351–360 of 939 posts
Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself. "The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait " Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for…
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A) This is short-sighted. What you're suggesting is in fact a way to optimize short-term gain over long-term viability. It's pure MBA tactics. Additionally, it's complete and total oversimplification. If you look at Google's earnings it's pretty damn clear that at least until 2020 they were not just going for maximum total spend, but for a steady, gradual raise in total spend. Not too slow, not too fast. They were NO…
> You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away for the money, they ran away because they were getting scared into compliance. Can you elaborate?
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Man they used to drop some awesome stuff: Google Maps, GMail (remember the hype over Gmail invites?), Google Earth... then they just stopped improving stuff and started releasing multiple versions of things and abandoned them all, over and over again. Very strange.
I was there around this time and remember the first time someone said out loud that they were doing project Z because "that's what will get me promoted". I argued until I was blue in the face that it was a bad idea, but they didn't care: they had their objective and knew how to get it. Unhappily, everyone was right: he got promoted and the project was an expensive failure. My two cents is that Google has been consume…
Advancement and fulfilling of personal ambitions is a common thing in basically every sufficiently large company. Google isn't unique in having that problem - nor is their promotion process markedly different than everyone else's!
What is different is that Google is extremely metrics and OKR driven, combined with a near-total absence of product leadership. There is often no broader product strategy besides "grow X by Y".
This results in a critical weakness where you can get promoted for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit, because it hits some ill-defined OKR. It's practically an annual tradition within Google's management: creatively interpret pointless and vague OKRs so that you can make a (contorted) argument that Projects X and Y contribute to it, so you can ship it and get everyone involved their promos.
People in other companies are ambitious and want to get promoted too! The difference is that in many other companies there are other sanity checks in place that you don't get promo'ed for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit.
Google's root problem IMO is that there is an extreme lack of product leadership and product vision at the very top levels of the company. This results in a near-total inability to mitigate meta-hacks of internal promotion systems.
At companies with more product strategy at some point someone at a high level goes "Projects X makes no damned sense!" and puts the kibosh on it. At Google Project X will ship, and then after its badness becomes inescapable, get shut down.
Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself. "The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait " Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for…
> I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it. If you haven't read it, why are you in a position to suggest whether the title is accurate to the article's contents or not?
The tech fluff pieces are wild. And that entire paragraph about how the execs for Yahoo failed horribly, hired a new one, and that one lied about his degrees, and they hired another . People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society: basic contracts like "fail and you won't get rewarded" or "succee…
> People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.) It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example,…
The people I know who've successfully demonstrated their ability to operate at the C level are addicted to the role and have more money than time. I wonder if we can come up with some kind of prestige leveling system and just not pay them after a while.
A physical $100 million CEO coin with embedded connection to a purpose-built government blockchain. The coins are non-transferable.
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You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a str…
> You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it. It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomp…
But I can guarantee you that Google employees are reading these comments and saying "Wow, this guy is totally full of it, he doesn't know about anything!" and for some of them that thought will arise not from flaws in what I and others are saying, but in the uncomfortable space of "if this is accurate my future plans I'm invested in are not going to happen..., this must be wrong." I have lived in that space with an early startup I helped start, when I went back and worked on the trauma it had caused me it taught me a lot about my willingness to ignore the thinking part of my brain when it conflicted with the emotional part.
You have to do some of that to take risks, but you also have to recognize that they are risks. Painful lesson for me.
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You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a str…
Chuck, curious if you have ever posted here on what happened to Sun Micro. Love to read your take on it.
This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including the “[engineering] class traitor” running the failing division.
Boeing was put on the path to failure by James McNerney. He was their first non-engineer MBA CEO. A literal Jack Welch apprentice. He divested Spirit and chose to build the MAX instead of the 797. Dennis Muilenburg was an engineer and handled the MAX crisis poorly but wasn’t responsible for the decision to divest key capabilities from Boeing or to optimize short-term sales over long-term survival by building the MAX…