
Google Founders Have Skipped All of the Company's 2019 Town Hall Meetings - kgwgk
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/google-founders-tgif-town-hall
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logicx24
Sigh. I work at Google, and this is vastly overblown.

Larry and Sergey don't work at Google anymore. They're much more laissez-
faire, working on special projects across Alphabet. They don't make most of
the decisions that effect Google employees, and don't have answers to most of
the questions that are asked. That was the entire point of promoting Sundar,
after all: so Larry could step away from Google.

And finally, Larry and Sergey being at TGIF's undermines Sundar's authority.
He's the one making decisions, and he's where the buck stops, but having the
cofounders there creates an uncomfortable dynamic and makes it seem like they
have a larger role than they do.

So it's not a matter of "courage" and "accountability" as much as corporate
governance and priority changes. There's no drama buried here.

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ikeyany
Sundar became CEO in 2015, which is when Page/Brin stepped away.

So the question is "Why disappear _now_?", just when there are so many high-
profile ethical issues facing the company.

~~~
logicx24
I think now is the best time to step away, so that people know exactly who's
in charge at a time of supposed crisis.

~~~
ikeyany
Do you think there's a question of who's in charge?

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stickfigure
Clickbait headline that is explained within the article itself:

 _The cofounders planned to step back their Google involvement when they
formed Alphabet in 2015 ... The idea was to give Google CEO Sundar Pichai the
ability to assert his own leadership during a tumultuous time._

Not news, but I'm sure they'll get plenty of clicks from the Google haters.

~~~
pwinnski
From 2015 to 2019 is four years, and they kept showing up for three years.

~~~
maxwell
They were waiting for a "tumultuous time".

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mooman219
How do you scale a company to 100K people while maintaining accountability for
both management and engineers on top of preventing leaks? Are there examples
of companies doing this while maintaining an open culture? Even assuring
99.999% of people do the correct thing leaves someone.

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thiscatis
Maybe we should have a
[https://notnews.ycombinator.com](https://notnews.ycombinator.com) for stuff
like this.

~~~
amrrs
I just clicked thinking this as real (just like _past_ ) to find out not found
error. But I think this makes a nice side project to train an ML classifier to
call news titles - NotNews

~~~
skilled
I think it's because of jobsism, would you agree? I think jobsism definitely
falls into this category. That darn jobsism!

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pwinnski
The article lists some examples of Google's traditionally open culture
becoming more closed, and then states this "has some employees wondering
whether Google’s traditionally open culture will hold up."

It seems clear that it's already not as open as it once was. How much more
closed does it need to become before employees stop wondering?

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trevyn
They’ve both checked out long ago, particularly Sergey.

