There is mandatory training for CEOs to always be positive unless there is a very good reason not to. What did you expect him to say? "Yes, moral is low and all the good people are leaving" ?
You can communicate, even in difficult situations, sincerely, genuinely, and truthfully, while providing good leadership. That is a manager's job description, effectively.
That’s only theory. In reality, people who spin everything in a positive light survive longer in a big organization.
> A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy.
I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
>Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it. >FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber. I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And…
There's an easy solution here: Offer both! Google can afford to offer two kinds of document editors, and it would make the entire GSuite infinitely more valuable and enjoyable to me. I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
Which can be the formula for adding another layer of features that 1% (or whatever) of users care about.
"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed
People always talk about these things as if they are mutually exclusive. In reality, there’s lot of opportunities that benefit all 3 of user, Google, and decision maker. it’s kind of the fundamental principle of trade/business - that both sides can proper in a deal.
That's nice in theory, but can you say that Google does things that actually achieve that trifecta?
With >150,000 employees, I think they can probably do both
I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search. Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
WoW, I thought my VPN failed (to properly traverse the GFW) when the date filter just didn’t show up on iOS.
>Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it. >FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber. I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And…
There's an easy solution here: Offer both! Google can afford to offer two kinds of document editors, and it would make the entire GSuite infinitely more valuable and enjoyable to me. I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
Want me to really bake your noodle?
Ready?
It has Markdown mode as an option.
Peak HN, perfectly executed:
- "it's obvious my pet peeve feature X should be added to Y, the company in the article".
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse ? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too. > Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Google Docs has some of the most cur…
> FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
This exactly hard on Google's caliber.
Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.
> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse ? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too. > Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Google Docs has some of the most cur…
>> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. > How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too. To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but unt…
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
I actually don't have a problem with Google myself. I love gmail and I use Google FI for my cellphone service. I agree their security has been fantastic. The only criticism I have for them is that they give up too easily on their new ideas. They're known for not seeing anything new through. And, while they saw things like Android and Gmail through to the bitter end, it has been a long time since they've had a win like that. Bard is impressive, but they were late to the game. Which is ironic, since they pioneered the research that made LLMs possible. They're very careful and don't take risks. To win big, you have to risk big. And, when you're as big as Google you stop taking the big risks. I think if I had any advice for them, it would be to create and announce a new accelerator to fund new startups. Something exciting with lots and lots of cash behind it to whip up innovation. They can steer that and ride the success of all the ventures that it starts. They have some funds but they're pretty low key about them. Companies like Nvidia have been funding some pretty impressive stuff with their accelerator. It is about how much noise you generate with that kind of thing.