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

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

#171

Post by logjammin »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #149
logjammin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lol yes

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

#172

Post by jillesvangurp »

Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for both founders who acted in a duo CTO role.

Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem is that their current CEO is not filling the CTO boots very well and that's a problem because there is no CTO. It's showing. Google's strategy is fine from a financial point of view but less so from a technical point of view.

A bit like MS under Balmer. In fact, Google is starting to act a lot like MS a decade ago; including being arrogant, increasingly isolated, and somewhat tone deaf. I like them a lot less than 10 years ago. Of course Balmer added a whole other level of surreal to the mix that is thankfully missing here. Looking at MS today, they turned things around quite a bit and their current CEO is in an entirely different league than Google's CEO. That's the problem they need to fix. He's alright but not great. They need great. Pichar isn't. That's what those numbers are saying.

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

#173

Post by crag »

vl wrote: post #7

Wait, our CEO has a vision? Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons: De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the reporting structure in the last few years (ie endless layers of middle management). Both of these make consistent vision and values much harder to achieve. Recent Googlegeist just reflects that.

Layers of middle management always sucks the life out of companies. And indeed governments. Try working for a bank, and you'll see exactly what I am talking about.

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

#174

Post by bseidensticker »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #146
azurezyq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read cracking the coding interview and do a few problems from each section. Make sure to cover dynamic programming. I spent about a month and I was very well prepared.

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

#175

Post by mav3rick »

osrec wrote: post #63
goldenchrome wrote: post #40

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…

It's not the same as a bank. Google is far far ahead of that. HN seems to have pitch forks for anything Google. It's the only company that let's you openly engage with the CEO and hold them accountable.

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

#176

Post by gvand »

kappi wrote: post #32
hcnews wrote: post #8

Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven. I guess Google at this point just keep churning through systems because Engineers are incentivized to show impact and rarely end up creating new good products. Adding tons of new engineers is also probably hurting their overall quality and velocity.

It is a paradox that Google who boasts themselves to be very technical, gave CEO job to someone who was never software engineeer or written single line of code. His path to fame initially was product management of IE plugin. Smart enough to suck up to founders and give a perception of no threat to them, assured his path to the throne by kicking down others and grabbing successful projects from other leaders.

This is exactly what I thought when I saw that the guy that did those lame demos on ChromeOS during I/O had just became CEO. And my opinion hasn't changed since that, yes, he's a non-threatening kind of guy and for most that aligns with their shallow definition of nice, but other that this? From the outside I can't really see anything else (and so maybe I should keep my opinions to myself).

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

#177

Post by Kovah »

Mr_P wrote: post #41
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct). I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of remind…

If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products actually kind-of makes sense. Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't. The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long to derisk a new prod…

From a business perspective, Google's way to work with products makes totally sense, as you described. But - and that's that problem I have with Google - from a user perspective, their way to work is unprofessional. Why did this become an internet meme? Because all the projects they launch are launched with a lot of loud tam tam, they advertise them and for new users it clearly feels like this new product is here to stay - only to find out two years later that the product will be cut off. People start to use this new fancy app which is marketed to be the "next big thing". And then later some product manager thinks that it may be not worth to continue working on it.

IMO if Google really wants to try out new things, they should make these things invite-only to find out if they are working and how users interact with it, or clearly mark them as 'beta' or something like that. Google has a huge fan base and the internet is full of people excited to try out new things. But if users clearly see "hey, this is kind of a beta product, I am just testing this out" there would be way less disappointment if the product shuts down after a while.

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

#179

Post by kurtisc »

mav3rick wrote: post #175
osrec wrote: 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…

It's not the same as a bank. Google is far far ahead of that. HN seems to have pitch forks for anything Google. It's the only company that let's you openly engage with the CEO and hold them accountable.

>It's the only company that let's you openly engage with the CEO and hold them accountable.

That's a very big claim.

I can instant message mine. And I still have my last one's personal mobile number.

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

#180

Post by nostrademons »

mav3rick wrote: post #136
vl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All corporations grow, decay and rot on the similar trajectories, so in this sense it's similar. I worked at MS at this time, and I think BigG now is like MS in 2003 roughly speaking. I'm waiting for miniggl to appear, then the circle will be complete. :)

Having worked at both. Google is far far ahead. Any young dev reading this, you will get good engineering foundations at Google that will keep you in good stead for the future.

People said the same thing about Microsoft in the late 1990s - The Windows NT kernel was supposedly a thing of beauty, while Cairo was way ahead of its time. Problem is, computer science advances, so the type of programming that was state-of-the-art in the 1990s paled in comparison with what Google developed 10 years later. And the Google stack of 2003 is remarkably outdated by 2018 standards.

As a Xoogler I use & value the engineering chops I learned at Google every day, but I'm not naive enough to think that'll last forever. There are some really exciting developments in multiple areas of computer science - notably blockchains, Rust, GPGPU, serverless - that Google is poorly positioned to take advantage of, as well as others (machine learning, search, big data, distributed systems, capability security) that Google has historically been the market leader at but that are rapidly being commoditized by very high quality open-source projects.

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