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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

#251

Post by est »

analogmemory wrote: post #10
prepend wrote: post #2

What is Sundar’s vision? I’m not quite sure and I think I’m pretty aware of google’s goings on through media and such.

According to some search results ... it's > “Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the “device” to fade away. Over time, the computer itself — whatever its form factor — will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world” https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/sundar-...

that's a cool vision, but I am not sure how would that make money?

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

#252

Post by apathy »

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?

Urs and Jeff were amazing. Something has changed though. Granted it’s been 15 years since I worked there, but some of the incredible spark that used to be there seems to have gone out.

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

#253

Post by kurtisc »

izacus wrote: post #232
kurtisc wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. It has nothing to do with the topic though. Google are an order of magnitude less than Volkswagen.

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

#254

Post by apathy »

dasmoth wrote: post #191
jpm_sd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things. (Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)

Those were pretty much the only reasons I continued to admire Google for as long as I did. They gave hope that the company might one day have a meaningful consumer revenue stream that isn’t advertising. They’ve gone for “cloud services” instead. Drastically, drastically, less inspiring — and also pretty competitive. What happens if Amazon drop their prices a bit?

AWS accounts for something like half of Amazon’s operating revenue. It may not be exciting but it is a license to print money. Why wouldn’t google (and MSFT, and anyone else with a big sunk investment in data centers) want to monetize their investment too?

Originally bezos was pissed off that Amazon’s excess capacity for the Black Friday/Christmas surge was going to waste the other 50 weeks of the year. I suspect that’s a pretty powerful motivation. But google absorbs huge spikes too (9/11 was one of the first harbingers of this) so it seemed inevitable, even back then, that they’d do it eventually.

Fighting the momentum of entire markets and hoping a muse settles on your shoulder isn’t a sustainable business strategy for most companies, let alone very large public companies.

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

#255

Post by brobdingnagians »

I think, sometimes, people at the top forget that there are a lot of talented people who got the company where it is today. THey believe they can reorganize however they want and it will turn out well, but ultimately you have to keep attracting top talent and motivating them. It is harder for tech people to get motivated about ad sales than about cool tech (heck, that's why a lot of startups are terrible at sales). It may be their main revenue source and source of growth, but it probably doesn't fire up the imagination as much as what they used to do.

Edit: Although, I do believe they still do a lot of cool things, and that is a strong point, but it seems ... different than before.

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

#256

Post by jandrewrogers »

mav3rick wrote: post #175
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…

It's not the same as a bank. Google is far far ahead of that. HN seems to have pitch forks for anything Google. It's the only company that let's you openly engage with the CEO and hold them accountable.

This isn't that unusual. Being able to text the mobile of the CEO of tech companies with 10k employees -- and get quickly get a response -- is something I've used more than once. Not every big company is like this but I suspect it is more common than you might expect. At least in tech, this is an expectation of the role.

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

#258

Post by dekhn »

Sundar is a consumer products guy. Great for social and chrome and android. he's not a cloud guy or a tech infra guy. He also is completely unable to handle challenging situations head on and will cancel meetings if something is even remotely controversial. that's a sign of a poor leader.

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

#259

Post by dekhn »

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.

deep learning at google was due to distbelief, not deepmind. deepmind brought reinforcement learning.

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

#260

Post by DanCarvajal »

tehlike wrote: post #109
wvenable wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list seems awfully incomplete compared to: https://killedbygoogle.com/ Your list is missing some high profile products like Google Allo and Chromecast Audio.

I dont think chromecast audio was a high profile product. Allo is overhyped, from day 1.

The Chromecast audio got replaced by the Home Mini for the average consumer looking for a Google audio product.
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