Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
yes
Culture Change at Google
501–510 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#502Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate. > he most incredible and u…
> Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s. I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who w…
Yeah I get the impression that people don't take as much pride in their work for its own sake anymore - more assembly line worker than master craftsman.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days. One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become…
But then they did nothing to sell their infrastructure because it was seen as a competitive advantage.
Google3/Borg ecosystem should have been productized but that'll never happen now the way things are evolving.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#504I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect. The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe…
I agree tbh but it feels like the current environment doesn't reward risk taking and heads down work, especially with diffuse or longer term payoffs, and our AI efforts are still being retardedby safetiests/activists.
Rest & vest types are still doing fine, it's the passionate/care-a-lots that are increasingly burning out and disengaging or leaving.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#505Whenever I see posts like these, whether for Google, or any other company, I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all els…
Google isn’t an engine to create wealth out of nothing. Its a place that is/was structured to extract maximum value from its engineers specifically. It isn’t all that surprising that engineers got most of the perks.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are... * EA/Origin * Epic * Ubisoft EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential tre…
There’s GOG, but they seem more niche for retro/hardcore gamers.
Ah, of course, I knew I was forgetting one. They did start that way although they've branched out since then. For example they sell Everspace 2, which is a much newer game.
They actually might be my favorite since all the games they sell are DRM-free. You can download the installer of every one of their games locally and they'll run "forever" without any dependency on GOG or their Galaxy library app (unlike Steam). Though their selection is more limited since IIRC they manually review every game they list.
However, even they tend to favor their "in-house" games (they're a sibling company of CDPR which developed the Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll frequently see those featured prominently there). Not as bad as Epic, though. More in the style of how Steam advertised Half Life 2 and Portal in the early days of Steam.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#507> The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. 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. If you're someone building a company, challenge y…
Dart is an interpreted language created as a replacement for JavaScript, Go is a compiled language created as a replacement for C/C++. Those can hardly converge.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#508It’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…
> It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.
A company can manage to take risks with the right culture and the right business priority, even if it has limited profit. AWS, for instance, gives its services years of runway to prove themselves. The company places enormous demand on its leadership to show "technical boldness" and business initiatives. S3, EC2, Serverless, DDB, and etc, were initially considered risky bets. On the other hand, the same AWS culture does not necessarily encourage long-term applied research. As a result, AWS couldn't come up with breakthroughs like BERT and GPT. Case in point, AWS adopted a German's university's ASR solution so AWS could go to market quickly, even though the cost was that the engineers and scientists were bogged down by maintaining the model instead of coming up with models like Whisper.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He also developed AdSense as part of Gmail.
I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?
Maps came from the acquisition of Where 2. Here are a few links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions
- https://medium.com/@lewgus/the-untold-story-about-the-foundi...
Re: Culture Change at Google
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, Google’s choice of architecture prevents them from open-sourcing or maintaining projects a tad longer than absolute necessary. I’d say they dug their own grave, if it has such a large impact on the trust of customers. Maybe Google3’s architecture was excellent for worldwide scalability and costs, but let’s see which one matters in the long term.
I listed many reasons why open sourcing wouldn’t make sense and you seem to have hyperfixated on just one. Yes - Google chose a monorepo because of the engineering and business advantages it gave them. For example, all binaries had a common dependency that implemented all sorts of common functionality they found binaries on their servers needed out of the box - that’s why a simple c++ hello world on Google3 results i…
> Also, they have a bunch of tooling to manage open source projects that mirror google3 projects. ... if I recall correctly the tool itself was open sourced too.