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).
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.
5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Hard agree. Sold Google stock after realizing I'd more or less replaced Google Search with chatgpt...
That's what the AI robots will use as an explanation when they have f*cked us up. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty standard rate of failure for early stage startups.
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
Google Inbox
Still so damn bitter about that death.
"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.
"Present company excluded"
It's a polite fiction.
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.
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.
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 ... ?
Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk:
Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it was illuminating.
> at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor...
sounds like Clayton Christensen
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?
The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum tsss"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure I’d characterize YouTube as a diversification from ads.
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"?
Also, they sell Premium
That's probably less than 1% of YouTube revenue (number came out of my hat)
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...
8-9% is actually a pretty impressive conversion rate considering close to 100% of people use YouTube. They have like 97.6% market share.
To use a googlism: I’m surprised Google can count that low.
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)
There was something called "YouTube Originals" that's been discontinued but I didn't consider that central to the point I was making.
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
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.
By that standard, Search is also a diversification from ads.
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.
And before, it might've been in that "profitable if we want it to be" situation where they're just reinvesting the revenue.
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.
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.
You have the history backwards.
Ads in early 2000s > Mega-valuation
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...
That's an article from 2021 that says ads were 80% of revenue
Are the Android app store and GCP loss leaders? I assumed those two would be profitable at least.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.
So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of dollars?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, hence why Larry and Sergei don't care that the company they founded is currently on a downward trajectory...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Having children can awake antisocial impulses in people but it can awake prosocial impulses just as easily and just as strongly.
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".
Should I take it to be some kind of Freudian slip that you’ve written “myself” rather than “themselves” here?
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.
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.
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?
This presumes that people with no children are somehow less horrible.
In truth, all humans are equally worthless.
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.
Really? What about people not in the in-group, not in your tribe?
... 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.
Some companies do something like this with some success, but this was also the theory of the guy who drove Sears into the ground.
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
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.
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.
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?
Gonna be awfully hard to comply with all the consent decrees and regulatory scrutiny with zero bureaucracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A good manager does not always a good SWE make.
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.
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.
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?
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?
You’re giving Google too much credit. They couldn’t even conceive of short videos. Why? See earlier in the thread.
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.
This reminds me of the "Explore/Exploit" chapter from "Algorithms to live by" :)
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?
I feel so much exactly what you're describing here...
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...).
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)
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.
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.
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.
It was easier to thread this needle in an easy-money environment than now, when everyone has suddenly grown much more conservative.
Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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”
If google's mantra had been "Don't rock the boat" since they achieved market dominance, we would still have xmpp.
Google fought against Microsoft’s EEE strategy until they could do it themselves. Enter Chrome.
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.
kind of interesting how bell was able to spun off so much while modern companies aren't able to do so
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.
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.
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.
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."
the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way
In a word: momentum
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
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.
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?
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.
The author worked under her at least during their time working on flutter; which was their most recent experience at google.
Not beyond criticism, some criticism is fine. It's just not a very good look to savagely take them down when you barely have any representation of said group.
Post author never mentioned her race, HN commenters did.
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.
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.
Pretending racial disparities doesn't exist (particularly in tech) doesn't do any favors either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you - also why target someone who has been there for only 2 years.
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.
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.
Why is there a presumed intent to "accomplish" anything? It's a blog post.
Which race would have made the "targeted attack" better?
You're being disingenuous. The commenter clearly was saying any "targeted attack" is wrong, and that "targeted attack where the target is a minority" then brings up even more suspicions about the underlying motives for the attack.
At least it does for me. But you sound like you have other axes to grind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
You are implying that every manager is competent and every criticism from a subordinate is baseless.
Not at all. This is a false dichotomy
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.
It'd be hard to find an org where you couldn't find someone to make similar complaints.
I'm in one. This is a pretty specific dressing down from a senior engineer. It's disturbing, and consistent with Google's output
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.
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.
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.
It's doubtful.
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.
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.
What is a problem with being an IC?
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...
Keeping quiet about perceived problems is exactly the kind of toxic political lack of transparency that Ian is calling out here.
How much is it really doing if you’re making the criticism after you left?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since when is a VP middle-level management ?
Well that is because you live your life from a place of fear. Not everyone is like that.
But you could.
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.
Good for you. It might save someone from taking a job under what appears to be an awful manager though
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?
He grew up in Europe, which may have given him different sensibilities.
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.
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.
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
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.
just 1 disgruntled employee's impression of their job performance.
And what’s wrong with that, if that’s their honest and informed impression?
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If she doesn’t want to be publicly shamed for being bad at her job she could always try to be good at it.
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.
She probably makes $10M a year, don’t worry about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And her summary is literally a list of corporate buzzwords
“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.
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.
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.
Yes, Microsoft really re-invented itself. Maybe Google can turn itself around too after a decade or two of malaise.
But Microsoft reinvented itself with precisely leadership change in Satya, right?
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.
ime Googlers/Xooglers have this egotism that needs a sharp kick in the butt to remedy.
Well they're getting that kick now.
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
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.
‘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.
Yeah that’s what I don’t understand, what is the incentive to preserve the culture?
Outcomes follow incentives
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.
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.
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?
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.
If creates new things with the impact of Chrome, Maps and Gmail, but with less spyware? Hell, yeah!
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?
~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.
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.)
It’s a tale as old as time
The kid inherits the company built by the parent
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" ;) )
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.
I would bet that the average tech-savvy outsider has a higher opinion of Sundar than the average Googler does.
I think Pichai tries his best within his abilities, maybe it's time to pay attention to the ones who had chosen him?
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.
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
The point being made is exactly that your inference about Google's motives early on was wrong. Common. But wrong.
"Our motto is "Don't be evil"" is not an inference. It's a quote.
The inference you made is that Google actually was evil all along.
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.
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.
Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.
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.
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.
Having been in the room on a number of these occasions, a don't think this description is remotely accurate.
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".
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"?
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.
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.
It is only an oxymoron in the worst possible interpretation to the point of maliciousness.
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.
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.
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?
Her linkedin profile is 'winner' if it helps provide any backstory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winner/
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].
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.
> ...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?
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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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"
Doesn't seem like the worst plan in the world.
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.
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.
Surely they could do something better for humanity, such as selling heroin to middle schoolers.
This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google:
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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-...
"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.
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.
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.
He spent the last 9 years in competition with Android so it's not surprising that he has some biases about it
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on derstruction, you'd probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you?
Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." - Stanisław J. Lec
It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
>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.
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."
Yep. It usually is a ship leaking from the top. I have seen it (not from Google).
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.
Tacky to sling accusations without evidence or examples.
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.
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...
> They can give excellent advice for working at Google.
My understanding is that that's the kind of mentoring he offerred, yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
Is there currently companies where you can do this?
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 technical 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's 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.
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.
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.
Ok, but you also just non ironically said "collaborating on an OKR".
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.
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.
Not even if they pay well enough that you can quit and still afford having a family in only 5 years, instead of 20?
Can't speak for OP, of course, but for me -- no, not even then. There really are things money can't buy.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
They are getting "beat badly" only if you read tech blogs and not their financial statements.
Microsoft under Balmer did great financially IIR.
Their stock price was flat for a decade, so no. The company was a wreck financially under Ballmer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you might be confusing cookies and local storage.
Where do you think cookies get stored?
Not localStorage.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your understanding of web technology is incredible. You should run for congress.
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.
Is Google the new Microsoft?
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.
Did you pass the Azure ones then?
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.
Sounds like you were rejected due to your snippy attitude.
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.
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.
and Microsoft the new Google?
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.
Yep. I quit after a year in 2015 because it already felt like that.
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.
And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and nobody was held accountable for that failure.
There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen, search for the phrase "vicg" among others.
(un?)fortunately I haven't had access to Memegen since 2020.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'état 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.
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.
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.
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.
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! )
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?
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.
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.
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.
Which companies today are the Google of 20 years ago?
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
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?
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.
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.)
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...)
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).
hi Ken. I don't think I mentioned you in the Enterprise article!
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.
The word would be "Kwisatz Haderach" ;)
That experience sounds so great. How did you get hired?
Ex-googler here as well. What are you guys using instead of flume for data pipelines? Beam on Spark?
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.
He was famous (or infamous) way before joining Google
Now that I think of it, the name IS vaguely familiar.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
"Flutter is amazingly successful. It's already the leading mobile app development framework" ???
Where is that happening? I want to move there.
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.
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.
Was that mission achieved by Google, or by Wikipedia?
Mostly Google.
"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)!
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
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.
Flutter is a leading framework? Maybe in some niche. It's not even in the top 10 for me.
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.
I’m also curious what he meant by that statement. By leading does he mean most used?
Another article that highlights Vic Gundotra’s arrival and rise at Google as the beginning of their decline.
...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.
I almost forgot about Vic! He hasn't been relevant for quite some time though, right?
Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had the same thought.
The submitted link is missing the query params (or HN stripped them) that lead directly to the post:
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.
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.
I don't think this began under Sundar. I remember that lack of accountability under Larry also.
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.
What the hell
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?
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
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,
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.
I think this link should point to the post at https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
Yup. Changed from https://ln.hixie.ch/. Thanks!
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Ehm no tests are a best practice
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".
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.
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
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
At some point we really need to admit our domain (and maybe society at large) is in a "Managerial Crisis."
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.
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.
Wouldn't be surprised if he receives a subpoena to testify in Google's anti-trust case
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.
What an amazingly well-written article. It's incredible how well it describes the feelings that I've struggled to vocalize on my own.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
The whole post is a good illustration of what made early Google so insufferable.
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
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.
« Google workers are nice humans therefore the company is doing good (tm) things »
Maybe it’s time to stop drinking the koolaid.
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.
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.
Honestly, Flutter, Dart, Go, dont provide much for Google in my opinion. Google shouldn't be wasting money on them
Of course Hickson was behind Flutter
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"I see you've been working for 18 years in a corporate environment, do you have startup experience?"
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.
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.
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.
The corporate form is disappointing. Everything described is inevitable.
Puts me in a UBI + cooperatives mood.
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).
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.
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.