91–100 of 348 posts
Wait, our CEO has a vision? Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons: De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the reporting structure in the last few years (ie endless layers of middle management). Both of these make consistent vision and values much harder to achieve. Recent Googlegeist just reflects that.
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I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…
I've had a similar feeling about how our society deals with people who don't fit in in this way (non-productive), and it's a fun thing to play around with in your head because in a loose way it undercuts a key selling point of organizing your society capitalistically like ours: during the cold war, it was like "yeah well you Soviets just give every lazy bastard some meaningless quasi-task in a widget factory or in so…
Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven. I guess Google at this point just keep churning through systems because Engineers are incentivized to show impact and rarely end up creating new good products. Adding tons of new engineers is also probably hurting their overall quality and velocity.
While he may not have written code that's two world-leading consumer adoption stories. So many great engineers build products that never achieve great adoption. So aren't Pichai's accomplishments worthy of CEO-level promotion?
Recruiting a world-class team, motivating them to achieve such domination, managing their egos amid a huge company full of talented people, executing across the behemoth that is Google... all these are vital skills and as a company grows maybe more of what you need from a CEO than one who is the most talented engineer. (I may be wrong; just a thought).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-sundar-pichai-rose-to-be...
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As a former Googler I'd like Urs Holzle as a CEO. I might even consider coming back if he's at the helm. Dude is both a solid engineer, and an outstanding leader. I respect him a lot and so do most other current and ex-Googlers. Problem is, Urs probably doesn't want the job. :-)
Urs is decent at being a technical lead. He'd make a great CTO if Google had one (and in many ways I think he is the unofficial CTO), but he's not at all a good leader when it comes to non-technical things, for a variety of reasons. I think you'd very quickly realize you didn't actually want him as CEO. To give him credit, from what I've seen, he's very aware of these shortcomings and as you say, he'd refuse.
Compare this to the current Google which is basically run by an ex-McKinsey type of person who has no idea about the technical side of things and will sell his mom for a buck (as evidenced by Dragonfly). Of all the possible choices they have somehow converged on the worst one. I'd argue Urs, even with his shortcomings, could make Google a far stronger company in the mid- to long term. Urs has as good a bullshit filter and ethics as I've ever seen in an SVP, and he's not "slimy". Again, Sundar was a crap choice. I mean, it didn't even have to be an engineer. Nikesh Arora (sales) was pretty outstanding as well. Clearly CEO material, clearly one of the very best in his field, he had the internal respect. We will never know for sure, but he probably was angling for the CEO spot as well. And he'd be a better choice as a strong business leader. He left in 2014, shortly before Sundar took over.
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I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…
I’ve had that experience before as well. What always surprises me is how upper management overlooks the opportunity to pocket more money for themselves by cost-cutting the net negative employees. Too often the ones who do it go overboard and completely gut the company to death instead of just making it more effective and profitable. For example, a company with 5,000 employees might have about 500 positions that could…
Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct). I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of remind…
If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products actually kind-of makes sense. Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't. The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long to derisk a new prod…
I might be biased but I think Amazon is like this.
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> Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven. He might have not fought in the trenches of engineering. But I've seen his congress testimony. He is such a humble and kind guy while still being a nerd, one of us. If I worked at Google, I definitely would be glad about him being CEO.
> He is such a humble and kind guy while still being a nerd, one of us. Yes, but I'm only half joking when I say that that's how all the pod people make you feel. In fact the people who I would consider the most through and through "one of us" are often off-putting and completely antisocial by nature, not even by choice. I think that's the difference between being naturally reality-focused or people-focused.
Doom. When it comes to culture plant the seeds early and enforce it with an iron fist of death, because it takes time for the consequences to manifest and once they do its too late, like rabies. Resolution to culture problems take just as much effort and time to resolve as the neglect and time it took for them to set in. I have the perspective of going through something like this on a microscopic scale right now. An…
For the sake of the employees and for the sake of the rest of us, I believe that Sundar Pichai is not CEO material at all. He should go or be pushed out, and Larry Page and Sergei Brin (or one of them) should take a stronger role and have a deeper engagement on many matters. Google has been doing well financially, but it has lost its soul (the one it had in its very initial years) and seems to be going around aimless…
I dunno. I like Sundar. I like his straightforward style. Personally I think he's got it together a lot more than Larry and Sergey do. When Larry was the boss, I always felt like we were lurching. Sundar feels like high speed cruise. Look this ship don't turn fast no matter who's at the helm. And it's not even clear it needs to. Maybe it's already sailing where Sundar wants it to (mad money + compelling products). As…
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, ease up on the kool-aid. Productive, maybe? Better, hell no.
Google's Achilles heel is search and ad revenue (80%). Which is sad because they've been trying to diversify and find another major source of income for 20 years now. If a better search engine comes along and people switch over, then google won't be able to maintain its empire and it could fold, or how would you like to pay $10 a month for a GMail and Google Maps combo access package? It could happen a lot easier and…
I think they're a lot stronger than you think. True, Search and Ads is still their bread and butter, but: Their search engine is really hard to replace, not just because of the quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and has the largest mindshare of any website on the internet. Android is "the" platform pretty much everyone accesses the internet. Cl…