Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things. (Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)
>>Robot butlers This is actually pretty cool. The butler part makes it sound silly but if you were able to pull it off it would mean that we have reached a technological breakthrough. It would be very close to a technological singularity.
More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
141–150 of 348 posts
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#142Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imo, there are other companies that operate like this but don’t lose customer trust in the process. I might be biased but I think Amazon is like this.
Remember the fire phone?
Disclaimer - work in Alexa
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#144Having read the article, only 54% of Googlers view their compensation is better than what they could get from another company. I find it surprising. Who else pays more than Google does? Can only think of Facebook, but even then not sure.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
They flipped it 20 years ago...talking about where these companies rank as far as current vision and innovation goes today in 2019.
They flipped it at least as early as 15 years ago in 2004 with with gmail, their acquisition of google maps, and in 2006 with their acquisition of youtube. Actually I think you're basically right.
The only innovation among these was whatever youtube did to be allowed to host all the pirated content, as opposed to everyone else who tried it.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly as a Googler I neither saw nor needed the vision of Larry, Sergey, Eric, Sundar, or anyone else except maybe Urs, Jeff, and Sanjay. I mean I worked on the C++ toolchain. Making a bitchin' compiler is its own reward. I guess things are different on product teams?
I work for cloud products. I cannot say much about others, but at least urs is the best technical infrastructure leader but not a good choice for cloud leader. Many people on customer engineering side also share the same feeling with me. Business is complicated. You cannot be narcissus forever.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they're a lot stronger than you think. True, Search and Ads is still their bread and butter, but: Their search engine is really hard to replace, not just because of the quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and has the largest mindshare of any website on the internet. Android is "the" platform pretty much everyone accesses the internet. Cl…
> Android is "the" platform pretty much everyone accesses the internet. Not really. Windows still exists, as does iOS.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#148Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…
I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…
I've had a similar feeling about how our society deals with people who don't fit in in this way (non-productive), and it's a fun thing to play around with in your head because in a loose way it undercuts a key selling point of organizing your society capitalistically like ours: during the cold war, it was like "yeah well you Soviets just give every lazy bastard some meaningless quasi-task in a widget factory or in so…
AKA people invent novel ways to support themselves when the alternative is starving in the street