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Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

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Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#101

Post by SllX »

MikeTheRocker wrote: post #84
solardev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.

With >150,000 employees, I think they can probably do both

I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search.

Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#102

Post by michaelt »

sianemo wrote: post #11

Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers…

> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently?

Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.

Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.

The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#103

Post by api »

bradleyjg wrote: post #35
treprinum wrote: post #12

"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’" Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.

There’s a powerful evolutionary force which provides very rich or powerful people with whatever yes-men are appealing to their particular personalities. The returns to being an accepted yes-man are so high that attempts are going to continually be made until someone clicks. Eventually someone is going to click. It’s near impossible not to become detached from reality under such circumstances. Hence all the legends ac…

I forget where I heard this but I once read a saying that “communication is only possible between equals.”

I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play.

If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer.

“Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news.

The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another.

This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up.

It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#105

Post by slyall »

treprinum wrote: post #12

"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’" Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.

There is mandatory training for CEOs to always be positive unless there is a very good reason not to.

What did you expect him to say? "Yes, moral is low and all the good people are leaving" ?

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#106

Post by smeej »

I don't understand the complaint from the guy who has been there for 15 years and doesn't like that it's changed.

Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality.

If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. Leave before a company gets that size!

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#107

Post by SllX »

dekhn wrote: post #96
ojbyrne wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo came out of X.

The technology predates X; X just housed it for a while. There were self-driving cars at Google in 2008, that look almost exactly like the ones that drive around now, except the computer vision hardware was bulkier.

That doesn’t sound right.

Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#108

Post by [deleted] »

siggen wrote: post #38
treprinum wrote: post #12

"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’" Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.

What he said probably cannot be verified, even. On another note, has anyone noticed how Pichai likes to take pictures in front of others’ work for the media [1]? To me, it’s a weird feeling—- like someone taking credit for others’ work. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/23/google-quantum-computing...

[deleted]

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#109

Post by QuinnyPig »

TillE wrote: post #20

Google does plenty of stuff well, but what's their last big exciting new product or even new feature? Bard is good but they're chasing OpenAI. Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung. Or YouTube Shorts and Tiktok. It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.

Apparently they’re killing / renaming Bard, because Google gonna Google. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/google-reportedly-rebr...

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#110

Post by 23B1 »

curt15 wrote: post #85
quatrefoil wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Go…

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel.

Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist.

Now add 149,999 nodes.

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