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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#301

Post by dvirsky »

aappleby wrote: post #209
omoikane wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally felt the best icon of original Google culture was Craig Silverstein, whose departure greatly affected the various intergrouplets that were holding the company culture together. In that sense, I wouldn't place all the blame on Sundar, although he didn't necessarily help. But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the compa…

I'm the "12 years at Google" commenter from below. Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after that. Good guy.

Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".

They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.

(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#302

Post by bruce343434 »

willsmith72 wrote: post #268
NanoYohaneTSU wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

What good does that do when they ruin a workplace? If I were bad at my job, it's not like I wouldn't get fired because I'm just such a great person outside of the workplace...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#303

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

fidotron wrote: post #19

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is…

> to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered

Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top.

I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#304

Post by itsyaboi »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #142
Dudester230602 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you pass the Azure ones then?

lol no, I got into a big argument having to explain recursion, tail call recursion, etc. The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent with the exception of stack space. But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the experience. My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first in…

Sounds like you were rejected due to your snippy attitude.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#305

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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…

> the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way

In a word: momentum

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#306

Post by pas »

hinkley wrote: post #154
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff. This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of. I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.

can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the only login, no need for password for the first iteration, we will fix it later, or ... ?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#307

Post by xorvoid »

Around 2008 when I was starting college, I was really excited about Google and wanted to work there. By 2013 I began to feel like they weren’t the same anymore and no longer interested me. By 2023, I can say that Not pursuing a job at Google was my best career decision. You can go watch old Google Tech Talks circa 2010 and they’re fabulous. I can’t imagine them putting out that kind of content these days. It’s rather sad, I bet 2005 Google was a remarkable place that’s now lost to time

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#308

Post by sage76 »

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.

Idk why you are downvoted. It's become a cultural trope to use "I did it for my family" as an excuse to justify absolutely heinous stuff.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#309

Post by lapcat »

mkozlows wrote: post #283
lapcat wrote: post #256

> 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…

I think this criticism of WHATWG forgets how moribund and ossified W3C was at the time, up its own ass with semantic web nonsense and an imaginary suite of XHTML 2.0 technologies that had no path to reality. Hixie's criticisms of it were correct, and WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.

I think the fact that I'm bringing up the history shows that I haven't forgotten.

There are legimate disagreements over whether switching to XML was a good idea. Nonetheless, these disagreements were not a good excuse to overthrow W3C entirely, merely a convenient excuse for the browser vendors. Moreover, I don't think the HTML standards need to move as fast as Google wants them to move. HTML is now a "living standard", in other words, constantly changing, and I don't think that's good for the web. These things should move slowly. The giant browser vendors themselves are selfishly the main beneficiaries of forcing everyone else on the web to move at their pace. It consolidates their monopolization of the web.

> WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.

Relevant things like... not controlling the HTML standard anymore? WHATWG has stolen a lot of the relevance of W3C.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#310

Post by wavemode »

hot_gril wrote: post #227
chatmasta wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to correct you about GCP profitability, but I just looked it up, and TIL that GCP became profitable for the first time in 2023 Q2. Interesting.

And before, it might've been in that "profitable if we want it to be" situation where they're just reinvesting the revenue.

Which is precisely why profit is a red herring. What matters is market share (which for GCP is still 10%, not amazing but gradually increasing) and, ultimately, revenue growth.
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