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Culture Change at Google

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Re: Culture Change at Google

#511

Post by deanCommie »

redcobra762 wrote: post #68

Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving . This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time the…

This is the thread I was looking for. In all these glowing odes to the Google that Was that cross Hackernews every day now, about what an incredible and liberating and productive place it was, there's always something missing.

The most toxic, conceited, selfish, inflexible, basically the worst stereotype of "genius asshole" engineers I've ever studied with, or worked with, all wound up at Google.

And is it a surprise when the entire interview process consists of "Are you good at computer science?"

Re: Culture Change at Google

#512

Post by deanCommie »

mschuster91 wrote: post #52

> Let me explain. In a typical company, when priorities shift, you "downsize" (or cancel) a project, and then use the money to add people to a different, more important project. The common way to do this is fire people from the first project, then rehire a bunch of new people in the second project. It's easy, it's simple, it's expected. This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed t…

It's a question of trust and societal culture, not company culture.

On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?

In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.

This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.

BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)

Once you grow past a certain size, you lose it.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#513

Post by andromeduck »

summerlight wrote: post #450
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. _total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.

If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.

I feel like the mistake is not having more local zones of total internal transparency but idk what my org is even thinking nowadays.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#514

Post by N1H1L »

hn8305823 wrote: post #401
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…

> 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. A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company. Unfortunately…

True. Honestly they should have taken the second bet in the 2010s and come up with a clean sheet 737 successor. It would have been bold, but the company would have been in far better shape today

Re: Culture Change at Google

#515

Post by erhaetherth »

englishspot wrote: post #426
piva00 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've been hesitant to comment on this to avoid sounding "bitter", but you're absolutely right.. it's telling that quite a number of folks are so laser-focused on the money as opposed to the innovation. at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.

It's stifling.

I got into programming because I enjoyed programming. My first "real" job was not in FAANG, just some small company with about 2 other developers. And it was great, I had a lot of fun, I got to work with great technology and try new things.

Then I got lured into FAANG for the $$$ and free food. Now it's boring. There's no room to innovate. I'm not allowed to make any big decisions or play with fun technology. What's left? I enjoy my TC and that gets me through the day. You can't blame folks for focusing on TC when there's no innovation to be had.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#516

Post by eru »

deltaburnt wrote: post #315
eru wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here. Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of…

Their employees and executives make the majority of their income from RSUs. You can't exactly run a company if your entire workforce gets a huge pay cut each year from a poorly performing stock.

When I was working for Google, only a minority of my income came from RSUs.

You might be right about some executives, or people who have been with the company for a very long time.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#517

Post by iamdelirium »

eastbound wrote: post #462
vlovich123 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I love how out of date you are in your opinions or in a bubble your opinions are.

YouTuber might be degrading to you but it’s one of the most desired position among teens.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#518

Post by tech_tuna »

rapnie wrote: post #135
eru wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here. Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of…

> Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse' I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.

I see it them taking a risk and while I thought it was a silly idea, I applaud them for trying. It's hard to imagine Google taking a risk like this, which is the crux of this post and these threads.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#519

Post by tech_tuna »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #69

People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit. When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet…

I think that's implicit in this. . . a lot of us have held Google in high regard for a long time, knowing that they pioneered a lot for modern big tech companies while also staying cool in the eyes of the nerds.

Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google.

Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft.

tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.

Re: Culture Change at Google

#520

Post by themaninthedark »

knorker wrote: post #187
dash2 wrote: post #166

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground." Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

> I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so. There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).

See also the Boeing and MD merger. Also GE.
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