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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#551

Post by andromeduck »

robertlagrant wrote: post #375
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…

> they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.

But that's what equity driven comp is supposed to resolve - give them small refreshers until they leave.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#552

Post by htrp »

e_y_ wrote: post #438
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…

On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyon…

> at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

If you can't innovate at the base level of app design .... how do you have any hope of innovating for AI apps that require research/engineering/product/marketing collaboration?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#553

Post by ttepasse »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #515
lapcat wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fact that I'm bringing up the history shows that I haven't forgotten. There are legimate disagreements over whether switching to XML was a good idea. Nonetheless, these disagreements were not a good excuse to overthrow W3C entirely, merely a convenient excuse for the browser vendors. Moreover, I don't think the HTML standards need to move as fast as Google wants them to move. HTML is now a "living standar…

The WHATWG W3C kerfuffle perfectly illustrates that when an unaccountable body's decisions become unpopular, another body can meet popular demands and sidestep the body's work. W3C was not taking HTML, XML, and XHTML in the directions that most users of the Web wanted. The fact that semantic web fans and the web-should-be-for-documents crowd agreed with the W3C doesn't matter, they were outnumbered by the rest. WHATW…

... another _unaccountable_ body

And of course WHATWG didn't out-convince devs on a marketplace of ideas; as an oligopoly of browser developers they just did.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#554

Post by scamworld2 »

pyb wrote: post #334
emodendroket wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the generic complaints of everyone who doesn't like their manager ever and frankly I would have thought twice before attaching my name to a broadside that attacks a former manager by name. But hey, what do I know, I never worked at Google.

A 18-year veteran like OP shouldn't be complaining about their manager's lack of vision ; they should have realised by now that it's also their job to enact the vision. He was probably paid too much to behave as a passenger.

Who exactly at Google isn't a passenger? Jeff Dean? There aren't many pilots there.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#555

Post by kccqzy »

fragmede wrote: post #477
Osmose wrote: post #69

This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making i…

5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.

I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling.

But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme.

I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#556

Post by esafak »

yashap wrote: post #466
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…

I honestly think it’s possible to have large/mature companies that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It’s just really, really, really hard. You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workf…

Which companies did you have in mind?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#557

Post by 93po »

ruszki wrote: post #415
chatmasta wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't for the life of me figure out why you would put someone like that in charge of google-dev relations. One possibility is that the person who put her in that position has an incentive for Flutter/Dart to fail.

They just don't care. Btw, it's very funny to see projects, which were predestined to fail, because they send their shittiest, and somehow they became better, and slowly more important than the executives star projects. There are meetings in such cases (I was part of such projects and meetings, several times), after almost everybody should be fired immediately, if you want anything good for the company. But of course…

> They just don't care.

This seems likely. Google makes 90% or some very high percent of their money from ads. I doubt there is any focus on on comparatively small side projects

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#558

Post by mschuster91 »

kccqzy wrote: post #508
Eridrus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose. I think this is directionally true: Google would hav…

Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao. If Google were to try this early, it is uncertain that Google will discover a monetization strategy before the product joins the Google graveyard. Let's not even ta…

> Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao.

Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever reason there's almost zero attention to TikTok.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#559

Post by 93po »

emodendroket wrote: post #411
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping quiet about perceived problems is exactly the kind of toxic political lack of transparency that Ian is calling out here.

How much is it really doing if you’re making the criticism after you left?

I would guess he's been advocating for this for years before he left.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#560

Post by concordDance »

Mistletoe wrote: post #374
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…

There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever. Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the…

But we have created new types of social institutions despite having the same DNA as our ancestors! Most notably the corporation and the nation-state.
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