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Mourning Google

cousin_it
111 replies
7h31m

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline.

Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.

It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.

Chathamization
42 replies
5h15m

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies.

I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being.

I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...

Multicomp
15 replies
3h36m

People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.

I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.

Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year.

Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth.

Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.

sneed_chucker
6 replies
3h23m

Don't think the Bell Labs people were pulling Google tier TC.

nonameiguess
3 replies
3h1m

This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or DARPA from that. Moonshot basic research like that may or may not make money. Your fundamental motivating force has to be doing cool shit, not getting rich. If you want something like Google X to work, the culture has to be such that no one is going to jump ship when Netflix offers to double your cash compensation.

How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.

dmoy
1 replies
2h11m

How do you get this? I don't even know.

Well one component that has changed there is that the marginal tax rate on the inflation-equivalent of a Google Director pay back then was 80-90%, so there wasn't really a point in enticing people with large salaries.

Also, the factory workers you mentioned could afford houses in a big city on a single income. Now a single FAANG eng struggles to do the same unless they get N promotions, and even moreso if you tack childcare costs on top.

refulgentis
0 replies
1h56m

150% nailed what happened to the culture in the most concise way I've ever seen anyone do it.

Absolutely not: re factory workers affording houses in big city on single income in 1960s.

Apocryphon
0 replies
2h33m

You make a lot of good points, but was the failure of Google moonshots really the fault of the workers who were easily lured by comp, or management who were impatient about seeing material results? Seems like either could have been chasing higher returns.

Initiatives like Google Fiber flaming out were certainly not the fault of anyone at the company. Maybe for drastically underestimating the difficulty of the problem. Actually, maybe that’s a reoccurring issue with these moonshots.

ash
1 replies
1h45m

What's TC?

Fripplebubby
0 replies
1h32m

total compensation

bluetomcat
1 replies
3h12m

Bell Labs worked during the Cold War, in a Keynesian economic system. They were focused at fundamental technology, not in creating an end-user service to conquer the world.

PaulDavisThe1st
0 replies
2h30m

Bell Labs did that, but they worked in service to the rest of the Bell system that was precisely targetting "creating an end-user service to conquer the world". Citing Bell Labs as if they were "an entire company" is misleading - they were the R&D wing for what was essentially a monopoly in telecoms.

un_ess
0 replies
2h21m

The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory describes how the Labs was working. The last chapter tries to figure out why it was working and one of the conclusion is that the Labs was always guided by the long term idea that it might help the telephone company (and that the breakup removed a) the long-term funding b) some kind of direction )

tensor
0 replies
1h46m

One thing everyone here always forgets about places like Bell Labs and Xerox parc, was that it was NOT a monoculture of developers working on things. These places encouraged collaboration between many different disciplines. They encouraged diversity.

What turned me off tech culture is not just that tech companies became more like banks. It's that there is a monoculture of thought, and highly arrogant thought at that. It's the place where developers are royalty and everyone else is regarded as mouth breathing servants. Of course, most companies, for damn good reason, are not structured with developers running everything, and so you get a constant stream of toxic comments complaining about how every other role at the company is useless and holding back the oh-so-brilliant developers.

That's not diversity, it's not inclusion, and it's not a recipe for actually changing the world for the better.

jmbwell
0 replies
2h19m

100% with you.

And growth is not just in physical size but in intelligence. 40 year old me knows a whole lot more even than 20 year old me thought he did.

Sustainability is hard. Would Google still be a favorite if it had never gone beyond a handful of products? Well never know, but has chasing new shiny worked out?

I guess for the billionaires, it has.

hn8305823
0 replies
1h52m

I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was?

More like Xerox PARC. I wish we could re-create the secret to how productive that engineer playground was. Yes, Xerox HQ (across the country) had little interest in monetizing their output but as an invention factory it was an immense success and we use their ideas every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Parc

InitialLastName
0 replies
2h4m

I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.

In a somewhat-parallel to early Google, it's worth noting that Bell Labs was funded by, and operated in service to, a near-total national-scale monopoly. When that monopoly was deconstructed, it triggered a decline in the output of the research organization as well (there's a clear decline in the ground-breaking output of Bell Labs after the 1984 Ma Bell breakup).

Chathamization
0 replies
2h57m

I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top?

Was it? A lot of people here think the transistor was one of the most important inventions to come out of Bell Labs. Here's Wiki's description of its creation:

In 1945, Bell Labs reorganized and created a group specifically to do fundamental research in solid state physics, relating to communications technologies. Creation of the sub-department was authorized by the vice-president for research, Mervin Kelly. An interdisciplinary group, it was co-led by Shockley and Stanley O. Morgan. The new group was soon joined by John Bardeen. Bardeen was a close friend of Brattain's brother Robert, who had introduced John and Walter in the 1930s. They often played bridge and golf together. Bardeen was a quantum physicist, Brattain a gifted experimenter in materials science, and Shockley, the leader of their team, was an expert in solid-state physics.

According to theories of the time, Shockley's field effect transistor, a cylinder coated thinly with silicon and mounted close to a metal plate, should have worked. He ordered Brattain and Bardeen to find out why it wouldn't. During November and December the two men carried out a variety of experiments, attempting to determine why Shockley's device wouldn't amplify.

It hardly sounds like they just gave a bunch of smart people a playground and told them to have fun. The problem with many historical examples is that people sometimes only pay attention to the fun parts they want to hear (a lot of focus was put on engineers and they were given some leeway) and often ignore the hard work that went into it (a lot of management, structure, and focus). We get left with overly simplistic solutions that sound wonderful, but then fail when people try to implement them.

fidotron
12 replies
4h34m

I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result).

There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often.

Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.

psunavy03
7 replies
2h28m

Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.

Except you don't have to be an asshole to be that person, just in charge.

hn8305823
6 replies
2h2m

Just having the power isn't enough. Nobody respects pushovers. Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect.

But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.

behnamoh
4 replies
1h48m

I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code.

Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is?

I often think it also has to do with the person positioning himself/herself in crowds that appreciate/respect/value him/her. For instance, it's hard to imagine someone like Jobs at an Oracle-style corporation, or imagine Elon Musk running a bank. It seems like these types of people soon understand that certain groups match their "vibe" better, and it works as a positive feedback loop for them.

jterrys
0 replies
11m

I think it's literally just notoriety. There's collaborative and visionary leadership styles but nobody bats an eye because there's no conflict. People just work and its another Tuesday. Product gets delivered. Everyone moves on.

ephemeral-life
0 replies
1h16m

I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code.

People want to believe in the genius that conquered the world, because it gives them the impression that success is a function of individual agency. It is much less impressive to hear that some world changing product was made by hundreds of engineers who all have been in the industry for decades working late nights on boring engineer stuff. These Jobs like figures are then chosen by the masses, because they are the only ones putting themselves out there and thus receive a disproportionate amount of the credit.

QuizzicalCarbon
0 replies
1h9m

Think of it like how an orchestra conductor and musicians work together.

Kye
0 replies
1h36m

I don't need to know anything about masonry to respect a skilled mason or for it to be mutual. Why would it be any different for a programmer and a leader? I don't know much about programming and avoid it at all costs [0], but all my programmer friends appreciate insights I have when they bounce ideas off me.

[0] I've written about this: https://kyefox.com/2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/

kbenson
0 replies
1h49m

I think Jobs as an example here is confusing, because he's noted as being an asshole and also an asshole, so people will read it your way and people will read it the other way.

vharish
3 replies
3h33m

The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.

fidotron
2 replies
2h57m

Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels.

It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat.

What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.

refulgentis
0 replies
2h2m

They fixed the VPs but they're way too busy to appeal to, even when they agree with you and everyone was told as much. And now you have extremes of rest-and-vest and "if I get the Visibility(tm) for this, maybe I'll get one more promo..." behavior from the L7s and lower.

psunavy03
0 replies
2h28m

So basically Microsoft under Ballmer?

MrPatan
4 replies
4h34m

The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable.

A subset of people around here don't think that way. Why? I have my own opinion, not very flattering.

coldpie
0 replies
3h59m

The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable.

By the same logic, our biology must think cancer is pretty valuable because of how many resources it dedicates to feeding cancerous cells. Wealth and value are not correlated.

cogman10
0 replies
3h12m

I honestly don't follow your line of thinking.

How is the market saying that the richest man is pretty valuable? Because the richest man owns a significant number of shares in a company the market deems as valuable?

blihp
0 replies
1h19m

When you really analyze at how many/most of the richest people in the world got so rich, they tended to extract (i.e. more parasitic) much of the value rather than create (i.e. more symbiotic) it. They have also often done so at the direct expense of others simply so they could have more... when they already had much more than they could ever use. Our economic system allows for this, but to praise these folks for much of what they did leaves a bad taste.

azemetre
0 replies
3h14m

Care to share your opinion? I’m curious.

cmrdporcupine
3 replies
2h9m

You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer.

The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains.

And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe.

The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running.

All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.

behnamoh
2 replies
1h44m

How do we break ads for Google? More generally, what do we do to make ads disappear or weakened? I guess that's the only way current Google would want to innovate more.

vineyardmike
0 replies
27m

You can’t break ads without breaking Google.

It’s like an Oil Rich Nation. Pumping oil is the only thing they know. They’ll build shiny cities, crazy buildings, and fund moonshots. But nothing else will compare to the profits of oil/ads, so nothing else can possibly matter.

The only big oil economy that isn’t totally dependent on their energy industry is the US, and only because we had other natural resources that allowed us to diversify early.

To divest Google from ads they need another source of infinite cash. If you can discover that, it’s way more valuable to you on its own instead of within Google. Maybe they can find a few thousand smaller side businesses to supplement revenue, but they’ll always be individually disposable (as we see now) and subject to cancellation.

cmrdporcupine
0 replies
1h38m

I don't really care if Google innovates. The good thing that is coming out of these layoffs and recent departures is that talent locked up in Google will scatter out into other places, instead of being locked up inside. In the long run it will be good for the tech industry.

theptip
0 replies
2h6m

If the only X moonshot that lands is Waymo, I think that still counts as having a transformative impact.

But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized.

I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?

ponderings
0 replies
4h4m

What should one do with power once one has it? After immaturity wears thin, what should one become? The most simple answers seem to make an effort to hold onto power, expansion of power seems a method but I think popularity might be a greater preservant which in turn depends on what one chooses to become. Gluttony, specially on it's own, is pretty useless to everyone else. You could convert popularity into power, it isn't a net gain necessarily.

I suppose the todo table could have many columns. What are the great unsolved mysteries or challenges? How useful are they to humanity? How hard are they? What does it cost? How does one sort the rows?

Say each human is assigned a column with the value of the todo item. Most fields would be empty. We would need a column with virtual min-max values.

Then, while expanding the data set, you dump it onto the internet, sit back and eat popcorn for a while?

kbenson
0 replies
1h44m

Having someone with a strong vision to rally around and attract others with similar views probably works wonders in itself. This could be someone powerful at a large company attracting like minded employees, or a small company whose founder and mission mission attracts specific hires, which explains to a degree some of the performance of small companies (or lack of performance of large ones if you see it that way).

Maybe Jobs' strength was that he had strong visions in multiple areas, and was able to have a few different stacks of people really in line with each and keep them moving separately?

hyperthesis
0 replies
2h1m

Jobs-as-coach, guiding by valuing what you value but more so, by its contribution to a valued goal. https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

Elon does the same externally ("visionary") - and I expect internally.

rezonant
33 replies
7h12m

Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.

Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation.

But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned.

As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly.

I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care.

It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job.

Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.

fidotron
14 replies
6h47m

“Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old.”

This is completely wrong. Their style was deliberate indifference about aesthetics, but their products (maps, search and gmail in particular) were absolute masterpieces of product design when first launched.

Edit to add: even Chrome itself was like this.

rezonant
13 replies
6h14m

Search was a product designed by two engineers. Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web, and now Maps is so ubiquitous, and requires such an insane data investment, that we'll probably never know the ideal Maps design, because every competitor out there is still catching up. Their primary advantage was the money they threw at mapping data and the ability for them to give it out for free.

Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design, it offered an escape from spam and manually managing your mailbox storage. Back then, if you used a free email experience, you were bombarded with banner ads, had 100MB of storage, and 99% of that was eaten by the spam sent directly to your inbox. Features are not product design.

Chrome might be a good exception, though. I still get the sense that it was primarily driven by inspired engineers. The reason for Chrome's success is probably not it's innovative design (it was it's performance), but it certainly was an incredible advance.

fidotron
5 replies
6h3m

“Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design”

It popularized instant search, tagging and threading to such a degree you have clearly forgotten how elegant it was!

rezonant
2 replies
5h55m

Features are not product design.

fidotron
0 replies
5h50m

You seem to confuse graphic design and product design.

Product design is what something does, how it is structured and how it behaves to user interaction, _and_ how it appears, not just one of them. GMail was almost to email what the iPhone was to smartphones.

dolmen
0 replies
4h56m

Labels vs folders.

This is product design.

vishnugupta
0 replies
3h33m

Exactly.

If I remember my thoughts back when Gmail was launched I was clearly awestruck. Gmail showed what was possible to do if one had fast internet connection. All those little interactions enabled through ajax! I think it was the first time, atleast for me, a product was as good as a desktop app w.r.t interactions and usability.

For comparison, with Yahoo mail one had to hit compose button and wait for a few seconds for compose window to open up. With Gmail it was extremely nifty and nearly instantaneous because I think it was done clientside and Ajax.

DonHopkins
0 replies
4h32m

And excellent spam filtering. The irony of having an advertising company filter out your advertisements so you only see theirs. And loving it.

SUPERCUT Every "And loving it" in Get Smart (1965-1970)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aeETaCsop8

robin_reala
3 replies
4h24m

The primary reason for Chrome’s success was literal billions of dollars in pervasive advertising (I remember years of Chrome TV ads and billboards), ads plastered all over Google’s products saying “better in Chrome”, and product bundling into many many pieces of software a user might download (e.g. Acrobat[1]). That’s not to say that it wasn’t a technically good product, but it wasn’t so much better than the competition that it would have got to the market share it has on its own merits.

[1] https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...

fidotron
2 replies
4h12m

Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this.

Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.

The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.

crazygringo
0 replies
3h41m

Totally agreed. I remember the first couple years of Chrome, and I didn't work at a tech company at the time, but everyone did work in front of a computer.

It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.

Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"

It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.

Apocryphon
0 replies
3h4m

Also because Firefox had become bloated and clunky at that point, Chrome was much more lightweight and zippy. It was Mozilla’s complacency that ceded their position as the alternate browser.

mbreese
2 replies
5h57m

> Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web

Mapquest would beg to differ. To me, the interface was the killer feature for Maps. The data and trip planning functionality existed already on the web (as my print outs of driving routes in the late 90s can attest to). But being able to just scroll around a new city was amazing. Every other site required clicking through every North or West button with a round trip to the server.

It wasn’t until later that the satellite data and street view data became the next killer feature.

rezonant
1 replies
5h54m

Oof that's true I forgot about MapQuest.

Apocryphon
0 replies
3h6m

Yo, where's the movie playin'? (Upper West Side, dude)

Well, let's hit up Yahoo! Maps to find the dopest route

I prefer MapQuest; (that's a good one, too)

Google Maps is the best; (true that;) double true!

So yeah, there was a third competitor-

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2005/12/27/saturday-night-...

bsenftner
6 replies
6h48m

My theory is any engineer led organization is doomed to fail because the STEM education does not include professional communications, and as a result any engineer led project and organization has communications issues that ultimately lead to failure. Quality communications is so critical in any collaborative, it is simply amazing an emphasis on communications is not a part of technology development - where "new" and "how" and "what" needs to be continually redefined. While a "project manager" is an individual specifically selected because they have quality, or at least better than the average engineer, communication skills. It is no wonder engineers and developers dislike project managers: they run communication circles around their developers, and the developers do not have the training or skills to compete, so they lose every debate, including those they should win on facts, but they can't convey their points, so they lose, and we lose.

Apocryphon
2 replies
3h1m

How do non-software engineering fields somehow achieve this?

bsenftner
1 replies
1h41m

There is an entire college of communications devoted to the power of persuasion via language, professional communications, and media. Software developers culturally ignore that entire school of thought, to our determent.

Apocryphon
0 replies
1h36m

I agree, I’m just wondering why other STEM fields don’t seem to have this problem or at the same level. I’m guess it’s the hubris of being the hotshot new lucrative world-eating industry.

deltaburnt
1 replies
4h30m

My degree required a communications course, and a full year senior project course that included pitching, design documents, and demos. My understanding is plenty other universities require similar courses.

Furthermore, even if that were true, companies (especially ones like Google) look for project and product managers that have CS degrees or other STEM degrees.

Personally, my frustration with project/product managers often comes from (ironically) underspecified requirements and highly unrealistic deadlines. Neither of those I consider a failing of their education or skills, but a failing of the company's reward structures.

bsenftner
0 replies
1h44m

Those under specified requirements and unrealistic deadlines are both the outcome of poor communications. An adept communicator is able to identify and convey the critical importance of correctly defined requirements. Likewise, such a communicator addresses unrealistic deadlines and explains the reality to those that need such explainers why their unreality is impossible, and they thank the good communicator for their honest language rather than any form of negative reaction. Such is the power of quality communications. An unrealized super power that actually exists in our social civilization.

cxseven
0 replies
5h53m

Engineers would win many more arguments if that was their full-time job. Who has the energy after completing a blitz to solve a highly technical problem by deadline to debate a PM who has spent months cooking up a product story?

cousin_it
4 replies
7h6m

I think the two viewpoints are compatible. The "PM takeover" was indeed a very distinct event, and the precursor of today's problems. I think the reason that takeover was allowed to happen is because engineers-in-charge wasn't bringing enough results, like I said. Maps and Gmail are good success stories but they happened many years earlier.

rezonant
3 replies
7h3m

Yes, but Google as a business felt like they could do no wrong, like they were the best at everything, and failed to see that they threw the baby out with the bathwater while trying to chase product categories that weren't in their DNA.

cousin_it
2 replies
6h59m

Ah, if that's your point then I disagree. There is no "DNA". A big tech company can and should try to do many things in many markets, look at Microsoft. When they started with Basic interpreters, or even when they launched Windows, would you have said that Xbox is in their "DNA"?

rezonant
1 replies
6h53m

Perhaps DNA is too strong a word, because it would seem to imply that change is impossible. It's more that Google executed the changes badly, after the "PM shift" as we're calling it happened, they continued to fail to see growth in these new markets, and failed to address exactly why that was. Instead they simply got very good at unlaunching their failed products.

All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.

cousin_it
0 replies
6h38m

Yeah, that sounds fair to me. The PM shift didn't really fix the problems it was supposed to fix, and introduced new ones.

ulfw
1 replies
6h0m

"However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid"

Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this. So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?

tuukkah
0 replies
5h8m

A middle way exists between "keys to the kingdom" and "no input".

mdgrech23
0 replies
4h29m

It is odd. It all stems from this idea that engineers make ugly products but that's just not true. I do think some engineers are more well versed in design than others though. I will say the ones I've met who are well versed in design are prone to doing odd things when comes to stuff like storing data. Like they won't know that area well and will introduce slowness or delay which also kills the product experience. I think like anything to be successful you need a high functioning team w/ various specialties, oddly enough I'm not convinced you actually need a dedicated "product" person.

jppittma
0 replies
5h35m

I guarantee you that for most flaws you find in the product, somebody knew about it and cared about it, but fixing it didn't make the chopping block for the release.

eduction
0 replies
4h8m

You make some very good points. Just two critiques:

Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.

Just by definition search predated any culture or strategy at Google since its launch came before any hiring or incorporation. Certainly it was refined and maintained well for years but I’d argue this is an exception to the culture as refining and maintaining things well are not regarded as Google’s strong suit. Search dominates revenue in a big way so they had to do that for search and made it happen.

And a second bit of pushback - Maps, Gmail and Street View were certainly best in category from a user standpoint but my impression is they are a rounding error when it comes to revenue (actual businesses success) compared with search. Maybe this has changed. But assuming it hasn’t, a common critique of engineering led orgs is that they tend to stop at technical sweetness and fail to fully follow through on delivering great businesses and all that entails (revenue, support, incremental evolution, maintenance). That shoe seems to fit.

dleeftink
0 replies
5h16m

ceded heavy ground

Calling attention to this specifically, because do we want a single 'Google' to have foothold on every ground? Innovation needs a healthy dose of competition, after all.

coldtea
8 replies
7h19m

"The non-normal culture wasn't proving itself."

Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof.

What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market".

I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.

rezonant
7 replies
6h56m

Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there.

I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unified payments infrastructure, it's become pretty clear. The engineers are spending too much time mucking through the garbage left behind by M&A tech merging and code left behind by hotshot college grads on their way to early retirement at 25.

EDIT: M&A

hashar
4 replies
6h39m

As a non US person, I have a couple questions:

* What is P&A tech?

* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

sweettea
1 replies
5h35m

* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.

acdha
0 replies
5h5m

$270k in the Bay Area is not retirement at 25 money unless you’re that Googler living in a van in the parking lot, or your retirement plan is living simply in a poor country. It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc. and the American healthcare system alone means you need to have millions saved as a buffer against illness over that kind of timeframe (kinda hard to re-enter the workforce at 40 with cancer when you realize your cost projections were optimistic).

rezonant
0 replies
6h37m

Oops, should've been M&A (mergers and acquisitions)

coldtea
0 replies
5h39m

How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.

They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.

potatomonster
1 replies
4h59m

Joined Google relatively recently and have also worked in/with the payments infrastructure. Couldn’t agree more - absolute nightmare to work in and it’s a small miracle when anything gets delivered at all.

As far as I can tell, seems to be a lack of a cohesive vision from leadership and an absolute willing ignorance of existing challenges, as you’ve mentioned.

rezonant
0 replies
1m

OK let me share more detail. My personal account has 2 payment profiles, one that is individual and one that is an Organization type with just my name which has a Public Merchant section. The second one clearly came from some kind of long retired way to accept payments via an older iteration of Google Pay or Google Wallet, that I didn't end up actually using, and which has long been removed from the platform or failed to migrate to the newer Merchant Center, and as a result I cannot remove it or manage it in any way except to edit the name, address, and credit card indicator in use. Merchant Center declares that I have no Merchant Center account.

90% of my personal Google services appear to be tied to the organization one for some reason, but a few recent ones from the Google Store are now tied to my personal one, meaning I need to use the profile switcher to access and manage them. There is no way to move subscriptions between payment profiles and the only option is to close one which will terminate the services immediately and remove the billing history. The one I should remove is the Organization one, as I'm not an organization...

-.-

Meanwhile, I have a single owner LLC that had GCP projects in play before the company was founded. I had tried to set up two separate GCP billing accounts, one owned by my GSuite admin and one owned by my personal account, to bifurcate the projects that fell under the new company.

Somehow that resulted in the one and only payment profile associated with my GSuite business GAIA identity being that same organization payment profile from my personal account! So I can see and manage personal subscriptions on payments.google.com. There's no way to change this that I'm aware of short of working with GSuite support.

You can in fact make a new payment profile, and Google says you should do this when you move to another country, but the help docs themselves note that your existing services will continue to charge on the old one. Which I guess means you are expected to cancel all your Google services, delete your old payment profile so that you can sign back up for all of them in the new payment profile manually, and lose all history of your previous payments.

So there's Billing Accounts which point to Payment Accounts, and Payment Accounts which point to Payment Profiles. In true Google fashion, there's a tooltip on the Payment profile ID which says it used to be called Billing ID. That's not confusing at all.

This is just a few of the utterly baffling things I found while trying to work this out. It reminds me of how PayPal has active subscriptions that it's UI literally cannot manage because they are too old and were incorrectly migrated from one of the zillions of older M&A subscription products that they merged in in their history.

eitland
3 replies
2h1m

I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain:

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives.

My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization:

- a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design)

- research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes

- etc etc

- meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting

- at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates

Still everything worked for a while:

- DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc.

- Same goes for Bing until GPT

But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today:

- results are as bad as the search engines they replaced

- the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads

- search operators are gone

- and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google

Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.

wuschel
2 replies
1h31m

While I can’t really objectively comment on the development of the quality of search result over time, one is for sure: the amount of data Google has to process and the amount attempts to influence beforementioned search results have grown a couple of orders of magnitude since Google’s creation.

eitland
1 replies
1h22m

Yes.

But

1. so has their processing power

2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale

3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.

dtdynasty
0 replies
33m

For 2 it is related to scale. Because of their scale Google is targeted by spammers the most. The smaller searches don't need to fight off bad content because it's not targeting their specific algorithms.

DeathArrow
3 replies
5h49m

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline.

What decline are you talking about? They have hundreds of billions revenue and climbing.

acdha
2 replies
5h15m

What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting.

It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.

DeathArrow
1 replies
3h18m

That is from an user perspective. From a shareholder perspective they are doing just fine.

Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.

acdha
0 replies
2h1m

Your original claim wasn’t scoped to shareholder returns, but even as a shareholder (which I happen to be) throwing away their reputation & goodwill is a concern. Only a few businesses like ISPs have something like a natural monopoly insulating them from the long-term impacts of that loss. Saying it’s doing fine sounds a lot like the people saying it was good to have accountants in charge of IBM in the 90s, who were right until it was too late to recover.

The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.

dolmen
2 replies
4h59m

Same as Bell Labs.

Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.

ephemeral-life
0 replies
57m

The situations are nothing alike. At the time bell labs was making all of its world changing inventions, AT&T was a regulated monopoly that was only allowed to live if they made their research open and not compete in adjacent markets.

TheCondor
0 replies
3h2m

Odd, it one mention of ‘hunger’ that I’ve seen in this discussion…

Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products.

A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there.

Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.

Paianni
2 replies
7h3m

Chrome? Chrome OS? Google Docs? Those haven't been successes?

Zetobal
1 replies
5h3m

They were inevitable even my granny would have made those decisions.

Paianni
0 replies
4h10m

Maybe, but several companies had attempted 'internet appliances' in the past and failed, Chromebooks were a risk.

steve1977
1 replies
7h20m

I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate.

But maybe it was just luck.

herval
0 replies
7h5m

I wouldn't say creating something like Google search is purely _luck_, but having the right skill and hitting it at the right timing_is indeed a big component of success

uoaei
0 replies
2h12m

The very premise that a single company should have as a goal to "win in every market" is problematic to its core. Can you justify this premise and how it relates to your assessment of Google?

throwaw12
0 replies
1h52m

hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened

There are 2 dimensions in this equations (1) best programmers (2) management.

They might have hired best engineers, but not the best management. Maybe the management ruined them, by putting profits above everything else.

Keep in mind, some of those management/MBA people have tendency to put promotion above anything else.

smrtinsert
0 replies
5h34m

Absolutely agreed. The mythology of engineer driven innovation only applied to the brief birth of the web and even then it was more product vs programming, yt for example.

ksec
0 replies
11m

the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.

Remember the big fuss about no managers?

not many amazing new products were happening.

And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs

To me Google is simply a technology company, and are constantly innovating with Technology and looking for uses cases with the new tech they have. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple because the current Apple is looking more and more like Google. Are a consumer company that identify a problem and work backwards to look for a technology solution.

Unfortunately, it turns out Technology, Business, and Consumer understanding is an extremely rare set of combination.

dec0dedab0de
0 replies
1h36m

From the outside it seemed like Google 20-25 years ago cared more about making good things than they cared about making money. Which counter-intuitively is why they made so much money, people trusted google. Somewhere around the doubleclick merger or the IPO that changed. When google launched Gmail people were paying for invites on ebay. Changing your email address is the biggest pain in the ass in digital life and Google had people paying for the chance to do it before their friends. That would not happen if they launched something new right now.

After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.

bitcharmer
0 replies
6h23m

I disagree. To me it looks like the corporateness, the MBA types, KPIs and all that bullshit steered Google off its course and into what it is today.

amadeuspagel
0 replies
3h45m

And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/on...

DonHopkins
0 replies
4h35m

Game Helpin' Squad: A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

DanielHB
0 replies
5h7m

I think the main problem is because the reward from your innovative ideas being successful was not tied to the team members own rewards. Startup founders get crazy rich or get nothing so they will do their damnest to get their ideas to deliver value and capitalize their value.

All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.

vanderZwan
61 replies
7h14m

To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry.

Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me)

Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).

If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.

(this is not a defense of Big Tech, btw)

nostrademons
21 replies
6h17m

This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because they have more interdependencies. Mammals emerged from the carnage because they were small and nocturnal and could occupy small & simple ecological niches. The original disruptive innovation.

As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech, but all of these are fundamental shifts in the foundations of our society that make our society no longer adapted to the ecological niche it grew up in.

glimshe
8 replies
4h42m

Large institutions have been "failing" for over a century, in most countries, similar to things in orbit being always "falling". Just go find old newspapers and you'll see similar wording. The constant criticism and renewal of our institutions is part of the system.

whythre
5 replies
4h28m

You aren’t wrong, but we used to teach Latin in schools. Things aren’t getting better in a lot of these arenas, they are being chipped away… and the center cannot hold forever.

zehaeva
2 replies
4h15m

What does teaching Latin in schools have to do with schools, ostensibly, failing?

Are you saying that Latin is something that is useful to everyday life and because we don't teach it to our children we're depriving them of this wonderous tool?

I personally do not know Latin, but I have never run into a situation where I needed to know it.

And to analyze the idea that, "Well, it's not Latin in specific, but that we are not teaching our children to think for themselves", this too has been bayed about for the last forever, Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"

I don't know which pedagogy is the "correct" one, stuff children with, seemingly, random knowledge and watch them "blossom" or to stuff them with narrowly focused learning so that they will flourish at whatever work they are funneled into.

But I do know that teaching a dead language isn't the bellwether you think it is, unless you're trying to start a jobs program for all those unemployeed Latin tutors.

marginalia_nu
1 replies
2h32m

Well, you would be surprised how much historical writing you are locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Not from antiquity, but from the fall of rome up until the turn of the previous century, Latin was the language. A tiny fraction of what's been written in Latin is available in any vernacular. By not reading Latin, you're locked out almost all western pre-modern writing.

Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"

Where does he say this? This seems an incredibly uncharacteristic sentiment coming from Plato. If nothing else because his mentor Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth, and almost all extant writing from Plato deals with Socrates' legacy. When Socratres isn't harassing rulers and generals, he's typically portrayed hanging out with the youth in Plato's writing.

Closest thing I'm aware is a section of The Republic. The section, a hypothetical aside really, deals with the horrors of Athenian democracy (the same that killed Socrates), where fathers fear their sons and children are said to think themselves equals to their parents.

zehaeva
0 replies
6m

I assure you that I am not surprised with how much historical writing I am locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Honestly I would be willing to bet that it as much as I am locked out of from not being able to read Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Japanese, Arabic, etc. You can't think that's a serious argument for teaching Latin in primary or secondary school? If I were a western historian, sure, you should probably learn Latin, probably some flavor of ancient Greek as well.

I am referencing a Guardian article that I read nearly a decade ago[0] but he wasn't the only one to have bemoaned the "youth".

With Socrates, him being sentenced to death while for "corrupting the youth" that's a pretty naive, and incomplete, explanation, if you were to dig a little deeper you'll find that the, probably, true reasons for Socrates' trial was political[1]. You forget that the "corruption of the youth" was bound with the accusation that Socrates was denying the gods and introducing new gods[2], not, as you imply, that he was a champion of the youths themselves. For me it's difficult to take everything we know about Socrates as true given the posthumous glow up that Plato gives us. This is partly Socrates' own fault for his, as we're told, ideas that writing things down would lead to forgetfulness. Ironic honestly.

I am tempted to discuss further about Socrates' trial, how most thought that he was going to going to get off due to his ability in rhetoric and hi, basically, not defending himself was pretty shocking in and of itself.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/mar/17/ephebiphob.... [1]https://www.mcgill.ca/classics/files/classics/2006-7-03.pdf [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates

blackmesaind
0 replies
4h16m

I don't find the lack of Latin in public education to be particularly alarming, and I've found that it's been replaced by subjects a bit more relevant to the modern day (i.e. Comp Sci)

Eisenstein
0 replies
3h36m

They still teach Latin in Catholic schools.

nostrademons
0 replies
3h9m

That's true but also very germane to the conversation here. Sure, life will go on. It's not guaranteed that life with Google will go on, or that FANG will be an acronym of interest anymore than the "Nifty Fifty" are today.

geodel
0 replies
3h26m

Well a century is hardly a long time unless someone think that 1987 was deadline or some such. And even during failing only few bemoan, large number of people adjust to new/worse reality.

Roark66
4 replies
4h50m

As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech.

Falling? When was the last time in a developed country when an educational system/heathcare failed as a system? Or the government (other than in Argentina), or Military? As for the concept of borders? No, that is not failing either, it's just people in some countries today became convinced it is not worth to use deadly force to defend borders. See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to. It is not a pretty picture, but it is very far from "systems failing". As for reasons, why these systems are under pressure I can definitely agree on demographics, but climate change affecting our education/healthcare systems? No way.

Periods of boom and bust are a feature of our financial system, I'm not seeing anything unusual. Currencies fail too due to mismanagement. But extrapolating this into some sort of overall systemic failure of everything caused by climate change no less is not rational.

On the global scale the biggest challenge in today's world is the growing power of authoritarian nations hell bent on global domination and continued enfeeblement(deindustrialisation, increased corruption, disregard for the rule of law) of the free world. Then demographics, then very far in the distance climate change.

benterix
1 replies
3h12m

See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to.

I think mixing France and Sweden on this point makes no sense. France made a deliberate attempt to attract as many refugees (and, at the same time, non-refugee immigrants) as possible in a very short period of time; they understood where it leads to and backpedaled on too open policies but things want a bit too far and they need to deal with the consequences, mainly criminal gang bombings.

As for France, the situation is dramatically different. You have several generations of immigrants already, some feeling more French than the French if I may use this expression. This population is very heterogeneous but suffice it to say than when ISIS planned Bataclan attacks, they had to recruit people in Belgium. Also, the countries of origins for immigrants in both cases are very different and in the case of France related to the history of the country, the Algerian War etc.

So, if you wanted to lump the two together, it would be proper to say "Sweden and Merkel's Germany" (because today's Germany is quite different, too).

ajb
0 replies
2h53m

Is there a typo in your first para? You seem to want to compare France and Sweden, but both paras refer to France; I'm guessing you meant Sweden in the first.

whateveracct
0 replies
3h18m

Periods of boom and bust are a feature of our financial system, I'm not seeing anything unusual.

We had a decade+ of boom boom boom and the moment the economy dips for a couple years, people start freaking out. Some years, things are more expensive and life is harder. Some years, it's easier. That's life. And that's the economy.

Certhas
0 replies
4h17m

With you on "institutions are not failing as such".

As for biggest challenges: You _massively_ underestimate climate change, and the way it is entangled with everything else. There have always been authoritarian nations. The so called free world does not seem notably more corrupt than it was 50 years ago, it is in many ways freer than it has ever been (see the annoyance and backlash of those that don't think the freedom should extend to such things as chosing your gender), and it's economic power remains unmatched for now.

But: We already live in a changed climate. This means we no longer speculate about the damages climate change will do, we can measure them in macroeconomic data already [1]. This was a huge surprise to ke. I would have expected economic systems to be much more resilient to the warming already seen.

We are facing a situation where the world's poorest are experiencing reduced growth (meaning not fewer corporate profits, but people fleeing hunger and destitution), while we are all dealing with a massively increased number of extreme events (which _will_ stress institutions not adapted to the new normal, possibly to the breaking point), while we also have to transform or economic systems towards carbon neutrality to prevent even more catastrophic impacts.

This is fertile ground for authoritarians, democratic backsliding, loss of liberties and institutional failure.

[1] e.g.: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00985-5

twisteriffic
2 replies
4h36m

Those public institutions are being _made_ to fail right now. Purposefully. Not by unthinking forces of nature but by conscious effort.

geodel
1 replies
3h24m

Right, it is always that vast right wing conspiracy.

PaulDavisThe1st
0 replies
2h8m

Is it your position that there are no powerful entities that actually desire to see many social institutions diminished if not outright demolished?

genmon
2 replies
3h55m

you're saying that dinosaurs were a zero interest rate phenomenon?

ok ok flippant but maybe not entirely flippant... I'm used to conceiving of fitness as in fitness for a niche. But I hadn't grasped the idea of "meta-fitness" being the ability to adapt to a highly dynamic niche. there must be a term in evolutionary theory for this.

skeeter2020
0 replies
3h30m

Are you saying Big Tech was the primary beneficiary of free money? That doesn't seem as accurate as saying it is/was all ventures that couldn't be funded by revenues and profit, from the largest to smallest players.

PaulDavisThe1st
0 replies
2h7m

The term is "resilience".

ynniv
0 replies
5h8m

I think you're mistaking popularity with power. Big Tech is less cool, but 7/8ths of humanity are under their umbrella.

naasking
8 replies
3h42m

Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you).

The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction level events are inevitable. Humanity has the potential to deflect or destroy such asteroids (and other such events), thus we have the potential to not be an evolutionary dead end.

Eisenstein
3 replies
3h33m

Ironically, we only have that ability because the dinosaurs all died millions of years ago and we got to use their energy.

skeeter2020
0 replies
3h26m

Two common mistakes regarding oil and gas:

1. it's not goopy, bubbling tar in giant cavernous pools 2. it's not dinosaurs, at least in the sense being discussed here

nialv7
0 replies
3h24m

Common misconception, fossil fuels didn't come from dinosaurs. Oil is mostly from aquatic phytoplankton and zooplankton, and coals are from plants.

naasking
0 replies
3h25m

I wouldn't go that far. Fossil fuels helped for sure, but we still had wood as a renewable resource that would have served until we discovered nuclear power.

lolinder
1 replies
2h46m

There's very little point in talking about ability to survive "extinction level events" in the abstract—the question is which extinction level events a given species is poised to survive, and was it unlucky enough to encounter one that it wasn't. The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions, until they eventually met their match.

Humans can deflect asteroids, so we've (probably) dodged that extinction, but that doesn't mean we're immune to others.

naasking
0 replies
2h8m

Humans can deflect asteroids, so we've (probably) dodged that extinction, but that doesn't mean we're immune to others.

At this point, there is no conceivable extinction level event humanity couldn't avoid or avert, in principle, given sufficient time/warning, except the heat death of the universe.

So I disagree that there's no point in talking about survivability in the abstract. You can roughly project the growth of a species' capabilities through time, and the trajectory the dinosaurs were on clearly entails they were heading towards extinction due to an inevitable run in with a supervolcano or an asteroid. Humanity's trajectory is conceivably very different due to science and our ability to construct sophisticated tools.

The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions

I'll also note that this is a slightly unfair comparison because "dinosaurs" is a category consisting of many species, where the comparison here is against the one homo sapiens species. Many dinosaur species went extinct through those events you mention, some survived.

NoGravitas
1 replies
11m

Humanity is currently showing very little potential for averting extinction level events. They might end up surviving and rebounding from the Jackpot, but that's not the way to bet.

naasking
0 replies
4m

Of course we have the potential. You can place the confidence low, but it's not zero. For the dinosaurs, it was zero.

rezonant
5 replies
6h46m

If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.

In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm.

In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.

asah
4 replies
6h3m

Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.

As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.

Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.

Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.

Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them.

The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.

Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.

Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.

Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.

As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).

As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.

Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)

anticorporate
1 replies
4h10m

Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc.

What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.

asah
0 replies
2h0m

true, but let's not paint the bike shed here: you can have all the best policies, and hackers and inside threats ruin all of it. If I'm going to trust a cloud provider with (say) multimedia, I trust YouTube and Google Photos a lot more than random small providers, who sound good until the next hack.

ejiblabahaba
0 replies
1h21m

With Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's reputation would remain its own worst enemy.

Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be.

As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly.

I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor.

All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry.

[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

GoogEngMgr2024
0 replies
3h43m

Google remains … less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking)…

This may have been true in 2009. It is no longer true in 2024.

Grimblewald
5 replies
6h29m

building on the dino thing, we've currently hellbent in creating a new dino age it seems. Hot ass planet high in the CO2 required to create thriving lush jungles.

paulryanrogers
3 replies
4h57m

There was also much more O2 in the atmosphere. Doubtful that's coming back.

sojournerc
2 replies
4h14m

Plants do this weird thing and turn CO2 into O2. More CO2 means more plants. The earth is greening with the additional atmospheric carbon.

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...

marcosdumay
1 replies
3h1m

O2 levels are not set that way.

Just think where all the new CO2 is coming from.

sojournerc
0 replies
2h30m

Much of it is coming from the carbon in fossilized remains of a time when there was much more O2 in the atmosphere because there was so much flora and a warmer planet... what am I missing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen

LoveMortuus
0 replies
6h1m

While humans might not survive, the nature will.

Should the worst happen. But I'm optimistic that humanity won't let things get this bad.

yard2010
2 replies
5h35m

Excuse me if the dinosaurs couldn't handle an asteroid they did not adapt, lost the race and went extinct, good day. The birds adapted well and they're still thriving. There are no laws to the race of life. Just survive and reproduce. If you failed to do either you're out.

Tistron
1 replies
5h29m
YoshiRulz
0 replies
3h56m
agumonkey
2 replies
5h3m

trivia: you just made me wonder what's the etymology of dinosaur, https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 says it's from "deinos "terrible" (see dire)". seems that from start, people in the field had this view of crippled genus

sirsinsalot
1 replies
4h23m

It means terror inducing, not bad or substandard

agumonkey
0 replies
2h43m

I was wondering, but etymonline had many many pejorative meanings for "dire" so I assumed dinosaurs too. But wikipedia says like you.

gumby
1 replies
1h34m

The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system.

Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely.

Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.

vanderZwan
0 replies
6m

Right, it can still work, as other commentors also show with their interpretation. However, I'd say that this is only so because we put in the effort to "patch" the metaphor into something the author didn't really say.

Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances.

But maybe that's just a quibble.

Heh, maybe, but the quibble is valid. Quibbling over such details is practically how paleonerds show affection, right?

ak_111
1 replies
4h29m

Tangent: I thought you were going to hate the inflection point metaphor (and hence started your post with a pun about it).

The point being inflection points mathematically speaking don't usually imply a peak, rather a change in concavity (which might still be increasing).

It would be better for people to say something like "...it feels like we reached a high water mark..." to stress they worry about a certain maxima being hit.

wavemode
0 replies
4h11m

Well, you can't change to concave down without eventually either hitting a maximum or another inflection point, right? Could be apt, given that most big tech companies are still growing in strength, for now. Just not as rapidly.

zozbot234
0 replies
5h8m

Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).

Conspiracy theory: Birds are not real, they're actually dinosaurs.

pyrale
0 replies
3h38m

If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.

...Antitrusteroid, the extinction event that transformed the thriving tech behemoths into Standard Oil.

pm
0 replies
2h36m

The characterisation is off (stumbling vs. nimble), but the metaphor is apt. Adapt or die.

picadores
0 replies
5h18m

Turpor after great feasts and the ability to either winter and scurry under the snow - or move migrate away to greener pastures is what saved the day.

otikik
0 replies
3h7m

A global pandemic

jbaber
0 replies
4h56m

You're right that big dinosaurs only lost because they were big, not because they were an evolutionary dead end of some sort.

From an anthropocentric point of view, though, they seem very dead end. Despite bipedalism and possible warm bloodedness sometimes, they would never use tools. Down so many taxonomic branches, their arms would shrink away and their jaws become enormous. Nothing to motivate any of those lizards to get big brains -- something anthropos value highly :)

_Algernon_
0 replies
4h9m

Just because extinction of a species occurs because of a rare Black Swan event doesn't mean that it isn't evolution. (Large) dinosaurs were in fact an evolutionary dead end when it comes to the threat of large asteroids crashing into the planet.

DonHopkins
0 replies
4h37m

If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.

Another Trump presidency.

fancyfredbot
24 replies
7h21m

Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was jealous of them. Then they always seemed to end up spending their time on Google+ or Play Store or some other application which was not as glamorous or interesting as you were expecting. It felt like a huge disconnect between the perception and reality. I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. I am glad though that these days people may judge the idea of a big-tech career more objectively.

bluetomcat
12 replies
7h6m

I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success.

Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem.

Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

baud147258
3 replies
7h3m

I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money

squarefoot
1 replies
6h27m

Google acquired YouTube, they didn't make it, just like Android. At the time Google had Google Video which was terrible in comparison, and although Google was already the most used general purpose search engine, YouTube was so much better that it had already become the standard for publishing and/or searching videos.

nostrademons
0 replies
6h4m

They also acquired Android, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and many of the precursors of Maps & Ads.

There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.

chpatrick
0 replies
5h45m

YouTube made $8 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2023, that's more than 10%: https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-202...

fancyfredbot
2 replies
5h25m

"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.

bluetomcat
1 replies
5h14m

Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.

Apocryphon
0 replies
2h53m

Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.

AlexCoventry
2 replies
7h4m

The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.

sanderjd
1 replies
6h50m

Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.

_bohm
0 replies
6h15m

Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC

wyclif
0 replies
7h3m

I felt like Wave had potential, but they killed it too soon.

_bohm
0 replies
6h40m

GCP started turning a profit last year.

gumballindie
6 replies
6h39m

Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI).

Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.

rm_-rf_slash
5 replies
6h12m

Google never stole? That’s a memory hole if I’ve ever seen one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....

gumballindie
3 replies
5h1m

Openai's entire business model and product offerings are based on theft. Google's no saint, but the scale and scope are rather different. Furthermore, openai's shills spamming forums to defend the practice is unseen in intensity.

ecshafer
2 replies
4h19m

Training models is fair use, and i think the courts will agree with that. Saying its based on theft is not so cut and dry as youre making it out.

gumballindie
1 replies
3h30m

Those would have to be some rather corrupt courts to agree to such theft. What's next? Agreeing that if you are out on the street it's fair game to be robbed?

nkohari
0 replies
1h37m

Your definition of theft doesn't necessarily match the legal definition. It still remains to be seen whether training foundation models is fair use or not, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

tuukkah
0 replies
4h55m

Did we read the same article?

The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.
herval
2 replies
7h2m

Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today

It also was allegedly a "special" place, where you had autonomy as an engineer, yada yada. From what I hear about openai, that doesn't really apply there. Are there any small-but-large-ish companies (100-1k employees) out there today that have a culture similar to the early google?

rezonant
0 replies
6h42m

We should all endeavor to emulate it if we can.

fnikacevic
0 replies
4h41m

The perception of autonomy at Google was somewhat marketing. In reality the company was extremely rigorous and top down. They used the perception to hire the creative genius types they wanted.

Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google) discusses it here: https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154

mattgreenrocks
0 replies
4h11m

It still happens. Dev culture today is way more steeped in external status indicators than it used to be. It’s just naïveté and a need for some sort of hierarchy for engineering competence.

Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced.

Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.

Xcelerate
16 replies
6h41m

quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”

This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company.

The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.

redrove
6 replies
5h42m

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position.

Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

lxgr
2 replies
4h50m

Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end.

Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code.

I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.

nescioquid
0 replies
2h53m

There are people in technical leadership making decisions who are not capable of performing the most rudimentary of programming tasks like committing code.

This is a problem when the decision-maker doesn't act on advice from staff or is incapable of understanding the advice. Now give that leader an ego and abandon all hope.

There are many rungs to fall below "competent, but not passionate". In fact, I think I prefer my leaders to be dispassionate and competent.

flobosg
0 replies
1h59m

Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end.

Case in point: the Hacktoberfest fiasco.

jbaber
1 replies
4h53m

Are there enough people like this who want to deal with the unpleasantness of being managers? The only enticement we have is money.

redrove
0 replies
4h52m

The only enticement we have is money.

Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)

shuckles
0 replies
3h51m

Financially motivated types can figure out how to use git if that lets them gain a lucrative job. There as entire undergrad CS major to Associate Product Manager pipeline which proves this.

poszlem
1 replies
3h34m
redrove
0 replies
2h34m

I’ll use this article as an argument for the next time I’m forced to choose the lesser of two idiots in a round of interviews.

Thanks for sharing, really insightful.

el_benhameen
1 replies
2h9m

Where do we think the unicycle riders work now?

Apocryphon
0 replies
2h8m

Whichever company has pickleball courts

amadeuspagel
1 replies
3h34m

Maybe the same people got older.

troutwine
0 replies
2h38m

Having been around at that time, I suspect a lot of that behavior was period specific — “quirky” as a character trait was big then — or a put on to fit in socially. Lifted trucks that never see so much as gravel in one place, unicycles and learning functional programming language from comic books in another.

actualwitch
1 replies
3h29m

I think there is also another issue on top of that - once you establish yourself as a big money maker (a part of FAANG), a lot of tech people start treating a position there as a way to pad resume or make a ton of money. I am convinced it will shift the culture inside the company towards more corporate mindset.

aquova
0 replies
2h47m

I think this is really the issue. When I was in graduate school, I was in a group for some project. Before class had started, I was showing off another group member some little personal thing I had worked on over the weekend, some game or demo or something. The third group member, having seen this, was shocked that I was spending my spare time programming things for fun. I recall being perplexed by this, as it was pretty much the whole reason I was in the degree. She responded she was only interested in software engineering for the money.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to structure your career around financial success, but I met many people like her who were attempting to get jobs at Google or Amazon just to cash in as much as they could for a few years, then bounce. At some point your company is bound to become filled with people like this.

ben7799
0 replies
3h44m

This problem existed way before 2010.. it might not have been a problem in companies like Google but it had already been a problem in previous waves of big tech companies. For example in lots of the Telecommunications giants that were building the hardware in the 1990s that made the growth of today's BigTech possible.

samirillian
14 replies
7h9m

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language.

What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality.

I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. (People I read and liked btw). But the people I now hear regurgitating the phrase make me wonder what happened. For Marxists I think the implication is that capitalism will soon die with its host. Which like all prophecies will probably be proven ironic in retrospect, but who knows.

But I'm starting to think the way people use it now, it's like they sub-consciously think there was a good capitalism time just like there was a good Google time.

Hegel observed that the US was founded on greed. When I look at tech, I see greedy people. That's more general and just as specific as the ambiguous term "late stage capitalism".

_bohm
5 replies
6h21m

cultural marxists

I think maybe you mean just "Marxists". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

To your question, I do think the term is becoming heavily watered down as I see it being used frequently by people who clearly lack the context on Marxist thought to be able to use it with it's original meaning. More often, when people use the term, I infer the sentiment that the "capitalism" we live in is regressing into oligarchy or corporatocracy.

throwawayqqq11
2 replies
4h53m

You think, you can reach people that speak of "cultural marxism" with wikipedia?

I dont and i dont know an alternative since cognitive biases slowly take away the ability to freely reason about contradicting statements; their ability to reason in general.

Apocryphon
1 replies
3h23m

Well, the OP seems to know a few lofty theorists and cites Hegel, yet resorts to the inflammatory meaningless epithet, so their post is all over the place. No level of depth is easily gleaned from the post; it is one of contrasts. Whatta dialectic.

_bohm
0 replies
1h48m

Reading the OP charitably, I think it was a genuine mistake.

samirillian
1 replies
1h18m

Actually I meant Western marxists

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Marxism

Less concerned with economic analysis than earlier schools of Marxist thought, Western Marxism placed greater emphasis on the study of the cultural trends of capitalist society, deploying the more philosophical and subjective aspects of Marxism, and incorporating non-Marxist approaches to investigating culture and historical development

I thought Western marxist would be obscure to hn readers and that in the context what I meant by cultural Marxism would be clear, but I guess not.

I'm dismissive of the alt-right usage of cultural Marxism to the point of forgetting how much other people care about it

Apocryphon
0 replies
35m

Maybe cultural theorist Marxist or cultural critique Marxist would be clearer. I hadn't heard of those thinkers you mentioned but everyone is at least faintly familiar with Žižek's shtick.

fwiw, "late stage capitalism" feels to be a phrase that's been around as popular parlance since at least the mid-2010s. It's even brought up in the Wikipedia article for the term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism#Modern_usage_o...

It's cliche by now. They should probably move on to a new buzzword. Actually, in tech, it does exist: enshittification is a good replacement as any.

jdub
2 replies
6h46m

You question the phrase "late stage capitalists" and use the phrase "cultural marxists"? Shoo.

dmix
1 replies
6h33m

Meme words attract other meme words. On average people's brains tend to operate on simple reductive trends, things get grouped with over simplified patterns. You can fight it but they'll just express the same ideas in double speak if you make it a no no phrase. I wouldn't use it personally but like what OP is saying, it used to he "neoliberal" then that became boring/overused so they invented "late stage capitalism" as the new bucket to throw every criticism of modern economics into. Likewise with "cultural Marxism" for popular social justice trends.

There will be a new phrase for these same groupings that we'll all get upset about in a few years once these get fully played and become taboo.

Apocryphon
0 replies
3h18m

It’s not a no-no phrase because it’s taboo; it’s a virtue signifier that denotes the user is a meme-parroting, trend-following, partisan rube. It’s gauche.

dmix
1 replies
6h38m

If you look at trends Late capitalism must be when markets became increasingly top heavy with ever escalating layers of state intervention favouring mega corps and entrenched players. Which resulted in things like the housing supply crisis or the destruction of small banks, where the banking market was reduced to 5 megabanks because after every market fluctuation new rules get added which only megabanks can afford (and these rules keep coming and coming https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/business/banks-capital-ba...). There's a ton of other examples in pharma, retail, farming, etc.

After the next few media cycles of AI doomerism and fear mongering we're probably going to see the same thing with AI where any minor risk is intolerable to gov technocrats so they'll make controls where only some megacorp like OpenAI or Google, who has friends and lawyers in the right places, gets to operate with a green light and small players will need to hire a team of lawyers and developers to enforce an ever growing list of controls.

hotpotamus
0 replies
5h30m

You don't need state intervention to get monopolies; actually it's quite the opposite - economies of scale push for consolidation, and you eventually need government to intervene. Whatever it was known for, the Gilded Era doesn't seem to be associated with large-scale government regulation, but you certainly had mega corps. And given enough leeway, the mega corps will start to take on functions you'd normally associate with government - company tows, stores, and scrip as examples.

throwawayqqq11
0 replies
5h20m

Id argue that neoliberalism is not just a meme and what the author, i think, refers to with LSC is an underlying systemic property of capitalism, that tries to do its capitalism thing in a saturated world.

Capitalism is great in growing, greed is not per se bad but these capitalist incentives start to cannibalize everything once growth hits deminishing returns. The "good capitalist times" end exactly here. Thats what makes it "late stage" (e.g. after the european conquerors took the americas, where growth was still easy. Or consider the chinese development).

You think this incentive structure, which actually explains well enough recent developments and can be seen pretty much everywhere -- you dont even have to actively look for it -- is just a meme!? To me, this smells like your bias to unreasonably dismiss the far-radical-left explanation. Your loaded language (like mine here) lets me suspect a distorted perception.

tdb7893
0 replies
5h51m

So from my experience most of the people using it won't think there was a "good capitalism time". I think the prevalence of that term is used to evoke the idea that continuing for too much longer on the current path is impossible without something major breaking. The ecology of the planet is slowly going to shit, basic necessities like housing and medical care keep getting more expensive, and pay for most people in real terms has been stagnant (even with huge productivity gains).

In contrast to that corporate profits are off the charts but there's the sense that they are getting that by squeezing everything else too much and eventually something is going to give and it's just a race between whether what breaks is the planet, the labor force, or the broader structure of society.

Take this all with a bit of a grain of salt though as this is just why it's caught on in the particular circles I run in.

burnerburnson
0 replies
3h36m

Most socialists only hang out with other socialists. This has tricked them into believing capitalism must soon be coming to an end because everybody they know hates it.

It's pure delusion. Capitalism isn't coming to an end any time soon. None of the candidates for the 2024 election are even close to being anti-capitalist.

VBprogrammer
12 replies
7h40m

I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.

_heimdall
4 replies
6h23m

edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along

I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is.

They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.

VBprogrammer
1 replies
6h14m

I think you've misread my comment. I have found copilot for example to be really useful for searching for things like how to pull out part of a log like using common bash commands. I can generally evaluate what it comes up with pretty well; having used all of the commands before but just not using them on the daily basis which would make it easy for me to come up with the initial version on my own.

On the other hand asking it the population of Azerbaijan is problematic. I'd have to Google whatever it told me.

_heimdall
0 replies
5h54m

Looked again and I absolutely misread it, I somehow completely missed the "things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate" part. Sorry about that!

AYBABTME
1 replies
5h38m

Can't they technically be supplemented to report their confidence level along with their output? Afaict there's ways to do it.

_heimdall
0 replies
5h11m

But what does a confidence level even mean for an LLM? "Truthfulness" would be limited by the original training set, compounded by the fact that the LLM loses context when effectively compressing the original dataset down to the LLM's final model.

A confidence level could be helpful to know how much competing data was considered by the LLM when predicting each word, but it would say nothing of truthfulness or even accuracy relative to the original training data.

k_kelly
3 replies
5h23m

It’s far more 5D chess than that.

Search costs nothing to run relative to ad revenue. Microsoft makes each query require 100x the cpu usage because users expect an LLM answer for results.

Microsoft’s share of search goes from 1% to 5%. Their cost go up but their sale of ads increases and they get valuable IP.

Google loses 5% share of market but its costs go up 100x.

Google can no longer finance its other bets like Cloud so effectively.

Microsoft meanwhile has a more compelling cloud offering.

Google starts to lose more ground on Cloud.

Amazon (not an AI company) lose ground to both.

Classic Art of War, if your opponent is strong, attack somewhere they are weak.

sgu999
2 replies
3h51m

Is your point that MS is diversified enough to absorb the losses of eating up Google's share in search even with the now higher costs?

k_kelly
0 replies
40m

Microsoft can afford to make a less profitable product for search than Google because if Google competes it’s a net win for Microsoft.

AI has many other profitable uses for Microsoft but specifically using it to compete with Google Search seems like a poison pill.

VBprogrammer
0 replies
2h17m

The point, as I understand it, is for Microsoft the additional cost of making their search return results as a LLM is pretty small as compared to their overall business.

However, they will force Google's hand into moving their whole search load over to LLM to avoid loosing market share to Bing. This will cost Google a lot more as search is a much bigger part of their business.

It's an interesting theory but I wouldn't know enough to evaluate how likely it is.

bigallen
2 replies
6h43m

I will be devastated when (hopefully if!) this happens. If I use a standard search engine to look up a question, I typically get endless “okay” results with piles of moneygrabbing shit mixed in. If I ask chatGPT, I get a contextually relevant, straightforward answer that is probably as accurate as anything else I could reasonably find. It’s like a breath of fresh air

renegade-otter
1 replies
5h33m

Sure, but for now. ChatGPT results will also be enshitified, and since the cycle of everything is much faster now, it will take much less than 20 years.

kmac_
0 replies
39m

Nah, the fruit hangs very low here, I bet that fine-tuning with ads is in MS and Google backlogs already. Try to ad block that.

rchaud
11 replies
3h11m

These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads.

There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, surely they could have come up with something in 25 years besides ads that made money and could stand on its own two feet. Instead, there is:

- Youtube (unprofitable 18 years running)

- Android (dead in the water w/o Samsung)

- Google Cloud Platform

- Google Workspace

- hundreds of smaller projects that were sunset

For all the non-Ads people lamenting the end of the good ol' days, has there been any reflection from them on the fact that all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?

GNOMES
3 replies
2h47m

Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment.

I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices.

Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani...

It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance

rchaud
1 replies
2h32m

The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s.

Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded.

Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.

Apocryphon
0 replies
2h23m

There was a time when it felt like HTC made every smartphone. Of course, that was very early in the history of smartphones, and mostly because HTC phones were often not branded as such, so they were almost like the mystery manufacturer behind everything.

Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

wilsonnb3
0 replies
2h8m

there was an article earlier this week talking about Apple overtaking Samsung for the first time that has some good numbers

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...

6gvONxR4sf7o
2 replies
2h42m

I know ads are their behemoth, but aren’t some of the other groups you listed large enough to be considered huge companies in their own right? You always hear about products getting shut down at google because they “only” make $100M a year in profit or whatever. They may not be as successful as ads, but they sure are successful.

(… at least until they get shut down for not being as successful as ads)

rchaud
1 replies
2h29m

Yes, Youtube for example could certainly be spun off into its own company. But Google (or is it Alphabet?) has always resisted this. We do know that YT is not profitable, so I imagine they can't spin it off and charge market rates for GCP hosting.

6gvONxR4sf7o
0 replies
2h6m

Are they unprofitable like amazon was for a long time, where there’s a switch laying around somewhere they could choose to flip, or is it the other kind?

vishnugupta
0 replies
1h56m

all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?

Not only were they not profitable they wouldn't even get funded if not for the money printer of Ads business.

sidcool
0 replies
1h25m

Monetization aside. They have produced or augmented some of the most widely used products

serjester
0 replies
29m

Who said YouTube is unprofitable? They brought in 30B last year - if they’re unprofitable it’s because of accounting magic to offset other parts of the business.

behnamoh
0 replies
1h54m

Google keeps YouTube for its massive dataset to train its (unsuccessful) multi-modal language models.

herval
10 replies
7h0m

"Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious."

Big Tech in a nutshell

coldpie
6 replies
5h36m

Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.

moritzwarhier
4 replies
5h24m

Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary.

So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.

coldpie
1 replies
4h32m

Sorry, I was (trying to) use the same term as the person I was replying to.

moritzwarhier
0 replies
4h25m

Should have answered to that then, sorry. Was just a quick lunch break thought.

tuukkah
0 replies
4h43m

"psychotic" seems to have been a typo as the subheading is "Psychopaths".

mcmcmc
0 replies
2h53m

To be fair, with the rampant drug abuse in Silicon Valley (particularly hallucinogens) I would not be surprised if a lot of those execs have experienced psychosis.

mlrtime
0 replies
5h4m

"psychotic" is being thrown around as the new "narcissist".

Basically anyone with some personality trait that I don't agree with is now a "psychotic".

smugglerFlynn
1 replies
36m

I asked ChatGPT to turn this comment into rap verses:

  (Verse 1)        
  Yo, Larry and Sergey, smart minds in the game,
  But corporateness was a puzzle, they couldn't tame.
  Recognized they didn't know, that corporate twist,
  Hired some psychotic pricks, on a business tryst.
  
  Empowering minds, in a pattern so bold,
  In the world of business, where stories unfold.
  Can't spill all the beans, gotta keep it tight,
  Litigious whispers, in the wealthy night.

  (Chorus)
  Big Tech in a nutshell, where stories unfold,
  Wealthy and litigious, secrets kept untold.
  Larry and Sergey, on a corporate quest,
  Psycho pricks hired, put their skills to the test.
  
  (Verse 2)
  Silicon Valley, where the genius minds align,
  But some dark shadows, in the corporate design.
  Gonna keep it vague, won't spill the tea,
  Litigation looming, in this industry.
  
  Psychotic pricks, in a business ballet,
  Dancing with dollars, every single day.
  Can't ignore the game, it's a tech chessboard,
  Larry and Sergey, their legacy stored.

  (Chorus)
  Big Tech in a nutshell, where stories unfold,
  Wealthy and litigious, secrets kept untold.
  Larry and Sergey, on a corporate quest,
  Psycho pricks hired, put their skills to the test.
  
  (Bridge)
  Patterns emerging, in the tech terrain,
  Money talks loud, can't escape the chain.
  Silent whispers, in the boardroom air,
  Corporate dramas, with a cold-eyed stare.
  
  (Verse 3)
  Silent nights, with secrets in the code,
  Big Tech stories, on the wealth road.
  Gotta keep it hush, can't break the seal,
  Litigation battles, real-world ordeal.
  
  Larry and Sergey, pioneers in the mist,
  But the corporate game, got a twist.
  Psycho pricks in the business game,
  Litigious whispers, ain't that a shame?
  
  (Chorus)
  Big Tech in a nutshell, where stories unfold,
  Wealthy and litigious, secrets kept untold.
  Larry and Sergey, on a corporate quest,
  Psycho pricks hired, put their skills to the test.
  
  (Outro)
  In the world of bytes, where the secrets stay,
  Big Tech tales, in the light of day.
  Larry and Sergey, in the corporate spin,
  Litigious shadows, closing in.

tadfisher
0 replies
18m

This works great with the instrumental to "311 - The Continuous Life".

amadeuspagel
0 replies
3h44m

"If only the czar knew."

jqpabc123
9 replies
5h32m

This is really mourning the human condition.

This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity.

I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't.

I watched as even my own family ignored my warnings and succumbed to the allure and promise of "free service" without really questioning why or how it was possible.

Some yearning deep inside the human psyche drives people to just "believe" in the impossible without questioning. Those who recognize and tap into this typically don't have altruism as their objective.

"Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished --- to the surprise of few even though some holdouts still refuse to accept it out of fear for what it implies about themselves.

PaulDavisThe1st
8 replies
2h24m

"Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished

I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture.

The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate culture successfully. Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all.

If you want to "not be evil", you must be prepared to remain small, and probably niche. That doesn't mean you're unimportant, but you're definitely not Google as we know it today.

Apocryphon
5 replies
2h17m

People forget how common this cycle reappears in tech. Jobs founded Apple in opposition to IBM culture alongside Wozniak the ultimate hobbyist tinkerer. Musk was lauded for open-sourcing Tesla’s patents, ten years ago. I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s. Though some of this was just public posturing, of course.

varjag
3 replies
1h12m

I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s.

Uh, about that…

Apocryphon
2 replies
41m

I said at the top of the decade, not at its end.

varjag
0 replies
4m

Microsoft was a broadly accepted villain throughout all 1990s, only a matter whether one despised or adored that.

PaulDavisThe1st
0 replies
38m

The letter to hackers ("hobbyists") was actually from 1976:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Microsoft were never the good guys, not in the 80s, not in the 90s, not ever.

PaulDavisThe1st
0 replies
2h5m

All correct except the Microsoft part. They were never seen as the good guy, thanks to Gates' "Letter to Hackers" in the 80s. MS may have started small, but they were always about "let's make lots of money".

jqpabc123
1 replies
2h5m

Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all.

You are free to believe as you choose.

I believe they were fully aware of the nature of their work and who was funding it before the company was ever formed. And they worked to counter any realistic public perception of it.

Email conversations in 2012 between the NSA chief and Google executives, including Brin, were uncovered, inviting the Google heads to a classified threat briefing.

https://www.grunge.com/640181/the-shady-history-behind-googl...

PaulDavisThe1st
0 replies
1h11m

2012??

Google was founded in 1998. 2012 is 14 years later. I'm fine with the argument that they had already abandoned "Don't be Evil" by that point in time.

duringmath
9 replies
7h59m

Things were better when I was younger and still worked there

I don't know how much of it is a perspective thing but it's probably a decent amount.

coldtea
8 replies
7h13m

"Things were better when I was younger and still worked there"

You make it sound like having actually worked there, and knowing how Google was, versus what it is now, is a bad thing, that somehow "taints" your critique.

It's, on the contrary, one of the most important prerequisites to be able to evaluate current Google.

closewith
5 replies
7h3m

The real issue the OP has is that they’re aging and seeing things differently. The Google they remember never existed - it’s just how they felt at the time.

sanderjd
2 replies
6h46m

Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!

coldtea
1 replies
5h44m

It makes me cringe to think people believe any mention of the past and comparison to the present is automatically some age-induced hallucination, as if reality doesn't exist, changes never happen, and (in this case) 2024 Google isn't a much shittier version of the older Google.

Radim
0 replies
4h9m

You're just too old to understand! :-)

When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *

There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.

One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.

* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.

coldtea
1 replies
5h46m

Well, a Google existed then, and a Google exists now. Has Google always been the same, so that we can attribute any note of it changing, to "aging and seeing things differently"?

This is a kind of gaslighting ("Google was always the same, your experience of it in a previous state is irrelevant, you see things that never existed because you're older").

Tons of real world changes have happened to Google, the people, the culture, its reach, its products, its business practices, between 1998 and 2024. Things obvious even to people who weren't there - and of course more obvious to people who have been there, but in any case not things that are subjective as to whether they happened, but concrete things, documented in news reports and press releases, shown in the product line, and so on.

And many of the things that changed between 1998 and 2024, changed in the part between 2010 (when TFA's TB was hired) and 2024.

Similar to how Apple was different in 1977, different in 1984, different in 1992, different in 2000, different in 2008, and different in 2024. That's not some personal subjective hallucination, it's a hard fact.

You can say "Google was good/shit then to be that way, and it's equally good/shit now, even though it has changed in several ways".

But you cannot say "Google was always the same, it's just you 'seeing things' if you see it as having changed", because that's absolutely and objectively wrong.

closewith
0 replies
4h3m

Nobody's claiming nothing has changed, but that's not the source of the OP's grief.

duringmath
1 replies
7h6m

Sure, but it comes with its own biases and a certain conviction about how things should be.

coldtea
0 replies
5h43m

And why would the conviction of "how things should be" should be assumed to be wrong, and the way things are now should be taken as better?

Is 2024 Google better than 2010 Google? How about 2001 Google?

verisimi
8 replies
7h41m

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that.

It was marketing spin - and I bought into that.

I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from a more messy handmade internet, into a corporate one. A way to dominate and intercept everyone's actions online when searching. And you have to say, it was a good strategy! Do the younger generation even know that there are pages outside of the corporate held companies?

robertlagrant
4 replies
7h32m

I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money.

I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.

closewith
2 replies
6h49m

I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.

robertlagrant
1 replies
6h12m

Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites.

I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.

Apocryphon
0 replies
2h38m

SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent.

But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building.

I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.

Peritract
0 replies
5h30m

It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money.

It's easy to think you've bought a utopia; money buys a lot of blindspots.

vintermann
1 replies
6h58m

I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm.

It just occurred to me - it's almost a too stupid theory to be true, but you should never underestimate this kind of corporate stupidity - the name change to Alphabet, maybe that was part of telling the actual alphabet agencies, "We're on your side"? One thing is sure, Schmidt really, really wanted to have a good relationship with Obama's state department.

hello_computer
0 replies
3h32m

Assange's encounter with the big G, as documented in his "When Google Met Wikileaks," leaves little to the imagination on how tightly Google has been integrated with the US Department of State.

gumballindie
0 replies
6h38m

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that.

It was and is a factory. Like chrysler and ford before them, and the mines before them.

fidotron
7 replies
6h52m

There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success.

Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that.

More controversially Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement, and with that came floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead. That agreement was bad but the absolute avarice among modern tech people is stunningly depressing for those of us that have been around to see the change.

Google mainly remind me of SGI, and it is their office after all.

fancyfredbot
3 replies
5h33m

floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead

Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?

DanielHB
1 replies
4h59m

More

fancyfredbot
0 replies
4h0m

Another great service big tech has provided to the world then!

yedava
0 replies
46m

I would say less if they had stayed on Wall St. The past decade has laid the groundwork for an Orwellian society. Digital communication and commerce is now centralized to a few big firms and that is going to hurt us as a civilization.

mlrtime
0 replies
4h59m

Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement

And 1000's of non Google and Meta employees have benefitted from this, so I say this is good.

The argument may be that this invited the wrong type of people to VC. I would say, They were already there, just not as obvious.

lxgr
0 replies
4h46m

I don’t know about marketers, but being allergic to design by itself does not yield a good product. At best it’s orthogonal to it; at worst – see Amazon.

Apocryphon
0 replies
3h34m

The articles about how Google uses A/B testing to determine the optimal shade of blue are what ended data-driven design.

puchatek
6 replies
5h49m

I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or something like that.

YoshiRulz
3 replies
3h42m

It violates copyright, yes.

If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).

osmsucks
1 replies
2h41m

Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to shout at me multiple times about it (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Geographical_s...).

matkoniecz
0 replies
22m

t bundles edits together in one big changeset

have you enabled manual uploading (that needs to be done in settings and warns about need for triggering regular uploads)?

or have you edited just before and after air travel, and enabled plane mode before changes had chance to upload?

wharvle
0 replies
2h51m

Facts like that would be more likely to be a T&C issue than a copyright one. Unless you scraped the data as screenshots that you presented directly to the user, or something nutty like that.

Of course, if Google decided to fight it as a copyright issue you’d still probably be screwed, even if you were in the right.

treyd
0 replies
3h36m

The thing that makes me woefully unable to switch from Google Maps is how it's nicely integrated with the MBTA APIs and understands transit connections better when planning routes than anything else I've tried.

It's really the kind of thing that municipal and state governments should come together on and build common protocols so when Google is inevitably forced to break up we can take the pieces of Maps and make it less of a lever for monopoly power.

Obscurity4340
0 replies
5h44m

Try MagicEarth

amadeuspagel
6 replies
3h50m

“Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number.

But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.

Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile.

Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.

SadCordDrone
3 replies
3h29m

There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile.

That's because kids are dumb and have no attention span to read anything.

Source: I am from the same generation you talk of.

amadeuspagel
2 replies
3h8m

Reading is a skill. The more you read, the better you get. The laptop encourages you to surf (and surfing is reading), the phone encourages you to scroll, usually through images and videos.

Attention span is a separate issue. I lack the attention span to watch a short youtube video, but I can easily read long essays.

SadCordDrone
1 replies
1h56m

The phone is not that bad for reading.

Granted, reading PDFs is harder. But reading webpages is mostly fine.

When I started using phones, I didn't have the luxury of high speed internet and multimedia-focused apps. I should probably be thankful for that.

amadeuspagel
0 replies
44m

The phone is good for reading, but not good for surfing, which is where the motivation to read comes from.

the_doctah
1 replies
3h48m

Tik tok as a search engine on mobile? Huh? Does it search outside its own content?

amadeuspagel
0 replies
3h41m

No, but that's exactly why kids prefer it on mobile. It's a consistent experience that loads fast and doesn't show a cookie banner between every step.

alimbada
6 replies
6h40m

Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate

I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that "<X> works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.

stevage
2 replies
6h1m

Yeah there is nothing that doesn't work fine on FF.

Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.

jpc0
0 replies
3h23m

YouTube and Google Drive large file uploads sorted? Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load?

If so I will be very excited since I want off of Chrome but for work it was broken last time I check and that was like early December.

Perz1val
0 replies
4h13m

I use chromium browsers (Brave), only because of the dev tools - I'm just not used to Firefox devtools and don't want to invest time in learning their quirks.

marginalia_nu
0 replies
3h3m

It's the other way around, Chrome acts as a funnel that leads users to the Google ecosystem. It's a huge part of their sticking power.

This is accomplished both by how integratred it is with Google Search, but also by making competing technologies awkward or impossible to use, like bookmarks and RSS feeds, which used to be relatively big back in the day.

aorth
0 replies
4h6m

I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years.

Yep, me too. A conscious decision on my part. I run Firefox Developer Edition, though (which is essentially Firefox Beta). It has a comfortable freshness somewhere between stable and nightly.

NoGravitas
0 replies
22m

I have a dedicated Google container in my Firefox for when I need to use a Google-owned site. It might be less essential now that third party cookies are dead, but I'm fine with belt and suspenders.

gardenhedge
5 replies
8h35m

I got a $90K bonus that year

That's why they liked google.

roenxi
3 replies
8h15m

I see you've attracted at least 2 downvotes. Never really gotten any insight into the minds of the downvoters myself - and in this case you can only be right. It isn't like the current wave of blog posts are talking about the wonderful place Google is in culturally. They're pointing out that Google - under the stewardship of people who've been at Google for a long time - is converging to the corporate culture mean.

If they're working at a company and they're just watching it drift to the mean, we can safely conclude that they're in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that, but let us not get distracted by razzle-dazzle on the side. People work because they get paid.

pgeorgi
2 replies
8h5m

It's moving from "paying the bills plus ..." to "paying the bills". Since the latter is _kinda_ important, it's difficult to let go when the "plus ..." part has left the building (and stopping that from happening is beyond the management level of most) - moreso, when there's no obvious place it went to that you could follow.

roenxi
1 replies
7h51m

The plus was contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing that is Google.

Google was - still is - a lot more responsible than most companies with that responsibility. But the risks are high and obvious. How good are these people at assessing this "plus"? I'd rather just be in it for the money if I were involved in Google. Being in it for the money is a respectable thing.

pgeorgi
0 replies
7h22m

Not sure if people consider "contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing" a benefit based on which they choose their career preferences.

It's more "pays the bills plus doesn't consider you merely a cost center", "pays the bills plus lets you try weird stuff of your interest with ~unlimited infrastructure at your disposal". _That_ was the appeal of Google. Not anymore.

On the other hand, the advertising machine (however you want to characterize it) is still alive and kicking, so that part isn't gone.

frou_dh
0 replies
7h34m

Who knew psychological analysis was as easy as homing in on a sensational tidbit? Masterful stuff. /s

throwawaylolx
4 replies
7h21m

It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around.

A pseudo-communist critique of Google.

But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.

A nostalgia-driven critique of Google.

This post is a bit of a mess. There is valid criticism too, but it sounds like the author doesn't know exactly what he doesn't like about Google anymore.

I can also say I used to find better articles on HN but clearly the userbase of this website has changed, despite the guidelines trying to insist HN doesn't change and it's just a "semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills". No, HN is worse just like most of the tech space.

Apocryphon
3 replies
3h29m

A nostalgia-driven critique of HN and of tech, delicious

Tim Bray has been shared on this site for the last seventeen years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&q...

throwawaylolx
1 replies
3h1m

None of this is relevant to my comment.

Apocryphon
0 replies
2h47m

Your comment isn’t very relevant.

timbray
0 replies
59m

Wow, didn't know about that, thanks. But the query has to be "timbray" not tim bray

ZeroGravitas
3 replies
7h32m

"Psychopaths" seems to be a running theme in the various reminisces that people are sharing in comments here on Google stories.

test77777g
2 replies
5h58m

I’ve noticed developers have a pretty low bar for being a “psychopath” I’ve found psychopaths to mostly be people that see programmers as disposable. This is pretty much true, hence the psychopaths everywhere.

marcosdumay
1 replies
2h40m

Hum... Seeing people as disposable is a quite reasonable definition for that word.

test77777g
0 replies
1h42m

No it’s not, you’re just seizing on a particular word to warp the social perception of what I said.

hello_computer
2 replies
6h9m

Zero self-awareness. Larry and Sergey "empower(ed) psychotic pricks" because they are psychotic pricks. Look up how Larry talked to his marketing team in the early days, or his dalliances with subordinates (i.e. Melissa). Birds of a feather. Like attracts like. "Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage. The comic books are more on-point:

You Either Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain
wharvle
1 replies
2h42m

“Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage.

I dislike that term, but do think post-war optimization of management and finance have built toward… something, which we are now in, which is different from how things were earlier in this process (50s, 60s, at least part of the 70s) and certainly different from pre-war American capitalism.

Calling it “late” seems silly though.

Apocryphon
0 replies
33m

The financialization of everything

eigenvalue
2 replies
5h0m

What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered.

Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s operating profit and stock price start falling and all their best developers jump ship to better companies (this part has already started). Then they will fully follow the model trailblazed by such erstwhile innovators as Polaroid, Kodak, and Xerox.

pcurve
0 replies
4h54m

I agree about the Sundar and Satya comparison, but I also feel Microsoft has always been in more stable position in terms of diversified revenue sources and its stronghold in business / enterprise market that served as platform for growing other lines of their business.

Apocryphon
0 replies
3h30m

What makes it late stage is that these decrepit monopolies or pseudo-monopolies are so ensconced in their markets that the share price will not fall appreciably long after calcification has set in.

Wonnk13
2 replies
7h33m

Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it (acknowledging I'm only one of nearly 150k employees) was basically IBM with better food.

hn_throwaway_99
1 replies
1h49m

I'm glad you posted this. Honestly, while I agree with the flood of recent posts mourning Google in the wake of their layoffs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 ), some of these posts (not necessarily this one by Tim Bray, as he left Google a decade ago, but certainly lots of the other ones) kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth because they strike me as a bit self-serving.

That is, I think folks generally have seen, and commented on, Google's rot for many years now. For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so, whenever Google drastically reduced the differentiation between ads and organic results, and began loading more and more ads into the top or the results page. I felt it was the first actively user hostile change that was solely in the service of revenue for Google. So I feel it's a tad rich that all these posts are coming out from ex-Googlers lamenting Google's decline now that it's really affecting Google's employees personally. I guess in their defense it seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be posting/commenting while they were currently Googlers, but still, it seems a bit lacking in insight/introspection to see all these posts pointing to the demise of Google's culture as when they had "uncaring" layoffs. I'm thinking, no, Google's demise started a decade-plus ago; they could just paper over it for a long time with good food.

ipnon
0 replies
1h30m

In companies of this size it takes decades to expire from the mortal blow. All the while investors crowd around and give reassurances of a full recovery. Always optimize for the long-term.

wscourge
1 replies
12h55m

While the article's content brings nothing to my life whatsoever, I did enjoy your writing style.

amelius
0 replies
8h41m

?

ericyd
1 replies
3h36m

I really don't understand people who throw their arms up in exasperation and wonder what alternatives exist to Google (or other big tech) products. It's takes a little dedication because it's not as easy as using a conglomerate, but there are a bunch of easy and stable alternatives to core Google products just a... ahem... internet search away.

scythmic_waves
0 replies
3h15m

My personal exasperation is less about being unable to find alternatives (e.g. [1]). It's more that those alternatives aren't 1) as good, 2) free, or 3) part of the same platform.

And even if I use an alternative, my friends, family, and workplace do not. So I'm still fighting the use of Google products after I stop using them.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google

defanor
1 replies
5h5m

I thought the non-evil phase of Google is commonly viewed to be considerably earlier, sometime before Gmail (2004). While the article mentions 2010 as still being in it. I wonder whether by 2040 somebody will lament the good old Google of 2024.

Zetobal
0 replies
5h1m

I guess we are talking about the time before they literally scraped it from their mission statement?

camdenlock
1 replies
2h3m

Anyone who unironically uses the phrase “late capitalism” or “late-stage capitalism” is outing themselves as a deeply silly person.

Apocryphon
0 replies
32m

Just replace it with Cory Doctorow's enshittification, or platform decay.

bogomipz
1 replies
3h27m

"And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives."

I wished the author had elaborated on both of these points. Can people say what are the things that Google can't find? What do people consider the compelling alternatives in 2024?

user_7832
0 replies
3h1m

I think Kagi, and MS Bing/copilot are considered “good” nowadays.

wslh
0 replies
3h5m

It is the moment in history to create new services with the mission of "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.".

Stay tuned. One of them will be first published in a few months here.

willvarfar
0 replies
8h40m

Hot on the heels of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655, today is going to turn into pining for the past google day :(

I remember everyone wanting to work for them, back in their cultural heyday...

tortoise_in
0 replies
2h5m

Google plus and hangouts were best

swader999
0 replies
3h2m

The author's calling out of 'Late Capitalism' is misplaced. Oligarchy, monoploy, cronyism, corporate and state collusion, corporate dominance in election funding are all anti competitive and lead to nothing representing Capitalism.

robofanatic
0 replies
5h39m

Everything is a “No Evil Zone” when money flows freely.

prepend
0 replies
5h56m

For now, here’s the direction I think I’m going: Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests.

This is my approach. I used to really like google products. Not I keep chrome to run the google products I haven’t gotten rid of yet.

nbittich
0 replies
5h1m

I remember the day I decided to switch from Yahoo to Google, finally I could find relevant things on the internet. It was in 2001 iirc. At the time I really thought Google will never become the corporate mess it is now, it felt like a cool company.

nailer
0 replies
6h7m

Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.

No. We were losing all our staff to Facebook and embarking on Google Plus, giving ourselves bonuses for 'success' in social. The last major successful google products had already stopped being produced (last one was android, which deliberately siloed itself off from the rest of the company). Wave team negotiated a huge bonus with no success criteria and then left the company. We threw serverless away because the App Engine team didn’t feel like doing their jobs. It was fucked by then too. Maybe everyone else just didn’t know it.

matt_s
0 replies
5h34m

Big Tech can't be immune to human psychology and how we have organized ourselves to do work for hundreds of years. Any organization beyond some size starts to exhibit bureaucracy, politics, in-fighting, sociopaths, etc.

Would a different corporate structure have different outcomes? (i.e. not mimicking medieval fiefdom structures that allow peasants/individual contributors to make bank) I think if massive profits and growth are the goals then this will always be the way things go when those goals are achieved. Look at any other large corporation and you'll see the same things. In Big Tech the massive money one can make via stock/bonuses means the gas pedal is on the floor as the car speeds towards dysfunction.

lumost
0 replies
3h34m

The mammal metaphor may not be accurate. This period could easily be equivalent to 2000-2010 where for the most part, big tech continued to exist and layoff while small firms struggled.

The giants of today weren’t particularly giant back then, but we famously had the balmer era, Cisco’s decline, and Yahoo’s slow death.

Presuming that interest rates stay high, it will be difficult to justify speculative bets in tech. Even SaaS models may see investors discount future cash flow potential. This means investors will look for higher payouts from existing firms, and underinvest in new firms - a few new firms will have special privileges due to who invested in them and what they do.

lgkk
0 replies
1h55m

The problem with these companies is the stat padder employees these days.

How many people do you genuinely know who are actual well.. engineers or at least creative minded?

90% of the people I meet these days (I’m in Bay Area) who work in tech just want to get these companies on their resume. People whose bio is basically I’m ex meta ex Amazon ex google.

When most of your employees are only in it for the money and prestige, and nothing more, imo this dullness and stagnation is what you get.

It’s quite toxic.. a culture focused on TC instead of creativity and earnest. Just people chasing a check for the sake of it.

Compare that to the innovations that came out of these companies prior to the mid 2010s. Everything “cool” since then has just been to support their massive scale and not really to promote new and interesting things.

Just my opinion.

kosolam
0 replies
4h25m

Well, this is definitely TLDR. That said, I don’t mourn Google - nostalgia is for the privileged. Google is pure evil, and should be dismantled.

knorker
0 replies
5h0m

Some context here left out that may matter is that it looks like Bray left Google a decade ago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbraysoftwareguy/

Reading this it wasn't clear if this was a recent inside view, at outside view, or a historical inside view.

gdsdfe
0 replies
5h32m

I think it's time to disrupt the disruptors and stop longing for what was and what wasn't

gdiamos
0 replies
1h19m

“Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”.”

That sounds pretty negative about people who were “good at business”.

How is that different from engineers who join because they wanted to be cool?

frankfrank13
0 replies
2h37m

Its interesting that Google always staked itself on "being google-y" and now that its lost that its not clear what value prop it has to new hires beyond brand name and high pay.

Other companies that are highly corporate, and have never tried not to be (or at least in 20+ years), are not having an identity crisis -- Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.

bogwog
0 replies
4h36m

Google used to be truly great. Their business was inherently evil, yet they were somehow not. They actually did good, and as a naive highschooler with a programming hobby, they inspired me to try to be the best I can at it.

But they crashed hard. Almost as soon as I started college, they began the quick descent into evilness (about the time Pichai became CEO).

They're irredeemable at this point, and the only solution left is a breakup or a massive amount of regulation. Still, I think Google is unique among the tech giants because they really were a force for good at one point. That's why I hate them the least, even though they're probably at #2 or #3 in the evil leaderboard.

aws_ls
0 replies
3h53m

Good post. But it ended as soon as I was sinking in deep to read it. Not blaming, just felt it ended abruptly.

amadeuspagel
0 replies
3h49m

Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests.

Using a different browser for different websites doesn't make sense because of links.

As web user and web developer, a browser that's made by a web company is aligned with my interest, not a browser by a company for which the web is a kind of tax haven, a way for companies to avoid paying the 30% tax they're supposed to pay when selling to their users.

TomMasz
0 replies
5h2m

His take on Google's search is spot-on. It's not totally useless but it no longer stands apart from everything else. Who in 2010 would have predicted that?

Marazan
0 replies
2h27m

The sad slow death of Google Search is close to genuinely upsetting.

At one point it felt like Google cared about defeating SEO spam. Now it feels like they actively encourage it.

ImaCake
0 replies
5h47m

It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around.

Blaming “late capitalism” for google’s institutional problems provides absolutely zero insight. Rapidly growing orgs have turned rotten since ancient times. OP’s other comments on institutional dysfunction are more informative and it made this well worth the read.

Sorry for your loss OP, it sounds like google was once a great place and I hope you find something like it again <3

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
6h14m

> a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”.

Lot of that, going 'round...

AlbertCory
0 replies
1h41m

The best things about being there were things I'd probably never be able to do anywhere else:

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o...

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t...

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-more-a...

Oh yeah. I did do some work, too.

23B1
0 replies
5h4m

I can't decide if I feel sympathy or schadenfreude for these googlers getting laid off.

On the one hand, they're humans going through a hard time. On the other hand, to what degree should I hold them responsible for the hostile monopolistic panopticon they contributed to building?