I left Google 10 years ago because it was boring. Any interesting things it does is restricted to an elite cabal. It's horribly conservative with programming innovation for a company its size. Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors.
Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
351–360 of 401 posts
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#352Google is printing more money than ever before. Google could likely fire 1000s more and it wouldn’t change their trajectory. Same with Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc. Their core businesses are massive empires. They can make so many stupid mistakes, hire inept layers of management and still cash billions. They can randomly fire 5% of their workforce with roll of dice. There is enough redundancy and resilience that…
At current trajectories, nVDA could surpass GOOG within a month.
MSFT already did-so within the past year (after providing OpenAI funding).
----
All I'm suggesting is that the money fountain isn't forever.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people who…
> I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company. This is a ridiculous take. You would need way more than that just to maintain Kafka and run ops for it, that LinkedIn heavily relies on. You are trivializing the complexity of running a platform like LinkedIn.
Perhaps if reducing the complexity was considered an urgent necessity, over hiring more, there would be less complexity and new opportunities would be easier to consider and jump on.
Complexity compounds, so the tradeoff is, continually tame it, or continually hire with less and less impact per employee.
The latter seems to happen a lot when money flows.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then lazy "people" would benefit and we don't like that.
There have been a lot of trials of UBI now and the evidence is very strong that… it doesn't affect employment much either way. So it doesn't make people lazy, but it's probably a disappointment to people who don't believe in work. In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.
I hope we'll get there. I see studies and reports of things like UBI and 4 day work weeks and even basic things folks in EU countries get and it's honestly difficult to ever envision any of it actually coming to the US for most of us regular folk.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot. And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuc…
Sundar was never an engineer. > Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? There is a clear identity - Google is about hoarding all of the available data (originally web) and making money off of it any way you can. By definition it has to be huge and get…
> making money off of it any way you can
Of course there isn’t an inconsistency there. Its such a non-identity there isn’t anything to be inconsistent with, outside of declaring the company a on-profit.
The problem of lack of identity isn’t always about lack of consistency. It also is a lack of focus.
Lack of focus leaves the door open to vastly increased complexity. The need for more and more employees as per employee impact drops.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#356Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.
who would replace him? I don't think larry has many choices
Who isn’t going to be available to him?
If he can’t find someone better, it’s only because finding that person would be a full time job for him, for an indefinite period.
With the risk of a repeat.
Which may not be an acceptable price to him.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#357I don't understand the complaint from the guy who has been there for 15 years and doesn't like that it's changed. Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality. If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could ha…
> contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so…
I think it also behooves these smart people just to realize that they're not "one company for the long haul" people.
I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment.
But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applying at raise an eyebrow over it.
I think there's a tangential tricky element here too, that most financial advice is written for the masses of people who do have predictable career paths and long-term plans. There's nothing wrong with that. Those people need to have plans too.
But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were. I could use decent advice, but "be a different kind of person, because the kind of person you are isn't like me" doesn't really help. I'm financially way ahead of my friends in traditional roles, because risk is often rewarded and ownership matters, but I've yet to find an advisor who has the first idea what to do with me.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple Vision Pro.
So late to the VR headset market they thought they needed to stick googly eyes on it... dunno maybe I'm missing something?
It instantly changed how I work. Seems like a lasting change.
I sit on my couch with a MacBook Air (very couch friendly) developing with many screens of relevant info arranged around me.
A mundane but profound benefit of “spatial computing” is no longer having visual information limited to the “keyholes” of hardware screens.
Apple seems to get that the Vision Pro wants to be a Mac replacement, not an iPad replacement.
Counterintuitively, the stereo 3D is the secondary benefit. Albeit a natural and significant one.
Everything in Vision works with both see-pinch and track/mouse click.
Hoping see-pinch comes to Mac screen in Vision, or simply Mac becomes redundant.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#359Google is printing more money than ever before. Google could likely fire 1000s more and it wouldn’t change their trajectory. Same with Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc. Their core businesses are massive empires. They can make so many stupid mistakes, hire inept layers of management and still cash billions. They can randomly fire 5% of their workforce with roll of dice. There is enough redundancy and resilience that…
At current trajectories, nVDA could surpass GOOG within a month. MSFT already did-so within the past year (after providing OpenAI funding). ---- All I'm suggesting is that the money fountain isn't forever.
True. My point being that all of mega tech corps are like hive intelligences. They are all optimizing for shareholder value. At that scale, the individuals don't really matter.
If you make your Job your identity, you're in for a big surprise. The truth is that most of us are replaceable. We are not special snowflakes in the eyes of Mega Tech Corps.
Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sundar was never an engineer. > Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? There is a clear identity - Google is about hoarding all of the available data (originally web) and making money off of it any way you can. By definition it has to be huge and get…
> making money off of it any way you can Of course there isn’t an inconsistency there. Its such a non-identity there isn’t anything to be inconsistent with, outside of declaring the company a on-profit. The problem of lack of identity isn’t always about lack of consistency. It also is a lack of focus. Lack of focus leaves the door open to vastly increased complexity. The need for more and more employees as per employ…
It’s not much more generic than “make consumer electronics” from apple which makes everything under the sun now from headphones to cars. Google just increasingly became at odds with its own “dont be evil” motto as the company had scaled so execution had greately suffered