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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#491

Post by t8sr »

antupis wrote: post #118
cbozeman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. This is the coolest shit I have ever read. Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.

Is there currently companies where you can do this?

The industry has changed in a few important ways that I think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain.

First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.

Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting.

Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job.

I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation.

This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#492

Post by JumpCrisscross »

closeparen wrote: post #295
yojo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers. I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all…

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…

It’s Coase’s theory of the firm [1] in synecdoche. Silos escape the political transaction costs around them at the expense of access to external resources.

They can famously work, e.g. Skunkworks. But they also decay into fiefdoms.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#493

Post by heyoni »

alargemoose wrote: post #345
sage76 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there aren't a lot of other black women in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse. Are people of specific races to be put beyond criticism?

This seems like a bizarre mid-representation of GPs point. They sated she was “par for the course” for that department. Meaning everyone was bad, not just her. And found it concerning she was the only person they singled out.

The author worked under her at least during their time working on flutter; which was their most recent experience at google.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#494

Post by ludwik »

sjkoelle wrote: post #332
throwaway678808 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you - also why target someone who has been there for only 2 years.

It seems she, being his direct manager, was a large part of the reason he decided to leave after 18 years. There is probably a lot of anger and frustration. I do agree this part of the post could have been phrased better.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#495

Post by tdeck »

shaftway wrote: post #361
tdeck wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and nobody was held accountable for that failure.

There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen, search for the phrase "vicg" among others.

(un?)fortunately I haven't had access to Memegen since 2020.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#496

Post by w4yai »

benvolio wrote: post #274
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…

Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg

Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it was illuminating.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#497

Post by cmrdporcupine »

screye wrote: post #360
willsmith72 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing kills motivation more than bad management, I can totally feel his pain. In saying that, I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do. She's just a person, doing a job.

> I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do. As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree. (even if I am too chicken to do it myself) Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people. They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces. When an org, leader, employee or associate taints ever…

The consequences of naming someone in such a manner, in an article that makes its rounds on the Internet, can be actually quite dire. Public harassment, etc. There are some pretty unhinged people out there, and in particular some rather ugly people who in particular get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc.

I think it's in very bad taste in this case.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#498

Post by johngossman »

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…

This is spot on. I'll only add that the necessity of showing perpetual growth in the quarterly income report strongly incentivizes big companies to act this way, especially where--as in most tech companies--the employees have equity.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#500

Post by refulgentis »

RivieraKid wrote: post #470

I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he's busy with windy.com now) and it's funny how similar my feelings are. What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave, and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate environment as long as they're getting paid tend to stay or join. I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity c…

This is really really incisive, I almost shivered: I went through a "defrag" from Android Wear to Android (i.e. they shut down Boston Android Wear and offered us jobs on Boston Android)

I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI.

We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the vast majority of that 50% transferred to other things within Google.

That occurred exactly along the lines you mention, with some side help of them accepting there was something genuinely wrong with Android's culture that needed to be avoided, as Ian mentions.

That self-selection combined with the...qualities...of Android completely changed the job. For the first time at Google I was working with people who genuinely, firmly, at their core, had no real interest in anything except the paycheck. I do believe this is very well-adjusted and have a hard time explaining the feeling and what it leads to without sounding derogetary. Your post does such an excellent job of pointing at it.

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