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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#261

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

eslaught wrote: post #123
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…

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…

> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."

Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#262

Post by antipaul »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #183
hot_gril wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don't even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom, OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder. Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves faster than we do! I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.

Yes, Microsoft really re-invented itself. Maybe Google can turn itself around too after a decade or two of malaise.

But Microsoft reinvented itself with precisely leadership change in Satya, right?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#263

Post by dilyevsky »

janmo wrote: post #242

"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 pro…

I doubt that retail adsense is very large - it’s probably mostly large enterprise deals where you do get your personal poc for support and whatnot

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#264

Post by riku_iki »

occz wrote: post #103

Sad times. If not Google, what's the place to be nowadays? Has high interest rates killed tech as a great place to work in entirely, or is there any oasis left?

it is also industry maturing, there are tons of people came to the industry in the latest years because of money and not because of passion about tech.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#265

Post by throwaway678808 »

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 worked in the org that Jeanine now runs. It had a series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level.

To call out Jeanine and only Jeanine in language this harsh feels wrong. From my recollection and from what I have heard from people still working there, she is par for the course.

Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#266

Post by KerryJones »

NanoYohaneTSU wrote: post #248
willsmith72 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know her (nor do I presume to know her), but if I take your definition of "bad" as in "morally bad" (you used it in the context of evil), that feels pretty presumptuous, and then fairly attacking to assume the commenter is "defending the bad". There are so many people who end up half-assing their jobs in various ways, I think it's a pretty slippery slope to start calling those people "bad". They may be bad at their job, but I wouldn't call them bad people.

I also don't have enough information to say she's "not" a bad person, but with the information given, I don't see anything that would indicate she is one.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#268

Post by willsmith72 »

NanoYohaneTSU wrote: post #248
willsmith72 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly my point. There is no way the public has information about whether the person is bad or good, just 1 disgruntled employee's impression of their job performance.

There's more to life and a person than a job. That's all. Even the worst managers I've had have been good people. They're good dads and mums, enjoy hiking and camping.

Public statements like this one are easy to make, impossible to verify or challenge, and only cause hurt

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#269

Post by pardoned_turkey »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #243
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…

Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more than that.

For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.

Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#270

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway678808 wrote: post #265
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 worked in the org that Jeanine now runs. It had a series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level. To call out Jeanine and only Jeanine in language this harsh feels wrong. From my recollection and from what I have heard from people still working there, she is par for the course. Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in…

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