651–660 of 1001 posts
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I worked in the org that Jeanine now runs. It had a series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level. To call out Jeanine and only Jeanine in language this harsh feels wrong. From my recollection and from what I have heard from people still working there, she is par for the course. Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but ... there aren't a lot of other black women in…
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> 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. ...for things that align with that silo structure. If you try to build new things that necessitate conceptual integrity across org boundaries, then teams that think this way will first debate ownersh…
And this is another reason why managers growing their fiefdom to make big teams is bad for the organization. Most of the most successful projects and incredible feats of engineering happen by tiny teams full of very talented people NOT a 4-layer management pyramid of people who are here for a nice stable 9-5. Not to say you can’t be successful with WLB but you need a certain fire in your gut and a hunger to execute a…
Too often do people just throw more time and/or bodies at a problem to make it go away.
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I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments. But the bigger thing I’m coming to gri…
How do you distinguish "I can fix them" companies that will not improve because they are where they are because of organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual improve and are ready for you?
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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…
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I don't really see how naming the specific individual improved the argument, unless there is true malfeasance, like sexual harassment, I don't think it's ethical to publicly name-and-shame somebody for the crime of being bad at their job. LOTS of people are bad at their job.
If she doesn’t want to be publicly shamed for being bad at her job she could always try to be good at it.
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 have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments. But the bigger thing I’m coming to gri…
And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.
In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly.
To the extent that Google's culture is still "good", it's for the most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies have caught up to the best parts of Google's culture, and exceeded it in many ways.
I totally relate to his experience with middle management. Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little interest in the actual product they were managing. There will still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too much of their time just playing politics to do any good.
There's one way that Google is still leading, and that's in employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google still offers one of the most generous free food / meal benefits in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google's Vision plan that let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.
> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently m…
> 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. > For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards ( https://whatwg.org/ ). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would…