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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#121

Post by esafak »

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…

Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#122

Post by dang »

js2 wrote: post #26

The submitted link is missing the query params (or HN stripped them) that lead directly to the post: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

Fixed now. Thanks!

Btw HN didn't strip them -the submitted URL was https://ln.hixie.ch/. No doubt this was the top post at the time.

We do strip some query strings, but only for larger/known sites.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#123

Post by eslaught »

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…

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#124

Post by hot_gril »

satvikpendem wrote: post #112
hot_gril wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes Google is still less diversified than its peers. Cloud and YouTube (edit: and Pixel phones?) are profitable afaik. The overall tech market has matured is what I meant; it's no longer time to loss-lead everything.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#126

Post by FirmwareBurner »

jimbokun wrote: post #55
fidotron wrote: post #19

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is…

This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google: https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/

Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team.

Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.

Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.

The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#128

Post by LargeTomato »

aappleby wrote: post #48

12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done. Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left. The change in frankness and hones…

I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was.

I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#129

Post by chatmasta »

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…

> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment

Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.)

> And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.

This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it generalizes to other industries.

I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#130

Post by jrmg »

paxys wrote: post #41
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.

The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader. That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google's share price.

‘Shareholders’ can’t do anything. Different classes of shares confer different voting rights, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin still own shares controlling over 50% of shareholder votes.
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