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Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#371

Post by dang »

MicroBerto wrote: post #110
espadrine wrote: post #37

Contrast Google's old way of managing bets with Tesla. When Google started working on self-driving cars, they went about it academically. They did not plan a sequence of stepping stones that they could sell. They meant to have a product in an indeterminate future which should be immediately perfect and better than a human, essentially not needing a wheel. Tesla went about it with an engineering perspective. First, ca…

> but they make money along the way Only killing a few people in the process, but hey who am I to judge?

Please don't toss off inflammatory, unsubstantive comments on HN. If you're going to comment here, make it substantive, and if the topic is divisive, please make it less inflammatory, not more.

Edit: you also became uncivil downthread. We ban accounts that do that. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and follow them:

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#372

Post by dang »

photogrammetry wrote: post #241
MicroBerto wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they make money along the way Only killing a few people in the process, but hey who am I to judge?

Are you implying that Tesla killed the (1 person, not people) who decided to let his car slam into a tractor-trailer on cruise control? It's not a problem to you that, say, Apple has "financed the suicides of dozens of Foxconn workers," or that GM killed 140 people by suppressing information on a defective ignition switch, or that Lockheed Martin and Halliburton buoy their stock by selling weapons to kill hundreds of…

This is uncivil and stoops to personal attack. It's just the ante-upping, signal-noise-lowering sort of comment we ask people to abstain from here. Please don't post like this to HN.

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#373

Post by dang »

legolas2412 wrote: post #290
photogrammetry wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that Tesla killed the (1 person, not people) who decided to let his car slam into a tractor-trailer on cruise control? It's not a problem to you that, say, Apple has "financed the suicides of dozens of Foxconn workers," or that GM killed 140 people by suppressing information on a defective ignition switch, or that Lockheed Martin and Halliburton buoy their stock by selling weapons to kill hundreds of…

I'm going to ignore the whataboutism you spew. Also, Elon musk has done amazing work with electric cars, sustainable energy and space travel. No doubt about that. But this is about Autopilot, a collection of driver assistance program. Not sure about OP, but my spite with Tesla is that they are pushing the above-mentioned driver assistance programs as self-driving features. This over-selling is going to kill people. A…

Please don't call names ('you spew') in arguments. If someone is wrong, explain so civilly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#374

Post by morgante »

gph wrote: post #104
quotemstr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a fitness center You'd be amazed how much exercise helps with concentration and reduces stress.

Yea I get that, but you can extend that logic to just about every domain of life. Should they be allowed to buy all their employees the best mattresses available because a good night's sleep helps productivity? Should they pay for a nanny because help with child care makes you more productive? With that logic you could fund your employees entire lifestyle if you made the case that it helps them be more productive.

> Should they be allowed to buy all their employees the best mattresses available because a good night's sleep helps productivity?

Yes, potentially though it'd probably help to have data supporting that. But things like company housing or sleep pods can materially benefit the company (for one thing, if you can take a nap at work you'll work longer hours).

> Should they pay for a nanny because help with child care makes you more productive?

Sure, potentially. In fact, employer-provided childcare is a tax-free benefit.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#375

Post by morgante »

sjg007 wrote: post #345
OrwellianChild wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you factor in employee turnover costs... Amazon spends an enormous number of man-hours and resources recruiting to backfill and has thousands of open job listings un-filled. It would be difficult to argue that they are saving money at the end of the day by crimping benefits and salary at the expense of employee loyalty.

uhm.. walmart sets the example here I think... For Amazon is there high turnover in software engineering?

> For Amazon is there high turnover in software engineering?

Yes. Amazon has, by far, the highest turnover amongst tech companies. [0]

[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/amazon-rewards-emp...

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#376

Post by vidarh »

ihoz wrote: post #262
nir wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people in Google still think the magic is there? It seems like a great place if you want stability and a nice salary, but obviously (unless you're in the comparatively tiny X dept) you're going to be a very small cog in a huge machine?

I know many people at Google Boston (Cambridge). They are all bored out of their skulls. One guy says how he works 30 hours in a busy week and uses his 20% time to hit the gym. But in another's words: "how can I leave when they pay me so much?"

Already 5+ years ago, I talked to a director at a recruitment company in London that loved Google, because they were easy pickings to find good candidates to place in the roles he had because they were all - in his words - disillusioned - and at the same time the "Google" on their resumes still made his clients all starry-eyed. He saw recruiting people out of Google as easy money.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#377

Post by vidarh »

serge2k wrote: post #201

> “No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” great line. > Many former X employees blame overexuberance on the part of Google’s marketing division for the hostile reception that greeted Google Glass it was $3000, hard to get, and what were people really going to do with it? Sure. Marketing. > He notes that although Glass was marketed to the public as the Explorer E…

When I worked at Yahoo (2003-2005) the talk was the same: Engineering, which dominated the company, largely thought Yahoo was a tech company.

But Yahoo was an advertising and media company.

Yahoo never quite managed to resolve that conflict, which rose straight to the top, and it kept causing stupid things like the massive amount of money that was poured into their own search engine instead of focusing on the content and services that actually had users continue to come back and stay within the network (e.g. Mail never made much money, but a large portion of users went to the Yahoo homepages to log into their e-mail, and a good portion would end up clicking on various news articles etc.)

Lots and loss of engineering effort went into project that'd never have been greenlit if Yahoo had accepted earlier what it was.

But Yahoo had a great deal of Google-envy at the point I was there, and it coloured a lot of decisions. At the same time, Yahoo didn't have the cash to operate like Google. E.g. where Google engineers could order servers by the dozens without justifying it, I had to present my arguments to a harware review group in Sunnyvale (I ran a team in Europe) to get a single new server to run the European billing system that processed millions of dollars worths of payments. So on one hand they wanted to be more like Google, on the other hand they didn't want to pay or it, and meanwhile what made Yahoo money was first and foremost the content side.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#378

Post by VladimirGolovin »

dgacmu wrote: post #315
bane wrote: post #313

One of the problems with companies that have cash cow revenue streams is that it sometimes doesn't matter what kinds of decisions the executives make, poor or good, the money will keep rolling in...until one day it doesn't and nobody has a clue how to actually manage the rapidly sinking ship. I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, a…

I think you can look back and see some things that Google has done successfully. Youtube turns out to have been a good buy. Google successfully managed the transition to mobile, which many questioned whether Google would be able to do ("Mobile first"). Most recently, Google has made a huge bet that their future is intrinsically tied in with machine intelligence ("AI first"). We'll get to watch over the next 5-10 year…

I'd bet that "AI first" will play out well for them, because AI is beneficial to both search and ads - while self-driving cars, fiber and balloons are not.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#379

Post by ianderf »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #16
michaelvoz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

The problem is that Google's target market is largely people who are unaware of what the risks are, unaware of the extent of what Google does with their data. It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google. yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out…

Even if you know that, you don't really have an option to stop it. You can buy a smartphone with either Android or iOS - and both are spying on the user heavily.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#380

Post by muse900 »

thearn4 wrote: post #97
matwood wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Valve's no manager management style: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there... When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.

The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.) In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky). But there is still a ton to admire in both…

This is so true especially for valve.

They have a gem game called Counterstrike Global Offensive which is their 2nd biggest game after dota2(which is free), and up to a half a year ago that I was playing, we all thought (me and reddit) that they had 0 devs working on it.

Bugs were all over the place, noone was taking action into fixing them, releases were every once in a blue moon including just new skins that were content created by players etc.

Now of course the game has evolved and there are some new developers trying to do something with it but its funny to think that a game of that calibre that returns prolly billions in revenue has pathetic support.

The only gaming company I've seen keeping up with what they make is Blizzard.

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