Live data from Hacker News

More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

bloomberg.com

141–150 of 348 posts

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#141
post #56

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.

Speaking as someone who was the caregiver for both my parents as they aged, good lord would it have been wonderful if I could have been able to offload some of those tasks to a 'bot while I enjoyed the remaining time I had with my folks.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#143

Earlier 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?

The fire phone begat the teams that build Alexa and Go so I’d say we are doing pretty well.

Disclaimer - work in Alexa

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#144
post #17

Having 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.

LinkedIn, Netflix. Also if you evaluate stock reasonably, AirBnB, Lyft, Pinterest.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#145

Earlier 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.

> 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.

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

#146

Earlier 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.

I'm considering applying there. Any hint/help? username @ gmail. Thanks.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#147

Earlier 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.

More people use mobile devices than desktops.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#148
post #63

Don'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…

Some suggest that a company should not exceed Dunbar's number (150). They say that when a company grown it should split up and work together as two companies to be productive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#149
post #63

Earlier 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…

> We in the West, otoh, have purpose and let our people put themselves to better use!"

AKA people invent novel ways to support themselves when the alternative is starving in the street

Post reply on HN