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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#291

Post by chatmasta »

emodendroket wrote: post #236
chatmasta wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But people in this thread aren't complaining that Google's profitable. They're complaining about the culture. Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability. And it's even less sustainable when the company is dependent on an undiversified revenue stream, since they need to be innovating to mitigate that risk, and a poisonous culture is toxic to innovation. But…

> Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability. Are you sure? This feels a little bit like when I read the American capitalism is going to collapse because there are a lot of homeless people. Just because something has the effect of making some people miserable doesn't mean that it's unstable or doomed to fail. IBM, GE, Boeing, or any number of other "dinosaur" com…

But Google doesn't intentionally have a conservative culture. They're trying to innovate, since they need to mitigate the existential risk of their undiversified revenue stream. But they're failing to innovate.

So perhaps such a conservative culture does have its merits, but claiming that Google sought those merits is post-facto rationalization of their failure to innovate. Google never intended to turn into IBM (which, btw, they havent - at least IBM has more diversified sources of revenue!).

That said, you make a good point that Microsoft itself is a counterexample. So maybe there is still hope for Google. But IMO, that hope is not aligned with the path they're currently traveling. They need to fire Sundar and make some drastic cultural changes if they want to outcompete Microsoft between now and 2035.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#292

Post by kelnos »

antipaul wrote: post #262
bcrosby95 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, but consider that MS came from Ballmer, whom many of us blame for Microsoft's badness of the 00s (granted, Ballmer of course came from Gates, who probably set back general-purpose computing by decades due to his greed). I do believe Nadella has made MS a much better, likeable company, but I don't think I'll ever trust them to do right by humanity.

Google has gone the other way: Page and Brin seemed to be well-liked outside of Google, as they were the visionaries who started it all. They made the choice to go with Pichai, who cares more about ad revenue than doing anything great. And Page and Brin, sadly, seem to be happy with their choice so far.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#293

Post by starcraft2wol »

3seashells wrote: post #132
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…

It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block.. One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.

This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil, corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#294

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#295

Post by closeparen »

yojo wrote: post #200
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…

I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers. I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all…

Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a straight answer or get something done that wasn’t formally planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it, especially engineers who don’t share priorities, timelines, conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally also the best way to get promoted at a large company that believes in breaking down silos.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#296

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

debatem1 wrote: post #168
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our motto is "Don't be evil"" is not an inference. It's a quote.

The inference you made is that Google actually was evil all along.

I haven't made any inference at all.

You seem to be telling the GP that they made a (common) mistake in thinking that early Google had non-evil motives.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#297

Post by kelnos »

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…

> 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 amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots.

And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.

> If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.

Couldn't agree more. Our brand of capitalism isn't set up to allow for such corporate-culture time travel.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#298

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…

[deleted]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#299

Post by qez2 »

emodendroket wrote: post #189
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…

It sounds like the generic complaints of everyone who doesn't like their manager ever and frankly I would have thought twice before attaching my name to a broadside that attacks a former manager by name. But hey, what do I know, I never worked at Google.

[dead]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#300

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

emodendroket wrote: post #204
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in my “I quit Google” post I was careful to make it impossible for an outsider to determine who I was complaining about, even scrubbing my team info from LinkedIn. But I think 18 years at Google means the author has plenty of “fuck you” money.

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 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'm not quite there, but as a heavy Firebase user who generally loves the product but who has been incredibly frustrated with a lot of the (lack of) direction of new features over the past 4 years or so, reading this post made me think "Ohhh, now it makes sense."

That is, there are basic, presumably easy-to-implement, features that have languished for years in Firebase. Part of me has wanted to go interview with Firebase just so I can get hired to fix some obvious missing feature. Now, granted, it's obviously impossible to pin this directly on this manager, and this is also a Google-wide problem, but I think the author's point is that a lot of this "directionless-ness" is a result of poor middle management.

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