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

Post by gtirloni » Thu, Feb 08, 2024, 2:23 AM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #147

bazil376 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up

Nothing to do with it. We're not mature enough to recognize the importance of a flat hierarchy and adopting a startup-like model with our internal teams (business and technical independence, succeed and you'll be rich, fail and you're fired) 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 ca…

Post by neilv » Thu, Feb 08, 2024, 2:24 AM UTC

quatrefoil wrote: post #122

curt15 wrote: post #85

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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…

Post by cratermoon » Thu, Feb 08, 2024, 2:28 AM UTC

WWLink wrote: post #144

lxgr wrote: post #112

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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.

Post by gtirloni » Thu, Feb 08, 2024, 2:28 AM UTC

blindriver wrote: post #90

DanHulton wrote: post #76

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They're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinkin…

Except that revenues have been growing for years under him and the stock price has skyrocketed. I personally think he's a terrible CEO but it's impossible to argue to anyone that cares that he should be removed until at least revenue or the stock price drops.

Post by cratermoon » Thu, Feb 08, 2024, 2:31 AM UTC

api wrote: post #103

bradleyjg wrote: post #35

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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 I…