[deleted]
Culture Change at Google
391–400 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists I might be parsing this incorrectly, but isn't this sentence saying "too many people used the daycare (long waitlist), so not many people could use it"?
"Nobody Goes There Anymore. It’s Too Crowded" - Yogi Berra The point isn't about popularity (or not) of the daycare. The point is that on-site daycare isn't a competitive advantage for Google, because it is understood that the perk is rarely available.
>The point is that on-site daycare isn't a competitive advantage for Google, because it is understood that the perk is rarely available/convenient.
Except for the people who filled up all of the slots of the daycare, right? Surely it was seen as an advantage to those people, it was available, and it was convenient.
Which I think was the point of the original poster. Implying that dry cleaning and daycare have the same level of importance is just kind of silly.
However, nostrademons worded it in a way (on another comment here) that my smooth brain was able to parse better, and makes sense/resolves the contradiction I was pointing out.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud. The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job. That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that expe…
You learned how to assume the world is broken, and not fix it. That's the path back to a hunter gatherer society. I think that's the wrong lesson to learn.
I had one project where there were about 10 people working on it. Shipped about 10k units. Doing decent but not hockey stick money. Until we hired one guy. We went from a 10 man team to 2. He could not get along with any one. No one could approach his amazingness. He would triangulate people and get them kicked out of the group. Soon those 10k units and 5 customers were getting rather pissed off as nothing was getting done other than giant presentations. He really wanted to be a manager in 6 months.
Before he could infect another group with his special touch I politically maneuvered him into the most boring of tasks that no one wanted to do. He had run the one project into the ground. At the right moment I used his own triangulation manipulation bits on him. I had to become that which I despised to basically take him out before he did too much damage. I had him shunted off to a task that if it was done no one cared. It was a pity too as he was a competent programmer. But had too much of an ego to listen to the other decent programmers around him.
Moral of that story? There are jerks out there that will take out a well functioning team and not even see they are doing it. Beware of them. The world is not broken. But there are those who start fires because they like to make messes.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#394Re: Culture Change at Google
#395How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees but it is not a tough decision.
Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.
Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.
Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#396Re: Culture Change at Google
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> Some men can be pregnant Only if you define man in a way such that any person can claim manhood.
Not necessarily. Unless otherwise asked, I, like the vast vast majority of people, classify others as men or women or non-binary based on their presentation, because it's the only thing I have access to. If someone wears masculine clothes, and masculine style, and has a masculine name, and I knew nothing else about them, I would obviously say he is a man. If I later find out he was born female, I wouldn't suddenly start thinking he is a woman.
On the other hand, if someone dresses and styles themselves in a typically feminine way but tells me they use masculine pronouns, I will of course by reasons of politeness call them by their preferred pronouns, but privately I would find it hard not to consider her a woman who prefers masculine pronouns.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#398Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you st…
> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. _total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in.
*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because child care (aka day care) is temporary and optional. A person who is raising a child has taken responsibility for them through their childhood—metaphorically “raising” them up into adulthood.
What an insult to someone who has taken on the responsibility of raising a child. Of course they should be called parents. A man doesn’t adopt a son only to be called his “child raiser”. Stop this foolish line of thought.
You're the only one in this thread not attaching the same connotations of "child raiser" to "parent" and considering one lesser than the other. I don't know what's more insulting, being called a child raiser, or considering child raiser to be off-brand parent rather than a generalization of the term.
"No man goes into education to be called 'instructor', they're 'teachers'."
"No woman goes into CS to be called 'coder', they're 'developers'."
Re: Culture Change at Google
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Men can not be pregnant, that’s what makes them men
So if, say, George Clooney announced tomorrow that he is a trans man (assigned female at birth) all along and is pregnant, would you consider him a woman?
Not to mention, women who got a histerectomy can't be pregnant either, does that make them men?