741–750 of 1001 posts
Its not very cool IMO to name & shame anyone lower than Sundar. Nevertheless the article is spot on with the effect of layoffs, and the general culture of big tech.
Maybe this was something that applied in the "good old times" but nowadays since anything goes for corpos the same should go for drones.
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There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever. Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the…
I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it. Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that tho…
Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like.
We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes.
They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures.
For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation.
Don’t hate the players, hate the game.
When did it become acceptable to write things about other people as he writes about Jeanine Banks? Even if everything he says about her is true, it still feels incredibly rude to say it in public.
Corporation can decimate their workforce in the search for better earnings but god forbid the drones speak up.
> 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…
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I ran one of the successful projects in Area 120. I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007. But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked…
Somewhat spicy take - if the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers you worked with, they probably weren't the right builders to start a new vertical. Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.
I too believe the company has entered a phase of stagnancy or even decline. In fact, so much that two weeks ago I put my money where my mouth is by selling $1M worth of GOOG I was given as part of a stock grant when I was hired by Google in 2014. (I promptly reinvested this capital in a generic S&P 500 index fund.) From 2014 to mid 2015, when I quit, I found Google had a great engineering culture and I loved my time…
As an investor, though, calling the “top” for a company like Google (or Microsoft) is so challenging — not “top” in terms of all time high valuation, but “top” in terms of differential forward-looking, annualized, and adjusted-for-tax returns vs VGT or VOO (i.e. a more challenging target).
These are some of the most entrenched and profitable companies in modern history. Even as they mediocratize, they remain value-accretive for years. It’s difficult to imagine them losing to inflation.
Buffet choosing Apple over any of the other FAANG/M may be looked upon even more favorably, 10-20 years from now, than it is today. Google and Microsoft are tight together in second, but I think you’re right that we’ll look back on 2018-??? as Google’s equivalent to the Ballmer years.
Perhaps the individuals the author knows were pernicious, but clearly someone is. Look at the current state of YouTube demonetization and war on adblocking (ads are a vector for malware).
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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.
Throwaway didn't claim bad faith necessarily, but just pointed out an important variable. It's good to have good faith, but it's also good to understand that good faith individuals also suffer from blindspots and unconscious biases. Hypothetically if there is a set of leaders, directors, and VPs, that all seem equally incompetent, but you call out only one, what might be the reason for it? It could be random. It coul…
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…
The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.