The soulful software artisans I know would never consider working at Google. Why is that?
Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#732"Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase."
Brutal but should we do more name-naming to allow people to avoid working for inept managers?
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…
On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyon…
Microsoft today is more innovative than google IMO. They keep executing bold and controversial strategies, even though being older than google.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#734> Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious).
The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic.
Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the first search intelligence business in 2005 as a side business. Again, Google engineers were awesome to work with.
Then in 2009 or so, they began to get territorial. Some outsider sales person was brought in and IIRC, he bought a boat and named it, "AdSense". The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded. We had extensive crawling capabilities but needed to correlate it to API data to give a holistic picture of the competitive AdWords landscape.
We spent the next two years gaming the system. We had 100 API accounts. We launched our own bare metal "cloud" with 1300 distinct IP addresses which we throttled to hit Google no more than once per minute.
This worked. We monitored Google in over 50 countries. Clients loved us because we could tell them exactly how they were doing on AdWords, both good and bad. Any intelligent person could use our data to improve their ads and excel. Our IPs would occasionally get banned but we would just temporarily shut them off and use one of our reserves. And even then, we eventually developed a crowd sourced solution to solve captchas which got them reinstated.
Another three years of the cat and mouse game passed. We were acquired by the world's largest advertising company.
Guess what? A call from the CEO to Matt Cutts ended the war. No promises were made but our access was simply restored. Everything worked again.
So yeah, Google is just like every other company in the world. The corruption has been there for at least 15 years. Please stop worshipping it.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do. As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree. (even if I am too chicken to do it myself) Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people. They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces. When an org, leader, employee or associate taints ever…
The consequences of naming someone in such a manner, in an article that makes its rounds on the Internet, can be actually quite dire. Public harassment, etc. There are some pretty unhinged people out there, and in particular some rather ugly people who in particular get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc. I think it's in very bad taste in this case.
Do you honestly believe that somebody is going to be harassed by the public or harassed in public or harassed in private because somebody on a niche blogs wrote that they were a bad boss? Or are you inventing a false scenario to argue against some writing you consider to be in bad taste?
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should I take it to be some kind of Freudian slip that you’ve written “myself” rather than “themselves” here?
I'm half senile, and so when you replied I wondered if I did that. But re-reading it several times now, I don't see it. When I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, they might make good husbands/wives for my own kids" where is the Freudian? I am on the lookout for my kids. I can't tell them who to marry, but I can put them in circumstances where there are people their age that I approve of, such that familiari…
My parents had a lot of ideas about my romantic life too, none of them particularly good or welcome and none of which I listened to. Maybe you'll have better luck.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…
On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyon…
They made - and still make - one crucial error: you need to spin those projects that are simply viable out immediately after they take root. Otherwise you will end up with the brand advantage but there will always be the pressure to use the resources (people, mostly) more efficiently in terms of ROI. And so nothing ever lasts and slowly but surely your reputation as a reliable partner for new products is eroded.
You can use your main brand for the launch, but then you have to be willing to support the child.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#738> 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 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…
> there aren't a lot of other white men in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.
Reverse racism is just racism.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#739> 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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Wow. Yes, there's absolutely zero criticism of white males these days.
Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
#740> 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 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…
>Also I am almost never the person to bring this kind of thing up but
I find that hard to believe.