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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 no

by 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.

by MarkMc 7y ago

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.