Lessons from 14 years at Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#511

Post by NamlchakKhandro » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

codingbbq wrote: post #499

trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

Rightly said. I spent good amount of time cleaning up 15 year old codebase and removed almost 10MB of source code files which was being part of production build and it was never used. This helped reduce the build time. I thought I'd get appreciated from everyone in the team, but it was never acknowledged. In fact my PM was warried and raised an alarm for regression. Even though I was 100% confident that there would n…

LoL managers.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#512

Post by eru » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

droopyEyelids wrote: post #435

Panzer04 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades.

What's your evidence for that?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#513

Post by Jean-Papoulos » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

>Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.

While I agree in spirit, when you reach a certain amount of people working on a project it's impossible. The product manager's job is to understand real user problems and communicate them efficiently to the engineering team so the engineering team can focus on engineering.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#514

Post by zelphirkalt » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #10

I first learned about the "innovation tokens" idea in "Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead" from this, still one of my favorite essays on software architecture: https://boringtechnology.club/ Likewise, "Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call." made me think of this 23 year old classic from Joel Spolsky, the Law of Leaky Abstractions: https://www…

I think most people don't really claim, that complexity is gone when properly abstracted, but claim that you don't have to deal with it every single time. That's the purpose of abstracting something.

Simple example: You are not dealing with the complexity of process management of the OS, every time you start any application. Sometimes you might need to, if you are developing software. Or if your application hangs and you need to kill it via some task manager. Most users however, never deal with that, because it is abstracted "away". That's the whole point. Nevertheless, the actual complex work is always done. Behind the scenes.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#515

Post by eru » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

elmomle wrote: post #434

Panzer04 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.

Everybody can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. It's pretty easy.

If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.

(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.

The labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#516

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:26 AM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #427

euifii wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I really don’t get about these types of folks. Do they really want to remember their life’s work as “kissing ass and playing politics”? I get the “work to live” and all that, but you’re basically tossing away half your life…for what, money? How much money do you need!?

Well you can "work to live" in a nice big house, with a nanny, eating steaks, flying business class to ski in the alps or scuba in the Galapagos... I think it takes a lot of money before you feel like you don't need more money.

Other than the big house, which can easily be achieved in much of the country, nothing in the list above incentivizes me to either work harder or kids ass.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#517

Post by zelphirkalt » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #360

simonw wrote: post #10

I first learned about the "innovation tokens" idea in "Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead" from this, still one of my favorite essays on software architecture: https://boringtechnology.club/ Likewise, "Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call." made me think of this 23 year old classic from Joel Spolsky, the Law of Leaky Abstractions: https://www…

My former boss had a rule of “One novel thing per project”. This was both an upper and lower limit, which ensured that he was “always learning”. I’ve followed that rule for decades and always regretted it when I couldn’t: projects were either too boring or too stressful except at the magic level of novelty.

That's fine ... only have to size your projects accordingly!

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#518

Post by Sprotch » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

yobbo wrote: post #392

naijaboiler wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

> It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. This might be defacto true in most workplaces, but defending "politics over competence" boils down to "I deserve the rewards from other people's work". People oppose it because it is morally wrong, not because they think it is an inaccurate description of reality.

It’s not politics over competence. It’s getting things done in the real world

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#519

Post by rincebrain » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

wafflemaker wrote: post #467

vbezhenar wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost…

A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.

Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#520

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

naijaboiler wrote: post #259

bigcloud1299 wrote: post #133

15 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you i…

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

You're not wrong. You're just missing the thing people are complaining about: The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear (which can take years in a large company).

My previous company is in a bad position and many such folks are finally being outed. But it takes lots and lots of screwing up before the fat is trimmed.