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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#191

Post by lmm »

tavavex wrote: post #114
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's like 30% correct. Before, hiring someone from Google was an accomplishment, because they were so rare. Now, there's so many people with Google on their resume, most refusing to downsize in TC, that even mediocre positions are filled with ex-Google applicants.

Is that really because Google workers are seen as worse employees (like what the original post said), or just because the job market is now suddenly loaded with thousands of Google employees who'd just been laid off?

The one pretty directly suggests the other.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#192

Post by wyclif »

aspenmayer wrote: post #173
tonfa wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. Buchheit was asked to work on it.

I thought Gmail or its predecessor was a third party/acquihire situation?

No, Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He also developed AdSense as part of Gmail.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#193

Post by andromeduck »

foofie wrote: post #162
nicoburns wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies

> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies. It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.

just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out

Re: Culture Change at Google

#194

Post by antupis »

adrianN wrote: post #164
Ntrails wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.

both had slump but I think Facebook has been much better shape after Zuck did layoffs and pivoted away from metaverse. Llama and Meta Smart Glasses both feel like groundbreaking products.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#195

Post by robertlagrant »

_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…

> Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.

Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#196

Post by why_only_15 »

rightbyte wrote: post #93
Uehreka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code at Google3 is one giant monolith I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo. Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there…

Ye, like, is there a google.exe at 3912GB with 10k command line options like '--search-server --port=80' or '--Gsolitaire'?

no, there are thousands of Blaze build files that each have their own binaries, tests, libraries, etc.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#197

Post by mciancia »

choppaface wrote: post #108
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the real answer is to join the next Google.. :) OpenAI?

Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...

Is that bad?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#198

Post by ankit219 »

hintymad wrote: post #67

Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate. > he most incredible and u…

From the outside, it looks like many in the industry assumed Covid-induced changes would be permanent. They hired accordingly, beefed up their headcount and in the process ended up getting a lot of talent which wouldn't have gotten in pre-pandemic. Once you recalibrate, you are not left with much choices.

I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#199

Post by rayxi271828 »

gws wrote: post #106

“The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else” I wish they had valued users above all else

> wish they had valued users above all else

My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.

I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?

Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...

The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".

The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#200

Post by Radim »

saiya-jin wrote: post #119
tavavex wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the characterization is unfair to generative AI, because the information that is retained in the model is a very lossy and rough generalization of the training data - that situation is a lot less direct than what it's like with search engines. In my mind, the lawsuits against search engines have a lot more ground to stand on. Saying that something "provides access to copyrighted content" almost implies that t…

Well, you certainly have right to your opinion, as do others to theirs. Law is the ultimate arbiter as usually.

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law"

Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.

It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.

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