141–150 of 401 posts
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At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up
Why would that shift it from 'for the benefit of Google' to 'for the benefit of whoever makes the decision'?
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…
The regular employees are far more deluded than management in thinking that they're somehow changing the world for the better.
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...
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse ? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too. > Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Google Docs has some of the most cur…
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.
Every large tech company does one or two things extremely well and prints money from them and then has a hundred other efforts that range from terrible to middling. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon...they are all the same in this regard. When was the last time any of them truly innovated?
"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed
At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up
As a result, the larger the company, the larger the hierarchy, the larger the inefficencies. At the extreme you approximate the government of a country.
Layers of managers who care only about collecting a paycheck, engaging in company politics and looking busy cause exactly this problem. Managers will pick the best decision for them, not anyone else.
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We need UBI and less dependence on private enterprises for basic human needs like income to survive and healthcare Would give both companies and individuals more flexibility and dynamism
But then lazy "people" would benefit and we don't like that.
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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.
I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people who…
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
>Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.