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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#961

Post by goog2012 »

markdog12 wrote: post #3

> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently m…

100%

We might think it wrong to name and shame, but this is one explicit case where it's the right thing. The autocratic style, the sheer bullying, and the lack of promotion from within have run what was one of the best developer (and developer relations) groups in the world into the ground.

They talk AI - AI - AI but do they walk the walk?

Firebase? Remember when it was the best developer tool there was? Missed the boat with Vector DBs for AI, and when experts within the company raised that it was necessary.

Flutter? Yeah -- didn't they get a community member or an intern to put out a plugin for TensorFlow lite for mobile AI, and when they moved on, nobody cared.

Dart and Go? Don't make me laugh.

TensorFlow and Open Source AI (also under JB) -- Didn't give a crap, zero investment, lots of cuts, and did nothing about advancing TF since, what 2020? When was version 2? What happened to version 3? Literally invigorated the world with AI, and then JB came along and what...?

In the last 6 months? Spun up internal incubators to build new AI products. Trying to replicate Pinecone with less than 5 internal folks who don't have a background in AI at all etc. (Pinecone have ~200 people?)

Trying to build prompt management tools, when there are a million GPT ones out there? Check. I guess she never heard of OSS?

Oh yeah, wait the OSS office @ Google is also under JB.

It's nothing short of a catastophe.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#962

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #504
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same reaction. I'm ex-Google, but never worked in that org or heard of her ever but it seemed in profound bad taste (or just mean?) to me to be pinpointing people by name like that. I'm not sure what it accomplishes, unless there is a vendetta at work here? Also seemed out of tone with the rest of the article, which I agreed with the substance of and enjoyed reading.

Why is there a presumed intent to "accomplish" anything? It's a blog post.

Haha! I've never heard anyone say "blog posts are pointless" out loud but it's true

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#963

Post by lawrenceyan »

somenameforme wrote: post #786
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. S…

Everyone made fun of Google for self-driving and totally derided them for years.

It only feels normal now because they took the risk and pulled everyone else in the industry forward.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#964

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#965

Post by [deleted] »

sumeno wrote: post #598
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more…

> Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. This doesn't really match the reality of the layoffs. They weren't team/project based or perform…

[deleted]

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#966

Post by nick222226 »

dmazzoni wrote: post #658

I worked at Google for 15 years and I was lucky enough to work with Ian a few times. I might quibble about a few things, but I largely agree with his overall conclusions. In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly…

Dude, get your prescription then go to eyebuydirect.com

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#967

Post by ChuckMcM »

InCityDreams wrote: post #781
ChuckMcM wrote: post #378

Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ... Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't…

Would like more info on [1]. I work in the area of cutting costs (also privately - gave up coffee as it was a waste of money, for me): with money being finite, what you can save is often worth more than what you can earn.

It wasn't particularly transferable outside of Google's scale. They have continual failures in their fleet of machines which cycle through a repair queue. It's fairly automated, dispatching bulk repair requests to people in the data centers. I managed to get some process changes and code changes through that allowed machines with alleged disk errors to be processed while still in production and have the resources returned after the disk was verified good and reformatted. When you calculated depreciation costs for the equipment that had been waiting for repairs before, and now never left production, it was well over $10M/year of depreciation cost. (there were other cost savings as well like the over provisioning needs of a cluster were lower , etc etc) They weren't wrong in that it wasn't particularly technically challenging, but getting a change like that through the organization had been tried and failed several times before I was given that task and succeeded. That skill, being an effective change agent in a large organization, was not even on their radar of useful skills at that time.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#968

Post by somenameforme »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #963
somenameforme wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. S…

Everyone made fun of Google for self-driving and totally derided them for years. It only feels normal now because they took the risk and pulled everyone else in the industry forward.

This is not accurate. Wiki has a pretty reasonable page on self driving cars here [1], but you can also look to what led Google to go for Waymo to begin with. [2]

Levandowski had already created a self driving motorcycle for a DARPA challenged in 2004. In 2008 Discovery contacted him for a show about it, but being unable to lend them the vehicle - he instead built a new self driving pizza delivery car for them. He asked Google if they wanted to participate in the show or get involved in self driving, but they were uninterested due to liability. After they show aired and went off without a hitch, they decided to get involved.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Pribot

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#969

Post by CrimsonRain »

lapcat wrote: post #643
CrimsonRain wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

W3C got what it deserved. > The WHATWG began because the W3C told you, “HTML was dead. If you want to do something like HTML5, you should go elsewhere.” Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform? We tried (2007–2012). It didn’t work out. In fact, we ended up spinning more specs out…

> W3C got what it deserved. This is an unnecessarily "team"-oriented spin. The question is what the web and the users of the web deserve, and I don't believe they deserve to be dominated by a few giant tech corporations who have a monopoly not only on web browsers but also on operating systems. > Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work i…

I dont disagree with WHATWG is more dangerous but it is the result of W3C's (lack of) actions.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#970

Post by negus »

> 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).

What a coincidence that in the only country outside the US where Google search has a worthy competitor in the open market, search engine choosing dialog should not appear in all chromium-based web browsers. Certainly this is the care for the users

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81578

https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/kz5cn/google_disabl...

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