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Google wants employees to move faster

cnbc.com

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Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#41

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

cletus wrote: post #15

Having worked at Google, this is entirely self-inflicted. This once internal now leaked video [1] summed it up pretty well. There is so much process you have to go through to do anything. A lot of it makes sense but it comes at the expense of speed. More than a decade ago OKR (Objectives and Key Results) culture set in where once you just worked on things until they were ready. OKRs are really insidious because what…

Google makes >90% of profits from Search and Ads.

Even if you group in half of gsuite for Gmail and all of Android (for the default search app) - that's still not even half of the company.

The profit per employee there is probably close to $1.5M - and that's after average compensation above $500k.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#42

Post by qaq »

khendron wrote: post #34
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right. When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our curre…

"conjoined triangles of success"

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#43

Post by Zigurd »

afavour wrote: post #10
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #2

> “People come to us because we are trusted,” Raghavan said. “They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.” Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?

I actually think he’s right. Us Hacker News types don’t trust Google at all but for the average person it’s where they go to find information, and we’ve seen time and time again that the majority either don’t understand or don’t care about many privacy concerns. All this stuff is a little handwavey but a 2023 report: https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Mos... Has a specific breakout about Google.…

Slide decks like that make me feel like there is another species out there for which brands matter. It's literally disorienting.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#44

Post by Rinzler89 »

khendron wrote: post #34
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right. When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our curre…

>he just showed us the graph again.

The conjoined triangles of success?

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#46

Post by toxican »

angry_moose wrote: post #12
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

Yeah, we get the same crap constantly. “You have to be faster” “Ok, are you going to remove the mountains of red tape, reviews, and documentation that make a 2 week project take 16 weeks?” “Well, we can’t do that. Here’s a motivational story about boats”

We got the same pep talk at the beginning of the year. They wanted to give us developers more autonomy, the ability to move faster, etc. Sounds great on paper as there were a lot of useless meetings and chat channels we wasted a lot of time in.

But the solution was to eliminate the release manager role and move QA away from testing individual tickets and instead toward developing/managing automated testing. And then the devs had to pick up the QA and release responsibilities without any change in our original responsibilities.

Which means that I now waste a massive chunk of my work week doing things other than write code. All the while they're making a big stink about "coding days". Which has pretty much never ended well for developers. I'm sure next they'll be counting total lines of code, too.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#47

Post by christkv »

korginator wrote: post #19

“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said. “There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said. Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.” After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day. Early in…

Its really just the effect of empire building. Too much money allowing non operative people to flourish and new administrative layers to be added that then have to justify themselves by making operative employees report thing they can quantify to show their bosses in the hope to climb the ladder.

Its just a symptom of all big organizations in the west these days be it private or public.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#48

Post by mxuribe »

UncleMeat wrote: post #27
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

Exactly. My experience at Google over the past two years has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so…

> ...has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so the net effect of all of this is that people move slower...

Wow, its like you were reading my mind for almost exactly how i was going to describe my current employer. The difference is that i do NOT work for a startup nor a big tech company, etc...I'm just a cog on a digital team at a consumer packaged goods mfg company; sort of a typical corporate America type job...and all that you noted is happening at my job too...so odd that many seem to be experiencing similar tactics from "Above"! Did all the top management companies whisper the same set of tactics to all corporations recently!?!

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#49

Post by christkv »

UncleMeat wrote: post #27
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

Exactly. My experience at Google over the past two years has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so…

This rot is everywhere in both private companies and public institutions

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#50

Post by acdha »

roenxi wrote: post #21
paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

In fairness, he seems to effectively have CNBC reporters sitting in with the crowd at the company all-hands. He would probably come off the worse if he started saying things of substance. In his position I'd cancel the all-hands.

He’s deservedly being criticized for not saying anything of substance. If he had something to say worthy of his paycheck, it’d be less newsworthy than the “Google has no idea what they’re doing” stories which come out of consultant babble like “faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution”. Google had the reputation they’ve been working so hard to shed because they used to actually innovate and build things which the average person could immediately see as better; telling people to do more with less becomes the story because it announces that the old Google is gone.

I asked Gemini for some advice and it gave a better answer suggesting things like “break down silos and empower teams to make decisions without excessive bureaucracy” and “refocus on what made us great – building products that solve real user problems”, not working 120 hour weeks.

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