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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#402> 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.
> I don't really see how naming the specific individual improved the argument
I disagree. Good articles should make specific propositions about specific exemplars. The alternative is to make generalities that are hard to falsify.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block.. One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.
Idk why you are downvoted. It's become a cultural trope to use "I did it for my family" as an excuse to justify absolutely heinous stuff.
To close to home for many? Then again this is what life is about from moralphilosophical view. A body horror show with a "what have I become" at the end? Spoilers not welcome?
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#404This is the result of having leadership with MBA or finance background instead of engineering. All they see is short term money, product is a 2nd class citizen.
This is what happened to the automotive industry. In the past companies tried to build the best car. Now? Profit is all that matters.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#405This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making i…
Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#406Yet another "famous" Googler whom I didn't know. He joined one month before I did. I did know Chris DiBona, at least. Didn't know this Jeanine person. I wrote a number of articles about working there in the early (or earlier) days. Chronologically: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterp... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-go…
He was famous (or infamous) way before joining Google
Now that I think of it, the name IS vaguely familiar.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#407Ian'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 where you're never sure about the future of your job? No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control. So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up wit…
This is a good way to be biased towards the most lucky and the most cutthroat. Also, why would the best talent look to work for you if they have to take so much personal risk without the possibility of the upside of stock options of a startup?
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Google hasn't created a new major product in years Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway). But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products…
~Chrome was an acquisition.~ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome (Edit: I misremembered / misstated, this is incorrect.)
Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Spanner were not.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms. Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is ri…
the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
Having been in the room on a number of these occasions, a don't think this description is remotely accurate.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#410Ian'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…
> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it."
How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?
Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.