Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

ln.hixie.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#351

Post by liveoneggs »

pkasting wrote: post #232
liveoneggs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.

Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms. Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is ri…

the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#352

Post by away271828 »

kelnos wrote: post #297
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 a…

Just the other week had a team meeting that was partly to discuss a possible round 21 of team charter/organization changes. Personally, I basically have bounced around multiple rounds of managers/teams/responsibilities in just the past few years. As the team lead philosophically said, many of you (senior) folks have seen maybe 10x employee growth since you joined and it's just a different company and the old one isn't coming back.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#353

Post by nvrmnd »

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…

While it's easy to agree with you, I find that my opinion here has shifted after leaving a large tech company for a seed stage startup. Competing against these giant companies is really challenging, you have to me more than 2x better to get a customer to look at you a second time.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#354

Post by neilv »

dilyevsky wrote: post #272
neilv wrote: post #237

Which companies today are the Google of 20 years ago?

The stuff people say plagued google i’ve seen in much smaller companies in the last few years. It’s not Google it’s the whole damn industry

The industry has a lot of problems, but I remember when Google was just starting, and it was obviously a place to go, and for years after that it was obviously the place to go. Hopefully there are some other obviously the place to go companies now?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#355

Post by marklar423 »

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…

I feel like you're working with a different definition of "silo" than the parent. My understanding of a "silo" is "closed off teams that aren't allowed to work with outsiders" who have their own culture that may be at odds with the company.

It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#356

Post by pardoned_turkey »

Laremere wrote: post #230
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…

> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today. A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom l…

Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#357

Post by caskstrength »

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…

> 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 leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.

Unless I misunderstood the author she was his manager. It is not like he chose some random "black woman in leadership at Google" to attack.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#358

Post by chatmasta »

screye wrote: post #347
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…

> series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level Isn't that exactly the job of an org executive? To hire and align competent senior leadership ? I don't think he is criticizing her in particular as much as the archetype that she represents. She is a person who has never had a coding job & spent her early career quite far from the people who write code. I can't for the life of me figure out why…

> I can't for the life of me figure out why you would put someone like that in charge of google-dev relations.

One possibility is that the person who put her in that position has an incentive for Flutter/Dart to fail.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#359

Post by zellyn »

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.

There's definitely a period of history where noticing WHATWG on a URL made me breathe a sigh of relief that the content might actually be useful and understandable.

These days, W3C stuff seems perfectly fine (except for their standard document template making it almost impossible to tell “what is this thing actually about?” at a glance! )

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#360

Post by screye »

willsmith72 wrote: post #224
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…

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.

> I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do.

As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree. (even if I am too chicken to do it myself)

Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people. They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces. When an org, leader, employee or associate taints every single private avenue for criticism, you are left without much recourse.

People quit bad managers. But bad managers are often amazing as appearing amazing. As long as management has zero accountability within the org structure, sub-optimal signals like these must do.

> Those who make private criticism impossible will make public tirades inevitable

- John F. Kennedy reincarnated in 2023

Post reply on HN