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Lessons from 14 years at Google

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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#581

Post by samiv »

yujzgzc wrote: post #370
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.

"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one…

This is putting the apple cart before the horse.

Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#582

Post by lofaszvanitt »

cube00 wrote: post #457
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #122

Seems like the author had lost his personality during that 14 years trying to appease the strange people at the top or figure out the allpermeating bs they force on people.

17. Your network outlasts every job you’ll ever have. Maybe you're not allowed a personality after you unlock peak outlasting networking.

Pluribus effect :).

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#583

Post by gnz11 »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #490
rictic wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.

How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?

Household income is more than just wages. Household income can go up while wages remain stagnant or shrinking because other pieces of the pie are increasing (e.g. work benefits, investments, money from the government). https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/09/sources-of-household...

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#584

Post by regularfry »

lazylizard wrote: post #552
rahimnathwani wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. Imagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs...

efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?

The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#585

Post by robocat »

couchridr wrote: post #502
phyzix5761 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average, most large cap stocks (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, etc) are owned by millions of retail investors through 401Ks, mutual funds, ETFs, and direct ownership.

Of the US stock market half is owned by 1%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01122

Tech founders (part of the 1%) own about 2% of the stock market.

About 18% is owned by foreign entities.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#586

Post by eloisant »

fragmede wrote: post #468
wafflemaker wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!

If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#587

Post by fainpul »

websiteapi wrote: post #113
hansmayer wrote: post #93

Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…

which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary

Nothing is perfect, but here are a few things I enjoy using:

https://www.geogebra.org/calculator

https://regex101.com/

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

https://www.figma.com

https://www.affinity.studio

https://bluecinema.ch (To buy movie tickets for a certain movie chain in Switzerland. I haven't used this in many years, but at first glance it looks like I remember it. Back then, this was a very smooth experience both on desktop and mobile. Just perfectly done.)

Any spreadsheet program (it's the spreadsheet itself, which I like, not necessarily how the UI is aranged around it)

Apple's Spotlight, GNOME's similiar thing (don't know the name)

I also like Tantacrul's interface design work: https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul/videos

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#588

Post by rswail »

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…

Worked on public transport ticketing (think rail gates and stuff) with contactless last 30 years, when guys would tell me that the software was "ready", I'd ask:

> Is it "stand next to the gates at Central Station during peak time and everything works" ready?

We were working on the project from a different city/country, but we managed to cycle our developers through the actual deployments so they got to see what they were building, made a hell of a difference to attitude and "polish".

Plus they also got to learn "People travel on public transport to get somewhere, not to interact with the ticketing system."

Meant that they understood the difference just 200ms can make to the passenger experience as well as the passenger management in the stations.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#589

Post by kakacik »

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…

Thats sociopathy in corporate world. Big companies have often 20-40% of such individuals, ie finance has way more (as I see daily) and concentration rises as you rise up in ranks.

The thing is - you don't have to play that game. Sure, you will miss some promotions to largely meaningless titles, much more stress and pressure in such work, and a bit of money but in most companies the money is not worth it (ie work 50% more to get 20% more compensation, in net income rather 10% more since extra income will be hit with high marginal tax bracket in most countries).

But main reason is - what you do 40+ hours weekly for decades (and especially how you do it) seeps back in into you even if you actively try to prevent that. Is it really worth tainting your personality permanently with more sociopathic behavior and thinking, with subsequent negative effect on all personal relationships and even things like personal happiness? I am old enough to see these trends among peers, they are very gradual but once you know what to look for, rather obvious.

When poor such a deal is easy to rationalize since poverty can be crippling, but once beyond that quality of life should be top priority, we are here for rather short time. Otherwise most probably regrets happen later, just listen well to old folks what they are proud of and what not so much.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#590

Post by mangamadaiyan »

cm2012 wrote: post #408
taklimakan wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes nice but also very naive. Most developers do not have that level of ownership, nor know how their users interact with the software. Their job is precisely to complete tickets from the product manager. The product manager is the one who should be in charge of UX research and “build a software that solves users problems.” Sure, in abstract that is the mission of the developers too, but in any structured (and hopefu…

I have never seen a pure ticket based / zero ownership approach ever work.

Tell us you've never worked in a faang without telling us.
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