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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#321

Post by glimshe »

nrb wrote: post #290
glimshe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the "Dream Team" of Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is. Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their ga…

I would rather the people go, and use their considerable intellect on things that have interests more aligned with societal benefit. Do we really want a re-ignited Google?

If creates new things with the impact of Chrome, Maps and Gmail, but with less spyware? Hell, yeah!

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#322

Post by sage76 »

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…

Since private complaints routed through internal channels don't generally work either, this is a good thing he has done.

And no, public statements can make you a public target. These are not easy to make.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#324

Post by ren_engineer »

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…

logical move is to get better at splitting off their research and innovation into startups by licensing or funding employees who leave. Spinoff anything risky into an independent company so it can move faster and isn't slowed down by Google's risk aversion and bureaucracy. Basically what Microsoft did with OpenAI, give them cash and compute resources but have plausible deniability if things go wrong

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#325

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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…

The department could be one of those "wilderness" assignments where you send somebody you don't wanna fire but also don't want to have a big impact. A useful place to help someone develop their executive leadership skills, or keep those with really bad skills from wreaking havoc.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#326

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

sage76 wrote: post #316
throwaway678808 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> there aren't a lot of other black women in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse. Are people of specific races to be put beyond criticism?

[flagged]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#327

Post by ghaff »

closeparen wrote: post #295
yojo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Silos and fiefdoms are normally seen as negative things. And that's not entirely wrong.

But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc. teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference or having to constantly coordinate with every other organization in the company.

It can go both ways.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#328

Post by wavemode »

NanoYohaneTSU wrote: post #248
willsmith72 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing kills motivation more than bad management, I can totally feel his pain. In saying that, I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do. She's just a person, doing a job.

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.

I guess it depends on how you view work. I can dislike someone's work as a colleague, but like them as a person. And vice versa. Work is just work - it's not our entire life. And someone being bad at a job (even if we accept that this person is truly intrinsically incompetent, and not just a byproduct of a dysfunctional org, as is often the case) doesn't automatically mean, to me, that they have some personal moral failing or personality flaw.

So, in that vein, I think I'd hesitate to publicly embarrass someone merely for being bad at a job, since that crosses over to affecting their personal life. If someone asked me about that person in a professional context (to make a hiring decision, for example), I'd be frank about their weaknesses. But I don't think the whole world has to know about it.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#329

Post by hbn »

SilverBirch wrote: post #234

I think the conclusion is really interesting. Maybe this was just well written, but I was thinking "What should the CEO of Google be pursuing as a strategy", and then he drops the mission statement. I don't know if the mission statement is the best articulation of the goal. But it's a clear goal. And it's a goal that Google aren't pursuing. It's an interesting goal in the context of large language models. Now, more t…

> Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010. Just let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes anything published in the last 15 years.

I mean, you can add before:2011-01-01 to your search.

But I'm not sure how accurate the publishing dates on every page are.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#330

Post by janmo »

dilyevsky wrote: post #263
janmo wrote: post #242

"Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter" Seems like they fired the Google Adsense support team. I have been using Google Adsense for many years, and since last year there is no way of contacting any support, there IS NO WAY, I have lost over 10k in revenue because of it, and was only able to get my pro…

I doubt that retail adsense is very large - it’s probably mostly large enterprise deals where you do get your personal poc for support and whatnot

You are probably right, because once I got accepted in the network, they were able to get to talk to the Google MCM/Adsense support and within one week I got MCM approved and my Adsense account was reinstated. Hadn't they be there I would still be stuck.
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