[dupe]
More discussion on around the linkedin post mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082599
Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
#52You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1. It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal. It's a company rotten to the core. It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps. Don't come saying that Gmail was geni…
> The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.
Uh, no, they gave 1GB at the time, when the most you would get was usually either 100MB or 250MB (i think that was what Hotmail was offering at the time?).
GMail was a game-changer at the time, though.
The search features were incredibly fast and super accurate, the UI would refresh immediately (AJAX before it was cool, essentially, nobody was doing that at the time) and their anti-spam was top-notch. Literally, spam was not an issue anymore.
Oh, and it was super fast and very lightweight: I had a P3 with 128MB ram at the time of launch, but it would still run incredibly well.
I managed to get an invitation from a friend, and I loved it.
Nowadays... It's almost saddening.
Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search, Ads, Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Drive, Youtube, Maps, Android, Calendar.. All 10 are category defining (but at least top 3) products. I'd like to have a 1-trick pony like that one day!
Most of those on your list were either bought/copied/stolen, as mentioned in my comment. For the office suite tools they offer (calendar, docs, gmail and drive), they were the first to move to the cloud, but nowadays there are so many companies with similar offerings that are either cheaper or better. Even Microsoft nowadays has Excel on the cloud, which let's all be frank. It's much superior. Before I do look like a…
Excel still unrivaled. By comparison Google sheets feels like one of those "I could do that in a weekend" projects.
Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
#54You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1. It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal. It's a company rotten to the core. It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps. Don't come saying that Gmail was geni…
Be fair, Gmail was groundbreaking. It's UX was miles ahead of anything else. Especially webmail UIs. Google was a good product company for a while. But the it wasn't anymore.
I think people have forgotten or weren't around back then.
gmail did away with the idea of folders and instead had tags. They were very clearly an innovation on top of how most organization happened with email.
granted, those tags were shunted into folders for the IMAP protocol, but if you were using the web UI it was a whole other world.
The rest of the world caught up, but at the time they were absolutely groundbreaking. yahoo and hotmail existed at the time but neither had anything on gmail.
Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
#55I have thought about this as an employee. I think which point of view you have matters. The problem is that the best interest for the company and for the individual employee do not align in most cases.
If someone wants to move fast and innovate, an employee or a large company like Google, it needs to invest time to do things differently.
Given a finite amount of resources, you can spend them part on "speed" of execution, to keep up with in AI race, or "acceleration", to innovate and move faster in the future.
If you are a company CEO or senior leader and you think we are in a paradigm shift that threatens the very core products of your company, you cut what you think won't bring future revenue or better revenue growth; then, to maintain speed, you focus fewer resources on mature products that have less space to growth or fewer risks to be challenged in the short term; then, and use all resources that you freed up to accelerate. (Whenever a leader is visionary and good or not impacts the quality of these decisions; this is not an endorsement or rebuttal of Google's leaders)
The problem as an employee is that you are only in one of those buckets. Depending on where you are in these buckets and in your personal point in life, the consequences can be very different. It colors how you view the choices of those leaders in these surveys.
- cut + early career = can be challenging and demoralizing, but in my past experience these moments were those that pushed me into a higher trajectory.
- speed + early career = can be very comfortable to be here, but you're learning less variety than if you see more companies/roles. In the long run, it could make you less successful.
- innovate + early career = be blessed, you're very well paid and you learn state of the art that will hopefully be very marketable. If the bets of the industry do not play out and sentiment/hype on AI cools down, be prepared for a drop in earning down the line and save;
- cut + mid career = depending on your early career choices and marketable skills and personal inclination for risks, this can be quite challenging or push you out of your comfort zone, into another (hopefully upward) trajectory.
- speed + mid career = very comfortable position, but the most risky on long term trajectory. (1) If the AI paradigm shift materializes, your skills could likely become outdated/largely reduced value and you are at risk of being automated away. (2)
- innovate + mid career = nice place to be, very highly paid and very hard to replace.
I can't comment on late career, I am not there yet. I'd expect it really depends on your priority and inclinations. My judgement is also likely influenced by the fact that I started as a generalist and contractor/small-business-owner; if you move from education right into FAANG, you'll likely have a more organized but less innovative personal drive/risk tolerance.
(1) I think I am here, and that's why I decided in late last year to move to (60%) part time and invest a significant portion of time, beyond what I can do at work (learn to do things differently, and learn about other industries, how they solve similar/adjacent problems and what is unique about them), on my own improvement/innovation at a significant personal cost (40% less income).
(2) IMHO the risk as an employee in "speed+mid career" in one of the companies in the AI race can be much higher than in other companies, automating SWE/eng roles requires a lot more mature tech infrastructure (e.g. good testing of very large systems is tricky to get right, but it enables closed-loop automated AI improvements) than many non-tech companies have.
Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a disclaimer of sorts - "this is my immediate reaction, probably somewhat emotional, which should not be taken too personally nor too seriously".
If you don’t want anyone to take it personally or seriously, then maybe don’t post it
I think it’s fine, I was just curious.
Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my life, this is the first positive thing I have ever read/heard about yahoo
What's so negative about yahoo mail today? Other than not being a hip cool company like Google.
No idea, but there’s an old adage that goes like:
There exists only 2 kinds of tools.
The kinds people complain about And the kinds nobody use.
Yahoo is definitely the latter.