14 ms·

I personally think google's inability to move past the their search and advertising business model is because of their workforce and the incentives to get promo

I personally think google's inability to move past the their search and advertising business model is because of their workforce and the incentives to get promoted within the company. Blind hiring of programmers based on algorithmic questions and blind promotion of people for launching new and often poorly designed products has crippled the company.

satokema 7y ago
I finally stopped hiding my contempt for this sort of hiring process. The massive majority of positions out there are perfectly fine with a generalist that doesn't have photographic memory of their old college algorithms book but can code their way out of a variety of bag materials. Maybe one day AIs will replace that level of software engineering, but we're still far away.
- brightball 7y ago
  IMO, AI has a better chance of replacing the other kind
enitihas 7y ago
I don't think the hiring process is the reason for Google's inability to gain market share in the cloud market. Google's hiring process has ensured that the quality bar has been very high. They have unique offerings like spanner, which other clouds are simply not anywhere near of. Their failure in cloud is mostly because the inability to sell primarily, and secondly maybe because of their support being not as good as other clouds. But both are specific classes of directions taken by their leadership.
- fwip 7y ago
  The argument isn't that the quality bar is too low, but rather that they're measuring "quality" in the wrong way. If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    But megacorps hire in such volumes that it's simply not possible to ensure any quality at all by any measure. It's all just random people that even perform worse when put in a corporate environment. So overall it's below average quality.
    - pm90 7y ago
      So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?
      - coldtea 7y ago
        >So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all? If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it. That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.
        pm90 7y ago
        Making money is one metric. How about diversified revenue stream? Do you think they should be concerned about that?
        coldtea 7y ago
        They probably should. But it's not the concern of their developers.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Blackberry’s highest revenue quarters were around 2010. Three years after the iPhone was introduced. Profits are a trailing indicator. But even if you don’t buy that, Google’s net income was down last quarter. Revenue was up but traffic acquisition costs were up even more. What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced. What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?
- johan_larson 7y ago
  That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    What good is “building software systems” if you can’t produce products that people and businesses want? After all of these years and all of the initiatives, still almost all of their profits come from ad sales.
    - johan_larson 7y ago
      It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        As long as the trend of blocking ads doesn’t increase and as long ad buyers don’t see Facebook as being better at targeting. Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons. edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And this is attitude is the issue. You have a lot of geeks who know nothing about what businesses need to succeed because the hiring process is optimized for those who can memorize leetCode.
  - enitihas 7y ago
    Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money. And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.
      - pm90 7y ago
        Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).
      - enitihas 7y ago
        Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else. Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.
- pm90 7y ago
  You’re oversimplifying why they’re failing in the cloud. * _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up) * _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent. * _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really). There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.
- adventured 7y ago
  There is another very large factor in what has set Azure apart from Google. Google is more of a pure play competitor to AWS. Azure got a big jumpstart due to the Windows enterprise market adopting them as a natural home. From there Azure has gradually leveraged itself into taking some share of the Linux market. The Windows business segment provides a lucrative, lower competition base for Azure. Realistically, Google poses zero potential threat to the large Windows cloud business that Azure will yield billions in annual profit off of in time.
- wisty 7y ago
  Also, here's a list of reasons why investment in Google's cloud might be hard for third parties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...
pgt 7y ago
Culture is process. I think you're right about the internal product incentives to launch vs maintain or grow. Politically-correct hiring may also have poisoned the well, because PC-engineers are - by definition - more motivated by politics than product. Once you are no longer product-focused, process follows.
- cycrutchfield 7y ago
  I am rolling my eyes at the thought that political correctness plays any major role in hiring at Google. Striving to improve diversity doesn’t mean that you only hire “PC-engineers”.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Didn't they just get in hot water for throwing out resumes from undesirable demographics en masse and having racial convictions so strong they didn't even realize it was legally inadvisable to do this in the open?
    - paganel 7y ago
      I directly know of a well known international institution that did the PC thing when trying to hire someone (“we’ll very much prefer if you’d send us a woman instead of a man for on-premises support role”) but they were smart enough to only say this over the phone, not over email, especially not in an official manner out in the open. If Google really did the thing you say they did (not saying that they didn’t, is just that a source would be helpful) then they’re beyond stupid. If it matters I live in Europe, not in the States.
      - jjoonathan 7y ago
        Oh yeah, it's very much a thing. Someone responsible for hiring in my office regularly engages in illegal PC-motivated resume dumping and regularly brags and laughs about it. I've kept my mouth shut because I value my job, I don't trust the system to protect me from retaliation, and the guy in question isn't dumb enough to make his confessions in written media.
jtdev 7y ago
In my experience, the category of comp. sci. grads that these riddle based interviews select are often very smart, but have difficulty in developing novel solutions to real world problems. Not sure why the industry still relies on these methods so heavily...
- trophycase 7y ago
  Some of the smartest and most creative people I ever met were when I worked at Google. The problem has far more to do with perverse promoting incentives, poor management, and corporate inertia than some "hiring process"
  - gxer 7y ago
    > The problem has far more to do with perverse promoting incentives As a Googler, I agree. The promo system is fucked up here, and everyone is micro-optimizing for promos. Nobody gives a fuck for developing long-term, stable and scalable solutions. People just want to fling shit on the wall, and if it doesn't stick fling some more. Sooner or later something will stick and they'll be basking in the glow of L_{N+1}, before starting the process all over again. Google is very top-heavy now, with 1000s of people sitting at levels 7+ doing absolutely nothing (since you don't get demoted for lack of production).
    - pm90 7y ago
      Hah, sounds a lot like Big Blue. Boat loads of seniors who do “design” but can’t code anymore. They set the “agenda” and the grunts are supposed to just follow that advice. Stay there long enough and you begin to think you have no agency, nothing that you think matters since nobody is listening anyways. The difference I think maybe that Seniors at google may actually be super smart, just not engaged.
      - pishpash 7y ago
        If you're smart and do nothing, what difference does it make?
epc 7y ago
It's the promotion process moreso than the hiring process. You can only be promoted if you fit a pattern that your job ladder's promo committee recognizes and if you are already performing at the level you're going to be promoted to. May have worked well in a 10000 employee company but it’s extremely conservative in a company of Google's size. It knee caps recognizing innovation outside whatever's considered "traditional" for your ladder, and it is blind to any roles which require cross-ladder, cross-organizational OKRs and accomplishments. Source: not a Googler, will never be a Googler, but friends of many NYC based Googlers who all seem to be looking to leave out of frustration with the promo process.
otabdeveloper2 7y ago
ITT: a massive roll-call for sour grapes. P.S. Life would be easier if you just bit the bullet and finally learned those algorithms. It ain't that hard.
- fallenatreus 7y ago
  And still, develop poorly designed or executed software projects? Come on don't add your echo to the chamber of the nuisance of the IT industry which is causing a gatekeeping to brilliant talent from other fields. It's what actually causing a stale in innovation now. Anyone with sufficient study and grit can master those and come up with excellent implementations. Now what I will consider too stupid is if I ask someone to prove that "knowledge" to me in less than 1 hour. [Disclosure: I am learning and working on those algorithms on a pretty much daily basis, just from a perspective of broadening your thinking & logical skills during your learning curve (Why we need to learn Pythagoras theorem, if we are not going to ever use it?: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154359309646005 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154359309646005 ) they don't serve many purposes except developer's ego. Not to mention that there have been better implementations of these algorithms out there. And you can always pick and choose.]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  When I interviewed at Google I knew all the algorithms, and when I got rejected they said I should contribute to more open source projects to raise my profile instead.
- codingslave 7y ago
  This isnt the case, I work in quantitative finance in NYC. We occasionally interview engineers coming out of google. Often times their compensation does not match the level of engineering skill that they bring to the table. It's my belief that google is overpaying for the people they hire.
  - duality 7y ago
bit_logic 7y ago
The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time, look at all the HN/reddit discussions, blogs, twitter posts, and many others. The impact of their poor promotion/incentive structure is very publicly visible, look at their complete failure in the messaging space, giving up a huge lead they had with Google Talk and Hangouts. They could've dominated this space. And all the other popular products that were cancelled. Their poor customer support is well known by everyone, the algorithmic shutdown of Google accounts due to false positives with no recourse. These major public failures would've caused massive culture shift in most companies. But nothing changed at Google. The reason why? Success hides all failures. For a long time, the ad business was so lucrative and successful, nothing else mattered. But now with the ad business showing signs of faltering, the impact of those failures will start to become very noticeable. They will try to focus on greatly expanding new revenue streams like Google Cloud. But here, their poor reputation with customer support will hinder making any progress against AWS and Azure. They will try to launch new products, but years of burning customer goodwill by shutting down products (again, look at their messaging apps) will make it difficult for anything to become popular. And with decreasing profit and revenue, they will have to decrease their total compensation packages. Then their hiring pipeline will completely collapse. High total comp is the only thing keeping their hiring going. And even that isn't enough for many senior engineers in the industry because they have angered so many with their arrogant and stupid hiring process. Without the high total comp, they have nothing. And when they start missing the targets during quarterly earnings reports, those fat bonuses, RSUs, free food, other perks, signing bonuses, will be among the first to go. Then come the layoffs.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time Does Google have a major issue with their hiring process? They seem to be able to hire the talented people they need. I guess it's an issue for the individuals that get rejected, but not for Google, who seems to get as many people as they want.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    If these people are so “talented” and not people who can memorize leetCode, where are the profitable products?

satokema 7y ago

I finally stopped hiding my contempt for this sort of hiring process. The massive majority of positions out there are perfectly fine with a generalist that doesn't have photographic memory of their old college algorithms book but can code their way out of a variety of bag materials. Maybe one day AIs will replace that level of software engineering, but we're still far away.

brightball 7y ago
IMO, AI has a better chance of replacing the other kind

enitihas 7y ago

I don't think the hiring process is the reason for Google's inability to gain market share in the cloud market. Google's hiring process has ensured that the quality bar has been very high. They have unique offerings like spanner, which other clouds are simply not anywhere near of. Their failure in cloud is mostly because the inability to sell primarily, and secondly maybe because of their support being not as good as other clouds. But both are specific classes of directions taken by their leadership.

fwip 7y ago
The argument isn't that the quality bar is too low, but rather that they're measuring "quality" in the wrong way. If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  But megacorps hire in such volumes that it's simply not possible to ensure any quality at all by any measure. It's all just random people that even perform worse when put in a corporate environment. So overall it's below average quality.
  - pm90 7y ago
    So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all? If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it. That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.
      - pm90 7y ago
        Making money is one metric. How about diversified revenue stream? Do you think they should be concerned about that?
        coldtea 7y ago
        They probably should. But it's not the concern of their developers.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Blackberry’s highest revenue quarters were around 2010. Three years after the iPhone was introduced. Profits are a trailing indicator. But even if you don’t buy that, Google’s net income was down last quarter. Revenue was up but traffic acquisition costs were up even more. What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced. What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?
johan_larson 7y ago
That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.
- scarface74 7y ago
  What good is “building software systems” if you can’t produce products that people and businesses want? After all of these years and all of the initiatives, still almost all of their profits come from ad sales.
  - johan_larson 7y ago
    It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      As long as the trend of blocking ads doesn’t increase and as long ad buyers don’t see Facebook as being better at targeting. Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.
- usrusr 7y ago
  I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons. edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.
scarface74 7y ago
And this is attitude is the issue. You have a lot of geeks who know nothing about what businesses need to succeed because the hiring process is optimized for those who can memorize leetCode.
- enitihas 7y ago
  Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money. And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.
    - pm90 7y ago
      Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).
    - enitihas 7y ago
      Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else. Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.
pm90 7y ago
You’re oversimplifying why they’re failing in the cloud. * _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up) * _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent. * _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really). There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.
adventured 7y ago
There is another very large factor in what has set Azure apart from Google. Google is more of a pure play competitor to AWS. Azure got a big jumpstart due to the Windows enterprise market adopting them as a natural home. From there Azure has gradually leveraged itself into taking some share of the Linux market. The Windows business segment provides a lucrative, lower competition base for Azure. Realistically, Google poses zero potential threat to the large Windows cloud business that Azure will yield billions in annual profit off of in time.
wisty 7y ago
Also, here's a list of reasons why investment in Google's cloud might be hard for third parties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

pgt 7y ago

Culture is process. I think you're right about the internal product incentives to launch vs maintain or grow. Politically-correct hiring may also have poisoned the well, because PC-engineers are - by definition - more motivated by politics than product. Once you are no longer product-focused, process follows.

cycrutchfield 7y ago
I am rolling my eyes at the thought that political correctness plays any major role in hiring at Google. Striving to improve diversity doesn’t mean that you only hire “PC-engineers”.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Didn't they just get in hot water for throwing out resumes from undesirable demographics en masse and having racial convictions so strong they didn't even realize it was legally inadvisable to do this in the open?
  - paganel 7y ago
    I directly know of a well known international institution that did the PC thing when trying to hire someone (“we’ll very much prefer if you’d send us a woman instead of a man for on-premises support role”) but they were smart enough to only say this over the phone, not over email, especially not in an official manner out in the open. If Google really did the thing you say they did (not saying that they didn’t, is just that a source would be helpful) then they’re beyond stupid. If it matters I live in Europe, not in the States.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Oh yeah, it's very much a thing. Someone responsible for hiring in my office regularly engages in illegal PC-motivated resume dumping and regularly brags and laughs about it. I've kept my mouth shut because I value my job, I don't trust the system to protect me from retaliation, and the guy in question isn't dumb enough to make his confessions in written media.

jtdev 7y ago

In my experience, the category of comp. sci. grads that these riddle based interviews select are often very smart, but have difficulty in developing novel solutions to real world problems. Not sure why the industry still relies on these methods so heavily...

trophycase 7y ago
Some of the smartest and most creative people I ever met were when I worked at Google. The problem has far more to do with perverse promoting incentives, poor management, and corporate inertia than some "hiring process"
- gxer 7y ago
  > The problem has far more to do with perverse promoting incentives As a Googler, I agree. The promo system is fucked up here, and everyone is micro-optimizing for promos. Nobody gives a fuck for developing long-term, stable and scalable solutions. People just want to fling shit on the wall, and if it doesn't stick fling some more. Sooner or later something will stick and they'll be basking in the glow of L_{N+1}, before starting the process all over again. Google is very top-heavy now, with 1000s of people sitting at levels 7+ doing absolutely nothing (since you don't get demoted for lack of production).
  - pm90 7y ago
    Hah, sounds a lot like Big Blue. Boat loads of seniors who do “design” but can’t code anymore. They set the “agenda” and the grunts are supposed to just follow that advice. Stay there long enough and you begin to think you have no agency, nothing that you think matters since nobody is listening anyways. The difference I think maybe that Seniors at google may actually be super smart, just not engaged.
    - pishpash 7y ago
      If you're smart and do nothing, what difference does it make?

epc 7y ago

It's the promotion process moreso than the hiring process. You can only be promoted if you fit a pattern that your job ladder's promo committee recognizes and if you are already performing at the level you're going to be promoted to. May have worked well in a 10000 employee company but it’s extremely conservative in a company of Google's size. It knee caps recognizing innovation outside whatever's considered "traditional" for your ladder, and it is blind to any roles which require cross-ladder, cross-organizational OKRs and accomplishments. Source: not a Googler, will never be a Googler, but friends of many NYC based Googlers who all seem to be looking to leave out of frustration with the promo process.

otabdeveloper2 7y ago

ITT: a massive roll-call for sour grapes. P.S. Life would be easier if you just bit the bullet and finally learned those algorithms. It ain't that hard.

fallenatreus 7y ago
And still, develop poorly designed or executed software projects? Come on don't add your echo to the chamber of the nuisance of the IT industry which is causing a gatekeeping to brilliant talent from other fields. It's what actually causing a stale in innovation now. Anyone with sufficient study and grit can master those and come up with excellent implementations. Now what I will consider too stupid is if I ask someone to prove that "knowledge" to me in less than 1 hour. [Disclosure: I am learning and working on those algorithms on a pretty much daily basis, just from a perspective of broadening your thinking & logical skills during your learning curve (Why we need to learn Pythagoras theorem, if we are not going to ever use it?: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154359309646005 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154359309646005 ) they don't serve many purposes except developer's ego. Not to mention that there have been better implementations of these algorithms out there. And you can always pick and choose.]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 7y ago
When I interviewed at Google I knew all the algorithms, and when I got rejected they said I should contribute to more open source projects to raise my profile instead.
codingslave 7y ago
This isnt the case, I work in quantitative finance in NYC. We occasionally interview engineers coming out of google. Often times their compensation does not match the level of engineering skill that they bring to the table. It's my belief that google is overpaying for the people they hire.
- duality 7y ago

bit_logic 7y ago

The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time, look at all the HN/reddit discussions, blogs, twitter posts, and many others. The impact of their poor promotion/incentive structure is very publicly visible, look at their complete failure in the messaging space, giving up a huge lead they had with Google Talk and Hangouts. They could've dominated this space. And all the other popular products that were cancelled. Their poor customer support is well known by everyone, the algorithmic shutdown of Google accounts due to false positives with no recourse. These major public failures would've caused massive culture shift in most companies. But nothing changed at Google. The reason why? Success hides all failures. For a long time, the ad business was so lucrative and successful, nothing else mattered. But now with the ad business showing signs of faltering, the impact of those failures will start to become very noticeable. They will try to focus on greatly expanding new revenue streams like Google Cloud. But here, their poor reputation with customer support will hinder making any progress against AWS and Azure. They will try to launch new products, but years of burning customer goodwill by shutting down products (again, look at their messaging apps) will make it difficult for anything to become popular. And with decreasing profit and revenue, they will have to decrease their total compensation packages. Then their hiring pipeline will completely collapse. High total comp is the only thing keeping their hiring going. And even that isn't enough for many senior engineers in the industry because they have angered so many with their arrogant and stupid hiring process. Without the high total comp, they have nothing. And when they start missing the targets during quarterly earnings reports, those fat bonuses, RSUs, free food, other perks, signing bonuses, will be among the first to go. Then come the layoffs.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time Does Google have a major issue with their hiring process? They seem to be able to hire the talented people they need. I guess it's an issue for the individuals that get rejected, but not for Google, who seems to get as many people as they want.
- scarface74 7y ago
  If these people are so “talented” and not people who can memorize leetCode, where are the profitable products?