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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

#211

Post by lordnacho »

pasta wrote: post #148
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…

Some suggest that a company should not exceed Dunbar's number (150). They say that when a company grown it should split up and work together as two companies to be productive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

But people need to take up some of their 150 with connections outside of work. Quite a lot if you have a few family and friends. What does that say about the ideal size of teams?

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

#212

Post by Baeocystin »

mac01021 wrote: post #202
riffraff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those are expensive. And their presence compromises your family's privacy.

Exactly. We were already hemorrhaging money, and skilled nursing care for even a few hours a week is incredibly expensive. Not to mention you now have a stranger in your home, and without going in to details, we caught some very unsavory behavior via IP Camera with one of the caregivers we'd hired early on.

It's just an incredibly stressful time in a family's life, no matter how you cut it.

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

#213

Post by bertil »

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…

Not an insider, but I was under the impression that Jeff Dean was that visionary. He seems to focus on AI, which sounds like a conscious pivot from Google. Have I missed something?

It’s likely that anyone who works on other projects might feel left out and that would explain your reaction and the article.

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

#214

Post by lordnacho »

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…

> So your observation reminded me that our society has plenty of people on a similar sort of hidden dole:

This is why everyone wants to be university educated. The great bulk of "respectable" office jobs require no real skill or effort, just some cultural knowledge about how to talk like you're contributing.

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

#215

Post by feanaro »

mac01021 wrote: post #202
riffraff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those are expensive. And their presence compromises your family's privacy.

I'm afraid having Google's robot butlers around all the time wouldn't do wonders for privacy either.

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

#216

Post by saurabh20n »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #87
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.

Honestly as a Googler I neither saw nor needed the vision of Larry, Sergey, Eric, Sundar, or anyone else except maybe Urs, Jeff, and Sanjay. I mean I worked on the C++ toolchain. Making a bitchin' compiler is its own reward. I guess things are different on product teams?

Honest question: does the current Google have the environment to innovate on the next generation of compilers/PL/program synthesizers?

I would have definitely said yes back in the day; but not so sure now.

(Admittedly might be biased. I'm the founder of Synthetic Minds. We're building program synthesizers; basically all compilers work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19059922)

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

#217

Post by lotsofpulp »

pasta wrote: post #148
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…

Some suggest that a company should not exceed Dunbar's number (150). They say that when a company grown it should split up and work together as two companies to be productive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Given that large organizations have an ever increasingly larger share of revenue and power in the world, it doesn’t seem like it would be in the interest of the organization’s leaders or equity owners to have it split up.

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

#218

Post by paganel »

Mr_P wrote: post #41
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct). I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of remind…

If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products actually kind-of makes sense. Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't. The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long to derisk a new prod…

Google Photos is definitely not a success from my POV, sure it’s a nice product but they killed Panoramio because of it and most importantly most of the data behind Panoramio is now lost. I personally don’t know what Duo is, I guess I’ll google it.

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

#220

Post by mav3rick »

scottlocklin wrote: post #199
mav3rick wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardware innovation in the Pixel Camera also uses ML. "Night Sight" is the result of work across teams
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