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I work for cloud products. I cannot say much about others, but at least urs is the best technical infrastructure leader but not a good choice for cloud leader. Many people on customer engineering side also share the same feeling with me. Business is complicated. You cannot be narcissus forever.
I'm considering applying there. Any hint/help? username @ gmail. Thanks.
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Honestly as a Googler I neither saw nor needed the vision of Larry, Sergey, Eric, Sundar, or anyone else except maybe Urs, Jeff, and Sanjay. I mean I worked on the C++ toolchain. Making a bitchin' compiler is its own reward. I guess things are different on product teams?
Urs and Jeff were amazing. Something has changed though. Granted it’s been 15 years since I worked there, but some of the incredible spark that used to be there seems to have gone out.
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Also, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things. (Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)
Those were pretty much the only reasons I continued to admire Google for as long as I did. They gave hope that the company might one day have a meaningful consumer revenue stream that isn’t advertising. They’ve gone for “cloud services” instead. Drastically, drastically, less inspiring — and also pretty competitive. What happens if Amazon drop their prices a bit?
There was a hard pivot in TechInfra when Cloud became a priority. And there is a business reason for it - if was estimated that with other cloud providers growing and consolidating Google will cease to be hardware buyer #1 and thus will not get best hardware discounts, affecting profitability of Ads/Search. So there was no choice but to get serious about cloud.
As for dropping prices, nothing will happen - clouds already run on relatively small, albeit oligopolic margins. If one provider reduces price, other providers will follow, with a bit less profit for everyone. This happens from time to time.
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They kicked off the deep learning trend when they bought deep mind I guess. Otherwise what innovation are you talking about? Switching from KNN to DL in machine translations is impressive as a technical achievement ... but not really an innovation, and I doubt all this "innovation" impacts their bottom line in any way.
> Otherwise what innovation are you talking about? Quantity: Google has the highest number of deep learning papers accepted into top conferences among all institutions, even when papers from DeepMind are not counted in Google's. Quality: Transformer and the recent BERT have, pun intended, transformed the entire NLP field. Batch normalization is now a staple of all neural networks, as are its descendants instance norm…
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I don't know why this is downvoted. Seems legitimate to me.
I must have struck a nerve. I use the Brave browser now. I think other people should too. Downvotes welcome.
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No, but I am saying that I don’t need any executive “vision” to motivate my work, especially when the executive vision is obviously insipid, like it was with Vic Gundotra and G+. It is motivating enough for me if search gets 10% faster every year. If you hook your motivations to corporate figureheads then you’ll eventually find yourself without any reason to go to work.
If you are a Google employee and you don't care about the executive visions, you are a living proof that Google is made of people who don't even understand what they are working for, beside having a good salary imo. When you work for a corporation, you are supposed to embrace (and consent to) the company's goal, which is defined by the top level. Having a search "10% faster every year" looks like a narrow-minded KPI…
Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…
I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…
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Companies do this frequently. It's the annual "Cisco is laying off 7400 employees" or "E-bay is laying off 5000 employees" or "Microsoft is laying off 13,000 employees", where each time the number is suspiciously close to 10% of the company. Commenters on HN usually assume this means that X is in trouble, but really it's a way to get rid of the bottom 10% of the company while passing the cost on to the state's unempl…
Your employer pays into that fund, and when you draw, your employer's premium goes up.
Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…