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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#81

Post by a-dub »

3grdlurker wrote: post #75
lotsofpulp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing Y…

or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do.

that's why we have public benefit corporations.

Re: Leaving Google

#82

Post by antupis »

Jensson wrote: post #44
echelon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're no longer about breadth, limitless innovation, and moonshots, but rather extraction of platform economic control. They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases. Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.

The old companies were pushed over by technological or organizational disruptions. A major disruption was paying significant premium money for premium talent, often more than twice the market rate for a given experience level and do that to everyone and not just to poach hires. All of the biggest tech companies do that today, but 20 years ago that was a huge disruption and caused many giants to fall from grace since…

I think it low-key already happening first now talent markets are global so I bet there is companies that are willing to pay premium for premium remote talent. Then there is companies like uniswap which are unicorns and there is like 20 people working that kinda opens situation where they can outbid even google for premium talent.

Re: Leaving Google

#83

Post by mavelikara »

cube00 wrote: post #2

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers:

    One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit 
    to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he 
    shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more 
    nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than 
    any other type. The man who is mentally alert and 
    intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to 
    what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work 
    of this character.
It is sad to see this happen at places like Google, where engineers had a lot more autonomy.

Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.

Re: Leaving Google

#84

Post by freyir »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #49
freyir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.

She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too. The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847

She submitted her paper late for internal review when it was too late for revisions. It might be the case that most papers are submitted late for internal review, but most papers don’t expressly criticize the employer’s work. That’s an important distinction, and it was naive to not anticipate that the paper might get extra scrutiny.

Regardless, being upset because you didn’t get your way doesn’t give you carte blanche to do unprofessional things that will get you fired. You can’t say “Give me X or I quit” and not assume there’s a chance your bluff will be called (especially when “X” is a demand for the company to violate its own policies).

Re: Leaving Google

#86

Post by icelancer »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #55
titzer wrote: post #43

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…

> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

Re: Leaving Google

#88

Post by amha »

ashtonkem wrote: post #38

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would le…

My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)

Re: Leaving Google

#89

Post by joshuamorton »

Jensson wrote: post #79
sillysaurusx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too. The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847

Other people circumventing policy doesn't mean that it is fine for her to do it. It is really hard to judge as you do without more data on the circumstances of the other people circumventing the policy and not getting punished, right now we have to take their word that what she did wasn't worse than what most others did. We can't know that. Similarly one engineer force pushing code to fix an issue might be fine, but…

Why do we have to take Google's word and not hers? (Especially in light of corroborating witnesses who say that what she did was completely normal)

Re: Leaving Google

#90

Post by [deleted] »

mavelikara wrote: post #83
cube00 wrote: post #2

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers: One of the very first requirements for a ma…

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