
Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’ - walterclifford
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/31/google-veterans-the-company-has-become-unrecognizable.html
======
cletus
Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have.

It actually became an internal joke where you'd get these emails every 2-3
months saying your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a
different manager, neither of which you'd ever met or even necessarily heard
of.

To be clear, the executive team are ultimately responsible but Google has
fallen prey to a lack of leadership (Eric Schmidt, we miss you) and an
entrenched swarm of middle management. I honestly believe a lot of the bad
ideas Google got involved in (like the DoD ML thing) sprang from over-eager
VPs.

There's an old Dilbert strip basically saying that managers reach a point of
constant reorgs and responsibilities churn to the point that no one is around
long enough to be held accountable for their actions ("oh that was the last
guy") and definitely not around long enough for anything to work.

This to me is what Google had become. The reorgs were constant and the
leadership was directionless.

The transparency thing here is a big one. There was a culture of blameless and
open post-mortems. This probably started to change in the Vic Google Plus era.
Dashboards were locked down. There were some pretty (internally) famous
examples of post-mortems people found that were subsequently restricted,
essentially because they (rightly) made some VP look bad.

One of the most shocking things to me was a story from last year about how
accessing such documents could retroactively lead to you being fired. As in
Google docs were typically sent around such that if you had the link you could
open it and these links might be forwarded to open groups. That's how a lot of
things (internally) "leaked".

Disclaimer: Xoogler (6 years)

~~~
nostrademons
It's interesting. Many large companies routinely fire the bottom 10% of their
employees every year. I wonder if they would perform better if they routinely
fired the top 10% of their employees (by org chart, not by performance
ratings) and let talented new blood bubble upward. The Peter Principle says
that people rise to the level of their incompetence, and in general new
employees enter at the bottom of the organization, so logically you would have
more incompetent people at the top than at the bottom.

There're a bunch of organizational anti-patterns that could be avoided with
this scheme, too. Empire building would be disincentivized because it'd always
become someone else's empire after a short period of time, and organizational
politics is reduced as the players keep leaving, and you'd have to think in
terms of building institutional knowledge from the beginning of your tenure
unless you want everything you've accomplished to be undone by the next guy.

~~~
tedivm
The "fire the bottom 10%" thing is called stack ranking, and it has been
studied over and over and it never leads to good results. At this point I
don't think that many companies are still doing it- the biggest example,
Microsoft, killed it off in 2013.

[https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-
kills-...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-
ranking-internal-structure)

~~~
trenning
Everyone is still doing it, they just aren't transparent about it now.

~~~
tedivm
Source? I've literally never worked at a company that regularly fired the
bottom X% of workers.

~~~
lmeyerov
Large orgs regularly do this. E.g., most of the banking industry, esp. the
non-wall st side, have had layoffs every few years for awhile now. It can be
called all sorts of things, and it adds up.

When you think about it, it makes a sad sort of sense at scale. Hiring
mistakes mean, at scale, a good number of jobs aren't fits for the people you
hired, half the people out there are below average to beginwith, and a good
number end up toxic (they slow down orgs!), and over time, these folks cost
more money and suborgs decay. We've all inherited WTF+NIH projects and worked
with people who drain energy. So even if an org doesn't do explicit layoffs or
stack ranking, and hiring committees and employees have good intentions, a
healthy org should be fixing hiring mistakes somehow: it can't all be
retraining / reshuffling the deck. Arguably, the numbers mean most tech
companies are _unhealthy_ orgs because the high demand for engineers makes the
healthy level of rehiring tough to do.

The result is toxic devs get retained and the tail wags the dog from a
business perspective. E.g., I bet some of the #MeToo issues in tech, deep
down, relate to the difficulty of curating a top org at scale, with very few
exceptions (Netflix?)

------
mkolodny
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there's an article on the second page of HN
right now (458 votes last I checked) by Google's former Head of International
Relations about why he left the company. I think it's very worth reading.
There's some extremely interesting (and damning) stories about his experience
at Google since 2008.

Here's the article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446)

While this might (and almost certainly should) hurt Google's brand, I think
this issue applies to any big for-profit company. I doubt that Amazon or Apple
are much different.

~~~
paganel
Thanks for the link. I refresh the HN front-page quite frequently (too
frequent, I would say) but somehow I had missed that entry.

~~~
cvhashim
Try the hckrnews client which is kinda of better for ranking

------
habosa
Googler here. Opinions are obviously my own and not that for my employer. Just
sharing my thoughts, take it all with a grain of salt.

I've been at Google full time for 5+ years and was an intern before that. The
company has more than doubled in size since I've been here, so I'm not exactly
old-school but I have seen change.

When I started Google felt like one company. I was blown away that I could
look at any piece of code (besides Google X and parts of Android) and file a
bug against any team when something didn't work. I felt proud of other team's
products and I also felt responsible for them, I filed a lot of bugs/feedback
trying to make random things better.

The culture was also just fun as hell. The mailing lists and Memegen (our
internal meme site) were really fun to participate in for the most part.

A lot has changed now. Each product feels more isolated and does things their
own way. The company is far too big for anyone to claim they really know
what's going on outside their local area. The culture is no longer fun at all.
There is a lot more negativity, and a lot of it is justified (you've seen the
news).

However I still love the people I work with directly and what we work on
(Firebase, fwiw). And one strange positive about how large the company has
gotten is that I can just focus on that. I no longer get too worked up about
what's going on over in far-flung teams and that's fine with me. And I don't
naively participate in company-wide forums expecting a good mood. But I get to
build cool things and we have more resources (money, people, knowledge, etc)
than we know what to do with.

All of that is to say that yes, a lot has changed. Some for the worse, some
for the better, some just different. I still think this is a great place to
work and I don't plan to leave any time soon.

~~~
panabee
firebase is awesome. keep up the great work! if you had a magic wand and could
change one thing about "new" google, what would it be?

~~~
habosa
That's a really hard question but I think smaller teams need to be more
empowered. Right now every big decision seems to come from way up high which
guarantees that it seems out of touch and misses edge cases. A lot of the
angst comes from people at the bottom shaking their fists at VP/CEO types. If
individual teams could make their own decisions about what to do and how to do
it they could shrug off some of the corporate nonsense that happens above
them.

------
extraz6b3c
And some have quit for as-yet-undisclosed colossal fuckups. Google's inherent
belief that it is the "good guy" in all things internet has fed a massive
hubris. That hubris has led to inherent blindness to its detrimental effects
on the wider internet and a hero complex. When in reality, they are just like
all other mega corporations: interested in only one thing: maximum dollars,
and they do this by tilting the tables to make all the quarters slide into
their pocket. When you're huge, the urge to take up your power to do this
becomes overwhelming. It comes in fits and starts at first, until the culture
rots, and soon you're rolling downhill into full-blown corrupt self-dealing
and monopoly tactics.

Google's on its way. And it's too big to fail, except it will, and we'll be
shocked at the reach of its surveillance capabilities at the fire sale.

~~~
ghostpepper
This is the worst case scenario but it’s not entirely out of the realm of
possibility. Hopefully they have too much money to let this happen and instead
find a new CEO to turn things around.

------
c3534l
Nothing is permanent. No company will stay the same 22 years later. I wouldn't
be surprised if there are people working at Google who were born after Google
was founded. At some point, the feisty startup that wants to change the world
will become the status quo. It's delusional to think otherwise.

~~~
ljm
I'm growing to believe that the greatest folly of humankind is the idea of
permanence.

We love to cling on to what we have and fight against anything that might
remove it from us. Even when we would benefit from the loss.

So it is with companies. Just because Google was an amazing toddler doesn't
mean it's an amazing grown-up. Plenty of our angelic youngsters turn out to be
grade-A assholes or psychopaths a few years later on.

Which is to say, the google that we knew back in the 90s and 2000s is dead,
and has been for a long time.

~~~
pharke
It would be interesting if we could institute a law that would in effect
compel companies to open source their technology, patents, trade secrets, etc.
after a certain amount of time to force competition and innovation. Wishful
thinking I guess but I think we'd be better off if we could get there.

~~~
ljm
I would like to see a legally enforced compulsion to work for the public good
and not the investor good.

~~~
mkolodny
That sounds a lot like a non-profit.

------
adventskalender
I consider this and the other article by the international relations guy to be
very one-sided accounts.

A couple of people are unhappy, out of a workforce of 100000. So what?

It also mostly seems to be political reasons. I would imagine a lot of people
working for Google just want to do a good job for a good salary, not make
Google a vehicle for their political opinions.

I think people pushing their political agenda within a company tend to harm
the company and it should therefore be ok to fire them.

That said, I haven't wanted to work for Google for years. But I am from the
opposite side from these veterans. I felt it was very unjust when James Damore
was fired, and I really don't want to work at a place that distrusts its
workers so much that it forces them to go through diversity trainings and
things like that. I would feel "unsafe" at Google.

~~~
hnarn
> I really don't want to work at a place that distrusts its workers so much
> that it forces them to go through diversity trainings and things like that.

So for the sake of argument, if you worked at a company where one of your
colleagues was being overtly racist and made another employee uncomfortable,
you as a third party would feel "unsafe" by the diversity training that this
person would be _required_ to attend (likely not even only for ethical or
corporate reasons, but likely also legal)?

~~~
username90
Everyone is forced to go through diversity training, not just problematic
people.

~~~
hnarn
This depends on multiple factors, and even when it's true I don't see the
issue in trying to avoid these issues before conflicts happen.

------
borramakot
Is there data on what tech companies programmers (either generally or new
grads) most want to work for? It feels like it used to be Google by a lot, but
even outside the HN bubble, I get the sense Google has taken some reputation
hit.

~~~
yaacov
Anecdotal, graduated 1 year ago and have many new-grad friends looking for
work now:

Airbnb is probably the most desirable non-fintech company, Uber and Lyft were
in this category too before their IPOs.

Of megacorps, Facebook generally has the best new grad comp and benefits, and
is therefore most desirable. Google is a close-ish second, Microsoft and
Amazon are far behind due to lower comp and cultural issues (In Amazon’s case,
this means terrible work/life balance, in Microsoft’s, perception that it’s
boring due to enterprise culture and office locations in particularly bland
suburbs).

Apple and Netflix aren’t really on the new-grad radar because they hire mostly
experienced engineers.

~~~
adventskalender
I find that completely mind boggling, tbh. What gets people excited about
AirBnB? Is this just about perks (salary and so on)?

Nothing against AirBnB, it might be a fine, solid company doing a good job.
But what about them is inspiring?

~~~
yaacov
Most importantly, their comp is really good.

Second, it seems to me that there’s more room for growth at Airbnb than other
companies with similar compensation. (This is an impression with no hard
evidence to back it up)

~~~
adventskalender
Comp meaning compensation? OK, I could understand that.

------
standardUser
Sometimes I genuinely wonder what people expect from one of the world's
largest corporations. They aren't the first. There are hundreds of other giant
multinationals that have been around for generations. Why exactly does anyone
expect Google to be different?

~~~
zepto
Because they claimed to be.

~~~
catalogia
Many corporations are prone to claiming outlandish things about themselves, so
if that's the answer it suggests another question: why did so many people
believe _this particular_ corporation that claimed to be unique?

~~~
zepto
The were far more serious about it - is wasn’t just a casual claim.

------
ahelwer
Well, that's what you get when you appoint a CEO from McKinsey.

~~~
osipov
Google Cloud is full of ex-McKinsey people in middle management positions. Add
ex-Oracle to that mix and you got yourself a culture war with old-time
Googlers.

~~~
jorblumesea
It's interesting how high the technical bar is for ICs and "normal staff", but
how low the bar is set, or seems to be set, for management and their
backgrounds. Their head of cloud is an ex-Oracle guy that led their disastrous
cloud initiative. CFO from Goldman Sacks, McKinsey MBAs and mediocre tech
managers galore. Earnings expectations clearly favored over product
development, and not an engineering led company anymore.

Just looking at their hires, you can almost see the cultural shift play out.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
At the executive level, your options are typically people who've never had
embarassing failures or people who've never accomplished much in the first
place. Kurian was the head of product at Oracle at the beginning of their
cloud efforts - but he was also the head of product _at Oracle_ , bringing a
level of enterprise experience and credibility that Google Cloud has
historically been in desperate need of.

~~~
jorblumesea
Amazon and Microsoft have extremely deep benches of talent when it comes to
cloud, and both have a huge % of the market share combined. Google has had
presences in Seattle for almost a decade. I really don't see the logic with
the kind of money Google is throwing around. It's not like Kurian was cheap.

I think it's more a failure of leadership and vision on Google's part. A
symptom of the company transitioning from engineering led to MBA/Business.

~~~
thu2111
The logic was straightforward and probably correct: Google has great tech but
sucks (and has always sucked) at selling software to companies. A culture
forged in an environment where your users are hundreds of millions of
anonymous, low value individuals rather than e.g. a single CEO who will sign a
$100M deal with you if he likes the cut of your jib means Google always under-
valued relationship building.

The exception was their ad sales department, which under Nikesh Arora _did_
develop a capability to build and sign large ad deals. But it took a long time
because you didn't really need that for text ads, only for stuff like "rent
the YouTube homepage for a day".

But for everything else they didn't really have it or care about it,
institutionally.

Now look at Oracle. Weak tech, huge experience in high-touch enterprise sales.
And say what you like about Oracle but they have an enormous customer base and
are deeply entrenched for valid reasons. So combine Oracle's sales and
relationship-oriented culture with Google's raw tech prowess and you have a
potentially great combination.

------
longtimegoogler
I actually think the greatest period was under Schmidt. Back then there was a
lot of freedom to choose what to work on. Google Labs and 20% projects were
healty.

It felt like a place where people worked on ideas they thought were cool.
Things seemed to just happen organically without a lot of bureaucracy and
management structure.

I think Larry changed that with a more top down approach with what to work
being decided higher up, see social. This led to less project flexibility and
more hierarchy, with managers and pms becoming more important in the org.

Coupled with the growth in the number of employees, I think where the company
today is just a gradual evolution of what Larry started along with the
problems of growth.

That said it is still a pretty good place to work at for a number of reasons.

------
jelliclesfarm
The last bit resonates with me. Work has to be something we need to do for
about 1/3 of our lives. Work is service. Even if we get paid for it, work is
what we do for the betterment of collective. 1/3 of our lifetime ought to be
for family and kin and our own. The remaining 1/3 for self development. To
become better than who we were yesterday, last month..the year before. It’s a
continuous improvement.

But I see people do nothing but work. They start at 7.00. Work all day.
Outsource family time. Scrounge for a little bit of self care time. Sleep
little, enjoy in chunks of time once a year. All for a price.

Most of what we work for goes to the government. Yes, taxes go for betterment
of society but because no one has a say in it, it can also go towards things
some of us don’t believe in. War, for example. I can’t divert my tax dollars
towards space exploration rather than bloody wars.

We need a formula for life and living. A formula that gives us true and
lasting freedom.

[..] When Page became CEO in 2011, he became “obsessed” with reading about why
companies fail from being too big and sluggish, Stapleton said. “It’s sort of
sad that a lot of the things he was afraid would happen, actually happened.”

Stapleton, who held a number of roles close to the founders, recalled Page
walking around offices with a chunk of metal that he said was from his
grandfather’s auto plant in Michigan. It supposedly symbolized a point in time
when auto workers felt like they needed to protect themselves against
management. Page showed it as an example of something he hoped would never
happen to Google.

“He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it
handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an
optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people
live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.”[..]

~~~
dmoy
> Most of what we work for goes to the government.

Relatively few people have an effective tax rate above 50%.

In the US, if you live in a high tax state like California or New York, you
need to have an income (single person!) of about 2,500,000 USD/yr to have an
effective tax rate above 50%. (Actually more like $2.9m in NYC)

Edit: for an EU example, somewhere in Bayern, Germany it'd be about 1m ~ 1.5m
EUR to have an effective tax rate above 50%.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
We are also taxed on goods, property, transactions, consumption, death,
inheritance..even gifting.. etc. we pay a lot of taxes.

Imagine you make 2.5 million/year. Why should you pay 1.25 million as taxes?
Are you being taxed for being wealthy? Isn’t it punitive? What services do you
receive that is worth 1.25 million?

But imagine you make 60k/year. Roads, infrastructure, essential services,
public schools for a family of 4 with 2 kids does make sense. A larger family
benefits more as they get more than they contribute.

Our tax system incentivizes larger families and redistributes wealth. It works
if there is a healthy middle class. In CA the very rich is thin but they also
support a larger proportion than other states.

When we are looking to hit 9 billion soon, it’s probably not best to
incentivize rampant population growth and large families.

~~~
smt88
> _Our tax system incentivizes larger families and redistributes wealth._

Do you have a shred of evidence to back this up?

In reality, the situation is the opposite: places with higher taxes that pay
for better government services see a declining birth rate.

Taxes pay for a social safety net and birth control. Both of those things
cause birth rates to go down, not up. By contrast, large families are the
safety net in places with riskier economies and poorer public health.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
45% of California state budget goes to public school education. A middle class
family with 4 children and one earning member pays way little and gains more.

Someone making 2.5 million and paying 1.25 million in taxes supports the
others with less benefits.

This is the first example that came to my mind. What are your thoughts on
this?

~~~
jcranmer
I am glad to subsidize those kinds of services that I myself do not personally
need. And anyone who has the mentality of "why am I paying the government to
provide stuff that doesn't help me?" needs to be taught compassion and
empathy. Or given a one-way ticket to the government-free utopias such as
Somalia that is clearly their dream come true.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Have to be taught compassion and empathy? Like in re-education camps?

I hear your emotional plea, but I can’t find logic or rationality behind it.

------
ProAm
I think this is the case to most companies when you move onto the 3rd
generation of leadership/CEO, or if you are 3 degrees separated from the
original vision. You see this with most projects/companies etc.

Too much dilution in vision, other priorities take center stage of a public
company.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
I think this is Amazon's core strength: the continuity of leadership and
vision that comes from having a single CEO who is deeply involved in
everything. No product launches at Amazon without Jeff Bezos at least being
aware of it.

That said, woo boy, has that guy gone weird in the last couple of years. He
used to be one of the only sane-seeming billionaires. The quirkiest thing
about him used to be "he's investing in space."

~~~
aylmao
> I think this is Amazon's core strength: the continuity of leadership and
> vision that comes from having a single CEO who is deeply involved in
> everything.

Not only Amazon, it seems to be the case with other big tech companies:

\- At Apple, this was famously 100% the case under Jobs. Under Tim Cook the
company still very much seems cohesive on a single vision, is very, very
focused in its products and from the outside it does look like upper-
leadership takes credit for and oversees most things.

\- Facebook still has Zuckerberg, which built the original product. Last I
heard he was reorganizing the company so that "the heads of individual
products, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and others, would report directly to
him" [1].

[1]: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-
chris](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-chris)

~~~
Skunkleton
I like how Zuckerberg is a "which", and not a "who". Seems fitting.

~~~
aylmao
Oh, 100% accidental (not a native speaker). A good chuckle though haha.

------
brodouevencode
> scaled to more than 100,000 workers

> Googlers who interviewed for roles at Oso said the company had become “too
> big” and bureaucratic to make a difference for workers

Well, yes of course. Your voice becomes diluted to a large degree when
companies become that large. It's sad that Google has shifted away from it's
previous culture, but the outcomes shouldn't be too terribly surprising.

------
e5india
This is what happens to every tech company once they enter growth mode and
bring in a ton of mercenary sales people from Oracle and the like.

The irony here is people point to social justice activity as the reason for
decline but really all that social justice activity is a smokescreen for
betraying other values. We'll do what we're bid by totalitarian regimes and
then make ourselves feel better by putting rainbow colors on our logo during
Pride Week.

------
tempsy
Hard to be surprised. Seems only natural for a company that large.

Though I agree as far as tech brand goes Google seems to have gone down much
faster than other big tech cos go.

~~~
enitihas
Yup. I think Google needs to hire the PR people from Microsoft and pay them
rockstar salaries. Microsoft does far worse things than Google yet they manage
to hide from the public eye much better. Bing works and censors in China.
Microsoft doesn't care what employees say about their clients. Whereas Google
gets immense negativity for a not yet live "dragonfly" project, and even very
small scale US military projects.

Windows 10 broke new ground in privacy violations in a desktop operating
system, but things are much farther away from the public eye. Even for
something like deprecating services, Microsoft shut down their ebook store,
where users had _paid_ for the books, and yet their brand value doesn't get
impacted as much as Google's.

~~~
tempsy
It's not an PR thing, it's mostly an internal communications issue.

Google championed a culture that allowed SJW-ism to thrive in its own rank
that isn't really true of other large companies. Cheerleading social
progressivism and then forgoing its "do no evil" motto and then trying to act
like any other big corp created massive cognitive dissonance among its own
employees that isn't true of other companies.

~~~
vkou
> SJW-ism

Is another word for 'we hire young, educated, mostly coastal, twenty and
thirty-somethings who statistically lean left'.

There is nothing unusual about Googler political leanings, given the
demographics of the tech worker pool.

Viewing it the way you are simply projects your own politics on a... Perfectly
expected outcome of demographics.

~~~
tempsy
It’s all about expectations.

Amazon and Microsoft have never codified in their value system anything that
touches “never working with the military” and no one that joins either company
should or does have the expectation that the company would ever back away from
something so lucrative.

Google on the other hand has created a culture of “do no evil” (even if that
isn’t their official motto anymore) that encouraged SJW-ism, and thus falsely
gave the impressions to their workforce that they could speak up about
socially progressive issues that have clashed with corporate strategy. They’ve
created a workforce of snowflakes, for lack of a better term, and the
cognitive dissonance created by a fake progressive culture is extremely
counter productive.

~~~
vkou
And yet, Amazon and Microsoft had the exact same ethical struggles about the
exact same issues as Google in the past few years. The outcome for all three
firms on these issues was incidental, and could have, very much, gone either
way, based on the personalities and individuals involved.

Your second paragraph does not square with the principled stance Google made
wrt China a decade ago. VPs abandoning those principles (and trying to keep
the entire thing secret) is the unusual behaviour, in this case - not the
pushback they met.

------
bitL
One of my MBA classes on designing an organization mentioned a significant
change when moving from collectivity stage ("charismatic", "empowering") to
formalization stage (bureaucratic, most desired by individual managers,
principal-agent at play). It looks like Google was able to delay this jump
longer than most companies but in the end couldn't avoid it. From what I've
heard recently from former employees, JetBrains is another company that is
undergoing a similar shift; in the past half of their "escapees" returned back
from Google/Facebook within a year, expressing displeasure with those
companies, now they are jumping ship as well...

~~~
zozbot234
Is there a "unicorn"-sized company which is _not_ highly bureaucratic
(dominated by internal politics)? It just doesn't seem logically possible to
me. The weird thing, rather, is the extent to which the largest companies do
_way better_ than we might otherwise expect, given the obvious drawbacks of
these formalized, bureaucratic arrangements.

~~~
bitL
I think one has to follow the life-cycle of a company to have a good time;
e.g. Valve used to be awesome company, now that is no longer true. Be in the
right place at the right time, all the time, it seems...

So to answer your question, one has to view a company in time and likely there
will be a time span when company is not dominated by internal politics.
Managers push for bureaucracy as their desired form, rank-and-file employees
fight against it, at some point power moves to managers and companies slowly
die, even while wildly profitable, making disruptive innovation by a next
generation of companies possible.

Avoid stressful start ups (except when you are co-founder/investor), join once
a company has money to invest into crazy things, run away once bureaucracy
sets in (or if company passes Bozo event horizon).

------
thu2111
I vaguely remember Claire Stapleton from when I was there, as some sort of
quirky marketing person. I think her comments are mostly pretty accurate. This
one though jumped out as weird:

 _“He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how
it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an
optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people
live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.”_

Was that really her interpretation of Larry Page? No wonder she's now publicly
crying her disappointment. It seems like the total opposite of the Page I saw,
a man who never cared about the arts at all and in fact had to be browbeaten
into caring about visual design by Steve Jobs himself.

Page back then was a man who cared deeply about science and anything sci-fi.
The more sci-fi the better. His vision for Google was a machine that converted
ad clicks into flying cars, the computer from Star Trek and so on. Amazing
tech wasn't a means to an end but rather, the end itself. I never heard or saw
anything in Google's mission about "freeing up humanity to pursue the arts". I
can imagine why a humanities person like Stapleton might have wanted to
believe that as it would have given her own interests and background an anchor
in what was back then a supremely engineering oriented culture. But it wasn't
true. Nobody gave a stuff about the arts, as evidenced by hiring priorities.

------
jrockway
Many years ago, maybe before I even worked at Google, I read a very wise post
here. I think it was from nostrademons. The gist was that one cannot be given
a good place to work, one has to make an active effort to make it a good place
to work. When a lot of people come together with the same ideas, they can make
a place that wins awards for being a good place to work, but there always has
to be active effort from everyone to keep that alive. You can't just show up
and hope that the "make this place good to work at" team makes this place good
to work at. You are that team!

That attitude, to me, kind of explains the downfall of Google. People started
to realize they could stop doing the things that made it a good place to work,
and just focus on their project work. No need to do a tech talk to share with
the company what you're up to. No need to clean up tech debt. No need to work
with the teams whose products you consume to make them better. Just take every
shortcut to launch, get promoted, and get more power. People saw that that
worked better than being transparent, fixing tech debt, etc., and now THAT'S
the culture. People see that working, repeat it as fact ("how to get promoted:
don't fix bugs!"), and then that becomes the culture and that's where Google
seems to be now. Now people think that there is nothing they can do to change
the culture, and maybe that's true. There is just too much inertia and so YOU
being transparent, YOU being a good steward of the codebase and shared
resources, etc. just won't matter. They just get in the way of getting
promoted. So people fall back to the natural human fallback of "appeal to
authority". They write open letters, they have protests... but it doesn't
matter. That never worked. The early engineers didn't write open letters to
management about having a shared codebase, or requiring code reviews... they
just did it. It is hard work, often with no reward, but over time the benefits
accumulate. But when you stop putting in the work, it stops working. Now the
company is too large to ever change, probably. But it got there because people
were lazy about protecting the culture, and now all that cultural tech debt
piles up and results in the things that we read about on HN.

Next time, when you're at a new company... realize that YOU have to set the
objectives. If you want transparency, be transparent about your work. Do
internal talks or write internal blog posts about what you're up to. Give
curious people permission to look around and play with your service. Give
people peer bonuses and write them good reviews when they do menial tasks that
help code health long term. You have to make a conscious effort every single
day, and remind others to do the same... or you'll just end up with another
heartless megacorp that is coasting on momentum from all this work that people
put in in the early days. And, you have to deal with the consequences of your
positive culture. Some jerk is going to break your service that has no rate
limits. Someone is going to walk off with your customer list. You're going to
miss a deadline because someone was doing a big refactor instead of that last
little cleanup before launch. If you really value transparency, code health,
whatever, you have to accept that they are going to conflict with other things
you care about! If you can't accept that, you aren't going to really have that
culture that you want.

(Also, to be clear, I am not criticizing anyone mentioned in the article here.
I did not work with them at Google, but they were very transparent about what
they were working on, so I know exactly what they were up to at any given
time. And I was also pretty transparent, so I bet they knew me despite having
never worked with me. A lot of people were doing a lot of good things, and
that community certainly knew each other well, even if only in passing. But
there were tens of thousands of people that just existed without contributing
positively to the culture, and the "carrying capacity" was reached and here we
are. It is sad to see.)

Anyway, I write this because it is something that everyone will need to think
about in their next (or current) adventure. You have to decide what you value,
and if it's a "good culture", you will have to scrimp somewhere else to make
that a reality. Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to be the
"management" or "promotion committee" that enforces your values. And it will
come at a cost!

------
cbanek
> Stapleton said when she made a request to HR earlier this year, she was
> routed to a call center in Chicago, where she spoke to a young gentleman who
> had recently graduated college. Responding to a concern she had with a
> manager, he gave her bad advice to take her manager out to drinks, she said.

Wow. And this is why those call in EAP / anonymous reporting programs offered
as a 'benefit' always seem to be garbage. Never had a good experience with any
of them.

------
duelingjello
Step 0. Lots of FAANG veterans discover each other and plot their exits.

Step 1. Start a FAANG-competitor worker-owned co-op that is profitable through
donations, subscriptions and freemium products / services. No evil allowed.

Step 2. Poach more workers from FAANG to a civilized, humane and decent
organization that creates excellent products for normal humans.

Step 3. Dominate FAANG without selling-out to governments privacy invasions or
reselling customer data.

~~~
perceptronas
Step 4. Remove "No evil allowed" from mission

------
a3n
Google is entirely recognizable, as a modern, amoral hyper-corporation whose
entire purpose is to service its giant self-aware pile of cash. They used to
make money by making information available. Now they just make money, and how
they do it is incidental.

> “Google is built on trust,”

They were. They don't need that anymore.

------
ChrisCinelli
This article was posted 3 times in 3 days and only today is taking off! What
is going on?

As I tried to posted it 2 days ago and I was redirected to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103)
posted by mattydread and at that time it was [DEAD]. I started wondering why.
I vouched to resurrect it and somebody else must have done it too but
eventually it only got to 5 points.

I even thought for a moment that Google have bots to kill undesired articles
on Hacker News but I thought I was reading too much into it.

When I noticed that this was a different post, I run a search on Algolia (
check
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=google%20veterans&sort=byDate&type=story)
) and apparently yesterday it was posted _again_ by raiyu (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616)
) and it only collected 2 points.

Today it was posted for the 3rd time and it is finally taking off...

How did it ended up [DEAD] 2 days ago ?

Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]?

~~~
Buge
>Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]?

According to what you said previously, it was only dead the first out of 3
times, and even that one is no longer dead. Maybe some people flagged it or
downvoted it the first time.

Things being reposted repeatedly to HN and taking off on later reposts is
quite common[1][2][3]. Reposting is explicitly allowed in the FAQ[4].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125589)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806801)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867946)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

------
lunias
Not surprising, but the more interesting question is: What can be done to
prevent new companies from reaching the final, greedy and uncaring, corporate
form that we all loath?

This is not an isolated Google issue. It's systemic in companies w/ a certain
momentum.

------
buboard
i wonder how advertisers feel about their products being advertised through
google these days

------
onetimemanytime
Screw these "veterans" that ignored the warning signs as they became
multimillionaires. Now it's too late. I specifically remember Matt Cutts lying
and spinning through his teeth as Google decimated legitimate websites through
updates that surprisingly increased Google's click on ads and prices.

~~~
raphlinus
I know he made some people angry, but I very much consider him one of the good
people. So much so that I cited him by name (along with three others) in my
goodbye letter as people I missed and whose departure signaled a change in
culture.

BTW, I'm one of the main people quoted in this article, and feel it turned out
pretty well. Feel free to ask me followup questions, though I don't guarantee
answers.

~~~
freedomben
"In the Plex" was one of my favorite books. Have you read it? If so, did you
agree with its analysis? How accurately does it portray Google in 2019?

Thank you for being willing to answer questions!

~~~
raphlinus
I actually didn't read it, so can't really answer, sorry.

------
Animats
You have to have a Google or Facebook account to read this. Ironic.

------
ljw1001
Google was a great place - for most people - when it was riding the crazy
growth rocket that was its Search/Adwords/Adsense/Analytics engine. (former
Googler here)

As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart
them in other ways. It had to do this to keep the stock in the stratosphere,
which kept the mid-to-senior managers rich, and gave the ones who weren't yet
rich the possibility of becoming so. Some of these attempts were questionable
ethically. Similarly, privacy invading changes were made in the core business.
People all the way to Larry & Sergey told themselves and everyone else the
same lies that their ceaseless profiling and other invasions were for the
customers own good. Think G+'s real names policy, Google Glass's creepy
stalker potential, etc.

The engagement in dubious if completely legal tax dodges was another sign. As
was the army of lobbyists, as was the work on censored search.

In any case, it's sort of inevitable in stock-market driven capitalism that
unicorns can't slow down gracefully, with everyone being satisfied that their
millions or billions are 'enough.' I wish they could. I suspect it's doubly-
hard for a company when their outlandish success attracts people primarily
driven by money. All that growth meant a ton of hiring, and i suspect people
who really just wanted to get rich self-selected into the applicant pool.

Beyond that, instances of sexual harassment and their cover-up suggests that
maybe their was never a big commitment to not 'be evil'. At least when it came
down to powerful execs and less-powerful women. Maybe it was always just
another company.

I used to be really proud of my time at Google, and I still think it was, and
probably still is, a better than the rogues gallery of tech's giant offenders
(Uber, Facebook, Amazon _). But the pride I felt in working there is gone.

_ I believe Jeff Bezos is the greatest businessman we've seen since Ford or
Rockefeller, but his insatiable need for not just more, but everything, has
kept him from being a great human and Amazon from being a great company in
anything other than the most narrow economic sense.

~~~
hash872
>As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart
them in other ways >unicorns can't slow down gracefully

Their revenue keeps growing 20% every single year, which is absurdly
impressive. Google is one of the most staggeringly successful companies of the
last 100 years, I don't see how they're 'flailing'

------
aaomidi
All beasts will fall someday. This is Google's turn.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Counterpoint: Microsoft has been Fortune 250 for 20+ years, and a F50 for
almost 20 years.

~~~
Nasrudith
Microsoft is essentially a spring chicken compared to other entries on the
list.

------
corporateslave5
That’s what happens when you hire strictly off of algorithms questions with
zero behavioral questions. How they thought that wouldn’t destroy the company
culture is beyond me.

~~~
daxfohl
Hiring off of behavioral questions is exactly what opens the door to abuse.

~~~
zozbot234
The problem with behavioral questions is that the people you _don 't_ want to
hire are precisely those who will answer those questions in self-serving and
self-deceptive ways. To guard against this, hire and promote interesting,
accomplished folks. Not necessarily "nerds" or "geeks", but people who have
_some_ achievement, _something_ genuinely worthwhile to show off. If anyone
can do this, Google can.

~~~
daxfohl
Didn't they tell the guy who invented homebrew to take a hike a few years
back, even though like 90% of the company used it at the time?

