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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#131

Post by sokoloff »

hshsbs84848 wrote: post #108
hemloc_io wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like tech generally has a CEO vision problem. Andy Jassy + Sudar for example. off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)

It’s a tale as old as time The kid inherits the company built by the parent

Jassy was at AWS and in a senior role essentially since its inception. Retail predates Jassy, but I give Jassy a lot more credit than presiding over a company that someone else built.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#132

Post by 3seashells »

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…

It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block..

One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#133

Post by detourdog »

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.

I loved old google they refused to share a business model. Google ~2006 I think is just past peaked google. I think they developed ads because it was the only model that fit their valuation.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#134

Post by cbsmith »

eslaught wrote: post #123
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 i…

"Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."

I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#136

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #91
hemloc_io wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like tech generally has a CEO vision problem. Andy Jassy + Sudar for example. off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)

Tech started to have a vision problem the moment big money (and people with big money) entered the picture and started calling the shots. Sundar, Jassy, Satya, Tim Cook are all cut from the same cloth. Their job is to appease the shareholders and not much else. Zuckerberg is probably the only founder/majority shareholder still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar company day to day and executing his…

[deleted]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#137

Post by nine_zeros »

financltravsty wrote: post #53
nine_zeros wrote: post #8

A lot of glorified companies are completely filled with corrupt, inept management. I hope this recession destroys this management culture and brings back the ethos of innovation in engineering and product.

Be the change you want to see. I'm not holding out. Public companies all turn into this. One solution is to make greed and going public a shameful thing; but who's going to do that?

> Be the change you want to see.

I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who will always prioritize a mix of business needs and engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And then, to shame/call out other "leaders" throwing their people under the bus.

I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only way to maintain company culture in the direction of innovation.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#138

Post by vkou »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #119
vkou wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Sure. It's an incentives problem. It's very difficult to align the incentives in any organizations with six levels of reporting chain so that people with the most day-to-day power over the direction of the firm (mid-level directors) are marching in the right direction.

I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor job.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#139

Post by dazzlefruit »

Osmose wrote: post #69

This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making i…

The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#140

Post by LargeTomato »

jorvi wrote: post #58
pkasting wrote: post #10

As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this. It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the…

> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google. This sentence is an oxymoron. How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "…

It is only an oxymoron in the worst possible interpretation to the point of maliciousness.
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