Googler... ex-Googler

There is demand for tech workers, but the output of EU tech companies can't afford huge salaries. Lower margins.

That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?"

And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care.

There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc.

What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki.

As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events."

Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows.

Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Or maybe it's a business problem that Google shares with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

Microsoft has struggled to find any new products that will really move the needle in terms of revenue but they support their old customers with enduring loyalty while making the occasional absurd-but-bold move like Windows 8 and sticking to businesses that seem to make no sense like XBOX.

Facebook is the captain of cringe, not cool, but at least they're investing big in VR as a platform. They subsidize great rigs for Beat Saber because Zuckerberg will never forgive himself if he gives up and somebody else succeeds. [1]

Apple will never find a product as big as the iPhone. To do so they've have to make an iCar or iHouse or skip Starship and go straight to O'Neill Colonies. At least they are indisputably the best at what they do and they can occasionally take a hopeless shot at someone else's turf (Vision Pro) feeling justified that the only rival platform has a trashcan for a logo.

Google has trained us all that anything new from Google has a shelf life less than day old bread. They go at new projects as if they a startup that didn't get into Y Combinator or like the kind of company that Marissa Mayer starts these days [2] -- they don't realize part of the special opportunity of being a huge company like that with an absurd valuation is you can do really big, audacious, and irrational things.

[1] I learned for myself how dangerous this attitude is but all I could do was max out my HELOC.

[2] see https://sunshine.com/ not to put it down, I might be involved in something like that if I wasn't doing what I am doing