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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#781

Post by InCityDreams »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #378

Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ... Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't…

Would like more info on [1]. I work in the area of cutting costs (also privately - gave up coffee as it was a waste of money, for me): with money being finite, what you can save is often worth more than what you can earn.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#782

Post by ken47 »

The issue is quite simple IMHO. The company has a motto that is almost completely PR. If they truly cared about doing the right thing, don’t be evil, to the extent they imply by making it their motto, then they would have an interview process which evaluates the ethics and morality of their candidates, even if only a little bit. It is well known that entry to Google is, at least for engineers, basically little more than a leetcode mastery test.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#783

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

obviouslynotme wrote: post #574
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

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…

It's less about risk aversion than it is about position, size, and complexity. As these things grow, the incentives change and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible. A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it d…

> Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that

That dude just made the number up.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#784

Post by Rebelgecko »

pb7 wrote: post #686
Rebelgecko wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She probably is trying to be good at it.

She’s failing, hence the call out. You don’t get to quietly fail when you’re raking in millions dictating the work lives of thousands of people.

She's presumably already trying to do a good job. Saying "try to a good job" isn't helpful feedback and isn't assuming good intent.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#785

Post by solatic »

yashap wrote: post #466
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

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…

I honestly think it’s possible to have large/mature companies that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It’s just really, really, really hard. You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workf…

It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executive oversees a single layer of middle management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing telephone, and you have an echo chamber.

The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#786

Post by somenameforme »

eslaught wrote: post #123
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

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…

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…

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project?

And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.

[1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#787

Post by scaramanga »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

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…

Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a tobacco company or Chevron.

So i mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#788

Post by johnluigi »

sgu999 wrote: post #776
Eridrus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This story that Google would be destroyed if they had released GenAI tech before OpenAI is BS. Most people I know were instructed to tell people it was because of “responsibility” that GenAI was not out yet, while the entire company was freaking out and playing catch up with OpenAI (a 770 people company!) and promising non existent things to customers. There was nothing ready or thought through. Many people at Google thought they would be dominating AI forever. Little did they know that regardless of having a 170k people workforce, a 700 people start up nearly knocked them down. Google does not use Google Cloud for nearly nothing, also because of safety and security threats. I never understood why they could not be like AWS and use their own cloud. I wonder how long they will keep going trying to sell people something they don’t trust themselves.

About culture: it has deteriorated very much so. Working in Google was one thing, moving to Cloud was horrific and the sign I needed to get out of there. It has a culture that is rotten and somewhat worse than other Alphabet orgs, and tons of individuals with very poor technical acumen. Friends recommend friends who are morally flexible and they end up in Cloud. That is the easiest back door to Google and to a career ruin too given there are very poor execution and scarcity in technology innovation.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#789

Post by fargle »

as another engineer from another company, i'm sad to relate that i see point-by-point the same things with different names of course. i sympathize. it's sad to see the cancer, the nepotism, the grifters that move in on the now weakened, once great, company.

f*ck them. just say it. it's useless, but good for your psyche.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#790

Post by konschubert »

somenameforme wrote: post #786
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier 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…

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. S…

Building the best self driving car in the world is amazing , come on!
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