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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#481

Post by refulgentis »

swetland wrote: post #144
fidotron wrote: post #19

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is…

Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship. I came aboard during the…

I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material/Hardware.[2]

Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.

Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.

As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.

[1] https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...

[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-material-you-interview-...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#482

Post by Fordec »

ghaff wrote: post #312
kradroy wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no greater source of professional resentment than suffering under a manager who's incompetent and a narcissist (my summary of his blurb). After 18 years at Google he probably feels safe burning that bridge.

But why? I could legitimately IMO rag on a handful of former managers who I think mostly meant well but I’m not going to do it in a blog post.

After 18 years at Google he's likely at a stage in his life where he's at f-you money in his bank account.

If he cares more about the company culture than being rehired by the people that disagree with his outlook, why not let it fly? If it instigates a culture change, he wins at the cost of a professional bridge he doesn't value anyway.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#483

Post by layer8 »

znpy wrote: post #251
drubio wrote: post #117

> 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 noticed that and it's a very strong point. Taking such a strong stance is not something would so light-heartedly, i really wonder what went on to drive this person to write such harsh words about her. Considering the amount of people the author has likely seen over 18 years and how many of them he could have complained about... It must not be a chance it's her specifically .

He grew up in Europe, which may have given him different sensibilities.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#484

Post by jjulius »

e_y_ wrote: post #438
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…

On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyon…

>Google Inbox

Still so damn bitter about that death.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#485

Post by closeparen »

marklar423 wrote: post #355
closeparen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your pa…

I feel like you're working with a different definition of "silo" than the parent. My understanding of a "silo" is "closed off teams that aren't allowed to work with outsiders" who have their own culture that may be at odds with the company. It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.

Building in silos is when you get something done by yourself or with your direct teammates. Cross team collaboration involves e.g. a weekly sync, coauthored design documents, code changes made in modules you’ve never seen before reviewed by people you don’t know, tasks that are critical blocking dependencies for you but totally irrelevant to the decision-makers of the teams that need to allocate time for them. The extent to which a company is siloed is the extent to which its engineers are talking to their desk neighbors and getting things done vs. navigating communication overhead and being blocked on people quite remote from them and their goals.

It’s hard to believe you could have a nimble and cohesive team at the scale of a large corporation, because the number of communication edges gets silly. Dunbar’s number and all that. You can have team nimble and cohesive teams within large corporations. But having several distinct networks is otherwise known as being siloed.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#486

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian'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…

> the prescription is always to go back in time

I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#487

Post by mpalmer »

jLaForest wrote: post #362
mpalmer wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't think mentioning her by name was necessary (she's just an example of the culture of bad middle management he's calling out), I do think highlighting her race as a meta-criticism does neither the OP nor Banks herself any favors. My rule of thumb: unless given an obvious reason not to, assume good faith on the part of individuals.

Pretending racial disparities doesn't exist (particularly in tech) doesn't do any favors either.

I'm not pretending anything like that. I assume good faith on the part of individuals (intentional word choice), because individuals are not systems or institutions and they really do tend to be decent and well-intentioned.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#488

Post by next_xibalba »

> A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example

Wow. Shots fired.

More seriously, his description of this manager has been my typical experience of managers in large companies. Very sad to see what Google has become.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#489

Post by munificent »

artzmeister wrote: post #228

You see a lot of people here in the comments, as well as the author in the article, talking about how "there are good and well-meaning people working at Google" and "it sucks that people unfortunately hate us =(". A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused becau…

> A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money.

The challenge is that we are all simultaneously part of many groups whose behavior we don't always agree with.

Should you be piled up with all the others because you're a member of a species that is destroying the planet's natural resources? Should you be piled up with all the others because you pay taxes to a country that used that money to build weapons that killed innocents? Should you be piled up because you live in a city whose cops commit police brutality? Should you be piled up because you bought a product and gave money to a corporation that uses child labor?

Life is not so black and white. We have some responsibility for the behavior of the groups we are part of, but only fractional. We should exert our agency towards good when we can, but believing that we have all of the stains on our hands of every community or group we've ever touched or participated in is not a path to a better world, it's just a path to individual shame and misery.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#490

Post by serial_dev »

throwaway678808 wrote: post #265
drubio wrote: post #117

> 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 worked in the org that Jeanine now runs. It had a series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level. To call out Jeanine and only Jeanine in language this harsh feels wrong. From my recollection and from what I have heard from people still working there, she is par for the course. Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in…

Calling her out by name felt a bit harsh within the context of the post. Sure, call out Sundar as he's a public figure, but this lady, never heard of her, never seen her.

He could have made the point by writing "I had this terrible boss who had no idea about anything and...", her name is irrelevant to demonstrate the issue of decline at Google.

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