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Larry Page's Comeback (2014)
- mathattack 6y agoCan anyone here give a first account of what happened? And the impact? Too often there’s an agenda behind the story.
- NickNaraghi 6y agoThis article is actually a fabulous account of Larry Page’s development as a CEO and leader at Google. I wasn’t expecting to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed it.
- coinerone 6y agoMaybe because its written like a Hollywood Movie Plot! "It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way."
- johnchristopher 6y agoTo be read in Jeff Bridge's voice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-J4duzP8Ng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-J4duzP8Ng (Tron legacy speech).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Zigurd 6y agoThe article is from 2014 and describes events from 2001. That is before the Agile approach became popular for managing software development projects. It is the same year the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written. Agile happened because using the standard set of pre-Agile tools was inflexible. Replanning happened way too often, and was way too much work. Or, worse, teams tried to stick to a clearly obsolete schedule. This is not to say that Agile, especially as it has morphed into something that is too often a jargon-laden dogma, it an unalloyed good. But it was a relatively primitive time for software project management. The article says very little about what responsibilities were organized onder project managers. Was it the wrong approach to project management? Was the job description inappropriate? The wrong tools?
- tpmx 6y agoSounds a lot like the chaos at Tesla. I guess Tesla really needs a Gwynne or an Eric.
- Daho0n 6y agoExcept in Tesla it is their "Larry Page" that need to be fired to fix the problem.
- tpmx 6y agoWhat I'm saying is that Tesla board needs to find an Eric Schmidt/Gwynne Shotwell-like person to replace the technoking as CEO. The technoking is spiraling.
- Daho0n 6y agoWell then I couldn't agree more. He is more of a TechNogging though.
- cma 6y agoShotwell seems no better, promoting cross-globe rocket flights by 2028 cheaper than business class plane tickets. Not space tourism, but a real commercial service starting then. It makes no sense. Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-shotwell-space-ted-conference-interview https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-... They haven't walked it back.
- leesec 6y agoSpiraling into the most valuable automaker on earth?
- jsnell 6y ago(2014)
- tpmx 6y agoYeah, some parts didn't age well. > Page set up Android as a separate entity, one that was only nominally a part of Google, and allowed Rubin wide latitude to run it without interference from the parent company.
- ardit33 6y agois that part not true, At least initially? I mean, it could have changed over time, but didn't Android have its own repo, and team, and some googlers were complaining about not being part of the whole system?
- tpmx 6y agohttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/andy-rubin-court-complaint-lawsuit-rie-divorce-google https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/andy-rubin-cour... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
- ardit33 6y agoI feel the "PM as CEO of the product" (aka, Product Owner) paradimng is completely wrong. PMs become very political fast, and often don't have qualms to undermine other parts/products of the company in order to advance their own. Since often they are not the ones doing the hiring of engineers, they really don't care/have no qualms of the long term engineering needs (both personel/morale, and architecture). True company CEOs have to think about engineering personal needs all the time as recruiting is hard. PM/PO just don't care as they don't have to deal with true consequences of their decissions on the people that actually get the work done. I have seen narcistic PMs completely destroy team morales, and have engineers after engineers jus transfer out their teams. Also, Google PMs have earned a 'toxic' reputation in the industry. They are just too political. Might be ok for a large company, but they can be poison to smaller ones.
- lumost 6y agoI really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value. Typically the role ends up contending for scope with manager/engineer responsibilities or serving as a glorified task manager. The industry just doesn't have a good way to measure the performance of "product" and as such the PM can make good decisions or bad decisions and there is no measurement or mechanism to course correct. Occasionally I've seen a "product research" role where individuals focus on characterizing the problems customer's face, running user studies, or other analysis. This role provided immense value as it's easily a full-time job just talking to customers and bucketing their pain points.
- refulgentis 6y agoThe PM I've worked with the most over the past few years is excellent acting as a sort of coordinator role, as you describe - maintaining relationships with UX and engineering across organizations, making sure UXR is involved, having an overarching vision, etc.
- topkai22 6y agoBack a bit (like a decade ago) when I still had PMs ours spent a lot of time on vendor and contract management, filtering/prioritizing cross team requests (of which we had many), and generally making sure that features got compelted in an order that kept our external partners satisfied. All important work, and work I was very glad to not have to do (except maybe the prioritization.)
- stunt 6y agoThe difficult thing about talking about project management is that it is so inconsistent at different organizations that makes it impossible to talk about it without having a lot of context. I worked at companies where project managers had very strong technical background and experience, but I also worked at a company where project managers were only a little technical, but had very strong project management skills. Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where project managers are simply incompetence. They got promoted to become a project manager with almost no knowledge about it and also no willingness to learn it properly and become good at it. The latter (incompetence PM) is awful for any type of engineering work. And some companies make it even worse by making engineers report directly to those project managers. The first type (technical project manager) is obviously harder to build, because not many engineers want to become project managers, and not many engineering teams are able to navigate without a good product team in organizations that don't have a solid engineering culture (e.g. traditional companies). So you often find companies with the second type. And even then I think it’s best if there is a clear separation of concerns between product and development teams. A product manager/team that takes care of product concerns but not engineers themselves. While they work with each other, engineers should report directly to a technical lead that understands their efforts and needs.
- 908B64B197 6y agoIf engineers report to PMs, your organization is broken. Love it when our competitors do it. Makes poaching great engineers really easy.
- ur-whale 6y agoNote that Google currently has a PM in the CEO's seat.
- ignoramous 6y agoTo be fair, one simply doesn't go from running a humble org competing with the Alexa Toolbar to running all of Alphabet with just PM mindset.
- 6y ago
- motohagiography 6y agoPage's "perfect search" vision, the idea that you can get everything you could need so that you can work on important problems, is the perfect specimen idea from an engineering mind. The problematization of experience is a great tool, but it is not an end, and of the options available it is a pretty humble one. If you have ever seen a highly automated dairy farm, cows have everything they need to work on important problems too, but they're cows, hooked up to machines that remove every aspect of what makes them cows other than how they serve the machines they are connected to. Maybe we could use a variation of Neuralink to connect all those cows' brains for distributed processing to solve important problems for us, and when they're done, we eat them, or use them for decorative materials. With a sufficiently random drip of seratonin and dopamine, they'd even be happy, if that were meaningful to them. I like that the first incarnation of Google was called "BackRub," and they even had masseuses on-site is a pretty unselfconscious and intimate expression of what actuated him. The only thing that separates those cows from people in a mind indexed like that is probably not sufficient to prevent it from collapsing them into indifference. If cows had a version of "don't be evil," from our perspective it would be cow-evil and not even register as something we needed to consider. It's just an entertaining article from the perspective of the writer, but I can't help but suspect what Page's vision looks like now is informed by the omniscience of google's data and AI, and the ethics of that perspective are not the same as those cows. We may be into the territory of having a Dr. Manhattan problem.
- newbie578 6y agoWow, I didn't expect to read the full article and really be pleased..
- callesgg 6y agoI think the idea that the project manager of a technical project should be an engineer sounds like a good idea. In my life I have seen project managers getting played for fools over and over. If the project manager can’t asses if something like a time estimate is reasonable people will take advantage. The cost, the timeline and the deliverables will suffer.
- evilsnoopi3 6y agoThis should have (2014) at the end of the title. Very interesting though especially with the hindsight of 7 more years...
- dehrmann 6y agoGoogle's biggest business failing around that era was how far behind they were in cloud computing. GCE only launched in 2013. EC2 launched 2007-ish. In 2014, unless you were paying attention to Amazon, it wasn't obvious how big of a blunder this was, yet.
- golergka 6y agoI'm pretty sure that they had app engine in 2010, I was building a company on it then. Or does it not count as cloud computing?
- khazhoux 6y agoApp Engine team was maybe a 5-10 engineers. It wanted to be the next Heroku, whereas AWS aimed to be the infrastructure for all the world's software.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 6y agoThey did, but I called out GCE because you're not a serious cloud provider without (virtual) machines you can do what you want with.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI feel like in 2014, at least in my circles, AWS was already a behemoth.
- ignoramous 5y ago> EC2 launched 2007-ish Aug 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History
- dehrmann 6y ago> Page was convinced that Google could use a CEO after all. But only if that CEO was Steve Jobs. That was in 1999. Steve Jobs had returned to Apple by then, but wow, the valley would be a different place if that had happened.
- telltruth 6y agoAt the risk of fanboys downvoting this, I think world won’t be better place if Jobs went on to be CEO of Google. He would have locked everything down, imagine all of the massive open source just never coming out, Google Brain never existing, all the free products only available on Android and no where else.
- setpatchaddress 6y agoNeXT and Apple open sourced more projects under Steve Jobs than they have since. A world where Jobs went for Google CEO is a world where Jobs has a different aesthetic worldview entirely, and you can’t know what would have happened.
- ignoramous 5y agoPage did make sweeping design / product changes once he was handed the reigns; I suspect, acting on his conversations with Jobs? His "Chief of Product", Sundar Pichai, on hand to execute his vision across Search, Apps, and Ads (and later, on Android as well).
- mpalmer 6y ago> Later, at Stanford, he’d peppered his adviser, Terry Winograd, with thesis ideas that sounded as far out there as some of Tesla’s later schemes. One idea involved building a superlong rope that would run from the Earth’s surface all the way into orbit, making it cheaper to put objects in space. Pretty sure Larry Page didn't invent space elevators.
- khazhoux 6y agoIn my time at Google I never understood on what criteria young PMs were hired. The company would regularly reject engineering candidates who had very successful solo projects because they didn't correctly answer the generic Comp Sci and how-do-you-scale-search questions, but at the same time the vast majority of PMs I encountered were just a year or two out of undergrad, and had never built a product, never launched a product, never demonstrated any aptitude for connecting with users. They were certainly personable, and overall were good communicators, but not --as a rule-- inventive or imaginative.
- enos_feedler 6y agoThis was one of my biggest frustrations that weighed on my decision to leave the company. The PMs I worked directly with rarely felt a true sense of ownership and pride over the roadmap and evolution of value to users. They never bothered to think how the future was evolving. They seemed to be brought in on pretty regular rotation with no attachment. They were mostly interested in seeing product management as some kind of accounting/ROI management problem. They would go through a long list of line items and try to assign priority and tried to remove as many things as they could. They also wanted to make the few things they did commit to seem much bigger than they actually were. I most directly saw this with Android Camera framework and APIs. The worst part was sitting through feedback meetings from developers. Instead of truly listening and challenging their current views, they would try to fit the feedback to their current view and dismiss a lot of really important insights from the field.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoGiven Googles poor track record for creating new products in recent years this all makes sense.
- koolba 6y agoGoogle has a great track record for creating new products. It’s the longevity and overall follow through that is lacking.
- drawkbox 6y agoThe value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer. Nothing worse than knowing what a product needs and being overridden by project managers with no experience shipping product or fighting to put in quality or features the users want. Somehow the MBAs and PMs are now seen as product value creators when they are part of the value extraction team, it doesn't and won't work. Most developers know now that adding to a product or putting in time to get to a more polished post-production model rather than pre-production only can cost you perception due to taking longer, it is a major problem with our industry today. Imagine the executives of the movie company telling what directors, technical and creative people should and make. Or a novel written by the publisher. It isn't what anyone wants. The value creation needs to go to the value creators AND they need freedom to control their tasks and flows. What happens is people that are capable of shipping products people want, end up in a tasked system where they are given daily/weekly tasks from people that have never shipped. It is frustrating and destroys value. This is an age old problem highlighted in "How Software Companies Die" but really you could say how creative companies die. Software and technology is closer to art than business in many cases. You can't force creativity into a 3 hour task planned by an outside project manager that doesn't understand what it takes to ship a product themselves. There are some great project managers that do, but they end up just making things or their own company because it is such a unique subset of the overall pool.
- higerordermap 6y agoJoel Spolsky nails it in a blog post. > Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. > “It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- yawaramin 6y ago> Worse, she reported, “Engineers say they have been encouraged to build fewer new products and focus on building improvements to existing ones.” Sounds like a different Google indeed. Most complaints I hear about nowadays are that Google incentivizes shipping new features too much and ignores buggy existing features.
- dang 6y agoDiscussed at the time: The Story Of Larry Page's Comeback - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114 - April 2014 (130 comments)
- 11235813213455 6y agoI guess Larry must use Gmail with ?ui=html then, if he wants fast load One of his rare failure might be Google Plus
- sinuhe69 6y agoJob’s second success was not just Pixar. It was NEXT that bought the whole evolution of Apple.
- sirmarksalot 5y agoI wouldn't call NeXT a success. They did some really great R&D, lost a ton of money, and basically donated all that work back to Apple. They did great work, but weren't successful as a corporate entity. Pixar, OTOH, was hugely successful on its on terms.
- de6u99er 6y agoThanks for the article. This explains a lot. Not many companies would be able to survive so much organisational expetimentation.
- binbag 6y agoThere are a lot of comments in here about how project managers get in the way of good engineering and building a commercial enterprise. I suspect many people only read the first few paragraphs of the article, because this misses the point. Page, like many engineers, wasn't able (yet) to do a lot of what was required to turn good engineering into good business. His instict wasn't right - it was wrong. He eventually realsied that, matured, and returned to the helm of the organisation later. I've found there's often a quiet but strident feeling shared amongst engieneers that we are smarter than everyone else. This leads to us being very impatient with opinions and worldviews we don't agree with or understand. There is more to relationships and business than being clever and being a great engineer. Some of the comments even go as far as to classify the engineers as value creators and the non-engineers as value extractors! How patronising can you get. If finance, marketing, leadership, sales, etc wasn't needed then they wouldn't get hired. They could hold a similarly unbalanced view that engineers are just paid to build a thing, and that the thing is pointless until they convince others to finance its real development or buy it.