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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#161

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #136
poisonborz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.

Valve also has much better hackers than Facebook.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#162

Post by foofie »

nicoburns wrote: post #160
zamfi wrote: post #24

Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you st…

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies

> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies.

It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#163

Post by cool_dude85 »

fuzztester wrote: post #159
0xpgm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do. SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute [ In J…

If SAS is the paragon of a company not pursuing growth at all costs, then maybe we do need to start looking at quarterly metrics. As a customer their business model sucks and they are doubling down on "either we're a solution for your whole enterprise or else."

Re: Culture Change at Google

#164

Post by adrianN »

Ntrails wrote: post #131
poisonborz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#165

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

piva00 wrote: post #154
hintymad wrote: post #67

Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate. > he most incredible and u…

> Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s. I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who w…

[flagged]

Re: Culture Change at Google

#166

Post by dash2 »

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground."

Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#167

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

glimshe wrote: post #157
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #29

For me, the important sentence is "Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things." This is very interesting, but I like that the author notes the outside view, because I still get the feeling I'd like to work there someday.

Don't go to Google unless it's for the pay/benefits (benefits are basically pay in a costume) or for a very particular role which is unmistakably aligned with your professional priorities. You won't find any of the mythological coolness there, literally all of my buddies say. Additionally, when recruiters sell you the position, they try to make it look like you are working at the core of their most important products…

>unless it's for the pay

Luckily, that's the only reason I do anything at all!

Re: Culture Change at Google

#168

Post by yodsanklai »

pants2 wrote: post #49
siliconc0w wrote: post #7

There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.

Are the layoffs actually completely random? Is there some reason to do that instead of performance-based layoffs?

I suppose every layoff is different, but they are not completely random. There are many factors involved, performance can be one of them. My assumption is that leaders craft some query on the employees list and tweak parameters until they get the right number of people to lay off.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#169

Post by gardenhedge »

glimshe wrote: post #155
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....

> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.

Is the NYT lawsuit cartoonish too?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#170

Post by toyg »

> You know how people are much more likely to read an email if it is one screen long, rather than the length of this :-/ ? It is similar with contributing code to the kernel. It is much more social and relationship developing to contribute a screenful or two of code once every week or two over the course of years. We were dropping 90,000 lines of code on them all at once, having worked on it in total social isolation for 5 years in Moscow, Socially it was all bad. Small increments are the more social way to go. Incremental improvements to V3 would have met no opposition.
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