711–720 of 1001 posts
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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).
Does that mean managers are incentivised not to let go of underperformers?
> 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…
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> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt. I don't get this. Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion) If…
I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth. But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price. There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend.…
> We also didn't follow engineering best practices for the first few years. For example we wrote no tests... Tests are not a best practice but more of a necessary evil for production systems and/or businesses incapable of retaining their best for many years.
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It's worth noting that was a turning point: the "more wood behind fewer arrows" policy adopted by Larry [1] initiated the die-off cycle of Google products. Prior to that, as far as I am aware, they were much more tolerant of products staying around in a mature-but-not-wildly-successful state. Afterwards, it seemed as if they would only keep things that maintained a trajectory to become as successful as their core pro…
What’s remarkable is that that phrase was already, at that time, notorious for having been a portent of doom at Sun Microsystems.
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In the past, such criticism of a leader would show up internally via Googlegeist and the leader and their reports would all know and possibly adjust. Cutting Googlegeist has knock on effects that create problems like this. The rank and file no longer have a way to communicate back up the chain honestly and things like this come out.
The vast majority of professionals resist the urge to call out their manager on a blog after they quit a job. Even without Googlegeist.
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Why are you surprised by people that don’t work on side projects?
That's not what I said. I don't currently work on any side project. But I have a desire to and I like to think about and discuss project ideas. I assumed everyone is like this.
All the stuff seems "obvious" in retrospect, like...oh...a lot of you went to MIT and did Computer Science because that's what people do but...you went to college to get a degree to get a job, you didn't necessarily become absorbed in it.
But then again most other tech jobs I've been in had that quality 100%. Life is weird.
(I'm a dropout from a state school with a 2.8 GPA, and I honestly don't know if I've ever felt more 'alien' anywhere other than Google.)
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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…
While I don't think mentioning her by name was necessary (she's just an example of the culture of bad middle management he's calling out), I do think highlighting her race as a meta-criticism does neither the OP nor Banks herself any favors. My rule of thumb: unless given an obvious reason not to, assume good faith on the part of individuals.
People in positions of power, particularly those in-charge of others, should be taking it on a responsibility and duty; like any other person, sometimes they do a shit job, and I think managers (unless they've committed sexual assault or something) often get exempted from criticism, while any failures ironically tend to be shoveled onto individuals as replaceable units. How many people out there have managers that end being directly responsible for burning them down and out, causing problems in their family lives, and otherwise cultivating an environment that makes the task of getting work done all but impossible?