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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'

#261

Post by Ferret7446 »

quatrefoil wrote: post #122
curt15 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Organizations can't scale linearly. You need more middle managers as you add more people and organizational layers, who don't contribute any "output" so this is trivially true.

Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.

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

#262

Post by quatrefoil »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #244
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…

But couldn't the founders put a competent CEO in the chair and still pursue their passion projects on the side?

Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot.

And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to.

Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B.

It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan.

I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.

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

#263

Post by lxgr »

refulgentis wrote: post #251
lxgr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peak HN is also claiming Y already supports X without showing any evidence. And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get…

You redefined Markdown support into "only Markdown support." No refunds, sorry. :)* Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown. That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code. * also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps bo…

Markdown shortcuts just really aren't markdown, no refund needed, in the same way that supporting j/k keybindings for isn't the same thing as Vim. It's about 10-20% of the way there.

And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).

I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.

> That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.

That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.

GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.

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

#264

Post by rurp »

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.

Yeah it's pretty unreal how hard Sundar is working to confirm all of the opinions about him being an out of touch and ineffectual manager. That line was unbelievably cringe inducing.

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

#265

Post by abkolan »

quatrefoil wrote: post #122
curt15 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.

This is a ridiculous take. You would need way more than that just to maintain Kafka and run ops for it, that LinkedIn heavily relies on. You are trivializing the complexity of running a platform like LinkedIn.

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

#266

Post by theGnuMe »

"CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “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.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,” he said, per the Verge."

When CEOs say this, you know you have a huge morale and leadership problem. Statements like that are incredulous. It's the boot lickers who say that stuff to the CEO.

Sundar is out of his depth at worse and disconnected at best if he believes that is the way to defend layoffs. I am surprised HR/PR let him say this...

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

#267

Post by csande17 »

gtirloni wrote: post #200
resolutebat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up and out: launch something, get promoted, move onto the next team, what happens afterwards is the next guy's problem. And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing. This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.

And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?

Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.

Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".

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

#268

Post by iboisvert »

karaterobot wrote: post #135

> 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…

I agree, but I think there are a couple important stages that should be explicit: actively solicit proposals and fund the proposals

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

#269

Post by geodel »

nine_zeros wrote: post #7

Google - as well as faag, faang adjacent, and wannabe faang companies - all have the same problem: The entire management track is filled with mediocre paper pushers instead of innovators.

This frees up innovators to launch their own companies.

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

#270

Post by carlthome »

nine_zeros wrote: post #162
smeej wrote: post #106

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…

> 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. 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…

Is there any company that has tried that idea? Sounds interesting (akin to DevOps).
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