[HN Gopher] Larry Page's Comeback (2014)
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Larry Page's Comeback (2014)
Author : monort
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-04-10 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| evilsnoopi3 wrote:
| This should have (2014) at the end of the title. Very interesting
| though especially with the hindsight of 7 more years...
| dehrmann wrote:
| Google's biggest business failing around that era was how far
| behind they were in cloud computing. GCE only launched in 2013.
| EC2 launched 2007-ish. In 2014, unless you were paying
| attention to Amazon, it wasn't obvious how big of a blunder
| this was, yet.
| golergka wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that they had app engine in 2010, I was
| building a company on it then. Or does it not count as cloud
| computing?
| khazhoux wrote:
| App Engine team was maybe a 5-10 engineers. It wanted to be
| the next Heroku, whereas AWS aimed to be _the_
| infrastructure for all the world 's software.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I feel like in 2014, at least in my circles, AWS was already
| a behemoth.
| jsnell wrote:
| (2014)
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, some parts didn't age well.
|
| > Page set up Android as a separate entity, one that was only
| nominally a part of Google, and _allowed Rubin wide latitude to
| run it without interference from the parent company_.
| ardit33 wrote:
| is that part not true, At least initially? I mean, it could
| have changed over time, but didn't Android have its own repo,
| and team, and some googlers were complaining about not being
| part of the whole system?
| tpmx wrote:
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/andy-rubin-
| cour...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-
| sexual-...
| adolph wrote:
| Did Rubin keep project managers for this activity or did
| Page fire the Android ones too?
| tpmx wrote:
| I believe this happened after managers were allowed
| again.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Is there some established definition of "sex ring"?
|
| Ring: a group of people drawn together due to a shared
| interest or goal, especially one involving illegal or
| unscrupulous activity. "the police had been investigating
| the drug ring"
|
| could we maybe be a bit more specific? Is the claim that
| this was a "prostitution" ring, which would be illegal,
| though possibly not immoral unless there was coercion? Or
| was this just a group of people having "sex", which I
| believe is still legal in the United States?
| musingsole wrote:
| ^ What happens when technotarians find money but not
| community
| neolog wrote:
| Sounds like he was running a sex work business?
| [deleted]
| httpsterio wrote:
| Rubin is a disgusting person but it's still a very relevant
| part of Google's and Android's history. Doesn't really attest
| to the 'ageing' of the article in my opinion.
| sneak wrote:
| The article paints this (in retrospect, bad) decision in a
| positive light.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Page was convinced that Google could use a CEO after all. But
| only if that CEO was Steve Jobs.
|
| That was in 1999. Steve Jobs had returned to Apple by then, but
| wow, the valley would be a different place if that had happened.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Page's "perfect search" vision, the idea that you can get
| everything you could need so that you can work on important
| problems, is the perfect specimen idea from an engineering mind.
| The problematization of experience is a great tool, but it is not
| an end, and of the options available it is a pretty humble one.
|
| If you have ever seen a highly automated dairy farm, cows have
| everything they need to work on important problems too, but
| they're cows, hooked up to machines that remove every aspect of
| what makes them cows other than how they serve the machines they
| are connected to. Maybe we could use a variation of Neuralink to
| connect all those cows' brains for distributed processing to
| solve important problems for us, and when they're done, we eat
| them, or use them for decorative materials. With a sufficiently
| random drip of seratonin and dopamine, they'd even be happy, if
| that were meaningful to them.
|
| I like that the first incarnation of Google was called "BackRub,"
| and they even had masseuses on-site is a pretty unselfconscious
| and intimate expression of what actuated him. The only thing that
| separates those cows from people in a mind indexed like that is
| probably not sufficient to prevent it from collapsing them into
| indifference. If cows had a version of "don't be evil," from our
| perspective it would be cow-evil and not even register as
| something we needed to consider. It's just an entertaining
| article from the perspective of the writer, but I can't help but
| suspect what Page's vision looks like now is informed by the
| omniscience of google's data and AI, and the ethics of that
| perspective are not the same as those cows.
|
| We may be into the territory of having a Dr. Manhattan problem.
| newbie578 wrote:
| Wow, I didn't expect to read the full article and really be
| pleased..
| ardit33 wrote:
| I feel the "PM as CEO of the product" (aka, Product Owner)
| paradimng is completely wrong. PMs become very political fast,
| and often don't have qualms to undermine other parts/products of
| the company in order to advance their own.
|
| Since often they are not the ones doing the hiring of engineers,
| they really don't care/have no qualms of the long term
| engineering needs (both personel/morale, and architecture). True
| company CEOs have to think about engineering personal needs all
| the time as recruiting is hard. PM/PO just don't care as they
| don't have to deal with true consequences of their decissions on
| the people that actually get the work done. I have seen narcistic
| PMs completely destroy team morales, and have engineers after
| engineers jus transfer out their teams.
|
| Also, Google PMs have earned a 'toxic' reputation in the
| industry. They are just too political. Might be ok for a large
| company, but they can be poison to smaller ones.
| mpalmer wrote:
| > Later, at Stanford, he'd peppered his adviser, Terry Winograd,
| with thesis ideas that sounded as far out there as some of
| Tesla's later schemes. One idea involved building a superlong
| rope that would run from the Earth's surface all the way into
| orbit, making it cheaper to put objects in space.
|
| Pretty sure Larry Page didn't invent space elevators.
| mathattack wrote:
| Can anyone here give a first account of what happened? And the
| impact? Too often there's an agenda behind the story.
| callesgg wrote:
| I think the idea that the project manager of a technical project
| should be an engineer sounds like a good idea.
|
| In my life I have seen project managers getting played for fools
| over and over. If the project manager can't asses if something
| like a time estimate is reasonable people will take advantage.
| The cost, the timeline and the deliverables will suffer.
| NickNaraghi wrote:
| This article is actually a fabulous account of Larry Page's
| development as a CEO and leader at Google.
|
| I wasn't expecting to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed
| it.
| [deleted]
| Zigurd wrote:
| The article is from 2014 and describes events from 2001. That
| is before the Agile approach became popular for managing
| software development projects. It is the same year the
| Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written.
|
| Agile happened because using the standard set of pre-Agile
| tools was inflexible. Replanning happened way too often, and
| was way too much work. Or, worse, teams tried to stick to a
| clearly obsolete schedule. This is not to say that Agile,
| especially as it has morphed into something that is too often a
| jargon-laden dogma, it an unalloyed good. But it was a
| relatively primitive time for software project management.
|
| The article says very little about what responsibilities were
| organized onder project managers. Was it the wrong approach to
| project management? Was the job description inappropriate? The
| wrong tools?
| coinerone wrote:
| Maybe because its written like a Hollywood Movie Plot!
|
| "It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate
| student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with
| a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web
| and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world's
| information in an entirely new way."
| johnchristopher wrote:
| To be read in Jeff Bridge's voice
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-J4duzP8Ng (Tron legacy
| speech).
| khazhoux wrote:
| In my time at Google I never understood on what criteria young
| PMs were hired. The company would regularly reject engineering
| candidates who had very successful solo projects because they
| didn't correctly answer the generic Comp Sci and how-do-you-
| scale-search questions, but at the same time the _vast_ majority
| of PMs I encountered were just a year or two out of undergrad,
| and had never built a product, never launched a product, never
| _demonstrated_ any aptitude for connecting with users. They were
| certainly personable, and overall were good communicators, but
| not --as a rule-- inventive or imaginative.
| stunt wrote:
| The difficult thing about talking about project management is
| that it is so inconsistent at different organizations that makes
| it impossible to talk about it without having a lot of context.
|
| I worked at companies where project managers had very strong
| technical background and experience, but I also worked at a
| company where project managers were only a little technical, but
| had very strong project management skills. Then there is the
| other end of the spectrum, where project managers are simply
| incompetence. They got promoted to become a project manager with
| almost no knowledge about it and also no willingness to learn it
| properly and become good at it.
|
| The latter (incompetence PM) is awful for any type of engineering
| work. And some companies make it even worse by making engineers
| report directly to those project managers.
|
| The first type (technical project manager) is obviously harder to
| build, because not many engineers want to become project
| managers, and not many engineering teams are able to navigate
| without a good product team in organizations that don't have a
| solid engineering culture (e.g. traditional companies). So you
| often find companies with the second type. And even then I think
| it's best if there is a clear separation of concerns between
| product and development teams. A product manager/team that takes
| care of product concerns but not engineers themselves. While they
| work with each other, engineers should report directly to a
| technical lead that understands their efforts and needs.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If engineers report to PMs, your organization is broken. Love
| it when our competitors do it. Makes poaching great engineers
| really easy.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Note that Google currently has a PM in the CEO's seat.
| ignoramous wrote:
| To be fair, one simply doesn't go from running a humble org
| competing with the Alexa Toolbar to running all of Alphabet
| with just PM mindset.
| tpmx wrote:
| Sounds a lot like the chaos at Tesla. I guess Tesla really needs
| a Gwynne or an Eric.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Except in Tesla it is their "Larry Page" that need to be fired
| to fix the problem.
| tpmx wrote:
| What I'm saying is that Tesla board needs to find an Eric
| Schmidt/Gwynne Shotwell-like person to replace the technoking
| as CEO. The technoking is spiraling.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Well then I couldn't agree more.
|
| He is more of a TechNogging though.
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(page generated 2021-04-10 23:00 UTC)