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Culture Change at Google

zamfi
105 replies
12h6m

Is any company still like this?

I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.

At some point the real world just gets in the way.

0xpgm
57 replies
11h39m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?

Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.

Did Valve corporation do something like that?

tavavex
34 replies
11h23m

I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have that "infinite abundance" mindset - their initiatives in game development, hardware and VR are probably subsidized by Steam many times over.

poisonborz
30 replies
10h14m

I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

Ntrails
16 replies
10h1m

I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success?

There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

tigroferoce
8 replies
7h9m

I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days.

One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network). Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).

And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.

PoignardAzur
2 replies
6h12m

Youtube failed to become something big? I think you've lost yourself in your argument a bit.

tigroferoce
1 replies
4h41m

It's not that it's not big. It's that it's not as big as it could be. It's not gmail-big or maps-big, at least for me. It is outclassed by many other, in their respective niches (video streaming, music, and social networking), and despite the huge efforts, Google never managed to turn it into a subscription-based service.

It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.

Kakashi4
0 replies
4h11m

Atleast according to average daily watch time reported in 2019, Netflix was at 164 million hours and YouTube was at 1 billion. I doubt that ratio has changed much since then

aleph_minus_one
1 replies
6h20m

YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big

Before YouTube there was Google Video, which was moderately successful (it was just that YouTube was more successful, so it got acquired).

tigroferoce
0 replies
4h40m

I strongly believe that Google Video would have been killed by Google long ago. They bought YouTube because they couldn't create it themselves. And they never managed to turn that into a real product, IMO.

But there are just my opinions, of course.

trinsic2
0 replies
35m

I don't know about that, they made some good products, or invested in ones that already existed.

I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.

I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.

asoneth
0 replies
3h32m

I think YouTube is bigger (by profit, revenue, customers, or total hours used) than Netflix, Spotify, and Tik Tok.

See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation

Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...

PokestarFan
0 replies
2h23m

How do you think YouTube failed? If you tried to get someone to name a search engine that's not Google, they could maybe think of Bing or DuckDuckGo or something. If you tried to get someone to name a email service that's not Gmail, they could maybe say Outlook or Yahoo if they're older. But try to get someone to name a user-generated video platform that's not YouTube? YouTube has comparable revenue to Netflix. And Netflix has direct competitors -- such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ to name a few that are pretty big on their own right.

adrianN
3 replies
8h41m

Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.

lmm
1 replies
8h23m

I think that's their point. If Google or Facebook had stayed with a Valve-sized team and stuck to their knitting, would they really have made any less money?

sokoloff
0 replies
3h48m

Would this preclude buying Instagram? That was considered expensive at the time, but I think was a great buy for them and is a significant part of keeping Facebook competitive now and for the next half-decade.

Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.

antupis
0 replies
7h50m

both had slump but I think Facebook has been much better shape after Zuck did layoffs and pivoted away from metaverse. Llama and Meta Smart Glasses both feel like groundbreaking products.

indigochill
1 replies
6h7m

There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve.

What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...

* EA/Origin

* Epic

* Ubisoft

EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).

Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".

I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.

Apocryphon
0 replies
1h49m

There’s GOG, but they seem more niche for retro/hardcore gamers.

gloryjulio
0 replies
9h31m

For some reason steam is really just better than anything else combined. Maybe except gog as it's drm free

LarsDu88
10 replies
9h43m

And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.

I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.

imadj
4 replies
8h18m

yet they[Valve] crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.

Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died.

Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you mean "Meta Quest"? Literally, each division within Meta is fighting in a different sector

Valve has been operating in the same market for 27 years and has consequently built a loyal and enthusiastic fan base.

Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.

robertlagrant
1 replies
7h48m

Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.

Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.

Apocryphon
0 replies
1h47m

People don’t care to.

internet101010
0 replies
2h31m

From a customer perspective Valve is undisputed. Nobody opens any other marketplace unless they have to.

Aeolun
0 replies
8h4m

I think he’s talking about the Index and their new Linux console

ilrwbwrkhv
4 replies
8h48m

Valve also has much better hackers than Facebook.

Eisenstein
3 replies
8h26m

Since VR was mentioned tangentially, how many 'Valve hackers' is one John Carmack worth?

Aeolun
1 replies
8h3m

Zero, right now, as he’s not working with Facebook any more.

Eisenstein
0 replies
3h40m

I guess everyone takes everything seriously now and there is no light banter anymore...

edgyquant
0 replies
6h49m

I don’t know, how many combined are worth -500 million? Think just one is worth literally hundreds of million more than him all things considered

raxxorraxor
0 replies
6h42m

Same can be said for a company like Microsoft or Google. They have their core products and milk cows for years.

And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.

ShamelessC
0 replies
4h10m

Steam doesn’t exist without Valve’s catalog of games and especially Half-Life 2. Its continued success can’t be simple luck given how much competition they have, although at times it does seem like Microsoft, Google (Stadia), Epic, Ubisoft simply want Steam to win.

keyringlight
0 replies
6h42m

Valve had the advantage of Newell/Harrington starting the company with a pile of money from being former MS staff, which gave them the ability to say "when it's done" for their first game. As the resulting first game was a hit and they didn't owe much (if anything) to their publisher Sierra [1], from that point on they've kept rolling the success forwards. Being a private company there's no details I'm aware of on how much has been taken out of the business, although Harrington left not long after Half-life.

[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.

briffle
0 replies
11m

I remember the forums (and slashdot comments) just hammering valve for thinking of creating steam and introducing DRM to their games, and that they would never, ever use it because of that.

But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.

amadeuspagel
0 replies
1h58m

There's a classic tweet I remember about Valve, about someone who finally learned who his boss was the day he fired him.

eru
4 replies
9h50m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.

Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.

rapnie
1 replies
9h43m

Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse'

I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.

eru
0 replies
9h36m

That's plausible, and perhaps what Mr Zuckerberg had in mind?

But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.

(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)

deltaburnt
1 replies
4h18m

Their employees and executives make the majority of their income from RSUs. You can't exactly run a company if your entire workforce gets a huge pay cut each year from a poorly performing stock.

refurb
0 replies
4h7m

That’s a great point as well. People blame investors but at FAANGs the workforce itself are investors and very important ones since they’ll bail if the stock stops going up.

fuzztester
2 replies
8h50m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.

SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.

Update: Looks like they are:

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

[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]

jasode
0 replies
8h3m

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:

No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025

Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...

cool_dude85
0 replies
8h42m

If SAS is the paragon of a company not pursuing growth at all costs, then maybe we do need to start looking at quarterly metrics. As a customer their business model sucks and they are doubling down on "either we're a solution for your whole enterprise or else."

sotix
1 replies
3h22m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.

zucked
0 replies
2h2m

Bingo - you hit the nail on the head. Keeping the investor pool small and close-in is how you avoid this. If you go public, eventually you will succumb to this "growth above all" mindset, even if your culture was set up to resist it.

I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.

raincole
1 replies
11h33m

I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees.

It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.

Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.

michael-online
0 replies
3h41m

I agree, I'm in awe of SideFX and have a lot of respect.

They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.

bitcharmer
1 replies
9h33m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value

refurb
0 replies
4h3m

You think employees will stick around when their vested options are underwater?

It’s not the MBAs alone that demand an increasing stock price.

KoftaBob
1 replies
6h46m

pay off the VCs then don't go public?

The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?

zucked
0 replies
1h58m

Unpopular opinion - avoid taking VC cash at all costs?

roenxi
0 replies
9h17m

There is actually evidence that the market doesn't demand growth - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=JpB4 suggests that the market is chasing the base rate of monetary creation.

If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?

refurb
0 replies
4h9m

It’s not the “growth at all costs” mindset at all.

It’s growth period.

It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.

But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.

You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.

That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.

nonameiguess
0 replies
4h27m

Financial markets in general do not demand this. As someone else said, the return expected is just a basic risk-free rate plus some compensation for the added risk of owning equities instead of treasuries, which isn't nothing but it doesn't mean you need to double in size every year indefinitely.

The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.

Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.

kmlx
0 replies
6h50m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.

for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.

jjav
0 replies
10h38m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

If you go public, no way to prevent it.

You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.

JeffSnazz
0 replies
9h31m

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Growth and private investment are part and parcel.

brcmthrowaway
26 replies
12h4m

So the real answer is to join the next Google.. :)

OpenAI?

nequo
23 replies
11h58m

What is the company culture of OpenAI like? How does it compare to early Google?

CobrastanJorji
19 replies
11h43m

Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....

tavavex
12 replies
11h17m

providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.

CobrastanJorji
9 replies
10h53m

I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI.

Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it.

OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.

tavavex
4 replies
10h36m

I think the characterization is unfair to generative AI, because the information that is retained in the model is a very lossy and rough generalization of the training data - that situation is a lot less direct than what it's like with search engines. In my mind, the lawsuits against search engines have a lot more ground to stand on. Saying that something "provides access to copyrighted content" almost implies that there's some mechanism that allows the user to wholesale download complete, unedited and exact copies of some copyrighted material - I could see that argument with a search engine, but not really with a text or image generator.

saiya-jin
1 replies
10h18m

Well, you certainly have right to your opinion, as do others to theirs. Law is the ultimate arbiter as usually.

Radim
0 replies
7h32m

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law"

Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.

It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.

piva00
0 replies
9h16m

It's 100% dependent on copyrighted material at least, even though you can't access an exact copy of it without access to the material it wouldn't exist. It's a messy issue, I have no idea how it will be solved since it's a rather new development for humanity, in the past when humans would collect knowledge from different sources to use them in a novel way there would be at least some kind of attribution, recognition of the sources, either being cited or acknowledged in a preface. With GenAI there's nothing, and probably not even a way for GenAI to tell us where it got "inspired" from to generate something.

It's going to be a very messy landscape for copyrights and intellectual property in the next years.

TheOtherHobbes
0 replies
3h55m

You should look up the definition of "derivative work."

I agree that Google should have been forced to pay licensing fees, and OpenAI should too.

We know from history that's unlikely to happen.

dougb5
3 replies
10h5m

A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world; rather, they suck the marrow out of all the text and art and everything in the world and use it to sell their own replacement service for all the text and art and everything in the world. Google has done some questionable things to become a gateway to the world's work, but they're (mostly) still a gateway, not a copy.

broeng
1 replies
9h8m

Maybe we can agree they are still _mostly_ at gateway. But their ambition to answer your question through zero-clicks (i.e., show the answer right in their search results) does make them profit from direct copying. The copyright owner will not get any clicks, show any adds, or get any other kind of feedback to their work, in those cases.

dougb5
0 replies
2h28m

Yeah, for sure, Google wants to show the answer on the results page, and for many search queries they're able to achieve this in one way or another -- either through the knowledge graph, the question-answering slop, or in the snippets of text pulled from the search results themselves. They do, at least, show links to sources in these cases, which is better than ChatGPT (or Bard, to the extent that it's used). But I agree that there's not a lot of short-term incentive for Google to cite sources in a prominent way, and there is a lot of incentive for them to develop features that replace the websites that made them valuable in the first place. There's always been an uneasy bargain between Google and webmasters, and there's always been a tension between what's best for the Google user, best for Google, and best for the Web. If there's a similar bargain with OpenAI, I don't see them approaching it with nearly as much respect: source attribution has not been prioritized in any meaningful way.

LunaSea
0 replies
6h5m

A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world

They do, juste look at all the art being generated that uses well known brands and characters.

leereeves
0 replies
10h59m

In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up.

Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.”

Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said.

https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...

apwell23
0 replies
4h41m

basically being already solved.

Whats the solution ?

glimshe
5 replies
9h0m

providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.

executesorder66
3 replies
8h19m

How is calling out violations of the GPL license helping copyright trolling?

If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.

sokoloff
2 replies
3h33m

Citation very much needed, in particular if you're claiming that OpenAI would need to GPL license the OpenAI code ("their stuff") in order to provide the answer (as opposed to the lesser question of whether the code in the text of that answer ought to be covered by GPL).

dns_snek
1 replies
1h9m

GPL stipulates that derivative works must be licensed under GPL.

Just because an entire industry has their entire future riding on courts eventually deciding that "Yeah, but copyright doesn't apply to AI", that doesn't make it so.

sokoloff
0 replies
48m

Indeed; I think there's a genuine question as to whether the output of ChatGPT is a derivative work under the law or under our feelings of what's moral.

I've read a lot of code in my career, much of it GPL. When I now write code, it's based in part on that previous code reading. I think most people agree that doesn't mean that all code that I write must be licensed under GPL. In other words, they agree it's not derivative. Even if I write a C strcpy implementation that's functionally identical to one in glibc, I think most of us agree it's not derivative, even if I've read glibc's implementation before. Or if someone asks me "how can I write strcpy in terms of memcpy and strlen?" and I answer them with code I write that's very close to glibc's implementation.

Is AI-written code fundamentally different from bio-intelligence-written code in that regard? (I think the answer is uncertain in terms of "how should it work?", not that it's clearly one way or the other.)

gardenhedge
0 replies
8h32m

Is the NYT lawsuit cartoonish too?

ulfw
2 replies
11h46m

I didn't see Google's board fire it's CEO and then he gets reinstated and basically fires the board.

Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.

saagarjha
0 replies
9h22m

That we know of, at least.

CSSer
0 replies
11h40m

To be fair one could argue that was still in vogue at the time…

choppaface
1 replies
10h37m

Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...

mciancia
0 replies
7h42m

Is that bad?

poisonborz
8 replies
10h18m

Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.

sparrowInHand
6 replies
9h53m

This is because, states at some size become immoral power machines deeply distrusting one another.

JeffSnazz
3 replies
9h26m

This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.

edgyquant
2 replies
6h27m

States are rational actors though

red-iron-pine
0 replies
2h58m

when in the history of anything was that the case? democracies make terrible choices, with voters often voting against their interests all the time.

dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).

TheOtherHobbes
0 replies
4h2m

You're confusing "rational" with "competitive", which is neoliberal sleight of mind.

There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.

nwatson
0 replies
6h10m

Beau of The Fifth Column (Justin King) emphasizes ... states/countries don't have friends, they have interests. He delves into specific cases all the time and is one of the clearest-eyed political commentators out there.

Eisenstein
0 replies
8h19m

That sounds like it is true, but is it really? I'd love to read a well written hypothesis which goes through a cause and effect and is backed up by at least some peer reviewed research.

KineticLensman
0 replies
8h6m

no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine

I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.

nicoburns
3 replies
8h50m

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies

foofie
2 replies
8h47m

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies.

It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.

andromeduck
1 replies
7h52m

just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out

sokoloff
0 replies
3h35m

Market sorting it out: "Lots of Employees, Inc licenses our key technology from [and pays large royalties to] Just One Employee, Limited."

altaltson
1 replies
3h40m

I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.

Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.

The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.

flakiness
0 replies
33m

You don't remember it correctly, or there is a typo. All manager firing happened at 2001 not 2011. And it was not PMs but people managers.

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

2-718-281-828
1 replies
10h18m

You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.

IX-103
0 replies
2h37m

Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in.

*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.

yard2010
0 replies
5h20m

Man I wish I could be infected with this disease

raxxorraxor
0 replies
6h46m

I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.

neilv
0 replies
11h37m

Thread from yesterday on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569

baron816
42 replies
12h21m

Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.

But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.

So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.

voiceblue
15 replies
12h19m

The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.

tonfa
11 replies
10h41m

Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. Buchheit was asked to work on it.

aspenmayer
8 replies
8h26m

I thought Gmail or its predecessor was a third party/acquihire situation?

wyclif
7 replies
7h52m

No, Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He also developed AdSense as part of Gmail.

aspenmayer
6 replies
6h16m

I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?

_heimdall
3 replies
6h3m

YouTube was a huge early acquisition for them around 2005 or 2006.

aspenmayer
2 replies
6h0m

True, although I thought there was another big one whose name escapes me. Any ideas?

Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.

_heimdall
1 replies
5h56m

Looks like Wikipedia actually has the full list.

DoubleClick and Waze are two other big ones that I remember seeming important at the time.

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

aspenmayer
0 replies
5h23m

Thanks for that list! One of my favorite Wikipedia-isms are these very “list of” pages.

I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History

https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

From that page:

As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized.

[…]

While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.c...

Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_...

some_random
1 replies
2h42m

Google Earth was an acquisition (formerly Keyhole), maybe that's what you were thinking of.

aspenmayer
0 replies
1h52m

I think that was it. I replied to this point downthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054947

I’d be glad to hear your perspective or thoughts in this thread or as a reply to my post re: Google Earth/Keyhole.

veselin
0 replies
4h28m

The product they often presented as started in 20% time is Google news. I don't know the actual details, just this is what I remember from my time at Google (2006-2012).

jasode
0 replies
7h24m

>Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is.

It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia:

- >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1....

The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project:

- >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.” : https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...

mike_hearn
2 replies
8h16m

It's not a myth. I had a successful 20% project when I was there and I was nobody special. I started an anti-bot system in 2010 and by 2014 it had become integrated into most of the top products. Last I heard there is a whole team working on it still, and there were also spinoffs.

That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.

It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.

I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.

I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.

voiceblue
1 replies
4h39m

I appreciate your comment and anecdata, and I’m glad you commented here.

That being said, I’m not sure whether it is you or I who does not know what “quasi” means.

mike_hearn
0 replies
4h28m

I think we both have a quasi-understanding of the word :)

huevosabio
14 replies
12h18m

They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP.

Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.

vlovich123
13 replies
12h7m

Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons:

* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google

* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP

* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk

* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).

It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.

Uehreka
6 replies
11h9m

Code at Google3 is one giant monolith

I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo.

Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there too? Is Chromium in there too? What about the whole golang project?

Even if I’m off about some of this, it feels like the statement “Code at Google is one giant monolith” needs some qualifiers.

rightbyte
2 replies
10h48m

Ye, like, is there a google.exe at 3912GB with 10k command line options like '--search-server --port=80' or '--Gsolitaire'?

why_only_15
1 replies
7h43m

no, there are thousands of Blaze build files that each have their own binaries, tests, libraries, etc.

vlovich123
0 replies
19m

To be fair though, the baseline hello world C++ binary is quite hefty (10s or 100s of MiB - can't recall) & comes with a bunch of command-line options & an HTTP server out of the box. Or at least did when I was there & I doubt it's changed much. All that functionality is to integrate the baseline set of SRE ops tooling that are common to all services that are deployed on Google servers (eg. HTTP server is to support scraping for performance monitoring integration similar to Prometheus/OpenTracing). It's mildly annoying because any command line tools you write pick up all of that useless functionality but it is easy to teach so trade offs.

summerlight
0 replies
10h27m

Note that google3 is a subset of the entire Google codebase. But it still contain more than half of its code (>2B LoC), mostly those running over their cloud. In contains all the infrastructure code as well, including Linux kernel, compiler, tool chain... literally everything needed. When you build some big binaries, you may see more than 500k~1M build targets analyzed and built (or pulled from cache).

morgante
0 replies
10h48m

There are certainly a few notable exceptions (Chrome and Android), but google3 really is a massive monorepo.

It does contain forks of tons of open source code in the third party folder. I don't recall if the Linux kernel is in /third_party but I would not be surprisied if it is.

A fair amount of the operations are actually documented publicly, ex. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...

dilyevsky
0 replies
10h46m

Android, golang, chromium and a few others were separate but there were 2B+ loc of other stuff in that repository

eastbound
3 replies
11h36m

So, Google’s choice of architecture prevents them from open-sourcing or maintaining projects a tad longer than absolute necessary. I’d say they dug their own grave, if it has such a large impact on the trust of customers. Maybe Google3’s architecture was excellent for worldwide scalability and costs, but let’s see which one matters in the long term.

_heimdall
1 replies
5h59m

Google and their codebase architecture have been around for a while now in the scale of software lifecycle. How far out do we need to wait before its "long term", and how will we know if failure was from decades of business decisions vs repo architecture?

eastbound
0 replies
4h44m

Let’s say their repo architecture didn’t help soften the blow of various business decisions of abandoning products.

There was a time when Google was also Guava and a myriad of Java libraries helping the rest of the world. It’s a design choice, they chose to stop helping, because of their repo. Perhaps it also helped avoid leaks, since copied code can’t be used outside of Google.

vlovich123
0 replies
4h43m

I listed many reasons why open sourcing wouldn’t make sense and you seem to have hyperfixated on just one.

Yes - Google chose a monorepo because of the engineering and business advantages it gave them. For example, all binaries had a common dependency that implemented all sorts of common functionality they found binaries on their servers needed out of the box - that’s why a simple c++ hello world on Google3 results in a many many mib binary that includes an http server for performance monitoring. It’s an opinionated codebase but the opinions are largely documented and explained and aren’t crazy (just because you may make other decisions or prioritize things differently doesn’t mean Google’s choice are wrong). And again, please don’t hyper focus on what I wrote as “oh it only has this one advantage”. There’s lots of advantages and I’m just giving very basic examples. It’s been a fairly long time since I worked at Google and someone who works there is going to have a more authoritative explanation of how things work now as things will inevitably changed some.

You may say they dug their own grave while the internal teams find it helps them run services and maintain things because there’s 1 way of interacting with the artifacts of lots of different teams. And they weren’t going to open source EOL projects anyway and maintenance decisions have nothing to do with google3 and are product and engineering led decisions.

Also, they have a bunch of tooling to manage open source projects that mirror google3 projects. It’s doable for projects that care / who it’s important to but it is also a lot of work (eg can write rules that bidirectionally rename files, functions, c++ namespaces, comments that can strip out code before outgoing synchronization, etc etc). if I recall correctly the tool itself was open sourced too.

As for customer trust, again I point out that not only is the Google3 aspect a minor detail, open sourcing wouldn’t even impact customer trust in a large way. It might with a certain segment of the technical population, but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust. And any open sourcing also has to find motivated maintainers who are not going to be motivated by 0 pay and a huge amount of bug reports and feature requests from users who started with maintenance support of paid engineers and focused product vision. Make sure not to extrapolate your own predilections as a tech engineer onto the general population.

wyclif
1 replies
11h53m

Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.

cjmcqueen
0 replies
4h43m

I'm hard pressed to remember a feature in Wave that does not exist in Docs now. What is it that you miss? I just remember it being dog slow with a lot of latency.

eftychis
4 replies
12h7m

The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name.

There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.

If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.

saagarjha
1 replies
9h17m

They do that, this is what their various Labs and subsidiaries and internal accelerators are there for. The issue is that people figure out it's associated with Google and then expect it to be maintained as such.

Vinnl
0 replies
4h22m

I do wonder how people figured out that Google was associated with Google+, Google Inbox, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Video, Google Wave, ...

(I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)

eastbound
1 replies
11h26m

There is little to no “this is an experimental project by x team”

They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long.

Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1].

[1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...

khuey
0 replies
1h27m

Google Domains was born in 2015, exited beta in 2022, and was killed in 2023.

Rebelgecko
1 replies
11h27m

FWIW, the only person I've ever actually met with a 20% project was working on quantum

cjmcqueen
0 replies
4h48m

I had several 20% projects from 2012 to 2016, all of which were on the Cloud Business side (ie not engineering). It was very much a thing up until Larry Page stepped down as CEO

skybrian
0 replies
12h12m

Even in the early days, I don't believe Google was all that fast about launching new products? The "fail fast" stuff was about people working on blue-sky ideas that failed to get traction before they were launched, or maybe just launched in Google Labs [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs

mizzao
0 replies
11h52m

I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.

mcmcmc
0 replies
9h18m

So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.

lutarezj
0 replies
11h25m

https://gcemetery.co/ Google’s reputation is not only in innovation

redcobra762
41 replies
11h22m

Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving.

This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.

treprinum
22 replies
11h7m

My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

SkyMarshal
12 replies
11h2m

What alternatives do you recommend for email? That's my one google service I have difficulty getting away from.

the_third_wave
5 replies
10h44m

Self-host, easy. No matter the hordes of detractors who will tell you this is impossible and that all your mail will be /dev/nulled by all the usual suspects (Microsoft, Microsoft and Microsoft being the main culprit here, Gmail comes in second) the truth is that you'll be fine as long as you make sure to configure things like SPF and DKIM correctly and you're either using a smarthost for outgoing mail (ask your IAP whether they provide one) or are on a reputable network.

A SBC like a Raspberry Pi is sufficient to host mail services for a fairly large number of people. Filter out spam with Spamassassin and a greylist, run sieve to organise your incoming mail flow, use specific mail addresses when communicating with commercial and government organisations and you'll end up asking yourself why so many people insist that self-hosting mail is not an option.

Now that you're self-hosting mail you can also self-host XMPP using the same address making it possible for people to reach you through either SMTP (mail) or XMPP (instant messaging/voice/video calling) using that address. This can be hosted on that same SBC without problems.

Source: my own experience self-hosting mail (and more) since the 90's. If it worked on a 486DX2-66 it should work on a quad-core 1.5GHz 64-bit ARM...

the_third_wave
3 replies
3h13m

It would be interesting to hear why the armchair experts clicked that vote-down arrow instead of reacting. The fact that you think self-hosting mail can not be done does not mean others can not do it. If you happen to work for a mail hosting company and feel you need to grey out potential competition that'd be understandable (if fraudulent) but otherwise I do not understand this reaction. Does the fact that others can self-host make you feel insecure? Does the fact that this gives those people freedom and the opportunity to evade censorship threaten you? Let's hear it, I'm interested in understanding the background for this ever so common reaction to any suggestion of not letting the experts handle things like this.

skazazes
2 replies
1h18m

I'll bite. I am willing to bet the majority of people down voting you are more than capable of hosting an email server. But like me, see it as not worth the potential risks involved.

Before even considering why someone might not choose to do so, I would like to point out that selfhosting email is not even that hard to do nowadays. I spent a couple hours a few years back manually setting up a stack on a dummy domain just to see if its as hard as developer circles make it out to be. It was not. Furthermore a quick search today nets half a dozen docker containers you can spin up that claim to be one stop solutions for email. If even a fraction of them succeed in what they claim you could self host email with one command and an env file. You could even use the dockerfiles as a template to run the software on metal, its all there.

Even with this newfound knowledge, and as someone who tries to selfhost equivalents to any service I find myself using regularly, I would never attempt to host my own main emails. My bank accounts are linked to my emails, my investment accounts, my insurance, my loans, things that I am not willing to risk compromising my ability to access as the result of some sort of overly prideful sentiment.

Just because someone has the ability and knowledge to host their own email does not mean they should or would even consider it.

SkyMarshal
1 replies
58m

Those are all good reasons not to self-host, but none are good reasons to downvote someone advocating self-hosting and providing some useful info about it. I don't get the downvote-brigading here either, especially on a hacker website.

skazazes
0 replies
43m

Fair enough, I assume the down votes came as a result of the tone.

SkyMarshal
0 replies
57m

Thanks, I was hoping someone would provide an update on self-hosting too, in addition to service recommendations. I may test it out, thx for the info.

unethical_ban
1 replies
10h51m

I use Protonmail. Free tier I think, but I pay $10 a month for a bundle that allows custom domains, calendar, VPN, and storage.

atomlib
0 replies
9h17m

You pay $120 per year, not $10 per month.

johannessjoberg
1 replies
10h49m

Fastmail is great and worth the small cost imo

slices
0 replies
3h52m

aren't they still in Oz, with its govt mandated backdoors?

brodo
0 replies
5h37m
Doctor_Fegg
0 replies
10h27m

Runbox is good.

selfawareMammal
2 replies
11h1m

After being in multiple orgs and having been in touch with c-suite, I have suspicions that lack of total empathy and psychopathic tendencies are a must to get to really high social-based positions.

saiya-jin
1 replies
10h12m

They are practically a must just to get there... to thrive in this 'layer' of society, a person is quite far away from regular average human in various worst ways possible

treprinum
0 replies
23m

I know headhunters that specialize in identifying highly functioning sociopaths for leadership roles. But experiencing total dehumanization of others first-hand and subsequent rise of that person is something one never forgets.

the_gipsy
1 replies
10h35m
InCityDreams
0 replies
8h58m

the Gervais Principle

Which it's not really, as it only considers the US version. "The characters portrayed here are based upon other characters that RG invented."

operatingthetan
1 replies
11h0m

undiagnosed psychopath

Eh, I've seen these in every kind of company, none are immune.

com
0 replies
10h7m

If you’re in a business still in control of your own destiny, you could do what we did and keep a weather eye out for sociopathy-aligned behaviours and gently work them out while minimising danger.

It worked reasonably well at one place I was at for about 8 years, estimating one of those characters popping up every 200-500 hires.

It’s the strategic side to your internal integrity function. Typically recruit folks who are lightning rods for these kinds of behaviours: young, female, brown, queer members of staff - don’t forget reception annf cleaning personnel! - and train them (often not necessary!) to spot abuse of power, bullying, threats and gaslighting and to confidentially report it.

Catch people with these behaviours early and divert the smart ones, fire the dumb ones. Sure, you’ll lose your next CEO, but did you want to work for that kind of person?

foofie
1 replies
8h51m

My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

I had a boss who was a manager at one of Google's flagship products, and he made it his point to not let anyone forget it. He pushed people to work nights and weekends, he berated team members and threatened firing them during daily meetings, he overrode engineer's calls to not release a product to claim he released it before schedule, he threatened the same engineers if anything went wrong during the illadvisable release, etc.

He was since hired as a VP of engineering of another global company.

euroderf
0 replies
2h30m

"The typical company is like a septic tank.

It's the biggest chunks that rise to the top."

elektrontamer
13 replies
11h18m

How is that even possible? Won't he just get exposed in the first performace review? Or is he in some cushy managerial role?

romanovcode
11 replies
11h3m

I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud.

The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job.

That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that experience because I was just starting out, the scammer indirectly taught me much more about how to scam and lie your way to the top, how to sell your ideas to unaware management and most importantly - that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.

boxed
5 replies
10h55m

You learned how to assume the world is broken, and not fix it. That's the path back to a hunter gatherer society. I think that's the wrong lesson to learn.

Intralexical
1 replies
10h5m

Hard agree. But yet, what became of the one who did try to fix it?

protomolecule
0 replies
9h39m

He left that shitty place early and lived happily ever after?

vkazanov
0 replies
9h13m

This might sound rough but the lesson should be "don't be an idiot".

Time for shouting "king's naked!" comes eventually but people who ignore timing will end up losing this game. The secret to this is to understand how other decision-makers see the status quo. Who made a bet on this person? Who understands that he is THE problem? Is right now the best time for a direct opposition?

And sometimes it's just easier to accept that it may make sense to work elsewhere.

sumtechguy
0 replies
2h44m

I had one project where there were about 10 people working on it. Shipped about 10k units. Doing decent but not hockey stick money. Until we hired one guy. We went from a 10 man team to 2. He could not get along with any one. No one could approach his amazingness. He would triangulate people and get them kicked out of the group. Soon those 10k units and 5 customers were getting rather pissed off as nothing was getting done other than giant presentations. He really wanted to be a manager in 6 months.

Before he could infect another group with his special touch I politically maneuvered him into the most boring of tasks that no one wanted to do. He had run the one project into the ground. At the right moment I used his own triangulation manipulation bits on him. I had to become that which I despised to basically take him out before he did too much damage. I had him shunted off to a task that if it was done no one cared. It was a pity too as he was a competent programmer. But had too much of an ego to listen to the other decent programmers around him.

Moral of that story? There are jerks out there that will take out a well functioning team and not even see they are doing it. Beware of them. The world is not broken. But there are those who start fires because they like to make messes.

romanovcode
0 replies
10h44m

I learned how big companies function and how to get ahead quick. The two things - politics and competence are not mutually exclusive.

jjav
3 replies
10h34m

that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies

My experience (5 startups) is that office politics are 100x more important in small startups. Everything is more concentrated, including the politics. That's why there is so much cofounder drama to go around.

At least in a big company there's a lot of inertia and process to tone down the politics a little bit.

taurath
0 replies
7h8m

Goodness yes. Your relationships literally are your career at small startups. Your reputation means everything. Not to mention the nepotism and the privilege - the people with truckloads of money meeting for dinners afterwards while those who’ve had to budget a house payment in 10 years go for a beer.

shiroiuma
0 replies
9h14m

Yeah, I agree. Anecdotes like the GP's just show that big companies aren't immune to these problems (and some big companies are better-run than others). These problems can happen at any company. My experience, at both big and small and also medium-size companies, is that smaller companies usually have much less process and procedures, and can vary greatly from one to another. Big companies have evolved procedures and processes to try to mitigate these human problems. So, for instance, you're much more likely to see sexual harassment and discrimination in a smaller company: if the guy who owns the place is cool with it, it'll be the norm there. Huge companies don't get to be huge these days by tolerating that stuff, and they have a lot of money to lose in a lawsuit, so they put a lot of effort into insulating themselves: anti-harassment training for employees, etc.

ljm
0 replies
4h59m

Funnily enough my experience of politics was far worse in a larger, more established company than a smaller one.

Maybe a different kind of politics, but it was toxic as fuck and my career was basically at the mercy of heads and directors that I would never have reason to interact with. Hit a bump on a project that causes a delay? Expect some higher up to threaten the prospects of the entire team unless we got it done on time.

Most of the people engaging and benefitting from such cut-throat politics and gossip had no right to be in such management positions. Non-existent leadership skills.

Tiny startups can be equally rough but at least it's more direct.

OJFord
0 replies
5h57m

that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.

's/big //'

rightbyte
0 replies
11h3m

Your boss got no clue how hard or easy your work is usually. Even if he is a good programmer you need to more or less work side by side to get a grip on someones performance.

And smooth talkers game peer reviews.

mrintegrity
0 replies
9h54m

I was at a big conference in Dublin years ago where a Google talking head stated to hundreds of people that "google only hires the most intelligent people" with a grotesquely smug look on her face, instantly turned me off from ever considering applying to work there. Incidentally RMS was also there and screamed from the back "WHICH BSD LICENSE?" when the Google drone said google uses "the bsd license", which I thought was hilarious.

gumballindie
0 replies
6h24m

This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me.

What ruined it for me was interviewing ex googlers. Not the PhD levels, but IC. To be fair none passed the inteview. Perhaps it was just the UK google offices. Similar for facebook. At facebook some of the people I know working there are abolutely vile. The types that threatened their coworkers and somehow got away with it. Each organisation favours a certain type and it all comes down from the top.

choppaface
0 replies
10h34m

Former friend joined Google and started hitting his pet (violently and angrily) and doing heavy drugs. Anthony Levandowski might be an outlier at Google for criminal behavior as well as total comp, but there are plenty of Googlers who you want to have nothing to do with.

cageface
0 replies
10h17m

Two of the worst colleagues I ever had also went on to thrive at Google. It’s been hard for me to take their claims of only hiring the best since then.

red_admiral
29 replies
7h4m

There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot:

... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal.

Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get.

I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.

Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.

nostrademons
12 replies
5h26m

Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Googlers.

Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.

swozey
5 replies
3h50m

You had to pay.. 4-5k/mo for daycare, at work?

I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left.

Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits.

A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and wanted a bar or something added for them.

I've never worked anywhere with a daycare except a Golds Gym in high school so I'm not familiar with how they usually go.

swexbe
4 replies
3h39m

That’s crazy. Couldn’t you basically hire a day-time nanny for that price?

nostrademons
3 replies
3h21m

Going rate for a nanny is about $25/hour or about $4000-5000/month in the Bay Area, so yes, it was roughly the same price. I know many, many Googler families with daytime nannies, night nannies, multiple nannies, etc.

The two main things you got with the in-house daycare was a.) consistency and b.) convenience. I have a teammate whose kid went through the Google daycare; she said that at the time (over a decade ago now), it really was quite high quality, and because the caretakers were in-house employees of Google, they had passed the same high bar as the rest of Google employees. (I've also heard that this - like many other things about Google - has gone downhill in recent years, and that people whose kids went through post-COVID dealt with high staff turnover and inadequate care.) Meanwhile, almost everybody I know who uses nannies for full-time care has had horror stories about finding a reliable nanny. Some are flakes who don't show up to work; some seem to have perpetual car trouble; some are neglectful; some always have their boyfriend come over and spend more time with him than the kids; some get fired for putting the kids in danger. Nannies are not licensed, unlike daycares. It's very much parent-beware, and a lot of people don't have time to search for a good nanny, hire them, and monitor them to make sure their kids will be safe.

There's also just a convenience benefit from having your kid on-site. You can share commutes; you can use the carpool lane; your schedules are identical; you can pick up your kid in a blink if they get sick; you know they're always close; you don't need to coordinate logistics with a nanny; your time schedules will overlay; and so on.

matsemann
2 replies
3h5m

and because the caretakers were in-house employees of Google, they had passed the same high bar as the rest of Google employees

I wonder what the equivalent "why are manhole covers round" and "reverse this linked list" questions are for a caretaker.

archagon
1 replies
2h55m

If anything, Google should ask prospective engineers how they would corral a room full of boisterous toddlers.

hansvm
0 replies
20m

Oh, they already do that. IIRC, the phrasing was "how do you deal with multi-team dependencies and OKR conflicts?"

ziddoap
4 replies
3h11m

Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists

I might be parsing this incorrectly, but isn't this sentence saying "too many people used the daycare (long waitlist), so not many people could use it"?

dfxm12
1 replies
3h2m

"Nobody Goes There Anymore. It’s Too Crowded" - Yogi Berra

The point isn't about popularity (or not) of the daycare. The point is that on-site daycare isn't a competitive advantage for Google, because it is understood that the perk is rarely available.

ziddoap
0 replies
2h45m

The point is that on-site daycare isn't a competitive advantage for Google, because it is understood that the perk is rarely available/convenient.

Except for the people who filled up all of the slots of the daycare, right? Surely it was seen as an advantage to those people, it was available, and it was convenient.

Which I think was the point of the original poster. Implying that dry cleaning and daycare have the same level of importance is just kind of silly.

However, nostrademons worded it in a way (on another comment here) that my smooth brain was able to parse better, and makes sense/resolves the contradiction I was pointing out.

nostrademons
0 replies
2h51m

A better model is "The daycare was supply-constrained and never expanded at the same rate as Google's employee base, so it ended up having little influence on the overall population." That resolves the contradiction while still being an accurate representation of reality.

It's the same phenomena as the housing market or California's population today. Both are super expensive and not growing. The reason they are super expensive is that they are not growing, while the pool of potential buyers is.

medler
0 replies
3h3m

But the people on the waitlist are not using the daycare. I don’t know the numbers in this case but you could imagine a daycare with 10 slots and 1000 people on the waitlist.

euroderf
0 replies
2h53m

(sometimes as much as $4-5K/month)

That's not a service, that's a profit center !

nigelk
7 replies
5h31m

The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.

It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

apwell23
6 replies
5h21m

is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.

nigelk
5 replies
4h54m

It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.

apwell23
3 replies
4h43m

to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.

oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost

swozey
1 replies
3h44m

Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.

apwell23
0 replies
3h25m

we pay 2k/month here in chicago, so that number kind of makes sense to me.

nigelk
0 replies
4h0m

as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)

MarketingJason
0 replies
3h15m

I'll bet many people were willing to pay that if executives and managers had there kids there. Daycare can provide unique kinds of networking and job-security/promotion options.

alephnerd
2 replies
6h17m

Their onsite daycare was out of the way and oversubscribed. It was basically created for the Wojcicki sisters' children.

swozey
1 replies
3h39m

I'd never heard of Wojcicki. Nor this story from her Wiki. I was curious how a CEO of youtube was worth $800 million.

Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023.

And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..

alephnerd
0 replies
3h18m

That's Susan Wojcicki (former Youtube CEO).

Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the IB turned co-founder and CEO of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife

DiggyJohnson
2 replies
3h11m

Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.

red_admiral
1 replies
2h31m

Stylistic choice, no deeper meaning. I know people who are the sole child-raiser after separating from the child's other parent, and people who are parents but they work full-time and their partner looks after the child.

DiggyJohnson
0 replies
2h4m

Cool cool, appreciate the explanation.

lumost
1 replies
3h4m

I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline.

There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.

red_admiral
0 replies
2h28m

There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents.

Arguably, many already do.

As "main child-raiser" (as opposed to "parent", again a place where this matters) is not equally distributed across the sexes in our society, I would say though that (1.) this does leave you at risk of legal challenges over structural discrimination and (2.) it leaves a bad taste when a corporation one the one hand does this, and on the other hand bemoans how few women in "tech" (or any other sector) they're getting.

Pushing off kids until the late 30s also has a different risk profile if it's your womb those kids might be coming out of.

petesergeant
11 replies
12h8m

Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?

Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.

The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.

It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.

It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place

avgcorrection
2 replies
11h5m

Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?

So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?

galkk
1 replies
10h43m

Noogler - new googler. not “never googler”.

avgcorrection
0 replies
10h30m

When you can’t parody reality because it just outdoes your efforts.

jillesvangurp
1 replies
11h32m

Google is a bit like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. It had lost its way. There was no leadership. Most of what they tried failed or wasn't that great. And yet it was still raking in the profits. And then MS turned it around. All it took was new leadership. They just overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Just a string of good, solid decisive leadership. Satya Nadella turned that company around.

Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.

petesergeant
0 replies
10h48m

Absolutely they need a leader to turn it around, but Apple and Microsoft don’t feel like Google did: it’s still going to be a mature tech giant, run by spreadsheets, even if they can start producing some cool stuff again

glompers
1 replies
11h48m

If historic Broadway theaters in NYC transitioned to blocks of server farms, then many people would have a feeling, "Singing and dancing and live art used to happen here, and that history is worth continuing, here," even if for economic reasons it wouldn't and couldn't anymore. . . and so I don't think it's only wistful or wishfulness speaking.

It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.

jrockway
0 replies
11h24m

If historic Broadway theaters in NYC transitioned ...

We should get a "Landmarks Preservation Commission" for corporate cultures.

Niksko
1 replies
11h12m

It's time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where innovation happens

I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.

petesergeant
0 replies
10h47m

and now there isn’t

… at Google. Which comes back to my point that why should anyone except Google ex employees care if it’s happening there or somewhere else?

riku_iki
0 replies
11h24m

they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets.

or abusing monopoly and network effect.

eesmith
0 replies
11h56m

To dissuade potential employees who are thinking to apply because they mistakenly think it's still like the stories they hear from the old days?

To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?

V-eHGsd_
11 replies
12h29m

i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable.

it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.

anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.

kyrra
6 replies
12h17m

Eric leaving. Larry and Sergey stepping back. And the hiring of Ruth Porat as CFO.

My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.

AlbertCory
5 replies
12h11m

Could be. Patrick was just so perfect as a Google CFO. Only-at-Google. His backpack full of hundreds (supposedly).

But Ruth: she could be anywhere in the corporate world.

V-eHGsd_
2 replies
12h7m

patrick "sorry I missed the last tgif I was running a marathon in paris with my daughter" pichette.

and I don't say that disparagingly. that was endearing.

(i'm probably getting some details of that wrong, it was ... dear lord, a long time ago)

jrockway
1 replies
11h27m

Speaking of TGIF, the day it moved to Thursday is where I start my "beginning of the end" counter.

V-eHGsd_
0 replies
11h7m

it was less fun having beers on a thursday afternoon for sure, but I at least understood the fact that the company had thousands of non-US employees and TGIF on a friday afternoon for us was TGIM for everyone else.

dilyevsky
1 replies
10h43m

Imo patrick was no better with his “we saved 200M on snacks this year oh btw guess what my bonus was”

AlbertCory
0 replies
23m

If you think Ruth and Patrick are the same, I'd hate to work at whatever company you actually admire.

infotainment
2 replies
12h24m

This tracks with what I saw as an outside observer; I felt like around 2015 was the inflection point where Google started its slow arc toward mediocrity.

It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.

k2enemy
0 replies
5h39m

It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.

Another option is that he saw the trajectory of the company culture and wanted out.

V-eHGsd_
0 replies
12h13m

yeah, eric stepped down in 2011 and larry took over as CEO and from the inside it felt fine for a while. but larry definitely got disinterested after a few years and the company felt rudderless by like the end of 2014.

beej71
0 replies
2h0m

We did contract work for them in the early teens. I remember going to various Google campuses and being shocked at how little it reminded me of my dotcom days and how much it reminded me of my Hewlett Packard days.

flklklklkl
7 replies
10h46m

Whenever I see posts like these, whether for Google, or any other company, I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?

I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.

saagarjha
5 replies
9h11m

Fulltime employees at Google are basically the same as any other employee. They get the same benefits, can eat the free food, and generally I haven't seen any serious discrimination against them for being "not engineers". However, some of the things you've mentioned (e.g. building maintenance) are often done by contractors or outside firms, and for them things are often very different.

taurath
3 replies
6h39m

Red badges and the equivalent elsewhere make up an astounding amount of who actually works at most major companies. They’re the poor and working class to the gentry (FTEs) and the elites (FTE executives).

They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties, for goodness sake.

flklklklkl
1 replies
6h8m

While I'm hesitant to give in to my inner cynic, the anecdote about walking into the local, on-site IT in the post about his first day at google linked in the first post, especially stood out in my mind. Someone's manning that walk-in station - do they have the same benefit as the engineers? Half of which allegedly have PhD's, mind you.

taurath
0 replies
5h27m

It’s a person who commutes from Tracy and lives with 5 other people in a 3 bedroom house and doesn’t have health insurance because they can’t afford the subsidized rate nor the deductible. Their mask is impenetrable and only drops once they pull into the drive thru in Hayward for some McChickens to tide them over for the last hour of the commute.

sokoloff
0 replies
2h22m

If I have $100 to pay someone in the US, about 25% of that will go to "fringe" (taxes, health insurance, unemployment/worker's comp, 401k match, PTO/sick, etc) and that percentage is probably higher for lower-paid employees. So, start with $100, fringe expenses take $25-30, agency middleman profit/overhead/flex-risk takes maybe 20% ($20), and the end worker gets $50-55 out of the $100 the original company is paying for them.

That the end worker is getting ~50% isn't that crazy to me. If directly employed, they'd be getting only about ~65-70%. (which is less than the direct fringe ratio because someone has to fade the PTO/sick/hiring lag flex to ensure the trash cans get emptied consistently and the agency is doing that in the other case).

flklklklkl
0 replies
6h21m

Some services are, like you said, obviously done by contractors, but I can't help to think that you rarely see any testament from other employees than engineers to how great an employer Google is, or was, and if you're looking at the bigger picture - while Google's up until recently practically been drowning in cash, they're at the same time outsourcing CS to sweatshops like Teleperformance.

lmm
0 replies
8h7m

I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?

Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)

siliconc0w
6 replies
12h19m

There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.

ptmcc
3 replies
12h16m

And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty.

travisgriggs
0 replies
11h44m

It has always been my theory/belief that long periods of demoralization actually get rid of a disproportionately higher amount of good talent. When the company starts to smell, those that can move on, because they’re in demand elsewhere as well, will do so. You’re then left with those that hope you don’t let them go, but are less confident or capable in their abilities to find employment elsewhere.

antupis
0 replies
11h26m

I think there are two ways. The first is basically what good sports teams do (or Netflix at least was doing) where you continuously fire people who don't perform wanted at levels but also do very rigorous hiring and pay very well. Then there is cut fast and deep and shuffle organization at the same time which also works if you do that when needed and very rarely like once in 10-15 years Facebook might have pulled this and the company looks like it is in much better shape than Google or Amazon.

Clubber
0 replies
5h55m

And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty.

It's a huge red flag. Layoffs typically lead to more people leaving the company after the fact because of the instability. I was one of the "last man standing," after a company did this over a period of a few quarters and I ended up leaving shortly after. They no longer had anyone to maintain their software. Oops.

They taught this in business school back in the 1990s. I don't know why a company the caliber of Google wouldn't understand this. It could be the execs think that Google is such a stellar place to work that none of the remaining people would dare leave. It could be the execs are so self concerned, they don't care about anything other than their bonuses and just make sure to get cuts in before each quarter ends to pad their bonus. It could be business schools just don't teach this anymore.

pants2
1 replies
11h39m

Are the layoffs actually completely random? Is there some reason to do that instead of performance-based layoffs?

yodsanklai
0 replies
8h33m

I suppose every layoff is different, but they are not completely random. There are many factors involved, performance can be one of them. My assumption is that leaders craft some query on the employees list and tweak parameters until they get the right number of people to lay off.

renewiltord
6 replies
11h23m

It's interesting. When I moved to California in 2012, Google was exciting. They had hot stuff, new platforms, very exciting. Six years later, you were hesitant to hire Google people. Today, it's the Bay Area retirement home.

No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.

In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.

tavavex
4 replies
11h12m

I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their careers, and I can't really imagine the kind of a one-in-a-million company that'd be justified in turning down a Google ex-employee based on just their employer.

OsrsNeedsf2P
2 replies
10h44m

He's like 30% correct. Before, hiring someone from Google was an accomplishment, because they were so rare. Now, there's so many people with Google on their resume, most refusing to downsize in TC, that even mediocre positions are filled with ex-Google applicants.

tavavex
1 replies
10h33m

Is that really because Google workers are seen as worse employees (like what the original post said), or just because the job market is now suddenly loaded with thousands of Google employees who'd just been laid off?

lmm
0 replies
7h54m

The one pretty directly suggests the other.

thowawatp302
0 replies
10h43m

I work at one of those SV Fortune 500 companies and I’d absolutely give pause during hiring if I saw google in their resume

I might be an outlier

makerofthings
0 replies
7h10m

I work at Google. Having Google on my CV has been a huge bonus, I get so much more interest from companies trying to hire me and many of them directly reference having Google on there as a positive. I know zero people who are just coasting along, everyone is working super hard. I have seen a few people leave in the last year because they were under too much pressure, despite the pay.

dash2
6 replies
8h38m

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground."

Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

pgeorgi
1 replies
7h55m

Google was most successful when it was "like a giant grad-school". Its downward trajectory coincides with it being run by McKinsey alums.

dash2
0 replies
7h11m

Maybe, but here's an alternative interpretation. Google discovered a money spigot. At first the money spigot funded lots of smart people having fun. (But not making any more money.) Then, as tends to happen, the money spigot attracted parasites. Now the spigot is, if not running dry, at least not growing. Times get tough. Management wants to focus. And so everything is less fun than it was. And the playground culture, which was irrelevant when the spigot was gushing, is an impediment to change.

I think it's fair to say that Google's leadership is also not up to the job. But even if Satya Nadella were in charge, he'd still have to deal with the "grad school playground" aspect, which has as many negatives as positives from the vulgar point of view of making money.

More generally, I want to argue that the common HN meme, "management and politics ruins everything from the point of view of us heroic engineers", is self-serving and naive. Management and politics are how companies run. If you don't want to do that job, fine; if you want to grumble about its pathologies, fine and you'll often be right; but don't kid yourself that it can be avoided.

xyst
0 replies
8h31m

I see you went to the b-school that taught the “cOnJoInEd tRiAnGlEs oF sUcCeSs!1!1”

lordswork
0 replies
5h57m

IMO Google DeepMind is like this today, for better and worse.

knorker
0 replies
7h58m

I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).

Aeolun
0 replies
7h55m

It seems like things were fine for the engineers when they ran things?

What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?

kweingar
3 replies
12h2m

Is there any tech company, big or small, with the same kind of dynamic engineering culture that Google once had?

throwaway2037
0 replies
10h25m

I can think of two: Digital Equipment Corp and Sun. Also, first 10 years of AWS was probably ridiculous good.

pompino
0 replies
8h27m

They permanently harmed the world with their spying technologies, what exactly is there to celebrate of their culture?

V-eHGsd_
0 replies
11h57m

i'm sure there are. but google's arc, the engineering culture wasn't just dynamic, it was dynamic and (apologies to use an eric schmidt-ism) impactful.

hintymad
3 replies
11h23m

Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate.

he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else

At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

piva00
1 replies
9h8m

Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.

I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.

englishspot
0 replies
56m

I've been hesitant to comment on this to avoid sounding "bitter", but you're absolutely right.. it's telling that quite a number of folks are so laser-focused on the money as opposed to the innovation.

at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.

ankit219
0 replies
7h42m

From the outside, it looks like many in the industry assumed Covid-induced changes would be permanent. They hired accordingly, beefed up their headcount and in the process ended up getting a lot of talent which wouldn't have gotten in pre-pandemic. Once you recalibrate, you are not left with much choices.

I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.

hiAndrewQuinn
3 replies
11h57m

For me, the important sentence is "Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things." This is very interesting, but I like that the author notes the outside view, because I still get the feeling I'd like to work there someday.

glimshe
1 replies
8h54m

Don't go to Google unless it's for the pay/benefits (benefits are basically pay in a costume) or for a very particular role which is unmistakably aligned with your professional priorities. You won't find any of the mythological coolness there, literally all of my buddies say. Additionally, when recruiters sell you the position, they try to make it look like you are working at the core of their most important products, when it's generally about some minute pedestrian detail of their internal ecosystem.

hiAndrewQuinn
0 replies
8h37m

unless it's for the pay

Luckily, that's the only reason I do anything at all!

tdb7893
0 replies
6h22m

I just got laid off but working there can be really good. My manager and team were great engineers but also just truly nice and caring people and the pay and benefits were great. On the other hand I found the work to mostly be tedious (for every bit of interesting engineering there was lots of bureaucracy and wrestling with obtuse internal tools).

It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.

heads
3 replies
12h32m

Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else.

There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?

closeparen
1 replies
11h7m

It’s hard to imagine an absence of resource anxiety in the land of the six figure mortgage payment. Must have been incredible.

Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.

lmm
0 replies
8h4m

Everyone else's salary is going up at the same rate, more and more jobs are there, and it's de facto illegal to build any more housing anywhere nearby. Of course house prices are growing without limit.

neilv
0 replies
11h50m

There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?

From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".

Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.

For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.

softwaredoug
2 replies
4h30m

It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.

What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.

I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.

You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.

And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.

lawrenceyan
0 replies
1h7m

Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.

????

hn8305823
0 replies
2h34m

What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends.

A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.

Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.

So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.

siwatanejo
2 replies
10h15m

The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI.

This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).

taurath
0 replies
6h43m

I don’t think the working world is at any risk of going too extreme at valuing employees. It is the exception which is why we’re even talking about it.

Their promotion process probably has more to do with product fragmentation as anything.

ksplicer
0 replies
8h24m

I don't think it's contradictory. There was an amazing ROI for a long time, so I think it was a very successful strategy early on. It's just clear that as the founders retired and more MBAs got a hold of upper management positions the first thing that happened was that the employee psychological safety was slowly eroded. Did you know that Pichai started his career at Mckinsey? That place is all about making safe choices that erode a companies future to improve short term profits.

gws
2 replies
10h41m

“The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else”

I wish they had valued users above all else

rayxi271828
0 replies
7h35m

wish they had valued users above all else

My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.

I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?

Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...

The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".

The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.

langsoul-com
0 replies
10h35m

That's Amazon.

There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.

altaltson
2 replies
3h50m

I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect.

The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.

By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"

I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.

But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.

dns_snek
0 replies
44m

Do you care to speculate about why the culture changed?

alephnerd
0 replies
3h22m

This is a very hot take, but does mesh with my own experience with mentors, friends, and family at GOOG at the time.

I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.

There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.

Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.

tptacek
1 replies
11h29m

I find it useful, in reading this stuff, to remember: the company he joined in 2005 had (apparently) 5,600 employees. In 2022, that number was 190,000.

bombcar
0 replies
6h14m

Which is the difference between a very small town (might have a Walmart!) and the entire population of Montgomery, AL.

With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.

poundofshrimp
1 replies
11h49m

But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.

Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?

debok
0 replies
11h18m

I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.

kderbyma
1 replies
12h0m

Alphabet has ruined it's entire portfolio if measured by the initial vision of each product. They have decimated the once great platforms they developed in pursuit of ever canabalizing their consumers

jacquesm
0 replies
11h44m

As well as lots of stuff they acquired and left to rot.

ipaddr
1 replies
10h56m

There is pre IPO Google culture and post

gorjusborg
0 replies
6h7m

Probably true for most public companies.

darth_avocado
1 replies
12h7m

Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.

Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.

eru
0 replies
12h6m

Sounds like their internal interest rates have gone up?

VirusNewbie
1 replies
11h21m

People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit.

When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.

Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.

All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.

The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.

mlrtime
0 replies
5h20m

You're not wrong, likewise I've heard Meta can be seen as the company that started the TC war by paying 99% for their IC positions.

Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.

ChicagoDave
1 replies
12h8m

Ben was also a co-creator of the once ubiquitous Subversion source control software.

pjmlp
0 replies
10h16m

Very happy user until 2019, until the winds of change were forced upon me.

Thanks Ben.

29athrowaway
1 replies
11h56m

Pro tip: Turn reader mode on

neilv
0 replies
11h41m

This article's site is a rare one for which Firefox's built-in reader mode doesn't currently have a silent cost: the reader mode bypasses uBlock Origin protection against some kinds of trackers.

yard2010
0 replies
5h22m

Evil is not something that applies to a person only. A company can be evil too. Look at facebook

wslh
0 replies
7h31m

Ironic tl;dr, the author separates Google culture from business but Google is not just another public company in the NASDAQ. It is a company that impacted and impacts [political] viewpoints of people around the world. In the past "common" people could create content and be visible, now SEO is an impossible game that requires big budgets. Google forgets things (sites) and it is not "Organizing the world's information" [1]. It is just stockpiling it. The company is not a McDonald's. If the soul of the company culture changed it means the seeds for [1] are dead.

[1] https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-goog...

trinsic2
0 replies
48m

From someone who got out of the corporate rat race in the early 2000's, this is a really balanced article on how companies change to meet the environment they find themselves in. I'm not sure what the answer is when growth starts to dissipate. Maybe trust the people you already have and work towards downsizing in less artificial way? I feel like the stock market has made this problem worse

toyg
0 replies
8h31m

> You know how people are much more likely to read an email if it is one screen long, rather than the length of this :-/ ? It is similar with contributing code to the kernel. It is much more social and relationship developing to contribute a screenful or two of code once every week or two over the course of years. We were dropping 90,000 lines of code on them all at once, having worked on it in total social isolation for 5 years in Moscow, Socially it was all bad. Small increments are the more social way to go. Incremental improvements to V3 would have met no opposition.

tock
0 replies
11h50m

Ben and Brian's Google IO talks were fantastic. Their talks always made me realise that Google was a special place. Sad to see its not the case anymore from Ben himself.

tmpDn2Gw3PeB3
0 replies
5h58m

The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else.

One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.

Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.

The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.

My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.

All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.

sidcool
0 replies
11h16m

I think the recent treatment by companies of its employees will remove the rosy glass from our eyes. All employee goodiness is a fair weather phenomena. Always keep a healthy distance from your work and company.

rimeice
0 replies
2h13m

I think I'd s/"unlimited abundance"/"nothing to lose" - particularly in startups. In the small businesses I've worked in, it's when the times a tough, the biggest and most critical bets have been made often with the most conviction. That sort of situation I think also drives some of those motivational and incredibly innovative behaviours in people.

piddydiddy
0 replies
14m

This is all a joke right? The "limited resources" party pooper fucking up your unsustainable "I wish uni could go on for ever" lifestyle?

neom
0 replies
12h11m

Reminds me of the recent blog post by Sir Adrian Cockcroft.

Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...

mschuster91
0 replies
11h33m

Let me explain. In a typical company, when priorities shift, you "downsize" (or cancel) a project, and then use the money to add people to a different, more important project. The common way to do this is fire people from the first project, then rehire a bunch of new people in the second project. It's easy, it's simple, it's expected.

This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.

And that email quote is also interesting on its own:

Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.

I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.

mikpanko
0 replies
2h40m

How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees but it is not a tough decision.

Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.

Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.

Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.

max_
0 replies
12h18m

"Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."

Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...

lnxg33k1
0 replies
7h57m

I don't think the part of attacking big targets works in this context, I would care very little about Google and its culture, it's not my business and people who work there decide to stay there autonomously

The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.

For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares

gmerc
0 replies
11h24m

If anything OpenAI demod just how quickly culture can be changed by paying massive salary packages.

The non profit people never stood a chance.

apienx
0 replies
10h6m

The unstated cultural principle was: "products come and go“

That explains a lot! ;-)

JKCalhoun
0 replies
6h2m

And so, when priorities would change, Google did not fire people, but rather moved them carefully between projects.

Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.

I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.

It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.