161–170 of 401 posts
"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.
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 ha…
This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so many mediocre people who want to be seen as "doing something", they are literally destroying the innovation by virtue of just existing in that company at that level.
The solution is actually pretty simple - make management track people go on call. That way, they develop empathy for customers, engineers and services. Make them spend less time on committees, promo packets, performance reviews and instead, spend more time on services. Make them fix bugs. Be close to the work that they are supposedly the face of.
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The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about. The only thing.
That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.
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> 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…
>> 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. To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but unt…
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> 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 Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it. >FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber. I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And…
I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
> Hirsh Theriault complained that executives are “trying to point in a vague direction” toward AI while waiting for lower-level staff to propose concrete, actionable ideas. I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what bu…
There is another alternative, "The executive rallies people behind a vision, encourages people to come up with ideas and solutions, sets up incentives such that low level ICs can bypass all middle management nonsense, encourage failures, and skill themselves up to be able to make tough calls."
But that's not what executives do. They set some vague vision, force middle management to trickle it down to ICs. Everyone is under pressure to do something with no reward for doing that something. Everyone still has to follow the chain of command and everyone still has to manage mediocre middle management politics.
"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.
I don't think you get to be the CEO of a big tech company by caring about workers.
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> 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…
If you think jira is bad you should try deltek costpoint. Holy shit.
(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…
IDK when but anything other than Google is better now. Even whatever default Brave has, or ddg. It's like using Google 15 years ago - minimal SEO crap.
Sure I do have to go back to google every few days, but thats due to braindead devs who explicitly only allow google to scrape them.
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>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.
AWS is certainly very capable but I haven't at all found that everything AWS is easy or makes sense and that's certainly not the general reputation it has among other devs I know. It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.