Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

ln.hixie.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 1001 posts

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#241

Post by tcbawo »

drubio wrote: post #117

> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently m…

I have come to the opinion that being an executive at any sufficiently large company revolves around building a cult of personality. Any contribution they make would be nearly impossible to compare against what a possible replacement candidate would make. This might be a fair or unfair characterization -- it might even be both! Building a personal brand by being a cheerleader for your company/organization, maintaining the image that you have everything figured out and everything is under control, while taking credit for building the world class team underneath you is essential.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#242

Post by janmo »

"Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter"

Seems like they fired the Google Adsense support team. I have been using Google Adsense for many years, and since last year there is no way of contacting any support, there IS NO WAY, I have lost over 10k in revenue because of it, and was only able to get my problem fixed after 2 months by joining a third party publisher network.

Keep in mind that Adsense is one of Google's main sources income, and that they take a 32% cut as an intermediary (So they have ample money to pay for a 5 star support)!

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#243

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

> Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.

Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#244

Post by worik »

A very interesting article

Very interesting they were working on Flutter

I have just spent 18 months with Dart, supporting Flutter development

I formed the view that Fludder (as I called it) was built by brilliant engineers who were directionless. As a replacement for Javascript it is an utter failure, sadly

Made this a very interesting read

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#245

Post by cubefox »

He doesn't mention it, but it is curious that Google has apparently also lost the lead in the AI race to OpenAI, after being unquestionably on top for many years. PaLM 2 was inferior to GPT-4, despite being younger, and Gemini is set to release a whole year later. What's going on?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#246

Post by emodendroket »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #222
emodendroket wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably right; I just don't really see what's to be gained by going public with it considering the complaints are pretty inside-baseball and not that interesting to outsiders (I mean, hard to imagine someone thinking "I'm not going to deal with Google because so-and-so's subordinates say they don't understand her strategy").

I will certainly not use Dart if a person in charge of its direction doesn't know what they're doing even at a basic level. I can't just blindly hope her team does what's best and doesn't listen to her.

It'd be hard to find an org where you couldn't find someone to make similar complaints.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#247

Post by downWidOutaFite »

paxys wrote: post #159

Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amo…

Google is getting beat badly on multiple fronts, even Search, and has pissed away a mountain of goodwill. It's living off of declining 15 year old achievements. I wouldn't call Sundar a steady hand, he has destroyed much more potential than he has created, even if the stock has continued to go up it won't for much longer. I sold a significant position in GOOG a few years ago and I'm certain it was the right call.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#248

Post by NanoYohaneTSU »

willsmith72 wrote: post #224
drubio wrote: post #117

> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently m…

Nothing kills motivation more than bad management, I can totally feel his pain. In saying that, I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do. She's just a person, doing a job.

You know people can be evil or at the least they can be bad people. Do you think this person is bad or good? My point is that when you say something like "She's just a person, doing a job." you're defending the bad rather than calling it out.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#249

Post by throitallaway »

LargeTomato wrote: post #128
aappleby wrote: post #48

12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done. Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left. The change in frankness and hones…

I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was. I left and from what I hear it just…

GCP has also been bringing in Oracle execs to run things. The results are very much so affecting our relationship with Google to the negative.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#250

Post by summerlight »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Yes, Google couldn't find a good way to scale out its early model. Talents are not something easy to scale out. Transparency is inherently in tension against confidentiality, and when you have lots of eyes then the latter tends to win unless you're comfortable of spending your daily life with all those media outlets. If you want to do the right thing, then you'll figure out that there's too many "right things" at its scale because there are too many people with different, conflicting goals. The list goes on.

Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.

But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.

Post reply on HN