61–70 of 348 posts
78% approval ratings seem pretty high to me. Am I the only one who thinks we may be looking for a pattern where none exists? A lot of factors like market conditions, news cycle etc. could lead to +/-10% swing in what is such an unofficial metric to begin with.
Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…
Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…
Wait, our CEO has a vision? Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons: De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the reporting structure in the last few years (ie endless layers of middle management). Both of these make consistent vision and values much harder to achieve. Recent Googlegeist just reflects that.
Also, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things. (Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)
This is actually pretty cool. The butler part makes it sound silly but if you were able to pull it off it would mean that we have reached a technological breakthrough. It would be very close to a technological singularity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In both cases they went from being run by a CEO who had experience as an engineer to someone with more of a business background
Also from a founder to someone who had risen through the ranks as a manager & executive.
Among the FAANGs (btw I think Microsoft deserves to be included there now) I find Google to be at the bottom in terms of vision. It's morphed into the conservative, big co they were once fighting. It's kind of sad.
Come on, Facebook's vision is Frindster but 15 years later and Netflix is literally putting TV on the Internet, a Silicon Valley (I mean the show) worthy description.
For the sake of the employees and for the sake of the rest of us, I believe that Sundar Pichai is not CEO material at all. He should go or be pushed out, and Larry Page and Sergei Brin (or one of them) should take a stronger role and have a deeper engagement on many matters. Google has been doing well financially, but it has lost its soul (the one it had in its very initial years) and seems to be going around aimless…
Larry and Sergey have pretty much semi retired with about $50 billion each. Short of Alphabets share price plumetting, why would they come back now if they haven't already?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on, Facebook's vision is Frindster but 15 years later and Netflix is literally putting TV on the Internet, a Silicon Valley (I mean the show) worthy description.
Facebook is near the bottom with Google IMO. Netflix has totally flipped Hollywood and airing really interesting original content. That is something.
Don't discount the massive increase in the number of employees. The more people you add, the more the culture dilutes. It becomes impossible for employees to feel like they're part of single a tribe with a clear goal. Factions develop, tensions mount, and you get angry employees leaking confidential information constantly. Most of the negative press the public has heard about Google in the past year is a direct resul…
I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…