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Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

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Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#51

Ego is essential to breaking through those tough barriers and new opportunities. Disregard for risk. Is this really what is needed when Google is being criticized for falling behind its competitors in innovation.

I would consider "disregard for risk" to be the defining feature of bad decision-making.

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#53

Hopefully this will also happen at lower levels. The "I'm the smartest person in the world, because I work at Google" attitude is a reason I don't interact with/communicate with/contribute to Google-related projects. Their hugely inflated egos are just off-putting.

Googler for close to a year, so take this with a grain of salt.. I had heard of this exact reputation before I joined and frankly it was one of the things that worried me most. After I joined, I kept waiting for the hammer to fall, to see the competitive mean streak in people and in my team at least, it was exactly the opposite. It's frankly the best environment I've worked in because they are genuinely caring people…

While I worked at Google I noticed a huge disparity between how people responded to other Googlers and how they responded to non-googlers. A more interesting observation would be to find people you know and look for their outside interactions. If you find the same disparity as I did you might want to bring it up with them, sometimes that helps sometimes not.

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#54
post #16

Shouldn't this have the correct title "The New Google: ‘All the Assholes Have Left’" ?

HN has overeager mods. Every day I see a new link here, just to find out it was simply a rename, when the original title was IMHO perfectly appropriate.

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#55

"Page was known as a tough manager inside the search giant, peppering his team with pointed questions and cutting (though usually accurate) observations. “He could come off as very harsh,” said one person who has had many encounters with Page over the years. “Until you realize it was more that he was completely lacking in EQ. I mean, zero.”" How is asking pointed questions and making cutting observations equate to be…

being right is not an excuse for being a dick. its a false dichotomy to think that if you are generally respectful you are any less effective as a leader. if the same thing can be accomplished without being a douche, who would you rather work for?

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#56
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler for close to a year, so take this with a grain of salt.. I had heard of this exact reputation before I joined and frankly it was one of the things that worried me most. After I joined, I kept waiting for the hammer to fall, to see the competitive mean streak in people and in my team at least, it was exactly the opposite. It's frankly the best environment I've worked in because they are genuinely caring people…

But are the people you interact with the ones in the big public positions the grandparent is referring to? (e.g. Open source projects like Kubernetes)

My experience with the Kubernetes engineers has been awesome.

They are incredibly helpful, and very tolerant of newbies like me who sometimes ask dumb questions...

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#57

Hopefully this will also happen at lower levels. The "I'm the smartest person in the world, because I work at Google" attitude is a reason I don't interact with/communicate with/contribute to Google-related projects. Their hugely inflated egos are just off-putting.

The Angular team is full of amazing low-ego developers that are a pleasure to interact and work with.

I can second this, having worked with and talked with many of the team - they are great people, and enforce respect for each other within the community as the minimum bar for being involved in the ecosystem.

I have not had an issue with any interactions with any Google-backed projects.

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to be pointed and direct with tact. It is called manners.

Agreed, being tactful is a good thing. But what is implied in that statement is that asking pointed questions and making accurate observations ( which could be damaging to your beliefs ) equates to being an asshole.

Depends HOW you do it.

Re: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership

#59
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, G+-the-product is not bad. It's G+-the-borg, the forceful attitude towards integrating other Google properties and establishing a source of truth for real names, that generated backlash and eventually doomed the project.

The forceful integration was the product. G+ was adding a unified social network to all of Google; hence, Google+.

That might have been the internal aim of the project, but to the user G+ was just another social network. In that sense, it wasn't a terrible social network.

IMHO if Google had just kept G+ on its own (working hard on fixing the "ghost town" byproduct of evolved privacy features, and providing decent APIs), adoption numbers could have been lower in the short term, but the product would have survived in the long run. Integration with other Google products should have come naturally, not forcefully. Then we would have got a modern social network people actually wanted to join, instead of a tainted product stinking of corporate malfeasance.

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