[HN Gopher] The maze is in the mouse: what ails Google
___________________________________________________________________
The maze is in the mouse: what ails Google
Author : npalli
Score : 261 points
Date : 2023-02-15 02:34 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I can't remember where it's from, but one thing I read put it
| something like this: as a company grows, the proportion of people
| working to further organisation's goals shrinks compared to the
| proportion working for the organisation.
| mcenedella wrote:
| A remarkable piece of writing, and I'm enthralled that the author
| has taken the lyrics of an extremely famous cover song and made
| it seem fresh, new and relevant to this very moment.
|
| I will forever hear "Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig
| my earth None of them along the line, know what any of it is
| worth"
|
| differently now.
|
| btw, the Waze founder's (similar) goodbye post is also worth
| reading.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > the lyrics of an extremely famous cover song
|
| Actually he used the lyrics of an extremely famous _original_
| song, which were written by Bob Dylan :)
| magicloop wrote:
| One thing I can't figure out (genuine question) is why they don't
| have 20% time anymore for innovation. I thought it was a key
| driver for new products at Google. Does such a thing cause career
| risk, or political strife?
|
| Also, I'd like to understand if their AI lab, Deep Mind, also
| suffers the same problem, or does it have a different culture?
| Does Deep Mind have 20% time?
|
| I'd appreciate it if anyone within the company could explain it
| please.
| akomtu wrote:
| The corporate environment demands results every quarter, so
| everyone who cares about career must show measurable progress
| every 3 months. That's why the corporate crowd looks like a
| bunch of blind men with walking sticks, looking down precisely
| 3 feet ahead. They are the type that will walk thru an amazon
| forest, and their only memories will be mud and potholes on
| their way.
| magicloop wrote:
| If I'm understanding it correctly, you are saying doing 20%
| time on a side project is a career risk as you won't be seen
| to be "delivering" as much as your peers (because the side
| project is not valued).
|
| Is it even worse than that - you get rooted out because
| innovation side projects marks you out as being troublesome
| (as it does not align with corporate plans/goals)?
| __derek__ wrote:
| Caveat that I don't know what I'm talking about, but maybe 20%
| time violates the inclusiveness value because it doesn't
| require/include others' opinions:
|
| > "Respect each other" is translated into "find a way to
| include and agree with every person's opinion". In an inclusive
| culture (good --it doesn't withhold information and
| opportunity) with very distributed ownership (bad), you rapidly
| get to needing approval from many people before any decision
| can be made.
| vkou wrote:
| The _only_ person whose opinion 20% time, as prescribed, does
| not value, is your manager 's. (As they shouldn't be able to
| veto it.) Your 20% project is not going to get anything done
| if you're not taking the opinions of your
| collaborators/dependencies/customers into account.
|
| IMO, The reason most people don't pursue 20% projects is
| because it's hard to be the manager, product manager, and
| main developer on a project that you're giving 1 day a week
| to. It's really, really hard. Most people don't have the
| skillset to do that well.
|
| So the path of least resistance to a simple life is to just
| devote 100% of your time to what your manager wants you to
| work on, where its her job to manage, product manage/wrangle
| product managers, etc.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It was always a myth. Back in the day, a few people would have
| 20% projects. Most did not, or did so only once in a while.
| akprasad wrote:
| I was at Google from late 2013 to early 2016, and even then, I
| would hear 20% time referred to as 120% time [1]. So 20% time
| hasn't been a _de facto_ practice for about a decade.
|
| [1]: https://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-
| not...
| carom wrote:
| This is dead on. When I worked there I summed the culture up as
| code bureaucracy. Truly awful place to work for someone who likes
| to build. It taught me what I don't want in a company I work for
| or run.
|
| Side note, I really enjoyed the interspersed poetry excerpts in
| this article. Refreshing from normal articles whose call outs
| just have you reading the same sentence twice.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| > trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal
| reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings,
| bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-
| hands summits, and inevitable reorgs.
|
| Sounds like any large corporation after 20 years.
| hoseja wrote:
| Turns out that's about the natural lifespan of the _Polyhomo_
| _corporaticus_
| iandanforth wrote:
| The question the author doesn't answer is, "Why?". Who the hell
| cares if Google is innovating and making the world a better
| place? They jettisoned their idealism with the founders and are a
| standard company. A standard, ludicrously profitable company.
|
| The more likely and rational approach to the situation described
| by the author is seeking efficiency in support of the core profit
| generating business. Google is ripe for huge, painful cuts that
| further consolidate wealth in the hands of shareholders. If that
| absolutely massive R&D spend isn't doing much, or doing
| _anything_ efficiently, cut it.
|
| Personally I hate this approach and would love to see Google to
| return to its nimble and "Don't be evil" roots, but I have yet to
| identify sufficient motivation for it to do so.
| Animats wrote:
| > _" the stated core values of the company are rock solid"_
|
| What is Google using after "Don't be evil"?
|
| > " _... problems. They are all the natural consequences of
| having a money-printing machine called "Ads" that has kept
| growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins._ "
|
| Right. Google has only one product that generates real profits,
| and it has one main user entry point. So they have to be very
| cautious and not break what happens at that entry point. That
| fuels the culture. (The other products: [1]. All either lose
| money or are small markets relative to ads.)
|
| For the first time in decades, Google now faces a real threat -
| somebody else has technology that can disrupt their position in
| search. Yes, ChatGPT produces some bogus results as an answer
| engine right now, but a year from now? Microsoft is willing to
| spend a few billion dollars on that.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
| pc_edwin wrote:
| Google with its highly concentrated pool of galaxy brains has the
| potential create world-changing products at the same level of
| SpaceX or Tesla.
|
| Its a pity, I recall the days when I was so excited to use Google
| Cloud or just watch their keynotes. Regrettably, as the years
| went by it got more and more diluted.
|
| Unlike Microsoft, the obstacle for Google is not greed or hubris,
| its tolerance. I hesitate to elaborate further, as the specifics
| are likely to attract scrutiny or censure.
| larrymyers wrote:
| tl;dr Acquihire founder is shocked when the giant behemoth that
| did the acquisition is motivated to protect its billions of
| quarterly profit at the expense of empowering all the brainpower
| it employs to do innovative and inherently risky things.
|
| Really good piece of writing though, it never loses the plot
| despite being a longer read.
| mcenedella wrote:
| "it never loses the plot" - great assessment. it really does
| hold your attention throughout.
| pif wrote:
| Your comment is spot on, and the line you wrote summarizes
| perfectly the article.
|
| If you are wondering about the downvotes, it's because HN'ers
| hate when you state the truth about the world being larger than
| the web startups microcosm.
| college_physics wrote:
| Lots of stereotypical phrases: "Lead with commitment to a
| mission", "Embrace agile or lean development", "Winnow the layers
| of middle management" etc., the sort of low-risk generalities
| that are maybe suitable for expertise-lite consultancies but
| don't really shed new light.
|
| What truly "ails" an entity that prints billions? Does it take an
| insider to figure out? Does it take a technologist? If you go
| back to startup school and try to map the entity into the
| Business Model Canvas [0] you immediately spot the obvious
| peculiarity: the incongruous mix of customers (advertisers versus
| infrastructure users). What is the value proposition, to whom?
| All the money and brainpower in the world don't help if you have
| your moral values messed up. Its a soul thing.
|
| [0] https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas
| dekhn wrote:
| I built and launched a fairly simple project at Google- a web
| site for the upcoming North American solar eclipse. At some point
| I had to do a legal review to launch the website and come up with
| a "GDPR narrative" for EU users. But our users were almost 100%
| american and the entire project was centered around an event
| occurring in the US. SO I am very open to the idea that Google
| needs to relax its process around its lower-impact projects.
| [deleted]
| spicyusername wrote:
| Very well written and insightful. Thank you for sharing.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| >> _on the other hand, any individual customer you dissatisfy
| creates zero risk unless it is a mega-customer, so customer
| satisfaction is just a concept on a dashboard to be trotted out
| at an all-hands meeting, tut-tutted about, and then forgotten
| about_
|
| From my exposure to GCP from the enterprise side, this rings
| true. The folks we worked with were polite, but seemed to be
| asking us about our needs as a one-off / outside the normal
| process.
|
| With credit to the teams we interacted with, they were helpful
| and acted on our feedback (things like "As a customer, I need a
| dashboard that tracks my GCP spending"), but it was apparent this
| wasn't something they frequently did with customers.
|
| "The maze is in the rat" is a great metaphor.
|
| Execs want certain things ("Realtime visibility into all
| projects!" or "Stability!") but underappreciate the
| organizational opportunity cost in requiring them.
|
| Is it more important to have perfectly tracked projects or
| projects which ship 20% faster?
|
| And if the former, we all understand you're training your people
| to be like forever, right?
| bruce511 wrote:
| Google is famous for basically just ignoring customers. Or more
| accurately, ignoring users, since users are not customers.
|
| Customers are those spending money posting ads on search.
| Frankly even they get crap customer support, but at least they
| are customers.
|
| I'm no googler but it's clear "user support" (and "customer
| support") are not priorities at google, and that means other
| people _are_ priorities. So it's not exactly a shock to
| discover employees optimize to make other employees happy
| (measured) versus keeping users happy (not measured.)
|
| I factor that in when I decide if I want to be more than a
| user, if I want to be a customer. (So far the answer is
| basically "no".) And, as a user, I understand I'm not a
| customer and Google doesn't care about me, or my gmail
| account... So I treat my gmail account with the importance it
| deserves.
|
| So what though? This makes them happy, and they're all paid, so
| what does it matter what the outside world think or care?
| rwmj wrote:
| They don't seem to care about their corporate customers
| either. eg. corporate gmail spam filtering is fundamentally
| broken and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.
| motoboi wrote:
| I have been a enterprise customer of google cloud.
|
| There is a chasm between google cloud and microsoft azure.
| Azure sucks as a product, but they really, really, really
| want you as costumer. Damn, I get a weekly one-to-one with
| the guy which was part of the team that created their
| kubernetes offering, just because I needed someone with
| expertise in the matter to help us maximize the benefit or
| ours. NO EXTRA COST.
|
| With Google I got a guy that knows Kubernetes less than me. I
| sometimes get embarrassed asking them questions because they
| don't know how to answer but must come up with something to
| answer because the account manager is in the call. It feels
| like their poor account managers take a uphill battle just to
| get someone to talk to us. I feel sorry for them.
|
| Guess what happens? must deployments are in azure, even if
| the azure CLI sucks, the azure portal is a mess and azure
| products are inconsistent.
|
| But Google's GKE ingress takes 20 minutes to update (there is
| a years old bug opened, nobody cares), vs Azure application
| gateway taking 30 seconds. Both being very bad for us, but I
| get to talk to the Microsoft the guy who worked on that
| integration and discussing with him the pros and cons of
| using ingress-nginx instead.
|
| Google don't want us as costumers, they just want to brag
| about having a better cloud (they don't).
|
| (as a PS, please microsoft your employees don't like to
| answer questions on stack overflow. But great to be able to
| get stackoverflow answers from the product managers).
| com2kid wrote:
| > Azure sucks as a product, but they really, really, really
| want you as costumer. Damn, I get a weekly one-to-one with
| the guy which was part of the team that created their
| kubernetes offering, just because I needed someone with
| expertise in the matter to help us maximize the benefit or
| ours. NO EXTRA COST.
|
| When I was at Microsoft, the highest tier of support
| contract got you meetings with the lead developers of
| whatever product you found a pri0 bug in.
|
| Found a way to crash the compiler and simple code changes
| weren't enough to work around it? A meeting with a member
| of the C++ compiler team would be arranged.
|
| Microsoft has a history of customer focus, though I fear
| that was very much diluted when MS got rid of their
| dedicated test orgs.
| dekhn wrote:
| if you're on a call with an account manager and a support
| person, and the support person is clueless, politely shut
| down the meeting early, and then schedule a 10-minute with
| the account manager to tell them the support person isn't
| helping.
|
| As much as I hate personal relations, I frequently have to
| "herd cats" (contractors and cloud vendors). On the other
| hand, once in the while I get an absolute superstar and I
| work to keep them on my projects as long as possible.
| quanticle wrote:
| Is it more important to have perfectly tracked projects or
| projects which ship 20% faster?
|
| It's far more important to have perfectly tracked projects. A
| perfectly tracked project which is guaranteed to deliver on a
| particular day is _gold_. It makes planning for the rest of the
| organization much easier.
|
| To use a programming analogy, it's like the difference between
| latency and jitter for real-time systems. Many real-time
| systems will happily sacrifice considerable amounts of average
| latency, in order to minimize jitter. It's far better to have a
| process that completes in 200 ms _every single time_ than it is
| to have a process that completes in 2ms most of the time, but,
| occasionally takes 2000ms.
|
| Similarly, from a managerial perspective, it's far better to
| have a team that gives you good visibility, allowing you to
| plan for a completion date (even if that date is farther into
| the future than you'd like) than it is to have a team that
| mostly finishes projects quickly, but occasionally bogs down
| and takes a year to finish a project that was initially
| estimated at two months.
|
| The problem is that far too many organizations have _neither_.
| They don 't have visibility, _and_ they finish projects late.
| For these organizations, your dichotomy is a false one --
| better tracking is _how_ they will ship faster.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _better tracking is how they will ship faster_
|
| There's a reason PMs are reviled to mildly tolerated by
| engineers: they believe the map is the end product, not the
| territory.
|
| The correct answer to which is more important is "It
| depends."
|
| There are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to
| ceding first mover advantage and losing the game. Largely
| what's being discussed in the article.
|
| More detailed and accurate project tracking and projection
| doesn't deliver quicker shipping. Effectively _prioritizing_
| outstanding work does.
|
| They're similar but definitely not the same.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > More detailed and accurate project tracking and
| projection doesn't deliver quicker shipping. Effectively
| prioritizing outstanding work does.
|
| This is it. With the advent of broad, powerful tools you
| can use to automate off your codebase, there's less and
| less manual rote work that needs tracking, and a greater
| and greater percentage of creative, hard to estimate,
| engineer-driven work. And the best way forward is to plan
| releases with certain features, and flexible timelines, or
| plan releases with fixed timelines, and flexible features.
| quanticle wrote:
| There are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to
| ceding first mover advantage and losing the game.
|
| Are there? Can you name some examples? Because when I think
| of technology, first-mover advantage counts for very
| little. The first successful web browser wasn't NCSA
| Mosaic. It was Netscape. The first successful portable
| music player wasn't the Nomad, it was the iPod. The
| Macintosh long predated Windows, but Windows has by far the
| larger market share. Same with iOS and Android. Google was
| far from the first search engine. Facebook was far from the
| first social network. Amazon didn't invent e-commerce. In
| automobiles, Ford was first to mass production, but it was
| overtaken by General Motors by the 1930s, and they both
| were in serious trouble when the Japanese auto
| manufacturers, which didn't even really get going until
| after World War 2, arrived.
|
| So in which business exactly does shipping 20% later lead
| to "losing the game"? If anything, the _real_ risk is in
| shipping a half-baked product too soon.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| AdSense, Amazon, Apple II / iPod / iPhone / iWatch, CNN,
| JavaScript, Netscape, Netflix, PayPal, Roku
|
| The critical window isn't when something is first
| possible (e.g. when the first product appears), but when
| the combination of technical abilities, component price
| points, and market characteristics intersect to permit
| success.
|
| To use a physical example, the iPod and iPhone were great
| products, but they were hits because they launched with
| the features they did, at a specific point in time, at a
| specific price point.
|
| We know that potential for success infection point
| existed then, because they did build a working device and
| achieved success.
|
| Consequently, if they had _not_ completed those devices
| when they did (say, +20% time), another device could have
| achieved their success.
|
| Maybe nobody on the planet existed other than Apple who
| could do it... but the possibility was provably there.
|
| Or in simpler form: Netflix was far from the first
| streaming video service. They were the one who launched
| with the right features at the right time.
|
| Nobody cares if you catch a small wave perfectly. What
| matters is catching the best wave of the day, in the
| brief window you have.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Tracking does not guarantee anything. Tracking only tells you
| have missed the release after all of your plan is already
| destroyed.
|
| You seem to want estimation. And you will keep doing exactly
| that, "wanting", because estimation isn't something that
| scales to big projects or multiple ones.
| quanticle wrote:
| We're not special [1]. Programming isn't _that_ different
| from other engineering disciplines. The difference is that,
| somehow, programmers have developed this anti-intellectual
| attitude that keeps them from doing the hard work needed to
| develop the estimation tools that other engineering
| disciplines take for granted. Step one in developing those
| tools is tracking.
|
| [1]: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/
| cube2222 wrote:
| It's worth noting that AWS is really good with this.
|
| Their paid technical support (the 100-200$ one) is great and
| responsive, with an easy way to escalate if a response isn't
| helpful.
| plantain wrote:
| For what it's worth, I had similar experiences with GCP's
| paid support. Callback from a real human within 10 minutes
| kind of support.
| cm277 wrote:
| The problem with the article is that every company wants to
| manage risk; turning risk into money is what a company, any
| company, _does_.
|
| Now bigger companies have processes, hierarchies, etc. to
| manage risk in a distributed way, because well they are bigger.
| But guess what these companies also have? profits! revenue!
| multiple products/services that produce that revenue that can
| be then assigned down at the appropriate level of hierarchy
| that took/mitigated/managed the original risk.
|
| Google doesn't. It's a single-product company with a single
| Profit Line and thousands of Loss lines and it's pretending to
| be something else. That's why they are so busy managing risk
| all the time; most of them _don 't_ have revenues to manage,
| aim for, use to be rewarded for.
|
| Google is a monopoly, a rentier on the internet. They need to
| be broken up and repurposed to multiple, actually value-
| creating companies. If not for the health of the internet, at
| least for the mental health of its employees it seems.
|
| (I would argue that Google's "free" products, like Android, are
| the worst thing that has happened to the internet; they cannot
| be broken up soon enough).
| guelo wrote:
| I agree with your larger point but you exaggerate too much
| calling it a single-product company. Here's a revenue pie
| chart https://i0.wp.com/fourweekmba.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/10...
|
| Search is 58% of revenue but I'd still call it at least a 4
| product company with the "other" products contributing a
| decent 11%.
| drewda wrote:
| For example, it could be fascinating to see YouTube as a
| stand-alone company. Currently its revenues are masked under
| the "Google" part of Alphabet. It sounds like it's extremely
| profitable. It could be interesting to see YouTube perform as
| an independent entity on public markets alongside other media
| entities, rather than bundled into a "tech" company.
| Konnstann wrote:
| From what I've heard, and from the decisions Google keeps
| making regarding revenue sharing, ads, etc. YouTube loses
| them a lot of money due to video storage costs. I believe
| they even restrict the quality of uploads for some users
| now to combat that, but don't quote me.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I don't feel articles like this are "wrong". I feel like they
| fail to go deep enough and if they went one layer deeper then it
| would be clear why the problems they describe are at best
| actually features and at worst the "least bad" option.
|
| Specifically, all the issues being discussed are actually just
| features of Google (and the rest of FAANG really) being a mature
| company in a mature industry.
|
| Google cannot (it seems) launch and maintain new services. Why?
| Because it already has a single, ultra successful, profitable
| service: advertising (primarily via search, gmail, youtube etc).
| When you have no existing business (say you are a start up) you
| have an urgent need to get one. But when you have a multi billion
| dollar core business asset (search), you have no urgency to
| create another. Instead you "urgently" need to not break your
| existing asset.
|
| This is the same reason GE and AT&T etc did NOT beat Google to
| the online space.
|
| This is the natural result of success.
|
| This is the healthy, efficient, economically correct position for
| a company like google to be in.
|
| People have a weird expectation that Google (etc) will be a start
| up forever. Or an incubator for start ups. Only thats basically
| functionally impossible.
|
| So the problem here is people's expectations not being realistic
| and refusal to accept the reality that google (with 175000
| employees) is no longer a plucky 10 person startup...
| bambax wrote:
| That's quite true; but then again, if the goal is to change
| nothing, not make waves, and let the ad billions roll in, do
| they need 175,000 people to do that?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Well now you will be labelled an "activist investor"! :)
|
| I think this is an excellent question.
|
| I think Google has tried to be an incubator etc. And it's
| management have had a go at new products. That means hiring
|
| I think they have also been pretty big acquirers. That also
| pushes the headcount up. Cynically people also say Google
| acquires companies to stop those companies becoming anything.
| When you do that, you need to keep those employees on the
| books too (or they will just go re-found the thing you just
| paid to kill). Not sure how true that is, I leave it to the
| reads discretion.
|
| When both these sources of new services have failed, they
| have NOT fired people. Closing Stadia did not lead to firing
| 90% of the "Stadia Team". Ditto 101 other initiatives and
| take overs. It was actually a joke on "Silicon Valley" (the
| TV show) that no one ever get's let go by tech giants. No
| matter if they are useless or incompetent.
|
| So the head count is probably pretty bloated (I have no idea
| how many people are actually needed to run Google).
|
| And that brings us to actual Activist Investors and last
| months lay-offs.
|
| I think investors are finally calling for efficiency not
| growth. I think management are finally listening. I say
| finally not because I think I would have done it sooner, only
| because I think it makes sense in hind sight.
| mwhitfield wrote:
| Thank you for phrasing the comment I came here to make better
| than I could.
|
| This article (much like a lot of views expressed on this site)
| mostly just reads as someone jumping from a startup to large-
| business environment for the first time, and not grokking the
| very legitimate and unshakable reasons such an org has for
| being more conservative and process-heavy. Yes, that kind of
| thing has to be monitored and constantly worked on to ensure it
| doesn't grow out of control, but some level of bureaucracy is a
| _feature_ , not a bug, for a large, successful organization. At
| Google's scale, that "some level" is quite high.
| jukkan wrote:
| The author had worked at Microsoft for 12 years before
| starting the company that Google acquired. So, not only does
| he have a fair amount of experience from both sides, he's
| also worked at MS during its "lost decade" i.e. the Ballmer
| years.
|
| The similarities between what MS was going through then and
| what Google is now facing is to me the most interesting
| aspect of the story. Whether you're printing money via OS or
| search monopoly, it seems like both the direction and timing
| of what's going to eventually happen to your business are
| almost inevitable.
|
| MS today is quite different from what it was 10 years ago
| when the writer left. By getting acquired by Google in 2020,
| it's almost as he travelled back in time, into another Big
| Tech company at that same stage of the enterprise lifecycle.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep, the primary distorting effect at a place like Google is
| the seemingly infinite source of revenue from something which
| is in large-part fully automated. The ad revenues are a crazy
| firehose.
|
| Yes it takes a large crew of SREs and SWEs to keep that
| firehose fully primed, but nothing close to the labour force
| that Google employs.
|
| When I joined Google at the end of 2011 there was something
| like 20,000 full time employees. At that point it was already
| clearly a company that had already transitioned from a
| disruptor of the industry to a maintainer of the status quo.
| e.g. they clearly bought the ad-tech company I was an employee
| at just to make us shut up and go away.
|
| The conservative review and permissions structures in place
| there that the writer is complaining about are in place to
| avoid fucking up the firehose. And they're legit important. One
| of the most intimidating times I had working in my career was
| on the Ad Exchange release rotation, where I had production
| access for the deployment of binaries to thousands of machines
| in many datacentres that produced millions out transactions per
| second and were responsible for buckets and buckets of revenue.
| Please Don't Fuck Up was like an airplane banner circling
| around in my skull the whole time.
|
| Any innovations that happen at Google happen because there are
| very smart keen people there, and Google is constantly seeking
| out alternate $$-firehoses. But it's never happened and I doubt
| it ever will. It's not a culture accustomed to being hungry
| enough to work aggressively to hunt $$.
|
| Politics is eating everything there.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I think all of this is just a symptom of the fundamental problem
| - Google employees have been told they're special and coddled so
| much they believe it. They genuinely think they are inherently
| superior to the rest of us - either customers or even just other
| practitioners at other companies.
|
| I saw a talk about an upstream change to submodule initialization
| in Git being made by a Google engineer and she was asked about
| the specifics of how submodules ordering would work for the
| default use case. Her response boiled down to "I don't know, how
| we do it is we <XYZ> and we're more interested in our use case".
| Willish42 wrote:
| Like many have said, this contains a ton of insightful valuable
| criticism.
|
| That said, I take immense issue with the characterization of the
| "heroism bad" sentiment at Google:
|
| > There are documents that explicitly and proudly deride
| "heroism" and assert that not only should product teams not
| encourage "heroes", they should actively dissuade them. If
| someone chooses to work twice as hard as is expected of them,
| they usually will be prevented from doing so because they have to
| work with others and doing so would force the others to work
| harder too.
|
| As it's been explained to me, this is actually a principle
| primarily around avoiding inefficient hard work to keep a system
| healthy, more of a "work smart not hard" thing. Being the only
| person on the team who can keep prod healthy is not valuable when
| you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and this behavior doesn't
| scale well. That's the gist of the argument and I think it is a
| good one. His criticism of people not taking enough risk is apt
| but that's not what this particular piece of culture is about.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Google is already running critical infrastructure of modern
| world. Of course risk mitigation is paramount. What would be
| 1000-s in list of risks of fresh startup easily worth full-time
| employee working at it in Google working exclusively on some bs
| like optimising talent acquisition reporting pipeline.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Decide which (few!) products need legal review and let the
| others run faster.
|
| That is unfortunately not really possible. At the scale of
| Google, you have to keep up with a ton of different regulatory
| environments - the US and EU as large blocks which lead with
| regulation like GDPR, but also the 150+ _other_ countries that
| have their specific demands. On top of that come all the
| diversity issues - something completely innocent and expected in
| the US and EU can become a criminal offense in other countries
| (e.g. Saudi-Arabia and women 's or LGBT rights, China/Russia and
| anything democracy, India and running afoul of the BJP).
| onphonenow wrote:
| I always wondered why glaring customer facing problems could go
| years without a fix despite literally thousands of posts. I'm not
| talking free users, but google apps (workspace) stuff etc. I'd
| describe support as nice but not helpful. This really explains
| it.
|
| They also seem to have weird eventual consistency type bugs that
| can get you into weird states you can't get out of, I wonder -
| what tech stack is this? Do they not use sql for this?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd assume those are interface (both user- and code-to-code)
| complexity at scale.
|
| I.e. 0.0001% of accounts end up in a state (across multiple
| services) that was never expected, and therefore code to handle
| it never written, and thus is unable to ever transition because
| there are circular dependencies
| timmg wrote:
| This is a good article and it does a nice job of explaining
| _some_ of the problems at Google. Of course, much of them are
| overstated and others overfit to the _particular_ group this
| person was hired into.
|
| As someone who has first-hand knowledge of this person and the
| project he led, I can say (and I'm sure everyone would expect
| this): he does a great job of seeing all the things wrong with
| the org and the company; but he fails to recognize his own
| mistakes and shortcomings.
|
| I would love to see one of these kinds of blog posts where the
| author owns up to their own mistakes.
| helicalmix wrote:
| How exactly does having a blog post about the author's own
| mistakes affect the validity of his criticisms against Google?
| germanjoey wrote:
| I worked with the author for a couple of years, pre- and post-
| acquisition, and I have to admit that he drove me somewhat
| crazy sometimes too. Leaving that aside, I also had an immense
| amount of personal respect for him as I could see how much he
| very genuinely cares about what he is doing. And, that's
| actively doing his best to do right by his customers. I think
| the author is 110% spot-on with his critique of Google here.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Wow. When I read this I was so struck by just how accurately it
| captured Google culture. Things that really resonated;
|
| _The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They
| are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing
| machine called "Ads" that has kept growing relentlessly every
| year, hiding all other sins._
|
| _(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of
| exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement._
|
| For history, my first big contribution inside Google was
| criticized for being "not technical enough." (and that was fair
| because the technology was straight forward), however it had
| pushed through the organizational inertia of "don't change
| anything" across several groups to get into product. My
| contribution was to skillfully push things through the org
| without activating the organizational antibodies that resist
| change at all cost. But this was not a skill that was appreciated
| at the time by the people that mattered.
|
| The second thing was this;
|
| _Any disagreement with the management chain is career risk, so
| always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the senior VP,
| all the way up._
|
| People who were there when I was often didn't know me personally,
| but did know "of" me by my calling out management on their
| bogosity. I was not so enamored with "working at Google" to bury
| my irritation with bad faith communications and actions. To the
| point where I got direct feedback from my management chain that
| they would have an easier time in "calibration" if I was not
| causing so much friction. :-)
|
| I suggested they might get a lot less friction if they stopped
| doing the kinds of things they were being called out on. I have
| never been one of those "go along to get along" people in the
| presence of basically evil[1] people.
|
| When people ask me if they should work for Google this is the
| litmus test I give them, "Can you suppress all of your feelings
| of justice or ethics in the face of senior leaders making
| unethical choices chasing promotion, market monopoly, or
| additional profits for the company?" If the answer is "no" then I
| suggest they look to work elsewhere.
|
| [1] I know that reads hypercritically, I don't have a good
| neutral way of describing people who make decisions that help
| advantage them at the cost of disadvantaging others. Especially
| when that decision is unnecessary or frivolous.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is a pretty insightful article. I would just add that nearly
| every large company follows this same arc. It used to be said
| about IBM, back in their dominant days, that their product
| bureaucracy was such that it would take them nine months to ship
| an empty box.
|
| Relative to yesterday's comments about "wartime CEOs and
| peacetime CEOs", he says:
|
| > a soft peacetime culture
|
| Also:
|
| > Within Google, there is a collective delusion that the company
| is exceptional. And as is the case in all such delusions, the
| deluded ones are just mortals standing on the shoulders of the
| truly exceptional people who went before them and created an
| environment of wild success. Eventually, the exceptional
| environment starts to fade, but the lingering delusion has
| abolished humility among the mere mortals who remain.
|
| I summarized this yesterday (quoting someone else) as "born on
| third base and thinks he hit a triple."
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This delusion (of being an exceptional company) is always built
| on some truth at the start.
|
| And it is sad to see it vanishes. Hewlett-Packard used to be
| such a company, their products were exceptional on many levels.
| They had an incredible engineering culture and almost a cult
| following of users.
|
| Today they make crappy printers and what else?
|
| This is sad but I am not sure this arc can be avoided, success
| brings money and scale, and those are poison in the long run.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > their product bureaucracy was such that it would take them
| nine months to ship an empty box.
|
| They _didn 't_ ship an empty box though, did they? That's what
| the bureaucracy is partially designed to prevent. Can you
| imagine the reputation loss if some rogue company element
| actually shipped a branded empty box?
| akomtu wrote:
| That's the good old saying:
|
| "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times.
| Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." -- G.
| Michael Hopf
| zwkrt wrote:
| That sounds nice but is there a case when 'strong men'
| created good times? The example that I see people gravitate
| toward here is how soldiers coming back from WW2 in the US
| 'created' a society of unprecedented prosperity. But this of
| course ignores almost every single external factor that
| precipitated this prosperity, ignores that the prosperity was
| for a minority of people (both in the US and /especially/
| globally), and the fact that war does not in fact make people
| stronger but tends to break them down. Ask your nearest vet.
|
| This just sounds like a factoid upholding an antiquated ideal
| of masculinity.
| carom wrote:
| Masculinity is not an antiquated idea. It is an identity
| for a huge amount of the population and it is quite nice
| when you embrace it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| The comment you replied to didn't say that masculinity is
| an antiquated idea. It said that _an_ ideal of
| masculinity is antiquated; that is, one particular ideal
| of masculinity, not the idea in its entirety. You may
| disagree with that too, which is fine, but it 's a
| different thing than you responded to. Different people
| see themselves in different ideals of masculinity.
| jimduk wrote:
| Not sure it is a good saying. Brett Devereaux covers it in
| detail in his "fremen mirage" articles which I find a good
| read.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-
| mirage-...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A strawman argument, which no one is actually saying:
|
| > Second: Consequently, people from these less settled
| societies are better fighters and more militarily capable
| than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
|
| > Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will
| inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more
| prosperous communities around them.
|
| I prefer real history to science fiction, myself. The 30s
| were indisputably hard times, but they produced the people
| who won WW II and went to the moon.
| rebuilder wrote:
| The 30's (and the bad times before) also produced the
| people that caused WW2.
| [deleted]
| iinnPP wrote:
| It's odd reading this because none of it is surprising. Despite
| never working there and doing absolutely nothing to research the
| culture. It's obvious because it is everywhere, every company and
| government is so risk adverse as to be useless. Why? That I have
| pondered significantly.
|
| My current thought process leads to virtual organizations formed
| using the existing employees as members of a virtualized
| democratic business. The CEO is voted in, the employee is the
| citizen, the managers are voted in.
|
| I believe it would be different than the government we have
| because the government we have is possibly too large to function
| as it did closer to founding. For example, Walmart has more
| employees than the USA had people when the USA was founded.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Companies are not democracies, and companies that are
| democracies do not work at scale. Google is struggling
| precisely _because_ there is "too much democracy" and not
| enough leadership.
|
| In a democracy it's not important to have happy customers, or
| ship product, as long as internally everyone is popular. So we
| spend all our time doing politics and getting nothing done.
|
| >> It's obvious because it is everywhere, every company and
| government is so risk adverse as to be useless.
|
| clearly this is not true - there are plenty of companies, and
| startups, that are very much not risk adverse. Large companies
| become risk adverse because bad outcomes affect huge numbers of
| people.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Are you saying co-ops don't work? Mondragon is "at scale".
| The US is failing at [affordable] health care compared to a
| country like Cuba. Worker unions are closer to democracies
| and work well too.
| iinnPP wrote:
| Thanks for that. I didn't know about Mondragon, but given
| the size it's a subject I am now very interested in.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I'm still interested too. If you find anything solid on
| it, let me know if you can, email is in bio :).
|
| I was told about it by a European but otherwise have not
| heard of big worker coops without looking for lists.
|
| This coop is bigger than any organized crime like Yakuza.
| The town where it was founded in is entirely resident
| owned. I can't go anywhere in the US without there being
| corporate landlords.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Is Google struggling, though? I think only in comparison to a
| particular set of expectations or aspirations that people
| have for it, right? Personally I share those aspirations for
| Google - which I believe is still one of the shining lights
| of our industry in my working lifetime - but there is nothing
| fundamentally wrong with large risk-averse stable businesses.
|
| The author of this article clearly prefers the excitement and
| constant breakneck forward momentum of startups - and that's
| fair enough for him! - but that doesn't imply it is the
| objective ideal way for a company to be.
| cpeterso wrote:
| > Google is struggling precisely _because_ there is "too much
| democracy" and not enough leadership.
|
| As an example, if Google had stronger product leadership,
| they would have one messaging/chat strategy instead of a
| dozen competing chat apps. Other Google products would
| integrate with and enrich that one messaging solution,
| providing more value for users and creating a Google suite
| that is more useful than the sum of its parts.
| iinnPP wrote:
| "Every company" was definitely poor wording, a seemingly
| qualifier should be there.
|
| Perhaps democracy is a poor word as well?
|
| My thinking is on changing the hierarchy in a way that
| results in positive impacts to productivity, innovation, and
| employee satisfaction. Perhaps in a way similar to the
| formation of the USA.
|
| The top down method currently used seems to have a rather
| negative impact. It is still a popularity contest, the only
| difference I see is where that contest is focused.
|
| Is the preference not to want to work and make things better?
| Is that gone? Is the new model do what you're told and find
| another 10% effort job or five? Possibly. Maybe people like
| that, maybe they don't.
|
| Though I prefer in life to look at potential solutions than
| at problems. I realize that's not normal
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > It is still a popularity contest
|
| The point of the focus on bottom line profits is because it
| cannot be gamed like a popularity contest.
|
| Banks would never add money, or subtract money, from a bank
| account just because of someone's fame or popularity, so
| they serve as the neutral arbiter.
|
| It can of course be gamed in other ways such as
| prioritizing quaterly profits by neglecting longer term
| potential.
| bbor wrote:
| Sounds like you'd be interested in a co-op!
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm going to call out one specific point I disagree with, which
| I'm curious whether others will or won't agree with me on:
| google3 and the associated set of internal tools actually are
| better than what exists "in the real world".
|
| I went from startup world (mostly rails and frontend frameworks
| of the early teens) early in my career to google3 for about half
| a decade to the whole suite of public cloud stuff starting about
| a year ago and I really miss google's internal tooling.
|
| It's not at all that any given component is much or at all better
| than any given public competitor. Indeed I think the article is
| right that on an individual component basis there are strong
| competitors to everything google has internally. But taken as a
| whole, I found it _much_ easier to figure out what tool to use
| for a given job and get it working well for my task within google
| than it is with all the public tools. But it 's an integration
| and analysis paralysis / paradox of choice and sales cycle
| problem, rather than a technical problem.
|
| Do I go with a fully managed service or self-host? How well does
| the self-hosting work with my infrastructure? What about cost
| comparisons? Do these three tools work together at all? Do they
| support my particular sso setup? It's just so much crap before
| even getting to the point where the technical capabilities are
| important. And it is either prohibitively time consuming or just
| actually impossible to do any sort of objective analysis of
| different options, so everyone just guesses and cargo cults.
| "This seems to have the most mindshare in the community."
|
| I experienced variants of some of these same problems with google
| internal tools, but there were easy and good answers to a large
| enough set of the questions that it always seemed a lot easier to
| get an answer and move on.
| williadc wrote:
| Google erased more than $100B in shareholder value with a single
| botched demo. I imagine events like this will only further
| increase their risk aversion.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| How does this square with Google's reputation for releasing and
| then abandoning many, many products? Like their dozen chat apps,
| Stadia, seemingly every other Alphabet subsidiary, etc.
|
| It seems like Google is pretty good at releasing things, just not
| at following though on supporting them to become a real line of
| business. The perception that Google can't release seems new and
| odd to me as an outsider.
| blululu wrote:
| One of the author's primary critiques is that nobody cares
| about the users/customers. All actions are aimed at an internal
| audience rather than an external audience. Thus product
| releases are done for internal reasons (i.e. impressing senior
| managers and getting promoted). They aren't done for the sake
| of external customer/users - hence the lack any long term
| commitment.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| This rings true to me. I worked at Google after being at
| Amazon for a few years and the customer focus was like night
| and day.
| dangus wrote:
| This is a lot of detail without a lot of _business_ substance
| that matters. It 's not true insider information, it's opinion-
| based, and it's not really all that relevant to whether Google is
| "in trouble."
|
| The premise is that people are catching up to Google while Google
| mismanages. Microsoft is coming out strong and refreshed (and, I
| agree, they are seemingly very well managed), and small
| competitors are nipping at their heels.
|
| The intro of this article touts the new Bing AI search engine as
| a major threat to Google. But...is it? Microsoft released what is
| essentially a proof of concept piggybacking on OpenAI's work.
|
| So is Google really in trouble? Let's look at this through the
| lens of revenue [2]:
|
| - Google is essentially a search monopoly. It's impressive that
| Bing has gotten _anywhere_ , but it's too early to say if gaining
| 4% marketshare in a year [1] is the sign of a lasting trend. The
| fact that Bing and Edge are persistent defaults with constant
| nags in Windows 10/11 as well as being integrated into Windows
| search and 90%+ of people _still_ switch their browser and search
| to Google tells you a whole lot about consumers ' preferences.
|
| (On this note, remember that the better product doesn't always
| "win" in capitalism. For example, Microsoft Teams has more active
| users than Slack _by far_ [3], but that 's not because it's the
| better app - that's because it's part of an ecosystem and a
| migration path for Microsoft's army of business clients)
|
| - GCP will be a cash cow forever, just like AWS and Azure.
|
| - Android and the Google Play store are also forever cash cows.
| Android and iOS are a forever duopoly with no chance of
| disruption.
|
| - YouTube: another cash cow with both ad and subscription revenue
| with no sign of disruption.
|
| Sure, if Google Search fails, the company is basically less than
| half the size. But the idea that a company like Google is going
| to screw up on search in the long term isn't based on any sort of
| evidence in my mind.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-
| market-...
|
| [2] https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-breakdown/
|
| [3] https://kinsta.com/blog/microsoft-teams-vs-slack/
| hintymad wrote:
| > Risk mitigation trumps everything else
|
| Yet, Google has no problem shutting down services that millions
| of users use daily (greader), and worse, tens of thousands of
| customers use (IoT Core). It seems their reward-and-punishment
| system, aka culture, has some issues.
| davemp wrote:
| >> Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about
| "organizing the world's information"?
|
| This is the poignant question IMO.
|
| The texture of the internet has changed drastically since the
| golden age of "Googling" for things. I feel like the current
| search vs. SEO paradigm has become a losing battle. The bad
| actors have adapted to Google's algorithms and now resemble the
| holes in Search's strategy like some over evolved contagion. The
| main issues I see as a lay person are:
|
| - Bounce time and other metrics actively incentivizing content to
| be obfuscated and waste user's time.
|
| - Content theft being viable and disincentivizing high quality
| content that can be copied easily.
|
| - Walled garden sites that don't want to surrender their content
| for ad impressions and aren't easily or impossible to index.
|
| I feel like solutions to the above problems would involve Google
| killing its own golden advertisement goose.
|
| Maybe there are high influence Googlers that do come into work
| and think about "organizing the world's information . . ." but a
| "in way that makes Google the most money" is inevitably tacked
| on.
| mblevin wrote:
| The other issue is also does "organizing the world's
| information" fit as the right mission for the company? Company
| missions change over time.
|
| Larry Page said almost 10 years ago (!!!) that Google's mission
| probably needed to be updated. That's a long time to be lost in
| the wilderness.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag...
| davemp wrote:
| Sure Google is a lot more than search at this point, so it's
| not _the_ right mission. Though, I would say "organizing the
| world's information" is at least _one_ of the right missions
| for the company.
| mblevin wrote:
| Funny enough - Satya Nadella introduced a new mission
| statement at Microsoft shortly after he became CEO[1].
|
| It's pretty anodyne, but by design - it's a way to push the
| company towards different ways of operating by creating a
| pretext to say "X project is part of the new mission and
| here's why" from a top-down perspective.
|
| 1. https://www.geekwire.com/2015/exclusive-satya-nadella-
| reveal...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The web as a whole never came up with an answer to the question
| "As someone in possession of valuable information, why would I
| want to allow that information to be indexed, which would allow
| someone to trivially copy it?"
|
| "Information wants to be free" was fine for ~1990-2010, until
| Google et al. took advantage of it to build walled gardens they
| could profit from.
|
| In retrospect, I feel like if the in-web-standards
| micromonetization efforts had been adopted, we'd be in a better
| place today, because there would have been better revenue
| channels than "Whoever controls ads."
|
| And/or differentiate and regulate search as a privileged common
| carrier-style business class, prevented from reusing their web
| scraping for other products.
| davemp wrote:
| It certainly feels like there are some regulatory
| loopholes/oversights being abused.
|
| Maybe just make it illegal (or actually just enforce existing
| laws) to link to websites that violate copyright laws (from
| pages with monetization) and force the market to sort things
| out?
|
| It would be the end of an era for the internet in many
| different ways, but maybe the wild west needs to just end?
| bootsmann wrote:
| I think a big reason why ads became the dominant way of
| revenue generation on the web (as opposed to
| micromonetization) was systemic issues that just took time to
| solve.
|
| a) early internet adopters were mainly young people who
| didn't have a lot of purchasing power yet
|
| b) a complete lack of trusted means for online payment
|
| More recently things have started to trend away from this
| because these two issues are now solved. You can see this in
| social media like Discord or Telegram who have a freemium
| model, movie/tv streaming like netflix or disney plus, new
| entrants like kagi or the general proliferation of SaaS
| offerings which can now sustain a premium userbase where
| previously you would've opted for an ads based model (think
| of the n different todolist providers etc.)
| ejb999 wrote:
| "delusions of exceptionalism"
|
| Love that description - and of the 4 faults the author points
| out, that is the one that is going to hurt them the most.
|
| No way a company fixes having 'no mission', 'no urgency' and
| 'mismanagement' if a large portion of the staff things they are
| exceptional at everything they do.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| lots of people here piling on google over the past 2 weeks,
| interested to see how it goes
| quags wrote:
| I see that too and wonder if this will lead to an over sold
| stock and a similar Microsoft lost decade which may be a few
| years in. Google overall is very profitable and just needs 2-3
| wins over the next few years and they have the cash to do it.
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