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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#771

Post by barnabee »

antupis wrote: post #373
miohtama wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service…

5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.

I haven’t used Google as more than an occasional backup for years, and even less since I switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi a few months back.

The more I eliminate anything to do with ads from my life, the better things get,

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#774

Post by DannyBee »

lurker919 wrote: post #624
throwaway678808 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

I'm staying out of all of this, but i'll opine on the legal side - defamation requires statements of fact and not opinions.

To the degree his rant deals with facts - like claiming someone did or did not do a thing, that's at least possibly actionable.

But the opinions are not actionable as defamation.

So for example:

"bob murdered someone" - actionable

"i don't like bob" - not actionable.

Depending on what gets said, etc, it may be actionable as something other than defamation.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#775

Post by seraphsf »

jklm wrote: post #697
seraphsf wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re not wrong. They were among the top 10% of people I worked with in terms of passion, commitment, and creativity. They weren’t among the top 10% in terms of their skill in navigating Dilbert-land corporatism.

A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google’s reputation as a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#776

Post by sgu999 »

Eridrus wrote: post #338
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more…

> Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose. I think this is directionally true: Google would hav…

> It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

I wouldn't be so sure, in my case ChatGPT passes the bar of being mildly useful but Bard is still absolutely useless. I can see two equally likely explanations for this: they simply can't manage to pull it off due to their culture or they can't release something that isn't massively more nerfed than the competition.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#778

Post by mil22 »

liveoneggs wrote: post #29

"Flutter is amazingly successful. It's already the leading mobile app development framework" ???

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/development/#...

Flutter: 46% React Native: 35% Unity: 10% Cordova: 10% Ionic: 9% Xamarin: 8%

Just one datapoint, of course - a survey of 26,384 developers.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#780

Post by ChrisArchitect »

leoc wrote: post #702
eslaught wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

..and now all that's left of Sun is the wood on the back of the Meta sign.
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