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Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

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Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#781

Post by noisy_boy »

dd36 wrote: post #405
noisy_boy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"so long as my family and I are good" - wealth goes a long way to ensure exactly that.

Yes but there is a threshold. Good to me doesn’t mean everyone drives a Tesla. It means freedom to do what we want and not be prisoners to what we own or want to own.

True - it doesn't mean that everyone drives a Tesla to me either. To me, it means that if I need to shell out some serious cash to fix an expensive kidney problem, I am able to do it (levels of insurance coverage aren't same everywhere). Because if I can't, then there isn't any freedom to do what I want because I'll be dead.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#782

Post by _carbyau_ »

rapsey wrote: post #465
gonehome wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consum…

I don't know about that. Was MS ever not filthy profitable? They are very successful with azure, was that started by balmer or nadella? People here give MS too little credit. Their reach is MASSIVE. No american company has the world wide reach that MS has. Practically every enterprise in the world is their customer.

Agreed.

I find it interesting that Apple has money, hardware, OS, many apps, web presence. And now ARM CPU knowhow.

Why aren't they forcibly pushing into Corporate?

Sure, they'd have to develop corporate fleet management stuff but at this stage they could buy a few companies and be 80% of the way there. Or build it right from the start for only a handful of their hundreds of billions.

How many iphone toting CTOs in your average non-silicon valley companies would jump for Apple "Just Works" in their business?

Either they see something they don't like or a Gates/Jobs handshake said no.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#783

Post by nr2x »

"The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus."

...yet I imagine verifying a feature is not actually illegal is a fairly good use of time.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#784

Post by jariel »

gonehome wrote: post #576
jariel wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"made them a serious competitor again?" They were making money hand over fist, massive growth in revenues almost ever year under Ballmer. [1] Which part of that massive money train is 'not serious competitor'? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...

I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let me clarify a bit. Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web). At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed that entire platform because o…

I see where you want to go with that, but I'm not sure you made the argument you're trying to make.

Ballmer didn't 'make money from extracting rents and screw everything else up'.

Ballmer entrenched and expanded MS core products i.e. Office to the Cloud and along with that massively expanded revenues, which continue to this day, long after his departure, with no signs of slowing down.

He completely screwed up Search and Mobile, but those were risky new things, that's to be expected. Frankly he should have had 1 of 2 ...

But he also established XBox and Cloud; the former is a very successful play into a very difficult space (though maybe not as nice in terms of profits) - remember, Google just completely failed at this. The later, is now a hugely successful and growing business, and frankly, over the long haul has a shot at actually going toe-to-toe with Amazon.

Microsoft has 10's of thousands of sales people and direct access to every single CTO in the world if companies with > 1000 emoloyees. Much the same way they are going to stomp Slack, they have that kind of advantage (though not the same leverage) against AWS. Point being - he started a massive business.

Azure now has revenues of more than Windows did when Ballmer started, and it's growing by 40% YoY.

So yes 'revenue' is not the 'whole story' if someone is bilking a cache cow and running everything else into the ground ... but that's now what happened.

Ballmer 'grew and entrenched the cash cows' and made some other huge bets, some of them working out to the point where they are now also, big growing foundational aspects of the business.

'The Market' took a long time to recognize this, but all the historical sales numbers are there for everyone to see.

I believe that once Analysts realized that 1) Windows and Office is 'here to stay' and 2) due to AWS, Azure is going to be huge ... that they revised their view on MSFT from a 'old company' to a 'well run growth company'.

Satya seems great and has made some good moves, but nothing of the magnitude that Ballmer did. At least not yet.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#785

Post by mentos »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #708
projectileboy wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as someone who recently bought a Quest 2, it really is an amazing product, so some things there must have been very right. In retrospect, do you know what those things were?

Honestly, I doubt the Quest line of products would have launched when they did with such a low price if FB was not running the show. Quest 1/2 might not even exist at all. The original founders were mostly focused on PC VR. Carmack was the odd one out in that respect in pushing for standalone VR (as can be seen with the Samsung GearVR).

I was an early backer of Oculus having bought the DK1/Dk2 back in 2012/14 and I was so perplexed when they announced they were putting effort into a mobile headset. It made no sense to me until I put the Oculus Quest 2 on my head last October 2020 and I learned a massive lesson!

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#786

Post by nr2x »

ck425 wrote: post #173
izacus wrote: post #99

This is an amazing post - it describes exactly how bad manager looks like and what kind of expectations does he have from his employees. No emergency PTO (despite being a benefit), ability to just get rid of people who don't suit him, cursing at people, not having a proper work/life balance. It just keeps on giving. And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.

I agree with all of that except the swearing part. Is swearing in work a big deal in US? I'm Scottish (even worse Glaswegian) so perhaps have a skewed view.

If it is naturally how you talk most people tend not to notice.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#787

Post by nitwit005 »

theptip wrote: post #435
the_local_host wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more". That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.

The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the company change as the company grows, and people can’t keep up. Or people change and they can’t give what the company needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects of being a manager in a startup that’s growing quickly. The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B…

Every company I've joined has been in a new field that I have never had experience with previously, and that doesn't seem all that rare. People are fairly adaptive.

That VP of sales and CTO will almost certainly do fine. The jobs need to be radically different for it to be worth the morale hit of firing people, and the cost of hiring and onboarding new staff.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#788

Post by throwawaysea »

The real question is how can Google get away with such poor cultural and managerial practices that would be certain death for any startup or small business. And the answer of course is that they are a monopoly. And I don’t mean this in a “meets the current legal definition in America” sense but in the fuzzy “relatively immune to market forces” / “in equilibrium with a few other incumbents” / “not realistically challenge-able by new small companies” sense. We need new anti trust regulation that is updated for the reality of these giant megacorps. Solving the problem of competition will also help with greater distribution of wealth, but in a meritocratic way. But to get there we need the market to work, and it can’t if you have entities with infinite capital, the ability to starve the market of talent, the profit margin to loss lead, and massive network effects.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#789

Post by tdeck »

jeffbee wrote: post #602
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #363

9 years @ Google, and I too came from a company acquired by Google. (In my case, Google did not keep our product or tech stack around, so.) And yes, I can say many Googlers are entitled. It's a fair descriptor. And the pace of work is slower than a startup. In general. And I too have many criticisms of Google. But. Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working.…

I've worked at 8 different companies and none of them could even hold a candle to Google's pace of work. Everything just works. The quota system works, the identity and authorization system works, observability works, the build and release system works. You can be a productive engineer at Google on day 2 if you read the codelabs on day 1. Nobody at Google has ever needed to have their manager email the Jira admin to…

There's plenty of red tape and broken processes at Google if you know where to look. I've waited months for a small log schema change to be approved for a yet-unused log topic. CI presubmit runs for tools I worked on routinely took several hours and needed to be manually restarted due to flakes, whereas at Square people would complain if a CI run took more than 10 minutes. The tool for releasing Android Studio SDKs was a broken mess of Python that nobody understood, so they spent 2 years writing a replacement that never came rather than fixing it. I could go on. These things definitely affect your happiness and productivity while working and the pace sure didn't seem fast.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#790

Post by tpudlik »

justapassenger wrote: post #413
tinyhouse wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the peo…

> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality. Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad…

He was the CEO of Waze, but not of Google. After the acquisition, he had to adopt Google promo processes.
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