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While he has valid points of how corp life is different from startup, he seems like a horrible, entitled person to work for. General attitude that comes out of

While he has valid points of how corp life is different from startup, he seems like a horrible, entitled person to work for. General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your employees growth doesn’t matter, only his vision of product matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensive things in his talks. And most entitled one - he’s sold his company (that he actually didn’t own, from the beginning, like with most startups) and he cannot control it fully anymore? And complaining that he cannot fire people on the spot? He should check his entitlement before complaining about other being entitled by not wanting to put his product vision above their wellbeing.

tinyhouse 6y ago
I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when they are not performing.
- the_local_host 6y ago
  But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more". That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.
  - tinyhouse 6y ago
    I agree. Not sure he meant that. People are much more important than roles. If you have someone who is good but in a role that is not needed anymore, you'll find another role for them. Esp in big tech.
  - theptip 6y ago
    The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the company change as the company grows, and people can’t keep up. Or people change and they can’t give what the company needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects of being a manager in a startup that’s growing quickly. The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build a data pipeline. In these cases you could say “they will figure it out”, and sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize that through no fault of their own, your employee now does not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find someone that does have those skills. This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee can’t grow with the role.
    - dwohnitmok 6y ago
      > That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?
      - theptip 6y ago
        Maybe to some extent, but I’m not certain. If you are passionate about what you do, then you are probably not enjoying the job which shifted into not being a fit for your skill set, so the need to find someone else can be a mutual/positive conversation. It’s also really fraught with ego and self-worth landmines so it doesn’t always go that way.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  > He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality. Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.
  - nqo 6y ago
    Was literally about to type this out. The issue of prioritizing promos over product value doesn't exist when delivering product value is what gets you promoted. If that's not the case, it's the fault of management and not the employee.
  - tpudlik 6y ago
    He was the CEO of Waze, but not of Google. After the acquisition, he had to adopt Google promo processes.
- viklove 6y ago
  > He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.
  - moreranchplease 6y ago
    Exactly! Give people equity if you really want them to care about the product over what's best for their career.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    In the article he says this doesn't work because people effectively view equity as salary.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      And rightly so. Your google equity is absolutely disconnected from whatever product you are building there. External forces are more likely to affect it than anything you do personally.
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        Yes, exactly. But this is the complete opposite of what people are saying in this thread.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes. No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person. What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his. Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I dunno, based on what you wrote about the process it sounds impossible to actually fire someone. Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average. Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own volition. I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority.
    - drclau 6y ago
      > they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no need to fire them.
  - jstrong 6y ago
    you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1, returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was a bit over the top?
- indeedmug 6y ago
  Sometimes I find reading HN comment to be a bizarre experience because people seeming read an entirely different article than I did. All the article's author is saying that at large corporates the incentives are about personal promotion as opposed to delivering user experiences. He justifies this by saying that individual contributions get diluted in large organization. To me, this makes a lot of sense and is an interesting and thoughtful conversation. Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.
apozem 6y ago
Yeah, it shows a lack of self-awareness to complain about employees' entitlement and then wish they'd work more, without any talk of extra compensation. Seems a bit entitled to expect other human beings to sacrifice their weekends and happiness to bump the value of your shares.
- johncessna 6y ago
  That's a bit unfair. He's clearly passionate about the product and its customers. The ask to sacrifice for your customers is a reasonable position to take, especially in weird one of situations. It also ties into his risk/reward compensation section. I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think he was frustrated with his employees going to the townhall or yoga class in the quad instead of working on the customer outage.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    A charitable explanation is that he would like to motivate his workers by equity... but in the company as big as Google, equity doesn't work that way anymore, and there is no good substitute.
    - justapassenger 6y ago
      Motivating by equity in startups is extremely misleading most of the time. You give people paper money that are extremely unlikely to have any value, even if startup has successful exit due to liquidation preferences (excluding really one of cases, of most the time good IPOs).
      - Viliam1234 6y ago
        That in my opinion is morally equivalent to fraud, although the law sees it differently. And yes it seems to happen all the time.
      - smabie 6y ago
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
He seems like the kind of CEO I would love to work for. It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants his team to as well. Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.
- DC1350 6y ago
  Why would you ever prioritize your users over yourself? They have no idea who you are and they don't care. Don't you have your own goals to worry about?
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Where does he say to prioritize users over yourself?
    - DC1350 6y ago
      That's what caring about the users or the product at the expense of ladder climbing is.
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        I think having a mercenary-like attitude is just as bad as naively sacrificing your time for the company. Why can't there be a middle ground?
- raclage 6y ago
  > Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account. Is that really something we should take at face value? There are plenty of instances of people getting unreasonably offended but it's also extremely common for people to be shitty to their colleagues and use this as an excuse. He provides no actual examples.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago

tinyhouse 6y ago

I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when they are not performing.

the_local_host 6y ago
But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more". That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  I agree. Not sure he meant that. People are much more important than roles. If you have someone who is good but in a role that is not needed anymore, you'll find another role for them. Esp in big tech.
- theptip 6y ago
  The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the company change as the company grows, and people can’t keep up. Or people change and they can’t give what the company needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects of being a manager in a startup that’s growing quickly. The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build a data pipeline. In these cases you could say “they will figure it out”, and sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize that through no fault of their own, your employee now does not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find someone that does have those skills. This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee can’t grow with the role.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    > That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?
    - theptip 6y ago
      Maybe to some extent, but I’m not certain. If you are passionate about what you do, then you are probably not enjoying the job which shifted into not being a fit for your skill set, so the need to find someone else can be a mutual/positive conversation. It’s also really fraught with ego and self-worth landmines so it doesn’t always go that way.
justapassenger 6y ago
> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality. Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.
- nqo 6y ago
  Was literally about to type this out. The issue of prioritizing promos over product value doesn't exist when delivering product value is what gets you promoted. If that's not the case, it's the fault of management and not the employee.
- tpudlik 6y ago
  He was the CEO of Waze, but not of Google. After the acquisition, he had to adopt Google promo processes.
viklove 6y ago
> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.
- moreranchplease 6y ago
  Exactly! Give people equity if you really want them to care about the product over what's best for their career.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  In the article he says this doesn't work because people effectively view equity as salary.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    And rightly so. Your google equity is absolutely disconnected from whatever product you are building there. External forces are more likely to affect it than anything you do personally.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. But this is the complete opposite of what people are saying in this thread.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes. No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person. What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his. Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I dunno, based on what you wrote about the process it sounds impossible to actually fire someone. Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average. Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own volition. I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority.
  - drclau 6y ago
    > they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no need to fire them.
- jstrong 6y ago
  you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1, returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was a bit over the top?
indeedmug 6y ago
Sometimes I find reading HN comment to be a bizarre experience because people seeming read an entirely different article than I did. All the article's author is saying that at large corporates the incentives are about personal promotion as opposed to delivering user experiences. He justifies this by saying that individual contributions get diluted in large organization. To me, this makes a lot of sense and is an interesting and thoughtful conversation. Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.

apozem 6y ago

Yeah, it shows a lack of self-awareness to complain about employees' entitlement and then wish they'd work more, without any talk of extra compensation. Seems a bit entitled to expect other human beings to sacrifice their weekends and happiness to bump the value of your shares.

johncessna 6y ago
That's a bit unfair. He's clearly passionate about the product and its customers. The ask to sacrifice for your customers is a reasonable position to take, especially in weird one of situations. It also ties into his risk/reward compensation section. I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think he was frustrated with his employees going to the townhall or yoga class in the quad instead of working on the customer outage.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  A charitable explanation is that he would like to motivate his workers by equity... but in the company as big as Google, equity doesn't work that way anymore, and there is no good substitute.
  - justapassenger 6y ago
    Motivating by equity in startups is extremely misleading most of the time. You give people paper money that are extremely unlikely to have any value, even if startup has successful exit due to liquidation preferences (excluding really one of cases, of most the time good IPOs).
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      That in my opinion is morally equivalent to fraud, although the law sees it differently. And yes it seems to happen all the time.
    - smabie 6y ago

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

He seems like the kind of CEO I would love to work for. It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants his team to as well. Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.

DC1350 6y ago
Why would you ever prioritize your users over yourself? They have no idea who you are and they don't care. Don't you have your own goals to worry about?
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Where does he say to prioritize users over yourself?
  - DC1350 6y ago
    That's what caring about the users or the product at the expense of ladder climbing is.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      I think having a mercenary-like attitude is just as bad as naively sacrificing your time for the company. Why can't there be a middle ground?
raclage 6y ago
> Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account. Is that really something we should take at face value? There are plenty of instances of people getting unreasonably offended but it's also extremely common for people to be shitty to their colleagues and use this as an excuse. He provides no actual examples.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago