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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#491

Post by hnbad »

0xcafecafe wrote: post #276
n6242 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Parents is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say parents we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

IMO I felt that battle was lost couple of years back when my wife was pregnant with our youngest. We were looking for CDC guidelines on covid booster for expectant mothers. The website mentions "pregnant people". That's when I felt discourse is evolving to cater to the edge cases. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...

So you're saying the CDC should not cater to the edge cases? Where are we drawing the line? 10% of the population? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%? That last one is still thousands of people. Does your opinion hold for all edge cases or just those involving gender identities?

If there is a place I'd expect to "cater to edge cases" including those that only make up a fraction of a permille of the population, it'd be the CDC because they have to address hundreds of millions of people so even a one-in-a-million edge case still represents hundreds of people.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#492

Post by xtreme »

zamfi wrote: post #481
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…

Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist, is pretty sure this is because the incentive structure goes bad. An executive who goes for a new project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m -- note the expected value of $2m -- expects a pat on the back, maybe a couple months' salary as bonus, in case (a), and to be fired in case (b). Naturally, the business would love to pursue all these opportuni…

I'm nitpicking, but the expected value for a project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m is $1m. Not $2m.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#493

Post by zamfi »

xtreme wrote: post #492
zamfi wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist, is pretty sure this is because the incentive structure goes bad. An executive who goes for a new project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m -- note the expected value of $2m -- expects a pat on the back, maybe a couple months' salary as bonus, in case (a), and to be fired in case (b). Naturally, the business would love to pursue all these opportuni…

I'm nitpicking, but the expected value for a project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m is $1m. Not $2m.

Ugh, you are totally right. I originally had making $5m but then changed it and not the EV :facepalm:

Re: Culture Change at Google

#494

Post by willi59549879 »

huevosabio wrote: post #8
baron816 wrote: post #5

> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they m…

They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP. Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.

I like that idea

Re: Culture Change at Google

#495

Post by wyclif »

cjmcqueen wrote: post #288
wyclif wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.

I'm hard pressed to remember a feature in Wave that does not exist in Docs now. What is it that you miss? I just remember it being dog slow with a lot of latency.

Wave was supposed to be "equal parts conversation and document" (their description). It seems like they separated out the conversation part to Google Talk and made the document part Docs. Wave was kind of the precursor to the state of affairs we have now with Slack and Discord.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#496

Post by BossingAround »

xtreme wrote: post #492
zamfi wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist, is pretty sure this is because the incentive structure goes bad. An executive who goes for a new project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m -- note the expected value of $2m -- expects a pat on the back, maybe a couple months' salary as bonus, in case (a), and to be fired in case (b). Naturally, the business would love to pursue all these opportuni…

I'm nitpicking, but the expected value for a project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m is $1m. Not $2m.

Just wondering, is it because 3 * 0.5 + (-1) * 0.5 = 1.5 - 0.5 = $1M?

Re: Culture Change at Google

#497

Post by majani »

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?

It takes a super special set of conditions to be able to bootstrap a >10 billion dollar company like Valve. Most >10b companies need immense capital injections to work

Re: Culture Change at Google

#498

Post by eastbound »

vlovich123 wrote: post #472
eastbound wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t mean to focus entirely on Google’s approach to developers. However, one has to notice that Google has lost the upper hand over the web since ChatGPT came about. It can still be summarized in your sentence: > but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust Exactly. At the beginning, Google cared a lot about perception from technology-minded people. It was necessary to rise. Now, this ori…

> At the beginning, Google cared a lot about perception from technology-minded people. It was necessary to rise. Sorry no. You’re overestimating the importance of techies here. Techies were the first on the web but in no way were techies critical for Google’s growth. Heck I was in junior high in Canada when I first came across Google and our librarian thought Yahoo was the better approach because manual expert indexi…

Are you Gavin Belson defending Google on HN? You seem to be defending Google so much that you might be blindsided about how unpopular and irrelevant it’s becoming.

Just look here regarding the supposed popularity of Google, and supposedly only worldclass developers in small circles noticed:

https://9gag.com/gag/a04BOgq

Yes, 9Gag is a decent source of what random kiddos around the world think. Look at the comments. Google’s loss of monopoly will be slow at the beginning, then very sudden.

And when a company collapses, suddenly the 50-year readiness of its architecture doesn’t matter as much as immediate features, such as being built by geeks, for geeks.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#500

Post by psd1 »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #83
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.

What alternatives do you recommend for email? That's my one google service I have difficulty getting away from.

Runbox
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