[HN Gopher] Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
Author : whiplashoo
Score : 2076 points
Date : 2023-11-22 16:44 UTC (1 days 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.
| caminante wrote:
| You're describing the BigCorp meta, which I think is a good
| portrayal that people need to see.
|
| However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it
| sounds like you're trying to defend.
|
| I don't agree.
|
| It's completely rational to play career frogger. The leader
| is getting compensated (We're talking re-ups of generational
| wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their
| leadership is fair for criticism. It sounds like the leader
| hasn't created a compelling vision, which their staff is
| craving, let alone delivered team success.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| What I suppose I'm saying is that there likely isn't a
| compelling vision that (a) they could get funding for, or
| (b) moves the needle enough to matter. I imagine their
| staff prefers getting paid to not getting paid, so this is
| the best the leader could do.
|
| I don't like it either, it was my lived experience for
| several years. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas or people
| who knew about them, it was usually an inability to drop
| existing product lines + customers and no approval for the
| additional headcount needed to pursue bigger opportunities.
| 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).
| surajrmal wrote:
| It's not surprising given how most of HN seems to only see
| a glimpse of things work internally based on blog posts
| unhappy xooglers write. It's very biased and folks
| extrapolate too far. The real picture is far more complex.
| Unfortunately no one seems to want to read a balanced
| perspective these days.
| 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".
| pkasting wrote:
| I don't know what you're referring to with the first two.
| On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay
| discussions and there's never been any discussion of
| preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a
| lot of discussion of unintended consequences and
| workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay
| and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and
| the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many
| ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in
| crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held.
| Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it
| was because we loved ads.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| My memory or the auto-play thing is that some
| withgoogle.com functionality broke, it was quickly put on
| the blessed list, and then it was working again. Sadly
| the rest of the web that was broken by that change didn't
| get such treatment.
| 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
| surajrmal wrote:
| Sometimes it feels like Google could cure cancer and HN would
| still react negatively. Companies are not monolithic and it's
| silly to paint it that way. It's not simple about intent, but
| premature judgment.
| stephenr wrote:
| Conversely it feels like Google could say "hey we've found
| a cure for cancer, we just transplant the brain into a
| healthy 'donor' body" and Google apologists would insist
| that there's no possible way that could ever be misused.
| 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.
| debatem1 wrote:
| Being frank, I think you have an ideological position
| which is both satisfyingly consistent ('google is evil
| and always has been') and which provides a mechanism to
| discount any contrary facts ('you were just boots on the
| ground and didn't understand the corporation as well as
| I, being an enlightened person, did'). But I was actually
| there, and while I can't tell you any of the many times I
| saw Google do the right thing when it hurt its bottom
| line I can tell you that I saw it happen a lot and in big
| ways. You don't have to believe me, poor little deluded
| cog that I am, but I think I will take my messy,
| complicated, first person understanding of the place over
| the reductive ideology any day.
| 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.
| robryk wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Do you mean that new areas appeared that require
| specialization that didn't exist previously, or that
| areas that require some sort of specialization have
| comparatively grown? (Or something completely different?)
| t8sr wrote:
| Well, it's more that the problems in an area like ML or
| security were solvable if you generally knew how
| computers work and were smart and good at learning new
| things. Switching to a new domain took a few months, but
| ultimately there wasn't /so much/ you had to learn.
|
| Nowadays, those easy problems are solved. If you want to
| contribute to an area, you have to learn all the context,
| read a bunch of papers, it basically takes at least a
| year. So you can't quite be a generalist SWE, drop into a
| random team for three weeks and meaningfully contribute.
|
| Put another way, the relative value of spunk and
| generalist ability has decreased and the relative value
| of domain knowledge has increased.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Ok, but you also just non ironically said "collaborating on
| an OKR".
| t8sr wrote:
| It's funny now, but OKRs as originally conceived were the
| simple, "just set a simple goal and work on it"
| lightweight thing, standing in opposition to the old way
| of corporate planning. I used to have goals like "try X
| and write a paper about it".
|
| Of course every process becomes perverted into waterfall
| eventually.
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It was a whole bundle of things all at the same time but
| probably started with G+ and "The Social Wars". That was all
| happening when I first got there, but it set internal crap on
| a bad path, plenty of bad feelings as the whole organization
| was pivoted onto that, but it all basically fizzled out and
| failed.
|
| And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth & Alphabet.
| And that's when it got progressively stupider and stupider.
|
| When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was
| big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going
| on there. And I'm a pretty cynical person.
| 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?
| _heimdall wrote:
| It may be more helpful to pay attention to the ones leaving
| him in charge if its clear his abilities may not be the right
| fit.
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't see how Microsoft reinvented themselves. For
| better and worse, they behave the same way I grew to
| expect in the 00s with Ballmer. New CEO knocked off the
| Google founders' "nice guy" look, that's about it.
|
| Meanwhile, Google is reinventing themselves... to be more
| like Microsoft.
| 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.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Bard is trash. In my experience it's ChatGPT > Bing Chat >
| Bard.
|
| Shame because Google invented the transformer architecture
| that enabled the technology.
| 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.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| > Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or
| maps platform. Those products need a massive organization
| behind them.
|
| OpenStreetMap Foundation, 1.5 FTE.
| magarnicle wrote:
| > throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server
| power at problems that can't be solved any other way.
|
| Street View is the perfect example of this. It still seems
| like an insane-in-a-good-way product to me after all these
| years.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Eh, YouTube was going to crash and burn hard without an
| acquisition. It was acquired in 2006, and was built into
| something sustainable by integrating with Google
| infrastructure.
| zerbinxx wrote:
| Not to be an egghead/navel gazer about it, but I've grown
| skeptical of "innovation" as an end in itself: was Facebook
| innovative, or was it just another small iterative
| improvement on an existing form? Same with Google and
| search. My gut tells me companies should focus on more
| concrete measures of success rather than the abstract
| "innovation".
|
| It's probably not semantically wrong to say that these two
| cases really were/are innovative, but even so, was that
| really the cause of their success? And is it replicable as
| a methodology? My gut tells me that a lot of what gets
| labeled as a massive innovation is really just a market
| inevitability, and someone got to the right idea first,
| either by luck or having a single clever differentiating
| idea.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Yeah, "innovation" has always been a rather nebulous term
| for iterative improvement, and more particularly, the
| iterative improvement that people remember in retrospect.
| Often the same "innovation" appears almost simultaneously
| from multiple companies (or inventors, or
| mathematicians... this phenomenon has existed for a long
| time). But usually only one of them can win, and it seems
| relatively arbitrary who it is. Certainly once they're
| perceived as winning, they benefit from a compounding
| effect.
|
| Really, "innovation" is a matter of hard work, timing,
| and luck. You need to work hard to ship a product or
| publish a theory. You need to recognize the opportunity
| and execute on it at the right time. And you probably
| need some luck to get your initial boosts. But even after
| all that, you still need to be mature and capable enough
| to turn your small golden egg into a golden goose. It's
| still a long slog from initial hit to resting on your
| laurels.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Given Google's current reputation killing of products left
| and right, lately I don't bother even trying new things they
| roll out, and building anything dependent on it is completely
| out of the question. No.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I would bet that the average tech-savvy outsider has a higher
| opinion of Sundar than the average Googler does.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Sundar became CEO in 2015. The author quit this year. Was his
| "lack of visionary leadership" not that obvious for 8+ years?
| Or did the author stay because the stock price and his TC kept
| going up?
| strunz wrote:
| Just because you stay in a job doesn't mean you can't
| criticize the company and its leadership.
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yeah. Like I said, the dream never died. Almost ten years
| later, it was revived & made real.
| 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.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| Your description of msft sounds like current google with
| generative AI.
| Gigablah wrote:
| There's always room for a runner-up. What you really
| don't want to be in is 3rd place.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| Microsoft staying on top with Windows Mobile would have
| been a good thing for developers and consumers for one
| gigantic reason: Windows Mobile devices were open. No app
| stores, no Google or Apple bleeding away 30% of your
| revenue to line their own pockets, no byzantine approval
| process, just load your executable onto the device and
| go.
| mcny wrote:
| Windows mobile is not windows phone though and iirc from
| my brief time trying it out it was a mess even in 2008.
| My understanding was Android and open handset alliance
| came into being to tackle the fragmentation in the
| market. Clearly that's not true if the Android team saw
| Windows Mobile as it's biggest competitor...
|
| I don't think Windows Phone would have ever happened if
| the iPhone never existed. Looks like Microsoft was just
| happy making money with Visual Studio licenses so I don't
| know if Visual Studio community edition would even have
| happened without outside pressure.
|
| > Windows Mobile runs the .NET Compact Framework, which
| will support development in C# and VB.NET. You can also
| develop for Windows Mobile using MFC/Win32 APIs in C++ or
| Embedded Visual Basic. At the end of the day it's a
| stripped-down Win32-based OS, so there are other options,
| but these are probably the most popular.
|
| > Depending on your experience, it will probably be
| easier to get Visual Studio 2008 and develop in a .NET
| language, the development experience is pretty nice and
| there is a built-in emulator in Visual Studio, so you
| don't need to have a device plugged in unless you are
| working with device-attached or embedded hardware.
|
| > Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (the
| free versions) do not support Mobile development, you
| would need to run a trial version or purchase a license.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/1702070
| 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.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > 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 doesn't resonate. I've been a loyal Android user since
| Gingerbread (2010), and maybe for the first couple of years
| it was catching up to Apple, but i would say since pretty
| much KitKat, it's Apple that's been accused of just copying
| Android features. (And arguably putting them out with more
| stability and polish).
|
| Throughout the main feature that Android was behind on and
| had to "copy" was performance. iPhones used to (and still)
| blow even top-tier Android phones away on basic things like
| scroll smoothness.
| mianos wrote:
| I think he may be referring to Android Wear. While I
| agree with you, Android is rock solid and great to use on
| most phones in the last few years, Android Wear is
| anything but. It's buggy, unstable and a long long way
| behind the Apple platform.
|
| I love my Android phone, but, having had way too many
| Android Wear devices, it's complete crap.
|
| I _really_ want it to be good.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'd say y'all are thinking macroscopically of Android as
| a whole, whereas I'm thinking about my corner of 100-200
| on launcher / system UI. There's very explicit examples I
| can think of, but now that I think of it...it might
| impossible to tell from the outside because you can't
| really tell what's The Cool Project from year to year
| mcny wrote:
| From the outside, my perspective has been that Android
| was a free for all in the beginning and had to tighten
| down permissions later for battery drain problems while
| iPhone was too locked down initially and had to figure
| out how to make their devices actually useful for third
| party apps.
|
| It is just an impression I remember so may not be
| completely accurate but android made huge progress from a
| user's perspective in my opinion in terms of battery
| management (new phones having huge batteries I guess but
| 5Ah battery means nothing if Android kept wasting it
| unnecessarily.
|
| I remember at some point there was a funny example
| something like if you forget your android tablet at home
| on wifi when you go on a three day trip, you should not
| come back to see a dead battery on your tablet. It was
| funny but also got the point across I think. I appreciate
| that.
|
| For example, on this phone I am typing on, I have set it
| so by default battery saving kicks in as soon as I drop
| down to 75%. Then I turn it off manually if I need to do
| something important (rare).
|
| One thing that bothered me about Android as a user was by
| default there was no feature for me to say don't allow
| this app to do anything on boot or in the background
| without my permission. Don't allow this app to connect to
| anything on the Internet or don't allow this app to
| connect to any network at all unless I say it is ok to do
| so. Any ideas why?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android
| features.
|
| I think you might be in a bit of an Android bubble.
| Android is plenty "accused" of copying Apple features as
| well. Really, both copy plenty of ideas from each other.
| swetland wrote:
| I had moved on from Android by 2013, so I definitely don't
| have much insight into what it's become over the past
| decade. In the earlier years it was very much about working
| hard to build the platform, products, and ecosystem. The
| team was pretty small and generally isolated from the rest
| of the company, which was both good (we got to focus on
| doing our thing and not get distracted) and bad
| (integrating with Google properties, services, etc was
| often rather painful).
|
| Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it
| became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a
| watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited
| about and things getting more political and "too big to
| fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of
| scenery.
| 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.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| The build tools are not great. Well, maybe the tools are
| fine, but the build times are killing me. Going from 5ms
| builds at home to 5 minute builds at work is brutal. 98%
| of my day is just waiting for builds, tests, CL
| approvals, experiment results, launch approvals and lunch
| lines.
| mepiethree wrote:
| I meant more that when I started the job and only had to
| type one command to run a giant application locally, that
| tooling blew my mind. No config files, env vars, not even
| any apt-get or cloning 50 different repos. Just boq run
|
| Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work
| around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once.
| But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make
| this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds
| natural breaks into the work.
| 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.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Indeed, I also find the critique of the Android team amusing
| (except for the implied overtime).
|
| It's still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely
| competent. And I still prefer iOS.
| 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.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I was outright hostile by the end. My point was, in my
| very long history in tech, it was only Microsoft that
| pushed me to that point. I've bombed hard interviews,
| passed easy ones, bumbled medium ones, and never once
| lost my cool.
| 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.
| julianozen wrote:
| Well assuming Swift and Kotlin split the remaining half
| 50/50 (I think this is reasonable as most major apps are on
| both platforms and it is unlikely to use Swit for iOS but
| flutter for Android), they're probably only 25% each.
|
| Unless you want to count them both as Native at 50%?
| hbn wrote:
| To add to this, perhaps anecdotal but I've noticed Flutter
| to be in that specific area of people who like it and use
| it feel like they're underdogs, fighting in the war to make
| it the next big thing. It's not the default way to write an
| app on either Android nor iOS, so they're vocal about
| spreading the word and getting/keeping momentum.
|
| People who use Swift/UIKit to make apps may like it, but
| it's also the default way to make an iOS app, so they don't
| feel the need to fight a war. That language was handed down
| from above as the winner of iOS development. Same for
| Java/Kotlin/native UI libraries on Android.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Huh, that's hard to believe. If you go by job postings, React
| Native is miles ahead.
| mil22 wrote:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/development/#...
|
| Flutter: 46% React Native: 35% Unity: 10% Cordova: 10% Ionic:
| 9% Xamarin: 8%
|
| Just one datapoint, of course - a survey of 26,384 developers.
| 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?
| robryk wrote:
| > Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?
|
| I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine
| a situation where someone's actions caused a change in a
| society, which is no longer attributed to him according to
| popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?
| 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.
| towway23111257 wrote:
| I have almost never heard a single good thing about Vic from
| people who were there around same time as him
| 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
| mparnisari wrote:
| Lmao 'tests are not a best practice". Please, never be in my
| team.
| 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).
| cavisne wrote:
| Its pretty heartening that among all this drama and activism
| I've never heard of a users data being maliciously leaked
| from Google.
|
| To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty
| safe at Google (one of the authors points).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| They did have one incident though -
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/google-engineer-stalked-
| spied-...
| 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
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Non-FTEs lost access in 2020 or 2021 IIRC
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Possibly for the same reason they can't access MoMa.
| tdeck wrote:
| Actually I got the date wrong, but it's because I quit my
| job at Google in late 2020 and my last day was in early
| 2021 :). I wanted to work somewhere where I'd get to do
| something interesting and have a meaningful impact in a
| reasonable time frame. Based on my experience, I felt
| that would be hard to find at Google.
| 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.
| eric-hu wrote:
| As a web developer I also have to tell you that my
| industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources.
| Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know
| have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel
| could be from development teams using shiny new
| frameworks.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Chrome isn't using all that RAM.
|
| The web pages you visit are.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Did it really?
|
| Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude
| more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old
| version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has
| gotten.
|
| Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome.
| It's still super light and zippy.
| callalex wrote:
| Yes, feature creep has happened in a really big way because
| there is an obvious profit incentive to Google if every
| last bit of computing happens in-browser. Glossing over the
| thorny topics like "my browser shouldn't care what hardware
| I run it on", the Web* set of standards hasn't stopped
| ballooning since the release of chrome. WebRTC made sense.
| But WebUSB? WebGPU? WebAssembly? etc. etc. Each can have
| interesting use cases individually, but in aggregate they
| have become a whole second operating system filled with
| compromise and bloat.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It also looked much nicer. These thick curved tab
| decorations, unnecessary ovals everywhere, yuck.
| 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.
| amf12 wrote:
| > My view is that the people on the inside often can't see
| the forest for the trees.
|
| Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on
| both sides. People on the outside also have partial
| information about things coming from tech. We sometimes
| believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil",
| but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information
| about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.
|
| What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something
| "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if
| Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be
| evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft
| does.
| piyush_soni wrote:
| But then again, everyone says Google is evil to have made
| their own browser, but most of the world is using it - one
| would guess they must have done _some_ good things with it
| (so taking humanity forward in some capacity etc.). Some are
| even criticizing Google from its own browser - I hate the
| fact that it made Firefox lose their market share, but I also
| understand it can 't all be because the big corp brainwashed
| everyone (sure it would be a significant part though).
| rpgbr wrote:
| Maybe they've achieved this position for Chrome leveraging
| Google's strength, not because Chrome's quality? I can name
| a few reasons, like an aggressive marketing campaign for
| Chrome circa 2012 (promotion on Google search, bundling
| Chrome with popular apps) and sabotaging Google web apps in
| rivals, specially Firefox, that makes Chrome look better
| for Google's users (basically everyone online).
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone is calling them evil simply for making
| a browser. Tactics like forcing it to be pre-installed and
| unable to be removed on Android are somewhat evil,
| especially if they're part of an anti-competitive strategy.
| berkes wrote:
| IE6 was the browser "most of the world used" too. But
| really, surely, there was absolutely _nothing_ done well in
| it. The only reason it was the most used browser was
| monopoly abuse. And while we can discuss the exact
| terminology of "a monopoly" and whether the Ie6 hegemony
| fit in there theoretically, that it came with the most used
| OS, really was the only reason it was popular.
|
| With Chrome it is different. But at least a large part of
| its popularity comes from abused monopolies enforcing this
| software on people. Less than IE6 i'd say, but still a
| large part.
| robin_reala wrote:
| That's not true. When IE6 launched it was definitely the
| fastest of its contemporary competitors. The problem with
| IE6 was not that it was bad at launch, but that it wasn't
| touched for five years after launch, and didn't properly
| disappear until 2016 or so.
| berkes wrote:
| Yes. And in that sense it's also similar to Chrome.
|
| IE6 might have been the best competitor at first. But it
| certainly did not grow into the 9x% usage and staid there
| by being the best competitor. It only grew popular once
| MSFT started using its monopoly to push it.
|
| It really sucked by then, compared to its competition.
| piyush_soni wrote:
| While I understand your argument about IE6 which was
| shipped with Windows, Chrome didn't have that advantage
| for a long time - it's only now that Android phones and
| Chromebooks are shipped with it, but I don't know of a
| single person who does not download Chrome on their
| Windows Desktop too - even now when Edge is based on
| Chromium! Firefox has always been my primary browser (it
| still is, I'm typing this in Firefox), but say what you
| may, Chrome has taken the internet forward in many
| aspects. I work on an in-browser CAD tool, and I can see
| how vastly better Graphics performance is in Chrome when
| compared to Firefox for example (and it's just one
| example).
| KaiserPro wrote:
| As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see
| instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action
| that the company takes.
|
| However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your
| actions might look to the outside with little to no context.
|
| The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways:
| "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive."
| Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the
| street that we have done effective work to mitigate the
| downsides so that its a net benefit to society.
|
| This means we have to actually think about how adversaries
| might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than
| handwavey "oh but no one would be that
| evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry"
|
| large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny,
| the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For
| example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default
| hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid
| thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple
| are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as
| each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same
| reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young
| people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial
| levels and undermining encryption in the process.
| 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 destruction, you'd probably not have even
| conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent,
| maybe even offended. 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.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Because shuttering the business would be an existential
| threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise
| be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud
| print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the
| level of seriousness/vision required to long term success
| like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.
| surajrmal wrote:
| The teams running products see it as an existential threat.
| Google shutting down the product is closer to an investor
| or board member forcing a startup to shut down because it's
| not long term sustainable. None of the things you mentioned
| could be run as independent businesses successfully, at
| least not at the levels of funding Google was giving them
| prior to them being shut down.
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| 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.
|
| This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large
| tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a
| particular project is bad for my mental health.
| dekhn wrote:
| There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop
| Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar.
|
| But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in
| stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google
| growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower,
| or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| I'm friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at
| Google.
|
| I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but
| where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the
| woodwork to block or slow it down.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| > 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
|
| Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of
| the browser, when they didn't have to.
|
| That has led to tons of other companies being able to build
| potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody
| anticipated, like Electron.
|
| I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers
| gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose
| its lead.
|
| Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate
| forever.
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| No data for this, but I feel like 9% is less than they
| expected after 5 years of the "frustrate and seduce"
| strategy, which is why they're even going after ad-
| blockers now. If anything, they look frustrated. But they
| probably had to do this.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Why would they want people using an ad blocker to even
| use the site that much though. They're denying them
| revenue while costing them. I mean it's great as a user
| but as a service there's not really much upside.
| 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.
| lizknope wrote:
| Cobra Kai started on "YouTube Red" which I think was
| renamed "YouTube Premium"
|
| Then it went to Netflix where it became a big hit.
|
| There was another show I liked named Ryan Hansen Solves
| Crimes on Television. They constantly broke the third
| wall making fun of YouTube Red being confused with some
| kind of adult content service.
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Is it? If some new thing came along tomorrow that made
| Google's ad exchange obsolete, they could still sell ads
| on YouTube using whatever the new thing is. Or if YouTube
| became untenable, they'd have the ad exchange.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| You two are nitpicking over "ads" vs "ads exchange"
| without saying it or talking about it meaningfully
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah, the point is diversification
| emodendroket wrote:
| OK, enlighten us then.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| By that standard, Search is also a diversification from
| ads.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sure. Why not.
| hot_gril wrote:
| But it's not a diversification from what they've always
| done.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| You may wish to review Google's sources of revenue. There
| is one source which contributes over 50%, and it's not
| the ad exchange.
| oblio wrote:
| HBO? No. NYTimes? Probably. All media is.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Your ontology raises more questions than it answers, like
| how a streaming service/cable television channel is not
| "media" in your world.
| oblio wrote:
| Ok, rephrase the last part to "The vast majority of media
| is".
|
| Even HBO is partially an ad company, I imagine their own
| shows include product placement.
| hot_gril wrote:
| HBO is paid programming with product placement at most,
| and NYT sells subscriptions that actually bring in the
| majority of their revenue. If it were 90% ads, I'd say
| yeah they might want to reconsider that.
|
| YouTube has its own content while Search ofc doesn't, and
| its advertising model is different. I wouldn't lump it in
| with Search. But still, they've decided ads aren't enough
| and they need YT Premium subscriptions.
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yes, they don't need profits from Cloud yet. They do need
| it to be a viable business when growth slows eventually,
| though.
| 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
| detourdog wrote:
| Could be, they also had a pre-iso valuation that needed
| justifying. The signal to me that it was really over was
| when they stopped supporting jabber/XMPP and look where
| it go them. I never experienced Google as a stock. My
| only experience with google is as a search engine and a
| mail delivery system that broke all the rules of polite
| society.
|
| Could be "Don't be evil" was the answer to the business
| model question of early google. My memory is that it
| spawned during an interview with Larry and Sergey
| regarding the business model.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| Are the Android app store and GCP loss leaders? I assumed
| those two would be profitable at least.
| saagarjha wrote:
| GCP burns massive amounts of cash and was a loss for many
| years. It just barely pulled a profit this year, though
| it looks more like some accounting tricks to make a small
| negative number look like a small positive one to make
| things look better during a downturn.
| davedx wrote:
| IIRC most of the public clouds changed their depreciation
| accounting recently. So all that cloud hardware is now
| good for 20 years instead of 10 years or something. Quite
| a boost to the old bottom line when you do that.
| 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
| immibis wrote:
| When companies figure out that cloud is a waste of money,
| this might not work.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Which mid to large companies have made this decision so
| far? I know there's Facebook, but their use case is
| exceptional.
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was
| a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil
| company would say this) but taken seriously by some
| inside.
| EdiX wrote:
| To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra
| was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave
| substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for
| me to argue that it didn't work.
| 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 ... ?
| hinkley wrote:
| It's been long enough that I've successfully blocked a
| lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some
| terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting
| that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad
| weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people
| explained project management to a project manager.
|
| Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We
| explained five better ways to display the data.
|
| All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point
| the relationship died.
| pas wrote:
| oh, that seems like a rare breed. (at least in my comfy
| bubble.) thanks!
| hinkley wrote:
| She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far
| as I could manage to connect, but something happened when
| she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough
| rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message
| with the lead devs in private.
|
| Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance
| athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her
| animated.
| 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.
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| This is also where the paid search engine comes into
| play. I get to pin Wikipedia so it's always at the top
| whenever it's relevant to my search, and there is almost
| zero SEO spam. And no ads.
|
| I use a mix of that and chatGPT together depending on the
| specific thing I'm searching for, and it's truly better
| than even the old Google.
| 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.
| vram22 wrote:
| Just add Wikipedia to the end of your search pattern.
| ajross wrote:
| > 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
|
| I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not
| how my world works at all. Picking some random popular
| favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger
| Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a
| wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally
| behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real
| man and the short story ahead of the films, not
| unsurprisingly).
|
| I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and
| nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia
| results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is
| starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome,
| where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I had the same problem. Less with missing Wikipedia
| results, but I was definitely getting the first page
| stuffed with crappy SEO results and ads. I switched to
| DDG a few months ago and I'm finding the experience much,
| much better. I tried switching a few years ago and found
| DDG's search wasn't as good. But since then either DDG
| has got better or Google has got worse. I actually
| suspect the latter.
| ajross wrote:
| OK, but this is the "alternative facts" thing at work.
| Grandparent claimed something frankly ridiculous, you say
| you had the "same problem", then you _redefine the
| problem_ to be, well... not the same thing at all? I
| mean, of course there are "SEO" pages in search results,
| that's literally what "Search Engine Optimization" means.
|
| And it's impossible to know what you mean by it without
| specifics: are you complaining that a top search result
| is a useless page of advertisement and AI-generated text
| (which would be bad), or just that e.g.
| "tutorialspoint.com"[1] or whatever is above Stack
| Overflow on some search (hardly a disaster).
|
| Maybe you have some examples we could try?
|
| [1] Or some other vaguely low quality but still
| legitimate site.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I gave this a go. I typed google.com into my browser.
| First thing: oh yeah, that's right, because I use a VPN
| google puts me through captchas before letting me search
| (and I'm currently logged-in to Google on my gmail ID, so
| it definitely knows who I am, which is even more
| annoying). One annoying captcha session later, I can
| search. (and ofc Google wants to know my location,
| despite knowing my address as part of my Google ID).
|
| I tried "El Dorado" because I happened to have that
| boardgame on a shelf in front of me. Actually the results
| were pretty good - wikipedia, national geographic, IMDB,
| no ads. But yeah, not something there's going to be many
| ads on, so let's try something more adworthy.
|
| So I switched to an Incognito window (many, many
| captchas) and tried "erectile dysfunction". Whole bunch
| of decent results, no ads until the bottom half of the
| page (and then it was solid ads of course).
|
| I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised - it's not
| nearly as swamped with ads and shitty SEO as I remember.
| But that's the thing, isn't it? I only switched to DDG a
| few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's
| responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that
| ;) But yeah, you're correct - the first page of Google
| isn't all ads and SEO crap. HN must be hallucinating
| that.
| ajross wrote:
| > I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was
| so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless
| captchas). I didn't dream that
|
| Well, that's the thing... maybe you did? I mean, clearly
| from context you live in a world awash in the kind of
| rhetoric we're seeing in this topic, with hyperbolic
| claims about the Descent of Google into Vice and Decay
| everywhere. And... it's easy to fit stuff into a frame if
| that's how you're already thinking. One bad result or one
| unexpected pop up ad can sway a *lot* of opinion even if
| it's an outlier.
|
| Thus: "alternative facts". In the real world search
| results are boring and generally high quality because
| that's the way they've been for 20+ years (I mean, come
| one: it's a mature product in a mature market, you really
| expect it to change much?). But here on HN testimony like
| that gets voted down below the hyperbolic negativity, so
| what you read are the outliers.
|
| HN, to wit, has become the Fox News of tech.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I can see how you got there from where you started, but
| I'm not sure it's accurate ;)
|
| HN is useful but like all new sources and social media
| sites, it's not the unbiased pure stream of news and
| educated opinion that we'd like. Humans are weird.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I don't like the "you're remembering it wrong" defence
|
| Google doesn't publish a search quality report, or
| publicly index their results for the same queries over
| time, so you can't objectively compare whether the
| quality has changed or not. Plus, the Google search
| signals and the product itself are constantly changing
| day to day and there's no way to see those changes.
|
| So if Google went through a spell of bad results, or
| their algorithm entered a degenerate state, or SEO
| figured out how to break through their algorithmic walls,
| or even their algorithm deemed you interested in
| something you aren't, then "you're remembering it wrong"
| because it's fixed today, but at the time it really was
| worse.
|
| I do agree though, people remember bad experiences far
| more than positive ones, there's a definite bias in the
| human psyche there. But also, anecdotally, I've never
| been so annoyed with Google results as I have lately. I
| know I'm not alone, my low-tech wife even complains that
| Google has become useless for so many things. True or
| not, it's a bad omen for Google because it's very hard to
| rebuild a reputation.
|
| One of the most annoying things about Google the last few
| years has been searching reviews, and they've just added
| a widget to combine product reviews which is nice to see,
| so they do seem like they're working on these issues.
| ajross wrote:
| It's not a defense, just a postulate. I'll grant that
| sometimes search results are bad, that seems eminently
| plausible. But you'll likewise grant that echo chamber
| logic tends strongly to "create facts" by elevating
| outliers into assumed priors, right?
|
| I'm just saying that right now HN has become an echo
| chamber of this kind of logic, with people writing and
| voting more for the visceral rush of anger against a
| shared enemy and not "truth", so much. Hence, the Fox
| News of tech.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| That's fair, and I agree.
| murphy1312 wrote:
| Started using startpage.com for google results without
| the ads and its pretty good.
| bombcar wrote:
| Try finding out if Walmart is closed tomorrow. Google
| results are all SEO spam even though Walmart themselves
| tweeted about it.
| ajross wrote:
| Did you try this? First hits are Walmart locations with
| hours. Followed by "People also ask" where the first item
| (with a correct answer) is "Will Walmart be open on
| Thanksgiving near me?". Followed by proper search results
| where the top two hits are, indeed, the two nearest
| Walmarts to me. How exactly would you improve that? Is
| there a better site to put at the top?
| whstl wrote:
| In Google's defence:
|
| Twitter shouldn't be considered a proper source anymore.
| It's closed without an account and the access is severely
| limited. You can't see follow-up messages, questions, or
| whole threads.
|
| Also I don't have Walmart here but it does show opening
| hours from Google Maps which is often better than
| official websites.
| whstl wrote:
| Some of the queries you gave me weren't so bad!
|
| I specifically searched just now something I searched
| recently, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off".
|
| I naturally blocked ads, but it shows "Cast", "People
| also ask", the official Netflix result (good), "Trailers
| and Clips", "Reviews", "Episodes", "Top Stories" with
| some gossip, and then Wikipedia and IMDB.
|
| However this is also not so bad! I will make sure to
| document all my problematic Googling experiences.
|
| You can argue that those things are "noise that my brain
| should block" or that "they're actually useful", and
| that's entirely true. But Google is no longer returning
| the results I used to expect from it, and that's a fact.
| Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore? Well, that's
| not a big deal, there are other products. But my point
| still stands. Sorry but not sorry: Apple's Spotlight is
| still better for this and needs zero scrolling to take me
| to Wikipedia.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It depends on how heavily targeted the terms are. The two
| big objectively user-hostile lines I was watching and
| have seen crossed:
|
| 1. Removed the yellow background that easily
| distinguished ads.
|
| 2. Zero organic results above the fold.
|
| Obviously #2 doesn't happen every day on every query, but
| I saw it during the crypto craze and I have seen it
| during the AI craze.
| araes wrote:
| The movie example is an exaggeration (in my opinion). I
| find that mostly Google Search has issues with related
| ideas (Microsoft Project Silica) where there is not a
| direct article, yet a reference. Ex: [1]
|
| There is also what I would call a phase delay. Google has
| a really bad issue with SEO, takes forever to get rid of
| it, but by the time you can check, its mostly resolved.
|
| Finally. What you see as an end user is only partially
| Google. A lot of the page is farmed out to Real-Time
| Bidding (RTB) networks based on your user tracking. So
| its often difficult to correlate if someone else's user
| profile delivers wildly different experience. [2] You
| might get spammed by SEO and near constant TEMU ads, and
| others might get nothing.
|
| Finally. Finally. 'Cause its spec.' I expect there are
| client side or man-in-the-middle viruses that mess with
| search results.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
|
| [2] https://www.iccl.ie/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidde...
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| It's because ChatGPT isn't being monetized with ads yet.
| I use "yet" quite deliberately, mind you. The question
| isn't whether ChatGPT will eventually have ads; the
| question is how easily you'll be able to _tell_ they 're
| ads, or if it's going to be product/service placement
| worked into responses as seamlessly as possible.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| What a long con nudge bubble will be woven, in the
| darkness to bind them.
| martinflack wrote:
| You say that, but Google Search is still free after
| decades, whereas you can pay ChatGPT $20/mo for a
| membership right now.
| esafak wrote:
| If only Google offered the option to pay in return for no
| ads and other junk. But they would say it does not scale;
| they can't count that low. So people are flocking to
| chatGPT.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I suspect that by doing so they'd indicate just how much
| each user is worth to them in ads.
|
| I suspect that folk who opted into this would be the ones
| getting lots of ads (hence the most valuable.)
|
| If Google said "you can opt out for $99 a month" you'd
| freak out. But you're probably worth that (or more).
|
| People aren't really flocking to ChatGPT though - not
| yet. Not at Google Scale. It's not like my mom will pay
| $20 a month when she just uses Google for free...
| esafak wrote:
| Given that I've moved to Kagi and chatGPT how much are
| they making off me now? They should have disrupted
| themselves when they had the chance.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Sure some are moving. There are always some moving. But
| despite the HN bubble effect its a tiny sample.
|
| Plus folk moving now are folk who'll move back later when
| they get disgruntled there. (No disrespect.) First movers
| are not the loyal customer base. Movers gotta be moving..
|
| (I say this as a general rule not making an assumption
| about you personally.)
|
| It's like even everyone "left" Facebook for google+.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Person 1: "They figured out how much they could make off
| you and it was more than what you would pay."
|
| Person 2: "Well, they pissed me off so I left completely
| and now they make nothing off of me."
|
| Person 1: "They already knew you would move so they
| figured out they would make nothing off of you in the
| long run!"
|
| Person 2: "..."
| esafak wrote:
| My churn would appear as a loss in their lifetime value
| model, so it would be detected by a long-term experiment.
| And I am reasonably confident they are performing long-
| term experiments for such things.
| girvo wrote:
| On the other hand, Google does exactly that with YouTube?
| esafak wrote:
| Good on them! I meant for search. They have other paid
| services.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I say it because I don't think enough people are going to
| pay for LLM/GPT services for investors to get what they
| consider a sufficient return on their investment. I'm
| pretty sure no "pure AI" company is anywhere near a track
| to profitability as of yet, and there is only so long
| that VCs will be comfortable with that. (And while there
| might be AI "true believers" who don't much care about
| the profit horizon, ask OpenAI's board how that worked
| out for them last week.)
| Ckirby wrote:
| What kind of shallow, bland, inoffensive and disconnected
| items do you search for that a simple chatbot can spit
| out?
| antupis wrote:
| Work-related stuff, Google is for more personal stuff but
| even there 85% of my search is something like best
| running shoes Reddit.
| barnabee wrote:
| I haven't used Google as more than an occasional backup
| for years, and even less since I switched from DuckDuckGo
| to Kagi a few months back.
|
| The more I eliminate anything to do with ads from my
| life, the better things get,
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| People are already lamenting the lack of useful results in
| Google Search, and adverts aren't returning as much value
| as they used to, and there's been a rise in modified client
| apps without ads as a reaction to ads being spammed on
| certain services.
| 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.
| efitz wrote:
| > _I don 't think it's literally impossible to avoid the
| same mistakes as our predecessors._
|
| Our predecessors didn't make mistakes; they made rational
| choices that led to outcomes we don't like.
|
| We (for some subset of us that become business leaders)
| will make similar choices that those who come after us
| will view as mistakes.
|
| They will rightfully think that we made the "same"
| "mistakes" because our rational decisions will be made in
| response to similar pressures.
|
| For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long
| term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors,
| because we are subject to the same demands from investors
| for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short
| term goals in exchange for increased compensation.
|
| Don't hate the players, hate the game.
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Things tend to repeat but it's not completely impossible to
| have large and lasting changes. Ursula K. Le Guin used to
| say how people thought inescapable the divine rights of
| kings.
|
| On the other hand, Google did change the world.
| Everything's just more mature nowadays. There's less blue
| ocean in its business segments.
|
| I wonder if a company could stay "evergreen" by constantly
| finding new business areas and somehow spinning off old
| ones? Apple for example almost died in between before
| really coming back with the iPhone.
| peanutz454 wrote:
| Humans have great capacity to learn from our mistakes. Our
| source code or DNA have no encoding related to running
| business in a certain way. We mourn old google the
| revolutionary place, the likes of which could not have
| existed 100 years ago. But we forget that it was such a
| revolutionary place that its mere existence was an anomaly
| of sorts, and also that it spurned us to create several
| such new places, and that learning will continue us to
| create many more.
| 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.
| lapphi wrote:
| Agreed, we are on ycombinator.com, after all. The patron
| saint of failed ideas.
| 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.
| jklm wrote:
| Somewhat spicy take - if the people in Area 120 were
| among the top 10% of Googlers you worked with, they
| probably weren't the right builders to start a new
| vertical.
|
| Most of what makes people effective at large companies is
| neutral or negative value when applied to very early-
| stage companies.
| tomrod wrote:
| That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top
| 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any
| size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and
| deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top
| 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any
| size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and
| deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.
|
| These are rather the top 10 % sycophants, not the top 10
| % researchers or top 10 % programmers.
| tomrod wrote:
| I didn't see that mentioned, perhaps I missed it. I read
| it as top 10% of performers.
| seraphsf wrote:
| You're not wrong. They were among the top 10% of people I
| worked with in terms of passion, commitment, and
| creativity. They weren't among the top 10% in terms of
| their skill in navigating Dilbert-land corporatism.
|
| A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects
| were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their
| previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120
| was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside
| startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural
| reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google's reputation as
| a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.
| vincnetas wrote:
| "One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss
| of these entrepreneurs to outside startups"
|
| So basically google had a shed where they hoarded
| talented people, to prevent competition? :)
| zaphar wrote:
| I Don't think hoarding is necessarily the right word.
| They were using them to research potential new products
| or tools. The theory being that if only a few of the
| projects prove high value then it's worth it. That's not
| hoarding that's letting them flourish.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > So basically google had a shed where they hoarded
| talented people, to prevent competition?
|
| That's a succinct description of why Microsoft Research
| was created.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Google Inbox
|
| Still so damn bitter about that death.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's weird that Gmail never reached that point. Even
| years later it's still the same it was 10 years ago.
|
| I think after inbox died I just gave up on it and moved
| to fastmail.
| wyclif wrote:
| I understand what you're saying (I miss Inbox, too). But
| end users like sameness and "it just works." Normies
| prefer stability over innovation when they are trying to
| get stuff done.
| abirch wrote:
| Normies like sameness, this is why God gave us configs.
| You can default to normal but let the crazies customize.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Thing is, they quit on it too quickly; sure, a lot of
| people would stick with gmail, but others - and following
| generations - would adopt and grow up with inbox.
|
| I think / suspect that many people develop habits of this
| type in their 20's and never move away from it for the
| next 60 years because it works. Example, people who still
| use vi(m) / emacs. Nothing personal, but as an example,
| they use it because they're used to it and have been for
| decades. And no editor that claims to be better will ever
| replace it for them.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Inbox was not deterministic. It's like a social media
| feed for your e-mail. I'd rather have my mails left as-
| is, and allow me to work with them the way I want.
|
| You don't have to be a "normie" to appreciate simple or
| old fashioned things. Most of the e-mails I receive is
| not for quick-consumption, and I prefer the standard way
| over Inbox's way.
|
| Maybe it was a solution trying to find a problem, IDK. I
| used it for 30 minutes tops.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Gmail settings still look like they were made in 2001.
| Any UX designer will want to pour Clorox into their eyes
| by just looking at it. Remarkable how Google can just
| totally ignore it, but then again - email is a very
| specific product. Once you grab your market share, we are
| locked in into our emails.
| foxp2 wrote:
| I miss Inbox features too. Shortwave is nice if you want
| something similar today.
| ssd532 wrote:
| It is the best email client I have ever used.
| 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?
| nextos wrote:
| That's true. What they need is what they had started
| doing, i.e. breaking down Google into Alphabet and
| letting some companies within the conglomerate act like
| startups.
|
| Why was this effort unsuccessful? Perhaps they were
| unable to get rid of middle management? I have had
| lengthy discussions with employees from several of their
| companies, e.g. Calico, and that seemed to be the case.
| This article only reinforces my view.
| chii wrote:
| > Why was this effort unsuccessful?
|
| i suspect that they are unsuccessful for two reasons:
| failure is not death, and success is not riches (for
| those who did the work).
| bicepjai wrote:
| I think you are talking about "innovators dilemma" great
| book by the way
| eslaught wrote:
| It's worth noting that was a turning point: the "more wood
| behind fewer arrows" policy adopted by Larry [1] initiated
| the die-off cycle of Google products. Prior to that, as far
| as I am aware, they were much more tolerant of products
| staying around in a mature-but-not-wildly-successful state.
| Afterwards, it seemed as if they would only keep things
| that maintained a trajectory to become as successful as
| their core products.
|
| Again, this was not entirely unpredictable. While I don't
| remember the details of that lecture, I remember the
| professor calling out these sorts of big shifts in cultural
| values as being typical of startups transforming into large
| companies. And Larry himself was part of the
| transformation, turning into (presumably, what he believed
| to be) what was needed to lead Google into its next stage
| as a large company.
|
| [1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-
| behind-few...
| leoc wrote:
| What's remarkable is that that phrase was already, at
| that time, notorious for having been a portent of doom at
| Sun Microsystems.
| jmcguckin wrote:
| All the wood behind one arrow...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| ..and now all that's left of Sun is the wood on the back
| of the Meta sign.
| nstart wrote:
| If I recall past discussions on this topic correctly, it
| wasn't just about profits. I believe the incentive
| structures are setup around launches and not maintenance.
| If that's correct, then that would lead to people
| launching, collecting rewards (bonuses, promotions, etc)
| and then abandoning.
| rizky05 wrote:
| Microsoft today is more innovative than google IMO. They
| keep executing bold and controversial strategies, even
| though being older than google.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They made - and still make - one crucial error: you need to
| spin those projects that are simply viable out immediately
| after they take root. Otherwise you will end up with the
| brand advantage but there will always be the pressure to
| use the resources (people, mostly) more efficiently in
| terms of ROI. And so nothing ever lasts and slowly but
| surely your reputation as a reliable partner for new
| products is eroded.
|
| You can use your main brand for the launch, but then you
| have to be willing to support the child.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| In addition, I don't understand why they stopped them
| entirely, instead of spin them off as subsidiaries under
| e.g. Alphabet; make them financially self-reliant, have
| Google/Alphabet as the main shareholder, and give the
| people that worked on it (and whoever else wants to) the
| opportunity to continue working on the product.
|
| Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were
| probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software
| ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if
| nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering,
| which would make it simpler, just change the billing).
| beambot wrote:
| Most of them were probably built on Google's core
| infrastructure in ways that make them difficult to
| externalize at sub scale. There's also compensation
| disparity - it's virtually impossible for a new startup /
| spinout to pay FAANG comp and remain profitable & nimble.
| This results in braindrain.
| martius wrote:
| The reason is quite simple: why spend engineering
| headcount on a less successful product?
|
| > Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were
| probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software
| ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if
| nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering,
| which would make it simpler, just change the billing).
|
| Google Cloud is built on top of Google's tech ecosystem,
| not the other way around.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because things need time and alignment of incentives
| between creators and consumers and if you interfere in
| that relationship all the time things will never ever
| succeed. The last thing any project needs is an investor
| with a majority interest that fucks up your plans all the
| time, can take your employees away at will and can axe
| the project at any time because it doesn't perform
| according to their metrics.
|
| That's why VCs take a minority stake in start-ups. The
| trouble usually begins when the founders dilute to the
| point that they no longer have a majority.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Assignment: Consider Agilent, itself a spinoff from HP,
| also spun off four (I think) companies, because they were
| good businesses but distracted the management.
|
| Is this the right strategy? I'm tempted to say Yes.
| 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
| somenameforme wrote:
| There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro
| Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016.
| In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to
| dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a
| project might fail. And even rewarding employees for
| scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly
| unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative
| planning process. So then what exactly is the difference
| between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project?
|
| And so when you look at this sort of selection process it
| ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up
| being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone
| delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the
| world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and
| their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are
| building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and
| future of Google.
|
| [1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-
| moonshots-...
| konschubert wrote:
| Building the best self driving car in the world is amazing
| , come on!
| bobviolier wrote:
| At that time, others companies were not building most of
| those things though.
| LeonB wrote:
| And those that were building were basically doing
| research, not refining a product that had achieved
| product market fit. The gp makes it sound like they were
| manufacturing widgets. The existence of others in the
| market is better described as "other people were also
| able to attract funding for the potential payoffs in that
| field."
|
| It demands that google's mopnshots need to be something
| no other investor has considered.
|
| The same comment translated to 1965 -- "The US is trying
| to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I'd
| hardly call it a "moonshot" "
|
| (Edited to change typo of "potential layoffs" to
| "potential payoffs", possibly more fitting though)
| rvba wrote:
| Did Astro Teller have any successful project? A lot of
| money was spent, but what are the results? Looking at the
| wikipedia page it seems this whole Google X thing is a
| place where senior people have fun, while the rest of the
| company is undetstaffed. (E.g. no money for human customer
| service)
| 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...
| lupire wrote:
| That's 25% of Google revenue using more employees.
|
| So yeah, bloated and underperforming.
| 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
| lupire wrote:
| It's nearly impossible to measure the marginal
| contribution of someone one in a non sales role.
| ivancho wrote:
| And yet somehow most people in charge of resourcing and
| budgeting for projects, teams and companies have some
| idea of who to hire, how much to pay them, etc. How do
| you think they do that with something that is nearly
| impossible to measure?
|
| It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if
| those people could estimate their own contribution, or,
| god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think
| there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.
| chatmasta wrote:
| > How do you think they do that with something that is
| nearly impossible to measure?
|
| The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion
| scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and
| then beyond that it's a question of who is the most
| productive, effective at getting things done, etc.
|
| So while they do have "something to measure," these
| metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even
| negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a
| productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable
| project, while another team barely works but ships a
| profitable product.
| ivancho wrote:
| Big tech, yes, lots, but an extra skill required there is
| to recognize and actively avoid ambitious managers, who
| would sacrifice/burn out their own team for self-
| advancement. Lots of churn in big tech is purely from
| that. Small tech, I think the capital pressure is much
| higher, so just getting a steady good deal on labor is
| not enough, leadership there is constantly optimizing and
| trying to upgrade the labor value without matching comp
| (ie, people are expected to always be acquiring more
| skills, giving internal talks/lectures, mentoring etc,
| and those who don't, well, they turn out to not be a good
| culture fit).
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| My parents had a lot of ideas about my romantic life too,
| none of them particularly good or welcome and none of
| which I listened to. Maybe you'll have better luck.
| nl wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but you realize that implying they were
| looking at the kids as spouses for themselves is
| extremely creepy right?
|
| (Not that I agree with what the OP said either - I think
| most people have a protective instinct towards all
| children without thinking of them as potential spouses
| for their own offspring. We see this behavior in other
| primates too, eg:
| https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2021/mountain-
| gorillas-ad... )
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think you've misread me. My point was the guy seemed to
| be suggesting some general human tendency towards extreme
| self-interest but then used personal pronouns ("I think
| to myself"). Not that people are generally seeking child
| brides. If you look at the position of the word "myself"
| your interpretation does not really fit.
| jsnell wrote:
| Sure, but everybody generalizes from one example. Well,
| at least I do.
| nl wrote:
| No, as can be seen by the other comments in this thread
| the use of "myself" there is entirely appropriate.
|
| He is using personal pronouns consistently: "myself" and
| "my children". "Their" children is the other children he
| is observing, and he is thinking to himself.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Then again given your bizarre reading of my post how much
| should I really trust your interpretation.
| dekhn wrote:
| No, not the way it's written.
| 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?
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| People without kids have that problem. This poster is
| talking about having children causing an evil change in
| personal character.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Kids often bring out the worst level of 'fuck you, got
| mine' politicking in humans. All that school segregation
| stuff in the 60's? Parents 'protecting' their children.
| Same for the school segregation stuff in the 2010's.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-
| paren...
| 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.
| 3seashells wrote:
| Less incentives to be all out horrific in large groups
| with distributed responsibilities?
| 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?
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's simple, you just assume none are ready for change, and
| you'll have a pretty much 100% accurate heuristic.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think my thesis is that rather than looking for
| diamonds in the rough I need to reset my sense of good
| enough at least high enough that the exchange of new
| wisdom is somewhat proportional. I can teach you things
| and you can teach me things.
|
| As a polymath my natural instinct is to learn by
| observation and doing rather than engage a teacher
| directly. Fortunately I can also learn by interviewing,
| so I'm not completely hopeless. If I'm asking you a ton
| of questions odds are good I think you're a mentor or I
| think you need one.
|
| The problem is that I've worked for a couple places that
| I thought could teach me a lot more than they did, I
| mistook individual attributes as a pattern that wasn't
| there, and what I saw was more (or less) what I got. So
| at the end of the day I am probably the wrong person to
| ask. Thankfully other people replied.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I joined my current company 5 years ago, and I feel like
| we've 'fixed' a lot of things, but the effort to do so is so
| absurd.
|
| And then it's suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on
| the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to
| the bad old way of doing things.
| hinkley wrote:
| How do you cope with Told Ya So? I've found it's never as
| cathartic as I think and keeping it to myself is somewhat
| stressful, so nobody wins no matter which option I choose.
| 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.
| konschubert wrote:
| I think it's fine if big companies stick to their core
| competencies, return money to shareholders, and the
| shareholders can then re-invest into innovative startups.
|
| Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody
| involved, except for the CEO who's ego is scratched by
| running an "old" company.
| 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.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| This is not at all what people mean when they talk about
| silos
| Solvency wrote:
| Ok how do you meaningfully define the difference and
| moreover how would you prevent his version of a "good"
| silo from devolving into a "bad" one in actuality?
| whatshisface wrote:
| "How does efficient compartmentalization become bad
| siloing?"
|
| Step one: build Aa and Bb with the A and a people
| together, and the B and b people together.
|
| Step two: realize you need AB and ab.
|
| Step three: keep the same organizational structure, and
| try to get the A team to work with the B team ten
| managers and five hundred miles away.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Data point of one, but it's _precisely_ what I mean when
| I talk about silos.
| 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.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > In my experience, highly-siloed orgs have tremendous
| coordination barriers to even the smallest request across
| teams.
|
| Isn't this solved by having cross-team project managers
| who can perform this coordination?
|
| I certainly agree that the failure case you describe is
| possible, but it's also solvable (in my experience).
| closeparen wrote:
| > Your one-line API change didn't make it onto your
| dependency's roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in
| three months.
|
| This is one of the key problems of working across teams,
| and its impact is amplified by a culture that says you
| should turn everything into a cross-team project that you
| possibly can. The whole company grinds to a near halt on
| these sorts of blockages.
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think there's nothing incompatible between fire and
| WLB. Execute with a much greater degree of efficiency
| between 9 and 5.
|
| Too often do people just throw more time and/or bodies at
| a problem to make it go away.
| 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.
| closeparen wrote:
| IC leadership positions are earned by leading cross-team
| projects, so the senior engineers who want them (and the
| managers who want to grow IC leaders) are encouraged to
| turn everything into one.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Leadership positions should be granted not just on
| "projects", but demonstrated technical ability and
| judgement. This often includes influence of what NOT to
| do just as much as it involves driving projects.
| Obviously any rubric is only as good as the people who
| apply it, and if you hire tens of thousands of smart
| engineers with only one really profitable product and not
| much in the way of vision it's going to be a fucking
| mess.
| closeparen wrote:
| But because of the stigmatization of silos and
| valorization of cross-team efforts, making a project
| cross-team when it doesn't need to be is considered an
| example of demonstrating the company's values rather than
| example of bad technical judgement.
| dasil003 wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy and bad leadership judgement. I
| don't doubt these arguments are made and sometimes won
| (especially in dysfunctional or apathetic orgs), but
| context matters, there's no value system that supersedes
| critical thinking in context. One of the questions I ask
| in staff+ promo committee is what did this person prevent
| from being built.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Good question :-) Could make sense on a senior developer
| level?
|
| At the same time, seems possibly easy to game? If two
| friends make unnecessary suggestions, and stop each
| other's suggestions.
|
| If it becomes well known that this question is being
| asked?
|
| Not much work required to pretend one stopped sth from
| getting built
| 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
| mk89 wrote:
| Breaking down silos de-risks a company, despite some of the
| costs you mentioned. Especially after covid, companies
| capitalize on the flexibility of employees and lack of
| (physical) offices. Employees can be replaced like never
| before.
|
| But even without that in mind, breaking silos can also put
| the right people in the loop - for every successful silo
| you mentioned, I bet there is a successful company which
| was able to have a good mix of people from different teams.
|
| For me it always boils down to: what does the company want?
| Who they want to be in the next 3-5-10 years? Based on this
| you need to have proper management training. Without that,
| they simply throw engineers at the problem, which as you
| mentioned, can backfire. If you as an organization are able
| to scale well (even with some small and monitored silos) I
| don't see why it should be a problem.
|
| Reality is: companies want to be able to scale like Google
| for their pet projects, fire fast upon need, have a lot of
| teams all with the performance of 10x engineers, etc etc.
| That's the BS they write on their about page.
|
| Do they have agile coaches? Do they have people that help
| them organize work? Skilled people, not random guy that
| developed software all his life and now he/she wants to try
| something new, and he/she read a book over the weekend or
| listened to some podcasts..
|
| People have high expectations by paying little. It takes
| effort to do things right. That's in my opinion the truth.
| logical42 wrote:
| Counterpoint: Apple has been quite successful despite
| their insistence in silos across teams and orgs.
| 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 was already very hierarchical, when Google always
| advertised itself as a relatively flat company.
| hnick wrote:
| Sounds like encapsulation in OO. You don't want to let
| other people poke around in your bits except through well
| defined interfaces.
| 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.
| lacerrr wrote:
| Starting a business is a lot of work and risk. Having those
| removed makes the path so much easier to experiment and
| removes all the friction.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Indeed, which is the point of the original comment: that
| large companies bias towards those people who don't want
| that risk.
| 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.
| cellu wrote:
| I'm curious to understand your perspective:m as to why a
| business that focus on the user may expose to risk? Doesn't
| meeting user needs equals to making users happy which in
| turn equals to making more money?
| lupire wrote:
| Not when your users are not your paying customers
| 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...
| Eridrus wrote:
| Academic studies of social media are often very hampered
| by tooling and data access and studying a moving target.
|
| It's hard to even know if the methodology of the paper
| you cited (analyzing comment trajectories) is a good one,
| given YT is constantly tweaking their algorithms,
| including in response to public outcry, and this
| phenomenon does not show up in other analysis: https://12
| ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...
|
| I assume the methodological questions are even trickier
| for TikTok which has many more creators than YT.
|
| I would love to see someone actually study TikTok though,
| since people love to ascribe blame to platforms for
| radicalizing people rather than accepting that some users
| just have views we find unacceptable regardless of the
| platform.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I don't know YT's monetization history, but longform
| video is incredibly easy to monetize because advertisers
| are willing to pay much more for their content being
| there. They get some edge from all the tech they have
| built for matching ads to users, but it's just
| fundamentally one of the easiest things to monetize on
| the internet, so I don't think they would have struggled
| there.
| sgu999 wrote:
| > It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech
| but not the freedom to let it loose.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure, in my case ChatGPT passes the bar
| of being mildly useful but Bard is still absolutely
| useless. I can see two equally likely explanations for
| this: they simply can't manage to pull it off due to
| their culture or they can't release something that isn't
| massively more nerfed than the competition.
| brlewis wrote:
| The rationalization given in this comment for the layoffs
| is obviously false. Google had ways of getting rid of
| underperformers without massive layoffs that they have been
| using for many years. Google has ways of getting rid of
| projects that do not involve layoffs.
| davidcbc 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.
|
| This doesn't really match the reality of the layoffs. They
| weren't team/project based or performance based, they were
| seemingly random. If they were concernee about too many low
| performing products and employees they went about it in
| completely the wrong way.
| lupire wrote:
| Layoffs at everywhere happened because money got more
| expensive.
|
| The whole industry didn't magically accumulate debt weight
| all at the same time in the same proportions.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > the company accumulated way too much dead weight -
| pointless projects, underperforming employees
|
| The layoffs weren't just low performers and killing
| unwanted projects.
| 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.
| financltravsty wrote:
| Slowly but steadily we age out "divine mandate" for "hustle
| mandate."
|
| Nothing changes, psychopaths still cling on to some nebulous
| notion to make labor work harder to capture more excess
| value.
| 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.
| davedx wrote:
| I doubt it's provably true or false, as psychology tends to
| be.
|
| Largely I agree with the OP though - treat your customers
| _bad enough_ and unless there 's something stopping them,
| they'll go elsewhere. That's how the free market works.
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Sorry - could you expand? I'm not sure how that relates.
| 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)
| Aeolun wrote:
| You can build a very solid business empire on a large
| collection of small offerings.
| bariswheel wrote:
| Though one key issue: Winning hearts and minds matter,
| public perception matters, they do indirectly affect the
| bottom line. Requires some nuance/between the lines sight
| to see this.
| 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?
| yashap wrote:
| I haven't worked personally at these places, so just going
| on what I've heard:
|
| - Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their
| "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they
| operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility,
| letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you
| fight to keep this person if they told you they were
| leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and
| candid communication, and generally a smart and driven
| group doing great work
|
| - I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a
| long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep
| going a really high performing group, that were passionate
| about their work and hustling hard to build great things.
| Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and
| lack of work/life balance
|
| - Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be
| solatic wrote:
| It's one of those things that _ought_ to be possible, but the
| problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on
| the bottom, but it 's impossible to have hundreds or
| thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with
| a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get
| politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective
| storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company
| where an executive oversees a single layer of middle
| management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where
| it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting
| executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to
| get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and
| what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing
| telephone, and you have an echo chamber.
|
| The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success
| _in spite of_ the necessary evil of layers of middle
| management.
| 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.
| davedx wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Kind of like Apple.
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Your comment has been removed for threatening violence, and
| your user account has been permanently suspended. Have a nice
| day. - corporate censors
| 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.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This is my experience having been through 3 acquisitions.
|
| In 1-2 years you go from: - operating well, get bought -
| throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place
| that's deliberately different and better with what was before
| worse and slower - then leaders get replaced or leave because
| we can't do anything anymore - leaders start saying things like
| "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically
| just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| It's less about risk aversion than it is about position, size,
| and complexity. As these things grow, the incentives change and
| the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes
| impossible.
|
| A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers,
| and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The
| organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good
| balance between those three or it dies. As the organization
| grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them
| instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous
| customer service is an example.
|
| Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers,
| we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to
| know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6
| people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well
| enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it
| disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing
| exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for
| Y Initiative, doing Z position.
|
| Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore.
| The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and
| then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y
| Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and
| expenses are the only measures at the end.
|
| And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite
| class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the
| C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the
| sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an
| investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but
| not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its
| former self.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >and the ability to understand what the organization even is
| becomes impossible.
|
| What makes it impossible?
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| I explain it in the third paragraph but to illustrate it
| further: Consider a function. A function that is 1 line
| long is immediately understandable. At 10 lines, it is
| readable within a minute or two. At 100 lines, it is maybe
| legible to someone who lives in that function. At 1000
| lines, it is a black box. Human organizations are the same
| way.
|
| You might suggest refactoring, which is what companies do
| too. They create departments, promotion ladders, org
| charts, and mission statements. The problem is that
| abstractions leak by design. As your abstractions
| accumulate and change outside your view, your ability to
| understand the entirety reduces.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| But that has to do with the capabilities of the
| executives involved, it doesn't make it impossible. Just
| like in your example, there are many, many developers
| that can perfectly understand large functions or code
| bases without issue.
|
| If you have such a code base and you hire people that are
| not equipped, either through inexperience or capability,
| of managing that code base that is a resourcing issue.
|
| If your executives cannot understand and control the
| organization they are tasked with controlling and
| cultivating, then they should be fired.
|
| Which is basically what this dude is getting at.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| Except large code bases do the same. They regularly die
| when their ability to be understood drops too low. Even
| with well organized code, they are pushed to add features
| until they aren't understood at the deepest level. Once
| you hit millions of lines of code, even when you spend
| decades in that code base, you still forget changes you
| made even if you have an overarching picture. That's
| ignoring other people working on it all the time. The
| understanding gets reduced to contracts, types, and
| interfaces.
|
| And most importantly, humans are more complicated than
| code. With enough time and knowledge, I can accurately
| tell you what any piece of code does on a single
| expression or statement. Humans regularly do things they
| don't even know for purposes they don't understand.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I agree with you, but none of this makes it impossible.
| It just makes it a resourcing/hiring issue.
|
| The same thing regularly happens with smaller companies
| or code bases. The size exacerbates the issue, but it's
| not the cause of it.
|
| Which is largely this OP's point regarding the subject of
| calling out culture rot and a particular executive.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Do you have any resources to learn this. How to untangle
| the situation. What would happen if the resources indeed
| isn't the problem to tackle, rather its complexity that
| is hard to untangle.
| chii wrote:
| too many things going on, involving too many people and
| nobody can possibly keep track of it all in their head. You
| have to split it up. But by splitting it up, the left hand
| doesn't really know what the right hand is doing.
|
| So controls and processes are put in place to ensure no bad
| outcomes are possible, but this also prevents good,
| innovative outcomes from sprouting.
|
| Fundamentally, it's a loss of trust that can exist in a
| smaller organization.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that
|
| That dude just made the number up.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > But once you achieve market dominance
|
| "Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under
| capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the
| government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.
| crashmat wrote:
| Thing is, under capitalism large companies get significant
| control over the governments' actions. And large companies
| don't like not being allowed to be as powerful as possible,
| holding monopolies.
| timenova wrote:
| I highly recommend you read the paper Marketing Myopia by
| Theodore Levitt (1960).
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I find the real comedy here is the emotional attitude towards
| an employer TBH, especially with GOOG doing just fine.
|
| The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers
| coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there
| was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was
| beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social
| media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors
| or antitrust authorities or sth).
| yterdy 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?"_
|
| Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?
|
| _> A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure
| about the future of your job?_
|
| This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even
| often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of
| society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much
| an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the
| thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of
| SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a
| wry smile on my face.
| strangescript wrote:
| Companies confuse their initial product success with general
| success. "We made this amazing thing, so everything we do is
| amazing". The logic is flawed but can carry the company a
| tremendous distance before becoming unsustainable. Google is
| reaching the early steps of the unsustainable phase, and their
| initial product success is finally being threatened via AI.
| Working on an open source library for 9 years and then
| complaining that the company is changing is ironic.
| immibis wrote:
| I've seen a hypothesis that Google has never created anything
| new worth anything to anyone, after it created search and
| ads. Gmail is a clone of Hotmail, and YouTube and Android
| were acquisitions.
| donny2018 wrote:
| The hypothesis is not wrong. Google is still just ads and
| search. It's a utility "nothing to see here" company now.
|
| Paradoxically, Microsoft now looks newer, fresher and more
| innovative than this.
| wilsynet wrote:
| There were Internet search engines before Google, but
| Google did it way better.
|
| I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and
| more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically
| infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the
| time.
|
| I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for
| YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but
| it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot
| of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over
| the years.
|
| You could also say there were digital music players before
| the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were
| smart phones before the iPhone.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation.
| They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not
| aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are,
| chiefly, to make money.
|
| The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to
| burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I
| don't have any problem saying it.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| You've just described why once prominent companies fade into
| shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM,
| Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be
| avoided with better leadership.
| immibis wrote:
| But not a problem, either. Turnover is natural. Nobody but
| the investors care very much whether Kodak pivots to digital
| cameras, or whether Kodak remains the leading film camera
| company as the industry shrinks, and a different company
| makes digital cameras. In fact the latter is often better for
| the economy and consumers, due to the better specialization.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Yes it is a problem if a company is failing not just for
| the investors but the workers. Nobody wants to work for a
| sinking ship. Can't believe this even needs to be said.
| donny2018 wrote:
| Microsoft has managed to resurrect from the dead though. Now
| it feels like a "fresher" company than Google.
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Eventually everybody has to grow up and realize Santa isn't a
| real person.
| eVoLInTHRo wrote:
| Joined Microsoft in the early 2010s, and Google recently in the
| 2020s. I see the same bad company culture traits in both cases
| (incompetent & feuding middle managers, silos of information,
| promotion based on launches not business impact, hired too many
| people, etc.).
|
| I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had
| clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or
| not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough
| humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be
| open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture.
| Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation
| wasn't.
|
| I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any
| level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business
| threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-
| tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I
| would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly
| intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid
| creating the bad culture common to big old companies.
|
| To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the
| Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that
| reality.
| havercosine wrote:
| `why rock the boat` is spot on! Most large organisations
| eventually go into a mode of maximising the free cash flow for
| shareholders. I guess more or less this is by design.
| Investors, Founders and early employees take risks in short run
| for the rewards in the long run. A company cannot keep saying
| the promised green land is delayed by another 5 years.
|
| Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO
| compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to
| get back old Google is to start one!
|
| Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point
| (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus
| for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any
| other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had
| some nice discussions on this point.
| brandall10 wrote:
| The book "The Innovator's Dillemma" is about this concept.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a
| year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying
| "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in
| order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering
| whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding
| investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that
| the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or
| that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that
| definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a
| tobacco company or Chevron.
|
| So i mean -\\_(tsu)_/-
| davedx 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.
|
| Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that _in general_ (of
| course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to
| keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their
| current market share.
|
| It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable
| destiny.
| voytec 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.
|
| My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore
| vision[ary management]":
|
| > 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.
| etruong42 wrote:
| > 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 think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people
| might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't
| believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective,
| the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of
| not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo,
| not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.
|
| I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really
| sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to
| senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the
| layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have
| minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock
| vesting).
|
| I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that
| the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people"
| is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo
| when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the
| Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.
|
| I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that
| enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the
| status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so
| vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that
| means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable
| people around us.
|
| The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real
| risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people
| and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly
| planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings
| through short term thinking.
| 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.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| Eric and Tim already left awhile ago. It is very much
| possible that Tim left for the same reason as Hixie or at
| least fully supports Hixie for this decision.
| 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
| henrytill wrote:
| I found myself asking the same questions after reading
| the post.
|
| You might consider reading the followup post:
| https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1
|
| It suggests that, in spite of his problems with
| management, the author remains bullish about Flutter (and
| likely Dart).
| thrownaway9739 wrote:
| The Dart team certainly has vision!
|
| The VP above might not, but who cares...
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| Once it becomes acceptable I expect the correlation
| between people naming and shaming and actual poor
| performance/bad behaviour to drop drastically.
|
| Proper workers aren't as good at playing politics as
| those who just focus on politics.
| pas wrote:
| there would at least be some data, probably noisy, gamed,
| a bad proxy for this signal, but much better than the
| current empty void littered with courtesy linkedin
| endorsements
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sign up for Glassdoor, and you will find by-name
| denunciations of people who work at any company you care
| to interview for.
| 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.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| You have no idea what you are talking about. Hixie has
| enough vision and is loved by everyone. It's not his job to
| manage a clueless manager.
| thrownaway9739 wrote:
| Any vision covering firebase, flutter, dart and go, etc.
| doesn't make sense.
|
| It would take close to a decade to align these products.
|
| My impression is that this is a place to hang these
| products on the org-tree. IMO the individual teams appear
| to have LOTS of vision!
|
| The VP in question is unnecessary (IMO).
| 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?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Do you honestly believe that somebody is going to be
| harassed by the public or harassed in public or harassed
| in private because somebody on a niche blogs wrote that
| they were a bad boss? Or are you inventing a false
| scenario to argue against some writing you consider to be
| in bad taste?
| screye wrote:
| This wasn't a twitter tirade. This was on his niche blog
| post about someone's personal experience and towards
| someone who was making 10s of millions. Big difference.
|
| With her budget, just her org is effectively bigger than
| the biggest tech company in most countries of the world.
| At that point upper leadership is not allowed to
| differentiate between private and public life. Public
| criticism is private criticism and vice-versa. It's
| likely a testament to her achievements that she has
| earned an enviable? level of success that makes public
| criticism acceptable.
|
| > in particular some rather ugly people who in particular
| get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at
| Google, etc.
|
| That being said I do agree with your point. With those
| risks in mind, I still think it should be socially
| permissible to make this kind of post.
|
| > I think it's in very bad taste in this case.
|
| I thought it was done as well as one could. I know the
| west coast prides itself for its 'niceness', but in a lot
| of parts of USA, plain expression of dislike is
| considered in better taste than the kind of passive
| aggressiveness that would result from softening the
| poster's language. It was meant to be a targeted question
| at her competence. Just because she is one of many
| incompetent people at the helm at Google, doesn't
| invalidate the poster's experience.
|
| The anecdotal optics might be bad. But I for one rely on
| Occam's razor before jumping to conclusions about
| racial/gender angles in everything.
| nektro wrote:
| the solution is to report it to boss' boss or quit. calling
| someone out like this publicly is beyond bad taste
| 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.
| utopcell wrote:
| What a truly arbitrary comment. This is a conversation
| that is clearly about Google. What possible value did you
| think you added with what you wrote here.
| justin66 wrote:
| Bad example, I guess.
|
| You wrote _Since when is a VP middle-level management ?_
| in reply to the parent commenter 's observation _It 's
| one thing to legitimately trash Sundar Pichai; another to
| name some middle-level manager like that._ A VP is very
| much middle-level management.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_title#Middle_mana
| gem...
|
| (a quick look at a Google org chart makes it look like,
| well, VPs are middle management there too)
| DannyBee wrote:
| I'm not sure what org chart you looked at, but VP's make
| up less than 0.5% of the company.
| justin66 wrote:
| To be clear, since I guess we're really drilling down on
| this: VP denotes senior management at Google? So Hixie's
| blog post wasn't really dumping on a random middle
| manager as cmdrporcupine (an ex-Googler, I think)
| suggested, which was the point of all this, but rather
| picking on a potential C-suite executive or something?
| DannyBee wrote:
| Yes, VP is senior management at Google. Statistically,
| middle management is L6 or L7 manager. VP is at least
| L10.
|
| It's not quite picking on a potential c-suite executive,
| but it's close. She's two steps away from c-suite, in a
| company of >180k people.
| justin66 wrote:
| Thanks for the context. That's a lot of layers of
| management you've got there.
| Fordec wrote:
| Zero risk of that. Libel requires proof, and having this
| go to court would require airing that proof in open
| court. If this is truthful at all and it only casts shade
| on one director, and retaliatory suits would be more
| harmful to the company and illuminating of internal
| affairs than this blog post. Any competent HR would much
| rather mediate in private.
|
| The point is, you weren't the person who wrote this. And
| I'm glad someone did. We need a little more scrutiny on
| how given people run industry leading ships aground
| despite making more in a year than some people make their
| entire lives.
| 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| What is that supposed to mean?
| I-M-S wrote:
| As an European who worked in both North Americans and
| European companies I can attest European business
| communication is much more direct and less averse to
| confrontations.
|
| Having said that, I'm not sure we can assign this
| difference in mentality to author's decision to name the
| VP (which I personally find valiant, but probably short-
| sighted).
| 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?
| 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.
| electriclove wrote:
| Pretty much yes if you want to stay employed. Hixie can
| speak up now because he left.
| 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.
| biggc wrote:
| Where does the author say that this VP is his direct
| manager?
| 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.
| marknutter wrote:
| Let's just never criticize anyone who isn't white, and
| treat them like children. Racism is solved!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What an amazing argument! So clever! You really got me
| there!
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Yes, they really did get you there. Things can be about
| things other than race, though you wouldn't be able to
| tell based on this comment thread.
| biggc wrote:
| It's pretty unusual to publically throw someone under the
| bus by name like this in a professional name.
|
| Given it's an unusual situation, people are reflecting on
| what makes this allegedly incompetent VP different from
| other incompetent VPs who aren't called out like this?
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| Do you mean racial disparities in hiring or in
| performance?
| deanCommie wrote:
| Throwaway didn't claim bad faith necessarily, but just
| pointed out an important variable.
|
| It's good to have good faith, but it's also good to
| understand that good faith individuals also suffer from
| blindspots and unconscious biases.
|
| Hypothetically if there is a set of leaders, directors, and
| VPs, that all seem equally incompetent, but you call out
| only one, what might be the reason for it? It could be
| random. It could be because they were this person's actual
| direct manager. It coudl be because they're genuinely the
| one that are the most incompetent of the lot. But it could
| also be that they're the one _perceived_ to be the most
| incompetent of the lot. Why? Does them being a woman or
| black factor into it? Who knows. Not even OP might.
|
| It's not helpful to jump to racism at a moment's notice.
| It's not helpful to use race as a shield from criticism.
| But it's also not helpful to pretend that racism doesn't
| exist, even unconsciously within folks that would otherwise
| believe they don't have a prejudiced bone in their body.
|
| In conclusion, people shouldn't ACCUSE, and other people
| shouldn't get DEFENSIVE. It's OK to discuss. I thought
| Throwaway did a decent job of not accusing. Many responses
| got too defensive tho.
| marknutter wrote:
| Nah, it's race baiting bullshit, and more racist than the
| racism it claims to be calling out.
| mpalmer wrote:
| I agree with you that some reactions were a bit strong.
|
| But I reject that "pretending racism doesn't exist" is a
| good description of objections like mine above.
|
| In my view it's just as fair to say that taking your
| position means pretending that racism exists in all
| interactions between people of different races, and must
| be contended with before other matters.
|
| Unconscious racism is a thing, yet I question the utility
| of bringing it up when you have no actual evidence that
| OP is affected by unconscious racism. He might just hate
| women too, right? Can't rule that out.
| rondini wrote:
| A measured response, thank you for laying it out so
| nicely.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Aside from, but including, this instance, I commend anyone
| who calls out their manager for toxic behaviour and
| outright being bad at their job, as long as like any
| criticism it leaves a person room to take the feedback and
| change in some measurable way; even better if the person
| levying the criticism left of their own accord and has a
| mountain of career capital to stand on while doing so.
|
| People in positions of power, particularly those in-charge
| of others, should be taking it on a responsibility and
| duty; like any other person, sometimes they do a shit job,
| and I think managers (unless they've committed sexual
| assault or something) often get exempted from criticism,
| while any failures ironically tend to be shoveled onto
| individuals as replaceable units. How many people out there
| have managers that end being directly responsible for
| burning them down and out, causing problems in their family
| lives, and otherwise cultivating an environment that makes
| the task of getting work done all but impossible?
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| But then, why point at "her department" when they are both
| in it ? My read is she's not in author's direct hierarchy
| line.
| fastball wrote:
| The author has worked the last 9 years on Flutter. Banks
| is the VP of "Developer X", which is the department that
| "owns" Flutter.
| chairhairair wrote:
| Your read is incorrect.
| nostrademons wrote:
| She was a few levels up, but in his management chain.
| 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:
| 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.
| cavisne wrote:
| I think the right/ethical move is to identify your
| organization (ie Flutter) and not name anyone
| specifically.
|
| I agree completely with the article, but naming someone
| publicly makes the author seem like they are living in a
| bubble. Ie in their world the head of their org is a
| public figure, but hardly anyone knows what Flutter is
| let alone the org structure.
| caminante wrote:
| Why would the author single out Flutter if their critique
| is broader?
|
| It's not a monolith organization. Google re-structured as
| a conglomerate (Alphabet). They're critiquing
| culture/values.
|
| Further, if they were to single out Flutter, wouldn't the
| target be evident?
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| It is the right thing to do. Flutter team losing someone
| like Hixie is a big loss to everyone. It is very much
| possible Tim also left Flutter because of her. This
| terrible manager has nothing to contribute compared to
| that. I hope other googlers speak up.
| __float wrote:
| > It is very much possible Tim also left Flutter because
| of her.
|
| If not her, then likely someone she managed:
| https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273
| lurker919 wrote:
| Exactly. What a coincidence that the one person (apart from
| the public CEO) that he points out is a black woman who's
| been at google for 2.5 years. So has everyone else he'd
| worked with the other 15 years been perfect? Is she solely
| responsible for google's organizational malfunction? You can
| see HN comments analyzing her linkedin and dismissing her
| professional achievements - definitely feels like this is
| veering into defamation territory. This rant is juvenile and
| subconsciously biased.
| andromeduck wrote:
| She's their boss.
| DannyBee wrote:
| I'm staying out of all of this, but i'll opine on the legal
| side - defamation requires statements of fact and not
| opinions.
|
| To the degree his rant deals with facts - like claiming
| someone did or did not do a thing, that's at least possibly
| actionable.
|
| But the opinions are not actionable as defamation.
|
| So for example:
|
| "bob murdered someone" - actionable
|
| "i don't like bob" - not actionable.
|
| Depending on what gets said, etc, it may be actionable as
| something _other_ than defamation.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| So you think he left a (very) well paying job, working on a
| project that he created and has been building for nine
| years, one that he is now working on for no pay, just
| because a black woman became his manager? I dare say _you_
| are subconsciously biased, perhaps consciously biased.
| Subconsciously biased in that you won 't even allow
| yourself to consider the possibilty that a black woman
| could be a bad manager, so bad that it would cause a
| prolific engineer like Ian to leave, and consciously biased
| in that you then actively jump to resolve your subconscious
| bias' flaw with reality with racism.
| unix_fan wrote:
| As a person of color who is also disabled, I find bringing
| race into the discussion to be reductionist. It reduces the
| individual to the skin color, which is just as bad as what
| you accuse others of doing. People shouldn't be judged based
| on whether there are enough black women at Google.
| ot1138 wrote:
| > there aren't a lot of other white men in leadership at
| Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
|
| Reverse racism is just racism.
| Cheezewheel wrote:
| >Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of
| thing up but
|
| I find that hard to believe.
| eklavya wrote:
| And this is why it's getting incredibly difficult to have
| open honest discussions. It has to be about somebody's
| identity credentials somewhere. So tired of this nonsense.
| 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.
| SadCordDrone wrote:
| > He thinks she is bad at her job and it's clear she's not.
|
| 'At her job' - her job is improving the department.
|
| > She knows how to secure her millions in comp per year and
| retire early. She's very smart.
|
| If I had the background, connections and privileges of
| these several MBA types, I could also do that. But I
| couldnt perhaps be a great engineer. Therefore I wouldn't
| share your appreciation of sociopathy, and I believe many
| people are of similar opinion.
| 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.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| She probably is trying to be good at it.
| pb7 wrote:
| She's failing, hence the call out. You don't get to
| quietly fail when you're raking in millions dictating the
| work lives of thousands of people.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| She's presumably already trying to do a good job. Saying
| "try to a good job" isn't helpful feedback and isn't
| assuming good intent.
| towway23111257 wrote:
| For a rank and file employee or a line manager, I'd agree
| with you.
|
| But this is a Director at Google. She has the power to
| command change and her actions affect 100s of people directly
| inside Google and likely many thousands using the products of
| teams under her. They likely draw multi million dollar total
| comp.
|
| I very much welcome them to be publicly called out on their
| BS.
| 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.
| electriclove wrote:
| This has been happening at every middle sized and up tech
| company over the last couple of decades. Woke leadership brings
| in diverse but incompetent management that kills morale,
| productivity and any sense of purpose in the company.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I really like that he calls her and pichai out. They're both
| undeserving fat cats. If you're going to be a fat cat, you
| should know you're a fat cat. Otherwise, you'll think you
| deserve even more.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Would be interesting in data. Is this a Jeanine thing or a
| Google culture thing. Probably a Google culture thing.
| 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?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I am also a bit confused by that comment. Flink, Spark, Beam,
| Flume are all pretty similar...
| 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.
| foobiekr wrote:
| more like 50
| 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.
| arlongparker wrote:
| Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in
| AI won't retain any value in the transition to the space.
|
| People forget. Who owns kaggle, who owns Google collab.
| Boggles my mind that people think a few AI upshot's are
| going to reap all the value. Having a good AI companion
| that's integrated into all your suite of tools. That's
| the peak.
| bbor wrote:
| Google colab is ludicrously underfunded, I'm shocked it's
| stuck around for so long in the AI space. Tried Gradient
| recently and it's like night and day. I can't imagine how
| hard it must be to be on the colab team, knowing what
| features devs want/need and not being able to deliver
| because the org priorities are whack
| infoseek12 wrote:
| > Crazy you think that the company who invests the most
| in AI won't retain any value in the transition to the
| space.
|
| They'll obviously retain some value. Google can integrate
| more easily and seamlessly with things people are using
| but that's a competitive advantage not a moat.
|
| Google's trajectory has been from innovative market
| maker, to dominant market leader, to megacorp that has a
| strong established position that keeps them competitive
| and relevant, to legacy provider, to kind of irrelevant.
|
| Google's still strong and significant but every day they
| are less so.
| 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?
| bborud wrote:
| No thanks to Ballmer.
| 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
| com2kid wrote:
| > 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.
|
| For a while Microsoft was infamous for having talented
| engineers leave, found a startup, and then MS acquiring that
| startup for a lot of money.
|
| It was, in hindsight, a really great system that worked out
| well for everyone involved.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| And then commenters will complain that the company doesn't
| make anything, and just acquires good ideas...
| 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.
| rr808 wrote:
| > When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured
| they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies
| instead
|
| Ironically every AI person I know works on some dumb project
| with the goal they'll eventually get to work in Google/Meta for
| the big bucks. Maybe that is just a stepping stone.
| berkes wrote:
| > Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at
| Google.
|
| It all originated at universities.
| 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".
| cdibona wrote:
| It was a very big printer, Jeremy.
| ilamont wrote:
| Would be very interested to hear your take on Hixie's essay
| and the many reactions from other Xooglers from different
| eras.
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| The vast majority of professionals resist the urge to call
| out their manager on a blog after they quit a job. Even
| without Googlegeist.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| so things like glassdoor shouldn't exist? or people
| shouldn't warn of bad managers/jobs?
| justin66 wrote:
| I've derived some entertainment from the crappy Glassdoor
| reviews one of the shitty companies I worked at gets.
| There's a world of difference between those anonymous
| reviews on Glassdoor, which are sometimes useful and
| almost never call out by name anyone below the executive
| level, and what we're talking about here today.
| ajkjk wrote:
| imo, they should not resist it. It is shameful to let bad
| things bad stay in the world unless you really need the
| self-preservation, and somebody with 18 years of google
| money does not.
| justin66 wrote:
| > It is shameful to let bad things bad stay in the world
|
| It's incredibly goofy to characterize trashing someone in
| a blog post as a battle to destroy evil.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Not really? It's a microcosm of the battle, sure, but
| it's still the same battle. People vs entrenched
| unaccountable power. Same story everywhere.
| gniv wrote:
| It doesn't even matter whether the critique is true and fair.
| Naming names like this in public is potentially very damaging
| and should not be done.
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Why?
|
| Corporation can decimate their workforce in the search for
| better earnings but god forbid the drones speak up.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Why? Jeanine Banks is probably paid millions a year. People in
| such roles with such disproportionately high rewards should be
| constantly evaluated. But if you read between the lines here
| she's basically unfirable for reasons nobody would dare to
| mention. I think people should go even further.
| 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.
| robryk wrote:
| > 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?
|
| One way of reading the original statements is that there
| are many people who are not doing that and would not do
| that.
|
| > But we do not have a choice (...) or in paying taxes to
| our governments
|
| This obviously reminds me of Thoreau, but more practically
| many people can move. Unless you are from the US (or a
| handful of other weird countries) that stops you from
| paying taxes to your origin's government.
|
| E: Upheaval caused by moving is often actually not higher
| than one caused by quitting: consider (a) people on
| employer-tied visas and/or who don't speak the local
| language well enough to use it professionally (b) people
| who don't have families of their own yet.
| gniv wrote:
| > actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse
| society,
|
| This premise seems a stretch when applying it to Google. Most
| of us "sell our souls" to more-or-less terrible corporations
| for money. The point with Google is that it set much higher
| standards for corporate behavior, and those standards are now
| reverting to mean.
| 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.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Engineers at Google are referred to as "headcount". Managers
| fight each other for headcount. When someone leaves they are
| lamented for their net loss of .67 headcount (right now you
| only get one hire for 3 attritions).
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Does that mean managers are incentivised not to let go of
| underperformers?
| andromeduck wrote:
| That's "durable savings" for ya.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yes absolutely. I was explicitly told I could get away with
| doing nothing for 12 months before I'd get fired. I decided
| to quit instead.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Either I've read a blog post you've written before or
| this is a common occurrence.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yeah my blog post hit the front page.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| YES! One of the reasons I much prefer the netflix model of
| firing quickly and being able to get a headcount. You do
| have some slackers at google who are able to hang on for
| long periods of time because their manager knows the
| project they're in charge of isn't a priority anymore, so
| the backfill will go to more exciting/new projects. So
| these managers will let people slack.
|
| Most of the people I work with at Google work fairly hard
| in cloud (nothing crazy like I've heard about AWS) but you
| run into slackers on occasion.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Not true, my team gets 1 for 1.
| sidcool wrote:
| I still feel it's not professional to name the manager. Hixie
| could very well have just said "my manager", and many people
| would have understood.
| 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! )
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| W3C got what it deserved.
|
| > The WHATWG began because the W3C told you, "HTML was dead. If
| you want to do something like HTML5, you should go elsewhere."
| Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the
| WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work
| inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform?
|
| We tried (2007-2012). It didn't work out. In fact, we ended up
| spinning more specs out of the W3C! The WHATWG has about 12
| specs spread amongst eight or so editors now.
|
| > Bruce The spec now known as HTML 5 began with a "guerilla"
| group called WHATWG. How and why did the WHATWG begin?
|
| > Hixie The short answer is the W3C told us to. The long
| answer: Back in 2003, when XForms was going through its final
| stages (the "Proposed Recommendation" vote stage), the browser
| vendors were concerned that it wouldn't take off on the Web
| without being made a part of HTML, and out of that big
| discussion (which unfortunately is mostly hidden behind the
| W3C's confidentiality walls) came a proof of concept showing
| that it was possible to take some of XForms' ideas and put then
| into HTML 4. We originally called it "XForms Basic", and later
| renamed it "WebForms 2.0". This formed the basis of what is now
| HTML 5. In 2004, the W3C had a workshop, the "The W3C Workshop
| on Web Applications and Compound Documents", where we (the
| browser vendors) argued that it was imperative that HTML be
| extended in a backwards-compatible way. It was a turning point
| in the W3C's history--you could tell because at one point
| RedHat, Sun, and Microsoft, arch-rivals all, actually agreed on
| something, and that never happens. The outcome of that workshop
| was that the W3C concluded that HTML was still dead, as had
| been decided in a workshop in 1998, and that if we wanted to do
| something like HTML 5, we should go elsewhere. So we announced
| a mailing list, and did it there. At the time I was working for
| Opera Software, but "we" in this case was Opera and Mozilla
| acting together (with Apple cheering us from the sidelines).
|
| W3C declared html dead and now you are mad on whatwg for html5?
| lapcat wrote:
| > W3C got what it deserved.
|
| This is an unnecessarily "team"-oriented spin. The question
| is what the web and the users of the web deserve, and I don't
| believe they deserve to be dominated by a few giant tech
| corporations who have a monopoly not only on web browsers but
| also on operating systems.
|
| > Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the
| WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work
| inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform?
|
| Yes.
|
| Here's the major problem: the tech world of 2003 was a lot
| different than the tech world of 2023. Back then, iOS didn't
| exist, Android didn't exist, Google Chrome didn't exist,
| Safari barely existed. The WHATWG members are infinitely more
| dangerous and monopolistic now than they were back then.
| Maybe, arguably, HTML5 was the better outcome at the time of
| the dispute at that time, but the dominance of the major
| browser vendors now is not the better outcome.
|
| The irony is that Mozilla and Opera inadvertently handed over
| great power to the BigCos who would come to overshadow and
| virtually annihilate them. You won the battle but lost the
| war. Opera even had to switch to Chromium.
|
| > So we announced a mailing list, and did it there.
|
| It seems to me that more time could have been taken and more
| lobbying done.
|
| > W3C declared html dead and now you are mad on whatwg for
| html5?
|
| Well, I personally think HTML5 <video> was completely botched
| and became a nightmare, but that's a bit of a digression.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I disagree. If Google were to keep its grubby hands off the
| web, another corporation would step in and lead that effort and
| maybe even sabotage it. At least at that time Google's "don't
| be evil" motto was still alive enough that it was genuinely a
| good outcome. Can you imagine if Google didn't and Apple did?
| Clearly the outcome would be that Apple would complicate
| everything and make the web die a death by a thousand cuts and
| everyone would have had to switch to apps that only Apple can
| approve.
| financltravsty wrote:
| Slightly tangential, but I'd like to post a hyperbolic
| example against the "someone else would have done it anyway":
|
| Yes, a Googler could drown a box full of kittens; but if we
| stop him, then someone else will just drown the kittens in
| his place.
|
| I think you have to weigh the probability of it happening.
| It's unlikely someone else is going drown those kittens, as
| unlikely as it is someone else is going to stick their
| fingers into the web pot (considering, I can't think of any
| "FAAAAANGAMA" that has the same incentives).
| 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.
| jra_samba wrote:
| I am a personal friend of Chris, and was with him through most
| of his tenure at Google (we both got laid off at the same
| time). When Chris said no (and it was rare), it was usually
| because people were thinking of themselves over the good of the
| company (and usually around personal projects they wanted to
| own instead of Google).
|
| You might disagree with it (and I'm sure you do), but Chris
| _always_ thought of the company first. He was the personal
| embodiment of early Google culture and a fantastic manager.
|
| I just wish they'd made him a VP of Open Source (a position
| IMHO Google sorely needs). He probably could have staved off
| some of the failures.
| 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.
| fakedang wrote:
| Honestly, it's the community that brought me to learn Flutter
| as my first development framework. I tried learning React,
| React Native, Kotlin, etc. after asking around (even here), but
| often I got crickets or the snide remark that I shouldn't be
| developing on that framework. But Flutter? Nah, beginners
| welcome! Hixie and Sneath would personally reply to queries on
| reddit, and the community thrives on sharing open source code
| for all their cool projects. It's a pity that Flutter may not
| win the development wars, but it definitely has won way too
| many developers' hearts.
| 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.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I don't know where this idea comes from. Five minutes on any of
| the half-dozen internal communications sites reveals vast
| amounts of criticism on every google decision made, most of it
| thoughtful, but some quite sharp, and some quite bitter and
| unfair.
| 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.
| ddejohn wrote:
| > The web would not be what it is like without him.
|
| As somebody that _really_ dislikes the way the web generally is
| nowadays I got a chuckle out of this :)
|
| This is a _mostly_ tongue-in-cheek comment.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I totally side with you, I had exactly this in mind, too. :)
| 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
| realprimoh wrote:
| What are you up to now and what did you join instead?
| 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).
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Would like more info on [1]. I work in the area of cutting
| costs (also privately - gave up coffee as it was a waste of
| money, for me): with money being finite, what you can save is
| often worth more than what you can earn.
| 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.
| caminante wrote:
| _> This is what happened to the automotive industry._
|
| Not even close.
|
| The computer revolution happened and the automotive industry
| was displaced in the economy by other sectors, namely tech. [0]
| Car usage/ownership has gone down.
|
| [0]
| https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/spotlight/a...
| 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").
| meowtimemania wrote:
| Why are you surprised by people that don't work on side
| projects?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| That's not what I said. I don't currently work on any
| side project. But I have a desire to and I like to think
| about and discuss project ideas. I assumed everyone is
| like this.
| refulgentis wrote:
| It's really oddly no. I know what you mean and its hard
| to word. But yeah there's not a "fundamental interest"
| like you'd expect.
|
| All the stuff seems "obvious" in retrospect,
| like...oh...a lot of you went to MIT and did Computer
| Science because that's what people do but...you went to
| college to get a degree to get a job, you didn't
| necessarily become absorbed in it.
|
| But then again most other tech jobs I've been in had that
| quality 100%. Life is weird.
|
| (I'm a dropout from a state school with a 2.8 GPA, and I
| honestly don't know if I've ever felt more 'alien'
| anywhere other than Google.)
| devnullbrain wrote:
| The "sugar daddy effect" sounds an awful lot like benefiting
| from anticompetitive practices to the net detriment of society.
| 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
| J2pRPhgd wrote:
| Long time Googler, this resonates.
|
| I feel very unhappy at Google, certainly I would have left at
| this point if the job market were a little better.
|
| I've had a successful career here with multiple product launches
| which had significant revenue or other measurable impact and
| several promotions. But reflecting on all of it, I feel burnt out
| and used, dispirited with the directionless race to the bottom
| Google is now engaged in.
|
| Most of my last year was spent in bitter political fights,
| escalations, failed attempts at "alignment", retrospectives on
| what went wrong, and very little actual software engineering. I'm
| going to lose the ability to do anything but be a cog in the
| enormous Google bureaucracy if something doesn't change.
|
| It's definitely time to go, but I wish I could have come to this
| realization when the opportunities were more plentiful.
| 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.
| gen220 wrote:
| Disclaimer that I also sold my GOOG recently, also largely in
| compliance with my biases as an engineer.
|
| As an investor, though, calling the "top" for a company like
| Google (or Microsoft) is so challenging -- not "top" in terms
| of all time high valuation, but "top" in terms of differential
| forward-looking, annualized, and adjusted-for-tax returns vs
| VGT or VOO (i.e. a more challenging target).
|
| These are some of the most entrenched and profitable companies
| in modern history. Even as they mediocratize, they remain
| value-accretive for years. It's difficult to imagine them
| losing to inflation.
|
| Buffet choosing Apple over any of the other FAANG/M may be
| looked upon even more favorably, 10-20 years from now, than it
| is today. Google and Microsoft are tight together in second,
| but I think you're right that we'll look back on 2018-??? as
| Google's equivalent to the Ballmer years.
| gniv wrote:
| I commend you for going against the grain and holding onto the
| stock for so long. Most people sell as soon as the options
| vest.
|
| Anyway, I don't see much worrisome news about GOOG. It's true
| that they are not innovating and surprising us anymore, but
| neither is AAPL or AMZN. Good execution seems to be rewarded
| better nowadays than innovation. (Yes, some products are
| stagnating or getting worse, but some are getting better. I'm
| not sure there's really a trend. Also, to me, all this culture
| decline talk is mostly noise.)
| 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...
| JSavageOne wrote:
| The internet would be better without mandated cookie banners.
| It's so damn frustrating using the internet in the EU. If you
| don't want to be tracked just browse in Incognito mode.
| slavik81 wrote:
| Browsing in incognito mode does not prevent the sites you
| visit from tracking you.
| speedgoose wrote:
| GDPR doesn't mandate cookies banner but requires informed
| consent. Browsing in incognito doesn't prevent all kinds of
| tracking by the way.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply
| with EU regulations is not only a UX nightmare, but it
| doesn't even prevent tracking. Horrible pointless
| legislation.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > Right so every website needing a cookie banner to
| comply with EU regulations
|
| As it was pointed out, no, EU regulations don't mandate
| cookie banners. It seem you have an axe to grind with the
| EU.
|
| > but it doesn't even prevent tracking
|
| Incognito mode doesn't prevent all forms of tracking was
| what GP said...
| iEchoic wrote:
| > As it was pointed out, no, EU regulations don't mandate
| cookie banners. It seem you have an axe to grind with the
| EU.
|
| EU regulations do require cookie banners.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| No, they don't. Read the GDPR, it's not that long. The
| actual problem is that the current practice on which
| massive profits depend is contrary to any privacy
| desires. If they didn't track, they wouldn't need ask for
| consent for the tracking.
|
| And I don't even like the EU, I want it ended.
| speedgoose wrote:
| People wanting to track their online visitors do require
| cookies banner.
|
| Go the Apple website. No cookies banner.
| berkes wrote:
| You don't need a cookie banner if you don't have 3rd party
| tracking cookies. It's really that simple.
|
| The fact that _all_ sites have them, shows us a terrifying
| truth: all websites are tracking us with 3rd party tools.
| "all" websites send our browsing habits off to (many)
| companies that will sell, mine or otherwise monetize our
| data.
|
| Again: A cookie banner is not needed if you don't have 3rd
| party and/or tracking cookies. E.g. With matomo on your own
| domain, plausible analytics, or simply mining your servers
| logs with math, you won't need cookie banners.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Indeed. But Google is a company built on 3p cookies, perhaps
| more than any other. Innovating is very difficult at Google in
| general, but in the search/ads pipeline it must have been near-
| impossible. I'd imagine that any replacement that isn't
| entirely feature complete (ie does the same thing 3p cookies do
| today) would have been politically impossible to push
| seriously. The higher leadership (VPs etc) act mostly like
| middle-management but with more kool-aid and corp speech. The
| few who were more bold usually came from acquisitions and left
| for more impactful work elsewhere, after their bonus payouts
| (me speculating, but lines up).
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| > A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle
| management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example ...
|
| Giving a specific manager's name is ballsy! I suspect a deleted
| LinkedIn profile in 5...4...
| gigatexal wrote:
| I was not expecting them to name names and torch everything on
| their way out. They paint a really terrible picture. Still, one
| day I'd love to join the GCP team working on BigQuery or
| something in that arena Google problems notwithstanding.
| cavisne wrote:
| Its not very cool IMO to name & shame anyone lower than Sundar.
|
| Nevertheless the article is spot on with the effect of layoffs,
| and the general culture of big tech.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Why? Why do we feel the need to protect people that are bad at
| what they do?
|
| Maybe this was something that applied in the "good old times"
| but nowadays since anything goes for corpos the same should go
| for drones.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I disagree generally, but in specific, CFO Ruth Prost is
| clearly fair game.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Ruth Porat. Autocorrect ruins things.
| nektro wrote:
| Google needs to be broken up.
| gerdesj 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."
|
| "The oft-mocked "don't be evil" truly was the guiding principle
| of the company at the time"
|
| A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be
| anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder value.
| That is its overt and stated purpose when it goes public. In
| return for investment, the company must ensure a return on that
| investment. It's not that you've sold out or sold your soul - it
| is simply the market and how it works.
|
| If you want to try to be the nice guy then don't go public.
| "Don't be evil" is a lovely idea but it does not wash if you want
| lots of loverly shareholder cash. Stay private and raise capital
| via the old fashioned method of convincing some rich people to
| buy into your idea and become private shareholders.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| > _A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be
| anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder
| value._
|
| People always say this but I've never seen a law or regulation
| enforcing it. Care to enlighten me?
| gerdesj wrote:
| It's part of the tacit agreement when you list on an exchange
| - Initial Public Offering (IPO). You kick off with a
| nominated "value" ie I think I am worth x so I will sell y
| shares at z (where x = y * z). Hopefully all your shares are
| bought and you are fully capitalized and you can crack on
| with whatever you are doing.
|
| You now have two major forms of "money in and out" - what
| your business makes and loses by doing its thing and lolly
| from investment by shareholders and the vagaries of the
| stockmarkets.
|
| You can make and sell stuff to make loot - old school. You
| can also convince people that your ability to make and sell
| stuff is so good that you are really cool - your share price
| rises and so does your "value" via capitalization.
|
| You don't list unless you actually want to become a generator
| of increasing shareholder value. There is no law or
| regulation because it is what it is. You need more
| capitalization and listing is a method. In return you sell
| your soul!
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| > _tacit agreement_
|
| Not a law or regulation.
|
| Why can't a company have a goal other than profit along
| side it? there's no reason they can't coexist and worthy of
| investment for the goal too.
|
| If people don't want that they're free to not invest.
|
| >You don't list unless you actually want to become a
| generator of increasing shareholder value.
|
| Says who?
|
| >There is no law or regulation because it is what it is.
|
| There's no law in physics for it either. So in conclusion
| it's a layman's myth.
| dkarbayev wrote:
| Perhaps Dodge vs. Ford Motor Company [1] is relevant here?
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
| ulfw wrote:
| Google founders have 51% of voting power. Nothing happens from
| public shareholders without their consent.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| > _Flutter grew in a bubble, largely insulated from the changes
| Google was experiencing at the same time. 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. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would
| eagerly attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was
| happening, I found myself now able to predict the answers
| executives would give word for word. Today, I don't know anyone
| at Google who could explain what Google's vision is. Morale is at
| an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they
| will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google._
|
| I invested in Google back in 2005. I sold off my shares and
| stopped using google search a few years ago when they started
| making obviously politically movivated alterations to search
| results and started using Brave in lieu of Chrome.
|
| I wonder when that happened relative to the time period he's
| talking about. Unfortunately I can't go back that far in my bank
| to see exactly when I divested myself of their stock. But it has
| to be more than 3 years (my bank's limitation)
| yterdy wrote:
| _> Charlie's patio at Google, 2011. Image has been manipulated to
| remove individuals._
|
| I don't know if they are trying to make a point here, but this is
| _screaming_ one.
| cageface wrote:
| Very interesting that he plans to continue working on Flutter
| after leaving Google:
|
| https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1
|
| I agree with him that Flutter is on a good trajectory.
| physhster wrote:
| "Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the
| benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the
| decision."
|
| This is so painfully accurate. Everything is geared towards the
| individual's needs to appear good under the lens of promotion and
| compensation.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| I worked at Google for 15 years and I was lucky enough to work
| with Ian a few times. I might quibble about a few things, but I
| largely agree with his overall conclusions.
|
| In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I
| agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products
| focused on just building awesome products for users, not
| maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very
| slowly.
|
| To the extent that Google's culture is still "good", it's for the
| most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies
| have caught up to the best parts of Google's culture, and
| exceeded it in many ways.
|
| I totally relate to his experience with middle management.
| Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that
| directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-
| managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little
| interest in the actual product they were managing. There will
| still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too
| much of their time just playing politics to do any good.
|
| There's one way that Google is still leading, and that's in
| employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google
| still offers one of the most generous free food / meal benefits
| in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google's Vision plan that
| let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact
| lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it
| typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.
| totorovirus wrote:
| The author is roasting Jeanine Banks and she is probably the real
| motivation that drove the author writing a whole long article of
| google's culture when things were beautiful.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Ok... Where am I supposed to go after Google tho?
| mparnisari wrote:
| I wonder if anyone reached out to Jeanine over this post lol
| michaelkaufman wrote:
| Nicely written. Can't tell you how many times I've seen companies
| ruined by too many middle managers; some of whom are greatly
| under qualified to make certain decisions they do.
|
| Unrelated, does anyone here or OP have a ballpark ETA on when
| Google's Quantum and AI might meet and become friends? I'm really
| hoping to see this in my lifetime.
| gerash wrote:
| It's very difficult to assign credit or blame to outcomes in a
| large organization. It's like trying to see which weight in a
| large neural net caused a specific outcome.
|
| That said, IMO what Elon Musk did to Twitter can be done to
| Google and many other bloated tech companies.
|
| There are so many technically weak middle management and
| executives that need to be removed.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| The soulful software artisans I know would never consider working
| at Google. Why is that?
| smoyer wrote:
| "Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that
| somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart,
| Go, and Firebase."
|
| Brutal but should we do more name-naming to allow people to avoid
| working for inept managers?
| ot1138 wrote:
| > Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search,
| especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was
| way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes
| can appear malicious).
|
| The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic.
|
| Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was
| great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the
| first search intelligence business in 2005 as a side business.
| Again, Google engineers were awesome to work with.
|
| Then in 2009 or so, they began to get territorial. Some outsider
| sales person was brought in and IIRC, he bought a boat and named
| it, "AdSense". The engineering help disappeared. Within another
| year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to
| be rescinded. We had extensive crawling capabilities but needed
| to correlate it to API data to give a holistic picture of the
| competitive AdWords landscape.
|
| We spent the next two years gaming the system. We had 100 API
| accounts. We launched our own bare metal "cloud" with 1300
| distinct IP addresses which we throttled to hit Google no more
| than once per minute.
|
| This worked. We monitored Google in over 50 countries. Clients
| loved us because we could tell them exactly how they were doing
| on AdWords, both good and bad. Any intelligent person could use
| our data to improve their ads and excel. Our IPs would
| occasionally get banned but we would just temporarily shut them
| off and use one of our reserves. And even then, we eventually
| developed a crowd sourced solution to solve captchas which got
| them reinstated.
|
| Another three years of the cat and mouse game passed. We were
| acquired by the world's largest advertising company.
|
| Guess what? A call from the CEO to Matt Cutts ended the war. No
| promises were made but our access was simply restored. Everything
| worked again.
|
| So yeah, Google is just like every other company in the world.
| The corruption has been there for at least 15 years. Please stop
| worshipping it.
| ryloric wrote:
| Did you really have to say "some engineer in India"? What
| exactly are you trying to imply there?
| ayewo wrote:
| I don't see anything wrong with their phrasing.
|
| The full context of the quote: _" The engineering help
| disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told
| us our API access was going to be rescinded."_ seems to imply
| that Google had outsourced engineering help to India to save
| on operating costs. This type of outsourcing [1] was pretty
| common back in those days.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat
| financltravsty wrote:
| Outsourced engineers in India are bad.
| ot1138 wrote:
| I implied nothing. This is literally what happened. A woman
| who knew next to nothing about search strung us along for
| weeks. She couldn't answer even the simplest questions or
| provide any insight whatsoever. She made it clear she had no
| authority. Yet after making request after request to us for
| sensitive data, she simply shut off our access.
| gscott wrote:
| It used to be early on you could specify not to show your ad
| below a certain position.
| thom wrote:
| You can't go home again.
| tomrod wrote:
| > Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search,
| especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was
| way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes
| can appear malicious).
|
| Perhaps the individuals the author knows were pernicious, but
| clearly someone is. Look at the current state of YouTube
| demonetization and war on adblocking (ads are a vector for
| malware).
| issafram wrote:
| "We essentially operated like a startup, discovering what we were
| building more than designing it."
|
| I guess that's how the chat apps were created as well
| Threeve303 wrote:
| Google employees should be put on a Government watchlist for life
| brundolf wrote:
| Amazingly, my company has done something in three years that took
| google 18 years!
| uptownfunk wrote:
| I don't see how Sundar stays after the repeated fumbling of the
| AI ball. I think it just goes to show, you need someone radically
| bold and different.
| ta93754829 wrote:
| Google is the next Blackberry, it just hasn't happened yet.
| Unless they can get a Nadella, and really transform the company
| asap, they're in a death spiral.
| ken47 wrote:
| The issue is quite simple IMHO. The company has a motto that is
| almost completely PR. If they truly cared about doing the right
| thing, don't be evil, to the extent they imply by making it their
| motto, then they would have an interview process which evaluates
| the ethics and morality of their candidates, even if only a
| little bit. It is well known that entry to Google is, at least
| for engineers, basically little more than a leetcode mastery
| test.
| fargle wrote:
| as another engineer from another company, i'm sad to relate that
| i see point-by-point the same things with different names of
| course. i sympathize. it's sad to see the cancer, the nepotism,
| the grifters that move in on the now weakened, once great,
| company.
|
| f*ck them. just say it. it's useless, but good for your psyche.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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).
|
| > 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.
|
| Brutal. I can only imagine the disillusionment.
| fsndz wrote:
| We just have his version of the story though... He might be
| wrong. It's natural after spending so many years in a company to
| see change as bad, to miss the good old days... And he sure seems
| to have a problem with that black leader Jeanine... A guy who
| never rose from his technical roles is lecturing a VP and the CEO
| of Google for their "lack of vision and strategy". Come on.
| Managing is startup and managing a huge behemoth like Alphabet
| will never be the same
| volkk wrote:
| wow, truly one of the stupider, if not the most stupid take--
| well done!
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Ah I got really excited about Flutter back in 2018. Hard to
| believe it's been 5 years! A commendable project. I just wish
| they went with something other than dart for it
| scaramanga wrote:
| There's a great documentary about waco on Netflix and at the end,
| the guy who is was in command of the troops who massacred 80
| women and children concluded (after 30 years of reflection), "you
| know the real victim was? Me, because the whole fiasco made me
| look bad."
|
| It's interesting to see how those who appear outwardly evil
| manage to cling to a self-serving and distorted view of the world
| in which, if anything, they are the maligned victims.
|
| You can just as easily imagine a SWAT member saying "when we were
| training to assault civilian homes, it was a wonderful time,
| everybody was competent and had the right motivations, we were
| there to protect the good guys and hurt the bad guys - but only
| as a last resort! Then when we got to the branch davidian
| compound we applied all of our methods and tactics and it all
| went downhill from there and, tragically, we ended up in a dark
| place."
|
| When, from the perspective of even the most casual observer, it
| was evident from very early on that given the material,
| resources, methods, tactics, organization, and leadership that
| was deployed, the outcome that unfolded was actually inevitable.
|
| Getting back on topic, it's not particularly news to anyone to
| find out that there can be very well run, collegiate, bubbles
| full of well-meaning individuals doing great work who
| nevertheless operate within institutions which, on the whole, are
| a cancer upon society. It's a wonderful privilege and a joy to
| find yourself inside one of these bubbles compared to all of the
| worse things that you could be doing to make a living.
| ryloric wrote:
| Felt the same reading this post. These people are unable to see
| the bigger picture of what their work has been used to do to
| the world.
| mathteddybear wrote:
| An oddly dramatic response to a blog post of someone working on
| a, what is this flutter, some frontend framework library?
|
| Counterpoint - since I left Google, little birds told me good
| things happened, for example, cranking down on the travel
| expenses (that higher-ups used to spent with little to none
| oversight)
| sidcool wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone [at] Sundar on X (FKA Twitter) yet. I am
| not sure how Sundar would be feeling about this. Hostility for
| Hixie probably. And it's safe to say that Hixie's return to
| Google has no chances now, not that he would want to return
| anyway.
| shanghaikid wrote:
| is this the fate of big company?
| JSavageOne wrote:
| What a sad but refreshingly honest article. I never worked at
| Google, but this aligns with my impressions from the outside, as
| well as everything else I've read (eg. that recent article here
| from a founder who's startup was acquired by Google and she left
| due to the stifling bureaucracy). The company hasn't innovated
| much recently and its products like Google Search have
| deteriorated in quality tremendously. At this rate Google may be
| on its way to becoming the next has-been tech company (eg. sort
| of like what happened to IBM).
|
| The management and bureaucracy depicted in the article sound like
| a corporate nightmare and unappealing place to work. I didn't
| know that Google had non-engineers running dev tool teams. Can
| this VP even reverse a linked list? /s
|
| Seems like Google needs a change in leadership, starting with
| replacing CEO Sundar Pichar.
| osdotsystem wrote:
| Funny that it mentions the Android team.
|
| Sometimes back I wanted to contribute to Android. It's a source-
| open product, unfortunately. And development goes on, silently,
| eerily without as much public docs as I would like!
| mgaunard wrote:
| Staying within the same company for 18 years sounds like a
| mistake to begin with.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| I'm waiting if any CEO can maneuver this gigantic complex
| organization.
| SadCordDrone wrote:
| I don't know if the author is reading this. But thanks for this
| article. One day I want to grow up, become a big shot engineer,
| and Name-and-shame all clueless middle managers who have tortured
| me.
| pelasaco wrote:
| > I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in
| ways that were net harmful to users.
|
| I experienced it the beginning of the Corona pandemics, where I
| demo'ed some workflows and documented some step by step guide to
| use Google classroom to be able to offer a great experience
| regarding home-schooling in Germany. We presented to some
| Department of Education in Germany, they all declined it because
| of the "privacy advocates" doing FUD in a super conspiracy
| level.. we ended up spending millions of Euros and every State
| having it's on half baked solution and a super weak home-
| schooling infrastructure in general. I'm pretty confident that we
| definitely could have done better just using Google classroom.
| bobba27 wrote:
| Very early google was full of passion and people that wanted to
| build cool things for users. There was a passion where building
| things that would surprise and delight users.
|
| The process when this changed was slow but I think started
| 2008-2010 where passion for building something was no longer what
| drove people but instead the promo-process, having impact and
| moving the needle became what drove people. Not passion but
| promo-process changed the culture dramatically over time.
|
| Me and friends used to call it the LPA cycle. (L)aunch, get
| (P)romo, (A)bandon and switch team. And towards the second half
| of the 2010s it became a de-facto rule. Once something launches
| with a big fanfare, after next promo-cycle almost l5 and higher
| engineers leave to chase their next promo in a different team.
|
| You can see this over and over after ~2015. High velocity and
| innovation until launch and shortly after it grinds to a stop.
| very sad to see this change from early google.
| lysecret wrote:
| Sounds like someone who would be sufficiently candid with his
| board to me.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Given: - the string of missed opportunities in
| the last 10 years (specifically AI) - the string of
| user-hostile product decisions (latest: adblockers vs YT)
| - the complete lack of innovation (name a cool product launched
| by G in the last 5 years) - the clear and present
| competitive threat to their flagship product (search vs. OpenAI)
| - the once great culture that is rotting in place (see article)
| - the stock price completely flat or slightly down for the past
| two years - the enormous waste of goodwill Google had
| accumulated with both the world and their own employees, now all
| spilt on the floor (I mean, they've chosen to turn predatory, I'm
| not going to say fine, but ultimately: their choice. BUT: they
| don't even have the financial numbers that would justify such an
| about turn).
|
| How that ball-less wonder Sundar still has a job as CEO, or at
| all for that matter, is nothing short of amazing.
|
| Board is asleep at the wheel.
| snickmy wrote:
| There are few points that resonate with my personal experience
| (2012-2017).
|
| - Finance is running the company - HR has lost the original
| shepherding of the culture in favour of risks mitigation -
| Reduction of transparent leadership comms in favour of corp speak
| - Horrible middle management (senior managers up to VP1). Either
| because we promoted great engineers into a people role, or
| because we hired consultants to run engineering organization
| (favouring navigating the complexity of the org, over managing
| innovation).
|
| I did rationalise all those changes as something that was obvious
| from a short term optimization standpoint: the company was in the
| mist of PR fights, leaks , growing incredibly fast, etc. It's
| clear, 6 years later, that a sustained approach to this type of
| leadership has reduced the company to a shadow of itself. Less
| innovative, less talent driven.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I couldn't help but hear a desire for lack of accountability in
| this post. The guy worked at Google for 20 years but really just
| worked on open source projects he liked without regard for
| whether it added value to the company (and in fact fondly recalls
| someone telling him that googles interests shouldn't matter.)
|
| I get why that's fun but you can't run a company forever in that
| way. In my eye even the layoffs are a signal that headcount is
| not infinite and you have to align what people work on to what
| makes money.
|
| His ranting against his VP and Sundar seem hollow, for all I can
| tell he's just upset the gravy train of no accountability is
| over.
| vitiral wrote:
| Larry and Sergey just need to come back from their vacation and
| clean house. So much of Google culture used their humor and
| candidness at TGIF as a lighthouse.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| A good read, but I feel a little bit of "OK Boomer" rising up in
| me, to listen to someone pointing out institutional issues with
| the system that made them rich, at the same time as they bow out
| and encourage someone else to fix things.
| revskill wrote:
| The search and the gmail is trash now.
|
| I'm not sure what the teams at Google is doing besides serving
| Ads at top of search ?
| gttalbot wrote:
| Yeah I saw this process unfold over my decade there as well. I'm
| very grateful for my time there, my colleagues, and the great
| work we did (go Monarch team!). The latest evolutions there make
| me sad.
| hendler wrote:
| Excellent and succinct description of risk to all institutions
|
| > 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.
| ible wrote:
| > I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately
| actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without
| prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with
| cynicism in the court of public opinion.
|
| This is part and parcel of working for a visible/impactful
| organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad
| about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be
| wrong. They'll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-
| simplifications, political perspectives, etc.
|
| This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that
| because _most_ of the feedback is nonsense, that _all_ of it is
| nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful
| to you or critical of your team or values.
|
| I found a bit of Neil Gaiman's MasterClass very helpful when
| reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone
| is telling you something doesn't work for them, and what you
| should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn't work
| for them, but that the author is much better placed than the
| reader to know how and if to fix it.
|
| In my context I try to understand _why_ someone is saying
| something, what information I can take from it, and whether there
| is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can
| or should be done about it.
|
| (If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to
| go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)
| omerxx wrote:
| "People don't leave jobs, they leave managers". This strengthens
| my understanding that as a manager and as a team member who's
| being manage, communication skills are so much more important
| than engineering skills. It was a good and interesting read
| regardless.
| iteratethis wrote:
| The handful of trillion dollar companies have a problem that is
| unique: virtually all projects and innovation are not interesting
| enough even when successful. Only big bets remain.
|
| Google pulled in 280 billion $ last year.
|
| Now imagine a nice little side project within Google making it
| into market success with a 100m$ annual revenue.
|
| That's basically useless to Google. A line item that doesn't move
| the needle and adds weight to the company. Yet to any other
| company it would be an extraordinary success.
|
| If I'd arbitrarily say that 10% of annual revenue is "moving the
| needle" that means you need to innovate a new product raking in
| 30 billion a year. Good luck with that.
|
| And it would require to be entangled with the unique ecosystem
| benefits of Google, because a stand-alone product would easily be
| countered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. So the bottom line is that
| your new product needs to be of the monopoly-type, a new money
| printer. Anything less than that is not worthwhile.
|
| That's why Meta's big bet on the Metaverse wasn't as crazy as
| reported. When you make this much revenue yet social networking
| has peaked, you need to differentiate by adding a new revenue
| stream, and it would need to bring in a billion a month. You can
| only achieve that by building a brand new ecosystem and being the
| first at it.
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