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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

ln.hixie.ch

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#681

Post by abirch »

wyclif wrote: post #664
Aeolun wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird that Gmail never reached that point. Even years later it’s still the same it was 10 years ago. I think after inbox died I just gave up on it and moved to fastmail.

I understand what you're saying (I miss Inbox, too). But end users like sameness and "it just works." Normies prefer stability over innovation when they are trying to get stuff done.

Normies like sameness, this is why God gave us configs. You can default to normal but let the crazies customize.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#682

Post by teaearlgraycold »

asim wrote: post #239

"...She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set..." You know, I remember a time I said, management just think of engineers as a resource and refer to us as such. But when the word "dehumanising" is used it strikes me a lot clearer. When this disconnected occurs between different layers of the same corpora…

Engineers at Google are referred to as “headcount”. Managers fight each other for headcount. When someone leaves they are lamented for their net loss of .67 headcount (right now you only get one hire for 3 attritions).

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#683

Post by pb7 »

yterdy wrote: post #666
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.

[flagged]

No need to wait, the entire OpenAI board is white and they’ve been getting torn apart the entire weekend.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#685

Post by cavisne »

LargeTomato wrote: post #128
aappleby wrote: post #48

12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done. Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left. The change in frankness and hones…

I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was. I left and from what I hear it just…

Its pretty heartening that among all this drama and activism I've never heard of a users data being maliciously leaked from Google.

To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#686

Post by pb7 »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #655
pseg134 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If she doesn’t want to be publicly shamed for being bad at her job she could always try to be good at it.

She probably is trying to be good at it.

She’s failing, hence the call out. You don’t get to quietly fail when you’re raking in millions dictating the work lives of thousands of people.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#687

Post by SpaceManNabs »

gregw134 wrote: post #387
dekhn wrote: post #156

There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor leadership and become utterly banal. It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and m…

Ex-googler here as well. What are you guys using instead of flume for data pipelines? Beam on Spark?

I am also a bit confused by that comment. Flink, Spark, Beam, Flume are all pretty similar...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#688

Post by __float »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #599
serial_dev wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling her out by name felt a bit harsh within the context of the post. Sure, call out Sundar as he's a public figure, but this lady, never heard of her, never seen her. He could have made the point by writing "I had this terrible boss who had no idea about anything and...", her name is irrelevant to demonstrate the issue of decline at Google.

It is the right thing to do. Flutter team losing someone like Hixie is a big loss to everyone. It is very much possible Tim also left Flutter because of her. This terrible manager has nothing to contribute compared to that. I hope other googlers speak up.

> It is very much possible Tim also left Flutter because of her.

If not her, then likely someone she managed: https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#689

Post by andromeduck »

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.

Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness/vision required to long term success like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#690

Post by eric-hu »

dazzlefruit wrote: post #507
crazygringo wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it drifted? I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too. Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.

Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't. The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became m…

As a web developer I also have to tell you that my industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources. Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel could be from development teams using shiny new frameworks.
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