| I think the fact that I'm bringing up the history shows that
| I haven't forgotten.
|
| There are legimate disagreements over whether switching to
| XML was a good idea. Nonetheless, these disagreements were
| not a good excuse to overthrow W3C entirely, merely a
| convenient excuse for the browser vendors. Moreover, I don't
| think the HTML standards _need_ to move as fast as Google
| wants them to move. HTML is now a "living standard", in
| other words, constantly changing, and I don't think that's
| good for the web. These things should move slowly. The giant
| browser vendors themselves are selfishly the main
| beneficiaries of forcing everyone else on the web to move at
| their pace. It consolidates their monopolization of the web.
|
| > WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to
| focus on relevant things again.
|
| Relevant things like... _not_ controlling the HTML standard
| anymore? WHATWG has stolen a lot of the relevance of W3C.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The WHATWG W3C kerfuffle perfectly illustrates that when an
| unaccountable body's decisions become unpopular, another
| body can meet popular demands and sidestep the body's work.
| W3C was not taking HTML, XML, and XHTML in the directions
| that most users of the Web wanted. The fact that semantic
| web fans and the web-should-be-for-documents crowd agreed
| with the W3C doesn't matter, they were outnumbered by the
| rest. WHATWG met the demands of other devs and pushed the
| W3C into irrelevance. Sometimes it takes more than feeling
| right to be right, you need to convince others also.
| ttepasse wrote:
| ... another _unaccountable_ body
|
| And of course WHATWG didn't out-convince devs on a
| marketplace of ideas; as an oligopoly of browser
| developers they just did.
| zellyn wrote:
| There's definitely a period of history where noticing WHATWG
| on a URL made me breathe a sigh of relief that the content
| might actually be useful and understandable.
|
| These days, W3C stuff seems perfectly fine (except for their
| standard document template making it almost impossible to
| tell "what is this thing actually about?" at a glance! )
| throwaway678808 wrote:
| Overall reasonable post, but thanking Chris DiBona in this post
| honestly makes me question the whole narrative. When I was at
| Google he was on the short list of petty tyrants to avoid at all
| costs. Just a mean person having way too much fun running a tiny
| Kingdom Of No.
| darajava wrote:
| Flutter is such a brilliant tool. Not just the framework, but
| everything surrounding it. Tooling, the standard of cross
| compatibility, pub.dev, the Dart language itself, the friendly
| community... it's the best developer experience I've found and
| this article makes me really hope that Google pulls through.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google
|
| One thing I find bizarre in Google is lack of accountability. If
| someone builds a lousy product, we are not supposed to criticize
| it, not even objectively. That's because, well you guessed it,
| "it hurts feelings". Or per Pichai's words, "let's be
| thoughtful". So many teams have instead learned to launch failed
| products to advance their levels in Google.
| tdeck wrote:
| I don't think this began under Sundar. I remember that lack of
| accountability under Larry also.
| Lammy wrote:
| > it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear
| malicious
|
| Intent doesn't matter if the outcome is the same as intentional
| malice. """Hanlon's razor""" is total bullshit.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The article mentions a very keen observation. There are lasting
| consequences to over-hiring and then subsequently laying people
| off; it doesn't bring the company back to the starting point:
|
| > The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people
| might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that
| doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's
| not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people
| can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they
| dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are
| guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself
| irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from
| future layoffs.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I give Hixie exactly this: he is not brownnosing and he openly
| speaks up. There is nothing insulting from his side, and I
| personally like people with the standards Hixie has. It sounds
| like he acted internally in the same way which is fine.
|
| Hixie has seen some things at Google.
|
| I will be forever thankful to him for realizing HTML5. I read
| many document changes back then and when people left out of
| protest or whatever reason, Hixie kept things going in the right
| direction.
|
| The web would not be what it is like without him.
| boyesm wrote:
| In 18 years from now, which company will have employees writing
| blog posts like this about it?
|
| I hear amazing stories about the early days of Google and I can't
| help but think, which engineering company that is in its infancy
| right now will have employees reminiscing so fondly of the early
| days? An AI startup?
| xorvoid wrote:
| Around 2008 when I was starting college, I was really excited
| about Google and wanted to work there. By 2013 I began to feel
| like they weren't the same anymore and no longer interested me.
| By 2023, I can say that Not pursuing a job at Google was my best
| career decision. You can go watch old Google Tech Talks circa
| 2010 and they're fabulous. I can't imagine them putting out that
| kind of content these days. It's rather sad, I bet 2005 Google
| was a remarkable place that's now lost to time
| pneill wrote:
| I see these posts and just shrug. Tech companies have lifecycles.
| There is that early startup energy where "we're all in this
| together." Then, if they're lucky, success and growth, but the
| startup mentality remains. But as the company grows, it can't
| maintain the startup culture. It's simply not possible. And then
| companies mature and you have bureaucracy and leaks and empire
| building and layoffs, etc. It's inevitable.
|
| What surprises me about Google is not that its changing, but that
| it's taken so long to change.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The corporate form is disappointing. Everything described is
| inevitable.
|
| Puts me in a UBI + cooperatives mood.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| "Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded,
| because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to
| protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google
| now."
|
| My father, a machine mechanic, gave me the same advice years ago.
| In my mind stuff like this only applied to blue collars so I
| didn't give it too much thought. Only later did I realize (after
| the company I was at became so mismanaged) he was 100% right.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were
| sincerely intended to be good for society.
|
| > Take Jeanine Banks, for example, ... Her understanding of what
| her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes
| requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable.
|
| So, when Ian does sincere things that were intended to be good,
| they get criticized for them unfairly. But this Jeanine Banks is
| [fucking incompetent] and Ian could not possibly be an outsider
| making the same mistake he claims everyone else is.
|
| Also seems like a defamation suit waiting to happen.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years
| after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ...
|
| _Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error
| driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would
| keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google 's
| erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that
| led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil").
| The effects of layoffs are insidious._
|
| I think calling it an unforced error is generous. When I left in
| 2010 I pointed out to Google that their falling CPC rates meant
| that the profit margin on search advertising was eroding faster
| than they were developing new income and faster than they were
| reducing costs[1] and as a result they were going to find
| themselves compromising their principles to appease wall street.
| Before they laid off people they compromised every other
| principle they had, they added advertising to places they earlier
| boasted about not advertising, they started selling more and more
| demographic information about their users to sketchier people.
| All so they could show that revenue number going up and to the
| right.
|
| I predicted they would lay off people a lot sooner than they
| eventually did but I blame my misprediction on my
| misunderstanding of just how much money they could develop when
| they stopped worrying about whether or not it was good for their
| users. I completely concur though with how a layoff really
| changes people. I was at Intel when they did their first layoff
| in 1984 and suddenly everyone's attitude changed to "how do I
| stay off the layoff list?" That doesn't foster a creative, risk
| taking culture.
|
| Someday the story of Google will make a good read, kind of like
| 'Bad Blood' but where the enemy isn't a sociopathic leader but a
| bunch of regular people who got addicted to being massively
| wealthy and threw out all of their principles when that wealth
| was threatened. Altruism of the rich is a function of their
| excess wealth.
|
| [1] The primary reason I left was because the project I delivered
| which saved them $10M/yr year-after-year was considered "not
| significant" (read unpromotable).
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| > Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were
| sincerely intended to be good for society. Google Books, for
| example.
|
| Yes, Google books was great endeavor that could benefit all
| humanity. What happened to all those scans? Are they still stored
| somewhere?
| lopiar wrote:
| This is the result of having leadership with MBA or finance
| background instead of engineering. All they see is short term
| money, product is a 2nd class citizen.
|
| This is what happened to the automotive industry. In the past
| companies tried to build the best car. Now? Profit is all that
| matters.
| idlewords wrote:
| The whole post is a good illustration of what made early Google
| so insufferable.
| Krontab wrote:
| > Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at
| best; she frequently makes requests that are completely
| incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities
| in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their
| will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set.
|
| I worked under a VP at a job once who was exactly like this when
| I was a manager. Truly one of the most demoralizing experiences;
| always trying to do the best for the people under you and sheild
| them from this kind of nonsense, but in middle management you can
| only do so much _sigh_.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Slight change of company name for anyone interested:
|
| I'm currently finishing this book by an unabashed fan boy:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp...?
|
| about how HP went from the coolest company in the world (50's and
| 60's) to dorky old mediocre place that
| Fiorina/Hurd/Apotheker/Whitman just finished the destruction that
| was already underway.
|
| Like a lot of Valley folks, I blamed Carly, but some other long
| time HP'ers said it was already in process of destroying itself.
| And while people like to hold up IBM as the canonical bad example
| for Microsoft and then Google, HP could equally well play that
| role.
|
| I think. Still pondering this one.
| zem wrote:
| I was surprised to see him savage Jeanine Banks by name like
| that, but if this bit is true I can at least understand the
| impulse: "She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is
| dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that
| have no relationship to their skill set."
|
| as another longish-term google employee, the one thing I
| absolutely depend on among all the org and culture changes is the
| ability to have a fair bit of choice and input when it comes to
| the specific projects I am working on, where the company can
| trust me to pick something that will work with my skills and
| interests and also align with the team and department objectives.
| losing that would likely impact me more than any of the other
| changes over the last 12 or so years I've been here.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| At some point we really need to admit our domain (and maybe
| society at large) is in a "Managerial Crisis."
| axiomdata316 wrote:
| Interesting to read this as an outsider and to pretty much
| confirm what you suspected. Very interesting is the take on Vic
| Gundotra. I knew him briefly on a personal level and he came
| across as a nice guy but you don't want to cross him. The comment
| on how he doesn't do well when things go wrong lines up perfectly
| with what my impressions were of him.
| google234123 wrote:
| Honestly, Flutter, Dart, Go, dont provide much for Google in my
| opinion. Google shouldn't be wasting money on them
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar
| products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he's busy with
| windy.com now) and it's funny how similar my feelings are.
|
| What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave,
| and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate
| environment as long as they're getting paid tend to stay or join.
| I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity can be reversed.
|
| I actually can't decide what would be the best strategy from the
| CEO's point of view. I.e. how best to govern an aging,
| established tech company like Google? I really like what Aswath
| Damodaran said about Google - there's a "sugar daddy effect" -
| the various departments lack desperation to make it, unlike
| startups.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This is really really incisive, I almost shivered: I went
| through a "defrag" from Android Wear to Android (i.e. they shut
| down Boston Android Wear and offered us jobs on Boston Android)
|
| I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd
| and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS
| programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI.
|
| We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the
| vast majority of that 50% transferred to other things within
| Google.
|
| That occurred exactly along the lines you mention, with some
| side help of them accepting there was something genuinely wrong
| with Android's culture that needed to be avoided, as Ian
| mentions.
|
| That self-selection combined with the...qualities...of Android
| completely changed the job. For the first time at Google I was
| working with people who genuinely, firmly, at their core, had
| no real interest in anything except the paycheck. I do believe
| this is very well-adjusted and have a hard time explaining the
| feeling and what it leads to without sounding derogetary. Your
| post does such an excellent job of pointing at it.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Thanks. What also surprises me is that coworkers have little
| desire to start side-projects or startups. But that's
| probably because those who do have left already.
|
| By the way, I was developing for Android since its early days
| (before the first Android phone was released) and mostly
| switched to iOS development few years ago.
|
| I have to say that the Android SDK (and the UI/UX too) was
| underwhelming, although it started to get better at some
| point. It felt like the developers were not top talent and /
| or were under pressure to ship functionality quickly without
| having the time to step back and think hard about design and
| simplicity. The most notable example of this is the activity
| / fragment lifecycle (also known as the "lolcycle").
| knorker wrote:
| > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
| visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
| interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google
|
| These are the Balmer years. Or as we'll start saying in a few
| years: The Sundar years.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle
| management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example
|
| Wow. Shots fired.
|
| More seriously, his description of this manager has been my
| typical experience of managers in large companies. Very sad to
| see what Google has become.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| First thing I noticed were the Swiss trains :) I guess Google is
| pretty big in Zurich by now? I remember the beginnings of Google
| maps here
| mrb wrote:
| I too believe the company has entered a phase of stagnancy or
| even decline. In fact, so much that two weeks ago I put my money
| where my mouth is by selling $1M worth of GOOG I was given as
| part of a stock grant when I was hired by Google in 2014. (I
| promptly reinvested this capital in a generic S&P 500 index
| fund.)
|
| From 2014 to mid 2015, when I quit, I found Google had a great
| engineering culture and I loved my time at the company, but I was
| having gut feelings of the start of a decline. I saw engineering
| hires who weren't so skilled. I saw Larry and Sergei seemingly
| lack the spark in their eyes when giving candid answers at our
| TGIF meetings. I saw a buildup of red tape and overhead. Then,
| long after quitting Google, more problems crop up. In the last
| year or so I saw a noticeable decline in the quality of Google
| search engine results. In the last 2 months I saw an even more
| noticeable decrease of the quality of Gmail's spam filters (today
| I get ~10 spams daily out of ~50 legitimate emails.) I keep
| stumbling on more and more annoying bugs in Google's Android apps
| that remain unfixed for years.
|
| No one knows how long this stagnancy or decline is going to last.
| In the case of Microsoft they have stagnated (IMHO because of
| Ballmer) roughly between 2005 and 2017 (6% annual revenue growth
| on average). Since 2017, thanks to Satya Nadella's turnaround,
| their annual revenue growth was 13% on average. I think Google
| needs to see leadership change to whip the company back into
| shape. But this probably won't happen for another few years.
| There is so much inertia in market forces of a huge mastodon like
| Google that it will take another couple years for such sub-par
| products and services quality to start noticeably affecting
| revenue growth. That inertia is the same reason it took 3 years
| of Nadella as CEO before Microsoft saw revenue growth starting to
| bounce back up.
| greatgib wrote:
| I think this guy has a Stockholm syndrom like I saw multiple
| times with Google employees: ; one of the most
| annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have
| to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams
| would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good
| for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests,
| only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
|
| That is very fun because he thinks that they were trying to do
| good for the world but all was messed up because of cookie
| banners. Where, in fact, doing good for the world would have been
| to not abuse of cookies for tracking and evil use that would mean
| that they would not need bad cookies and would not have been
| needed to produce cookie banners...
| mclanett wrote:
| Interesting to hear the author complain about Android, which
| today is held up as the one part of Google which knows how to
| ship product.
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