391–400 of 1001 posts
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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.
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> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?
The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum tsss"
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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?
Absolutely.
> 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.
He thinks she is bad at her job and it’s clear she’s not. She know precisely how to move people around to take blame for failures while staying clean and clear to brag about the wins. To the clueless she might look dumb but she’s not at all. She knows how to secure her millions in comp per year and retire early. She’s very smart.
To be fair he seems to be waking up to the fact the sociopaths are in it for themselves, 18 years later.
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Google is getting beat badly on multiple fronts, even Search, and has pissed away a mountain of goodwill. It's living off of declining 15 year old achievements. I wouldn't call Sundar a steady hand, he has destroyed much more potential than he has created, even if the stock has continued to go up it won't for much longer. I sold a significant position in GOOG a few years ago and I'm certain it was the right call.
They are getting "beat badly" only if you read tech blogs and not their financial statements.
Yes, Google books was great endeavor that could benefit all humanity. What happened to all those scans? Are they still stored somewhere?
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…
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"
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 rel…
The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.
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> 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…
It's not an indictment of Google but every large company in existence. That's just how our current corporate structure works, and is the reason entrepreneurship is a thing.