More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by ptd » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 8:51 AM UTC

345tw4erfd wrote: post #168

ptd wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a better way of making sure someone can actually code? It’s easy to take credit for past projects when it’s unclear how much help you had or what part you played. Isn’t the best way to judge a candidate asking them to create/produce something for you?

IMHO a better way would be: - A non-trivial take-home exercise and give them a week or two to complete. This should have higher weight on the decision instead of the "Google doc coding" as most likely that's the type of code they'll be shipping to production. - Use the onsite interviews to improve upon the exercise and/or to get into the nitty gritty details, and also to make sure this is the type of person people wo…

I personally hate take home tests that you aren’t compensated for, but I see your point. As to your last point, depends on your definition of “couldn’t code”. I think we tend to give the hiring and HR at companies like google too much credit. Things still slip through the cracks, especially at an organization of that size.

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

#182

Post by tjpnz » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 8:58 AM UTC

bseidensticker wrote: post #174

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'll need to do significantly more than just that.

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

#183

Post by sildur » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:00 AM UTC

logjammin wrote: post #85

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…

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…

I have been thinking on this. From a capitalist point of view, an Universal Basic Income may be useful to remove non-productive people from companies. I think the productivity increase (because non-productive people tend to drag productive people around them) May very well offset the costs.

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

#184

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:03 AM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #94

joshuamorton wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urs is decent at being a technical lead. He'd make a great CTO if Google had one (and in many ways I think he is the unofficial CTO), but he's not at all a good leader when it comes to non-technical things, for a variety of reasons. I think you'd very quickly realize you didn't actually want him as CEO. To give him credit, from what I've seen, he's very aware of these shortcomings and as you say, he'd refuse.

Even on the "shortcomings" he'd be FAR better than Larry could ever hope to be, and Larry wasn't the worst CEO in the world. It's funny how the two very different companies go through the same tribulations, but it's true: Sundar is Google's Ballmer IMO, albeit a more polished version. Larry is Google's Gates, but less ruthless. Compare this to the current Google which is basically run by an ex-McKinsey type of person…

> Urs has as good a bullshit filter and ethics as I've ever seen in an SVP, and he's not "slimy"

That's precisely why he's not CEO material (for that matter, this is why Larry was a shitty CEO as well). Being CEO of a large multinational requires an amount of dissembling and two-faced-ness that few engineers (and certainly not engineers with integrity) are comfortable with. You're trying to balance the interests of literally billions of people, many of whose interest are not aligned, many of whom have widely disparate power levels, and some of whom are driven by cutthroat ambitious egos who would promptly chop your head off if you let them. If any one of those groups had a true picture of what the other parts of the system really thought of them, they would promptly cease to do business with them (at best) or erupt in outright warfare (at worst). Thus, it requires telling a different set of truths to each group, based on what they want to hear, and hoping that they never compare notes.

When they do compare notes, you get news stories like Project Maven, Project Dragonfly, the compensation memo, and so on.

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

#185

Post by tanilama » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:05 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #172

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…

Why would not having a CTO symbolize Google's strategy shift from tech? Google has more than enough talented tech visionaries at high levels in each of its sub organizations, probably overpopulated with such.

I don't think Google lacks tech direction, quite on the contrary, they still excel and way ahead of the crowds. But they don't have a strategy to make money off from those technologies, other than limited venues like advertising/play store. But that is nothing CTO can solve.

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

#186

Post by mav3rick » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:11 AM UTC

kurtisc wrote: post #179

mav3rick wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many people in each of those ?

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

#187

Post by mav3rick » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #180

mav3rick wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & va…

Right Google is losing in ML or not caught up to speed ? I don't know when you left but even outside Google it's pretty much known that ML innovation is Google's strength.

Two big teams use Rust at Google in production. I guess Google didn't make the TPU or Tensor Flow as well. Take your pitch forks out but once you're done have a look at some facts.

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

#188

Post by whiskyant » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

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 depends on the large tech company. If you try that at Facebook or Netflix for example, you'll be out on your ass pretty quick.

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

#189

Post by mav3rick » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #180

mav3rick wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & va…

Microsoft's hiring pretty much went down the drain because there was no common hiring bar. I can point different orgs with different level of devs. This is not the case at Google no matter how much HN complains about Google it consistently hires smart and above average engineers. Google is growing, it will meet its challenges, wait and watch.

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

#190

Post by 345tw4erfd » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

ptd wrote: post #181

345tw4erfd wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO a better way would be: - A non-trivial take-home exercise and give them a week or two to complete. This should have higher weight on the decision instead of the "Google doc coding" as most likely that's the type of code they'll be shipping to production. - Use the onsite interviews to improve upon the exercise and/or to get into the nitty gritty details, and also to make sure this is the type of person people wo…

I personally hate take home tests that you aren’t compensated for, but I see your point. As to your last point, depends on your definition of “couldn’t code”. I think we tend to give the hiring and HR at companies like google too much credit. Things still slip through the cracks, especially at an organization of that size.

One thing I do with take-home exercises after I'm done interviewing with a company is adapting them and then open-sourcing them (obviously removing identifying information about the company). This has really helped me and I have more side projects to show later on. With that said, I've gone above and beyond with the implementation of these exercises so typically many of them are worth open-sourcing.