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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#31

Post by eesmith »

petesergeant wrote: post #18

Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares? Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit. The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented…

To dissuade potential employees who are thinking to apply because they mistakenly think it's still like the stories they hear from the old days?

To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#33

Post by wyclif »

vlovich123 wrote: post #20
huevosabio wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP. Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.

Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons: * Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google * most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on G…

Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#34

Post by mizzao »

baron816 wrote: post #5

> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they m…

I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#38

Post by tock »

Ben and Brian's Google IO talks were fantastic. Their talks always made me realise that Google was a special place. Sad to see its not the case anymore from Ben himself.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#39

Post by neilv »

heads wrote: post #2

Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else. There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So mayb…

> There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?

From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".

Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.

For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#40

Post by poundofshrimp »

> But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.

Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?

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