Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

> 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.

...for things that align with that silo structure. If you try to build new things that necessitate conceptual integrity across org boundaries, then teams that think this way will first debate ownership and responsibility breakdown before it's even clear how the thing should work at a high level. I've seen too many examples of horrible engineering done by silo'ed teams, where they build down blind alleys that turn out to be unmaintainable and net-negative producing over time because they approached it based on what services they could touch rather than what made sense from an overall system and UX perspective.

Obviously "breaking down silos" involves greater coordination and communication overhead, and thus is harder to pull of successfully, so it's a tradeoff that should be weighed carefully in the context of business needs.

There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.

Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

In the past, such criticism of a leader would show up internally via Googlegeist and the leader and their reports would all know and possibly adjust.

Cutting Googlegeist has knock on effects that create problems like this. The rank and file no longer have a way to communicate back up the chain honestly and things like this come out.

Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ...

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, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious.

I think calling it an unforced error is generous. When I left in 2010 I pointed out to Google that their falling CPC rates meant that the profit margin on search advertising was eroding faster than they were developing new income and faster than they were reducing costs[1] and as a result they were going to find themselves compromising their principles to appease wall street. Before they laid off people they compromised every other principle they had, they added advertising to places they earlier boasted about not advertising, they started selling more and more demographic information about their users to sketchier people. All so they could show that revenue number going up and to the right.

I predicted they would lay off people a lot sooner than they eventually did but I blame my misprediction on my misunderstanding of just how much money they could develop when they stopped worrying about whether or not it was good for their users. I completely concur though with how a layoff really changes people. I was at Intel when they did their first layoff in 1984 and suddenly everyone's attitude changed to "how do I stay off the layoff list?" That doesn't foster a creative, risk taking culture.

Someday the story of Google will make a good read, kind of like 'Bad Blood' but where the enemy isn't a sociopathic leader but a bunch of regular people who got addicted to being massively wealthy and threw out all of their principles when that wealth was threatened. Altruism of the rich is a function of their excess wealth.

[1] The primary reason I left was because the project I delivered which saved them $10M/yr year-after-year was considered "not significant" (read unpromotable).

You’re giving Google too much credit. They couldn’t even conceive of short videos. Why? See earlier in the thread.