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Does anyone inside Google care to share how Eric is perceived among fellow engineers?. From the outside, it seems many of the great innovations came when he wS

by krm01 7y ago

Does anyone inside Google care to share how Eric is perceived among fellow engineers?. From the outside, it seems many of the great innovations came when he wS CEO and Larry + Sergey were building the company culture.

nostrademons 7y ago
I was there for both the end of the Eric era and the beginning of the second Larry era. I liked Eric - he was an engineer at heart, but he also was effective at making decisions, listened well, and was able to defer to subordinates when they had better ideas. Much of Google's strength came because he tolerated Larry & Sergey running around sponsoring talented engineering teams to work on crazy projects without his knowledge, which must've been challenging as a leader but was ultimately a great thing for Google.
dekhn 7y ago
it's kind of a bimodal distribution. many engineers hated him with a passion but then they would learn he wrote lex and set up early networks at Berkeley and kind of come around to the idea that he was a very successful technobusinessman who confronted Microsoft repeatedly.
- visarga 7y ago
  > he wrote lex Wow, didn't expect that. I used it back in my uni days for a compiler project.
enneff 7y ago
I found Eric extremely impressive as a CEO. He always spoke with eloquence and charisma and generally seemed to have the answers and explanations when pressed. Hard to compare Eric and Larry as CEOs because they both led at very different times in the company’s history, each with their own unique set of challenges.
inlined 7y ago
I greatly miss his leadership. There was a sense that he knew how to steer the ship.
cloudwalking 7y ago
Eric was great. I always watched his town hall live streams. He's incredibly charismatic and always offered a lot of detail about his thinking.
puzzle 7y ago
I left Google years ago and have a few crazy stories about Eric, but it might be still too early for some of them. He was very approachable and understood well the technology that we were building. Most of my colleagues seemed to like him, too. He wasn't the money guy at the top of the org chart that doesn't understand his own products. That was even clearer when I talked to him in person once, after a company-wide meeting. He wasn't in a rush to get away from us plebeians, either. Someone next to me made a comment about surveillance and he replied along the lines of "You know, I grew up in the Hoover days", explaining that he had seen the potential for abuse of power or personal information since a young age and that he held that as something to keep in mind or avoid when making strategic decisions.

by krm01 7y ago

nostrademons 7y ago

I was there for both the end of the Eric era and the beginning of the second Larry era. I liked Eric - he was an engineer at heart, but he also was effective at making decisions, listened well, and was able to defer to subordinates when they had better ideas. Much of Google's strength came because he tolerated Larry & Sergey running around sponsoring talented engineering teams to work on crazy projects without his knowledge, which must've been challenging as a leader but was ultimately a great thing for Google.

dekhn 7y ago

it's kind of a bimodal distribution. many engineers hated him with a passion but then they would learn he wrote lex and set up early networks at Berkeley and kind of come around to the idea that he was a very successful technobusinessman who confronted Microsoft repeatedly.

visarga 7y ago
> he wrote lex Wow, didn't expect that. I used it back in my uni days for a compiler project.

enneff 7y ago

I found Eric extremely impressive as a CEO. He always spoke with eloquence and charisma and generally seemed to have the answers and explanations when pressed. Hard to compare Eric and Larry as CEOs because they both led at very different times in the company’s history, each with their own unique set of challenges.

inlined 7y ago

I greatly miss his leadership. There was a sense that he knew how to steer the ship.

cloudwalking 7y ago

Eric was great. I always watched his town hall live streams. He's incredibly charismatic and always offered a lot of detail about his thinking.

puzzle 7y ago

I left Google years ago and have a few crazy stories about Eric, but it might be still too early for some of them. He was very approachable and understood well the technology that we were building. Most of my colleagues seemed to like him, too. He wasn't the money guy at the top of the org chart that doesn't understand his own products. That was even clearer when I talked to him in person once, after a company-wide meeting. He wasn't in a rush to get away from us plebeians, either. Someone next to me made a comment about surveillance and he replied along the lines of "You know, I grew up in the Hoover days", explaining that he had seen the potential for abuse of power or personal information since a young age and that he held that as something to keep in mind or avoid when making strategic decisions.