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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#891

Post by financltravsty »

stillwithit wrote: post #349
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…

> People will get hurt. Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt. I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position. It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality. Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us su…

Slowly but steadily we age out "divine mandate" for "hustle mandate."

Nothing changes, psychopaths still cling on to some nebulous notion to make labor work harder to capture more excess value.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#892

Post by financltravsty »

ryloric wrote: post #833
ot1138 wrote: post #734

> Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious). The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic. Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the first search i…

Did you really have to say "some engineer in India"? What exactly are you trying to imply there?

Outsourced engineers in India are bad.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#893

Post by EdiX »

hot_gril wrote: post #812
capableweb wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a " " in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.

I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.

To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#894

Post by phillipcarter »

caminante wrote: post #865
phillipcarter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the leader in question doesn't have a coherent strategy because she's likely trying to justify her org (and keep jobs!) in the face of a lot of developers who just don't care a whole lot about her portfolio. Her org could probably function with less people and achieve the same outcomes, but instead of getting rid of them, she's probably trying to make something happen by moving people around. In an environment li…

You're describing the BigCorp meta, which I think is a good portrayal that people need to see. However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it sounds like you're trying to defend. I don't agree. It's completely rational to play career frogger. The leader is getting compensated (We're talking re-ups of generational wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their leadership is fair for criticism. It…

What I suppose I'm saying is that there likely isn't a compelling vision that (a) they could get funding for, or (b) moves the needle enough to matter. I imagine their staff prefers getting paid to not getting paid, so this is the best the leader could do.

I don't like it either, it was my lived experience for several years. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas or people who knew about them, it was usually an inability to drop existing product lines + customers and no approval for the additional headcount needed to pursue bigger opportunities.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#895

Post by financltravsty »

kccqzy wrote: post #660
lapcat wrote: post #256

> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion. > For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards ( https://whatwg.org/ ). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would…

I disagree. If Google were to keep its grubby hands off the web, another corporation would step in and lead that effort and maybe even sabotage it. At least at that time Google's "don't be evil" motto was still alive enough that it was genuinely a good outcome. Can you imagine if Google didn't and Apple did? Clearly the outcome would be that Apple would complicate everything and make the web die a death by a thousand…

Slightly tangential, but I'd like to post a hyperbolic example against the "someone else would have done it anyway":

Yes, a Googler could drown a box full of kittens; but if we stop him, then someone else will just drown the kittens in his place.

I think you have to weigh the probability of it happening. It's unlikely someone else is going drown those kittens, as unlikely as it is someone else is going to stick their fingers into the web pot (considering, I can't think of any "FAAAAANGAMA" that has the same incentives).

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#896

Post by compiler-guy »

hintymad wrote: post #280

> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google One thing I find bizarre in Google is lack of accountability. If someone builds a lousy product, we are not supposed to criticize it, not even objectively. That's because, well you guessed it, "it hurts feelings". Or per Pichai's words…

I don’t know where this idea comes from. Five minutes on any of the half-dozen internal communications sites reveals vast amounts of criticism on every google decision made, most of it thoughtful, but some quite sharp, and some quite bitter and unfair.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#897

Post by martius »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #866
jacquesm wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made - and still make - one crucial error: you need to spin those projects that are simply viable out immediately after they take root. Otherwise you will end up with the brand advantage but there will always be the pressure to use the resources (people, mostly) more efficiently in terms of ROI. And so nothing ever lasts and slowly but surely your reputation as a reliable partner for new products is eroded. You…

In addition, I don't understand why they stopped them entirely, instead of spin them off as subsidiaries under e.g. Alphabet; make them financially self-reliant, have Google/Alphabet as the main shareholder, and give the people that worked on it (and whoever else wants to) the opportunity to continue working on the product. Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/…

The reason is quite simple: why spend engineering headcount on a less successful product?

> Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).

Google Cloud is built on top of Google's tech ecosystem, not the other way around.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#898

Post by closeparen »

yojo wrote: post #371
closeparen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your pa…

High process and high collaboration/coordination is not the only alternative to silos. Google in the mid aughts still had tightly aligned teams with clear priorities. But they were also transparent in what they were doing, and open to collaboration where it made sense. Teams felt empowered to reject requests that would trip them up, but also empowered to do small things to help another team (and got rewarded for doin…

> Your one-line API change didn’t make it onto your dependency’s roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in three months.

This is one of the key problems of working across teams, and its impact is amplified by a culture that says you should turn everything into a cross-team project that you possibly can. The whole company grinds to a near halt on these sorts of blockages.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#899

Post by closeparen »

dasil003 wrote: post #505
closeparen wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree. But I have also seen situations where middle managers are highly attuned to and proud of cross-team projects, and basically don’t pay any attention or give any weight to value delivered for end-users within teams, so everyone is encouraged to structure their projects to maximize communication overhead (even line managers, since doing so gives them the opportunity to grow their directs).

Absolutely. There are a lot of failure modes. This is why true IC leadership with teeth is needed. The whole point of staff+ engineer roles (outside of specialist research) is to navigate the right technical decisions that span across teams.

IC leadership positions are earned by leading cross-team projects, so the senior engineers who want them (and the managers who want to grow IC leaders) are encouraged to turn everything into one.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#900

Post by fakedang »

darajava wrote: post #279

Flutter is such a brilliant tool. Not just the framework, but everything surrounding it. Tooling, the standard of cross compatibility, pub.dev, the Dart language itself, the friendly community… it’s the best developer experience I’ve found and this article makes me really hope that Google pulls through.

Honestly, it's the community that brought me to learn Flutter as my first development framework. I tried learning React, React Native, Kotlin, etc. after asking around (even here), but often I got crickets or the snide remark that I shouldn't be developing on that framework. But Flutter? Nah, beginners welcome! Hixie and Sneath would personally reply to queries on reddit, and the community thrives on sharing open source code for all their cool projects. It's a pity that Flutter may not win the development wars, but it definitely has won way too many developers' hearts.
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