Why I Left Google

I think I agree that the existence of downslotting was a mistake. However, the problem it was attempting to solve (you got hired at one level, but performed at a lower level, because you managed to fool people in the interview) is a real one and there is no good solution for it. So I appreciate that they tried to find one, and realized their attempt didn't work, and tried something else.

If management was easy, we could all read a book about how to manage a company and then all do it optimally. Since that's not the case, experiments are necessary, and I admire the attitude that leaves them open to things that might not work. I disagree that it was "obvious" that the downslotting mechanism would not work - or rather, that it was obviously worse than any other alternative, because once you have the "not performing as expected" problem, all your options suck.

And BTW, I'm in New York :)

And if you join an engineering company where the engineers pride themselves on data and accomplishments rather than speculations, it may be worthwhile to provide evidence to support your theory than just argue with everyone without anything to it up.

And if you join a company and someone more senior than you with ACTUAL accomplishments and that is respected in and outside of the company tries to take you under his wings and guide you through the corporate landscape, don't dismiss their actual accomplishments as "irrelevant" at the same time boasting about your success in a product for a "niche market that doesn't exist"

And if you join a company, you should not claim expertise in something unless you are an ACTUAL expert and have the knowledge, experience, and accomplishments to back that up. Saying that you're a T7-9 visionary doesn't make you a T7-9 visionary!

And if you join a company, don't dismiss your fellow colleagues and make a fool of yourself because even if you don't work with them now at the current company, you may encounter them again in the future.

I'm not speaking to any specific incident. Just general advice that any new junior employee to any company should follow.

For people skeptical of the other replies here, the reputation of OP is pretty well known... it has almost become a shibboleth of the people that were around during his tenure.

Yes, this was certainly questioned. His threads on internal engineering lists (adopting this tone after just a few months at Google) are somewhat legendary. I'd caution anyone from forming an impression of the company from mchurch.

I don't think the exclusivity was a long-term strategy, but rather a natural progression from its beginning as a site for Harvard undergrads. It was really useful at providing specific needs for college students at the start. It was easy to find who was in your classes so you could ask for homework help or invite people to work on a group project back when everybody listed their classes through Facebook's central app. But after it opened up to everybody and a whole bunch of apps appeared, there were multiple competing class-listing apps with no clear winner and you needed to use all of them if you wanted to see everybody in the class. It became less convenient and most students no longer bothered to list their classes at all.

Once Facebook understood the appeal the site had to the general population, they realized that it would be better for them to create an ecosystem where network effects were optimized for the decentralized user base as a whole rather than the centralized subnetworks that made the site take off in the first place. At each step, they focused on what worked for the users at the time.

Google+, on the other hand, really did deliberately start out as an exclusive network, largely for people in the tech world, and it hoped to quickly transform into something with universal appeal. You can draw your own conclusions about how well that worked.

1) DEC also had bumper years just before they failed. That's a common pattern, according to Christensen (and his empirical data), caused by the incumbents' retreat upmarket (away from the new threat) - where the margins are higher.

For Google, this is optimizing its advertising reach and effectiveness. I haven't checked trends, but I'm sure that over time higher margin goods have began advertising online, and the competition for ad ranking has increased, bidding up google's price (they worked that system out well).

Overturning everything, in order to match a competitor, is a sign of something. As facebook figures out how to use its data to sell to people, it can target advertising more effectively than google's approach can.

I think facebook is a threat because you can advertise better the more you know about your audience - google's been gathering personal data, but they aren't in the same league as facebook (and I get the impression they haven't exploited it as effectively as they could). i.e. it's not really a contest between two companies so much as between the approaches they champion. Of course, Google is trying to become a champion of social; so the second issue is whether google can beat facebook at its own game.

Christensen found that incumbents practically never win this. It's because they are not incumbents in this new approach - here, facebook has had years of experience in social, of the technology, of the needs of people, how to address them, what works, what doesn't, and an organizational structure with values shaped over time around improving those issues, and synchronized to the rhythms of that business - and of course, astonishing marketshare and mindshare. Google beating them is like some other company beating Google at search. It's really hard to do, because there are so many advantages that an incumbent can build up over time.

It's different for "sustaining" technologies (which support the same way of doing business, same market, same values) - incumbents almost always win those. For example, if a new way of doing search came along, totally different from PageRank, google would likely still win that: they have habits of customers and advertisers; they have engineers that are great at doing it; and their whole organization is naturally galvanised around any such technology. Everyone involved would be excited about this new technology, because that's what they were hired for. They would probably also try to buy the competitor, paying whatever it took (which wouldn't be that high, since they'd be on the lookout and would catch them early).

2) Thanks for your insight on costing those innovations. Unwillingness to adapt is bad sign (i.e. change infrastructure). It makes sense: google's infrastructure is great. Excellent technically, and a world-beater when applied to Google's way of making money. It might not be valuable for other approaches, other ways to make money in other markets, based on other values.