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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#951

Post by kevmo314 »

lacerrr wrote: post #831
kevmo314 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what's your incentive to work at the company instead of starting the project externally? If the product is a sustainable business model in isolation, surely it's sustainable without the external resources.

Starting a business is a lot of work and risk. Having those removed makes the path so much easier to experiment and removes all the friction.

Indeed, which is the point of the original comment: that large companies bias towards those people who don't want that risk.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#952

Post by omerxx »

“People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers”. This strengthens my understanding that as a manager and as a team member who’s being manage, communication skills are so much more important than engineering skills. It was a good and interesting read regardless.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#953

Post by Vicinity9635 »

gerdesj wrote: post #647
Vicinity9635 wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder value. People always say this but I've never seen a law or regulation enforcing it. Care to enlighten me?

It's part of the tacit agreement when you list on an exchange - Initial Public Offering (IPO). You kick off with a nominated "value" ie I think I am worth x so I will sell y shares at z (where x = y * z). Hopefully all your shares are bought and you are fully capitalized and you can crack on with whatever you are doing. You now have two major forms of "money in and out" - what your business makes and loses by doing i…

>tacit agreement

Not a law or regulation.

Why can't a company have a goal other than profit along side it? there's no reason they can't coexist and worthy of investment for the goal too.

If people don't want that they're free to not invest.

>You don't list unless you actually want to become a generator of increasing shareholder value.

Says who?

>There is no law or regulation because it is what it is.

There's no law in physics for it either. So in conclusion it's a layman's myth.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#954

Post by t8sr »

stefan_ wrote: post #95
t8sr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it. One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to kee…

Ok, but you also just non ironically said "collaborating on an OKR".

It’s funny now, but OKRs as originally conceived were the simple, “just set a simple goal and work on it” lightweight thing, standing in opposition to the old way of corporate planning. I used to have goals like “try X and write a paper about it”.

Of course every process becomes perverted into waterfall eventually.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#955

Post by iteratethis »

The handful of trillion dollar companies have a problem that is unique: virtually all projects and innovation are not interesting enough even when successful. Only big bets remain.

Google pulled in 280 billion $ last year.

Now imagine a nice little side project within Google making it into market success with a 100m$ annual revenue.

That's basically useless to Google. A line item that doesn't move the needle and adds weight to the company. Yet to any other company it would be an extraordinary success.

If I'd arbitrarily say that 10% of annual revenue is "moving the needle" that means you need to innovate a new product raking in 30 billion a year. Good luck with that.

And it would require to be entangled with the unique ecosystem benefits of Google, because a stand-alone product would easily be countered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. So the bottom line is that your new product needs to be of the monopoly-type, a new money printer. Anything less than that is not worthwhile.

That's why Meta's big bet on the Metaverse wasn't as crazy as reported. When you make this much revenue yet social networking has peaked, you need to differentiate by adding a new revenue stream, and it would need to bring in a billion a month. You can only achieve that by building a brand new ecosystem and being the first at it.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#956

Post by andromeduck »

robertlagrant wrote: post #943
andromeduck wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You effectively cut their pay by 30-70% over 4 years but not giving refreshes.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#957

Post by ghaff »

pseg134 wrote: post #475
ghaff wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? I could legitimately IMO rag on a handful of former managers who I think mostly meant well but I’m not going to do it in a blog post.

Well that is because you live your life from a place of fear. Not everyone is like that.

It’s not fear. I just don’t really believe in opening up scabs.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#958

Post by gerdesj »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #953
gerdesj wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of the tacit agreement when you list on an exchange - Initial Public Offering (IPO). You kick off with a nominated "value" ie I think I am worth x so I will sell y shares at z (where x = y * z). Hopefully all your shares are bought and you are fully capitalized and you can crack on with whatever you are doing. You now have two major forms of "money in and out" - what your business makes and loses by doing i…

> tacit agreement Not a law or regulation. Why can't a company have a goal other than profit along side it? there's no reason they can't coexist and worthy of investment for the goal too. If people don't want that they're free to not invest. >You don't list unless you actually want to become a generator of increasing shareholder value. Says who? >There is no law or regulation because it is what it is. There's no law…

I am the MD of a small company. I have two partners and 15 employees. We are a private company and we can do what ever we like (within reason).

If we decided to try and grab a pot of cash from quivering investors to do mad things we would go for a listing - go public. Nowadays we would flood Insta/X/FB and that with all sorts of wankery and perhaps bother with the usual media and then show a bit of ankle to an exchange and then go with a prudent offering. We would offer x shares for y price.

Obviously, the world goes mad for us and buys the lot and with full capitalisation we become a unicorn with a rainbow mane. The papers are agog with how cool I am and TikTok explodes with how cool male pattern baldness really is.

y goes berserk and we have to split the bloody things to allow plebs to have a crack.

We are talking about money and not physics. I am a journeyman.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#959

Post by cloudier »

marssaxman wrote: post #188
aappleby wrote: post #48

12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done. Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left. The change in frankness and hones…

> Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work... This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way…

Googlers that were around when Vic Gundotra was a big player love trashing him. I was surprised when this blog described him in mixed and maybe even positive terms.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#960

Post by yashap »

solatic wrote: post #785
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…

It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executiv…

I don’t think middle management are the ONLY cause, but I do agree that once you start getting layers of management, managers “shielding their teams” from the rest of the company, cross-team dependencies that require lots of planning, and execs/upper-management that are very disconnected from the details of the business and product, you’re basically doomed to mediocrity-at-best.
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