Comments from an employee mentioned in the article: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-googl...
From that thread, a related post from last year:
Reflecting on 18 years at Google (2023)
Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
101–103 of 103 posts
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#102Wondering if anyone can confirm this, but.... I saw somewhere that part of the problem at google is how their mono repo code base is so cumbersome that they are more likely and willing to kill services just because of the maintenance overhead of maintaining the code. Any insight from Xooglers? I feel like I read this somewhere on here or reddit, but can't recall the specifics.
Am Googler. I do a lot of work on google3 code health and maintenance. I do not think that this is the primary cause of product turndowns. Messy product design, left-hand/right-hand problems, internal politics, unfunded regulatory mandates, and other organizational complexity seem like much more direct causes. People like to add promotion-focus to this list but I don't actually buy that since there are tons of Google…
> I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead
Yeah that sounds familiar and sort of makes sense.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#103I have worked for a company similar in size to Google for a long time. During covid I experienced the highest high of my 18 years here. Flexibility was suddenly rampant (it was forced, but still) in a company that had been stodgy and inflexible since its founding. They began hiring just like Google and every other company did, so jobs were plentiful. This had a 'rising tide' effect on everyone (I got a promotion with…
When an organization is growing there's enough cake for everyone. It's a positive environment which naturally encourages collaboration. But mathematically speaking, no organization can grow forever. Eventually they reach a stable size or even shrink. At that point it becomes a zero-sum game and the only way to advance your career is at the expense of your colleagues, so you have to shift focus towards politics and managing upwards. If you find yourself in such an environment then unless you've been given the nod from senior leaders as someone on the fast track, you should start looking around for a new job. Realistically the situation is unlikely to improve.
Some static size organizations such as militaries or professional partnerships try to escape this trap with an "up or out" policy that systematically terminates the lowest performers at each level every year in order to open up more opportunities for promotion. This works to an extent, but causes other dysfunctions and probably wouldn't work in most tech companies.