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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#181

Post by lmm »

flklklklkl wrote: post #97

Whenever I see posts like these, whether for Google, or any other company, I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all els…

> I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?

Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)

Re: Culture Change at Google

#182

Post by KineticLensman »

poisonborz wrote: post #121
zamfi wrote: post #24

Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you st…

Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.

> no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine

I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#183

Post by lmm »

closeparen wrote: post #79
heads wrote: post #2

Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else. There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So mayb…

It’s hard to imagine an absence of resource anxiety in the land of the six figure mortgage payment. Must have been incredible. Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.

Everyone else's salary is going up at the same rate, more and more jobs are there, and it's de facto illegal to build any more housing anywhere nearby. Of course house prices are growing without limit.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#184

Post by Aeolun »

_xivi wrote: post #179
LarsDu88 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.

> yet they[Valve] crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died. Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you…

I think he’s talking about the Index and their new Linux console

Re: Culture Change at Google

#185

Post by Aeolun »

Eisenstein wrote: post #174
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve also has much better hackers than Facebook.

Since VR was mentioned tangentially, how many 'Valve hackers' is one John Carmack worth?

Zero, right now, as he’s not working with Facebook any more.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#186

Post by jasode »

fuzztester wrote: post #159
0xpgm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do. SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute [ In J…

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:

No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025

Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...

Re: Culture Change at Google

#187

Post by knorker »

dash2 wrote: post #166

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground." Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

> I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).

Re: Culture Change at Google

#188

Post by lnxg33k1 »

I don't think the part of attacking big targets works in this context, I would care very little about Google and its culture, it's not my business and people who work there decide to stay there autonomously

The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.

For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares

Re: Culture Change at Google

#189

Post by Aeolun »

dash2 wrote: post #166

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground." Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

It seems like things were fine for the engineers when they ran things?

What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#190

Post by pgeorgi »

dash2 wrote: post #166

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground." Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

Google was most successful when it was "like a giant grad-school". Its downward trajectory coincides with it being run by McKinsey alums.
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