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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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+.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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].
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.
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)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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 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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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! )
> 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
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)!
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.
> 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?
One way of reading the original statements is that there are many people who are not doing that and would not do that.
> But we do not have a choice (...) or in paying taxes to our governments
This obviously reminds me of Thoreau, but more practically many people can move. Unless you are from the US (or a handful of other weird countries) that stops you from paying taxes to your origin's government.
E: Upheaval caused by moving is often actually not higher than one caused by quitting: consider (a) people on employer-tied visas and/or who don't speak the local language well enough to use it professionally (b) people who don't have families of their own yet.
Yes, but we must inevitably pay taxes to some government. If you can find one with zero blood on its hands, let me know and I'll be the first to emigrate.
> We do, however, have a choice when it comes to working for Google.
True, but we must work somewhere, and few corporations are purely good. And some large corporations that have done many regrettable things have also done many valuable things. Do the good things a group does enter into its calculation?
> actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society,
This premise seems a stretch when applying it to Google. Most of us "sell our souls" to more-or-less terrible corporations for money. The point with Google is that it set much higher standards for corporate behavior, and those standards are now reverting to mean.
Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision
The effects of layoffs are insidious… 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 see all of this at Google now
I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine a situation where someone's actions caused a change in a society, which is no longer attributed to him according to popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?
As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this.
It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured, reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the importing of "business focus" and the "bottom line" (read: short term share price) to Google's management structure wholesale.
> the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of
Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives.
This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.
Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And regardless of the intentions of the engineers, Google is run by its executives, not by its engineers. We don't have the luxury to extend the benefit of the doubt to ultramegacorporations.
Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms.
Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be.
If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice.
Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
"I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!"
or
"I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!"
or
"Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?"
Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
I don't know what you're referring to with the first two. On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay discussions and there's never been any discussion of preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a lot of discussion of unintended consequences and workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held. Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it was because we loved ads.
My memory or the auto-play thing is that some withgoogle.com functionality broke, it was quickly put on the blessed list, and then it was working again. Sadly the rest of the web that was broken by that change didn't get such treatment.
> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious.
How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't anymore.
Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.
I think what's been said, and the description of the general ineptness of that particular manager, has been 100% spot on. Middle management as a whole has basically gotten worse, meaner and generally less technically capable since 2018.
> ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term...
If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"?
Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?
What projects you would you say the public has been unfairly/viciously critical of the motives of?
I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion.
For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.
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I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for.
The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.
Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database.
A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising.
Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted?
I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now.
There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct.
If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly.
That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair.
(There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.)
Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything.
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When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 )
But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall.
Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products.
You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a mandate from the top.
Products that were poorly executed, violated the law, dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early promises, etc.
There's a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The company simply isn't user-centric, full stop. I can't see anyone argue otherwise.
What's the most user-centric improvement from Google in the last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago. My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated rapidly.
In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.
> "It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of..."
It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.
That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.
> genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't make it any less of a duck.
Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1].
Sometimes it feels like Google could cure cancer and HN would still react negatively. Companies are not monolithic and it's silly to paint it that way. It's not simple about intent, but premature judgment.
Conversely it feels like Google could say "hey we've found a cure for cancer, we just transplant the brain into a healthy 'donor' body" and Google apologists would insist that there's no possible way that could ever be misused.
I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling frustrated that public perception isn't able to match your privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I feel my eyes roll involuntarily here.
From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.
The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.
Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism
Well, given that you aren't who I thought I was talking with at least one of us is confused, but I suspect both of us are now.
The post I replied to was stating, essentially, that in their opinion Google had always been evil and only the timescales had changed.
My point is that multiple insiders (including myself) can confirm that Google took "Don't Be Evil" really seriously for a long time and that the cynics were wrong then to believe otherwise.
I'm the one you originally replied to, and yes that's roughly what I'm saying - maybe the individual engineers and designers that built features were trying their best not to be evil, but the company as a whole always had dark motives.
They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.
They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.
Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.
Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.
Being frank, I think you have an ideological position which is both satisfyingly consistent ('google is evil and always has been') and which provides a mechanism to discount any contrary facts ('you were just boots on the ground and didn't understand the corporation as well as I, being an enlightened person, did'). But I was actually there, and while I can't tell you any of the many times I saw Google do the right thing when it hurt its bottom line I can tell you that I saw it happen a lot and in big ways. You don't have to believe me, poor little deluded cog that I am, but I think I will take my messy, complicated, first person understanding of the place over the reductive ideology any day.
> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
This sentence is an oxymoron.
How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
> How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2) indifference to the user from upper management. It's institutional misalignment.
is this criticism reasonable though? Look at Waymo, for example. Investing in that is very visionary. I mean, someone has to work on the stuff that pays the current bills, right? Or, what about Bard? Sure, Bard kinda sucks compared to chat gpt 4, but it's really at worst number 2 in the most exciting current field?
> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
This is part and parcel of working for a visible/impactful organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be wrong. They'll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-simplifications, political perspectives, etc.
This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that because most of the feedback is nonsense, that all of it is nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful to you or critical of your team or values.
I found a bit of Neil Gaiman's MasterClass very helpful when reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone is telling you something doesn't work for them, and what you should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn't work for them, but that the author is much better placed than the reader to know how and if to fix it.
In my context I try to understand why someone is saying something, what information I can take from it, and whether there is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can or should be done about it.
(If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)
I think the conclusion is really interesting. Maybe this was just well written, but I was thinking "What should the CEO of Google be pursuing as a strategy", and then he drops the mission statement. I don't know if the mission statement is the best articulation of the goal. But it's a clear goal. And it's a goal that Google aren't pursuing. It's an interesting goal in the context of large language models. Now, more than ever, having a accessible and organised store of credible information would be incredibly valuable to me. I was literally saying this to someone earlier today - the web today sucks. I google something, I click the first link it's popup hell. I click through all the links on the first page, half of them are the same information re-garbled for Google. Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010. Just let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes anything published in the last 15 years. Well this post turned into a rant...
You aren’t wrong. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. I could throw in a bunch more complaints and the kitchen sink but the point is we should expect better things from these companies and they should expect more from themselves as well.
> Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010. Just let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes anything published in the last 15 years.
I mean, you can add before:2011-01-01 to your search.
But I'm not sure how accurate the publishing dates on every page are.
The handful of trillion dollar companies have a problem that is unique: virtually all projects and innovation are not interesting enough even when successful. Only big bets remain.
Google pulled in 280 billion $ last year.
Now imagine a nice little side project within Google making it into market success with a 100m$ annual revenue.
That's basically useless to Google. A line item that doesn't move the needle and adds weight to the company. Yet to any other company it would be an extraordinary success.
If I'd arbitrarily say that 10% of annual revenue is "moving the needle" that means you need to innovate a new product raking in 30 billion a year. Good luck with that.
And it would require to be entangled with the unique ecosystem benefits of Google, because a stand-alone product would easily be countered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. So the bottom line is that your new product needs to be of the monopoly-type, a new money printer. Anything less than that is not worthwhile.
That's why Meta's big bet on the Metaverse wasn't as crazy as reported. When you make this much revenue yet social networking has peaked, you need to differentiate by adding a new revenue stream, and it would need to bring in a billion a month. You can only achieve that by building a brand new ecosystem and being the first at it.
"Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now."
My father, a machine mechanic, gave me the same advice years ago. In my mind stuff like this only applied to blue collars so I didn't give it too much thought. Only later did I realize (after the company I was at became so mismanaged) he was 100% right.
I feel very unhappy at Google, certainly I would have left at this point if the job market were a little better.
I’ve had a successful career here with multiple product launches which had significant revenue or other measurable impact and several promotions. But reflecting on all of it, I feel burnt out and used, dispirited with the directionless race to the bottom Google is now engaged in.
Most of my last year was spent in bitter political fights, escalations, failed attempts at “alignment”, retrospectives on what went wrong, and very little actual software engineering. I’m going to lose the ability to do anything but be a cog in the enormous Google bureaucracy if something doesn’t change.
It’s definitely time to go, but I wish I could have come to this realization when the opportunities were more plentiful.
Don't Larry and Sergey still have 51% of the voting shares? (There are different classes of shares.) If so, then everything that happens at Google now is with the consent of the company founders.
> 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. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management.
He wasn't the snake in the garden of Eden-- google completed rather than began its transition with his ascension-- but he would definitely have been Team Snake once he saw the fig leaf sales figures.
This is the result of having leadership with MBA or finance background instead of engineering. All they see is short term money, product is a 2nd class citizen.
This is what happened to the automotive industry. In the past companies tried to build the best car. Now? Profit is all that matters.
> This is what happened to the automotive industry.
Not even close.
The computer revolution happened and the automotive industry was displaced in the economy by other sectors, namely tech. [0] Car usage/ownership has gone down.
Around 2008 when I was starting college, I was really excited about Google and wanted to work there. By 2013 I began to feel like they weren’t the same anymore and no longer interested me. By 2023, I can say that Not pursuing a job at Google was my best career decision. You can go watch old Google Tech Talks circa 2010 and they’re fabulous. I can’t imagine them putting out that kind of content these days. It’s rather sad, I bet 2005 Google was a remarkable place that’s now lost to time
Flutter is such a brilliant tool. Not just the framework, but everything surrounding it. Tooling, the standard of cross compatibility, pub.dev, the Dart language itself, the friendly community… it’s the best developer experience I’ve found and this article makes me really hope that Google pulls through.
Honestly, it's the community that brought me to learn Flutter as my first development framework. I tried learning React, React Native, Kotlin, etc. after asking around (even here), but often I got crickets or the snide remark that I shouldn't be developing on that framework. But Flutter? Nah, beginners welcome! Hixie and Sneath would personally reply to queries on reddit, and the community thrives on sharing open source code for all their cool projects. It's a pity that Flutter may not win the development wars, but it definitely has won way too many developers' hearts.
> 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.
I left 3 years ago for the same reason: I couldn't stand seeing Google continue to decline under Sundar's leadership.
There are few points that resonate with my personal experience (2012-2017).
- Finance is running the company
- HR has lost the original shepherding of the culture in favour of risks mitigation
- Reduction of transparent leadership comms in favour of corp speak
- Horrible middle management (senior managers up to VP1). Either because we promoted great engineers into a people role, or because we hired consultants to run engineering organization (favouring navigating the complexity of the org, over managing innovation).
I did rationalise all those changes as something that was obvious from a short term optimization standpoint: the company was in the mist of PR fights, leaks , growing incredibly fast, etc.
It's clear, 6 years later, that a sustained approach to this type of leadership has reduced the company to a shadow of itself. Less innovative, less talent driven.
> I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's mission statement (to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful).
I'm not sure if I agree. That mission seems to be largely achieved. And maybe has something to do with the decay in Google's overall culture.
When filtered to "cross platform mobile app frameworks" anyway, which is a huge reduction in scope - 1/3rd of respondents in that study in fact.
So 46% of 33% of mobile app developers that aren't building mobile websites use Flutter. That's not bad at all, but hardly supports a claim of being the "leading mobile app development framework" as you're down to ~15% of mobile app developers using it. And only then since mobile web is being excluded, who knows what it'd be if that was included.
To add to this, perhaps anecdotal but I've noticed Flutter to be in that specific area of people who like it and use it feel like they're underdogs, fighting in the war to make it the next big thing. It's not the default way to write an app on either Android nor iOS, so they're vocal about spreading the word and getting/keeping momentum.
People who use Swift/UIKit to make apps may like it, but it's also the default way to make an iOS app, so they don't feel the need to fight a war. That language was handed down from above as the winner of iOS development. Same for Java/Kotlin/native UI libraries on Android.
Well assuming Swift and Kotlin split the remaining half 50/50 (I think this is reasonable as most major apps are on both platforms and it is unlikely to use Swit for iOS but flutter for Android), they're probably only 25% each.
Unless you want to count them both as Native at 50%?
Glad to see Hixie still working on Flutter though, as I'm a big user of it. For the Google specific parts, I can't comment much on the internal development structure of the company, having not worked there, but as a user of their products over the past 20 years or so, there really has been a slowdown of innovation from them. I mean, what did they really create in the last decade that endures?
Read his latest posts, he's still working on Flutter, but now he doesn't have to answer to its boss, which seems like why he left based on a paragraph in this blog post.
Eric and Tim already left awhile ago. It is very much possible that Tim left for the same reason as Hixie or at least fully supports Hixie for this decision.
Interesting to read this as an outsider and to pretty much confirm what you suspected. Very interesting is the take on Vic Gundotra. I knew him briefly on a personal level and he came across as a nice guy but you don't want to cross him. The comment on how he doesn't do well when things go wrong lines up perfectly with what my impressions were of him.
Says something rather concerning about our economy's ability to innovate. Short term profits always end up eating at the core like this. I see why Elon has kept several of his companies private. The market lacks vision.
Very early google was full of passion and people that wanted to build cool things for users. There was a passion where building things that would surprise and delight users.
The process when this changed was slow but I think started 2008-2010 where passion for building something was no longer what drove people but instead the promo-process, having impact and moving the needle became what drove people. Not passion but promo-process changed the culture dramatically over time.
Me and friends used to call it the LPA cycle. (L)aunch, get (P)romo, (A)bandon and switch team. And towards the second half of the 2010s it became a de-facto rule. Once something launches with a big fanfare, after next promo-cycle almost l5 and higher engineers leave to chase their next promo in a different team.
You can see this over and over after ~2015. High velocity and innovation until launch and shortly after it grinds to a stop. very sad to see this change from early google.
When did it become acceptable to write things about other people as he writes about Jeanine Banks? Even if everything he says about her is true, it still feels incredibly rude to say it in public.
Why? Jeanine Banks is probably paid millions a year. People in such roles with such disproportionately high rewards should be constantly evaluated. But if you read between the lines here she's basically unfirable for reasons nobody would dare to mention. I think people should go even further.
What a sad but refreshingly honest article. I never worked at Google, but this aligns with my impressions from the outside, as well as everything else I've read (eg. that recent article here from a founder who's startup was acquired by Google and she left due to the stifling bureaucracy). The company hasn't innovated much recently and its products like Google Search have deteriorated in quality tremendously. At this rate Google may be on its way to becoming the next has-been tech company (eg. sort of like what happened to IBM).
The management and bureaucracy depicted in the article sound like a corporate nightmare and unappealing place to work. I didn't know that Google had non-engineers running dev tool teams. Can this VP even reverse a linked list? /s
Seems like Google needs a change in leadership, starting with replacing CEO Sundar Pichar.
> one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today.
Hey if you're cool with me using your hardrive to store data I have a bunch of chia coins that need mining. Its weird how getting somebody's permission before using their stuff is considered unnecessary.
It is weird to focus on storage, considering the cache for the HTML/CSS/JS generating the warnings likely takes up much more storage space than the cookies themselves.
I noticed that comment also. It seems like the point of view of an engineer that doesn't really think about security.
Reminded me of when I first discovered that major browsers allow third party cookies by default. And thinking I can't believe they allow this massive privacy leak.
You don't need to show a "cookie warning" to store a cookie. You only need to show a warning if you're tracking a user, regardless of the technology used (cookie, local storage...) But if you want to store someone's language choice, username, or credentials in a cookie, no banner is needed. In fact, this website is the perfect example.
Well they're two different APIs. Most people aren't concerned about a few KB to store things like sessions. Most people don't even know what cookies are.
So the cookie warnings have basically become the Prop-8 warnings of the internet, where they're so prevalent people just ignore them, but the cookie warnings are more annoying since they require active dismissal.
The distinction, and this is an important one, is that cookies have a hard cap of 4Kb of data per domain, making them nigh-useless for that purpose. All they are good for is recognizing a given user server-side across multiple page loads and storage of a few handful of user preferences. Cookies also get sent with every request, so using them as storage is just asking to balloon your bandwidth costs.
On top of that, using localStorage for storing large amounts of data rarely involves anything like a cookie warning because it's 100% client side unless manually sent back to the server. And even then, if you anonymize the data (i.e. you don't care who's storage you are using), you still don't technically need any warning.
All this to say: There is basically no relationship whatsoever between pervasive cookie warnings and the usage concerns you are voicing. Both are valid concerns, both are important stakes, but they have nothing to do with one-another.
You do say hard drive but you also imply that permission to store cookies is as good as permission to mine cryptocurrency simply because the user allowed access to storage.
The argument these other commenters are trying to make hinges on the idea that the type of storage for cookies wouldn't work that well for crypto mining.
You're calling that argument nonsequitor and I don't think it is. It's immediately applicable to explaining the gap in your reasoning. That gap, for the record, being Cookies Storage == Crypto Mining.
Finally, let me give an example. "I own my house and my land so therefore I'm a sovereign citizen." That's a bad argument for largely the same reasons.
Sad times. If not Google, what's the place to be nowadays? Has high interest rates killed tech as a great place to work in entirely, or is there any oasis left?
Startups are shit on pay and as an early tech employee you are basically the one that gets screwed the hardest of all. A huge gamble with very little upside even in the best of cases. I'm gonna have to pass.
it is also industry maturing, there are tons of people came to the industry in the latest years because of money and not because of passion about tech.
I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he's busy with windy.com now) and it's funny how similar my feelings are.
What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave, and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate environment as long as they're getting paid tend to stay or join. I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity can be reversed.
I actually can't decide what would be the best strategy from the CEO's point of view. I.e. how best to govern an aging, established tech company like Google? I really like what Aswath Damodaran said about Google - there's a "sugar daddy effect" - the various departments lack desperation to make it, unlike startups.
This is really really incisive, I almost shivered: I went through a "defrag" from Android Wear to Android (i.e. they shut down Boston Android Wear and offered us jobs on Boston Android)
I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI.
We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the vast majority of that 50% transferred to other things within Google.
That occurred exactly along the lines you mention, with some side help of them accepting there was something genuinely wrong with Android's culture that needed to be avoided, as Ian mentions.
That self-selection combined with the...qualities...of Android completely changed the job. For the first time at Google I was working with people who genuinely, firmly, at their core, had no real interest in anything except the paycheck. I do believe this is very well-adjusted and have a hard time explaining the feeling and what it leads to without sounding derogetary. Your post does such an excellent job of pointing at it.
Thanks. What also surprises me is that coworkers have little desire to start side-projects or startups. But that's probably because those who do have left already.
By the way, I was developing for Android since its early days (before the first Android phone was released) and mostly switched to iOS development few years ago.
I have to say that the Android SDK (and the UI/UX too) was underwhelming, although it started to get better at some point. It felt like the developers were not top talent and / or were under pressure to ship functionality quickly without having the time to step back and think hard about design and simplicity. The most notable example of this is the activity / fragment lifecycle (also known as the "lolcycle").
That's not what I said. I don't currently work on any side project. But I have a desire to and I like to think about and discuss project ideas. I assumed everyone is like this.
It's really oddly no. I know what you mean and its hard to word. But yeah there's not a "fundamental interest" like you'd expect.
All the stuff seems "obvious" in retrospect, like...oh...a lot of you went to MIT and did Computer Science because that's what people do but...you went to college to get a degree to get a job, you didn't necessarily become absorbed in it.
But then again most other tech jobs I've been in had that quality 100%. Life is weird.
(I'm a dropout from a state school with a 2.8 GPA, and I honestly don't know if I've ever felt more 'alien' anywhere other than Google.)
> 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.
That's an interesting observation considering Sundar is where he is because of early-Google cultural norms.
I have just spent 18 months with Dart, supporting Flutter development
I formed the view that Fludder (as I called it) was built by brilliant engineers who were directionless. As a replacement for Javascript it is an utter failure, sadly
I believe it's quoting a survey where you had to pick from "frameworks". Meaning "use the native tools" wasn't a choice on the list. Choices were things like Flutter, React Native, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, etc.
I don't know if the author is reading this. But thanks for this article. One day I want to grow up, become a big shot engineer, and Name-and-shame all clueless middle managers who have tortured me.
> 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
One thing I find bizarre in Google is lack of accountability. If someone builds a lousy product, we are not supposed to criticize it, not even objectively. That's because, well you guessed it, "it hurts feelings". Or per Pichai's words, "let's be thoughtful". So many teams have instead learned to launch failed products to advance their levels in Google.
I don’t know where this idea comes from. Five minutes on any of the half-dozen internal communications sites reveals vast amounts of criticism on every google decision made, most of it thoughtful, but some quite sharp, and some quite bitter and unfair.
I see these posts and just shrug. Tech companies have lifecycles. There is that early startup energy where "we're all in this together." Then, if they're lucky, success and growth, but the startup mentality remains. But as the company grows, it can't maintain the startup culture. It's simply not possible. And then companies mature and you have bureaucracy and leaks and empire building and layoffs, etc. It's inevitable.
What surprises me about Google is not that its changing, but that it's taken so long to change.
A lot of glorified companies are completely filled with corrupt, inept management. I hope this recession destroys this management culture and brings back the ethos of innovation in engineering and product.
I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who will always prioritize a mix of business needs and engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And then, to shame/call out other "leaders" throwing their people under the bus.
I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only way to maintain company culture in the direction of innovation.
Agree with everything he said, but then again nothing written here is unique to Google. Every company starts off with a coherent vision, competent leadership and bought-in employees, and then as the valuation goes up into the tens/hundreds of billions/trillions and employee count balloons to hundreds of thousands, it all inevitably goes to shit. It is impossible to have any semblance of "culture" at that scale. Google isn't the first to run into this and will not be the last.
Thanks for the post. I for one would love to experience the early Google culture. I'm not competent enough but as a middle-aged man I believe I have more fire than many of my peers.
Great post, epic that he calls out his idiotic upper management. I've only been at Google a little over a year and while I'm mostly happy with my management chain, I have run into directors who clearly should have been fired for overselling and underdelivering huge projects that impact my team.
I am surprised just how 'bottom up' so much is done at Google, and I wonder if that is why Sundar ended up where he is. Unlike so many other large companies, engineers who build consensus have way more influence on upper management's priorities than other places.
So being someone who is good at building consensus is a good way to built clout at google, more so than any other place. But this isn't alawys good. Sometimes I miss old boring "F500" companies where I can go to the one principal engineer (or director or whatever) and show them my idea, and how it doesn't get in anyone else's way, and boom they either approve or deny it.
No spending months convincing everyone and their mother to make a small (but significant) change.
> 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).
What a coincidence that in the only country outside the US where Google search has a worthy competitor in the open market, search engine choosing dialog should not appear in all chromium-based web browsers.
Certainly this is the care for the users
- the string of missed opportunities in the last 10 years (specifically AI)
- the string of user-hostile product decisions (latest: adblockers vs YT)
- the complete lack of innovation (name a cool product launched by G in the last 5 years)
- the clear and present competitive threat to their flagship product (search vs. OpenAI)
- the once great culture that is rotting in place (see article)
- the stock price completely flat or slightly down for the past two years
- the enormous waste of goodwill Google had accumulated with both the world and their own employees, now all spilt on the floor (I mean, they've chosen to turn predatory, I'm not going to say fine, but ultimately: their choice. BUT: they don't even have the financial numbers that would justify such an about turn).
How that ball-less wonder Sundar still has a job as CEO, or at all for that matter, is nothing short of amazing.
Nicely written. Can't tell you how many times I've seen companies ruined by too many middle managers; some of whom are greatly under qualified to make certain decisions they do.
Unrelated, does anyone here or OP have a ballpark ETA on when Google's Quantum and AI might meet and become friends? I'm really hoping to see this in my lifetime.
In 18 years from now, which company will have employees writing blog posts like this about it?
I hear amazing stories about the early days of Google and I can’t help but think, which engineering company that is in its infancy right now will have employees reminiscing so fondly of the early days? An AI startup?
He doesn't mention it, but it is curious that Google has apparently also lost the lead in the AI race to OpenAI, after being unquestionably on top for many years. PaLM 2 was inferior to GPT-4, despite being younger, and Gemini is set to release a whole year later. What's going on?
I was not expecting them to name names and torch everything on their way out. They paint a really terrible picture. Still, one day I’d love to join the GCP team working on BigQuery or something in that arena Google problems notwithstanding.
A sort of boiling frog phenomenon. The creep sets in because the founders hired or promoted people who did not uphold the core principles, and prioritized short terms gains.
My comment: Sieving and assessing multitudes of prospective candidates for a job is a very time consuming, exhausting work, and people are often willing to settle for less, especially if the organization is really successful and the founders feel the need to expand rapidly.
>Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to be good for society.
> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, ... Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable.
So, when Ian does sincere things that were intended to be good, they get criticized for them unfairly. But this Jeanine Banks is [fucking incompetent] and Ian could not possibly be an outsider making the same mistake he claims everyone else is.
Also seems like a defamation suit waiting to happen.
The author is roasting Jeanine Banks and she is probably the real motivation that drove the author writing a whole long article of google's culture when things were beautiful.
Ah I got really excited about Flutter back in 2018. Hard to believe it's been 5 years! A commendable project. I just wish they went with something other than dart for it
The issue is quite simple IMHO. The company has a motto that is almost completely PR. If they truly cared about doing the right thing, don’t be evil, to the extent they imply by making it their motto, then they would have an interview process which evaluates the ethics and morality of their candidates, even if only a little bit. It is well known that entry to Google is, at least for engineers, basically little more than a leetcode mastery test.
Larry and Sergey just need to come back from their vacation and clean house. So much of Google culture used their humor and candidness at TGIF as a lighthouse.
What I don't understand is that Ian has been at Google for 18 years with little to no real recognition for his work except that he was a tech writer for HTML5. Is it that Ian has the problem? This seems to be the sentiment of all his leaders over the last 18 years.
> 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).
Perhaps the individuals the author knows were pernicious, but clearly someone is. Look at the current state of YouTube demonetization and war on adblocking (ads are a vector for malware).
> 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).
> Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.
>Flutter grew in a bubble, largely insulated from the changes Google was experiencing at the same time. Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would eagerly attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was happening, I found myself now able to predict the answers executives would give word for word. Today, I don't know anyone at Google who could explain what Google's vision is. Morale is at an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google.
I invested in Google back in 2005. I sold off my shares and stopped using google search a few years ago when they started making obviously politically movivated alterations to search results and started using Brave in lieu of Chrome.
I wonder when that happened relative to the time period he's talking about. Unfortunately I can't go back that far in my bank to see exactly when I divested myself of their stock. But it has to be more than 3 years (my bank's limitation)
“People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers”. This strengthens my understanding that as a manager and as a team member who’s being manage, communication skills are so much more important than engineering skills. It was a good and interesting read regardless.
I haven't seen anyone [at] Sundar on X (FKA Twitter) yet. I am not sure how Sundar would be feeling about this. Hostility for Hixie probably. And it's safe to say that Hixie's return to Google has no chances now, not that he would want to return anyway.
These paragraphs really pack a punch, and having worked in tech for 20+ years now (but not at Google) I feel this. Every shitty company eventually has layoffs that ruin the culture, and end up with a "Jeanine Banks" manager type. This article was really well written.
> 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, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). 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 see all of this at Google now. The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google's founders famously told Wall Street "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." but that Google is no more.
> 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. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
> 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
These are the Balmer years. Or as we'll start saying in a few years: The Sundar years.
I didn't see them mention rank&file careerism culture.
Are they attributing the root cause to leadership, and believe the old culture is merely dormant, or could be inspired in people who never saw it, and who weren't hired for it?
Excellent and succinct description of risk to all institutions
> Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.
Yeah I saw this process unfold over my decade there as well. I'm very grateful for my time there, my colleagues, and the great work we did (go Monarch team!). The latest evolutions there make me sad.
Sometimes back I wanted to contribute to Android.
It's a source-open product, unfortunately.
And development goes on, silently, eerily without as much public docs as I would like!
Bold to call out an org director so...directly. Normally you leave and keep quiet about the abusive people you meet in case it backfires because the industry is small and you can be blacklisted.
Eh, I interviewed for both a GCP and multiple Azure teams simultaneously and the difference in talent level was astounding.
The latter team leads were anywhere from disinterested, asking basic level leetcode questions I could breeze through, to fucking incompetent who didn't even understand the coding questions they were asking. I was shocked at how different they were in terms of thoughtfulness and intelligence.
This was my experience too as well as some of my college friends who work at MSFT and GOOG. Microsoft engineers aren't stupid (of course they weren't) but there tends to be more dumb people and fewer very very smart people.
This could also be incentives at the companies. I have a buddy who went to Microsoft, worked 30hr weeks, and was bored. Dude is brilliant and level headed. The team was lazy AF. Worked there for 5 years and went to Facebook and is thriving, going from Senior to Staff rather quickly.
lol no, I got into a big argument having to explain recursion, tail call recursion, etc.
The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent with the exception of stack space.
But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the experience.
My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first interview rescheduled the time and no one told me, etc.
It was a fucking joke.
Also, I interviewed at Netflix as well, and I didn't get the job (passed technical interview but didn't get selected after Director level interview. Just wasn't a good fit in terms of interests) and I can't say enough good things about netflix, everyone I met there, and the overall interview process.
So I'm not just annoyed at Azure folks because I didn't get the job. I'm annoyed cause they're mostly morons.
I was outright hostile by the end. My point was, in my very long history in tech, it was only Microsoft that pushed me to that point. I’ve bombed hard interviews, passed easy ones, bumbled medium ones, and never once lost my cool.
Looking at the innovation of the former and the lack thereof of the latter, it sure seems that way. Even after almost half a century, Microsoft still endures.
Google is the next Blackberry, it just hasn't happened yet. Unless they can get a Nadella, and really transform the company asap, they're in a death spiral.
A good read, but I feel a little bit of "OK Boomer" rising up in me, to listen to someone pointing out institutional issues with the system that made them rich, at the same time as they bow out and encourage someone else to fix things.
The industry has a lot of problems, but I remember when Google was just starting, and it was obviously a place to go, and for years after that it was obviously the place to go. Hopefully there are some other obviously the place to go companies now?
Start by filtering out every publicly traded company. Eliminate every company not still run by the founder. Nothing that's about to IPO. Nothing involving ads. That's a start.
> I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users.
I experienced it the beginning of the Corona pandemics, where I demo'ed some workflows and documented some step by step guide to use Google classroom to be able to offer a great experience regarding home-schooling in Germany. We presented to some Department of Education in Germany, they all declined it because of the "privacy advocates" doing FUD in a super conspiracy level.. we ended up spending millions of Euros and every State having it's on half baked solution and a super weak home-schooling infrastructure in general. I'm pretty confident that we definitely could have done better just using Google classroom.
about how HP went from the coolest company in the world (50's and 60's) to dorky old mediocre place that Fiorina/Hurd/Apotheker/Whitman just finished the destruction that was already underway.
Like a lot of Valley folks, I blamed Carly, but some other long time HP'ers said it was already in process of destroying itself. And while people like to hold up IBM as the canonical bad example for Microsoft and then Google, HP could equally well play that role.
> Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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.
I worked under a VP at a job once who was exactly like this when I was a manager. Truly one of the most demoralizing experiences; always trying to do the best for the people under you and sheild them from this kind of nonsense, but in middle management you can only do so much sigh.
"At any rate, after exploring this, I naturally wondered if there wasn’t some easier way to do it; not as statistically valid, maybe, but adequate for the advertiser who just wants to improve his performance. I won’t go into the details here, but let’s just say that everyone wanted a Super Deluxe version even if it did require changing every part of the Ads system. No one wanted something quick-and-dirty that just did the job. This was Google, after all; “quick and dirty” would not get you promoted or get your talk accepted at a conference. It did not make me popular to suggest this."
I had a similar experience at Google--simple improvements such as parameter tuning are looked down on and rejected for being mere tinkering, even if the metrics are good. Meanwhile super complicated deep learning projects keep being added, even if they barely improve metrics. In the short term the complexity looks like hard work and leads to promotions, but long term it makes the system hard to maintain and understand.
Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ...
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, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious.
I think calling it an unforced error is generous. When I left in 2010 I pointed out to Google that their falling CPC rates meant that the profit margin on search advertising was eroding faster than they were developing new income and faster than they were reducing costs[1] and as a result they were going to find themselves compromising their principles to appease wall street. Before they laid off people they compromised every other principle they had, they added advertising to places they earlier boasted about not advertising, they started selling more and more demographic information about their users to sketchier people. All so they could show that revenue number going up and to the right.
I predicted they would lay off people a lot sooner than they eventually did but I blame my misprediction on my misunderstanding of just how much money they could develop when they stopped worrying about whether or not it was good for their users. I completely concur though with how a layoff really changes people. I was at Intel when they did their first layoff in 1984 and suddenly everyone's attitude changed to "how do I stay off the layoff list?" That doesn't foster a creative, risk taking culture.
Someday the story of Google will make a good read, kind of like 'Bad Blood' but where the enemy isn't a sociopathic leader but a bunch of regular people who got addicted to being massively wealthy and threw out all of their principles when that wealth was threatened. Altruism of the rich is a function of their excess wealth.
[1] The primary reason I left was because the project I delivered which saved them $10M/yr year-after-year was considered "not significant" (read unpromotable).
Would like more info on [1]. I work in the area of cutting costs (also privately - gave up coffee as it was a waste of money, for me): with money being finite, what you can save is often worth more than what you can earn.
It wasn't particularly transferable outside of Google's scale. They have continual failures in their fleet of machines which cycle through a repair queue. It's fairly automated, dispatching bulk repair requests to people in the data centers. I managed to get some process changes and code changes through that allowed machines with alleged disk errors to be processed while still in production and have the resources returned after the disk was verified good and reformatted. When you calculated depreciation costs for the equipment that had been waiting for repairs before, and now never left production, it was well over $10M/year of depreciation cost. (there were other cost savings as well like the over provisioning needs of a cluster were lower , etc etc) They weren't wrong in that it wasn't particularly technically challenging, but getting a change like that through the organization had been tried and failed several times before I was given that task and succeeded. That skill, being an effective change agent in a large organization, was not even on their radar of useful skills at that time.
Overall reasonable post, but thanking Chris DiBona in this post honestly makes me question the whole narrative. When I was at Google he was on the short list of petty tyrants to avoid at all costs. Just a mean person having way too much fun running a tiny Kingdom Of No.
I am a personal friend of Chris, and was with him through most of his tenure at Google (we both got laid off at the same time). When Chris said no (and it was rare), it was usually because people were thinking of themselves over the good of the company (and usually around personal projects they wanted to own instead of Google).
You might disagree with it (and I'm sure you do), but Chris always thought of the company first. He was the personal embodiment of early Google culture and a fantastic manager.
I just wish they'd made him a VP of Open Source (a position IMHO Google sorely needs). He probably could have staved off some of the failures.
It’s very difficult to assign credit or blame to outcomes in a large organization. It's like trying to see which weight in a large neural net caused a specific outcome.
That said, IMO what Elon Musk did to Twitter can be done to Google and many other bloated tech companies.
There are so many technically weak middle management and executives that need to be removed.
This is not going to be popular but I have noticed the same phenomenon at other companies where hiring decisions (especially for management hires) is a diversity quota exercise.
The decline is slow at first but compounds rapidly. Smart and lazy people leave first. Average but ambitious employees leave. Smart and hard working folks are the last to leave. Leaving the grifters and dumb & lazy to pick through the remains.
as another engineer from another company, i'm sad to relate that i see point-by-point the same things with different names of course. i sympathize. it's sad to see the cancer, the nepotism, the grifters that move in on the now weakened, once great, company.
f*ck them. just say it. it's useless, but good for your psyche.
> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
I worked in the org that Jeanine now runs. It had a series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level.
To call out Jeanine and only Jeanine in language this harsh feels wrong. From my recollection and from what I have heard from people still working there, she is par for the course.
Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
> Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
Unless I misunderstood the author she was his manager. It is not like he chose some random "black woman in leadership at Google" to attack.
While I don't think mentioning her by name was necessary (she's just an example of the culture of bad middle management he's calling out), I do think highlighting her race as a meta-criticism does neither the OP nor Banks herself any favors.
My rule of thumb: unless given an obvious reason not to, assume good faith on the part of individuals.
Aside from, but including, this instance, I commend anyone who calls out their manager for toxic behaviour and outright being bad at their job, as long as like any criticism it leaves a person room to take the feedback and change in some measurable way; even better if the person levying the criticism left of their own accord and has a mountain of career capital to stand on while doing so.
People in positions of power, particularly those in-charge of others, should be taking it on a responsibility and duty; like any other person, sometimes they do a shit job, and I think managers (unless they've committed sexual assault or something) often get exempted from criticism, while any failures ironically tend to be shoveled onto individuals as replaceable units. How many people out there have managers that end being directly responsible for burning them down and out, causing problems in their family lives, and otherwise cultivating an environment that makes the task of getting work done all but impossible?
Throwaway didn't claim bad faith necessarily, but just pointed out an important variable.
It's good to have good faith, but it's also good to understand that good faith individuals also suffer from blindspots and unconscious biases.
Hypothetically if there is a set of leaders, directors, and VPs, that all seem equally incompetent, but you call out only one, what might be the reason for it? It could be random. It could be because they were this person's actual direct manager. It coudl be because they're genuinely the one that are the most incompetent of the lot. But it could also be that they're the one perceived to be the most incompetent of the lot. Why? Does them being a woman or black factor into it? Who knows. Not even OP might.
It's not helpful to jump to racism at a moment's notice. It's not helpful to use race as a shield from criticism. But it's also not helpful to pretend that racism doesn't exist, even unconsciously within folks that would otherwise believe they don't have a prejudiced bone in their body.
In conclusion, people shouldn't ACCUSE, and other people shouldn't get DEFENSIVE. It's OK to discuss. I thought Throwaway did a decent job of not accusing. Many responses got too defensive tho.
I agree with you that some reactions were a bit strong.
But I reject that "pretending racism doesn't exist" is a good description of objections like mine above.
In my view it's just as fair to say that taking your position means pretending that racism exists in all interactions between people of different races, and must be contended with before other matters.
Unconscious racism is a thing, yet I question the utility of bringing it up when you have no actual evidence that OP is affected by unconscious racism. He might just hate women too, right? Can't rule that out.
Acting like race determines everything isn't exactly the healthiest strategy either.
Ultimately we're discussing assuming someone is a racist because they said something negative about a person of a different race. That assumption is also a racial stereotype.
The dickishness/meanness of singling someone out by name in a public article on the Internet, which is what the comment here was primarily about.
And then the second level, which the commenter deliberately downplayed as a minor second point (but people here jumped on it...) that said person is a minority, so it makes one extra-suspicious about motives.
So I'm not sure where you got this "acting like race is about everything" point, because that wasn't in the comment.
It's pretty unusual to publically throw someone under the bus by name like this in a professional name.
Given it's an unusual situation, people are reflecting on what makes this allegedly incompetent VP different from other incompetent VPs who aren't called out like this?
I'm not pretending anything like that. I assume good faith on the part of individuals (intentional word choice), because individuals are not systems or institutions and they really do tend to be decent and well-intentioned.
> series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level
Isn't that exactly the job of an org executive? To hire and align competent senior leadership ?
I don't think he is criticizing her in particular as much as the archetype that she represents. She is a person who has never had a coding job & spent her early career quite far from the people who write code. I can't for the life of me figure out why you would put someone like that in charge of google-dev relations. That's a premier-IC-turned-leader position if I've ever seen one.
No wonder she doesn't have a strategy. That's a terrible match for a hire.
Btw, it's very funny to see projects, which were predestined to fail, because they send their shittiest, and somehow they became better, and slowly more important than the executives star projects. There are meetings in such cases (I was part of such projects and meetings, several times), after almost everybody should be fired immediately, if you want anything good for the company. But of course, most of the employees of large, and old companies don't care anymore about products, or their respective companies.
This seems likely. Google makes 90% or some very high percent of their money from ads. I doubt there is any focus on on comparatively small side projects
I find it fascinating how you speak with so much authority. I know Jeanine Banks and I've been really upset with all the "diversity hire" nonsense coming from many of you who cannot hold a candle next to her. For your information she had been programmingor since high school and was hired into a government agency as a high school programmer-intern. That internship was her introduction into the worlf of technology. She has been an executive at GE and Amazon. Let's take alook at your resume and see if you can get into the rooms that Jeanine has been in. The condescension from many of you and particularly Ian's hit piece has been a disappointment to see.
This seems like a bizarre mid-representation of GPs point. They sated she was “par for the course” for that department. Meaning everyone was bad, not just her. And found it concerning she was the only person they singled out.
If she is in fact "par for the course" and the failures of that department were at multiple levels then that type of criticism is certainly suspect. I give you a C- at attempted strawman though.
Calling her out by name felt a bit harsh within the context of the post. Sure, call out Sundar as he's a public figure, but this lady, never heard of her, never seen her.
He could have made the point by writing "I had this terrible boss who had no idea about anything and...", her name is irrelevant to demonstrate the issue of decline at Google.
Maybe it was too much, but one counterpoint: if horrible managers never get called out how are you supposed to know to avoid them / how will they face consequences?
I understand authors frustration, I've experienced the same in the past but could not voice this beyond just some close friends and coworkers (who knew it already anyway), for fear of repercussions. I've since left but of course this person remains, and from what I hear is still as bad.
Outsiders might join that organization unaware of this. Others working with those teams might not know this and can get burned by it.
Was this particular call out justified? I don't know. But I don't think it is inherently bad.
I think the right/ethical move is to identify your organization (ie Flutter) and not name anyone specifically.
I agree completely with the article, but naming someone publicly makes the author seem like they are living in a bubble. Ie in their world the head of their org is a public figure, but hardly anyone knows what Flutter is let alone the org structure.
It is the right thing to do. Flutter team losing someone like Hixie is a big loss to everyone. It is very much possible Tim also left Flutter because of her. This terrible manager has nothing to contribute compared to that. I hope other googlers speak up.
As a person of color who is also disabled, I find bringing race into the discussion to be reductionist. It reduces the individual to the skin color, which is just as bad as what you accuse others of doing. People shouldn’t be judged based on whether there are enough black women at Google.
Seems more reasonable to me to focus on the head of the division since she has ultimate authority over it. Any incompetent people below her in the org structure are her responsibility. If they’re so bad, why didn’t she realize that and remove them? If you don’t ever want to be criticized then you shouldn’t seek out top management positions. He was also very critical of Sundar, is that also wrong because it could hurt his feelings? As for why he felt the need to air his dirty laundry like this, he must feel extremely aggrieved.
The department could be one of those "wilderness" assignments where you send somebody you don't wanna fire but also don't want to have a big impact. A useful place to help someone develop their executive leadership skills, or keep those with really bad skills from wreaking havoc.
I had the same reaction. I'm ex-Google, but never worked in that org or heard of her ever but it seemed in profound bad taste (or just mean?) to me to be pinpointing people by name like that. I'm not sure what it accomplishes, unless there is a vendetta at work here?
Also seemed out of tone with the rest of the article, which I agreed with the substance of and enjoyed reading.
And this is why it's getting incredibly difficult to have open honest discussions. It has to be about somebody's identity credentials somewhere. So tired of this nonsense.
So you think he left a (very) well paying job, working on a project that he created and has been building for nine years, one that he is now working on for no pay, just because a black woman became his manager? I dare say you are subconsciously biased, perhaps consciously biased. Subconsciously biased in that you won't even allow yourself to consider the possibilty that a black woman could be a bad manager, so bad that it would cause a prolific engineer like Ian to leave, and consciously biased in that you then actively jump to resolve your subconscious bias' flaw with reality with racism.
It seems she, being his direct manager, was a large part of the reason he decided to leave after 18 years. There is probably a lot of anger and frustration. I do agree this part of the post could have been phrased better.
It's Ian Hickson - the co-creator and lead of the entire Flutter project. He described her in his post as "Jeanine Banks, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase". As the head of Flutter he would be directly underneath her in the corporate hierarchy.
It sounds like the generic complaints of everyone who doesn't like their manager ever and frankly I would have thought twice before attaching my name to a broadside that attacks a former manager by name. But hey, what do I know, I never worked at Google.
While I'd never do that either, I did find it refreshing to read from someone else. It certainly makes this post unique amongst the many "I left Google" diary entries.
Frankly the fact he was willing to include that paragraph probably indicates that there's a few thousand more paragraphs he resisted including...
Even in my “I quit Google” post I was careful to make it impossible for an outsider to determine who I was complaining about, even scrubbing my team info from LinkedIn.
But I think 18 years at Google means the author has plenty of “fuck you” money.
Oh well. Maybe it's about time incompetent people were named and shamed, maybe that would put a stop to failing upwards for people who really shouldn't be there.
there would at least be some data, probably noisy, gamed, a bad proxy for this signal, but much better than the current empty void littered with courtesy linkedin endorsements
> But I think 18 years at Google means the author has plenty of “fuck you” money.
And the balls! Dunno whether I read your generic "why I quit Google" essay, but author's post was the first that I liked due to his willingness to throw punches.
You are probably right; I just don't really see what's to be gained by going public with it considering the complaints are pretty inside-baseball and not that interesting to outsiders (I mean, hard to imagine someone thinking "I'm not going to deal with Google because so-and-so's subordinates say they don't understand her strategy").
> I mean, hard to imagine someone thinking "I'm not going to deal with Google because so-and-so's subordinates say they don't understand her strategy"
I'm not quite there, but as a heavy Firebase user who generally loves the product but who has been incredibly frustrated with a lot of the (lack of) direction of new features over the past 4 years or so, reading this post made me think "Ohhh, now it makes sense."
That is, there are basic, presumably easy-to-implement, features that have languished for years in Firebase. Part of me has wanted to go interview with Firebase just so I can get hired to fix some obvious missing feature. Now, granted, it's obviously impossible to pin this directly on this manager, and this is also a Google-wide problem, but I think the author's point is that a lot of this "directionless-ness" is a result of poor middle management.
I will certainly not use Dart if a person in charge of its direction doesn't know what they're doing even at a basic level. I can't just blindly hope her team does what's best and doesn't listen to her.
Infinitely more than never talking about it, at the very least. It definitely will empower others to talk about it by validating their perceptions and concerns.
A 18-year veteran like OP shouldn't be complaining about their manager's lack of vision ; they should have realised by now that it's also their job to enact the vision. He was probably paid too much to behave as a passenger.
> I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do.
As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree. (even if I am too chicken to do it myself)
Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people. They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces. When an org, leader, employee or associate taints every single private avenue for criticism, you are left without much recourse.
People quit bad managers. But bad managers are often amazing as appearing amazing. As long as management has zero accountability within the org structure, sub-optimal signals like these must do.
> Those who make private criticism impossible will make public tirades inevitable
The consequences of naming someone in such a manner, in an article that makes its rounds on the Internet, can be actually quite dire. Public harassment, etc. There are some pretty unhinged people out there, and in particular some rather ugly people who in particular get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc.
And weirdly superfluous to the point he was trying to make. Did anyone really need the name of someone with whom he has an axe to grind in order to believe the larger point about Google's organizational ossification?
This wasn't a twitter tirade. This was on his niche blog post about someone's personal experience and towards someone who was making 10s of millions. Big difference.
With her budget, just her org is effectively bigger than the biggest tech company in most countries of the world. At that point upper leadership is not allowed to differentiate between private and public life. Public criticism is private criticism and vice-versa. It's likely a testament to her achievements that she has earned an enviable? level of success that makes public criticism acceptable.
> in particular some rather ugly people who in particular get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc.
That being said I do agree with your point. With those risks in mind, I still think it should be socially permissible to make this kind of post.
> I think it's in very bad taste in this case.
I thought it was done as well as one could. I know the west coast prides itself for its 'niceness', but in a lot of parts of USA, plain expression of dislike is considered in better taste than the kind of passive aggressiveness that would result from softening the poster's language. It was meant to be a targeted question at her competence. Just because she is one of many incompetent people at the helm at Google, doesn't invalidate the poster's experience.
The anecdotal optics might be bad. But I for one rely on Occam's razor before jumping to conclusions about racial/gender angles in everything.
Do you honestly believe that somebody is going to be harassed by the public or harassed in public or harassed in private because somebody on a niche blogs wrote that they were a bad boss? Or are you inventing a false scenario to argue against some writing you consider to be in bad taste?
You know people can be evil or at the least they can be bad people. Do you think this person is bad or good? My point is that when you say something like "She's just a person, doing a job." you're defending the bad rather than calling it out.
This is exactly my point. There is no way the public has information about whether the person is bad or good, just 1 disgruntled employee's impression of their job performance.
There's more to life and a person than a job. That's all. Even the worst managers I've had have been good people. They're good dads and mums, enjoy hiking and camping.
Public statements like this one are easy to make, impossible to verify or challenge, and only cause hurt
What good does that do when they ruin a workplace? If I were bad at my job, it's not like I wouldn't get fired because I'm just such a great person outside of the workplace...
I guess it depends on how you view work. I can dislike someone's work as a colleague, but like them as a person. And vice versa. Work is just work - it's not our entire life. And someone being bad at a job (even if we accept that this person is truly intrinsically incompetent, and not just a byproduct of a dysfunctional org, as is often the case) doesn't automatically mean, to me, that they have some personal moral failing or personality flaw.
So, in that vein, I think I'd hesitate to publicly embarrass someone merely for being bad at a job, since that crosses over to affecting their personal life. If someone asked me about that person in a professional context (to make a hiring decision, for example), I'd be frank about their weaknesses. But I don't think the whole world has to know about it.
I don't know her (nor do I presume to know her), but if I take your definition of "bad" as in "morally bad" (you used it in the context of evil), that feels pretty presumptuous, and then fairly attacking to assume the commenter is "defending the bad". There are so many people who end up half-assing their jobs in various ways, I think it's a pretty slippery slope to start calling those people "bad". They may be bad at their job, but I wouldn't call them bad people.
I also don't have enough information to say she's "not" a bad person, but with the information given, I don't see anything that would indicate she is one.
I don't really see how naming the specific individual improved the argument, unless there is true malfeasance, like sexual harassment, I don't think it's ethical to publicly name-and-shame somebody for the crime of being bad at their job.
> I don't really see how naming the specific individual improved the argument
I disagree. Good articles should make specific propositions about specific exemplars. The alternative is to make generalities that are hard to falsify.
Doing so head-on solves the problem faster. Talking directly to someone or about the problem as it is has felt to me like people can understand and act quicker. Less malcontent is felt by those affected by such a person's incompetence.
Capturing the subtleties in such a black/white call-out usually is lost though to the reader/listener. It also doesn't lend to this to do this so publically, for the entire internet.
For a rank and file employee or a line manager, I'd agree with you.
But this is a Director at Google. She has the power to command change and her actions affect 100s of people directly inside Google and likely many thousands using the products of teams under her. They likely draw multi million dollar total comp.
I very much welcome them to be publicly called out on their BS.
It doesn’t really matter as the poster is in the “clueless” cohort of the company and she’s a sociopath. He thinks that the company exists to do whatever he said it was earlier when in fact the sociopaths running it at that time just said that to attract people that can do work to make them rich.
He thinks she is bad at her job and it’s clear she’s not. She know precisely how to move people around to take blame for failures while staying clean and clear to brag about the wins. To the clueless she might look dumb but she’s not at all. She knows how to secure her millions in comp per year and retire early. She’s very smart.
To be fair he seems to be waking up to the fact the sociopaths are in it for themselves, 18 years later.
> He thinks she is bad at her job and it’s clear she’s not.
'At her job' - her job is improving the department.
> She knows how to secure her millions in comp per year and retire early. She’s very smart.
If I had the background, connections and privileges of these several MBA types, I could also do that. But I couldnt perhaps be a great engineer. Therefore I wouldn't share your appreciation of sociopathy, and I believe many people are of similar opinion.
Taking such a strong stance is not something would so light-heartedly, i really wonder what went on to drive this person to write such harsh words about her.
Considering the amount of people the author has likely seen over 18 years and how many of them he could have complained about... It must not be a chance it's her specifically.
There's no greater source of professional resentment than suffering under a manager who's incompetent and a narcissist (my summary of his blurb). After 18 years at Google he probably feels safe burning that bridge.
After 18 years at Google he's likely at a stage in his life where he's at f-you money in his bank account.
If he cares more about the company culture than being rehired by the people that disagree with his outlook, why not let it fly? If it instigates a culture change, he wins at the cost of a professional bridge he doesn't value anyway.
One great way to lose the f-you money in your bank account is to get involved in a harassment or slander lawsuit because of some offhand things you said that got pasted all over the interwebs.
I'm not saying that will happen here, but if I were writing this blog post I would have deliberately avoided specifics like this because of that, in part.
It's one thing to legitimately trash Sundar Pichai; another to name some middle-level manager like that.
Zero risk of that. Libel requires proof, and having this go to court would require airing that proof in open court. If this is truthful at all and it only casts shade on one director, and retaliatory suits would be more harmful to the company and illuminating of internal affairs than this blog post. Any competent HR would much rather mediate in private.
The point is, you weren't the person who wrote this. And I'm glad someone did. We need a little more scrutiny on how given people run industry leading ships aground despite making more in a year than some people make their entire lives.
Pretty much half the people who work at any given bank have some sort of "VP" title. "Middle-level" would be overestimating the standing of many with that title.
What a truly arbitrary comment. This is a conversation that is clearly about Google. What possible value did you think you added with what you wrote here.
You wrote Since when is a VP middle-level management ? in reply to the parent commenter's observation It's one thing to legitimately trash Sundar Pichai; another to name some middle-level manager like that. A VP is very much middle-level management.
To be clear, since I guess we're really drilling down on this: VP denotes senior management at Google? So Hixie's blog post wasn't really dumping on a random middle manager as cmdrporcupine (an ex-Googler, I think) suggested, which was the point of all this, but rather picking on a potential C-suite executive or something?
People who never had the misfortune to work with a truly toxic manager or co-worker are often oblivious to the damage they can cause. I'm speaking of psychological damage, burn out, anxiety, stress, depression, health problems. Naming their abuser can be helpful to people who had to endure such a thing.
As an European who worked in both North Americans and European companies I can attest European business communication is much more direct and less averse to confrontations.
Having said that, I'm not sure we can assign this difference in mentality to author's decision to name the VP (which I personally find valiant, but probably short-sighted).
I really like that he calls her and pichai out. They’re both undeserving fat cats. If you’re going to be a fat cat, you should know you’re a fat cat. Otherwise, you’ll think you deserve even more.
This has been happening at every middle sized and up tech company over the last couple of decades. Woke leadership brings in diverse but incompetent management that kills morale, productivity and any sense of purpose in the company.
I have come to the opinion that being an executive at any sufficiently large company revolves around building a cult of personality. Any contribution they make would be nearly impossible to compare against what a possible replacement candidate would make. This might be a fair or unfair characterization -- it might even be both! Building a personal brand by being a cheerleader for your company/organization, maintaining the image that you have everything figured out and everything is under control, while taking credit for building the world class team underneath you is essential.
There are genuinely amazing, highly respected executives in some (most?) tech companies.
I do agree though that the public facing image of a lot of them is a lot of hype. A lot of the big companies want to build an aura of infallible leader extraordinaire's for their management team.
I didn’t say that they weren’t talented or deserving people. But at some point, managing perception is essential to surviving and excelling. There are plenty of geniuses that fail to get their due. The hagiography (especially on this site) is particularly strong and often paints these people as larger than life. Based on the downvotes of my opinion, I seem to have struck a nerve.
The only thing I know her from is I/O, where she kicks off/MCs the dev keynotes. Her I/O bio says "VP and GM of Developer X" and "Head of Developer Relations", but I have no idea if "Developer X" is developer experience, or a reference to the old X skunkworks, or something else entirely.
EDIT: Dug a little more and it's the group formerly known as Developer Product. So Firebase, etc. makes sense. Successor to Jason Titus.
Not of non-public figures, not this acerbically, not singled-out, on the front page of HN, with most of the comment section assuming that every word must be true without having ever met them. The Old Boys' Club is real and it would be career suicide.
His critique of his manager doesn’t paint him in the most positive light either. The fact that she seems to articulate the strategy but he doesn’t understand it is something I’ve seen on a few occasions where people effectively refuse to acknowledge the strategy because they disagree with some aspect of it.
His lack of specificity on almost all counts but her name also makes me question his judgment.
> I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights have had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today.
If you don't track users and store personal info about them, there is no need for a banner. You could have an opt-in link for being tracked to hell and back in the footer. It is amazing to me how many "engineers" and "webmasters" cannot understand something so simple.
Might as well say all those boneheaded laws made by people who aren't even professional rapists require you to ask random strangers if it's okay if you spike their drink; yes, you might say they do, but if you're the kind of person who doesn't spike drinks, you will never even know, the issue will not come up once, it will not take one second out of your life. Even just scrolling by the FUD still spread by people against the GDPR takes more away from me than the GDPR does.
It's not often discussed but there is a cultural gulf between pre-IPO and post-IPO Googlers that still impacts almost 20 years later.
To put it crudely, one dwindling set of idealistic millionaires vs a growing set of capitalist thousandaires, each set with very different motivations to login to their computer each morning.
> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it).
As someone who's very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off to hear.
IMO the leader in question doesn't have a coherent strategy because she's likely trying to justify her org (and keep jobs!) in the face of a lot of developers who just don't care a whole lot about her portfolio. Her org could probably function with less people and achieve the same outcomes, but instead of getting rid of them, she's probably trying to make something happen by moving people around.
In an environment like that, your correct insights about "where we're headed" don't matter. The only thing that matters is that the leader can keep their org and not face layoffs. If that means shoving people around and not listening to what folks are saying, then that's what happens.
You're describing the BigCorp meta, which I think is a good portrayal that people need to see.
However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it sounds like you're trying to defend.
I don't agree.
It's completely rational to play career frogger. The leader is getting compensated (We're talking re-ups of generational wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their leadership is fair for criticism. It sounds like the leader hasn't created a compelling vision, which their staff is craving, let alone delivered team success.
What I suppose I'm saying is that there likely isn't a compelling vision that (a) they could get funding for, or (b) moves the needle enough to matter. I imagine their staff prefers getting paid to not getting paid, so this is the best the leader could do.
I don't like it either, it was my lived experience for several years. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas or people who knew about them, it was usually an inability to drop existing product lines + customers and no approval for the additional headcount needed to pursue bigger opportunities.
If true, it does sound terrible. Though, I would focus not so much on one named person. The culture is allowing it, leaders above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and so on.
OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important bit:
> I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward". Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you're going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.
Haven't we all? Unfortunately, in most corporate jobs, your main job is looking good in front of your boss, and making your boss look good in front of his boss, who further perpetuates this theatrical shit-show. Your actual work comes a distant second.
I burned myself once or twice by keeping my head down just focused on doing quality work and helping others, but without taking care that it also had the right upward visibility to my boss and the right people above him, and ended up getting laid off, while people who were experts at pretending to work and glorifying every little achievement kept getting the laurels and promotions.
Such is the case in very large orgs with rotten culture and lack of transparency, and you need to withstand the heat if you're gonna be working in the kitchen.
Absolutely, it's hard to overstate the importance of the theatrics and performance art. In many places, it's far more important that you "socialize" and "self-promote" than that you actually do your work. If I could go back 25 years and deliver one message to my old working self starting fresh out of college, it would be: "Buy lots of bitcoin and sell it in October 2021." But if I had a second message, it would be: "Concentrate on self-promotion and managing upward. You'll never get promoted just doing your job really well."
I don't agree with the author's complaint about the culture changing, it's just that the leadership is weak and directionless, which was also mentioned.
> 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.
I've been calling that out for years as it is obvious from the outside: Pichai is not a leader but a care taker. He has no vision that anyone can seem to articulate. And apparently he's restructured the company to not have any people reporting to him that have one either. Shocking to get some inside confirmation of what is clear to see from the outside.
I was reading Hixie's blog when he was working on WhatWG. He was one of the main authors of the HTML 5 spec. Always had great respect for how he communicated. Him being this explicit is a message in itself. He was juggling highly opinionated people arguing all sorts of things when he was writing that spec. Part of the reason why that worked was his pragmatism and ability to stay calm. This is a really strongly worded message and people at Google and in their board would do well to take note of it and take action.
My recommendation: time for some leadership changes. Doing more of the same isn't going to work. Do it more smartly than OpenAI. But don't wait.
We might think it wrong to name and shame, but this is one explicit case where it's the right thing. The autocratic style, the sheer bullying, and the lack of promotion from within have run what was one of the best developer (and developer relations) groups in the world into the ground.
They talk AI - AI - AI but do they walk the walk?
Firebase? Remember when it was the best developer tool there was? Missed the boat with Vector DBs for AI, and when experts within the company raised that it was necessary.
Flutter? Yeah -- didn't they get a community member or an intern to put out a plugin for TensorFlow lite for mobile AI, and when they moved on, nobody cared.
Dart and Go? Don't make me laugh.
TensorFlow and Open Source AI (also under JB) -- Didn't give a crap, zero investment, lots of cuts, and did nothing about advancing TF since, what 2020? When was version 2? What happened to version 3? Literally invigorated the world with AI, and then JB came along and what...?
In the last 6 months? Spun up internal incubators to build new AI products. Trying to replicate Pinecone with less than 5 internal folks who don't have a background in AI at all etc. (Pinecone have ~200 people?)
Trying to build prompt management tools, when there are a million GPT ones out there? Check. I guess she never heard of OSS?
Oh yeah, wait the OSS office @ Google is also under JB.
Pretty silly thing to do whether or not you have perfect examples, and strange to follow that up with the fact that you've been offering career advice..
There's not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion out of something like that compared to the pretty personal ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the most constructive attempts look vindictive.
I also noticed the bit about offering career advice to people in Google, but I found it odd for a different reason. How can someone who's spent 18 years of their career (and I'm guessing, almost all of it) at Google possibly be qualified to give career advice? They can give excellent advice for working at Google. But if they haven't left the company in 18 years, then surely they don't have the experience to give useful career advice that isn't at least heavily biased toward the idiosyncrasies of their one job. Even if they had a decade of experience prior to Google, how useful is pre-2005 career advice now?
That's not to say the author couldn't give valuable advice, especially in more generalized areas like the craft of programming, or even navigating office politics. It's just that any advice will inevitably be specific to Google. It seems strange to offer career advice when you've not had a "career" per se - more like you've had one really long job.
And who's asking him for this advice? Did people get wind that he might be looking for other jobs, and so he became the "career guy?" If so, that's a revealing insight into the culture at Google, evocative of flock animals asking their least risk averse member what he saw on his adventure beyond the paddock...
There's very little to be gained by making a post like that focus on an individual. I do think there are often changes in companies over time as they age and grow--but it really isn't so much about some specific individual much of the time. To some degree, it's inevitable.
I couldn’t help but hear a desire for lack of accountability in this post. The guy worked at Google for 20 years but really just worked on open source projects he liked without regard for whether it added value to the company (and in fact fondly recalls someone telling him that googles interests shouldn’t matter.)
I get why that’s fun but you can’t run a company forever in that way. In my eye even the layoffs are a signal that headcount is not infinite and you have to align what people work on to what makes money.
His ranting against his VP and Sundar seem hollow, for all I can tell he’s just upset the gravy train of no accountability is over.
We just have his version of the story though... He might be wrong. It's natural after spending so many years in a company to see change as bad, to miss the good old days... And he sure seems to have a problem with that black leader Jeanine...
A guy who never rose from his technical roles is lecturing a VP and the CEO of Google for their "lack of vision and strategy". Come on. Managing is startup and managing a huge behemoth like Alphabet will never be the same
"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."
"The oft-mocked "don't be evil" truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time"
A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder value. That is its overt and stated purpose when it goes public. In return for investment, the company must ensure a return on that investment. It's not that you've sold out or sold your soul - it is simply the market and how it works.
If you want to try to be the nice guy then don't go public. "Don't be evil" is a lovely idea but it does not wash if you want lots of loverly shareholder cash. Stay private and raise capital via the old fashioned method of convincing some rich people to buy into your idea and become private shareholders.
It's part of the tacit agreement when you list on an exchange - Initial Public Offering (IPO). You kick off with a nominated "value" ie I think I am worth x so I will sell y shares at z (where x = y * z). Hopefully all your shares are bought and you are fully capitalized and you can crack on with whatever you are doing.
You now have two major forms of "money in and out" - what your business makes and loses by doing its thing and lolly from investment by shareholders and the vagaries of the stockmarkets.
You can make and sell stuff to make loot - old school. You can also convince people that your ability to make and sell stuff is so good that you are really cool - your share price rises and so does your "value" via capitalization.
You don't list unless you actually want to become a generator of increasing shareholder value. There is no law or regulation because it is what it is. You need more capitalization and listing is a method. In return you sell your soul!
I am the MD of a small company. I have two partners and 15 employees. We are a private company and we can do what ever we like (within reason).
If we decided to try and grab a pot of cash from quivering investors to do mad things we would go for a listing - go public. Nowadays we would flood Insta/X/FB and that with all sorts of wankery and perhaps bother with the usual media and then show a bit of ankle to an exchange and then go with a prudent offering. We would offer x shares for y price.
Obviously, the world goes mad for us and buys the lot and with full capitalisation we become a unicorn with a rainbow mane. The papers are agog with how cool I am and TikTok explodes with how cool male pattern baldness really is.
y goes berserk and we have to split the bloody things to allow plebs to have a crack.
We are talking about money and not physics. I am a journeyman.
There's a great documentary about waco on Netflix and at the end, the guy who is was in command of the troops who massacred 80 women and children concluded (after 30 years of reflection), "you know the real victim was? Me, because the whole fiasco made me look bad."
It's interesting to see how those who appear outwardly evil manage to cling to a self-serving and distorted view of the world in which, if anything, they are the maligned victims.
You can just as easily imagine a SWAT member saying "when we were training to assault civilian homes, it was a wonderful time, everybody was competent and had the right motivations, we were there to protect the good guys and hurt the bad guys - but only as a last resort! Then when we got to the branch davidian compound we applied all of our methods and tactics and it all went downhill from there and, tragically, we ended up in a dark place."
When, from the perspective of even the most casual observer, it was evident from very early on that given the material, resources, methods, tactics, organization, and leadership that was deployed, the outcome that unfolded was actually inevitable.
Getting back on topic, it's not particularly news to anyone to find out that there can be very well run, collegiate, bubbles full of well-meaning individuals doing great work who nevertheless operate within institutions which, on the whole, are a cancer upon society. It's a wonderful privilege and a joy to find yourself inside one of these bubbles compared to all of the worse things that you could be doing to make a living.
An oddly dramatic response to a blog post of someone working on a, what is this flutter, some frontend framework library?
Counterpoint - since I left Google, little birds told me good things happened, for example, cranking down on the travel expenses (that higher-ups used to spent with little to none oversight)
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.