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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#441

Post by briffle »

tavavex wrote: post #66
0xpgm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have th…

I remember the forums (and slashdot comments) just hammering valve for thinking of creating steam and introducing DRM to their games, and that they would never, ever use it because of that.

But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#442

Post by EasyMark »

0xpgm wrote: post #48
zamfi wrote: post #24

Is 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…

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

I think you have to have a separate entity(ies) that is strictly eggheads trying new shit. They need a big budget and have to keep the bean counters away, otherwise they will steal all the soul out of the enterprise. That's why so many thing come out of places like universities and NASA, you don't have bean counters killing the soul of the engineers/scientists. I'm not saying that situation is always possible, just putting out a theory. Also a lot of the low hanging fruit in science and math has already been discovered/invented, so it gets harder. This is where I hope AGI comes in, even if it's risky.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#443

Post by EasyMark »

tavavex wrote: post #66
0xpgm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have th…

Mullvad ( a much smaller company) seems to have a similar set of goals and values. Not everything needs to be under the umbrella of a 800lb gorilla multinational. I hope that some of those entities can learn to be more creative rather than trying to reduce everything to something bean counters who need to report quarterly gains or get fired. It disincentivises taking risks at all.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#444

Post by the_third_wave »

skazazes wrote: post #432
SkyMarshal wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all good reasons not to self-host, but none are good reasons to downvote someone advocating self-hosting and providing some useful info about it. I don't get the downvote-brigading here either, especially on a hacker website.

Fair enough, I assume the down votes came as a result of the tone.

What is wrong with the tone? Is it wrong to point out that those who advocate taking care of one's own digital needs - a.k.a. self-hosting - tend to get shouted or voted down on this here Hacker News site which, if going by its name only would be just the place you'd expect to be the refuge for those who like to tinker and who value self-sufficiency?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#445

Post by dilyevsky »

AlbertCory wrote: post #437
dilyevsky wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo patrick was no better with his “we saved 200M on snacks this year oh btw guess what my bonus was”

If you think Ruth and Patrick are the same, I'd hate to work at whatever company you actually admire.

Not the same - Ruth is far more effective version. Guessing you missed the whole “scrappiness to help investors out oops nvm we are investors” thing or just hadn’t yet run out of coolaid at the time

Re: Culture Change at Google

#446

Post by tsimionescu »

diffea wrote: post #435
tsimionescu wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

That's just daft though. Defining women and men in terms of clothing, haircuts and other adornments is awfully regressive. It's like 1950s-style sexist stereotyping all over again.

Well, it's all you've got, ultimately. You can't categorize people just on their word, and you can't categorize them based on any of the biological criteria since you don't know what their chromosomes or hormones or genitalia are when you see them.

And it's not purely about clothes. Even if you look at people adopting more clothing styles traditionally associated with their other gender, say Harry Styles at awards shows, they do not style themselves exactly as the other gender would. Ultimately gender is a social construct, and that involves some shared performance that we each choose to adopt when defining ourselves in relationship to everyone else.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#447

Post by JeffSnazz »

edgyquant wrote: post #223
JeffSnazz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.

States are rational actors though

I have yet to see evidence of this lol

Re: Culture Change at Google

#448

Post by edgyquant »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #384
edgyquant wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

States are rational actors though

when in the history of anything was that the case? democracies make terrible choices, with voters often voting against their interests all the time. dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).

It’s generally accepted in international relations that it’s always the case long term. States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well. Erdogan has greatly expanded turkeys influence in the region and been relatively successful in playing the west and russia off each other for instance.

Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to his removal and it can be argued Iraq didn’t have many good options as historically it’s been controlled by one or more of the surrounding nations so it may just not working realistically due to geography and ethnic strife

Re: Culture Change at Google

#449

Post by edgyquant »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #331
edgyquant wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

States are rational actors though

You're confusing "rational" with "competitive", which is neoliberal sleight of mind. There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.

Your politics are bleeding through here and it’s clearly fogging your mind of reality. I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations and you’re strawmanning about “neoliberalism” and bringing up climate change. Do better, be less emotional. If you can’t do that you have no business making statements about nations and their relations with one another which are rational.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#450

Post by summerlight »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #120
zamfi wrote: post #24

Is 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.

If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.
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