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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#941

Post by yashap »

esafak wrote: post #556
yashap wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which companies did you have in mind?

I haven't worked personally at these places, so just going on what I've heard:

- Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility, letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you fight to keep this person if they told you they were leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and candid communication, and generally a smart and driven group doing great work

- I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep going a really high performing group, that were passionate about their work and hustling hard to build great things. Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and lack of work/life balance

- Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#942

Post by infoseek12 »

arlongparker wrote: post #564
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, I put my money where my mouth is. GOOG's monopoly-fueled glory days will soon be behind it. In tech, if you stand still for too long you will eventually be left behind.

Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in AI won’t retain any value in the transition to the space. People forget. Who owns kaggle, who owns Google collab. Boggles my mind that people think a few AI upshot’s are going to reap all the value. Having a good AI companion that’s integrated into all your suite of tools. That’s the peak.

> Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in AI won’t retain any value in the transition to the space.

They’ll obviously retain some value. Google can integrate more easily and seamlessly with things people are using but that’s a competitive advantage not a moat.

Google’s trajectory has been from innovative market maker, to dominant market leader, to megacorp that has a strong established position that keeps them competitive and relevant, to legacy provider, to kind of irrelevant.

Google’s still strong and significant but every day they are less so.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#943

Post by robertlagrant »

andromeduck wrote: post #551
robertlagrant wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.

But that's what equity driven comp is supposed to resolve - give them small refreshers until they leave.

Sorry - could you expand? I'm not sure how that relates.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#945

Post by VirusNewbie »

itsyaboi wrote: post #304
VirusNewbie wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol no, I got into a big argument having to explain recursion, tail call recursion, etc. The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent with the exception of stack space. But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the experience. My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first in…

Sounds like you were rejected due to your snippy attitude.

I was outright hostile by the end. My point was, in my very long history in tech, it was only Microsoft that pushed me to that point. I’ve bombed hard interviews, passed easy ones, bumbled medium ones, and never once lost my cool.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#946

Post by hinkley »

pas wrote: post #885
hinkley wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been long enough that I’ve successfully blocked a lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people explained project management to a project manager. Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display…

oh, that seems like a rare breed. (at least in my comfy bubble.) thanks!

She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far as I could manage to connect, but something happened when she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message with the lead devs in private.

Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#947

Post by volkk »

fsndz wrote: post #796

We just have his version of the story though... He might be wrong. It's natural after spending so many years in a company to see change as bad, to miss the good old days... And he sure seems to have a problem with that black leader Jeanine... A guy who never rose from his technical roles is lecturing a VP and the CEO of Google for their "lack of vision and strategy". Come on. Managing is startup and managing a huge b…

wow, truly one of the stupider, if not the most stupid take--well done!

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#948

Post by VirusNewbie »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #682
asim wrote: post #239

"...She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set..." You know, I remember a time I said, management just think of engineers as a resource and refer to us as such. But when the word "dehumanising" is used it strikes me a lot clearer. When this disconnected occurs between different layers of the same corpora…

Engineers at Google are referred to as “headcount”. Managers fight each other for headcount. When someone leaves they are lamented for their net loss of .67 headcount (right now you only get one hire for 3 attritions).

Not true, my team gets 1 for 1.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#949

Post by VirusNewbie »

devnullbrain wrote: post #700
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers at Google are referred to as “headcount”. Managers fight each other for headcount. When someone leaves they are lamented for their net loss of .67 headcount (right now you only get one hire for 3 attritions).

Does that mean managers are incentivised not to let go of underperformers?

YES! One of the reasons I much prefer the netflix model of firing quickly and being able to get a headcount. You do have some slackers at google who are able to hang on for long periods of time because their manager knows the project they're in charge of isn't a priority anymore, so the backfill will go to more exciting/new projects. So these managers will let people slack.

Most of the people I work with at Google work fairly hard in cloud (nothing crazy like I've heard about AWS) but you run into slackers on occasion.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#950

Post by ible »

> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.

This is part and parcel of working for a visible/impactful organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be wrong. They'll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-simplifications, political perspectives, etc.

This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that because most of the feedback is nonsense, that all of it is nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful to you or critical of your team or values.

I found a bit of Neil Gaiman's MasterClass very helpful when reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone is telling you something doesn't work for them, and what you should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn't work for them, but that the author is much better placed than the reader to know how and if to fix it.

In my context I try to understand why someone is saying something, what information I can take from it, and whether there is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can or should be done about it.

(If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)

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