Reflecting on 18 Years at Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#251

Post by znpy » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

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 noticed that and it's a very strong point.

Taking such a strong stance is not something would so light-heartedly, i really wonder what went on to drive this person to write such harsh words about her.

Considering the amount of people the author has likely seen over 18 years and how many of them he could have complained about... It must not be a chance it's her specifically.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#252

Post by hnthrowaway0328 » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

t8sr wrote: post #35

hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it was the Alphabet saga? It's all like this. I have decided that if given the chance, I'd never work in companies with more than 1,000 persons.

Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it. One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to kee…

This sounds interesting. Maybe it's just me, but all 5000+ people companies (I actually only worked with 200+ or 5000+, never the middle so could be BS) I worked for are a lot of BS and politics. Again this is probably because me not good enough so that I don't get to do deep technical things that I want to do.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#253

Post by izacus » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

Elof wrote: post #212

paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader. That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google's share price.

IDK, if you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under the leadership of Satya over the last 9 years it's obviously possible to innovate and bean count at the same time

Yes, but that happened after they had Ballmer which was their own bean counting CEO.

And they noticed that that's a problem - something VERY FEW corporations figure out.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#254

Post by paxys » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #247

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.

They are getting "beat badly" only if you read tech blogs and not their financial statements.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#255

Post by munificent » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:44 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #96

potatopatch wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty silly thing to do whether or not you have perfect examples, and strange to follow that up with the fact that you've been offering career advice.. There's not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion out of something like that compared to the pretty personal ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the most constructive attempts look vindictive.

I also noticed the bit about offering career advice to people in Google, but I found it odd for a different reason. How can someone who's spent 18 years of their career (and I'm guessing, almost all of it) at Google possibly be qualified to give career advice? They can give excellent advice for working at Google. But if they haven't left the company in 18 years, then surely they don't have the experience to give usef…

> They can give excellent advice for working at Google.

My understanding is that that's the kind of mentoring he offerred, yes.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#256

Post by lapcat » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:44 PM UTC

> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.

> For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards (https://whatwg.org/). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google's interests).

I feel as though Hixie is lacking in self-awareness here. Googlers tend to be biased toward themselves and their own power. Have Googlers considered the possibility that the best thing for the web, and the world, is for Google to keep its grubby hands off the web? Is Google Search's dominant market share good for the web? And the market shares of Android, Chrome, and Gmail? I would answer no, no, no, no.

It's funny that Hixie mentions WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) as a "good" example. What actually happened is that Hixie was a ringleader in a coup d'état by the browser vendors to overthrow the W3C and take over the HTML standards. Is that good for the web, and the world? Here I would also say no.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#257

Post by starkparker » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

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…

The only thing I know her from is I/O, where she kicks off/MCs the dev keynotes. Her I/O bio says "VP and GM of Developer X" and "Head of Developer Relations", but I have no idea if "Developer X" is developer experience, or a reference to the old X skunkworks, or something else entirely.

EDIT: Dug a little more and it's the group formerly known as Developer Product. So Firebase, etc. makes sense. Successor to Jason Titus.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#258

Post by gorbachev » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #241

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, maintainin…

I don't think that's quite accurate.

There are genuinely amazing, highly respected executives in some (most?) tech companies.

I do agree though that the public facing image of a lot of them is a lot of hype. A lot of the big companies want to build an aura of infallible leader extraordinaire's for their management team.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#259

Post by ThrowawayB7 » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

pkasting wrote: post #10

As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this. It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the…

> "It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of..."

It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.

That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#260

Post by ivancho » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:48 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #129

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…

> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.) > And then…

Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.