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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#111

Post by skisatwork »

cbozeman wrote: post #50
t8sr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it. One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to kee…

> I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. This is the coolest shit I have ever read. Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.

I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT department and we have this culture. The IT department alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past weekend I found myself in a different region needing a desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and ideas of them for process improvements. This communal culture is hard to find and I have no intention of leaving until the culture dies.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#112

Post by satvikpendem »

hot_gril wrote: post #106
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that. Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and a…

> All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Great, market has matured from that.

Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#113

Post by lapcat »

Don't Larry and Sergey still have 51% of the voting shares? (There are different classes of shares.) If so, then everything that happens at Google now is with the consent of the company founders.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#114

Post by Modified3019 »

> The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.

Well said. Just watched exactly this happen after some surprise layoffs in an entirely different industry.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#115

Post by drevil-v2 »

This is not going to be popular but I have noticed the same phenomenon at other companies where hiring decisions (especially for management hires) is a diversity quota exercise.

The decline is slow at first but compounds rapidly. Smart and lazy people leave first. Average but ambitious employees leave. Smart and hard working folks are the last to leave. Leaving the grifters and dumb & lazy to pick through the remains.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#116

Post by johnnyworker »

> I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights have had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today.

If you don't track users and store personal info about them, there is no need for a banner. You could have an opt-in link for being tracked to hell and back in the footer. It is amazing to me how many "engineers" and "webmasters" cannot understand something so simple.

Might as well say all those boneheaded laws made by people who aren't even professional rapists require you to ask random strangers if it's okay if you spike their drink; yes, you might say they do, but if you're the kind of person who doesn't spike drinks, you will never even know, the issue will not come up once, it will not take one second out of your life. Even just scrolling by the FUD still spread by people against the GDPR takes more away from me than the GDPR does.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#117

Post by drubio »

> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.

What a shellacking. I never heard of her, so did a quick search, she's on X/Twitter https://twitter.com/femtechie ; and yes, her Linkedin vanity url is, get this: https://linkedin.com/in/winner

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#118

Post by antupis »

cbozeman wrote: post #50
t8sr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it. One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to kee…

> I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. This is the coolest shit I have ever read. Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.

Is there currently companies where you can do this?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#119

Post by pardoned_turkey »

vkou wrote: post #104
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it. > She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning peo…

I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth.

It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#120

Post by geodel »

alberth wrote: post #13

> “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.” Ouch. I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.

> I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.

Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.

And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.

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