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Google wants employees to move faster

cnbc.com

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Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#21

Post by roenxi »

paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

In fairness, he seems to effectively have CNBC reporters sitting in with the crowd at the company all-hands. He would probably come off the worse if he started saying things of substance. In his position I'd cancel the all-hands.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#23

Post by frob »

> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner"

Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit.

But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees.

"Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#24

Post by vrc »

angry_moose wrote: post #12
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

Yeah, we get the same crap constantly. “You have to be faster” “Ok, are you going to remove the mountains of red tape, reviews, and documentation that make a 2 week project take 16 weeks?” “Well, we can’t do that. Here’s a motivational story about boats”

I launched what was ostensibly a web analytics platform that was just an Google Sheet we shared with partners attached to a JavaScript snippet for webpages. Very lean and unusual for Google. But we had to use internal tools and libraries to ensure this tiny tool was “Google Scale” and were subject to company-wide deployment restrictions as well as PR-sensitive launch dates that took what was mocked up internally as a JavaScript MVP by one of our engineers in 1 week almost 10 months to launch formally and with the exact same shit MVP Google Sheets interface. This was a “no red tape” project where execs cleared a path as best they could.

Yeah…faster isn’t going to happen.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#25

Post by lupire »

What a clown. Should have thought about 10 minutes into the future before he hobbled the company by laying off staff and sending everyone rushing to the competition. When you're publicly admitting that the competition is eating your lunch, you need to use your $100B cash hoard to invest in catching up, paying people to take the risk on you instead of working for the winners.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#26

Post by Rinzler89 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #9
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

The whole underlying message of move faster is: We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.

>we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday

Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday?

Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google so they can rest and vest, which is what Google is famous for and makes it a very desirable place to work.

There was even a Googler's guide on Reddit a few years ago how to pretend to work from home while you play videogames all day and cash in 400k/year, with all the details on the theatrics needed to pass your peer performance review for years while working less than 20h/month, since nobody really checks in detail what your working on and why how long it should take, so you have a lot of avenues to pretend to look busy while relaxing.

Doesn't sounds like the place where you'd need to miss your kid's birthday to me, unless maybe you hate your family.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#27

Post by UncleMeat »

paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

Exactly. My experience at Google over the past two years has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so the net effect of all of this is that people move slower.

Google is still, IMO, a good place to work. But it has degraded considerably over the last several years and I've lost pretty much all faith in leadership above the Director level.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#28

Post by tyingq »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #26
nine_zeros wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole underlying message of move faster is: We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.

>we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday? Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google…

In the story, he calls out a team working 120 hours a week, after first ramping to 100 hours/week for a while...in what seems like a example he's wanting people to follow.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#29

Post by goalieca »

sgt101 wrote: post #7

He's got problems... He says his teams are working 120hrs a week, but he wants them to work more. I think that this is not going to happen!

I find this hilariously ironic considering Gemini was supposed to be all about equity and inclusion and that. This is a perfect example of an inclusive policy that supports 40 year single mothers and other people with different needs /s

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#30

Post by hawkice »

letmeinhere wrote: post #13
sgt101 wrote: post #7

He's got problems... He says his teams are working 120hrs a week, but he wants them to work more. I think that this is not going to happen!

I thought you must be misrepresenting the article, but no, its almost as bad as you said: > He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said. psychotic

But image generation doesn't matter. It's a fun toy but it's not part of any professional workflow they care about, doesn't impact long term strategic goals, etc. It's literally just PR mistake they're covering for.

Praise reveals priorities. They don't care about getting things right the first time. They don't care about important projects. That's the inference.

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