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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

#191

Post by dasmoth »

jpm_sd wrote: post #56
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.

Also, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things. (Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)

Those were pretty much the only reasons I continued to admire Google for as long as I did. They gave hope that the company might one day have a meaningful consumer revenue stream that isn’t advertising.

They’ve gone for “cloud services” instead. Drastically, drastically, less inspiring — and also pretty competitive. What happens if Amazon drop their prices a bit?

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

#192

Post by ck425 »

doorbellguy wrote: post #133
john_moscow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more about transitioning from the founder-type CEO driven by vision to the maintainer-type CEO who only cares about pleasing the board to keep his position as long as possible.

Reminds me of Cook after Jobs.

Tbf while Cook doesn't have the product vision of Jobs, he does have a clear strategic/what we want Apple to be vision. He's a post founder CEO for sure, but one of the best and a different league from Pichai by all accounts.

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

#193

Post by jillesvangurp »

tanilama wrote: post #185
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…

I'd say Google is showing signs of too many captains on the ship when it comes to tech. I'm not going to bore you with all the examples that are being cited elsewhere in this thread but there are plenty of things where people are raising eyebrows lately.

A CTO's role is to provide clarity internally and externally on what a company is doing technically. In absence of a CTO, that role is for the CEO. Pichar is not enough of a credible leader on this front.

E.g. Steve Jobs was a clear visionary leader. Bill Gates was a clear technical founder CEO. They did not need CTOs. Amazon has an effective business oriented CEO that defers to a very strong CTO (Werner Vogels) for technical things.

AWS is no accident; that requires technical leadership (Vogels) and long term strategic thinking (Bezos). Google just got leapfrogged by MS in the same space. I'd argue lack of leadership is a big reason.

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

#194

Post by zozbot123 »

trixie_ wrote: post #19

Google's Achilles heel is search and ad revenue (80%). Which is sad because they've been trying to diversify and find another major source of income for 20 years now. If a better search engine comes along and people switch over, then google won't be able to maintain its empire and it could fold, or how would you like to pay $10 a month for a GMail and Google Maps combo access package? It could happen a lot easier and…

> If a better search engine comes along and people switch over

People are lazy. It's hard to deny that Bing and DDG are "better" in many ways, but how often does that matter? Most searches are simple and mindless - where any search provider will give you good results. Google has optimized for this use case.

> how would you like to pay $10 a month for a GMail and Google Maps combo access package?

Isn't $10/mo slightly above what Google Suite costs, per individual user? I would argue that it's already happening - if Google services are important enough to you that them denying you service would bring serious trouble, you need either Google Suite or to pay for a competitor - either way, providing them a meaningful incentive to keep you around. "Free" services are just not something you should ever rely on.

Same goes for other big service providers like Facebook, Twitter or Amazon's retail service, of course - if you can't even pay for meaningful support, you must have some sort of contingency plan and diversify the stuff you rely on. It didn't used to be like that, but Google and other big Internet properties have matured and lost a lot of their inherent "slack", even as our reliance on them may have increased - and that loss of slack could come back to bite you in the ass.

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

#195

Post by sillyguy123 »

tanilama wrote: post #185
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…

You are right in your views of them having enough technical leadership.

The main difference I can assume is when you look to 1 or 2 (founders)equal leaders to set vision it’s easier to get behind than however many VPs they have(today).

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

#196

Post by riffraff »

Baeocystin wrote: post #141
felipemnoa wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

forgive me for asking, but why not hire a caretaker/nurse?

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

#197

Post by nostrademons »

mav3rick wrote: post #187
nostrademons wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not losing, but commoditized - in those fields, there are now perfectly good open-source alternatives.

I was at Google from 2009-2014. When I joined, Google was literally the only place you could work if you wanted to do data science on web-scale data sets. Nobody else had the infrastructure or the data. Now if you want to do Search, ElasticSearch has basically the same algorithms & data structures as Google's search server, with Dremel + some extra features thrown in. (The default ranking algorithm continues to suck, though.) If you want to do deep learning, you reach for Keras, and it'll use TensorFlow behind the scenes but with a much more fluent API. Hadoop was a major PITA to use when I joined Google; now in many ways it's easier & more robust than MapReduce, and the ecosystem has many more tools. Spark compares well with Flume. Zookeeper over Chubby. There are a number of NoSQL databases that operate on the same principle as BigTable, though I'd pick BigTable over them for robustness. Take your pick of HTML5 parsers (I even wrote and open-sourced one while I was at Google). Google was struggling mightily with headless WebKit for JS execution when I left, now you can stand up a Splash proxy in minutes or use one of the many SaaS versions. Protobufs, Bazel, gRPC, LevelDB have all been open-sourced, as have many other projects.

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

#198

Post by riffraff »

john_moscow wrote: post #31
Cyclone_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In both cases they went from being run by a CEO who had experience as an engineer to someone with more of a business background

I think it's more about transitioning from the founder-type CEO driven by vision to the maintainer-type CEO who only cares about pleasing the board to keep his position as long as possible.

Ballmer was employee #30 at microsoft. While not technically a founder, he had been with the company 20 years out its 25 years of existence before becoming MSFT's CEO.

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

#199

Post by scottlocklin »

mav3rick wrote: post #187
nostrademons wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They kicked off the deep learning trend when they bought deep mind I guess. Otherwise what innovation are you talking about?

Switching from KNN to DL in machine translations is impressive as a technical achievement ... but not really an innovation, and I doubt all this "innovation" impacts their bottom line in any way.

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

#200

Post by gandutraveler »

Google's hiring quality is so low now a days. I knew how they used to only hire the best engineers. You could spot the difference between a Googler and others. But now I see almost anyone getting a job offer. I got one too :)

Formula for large tech companies growth is to just scale by adding engineers.

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