The main thing that Google has meant to me over the past few years is a company that has had all the fun sucked out of it and become, from its extreme power, a politicized environment where its decisions reshape the world so much that an endless army of people from outside the company want to control what's going on within it. I think Larry and Sergei got sick of that and went on to other things and let Sundar handle the B.S.
More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
231–240 of 348 posts
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many people in each of those ?
Nx1000 in the current one, a company you've definitely heard of and used, Nx10 in the last one, which you haven't and you haven't. FAANG aren't the only companies.
So at least an order of magnitude less than any of the Google competitors?
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#233Arguably, 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…
For example a CTO could say unilaterally "no, we won't help build the great search firewall for China".
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#234I used to love them, now I avoid them like the plague. If possible I do not use any Google products.
Yeah me too. They’ve made it a lot easier on me by killing off the two products that I still enjoyed, inbox and hangouts. Thanks Google! You made the transition easier then expected. Even if I did have a shred of trust for google, why would I invest myself into a new product of theirs? They’ll just kill it off
They broke my YouTube account a number of years ago in an attempt to force Google+ across their systems and artificially inflate user numbers.
Yesterday I got an email from them saying that they are nuking my Google+.
I will always remember that series of events as one of the most hostile acts of aggression against users that I have ever experienced.
That changed my perspective of Google as a company and I'm not sure that they can ever regain the positive perception that they lost due to those hostile actions.
Now their dominance with Chrome is leading them to make similarly hostile actions: breaking webaudio, attempting to "do away with URLs," forcing unwanted shit on our Internet.
Arrogance is the right word for it.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#235Arguably, 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.
They have many visions and no cohesion and no one technical with wide-sweeping power apparently. That's how you get Hangouts + Google Meet + Allo, and evidently, how China gets it's great search blocker. It feels to me like there are many divisions and teams and no one in charge of the collective, from a technical point of view. So yeah, kind of like microsoft in recent years. A many-headed hydra. Cut off a head, grow a new privacy or ethics violation.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked at both. Google is far far ahead. Any young dev reading this, you will get good engineering foundations at Google that will keep you in good stead for the future.
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…
ok I'll bite: what are the exciting developments in blockchains that google is missing out on
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#237Arguably, 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…
I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achievin…
To be fair, they only lead the world in AI because they bought DeepMind.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve had that experience before as well. What always surprises me is how upper management overlooks the opportunity to pocket more money for themselves by cost-cutting the net negative employees. Too often the ones who do it go overboard and completely gut the company to death instead of just making it more effective and profitable. For example, a company with 5,000 employees might have about 500 positions that could…
Companies do this frequently. It's the annual "Cisco is laying off 7400 employees" or "E-bay is laying off 5000 employees" or "Microsoft is laying off 13,000 employees", where each time the number is suspiciously close to 10% of the company. Commenters on HN usually assume this means that X is in trouble, but really it's a way to get rid of the bottom 10% of the company while passing the cost on to the state's unempl…
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Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally hate take home tests that you aren’t compensated for, but I see your point. As to your last point, depends on your definition of “couldn’t code”. I think we tend to give the hiring and HR at companies like google too much credit. Things still slip through the cracks, especially at an organization of that size.
One thing I do with take-home exercises after I'm done interviewing with a company is adapting them and then open-sourcing them (obviously removing identifying information about the company). This has really helped me and I have more side projects to show later on. With that said, I've gone above and beyond with the implementation of these exercises so typically many of them are worth open-sourcing.
Great Point. This is the right approach,as I have come to realize.
Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
#240Arguably, 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…
I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achievin…
Google's current vision is to try and shape/control the tech landscape to a point where you have to pay them to be found, distributed on or otherwise operate over the internet. They would like to have all search, social interaction and business services to be transacted or facilitated by them, so they can make money from it. That's at direct odds with all the missions you just stated, and is inevitble because of where the dollars ultimately come from.