Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 348 posts

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#101

Post by wvenable »

ehsankia wrote: post #58
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct). I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of remind…

Except for every one deprecated product you can name, there's probably more like 10-20 new product. The issue is that Google has gotten so big and has so many different projects, that the number of deprecation is just bigger, even if percentage wise they're probably lower than most other companies. Try looking at https://gcemetery.co/ and naming how many of those you even recognize and can describe without looking it…

That list seems awfully incomplete compared to: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Your list is missing some high profile products like Google Allo and Chromecast Audio.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#102

Post by wvenable »

Buge wrote: post #88
rms_returns wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read somewhere that Sundar's biggest achievement (and rise in power structure) relates to the saving of day by using practical business sense. Back in around circa 2006, Microsoft one day suddenly decided to remove Google search and replace it with Bing on their default browser, IE (which was still number one back then). This threatened Google's revenues to a considerable extent as online search is one of the ma…

Bing was released in 2009, so if this was in 2006 it must have been one of Bing's predecessors.

Probably MSN.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#103

Post by wolco »

dawhizkid wrote: post #13

Among the FAANGs (btw I think Microsoft deserves to be included there now) I find Google to be at the bottom in terms of vision. It's morphed into the conservative, big co they were once fighting. It's kind of sad.

What they are missing is a marketing department and customer service division. Without those they are forced to operate like a bizaar and offer commodity style products/prices.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#104

Post by avinium »

osrec wrote: post #63
goldenchrome wrote: post #40

Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…

I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…

> It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to hide within it, all while successfully siphoning off their sustenance.

Bang. You're spot on.

From what I've seen, it's an unfortunate artifact of many (if not most) large companies. There are just too many places to hide.

I'm keen to know if it's the same at Apple and Amazon.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#105

Post by trhway »

Each about 4 years there is a new tech wave. Google back then did very well on search, video, mobile. Missed social, cloud, voice assistant - the last 2, being tech-wise exactly up the Google alley, were missed because of vision and execution deficiencies so no surprise that the great Google engineers would be questioning their leadership.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#106

Post by whoisjuan »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #87
vl wrote: post #7

Wait, our CEO has a vision? Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons: De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the reporting structure in the last few years (ie endless layers of middle management). Both of these make consistent vision and values much harder to achieve. Recent Googlegeist just reflects that.

Honestly as a Googler I neither saw nor needed the vision of Larry, Sergey, Eric, Sundar, or anyone else except maybe Urs, Jeff, and Sanjay. I mean I worked on the C++ toolchain. Making a bitchin' compiler is its own reward. I guess things are different on product teams?

Your work is crucial for the foundation of whatever Google builds. Unfortunately just like in construction, having a good foundation doesn’t mean that what gets build on top is the right thing.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#107

Post by onetimemanytime »

wtmt wrote: post #15

For the sake of the employees and for the sake of the rest of us, I believe that Sundar Pichai is not CEO material at all. He should go or be pushed out, and Larry Page and Sergei Brin (or one of them) should take a stronger role and have a deeper engagement on many matters. Google has been doing well financially, but it has lost its soul (the one it had in its very initial years) and seems to be going around aimless…

>>Google has been doing well financially, but it has lost its soul

Google has been doing well financially, because it has lost its soul

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#108

Post by tehlike »

ModernMech wrote: post #55
Mr_P wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products actually kind-of makes sense. Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't. The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long to derisk a new prod…

> Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't. For some definition of work. They're still mostly (~80-90%) an ad-driven company, after all these years.

This is almost saying uber makes all of its money from ride hailing, almost all these years.

Reality: after 2008, economy boomed, and advertising also did. Advertising, once you have the means, is easier to scale, and high margin. Google stopped relying on just owned and operated properties, and diversified into 3p properties to achieve even more scale

Most other businesses or business attempts require massive operations which google lacks

Even you ramp up non advertising revenue to a billion dollar, advertising will grow more just because it is already big.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#109

Post by tehlike »

wvenable wrote: post #101
ehsankia wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for every one deprecated product you can name, there's probably more like 10-20 new product. The issue is that Google has gotten so big and has so many different projects, that the number of deprecation is just bigger, even if percentage wise they're probably lower than most other companies. Try looking at https://gcemetery.co/ and naming how many of those you even recognize and can describe without looking it…

That list seems awfully incomplete compared to: https://killedbygoogle.com/ Your list is missing some high profile products like Google Allo and Chromecast Audio.

I dont think chromecast audio was a high profile product.

Allo is overhyped, from day 1.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#110

Post by tehlike »

hopler wrote: post #83
ehsankia wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for every one deprecated product you can name, there's probably more like 10-20 new product. The issue is that Google has gotten so big and has so many different projects, that the number of deprecation is just bigger, even if percentage wise they're probably lower than most other companies. Try looking at https://gcemetery.co/ and naming how many of those you even recognize and can describe without looking it…

Picasa, the good photo editor in G+/photos whose name I forget, and 7 different chat apps

To be honest, i love new google photos. I was big picasa fan, but i dont regret.
Post reply on HN