10 ms·

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 month

by 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.
  - caconym_ 7y ago
    https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
username90 7y ago
I always wondered why Google needs hundreds of VP's? Is i just a scheme with them giving each other great peer feedback and promoting more to extract huge salaries from the company?
- riku_iki 7y ago
  How many VPs company with 100+k headcount should have?
  - username90 7y ago
    5k people per VP seems reasonable, so 20? Then they can have 10 senior directors each with 500 persons under them.
    - codemac 7y ago
      two pizza team = 8 ICs max reporting every 8 ICs + 1 manager = 9 every 8 managers = 1 director = 8 * 9 + 1 = 73 every 8 directors = 1 sr director = 8 * 73 + 1= 585 every 8 sr directors = 1 VP = 8 * 585 + 1 = 4681 every 8 VPs = 1 SVP = 8 * 4681 + 1 = 37449 every 8 SVPs = 1 EVP (c level exec) = 8 * 37449 + 1 = 299593 Clearly the problem is one of the large distribution of team sizes, rather than just "have less VPs".
      - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
        Certainly an anomaly, but there's a distribution to the number of ICs assigned to the lowest level managers (M1/M2s). I've seen anywhere from 3 to 30. The people with 30 basically just jumped from 1:1 to 1:1 on repeat biweekly.
      - username90 7y ago
        Problem is that there aren't enough people to every VP, so they fight for headcount and projects leading to frequent reorgs or projects shuttering to make room for VP's pet projects.
      - 7y ago
nostrademons 7y ago
It's interesting. Many large companies routinely fire the bottom 10% of their employees every year. I wonder if they would perform better if they routinely fired the top 10% of their employees (by org chart, not by performance ratings) and let talented new blood bubble upward. The Peter Principle says that people rise to the level of their incompetence, and in general new employees enter at the bottom of the organization, so logically you would have more incompetent people at the top than at the bottom. There're a bunch of organizational anti-patterns that could be avoided with this scheme, too. Empire building would be disincentivized because it'd always become someone else's empire after a short period of time, and organizational politics is reduced as the players keep leaving, and you'd have to think in terms of building institutional knowledge from the beginning of your tenure unless you want everything you've accomplished to be undone by the next guy.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  The most powerful (director level & above) members of an organization would never agree to a plan to fire the top 10% of their own annually.
  - tedivm 7y ago
    They aren't as powerful as you think- it's not like they get a huge say in how things are run. If the board was a reorg they have the power to put the people in place to make it happen, regardless of what some random Director or VP has to say about it.
    - quintushoratius 7y ago
      > They aren't as powerful as you think It's pretty common for C-level executives, and CEO's in particular, to be pretty chummy with the board of directors. They're all in the same social circles. Often the CEO of company A will be on the board of company B, and and the CEO of company B is on the board of company A, so there may even be a quid-pro-quo element. While the CEO officially answers to the BoD, in reality there's a lot of "understandings" and "gentleman's agreements" going on. This is why under-performing CEOs seem to stick around so long.
smt88 7y ago
> Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have. I know you weren't being 100% serious, but I'll say this anyway: of course they can't fire those people. They'd be buried in lawsuits. More to the point, this is the problem with bad hiring practices. A few years (or, in this case, 10+ years) of misguided hiring practices can bury you in a cultural problem that will take much longer to dig yourself out of. It's even worse when you're talking about top execs, who can only be fired by a risk-averse/change-averse Board of Directors and will take a massive golden parachute with them when they are fired.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Still better to fire them than atrophy the company slowly. Just fire your VP of legal affairs last.
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    "The sailors saved the boys, but who will save the sailors?"
  - smt88 7y ago
    I don't see any evidence that the company is atrophying based on its own measures of success: stock price and market share. That's part of the cultural problem. You can't know if your culture helps or hurts because there's no control group. Since Google is doing well financially, they'll have to conclude that their culture is good (or good enough) and stay the course. Firing VPs is rocking the boat, and any Board would be infuriated by it.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      Google is doing good now, but they’re literally hewing down their support columns at the moment.
- xref 7y ago
  In America anyway employment is largely “at will.” Is there something illegal about firing VPs?
jka 7y ago
Personal opinion, take with a grain of salt: Once you hear the term 'organization' used within an organization (i.e. "project alpha is moving under person x's org") there is a decent chance that Trouble Is Afoot. The trouble is that alignment is no longer guaranteed to be around the company's stated mission. There is a good chance that it is about territory building and poaching of internal staff and competing for important projects. And even if those aren't occurring, it's hard to prove to staff that they are not. A strong leadership team can manage these frictions carefully and turn inter-team and inter-personality competition into results, while reinforcing and repeating the overall company mission. But to an employee on the ground it may no longer be a transparent case of "we're all pulling in the same direction". One possibility to break through this scaling barrier might be to promote smaller organizations which assemble on-demand, akin to a film production team, and work on projects which the team is genuinely motivated to deliver. That requires a strong stated vision that a team can band behind. The next question becomes: who maintains such projects if the initial team moves on? I'm biased but my preferred response would be that open sourcing each project can lead to sufficient community collaboration and maintenance in the case of successful projects, or in the worst case (if no adoption occurs) a corpus of code which may still provide gems of value for future projects searching for snippets of functionality.
- FartyMcFarter 7y ago
  > The next question becomes: who maintains such projects if the initial team moves on? I'm biased but my preferred response would be that open sourcing This does not seem to be a realistic option for many Google projects, due to dependencies on internal technology and hardware scale.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Psyladine 7y ago
  >One possibility to break through this scaling barrier might be to promote smaller organizations which assemble on-demand, akin to a film production team, and work on projects which the team is genuinely motivated to deliver. That requires a strong stated vision that a team can band behind. aka strong unions.
stingrae 7y ago
I feel like lately Google has become more and more mission driven (organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful). This is because, this doesn't require taking any risks, it is straight-forward/easy to follow and very cost efficient (a change that occurred with Ruth). Before under Larry and Sergey there was an openness to ignore mission and take bets on interesting projects and to try things. No one on the executive team has a product vision of how Google should evolve so it remains stuck working on old projects and fulfilling the remnants of it's old mission.
- sombremesa 7y ago
  Every single time I've fallen in love with a new Google product, they have sunsetted it. It's probably not a fair comparison, but it's the reason you couldn't get me to touch Flutter with a 12 foot pole today.
  - bsaul 7y ago
    I don’t know why you got downvoted. This is a very valid concern regarding any new tech, especially one that wraps every underlying platform under its own api and programming language.
drdeadringer 7y ago
> 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 I believe it. During my time at Google as a TVC [recent times], whatever department du jour I was in was having a reorg about once a year. I//we had about 4 different managers in 3 years.
_0ffh 7y ago
Sounds like what typically happens to companies that get too big. It's just a question of sooner or later, IMO. Google has become part of the megacorp establishment and finds itself besides IBM, Microsoft and Apple. It's dead, Jim.
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
Sounds like BS I dealt with in defense. Lot of emails of people way up the chain moving around. Then in the off chance I see them in the halls and say hello they say nothing and look past. Also alot of large meetings where half the time is spent looking at org charts and praising some senior jackass for some minor accomplishment.
bb88 7y ago
> Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have. What's shocking was there was a time at google where management was forced to prove their existence was necessary. https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/ One of the problems of course is giving managers feedback. It's hard. It's ugly sometimes. It's always fraught with risk, since you are the one without typically any power in the situation. But the true canary in the coal mine is when the good employees feel like their feedback isn't heeded, and then they leave. And they can because well, they're good. And HR, having gone through all the trouble of hiring the best and the brightest, are just walking them out the door. If HR stands up for the employees, then that's a different story than HR being lap dogs for the powerful. Currently turnover numbers probably just sits on page 248 in a footnote of the quarterly HR report and lands on some executive's desk who may or may not care about it. As an aside, I once told an HR director that the problem with HR is the name: Human Resources -- as in "Humans are Resources". She told me the inside joke at her company was that HR stood for "Happiness Removal".
- random001 7y ago
  I'm sorry, what's wrong with the notion that 'Humans are resources"?
  - bmiller2 7y ago
    “We need to stop confusing human value with economic value. We don't exist to serve the market. The market exists to serve us.”
    - bb88 7y ago
      Wow, Andrew Yang tweeted that just yesterday. Prescient. I like him more and more.
    - ehvatum 7y ago
      The market exists to serve us? Cool. But who is providing this service?
wonderwonder 7y ago
Devil's advocate. What if everything Google has done and is doing is actually good for what a company is actually generally meant to do... generate revenue. The company has been growing and as it is now publicly traded, stockholder value very much becomes the drum beat. Of course one can argue that Google is no longer the altruistic, everyone has value place it used to be, but perhaps it no longer wants to be. This is not necessarily a failure, just a re-prioritization of goals. For every story of someone leaving Google and blaming X, there are a thousand people eager to fill that now vacant role. The stock is doing very well and the company is the undisputed king of search and actively targeting other industries. It appears what they are doing org. wise may be accomplishing exactly what it is meant to do.
- emmelaich 7y ago
  To generate revenue should be the default assumption about what companies do. And what their employees do. And what the employees believe about their purpose. Is all the internal company discussion about people valuing and improving the culture? Or are they are just whiny self-important shits? I literally have no idea. (fwiw I am not and probably never will be a G employee)
- thu2111 7y ago
  Companies are meant to generate profit, not revenue. Google generates a lot of both. It could probably double profits or more by just slashing a lot of the fat. Do they really need 100,000+ people? I feel like they used to launch amazing new products with far greater regularity when they were closer to 10,000. BTW you say "as it is now publicly traded" as if that's some recent change. Google's IPO was 2004!
m0zg 7y ago
The proliferation of VPs started under Eric. At one point I counted twice as many VPs per capita as what we had at Microsoft. There were VPs reporting to VPs and directors reporting to directors, as well as VPs and directors with zero reports. It's nuts. I suspect it's gotten much worse since then. Also, as the chairman of the board, there's no way Schmidt did not know the "DOD ML thing". For the record, I think the "DOD ML thing" is an appropriate "thing" for a US company to be doing, including Google. In fact I think GCP should accept (and seek out) all workloads legal under US law, same as AWS and Azure. Disclosure: same.
- smaryjerry 7y ago
  Sounds like the type of creep that naturally occurs after a company has existed for a long time. They offer higher level titles so they can recruit people with experience who want a move upwards when really all that changes is their title. Look at banks where President and Vice President are so over used that basically every relationship manager is called a "VP" even though they have no reports.
  - gen220 7y ago
    fun fact, I believe that the (V)P roles exist mostly as a satisfying hack of financial software development regulations applied to public and high-revenue companies, where all software changes impacting the ingress and egress of money requires "director-level approval". The least-burdensome solution to that regulation is to make every "Tech Lead" a director, hence the title creep! :)
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
I am not currently an employee at Google but just looking at the products I have noticed for at least 3 years that something at Google has been changing... and not in the right direction. When I talked to some friends in product management that worked and used to worked there, I was told Google is stronger and mature than before. The last example top of mind is when I saw the Pixel 3a coming out with 2 months old security patch and they tell you that it going to be updated the next month (with 3 months security update gap). The old Google would never have compromised on security to edge instability risks during the launch of the Pixel 3a. But some people wanted to play it more "safe" for themselves than for the users. It seems Google is quickly becoming just another big corporation where people go to make money wanting to work as little as possible and keeping their job as safe as possible avoiding risks. I am not saying it is like that in every part of the company, but in enough places that it start showing... No wonder the founders stepped down. Who may want to see their baby and an unique culture like Google slowly deteriorating without having anymore enough power to change it.
- random001 7y ago
  Can you give more example like this when you get time? Can we such things in Google Cloud as well?
  - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
    I did not use Google Cloud so I cannot tell. I would not be surprised if Google Cloud is well run. Since the product is intrinsically a product for engineers, I would expect that it is run by people with more engineering background and rigor. If you want anther example, one that come to mind is Google WiFi. When I installed it for a family member, I noticed that (1) You needed to install an app on your phone in order to configure it (2) The Google account on your phone (and you needed one) was going to be the one that "manage" the Google WIFI network (3) The phone needed to have a working internet connection to be able to configure it (4) Google WIFI lacked some standard options (5) Once the Internet connection is down Google WiFI also shuts down the local intranet. That made me think that whoever was running Google WIFI as a product probably did not know a lot about the last 20 years of how a router has been working and has been configured. So they ended up making a few assumptions that are problematic. For example: - My phone did not have reception where my family member lived. And since I did not have a working Internet connection I could not download the app and use it at their house. - The family member did not have a Google account, so I had to use mine or create a new one just for configuring the router. - I could not configure something (not remember exactly what) that any other router could. - When the Internet is down, and it regularly happen in that area, you cannot print. For at least 10 years, the standard home routers have been having a web UI where you can configure them. This is a pretty basic thing. How could have Google WIFI ignoring it? People with limited tech background that never configured a router must have been in charge.
dhsuywej 7y ago
I might have misunderstood your point but I don't follow why this is a thing you would want to remedy at the business level. Has modern Google been shown to be less effective as a business than past-Google due to ideas like the DoD contract? Companies exist to service an identified demand and there doesn't seem to be a reason technology companies would be different in this respect. If people don't want companies chasing the demand for services like Dragonfly then they should vocalize those concerns as clear demands at the political level so that additional regulations can be implemented. Unless the strategy itself was unsound, which I realize might have been your broader point, it seems weird to consider these sorts of changes as a negative thing for the business.

by cletus 7y ago

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.
- caconym_ 7y ago
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

username90 7y ago

I always wondered why Google needs hundreds of VP's? Is i just a scheme with them giving each other great peer feedback and promoting more to extract huge salaries from the company?

riku_iki 7y ago
How many VPs company with 100+k headcount should have?
- username90 7y ago
  5k people per VP seems reasonable, so 20? Then they can have 10 senior directors each with 500 persons under them.
  - codemac 7y ago
    two pizza team = 8 ICs max reporting every 8 ICs + 1 manager = 9 every 8 managers = 1 director = 8 * 9 + 1 = 73 every 8 directors = 1 sr director = 8 * 73 + 1= 585 every 8 sr directors = 1 VP = 8 * 585 + 1 = 4681 every 8 VPs = 1 SVP = 8 * 4681 + 1 = 37449 every 8 SVPs = 1 EVP (c level exec) = 8 * 37449 + 1 = 299593 Clearly the problem is one of the large distribution of team sizes, rather than just "have less VPs".
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      Certainly an anomaly, but there's a distribution to the number of ICs assigned to the lowest level managers (M1/M2s). I've seen anywhere from 3 to 30. The people with 30 basically just jumped from 1:1 to 1:1 on repeat biweekly.
    - username90 7y ago
      Problem is that there aren't enough people to every VP, so they fight for headcount and projects leading to frequent reorgs or projects shuttering to make room for VP's pet projects.
    - 7y ago

nostrademons 7y ago

It's interesting. Many large companies routinely fire the bottom 10% of their employees every year. I wonder if they would perform better if they routinely fired the top 10% of their employees (by org chart, not by performance ratings) and let talented new blood bubble upward. The Peter Principle says that people rise to the level of their incompetence, and in general new employees enter at the bottom of the organization, so logically you would have more incompetent people at the top than at the bottom. There're a bunch of organizational anti-patterns that could be avoided with this scheme, too. Empire building would be disincentivized because it'd always become someone else's empire after a short period of time, and organizational politics is reduced as the players keep leaving, and you'd have to think in terms of building institutional knowledge from the beginning of your tenure unless you want everything you've accomplished to be undone by the next guy.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The most powerful (director level & above) members of an organization would never agree to a plan to fire the top 10% of their own annually.
- tedivm 7y ago
  They aren't as powerful as you think- it's not like they get a huge say in how things are run. If the board was a reorg they have the power to put the people in place to make it happen, regardless of what some random Director or VP has to say about it.
  - quintushoratius 7y ago
    > They aren't as powerful as you think It's pretty common for C-level executives, and CEO's in particular, to be pretty chummy with the board of directors. They're all in the same social circles. Often the CEO of company A will be on the board of company B, and and the CEO of company B is on the board of company A, so there may even be a quid-pro-quo element. While the CEO officially answers to the BoD, in reality there's a lot of "understandings" and "gentleman's agreements" going on. This is why under-performing CEOs seem to stick around so long.

smt88 7y ago

> Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have. I know you weren't being 100% serious, but I'll say this anyway: of course they can't fire those people. They'd be buried in lawsuits. More to the point, this is the problem with bad hiring practices. A few years (or, in this case, 10+ years) of misguided hiring practices can bury you in a cultural problem that will take much longer to dig yourself out of. It's even worse when you're talking about top execs, who can only be fired by a risk-averse/change-averse Board of Directors and will take a massive golden parachute with them when they are fired.

Aeolun 7y ago
Still better to fire them than atrophy the company slowly. Just fire your VP of legal affairs last.
- Psyladine 7y ago
  "The sailors saved the boys, but who will save the sailors?"
- smt88 7y ago
  I don't see any evidence that the company is atrophying based on its own measures of success: stock price and market share. That's part of the cultural problem. You can't know if your culture helps or hurts because there's no control group. Since Google is doing well financially, they'll have to conclude that their culture is good (or good enough) and stay the course. Firing VPs is rocking the boat, and any Board would be infuriated by it.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Google is doing good now, but they’re literally hewing down their support columns at the moment.
xref 7y ago
In America anyway employment is largely “at will.” Is there something illegal about firing VPs?

jka 7y ago

Personal opinion, take with a grain of salt: Once you hear the term 'organization' used within an organization (i.e. "project alpha is moving under person x's org") there is a decent chance that Trouble Is Afoot. The trouble is that alignment is no longer guaranteed to be around the company's stated mission. There is a good chance that it is about territory building and poaching of internal staff and competing for important projects. And even if those aren't occurring, it's hard to prove to staff that they are not. A strong leadership team can manage these frictions carefully and turn inter-team and inter-personality competition into results, while reinforcing and repeating the overall company mission. But to an employee on the ground it may no longer be a transparent case of "we're all pulling in the same direction". One possibility to break through this scaling barrier might be to promote smaller organizations which assemble on-demand, akin to a film production team, and work on projects which the team is genuinely motivated to deliver. That requires a strong stated vision that a team can band behind. The next question becomes: who maintains such projects if the initial team moves on? I'm biased but my preferred response would be that open sourcing each project can lead to sufficient community collaboration and maintenance in the case of successful projects, or in the worst case (if no adoption occurs) a corpus of code which may still provide gems of value for future projects searching for snippets of functionality.

FartyMcFarter 7y ago
> The next question becomes: who maintains such projects if the initial team moves on? I'm biased but my preferred response would be that open sourcing This does not seem to be a realistic option for many Google projects, due to dependencies on internal technology and hardware scale.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Psyladine 7y ago
>One possibility to break through this scaling barrier might be to promote smaller organizations which assemble on-demand, akin to a film production team, and work on projects which the team is genuinely motivated to deliver. That requires a strong stated vision that a team can band behind. aka strong unions.

stingrae 7y ago

I feel like lately Google has become more and more mission driven (organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful). This is because, this doesn't require taking any risks, it is straight-forward/easy to follow and very cost efficient (a change that occurred with Ruth). Before under Larry and Sergey there was an openness to ignore mission and take bets on interesting projects and to try things. No one on the executive team has a product vision of how Google should evolve so it remains stuck working on old projects and fulfilling the remnants of it's old mission.

sombremesa 7y ago
Every single time I've fallen in love with a new Google product, they have sunsetted it. It's probably not a fair comparison, but it's the reason you couldn't get me to touch Flutter with a 12 foot pole today.
- bsaul 7y ago
  I don’t know why you got downvoted. This is a very valid concern regarding any new tech, especially one that wraps every underlying platform under its own api and programming language.

drdeadringer 7y ago

> 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 I believe it. During my time at Google as a TVC [recent times], whatever department du jour I was in was having a reorg about once a year. I//we had about 4 different managers in 3 years.

_0ffh 7y ago

Sounds like what typically happens to companies that get too big. It's just a question of sooner or later, IMO. Google has become part of the megacorp establishment and finds itself besides IBM, Microsoft and Apple. It's dead, Jim.

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

Sounds like BS I dealt with in defense. Lot of emails of people way up the chain moving around. Then in the off chance I see them in the halls and say hello they say nothing and look past. Also alot of large meetings where half the time is spent looking at org charts and praising some senior jackass for some minor accomplishment.

bb88 7y ago

> Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have. What's shocking was there was a time at google where management was forced to prove their existence was necessary. https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/ One of the problems of course is giving managers feedback. It's hard. It's ugly sometimes. It's always fraught with risk, since you are the one without typically any power in the situation. But the true canary in the coal mine is when the good employees feel like their feedback isn't heeded, and then they leave. And they can because well, they're good. And HR, having gone through all the trouble of hiring the best and the brightest, are just walking them out the door. If HR stands up for the employees, then that's a different story than HR being lap dogs for the powerful. Currently turnover numbers probably just sits on page 248 in a footnote of the quarterly HR report and lands on some executive's desk who may or may not care about it. As an aside, I once told an HR director that the problem with HR is the name: Human Resources -- as in "Humans are Resources". She told me the inside joke at her company was that HR stood for "Happiness Removal".

random001 7y ago
I'm sorry, what's wrong with the notion that 'Humans are resources"?
- bmiller2 7y ago
  “We need to stop confusing human value with economic value. We don't exist to serve the market. The market exists to serve us.”
  - bb88 7y ago
    Wow, Andrew Yang tweeted that just yesterday. Prescient. I like him more and more.
  - ehvatum 7y ago
    The market exists to serve us? Cool. But who is providing this service?

wonderwonder 7y ago

Devil's advocate. What if everything Google has done and is doing is actually good for what a company is actually generally meant to do... generate revenue. The company has been growing and as it is now publicly traded, stockholder value very much becomes the drum beat. Of course one can argue that Google is no longer the altruistic, everyone has value place it used to be, but perhaps it no longer wants to be. This is not necessarily a failure, just a re-prioritization of goals. For every story of someone leaving Google and blaming X, there are a thousand people eager to fill that now vacant role. The stock is doing very well and the company is the undisputed king of search and actively targeting other industries. It appears what they are doing org. wise may be accomplishing exactly what it is meant to do.

emmelaich 7y ago
To generate revenue should be the default assumption about what companies do. And what their employees do. And what the employees believe about their purpose. Is all the internal company discussion about people valuing and improving the culture? Or are they are just whiny self-important shits? I literally have no idea. (fwiw I am not and probably never will be a G employee)
thu2111 7y ago
Companies are meant to generate profit, not revenue. Google generates a lot of both. It could probably double profits or more by just slashing a lot of the fat. Do they really need 100,000+ people? I feel like they used to launch amazing new products with far greater regularity when they were closer to 10,000. BTW you say "as it is now publicly traded" as if that's some recent change. Google's IPO was 2004!

m0zg 7y ago

The proliferation of VPs started under Eric. At one point I counted twice as many VPs per capita as what we had at Microsoft. There were VPs reporting to VPs and directors reporting to directors, as well as VPs and directors with zero reports. It's nuts. I suspect it's gotten much worse since then. Also, as the chairman of the board, there's no way Schmidt did not know the "DOD ML thing". For the record, I think the "DOD ML thing" is an appropriate "thing" for a US company to be doing, including Google. In fact I think GCP should accept (and seek out) all workloads legal under US law, same as AWS and Azure. Disclosure: same.

smaryjerry 7y ago
Sounds like the type of creep that naturally occurs after a company has existed for a long time. They offer higher level titles so they can recruit people with experience who want a move upwards when really all that changes is their title. Look at banks where President and Vice President are so over used that basically every relationship manager is called a "VP" even though they have no reports.
- gen220 7y ago
  fun fact, I believe that the (V)P roles exist mostly as a satisfying hack of financial software development regulations applied to public and high-revenue companies, where all software changes impacting the ingress and egress of money requires "director-level approval". The least-burdensome solution to that regulation is to make every "Tech Lead" a director, hence the title creep! :)

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

I am not currently an employee at Google but just looking at the products I have noticed for at least 3 years that something at Google has been changing... and not in the right direction. When I talked to some friends in product management that worked and used to worked there, I was told Google is stronger and mature than before. The last example top of mind is when I saw the Pixel 3a coming out with 2 months old security patch and they tell you that it going to be updated the next month (with 3 months security update gap). The old Google would never have compromised on security to edge instability risks during the launch of the Pixel 3a. But some people wanted to play it more "safe" for themselves than for the users. It seems Google is quickly becoming just another big corporation where people go to make money wanting to work as little as possible and keeping their job as safe as possible avoiding risks. I am not saying it is like that in every part of the company, but in enough places that it start showing... No wonder the founders stepped down. Who may want to see their baby and an unique culture like Google slowly deteriorating without having anymore enough power to change it.

random001 7y ago
Can you give more example like this when you get time? Can we such things in Google Cloud as well?
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  I did not use Google Cloud so I cannot tell. I would not be surprised if Google Cloud is well run. Since the product is intrinsically a product for engineers, I would expect that it is run by people with more engineering background and rigor. If you want anther example, one that come to mind is Google WiFi. When I installed it for a family member, I noticed that (1) You needed to install an app on your phone in order to configure it (2) The Google account on your phone (and you needed one) was going to be the one that "manage" the Google WIFI network (3) The phone needed to have a working internet connection to be able to configure it (4) Google WIFI lacked some standard options (5) Once the Internet connection is down Google WiFI also shuts down the local intranet. That made me think that whoever was running Google WIFI as a product probably did not know a lot about the last 20 years of how a router has been working and has been configured. So they ended up making a few assumptions that are problematic. For example: - My phone did not have reception where my family member lived. And since I did not have a working Internet connection I could not download the app and use it at their house. - The family member did not have a Google account, so I had to use mine or create a new one just for configuring the router. - I could not configure something (not remember exactly what) that any other router could. - When the Internet is down, and it regularly happen in that area, you cannot print. For at least 10 years, the standard home routers have been having a web UI where you can configure them. This is a pretty basic thing. How could have Google WIFI ignoring it? People with limited tech background that never configured a router must have been in charge.

dhsuywej 7y ago

I might have misunderstood your point but I don't follow why this is a thing you would want to remedy at the business level. Has modern Google been shown to be less effective as a business than past-Google due to ideas like the DoD contract? Companies exist to service an identified demand and there doesn't seem to be a reason technology companies would be different in this respect. If people don't want companies chasing the demand for services like Dragonfly then they should vocalize those concerns as clear demands at the political level so that additional regulations can be implemented. Unless the strategy itself was unsound, which I realize might have been your broader point, it seems weird to consider these sorts of changes as a negative thing for the business.