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Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

asah
64 replies
17h34m

(repost after every Google-bashing...)

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

As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lxgr
25 replies
17h17m

Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.

How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.

Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough.

Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.

FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.

It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone.

The alternative is... giving up on the idea? Just storing anything centrally because end-to-end/client-side encryption/local processing is a lost cause?

Drive and storage just work.

That's what Google does really well indeed: Things close to infrastructure with as little product/UI aspects as possible. Getting rid of hard links in Drive was a great move too. No complaints there. Voice is another thing in that category: It's a hard infrastructure problem, and Google nailed it. The same goes for the versioning/conflict resolution backend of GSuite: A marvel of engineering.

The hardest part is not accidentally cancelling things that work and that solve problems for actual users in favor of yet another instant messenger.

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

Quantitatively, sure, maybe. Qualitatively, having unleashed Protobuf onto the world alone undoes a significant amount of goodwill in my view.

ghaff
7 replies
17h7m

Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.

FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.

I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)

And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.

It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.

lxgr
6 replies
16h35m

There's an easy solution here: Offer both! Google can afford to offer two kinds of document editors, and it would make the entire GSuite infinitely more valuable and enjoyable to me.

I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!

refulgentis
4 replies
16h23m

Want me to really bake your noodle?

Ready?

It has Markdown mode as an option.

Peak HN, perfectly executed:

- "it's obvious my pet peeve feature X should be added to Y, the company in the article".

- "I don't like X".

- "Can we have both?"

I'm guffawing

lxgr
3 replies
16h3m

Peak HN is also claiming Y already supports X without showing any evidence.

And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get lost when exporting and re-importing the same file, or parts of it via copy and paste).

Update: You made me look: Sadly still no Markdown support. I would have been very happy to be wrong here.

refulgentis
1 replies
14h33m

You redefined Markdown support into "only Markdown support." No refunds, sorry. :)*

Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown.

That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.

* also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps both are desirable, I'm not sure why you felt deceived that Docs didn't become a Markdown-only editor

lxgr
0 replies
14h7m

Markdown shortcuts just really aren't markdown, no refund needed, in the same way that supporting j/k keybindings for <- / -> isn't the same thing as Vim. It's about 10-20% of the way there.

And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).

I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.

That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.

That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.

GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.

shoelessone
0 replies
14h44m

I’m with you. I would love this so much.

Maybe irrelevant, but I will say that my spouse who spends a lot more time in Google docs can’t be bothered to learn even the markdown shortcuts for H tags in docs even though it would save her a ton of time. I imagine that’s a large majority of people.

ghaff
0 replies
16h27m

Which can be the formula for adding another layer of features that 1% (or whatever) of users care about.

WWLink
7 replies
16h59m

If you think jira is bad you should try deltek costpoint. Holy shit.

notpachet
1 replies
16h31m

Don't say its name!

a_gnostic
0 replies
16h17m

its name

mattgreenrocks
1 replies
16h1m

Costpoint is the UI hell you didn’t even know existed until you see it for yourself.

It’s timesheet software that appears to be a legacy Windows app using an unholy number of compatibility shims to run in the browser. Almost nothing is a native control!

It sometimes refuses to load randomly, and can be really slow at certain hours. Its job is to record a few numbers for each user once a day.

WWLink
0 replies
9h21m

It can be used for a lot more than just timesheets, and the UI gets weirder and weirder in those other features.

cratermoon
1 replies
15h57m

Microsoft's "Azure DevOps" is worse than Jira.

WWLink
0 replies
9h20m

TBH I'm surprised we aren't forced to use it since it's a Microsoft product and whenever there's a Microsoft version of something we seem to get forced to use it. Weird.

esafak
0 replies
15h16m

The only thing worse than B2B for UX is B2G.

klyrs
2 replies
16h49m

> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.

How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.

To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.

Surely we aren't blaming GPT for this.

cageface
1 replies
16h36m

It still works for me. What if you try it in an incognito window?

klyrs
0 replies
16h8m

Ah, fun. It didn't work on my last few attempts, it works today. Gotta love the internet.

readams
1 replies
15h42m

Markdown in Google docs: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en

Of course, if you want non wysiwyg, then don't use Google docs just use markdown in a text editor or install mediawiki or something.

lxgr
0 replies
15h18m

Yeah, I want non-WYSIWYG, or at least something that cleanly copy-pastes into and out of markdown.

I don’t get to choose, and I bet a considerable fraction of Google Docs users don’t either and it’s just what their workplace prescribes.

johannes1234321
1 replies
16h14m

FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.

This exactly hard on Google's caliber.

Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.

WYSWIG is core to the product definition.

lxgr
0 replies
15h15m

I do see that it’s not a simple problem. But this brings us back on topic nicely: This is Google we’re talking about!

There was a time when the name was synonymous for the best software engineering and some of the brightest minds in the world! And here we are arguing whether two different editing paradigms in one word processor might be too hard for them.

senseiV
0 replies
15h3m

I just saw a markdown mode show up today, but only partially, like bold and italics in markdown

sanderjd
0 replies
16h7m

FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG

Approximately nobody wants this though. Sure, you want it, and I want it, and some other people like us, but we're a rounding error of the user base of Google Docs.

This would be a great plugin, but very difficult to justify building as a first class feature.

And there's nothing wrong with protobuf :)

noqc
8 replies
16h9m

Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.

If you think the complaint about google search is that it isn't as good as chatgpt, I think you might be not listening. The problem with google search is that it's worse than it was

kibwen
4 replies
16h3m

To be fair, Google Search is worse today because the web is worse today.

But to be ultra-fair, the web is worse today because of the perverse incentives created by Google Search and Google Ads.

ChatGTP
2 replies
14h58m

Who was a key player in ensuring the web is worse do you think?

scarmig
1 replies
14h31m

If you had to pin it on a single actor, Google. Ads have corrupted the original vision of the web. When you offer a path for other actors to monetize the web, they will, and Google did that more than anybody.

ChatGTP
0 replies
6h3m

Google has made so many "death of the web" moves over the past few years that it's hard for them not to be implicated in the current situation. If they've shat in their own pants, well that's too bad.

postalrat
0 replies
14h41m

They could have prevented a lot if they stuck to penalizing when users received a different document than the googlebot got for indexing.

jszymborski
1 replies
16h3m

I was puzzling over this argument as well.

Is it possible GP was talking about SEO spam enabled by LLMs like ChatGPT? That's the most charitable read on it I can give it.

Because I can guarantee you my problem with Google Search has nothing to do with chat assistants, and if that is sincerely your position, I'd seriously consider trying to find perspective.

scarmig
0 replies
13h35m

LLMs are an obvious threat to web search, and guaranteed Google is already seeing their effects.

What they have done is given people an alternative to interacting with human knowledge via Google search. It was falling in quality before, but in the general case no one had an alternative (and so it would still generate the same revenues). But ChatGPT is not only a substitute but a superior product, so people actually move to it instead of kvetching about the decline.

asah
0 replies
6h44m

Apologies, I was making a deeper point, which is that search is going through a period of disruption and the endgame will be something more like ChatGPT and less like a lost of 10 links.

To address your concern, yes [low quality content] will still exist but it won't look at all like today's stuff. Too soon to tell.

In periods like these, the British saying applies to users: keep calm and carry on. The American saying: bitchin' ain't switchin'.

leptons
4 replies
17h7m

Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin

After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.

cageface
2 replies
16h55m

AWS is certainly very capable but I haven't at all found that everything AWS is easy or makes sense and that's certainly not the general reputation it has among other devs I know. It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.

nucleardog
0 replies
15h33m

It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.

I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.

The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.

Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.

Let’s not even get started on permissions.

I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.

And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.

I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!

My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.

bavent
0 replies
16h30m

Yeah this is more in line with my experience too.

sanderjd
0 replies
15h29m

This is pretty dissonant for me. AWS certainly has a lot, but I wouldn't describe any of it as being easy or making sense. It's all poorly integrated with UX that is just a hair above adequate. The documentation is generally pretty decent though, I'll give you that, and it's nice that everything has an API, though true to form, the client libraries for those APIs leave a lot to be desired.

But I haven't used Google Cloud extensively, so I don't know if it's even worse.

protocolture
3 replies
17h14m

It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone.

Trivializing privacy isn't the same thing as identifying good privacy.

exabrial
2 replies
17h12m

We would, but Google. What a hell of a justification.

protocolture
1 replies
17h2m

We have a multi billion dollar machine built by developers with the goal of doing good things and profiting by them.

Cell phone privacy

Sure we make a cell phone and we make a cell phone OS but its best to look the other way and never trust your privacy to a device that society has decided should follow you 24/7.

asah
0 replies
15h29m

Sorry for the flippant comment - I wasn't just referring to the code and apps running on your phone, but the servers and cell towers that collect tons of details about you. Plus, the physical emanations as your phone connects and responds to signals from 4g, 5g, wifi, bluetooth and more.

A secure OS is cute but so what - there's a million other ways to p0wn your privacy.

On the plus side, the digital trail is so intense, citizens have a pretty robust alibi against being framed. For example, sure someone could borrow your phone, but they'd have a real hard time using it exactly the way you do, from accelerometer data to swipes to individual apps and and and...

tehlike
2 replies
14h48m

Ex googler here.

Google has become a utility company, and I believe that's what you are saying. And I agree. I love Gmail, photos, drive etc and I have been a Google user longer than I have been an employee. This is a good thing.

But, I started my career at google, and can tell you with confidence that it is not the best place to build a career, especially if you are a high performer. Google will shape everyones career around average, and will not do much to reward extraordinary contributions, and it shows up also in compensation, promotions etc. google will happily not promote people unless they ask for, and many will not.

twojobsoneboss
1 replies
14h43m

What he really meant is it’s a great career choice financially (see the supporting extended family sentence after that)

And utility? Come on now. Yes it might be doing much less actual innovation than before but compare that to building awful websites at an actual utility company. I’ll wait.

tehlike
0 replies
7h50m

I mean, it's something we use everyday without thinking much. That's what I meant mostly but yeah innovation is also slowing

dekhn
1 replies
17h13m

Are gmail and gsuite really adding features?

I've used Google Slides for over a decade and I don't see any real improvement; Google Drawings is just pathetic. Basically "Powerpoint from 2001, but with doc sharing".

crazygringo
0 replies
17h8m

G Suite (now Workspace) absolutely is, a ton:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/

This lists literally every new feature it gets. Browse to your heart's content.

Here's everything specific to Slides:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...

I think Sheets has seen the most improvements since that's what power business users need, followed by Docs.

vultour
0 replies
15h55m

Reposted Google propaganda by someone associated with the company, at the top of HN. Hilarious.

unethical_ban
0 replies
16h55m

As someone who worked in cloud security for a year, GCP's security mechanisms were a joke next to AWS IAM and Organizations. But some of their products like Bigtable were better.

Also, AWS answered the proverbial phone.

scarmig
0 replies
15h14m

As another Xoogler, I'd dispute some of your points, though I agree with the rest:

1) The Cloud Console is very meh compared to the AWS frontend. Slow and cumbersome. Otherwise GCP is generally playing catch-up, though it's closed the gap significantly in recent years.

2) Morale is low. Googlers used to see themselves as representatives of the most beneficial company in the world. Now, they're much more likely to view themselves as well-compensated cogs in the next IBM. Which is more realistic, but the negative vibe shift is real.

3) Privacy/security wise, I trust Google to do what it promises to do better than anyone. Which is to say, it will extract your data and monetize it to the maximum extent possible and make sure no one else has access to it. Still better than the alternatives, but that's a pretty damn low bar.

And two other points:

4) Hiring standards have dropped. Googlers are more competent than the average SWE on the market, but they are not generally exceptional. And their experience at Google teaches them proprietary tooling and how to navigate bureaucracy.

5) On that note, the core issue is that Google is a bureaucracy split into fiefdoms, living off Ads profits like a Gulf oil state. It hampers execution and makes genuine product vision impossible.

scarface_74
0 replies
15h51m

Opposite opinion:

- Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea. They have been the least innovative company of the big 5 and cancel products and have no long term focus.

- GCP may be good but no one trusts Google to maintain their products and not cancel them under your feet. GCP representatives don’t know how to meet “customers where they are” and their enterprise relationships are so bad when I was at AWS (Professional Services) we didn’t even bother having have “talking points” about GCP vs AWS. GCP wasn’t even on our radar. Azure on the other hand was.

- Google and privacy? Really? Google’s whole purpose is to track you to monetize you. Android consistently has more security issues than iOS and Android devices don’t get security updates like iOS devices.

- Google like every other company only “contributes” to open source software that does not give it a competitive advantage.

palisade
0 replies
16h12m

I actually don't have a problem with Google myself. I love gmail and I use Google FI for my cellphone service. I agree their security has been fantastic. The only criticism I have for them is that they give up too easily on their new ideas. They're known for not seeing anything new through. And, while they saw things like Android and Gmail through to the bitter end, it has been a long time since they've had a win like that. Bard is impressive, but they were late to the game. Which is ironic, since they pioneered the research that made LLMs possible. They're very careful and don't take risks. To win big, you have to risk big. And, when you're as big as Google you stop taking the big risks. I think if I had any advice for them, it would be to create and announce a new accelerator to fund new startups. Something exciting with lots and lots of cash behind it to whip up innovation. They can steer that and ride the success of all the ventures that it starts. They have some funds but they're pretty low key about them. Companies like Nvidia have been funding some pretty impressive stuff with their accelerator. It is about how much noise you generate with that kind of thing.

mynameishere
0 replies
17h16m

They're getting rid of basic html gmail, so screw them.

moneycantbuy
0 replies
15h57m

why did you quit?

lebean
0 replies
15h4m

Thanks, haven't used GCE in nearly a decade, might give it another shot.

juliusdavies
0 replies
17h10m

Try buying some ads through Google ads and you might lose some of your optimism.

I want to run ads and I am unable to. Chrome never finishes loading ads.google.com so I switched to Firefox. It loads successfully on Firefox but I cannot get it to actually run an ad.

joe_the_user
0 replies
16h46m

Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.

Search had become awful well before ChatGPT appeared - the final really visible decline was in 2019 I recall. Recent 1st result for "Likely": "LIKELY - Women's Dresses, Tops & More". They've been happy to put anything commercial first for any term.

jasonjayr
0 replies
16h12m

Google has a lot going for it.

But the fact that they can kill your online identity in the blink of an eye, with zero recourse is the biggest reason why I personally cannot fully embrace the full Google ecosystem.

fortylove
0 replies
15h18m

With regard to Waymo, it seems it just hit a cyclist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39296067

exabrial
0 replies
17h14m

you don’t see Google exfiltrate data

When Google sucks up your personal data or compound some profile on you against your will, it’s “ok”. When other people do it, it’s “hacking”.

dzhiurgis
0 replies
16h31m

I tried Bing again and came back after a day.

IDK when but anything other than Google is better now. Even whatever default Brave has, or ddg. It's like using Google 15 years ago - minimal SEO crap.

Sure I do have to go back to google every few days, but thats due to braindead devs who explicitly only allow google to scrape them.

dang
0 replies
14h23m

(repost after every Google-bashing...)

That's not ok here, so please don't. We want curious conversation, not repetition. (Fortunately it doesn't look like you've repeated this more than once, but that is already too often.)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

andrewstuart
43 replies
18h12m

Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.

quatrefoil
21 replies
17h47m

Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Google was one tenth the size and was near-universally loved, the model of having frank fireside conversations with execs was already stretched thin.

They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.

curt15
13 replies
17h40m

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

quatrefoil
9 replies
17h12m

I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes...

I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.

michaelt
3 replies
16h55m

> A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

dzdt
2 replies
16h42m

Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?

rlanday
0 replies
10h22m

Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other.

(check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)

ghaff
0 replies
16h30m

No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy.

I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.

abkolan
1 replies
14h0m

I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.

This is a ridiculous take. You would need way more than that just to maintain Kafka and run ops for it, that LinkedIn heavily relies on. You are trivializing the complexity of running a platform like LinkedIn.

Nevermark
0 replies
2h46m

Perhaps if reducing the complexity was considered an urgent necessity, over hiring more, there would be less complexity and new opportunities would be easier to consider and jump on.

Complexity compounds, so the tradeoff is, continually tame it, or continually hire with less and less impact per employee.

The latter seems to happen a lot when money flows.

roncesvalles
0 replies
29m

I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products

Only if you're certain they will never quit their jobs. In tech where the average tenure is supposedly 2-3 years, a large number of employees are hired to make key persons redundant, groom for succession, and to make sure key persons can offload some bandwidth to work on emergent issues. It's irrational to have billions of dollars of revenue (or even tens of millions) riding on a single person who can decide to walk away with 2 weeks notice.

neilv
0 replies
16h0m

spherical developers

This could be a physics model, or an imperative to scale back the free food.

Ferret7446
0 replies
14h14m

Organizations can't scale linearly. You need more middle managers as you add more people and organizational layers, who don't contribute any "output" so this is trivially true.

Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.

23B1
2 replies
17h18m

Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel.

Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist.

Now add 149,999 nodes.

shostack
0 replies
12h29m

Are there any good examples of this?

ghaff
0 replies
17h1m

There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.

buzzerbetrayed
6 replies
14h38m

But couldn't the founders put a competent CEO in the chair and still pursue their passion projects on the side?

quatrefoil
3 replies
14h7m

Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot.

And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to.

Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B.

It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan.

I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.

dilyevsky
2 replies
11h45m

Sundar was never an engineer.

Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia?

There is a clear identity - Google is about hoarding all of the available data (originally web) and making money off of it any way you can. By definition it has to be huge and get their hands into as many pies as humanly possible and then cut away stuff that doesn’t work. So i would say they are being perfectly consistent whether their employees appreciate it or not.

Nevermark
1 replies
2h37m

making money off of it any way you can

Of course there isn’t an inconsistency there. Its such a non-identity there isn’t anything to be inconsistent with, outside of declaring the company a on-profit.

The problem of lack of identity isn’t always about lack of consistency. It also is a lack of focus.

Lack of focus leaves the door open to vastly increased complexity. The need for more and more employees as per employee impact drops.

dilyevsky
0 replies
1h7m

It’s not much more generic than “make consumer electronics” from apple which makes everything under the sun now from headphones to cars. Google just increasingly became at odds with its own “dont be evil” motto as the company had scaled so execution had greately suffered

geodel
1 replies
14h28m

Well, if they could've they would've. Also in unlikely case they could've different thinking about competence than yours.

buzzerbetrayed
0 replies
41m

Well, if they could've they would've

Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is

vondur
8 replies
18h4m

Google is still making money every quarter. Doubt they will get rid of him.

DanHulton
4 replies
17h45m

They're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinking decisions ever did."

blindriver
3 replies
17h36m

Except that revenues have been growing for years under him and the stock price has skyrocketed. I personally think he's a terrible CEO but it's impossible to argue to anyone that cares that he should be removed until at least revenue or the stock price drops.

pseudosavant
1 replies
15h42m

That description perfectly fits another massive tech company CEO: Steve Balmer. Revenue tripled under him. But Microsoft's mindshare, brand image, influence, etc. all went down.

kccqzy
0 replies
12h53m

So is it appropriate to predict that Pichai will end his tenure as CEO of Google just like Balmer did, which was when he voluntarily quit ("retirement")?

gtirloni
0 replies
15h56m

stock price is flimsy and on that revenue growth, what are the margins? If they are static, he's just doing more of the same.

yreg
2 replies
17h51m

They are going to be left behind once enough capable people leave.

whatshisface
1 replies
17h48m

Public markets are not known for combining ten-year-long outlooks with deep domain knowledge. In fact that's the two things they're best known for lacking! (P.S. They've already been left behind by whatever Kagi is doing to filter out LLM garbage.)

alwa
0 replies
17h32m

+1 to your observation about Kagi’s filtering. Whatever they’re doing sure seems to be working, and cumulatively with the rest of their small, quietly user-centric decisions over the past year or two, has really made them feel like an oasis relative to the sharp and quick deterioration that’s gone on over in Mountain View’s product.

blindriver
5 replies
17h38m

The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about.

The only thing.

wolverine876
2 replies
17h7m

That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.

AndrewKemendo
1 replies
16h37m

That’s very true. However in this specific case, the OP is correct for anyone with decision making power at Google

wolverine876
0 replies
15h35m

I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded.

On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second week of negotiating class: Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down. <Yawn.>

utopcell
1 replies
17h3m

Is it though ? Even Meta's 5y return is higher than Google's, and that includes the enormous pivot-to-VR blunder drop.

kccqzy
0 replies
12h55m

These things could be true at the same time. Alphabet stock did reach an all-time-high recently, but its growth could still be slower than Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and several other large tech companies.

sanderjd
1 replies
15h24m

I have myself found out very confusing that nobody ever seems to suggest that maybe Pichai isn't steering this ship very well...

tdeck
0 replies
13h29m

People have been saying that for years. I left in 2020 and some people were saying that. Having almost no compelling new products and shutting down multiple high profile flops while dismantling the internal culture that many people appreciated is pretty hard to miss.

dekhn
1 replies
17h49m

who would replace him? I don't think larry has many choices

Nevermark
0 replies
2h28m

Who isn’t going to be available to him?

If he can’t find someone better, it’s only because finding that person would be a full time job for him, for an indefinite period.

With the risk of a repeat.

Which may not be an acceptable price to him.

zyncronet
0 replies
12h16m

Lol all that matters is how much money is being made, they don't really give a shit about wrecking developer trust as long as google remains the money printing behemoth it is.

golergka
0 replies
17h46m

People were worried that Google would become the best IBM. Now I think it will become the next Boeing.

sianemo
42 replies
18h15m

Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.

MikeTheRocker
12 replies
18h9m

I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.

solardev
6 replies
17h56m

Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.

MikeTheRocker
4 replies
17h40m

With >150,000 employees, I think they can probably do both

SllX
2 replies
17h30m

I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search.

Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.

bdd8f1df777b
1 replies
16h24m

WoW, I thought my VPN failed (to properly traverse the GFW) when the date filter just didn’t show up on iOS.

SllX
0 replies
12h16m

Nope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.

solardev
0 replies
17h35m

Well, so far, they haven't really improved either one in a long time...

seoulmetro
0 replies
17h11m

You seem to be under the impression that Google search got bad by accident? They killed it on purpose. They killed image search on purpose too.

Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.

vineyardmike
1 replies
17h45m

Considering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.

zmmmmm
0 replies
15h6m

Seems likely the team was gutted specifically because they are refocusing on a new strategy.

zmmmmm
0 replies
15h9m

It's an interesting test for them. Essentially, it's a free hit - low expectations, few constraints, lots of latitude to throw out prior work, open ended opportunity to be creative and innovate, a clear baseline provided by Apple for them to benchmark success against and little to no regulatory scrutiny. Basically, one of the few opportunities they will ever got for a zero baggage, green field project where, if they actually have the talent and the will power, they could hit something out of the park. Will they do it? Will they not?

redleader55
0 replies
9h26m

Isn't Meta the one building the AR/VR operating system? Quest runs Android and they are upstreaming the 3D stuff, I think.

chaostheory
0 replies
18h1m

Hopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.

t_mann
7 replies
18h1m

How do projects that get canned after a short time benefit the CVs of the managers who launched them? Serious question.

resolutebat
3 replies
17h56m

Up and out: launch something, get promoted, move onto the next team, what happens afterwards is the next guy's problem.

And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.

This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.

gtirloni
1 replies
15h51m

And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?

csande17
0 replies
13h55m

Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.

Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".

solardev
0 replies
17h54m

I think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.

sianemo
1 replies
17h55m

To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.

You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.

ikiris
0 replies
17h49m

Its hard to see through the charade you got promoted for yourself.

eddythompson80
0 replies
17h50m

Plenty of projects don't get launched to begin with. The ability to "launch" a project is looked at favorably in general. Maybe too favorable, but that's another discussion. If you are someone who is known to be able to deliver a "launch" that's big on your CV in most companies. Believe it or not, in big companies many project never quite reach a minimal viable product status to begin with.

Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.

michaelt
5 replies
17h30m

> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently?

Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.

Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.

The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.

julianlam
2 replies
15h59m

Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.

Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style.

Takes 5-10 seconds to load.

Avoided fucking it up, huh.

martin-t
1 replies
14h59m

Exactly.

I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.

wyclif
0 replies
11h49m

Looks like they're going to kill it later this month. Today when I tried to use the HTML version, a splash screen loaded that said this:

Starting from February 2024, this version of Gmail (Basic HTML Gmail) will no longer be supported, and you'll automatically start using Standard Gmail. Switch to the latest Gmail version now.

wolverine876
0 replies
16h3m

Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.

Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.

That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.

astrange
0 replies
11h53m

Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.

The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.

This is actually the problem and solution in one go - they're all doing data annotation.

pinewurst
3 replies
18h9m

The regular employees are far more deluded than management in thinking that they're somehow changing the world for the better.

utopcell
2 replies
17h0m

Google Web Search is (supposed to be) changing the world for the better.

pinewurst
0 replies
16h6m

Certainly not in the last few years as it’s been increasingly enshitified.

zdragnar
2 replies
18h5m

I don't expect it to take over the world, but I really do hope Starline becomes a "thing"

https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/

solardev
0 replies
17h57m

They should've pitched it as a video add-on to a new chat app.

ShamelessC
0 replies
17h55m

You should prepare to be disappointed. Project will be canceled shortly after it launches, if it ever launches.

wtracy
2 replies
17h58m

I know a lot of investors are excited about Waymo, so I assume the executives are as well. I don't have any insight into what the experience is like on the actual engineering team, though.

dekhn
1 replies
17h48m

waymo isn't part of google

pb7
0 replies
13h32m

Sundar is CEO and it's part of $GOOG.

blibble
2 replies
18h12m

designing a new music app and/or chat app every 2 years sounds pretty fun

standardUser
0 replies
18h6m

But then you might have to watch it get killed right before your eyes. And the lack of new features and general support for a lot of their products makes me think there are a lot of employees wishing they could continue work on the products they've built, but can't.

esafak
0 replies
15h3m

Seeing your work get canned is not fun.

aaomidi
1 replies
17h57m

I was working on Google Trust Services. My job was genuinely interesting.

Bad upper management (immediate manager was absolutely 10/10) was the reason I ended up leaving.

cageface
0 replies
17h54m

The worst manager I ever had in 25 years of working in tech went to Google after she finally got fired at my company. Apparently there she fit right in.

jjjjoe
41 replies
15h44m

The reason the word "inept" keeps coming up is just how opaque and senseless to the rank and file the January 2023 layoffs were. High performers, low performers, newest hires, most tenure: we saw all kinds of heads roll. I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. A growing deployment team was actively hiring before and after it got a 6% haircut.

The simplest explanation would be that every cost center/P&L had to offer up 6% of its people, regardless of that cost center's overall trajectory, place in company strategy or open headcount. And that every cost center's VP or general manager or whatever just got collared by HR, was given a list on a piece of paper and couldn't leave until they chose 6% by ...whatever metric they came up with on the spot.

Whatever actually happened I'll never know, but what I've seen was 100% compatible with that theory. Which in turn looks pretty inept.

willio58
27 replies
15h2m

I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up.

My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"

MuffinFlavored
9 replies
14h31m

I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now

The average total compensation for an engineer is $250k-$350k/yr+

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Sa...

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Citrix,UKG,American%2...

refulgentis
7 replies
13h46m

It's hard to describe the pure absolute hell that can be working there, you'd be surprised how quickly the money becomes not worth it.

scarmig
4 replies
13h28m

It all depends on the team, of course, but hell really isn't a good way to describe Google employment. Of the half dozen companies I've worked for, Google consistently offered better life quality than the others, even ignoring the money. (I'd go so far as to say that Google is almost too lax in how it treats employees.)

refulgentis
3 replies
13h20m

Right, honestly I shouldn't have posted the 2 sentence version, and we'd need to have a beer and an hour to even begin understanding now that I started from there.

But, what I'd say in another flippant sentence, since I'm tempted again: exactly, and that's the problem.

I had a great time, will be forever proud and grateful, and there's more to life than work. But, it left me with a permanently jaundiced view of a lot of things I used to admire, and I saw the worst, most careless, self-centered, behavior I've seen in my life there.

scarmig
2 replies
13h2m

I went through a progression, where I was first accepted to Google (genuinely one of the most exciting moments of my life), and I gradually fell into a deeper and deeper cynicism as I saw all my fantasies about how the world should work evaporate. Maybe it was just growing up. Even the "best company in the world that does no evil" is really just a bunch of profit-mongering assholes.

That said, so is the rest of the world, at least in my experience. So long as you go into it with open eyes about what it really is, Google is a pretty solid experience. You should never identify with it or sympathize with it, but if you approach it as a parasite hoping to extract as much value from you as it can, it offers a pretty great personal opportunity. You've just got to keep in mind that it is not your friend, it is not looking out for your best interests, and it is definitely not not evil.

refulgentis
0 replies
11h9m

That can make it more acutely painful in a specific situation: you're aware of its limitations, you end up getting the opportunity to do exactly what you've always wanted to, you deliver, but yadda yadda yadda, so you have increasingly full knowledge you'll be roadkill eventually and they'll blame it on you even if you act perfect. Sisyphus.

beacon294
0 replies
12h17m

You should never identify with it or sympathize with it, but if you approach it as a parasite hoping to extract as much value from you as it can, it offers a pretty great personal opportunity.

I like you. This is my general perspective, however I try to be a greedy symbiote.

sitkack
0 replies
12h26m

I work at Google, fuck em. The whole place is toxic. I hope it is at peak larping lord of the flies. But if anything about modern history has taught me anything is that there is always lower.

Those 12k people they fucked over for zero real benefit, represented due to how Google hires, 240K interviews (5% accept rate). Let’s say they only did the screen. Still minimum 2 hrs, interview plus write up. 500k hours. 250 years of FTE time just in interviews flushed down the fucking toilet. And they are blowing the doors off the place hiring in LATAM.

And the bs just keeps coming by the dump truck full.

ipdashc
0 replies
13h32m

This feels excessive... ? It's Google, not a coal mine.

bdangubic
0 replies
14h19m

that is supposed make you not feel sorry, $250k-$350k…? feel sorry for you for posting this…

CamelCaseName
9 replies
14h39m

Is it possible they did this on purpose to expand their team size?

refulgentis
3 replies
14h31m

No that's absolutely bonkers and an edge case. 5 women don't have a baby in 1.8 months, and headcount has been frozen-ish since late 2021 unless you're Bard, so we're looking at someone dangerously stupid sticking their neck out to over-compensate, for no good reason, and inexperienced with basic tech shibboleths.

Also, the large firing decisions in January 2023 and January 2024 were made up several steps up the ladder. There's been probably just as much firings done informally inbetween, and to your point, some were very purposeful: multiple people in Assistant org. reported independently that new directors and their couterie were grafted onto the org, they were shuffled onto "Still Very Important" Assistant teams, then the not-so-important Assistant teams were let go en masse.

bluepizza
2 replies
11h5m

5 women don't have a baby in 1.8 months

They have 5 (or more) babies in 9 months, which is precisely the point of empire building: being able to handle more than one priority.

refulgentis
1 replies
11h0m

Sure, except, it was 1 employee replaced by 5, and there isn't headcount backfill.

Rastonbury
0 replies
10h43m

I don't find that story believable, you don't layoff then open backfill or let alone multiple roles on the team. The handful of Googlers I spoke to are now in smaller teams handling the same workload. If true it must've been some AI related team

jjjjoe
2 replies
13h18m

no.

dilyevsky
1 replies
11h54m

If you think managers everywhere dont employ this tactic i have a bridge to sell you

pooper
0 replies
7h42m

Absolutely. There was a leaked memo iirc from Microsoft that prohibited "exceeds expectations".

And then there's the antipoaching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipoaching

arvinsim
0 replies
14h31m

Not uncommon. Take out the old guard and hire new people for empire building.

PeterStuer
0 replies
10h15m

Absolutely, and tick more boxes on things other than merit and 'gets the job done'.

foofie
5 replies
12h27m

This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"

The conspiracy theory that's making the rounds is that these rounds of layoffs from tech firms have zero to do with financial reports or economy downturns, and are instead a coordinated effort, along with RTO policies, to wrestle negotiation power from tech workers and put downward pressure on tech salaries. Hence the apparent lack of criteria and indiscriminate layoffs complemented with hiring rounds.

I recall that a FANG ordered managers to decimate their teams while ramping up hiring on teams located in the same building, and HR openly rejected the idea of even having employees in the chopping block interview for those positions.

darreninthenet
3 replies
9h35m

Is there no law in the US that requires an employer to find a job for somebody before firing? And that includes being allowed to apply for open roles...

lotsofpulp
2 replies
7h52m

Barring an agreement to the contrary, employers and employees can terminate employment any time they want, except in Montana, as long as the termination is not due to the employee being in a protected class.

darreninthenet
1 replies
7h41m

So apart from the protected class thing, there's no concept of wrongful dismissal in the US?

And what's different in Montana?

lotsofpulp
0 replies
6h59m
bsimpson
0 replies
10h28m

I've also heard it positioned as an age discrimination loophole to fire your seniors and replace them with juniors, while calling the whole thing a macroeconomic-driven layoff.

EvanKnowles
0 replies
11h3m

We had this, but HR moved so slowly that the (good) guy that was fired was still there when the new guy arrived.

belter
3 replies
14h38m

Its almost like Developers need...A Union....

avidiax
2 replies
7h47m

Google has a union (AWU). It is currently protesting in support of Gaza.

filoleg
1 replies
5h40m

Anecdotal side-tangent: had a terrible second-hand experience with AWU.

I was an employee, and a friend of mine was interviewing at Google. After one of his interviews, he called me up and asked if I heard of AWU. I was not sure what prompted that, but I said I was roughly familiar with AWU, and then my friend elaborated on what went down.

Turns out, his interviewer spent half the interview just buzzing my friend’s ears off about AWU and trying to recruit him to join before my friend even got the offer.

And then my friend told me the exact details of what was said about AWU and what they do, and my ears just rolled up, because I realized that he was getting coaxed by an AWU member with a bunch exaggerations and half-truths. Mostly about the perceived self-importance of AWU, how much they actually accomplish, and what they actually do.

Left a sour taste in my mouth, because doing this as an interviewer is imo pretty unethical.

true_religion
0 replies
3h50m

Many unions have a goal that no one should be hired unless they are already a union member.

MichaelZuo
2 replies
14h33m

Making it an even percentage across the company is pretty common, it prevents middle management infighting and horse trading over who has to cut more and who gets to cut less.

The actual decisions about which specific individuals, after the percentage is arrived at, however seems questionable if what you say is true.

jjjjoe
1 replies
13h32m

This thinking is taught in MBA programs but does not map onto real businesses. If you're in the ice cube business and you made the profoundly unwise decision to set up vending machines in Inuit communities, you don't recover by laying off x% of both your Alaskan retail and Caribbean Cruise wholesale businesses.

ryloric
0 replies
12h42m

Lmao, most creative example ever.

Ferret7446
2 replies
14h20m

Was the TL in a high cost area, and the replacements junior SWEs in low cost areas? It's likely that they have a set budget for human resource (for lack of a better term), so they're cutting the "high cost items". Unfortunately, institutional knowledge/skill doesn't show up on a spreadsheet.

winrid
0 replies
11h49m

the better term would be "people"

jjjjoe
0 replies
13h44m

I've been on the receiving end of that kind of "reorganization" and this didn't look like that.

EDIT: Specifically, replacements were not "cheap".

the_70x
0 replies
8h39m

No matter what. Capital wants results and dividends.

ryloric
0 replies
12h36m

If you have some ambition and desire to work hard, large parts of Google were already wrong places to be in 2010-11.

I went in bright eyed, excited about the challenging work I would get to do, but instead found inept co-workers happy to do minimal amount of work while enjoying the perks and chilling most of the time. Couple that with the undeserved air of smugness many co-workers carried and the cult-like social environment... it was already not a great place to be, at the very least the team I was part of.

berniedurfee
0 replies
5h24m

One possible explanation is that companies try to avoid discrimination lawsuits by laying off employees in a way that provides plausible deniability of discrimination.

That tends to mean broad sweeping layoffs that select whole orgs, functions, lines of business or locations.

Often that means rehiring (sometimes the same people) to rebuild what was lost by some broad sweeping blind decision.

There’s also some gaming that goes on beforehand to protect key people by shifting them around to get them out of the selection group.

So yes, opaque and senseless may have been a purposeful strategy.

treprinum
32 replies
18h15m

"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’"

Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.

siggen
6 replies
17h58m

What he said probably cannot be verified, even. On another note, has anyone noticed how Pichai likes to take pictures in front of others’ work for the media [1]? To me, it’s a weird feeling—- like someone taking credit for others’ work.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/23/google-quantum-computing...

michaelt
4 replies
17h11m

Eh, that's kinda normal. Just because the queen shows up to get photographed cutting a ribbon at a new university building, doesn't mean anyone imagines she laid any bricks or tiled any bathrooms.

The photo you linked to is only confusing because he's not wearing a suit. Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.

TaylorAlexander
2 replies
14h35m

Or from another perspective, it's weird when the Queen does it too.

hyperman1
1 replies
10h2m

It makes more sense if the queen is just a mascot for $country. The whole country got together and made it, but its not practical to get everyone on the photo. So you put a crown on some random person to make clear she's a representation of the whole country, not a real person (at that instant).

What's missing here is the crown/suit/...

TaylorAlexander
0 replies
8h0m

I think there is some ideology attached to how "normal" that would be, and whether someone accepts the "mascot" analogy.

If society were very focused on worker's rights and the recognition of the necessity of labor, such as in an idealized socialist society or a society with a predominance of worker cooperatives in the economy, then the idea of having a monarch or CEO of a company standing in front of the hard work of people whose names are not mentioned and whose faces are not pictured would seem absurd. You would expect and indeed commonly see photos showing many workers in front of the item in question.

Just as an example I went to the wikipedia page for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was quick to find what I would expect: a photo of a large group of workers in front of a dam they constructed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...

Or you might find a focused photo of a worker who is one of the people who built the thing, and representative of the type of workers on the project:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...

I say this just to say, sure it can "make sense" but I think this is an artifact of the world we live in, where we have a hierarchical government and most firms in our economy are themselves hierarchical in nature. And so when the person at the top of the hierarchy stands for a photo op in front of the thing, we naturally accept that they serve as a "representation" of the output of the company.

But someone with a more worker-focused view would be more inclined to see that and find it off-putting. For the photo of Sundar Pichai up thread, I do in fact find it irritating that they don't even mention the people who were involved with the project he is standing in front of. And wouldn't you know it, I am a very pro-worker in inclination.

Gud
0 replies
10h59m

Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.

That would be different. In that situation it is clear who is doing the work, and who is providing the money.

But posing in front of a widget, he is signaling to the world, “I made this”.

geodel
0 replies
14h38m

Huh, he is the CEO of Google posing with Google's quantum computer. Unless someone is inventing the universe there will always be others' work where ever one poses.

bradleyjg
5 replies
18h0m

There’s a powerful evolutionary force which provides very rich or powerful people with whatever yes-men are appealing to their particular personalities. The returns to being an accepted yes-man are so high that attempts are going to continually be made until someone clicks. Eventually someone is going to click. It’s near impossible not to become detached from reality under such circumstances. Hence all the legends across many cultures of the king dressing up as a commoner and sneaking around his kingdom.

api
4 replies
17h30m

I forget where I heard this but I once read a saying that “communication is only possible between equals.”

I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play.

If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer.

“Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news.

The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another.

This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up.

It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.

lazystar
1 replies
14h39m

speaking truth to power is difficult when the survival of your social structure depends on your continued income. ironically - or perhaps intentionally - the fact that no one feels safe due to random firings of "top performers", new hires, "underperformers", etc, could result in a work envoronment where everyone finally speaks the truth, because they dont have a guarantee that lying will continue to protect their paycheck.

api
0 replies
6h33m

Works the other way too. Higher ups have an incentive to provide a rosy outlook, explain away problems, and over promise to those under them to stay there. So really everyone in a hierarchy is incentivized to blow smoke.

kinggrowler
0 replies
14h35m

Celine's Second Law, from the Illuminatus! series:

  Wilson rephrases the [law] himself many times as "communication occurs only between equals". Celine calls this law "a simple statement of the obvious" and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one's job)....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws

cratermoon
0 replies
15h54m

The inimitable Systemantics terms this the Hireling's Hypnosis.

AndrewKemendo
4 replies
16h50m

The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.

There’s no other requirement.

You make the board mad you’re fired. You make the board happy, then you’re golden and can do whatever.

The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.

CEO at this level isn’t a people leader like you’d expect because boards don’t care about people (unless they are unionizing). So anything they say about people issues, you can guarantee is a statement made for the board’s consumption.

This fits that perfectly because what he’s communicating is “we got rid of what we consider dead weight loss because those people worked in what we arbitrarily have deemed cost centers instead of what we used to call [important buzzword like “metaverse”]

ryloric
1 replies
12h24m

Come on, you say it as if every board member is an android focused only on short term results. They've had a board when Eric was CEO and Google was doing it's best work as well.

It's not really about the board, Google has become a mature company that's not going to grow 20% YoY anymore and this is what happens to such businesses. Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces, they will turn them into IBM.

throwawayqqq11
0 replies
6h27m

It's not really about the board.

Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces

Isnt the board the ultimate force, including the economic one?

You are supporting OPs claim actually. Becoming a mature company brings declining workforce morale.

they will turn them into IBM.

because

The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.
ncr100
0 replies
12h49m

It's gross, and true.

The average worker, adhering to Company Culture, trading their mental space and shaving off their own quality of life in favor of the company's growth, are not the point of the business.

bradleyjg
0 replies
7h30m

The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.

The easiest way to make a board happy is to stack it with your friends. Preferably those that are not that rich so that they appreciate the several hundred thousand dollar a year gig for very little work.

slyall
3 replies
17h27m

There is mandatory training for CEOs to always be positive unless there is a very good reason not to.

What did you expect him to say? "Yes, moral is low and all the good people are leaving" ?

wolverine876
2 replies
17h14m

You can communicate, even in difficult situations, sincerely, genuinely, and truthfully, while providing good leadership. That is a manager's job description, effectively.

bdd8f1df777b
1 replies
16h30m

That’s only theory. In reality, people who spin everything in a positive light survive longer in a big organization.

esafak
0 replies
15h9m

It appears that Pichai's survival is at odds with the company's.

wolverine876
2 replies
17h15m

I would not assume it's true; it's typical technique for responding to this kind of criticism - don't address the concerns, express complete rejection of them by claiming it's positive (layoffs are positive, if you only look at them from a certain angle), and most importantly demonstrate the conversation can't move forward - there's such a chasm between you and them that it's hopeless. It's a propaganda technique. It works - look at Ian Hickson, who resigned in despair.

It fits the contemporary fad of contempt for anyone less powerful than you, including employees, courts (for some), etc.

tdeck
1 replies
13h34m

I wouldn't call powerful peoples' contempt for those less powerful than them a fad. That's been a thing for millenia.

wolverine876
0 replies
13h2m

That's been a thing for millenia.

Somehow, the world changes day to day, year to year, generation to generation; somehow we change the world; and all despite the fact that, as people now copypasta everywhere, 'it's always been that way'. Do people say that at work meetings? Talking to investors? One wonders what all these entrepeneurs and engineers do? No wonder funding is drying up (I think that might be a literal problem - the despair, pessimism and cynicism reaching the executive suite).

We've always had carbon in the atmosphere, warfare, poverty, oppression, ... and people saying that _____ has always been that way.

skort
2 replies
16h40m

I don't think you get to be the CEO of a big tech company by caring about workers.

latency-guy2
0 replies
14h34m

What level of employment do you usually get to until you don't care about workers?

ghaff
0 replies
16h33m

I don't think that's really fair. But I also think CEOs have to think about tradeoffs and realistically assess needs and strategies going forward which may not mean keeping everyone on payroll.

xt00
0 replies
18h8m

Survivorship bias in action.. "I'm glad to be alive.. thanks boss!" How many of the people laid off said "thank you for simplifying.." ..

standardUser
0 replies
18h3m

This is a serious problem. There will always been a handful of "career-oriented' sycophants who will tell the top bosses exactly what they want to hear. That let's those bosses ignore complaints (if people dare complain) or simply assume everything must be wonderful since they keep getting such positive feedback.

sianemo
0 replies
17h42m

Pichai doesn't need to sincerely believe what he's relaying here to benefit from it, he needs only believe that by saying these things he can steer employee discontent to back within a manageable margin. Therein lies the ineptitude.

rurp
0 replies
14h7m

Yeah it's pretty unreal how hard Sundar is working to confirm all of the opinions about him being an out of touch and ineffectual manager. That line was unbelievably cringe inducing.

TillE
21 replies
18h7m

Google does plenty of stuff well, but what's their last big exciting new product or even new feature? Bard is good but they're chasing OpenAI. Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung. Or YouTube Shorts and Tiktok.

It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.

paxys
6 replies
17h30m

Every large tech company does one or two things extremely well and prints money from them and then has a hundred other efforts that range from terrible to middling. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon...they are all the same in this regard. When was the last time any of them truly innovated?

pb7
3 replies
16h58m

Apple Vision Pro.

jamedjo
2 replies
10h14m

So late to the VR headset market they thought they needed to stick googly eyes on it... dunno maybe I'm missing something?

pb7
0 replies
37m

dunno maybe I'm missing something?

Yeah, vision.

Nevermark
0 replies
2h15m

It instantly changed how I work. Seems like a lasting change.

I sit on my couch with a MacBook Air (very couch friendly) developing with many screens of relevant info arranged around me.

A mundane but profound benefit of “spatial computing” is no longer having visual information limited to the “keyholes” of hardware screens.

Apple seems to get that the Vision Pro wants to be a Mac replacement, not an iPad replacement.

Counterintuitively, the stereo 3D is the secondary benefit. Albeit a natural and significant one.

Everything in Vision works with both see-pinch and track/mouse click.

Hoping see-pinch comes to Mac screen in Vision, or simply Mac becomes redundant.

utopcell
0 replies
17h2m

Waymo.

david_allison
0 replies
15h17m

Metaverse?

QuinnyPig
5 replies
17h19m

Apparently they’re killing / renaming Bard, because Google gonna Google. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/google-reportedly-rebr...

gtirloni
3 replies
15h47m

Bard is a horrible name though. Poet? Horse ornament? It's close to Bardo which is the stage after death and before rebirth.

Gemini is much more neutral and easy to work with. Like Alexa or Siri.

Erratic6576
2 replies
9h16m

Gemini because of the two opposite faces: one looking towards you; the other one, towards the NSA

sigilis
1 replies
7h44m

That would have been Janus. Gemini are twins, which represents all of your data being copied I guess.

gtirloni
0 replies
7h34m

ROFL, thanks for that.

pb7
0 replies
16h59m

Like Microsoft killed Bing AI? I mean, renamed it to Copilot? Oh wait, Copilot already existed but for code. Wait, merged? Or is it the same thing? Hmmm... acquired and killed and rebirthed with a crappy new UI? Who fucking knows but Google gonna Google!

utopcell
2 replies
18h3m

Do you mean, Google is one CEO change away from turning it around, like Microsoft did ?

throwup238
1 replies
17h52m

More like Sundar is one bad conference away from a viral video of him running around on stage covered in sweat yelling "Shareholders! Shareholders! Shareholders!"

vineyardmike
0 replies
17h39m

Google is mostly owned by Larry and Sergey, so as long as they’re happy, nothing can be done. And they can have that discussion in private. Sundar just needs to smile through any conference and keep going.

My guess is that he’ll say some off color on a hot mic or email leak. Considering his lack of effort in addressing Caste issues at Google… that’s possibly an issue. Could be antitrust stuff too. He’s been in hot water lately.

parineum
2 replies
17h53m

Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung

Market share wise but not feature wise. Everyone is chasing them in regards to photo quality.

solardev
1 replies
17h50m

A bit out of the loop here... who are you saying has the better photo quality now, Pixel or Samsung?

kajecounterhack
0 replies
17h41m

I think they're saying Pixel is leading everyone in still image quality.

Pixel is assuredly NOT leading in video recording quality though. And the overall package still matters: for example X% superiority in still photos didn't make up for Pixel 6 having a very small photo buffer / a slow camera startup speed. Didn't make up for lens cracking issues in Pixel 7. iPhone just works.

kajecounterhack
0 replies
17h44m

Google Photos was pretty great. But yeah, Google is a utility company to me at this point. Search, Maps, GSuite, Chromecast, YouTube: it'd be nice if they could keep the things we use running and charge a reasonable price. Why is the Chromecast with Google TV still using such underpowered hardware?!

Erratic6576
0 replies
17h53m

The only exciting announcements from Google are the discontinuation of services

nharada
17 replies
17h57m

"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed

bazil376
7 replies
17h47m

At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up

wolverine876
2 replies
17h10m

Why would that shift it from 'for the benefit of Google' to 'for the benefit of whoever makes the decision'?

Rebelgecko
0 replies
16h47m

If you're cashing out all of your RSUs over the next 5 years, you don't necessarily care about the long term ramifications of your decision. Just that it pumps the stock price in the short term

LoganDark
0 replies
17h1m

Because once the company is big enough, it becomes competitive and immoral enough for employees to start to fear each other. So everyone starts to develop an "every man for themselves" mentality.

jokethrowaway
1 replies
16h56m

Nothing to do with it. We're not mature enough to recognize the importance of a flat hierarchy and adopting a startup-like model with our internal teams (business and technical independence, succeed and you'll be rich, fail and you're fired)

As a result, the larger the company, the larger the hierarchy, the larger the inefficencies. At the extreme you approximate the government of a country.

Layers of managers who care only about collecting a paycheck, engaging in company politics and looking busy cause exactly this problem. Managers will pick the best decision for them, not anyone else.

gtirloni
0 replies
16h1m

What are your thoughts on companies that adopted holacracy?

kevinventullo
0 replies
17h8m

And yet

jiveturkey
0 replies
17h31m

Yes. Those that don't make it to those transition points have "failed".

gretch
6 replies
16h52m

People always talk about these things as if they are mutually exclusive.

In reality, there’s lot of opportunities that benefit all 3 of user, Google, and decision maker.

it’s kind of the fundamental principle of trade/business - that both sides can proper in a deal.

uoaei
5 replies
16h26m

That's nice in theory, but can you say that Google does things that actually achieve that trifecta?

scialex
2 replies
13h40m

YouTube, Google maps, Gmail ...

uoaei
1 replies
11h2m

Name a single YouTube content creator who is satisfied with that arrangement.

gretch
0 replies
50m

Here's Tom Scott quoted on MKBHD's channel where he literally says "this is my dream job"

https://youtu.be/GQAvce3MA44?si=deP0GG1hICPp9jr8&t=93

im3w1l
1 replies
13h41m

Sure. It's just we tend to notice the tradeoffs and forget the win-wins. Every bug fixed and every performance improvement benefits all three.

uoaei
0 replies
10h58m

Every bug fixed and every performance improvement benefits all three.

I'd love to think so, but the truth is that any platform, working correctly, disadvantages those who contribute most of the content. The platform owners earn money in ways that are always contrary to the interests of the content creators.

tommiegannert
0 replies
11h51m

Or:

These users don't seem to know what they want. I'll just listen to whomever keeps calling me personally about things. My buddies are successful, so it makes sense.

Eh, these shareholders don't seem to know what they're doing. I'll just listen to myself. Everything I do makes sense to me, so that makes sense.

llelouch
0 replies
4h53m

Kind of reminds me of the evolution of bureaucracies

option
13 replies
18h28m

Their CEO needs to go, he has no tech vision

zx8080
6 replies
18h21m

CEO helps profits and ensures stock price. Engineers only spend money. Who should go?

/s

not2b
4 replies
18h17m

I know, /s, but:

If you have someone who aimlessly kills products and fires people but lacks vision or a decent plan, you could find someone much cheaper, and save tens of millions on executive compensation. If operating margin is so crucial now, then it seems cutting pay of top executives is the easiest way to achieve that with the least damage to the company.

zx8080
3 replies
18h10m

Firing people actually helps raising a stock price [0].

0 - https://money.com/tech-layoffs-affect-stock-prices/

zx8080
1 replies
18h7m

Raising stock price makes so many people happy than firing a few wealthy individuals does some small harm for the greater good of many.

/s

zx8080
0 replies
15h2m

so many people

Meaning shares holders, of course.

not2b
0 replies
17h34m

Improving operating margin helps raise the stock price: the company then can at least temporarily produce the same revenue for lower cost. But firing employees is only one way to do it. Executive compensation is now so bloated that reducing it might produce the same gain as from firing hundreds of employees, with less impact to future growth (talent is retained).

wtracy
0 replies
17h54m

Look at Tesla and Nvidia in recent years. Exciting innovations can cause stock prices to soar completely independently of the company's fundamentals.

mouse_
5 replies
18h20m

No, he has money vision. They're at an all time high right now.

He's not going anywhere

flkiwi
2 replies
18h17m

We'll see how short-term thinking works out for them in a decade. "Rich but irrelevant" isn't a good place to end up. But at least shareholders in 2024 got a percentage more in gains.

jaggederest
1 replies
17h57m

Just like IBM, outperforming the S&P by -4500% overall since the 1960s.

esafak
0 replies
14h52m

IBM's stock hasn't even tripled since Google's IPO in 2004. You buying?

pcloadletter_
1 replies
17h57m

Tech CEOs seem to have realized the really short-term wins drive stock prices up. Feel especially bad recently. Feels like we're going to see crumbling software soon

ChatGTP
0 replies
17h34m

They've just turned into regular companies.

proc0
7 replies
17h55m

I've wondered about the connection between organizations at the human level, and entropy. Nothing can avoid the increase in entropy, not even teams and their work culture. The processes used get old and unwieldy, domain knowledge becomes fragmented, features take longer and have more bugs, etc.

Perhaps this is inevitable, but maybe organizations could become aware of the changes in entropy and try to do the equivalent of maintenance and refactoring at the organizational level. There is probably some of this already happening, but I wonder if information theory can be applied at the people level to optimize and prevent increases in entropy.

vineyardmike
6 replies
17h46m

“Refactoring at the org level” sounds like re-orgs and layoffs.

I think it’s unavoidable. You hire to grow, but growth changes you. You can’t layoff to un-grow and return to former self because they layoffs take a toll.

twojobsoneboss
4 replies
17h38m

We need UBI and less dependence on private enterprises for basic human needs like income to survive and healthcare

Would give both companies and individuals more flexibility and dynamism

deprecative
3 replies
17h32m

But then lazy "people" would benefit and we don't like that.

astrange
1 replies
11h54m

There have been a lot of trials of UBI now and the evidence is very strong that… it doesn't affect employment much either way. So it doesn't make people lazy, but it's probably a disappointment to people who don't believe in work.

In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.

deprecative
0 replies
2h44m

I hope we'll get there. I see studies and reports of things like UBI and 4 day work weeks and even basic things folks in EU countries get and it's honestly difficult to ever envision any of it actually coming to the US for most of us regular folk.

twojobsoneboss
0 replies
16h56m

The amount of time and effort people spend looking at others instead of themselves is maddening

proc0
0 replies
14h54m

That's true, although if the analogy holds then it depends on the initial quality of the teams, but I have no idea if there is any solution around incentivizing companies to build long-lasting teams.

pcloadletter_
7 replies
18h6m

I think you're just in for a rude awakening if you expect the Google from 20 years ago. It's no longer a scrappy startup, it's closer to Microsoft at this point.

inamberclad
2 replies
17h54m

The thing that struck me about Google is that it's a really well running machine. The documentation is all there, the build system is easy, and just about every issue is fixed with a single form submitted or email sent. You quickly develop a very high standard for how an organization should function.

dekhn
1 replies
17h46m

I think you left out the sarcasm tag

inamberclad
0 replies
14h34m

Compared to a lot of startups, it's not sarcasm

gonzo41
1 replies
17h55m

Nah, it's closer to IBM.

PessimalDecimal
0 replies
16h53m

Came here to say exactly this.

utopcell
0 replies
18h4m

I'd be happy with the Google from 5 years ago.

away271828
0 replies
17h38m

Companies grow and they have to change. I was at a company that grew to about 10x the size of when I joined. It was still pretty successful but it was a different company. I didn't have the freedom and flexibility, there was more process, etc. Not as fun but you really can't run a 10x company like you run a 1x one.

brcmthrowaway
7 replies
18h6m

What ever happened to Google X, have they released a single product or is it all resume padding just like their balloons or whatever

ojbyrne
6 replies
18h1m

Waymo came out of X.

dekhn
3 replies
17h33m

The technology predates X; X just housed it for a while. There were self-driving cars at Google in 2008, that look almost exactly like the ones that drive around now, except the computer vision hardware was bulkier.

SllX
2 replies
17h24m

That doesn’t sound right.

Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.

dekhn
1 replies
17h9m

Google X starting 2010. I saw self-driving cars (large spinning cameras) in the lot of Crittenden within a year of joining. So maybe it was 2009, but it was definitely before X existed.

SllX
0 replies
16h52m

No, you’re right about X. My recollection was off by a year too.

ghaff
1 replies
17h45m

The question remains. Waymo is not really a product and it's unclear when it will become one in a broadly-deployed way.

pb7
0 replies
17h9m

What product does Uber or Lyft or DoorDash or Instacart have?

People take Waymo on a daily basis without incident. Just because it may not be available to you doesn't mean it's not real. It is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the industry.

smeej
3 replies
17h25m

I don't understand the complaint from the guy who has been there for 15 years and doesn't like that it's changed.

Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality.

If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. Leave before a company gets that size!

nine_zeros
2 replies
16h39m

contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job.

This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so many mediocre people who want to be seen as "doing something", they are literally destroying the innovation by virtue of just existing in that company at that level.

The solution is actually pretty simple - make management track people go on call. That way, they develop empathy for customers, engineers and services. Make them spend less time on committees, promo packets, performance reviews and instead, spend more time on services. Make them fix bugs. Be close to the work that they are supposedly the face of.

smeej
0 replies
2h17m

I think it also behooves these smart people just to realize that they're not "one company for the long haul" people.

I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment.

But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applying at raise an eyebrow over it.

I think there's a tangential tricky element here too, that most financial advice is written for the masses of people who do have predictable career paths and long-term plans. There's nothing wrong with that. Those people need to have plans too.

But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were. I could use decent advice, but "be a different kind of person, because the kind of person you are isn't like me" doesn't really help. I'm financially way ahead of my friends in traditional roles, because risk is often rewarded and ownership matters, but I've yet to find an advisor who has the first idea what to do with me.

carlthome
0 replies
13h51m

Is there any company that has tried that idea? Sounds interesting (akin to DevOps).

AndrewKemendo
3 replies
17h8m

This is just so totally absurd that I’m surprised nobody has pushed back hard on this claim:

“The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,”

That sounds like a massive hyperbolic exaggeration at best and pure fabrication at worst.

If true though it’s a massive indictment on the leadership that shows how inept they are at even having a semblance of knowing what their people do and taking care of them.

therealdrag0
0 replies
11h29m

A team that lost a low performer may appreciate it, otherwise not.

htrp
0 replies
13h40m

PR running interference as best they can

citizenpaul
0 replies
13h23m

sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts.

Sounds like Pichai has been drinking the linkedin toxic positivity kool-aid.

I would think that quote came from the onion 5 years ago.

nojvek
2 replies
15h6m

Google is printing more money than ever before.

Google could likely fire 1000s more and it wouldn’t change their trajectory.

Same with Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc.

Their core businesses are massive empires.

They can make so many stupid mistakes, hire inept layers of management and still cash billions.

They can randomly fire 5% of their workforce with roll of dice. There is enough redundancy and resilience that they’ll bounce back.

We, the average working joes are bound by gravity. We can escape into space, but with immense force and spice of luck. We have to work for money.

Mega trillion corporations are like black holes. They curve space time so hard, money works for them.

ProllyInfamous
1 replies
2h58m

At current trajectories, nVDA could surpass GOOG within a month.

MSFT already did-so within the past year (after providing OpenAI funding).

----

All I'm suggesting is that the money fountain isn't forever.

nojvek
0 replies
2h3m

True. My point being that all of mega tech corps are like hive intelligences. They are all optimizing for shareholder value. At that scale, the individuals don't really matter.

If you make your Job your identity, you're in for a big surprise. The truth is that most of us are replaceable. We are not special snowflakes in the eyes of Mega Tech Corps.

karaterobot
2 replies
17h4m

Hirsh Theriault complained that executives are “trying to point in a vague direction” toward AI while waiting for lower-level staff to propose concrete, actionable ideas.

I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what but how—is way worse.

nine_zeros
0 replies
16h34m

I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what but how—is way worse.

There is another alternative, "The executive rallies people behind a vision, encourages people to come up with ideas and solutions, sets up incentives such that low level ICs can bypass all middle management nonsense, encourage failures, and skill themselves up to be able to make tough calls."

But that's not what executives do. They set some vague vision, force middle management to trickle it down to ICs. Everyone is under pressure to do something with no reward for doing that something. Everyone still has to follow the chain of command and everyone still has to manage mediocre middle management politics.

iboisvert
0 replies
13h55m

I agree, but I think there are a couple important stages that should be explicit: actively solicit proposals and fund the proposals

ungreased0675
1 replies
17h46m

I’m not sure Google leadership appreciate how fragile their search business is. The core product has slipped significantly in quality and is ripe for disruption.

From the outside, the company looks rudderless, coasting along on (significant) momentum.

brokencode
0 replies
17h42m

Yup, time to bring in the consultants and MBAs, let them turbocharge the stock price by laying a bunch of people off and switching to single ply toilet paper, and cash out quick to pay for a new mega yacht.

nine_zeros
1 replies
18h19m

Google - as well as faag, faang adjacent, and wannabe faang companies - all have the same problem: The entire management track is filled with mediocre paper pushers instead of innovators.

geodel
0 replies
13h54m

This frees up innovators to launch their own companies.

nerpderp82
1 replies
17h12m

Morale from the initial and continued layoffs have utterly pulled the rug out from underneath the culture at Google. Any productivity savings they think they earned has afaict, but dwarfed by large margin in reduced productivity as people scramble to try and perform for whatever algorithm is being used to remove people.

Leadership all the way to the top is completely inept.

jjjjoe
0 replies
15h29m

whatever algorithm is being used to remove people

Different functions/teams/departments seemed to use very different algorithms, suggesting there was just no leadership at all. I posted a separate top level comment, but seeing one function do last-in/first-out and another jettison its most-tenured (most expensive? non-pristine HR record? who knows!) folks makes it hard for employees to understand what the new rules of engagement are.

lgleason
1 replies
18h4m

Google no longer hires the best and the brightest.

PessimalDecimal
0 replies
16h54m

Aren't they offshoring a lot of their roles to either India or eastern Europe? How'd that work out for IBM and others who tried this before them?

christkv
1 replies
17h50m

Failure is growth. Failure is learning. But sometimes failure is just failure. I think... I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.

hathawsh
0 replies
17h36m

In case anyone else is wondering: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Gavin_Belson

anacrolix
1 replies
3h29m

I left Google 10 years ago because it was boring. Any interesting things it does is restricted to an elite cabal. It's horribly conservative with programming innovation for a company its size. Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors.

avidiax
0 replies
47m

Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors.

Maybe they think that they don't really have competitors at this point, or rather, no competitors that can meaningfully reduce the market share in key areas, or competitors that are in a position to hire the laid off employees.

0xbadcafebee
1 replies
18h22m

“I guess I will just hang around and do my job until Google no longer wants me,” she finished her post.

Welcome to having a regular non-union job? There's several billion other people in the club. It's not exciting, and you will be let go whenever the company wants a boost in their financials. There's also no free snacks or chefs, but you (at Google) still get a bigger salary than anyone else in the world with your job, if that helps. If you want fulfillment, excitement, vision, etc, you could always change jobs to a smaller company whose reason for being isn't selling ads.

away271828
0 replies
17h52m

Perhaps not popular but, if you're getting paid well, the work is tolerable enough, the grass is often not actually greener somewhere else, you have mouths to feed, maybe you're close to retiring/semi-retiring, etc. continuing to hang around for a while isn't necessarily the worst strategy.

I probably wouldn't do it indefinitely but it can make sense to hang around for a while.

theGnuMe
0 replies
13h57m

"CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,” he said, per the Verge."

When CEOs say this, you know you have a huge morale and leadership problem. Statements like that are incredulous. It's the boot lickers who say that stuff to the CEO.

Sundar is out of his depth at worse and disconnected at best if he believes that is the way to defend layoffs. I am surprised HR/PR let him say this...

paxys
0 replies
17h4m

Is there a single tech company where morale has been high since 2022? Microsoft had multiple layoffs and froze promos, bonuses and stock grants for all employees, and now they are the most valuable company in the world and have a great reputation in the industry. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta and the rest aren't much different.

If you are looking for groundbreaking innovation, competent management, no politics, freedom from shareholder demands etc. then it's best to steer clear of any multi-trillion dollar corporation.

mfru
0 replies
8h49m

As with every time when scandals in tech land break:

"You Deserve a Tech Union" https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union

Put in the work, organize, unionize. The alternative is sisyphusian repetition of the same situations.

lulznews
0 replies
16h56m

Failing up and sucking up are the two most powerful forces in corporate America.

kurthr
0 replies
18h19m

To be fair disparagement for middle management has been around for ages. Nobody (10 years ago) I knew wanted to be promoted into management, if only because it was so hard to manage. It seemed like there was an outside hiring binge of middle managers who wanted to grow empires (from Amazon/MS etc).

Hmmm... would be interesting to go look at LinkedIn data to see if it's really true. Of course it wouldn't fix this problem. Workers are now unhappy with senior management, which is new. Although, I think some of the empire building resulted in a lot of the pandemic over hiring (and departures of long term staff).

klyrs
0 replies
18h16m

I love me a boring boss. Inept, I have zero patience for.

diogenescynic
0 replies
14h17m

My friend who works there says it's because they let people who've been there a long enough time transfer into roles they have no experience in, but because of their experience, they are automatically put into senior positions but lack the experience to actually do the job.

devwastaken
0 replies
13h40m

This is the time to make startups. The market is ripe for disruption when the old players become visionless shells only recognizable by name.

ChrisArchitect
0 replies
15h30m

Anything new here? Or is this article just aggregating every piece from the last month about layoffs, the leaked memo, discontent, boring etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39101384

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39125467

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39260956