21 ms·

Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’

382 points by walterclifford 7y ago

onetimemanytime 7y ago
Screw these "veterans" that ignored the warning signs as they became multimillionaires. Now it's too late. I specifically remember Matt Cutts lying and spinning through his teeth as Google decimated legitimate websites through updates that surprisingly increased Google's click on ads and prices.
- raphlinus 7y ago
  I know he made some people angry, but I very much consider him one of the good people. So much so that I cited him by name (along with three others) in my goodbye letter as people I missed and whose departure signaled a change in culture. BTW, I'm one of the main people quoted in this article, and feel it turned out pretty well. Feel free to ask me followup questions, though I don't guarantee answers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - freedomben 7y ago
    "In the Plex" was one of my favorite books. Have you read it? If so, did you agree with its analysis? How accurately does it portray Google in 2019? Thank you for being willing to answer questions!
    - raphlinus 7y ago
      I actually didn't read it, so can't really answer, sorry.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  Someone had to stop the cottage industry of spamming Google around 2011. Sites like Mahalo were ruining search for everyone. Black hat SEO is pure rent seeking that leaves everybody worse off. Matt Cutts did the right thing.
brodouevencode 7y ago
> scaled to more than 100,000 workers > Googlers who interviewed for roles at Oso said the company had become “too big” and bureaucratic to make a difference for workers Well, yes of course. Your voice becomes diluted to a large degree when companies become that large. It's sad that Google has shifted away from it's previous culture, but the outcomes shouldn't be too terribly surprising.
tempsy 7y ago
Hard to be surprised. Seems only natural for a company that large. Though I agree as far as tech brand goes Google seems to have gone down much faster than other big tech cos go.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- enitihas 7y ago
  Yup. I think Google needs to hire the PR people from Microsoft and pay them rockstar salaries. Microsoft does far worse things than Google yet they manage to hide from the public eye much better. Bing works and censors in China. Microsoft doesn't care what employees say about their clients. Whereas Google gets immense negativity for a not yet live "dragonfly" project, and even very small scale US military projects. Windows 10 broke new ground in privacy violations in a desktop operating system, but things are much farther away from the public eye. Even for something like deprecating services, Microsoft shut down their ebook store, where users had paid for the books, and yet their brand value doesn't get impacted as much as Google's.
  - pm90 7y ago
    Eh, this seems like the standard corporate response. While it’s brand may have suffered, the company still employs a lot of smart and creative people. I would hope that they tap into that pool to come up with better solutions than “hire better PR”.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    It's not an PR thing, it's mostly an internal communications issue. Google championed a culture that allowed SJW-ism to thrive in its own rank that isn't really true of other large companies. Cheerleading social progressivism and then forgoing its "do no evil" motto and then trying to act like any other big corp created massive cognitive dissonance among its own employees that isn't true of other companies.
    - adamsea 7y ago
ProAm 7y ago
I think this is the case to most companies when you move onto the 3rd generation of leadership/CEO, or if you are 3 degrees separated from the original vision. You see this with most projects/companies etc. Too much dilution in vision, other priorities take center stage of a public company.
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  I think this is Amazon's core strength: the continuity of leadership and vision that comes from having a single CEO who is deeply involved in everything. No product launches at Amazon without Jeff Bezos at least being aware of it. That said, woo boy, has that guy gone weird in the last couple of years. He used to be one of the only sane-seeming billionaires. The quirkiest thing about him used to be "he's investing in space."
  - techslave 7y ago
    You’re arguing sonething very different. Amazon acts very unethically (well, business is business, but still) and it’s never been a problem.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Google's founders used to be quite "deeply involved" in the day-to-day business, and the company didn't suffer for it. Maybe this has something to do with it becoming "unrecognizable" shortly after they checked out altogether.
    - vkou 7y ago
      > the company didn't suffer for it I have one word for you. Social. Social was Larry's project. He very explicitly put Vic in charge of it, and kept Vic in charge from one disaster to another.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        My guess is that they did this because they saw Facebook as an existential threat of sorts for Google. Maybe you feel that the whole thing was badly managed, but it's hard to say this other than with hindsight. G+ was no Facebook, but it looked like something that could be successful for quite some time.
mkolodny 7y ago
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there's an article on the second page of HN right now (458 votes last I checked) by Google's former Head of International Relations about why he left the company. I think it's very worth reading. There's some extremely interesting (and damning) stories about his experience at Google since 2008. Here's the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 While this might (and almost certainly should) hurt Google's brand, I think this issue applies to any big for-profit company. I doubt that Amazon or Apple are much different.
- microtherion 7y ago
  I was thinking along the same lines. Any sizable company is going to have thousands of people quitting each year, and it would be exceedingly unlikely that none of these left on unfriendly terms. "Why I left [FAANG of choice] / stopped using their products" is a staple of HN article titles. But of course, none of this anecdotal evidence is proof that everything is FINE with these companies, either. Many of these complaints may be entirely justified.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    Strangely I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Amazon one, save for Dan Vassalo which was more of a fatFIRE/entrepreneurial (folks, follow him on Twitter) article than just a stream of elitist, first world complaints. I think I read one from Facebook that blamed the OP quitting on how parking worked (??)
    - a3n 7y ago
      Did Amazon put nets on the building after that one guy jumped off? https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoughts-about-suicide-survivor-2016-12?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoug...
      - trenning 7y ago
        No but they did promote his manager the next promo cycle. Just normal Amazon things.
corporateslave5 7y ago
That’s what happens when you hire strictly off of algorithms questions with zero behavioral questions. How they thought that wouldn’t destroy the company culture is beyond me.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  What would have happened if they didn't trust their search engine algorithms and manually placed certain websites at the top for certain keywords?
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  .
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments here.
    - hnuser123456 7y ago
      I respect your decision, but I must say I think it's substantive and true, and I don't think it's flamebait. Happy new year.
- justicezyx 7y ago
  > That’s what happens when you hire strictly off of algorithms questions with zero behavioral questions. LMAO... I never saw anyone mention nerds being careless about culture. It was always executives. How can you get such a conclusion ...
  - empthought 7y ago
    Google engineering management are all “nerds...”
    - zozbot234 7y ago
borramakot 7y ago
Is there data on what tech companies programmers (either generally or new grads) most want to work for? It feels like it used to be Google by a lot, but even outside the HN bubble, I get the sense Google has taken some reputation hit.
- freedomben 7y ago
  Would be interested in this too. Anecdatally, it seems like Amazon has really picked up among people who don't consider proprietary software to be unethical. G still has a better rep among the FOSS people. Of course my sample size is probably about 30 people, mostly from startups we've worked at together. Hardly representative of the target market for FAANG.
  - gwright 7y ago
    > proprietary software to be unethical My sense is only a very small percentage (way less than 1%) of software developers think that proprietary software by definition is unethical. Am I wrong to think this?
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      In a hard sense maybe from selection bias and counting only full time and far fewer who don't pay the rent. Maybe uo to like 5% or so if you can count academia among developers. There is a sizable chunk who would prefer to work with non-properietary software if only for the ability to take a peak. The likely winner by raw numbers would be the "apathetics" who go wity whatever works.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        It would be welcomed if those ethics would be used to pay for the tooling as well. Instead we keep getting posts on HN from companies that either go dual licenses, or completely proprietary to stay on business, or just switch business altogether.
Animats 7y ago
You have to have a Google or Facebook account to read this. Ironic.
aaomidi 7y ago
All beasts will fall someday. This is Google's turn.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  Counterpoint: Microsoft has been Fortune 250 for 20+ years, and a F50 for almost 20 years.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Microsoft is essentially a spring chicken compared to other entries on the list.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - aaomidi 7y ago
    Falling and burning doesn't necessarily mean disappearing. Oracle is still making money but everyone hates them. Microsoft went through the phase of everyone hates them during Balmers time.
buboard 7y ago
i wonder how advertisers feel about their products being advertised through google these days
ahelwer 7y ago
Well, that's what you get when you appoint a CEO from McKinsey.
- osipov 7y ago
  Google Cloud is full of ex-McKinsey people in middle management positions. Add ex-Oracle to that mix and you got yourself a culture war with old-time Googlers.
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    It's interesting how high the technical bar is for ICs and "normal staff", but how low the bar is set, or seems to be set, for management and their backgrounds. Their head of cloud is an ex-Oracle guy that led their disastrous cloud initiative. CFO from Goldman Sacks, McKinsey MBAs and mediocre tech managers galore. Earnings expectations clearly favored over product development, and not an engineering led company anymore. Just looking at their hires, you can almost see the cultural shift play out.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      At the executive level, your options are typically people who've never had embarassing failures or people who've never accomplished much in the first place. Kurian was the head of product at Oracle at the beginning of their cloud efforts - but he was also the head of product at Oracle, bringing a level of enterprise experience and credibility that Google Cloud has historically been in desperate need of.
      - jorblumesea 7y ago
        Amazon and Microsoft have extremely deep benches of talent when it comes to cloud, and both have a huge % of the market share combined. Google has had presences in Seattle for almost a decade. I really don't see the logic with the kind of money Google is throwing around. It's not like Kurian was cheap. I think it's more a failure of leadership and vision on Google's part. A symptom of the company transitioning from engineering led to MBA/Business.
c3534l 7y ago
Nothing is permanent. No company will stay the same 22 years later. I wouldn't be surprised if there are people working at Google who were born after Google was founded. At some point, the feisty startup that wants to change the world will become the status quo. It's delusional to think otherwise.
- ljm 7y ago
  I'm growing to believe that the greatest folly of humankind is the idea of permanence. We love to cling on to what we have and fight against anything that might remove it from us. Even when we would benefit from the loss. So it is with companies. Just because Google was an amazing toddler doesn't mean it's an amazing grown-up. Plenty of our angelic youngsters turn out to be grade-A assholes or psychopaths a few years later on. Which is to say, the google that we knew back in the 90s and 2000s is dead, and has been for a long time.
  - pharke 7y ago
    It would be interesting if we could institute a law that would in effect compel companies to open source their technology, patents, trade secrets, etc. after a certain amount of time to force competition and innovation. Wishful thinking I guess but I think we'd be better off if we could get there.
    - ljm 7y ago
      I would like to see a legally enforced compulsion to work for the public good and not the investor good.
      - mkolodny 7y ago
        That sounds a lot like a non-profit.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      I think this would work way better as a privately-led effort than a matter of law. Look for struggling companies with interesting "IP" assets that are currently heavily undervalued by the market (because it's hard for an individual, private buyer to make a profit on them). Buy the assets and open them up. Yes, it takes some money and resources - but how much, compared to re-developing those assets from scratch?
standardUser 7y ago
Sometimes I genuinely wonder what people expect from one of the world's largest corporations. They aren't the first. There are hundreds of other giant multinationals that have been around for generations. Why exactly does anyone expect Google to be different?
- zepto 7y ago
  Because they claimed to be.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    Well - they were. Now they're not. Why is that shocking?
    - zepto 7y ago
      Who is shocked?
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Many corporations are prone to claiming outlandish things about themselves, so if that's the answer it suggests another question: why did so many people believe this particular corporation that claimed to be unique?
    - zepto 7y ago
      The were far more serious about it - is wasn’t just a casual claim.
  - standardUser 7y ago
    I tend to agree. The entire "Don't Be Evil" thing planted a bizarre idea in a lot of people's heads that this particular faceless corporate giant would be different and better.
    - sumedh 7y ago
ljw1001 7y ago
Google was a great place - for most people - when it was riding the crazy growth rocket that was its Search/Adwords/Adsense/Analytics engine. (former Googler here) As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart them in other ways. It had to do this to keep the stock in the stratosphere, which kept the mid-to-senior managers rich, and gave the ones who weren't yet rich the possibility of becoming so. Some of these attempts were questionable ethically. Similarly, privacy invading changes were made in the core business. People all the way to Larry & Sergey told themselves and everyone else the same lies that their ceaseless profiling and other invasions were for the customers own good. Think G+'s real names policy, Google Glass's creepy stalker potential, etc. The engagement in dubious if completely legal tax dodges was another sign. As was the army of lobbyists, as was the work on censored search. In any case, it's sort of inevitable in stock-market driven capitalism that unicorns can't slow down gracefully, with everyone being satisfied that their millions or billions are 'enough.' I wish they could. I suspect it's doubly-hard for a company when their outlandish success attracts people primarily driven by money. All that growth meant a ton of hiring, and i suspect people who really just wanted to get rich self-selected into the applicant pool. Beyond that, instances of sexual harassment and their cover-up suggests that maybe their was never a big commitment to not 'be evil'. At least when it came down to powerful execs and less-powerful women. Maybe it was always just another company. I used to be really proud of my time at Google, and I still think it was, and probably still is, a better than the rogues gallery of tech's giant offenders (Uber, Facebook, Amazon). But the pride I felt in working there is gone. I believe Jeff Bezos is the greatest businessman we've seen since Ford or Rockefeller, but his insatiable need for not just more, but everything, has kept him from being a great human and Amazon from being a great company in anything other than the most narrow economic sense.
- hash872 7y ago
  >As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart them in other ways >unicorns can't slow down gracefully Their revenue keeps growing 20% every single year, which is absurdly impressive. Google is one of the most staggeringly successful companies of the last 100 years, I don't see how they're 'flailing'
- buboard 7y ago
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
The last bit resonates with me. Work has to be something we need to do for about 1/3 of our lives. Work is service. Even if we get paid for it, work is what we do for the betterment of collective. 1/3 of our lifetime ought to be for family and kin and our own. The remaining 1/3 for self development. To become better than who we were yesterday, last month..the year before. It’s a continuous improvement. But I see people do nothing but work. They start at 7.00. Work all day. Outsource family time. Scrounge for a little bit of self care time. Sleep little, enjoy in chunks of time once a year. All for a price. Most of what we work for goes to the government. Yes, taxes go for betterment of society but because no one has a say in it, it can also go towards things some of us don’t believe in. War, for example. I can’t divert my tax dollars towards space exploration rather than bloody wars. We need a formula for life and living. A formula that gives us true and lasting freedom. [..] When Page became CEO in 2011, he became “obsessed” with reading about why companies fail from being too big and sluggish, Stapleton said. “It’s sort of sad that a lot of the things he was afraid would happen, actually happened.” Stapleton, who held a number of roles close to the founders, recalled Page walking around offices with a chunk of metal that he said was from his grandfather’s auto plant in Michigan. It supposedly symbolized a point in time when auto workers felt like they needed to protect themselves against management. Page showed it as an example of something he hoped would never happen to Google. “He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.”[..]
- dwighttk 7y ago
  >Work has to be something we need to do for about 1/3 of our lives. >1/3 of our lifetime ought to be for family and kin and our own. >The remaining 1/3 for self development. and then the fourth 1/3 of the time you sleep
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    Good point..thirds of our waking life. 1/3 of 16 hours then..
adventskalender 7y ago
I consider this and the other article by the international relations guy to be very one-sided accounts. A couple of people are unhappy, out of a workforce of 100000. So what? It also mostly seems to be political reasons. I would imagine a lot of people working for Google just want to do a good job for a good salary, not make Google a vehicle for their political opinions. I think people pushing their political agenda within a company tend to harm the company and it should therefore be ok to fire them. That said, I haven't wanted to work for Google for years. But I am from the opposite side from these veterans. I felt it was very unjust when James Damore was fired, and I really don't want to work at a place that distrusts its workers so much that it forces them to go through diversity trainings and things like that. I would feel "unsafe" at Google.
- adamsea 7y ago
  Did you know that Damor filed a complaint with the National Labor Board? “ ... an internal NLRB memo found that his firing was legal. The memo, which was not released publicly until February 2018, said that while the law shielded him from being fired solely for criticizing Google, it did not protect discriminatory statements, that his memo's "statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected", and that these "discriminatory statements", not his criticisms of Google, were the reason for his firing.“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_...
  - adventskalender 7y ago
    I know he sued Google, not details, though. This statement by the NBL just proves to me that the NBL is a batshit crazy untrustworthy institution. (Add the NBL to the list of places I wouldn't want to work for...). I guess that is just the modern world, people have so different views (perspectives) that no reconciliation seems possible. In any case, no need to discuss the Damore memo again, I just wanted to point out that there are different sides, and these recent articles seem to represent only one side.
    - 7y ago
banThisIP 7y ago
Google is an Indian software company now. Don't short it however yet. While they cannot create new products (see Gundotra's ejection), Pichai will successfully milk Android and Gmail for a while.
e5india 7y ago
This is what happens to every tech company once they enter growth mode and bring in a ton of mercenary sales people from Oracle and the like. The irony here is people point to social justice activity as the reason for decline but really all that social justice activity is a smokescreen for betraying other values. We'll do what we're bid by totalitarian regimes and then make ourselves feel better by putting rainbow colors on our logo during Pride Week.
cletus 7y ago
Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have. It actually became an internal joke where you'd get these emails every 2-3 months saying your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a different manager, neither of which you'd ever met or even necessarily heard of. To be clear, the executive team are ultimately responsible but Google has fallen prey to a lack of leadership (Eric Schmidt, we miss you) and an entrenched swarm of middle management. I honestly believe a lot of the bad ideas Google got involved in (like the DoD ML thing) sprang from over-eager VPs. There's an old Dilbert strip basically saying that managers reach a point of constant reorgs and responsibilities churn to the point that no one is around long enough to be held accountable for their actions ("oh that was the last guy") and definitely not around long enough for anything to work. This to me is what Google had become. The reorgs were constant and the leadership was directionless. The transparency thing here is a big one. There was a culture of blameless and open post-mortems. This probably started to change in the Vic Google Plus era. Dashboards were locked down. There were some pretty (internally) famous examples of post-mortems people found that were subsequently restricted, essentially because they (rightly) made some VP look bad. One of the most shocking things to me was a story from last year about how accessing such documents could retroactively lead to you being fired. As in Google docs were typically sent around such that if you had the link you could open it and these links might be forwarded to open groups. That's how a lot of things (internally) "leaked". Disclaimer: Xoogler (6 years)
- whateveracct 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the title of VP(E) is like the Ice King's crown in Adventure Time. It makes you a bumbling autocrat driven to secure your own position. Re-orgs, re-writes, etc are great instruments for this end.
  - wuliwong 7y ago
    It's possible. I also wonder if often times the type of behavior necessary to attain the title in the first place, filters out the people who are not willing to engage in the behaviors you describe.
extraz6b3c 7y ago
And some have quit for as-yet-undisclosed colossal fuckups. Google's inherent belief that it is the "good guy" in all things internet has fed a massive hubris. That hubris has led to inherent blindness to its detrimental effects on the wider internet and a hero complex. When in reality, they are just like all other mega corporations: interested in only one thing: maximum dollars, and they do this by tilting the tables to make all the quarters slide into their pocket. When you're huge, the urge to take up your power to do this becomes overwhelming. It comes in fits and starts at first, until the culture rots, and soon you're rolling downhill into full-blown corrupt self-dealing and monopoly tactics. Google's on its way. And it's too big to fail, except it will, and we'll be shocked at the reach of its surveillance capabilities at the fire sale.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  This is the worst case scenario but it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Hopefully they have too much money to let this happen and instead find a new CEO to turn things around.
longtimegoogler 7y ago
I actually think the greatest period was under Schmidt. Back then there was a lot of freedom to choose what to work on. Google Labs and 20% projects were healty. It felt like a place where people worked on ideas they thought were cool. Things seemed to just happen organically without a lot of bureaucracy and management structure. I think Larry changed that with a more top down approach with what to work being decided higher up, see social. This led to less project flexibility and more hierarchy, with managers and pms becoming more important in the org. Coupled with the growth in the number of employees, I think where the company today is just a gradual evolution of what Larry started along with the problems of growth. That said it is still a pretty good place to work at for a number of reasons.
jrockway 7y ago
Many years ago, maybe before I even worked at Google, I read a very wise post here. I think it was from nostrademons. The gist was that one cannot be given a good place to work, one has to make an active effort to make it a good place to work. When a lot of people come together with the same ideas, they can make a place that wins awards for being a good place to work, but there always has to be active effort from everyone to keep that alive. You can't just show up and hope that the "make this place good to work at" team makes this place good to work at. You are that team! That attitude, to me, kind of explains the downfall of Google. People started to realize they could stop doing the things that made it a good place to work, and just focus on their project work. No need to do a tech talk to share with the company what you're up to. No need to clean up tech debt. No need to work with the teams whose products you consume to make them better. Just take every shortcut to launch, get promoted, and get more power. People saw that that worked better than being transparent, fixing tech debt, etc., and now THAT'S the culture. People see that working, repeat it as fact ("how to get promoted: don't fix bugs!"), and then that becomes the culture and that's where Google seems to be now. Now people think that there is nothing they can do to change the culture, and maybe that's true. There is just too much inertia and so YOU being transparent, YOU being a good steward of the codebase and shared resources, etc. just won't matter. They just get in the way of getting promoted. So people fall back to the natural human fallback of "appeal to authority". They write open letters, they have protests... but it doesn't matter. That never worked. The early engineers didn't write open letters to management about having a shared codebase, or requiring code reviews... they just did it. It is hard work, often with no reward, but over time the benefits accumulate. But when you stop putting in the work, it stops working. Now the company is too large to ever change, probably. But it got there because people were lazy about protecting the culture, and now all that cultural tech debt piles up and results in the things that we read about on HN. Next time, when you're at a new company... realize that YOU have to set the objectives. If you want transparency, be transparent about your work. Do internal talks or write internal blog posts about what you're up to. Give curious people permission to look around and play with your service. Give people peer bonuses and write them good reviews when they do menial tasks that help code health long term. You have to make a conscious effort every single day, and remind others to do the same... or you'll just end up with another heartless megacorp that is coasting on momentum from all this work that people put in in the early days. And, you have to deal with the consequences of your positive culture. Some jerk is going to break your service that has no rate limits. Someone is going to walk off with your customer list. You're going to miss a deadline because someone was doing a big refactor instead of that last little cleanup before launch. If you really value transparency, code health, whatever, you have to accept that they are going to conflict with other things you care about! If you can't accept that, you aren't going to really have that culture that you want. (Also, to be clear, I am not criticizing anyone mentioned in the article here. I did not work with them at Google, but they were very transparent about what they were working on, so I know exactly what they were up to at any given time. And I was also pretty transparent, so I bet they knew me despite having never worked with me. A lot of people were doing a lot of good things, and that community certainly knew each other well, even if only in passing. But there were tens of thousands of people that just existed without contributing positively to the culture, and the "carrying capacity" was reached and here we are. It is sad to see.) Anyway, I write this because it is something that everyone will need to think about in their next (or current) adventure. You have to decide what you value, and if it's a "good culture", you will have to scrimp somewhere else to make that a reality. Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to be the "management" or "promotion committee" that enforces your values. And it will come at a cost!
bitL 7y ago
One of my MBA classes on designing an organization mentioned a significant change when moving from collectivity stage ("charismatic", "empowering") to formalization stage (bureaucratic, most desired by individual managers, principal-agent at play). It looks like Google was able to delay this jump longer than most companies but in the end couldn't avoid it. From what I've heard recently from former employees, JetBrains is another company that is undergoing a similar shift; in the past half of their "escapees" returned back from Google/Facebook within a year, expressing displeasure with those companies, now they are jumping ship as well...
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Is there a "unicorn"-sized company which is not highly bureaucratic (dominated by internal politics)? It just doesn't seem logically possible to me. The weird thing, rather, is the extent to which the largest companies do way better than we might otherwise expect, given the obvious drawbacks of these formalized, bureaucratic arrangements.
  - bitL 7y ago
    I think one has to follow the life-cycle of a company to have a good time; e.g. Valve used to be awesome company, now that is no longer true. Be in the right place at the right time, all the time, it seems... So to answer your question, one has to view a company in time and likely there will be a time span when company is not dominated by internal politics. Managers push for bureaucracy as their desired form, rank-and-file employees fight against it, at some point power moves to managers and companies slowly die, even while wildly profitable, making disruptive innovation by a next generation of companies possible. Avoid stressful start ups (except when you are co-founder/investor), join once a company has money to invest into crazy things, run away once bureaucracy sets in (or if company passes Bozo event horizon).
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    Yes. One person companies. All others are dominated by internal politics.
a3n 7y ago
Google is entirely recognizable, as a modern, amoral hyper-corporation whose entire purpose is to service its giant self-aware pile of cash. They used to make money by making information available. Now they just make money, and how they do it is incidental. > “Google is built on trust,” They were. They don't need that anymore.
habosa 7y ago
Googler here. Opinions are obviously my own and not that for my employer. Just sharing my thoughts, take it all with a grain of salt. I've been at Google full time for 5+ years and was an intern before that. The company has more than doubled in size since I've been here, so I'm not exactly old-school but I have seen change. When I started Google felt like one company. I was blown away that I could look at any piece of code (besides Google X and parts of Android) and file a bug against any team when something didn't work. I felt proud of other team's products and I also felt responsible for them, I filed a lot of bugs/feedback trying to make random things better. The culture was also just fun as hell. The mailing lists and Memegen (our internal meme site) were really fun to participate in for the most part. A lot has changed now. Each product feels more isolated and does things their own way. The company is far too big for anyone to claim they really know what's going on outside their local area. The culture is no longer fun at all. There is a lot more negativity, and a lot of it is justified (you've seen the news). However I still love the people I work with directly and what we work on (Firebase, fwiw). And one strange positive about how large the company has gotten is that I can just focus on that. I no longer get too worked up about what's going on over in far-flung teams and that's fine with me. And I don't naively participate in company-wide forums expecting a good mood. But I get to build cool things and we have more resources (money, people, knowledge, etc) than we know what to do with. All of that is to say that yes, a lot has changed. Some for the worse, some for the better, some just different. I still think this is a great place to work and I don't plan to leave any time soon.
- panabee 7y ago
  firebase is awesome. keep up the great work! if you had a magic wand and could change one thing about "new" google, what would it be?
  - habosa 7y ago
    That's a really hard question but I think smaller teams need to be more empowered. Right now every big decision seems to come from way up high which guarantees that it seems out of touch and misses edge cases. A lot of the angst comes from people at the bottom shaking their fists at VP/CEO types. If individual teams could make their own decisions about what to do and how to do it they could shrug off some of the corporate nonsense that happens above them.
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
This article was posted 3 times in 3 days and only today is taking off! What is going on? As I tried to posted it 2 days ago and I was redirected to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103 posted by mattydread and at that time it was [DEAD]. I started wondering why. I vouched to resurrect it and somebody else must have done it too but eventually it only got to 5 points. I even thought for a moment that Google have bots to kill undesired articles on Hacker News but I thought I was reading too much into it. When I noticed that this was a different post, I run a search on Algolia ( check https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=google%20veterans&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ) and apparently yesterday it was posted again by raiyu ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616 ) and it only collected 2 points. Today it was posted for the 3rd time and it is finally taking off... How did it ended up [DEAD] 2 days ago ? Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]?
- Buge 7y ago
  >Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]? According to what you said previously, it was only dead the first out of 3 times, and even that one is no longer dead. Maybe some people flagged it or downvoted it the first time. Things being reposted repeatedly to HN and taking off on later reposts is quite common[1][2][3]. Reposting is explicitly allowed in the FAQ[4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125589 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806801 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867946 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
duelingjello 7y ago
Step 0. Lots of FAANG veterans discover each other and plot their exits. Step 1. Start a FAANG-competitor worker-owned co-op that is profitable through donations, subscriptions and freemium products / services. No evil allowed. Step 2. Poach more workers from FAANG to a civilized, humane and decent organization that creates excellent products for normal humans. Step 3. Dominate FAANG without selling-out to governments privacy invasions or reselling customer data.
- perceptronas 7y ago
  Step 4. Remove "No evil allowed" from mission
thu2111 7y ago
I vaguely remember Claire Stapleton from when I was there, as some sort of quirky marketing person. I think her comments are mostly pretty accurate. This one though jumped out as weird: “He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.” Was that really her interpretation of Larry Page? No wonder she's now publicly crying her disappointment. It seems like the total opposite of the Page I saw, a man who never cared about the arts at all and in fact had to be browbeaten into caring about visual design by Steve Jobs himself. Page back then was a man who cared deeply about science and anything sci-fi. The more sci-fi the better. His vision for Google was a machine that converted ad clicks into flying cars, the computer from Star Trek and so on. Amazing tech wasn't a means to an end but rather, the end itself. I never heard or saw anything in Google's mission about "freeing up humanity to pursue the arts". I can imagine why a humanities person like Stapleton might have wanted to believe that as it would have given her own interests and background an anchor in what was back then a supremely engineering oriented culture. But it wasn't true. Nobody gave a stuff about the arts, as evidenced by hiring priorities.
cbanek 7y ago
> Stapleton said when she made a request to HR earlier this year, she was routed to a call center in Chicago, where she spoke to a young gentleman who had recently graduated college. Responding to a concern she had with a manager, he gave her bad advice to take her manager out to drinks, she said. Wow. And this is why those call in EAP / anonymous reporting programs offered as a 'benefit' always seem to be garbage. Never had a good experience with any of them.
lunias 7y ago
Not surprising, but the more interesting question is: What can be done to prevent new companies from reaching the final, greedy and uncaring, corporate form that we all loath? This is not an isolated Google issue. It's systemic in companies w/ a certain momentum.

Screw these "veterans" that ignored the warning signs as they became multimillionaires. Now it's too late. I specifically remember Matt Cutts lying and spinning through his teeth as Google decimated legitimate websites through updates that surprisingly increased Google's click on ads and prices.

raphlinus 7y ago
I know he made some people angry, but I very much consider him one of the good people. So much so that I cited him by name (along with three others) in my goodbye letter as people I missed and whose departure signaled a change in culture. BTW, I'm one of the main people quoted in this article, and feel it turned out pretty well. Feel free to ask me followup questions, though I don't guarantee answers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- freedomben 7y ago
  "In the Plex" was one of my favorite books. Have you read it? If so, did you agree with its analysis? How accurately does it portray Google in 2019? Thank you for being willing to answer questions!
  - raphlinus 7y ago
    I actually didn't read it, so can't really answer, sorry.
pcwalton 7y ago
Someone had to stop the cottage industry of spamming Google around 2011. Sites like Mahalo were ruining search for everyone. Black hat SEO is pure rent seeking that leaves everybody worse off. Matt Cutts did the right thing.

brodouevencode 7y ago

> scaled to more than 100,000 workers > Googlers who interviewed for roles at Oso said the company had become “too big” and bureaucratic to make a difference for workers Well, yes of course. Your voice becomes diluted to a large degree when companies become that large. It's sad that Google has shifted away from it's previous culture, but the outcomes shouldn't be too terribly surprising.

tempsy 7y ago

Hard to be surprised. Seems only natural for a company that large. Though I agree as far as tech brand goes Google seems to have gone down much faster than other big tech cos go.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
enitihas 7y ago
Yup. I think Google needs to hire the PR people from Microsoft and pay them rockstar salaries. Microsoft does far worse things than Google yet they manage to hide from the public eye much better. Bing works and censors in China. Microsoft doesn't care what employees say about their clients. Whereas Google gets immense negativity for a not yet live "dragonfly" project, and even very small scale US military projects. Windows 10 broke new ground in privacy violations in a desktop operating system, but things are much farther away from the public eye. Even for something like deprecating services, Microsoft shut down their ebook store, where users had paid for the books, and yet their brand value doesn't get impacted as much as Google's.
- pm90 7y ago
  Eh, this seems like the standard corporate response. While it’s brand may have suffered, the company still employs a lot of smart and creative people. I would hope that they tap into that pool to come up with better solutions than “hire better PR”.
- tempsy 7y ago
  It's not an PR thing, it's mostly an internal communications issue. Google championed a culture that allowed SJW-ism to thrive in its own rank that isn't really true of other large companies. Cheerleading social progressivism and then forgoing its "do no evil" motto and then trying to act like any other big corp created massive cognitive dissonance among its own employees that isn't true of other companies.
  - adamsea 7y ago

ProAm 7y ago

I think this is the case to most companies when you move onto the 3rd generation of leadership/CEO, or if you are 3 degrees separated from the original vision. You see this with most projects/companies etc. Too much dilution in vision, other priorities take center stage of a public company.

CobrastanJorji 7y ago
I think this is Amazon's core strength: the continuity of leadership and vision that comes from having a single CEO who is deeply involved in everything. No product launches at Amazon without Jeff Bezos at least being aware of it. That said, woo boy, has that guy gone weird in the last couple of years. He used to be one of the only sane-seeming billionaires. The quirkiest thing about him used to be "he's investing in space."
- techslave 7y ago
  You’re arguing sonething very different. Amazon acts very unethically (well, business is business, but still) and it’s never been a problem.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Google's founders used to be quite "deeply involved" in the day-to-day business, and the company didn't suffer for it. Maybe this has something to do with it becoming "unrecognizable" shortly after they checked out altogether.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > the company didn't suffer for it I have one word for you. Social. Social was Larry's project. He very explicitly put Vic in charge of it, and kept Vic in charge from one disaster to another.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      My guess is that they did this because they saw Facebook as an existential threat of sorts for Google. Maybe you feel that the whole thing was badly managed, but it's hard to say this other than with hindsight. G+ was no Facebook, but it looked like something that could be successful for quite some time.

mkolodny 7y ago

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there's an article on the second page of HN right now (458 votes last I checked) by Google's former Head of International Relations about why he left the company. I think it's very worth reading. There's some extremely interesting (and damning) stories about his experience at Google since 2008. Here's the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446 While this might (and almost certainly should) hurt Google's brand, I think this issue applies to any big for-profit company. I doubt that Amazon or Apple are much different.

microtherion 7y ago
I was thinking along the same lines. Any sizable company is going to have thousands of people quitting each year, and it would be exceedingly unlikely that none of these left on unfriendly terms. "Why I left [FAANG of choice] / stopped using their products" is a staple of HN article titles. But of course, none of this anecdotal evidence is proof that everything is FINE with these companies, either. Many of these complaints may be entirely justified.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Strangely I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Amazon one, save for Dan Vassalo which was more of a fatFIRE/entrepreneurial (folks, follow him on Twitter) article than just a stream of elitist, first world complaints. I think I read one from Facebook that blamed the OP quitting on how parking worked (??)
  - a3n 7y ago
    Did Amazon put nets on the building after that one guy jumped off? https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoughts-about-suicide-survivor-2016-12?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoug...
    - trenning 7y ago
      No but they did promote his manager the next promo cycle. Just normal Amazon things.

corporateslave5 7y ago

That’s what happens when you hire strictly off of algorithms questions with zero behavioral questions. How they thought that wouldn’t destroy the company culture is beyond me.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
What would have happened if they didn't trust their search engine algorithms and manually placed certain websites at the top for certain keywords?
hnuser123456 7y ago
.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments here.
  - hnuser123456 7y ago
    I respect your decision, but I must say I think it's substantive and true, and I don't think it's flamebait. Happy new year.
justicezyx 7y ago
> That’s what happens when you hire strictly off of algorithms questions with zero behavioral questions. LMAO... I never saw anyone mention nerds being careless about culture. It was always executives. How can you get such a conclusion ...
- empthought 7y ago
  Google engineering management are all “nerds...”
  - zozbot234 7y ago

borramakot 7y ago

Is there data on what tech companies programmers (either generally or new grads) most want to work for? It feels like it used to be Google by a lot, but even outside the HN bubble, I get the sense Google has taken some reputation hit.

freedomben 7y ago
Would be interested in this too. Anecdatally, it seems like Amazon has really picked up among people who don't consider proprietary software to be unethical. G still has a better rep among the FOSS people. Of course my sample size is probably about 30 people, mostly from startups we've worked at together. Hardly representative of the target market for FAANG.
- gwright 7y ago
  > proprietary software to be unethical My sense is only a very small percentage (way less than 1%) of software developers think that proprietary software by definition is unethical. Am I wrong to think this?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    In a hard sense maybe from selection bias and counting only full time and far fewer who don't pay the rent. Maybe uo to like 5% or so if you can count academia among developers. There is a sizable chunk who would prefer to work with non-properietary software if only for the ability to take a peak. The likely winner by raw numbers would be the "apathetics" who go wity whatever works.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      It would be welcomed if those ethics would be used to pay for the tooling as well. Instead we keep getting posts on HN from companies that either go dual licenses, or completely proprietary to stay on business, or just switch business altogether.

Animats 7y ago

You have to have a Google or Facebook account to read this. Ironic.

aaomidi 7y ago

All beasts will fall someday. This is Google's turn.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago
Counterpoint: Microsoft has been Fortune 250 for 20+ years, and a F50 for almost 20 years.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Microsoft is essentially a spring chicken compared to other entries on the list.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- aaomidi 7y ago
  Falling and burning doesn't necessarily mean disappearing. Oracle is still making money but everyone hates them. Microsoft went through the phase of everyone hates them during Balmers time.

buboard 7y ago

i wonder how advertisers feel about their products being advertised through google these days

ahelwer 7y ago

Well, that's what you get when you appoint a CEO from McKinsey.

osipov 7y ago
Google Cloud is full of ex-McKinsey people in middle management positions. Add ex-Oracle to that mix and you got yourself a culture war with old-time Googlers.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  It's interesting how high the technical bar is for ICs and "normal staff", but how low the bar is set, or seems to be set, for management and their backgrounds. Their head of cloud is an ex-Oracle guy that led their disastrous cloud initiative. CFO from Goldman Sacks, McKinsey MBAs and mediocre tech managers galore. Earnings expectations clearly favored over product development, and not an engineering led company anymore. Just looking at their hires, you can almost see the cultural shift play out.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    At the executive level, your options are typically people who've never had embarassing failures or people who've never accomplished much in the first place. Kurian was the head of product at Oracle at the beginning of their cloud efforts - but he was also the head of product at Oracle, bringing a level of enterprise experience and credibility that Google Cloud has historically been in desperate need of.
    - jorblumesea 7y ago
      Amazon and Microsoft have extremely deep benches of talent when it comes to cloud, and both have a huge % of the market share combined. Google has had presences in Seattle for almost a decade. I really don't see the logic with the kind of money Google is throwing around. It's not like Kurian was cheap. I think it's more a failure of leadership and vision on Google's part. A symptom of the company transitioning from engineering led to MBA/Business.

c3534l 7y ago

Nothing is permanent. No company will stay the same 22 years later. I wouldn't be surprised if there are people working at Google who were born after Google was founded. At some point, the feisty startup that wants to change the world will become the status quo. It's delusional to think otherwise.

ljm 7y ago
I'm growing to believe that the greatest folly of humankind is the idea of permanence. We love to cling on to what we have and fight against anything that might remove it from us. Even when we would benefit from the loss. So it is with companies. Just because Google was an amazing toddler doesn't mean it's an amazing grown-up. Plenty of our angelic youngsters turn out to be grade-A assholes or psychopaths a few years later on. Which is to say, the google that we knew back in the 90s and 2000s is dead, and has been for a long time.
- pharke 7y ago
  It would be interesting if we could institute a law that would in effect compel companies to open source their technology, patents, trade secrets, etc. after a certain amount of time to force competition and innovation. Wishful thinking I guess but I think we'd be better off if we could get there.
  - ljm 7y ago
    I would like to see a legally enforced compulsion to work for the public good and not the investor good.
    - mkolodny 7y ago
      That sounds a lot like a non-profit.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    I think this would work way better as a privately-led effort than a matter of law. Look for struggling companies with interesting "IP" assets that are currently heavily undervalued by the market (because it's hard for an individual, private buyer to make a profit on them). Buy the assets and open them up. Yes, it takes some money and resources - but how much, compared to re-developing those assets from scratch?

standardUser 7y ago

Sometimes I genuinely wonder what people expect from one of the world's largest corporations. They aren't the first. There are hundreds of other giant multinationals that have been around for generations. Why exactly does anyone expect Google to be different?

zepto 7y ago
Because they claimed to be.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Well - they were. Now they're not. Why is that shocking?
  - zepto 7y ago
    Who is shocked?
- catalogia 7y ago
  Many corporations are prone to claiming outlandish things about themselves, so if that's the answer it suggests another question: why did so many people believe this particular corporation that claimed to be unique?
  - zepto 7y ago
    The were far more serious about it - is wasn’t just a casual claim.
- standardUser 7y ago
  I tend to agree. The entire "Don't Be Evil" thing planted a bizarre idea in a lot of people's heads that this particular faceless corporate giant would be different and better.
  - sumedh 7y ago

ljw1001 7y ago

Google was a great place - for most people - when it was riding the crazy growth rocket that was its Search/Adwords/Adsense/Analytics engine. (former Googler here) As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart them in other ways. It had to do this to keep the stock in the stratosphere, which kept the mid-to-senior managers rich, and gave the ones who weren't yet rich the possibility of becoming so. Some of these attempts were questionable ethically. Similarly, privacy invading changes were made in the core business. People all the way to Larry & Sergey told themselves and everyone else the same lies that their ceaseless profiling and other invasions were for the customers own good. Think G+'s real names policy, Google Glass's creepy stalker potential, etc. The engagement in dubious if completely legal tax dodges was another sign. As was the army of lobbyists, as was the work on censored search. In any case, it's sort of inevitable in stock-market driven capitalism that unicorns can't slow down gracefully, with everyone being satisfied that their millions or billions are 'enough.' I wish they could. I suspect it's doubly-hard for a company when their outlandish success attracts people primarily driven by money. All that growth meant a ton of hiring, and i suspect people who really just wanted to get rich self-selected into the applicant pool. Beyond that, instances of sexual harassment and their cover-up suggests that maybe their was never a big commitment to not 'be evil'. At least when it came down to powerful execs and less-powerful women. Maybe it was always just another company. I used to be really proud of my time at Google, and I still think it was, and probably still is, a better than the rogues gallery of tech's giant offenders (Uber, Facebook, Amazon). But the pride I felt in working there is gone. I believe Jeff Bezos is the greatest businessman we've seen since Ford or Rockefeller, but his insatiable need for not just more, but everything, has kept him from being a great human and Amazon from being a great company in anything other than the most narrow economic sense.

hash872 7y ago
>As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart them in other ways >unicorns can't slow down gracefully Their revenue keeps growing 20% every single year, which is absurdly impressive. Google is one of the most staggeringly successful companies of the last 100 years, I don't see how they're 'flailing'
buboard 7y ago

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

The last bit resonates with me. Work has to be something we need to do for about 1/3 of our lives. Work is service. Even if we get paid for it, work is what we do for the betterment of collective. 1/3 of our lifetime ought to be for family and kin and our own. The remaining 1/3 for self development. To become better than who we were yesterday, last month..the year before. It’s a continuous improvement. But I see people do nothing but work. They start at 7.00. Work all day. Outsource family time. Scrounge for a little bit of self care time. Sleep little, enjoy in chunks of time once a year. All for a price. Most of what we work for goes to the government. Yes, taxes go for betterment of society but because no one has a say in it, it can also go towards things some of us don’t believe in. War, for example. I can’t divert my tax dollars towards space exploration rather than bloody wars. We need a formula for life and living. A formula that gives us true and lasting freedom. [..] When Page became CEO in 2011, he became “obsessed” with reading about why companies fail from being too big and sluggish, Stapleton said. “It’s sort of sad that a lot of the things he was afraid would happen, actually happened.” Stapleton, who held a number of roles close to the founders, recalled Page walking around offices with a chunk of metal that he said was from his grandfather’s auto plant in Michigan. It supposedly symbolized a point in time when auto workers felt like they needed to protect themselves against management. Page showed it as an example of something he hoped would never happen to Google. “He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.”[..]

dwighttk 7y ago
>Work has to be something we need to do for about 1/3 of our lives. >1/3 of our lifetime ought to be for family and kin and our own. >The remaining 1/3 for self development. and then the fourth 1/3 of the time you sleep
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  Good point..thirds of our waking life. 1/3 of 16 hours then..

adventskalender 7y ago

I consider this and the other article by the international relations guy to be very one-sided accounts. A couple of people are unhappy, out of a workforce of 100000. So what? It also mostly seems to be political reasons. I would imagine a lot of people working for Google just want to do a good job for a good salary, not make Google a vehicle for their political opinions. I think people pushing their political agenda within a company tend to harm the company and it should therefore be ok to fire them. That said, I haven't wanted to work for Google for years. But I am from the opposite side from these veterans. I felt it was very unjust when James Damore was fired, and I really don't want to work at a place that distrusts its workers so much that it forces them to go through diversity trainings and things like that. I would feel "unsafe" at Google.

adamsea 7y ago
Did you know that Damor filed a complaint with the National Labor Board? “ ... an internal NLRB memo found that his firing was legal. The memo, which was not released publicly until February 2018, said that while the law shielded him from being fired solely for criticizing Google, it did not protect discriminatory statements, that his memo's "statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected", and that these "discriminatory statements", not his criticisms of Google, were the reason for his firing.“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_...
- adventskalender 7y ago
  I know he sued Google, not details, though. This statement by the NBL just proves to me that the NBL is a batshit crazy untrustworthy institution. (Add the NBL to the list of places I wouldn't want to work for...). I guess that is just the modern world, people have so different views (perspectives) that no reconciliation seems possible. In any case, no need to discuss the Damore memo again, I just wanted to point out that there are different sides, and these recent articles seem to represent only one side.
  - 7y ago

banThisIP 7y ago

Google is an Indian software company now. Don't short it however yet. While they cannot create new products (see Gundotra's ejection), Pichai will successfully milk Android and Gmail for a while.

e5india 7y ago

This is what happens to every tech company once they enter growth mode and bring in a ton of mercenary sales people from Oracle and the like. The irony here is people point to social justice activity as the reason for decline but really all that social justice activity is a smokescreen for betraying other values. We'll do what we're bid by totalitarian regimes and then make ourselves feel better by putting rainbow colors on our logo during Pride Week.

cletus 7y ago

Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have. It actually became an internal joke where you'd get these emails every 2-3 months saying your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a different manager, neither of which you'd ever met or even necessarily heard of. To be clear, the executive team are ultimately responsible but Google has fallen prey to a lack of leadership (Eric Schmidt, we miss you) and an entrenched swarm of middle management. I honestly believe a lot of the bad ideas Google got involved in (like the DoD ML thing) sprang from over-eager VPs. There's an old Dilbert strip basically saying that managers reach a point of constant reorgs and responsibilities churn to the point that no one is around long enough to be held accountable for their actions ("oh that was the last guy") and definitely not around long enough for anything to work. This to me is what Google had become. The reorgs were constant and the leadership was directionless. The transparency thing here is a big one. There was a culture of blameless and open post-mortems. This probably started to change in the Vic Google Plus era. Dashboards were locked down. There were some pretty (internally) famous examples of post-mortems people found that were subsequently restricted, essentially because they (rightly) made some VP look bad. One of the most shocking things to me was a story from last year about how accessing such documents could retroactively lead to you being fired. As in Google docs were typically sent around such that if you had the link you could open it and these links might be forwarded to open groups. That's how a lot of things (internally) "leaked". Disclaimer: Xoogler (6 years)

whateveracct 7y ago
I'm pretty sure the title of VP(E) is like the Ice King's crown in Adventure Time. It makes you a bumbling autocrat driven to secure your own position. Re-orgs, re-writes, etc are great instruments for this end.
- wuliwong 7y ago
  It's possible. I also wonder if often times the type of behavior necessary to attain the title in the first place, filters out the people who are not willing to engage in the behaviors you describe.

extraz6b3c 7y ago

And some have quit for as-yet-undisclosed colossal fuckups. Google's inherent belief that it is the "good guy" in all things internet has fed a massive hubris. That hubris has led to inherent blindness to its detrimental effects on the wider internet and a hero complex. When in reality, they are just like all other mega corporations: interested in only one thing: maximum dollars, and they do this by tilting the tables to make all the quarters slide into their pocket. When you're huge, the urge to take up your power to do this becomes overwhelming. It comes in fits and starts at first, until the culture rots, and soon you're rolling downhill into full-blown corrupt self-dealing and monopoly tactics. Google's on its way. And it's too big to fail, except it will, and we'll be shocked at the reach of its surveillance capabilities at the fire sale.

ghostpepper 7y ago
This is the worst case scenario but it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Hopefully they have too much money to let this happen and instead find a new CEO to turn things around.

longtimegoogler 7y ago

I actually think the greatest period was under Schmidt. Back then there was a lot of freedom to choose what to work on. Google Labs and 20% projects were healty. It felt like a place where people worked on ideas they thought were cool. Things seemed to just happen organically without a lot of bureaucracy and management structure. I think Larry changed that with a more top down approach with what to work being decided higher up, see social. This led to less project flexibility and more hierarchy, with managers and pms becoming more important in the org. Coupled with the growth in the number of employees, I think where the company today is just a gradual evolution of what Larry started along with the problems of growth. That said it is still a pretty good place to work at for a number of reasons.

jrockway 7y ago

Many years ago, maybe before I even worked at Google, I read a very wise post here. I think it was from nostrademons. The gist was that one cannot be given a good place to work, one has to make an active effort to make it a good place to work. When a lot of people come together with the same ideas, they can make a place that wins awards for being a good place to work, but there always has to be active effort from everyone to keep that alive. You can't just show up and hope that the "make this place good to work at" team makes this place good to work at. You are that team! That attitude, to me, kind of explains the downfall of Google. People started to realize they could stop doing the things that made it a good place to work, and just focus on their project work. No need to do a tech talk to share with the company what you're up to. No need to clean up tech debt. No need to work with the teams whose products you consume to make them better. Just take every shortcut to launch, get promoted, and get more power. People saw that that worked better than being transparent, fixing tech debt, etc., and now THAT'S the culture. People see that working, repeat it as fact ("how to get promoted: don't fix bugs!"), and then that becomes the culture and that's where Google seems to be now. Now people think that there is nothing they can do to change the culture, and maybe that's true. There is just too much inertia and so YOU being transparent, YOU being a good steward of the codebase and shared resources, etc. just won't matter. They just get in the way of getting promoted. So people fall back to the natural human fallback of "appeal to authority". They write open letters, they have protests... but it doesn't matter. That never worked. The early engineers didn't write open letters to management about having a shared codebase, or requiring code reviews... they just did it. It is hard work, often with no reward, but over time the benefits accumulate. But when you stop putting in the work, it stops working. Now the company is too large to ever change, probably. But it got there because people were lazy about protecting the culture, and now all that cultural tech debt piles up and results in the things that we read about on HN. Next time, when you're at a new company... realize that YOU have to set the objectives. If you want transparency, be transparent about your work. Do internal talks or write internal blog posts about what you're up to. Give curious people permission to look around and play with your service. Give people peer bonuses and write them good reviews when they do menial tasks that help code health long term. You have to make a conscious effort every single day, and remind others to do the same... or you'll just end up with another heartless megacorp that is coasting on momentum from all this work that people put in in the early days. And, you have to deal with the consequences of your positive culture. Some jerk is going to break your service that has no rate limits. Someone is going to walk off with your customer list. You're going to miss a deadline because someone was doing a big refactor instead of that last little cleanup before launch. If you really value transparency, code health, whatever, you have to accept that they are going to conflict with other things you care about! If you can't accept that, you aren't going to really have that culture that you want. (Also, to be clear, I am not criticizing anyone mentioned in the article here. I did not work with them at Google, but they were very transparent about what they were working on, so I know exactly what they were up to at any given time. And I was also pretty transparent, so I bet they knew me despite having never worked with me. A lot of people were doing a lot of good things, and that community certainly knew each other well, even if only in passing. But there were tens of thousands of people that just existed without contributing positively to the culture, and the "carrying capacity" was reached and here we are. It is sad to see.) Anyway, I write this because it is something that everyone will need to think about in their next (or current) adventure. You have to decide what you value, and if it's a "good culture", you will have to scrimp somewhere else to make that a reality. Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to be the "management" or "promotion committee" that enforces your values. And it will come at a cost!

bitL 7y ago

One of my MBA classes on designing an organization mentioned a significant change when moving from collectivity stage ("charismatic", "empowering") to formalization stage (bureaucratic, most desired by individual managers, principal-agent at play). It looks like Google was able to delay this jump longer than most companies but in the end couldn't avoid it. From what I've heard recently from former employees, JetBrains is another company that is undergoing a similar shift; in the past half of their "escapees" returned back from Google/Facebook within a year, expressing displeasure with those companies, now they are jumping ship as well...

zozbot234 7y ago
Is there a "unicorn"-sized company which is not highly bureaucratic (dominated by internal politics)? It just doesn't seem logically possible to me. The weird thing, rather, is the extent to which the largest companies do way better than we might otherwise expect, given the obvious drawbacks of these formalized, bureaucratic arrangements.
- bitL 7y ago
  I think one has to follow the life-cycle of a company to have a good time; e.g. Valve used to be awesome company, now that is no longer true. Be in the right place at the right time, all the time, it seems... So to answer your question, one has to view a company in time and likely there will be a time span when company is not dominated by internal politics. Managers push for bureaucracy as their desired form, rank-and-file employees fight against it, at some point power moves to managers and companies slowly die, even while wildly profitable, making disruptive innovation by a next generation of companies possible. Avoid stressful start ups (except when you are co-founder/investor), join once a company has money to invest into crazy things, run away once bureaucracy sets in (or if company passes Bozo event horizon).
- danieltillett 7y ago
  Yes. One person companies. All others are dominated by internal politics.

a3n 7y ago

Google is entirely recognizable, as a modern, amoral hyper-corporation whose entire purpose is to service its giant self-aware pile of cash. They used to make money by making information available. Now they just make money, and how they do it is incidental. > “Google is built on trust,” They were. They don't need that anymore.

habosa 7y ago

Googler here. Opinions are obviously my own and not that for my employer. Just sharing my thoughts, take it all with a grain of salt. I've been at Google full time for 5+ years and was an intern before that. The company has more than doubled in size since I've been here, so I'm not exactly old-school but I have seen change. When I started Google felt like one company. I was blown away that I could look at any piece of code (besides Google X and parts of Android) and file a bug against any team when something didn't work. I felt proud of other team's products and I also felt responsible for them, I filed a lot of bugs/feedback trying to make random things better. The culture was also just fun as hell. The mailing lists and Memegen (our internal meme site) were really fun to participate in for the most part. A lot has changed now. Each product feels more isolated and does things their own way. The company is far too big for anyone to claim they really know what's going on outside their local area. The culture is no longer fun at all. There is a lot more negativity, and a lot of it is justified (you've seen the news). However I still love the people I work with directly and what we work on (Firebase, fwiw). And one strange positive about how large the company has gotten is that I can just focus on that. I no longer get too worked up about what's going on over in far-flung teams and that's fine with me. And I don't naively participate in company-wide forums expecting a good mood. But I get to build cool things and we have more resources (money, people, knowledge, etc) than we know what to do with. All of that is to say that yes, a lot has changed. Some for the worse, some for the better, some just different. I still think this is a great place to work and I don't plan to leave any time soon.

panabee 7y ago
firebase is awesome. keep up the great work! if you had a magic wand and could change one thing about "new" google, what would it be?
- habosa 7y ago
  That's a really hard question but I think smaller teams need to be more empowered. Right now every big decision seems to come from way up high which guarantees that it seems out of touch and misses edge cases. A lot of the angst comes from people at the bottom shaking their fists at VP/CEO types. If individual teams could make their own decisions about what to do and how to do it they could shrug off some of the corporate nonsense that happens above them.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

This article was posted 3 times in 3 days and only today is taking off! What is going on? As I tried to posted it 2 days ago and I was redirected to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103 posted by mattydread and at that time it was [DEAD]. I started wondering why. I vouched to resurrect it and somebody else must have done it too but eventually it only got to 5 points. I even thought for a moment that Google have bots to kill undesired articles on Hacker News but I thought I was reading too much into it. When I noticed that this was a different post, I run a search on Algolia ( check https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=google%20veterans&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ) and apparently yesterday it was posted again by raiyu ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616 ) and it only collected 2 points. Today it was posted for the 3rd time and it is finally taking off... How did it ended up [DEAD] 2 days ago ? Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]?

Buge 7y ago
>Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]? According to what you said previously, it was only dead the first out of 3 times, and even that one is no longer dead. Maybe some people flagged it or downvoted it the first time. Things being reposted repeatedly to HN and taking off on later reposts is quite common[1][2][3]. Reposting is explicitly allowed in the FAQ[4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20125589 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806801 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867946 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

duelingjello 7y ago

Step 0. Lots of FAANG veterans discover each other and plot their exits. Step 1. Start a FAANG-competitor worker-owned co-op that is profitable through donations, subscriptions and freemium products / services. No evil allowed. Step 2. Poach more workers from FAANG to a civilized, humane and decent organization that creates excellent products for normal humans. Step 3. Dominate FAANG without selling-out to governments privacy invasions or reselling customer data.

perceptronas 7y ago
Step 4. Remove "No evil allowed" from mission

thu2111 7y ago

I vaguely remember Claire Stapleton from when I was there, as some sort of quirky marketing person. I think her comments are mostly pretty accurate. This one though jumped out as weird: “He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.” Was that really her interpretation of Larry Page? No wonder she's now publicly crying her disappointment. It seems like the total opposite of the Page I saw, a man who never cared about the arts at all and in fact had to be browbeaten into caring about visual design by Steve Jobs himself. Page back then was a man who cared deeply about science and anything sci-fi. The more sci-fi the better. His vision for Google was a machine that converted ad clicks into flying cars, the computer from Star Trek and so on. Amazing tech wasn't a means to an end but rather, the end itself. I never heard or saw anything in Google's mission about "freeing up humanity to pursue the arts". I can imagine why a humanities person like Stapleton might have wanted to believe that as it would have given her own interests and background an anchor in what was back then a supremely engineering oriented culture. But it wasn't true. Nobody gave a stuff about the arts, as evidenced by hiring priorities.

cbanek 7y ago

> Stapleton said when she made a request to HR earlier this year, she was routed to a call center in Chicago, where she spoke to a young gentleman who had recently graduated college. Responding to a concern she had with a manager, he gave her bad advice to take her manager out to drinks, she said. Wow. And this is why those call in EAP / anonymous reporting programs offered as a 'benefit' always seem to be garbage. Never had a good experience with any of them.

lunias 7y ago

Not surprising, but the more interesting question is: What can be done to prevent new companies from reaching the final, greedy and uncaring, corporate form that we all loath? This is not an isolated Google issue. It's systemic in companies w/ a certain momentum.