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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#381

Post by zem »

ivancho wrote: post #260
chatmasta wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.) > And then…

Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates…

> someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth

that probably describes a lot of people in tech megacorps too

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#382

Post by cobertos »

jjiij wrote: post #277
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 don't really see how naming the specific individual improved the argument, unless there is true malfeasance, like sexual harassment, I don't think it's ethical to publicly name-and-shame somebody for the crime of being bad at their job. LOTS of people are bad at their job.

Doing so head-on solves the problem faster. Talking directly to someone or about the problem as it is has felt to me like people can understand and act quicker. Less malcontent is felt by those affected by such a person's incompetence.

Capturing the subtleties in such a black/white call-out usually is lost though to the reader/listener. It also doesn't lend to this to do this so publically, for the entire internet.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#383

Post by mepiethree »

ghaff wrote: post #182
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like most of the people who want to join google these days, "why do you want to join google", "for the tc and prestige"

Doesn't seem like the worst plan in the world.

Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid, generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out, walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools and learning new things while still generally having enough focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with enough compensation to treat them all to great food.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#384

Post by vineyardmike »

dasil003 wrote: post #372
closeparen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 ownersh…

And this is another reason why managers growing their fiefdom to make big teams is bad for the organization.

Most of the most successful projects and incredible feats of engineering happen by tiny teams full of very talented people NOT a 4-layer management pyramid of people who are here for a nice stable 9-5. Not to say you can’t be successful with WLB but you need a certain fire in your gut and a hunger to execute as a small and efficient team.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#385

Post by sonicanatidae »

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.

And shift they did.

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#386

Post by mathgradthrow »

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…

If google's mantra had been "Don't rock the boat" since they achieved market dominance, we would still have xmpp.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#387

Post by gregw134 »

dekhn wrote: post #156

There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor leadership and become utterly banal. It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and m…

Ex-googler here as well. What are you guys using instead of flume for data pipelines? Beam on Spark?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#388

Post by bane »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #303
fidotron wrote: post #19

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is…

> to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top. I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iO…

Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty well.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#389

Post by caskstrength »

ghaff wrote: post #312
kradroy wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no greater source of professional resentment than suffering under a manager who's incompetent and a narcissist (my summary of his blurb). After 18 years at Google he probably feels safe burning that bridge.

But why? I could legitimately IMO rag on a handful of former managers who I think mostly meant well but I’m not going to do it in a blog post.

> But why? I could legitimately IMO rag on a handful of former managers who I think mostly meant well but I’m not going to do it in a blog post.

Maybe he doesn't think that she mostly meant well?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#390

Post by 01100011 »

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…

> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment

No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.

C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.

I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.

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