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Having worked at a few places that aren't Google as well as a few places that are Google, here's what I think the meaningful difference is that makes the Google

by tylerl 7y ago

Having worked at a few places that aren't Google as well as a few places that are Google, here's what I think the meaningful difference is that makes the Google offices more productive. 1: The people are smarter. It's sort of cheating I suppose; better inputs make better outputs. Google doesn't have all the smartest people, but it's one of the few companies that get top-tier talent in a way that is meaningful. Everything else hinges on this. 2: Your manager (and their manager) cares a lot about you. That's a pretty broad statement and definitely not universal, but it's more often true than not. Managers are explicitly trained to focus on the needs of their employees, and the ones who don't are largely viewed as failures. No other success compensates for poor treatment of your reports. Again, there are plenty of bad managers, but they're widely seen as bad managers; justification like "demanding but fair" or "knows how to get results" or "evil genius" have little effect. 3: It's easy to move. There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on and internal mobility is encouraged and supported. People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. It also helps remove bad managers: sinking ships get abandoned really, really fast. This is arguably the company's greatest weakness as well as it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation.

vbezhenar 7y ago
> There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on I've heard that you'll get raises for working on new things. That's why Google launches so many new projects (and closes so many of those projects) and that's why old projects are constantly rewritten/redesigned instead of just imprpoving and bugfixing. I don't like it as a user, I want to use the same interface for 50 years and I want all bugs to be removed, rather than learning new interface and new bugs every few years.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  You get promoted by shipping stuff (at least, when I was there). You get a raise by getting promoted. So there's an indirect connection between launching things and getting more money. I think that the OP's referring to a phenomena at different big companies where certain divisions get paid more because management deems that division more important. That creates a dynamic where everybody tries to get into that division, and the ones that can't end up bitter, demoralized, and resentful (and hence unproductive). Connecting pay to tangible accomplishments rather than where you are in the company avoids that dynamic, though it does create the one you've observed where everyone is hunting for tangible accomplishments.
  - MarkMc 7y ago
    I'd say failure to align financial incentives is a bigger problem than jealousy of colleagues in the staff cafeteria. Zoom has crushed Google Hangouts and is now a $27 billion company, yet the Hangouts team are still rewarded with sweet Google stock options.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      Arguably both alternatives lead to the big company getting crushed in emerging markets. If you pay for performance in hot emerging markets you cause resentment in all the other divisions, which leads to them underperforming (which is often a more dangerous problem, since this includes the slow-growing cash cow divisions that finance the fast-growing emerging markets). If you don't pay for performance, everybody gets complacent, and you miss out on new markets to hot new competitors. I spent 5 years at Google hoping the intrapreneurship thing would work. AFAICT it doesn't, and eventually I came to accept Paul Graham's conclusion that big companies are constitutionally incapable of innovating and that's why he makes lots of money funding startups. In my observations the biggest problem isn't even compensation: it's that there are too many roadblocks to launching things and trying things out in a big company, too much incentive to be risk-averse, and too little feedback from the market itself with too much feedback from irrelevant decision-makers within the organization. The flip side of fixing those is that it radically increases both the failure rate and the rate at which the company pisses off outside people, both of which would be fatal at Google's scale. IMHO the way Google does compensation is the best I've seen, it's just that "the best" will still result in good companies getting crushed by upstarts. So just accept that and try to create a good working environment while the company continues to print cash.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  This is misleading. It is true that people are rewarded for impact, which usually means new systems. But this does not necessarily mean new products from an external perspective. I know a lot of people who have been promoted really high based on stuff that they have led that has zero visibility to external users but ends up being worth oodles of money (or whatever metric you are trying to impact). Zillions of product launches seems to arise from a combination of a largely bottom-up company with a ton of employees and a culture of building things themselves rather than using existing solutions.
asark 7y ago
> It's easy to move. There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on and internal mobility is encouraged and supported. People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. It also helps remove bad managers: sinking ships get abandoned really, really fast. This is arguably the company's greatest weakness as well as it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation. This is clearly both necessary if they want to retain their "all our people are among the best (and therefore have lots of options if they want to leave)" workforce and harmful to their projects. There's plain flakiness to their approach to things that's at this point a distinguishing characteristic of Google products. Even things that stick around long-term and don't get cancelled outright show heavy signs of no-one wanting to do the boring work, and no-one making them do it. Or of half-assing the boring work and then never fixing it.
- lumost 7y ago
  There is a really strong counter-argument to this that "the boring work" doesn't really matter in the long-run. I've seen many great projects sink over time because management over-indexes on easily understood, time consuming efforts, with only marginal customer impact. These efforts are easy to justify quarter on quarter - but are incredibly generic. Great big products tend to emerge from driving repeatable improvements in something everyone needs e.g. search, content, recommendations, servers, networks, data etc. and solving the hard problems that no one else has the dedication to solve.
  - Moru 7y ago
    The problem arises when you as developer rely on this thing that Google invented but suddenly got bored of and shut down or changed a lot so your implementation has to be rewritten. Many have been hit by this over the years so are reluctant to try again.
    - WanderPanda 7y ago
      There are counterexamples, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16347083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16347083
Mark222 7y ago
>But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation. In which way is Google innovative? They have good products for sure, but I haven't seen much innovation at Google since a while. If anything the past few years have been mostly disappointing (Loon, Calico, Fiber, etc)
- username90 7y ago
  Surveyed business leaders ranks Google as the most innovative company in the world, innovation is not just about new products https://www.bcg.com/en-ch/publications/2019/most-innovative-companies-innovation.aspx https://www.bcg.com/en-ch/publications/2019/most-innovative-...
  - wpietri 7y ago
    That's a measure of reputation, not innovation. Nobody denies that they have a reputation for innovation, but reputations are by necessity backwards-looking.
- cpitman 7y ago
  Kubernetes, which is basically supplanting how companies deploy, run, and manage software both on-prem and the cloud.
ryandrake 7y ago
> 1: The people are smarter. I’d phrase this a little differently: the people there can be relied upon to at least have some “baseline” technical ability. Having worked at both FAANG and more mediocre companies, one thing that stands out is that while not everyone at FAANG are super-wizards, you’ll never have to sit there and explain things like “what is a stack trace” and “what happens when you write past the end of an array” and “what is the difference between O(n log n) and O(log n)”. You’ll never have to argue whether using source control is a good idea. You’ll never have people who spend weeks just trying to get Hello Project” to compile. All of which I’ve seen in other companies. The big guys hiring processes might not be great but unlike most companies they seem to be able to filter out the complete know-nothings, and that alone is probably what raises the average. TLDR: it’s not that they hire smarter people—they just avoid hiring way-below-average people.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  I work at Google, worked at Amazon, and you nailed it. Most people at Google are far from coding superstars. But basically everyone is fairly smart, nice, and hard-working. I basically never come across any dead weight.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    Does this apply to Amazon too? I’m not sure what you’re implying here.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  That's funny, literally the only person I've ever had to explain a stack data structure to in my career was a Google alumni. He calls himself a "Chief Architect" now.
  - fizwhiz 7y ago
    Google alumni != Google SWE.
    - 7y ago
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
> it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation. I would argue that the best innovations tend to also be "soul-consuming". If it were easy, someone else would have innovated in that area earlier, right?
- SeanAppleby 7y ago
  I don't think he meant soul-consuming as in difficulty, but soul-consuming as in existentially unfulfilling or disturbing to your ability to sleep at night. There is, in my experience, plenty of appetite for hard, risky, complex, grinding, ambitious problems, and very little tolerance for boring, unimpactful or evil projects, since everyone at Google can already feed themselves and is more towards the self actualization end of the hierarchy of needs, and has no strong incentive to not roll off onto something more interesting or fulfilling.
- tylerl 7y ago
  I said soul-consuming, I meant soul-crushing (there were a lot of distractions around at the time and I was having trouble remembering the idiom). Point being, crappy work is hard to staff, and some work is just always going to be crappy. Nobody wants to maintain a hideous collection of accumulated bad decisions workarounds that exist for historical reasons but which have no value other than allowing lazy customers to avoid upgrading their 1970s client code. At IBM we maintained it anyway and hated it. At Google that sort of thing can't keep a team together.
badpun 7y ago
> People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. To what extends does this work? Let's say I want to work on Chrome's WebGL implementation, but I've no prior professional experience with neither C++ nor 3D graphics - would they still take me as a noob that will take a couple years to ramp up? I suspect not. So, you're probably most likely just stuck with your current niche and can only move within it - which, to be fair, is still much better than in most other companies where you're just stuck with your current project.
- dclusin 7y ago
  For domain specific roles I ought to think that the members of the current team would be more than happy to provide insight/advice/coaching to someone looking to skill up and get involved. This is typically how I've seen lateral moves done at other companies that encourage mobility. For example, moving from a primarily DBA job to devops/operations/wahetever.
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  The typical route would be to 20% with the team for a couple quarters to learn the ropes and demonstrate your skills, and then transfer 100% once the destination team has the headcount to absorb you. I know multiple people who have done this, although not specifically to the WebGL team.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
> The people are smarter. I’ll bite. Which other companies are like this would you claim?
- Balgair 7y ago
  Not OP, but the ones I know of are RAND, SpaceX, Illuminia, RevGen, and Tesla, in no particular order. Not saying they are good places to work, but they do seem to have more smart people than not
- tylerl 7y ago
  My last job before Google was working as a security consultant to SMEs. My experience working intimately with some 400+ such companies was that of businesses with less than 40 programmers, around one in 10 companies had one developer who could build something durable and follow "industry standard" precautions and practices. All the others had zero. At Google nearly 100% of developers are of that same quality which was exceptionally rare in industry at large.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    What about Amazon?

by tylerl 7y ago

vbezhenar 7y ago

> There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on I've heard that you'll get raises for working on new things. That's why Google launches so many new projects (and closes so many of those projects) and that's why old projects are constantly rewritten/redesigned instead of just imprpoving and bugfixing. I don't like it as a user, I want to use the same interface for 50 years and I want all bugs to be removed, rather than learning new interface and new bugs every few years.

nostrademons 7y ago
You get promoted by shipping stuff (at least, when I was there). You get a raise by getting promoted. So there's an indirect connection between launching things and getting more money. I think that the OP's referring to a phenomena at different big companies where certain divisions get paid more because management deems that division more important. That creates a dynamic where everybody tries to get into that division, and the ones that can't end up bitter, demoralized, and resentful (and hence unproductive). Connecting pay to tangible accomplishments rather than where you are in the company avoids that dynamic, though it does create the one you've observed where everyone is hunting for tangible accomplishments.
- MarkMc 7y ago
  I'd say failure to align financial incentives is a bigger problem than jealousy of colleagues in the staff cafeteria. Zoom has crushed Google Hangouts and is now a $27 billion company, yet the Hangouts team are still rewarded with sweet Google stock options.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Arguably both alternatives lead to the big company getting crushed in emerging markets. If you pay for performance in hot emerging markets you cause resentment in all the other divisions, which leads to them underperforming (which is often a more dangerous problem, since this includes the slow-growing cash cow divisions that finance the fast-growing emerging markets). If you don't pay for performance, everybody gets complacent, and you miss out on new markets to hot new competitors. I spent 5 years at Google hoping the intrapreneurship thing would work. AFAICT it doesn't, and eventually I came to accept Paul Graham's conclusion that big companies are constitutionally incapable of innovating and that's why he makes lots of money funding startups. In my observations the biggest problem isn't even compensation: it's that there are too many roadblocks to launching things and trying things out in a big company, too much incentive to be risk-averse, and too little feedback from the market itself with too much feedback from irrelevant decision-makers within the organization. The flip side of fixing those is that it radically increases both the failure rate and the rate at which the company pisses off outside people, both of which would be fatal at Google's scale. IMHO the way Google does compensation is the best I've seen, it's just that "the best" will still result in good companies getting crushed by upstarts. So just accept that and try to create a good working environment while the company continues to print cash.
UncleMeat 7y ago
This is misleading. It is true that people are rewarded for impact, which usually means new systems. But this does not necessarily mean new products from an external perspective. I know a lot of people who have been promoted really high based on stuff that they have led that has zero visibility to external users but ends up being worth oodles of money (or whatever metric you are trying to impact). Zillions of product launches seems to arise from a combination of a largely bottom-up company with a ton of employees and a culture of building things themselves rather than using existing solutions.

asark 7y ago

> It's easy to move. There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on and internal mobility is encouraged and supported. People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. It also helps remove bad managers: sinking ships get abandoned really, really fast. This is arguably the company's greatest weakness as well as it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation. This is clearly both necessary if they want to retain their "all our people are among the best (and therefore have lots of options if they want to leave)" workforce and harmful to their projects. There's plain flakiness to their approach to things that's at this point a distinguishing characteristic of Google products. Even things that stick around long-term and don't get cancelled outright show heavy signs of no-one wanting to do the boring work, and no-one making them do it. Or of half-assing the boring work and then never fixing it.

lumost 7y ago
There is a really strong counter-argument to this that "the boring work" doesn't really matter in the long-run. I've seen many great projects sink over time because management over-indexes on easily understood, time consuming efforts, with only marginal customer impact. These efforts are easy to justify quarter on quarter - but are incredibly generic. Great big products tend to emerge from driving repeatable improvements in something everyone needs e.g. search, content, recommendations, servers, networks, data etc. and solving the hard problems that no one else has the dedication to solve.
- Moru 7y ago
  The problem arises when you as developer rely on this thing that Google invented but suddenly got bored of and shut down or changed a lot so your implementation has to be rewritten. Many have been hit by this over the years so are reluctant to try again.
  - WanderPanda 7y ago
    There are counterexamples, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16347083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16347083

Mark222 7y ago

>But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation. In which way is Google innovative? They have good products for sure, but I haven't seen much innovation at Google since a while. If anything the past few years have been mostly disappointing (Loon, Calico, Fiber, etc)

username90 7y ago
Surveyed business leaders ranks Google as the most innovative company in the world, innovation is not just about new products https://www.bcg.com/en-ch/publications/2019/most-innovative-companies-innovation.aspx https://www.bcg.com/en-ch/publications/2019/most-innovative-...
- wpietri 7y ago
  That's a measure of reputation, not innovation. Nobody denies that they have a reputation for innovation, but reputations are by necessity backwards-looking.
cpitman 7y ago
Kubernetes, which is basically supplanting how companies deploy, run, and manage software both on-prem and the cloud.

ryandrake 7y ago

> 1: The people are smarter. I’d phrase this a little differently: the people there can be relied upon to at least have some “baseline” technical ability. Having worked at both FAANG and more mediocre companies, one thing that stands out is that while not everyone at FAANG are super-wizards, you’ll never have to sit there and explain things like “what is a stack trace” and “what happens when you write past the end of an array” and “what is the difference between O(n log n) and O(log n)”. You’ll never have to argue whether using source control is a good idea. You’ll never have people who spend weeks just trying to get Hello Project” to compile. All of which I’ve seen in other companies. The big guys hiring processes might not be great but unlike most companies they seem to be able to filter out the complete know-nothings, and that alone is probably what raises the average. TLDR: it’s not that they hire smarter people—they just avoid hiring way-below-average people.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
I work at Google, worked at Amazon, and you nailed it. Most people at Google are far from coding superstars. But basically everyone is fairly smart, nice, and hard-working. I basically never come across any dead weight.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Does this apply to Amazon too? I’m not sure what you’re implying here.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
That's funny, literally the only person I've ever had to explain a stack data structure to in my career was a Google alumni. He calls himself a "Chief Architect" now.
- fizwhiz 7y ago
  Google alumni != Google SWE.
  - 7y ago

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

> it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation. I would argue that the best innovations tend to also be "soul-consuming". If it were easy, someone else would have innovated in that area earlier, right?

SeanAppleby 7y ago
I don't think he meant soul-consuming as in difficulty, but soul-consuming as in existentially unfulfilling or disturbing to your ability to sleep at night. There is, in my experience, plenty of appetite for hard, risky, complex, grinding, ambitious problems, and very little tolerance for boring, unimpactful or evil projects, since everyone at Google can already feed themselves and is more towards the self actualization end of the hierarchy of needs, and has no strong incentive to not roll off onto something more interesting or fulfilling.
tylerl 7y ago
I said soul-consuming, I meant soul-crushing (there were a lot of distractions around at the time and I was having trouble remembering the idiom). Point being, crappy work is hard to staff, and some work is just always going to be crappy. Nobody wants to maintain a hideous collection of accumulated bad decisions workarounds that exist for historical reasons but which have no value other than allowing lazy customers to avoid upgrading their 1970s client code. At IBM we maintained it anyway and hated it. At Google that sort of thing can't keep a team together.

badpun 7y ago

> People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. To what extends does this work? Let's say I want to work on Chrome's WebGL implementation, but I've no prior professional experience with neither C++ nor 3D graphics - would they still take me as a noob that will take a couple years to ramp up? I suspect not. So, you're probably most likely just stuck with your current niche and can only move within it - which, to be fair, is still much better than in most other companies where you're just stuck with your current project.

dclusin 7y ago
For domain specific roles I ought to think that the members of the current team would be more than happy to provide insight/advice/coaching to someone looking to skill up and get involved. This is typically how I've seen lateral moves done at other companies that encourage mobility. For example, moving from a primarily DBA job to devops/operations/wahetever.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
The typical route would be to 20% with the team for a couple quarters to learn the ropes and demonstrate your skills, and then transfer 100% once the destination team has the headcount to absorb you. I know multiple people who have done this, although not specifically to the WebGL team.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

> The people are smarter. I’ll bite. Which other companies are like this would you claim?

Balgair 7y ago
Not OP, but the ones I know of are RAND, SpaceX, Illuminia, RevGen, and Tesla, in no particular order. Not saying they are good places to work, but they do seem to have more smart people than not
tylerl 7y ago
My last job before Google was working as a security consultant to SMEs. My experience working intimately with some 400+ such companies was that of businesses with less than 40 programmers, around one in 10 companies had one developer who could build something durable and follow "industry standard" precautions and practices. All the others had zero. At Google nearly 100% of developers are of that same quality which was exceptionally rare in industry at large.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  What about Amazon?