Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 348 posts

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#71

Post by beambot »

goldenchrome wrote: post #40

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…

It's not just culture, it comes down to unclear vision. Under Google, it was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." Under Alphabet? It's super unclear. "Do cool stuff and make money?"

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#72

Post by dawhizkid »

est31 wrote: post #68
dawhizkid wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is near the bottom with Google IMO. Netflix has totally flipped Hollywood and airing really interesting original content. That is something.

Google has totally flipped the internet . Or do you still know of a personal website that maintains a list of interesting links ordered by the topic?

They flipped it 20 years ago...talking about where these companies rank as far as current vision and innovation goes today in 2019.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#73

Post by joshuamorton »

m0zg wrote: post #54
est31 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven. He might have not fought in the trenches of engineering. But I've seen his congress testimony. He is such a humble and kind guy while still being a nerd, one of us. If I worked at Google, I definitely would be glad about him being CEO.

As a former Googler I'd like Urs Holzle as a CEO. I might even consider coming back if he's at the helm. Dude is both a solid engineer, and an outstanding leader. I respect him a lot and so do most other current and ex-Googlers. Problem is, Urs probably doesn't want the job. :-)

Urs is decent at being a technical lead. He'd make a great CTO if Google had one (and in many ways I think he is the unofficial CTO), but he's not at all a good leader when it comes to non-technical things, for a variety of reasons. I think you'd very quickly realize you didn't actually want him as CEO.

To give him credit, from what I've seen, he's very aware of these shortcomings and as you say, he'd refuse.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#74

Post by skinnymuch »

ehsankia wrote: post #58
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct). I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of remind…

Except for every one deprecated product you can name, there's probably more like 10-20 new product. The issue is that Google has gotten so big and has so many different projects, that the number of deprecation is just bigger, even if percentage wise they're probably lower than most other companies. Try looking at https://gcemetery.co/ and naming how many of those you even recognize and can describe without looking it…

That site is missing a lot since I thought of a couple right off the bat it didn’t have. Disco, QuickOffice, Songza, Slide, Bump. There have been some other google music/YouTube related shutterings too that I can’t give names too.

I recognized and could explain more than half listed, but only cared about a couple (didn’t care about Reader).

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#75

Post by felipemnoa »

ur-whale wrote: post #37
trixie_ wrote: post #19

Google's Achilles heel is search and ad revenue (80%). Which is sad because they've been trying to diversify and find another major source of income for 20 years now. If a better search engine comes along and people switch over, then google won't be able to maintain its empire and it could fold, or how would you like to pay $10 a month for a GMail and Google Maps combo access package? It could happen a lot easier and…

I think they're a lot stronger than you think. True, Search and Ads is still their bread and butter, but: Their search engine is really hard to replace, not just because of the quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and has the largest mindshare of any website on the internet. Android is "the" platform pretty much everyone accesses the internet. Cl…

>>Their search engine is really hard to replace, not just because of the quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is.

I'm not so sure about this. Bing is actually pretty good and in some aspects I find it superior. I like their video search better.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#76

Post by billhathaway »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #26
ajmbbs wrote: post #17

Having read the article, only 54% of Googlers view their compensation is better than what they could get from another company. I find it surprising. Who else pays more than Google does? Can only think of Facebook, but even then not sure.

I think Netflix does and I believe it’s all cash unlike the cash/stock split that google does. I got that from levels.fyi so not sure how accurate the information is.

My manager left Google for Netflix a few months ago and said he got to pick the mix of cash vs stock he received when joining Netflix.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#78

Post by nostrademons »

givehimagun wrote: post #61
abhinai wrote: post #35

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.

Agreed! Is this normal for Google? +-10% every year? The change % doesn't give us a lot of insight...these numbers in total seem much higher than the company surveys I've seen results for.

Typical numbers when I was there were usually in the high-80s to mid-90s on most of the satisfaction questions. A drop of +-10% was absolutely considered significant, as were numbers in the 70s.

I once made an internal G+ post that "voluntary response data measures liquidity, not satisfaction". When you have an organization that people can freely choose to join or leave, then you should expect that any internal surveys will have very high satisfaction numbers - because anyone who is dissatisfied will simply leave and drop out of the sample. Similarly, if you get consistently low numbers for satisfaction, that could be because the people in the sample have low liquidity - they can't easily go elsewhere.

This is why organizations like Congress, Comcast, and Facebook (users, not employees) have such perpetually low approval ratings - for most people stuck with them, there are simply no alternatives, and so they remain beholden to their decisions despite hating them. And similarly, Google employees have very high satisfaction ratings because it's relatively easy to get a job elsewhere or just not need a job at all as a Xoogler, and so anyone who dislikes it just leaves.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#79

Post by friedman23 »

osrec wrote: post #63
goldenchrome wrote: post #40

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…

> From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case.

I was hoping you would have a personal experience to share but I guess that's not the case. I wonder how often in anonymous forums people share beliefs (not data) on things they haven't personally experienced but have heard other people on the internet experience (who may have been lying).

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#80

Post by hopler »

jpm_sd wrote: post #56
vl wrote: post #7

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?)

Glass is useful and relevant. https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/03/18/51...
Post reply on HN