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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#401

Post by hn8305823 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #304

It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue. What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere. I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company lead…

> What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends.

A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.

Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.

So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#402

Post by red_admiral »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #375
red_admiral wrote: post #207

There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career…

Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.

Stylistic choice, no deeper meaning. I know people who are the sole child-raiser after separating from the child's other parent, and people who are parents but they work full-time and their partner looks after the child.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#403

Post by internet101010 »

_xivi wrote: post #179
LarsDu88 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.

> yet they[Valve] crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died. Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you…

From a customer perspective Valve is undisputed. Nobody opens any other marketplace unless they have to.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#404

Post by euroderf »

foofie wrote: post #158
treprinum wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

> My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives. I had a boss who was a manager at one of Google's flagship products, and he made it his point to not let anyone forget it. He pushed people…

"The typical company is like a septic tank.

It's the biggest chunks that rise to the top."

Re: Culture Change at Google

#405

Post by dougb5 »

broeng wrote: post #153
dougb5 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world; rather, they suck the marrow out of all the text and art and everything in the world and use it to sell their own replacement service for all the text and art and everything in the world. Google has done some questionable things to become a gateway to the world's work, but they're (mos…

Maybe we can agree they are still _mostly_ at gateway. But their ambition to answer your question through zero-clicks (i.e., show the answer right in their search results) does make them profit from direct copying. The copyright owner will not get any clicks, show any adds, or get any other kind of feedback to their work, in those cases.

Yeah, for sure, Google wants to show the answer on the results page, and for many search queries they're able to achieve this in one way or another -- either through the knowledge graph, the question-answering slop, or in the snippets of text pulled from the search results themselves. They do, at least, show links to sources in these cases, which is better than ChatGPT (or Bard, to the extent that it's used). But I agree that there's not a lot of short-term incentive for Google to cite sources in a prominent way, and there is a lot of incentive for them to develop features that replace the websites that made them valuable in the first place. There's always been an uneasy bargain between Google and webmasters, and there's always been a tension between what's best for the Google user, best for Google, and best for the Web. If there's a similar bargain with OpenAI, I don't see them approaching it with nearly as much respect: source attribution has not been prioritized in any meaningful way.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#406

Post by red_admiral »

lumost wrote: post #380
red_admiral wrote: post #207

There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career…

I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline. There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.

> There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents.

Arguably, many already do.

As "main child-raiser" (as opposed to "parent", again a place where this matters) is not equally distributed across the sexes in our society, I would say though that (1.) this does leave you at risk of legal challenges over structural discrimination and (2.) it leaves a bad taste when a corporation one the one hand does this, and on the other hand bemoans how few women in "tech" (or any other sector) they're getting.

Pushing off kids until the late 30s also has a different risk profile if it's your womb those kids might be coming out of.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#407

Post by PokestarFan »

tigroferoce wrote: post #205
Ntrails wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days. One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become…

How do you think YouTube failed? If you tried to get someone to name a search engine that's not Google, they could maybe think of Bing or DuckDuckGo or something. If you tried to get someone to name a email service that's not Gmail, they could maybe say Outlook or Yahoo if they're older. But try to get someone to name a user-generated video platform that's not YouTube? YouTube has comparable revenue to Netflix. And Netflix has direct competitors -- such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ to name a few that are pretty big on their own right.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#408

Post by sokoloff »

taurath wrote: post #219
saagarjha wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fulltime employees at Google are basically the same as any other employee. They get the same benefits, can eat the free food, and generally I haven't seen any serious discrimination against them for being "not engineers". However, some of the things you've mentioned (e.g. building maintenance) are often done by contractors or outside firms, and for them things are often very different.

Red badges and the equivalent elsewhere make up an astounding amount of who actually works at most major companies. They’re the poor and working class to the gentry (FTEs) and the elites (FTE executives). They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties…

If I have $100 to pay someone in the US, about 25% of that will go to "fringe" (taxes, health insurance, unemployment/worker's comp, 401k match, PTO/sick, etc) and that percentage is probably higher for lower-paid employees. So, start with $100, fringe expenses take $25-30, agency middleman profit/overhead/flex-risk takes maybe 20% ($20), and the end worker gets $50-55 out of the $100 the original company is paying for them.

That the end worker is getting ~50% isn't that crazy to me. If directly employed, they'd be getting only about ~65-70%. (which is less than the direct fringe ratio because someone has to fade the PTO/sick/hiring lag flex to ensure the trash cans get emptied consistently and the agency is doing that in the other case).

Re: Culture Change at Google

#409

Post by snowwrestler »

thinkerswell wrote: post #383
snowwrestler wrote: post #350

Earlier 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.

Some children are raised by grandparents, aunts or uncles, siblings, etc.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#410

Post by rimeice »

I think I'd s/"unlimited abundance"/"nothing to lose" - particularly in startups. In the small businesses I've worked in, it's when the times a tough, the biggest and most critical bets have been made often with the most conviction. That sort of situation I think also drives some of those motivational and incredibly innovative behaviours in people.
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