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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google (hixie.ch)
2213 points by whiplashoo 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 1040 comments



Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.

I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first."

But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.

Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?

I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.


When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).


On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup.

This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.


It's worth noting that was a turning point: the "more wood behind fewer arrows" policy adopted by Larry [1] initiated the die-off cycle of Google products. Prior to that, as far as I am aware, they were much more tolerant of products staying around in a mature-but-not-wildly-successful state. Afterwards, it seemed as if they would only keep things that maintained a trajectory to become as successful as their core products.

Again, this was not entirely unpredictable. While I don't remember the details of that lecture, I remember the professor calling out these sorts of big shifts in cultural values as being typical of startups transforming into large companies. And Larry himself was part of the transformation, turning into (presumably, what he believed to be) what was needed to lead Google into its next stage as a large company.

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-few...


What’s remarkable is that that phrase was already, at that time, notorious for having been a portent of doom at Sun Microsystems.


..and now all that's left of Sun is the wood on the back of the Meta sign.


And the Java/MaximeVM legacy, alongside some entertaining podcast stories.


Every time a socket is instantiated, Sun Microsystems comes alive; so too it is with NFS, and many other core technologies; there is lots that's left of Sun which still makes it live, even though it doesn't officially exist any more.

And any time 0xide Computer ships a cloud in a rack with the Helios operating system powering it, Sun Microsystems shines bright as a beacon of indestructibility due to quality.


All the wood behind one arrow…


It seems like the energy and creativity of Google Labs may have been lost rather than infused into all of Google.


They made - and still make - one crucial error: you need to spin those projects that are simply viable out immediately after they take root. Otherwise you will end up with the brand advantage but there will always be the pressure to use the resources (people, mostly) more efficiently in terms of ROI. And so nothing ever lasts and slowly but surely your reputation as a reliable partner for new products is eroded.

You can use your main brand for the launch, but then you have to be willing to support the child.


In addition, I don't understand why they stopped them entirely, instead of spin them off as subsidiaries under e.g. Alphabet; make them financially self-reliant, have Google/Alphabet as the main shareholder, and give the people that worked on it (and whoever else wants to) the opportunity to continue working on the product.

Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).


Most of them were probably built on Google's core infrastructure in ways that make them difficult to externalize at sub scale. There's also compensation disparity - it's virtually impossible for a new startup / spinout to pay FAANG comp and remain profitable & nimble. This results in braindrain.


The reason is quite simple: why spend engineering headcount on a less successful product?

> Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).

Google Cloud is built on top of Google's tech ecosystem, not the other way around.


Because things need time and alignment of incentives between creators and consumers and if you interfere in that relationship all the time things will never ever succeed. The last thing any project needs is an investor with a majority interest that fucks up your plans all the time, can take your employees away at will and can axe the project at any time because it doesn't perform according to their metrics.

That's why VCs take a minority stake in start-ups. The trouble usually begins when the founders dilute to the point that they no longer have a majority.


Assignment: Consider Agilent, itself a spinoff from HP, also spun off four (I think) companies, because they were good businesses but distracted the management.

Is this the right strategy? I'm tempted to say Yes.


>Google Inbox

Still so damn bitter about that death.


It’s weird that Gmail never reached that point. Even years later it’s still the same it was 10 years ago.

I think after inbox died I just gave up on it and moved to fastmail.


I understand what you're saying (I miss Inbox, too). But end users like sameness and "it just works." Normies prefer stability over innovation when they are trying to get stuff done.


Inbox was not deterministic. It's like a social media feed for your e-mail. I'd rather have my mails left as-is, and allow me to work with them the way I want.

You don't have to be a "normie" to appreciate simple or old fashioned things. Most of the e-mails I receive is not for quick-consumption, and I prefer the standard way over Inbox's way.

Maybe it was a solution trying to find a problem, IDK. I used it for 30 minutes tops.


Normies like sameness, this is why God gave us configs. You can default to normal but let the crazies customize.


Thing is, they quit on it too quickly; sure, a lot of people would stick with gmail, but others - and following generations - would adopt and grow up with inbox.

I think / suspect that many people develop habits of this type in their 20's and never move away from it for the next 60 years because it works. Example, people who still use vi(m) / emacs. Nothing personal, but as an example, they use it because they're used to it and have been for decades. And no editor that claims to be better will ever replace it for them.


Gmail settings still look like they were made in 2001. Any UX designer will want to pour Clorox into their eyes by just looking at it. Remarkable how Google can just totally ignore it, but then again - email is a very specific product. Once you grab your market share, we are locked in into our emails.


I miss Inbox features too. Shortwave is nice if you want something similar today.


It is the best email client I have ever used.


I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.


I ran one of the successful projects in Area 120.

I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.

But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked with in my decade at the company.

Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.


Somewhat spicy take - if the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers you worked with, they probably weren't the right builders to start a new vertical.

Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.


You’re not wrong. They were among the top 10% of people I worked with in terms of passion, commitment, and creativity. They weren’t among the top 10% in terms of their skill in navigating Dilbert-land corporatism.

A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google’s reputation as a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.


"One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups"

So basically google had a shed where they hoarded talented people, to prevent competition? :)


I Don't think hoarding is necessarily the right word. They were using them to research potential new products or tools. The theory being that if only a few of the projects prove high value then it's worth it. That's not hoarding that's letting them flourish.


> So basically google had a shed where they hoarded talented people, to prevent competition?

That's a succinct description of why Microsoft Research was created.


Bill Gates explicitly said in an interview that rather keep people busy than losing them to the competition.


1) in the case of Area 120, this is one of the ways it was pitched to management. “Passionate entrepreneurs are leaving to work on new ideas; if you give them a place inside Google to pursue new ideas, it keeps them and their entrepreneurial energy at the company.”

2) in general, early Google used to hoard talent all the time. The founders would keep great people (or their friends) on payroll for ~ever just to have them stick around. That was most prevalent in the first decade of Google’s life, to my knowledge, and mostly applied to very senior people.

By the time Area 120 was pitched and approved (circa 2014), those days were largely gone. Area 120 was primarily filled with junior people (L4-L6) and constantly had to sing for its supper - it was not at all a sinecure.


I know you're not wrong, but it stings a little to see L6 referred to as junior.


That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.


> That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.

These are rather the top 10 % sycophants, not the top 10 % researchers or top 10 % programmers.


I didn't see that mentioned, perhaps I missed it. I read it as top 10% of performers.


3 successful projects can totally justify what you call waste of money.

I sometimes wonder what people expect innovation is. You try and try and try. One thing is good and you must know how to use it - it can make history.

If I understood right, chatgpt comes from one of such ideas.... so the question is also: who evaluates the ideas? How come that Google was not able to capitalize on that idea?

So yeah, instead of treating the cause they treat the symptoms, like usual.


Agreed, we are on ycombinator.com, after all. The patron saint of failed ideas.


I think this is why these teams are really hard to have in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it’s impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some variant of “this team is able to bs and show no value, while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?”

I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards for success)…..but at that point just join a startup


Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator.

It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives).

In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.


I think these type of teams are a good way to give talented devs a break from the grind at bigger companies, even if the chances of a new product is low.

Not every company can afford these "paid vacations", but they do have some use at times.


Pretty standard rate of failure for early stage startups.


> at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

If you can't innovate at the base level of app design .... how do you have any hope of innovating for AI apps that require research/engineering/product/marketing collaboration?


That's true. What they need is what they had started doing, i.e. breaking down Google into Alphabet and letting some companies within the conglomerate act like startups.

Why was this effort unsuccessful? Perhaps they were unable to get rid of middle management? I have had lengthy discussions with employees from several of their companies, e.g. Calico, and that seemed to be the case. This article only reinforces my view.


> Why was this effort unsuccessful?

i suspect that they are unsuccessful for two reasons: failure is not death, and success is not riches (for those who did the work).


If I recall past discussions on this topic correctly, it wasn’t just about profits. I believe the incentive structures are setup around launches and not maintenance. If that’s correct, then that would lead to people launching, collecting rewards (bonuses, promotions, etc) and then abandoning.


I think you are talking about “innovators dilemma” great book by the way


Microsoft today is more innovative than google IMO. They keep executing bold and controversial strategies, even though being older than google.


At roughly similar points in their lives, Microsoft and Google initiated video gaming platforms. Microsoft stuck with Xbox through seven years (iirc) of still-unprofitable growth to what it is today. Google abandoned Stadia after three years.

Yeah, I think Google is looking more like an IBM in the long run, while Microsoft manages to innovate despite its age and size.


If we ignore the GUI civil wars for a bit, though.


There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project?

And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.

[1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...


Did Astro Teller have any successful project? A lot of money was spent, but what are the results? Looking at the wikipedia page it seems this whole Google X thing is a place where senior people have fun, while the rest of the company is undetstaffed. (E.g. no money for human customer service)


At that time, others companies were not building most of those things though.


And those that were building were basically doing research, not refining a product that had achieved product market fit. The gp makes it sound like they were manufacturing widgets. The existence of others in the market is better described as “other people were also able to attract funding for the potential payoffs in that field.”

It demands that google’s mopnshots need to be something no other investor has considered.

The same comment translated to 1965 — “The US is trying to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I’d hardly call it a “moonshot” “

(Edited to change typo of “potential layoffs” to “potential payoffs”, possibly more fitting though)


Building the best self driving car in the world is amazing , come on!


Everyone made fun of Google for self-driving and totally derided them for years.

It only feels normal now because they took the risk and pulled everyone else in the industry forward.


This is not accurate. Wiki has a pretty reasonable page on self driving cars here [1], but you can also look to what led Google to go for Waymo to begin with. [2]

Levandowski had already created a self driving motorcycle for a DARPA challenged in 2004. In 2008 Discovery contacted him for a show about it, but being unable to lend them the vehicle - he instead built a new self driving pizza delivery car for them. He asked Google if they wanted to participate in the show or get involved in self driving, but they were uninterested due to liability. After they show aired and went off without a hitch, they decided to get involved.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Pribot



I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff.

This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.

I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.


can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the only login, no need for password for the first iteration, we will fix it later, or ... ?


It’s been long enough that I’ve successfully blocked a lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people explained project management to a project manager.

Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display the data.

All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point the relationship died.


oh, that seems like a rare breed. (at least in my comfy bubble.) thanks!


She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far as I could manage to connect, but something happened when she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message with the lead devs in private.

Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.


There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.

Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir


I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it.

Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.


> I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors.

Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like.

We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes.

They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures.

For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation.

Don’t hate the players, hate the game.


Things tend to repeat but it's not completely impossible to have large and lasting changes. Ursula K. Le Guin used to say how people thought inescapable the divine rights of kings.

On the other hand, Google did change the world. Everything's just more mature nowadays. There's less blue ocean in its business segments.

I wonder if a company could stay "evergreen" by constantly finding new business areas and somehow spinning off old ones? Apple for example almost died in between before really coming back with the iPhone.


3M does something like this, with a rule that 30% of the company's profit must come from products introduced within the last 4 years:

https://hbr.org/2013/08/the-innovation-mindset-in-acti-3


Humans have great capacity to learn from our mistakes. Our source code or DNA have no encoding related to running business in a certain way. We mourn old google the revolutionary place, the likes of which could not have existed 100 years ago. But we forget that it was such a revolutionary place that its mere existence was an anomaly of sorts, and also that it spurned us to create several such new places, and that learning will continue us to create many more.


But we have created new types of social institutions despite having the same DNA as our ancestors! Most notably the corporation and the nation-state.


Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg


Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it was illuminating.


> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."

Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?


The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum tsss"


"Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."

I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.


Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.


I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.


To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.


"Present company excluded"

It's a polite fiction.


Exactly.


This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete

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

However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.


People are already lamenting the lack of useful results in Google Search, and adverts aren't returning as much value as they used to, and there's been a rise in modified client apps without ads as a reaction to ads being spammed on certain services.


I'm not sure what you mean by Visa/Mastercard duopoly, there's a lot of regionality so the picture could be fsirly different depending on what you have in mind.

To me Bing as a minority competitior in search, and facebook on ads for instance would be candidates to the same kind of duopoly.


5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.


Yeah, it's hard to go back to wading through SEO-optimized BS after just getting a decent answer (which, to be fair to the AI-sceptics, you do have to think about before using blindly).

It's an interesting mental shift - I wasn't googling because I wanted to find a web page, I was googling because I wanted an answer to a question. An AR or mixed-mode personal assistant is going to be a game changer.


This is also where the paid search engine comes into play. I get to pin Wikipedia so it’s always at the top whenever it’s relevant to my search, and there is almost zero SEO spam. And no ads.

I use a mix of that and chatGPT together depending on the specific thing I’m searching for, and it’s truly better than even the old Google.


Hard agree. Sold Google stock after realizing I'd more or less replaced Google Search with chatgpt...


I haven’t used Google as more than an occasional backup for years, and even less since I switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi a few months back.

The more I eliminate anything to do with ads from my life, the better things get,


Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better


For me it's because ChatGPT ignores less of what I type than Google currently does, plus it doesn't return spammy SEO results.

Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus.

Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's Spotlight is better for that.


> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried

I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).

I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.


I had the same problem. Less with missing Wikipedia results, but I was definitely getting the first page stuffed with crappy SEO results and ads. I switched to DDG a few months ago and I'm finding the experience much, much better. I tried switching a few years ago and found DDG's search wasn't as good. But since then either DDG has got better or Google has got worse. I actually suspect the latter.


OK, but this is the "alternative facts" thing at work. Grandparent claimed something frankly ridiculous, you say you had the "same problem", then you redefine the problem to be, well... not the same thing at all? I mean, of course there are "SEO" pages in search results, that's literally what "Search Engine Optimization" means.

And it's impossible to know what you mean by it without specifics: are you complaining that a top search result is a useless page of advertisement and AI-generated text (which would be bad), or just that e.g. "tutorialspoint.com"[1] or whatever is above Stack Overflow on some search (hardly a disaster).

Maybe you have some examples we could try?

[1] Or some other vaguely low quality but still legitimate site.


I gave this a go. I typed google.com into my browser. First thing: oh yeah, that's right, because I use a VPN google puts me through captchas before letting me search (and I'm currently logged-in to Google on my gmail ID, so it definitely knows who I am, which is even more annoying). One annoying captcha session later, I can search. (and ofc Google wants to know my location, despite knowing my address as part of my Google ID).

I tried "El Dorado" because I happened to have that boardgame on a shelf in front of me. Actually the results were pretty good - wikipedia, national geographic, IMDB, no ads. But yeah, not something there's going to be many ads on, so let's try something more adworthy.

So I switched to an Incognito window (many, many captchas) and tried "erectile dysfunction". Whole bunch of decent results, no ads until the bottom half of the page (and then it was solid ads of course).

I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised - it's not nearly as swamped with ads and shitty SEO as I remember. But that's the thing, isn't it? I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that ;) But yeah, you're correct - the first page of Google isn't all ads and SEO crap. HN must be hallucinating that.


> I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that

Well, that's the thing... maybe you did? I mean, clearly from context you live in a world awash in the kind of rhetoric we're seeing in this topic, with hyperbolic claims about the Descent of Google into Vice and Decay everywhere. And... it's easy to fit stuff into a frame if that's how you're already thinking. One bad result or one unexpected pop up ad can sway a *lot* of opinion even if it's an outlier.

Thus: "alternative facts". In the real world search results are boring and generally high quality because that's the way they've been for 20+ years (I mean, come one: it's a mature product in a mature market, you really expect it to change much?). But here on HN testimony like that gets voted down below the hyperbolic negativity, so what you read are the outliers.

HN, to wit, has become the Fox News of tech.


I don’t like the “you’re remembering it wrong” defence

Google doesn’t publish a search quality report, or publicly index their results for the same queries over time, so you can’t objectively compare whether the quality has changed or not. Plus, the Google search signals and the product itself are constantly changing day to day and there’s no way to see those changes.

So if Google went through a spell of bad results, or their algorithm entered a degenerate state, or SEO figured out how to break through their algorithmic walls, or even their algorithm deemed you interested in something you aren’t, then “you’re remembering it wrong” because it’s fixed today, but at the time it really was worse.

I do agree though, people remember bad experiences far more than positive ones, there’s a definite bias in the human psyche there. But also, anecdotally, I’ve never been so annoyed with Google results as I have lately. I know I’m not alone, my low-tech wife even complains that Google has become useless for so many things. True or not, it’s a bad omen for Google because it’s very hard to rebuild a reputation.

One of the most annoying things about Google the last few years has been searching reviews, and they’ve just added a widget to combine product reviews which is nice to see, so they do seem like they’re working on these issues.


It's not a defense, just a postulate. I'll grant that sometimes search results are bad, that seems eminently plausible. But you'll likewise grant that echo chamber logic tends strongly to "create facts" by elevating outliers into assumed priors, right?

I'm just saying that right now HN has become an echo chamber of this kind of logic, with people writing and voting more for the visceral rush of anger against a shared enemy and not "truth", so much. Hence, the Fox News of tech.


That’s fair, and I agree.


I can see how you got there from where you started, but I'm not sure it's accurate ;)

HN is useful but like all new sources and social media sites, it's not the unbiased pure stream of news and educated opinion that we'd like. Humans are weird.


Started using startpage.com for google results without the ads and its pretty good.


The movie example is an exaggeration (in my opinion). I find that mostly Google Search has issues with related ideas (Microsoft Project Silica) where there is not a direct article, yet a reference. Ex: [1]

There is also what I would call a phase delay. Google has a really bad issue with SEO, takes forever to get rid of it, but by the time you can check, its mostly resolved.

Finally. What you see as an end user is only partially Google. A lot of the page is farmed out to Real-Time Bidding (RTB) networks based on your user tracking. So its often difficult to correlate if someone else's user profile delivers wildly different experience. [2] You might get spammed by SEO and near constant TEMU ads, and others might get nothing.

Finally. Finally. 'Cause its spec.' I expect there are client side or man-in-the-middle viruses that mess with search results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

[2] https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidde...


Some of the queries you gave me weren't so bad!

I specifically searched just now something I searched recently, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off".

I naturally blocked ads, but it shows "Cast", "People also ask", the official Netflix result (good), "Trailers and Clips", "Reviews", "Episodes", "Top Stories" with some gossip, and then Wikipedia and IMDB.

However this is also not so bad! I will make sure to document all my problematic Googling experiences.

You can argue that those things are "noise that my brain should block" or that "they're actually useful", and that's entirely true. But Google is no longer returning the results I used to expect from it, and that's a fact. Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore? Well, that's not a big deal, there are other products. But my point still stands. Sorry but not sorry: Apple's Spotlight is still better for this and needs zero scrolling to take me to Wikipedia.


It depends on how heavily targeted the terms are. The two big objectively user-hostile lines I was watching and have seen crossed:

1. Removed the yellow background that easily distinguished ads.

2. Zero organic results above the fold.

Obviously #2 doesn't happen every day on every query, but I saw it during the crypto craze and I have seen it during the AI craze.


Try finding out if Walmart is closed tomorrow. Google results are all SEO spam even though Walmart themselves tweeted about it.


Did you try this? First hits are Walmart locations with hours. Followed by "People also ask" where the first item (with a correct answer) is "Will Walmart be open on Thanksgiving near me?". Followed by proper search results where the top two hits are, indeed, the two nearest Walmarts to me. How exactly would you improve that? Is there a better site to put at the top?


In Google's defence:

Twitter shouldn't be considered a proper source anymore. It's closed without an account and the access is severely limited. You can't see follow-up messages, questions, or whole threads.

Also I don't have Walmart here but it does show opening hours from Google Maps which is often better than official websites.


Just add Wikipedia to the end of your search pattern.


It's because ChatGPT isn't being monetized with ads yet. I use "yet" quite deliberately, mind you. The question isn't whether ChatGPT will eventually have ads; the question is how easily you'll be able to tell they're ads, or if it's going to be product/service placement worked into responses as seamlessly as possible.


You say that, but Google Search is still free after decades, whereas you can pay ChatGPT $20/mo for a membership right now.


I say it because I don't think enough people are going to pay for LLM/GPT services for investors to get what they consider a sufficient return on their investment. I'm pretty sure no "pure AI" company is anywhere near a track to profitability as of yet, and there is only so long that VCs will be comfortable with that. (And while there might be AI "true believers" who don't much care about the profit horizon, ask OpenAI's board how that worked out for them last week.)


If only Google offered the option to pay in return for no ads and other junk. But they would say it does not scale; they can't count that low. So people are flocking to chatGPT.


On the other hand, Google does exactly that with YouTube?


Partially. They still harvest your data from YouTube to try to manipulate you with ads on other websites.


Good on them! I meant for search. They have other paid services.


I suspect that by doing so they'd indicate just how much each user is worth to them in ads.

I suspect that folk who opted into this would be the ones getting lots of ads (hence the most valuable.)

If Google said "you can opt out for $99 a month" you'd freak out. But you're probably worth that (or more).

People aren't really flocking to ChatGPT though - not yet. Not at Google Scale. It's not like my mom will pay $20 a month when she just uses Google for free...


Given that I've moved to Kagi and chatGPT how much are they making off me now? They should have disrupted themselves when they had the chance.


Sure some are moving. There are always some moving. But despite the HN bubble effect its a tiny sample.

Plus folk moving now are folk who'll move back later when they get disgruntled there. (No disrespect.) First movers are not the loyal customer base. Movers gotta be moving..

(I say this as a general rule not making an assumption about you personally.)

It's like even everyone "left" Facebook for google+.


Person 1: "They figured out how much they could make off you and it was more than what you would pay."

Person 2: "Well, they pissed me off so I left completely and now they make nothing off of me."

Person 1: "They already knew you would move so they figured out they would make nothing off of you in the long run!"

Person 2: "..."


My churn would appear as a loss in their lifetime value model, so it would be detected by a long-term experiment. And I am reasonably confident they are performing long-term experiments for such things.


What a long con nudge bubble will be woven, in the darkness to bind them.


Personally it’s because there’s no ads. Google’s UX is to choke the user half to death with cookies, popups, reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner ads. And that’s before we even get to the content, which is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-whom.

(And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)


instead of Googleing and getting a forum post from 2009 where you have to read the whole thread and then interpret the results, ChatGPT just gives you the answer directly. ChatGPT could be shitty and rude about it and it would still be better because it's a direct smart to your direct question.

what's hilarious is the conversation that must have happened inside google about linking to pages vs giving the answer on the search result page, and now where we are with ChatGPT.


What kind of shallow, bland, inoffensive and disconnected items do you search for that a simple chatbot can spit out?


Work-related stuff, Google is for more personal stuff but even there 85% of my search is something like best running shoes Reddit.


That's what the AI robots will use as an explanation when they have f*cked us up. :-)


>> at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor...

sounds like Clayton Christensen



I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers.

I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission.

Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.

This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.


Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a straight answer or get something done that wasn’t formally planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it, especially engineers who don’t share priorities, timelines, conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally also the best way to get promoted at a large company that believes in breaking down silos.


> Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality.

...for things that align with that silo structure. If you try to build new things that necessitate conceptual integrity across org boundaries, then teams that think this way will first debate ownership and responsibility breakdown before it's even clear how the thing should work at a high level. I've seen too many examples of horrible engineering done by silo'ed teams, where they build down blind alleys that turn out to be unmaintainable and net-negative producing over time because they approached it based on what services they could touch rather than what made sense from an overall system and UX perspective.

Obviously "breaking down silos" involves greater coordination and communication overhead, and thus is harder to pull of successfully, so it's a tradeoff that should be weighed carefully in the context of business needs.


And this is another reason why managers growing their fiefdom to make big teams is bad for the organization.

Most of the most successful projects and incredible feats of engineering happen by tiny teams full of very talented people NOT a 4-layer management pyramid of people who are here for a nice stable 9-5. Not to say you can’t be successful with WLB but you need a certain fire in your gut and a hunger to execute as a small and efficient team.


I think there’s nothing incompatible between fire and WLB. Execute with a much greater degree of efficiency between 9 and 5.

Too often do people just throw more time and/or bodies at a problem to make it go away.


I don’t disagree. But I have also seen situations where middle managers are highly attuned to and proud of cross-team projects, and basically don’t pay any attention or give any weight to value delivered for end-users within teams, so everyone is encouraged to structure their projects to maximize communication overhead (even line managers, since doing so gives them the opportunity to grow their directs).


Absolutely. There are a lot of failure modes. This is why true IC leadership with teeth is needed. The whole point of staff+ engineer roles (outside of specialist research) is to navigate the right technical decisions that span across teams.


IC leadership positions are earned by leading cross-team projects, so the senior engineers who want them (and the managers who want to grow IC leaders) are encouraged to turn everything into one.


Leadership positions should be granted not just on “projects”, but demonstrated technical ability and judgement. This often includes influence of what NOT to do just as much as it involves driving projects. Obviously any rubric is only as good as the people who apply it, and if you hire tens of thousands of smart engineers with only one really profitable product and not much in the way of vision it’s going to be a fucking mess.


But because of the stigmatization of silos and valorization of cross-team efforts, making a project cross-team when it doesn't need to be is considered an example of demonstrating the company's values rather than example of bad technical judgement.


That’s a false dichotomy and bad leadership judgement. I don’t doubt these arguments are made and sometimes won (especially in dysfunctional or apathetic orgs), but context matters, there’s no value system that supersedes critical thinking in context. One of the questions I ask in staff+ promo committee is what did this person prevent from being built.


Good question :-) Could make sense on a senior developer level?

At the same time, seems possibly easy to game? If two friends make unnecessary suggestions, and stop each other's suggestions.

If it becomes well known that this question is being asked?

Not much work required to pretend one stopped sth from getting built


High process and high collaboration/coordination is not the only alternative to silos.

Google in the mid aughts still had tightly aligned teams with clear priorities. But they were also transparent in what they were doing, and open to collaboration where it made sense. Teams felt empowered to reject requests that would trip them up, but also empowered to do small things to help another team (and got rewarded for doing so).

The reality at a large org is you’re going to have dependencies. In my experience, highly-siloed orgs have tremendous coordination barriers to even the smallest request across teams. Your one-line API change didn’t make it onto your dependency’s roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in three months.

And I’m not sure we have the same understanding of “fiefdom.” I’m talking about the pattern where middle managers try to grow their headcount as large as possible without a clear purpose other than building status within the org. This often manifests as disparate and disjoint teams aggregated under a leader who has little understanding or care as to what exactly it is they’re doing. It is hard to find value in this arrangement.


> Your one-line API change didn’t make it onto your dependency’s roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in three months.

This is one of the key problems of working across teams, and its impact is amplified by a culture that says you should turn everything into a cross-team project that you possibly can. The whole company grinds to a near halt on these sorts of blockages.


> In my experience, highly-siloed orgs have tremendous coordination barriers to even the smallest request across teams.

Isn’t this solved by having cross-team project managers who can perform this coordination?

I certainly agree that the failure case you describe is possible, but it’s also solvable (in my experience).


It’s Coase’s theory of the firm [1] in synecdoche. Silos escape the political transaction costs around them at the expense of access to external resources.

They can famously work, e.g. Skunkworks. But they also decay into fiefdoms.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm


I feel like you're working with a different definition of "silo" than the parent. My understanding of a "silo" is "closed off teams that aren't allowed to work with outsiders" who have their own culture that may be at odds with the company.

It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.


Building in silos is when you get something done by yourself or with your direct teammates. Cross team collaboration involves e.g. a weekly sync, coauthored design documents, code changes made in modules you’ve never seen before reviewed by people you don’t know, tasks that are critical blocking dependencies for you but totally irrelevant to the decision-makers of the teams that need to allocate time for them. The extent to which a company is siloed is the extent to which its engineers are talking to their desk neighbors and getting things done vs. navigating communication overhead and being blocked on people quite remote from them and their goals.

It’s hard to believe you could have a nimble and cohesive team at the scale of a large corporation, because the number of communication edges gets silly. Dunbar’s number and all that. You can have team nimble and cohesive teams within large corporations. But having several distinct networks is otherwise known as being siloed.


This is not at all what people mean when they talk about silos


Ok how do you meaningfully define the difference and moreover how would you prevent his version of a "good" silo from devolving into a "bad" one in actuality?


"How does efficient compartmentalization become bad siloing?"

Step one: build Aa and Bb with the A and a people together, and the B and b people together.

Step two: realize you need AB and ab.

Step three: keep the same organizational structure, and try to get the A team to work with the B team ten managers and five hundred miles away.


Data point of one, but it's precisely what I mean when I talk about silos.


Silos and fiefdoms are normally seen as negative things. And that's not entirely wrong.

But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc. teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference or having to constantly coordinate with every other organization in the company.

It can go both ways.


Silos are also good for sheltering and nurturing high performing teams, especially when the broader organization is bad.


Breaking down silos de-risks a company, despite some of the costs you mentioned. Especially after covid, companies capitalize on the flexibility of employees and lack of (physical) offices. Employees can be replaced like never before.

But even without that in mind, breaking silos can also put the right people in the loop - for every successful silo you mentioned, I bet there is a successful company which was able to have a good mix of people from different teams.

For me it always boils down to: what does the company want? Who they want to be in the next 3-5-10 years? Based on this you need to have proper management training. Without that, they simply throw engineers at the problem, which as you mentioned, can backfire. If you as an organization are able to scale well (even with some small and monitored silos) I don't see why it should be a problem.

Reality is: companies want to be able to scale like Google for their pet projects, fire fast upon need, have a lot of teams all with the performance of 10x engineers, etc etc. That's the BS they write on their about page.

Do they have agile coaches? Do they have people that help them organize work? Skilled people, not random guy that developed software all his life and now he/she wants to try something new, and he/she read a book over the weekend or listened to some podcasts..

People have high expectations by paying little. It takes effort to do things right. That's in my opinion the truth.


Counterpoint: Apple has been quite successful despite their insistence in silos across teams and orgs.


As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently bad. Indeed, in a large company, they're necessary to avoid dysfunction. You want stable groups of competent people who share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for their thing.

"Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.


Maybe? I'm having a hard time finding a contemporary example. Bezos bowed out (though Amazon culture was famously bad for years), and even Facebook doesn't have 100k employees.

My point though is there is a difference between having a leader who got there by politicking versus a leader who got there by building a great company. They're both going to have different strengths and weaknesses, but there's at least a chance the founder isn't going to tolerate the sycophants.

An example: I was at Google 2005-2008. My manager's manager's manager was one of the early empire builders. He hired like crazy with no plan at all for the people he was hiring, and kept getting promoted for managing such a rapidly growing org. Eventually he rose high enough up that someone near the top realized what was going on, and promptly fired the guy, leaving behind a fair-sized mess as folks tried to figure out what to do with all his hires.

From what I've read lately, if this guy had just shown up to Google a few years later, he'd still be getting promoted.


Executives need to observe the whole organization, not just their direct reports. How far from the top was he when he started empire building? You make it sound like it was already very hierarchical, when Google always advertised itself as a relatively flat company.


Sounds like encapsulation in OO. You don't want to let other people poke around in your bits except through well defined interfaces.


I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments.

But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.

Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.


How do you distinguish "I can fix them" companies that will not improve because they are where they are because of organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual improve and are ready for you?


It’s simple, you just assume none are ready for change, and you’ll have a pretty much 100% accurate heuristic.


I think my thesis is that rather than looking for diamonds in the rough I need to reset my sense of good enough at least high enough that the exchange of new wisdom is somewhat proportional. I can teach you things and you can teach me things.

As a polymath my natural instinct is to learn by observation and doing rather than engage a teacher directly. Fortunately I can also learn by interviewing, so I’m not completely hopeless. If I’m asking you a ton of questions odds are good I think you’re a mentor or I think you need one.

The problem is that I’ve worked for a couple places that I thought could teach me a lot more than they did, I mistook individual attributes as a pattern that wasn’t there, and what I saw was more (or less) what I got. So at the end of the day I am probably the wrong person to ask. Thankfully other people replied.


I feel so much exactly what you're describing here...


I joined my current company 5 years ago, and I feel like we’ve ‘fixed’ a lot of things, but the effort to do so is so absurd.

And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.


How do you cope with Told Ya So? I’ve found it’s never as cathartic as I think and keeping it to myself is somewhat stressful, so nobody wins no matter which option I choose.


This reminds me of the "Explore/Exploit" chapter from "Algorithms to live by" :)


Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that.

Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.


> All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Great, market has matured from that.

Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.


Google has been trying very hard to diversify, mostly through Cloud.

How well they are succeeding at that is up to interpretation but they are chipping away at Ads' percentage of revenue. It used to be higher than 85% but as of 2022 it's down to only being 58% of operating revenue[0].

0. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-mon...


That's an article from 2021 that says ads were 80% of revenue


When companies figure out that cloud is a waste of money, this might not work.


Which mid to large companies have made this decision so far? I know there's Facebook, but their use case is exceptional.


Yes Google is still less diversified than its peers. Cloud and YouTube (edit: and Pixel phones?) are profitable afaik. The overall tech market has matured is what I meant; it's no longer time to loss-lead everything.


Not sure I’d characterize YouTube as a diversification from ads.


It is though. Being an ad supplier is different from being an ad exchange. Or would you describe the New York Times or HBO as "ads businesses"?


By that standard, Search is also a diversification from ads.


But it's not a diversification from what they've always done.


Sure. Why not.


I'm not into watching streaming services or TV for that matter, but that would be news to me. Does YT now produce own exclusive content? I think they don't 1. to keep content producers running their stuff on YT rather than acting as competitor 2. to avoid yet another reason for antitrust action (ie. the bad looks of extending their monopoly)


There was something called "YouTube Originals" that's been discontinued but I didn't consider that central to the point I was making.


Cobra Kai started on "YouTube Red" which I think was renamed "YouTube Premium"

Then it went to Netflix where it became a big hit.

There was another show I liked named Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television. They constantly broke the third wall making fun of YouTube Red being confused with some kind of adult content service.


HBO is paid programming with product placement at most, and NYT sells subscriptions that actually bring in the majority of their revenue. If it were 90% ads, I'd say yeah they might want to reconsider that.

YouTube has its own content while Search ofc doesn't, and its advertising model is different. I wouldn't lump it in with Search. But still, they've decided ads aren't enough and they need YT Premium subscriptions.


You may wish to review Google’s sources of revenue. There is one source which contributes over 50%, and it’s not the ad exchange.


It is not. Think about it. Diversification ensures that if one of your assets degrades in value, you have an unrelated asset that can still do well. Back to Alphabet, if ads revenues disappears overnight, Youtube becomes a dead project. Simples


At least they have alternate ways of selling ads, though. For example there has been a lot of talk about how their search business ads are threatened by LLMs that answer questions directly instead of giving search results that include paid placements, etc. But even if that happened, it likely wouldn’t affect YouTube ad revenues much.


Is it? If some new thing came along tomorrow that made Google's ad exchange obsolete, they could still sell ads on YouTube using whatever the new thing is. Or if YouTube became untenable, they'd have the ad exchange.


You two are nitpicking over "ads" vs "ads exchange" without saying it or talking about it meaningfully


Yeah, the point is diversification


OK, enlighten us then.


Also, they sell Premium


That's probably less than 1% of YouTube revenue (number came out of my hat)


In 2022, premium subscribers accounted for a bit less than 9% of YouTube's audience (and 67% of premium subscribers were in the US), according to this:

https://www.mediagistic.com/blog/how-many-youtube-users-will...


8-9% is actually a pretty impressive conversion rate considering close to 100% of people use YouTube. They have like 97.6% market share.


No data for this, but I feel like 9% is less than they expected after 5 years of the "frustrate and seduce" strategy, which is why they're even going after ad-blockers now. If anything, they look frustrated. But they probably had to do this.


Why would they want people using an ad blocker to even use the site that much though. They’re denying them revenue while costing them. I mean it’s great as a user but as a service there’s not really much upside.


YouTube didn't seem to mind so much before. Maybe they wanted to keep those users' attention on YouTube instead of elsewhere. Now they're a lot more focused on the profits, which is fine.


To use a googlism: I’m surprised Google can count that low.


HBO? No. NYTimes? Probably. All media is.


Your ontology raises more questions than it answers, like how a streaming service/cable television channel is not "media" in your world.


Ok, rephrase the last part to "The vast majority of media is".

Even HBO is partially an ad company, I imagine their own shows include product placement.


I was about to correct you about GCP profitability, but I just looked it up, and TIL that GCP became profitable for the first time in 2023 Q2. Interesting.


And before, it might've been in that "profitable if we want it to be" situation where they're just reinvesting the revenue.


Which is precisely why profit is a red herring. What matters is market share (which for GCP is still 10%, not amazing but gradually increasing) and, ultimately, revenue growth.


Yes, they don't need profits from Cloud yet. They do need it to be a viable business when growth slows eventually, though.


Are the Android app store and GCP loss leaders? I assumed those two would be profitable at least.


GCP burns massive amounts of cash and was a loss for many years. It just barely pulled a profit this year, though it looks more like some accounting tricks to make a small negative number look like a small positive one to make things look better during a downturn.


IIRC most of the public clouds changed their depreciation accounting recently. So all that cloud hardware is now good for 20 years instead of 10 years or something. Quite a boost to the old bottom line when you do that.


I loved old google they refused to share a business model. Google ~2006 I think is just past peaked google. I think they developed ads because it was the only model that fit their valuation.


You have the history backwards.

Ads in early 2000s > Mega-valuation


Could be, they also had a pre-iso valuation that needed justifying. The signal to me that it was really over was when they stopped supporting jabber/XMPP and look where it go them. I never experienced Google as a stock. My only experience with google is as a search engine and a mail delivery system that broke all the rules of polite society.

Could be "Don't be evil" was the answer to the business model question of early google. My memory is that it spawned during an interview with Larry and Sergey regarding the business model.


They were making massive jaw-dropping revenue years years before IPO. Secretly — the public or press were unaware.


> Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.

Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.


Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more than that.

For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.

Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.


> Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if their hand had not been forced, but I don't think pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was not done before TikTok.

I think short form video is just hard to monetize in comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if it does succeed?


Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao.

If Google were to try this early, it is uncertain that Google will discover a monetization strategy before the product joins the Google graveyard.

Let's not even talk about short form video, just YouTube. How many years did Google subsidize YouTube with Search money before it really turned up advertising on YouTube? Do we know how much effort Google expended in experimenting with monetization strategies for YouTube?


I don't know YT's monetization history, but longform video is incredibly easy to monetize because advertisers are willing to pay much more for their content being there. They get some edge from all the tech they have built for matching ads to users, but it's just fundamentally one of the easiest things to monetize on the internet, so I don't think they would have struggled there.


> Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao.

Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever reason there's almost zero attention to TikTok.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...


Academic studies of social media are often very hampered by tooling and data access and studying a moving target.

It's hard to even know if the methodology of the paper you cited (analyzing comment trajectories) is a good one, given YT is constantly tweaking their algorithms, including in response to public outcry, and this phenomenon does not show up in other analysis: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...

I assume the methodological questions are even trickier for TikTok which has many more creators than YT.

I would love to see someone actually study TikTok though, since people love to ascribe blame to platforms for radicalizing people rather than accepting that some users just have views we find unacceptable regardless of the platform.


> It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

I wouldn't be so sure, in my case ChatGPT passes the bar of being mildly useful but Bard is still absolutely useless. I can see two equally likely explanations for this: they simply can't manage to pull it off due to their culture or they can't release something that isn't massively more nerfed than the competition.


This story that Google would be destroyed if they had released GenAI tech before OpenAI is BS. Most people I know were instructed to tell people it was because of “responsibility” that GenAI was not out yet, while the entire company was freaking out and playing catch up with OpenAI (a 770 people company!) and promising non existent things to customers. There was nothing ready or thought through. Many people at Google thought they would be dominating AI forever. Little did they know that regardless of having a 170k people workforce, a 700 people start up nearly knocked them down. Google does not use Google Cloud for nearly nothing, also because of safety and security threats. I never understood why they could not be like AWS and use their own cloud. I wonder how long they will keep going trying to sell people something they don’t trust themselves.

About culture: it has deteriorated very much so. Working in Google was one thing, moving to Cloud was horrific and the sign I needed to get out of there. It has a culture that is rotten and somewhat worse than other Alphabet orgs, and tons of individuals with very poor technical acumen. Friends recommend friends who are morally flexible and they end up in Cloud. That is the easiest back door to Google and to a career ruin too given there are very poor execution and scarcity in technology innovation.


> There was nothing ready or thought through.

This was not my view being somewhat close to the technologies there. Lamda did exist internally for several years, with pretty good demos.

It was clearly not GPT-4, but there was a lot of exec-level fear about releasing these systems and having them say something offensive.

"Responsibility" is kind of bullshit, but fear of bad press is very real.


You’re giving Google too much credit. They couldn’t even conceive of short videos. Why? See earlier in the thread.


The rationalization given in this comment for the layoffs is obviously false. Google had ways of getting rid of underperformers without massive layoffs that they have been using for many years. Google has ways of getting rid of projects that do not involve layoffs.


> Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc.

This doesn't really match the reality of the layoffs. They weren't team/project based or performance based, they were seemingly random. If they were concernee about too many low performing products and employees they went about it in completely the wrong way.


> the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees

The layoffs weren't just low performers and killing unwanted projects.


Layoffs at everywhere happened because money got more expensive.

The whole industry didn't magically accumulate debt weight all at the same time in the same proportions.


Money becoming more expensive only matters for those who don't have any. I don't believe Google is one of them.

And before someone says opportunity cost, if the treasury offering a 5% ROI on your dollar is enough to dissuade you from executing on your business plan, that was never a very good business plan.


Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it.

> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set

This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.

The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.


I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth.

It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.


Sure. It's an incentives problem. It's very difficult to align the incentives in any organizations with six levels of reporting chain so that people with the most day-to-day power over the direction of the firm (mid-level directors) are marching in the right direction.

I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor job.


And the degree to having some level of org structure ossification is to have lots of people sort of going off and doing their own thing. Which probably worked at Google for a longer time than is often the case just because they were printing money. So what if they were doing projects and then just killing them, living with duplication, or having a bunch of random activities that led to nowhere.

Even if it's a bit frustrating it can also be more fun to be in an environment where it's more of a make your own adventure sort of thing. Mature companies though mostly have to be very structured about how they operate.


A good manager does not always a good SWE make.


Joined Microsoft in the early 2010s, and Google recently in the 2020s. I see the same bad company culture traits in both cases (incompetent & feuding middle managers, silos of information, promotion based on launches not business impact, hired too many people, etc.).

I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't.

I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies.

To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.


> People will get hurt.

Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.

I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position.

It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality.

Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities.

Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.


Slowly but steadily we age out "divine mandate" for "hustle mandate."

Nothing changes, psychopaths still cling on to some nebulous notion to make labor work harder to capture more excess value.


Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every growing / successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse, but even at our size being disruptive / staying innovative gets harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having capable people taking bets on new products, even when you know that such a product (if successful) is possibly years from making a dent in your revenue stream.

That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.


It was easier to thread this needle in an easy-money environment than now, when everyone has suddenly grown much more conservative.


I think it’s fine if big companies stick to their core competencies, return money to shareholders, and the shareholders can then re-invest into innovative startups.

Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.


Has nothing to do with Google “being bad” and everything to do with emerging social trends questioning the corporatization of everything.

Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are.

The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff!

People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.


Your comment has been removed for threatening violence, and your user account has been permanently suspended. Have a nice day. - corporate censors


> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.

I don't get this.

Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)

If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).


I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.

But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.

There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.

All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)


You can build a very solid business empire on a large collection of small offerings.


Though one key issue: Winning hearts and minds matter, public perception matters, they do indirectly affect the bottom line. Requires some nuance/between the lines sight to see this.


> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift.

This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.

A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".

Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".


Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.


I’m curious to understand your perspective:m as to why a business that focus on the user may expose to risk? Doesn’t meeting user needs equals to making users happy which in turn equals to making more money?


Not when your users are not your paying customers


This is my experience having been through 3 acquisitions.

In 1-2 years you go from: - operating well, get bought - throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower - then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore - leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition


> the prescription is always to go back in time

I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.


> A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off.

Kind of like Apple.


You're never too big put the user first.

When you stop doing that, someone else will and in time your customers will go there instead.


This is provably false. Customers are anything but rational, and pick things out that play against their best interests all the time.

Be it due to fashion, social pressure, brand recognition, cultural norms, et cetera and so forth.


I doubt it's provably true or false, as psychology tends to be.

Largely I agree with the OP though - treat your customers bad enough and unless there's something stopping them, they'll go elsewhere. That's how the free market works.


`why rock the boat` is spot on! Most large organisations eventually go into a mode of maximising the free cash flow for shareholders. I guess more or less this is by design. Investors, Founders and early employees take risks in short run for the rewards in the long run. A company cannot keep saying the promised green land is delayed by another 5 years.

Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one!

Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.


>But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?"

Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?

>A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?

This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.


Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a tobacco company or Chevron.

So i mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


> they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way

The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.


But that's what equity driven comp is supposed to resolve - give them small refreshers until they leave.


Sorry - could you expand? I'm not sure how that relates.


You effectively cut their pay by 30-70% over 4 years but not giving refreshes.


> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.

This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”


Yes, Google couldn't find a good way to scale out its early model. Talents are not something easy to scale out. Transparency is inherently in tension against confidentiality, and when you have lots of eyes then the latter tends to win unless you're comfortable of spending your daily life with all those media outlets. If you want to do the right thing, then you'll figure out that there's too many "right things" at its scale because there are too many people with different, conflicting goals. The list goes on.

Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.

But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.


Companies confuse their initial product success with general success. "We made this amazing thing, so everything we do is amazing". The logic is flawed but can carry the company a tremendous distance before becoming unsustainable. Google is reaching the early steps of the unsustainable phase, and their initial product success is finally being threatened via AI. Working on an open source library for 9 years and then complaining that the company is changing is ironic.


I've seen a hypothesis that Google has never created anything new worth anything to anyone, after it created search and ads. Gmail is a clone of Hotmail, and YouTube and Android were acquisitions.


There were Internet search engines before Google, but Google did it way better.

I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the time.

I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over the years.

You could also say there were digital music players before the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were smart phones before the iPhone.


The hypothesis is not wrong. Google is still just ads and search. It’s a utility “nothing to see here” company now.

Paradoxically, Microsoft now looks newer, fresher and more innovative than this.


> why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have... It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.

I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.

I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting).

I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.

I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us.

The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.


It's less about risk aversion than it is about position, size, and complexity. As these things grow, the incentives change and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible.

A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example.

Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position.

Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end.

And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.


>and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible.

What makes it impossible?


I explain it in the third paragraph but to illustrate it further: Consider a function. A function that is 1 line long is immediately understandable. At 10 lines, it is readable within a minute or two. At 100 lines, it is maybe legible to someone who lives in that function. At 1000 lines, it is a black box. Human organizations are the same way.

You might suggest refactoring, which is what companies do too. They create departments, promotion ladders, org charts, and mission statements. The problem is that abstractions leak by design. As your abstractions accumulate and change outside your view, your ability to understand the entirety reduces.


But that has to do with the capabilities of the executives involved, it doesn't make it impossible. Just like in your example, there are many, many developers that can perfectly understand large functions or code bases without issue.

If you have such a code base and you hire people that are not equipped, either through inexperience or capability, of managing that code base that is a resourcing issue.

If your executives cannot understand and control the organization they are tasked with controlling and cultivating, then they should be fired.

Which is basically what this dude is getting at.


Except large code bases do the same. They regularly die when their ability to be understood drops too low. Even with well organized code, they are pushed to add features until they aren't understood at the deepest level. Once you hit millions of lines of code, even when you spend decades in that code base, you still forget changes you made even if you have an overarching picture. That's ignoring other people working on it all the time. The understanding gets reduced to contracts, types, and interfaces.

And most importantly, humans are more complicated than code. With enough time and knowledge, I can accurately tell you what any piece of code does on a single expression or statement. Humans regularly do things they don't even know for purposes they don't understand.


I agree with you, but none of this makes it impossible. It just makes it a resourcing/hiring issue.

The same thing regularly happens with smaller companies or code bases. The size exacerbates the issue, but it's not the cause of it.

Which is largely this OP's point regarding the subject of calling out culture rot and a particular executive.


Do you have any resources to learn this. How to untangle the situation. What would happen if the resources indeed isn’t the problem to tackle, rather its complexity that is hard to untangle.


too many things going on, involving too many people and nobody can possibly keep track of it all in their head. You have to split it up. But by splitting it up, the left hand doesn't really know what the right hand is doing.

So controls and processes are put in place to ensure no bad outcomes are possible, but this also prevents good, innovative outcomes from sprouting.

Fundamentally, it's a loss of trust that can exist in a smaller organization.


> Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that

That dude just made the number up.


Google fought against Microsoft’s EEE strategy until they could do it themselves. Enter Chrome.


Well-said. I think this is all pretty well encapsulated in the truth that "we tend to become what we hate", or "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."


Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will.


So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's talking to Google?

It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.


Amazon is already there.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-th...

Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.


> But once you achieve market dominance [..]

Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.


> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it."

How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?

Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.


> ... what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?

No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.

So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.

So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.

You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.


Then what's your incentive to work at the company instead of starting the project externally? If the product is a sustainable business model in isolation, surely it's sustainable without the external resources.


Starting a business is a lot of work and risk. Having those removed makes the path so much easier to experiment and removes all the friction.


Indeed, which is the point of the original comment: that large companies bias towards those people who don't want that risk.


Some companies do something like this with some success, but this was also the theory of the guy who drove Sears into the ground.


The guy who drove Sears into the ground also did the classic private-equity self-dealing to carve off all the valuable bits and saddle the company with debt. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of a company that owns lots of businesses which are mostly independent


I’d theorize it has something to do with whether the separation actually makes sense. Berkshire Hathaway owns separate businesses that have zero to do with each other and may spin off or bring in new ones anytime. Sears had different departments of the same store trying to beggar each other which is counterproductive.


This is a good way to be biased towards the most lucky and the most cutthroat. Also, why would the best talent look to work for you if they have to take so much personal risk without the possibility of the upside of stock options of a startup?


Gonna be awfully hard to comply with all the consent decrees and regulatory scrutiny with zero bureaucracy.


> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment

No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.

C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.

I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.


> C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations.

The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.


> Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.

My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]":

> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.


Observing how companies evolve and face challenges as they grow is interesting. Priorities, risk tolerance, and organizational structures often change this process. While newcomers may emphasize innovation and disruption, market-dominant companies may prioritize maintaining the status quo to protect what they have achieved. Various factors, including the potential impact on careers and incomes, can influence this shift in mindset. Additionally, due to its uncertainty, established processes and experienced personnel may resist starting from scratch. In some cases, companies that aim to differentiate themselves from traditional models may operate similarly over time, realizing the reasons behind established practices.


> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.

Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share.

It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.


This is spot on. I'll only add that the necessity of showing perpetual growth in the quarterly income report strongly incentivizes big companies to act this way, especially where--as in most tech companies--the employees have equity.


You've described why older companies do not inevitably grow into monopolies and take over the world. They get so set in their ways and bureaucratic that they get destroyed by the next wave of upstart companies.


Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and things feel like ground hog day.

After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.

There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..

But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.


logical move is to get better at splitting off their research and innovation into startups by licensing or funding employees who leave. Spinoff anything risky into an independent company so it can move faster and isn't slowed down by Google's risk aversion and bureaucracy. Basically what Microsoft did with OpenAI, give them cash and compute resources but have plausible deniability if things go wrong


I honestly think it’s possible to have large/mature companies that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It’s just really, really, really hard.

You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.

You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.

I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.


It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executive oversees a single layer of middle management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing telephone, and you have an echo chamber.

The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.


I don’t think middle management are the ONLY cause, but I do agree that once you start getting layers of management, managers “shielding their teams” from the rest of the company, cross-team dependencies that require lots of planning, and execs/upper-management that are very disconnected from the details of the business and product, you’re basically doomed to mediocrity-at-best.


Which companies did you have in mind?


I haven't worked personally at these places, so just going on what I've heard:

- Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility, letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you fight to keep this person if they told you they were leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and candid communication, and generally a smart and driven group doing great work

- I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep going a really high performing group, that were passionate about their work and hustling hard to build great things. Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and lack of work/life balance

- Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be


If google's mantra had been "Don't rock the boat" since they achieved market dominance, we would still have xmpp.


>But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift.

And shift they did.

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...


> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment

Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.)

> And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.

This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it generalizes to other industries.

I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.


Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.


> someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth

that probably describes a lot of people in tech megacorps too


Big tech, yes, lots, but an extra skill required there is to recognize and actively avoid ambitious managers, who would sacrifice/burn out their own team for self-advancement. Lots of churn in big tech is purely from that. Small tech, I think the capital pressure is much higher, so just getting a steady good deal on labor is not enough, leadership there is constantly optimizing and trying to upgrade the labor value without matching comp (ie, people are expected to always be acquiring more skills, giving internal talks/lectures, mentoring etc, and those who don't, well, they turn out to not be a good culture fit).


It's nearly impossible to measure the marginal contribution of someone one in a non sales role.


And yet somehow most people in charge of resourcing and budgeting for projects, teams and companies have some idea of who to hire, how much to pay them, etc. How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure?

It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.


> How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure?

The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and then beyond that it's a question of who is the most productive, effective at getting things done, etc.

So while they do have "something to measure," these metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable project, while another team barely works but ships a profitable product.


Profitability is not the only short-term metric. In poker I know when a bet is worth it, even if it ends up not winning the pot (unprofitable). Is your argument that business people are just randomly guessing and have no idea how much profit they could expect to make by spending specific amount of payroll?


Yeah pretty much.


>perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.

So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of dollars?


Sure. But people in this thread aren't complaining that Google's profitable. They're complaining about the culture. Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability. And it's even less sustainable when the company is dependent on an undiversified revenue stream, since they need to be innovating to mitigate that risk, and a poisonous culture is toxic to innovation.

But yes, Google is a money printer, and it's printing at a higher speed than it was ten years ago. But in that same ten years, Microsoft has grown at a faster rate and even displaced Google in some areas, like developer tooling and AI. In fact, Google has lost its ability to innovate to such an extent that a startup was able to beat them to market by productizing research that originated from Google! And now Microsoft basically owns that startup. That's an embarrassing failure of leadership.


Microsoft has certainly had a pretty amazing transformation. After they lost mobile and the client OS market was clearly stagnant to declining, it seemed they were toast if you looked at where their revenue came from. (And their early hybrid cloud strategy was sort of a mess too.)

Whereas, as you suggest, Google's cloud strategy has been marginal except for Google Docs and they're still mostly an ad company.


> Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability.

Are you sure? This feels a little bit like when I read the American capitalism is going to collapse because there are a lot of homeless people. Just because something has the effect of making some people miserable doesn't mean that it's unstable or doomed to fail. IBM, GE, Boeing, or any number of other "dinosaur" companies haven't gone anywhere. And Microsoft itself shows that even a conservative culture can manage to adapt to changing circumstances when it's necessary.


But Google doesn't intentionally have a conservative culture. They're trying to innovate, since they need to mitigate the existential risk of their undiversified revenue stream. But they're failing to innovate.

So perhaps such a conservative culture does have its merits, but claiming that Google sought those merits is post-facto rationalization of their failure to innovate. Google never intended to turn into IBM (which, btw, they havent - at least IBM has more diversified sources of revenue!).

That said, you make a good point that Microsoft itself is a counterexample. So maybe there is still hope for Google. But IMO, that hope is not aligned with the path they're currently traveling. They need to fire Sundar and make some drastic cultural changes if they want to outcompete Microsoft between now and 2035.


Sure, they're not achieving everything they want, but I think most people would be pretty happy if they just achieved a huge money-printing machine through an app store and ad exchange.


Yeah, hence why Larry and Sergei don't care that the company they founded is currently on a downward trajectory...


That's 25% of Google revenue using more employees.

So yeah, bloated and underperforming.


A cutthroat environment is going to encourage plenty of people to behave conservatively so that their rivals do not seize on their failures, real or perceived.


I highly recommend you read the paper Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt (1960).


I find the real comedy here is the emotional attitude towards an employer TBH, especially with GOOG doing just fine.

The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).


> the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way

In a word: momentum


Eventually everybody has to grow up and realize Santa isn’t a real person.


The book "The Innovator's Dillemma" is about this concept.


Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.

The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.


> Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.

This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.


You've just described why once prominent companies fade into shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be avoided with better leadership.


But not a problem, either. Turnover is natural. Nobody but the investors care very much whether Kodak pivots to digital cameras, or whether Kodak remains the leading film camera company as the industry shrinks, and a different company makes digital cameras. In fact the latter is often better for the economy and consumers, due to the better specialization.


Yes it is a problem if a company is failing not just for the investors but the workers. Nobody wants to work for a sinking ship. Can't believe this even needs to be said.


It doesn't have to sink. Isn't Kodak still a respected company in the niche realm of film cameras?


Microsoft has managed to resurrect from the dead though. Now it feels like a “fresher” company than Google.


kind of interesting how bell was able to spun off so much while modern companies aren't able to do so


Your username is genius, BTW. Assume you are a regular on HN but decided to post with a new account?


> But once you achieve market dominance

"Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.


Thing is, under capitalism large companies get significant control over the governments' actions. And large companies don't like not being allowed to be as powerful as possible, holding monopolies.


Alas, we have stumbled upon the fact that capitalism only works on paper


Google has entirely become a corporate capitalist driven by short term profit.

If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd be really confused as to how poor the search results are.


It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block..

One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.


Having children can awake antisocial impulses in people but it can awake prosocial impulses just as easily and just as strongly.


Sure, if I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, those might make good husbands/wives for my own kids when they grow up".


Should I take it to be some kind of Freudian slip that you’ve written “myself” rather than “themselves” here?


I'm half senile, and so when you replied I wondered if I did that.

But re-reading it several times now, I don't see it. When I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, they might make good husbands/wives for my own kids" where is the Freudian?

I am on the lookout for my kids. I can't tell them who to marry, but I can put them in circumstances where there are people their age that I approve of, such that familiarity might blossom into something more. I've seen how it turns out with other people's kids when they act like that's none of their business and actively avoid the thinking, and I don't much like the outcomes.


My parents had a lot of ideas about my romantic life too, none of them particularly good or welcome and none of which I listened to. Maybe you'll have better luck.


I'm not the OP, but you realize that implying they were looking at the kids as spouses for themselves is extremely creepy right?

(Not that I agree with what the OP said either - I think most people have a protective instinct towards all children without thinking of them as potential spouses for their own offspring. We see this behavior in other primates too, eg: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2021/mountain-gorillas-ad... )


I think you've misread me. My point was the guy seemed to be suggesting some general human tendency towards extreme self-interest but then used personal pronouns ("I think to myself"). Not that people are generally seeking child brides. If you look at the position of the word "myself" your interpretation does not really fit.


No, as can be seen by the other comments in this thread the use of "myself" there is entirely appropriate.

He is using personal pronouns consistently: "myself" and "my children". "Their" children is the other children he is observing, and he is thinking to himself.


Then again given your bizarre reading of my post how much should I really trust your interpretation.



What you have linked me to is not what it means but an association many people have. It will say so on that very page if you scroll up.


Sure, but everybody generalizes from one example. Well, at least I do.


No, not the way it's written.


This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil, corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.


Kids often bring out the worst level of 'fuck you, got mine' politicking in humans. All that school segregation stuff in the 60's? Parents 'protecting' their children. Same for the school segregation stuff in the 2010's.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...


Really? What about people not in the in-group, not in your tribe?


People without kids have that problem. This poster is talking about having children causing an evil change in personal character.


Idk why you are downvoted. It's become a cultural trope to use "I did it for my family" as an excuse to justify absolutely heinous stuff.


To close to home for many? Then again this is what life is about from moralphilosophical view. A body horror show with a "what have I become" at the end? Spoilers not welcome?


This presumes that people with no children are somehow less horrible.

In truth, all humans are equally worthless.


Less incentives to be all out horrific in large groups with distributed responsibilities?


This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism.

People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now.

No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.


Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees. They look at their immediate team/group, love the autonomy/transparency/"don't be evil"-mandate/etc. that they have and follow, and look around and see some of that in other groups, and think, "wow, this company is great, doesn't care about all that big-bad-company stuff".

But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.

(And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.)

It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.


> My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees.

Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.

What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.


As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action that the company takes.

However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context.

The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive." Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society.

This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey "oh but no one would be that evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry"

large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.


> Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.

I'm late in cleaning up old browser tabs, so I understand if there's no reply to this in a week-old discussion. How would you support the first half of this statement? Surely, there's far more CSAM on social networks than on iMessage (assuming that's where you were alluding).


> and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now

This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.


But then again, everyone says Google is evil to have made their own browser, but most of the world is using it - one would guess they must have done some good things with it (so taking humanity forward in some capacity etc.). Some are even criticizing Google from its own browser - I hate the fact that it made Firefox lose their market share, but I also understand it can't all be because the big corp brainwashed everyone (sure it would be a significant part though).


IE6 was the browser "most of the world used" too. But really, surely, there was absolutely nothing done well in it. The only reason it was the most used browser was monopoly abuse. And while we can discuss the exact terminology of "a monopoly" and whether the Ie6 hegemony fit in there theoretically, that it came with the most used OS, really was the only reason it was popular.

With Chrome it is different. But at least a large part of its popularity comes from abused monopolies enforcing this software on people. Less than IE6 i'd say, but still a large part.


While I understand your argument about IE6 which was shipped with Windows, Chrome didn't have that advantage for a long time - it's only now that Android phones and Chromebooks are shipped with it, but I don't know of a single person who does not download Chrome on their Windows Desktop too - even now when Edge is based on Chromium! Firefox has always been my primary browser (it still is, I'm typing this in Firefox), but say what you may, Chrome has taken the internet forward in many aspects. I work on an in-browser CAD tool, and I can see how vastly better Graphics performance is in Chrome when compared to Firefox for example (and it's just one example).


That’s not true. When IE6 launched it was definitely the fastest of its contemporary competitors. The problem with IE6 was not that it was bad at launch, but that it wasn’t touched for five years after launch, and didn’t properly disappear until 2016 or so.


Yes. And in that sense it's also similar to Chrome.

IE6 might have been the best competitor at first. But it certainly did not grow into the 9x% usage and staid there by being the best competitor. It only grew popular once MSFT started using its monopoly to push it.

It really sucked by then, compared to its competition.


Maybe they’ve achieved this position for Chrome leveraging Google’s strength, not because Chrome’s quality? I can name a few reasons, like an aggressive marketing campaign for Chrome circa 2012 (promotion on Google search, bundling Chrome with popular apps) and sabotaging Google web apps in rivals, specially Firefox, that makes Chrome look better for Google’s users (basically everyone online).


I'm not sure anyone is calling them evil simply for making a browser. Tactics like forcing it to be pre-installed and unable to be removed on Android are somewhat evil, especially if they're part of an anti-competitive strategy.


In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management's responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management completely fails at that.


Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg's admonition to Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]:

"[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools."

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...


The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.


Has it drifted?

I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too.

Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.


Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't.

The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their performance improvements or did hardware get better faster than they grew?)

Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together. Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources. That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.


As a web developer I also have to tell you that my industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources. Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel could be from development teams using shiny new frameworks.


Chrome isn't using all that RAM.

The web pages you visit are.


Did it really?

Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten.

Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It's still super light and zippy.


Yes, feature creep has happened in a really big way because there is an obvious profit incentive to Google if every last bit of computing happens in-browser. Glossing over the thorny topics like “my browser shouldn’t care what hardware I run it on”, the Web* set of standards hasn’t stopped ballooning since the release of chrome. WebRTC made sense. But WebUSB? WebGPU? WebAssembly? etc. etc. Each can have interesting use cases individually, but in aggregate they have become a whole second operating system filled with compromise and bloat.


It also looked much nicer. These thick curved tab decorations, unnecessary ovals everywhere, yuck.


When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on destruction, you'd probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent, maybe even offended. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you?

Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.


"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." - Stanisław J. Lec


That's the beauty of mega coporations. 99% of employees can be genuinely trying to improve the lives of others and it still does evil as a whole.


> No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products

Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to.

That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron.

I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead.

Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.


5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.


Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is that they are doing their best to stay in business and deliver and improve that tool. It's all they have. So your incentives are credibly aligned.

Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.


I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling.

But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme.

I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.


Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness/vision required to long term success like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.


The teams running products see it as an existential threat. Google shutting down the product is closer to an investor or board member forcing a startup to shut down because it's not long term sustainable. None of the things you mentioned could be run as independent businesses successfully, at least not at the levels of funding Google was giving them prior to them being shut down.


There's no clawback for sandbagging the future, no reward for present impact of past work. The people who flock to these projects are there to score a quick promo/raise and move on to the next new thing.


I'm friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at Google.

I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.


   you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.


There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar.

But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.


It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."


Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.


Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.


This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been.

For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere.

Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.


Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.

I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.

Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.

No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.


I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material/Hardware.[2]

Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.

Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.

As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.

[1] https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...

[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-material-you-interview-...


I had moved on from Android by 2013, so I definitely don't have much insight into what it's become over the past decade. In the earlier years it was very much about working hard to build the platform, products, and ecosystem. The team was pretty small and generally isolated from the rest of the company, which was both good (we got to focus on doing our thing and not get distracted) and bad (integrating with Google properties, services, etc was often rather painful).

Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited about and things getting more political and "too big to fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of scenery.


"Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it"

Sounds like every org I worked in at Google, though it got worse as time went on. I started there end of 2011, and left end of 2021. This kind of bullshit is endemic to the tech culture at Google, but was the worst inside smaller sites or in teams with "sexy" products.

And might have been arguably worse when they had explicit "up or out" policies around L4s.


> TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus."

This doesn't resonate. I've been a loyal Android user since Gingerbread (2010), and maybe for the first couple of years it was catching up to Apple, but i would say since pretty much KitKat, it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features. (And arguably putting them out with more stability and polish).

Throughout the main feature that Android was behind on and had to "copy" was performance. iPhones used to (and still) blow even top-tier Android phones away on basic things like scroll smoothness.


> it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features.

I think you might be in a bit of an Android bubble. Android is plenty "accused" of copying Apple features as well. Really, both copy plenty of ideas from each other.


I think he may be referring to Android Wear. While I agree with you, Android is rock solid and great to use on most phones in the last few years, Android Wear is anything but. It's buggy, unstable and a long long way behind the Apple platform.

I love my Android phone, but, having had way too many Android Wear devices, it's complete crap.

I really want it to be good.


I'd say y'all are thinking macroscopically of Android as a whole, whereas I'm thinking about my corner of 100-200 on launcher / system UI. There's very explicit examples I can think of, but now that I think of it...it might impossible to tell from the outside because you can't really tell what's The Cool Project from year to year


From the outside, my perspective has been that Android was a free for all in the beginning and had to tighten down permissions later for battery drain problems while iPhone was too locked down initially and had to figure out how to make their devices actually useful for third party apps.

It is just an impression I remember so may not be completely accurate but android made huge progress from a user's perspective in my opinion in terms of battery management (new phones having huge batteries I guess but 5Ah battery means nothing if Android kept wasting it unnecessarily.

I remember at some point there was a funny example something like if you forget your android tablet at home on wifi when you go on a three day trip, you should not come back to see a dead battery on your tablet. It was funny but also got the point across I think. I appreciate that.

For example, on this phone I am typing on, I have set it so by default battery saving kicks in as soon as I drop down to 75%. Then I turn it off manually if I need to do something important (rare).

One thing that bothered me about Android as a user was by default there was no feature for me to say don't allow this app to do anything on boot or in the background without my permission. Don't allow this app to connect to anything on the Internet or don't allow this app to connect to any network at all unless I say it is ok to do so. Any ideas why?


Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on it, then it's understandable why he'd stay at Google even if he didn't like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he's still working on Flutter now, so clearly it's a passion project for him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he could?


Seems like most of the people who want to join google these days, "why do you want to join google", "for the tc and prestige"


I just joined because I've always wanted to, and when I had the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the fealty of a public corporation lies.

Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.

The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.


Doesn't seem like the worst plan in the world.


Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid, generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out, walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools and learning new things while still generally having enough focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with enough compensation to treat them all to great food.


The build tools are not great. Well, maybe the tools are fine, but the build times are killing me. Going from 5ms builds at home to 5 minute builds at work is brutal. 98% of my day is just waiting for builds, tests, CL approvals, experiment results, launch approvals and lunch lines.


I meant more that when I started the job and only had to type one command to run a giant application locally, that tooling blew my mind. No config files, env vars, not even any apt-get or cloning 50 different repos. Just boq run

Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once. But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds natural breaks into the work.


Surely they could do something better for humanity, such as selling heroin to middle schoolers.


This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google:

https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/


Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team.

Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.

Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.

The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.


The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over" thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely changed.

Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.

Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.


Microsoft staying on top with Windows Mobile would have been a good thing for developers and consumers for one gigantic reason: Windows Mobile devices were open. No app stores, no Google or Apple bleeding away 30% of your revenue to line their own pockets, no byzantine approval process, just load your executable onto the device and go.


Windows mobile is not windows phone though and iirc from my brief time trying it out it was a mess even in 2008. My understanding was Android and open handset alliance came into being to tackle the fragmentation in the market. Clearly that's not true if the Android team saw Windows Mobile as it's biggest competitor...

I don't think Windows Phone would have ever happened if the iPhone never existed. Looks like Microsoft was just happy making money with Visual Studio licenses so I don't know if Visual Studio community edition would even have happened without outside pressure.

> Windows Mobile runs the .NET Compact Framework, which will support development in C# and VB.NET. You can also develop for Windows Mobile using MFC/Win32 APIs in C++ or Embedded Visual Basic. At the end of the day it's a stripped-down Win32-based OS, so there are other options, but these are probably the most popular.

> Depending on your experience, it will probably be easier to get Visual Studio 2008 and develop in a .NET language, the development experience is pretty nice and there is a built-in emulator in Visual Studio, so you don't need to have a device plugged in unless you are working with device-attached or embedded hardware.

> Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (the free versions) do not support Mobile development, you would need to run a trial version or purchase a license.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1702070


>Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience

That fear was kind of overblown. In those days of Steve Balmer, Microsoft was far less focused and organized, too high on its success with Windows and Office, for such a slow, large and bloated ship to react quickly and precisely enough on this.

Just look at what they did with Zune before that. It was not a bad product at all, but it was too little too late for consumers to give up on Apple and jump ship to Microsoft.

They did react here as well, but just like before, by the time they had a desirable and competitive mobile OS, Apple and Google had already reached critical mass adoption that no matter how good Microsoft's offering was, they wouldn't have been able to recoup the lead lost to Apple and Google both with consumer and developer adoption.


Your description of msft sounds like current google with generative AI.


There’s always room for a runner-up. What you really don’t want to be in is 3rd place.


Indeed, I also find the critique of the Android team amusing (except for the implied overtime).

It's still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely competent. And I still prefer iOS.


> to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered

Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top.

I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.


Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty well.


He spent the last 9 years in competition with Android so it's not surprising that he has some biases about it


Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots.

This example is the perfect microcosm of the economics of innovation at large companies. Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and the like have zero incentive to continue to be the companies they were 20 years ago. They don't need to take risks. They don't need to disrupt anything. They instead need leaders like Pichai who will keep the ship steady and keep the shareholders happy, and will keep investing in or purchasing smaller companies that are either a threat or an opportunity for growth, all while keeping their existing revenue streams flowing.

If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.


Not disagreeing with your larger point, but Google paid $40M+ for the 3 people from U Toronto responsible for AlexNet (according to Cade Metz's book).

Google might deserve more credit than any other company, but there were 20-30 years of innovation at universities beforehand.


more like 50


> When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead

Ironically every AI person I know works on some dumb project with the goal they'll eventually get to work in Google/Meta for the big bucks. Maybe that is just a stepping stone.


Google is getting beat badly on multiple fronts, even Search, and has pissed away a mountain of goodwill. It's living off of declining 15 year old achievements. I wouldn't call Sundar a steady hand, he has destroyed much more potential than he has created, even if the stock has continued to go up it won't for much longer. I sold a significant position in GOOG a few years ago and I'm certain it was the right call.


They are getting "beat badly" only if you read tech blogs and not their financial statements.


Like I said, I put my money where my mouth is. GOOG's monopoly-fueled glory days will soon be behind it. In tech, if you stand still for too long you will eventually be left behind.


Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in AI won’t retain any value in the transition to the space.

People forget. Who owns kaggle, who owns Google collab. Boggles my mind that people think a few AI upshot’s are going to reap all the value. Having a good AI companion that’s integrated into all your suite of tools. That’s the peak.


> Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in AI won’t retain any value in the transition to the space.

They’ll obviously retain some value. Google can integrate more easily and seamlessly with things people are using but that’s a competitive advantage not a moat.

Google’s trajectory has been from innovative market maker, to dominant market leader, to megacorp that has a strong established position that keeps them competitive and relevant, to legacy provider, to kind of irrelevant.

Google’s still strong and significant but every day they are less so.


Google colab is ludicrously underfunded, I’m shocked it’s stuck around for so long in the AI space. Tried Gradient recently and it’s like night and day. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to be on the colab team, knowing what features devs want/need and not being able to deliver because the org priorities are whack


Microsoft under Balmer did great financially IIR.


Their stock price was flat for a decade, so no. The company was a wreck financially under Ballmer.


Yeah, and they're still around, relevant and profitable. What's your point?


No thanks to Ballmer.


> Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots.

And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.

> If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.

Couldn't agree more. Our brand of capitalism isn't set up to allow for such corporate-culture time travel.


> And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.

For a while Microsoft was infamous for having talented engineers leave, found a startup, and then MS acquiring that startup for a lot of money.

It was, in hindsight, a really great system that worked out well for everyone involved.


And then commenters will complain that the company doesn't make anything, and just acquires good ideas...


Just the other week had a team meeting that was partly to discuss a possible round 21 of team charter/organization changes. Personally, I basically have bounced around multiple rounds of managers/teams/responsibilities in just the past few years. As the team lead philosophically said, many of you (senior) folks have seen maybe 10x employee growth since you joined and it's just a different company and the old one isn't coming back.


It's not an indictment of Google but every large company in existence. That's just how our current corporate structure works, and is the reason entrepreneurship is a thing.


Yeah, and the other side of the coin is that there are tons and tons of people who left Google to pursue their passions and failed. And the third side of the coin is that there are many people who invented things within Google, were successful in doing so, and have stayed (e.g. Google Meet)


> many people who invented things within Google, were successful in doing so, and have stayed

Yeah there are tons of people like this that are L7-L8 collecting around 1M TC. You'll always have a boss but you can carve out a little kingdom for yourself, which is much more appealing to more risk adverse people than starting or joining a startup


While it's easy to agree with you, I find that my opinion here has shifted after leaving a large tech company for a seed stage startup. Competing against these giant companies is really challenging, you have to me more than 2x better to get a customer to look at you a second time.


> Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google.

It all originated at universities.


12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done.

Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.

The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.


> Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful"

That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...

This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.


Googlers that were around when Vic Gundotra was a big player love trashing him. I was surprised when this blog described him in mixed and maybe even positive terms.


I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was.

I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.


GCP has also been bringing in Oracle execs to run things. The results are very much so affecting our relationship with Google to the negative.


> affecting our relationship with Google to the negative

If you're paying them more money now then your relationship is affected to the positive (from Google Cloud's perspective).


Its pretty heartening that among all this drama and activism I've never heard of a users data being maliciously leaked from Google.

To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).



And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and nobody was held accountable for that failure.


There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen, search for the phrase "vicg" among others.


(un?)fortunately I haven't had access to Memegen since 2020.


Why don't you have access? I'm curious


Actually I got the date wrong, but it's because I quit my job at Google in late 2020 and my last day was in early 2021 :). I wanted to work somewhere where I'd get to do something interesting and have a meaningful impact in a reasonable time frame. Based on my experience, I felt that would be hard to find at Google.


Non-FTEs lost access in 2020 or 2021 IIRC


That's super unfortunate; memegen is one of the best perks of working at Google


Possibly for the same reason they can't access MoMa.


I was surprised to see him savage Jeanine Banks by name like that, but if this bit is true I can at least understand the impulse: "She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set."

as another longish-term google employee, the one thing I absolutely depend on among all the org and culture changes is the ability to have a fair bit of choice and input when it comes to the specific projects I am working on, where the company can trust me to pick something that will work with my skills and interests and also align with the team and department objectives. losing that would likely impact me more than any of the other changes over the last 12 or so years I've been here.


I worked at Google for 15 years and I was lucky enough to work with Ian a few times. I might quibble about a few things, but I largely agree with his overall conclusions.

In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly.

To the extent that Google's culture is still "good", it's for the most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies have caught up to the best parts of Google's culture, and exceeded it in many ways.

I totally relate to his experience with middle management. Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little interest in the actual product they were managing. There will still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too much of their time just playing politics to do any good.

There's one way that Google is still leading, and that's in employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google still offers one of the most generous free food / meal benefits in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google's Vision plan that let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.


Dude, get your prescription then go to eyebuydirect.com


I think this guy has a Stockholm syndrom like I saw multiple times with Google employees:

  ; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
That is very fun because he thinks that they were trying to do good for the world but all was messed up because of cookie banners. Where, in fact, doing good for the world would have been to not abuse of cookies for tracking and evil use that would mean that they would not need bad cookies and would not have been needed to produce cookie banners...


Indeed. But Google is a company built on 3p cookies, perhaps more than any other. Innovating is very difficult at Google in general, but in the search/ads pipeline it must have been near-impossible. I’d imagine that any replacement that isn’t entirely feature complete (ie does the same thing 3p cookies do today) would have been politically impossible to push seriously. The higher leadership (VPs etc) act mostly like middle-management but with more kool-aid and corp speech. The few who were more bold usually came from acquisitions and left for more impactful work elsewhere, after their bonus payouts (me speculating, but lines up).


The internet would be better without mandated cookie banners. It's so damn frustrating using the internet in the EU. If you don't want to be tracked just browse in Incognito mode.


You don't need a cookie banner if you don't have 3rd party tracking cookies. It's really that simple.

The fact that all sites have them, shows us a terrifying truth: all websites are tracking us with 3rd party tools. "all" websites send our browsing habits off to (many) companies that will sell, mine or otherwise monetize our data.

Again: A cookie banner is not needed if you don't have 3rd party and/or tracking cookies. E.g. With matomo on your own domain, plausible analytics, or simply mining your servers logs with math, you won't need cookie banners.


Browsing in incognito mode does not prevent the sites you visit from tracking you.


GDPR doesn’t mandate cookies banner but requires informed consent. Browsing in incognito doesn’t prevent all kinds of tracking by the way.


Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply with EU regulations is not only a UX nightmare, but it doesn't even prevent tracking. Horrible pointless legislation.


> Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply with EU regulations

As it was pointed out, no, EU regulations don't mandate cookie banners. It seem you have an axe to grind with the EU.

> but it doesn't even prevent tracking

Incognito mode doesn't prevent all forms of tracking was what GP said...


> As it was pointed out, no, EU regulations don't mandate cookie banners. It seem you have an axe to grind with the EU.

EU regulations do require cookie banners.


No, they don't. Read the GDPR, it's not that long. The actual problem is that the current practice on which massive profits depend is contrary to any privacy desires. If they didn't track, they wouldn't need ask for consent for the tracking.

And I don't even like the EU, I want it ended.


People wanting to track their online visitors do require cookies banner.

Go the Apple website. No cookies banner.


> “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.”

Ouch.

I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.


Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the "Dream Team" of Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is.

Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company to one uninspired direction after another.

Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to go.


> Google hasn't created a new major product in years

Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway).

But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products. Maybe that's where their strength lies: in throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What they've been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a new project from zero.

And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it's unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more than once, or a handful of times if they're really lucky.

The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they've got one flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads, and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has Facebook really innovated since their original product?


Not to be an egghead/navel gazer about it, but I’ve grown skeptical of “innovation” as an end in itself: was Facebook innovative, or was it just another small iterative improvement on an existing form? Same with Google and search. My gut tells me companies should focus on more concrete measures of success rather than the abstract “innovation”.

It’s probably not semantically wrong to say that these two cases really were/are innovative, but even so, was that really the cause of their success? And is it replicable as a methodology? My gut tells me that a lot of what gets labeled as a massive innovation is really just a market inevitability, and someone got to the right idea first, either by luck or having a single clever differentiating idea.


Yeah, "innovation" has always been a rather nebulous term for iterative improvement, and more particularly, the iterative improvement that people remember in retrospect. Often the same "innovation" appears almost simultaneously from multiple companies (or inventors, or mathematicians... this phenomenon has existed for a long time). But usually only one of them can win, and it seems relatively arbitrary who it is. Certainly once they're perceived as winning, they benefit from a compounding effect.

Really, "innovation" is a matter of hard work, timing, and luck. You need to work hard to ship a product or publish a theory. You need to recognize the opportunity and execute on it at the right time. And you probably need some luck to get your initial boosts. But even after all that, you still need to be mature and capable enough to turn your small golden egg into a golden goose. It's still a long slog from initial hit to resting on your laurels.


~Chrome was an acquisition.~ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome (Edit: I misremembered / misstated, this is incorrect.)

Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Spanner were not.


> throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way.

Street View is the perfect example of this. It still seems like an insane-in-a-good-way product to me after all these years.


> Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them.

OpenStreetMap Foundation, 1.5 FTE.


Eh, YouTube was going to crash and burn hard without an acquisition. It was acquired in 2006, and was built into something sustainable by integrating with Google infrastructure.


I would rather the people go, and use their considerable intellect on things that have interests more aligned with societal benefit. Do we really want a re-ignited Google?


If creates new things with the impact of Chrome, Maps and Gmail, but with less spyware? Hell, yeah!


If it means it fuels more competition than the late stagnation in tech that was pre-LLM stuff? (and arguably in a wide variety of fields than just ML)

Absolutely.


Given Google's current reputation killing of products left and right, lately I don't bother even trying new things they roll out, and building anything dependent on it is completely out of the question. No.


Having spent two decades at a far, far less known company, I think it’s common for long-timers to look back with fondness and a feeling that their early days were Camelot, that the current days are worse, and that the fault lies with a specific leadership change.

It’s way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it’s growing 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.

I don’t have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I’m not at all surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and engaging place to be than 2023 Google.


I sorta agree with you, but sorta don't. While I don't think you can squarely lay the blame on any one person, culture comes from the top. The board/CEO (but mostly the CEO) sets the culture, and hires (or molds) other executives and leadership positions into their vision of that culture.

Page and Brin chose Pichai to succeed them. They, and the rest of their board, share blame as well.


I've had that experience at a different company. Was really exciting when I joined and I had a very long leash to do pretty much whatever I thought was the right thing. Long-time manager left and did some new interesting stuff for a while. But then I bumped around a bit and I really just counted a couple years until my last major vests and retired.


I personally felt the best icon of original Google culture was Craig Silverstein, whose departure greatly affected the various intergrouplets that were holding the company culture together. In that sense, I wouldn't place all the blame on Sundar, although he didn't necessarily help.

But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what carries the culture forward.


I'm the "12 years at Google" commenter from below.

Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after that. Good guy.


Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".

They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.

(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )


The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader. That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google's share price.


Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don't even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom, OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder. Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves faster than we do!

I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.


Yes, Microsoft really re-invented itself. Maybe Google can turn itself around too after a decade or two of malaise.


But Microsoft reinvented itself with precisely leadership change in Satya, right?


Sure, but consider that MS came from Ballmer, whom many of us blame for Microsoft's badness of the 00s (granted, Ballmer of course came from Gates, who probably set back general-purpose computing by decades due to his greed). I do believe Nadella has made MS a much better, likeable company, but I don't think I'll ever trust them to do right by humanity.

Google has gone the other way: Page and Brin seemed to be well-liked outside of Google, as they were the visionaries who started it all. They made the choice to go with Pichai, who cares more about ad revenue than doing anything great. And Page and Brin, sadly, seem to be happy with their choice so far.


I don't see how Microsoft reinvented themselves. For better and worse, they behave the same way I grew to expect in the 00s with Ballmer. New CEO knocked off the Google founders' "nice guy" look, that's about it.

Meanwhile, Google is reinventing themselves... to be more like Microsoft.


Bard is trash. In my experience it's ChatGPT > Bing Chat > Bard.

Shame because Google invented the transformer architecture that enabled the technology.


ime Googlers/Xooglers have this egotism that needs a sharp kick in the butt to remedy.


Well they're getting that kick now.


Could add AWS and Azure to that list


I thought about that, but my list was focused on things that Google was leading in but let the market get away. Amazon got into cloud before Google did.


IDK, if you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under the leadership of Satya over the last 9 years it's obviously possible to innovate and bean count at the same time


Yes, but that happened after they had Ballmer which was their own bean counting CEO.

And they noticed that that's a problem - something VERY FEW corporations figure out.


And, as the article postulates, that sort of bean counting goes directly against what used to excite Google's employees, and is leading to their continued disillusionment.


Yeah that’s what I don’t understand, what is the incentive to preserve the culture?

Outcomes follow incentives


‘Shareholders’ can’t do anything. Different classes of shares confer different voting rights, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin still own shares controlling over 50% of shareholder votes.


> I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.

Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.

And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.


It feels like tech generally has a CEO vision problem.

Andy Jassy + Sudar for example.

off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)


Tech started to have a vision problem the moment big money (and people with big money) entered the picture and started calling the shots. Sundar, Jassy, Satya, Tim Cook are all cut from the same cloth. Their job is to appease the shareholders and not much else.

Zuckerberg is probably the only founder/majority shareholder still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar company day to day and executing his vision, and you have to give him kudos for that. He could easily go buy multiple countries instead and live out his life with a lot less stress.


It’s a tale as old as time

The kid inherits the company built by the parent


Jassy was at AWS and in a senior role essentially since its inception. Retail predates Jassy, but I give Jassy a lot more credit than presiding over a company that someone else built.


I think Pichai tries his best within his abilities, maybe it's time to pay attention to the ones who had chosen him?


It may be more helpful to pay attention to the ones leaving him in charge if its clear his abilities may not be the right fit.


I would bet that the average tech-savvy outsider has a higher opinion of Sundar than the average Googler does.


Sundar became CEO in 2015. The author quit this year. Was his "lack of visionary leadership" not that obvious for 8+ years? Or did the author stay because the stock price and his TC kept going up?


Just because you stay in a job doesn't mean you can't criticize the company and its leadership.


> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.

> For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards (https://whatwg.org/). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google's interests).

I feel as though Hixie is lacking in self-awareness here. Googlers tend to be biased toward themselves and their own power. Have Googlers considered the possibility that the best thing for the web, and the world, is for Google to keep its grubby hands off the web? Is Google Search's dominant market share good for the web? And the market shares of Android, Chrome, and Gmail? I would answer no, no, no, no.

It's funny that Hixie mentions WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) as a "good" example. What actually happened is that Hixie was a ringleader in a coup d'état by the browser vendors to overthrow the W3C and take over the HTML standards. Is that good for the web, and the world? Here I would also say no.


I think this criticism of WHATWG forgets how moribund and ossified W3C was at the time, up its own ass with semantic web nonsense and an imaginary suite of XHTML 2.0 technologies that had no path to reality.

Hixie's criticisms of it were correct, and WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.


I think the fact that I'm bringing up the history shows that I haven't forgotten.

There are legimate disagreements over whether switching to XML was a good idea. Nonetheless, these disagreements were not a good excuse to overthrow W3C entirely, merely a convenient excuse for the browser vendors. Moreover, I don't think the HTML standards need to move as fast as Google wants them to move. HTML is now a "living standard", in other words, constantly changing, and I don't think that's good for the web. These things should move slowly. The giant browser vendors themselves are selfishly the main beneficiaries of forcing everyone else on the web to move at their pace. It consolidates their monopolization of the web.

> WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.

Relevant things like... not controlling the HTML standard anymore? WHATWG has stolen a lot of the relevance of W3C.


The WHATWG W3C kerfuffle perfectly illustrates that when an unaccountable body's decisions become unpopular, another body can meet popular demands and sidestep the body's work. W3C was not taking HTML, XML, and XHTML in the directions that most users of the Web wanted. The fact that semantic web fans and the web-should-be-for-documents crowd agreed with the W3C doesn't matter, they were outnumbered by the rest. WHATWG met the demands of other devs and pushed the W3C into irrelevance. Sometimes it takes more than feeling right to be right, you need to convince others also.


... another _unaccountable_ body

And of course WHATWG didn't out-convince devs on a marketplace of ideas; as an oligopoly of browser developers they just did.


There's definitely a period of history where noticing WHATWG on a URL made me breathe a sigh of relief that the content might actually be useful and understandable.

These days, W3C stuff seems perfectly fine (except for their standard document template making it almost impossible to tell “what is this thing actually about?” at a glance! )


W3C got what it deserved.

> The WHATWG began because the W3C told you, “HTML was dead. If you want to do something like HTML5, you should go elsewhere.” Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform?

We tried (2007–2012). It didn’t work out. In fact, we ended up spinning more specs out of the W3C! The WHATWG has about 12 specs spread amongst eight or so editors now.

> Bruce The spec now known as HTML 5 began with a "guerilla" group called WHATWG. How and why did the WHATWG begin?

> Hixie The short answer is the W3C told us to. The long answer: Back in 2003, when XForms was going through its final stages (the "Proposed Recommendation" vote stage), the browser vendors were concerned that it wouldn’t take off on the Web without being made a part of HTML, and out of that big discussion (which unfortunately is mostly hidden behind the W3C‘s confidentiality walls) came a proof of concept showing that it was possible to take some of XForms’ ideas and put then into HTML 4. We originally called it "XForms Basic", and later renamed it "WebForms 2.0". This formed the basis of what is now HTML 5. In 2004, the W3C had a workshop, the "The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents", where we (the browser vendors) argued that it was imperative that HTML be extended in a backwards-compatible way. It was a turning point in the W3C‘s history—you could tell because at one point RedHat, Sun, and Microsoft, arch-rivals all, actually agreed on something, and that never happens. The outcome of that workshop was that the W3C concluded that HTML was still dead, as had been decided in a workshop in 1998, and that if we wanted to do something like HTML 5, we should go elsewhere. So we announced a mailing list, and did it there. At the time I was working for Opera Software, but "we" in this case was Opera and Mozilla acting together (with Apple cheering us from the sidelines).

W3C declared html dead and now you are mad on whatwg for html5?


> W3C got what it deserved.

This is an unnecessarily "team"-oriented spin. The question is what the web and the users of the web deserve, and I don't believe they deserve to be dominated by a few giant tech corporations who have a monopoly not only on web browsers but also on operating systems.

> Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform?

Yes.

Here's the major problem: the tech world of 2003 was a lot different than the tech world of 2023. Back then, iOS didn't exist, Android didn't exist, Google Chrome didn't exist, Safari barely existed. The WHATWG members are infinitely more dangerous and monopolistic now than they were back then. Maybe, arguably, HTML5 was the better outcome at the time of the dispute at that time, but the dominance of the major browser vendors now is not the better outcome.

The irony is that Mozilla and Opera inadvertently handed over great power to the BigCos who would come to overshadow and virtually annihilate them. You won the battle but lost the war. Opera even had to switch to Chromium.

> So we announced a mailing list, and did it there.

It seems to me that more time could have been taken and more lobbying done.

> W3C declared html dead and now you are mad on whatwg for html5?

Well, I personally think HTML5 <video> was completely botched and became a nightmare, but that's a bit of a digression.


I dont disagree with WHATWG is more dangerous but it is the result of W3C's (lack of) actions.


I disagree. If Google were to keep its grubby hands off the web, another corporation would step in and lead that effort and maybe even sabotage it. At least at that time Google's "don't be evil" motto was still alive enough that it was genuinely a good outcome. Can you imagine if Google didn't and Apple did? Clearly the outcome would be that Apple would complicate everything and make the web die a death by a thousand cuts and everyone would have had to switch to apps that only Apple can approve.


Slightly tangential, but I'd like to post a hyperbolic example against the "someone else would have done it anyway":

Yes, a Googler could drown a box full of kittens; but if we stop him, then someone else will just drown the kittens in his place.

I think you have to weigh the probability of it happening. It's unlikely someone else is going drown those kittens, as unlikely as it is someone else is going to stick their fingers into the web pot (considering, I can't think of any "FAAAAANGAMA" that has the same incentives).


> The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.

Well said. Just watched exactly this happen after some surprise layoffs in an entirely different industry.


> Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious).

The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic.

Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the first search intelligence business in 2005 as a side business. Again, Google engineers were awesome to work with.

Then in 2009 or so, they began to get territorial. Some outsider sales person was brought in and IIRC, he bought a boat and named it, "AdSense". The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded. We had extensive crawling capabilities but needed to correlate it to API data to give a holistic picture of the competitive AdWords landscape.

We spent the next two years gaming the system. We had 100 API accounts. We launched our own bare metal "cloud" with 1300 distinct IP addresses which we throttled to hit Google no more than once per minute.

This worked. We monitored Google in over 50 countries. Clients loved us because we could tell them exactly how they were doing on AdWords, both good and bad. Any intelligent person could use our data to improve their ads and excel. Our IPs would occasionally get banned but we would just temporarily shut them off and use one of our reserves. And even then, we eventually developed a crowd sourced solution to solve captchas which got them reinstated.

Another three years of the cat and mouse game passed. We were acquired by the world's largest advertising company.

Guess what? A call from the CEO to Matt Cutts ended the war. No promises were made but our access was simply restored. Everything worked again.

So yeah, Google is just like every other company in the world. The corruption has been there for at least 15 years. Please stop worshipping it.


Did you really have to say "some engineer in India"? What exactly are you trying to imply there?


I don't see anything wrong with their phrasing.

The full context of the quote: "The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded." seems to imply that Google had outsourced engineering help to India to save on operating costs. This type of outsourcing [1] was pretty common back in those days.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat


I implied nothing. This is literally what happened. A woman who knew next to nothing about search strung us along for weeks. She couldn't answer even the simplest questions or provide any insight whatsoever. She made it clear she had no authority. Yet after making request after request to us for sensitive data, she simply shut off our access.


Outsourced engineers in India are bad.


It used to be early on you could specify not to show your ad below a certain position.


That post is a very good description of Google and matches my experience at Google (2004-2016), both the good and bad. There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN, so hopefully this post will help. (Note: you need to scroll down a bit on the page to get the post.)


> There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN

Is there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the company and what happened there over time.

(Of course I can't speak for all HNers...)


Having spent a vast amount of time reading comments, there certainly is. HN can frequently become an echo chamber, though pretends not to be; and has very clear favorite tech darlings and near-immovable, predefined villains (Google being one of them).


It's not surprising given how most of HN seems to only see a glimpse of things work internally based on blog posts unhappy xooglers write. It's very biased and folks extrapolate too far. The real picture is far more complex. Unfortunately no one seems to want to read a balanced perspective these days.


hi Ken. I don't think I mentioned you in the Enterprise article!


There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor leadership and become utterly banal.

It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and making and stuff (like Hixie, all thanks to Chris Dibona) as well as a number of state of the art machine learning systems. There really was an amazing feeling being surrounded by so many highly competent people (many of whom I see in this post's comments) who had similar vision to mine. But ultimately, so many things started to chip away at my enjoyment that I had to leave. Middle management was a big part of that.

Once you're on the outside, so many things that seem obvious (borg, beyondcorp, flume, google3, etc) aren't. It's almost like the future is here, it's not evenly distributed.


The word would be "Kwisatz Haderach" ;)


Ex-googler here as well. What are you guys using instead of flume for data pipelines? Beam on Spark?


I am also a bit confused by that comment. Flink, Spark, Beam, Flume are all pretty similar...


That experience sounds so great. How did you get hired?


None of this surprises me as an outsider. Google has been in obvious, uncontrolled freefall for several years now. Search barely works anymore, they squandered a massive lead in AI, they are losing in cloud services, Android is so awful it kills me when I have to use it for more than a few minutes. I can't think of any good new projects or services that were created under Sundar's tenure (maybe Colab was cool when it came out, but it hasn't improved at all in years and is now badly lagging). And their propensity to kill services without a thought has made it so that any new service they introduce is met with eye rolls from people who have been burned way too many times.

The solution seems clear to me: they should acquire a really well run, innovative smaller company and then replace all the top executives with the new team. Sundar should be removed immediately before he destroys even more value. And then they need to do relentless cleaning up, quickly getting rid of unproductive middle managers like the person described in this post. That should give a burst of energy to demoralized devs.

Then they need to desperately work to fix search so that it doesn't suck so much that you need to add "reddit" to every query to not get 100% blog spam. And they need to get their act together and start very rapidly releasing impressive AI tools that aren't worse than stuff from companies that are 1/100th of the size. No matter what they do, I can't help but think their sustainable earnings trajectory is headed downwards for the next few years (they can continue to push short term earnings in various ways but that will run out of steam soon enough); the question is whether they can stop the decline.


I give Hixie exactly this: he is not brownnosing and he openly speaks up. There is nothing insulting from his side, and I personally like people with the standards Hixie has. It sounds like he acted internally in the same way which is fine.

Hixie has seen some things at Google.

I will be forever thankful to him for realizing HTML5. I read many document changes back then and when people left out of protest or whatever reason, Hixie kept things going in the right direction.

The web would not be what it is like without him.


> The web would not be what it is like without him.

As somebody that really dislikes the way the web generally is nowadays I got a chuckle out of this :)

This is a mostly tongue-in-cheek comment.


I totally side with you, I had exactly this in mind, too. :)


Around 2016 at Google, my entire reporting chain, from manager to CEO, changed. Literally not a single person was left. Laszlo, both Erics, Patrick and the rest of the L team all left in quick succession. I think the old Google of < 2015 and the current Google are two companies that have almost nothing in common.


I guess it was the Alphabet saga? It's all like this. I have decided that if given the chance, I'd never work in companies with more than 1,000 persons.


Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it.

One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of culture going for much longer than people think.

Conversely, I've worked at companies with 500 employees that were the blandest kind of "enterprise business company firm" you can imagine. :)


I like the old times when you could assume everyone around you is smarter than you, so collaboration and communication were never an issue. They never rely on "experts" in other teams to collaborate, they quickly and easily pick up how other systems work in depth themselves. Smart people just shine and work together to create amazing stuff.

Nowadays, you need to explain to people why unit test is needed, why you can't use production as the first place to try a risky experiment, and rely on 20 experts, one in each tiny service, to figure out and to deliver a tiny feature with bloated timeline and messy quality.


Ok, but you also just non ironically said "collaborating on an OKR".


It’s funny now, but OKRs as originally conceived were the simple, “just set a simple goal and work on it” lightweight thing, standing in opposition to the old way of corporate planning. I used to have goals like “try X and write a paper about it”.

Of course every process becomes perverted into waterfall eventually.


This sounds interesting. Maybe it's just me, but all 5000+ people companies (I actually only worked with 200+ or 5000+, never the middle so could be BS) I worked for are a lot of BS and politics. Again this is probably because me not good enough so that I don't get to do deep technical things that I want to do.


> I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later.

This is the coolest shit I have ever read.

Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.


I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT department and we have this culture. The IT department alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past weekend I found myself in a different region needing a desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and ideas of them for process improvements. This communal culture is hard to find and I have no intention of leaving until the culture dies.


Is there currently companies where you can do this?


The industry has changed in a few important ways that I think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain.

First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.

Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting.

Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job.

I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation.

This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.


> First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.

Do you mean that new areas appeared that require specialization that didn't exist previously, or that areas that require some sort of specialization have comparatively grown? (Or something completely different?)


Well, it’s more that the problems in an area like ML or security were solvable if you generally knew how computers work and were smart and good at learning new things. Switching to a new domain took a few months, but ultimately there wasn’t /so much/ you had to learn.

Nowadays, those easy problems are solved. If you want to contribute to an area, you have to learn all the context, read a bunch of papers, it basically takes at least a year. So you can’t quite be a generalist SWE, drop into a random team for three weeks and meaningfully contribute.

Put another way, the relative value of spunk and generalist ability has decreased and the relative value of domain knowledge has increased.


I think this depends on setting ci/cd and good data pipelines are like game changers in research ML projects and generalists definitely can do those it is not that flashy stuff.


conversely, I'm a boomerang Googler who worked there in 2015 and again now. In 2015, I felt like no one cared, that Googler engineering skills were overrated, and 17/23 people on my team quit in a year. In this stint, however, I'm amazed by how smart and passionate people are about a variety of different technologies, and enjoy collaborating across many teams on different things.

I think the takeaway for me is that, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, these experiences are more situational/random/based on what energy you bring to a space/team-based/seniority-based than they are a symptom of universal company culture.


It was a whole bundle of things all at the same time but probably started with G+ and "The Social Wars". That was all happening when I first got there, but it set internal crap on a bad path, plenty of bad feelings as the whole organization was pivoted onto that, but it all basically fizzled out and failed.

And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth & Alphabet. And that's when it got progressively stupider and stupider.

When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going on there. And I'm a pretty cynical person.


Not even if they pay well enough that you can quit and still afford having a family in only 5 years, instead of 20?


Can't speak for OP, of course, but for me -- no, not even then. There really are things money can't buy.


I find it refreshing that this post actually calls out specific problems and people. IMO, too many of these company culture posts keep the complaints somewhat vague which makes them harder to evaluate.


I think the post is spot on, but I don't agree with naming names especially when the other person doesn't get an opportunity to tell their side of the story. What if Ian's manager posted her own nasty missive criticizing him as an employee? Such things can damage someone's future career without any fair process to sort out the facts. I wouldn't at all be surprised that such manager exists and is not being held accountable internally, but it would be unfair to make conclusions based on unsubstantiated accusations,


In the past, such criticism of a leader would show up internally via Googlegeist and the leader and their reports would all know and possibly adjust.

Cutting Googlegeist has knock on effects that create problems like this. The rank and file no longer have a way to communicate back up the chain honestly and things like this come out.


The vast majority of professionals resist the urge to call out their manager on a blog after they quit a job. Even without Googlegeist.


imo, they should not resist it. It is shameful to let bad things bad stay in the world unless you really need the self-preservation, and somebody with 18 years of google money does not.


> It is shameful to let bad things bad stay in the world

It's incredibly goofy to characterize trashing someone in a blog post as a battle to destroy evil.


Not really? It's a microcosm of the battle, sure, but it's still the same battle. People vs entrenched unaccountable power. Same story everywhere.


so things like glassdoor shouldn't exist? or people shouldn't warn of bad managers/jobs?


I've derived some entertainment from the crappy Glassdoor reviews one of the shitty companies I worked at gets. There's a world of difference between those anonymous reviews on Glassdoor, which are sometimes useful and almost never call out by name anyone below the executive level, and what we're talking about here today.


It doesn't even matter whether the critique is true and fair. Naming names like this in public is potentially very damaging and should not be done.


Not naming names is also potentially very damaging, so should not be done?


The article mentions a very keen observation. There are lasting consequences to over-hiring and then subsequently laying people off; it doesn't bring the company back to the starting point:

> The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.


I used to "share" an office with Hixie at Google. Hixie used to store his board game collection in the office we nominally "shared", but he himself very rarely visited. I liked that just fine (let's just say I'm not a fan of "open" shared office spaces). My fondest Google office memories were sharing an office with Hixie, and "Mr Big Printer" which the Google Open Source Team used to print posters. We made an office CD label for "Mr Big Printer".


It was a very big printer, Jeremy.


Would be very interested to hear your take on Hixie’s essay and the many reactions from other Xooglers from different eras.


I too believe the company has entered a phase of stagnancy or even decline. In fact, so much that two weeks ago I put my money where my mouth is by selling $1M worth of GOOG I was given as part of a stock grant when I was hired by Google in 2014. (I promptly reinvested this capital in a generic S&P 500 index fund.)

From 2014 to mid 2015, when I quit, I found Google had a great engineering culture and I loved my time at the company, but I was having gut feelings of the start of a decline. I saw engineering hires who weren't so skilled. I saw Larry and Sergei seemingly lack the spark in their eyes when giving candid answers at our TGIF meetings. I saw a buildup of red tape and overhead. Then, long after quitting Google, more problems crop up. In the last year or so I saw a noticeable decline in the quality of Google search engine results. In the last 2 months I saw an even more noticeable decrease of the quality of Gmail's spam filters (today I get ~10 spams daily out of ~50 legitimate emails.) I keep stumbling on more and more annoying bugs in Google's Android apps that remain unfixed for years.

No one knows how long this stagnancy or decline is going to last. In the case of Microsoft they have stagnated (IMHO because of Ballmer) roughly between 2005 and 2017 (6% annual revenue growth on average). Since 2017, thanks to Satya Nadella's turnaround, their annual revenue growth was 13% on average. I think Google needs to see leadership change to whip the company back into shape. But this probably won't happen for another few years. There is so much inertia in market forces of a huge mastodon like Google that it will take another couple years for such sub-par products and services quality to start noticeably affecting revenue growth. That inertia is the same reason it took 3 years of Nadella as CEO before Microsoft saw revenue growth starting to bounce back up.


Disclaimer that I also sold my GOOG recently, also largely in compliance with my biases as an engineer.

As an investor, though, calling the “top” for a company like Google (or Microsoft) is so challenging — not “top” in terms of all time high valuation, but “top” in terms of differential forward-looking, annualized, and adjusted-for-tax returns vs VGT or VOO (i.e. a more challenging target).

These are some of the most entrenched and profitable companies in modern history. Even as they mediocratize, they remain value-accretive for years. It’s difficult to imagine them losing to inflation.

Buffet choosing Apple over any of the other FAANG/M may be looked upon even more favorably, 10-20 years from now, than it is today. Google and Microsoft are tight together in second, but I think you’re right that we’ll look back on 2018-??? as Google’s equivalent to the Ballmer years.


I commend you for going against the grain and holding onto the stock for so long. Most people sell as soon as the options vest.

Anyway, I don't see much worrisome news about GOOG. It's true that they are not innovating and surprising us anymore, but neither is AAPL or AMZN. Good execution seems to be rewarded better nowadays than innovation. (Yes, some products are stagnating or getting worse, but some are getting better. I'm not sure there's really a trend. Also, to me, all this culture decline talk is mostly noise.)


"...She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set..."

You know, I remember a time I said, management just think of engineers as a resource and refer to us as such. But when the word "dehumanising" is used it strikes me a lot clearer. When this disconnected occurs between different layers of the same corporation people just become a resource, they are no longer humans , they are a means to an end, and that end doesn't even serve the purpose of the company but the merits of that individual. I really wish developers had a way to empower themselves out of this hellscape.


It's called a union. This is what will always happen as long as the employees do not collectively bargain. Their strength in numbers is completely neutered by a lack of organization.


Engineers at Google are referred to as “headcount”. Managers fight each other for headcount. When someone leaves they are lamented for their net loss of .67 headcount (right now you only get one hire for 3 attritions).


Does that mean managers are incentivised not to let go of underperformers?


YES! One of the reasons I much prefer the netflix model of firing quickly and being able to get a headcount. You do have some slackers at google who are able to hang on for long periods of time because their manager knows the project they're in charge of isn't a priority anymore, so the backfill will go to more exciting/new projects. So these managers will let people slack.

Most of the people I work with at Google work fairly hard in cloud (nothing crazy like I've heard about AWS) but you run into slackers on occasion.


Yes absolutely. I was explicitly told I could get away with doing nothing for 12 months before I’d get fired. I decided to quit instead.


Either I've read a blog post you've written before or this is a common occurrence.


Yeah my blog post hit the front page.


That's "durable savings" for ya.


Not true, my team gets 1 for 1.


I still feel it's not professional to name the manager. Hixie could very well have just said "my manager", and many people would have understood.


Xoogler here - Totally agree that the bulging middle management layers and lack of crisp CEO vision have dismantled the company's ability to weather the changes of "growing up". Had a few managers and multiple reorgs in my < two years there, during a time of record profits. Peers said that wasn't an uncommon thing. Who cares about vision or management so long as the ads money printer goes brrr?

Still, there are definitely people trying to do the right thing for users despite frequent bu$iness side overrides, and IMO still some best-of-breed products amongst the sprawling graveyard/zombies. I could even get through to a real person at Nest customer support a few weeks ago!


"Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter"

Seems like they fired the Google Adsense support team. I have been using Google Adsense for many years, and since last year there is no way of contacting any support, there IS NO WAY, I have lost over 10k in revenue because of it, and was only able to get my problem fixed after 2 months by joining a third party publisher network.

Keep in mind that Adsense is one of Google's main sources income, and that they take a 32% cut as an intermediary (So they have ample money to pay for a 5 star support)!


I doubt that retail adsense is very large - it’s probably mostly large enterprise deals where you do get your personal poc for support and whatnot


You are probably right, because once I got accepted in the network, they were able to get to talk to the Google MCM/Adsense support and within one week I got MCM approved and my Adsense account was reinstated. Hadn't they be there I would still be stuck.


You see a lot of people here in the comments, as well as the author in the article, talking about how "there are good and well-meaning people working at Google" and "it sucks that people unfortunately hate us =(". A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money. People think of a dystopia as if it would come from an evil dictator, or a greedy corporate man, but the reality is that the dystopia will come with a charismatic smile and a promise of something better. You'd perhaps be right to criticize my calling of it a "dystopia" (for now), but my point stands.


> A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money.

The challenge is that we are all simultaneously part of many groups whose behavior we don't always agree with.

Should you be piled up with all the others because you're a member of a species that is destroying the planet's natural resources? Should you be piled up with all the others because you pay taxes to a country that used that money to build weapons that killed innocents? Should you be piled up because you live in a city whose cops commit police brutality? Should you be piled up because you bought a product and gave money to a corporation that uses child labor?

Life is not so black and white. We have some responsibility for the behavior of the groups we are part of, but only fractional. We should exert our agency towards good when we can, but believing that we have all of the stains on our hands of every community or group we've ever touched or participated in is not a path to a better world, it's just a path to individual shame and misery.


You're right, and it makes sense. Let me propose another perspective then: would a well-meaning, good person not be liable to culpability if he or she worked on a feature that actively monitored its users for data to sell to advertisors, much more than if such a person was working with something like Flutter or Go, since the latter workers are doing net positive things?

I suppose I got a bit carried away originally, but the point is just that - can one truly be well-meaning if he works in such a feature as that of the first example?

Moreover, when it comes to the examples you cited, I agree that we all share fractional culpability, some more than others. But we do not have a choice in being humans, or in paying taxes to our governments. We do, however, have a choice when it comes to working for Google.