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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#121

Post by poisonborz »

zamfi wrote: post #24

Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you st…

Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#122

Post by cageface »

redcobra762 wrote: post #68

Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving . This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time the…

Two of the worst colleagues I ever had also went on to thrive at Google. It’s been hard for me to take their claims of only hiring the best since then.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#124

Post by siwatanejo »

> The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI.

This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).

Re: Culture Change at Google

#125

Post by poisonborz »

tavavex wrote: post #66
0xpgm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have th…

I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#126

Post by saiya-jin »

selfawareMammal wrote: post #84
treprinum wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

After being in multiple orgs and having been in touch with c-suite, I have suspicions that lack of total empathy and psychopathic tendencies are a must to get to really high social-based positions.

They are practically a must just to get there... to thrive in this 'layer' of society, a person is quite far away from regular average human in various worst ways possible

Re: Culture Change at Google

#127

Post by com »

operatingthetan wrote: post #85
treprinum wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

>undiagnosed psychopath Eh, I've seen these in every kind of company, none are immune.

If you’re in a business still in control of your own destiny, you could do what we did and keep a weather eye out for sociopathy-aligned behaviours and gently work them out while minimising danger.

It worked reasonably well at one place I was at for about 8 years, estimating one of those characters popping up every 200-500 hires.

It’s the strategic side to your internal integrity function. Typically recruit folks who are lightning rods for these kinds of behaviours: young, female, brown, queer members of staff - don’t forget reception annf cleaning personnel! - and train them (often not necessary!) to spot abuse of power, bullying, threats and gaslighting and to confidentially report it.

Catch people with these behaviours early and divert the smart ones, fire the dumb ones. Sure, you’ll lose your next CEO, but did you want to work for that kind of person?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#129

Post by dougb5 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #90
tavavex wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.

I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI. Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea…

A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world; rather, they suck the marrow out of all the text and art and everything in the world and use it to sell their own replacement service for all the text and art and everything in the world. Google has done some questionable things to become a gateway to the world's work, but they're (mostly) still a gateway, not a copy.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#130

Post by Intralexical »

boxed wrote: post #89
romanovcode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud. The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job. That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that expe…

You learned how to assume the world is broken, and not fix it. That's the path back to a hunter gatherer society. I think that's the wrong lesson to learn.

Hard agree. But yet, what became of the one who did try to fix it?
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