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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#271

Post by fidotron »

vharish wrote: post #225
fidotron wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result). There are limits to how much tiny te…

The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.

Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels.

It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat.

What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.

Re: Mourning Google

#272

Post by Chathamization »

Multicomp wrote: post #216
Chathamization wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not i…

> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the c…

> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top?

Was it? A lot of people here think the transistor was one of the most important inventions to come out of Bell Labs. Here's Wiki's description of its creation:

> In 1945, Bell Labs reorganized and created a group specifically to do fundamental research in solid state physics, relating to communications technologies. Creation of the sub-department was authorized by the vice-president for research, Mervin Kelly. An interdisciplinary group, it was co-led by Shockley and Stanley O. Morgan. The new group was soon joined by John Bardeen. Bardeen was a close friend of Brattain's brother Robert, who had introduced John and Walter in the 1930s. They often played bridge and golf together. Bardeen was a quantum physicist, Brattain a gifted experimenter in materials science, and Shockley, the leader of their team, was an expert in solid-state physics.

> According to theories of the time, Shockley's field effect transistor, a cylinder coated thinly with silicon and mounted close to a metal plate, should have worked. He ordered Brattain and Bardeen to find out why it wouldn't. During November and December the two men carried out a variety of experiments, attempting to determine why Shockley's device wouldn't amplify.

It hardly sounds like they just gave a bunch of smart people a playground and told them to have fun. The problem with many historical examples is that people sometimes only pay attention to the fun parts they want to hear (a lot of focus was put on engineers and they were given some leeway) and often ignore the hard work that went into it (a lot of management, structure, and focus). We get left with overly simplistic solutions that sound wonderful, but then fail when people try to implement them.

Re: Mourning Google

#273

Post by ajb »

benterix wrote: post #253
Roark66 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demog…

> See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to. I think mixing France and Sweden on this point makes no sense. France made a deliberate attempt to attract as many refugees (and, at the same time, non-refugee immigrants) as possible in a very short period of time; they understood where it leads to and backpedaled on too open policies but things want a bit too far and they need to deal with the conseq…

Is there a typo in your first para? You seem to want to compare France and Sweden, but both paras refer to France; I'm guessing you meant Sweden in the first.

Re: Mourning Google

#274

Post by Apocryphon »

bluetomcat wrote: post #125
fancyfredbot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.

Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.

Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.

Re: Mourning Google

#275

Post by mcmcmc »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #118
coldpie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.

Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary. So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.

To be fair, with the rampant drug abuse in Silicon Valley (particularly hallucinogens) I would not be surprised if a lot of those execs have experienced psychosis.

Re: Mourning Google

#276

Post by nescioquid »

lxgr wrote: post #157
redrove wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end. Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t l…

There are people in technical leadership making decisions who are not capable of performing the most rudimentary of programming tasks like committing code.

This is a problem when the decision-maker doesn't act on advice from staff or is incapable of understanding the advice. Now give that leader an ego and abandon all hope.

There are many rungs to fall below "competent, but not passionate". In fact, I think I prefer my leaders to be dispassionate and competent.

Re: Mourning Google

#277

Post by wharvle »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #209
puchatek wrote: post #93

I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or so…

It violates copyright, yes. If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).

Facts like that would be more likely to be a T&C issue than a copyright one. Unless you scraped the data as screenshots that you presented directly to the user, or something nutty like that.

Of course, if Google decided to fight it as a copyright issue you’d still probably be screwed, even if you were in the right.

Re: Mourning Google

#278

Post by GNOMES »

rchaud wrote: post #255

These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads. There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, s…

Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment.

I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices.

Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani...

It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance

Re: Mourning Google

#279

Post by Apocryphon »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #270
Apocryphon wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nostalgia-driven critique of HN and of tech, delicious Tim Bray has been shared on this site for the last seventeen years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&q...

None of this is relevant to my comment.

Your comment isn’t very relevant.

Re: Mourning Google

#280

Post by aquova »

actualwitch wrote: post #235
Xcelerate wrote: post #53

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…

I think there is also another issue on top of that - once you establish yourself as a big money maker (a part of FAANG), a lot of tech people start treating a position there as a way to pad resume or make a ton of money. I am convinced it will shift the culture inside the company towards more corporate mindset.

I think this is really the issue. When I was in graduate school, I was in a group for some project. Before class had started, I was showing off another group member some little personal thing I had worked on over the weekend, some game or demo or something. The third group member, having seen this, was shocked that I was spending my spare time programming things for fun. I recall being perplexed by this, as it was pretty much the whole reason I was in the degree. She responded she was only interested in software engineering for the money.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to structure your career around financial success, but I met many people like her who were attempting to get jobs at Google or Amazon just to cash in as much as they could for a few years, then bounce. At some point your company is bound to become filled with people like this.

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