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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#531

Post by fragmede »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #448
antupis wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.

Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better

instead of Googleing and getting a forum post from 2009 where you have to read the whole thread and then interpret the results, ChatGPT just gives you the answer directly. ChatGPT could be shitty and rude about it and it would still be better because it's a direct smart to your direct question.

what's hilarious is the conversation that must have happened inside google about linking to pages vs giving the answer on the search result page, and now where we are with ChatGPT.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#532

Post by deckard1 »

chatmasta wrote: post #161
esafak wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will.

So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's talking to Google? It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.

Amazon is already there.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-th...

Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#533

Post by seraphsf »

121789 wrote: post #452
teen wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.

I think this is why these teams are really hard to have in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it’s impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some variant of “this team is able to bs and show no value, while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?” I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower ba…

Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator.

It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives).

In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#534

Post by greatgib »

I think this guy has a Stockholm syndrom like I saw multiple times with Google employees:

  ; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
That is very fun because he thinks that they were trying to do good for the world but all was messed up because of cookie banners. Where, in fact, doing good for the world would have been to not abuse of cookies for tracking and evil use that would mean that they would not need bad cookies and would not have been needed to produce cookie banners...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#536

Post by RivieraKid »

refulgentis wrote: post #500
RivieraKid wrote: post #470

I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he's busy with windy.com now) and it's funny how similar my feelings are. What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave, and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate environment as long as they're getting paid tend to stay or join. I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity c…

This is really really incisive, I almost shivered: I went through a "defrag" from Android Wear to Android (i.e. they shut down Boston Android Wear and offered us jobs on Boston Android) I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI. We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the vast…

Thanks. What also surprises me is that coworkers have little desire to start side-projects or startups. But that's probably because those who do have left already.

By the way, I was developing for Android since its early days (before the first Android phone was released) and mostly switched to iOS development few years ago.

I have to say that the Android SDK (and the UI/UX too) was underwhelming, although it started to get better at some point. It felt like the developers were not top talent and / or were under pressure to ship functionality quickly without having the time to step back and think hard about design and simplicity. The most notable example of this is the activity / fragment lifecycle (also known as the "lolcycle").

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#537

Post by [deleted] »

mk89 wrote: post #454
teen wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.

3 successful projects can totally justify what you call waste of money. I sometimes wonder what people expect innovation is. You try and try and try. One thing is good and you must know how to use it - it can make history. If I understood right, chatgpt comes from one of such ideas.... so the question is also: who evaluates the ideas? How come that Google was not able to capitalize on that idea? So yeah, instead of t…

[deleted]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#538

Post by esafak »

ghaff wrote: post #327
closeparen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your pa…

Silos and fiefdoms are normally seen as negative things. And that's not entirely wrong. But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc. teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference or having to constantly coordinate with every other organization in the company. It can go both ways.

Silos are also good for sheltering and nurturing high performing teams, especially when the broader organization is bad.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#539

Post by esafak »

yojo wrote: post #447
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently bad. Indeed, in a large company, they're necessary to avoid dysfunction. You want stable groups of competent people who share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for their thing. "Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees…

Maybe? I'm having a hard time finding a contemporary example. Bezos bowed out (though Amazon culture was famously bad for years), and even Facebook doesn't have 100k employees. My point though is there is a difference between having a leader who got there by politicking versus a leader who got there by building a great company. They're both going to have different strengths and weaknesses, but there's at least a chan…

Executives need to observe the whole organization, not just their direct reports. How far from the top was he when he started empire building? You make it sound like it was already very hierarchical, when Google always advertised itself as a relatively flat company.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#540

Post by cyanydeez »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Google has entirely become a corporate capitalist driven by short term profit.

If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd be really confused as to how poor the search results are.

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