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Lessons from 14 years at Google

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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#681

Post by zwnow »

pif wrote: post #646
zwnow wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup same story here, also warehouse optimization. I was the reason the employees got new scanners and oh my... the scanners didn't have a physical keyboard. Now all the 50yo+ would have to aim on a touch display which is apparently impossible. Also we had to introduce some fixed locations and storage placement recommendations. Our storage workers almost revolted. After a few months it settled though.

Yous story is not about optimization: it is about change imposed to people who did not request it, nor felt the need of it.

It 100% was about optimization. Introducing new devices, with more capabilities (storage place recommendations for example), that weren't 10 years old and broke every 2 weeks is optimizing.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#682

Post by glenstein »

j3s wrote: post #96

feels LLM assisted, at the very least. > The skill isn’t being right. It’s entering discussions to align on the problem > clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction > The punchline isn’t “never innovate.” It’s “innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate > This isn’t strictly about self-promotion. It’s about making the value chain legible to everyone > The problem isn’t that engineers…

I know it's sometimes considered not very nice to suggest this but I felt the exactly same thing, about exactly those phrases.

I wonder if we're going to get to a different singularity, where, regardless of whether it prose was AI assisted it (1) leaks into people's way of speaking, (2) is out there frequently enough that people are skeptical even of normal prose.

At the very least, we're long past due for a word to describe the "it isn't just X, it's Y" formulation. In my opinion it's worse and more rampant than the em dash (and I like the em dash when used responsibly).

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#683

Post by gwbas1c »

geodel wrote: post #288
k8sToGo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>b/c they didn’t know how to play politics Or they refuse to play that bs game

True. I used to count myself in that category. Do the work and stay away from games. I was also thinking of myself as clever, self-respecting by doing hard work and leaving daily politicking for others. And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways. This despite I am only one with left with knowledge of legacy s…

> And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways.

It's important that you have relationships with your boss's boss. Some organizations call these skip-level 1-1s, other times it's just riding with your boss's boss in the car. This also is not politicking or CYA.

The reason is that managers are fallible, and when you have a relationship with your boss's boss, it helps get things back on track when someone (you, your boss, or your boss's boss) makes a mistake.

Getting back to the point: If you get a dressing down from your manager, your relationship with your boss's boss helps you know if you deserve it, or your manager made a mistake and your boss's boss has to intervene.

---

Quite tangible: A few weeks ago my manager gave me a dressing down. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with the CEO where he told me I was 100% in the right, so my manager was basically putting his foot in his mouth the entire time they gave me the dressing down. It's interesting to see where the situation is going to go, because everyone (me, the CEO, and everyone else in the company) really respects my manager and wants to continue working with them in a non-managerial role.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#684

Post by ilaksh »

j3s wrote: post #96

feels LLM assisted, at the very least. > The skill isn’t being right. It’s entering discussions to align on the problem > clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction > The punchline isn’t “never innovate.” It’s “innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate > This isn’t strictly about self-promotion. It’s about making the value chain legible to everyone > The problem isn’t that engineers…

That pattern in particular is grating when it keeps repeating. But I don't think that LLM writing necessarily needs to have that pattern if you give it instructions to not do it and/or have a small review and edit workflow.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#685

Post by kshacker »

regular_trash wrote: post #676
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

Before I got into software development, I worked at a company doing technology-adjacent things. Nothing too fancy, but I got to improve a lot of things just by knowing a little powershell. One day, a senior developer there - a guy very fond of music - was showing me his process for converting a text file into SML. His process consisted of opening two notepads: one with an SML template block, and one with the text fil…

1. I do that once in a while. There is only so much thinking you can do in a day or a week that you need some mindless activity

2. Today morning, fresh in the new year after a break -- I took a day off on the 2nd, and I last worked on December 19th, I am not able to get into the zone, and luckily a training email popped up -- spent an hour doing that. Normally my manager would have had to remind me.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#686

Post by caminante »

sanderjd wrote: post #659
dclowd9901 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree -- the career advancement bent of this article is the most off putting aspect.

It does matter though. I also find it off-putting, but in the same way as lots of other stuff that I don't like about the reality of human society. The trick (I think) is to strike a balance between being open-eyed and realistic about unpleasant truths like "career advancement matters" without losing yourself to cynicism and self-interested gamesmanship. I read this article as striking this balance pretty well. (Thou…

FWIW, from a stoic viewpoint, glue/coordinator roles are getting eviscerated by basic LLMs.

I feel the resentment is stronger if you ignore the game and get lulled into contentment when others are more transactional. It's all about interfaces and continuous contracting. And planning 2+ steps ahead.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#687

Post by sanderjd »

caminante wrote: post #686
sanderjd wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter though. I also find it off-putting, but in the same way as lots of other stuff that I don't like about the reality of human society. The trick (I think) is to strike a balance between being open-eyed and realistic about unpleasant truths like "career advancement matters" without losing yourself to cynicism and self-interested gamesmanship. I read this article as striking this balance pretty well. (Thou…

FWIW, from a stoic viewpoint, glue/coordinator roles are getting eviscerated by basic LLMs. I feel the resentment is stronger if you ignore the game and get lulled into contentment when others are more transactional. It's all about interfaces and continuous contracting. And planning 2+ steps ahead.

Oh I disagree entirely with your first sentence. LLMs continue to be much better at writing lots of code than keeping track of how all the pieces of an organization actually fit together.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#688

Post by caminante »

gwbas1c wrote: post #683
geodel wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I used to count myself in that category. Do the work and stay away from games. I was also thinking of myself as clever, self-respecting by doing hard work and leaving daily politicking for others. And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways. This despite I am only one with left with knowledge of legacy s…

> And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways. It's important that you have relationships with your boss's boss. Some organizations call these skip-level 1-1s, other times it's just riding with your boss's boss in the car. This also is not politicking or CYA. The reason is that managers are fallible, and when…

In your situation, it's end of year review time. He might be softening you up.

Why not mention to your manager that CEO supported you? Are they working with different data? I get these may not be fun to press on right before the holidays.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#689

Post by DenisM »

conception wrote: post #349
DenisM wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the second order effects? Ignoring the customers becomes a habit, which doesn’t lead to success. But then, caving to each customer demand will make solution overfit. Somewhere in there one has to exercise judgement. But how does one make judgment a repeatable process? Feedback is rarely immediate in such tradeoffs, so promotions go to people who are capable of showing some metric going up, even if the metr…

Steve Jobs has a bunch of videos on creating products- https://youtu.be/Q3SQYGSFrJY Some person or small team needs to have a vision of what they are crafting and have the skill to execute on it even if users initially complain, because they always do. And the product that is crafted is either one customers want or don’t. But without a vision you’re just a/b testing your way to someone else replacing you in the marke…

This requires correct vision + enough influence to execute.

This is not a repetitive process. It’s pretty hard to tell apart a visionary from a lunatic until after they deliver an outsized success.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#690

Post by [deleted] »

mattacular wrote: post #652
QuadrupleA wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely can remove unnecessary complexity. If your app makes an http request for every result row in a search, you'll simplify by getting them all in one shot. Learn what's happening a level or two lower, look carefully, and you'll find VAST unnecessary complexity in most modern software.

I'm not talking about unnecessary (nor incidental) complexity. That is a whole other can of worms. I am talking about the complexity required given what you need to a system to spec. If choices are made to introduce unnecessary complexity (eg. "resume driven development" or whatever you want to call the proclivity to chase new tech) - that is a different problem. Sometimes it can be eliminated through practical consi…

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