
More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-01/google-talent-advantage-erodes-as-more-workers-doubt-ceo-vision
======
jillesvangurp
Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google
from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of
having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for
both founders who acted in a duo CTO role.

Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to
be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem is that
their current CEO is not filling the CTO boots very well and that's a problem
because there is no CTO. It's showing. Google's strategy is fine from a
financial point of view but less so from a technical point of view.

A bit like MS under Balmer. In fact, Google is starting to act a lot like MS a
decade ago; including being arrogant, increasingly isolated, and somewhat tone
deaf. I like them a lot less than 10 years ago. Of course Balmer added a whole
other level of surreal to the mix that is thankfully missing here. Looking at
MS today, they turned things around quite a bit and their current CEO is in an
entirely different league than Google's CEO. That's the problem they need to
fix. He's alright but not great. They need great. Pichar isn't. That's what
those numbers are saying.

~~~
petra
I do think that Google has a technical vision.

They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage.

They want to offer people focused answers to their questions.

They want to serve as your personal assistant.

They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google.

And they want to be deeply integrated with your life.

The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achieving
Google's list is more of a research project - it's just far harder and less
predictable.

Some will even say those goals require artificial general intelligence.

Assuming that's the case, the fact that Google leads the world in AI/ML ,
hints that they are doing a good job, right ?

~~~
taneq
To be fair, they only lead the world in AI because they bought DeepMind.

~~~
muro
Photos, voice recognition/assistant, search, smart reply etc. are not made by
DeepMind. Same for their tensor processor hardware and tensorflow.

------
vl
Wait, our CEO has a vision?

Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons:

De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the
reporting structure in the last few years (ie endless layers of middle
management).

Both of these make consistent vision and values much harder to achieve. Recent
Googlegeist just reflects that.

~~~
jpm_sd
Also, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things.
(Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)

~~~
dasmoth
Those were pretty much the only reasons I continued to admire Google for as
long as I did. They gave hope that the company might one day have a meaningful
consumer revenue stream that isn’t advertising.

They’ve gone for “cloud services” instead. Drastically, drastically, less
inspiring — and also pretty competitive. What happens if Amazon drop their
prices a bit?

~~~
apathy
AWS accounts for something like half of Amazon’s operating revenue. It may not
be exciting but it is a license to print money. Why wouldn’t google (and MSFT,
and anyone else with a big sunk investment in data centers) want to monetize
their investment too?

Originally bezos was pissed off that Amazon’s excess capacity for the Black
Friday/Christmas surge was going to waste the other 50 weeks of the year. I
suspect that’s a pretty powerful motivation. But google absorbs huge spikes
too (9/11 was one of the first harbingers of this) so it seemed inevitable,
even back then, that they’d do it eventually.

Fighting the momentum of entire markets and hoping a muse settles on your
shoulder isn’t a sustainable business strategy for most companies, let alone
very large public companies.

------
goldenchrome
Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more
people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for
employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal.

Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking
confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has
heard about Google in the past year is a direct result of leaks.

It just doesn't feel as "fun" anymore.

~~~
osrec
I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k
employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with
little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that
large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's
becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of
a company allows the non productive people to hide within it, all while
successfully siphoning off their sustenance.

~~~
logjammin
I've had a similar feeling about how our society deals with people who don't
fit in in this way (non-productive), and it's a fun thing to play around with
in your head because in a loose way it undercuts a key selling point of
organizing your society capitalistically like ours: during the cold war, it
was like "yeah well you Soviets just give every lazy bastard some meaningless
quasi-task in a widget factory or in some faceless ministry and go around
telling the rest of the world there's no unemployment and you're building
Utopia. We in the West, otoh, have purpose and let our people put themselves
to better use!"

So your observation reminded me that our society has plenty of people on a
similar sort of hidden dole: vast corporate structures with uncountable layers
of non-productive paper pushers, with a very small proportion of employees
setting the vision and another small bunch generating most of the value. A
social welfare program by any other name ...

So like do large human groups just inevitably have some subset that doesn't
quite fit (in terms of work and productivity) but who need taking care of so
we semi-deny their existence ("no slackers here!") while we semi-throw'em a
bone ("here's a paycheck, go look at Facebook for a few hours and fiddle with
PowerPoint while I harass my secretary")?

~~~
xkcd-sucks
> We in the West, otoh, have purpose and let our people put themselves to
> better use!"

AKA people invent novel ways to support themselves when the alternative is
starving in the street

~~~
logjammin
Lol yes

------
Someone1234
Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being
discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in
threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are
sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses
ultimately turning out correct).

I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind
of reminds me of a younger Microsoft back when three teams would create three
competitive solutions to the same problem (although to Microsoft's credit they
still support most of those to this day).

Google really needs to decide what it wants to be, what direction they're
going in, and work together. I'm guessing there's some perverse incentives at
play for some of this (e.g. promotions/bonuses for new stuff, nothing for
updates to existing products, or other "boring" work).

~~~
Mr_P
If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products
actually kind-of makes sense.

Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded
startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't.

The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to
indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long
to derisk a new product that they possibly miss out on a new market (I'm
looking at you, HomePod).

At the end of the day, this strategy has worked out well for them, so why
stop? For every failure like G+ or Allo, there's a success like Google Photos
or Duo.

~~~
Kovah
From a business perspective, Google's way to work with products makes totally
sense, as you described. But - and that's that problem I have with Google -
from a user perspective, their way to work is unprofessional. Why did this
become an internet meme? Because all the projects they launch are launched
with a lot of loud tam tam, they advertise them and for new users it clearly
feels like this new product is here to stay - only to find out two years later
that the product will be cut off. People start to use this new fancy app which
is marketed to be the "next big thing". And then later some product manager
thinks that it may be not worth to continue working on it.

IMO if Google really wants to try out new things, they should make these
things invite-only to find out if they are working and how users interact with
it, or clearly mark them as 'beta' or something like that. Google has a huge
fan base and the internet is full of people excited to try out new things. But
if users clearly see "hey, this is kind of a beta product, I am just testing
this out" there would be way less disappointment if the product shuts down
after a while.

~~~
feanaro
Gmail was famously in beta for many years, long after it became an extremely
important service.

~~~
Kovah
I think Gmail is a good example for how it should be done, one of the few, if
not the only good example.

------
sn41
Google's fall from grace mirrors HP's and Xerox's. At some level, CEOs who do
not share an altruistic vision espoused by the "rank-and-file" engineers who
are more idealistic. I think in Xerox, they were called "toner heads".

When you suck out the soul, the remaining carcass will totter on for a couple
more decades, and encomiums will be written to the "well-managed" company in
business magazines, but no promising undergraduates will list it as their
dream job, and somehow, that's what really matters.

~~~
kamaal
There is no way MBA CEOs can ever do any good to these companies.

Their whole training is to convert high performance engineering places to
minimum wage paying furniture assembly shops.

------
hcnews
Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta
hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven.

I guess Google at this point just keep churning through systems because
Engineers are incentivized to show impact and rarely end up creating new good
products.

Adding tons of new engineers is also probably hurting their overall quality
and velocity.

~~~
amoorthy
I'm not a Googler but read that Pichai oversaw the growth of Chrome browser
from minor player to the dominant position it has today. And he also oversaw
Android's growth after Andy Rubin's departure [1].

While he may not have written code that's two world-leading consumer adoption
stories. So many great engineers build products that never achieve great
adoption. So aren't Pichai's accomplishments worthy of CEO-level promotion?

Recruiting a world-class team, motivating them to achieve such domination,
managing their egos amid a huge company full of talented people, executing
across the behemoth that is Google... all these are vital skills and as a
company grows maybe more of what you need from a CEO than one who is the most
talented engineer. (I may be wrong; just a thought).

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-sundar-pichai-rose-to-
be...](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-sundar-pichai-rose-to-become-ceo-
of-google-2014-10)

~~~
unlimit
> oversaw the growth of Chrome browser from minor player to the dominant
> position it has today. And he also oversaw Android's growth

Couple of personal observations-

Would it have been same if Chrome was not advertised on every google property
and google intentionally breaking google properties on competitor browsers?

Also there was really no competition for android.

But not sure if the these two products were not world class then they would
have worked.

~~~
aikinai
Did you just forget Windows Phone ever existed? Also Palm and a few others.

And Chrome originally swept the world because it was just so much better (most
faster) than everything else. That’s why the tech industry migrated initially,
and then the growth tactics probably just kept things moving to grab the
number one spot.

------
wtmt
For the sake of the employees and for the sake of the rest of us, I believe
that Sundar Pichai is not CEO material at all. He should go or be pushed out,
and Larry Page and Sergei Brin (or one of them) should take a stronger role
and have a deeper engagement on many matters. Google has been doing well
financially, but it has lost its soul (the one it had in its very initial
years) and seems to be going around aimlessly as far as doing good things and
doing the right things are concerned.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I dunno. I like Sundar. I like his straightforward style. Personally I think
he's got it together a lot more than Larry and Sergey do. When Larry was the
boss, I always felt like we were lurching. Sundar feels like high speed
cruise.

Look this ship don't turn fast no matter who's at the helm. And it's not even
clear it needs to. Maybe it's already sailing where Sundar wants it to (mad
money + compelling products). As far as I can tell, public sentiment about
Google is very different from tech/nerd sentiment about the same, and that's
fine by me, because the public seems to like the company and its products. We
are making money hand over fist with no end in sight. While our politics might
not be progressive enough for the left fringe of Googlers (and I say this as a
liberal myself), they are certainly not reactionary by any stretch.

I wouldn't expect a radical new idea to spring out of Google at any point in
the future. It's too big for that. The folks with radical new ideas are
working in their garages. And that's OK. Companies have life-cycles, like
anything else, and Google-the-company is in the "mature adult" phase. It is
refining and extending in the areas where it's strong. Occasionally it tries a
new hobby, but it doesn't expect to make a career change. It _can 't_. It
likes its day job (the best damn information-seeking web properties on the
planet), and even if it got pretty good at something else, it's hard to
picture a scenario where the productivity of that alternative comes close to
the main business.

I guess this is the long way of saying that I don't see why the investors
would want Sundar out. I don't see why Larry or Sergey would. And I don't see
why most employees would either. We're all getting rich and mostly being
treated well, and building things that broadly speaking make the world a
better and more productive place. Those are all the people that get a vote, so
I wouldn't bet on Sundar going anywhere soon unless he wants to.

~~~
givinguflac
|and building things that broadly speaking make the world a better and more
productive place.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, ease up on the kool-aid. Productive,
maybe? Better, hell no.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Oh, because you disagree, I'm drinking the koolaid? Grow up and realize that
your perspective and priorities are not universal.

------
abhinai
78% approval ratings seem pretty high to me. Am I the only one who thinks we
may be looking for a pattern where none exists? A lot of factors like market
conditions, news cycle etc. could lead to +/-10% swing in what is such an
unofficial metric to begin with.

~~~
givehimagun
Agreed! Is this normal for Google? +-10% every year? The change % doesn't give
us a lot of insight...these numbers in total seem much higher than the company
surveys I've seen results for.

~~~
nostrademons
Typical numbers when I was there were usually in the high-80s to mid-90s on
most of the satisfaction questions. A drop of +-10% was absolutely considered
significant, as were numbers in the 70s.

I once made an internal G+ post that "voluntary response data measures
liquidity, not satisfaction". When you have an organization that people can
freely choose to join or leave, then you should _expect_ that any internal
surveys will have very high satisfaction numbers - because anyone who is
dissatisfied will simply _leave_ and drop out of the sample. Similarly, if you
get consistently low numbers for satisfaction, that could be because the
people in the sample have low liquidity - they can't easily go elsewhere.

This is why organizations like Congress, Comcast, and Facebook (users, not
employees) have such perpetually low approval ratings - for most people stuck
with them, there are simply no alternatives, and so they remain beholden to
their decisions despite hating them. And similarly, Google employees have very
high satisfaction ratings because it's relatively easy to get a job elsewhere
or just not need a job at all as a Xoogler, and so anyone who dislikes it just
leaves.

------
ur-whale
Once upon a time, Google used to be run by engineer types.

When Larry and Sergey retired and handed the reins over to Sundar, a standard
issue McKinsey drone whose technical contributions over the span of his entire
career are close to nil, it was game over for the original Google culture.

In fact, there is a theory floating around that he was chosen because someone
very smart at Google predicted the huge oncoming controversies around privacy,
data collection, manipulative monopolistic practices, and how overly powerful
Google was becoming in general.

Visionless, mild-mannered, bland, milquetoast, "we need to be incredibly
thoughtful about this" Sundar was the perfect choice as a CEO to weather that
particular storm, by staying under the radar as much as possible by projecting
a "don't worry we're the good guys, see how inoffensive I am myself" image (as
opposed to "I'm the CEO bitch" Zuck types).

Truth be told, the strategy has worked to a point: Google is in far less
trouble than e.g. FB.

But there is a price to be paid by handing over the wheel to someone who was
specifically chosen for how inoffensive and uninteresting he is.

~~~
hopler
You are saying Pinchai is a bad CEO but he was picked because he is talented
enough to handle the exploding time bomb created by the previous "good" CEOs?

~~~
wolco
Best fall guy not really most talented.

------
trixie_
Google's Achilles heel is search and ad revenue (80%). Which is sad because
they've been trying to diversify and find another major source of income for
20 years now. If a better search engine comes along and people switch over,
then google won't be able to maintain its empire and it could fold, or how
would you like to pay $10 a month for a GMail and Google Maps combo access
package? It could happen a lot easier and quicker than most people think.

~~~
ur-whale
I think they're a lot stronger than you think. True, Search and Ads is still
their bread and butter, but:

Their search engine is _really_ hard to replace, not just because of the
quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is.

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and has the largest
mindshare of any website on the internet.

Android is "the" platform pretty much everyone accesses the internet.

Cloud could do better (it's 3rd distant in the race against MSFT and AMZN),
but nevertheless a huge opportunity.

Buffet and Munger were correct when they commented about Google saying they'd
never seen a wider moat in their entire career.

~~~
aylmao
> Their search engine is really hard to replace, not just because of the
> quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is.

For the web, yes. I'd argue it's not threatened by other search engines,
though it is threatened by other players and indexes:

\- Apps. Google can't crawl apps, and people are getting used to the idea of
finding information in separate indexes as opposed to a single universal one.
Each app today has it's own search box, so if I'm looking for somewhere to eat
I go to Yelp. A product? Amazon. If I'm looking for someone I open Facebook.
If I'm looking for flights I open Kayak, Priceline or Expedia, etc).

> YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and has the
> largest mindshare of any website on the internet.

I agree that YouTube is very strong.

> Android is "the" platform pretty much everyone accesses the internet.

I disagree here. People largely access the internet (as in, data from the
internet) through apps, like I mentioned before (Yelp, Facebook, Amazon,
Kayak, Expedia...). [1]. Moreover, in terms of OSes, you still iOS and Windows
are still holding steadily to a decent chunk of important markets.

> Cloud could do better (it's 3rd distant in the race against MSFT and AMZN),
> but nevertheless a huge opportunity.

I do agree here.

> Buffet and Munger were correct when they commented about Google saying
> they'd never seen a wider moat in their entire career.

+1 on some things, but not so much on others IMO. At this point most tech
companies have comparable moats. Amazon, Facebook, Apple-- also huge moats.

And that's the thing-- competing against "just another search company" they're
definitely in no threat, but they're competing against companies about as
moated as they are. Amazon beat them to the punch with voice assistants. Apple
Music is taking market share like Google Music couldn't. ChromeOS still can't
seem to crack the dominance Microsoft Windows has on laptops. They're a lot
stronger than most people think, but their competition is too.

[1]: Fun fact, people browse the web a lot while using Facebook. This is
somewhat tangential to my main point so putting it down here, but Facebook is
actually a major web browser: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/facebook-is-
now-a-major-mo...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/facebook-is-now-a-major-
mobile-browser-in-u-s-with-10-market-share-in-many-states/)

~~~
ptd
I think you’re a more sophisticated user. Most people would just google
something like best [type of food] restaurant in [city]. They’re not going to
help specially for yelp stuff when it shows up on google anyways. If I want to
find someone’s Facebook, I search for their name and Facebook on google.

~~~
ramraj07
Yelp is for sophisticated users?

~~~
ptd
Perhaps sophisticated was the wrong word, but a lot of people who will never
use yelp use google daily. That is what I was trying to express.

------
dawhizkid
Among the FAANGs (btw I think Microsoft deserves to be included there now) I
find Google to be at the bottom in terms of vision. It's morphed into the
conservative, big co they were once fighting. It's kind of sad.

~~~
blfr
Come on, Facebook's vision is Frindster but 15 years later and Netflix is
literally putting TV on the Internet, a Silicon Valley (I mean the show)
worthy description.

~~~
dawhizkid
Facebook is near the bottom with Google IMO. Netflix has totally flipped
Hollywood and airing really interesting original content. That is something.

~~~
est31
Google has totally flipped _the internet_. Or do you still know of a personal
website that maintains a list of interesting links ordered by the topic?

~~~
dawhizkid
They flipped it 20 years ago...talking about where these companies rank as far
as current vision and innovation goes today in 2019.

~~~
darkpuma
They flipped it at least as early as 15 years ago in 2004 with with gmail,
their acquisition of google maps, and in 2006 with their acquisition of
youtube.

Actually I think you're basically right.

~~~
askafriend
Android? Chrome?

~~~
darkpuma
Okay, fair points. 2007 and 2008 respectively. I'm not sure that changes much.

------
ajmbbs
Having read the article, only 54% of Googlers view their compensation is
better than what they could get from another company. I find it surprising.
Who else pays more than Google does? Can only think of Facebook, but even then
not sure.

~~~
345tw4erfd
I used to work at another BigCorp (around $150,000/yr) and really thought
Google pays competitively, but boy was I wrong. Here are two offers that I
received recently:

1\. Small company: around $160,000/yr + equity

2\. Google: no exact number but I was told that for the level I was approved,
the base is around $120,000/yr. Apparently my coding skills on a Google doc
were equivalent to that of a new grad and they are really trying to low-ball
me. Somehow they are under the assumption that I'm "dying" to work there.

If you interview at Google make sure to have other competing offers, otherwise
you'll be up for a surprise. Also remember that although they'll tell you that
the hiring committee looks at a candidate holistically, only the onsite
interviews will dictate your level and the compensation. They don't seem to
care what products you've built previously, years of experience, or education.
How you code in a Google doc is what seems to matter.

~~~
ptd
Is there a better way of making sure someone can actually code? It’s easy to
take credit for past projects when it’s unclear how much help you had or what
part you played. Isn’t the best way to judge a candidate asking them to
create/produce something for you?

~~~
345tw4erfd
IMHO a better way would be:

\- A non-trivial take-home exercise and give them a week or two to complete.
This should have higher weight on the decision instead of the "Google doc
coding" as most likely that's the type of code they'll be shipping to
production.

\- Use the onsite interviews to improve upon the exercise and/or to get into
the nitty gritty details, and also to make sure this is the type of person
people would enjoy working with.

\- Allow candidates to run the code and to look things up (even Einstein
didn't remember how to do long division, he looked it up).

\- Give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not liars or
thieves. If you end up having certain doubts, ask yourself why you have those
doubts and take appropriate steps to remove doubts.

And let's be real. Do you think someone with X years of experience having
worked at multiple companies (small and big corps) was hired because they
couldn't code?

~~~
ptd
I personally hate take home tests that you aren’t compensated for, but I see
your point. As to your last point, depends on your definition of “couldn’t
code”. I think we tend to give the hiring and HR at companies like google too
much credit. Things still slip through the cracks, especially at an
organization of that size.

~~~
345tw4erfd
One thing I do with take-home exercises after I'm done interviewing with a
company is adapting them and then open-sourcing them (obviously removing
identifying information about the company). This has really helped me and I
have more side projects to show later on. With that said, I've gone above and
beyond with the implementation of these exercises so typically many of them
are worth open-sourcing.

~~~
oliTwist23
Great Point. This is the right approach,as I have come to realize.

------
austincheney
Doom. When it comes to culture plant the seeds early and enforce it with an
iron fist of death, because it takes time for the consequences to manifest and
once they do its too late, like rabies. Resolution to culture problems take
just as much effort and time to resolve as the neglect and time it took for
them to set in.

I have the perspective of going through something like this on a microscopic
scale right now. An employee under a manager underneath me launched and EO
investigation of toxic leadership fueled on rumors and hearsay. Perception is
reality (even if it isn't). I was spared the stupidity of this nonsense
because the complainant made a mistake: they didn't confront their leadership
before making a formal complaint. They deprived me, as a leader, the
opportunity to resolve (or intervene on their behalf) the problem. Even still
the corroding behaviors have set in from the bottom up corrupting the local
culture of the group.

~~~
wolco
Things sounds toxic. Under your leadership you have a chance to change this.
Use the situation to improve things for everyone else.

------
dmode
Little bit click baity. Still close to 80% employees support him, which is a
huge success for a company as large and as diverse as Google with a lot of
employees who are emotionally invested. Sundar is doing fine

------
tinus_hn
I used to love them, now I avoid them like the plague. If possible I do not
use any Google products.

~~~
move-on-by
Yeah me too. They’ve made it a lot easier on me by killing off the two
products that I still enjoyed, inbox and hangouts. Thanks Google! You made the
transition easier then expected. Even if I did have a shred of trust for
google, why would I invest myself into a new product of theirs? They’ll just
kill it off

~~~
Donzo
They broke my YouTube account a number of years ago in an attempt to force
Google+ across their systems and artificially inflate user numbers.

Yesterday I got an email from them saying that they are nuking my Google+.

I will always remember that series of events as one of the most hostile acts
of aggression against users that I have ever experienced.

That changed my perspective of Google as a company and I'm not sure that they
can ever regain the positive perception that they lost due to those hostile
actions.

Now their dominance with Chrome is leading them to make similarly hostile
actions: breaking webaudio, attempting to "do away with URLs," forcing
unwanted shit on our Internet.

Arrogance is the right word for it.

~~~
annadane
I don't know why this is downvoted. Seems legitimate to me.

~~~
Donzo
I must have struck a nerve.

I use the Brave browser now. I think other people should too. Downvotes
welcome.

~~~
needle0
I'd rather recommend Firefox. With Brave you're still buying into the
Blink/Chromium hegemony.

------
ajmbbs
Is this a bit similar to what Microsoft went through in the early 2000s?

~~~
vl
All corporations grow, decay and rot on the similar trajectories, so in this
sense it's similar.

I worked at MS at this time, and I think BigG now is like MS in 2003 roughly
speaking. I'm waiting for miniggl to appear, then the circle will be complete.
:)

~~~
mav3rick
Having worked at both. Google is far far ahead. Any young dev reading this,
you will get good engineering foundations at Google that will keep you in good
stead for the future.

~~~
nostrademons
People said the same thing about Microsoft in the late 1990s - The Windows NT
kernel was supposedly a thing of beauty, while Cairo was way ahead of its
time. Problem is, computer science advances, so the type of programming that
was state-of-the-art in the 1990s paled in comparison with what Google
developed 10 years later. And the Google stack of 2003 is remarkably outdated
by 2018 standards.

As a Xoogler I use & value the engineering chops I learned at Google every
day, but I'm not naive enough to think that'll last forever. There are some
really exciting developments in multiple areas of computer science - notably
blockchains, Rust, GPGPU, serverless - that Google is poorly positioned to
take advantage of, as well as others (machine learning, search, big data,
distributed systems, capability security) that Google has historically been
the market leader at but that are rapidly being commoditized by very high
quality open-source projects.

~~~
mav3rick
Right Google is losing in ML or not caught up to speed ? I don't know when you
left but even outside Google it's pretty much known that ML innovation is
Google's strength.

Two big teams use Rust at Google in production. I guess Google didn't make the
TPU or Tensor Flow as well. Take your pitch forks out but once you're done
have a look at some facts.

~~~
scottlocklin
They kicked off the deep learning trend when they bought deep mind I guess.
Otherwise what innovation are you talking about?

Switching from KNN to DL in machine translations is impressive as a technical
achievement ... but not really an innovation, and I doubt all this
"innovation" impacts their bottom line in any way.

~~~
netheril96
> Otherwise what innovation are you talking about?

Quantity: Google has the highest number of deep learning papers accepted into
top conferences among all institutions, even when papers from DeepMind are not
counted in Google's.

Quality: Transformer and the recent BERT have, pun intended, transformed the
entire NLP field. Batch normalization is now a staple of all neural networks,
as are its descendants instance normalization, group normalization, etc.

These are just on top of my head. Google may have done many things wrong these
days, but it definitely has not lost any edge in machine learning.

~~~
vl
While I don't know real numbers, back of the enveloper estimations for
hardware costs alone (based on GCP TPU/GPU pricing) give order of hundreds
thousands for BERT, and tens of millions for AlphaGo and friends. Notice how
very few organizations in the world are in position to commit these kind of
resources to AI problems, and that only Google and China are choosing to do
so.

~~~
netheril96
And? Most scientific breakthroughs after the World War II require expensive
equipments and materials. That fact doesn't make the achievements from Google,
from Bell Labs, from CERN, from Fermilab less innovative.

------
narrator
The main thing that Google has meant to me over the past few years is a
company that has had all the fun sucked out of it and become, from its extreme
power, a politicized environment where its decisions reshape the world so much
that an endless army of people from outside the company want to control what's
going on within it. I think Larry and Sergei got sick of that and went on to
other things and let Sundar handle the B.S.

------
jpeg_hero
The scales are maybe falling off the eyes of the google workers.

The search ads are the alpha and the omega of google. The thousands of
employees doing non-ad work are just a cover to make the employees think that
this is a change the world mission and flying cars and contact lenses that
read your blood pressure... all nonsense. They need smart people to keep the
ad machine running and to keep tuning it. The rest is all diversion.

Where is my balloon internet !?!

~~~
kkarakk
part of that initiative was to bring wifi to developing countries which is
being achieved in part by
[https://station.google.com/](https://station.google.com/) in
india,nigeria,mexico,indonesia,thailand

the balloon thing was also only for developing countries only,Loon has become
it's own thing [https://www.wired.com/story/alphabet-google-x-innovation-
loo...](https://www.wired.com/story/alphabet-google-x-innovation-loon-wing-
graduation/)

and is going to start in kenya -
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44886803](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44886803)

~~~
cco
To serve ads...

------
jezze
I think the decline has to do with us not trusting Google anymore. They used
to be this cool company that everyone wanted to work at but these days they
are just looked at as this big behemoth that has taken control of the
internet, harvesting peoples private data and flirts with the oppressive
Chinese government. It is not fun to see the things you help built being
misused like that. It was never their attention.

------
prepend
What is Sundar’s vision? I’m not quite sure and I think I’m pretty aware of
google’s goings on through media and such.

~~~
analogmemory
According to some search results ... it's

> “Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of
> the “device” to fade away. Over time, the computer itself — whatever its
> form factor — will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day.
> We will move from mobile first to an AI first world”

[https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/sundar-...](https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/sundar-
pichai-outlines-his-vision-for-google-six-things-the-indian-origin-ceo-said-
in-a-letter/245479/)

~~~
tehlike
Not his vision. Jeff dean, might be.

------
brobdingnagians
I think, sometimes, people at the top forget that there are a lot of talented
people who got the company where it is today. THey believe they can reorganize
however they want and it will turn out well, but ultimately you have to keep
attracting top talent and motivating them. It is harder for tech people to get
motivated about ad sales than about cool tech (heck, that's why a lot of
startups are terrible at sales). It may be their main revenue source and
source of growth, but it probably doesn't fire up the imagination as much as
what they used to do.

Edit: Although, I do believe they still do a lot of cool things, and that is a
strong point, but it seems ... different than before.

------
_i____ii_______
I thought every CEO's ultimate vision was to increase shareholder value. Does
the vision of company really come from one person's declarations? Just look at
what the company is doing as a whole and you can get a picture of what the
company's vision is. In the case of Google how can you can conclude otherwise
that the vision of the company is domination in any arena possible to
dominate?

~~~
ahartmetz
> every CEO's ultimate vision was to increase shareholder value

That is like saying every organism's ultimate vision is to flood the world
with offspring carrying its own genes. It is true in some sense... But it is
also good that it fades into the background in the day-to-day because the
things you (supposedly) do to get there have much better consequences than
just trying to go directly for the goal.

------
ummonk
Is it better to have your approval at 78 percent down from 88 percent a year
ago, or to have it at 60 percent, up from 50 percent a year ago?

------
trhway
Each about 4 years there is a new tech wave. Google back then did very well on
search, video, mobile. Missed social, cloud, voice assistant - the last 2,
being tech-wise exactly up the Google alley, were missed because of vision and
execution deficiencies so no surprise that the great Google engineers would be
questioning their leadership.

------
dekhn
Sundar is a consumer products guy. Great for social and chrome and android.
he's not a cloud guy or a tech infra guy. He also is completely unable to
handle challenging situations head on and will cancel meetings if something is
even remotely controversial. that's a sign of a poor leader.

------
gandutraveler
Google's hiring quality is so low now a days. I knew how they used to only
hire the best engineers. You could spot the difference between a Googler and
others. But now I see almost anyone getting a job offer. I got one too :)

Formula for large tech companies growth is to just scale by adding engineers.

------
uptownfunk
Don’t worry folks, as long as you’ve got www.google.com as your homepage, and
you’re using chrome or an android device (or both), and you are sharing that
sweet sweet data with the GOOG. They’re not going anywhere... ever.

------
known
Another classic case of
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

------
Cyclone_
Seems like it would be pretty difficult to define a vision for such a large
company with so many diverse products. Still I'd be interested to know what
employees there think.

------
gamesbrainiac
The article is actually quite alarmist. If you take a look at the actual
figures, approval is in the high 70s, and should not be really cause for
concern.

------
tyingq
The drops in confidence are notable, but no net year-over-year difference in
how many say they are leaving soon. That's interesting.

~~~
yihsiu
wondering the same thing... it also surprised me that 89% employee take the
survey and seemed caring about the vision so much

------
resalisbury
More accurate headline, "Google's CEO still has incredible employee support,
despite year over year dip".

------
p2t2p
Like if their CEO has any vision. It feels that the role is purely ceremonial
and product managers rule everything.

------
Markoff
if it's survey anonymous how do they know 89% of googlers participated in this
survey? and if it's not anonymous what's the point if these skewed results
sortability approving management by majority? /s

unless it was paper survey and each employee got one sheet of paper

------
sova
>89% of the company took the poll

More changed minds or simply more minds reporting?

------
YeahSureWhyNot
I think since day one it was clear that sundar has no vision. he has execution
and he is very good at it. vision? none. waymo and all other crazy bets are
larry's legacy. sundar is no satya, I tell ya that much.

------
RickJWagner
Wow, those are significant declines.

It'll be interesting to see how Google reacts, and if the numbers trend back
up.

------
fakare
Google is trying they best to help humanity and government to surveillance
they citizens.

Why now all the hate suddenly for company that is doing this since from start
?

Like Google CEO testify "we try our best" who could say Google is evil after
this comment ?

------
gammateam
_cries in money_

------
hnbroseph
i wonder if they'll add the ceo to their blacklists.

