13 ms·

Google executives see cracks in their company’s success

107 points by goodrubyist 5y ago

rogerkirkness 5y ago
NY Times backs into Peacetime CEO vs. Wartime CEO. A nice guy cannot execute a PMF pivot, but can milk and maximize a money printer. Tool for the job.
- swivelmaster 5y ago
  Sounds like Google made the Microsoft "Gates to Ballmer" pivot and is experiencing similar issues.
dekhn 5y ago
When I worked at Google I had the chance to interact with many of the leadership including the founders and CEOs, as well as many SVPs. I have to say, both Larry and Sundar have the personality and motivational skills of limp noodles. When I met Eric Schmidt, he immediately quizzed me about every detail about my product and product plans and further goals and was encouraging, like an actual leader. It was a wonderful discussion and I left the room feeling like I had actually been listened to by a leader who wanted the company to grow in new directions (like cloud and machine learning for health research). I also got to meet people like Urs Hoezle and Luiz Barroso who are responsible for Google's technical position in computing today; they were both also great leaders who really deserve to have their own sub-company to run (TI and Core). I was truly lucky to be able to have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat almost every morning for a year, which led to some great research collaborations. I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. That pretty much killed the reputation of Google Research's leader.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  ….how did you manage to get into this position? Were you a senior principal engineer?
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I have a long history. I started out as a Biophysics PhD doing MD simulations and applying machine learning to biology (search for 'David Konerding' in Google Scholar). Since Google is very much like academia, my research training prepared me to be successful inside. Getting inside was the hardest part! When I joined google, the only way I could get hired was as a test engineer on an SRE team, which I then converted into an SRE via mission control and wrote docs and shared them internally with folks until the principal engineers read them, and then they gave me infinite resources (Google Exacycle) to do everything I described above. I used that to get promoted to Staff SWE, and used that to launch a product (Google Cloud Genomics) and do some interesting machine learning for drug discovery (BTW, at this point mny career was effectively complete- I had set out to do everything I wanted, and was interested in what to do next). The above happened because (beyond a wide range of boosts provided by parents and country) I have an intense drive, wanted to work at Google more than anything, and exploited the internal structure of the company to maximize my power. I kept networking to meet more and more people, and by meeting those people I got more access and support. I helped build up a team- Google Accelerated Sciences- which does basically what I thought Google should be doing all along. unfortunately, at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      > I have an intense drive, wanted to work at Google more than anything, and exploited the internal structure of the company to maximize my power > at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club. It sounds like a power struggle gone the other way from reading this. And it certainly doesn't seem like either of the sides are more noble than the other. But props for you for doing what you loved best, if only one day any of these can be decoupled from politics.
      - alisonkisk 5y ago
        There's a difference from politicking into a club and politicking others out of a club.
- codingwageslave 5y ago
  Classic name dropping from a Google employee. This is why the companies products are mediocre, the employees care more about the fact that they work at Google. No mention of product possibilities, innovation, or anything. Just prestige.
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    Based on what I read of dekhn's internal Google+ posts when he was at Google, that couldn't be further from the truth. This is someone who cares greatly about both good engineering and making a positive impact on the world.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Strangely enough it feels like you’re proving OPs point here?
      - QuercusMax 5y ago
        I'd love for you to explain how. I've never met him personally. Reading internal blogposts is a very common thing that people do.
        rejectedandsad 5y ago
        It feels like a second order name drop (perhaps a prestige drop?) by immediately indicating your access to internal posts and identification of him by his username. I've been aware of him before but not enough to know his HN or common username!
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        Must be exhausting to be that cynical.
        rejectedandsad 5y ago
- choppaface 5y ago
  Do you think Jeff Dean defended the firing because he really understood the circumstances and the consequences of taking the position, or do you think he was naive? Was Jeff involved in the firing of people like Michael Church?
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Understanding the circumstances and consequences of taking a position, and not being naive, is almost definitionally the job of a leader. Technical wizards who are clueless n00bs should be individual contributors, not the head of Google Brain.
    - choppaface 5y ago
      And I actually mean the question seriously and thoughtfully, although the downvote barrage wants to take it as flame bait. Jeff’s calibration towards firings is unquestionably different than the rest of industry, but how different? And how much training / preparation did he really have? Important questions for any org head. The thing here is a lot of current and past Googlers seem to agree Jeff messed up. I’d like to understand why through the lens of evaluating what bar we set for the people-managing skills for engineering leaders industry-wide.
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        In 2020 if you can't figure out that a white man firing a black woman for something related to race and AI is going to be a big problem for you as the head of AI for perhaps the world's most potent AI juggernaut facing increasing calls for regulatory scrutiny you really have no fucking clue what you are doing. Overall the entire situation needed to be handled far more carefully even if the outcomes were the same. He thought that because he was the boss he could do whatever the hell he wanted to, and the fact of the matter is that there are forces more powerful than him.
- nostromo 5y ago
  > Larry and Sundar have the personality and motivational skills of limp noodles And yet they were still more motivating than Sundar, who is so flat he sounds like he's bored to death, even when he's talking about super cool tech like AI and quantum computing. Page wasn't polished, but he could energize teams about building the future in a way Sundar hasn't been able to.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I think you misread- Sergey has lots of personality and motivational skill (he's a brilliant natural leader with an amazing sense of humor). The main problem with Sergey (told to me by several SVPs) is that he's so smart (but not wise) , 10 minutes into your well-prepared presentation he'll ask "well, why didn't you do it this other way? It's faster and simpler?". This will cause your presentation to halt, you have to waste a bunch of time epxlaning why that is a cool academic idea that won't actually work in the real world, and then everybody on the team is amotivated.
- actuator 5y ago
  > Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. From what has been put outside, don't you think Timnit's mail to employees as a manager was out of line for someone in her role. Even to me who doesn't have intimate knowledge of the whole thing, that didn't look appropriate.
  - GVIrish 5y ago
    I think the email can be inappropriate and Dean's response can be problematic at the same time.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Yes, Timnit definitely pushed the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse at work. But, speaking both as an ex-manager, and an engineer who worked there (and resigned twice), it definitely wasn't a resignation. To resign at Google you tell your manager you're resigning and then fill out a form (that's the process that makes it an official resignation). What Megan did to Timnit was immediate termination, combined with an advanced exit date, which only happens if you're truly and deeply violating Google rules or your country's laws. When I brought up the Timnit firing situation my VP literally said: "It takes me a year and a half to fire a bad employee, I don't know how Megan did it so fast".
    - Judgmentality 5y ago
      > It takes me a year and a half to fire a bad employee What? I could understand 6 months, but how the hell do you add a year to that?
      - neaanopri 5y ago
        "Performance Improvement Plan"
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        I've seen lots of those before, but never anything that could remotely approach 18 months (I typically see them last only 1 month). I cannot imagine the frustrating bureaucracy that is Google.
- andyxor 5y ago
  Timnit was a bully, the definition of 'toxic employee', so glad Google had the balls to let her go, PR hit be damned, it means they still have true leaders
  - dekhn 5y ago
    my complaint is merely that they continue to insist she resigned. She didn't- she was terminated without cause. I personally think Timnit shouldn't have been hired in the first place, but if they were going to fire her, they needed to follow the path, which takes about 1-2 years, of establishing that she was not a good employee for Google.
    - mchusma 5y ago
      Thank you for following up with some nuance. I did read her email, and do disagree with your stance that she did not quit, and presumably Googles legal team did as well. But I appreciate your thoughts.
    - ksd482 5y ago
      Why shouldn't Timnit have been hired according to you?
      - dekhn 5y ago
        According to her, she was recruited by Jeff at a conference specifically to work on improving Google's machine learning equity. As part of hiring somebody, I don't just meet them at a conference and read their papers. I interact with their prior employment network and read their social media. I think if Jeff had paid any attention to her tweets before she was hired, he would have thought twice about bringing her on.
        Apocryphon 5y ago
        I wonder if anyone's compared Timnit's firing to Apple's firing of Antonio García Martínez. It sounds like both are politically opposite versions of the same mishire situation.
- 1024core 5y ago
  > I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit Jeff had 2 options: pick a safe leader, or a corrosive person. Timnit has shown incredible tone-deafness and arrogance; just view her Twitter exchange with Yann LeCun. She was clearly out of her league, and doubling down every day with newer and newer antics. She needed to go.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I didn't say that Timnit shouldn't be fired.
    - thu2111 5y ago
      Are you objecting to Google's refusal to let her "unresign" then? Btw plenty of us ex Googlers think Jeff Dean's reputation was enhanced still further by that move. Gebru was acting in crazy ways, she really should have been fired much earlier, but taking the opportunity when she so helpfully presented it seems like a no brainer. Sad that the rest of Google lacks that approach.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        I don't think Google should unresign her. I think it should admit it fired her (technically speaking), and pay her a bunch of money (to make up for the bad handling of the firing). I agree, she should have been fired earlier. However, she was just promoted, which meant she must have had several quarters of excellent perf. I think one thing that would be truly excellent, but won't happen, would be to have Megan Kacholia defend herself by explaining her actions to the wider Google community. In particular: Why was Megan, a person with effectively no research experience, a VP in Google Research and making decisions about research papers being withdrawn? Her lack of experience in the area seems to have led to an exacerbation of tensions. Why did Megan convert an offer to have a discussion about a resignation into an interpretation that Timnit resigned voluntarily, coupled with an accelerated departure (immediate, with termination of all Google services)? Why was Megan pushing so hard to have the paper withdrawn, given that the paper wouldn't be that impactful on Google's reputation, made some useful (if obvious and a bit overstated) points, and wasn't being published in a prominent venue? To Jeff and Megan: to what extent did Jeff support Megan's decision to fire Timnit over a refusal to withdraw a paper, or did his support come after learning Megan had fired Timnit? To what extent did Timnit's previous tweets calling out her employees and mentioning confidential Google Research activities play a role in her firing? Was her discouraging email really a reasonable justification for accelerating her termination? My guess about all of this is that Megan and Jeff decided to fire timnit when timnit posted several negative tweets attacking Jeff and google Research, and used the paper and the email (and vague offer to resign) to justify the firing and they didn't think through the implications of firing a twitterati like Timnit in a roughshod manner. This seems most consistent with all the evidence I've seen.
draw_down 5y ago
Record profits, so clearly their problem is the uppity workers. Sure we want them to be autonomous, we’re not monsters, but why do they have to air their yucky opinions? Why won’t they just shut up?
choppaface 5y ago
tl;dr https://mobile.twitter.com/daiwaka/status/1407011388711608323 https://mobile.twitter.com/daiwaka/status/140701138871160832... Google Execs have an average vote that’s decisively short of “exceeding expectations.” But Google had an additional set of execs go for interviews that gave a more positive vote.
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jstrong 5y ago
slightly unrelated, I used to open nytimes.com articles with a new private browswer session to avoid paywall, but this no longer works. any other ways to avoid registering/paywall to read their articles?
- deleted 5y ago
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- yellow_lead 5y ago
  I use Firefox and time the refresh / hitting the "outline mode" button before the paywall appears.
- ForHackernews 5y ago
  Have you considered just paying? People on this site often complain about freeloaders wanting software or support without offering anything in return, yet they also prefer to bypass paywalls on content.
  - blakesterz 5y ago
    I have seriously considered paying for the NY Times and that's the only site I've considered. I still haven't seen any reason to pay, yet. Seems like I can always find something somewhere else to read, and nothing that's exclusive to The Times has really drawn me in that much, at least not yet. I am aware of the freeloaders thing, and I end up feeling like one sometimes.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    The problem that I face is that I don't get $20/mo of value out of any one publication (ok, I guess NYT is $17 per 4 weeks, which is a bizarre billing cycle). I certainly get (more than) $20/mo of value out of "online news" as a whole, but it's spread out, and any given site would probably only get a few dollars a month (and many sub-$1) if allocated what I'd consider fairly. But pretty much no news website will let me subscribe for that little, or will give me a cheap plan that limits me to, say, 10 or 12 articles per month (which would still be overkill for many of the paid sites I'll occasionally click through to). If I were to subscribe to every site where I've bypassed a paywall even once in the last few months (of have just given up without reading), I'd easily be spending over $300 per month. I don't feel like my consumption warrants that price.
robinj6 5y ago
I have little sentiment for Google, but this article seems to be arranged as part of a campaign. The statements of a small number of x-Googlers is taken as a generalization of the company’s sentiment as a whole and is used to seed doubt, while acknowledging very little specific mistakes.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Unfortunately it feels like this is pretty common for the NYT today: they decide on a conclusion they want to make, and then interview enough people so they can cherry-pick the comments that support their conclusion, and don't bother to present any dissenting viewpoints. It's really a shame; I feel like this transformation happened in the last 5 years or so. Most articles from NYT that I see posted here have this slant.
  - ra7 5y ago
    > they decide on a conclusion they want to make, and then interview enough people so they can cherry-pick the comments that support their conclusion, and don't bother to present any dissenting viewpoints. I've said this exact thing in the past about NYT. This seems to be their MO these days and is especially apparent in their international reporting.
  - forgingahead 5y ago
    You're spot on with the timing because that's when the scion of the family business took over: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Sulzberger#The_New_York_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Sulzberger#The_New_York_... Along his goals of "doubling digital revenue" and maximising subscriber numbers, the place obviously turned towards clickbait and left-wing cheer-leading. Give the customers what they want - and they definitely don't want to be told their worldview is wrong or that their opinion of certain issues has valid counterpoints. So it's been a huge cratering of credibility and honest reporting.
- nitwit005 5y ago
  I don't mind the slant if it's clear they understand the issue, but it's clear that's not always the case based on what I've seen shared on Hacker News. I still remember their awkward correction about an article on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/pageoneplus/corrections-august-7-2019.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/pageoneplus/corrections-a...
rejectedandsad 5y ago
I’m confused by the inclusion of the Stochastic Parrot thing. Why did this become such a flashpoint? Did people care about culture wars that happened at HP Labs and Sun in the 90s (I guess the more illustrative point is tha they didn’t)? I don’t see the relevance to profitability or future growth.
- visarga 5y ago
  The Parrots paper is activism dressed up as research in my opinion. It only complains and offers no solutions. This is bad, that is bad, and that other thing, yes, it's bad...
retskrad 5y ago
I have lived in Silicon Valley for two decades and most people I've talked to see Apple as the most prestigious place to work out of all the FAANG companies. I'm not surprised because Apple has had the fortune of having a visionary founder AND Tim Cook, who is one of the best managers in the world.
- deleted 5y ago
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- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Haha... Apple to me is quite the opposite, more like a cult of personality. I really do not see Apple as visionary. I don't think they are doing anything really special or are market leaders in anyway when it comes to technology.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Out of the people I know who actually work at Apple, they're either incredibly overworked and constantly teetering on the edge of burnout, or they see Apple's market position as a tool they can use to further some goals of their own. While I'm sure some people do consider working at Apple as high-prestige, that's doesn't seem to be reflected in the employees I know, at least.
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    I used to want to work at Apple until I got to know people who work there. Very heavy secrecy + burnout culture, plus weird things like some projects get free meals where others don't.
  - Bhilai 5y ago
    This mirrors my impressions from friends and family who work at Apple as well. My friends do get paid well for working there but its quite a stressful place to work.
- ping_pong 5y ago
  I've lived in Silicon Valley for over 2 decades as well. Until iPhone, Apple was not prestigious at all. I still remember Brass Ring hiring conventions where the Apple hiring booth was completely empty. In fact, until recently, all I've heard is that Apple underpays engineers compared to most other companies. The fact that the stock as gone up ~300x in the last 8 years changed that equation, so everyone shuts up now, but it has historically never been prestigious. I've in fact never heard of Apple being prestigious unless you worked in design, or worked on the iPhone.
ffggvv 5y ago
it doesnt matter who runs google. its literally a money printing monopoly with search. And that will never end. And they can plow that money wherever they want. (even into a furance) and theyll be fine. Especially if you add in youtube money.
- spinningslate 5y ago
  > its literally a money printing monopoly with search. And that will never end. Until it does. Go back 20 years and you could've written the same thing about Microsoft and end-user computing. Google under Pichai looks increasingly like Microsoft under Balmer. Executing to stellar headline numbers, but increasingly paralyzed in anything other than their one or two anchor products. It took a change at the top to turn Microsoft around. I expect Pichai to go the same way as Balmer.
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jqpabc123 5y ago
I see one big giant crack --- their entire business model is built around data collection and privacy invasion. The fastest way to convince me not to use a product is to put the name "Google" on it.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  LOL.. I actually feel much safer using Google than Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.
  - nitinreddy88 5y ago
    Instead of LOL, care to explain why?!
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Because on my Google account I can turn off all the history settings, same for YouTube. Despite possibly being invasive with YouTube, they actually allow third party clients like NewPipe and youtube-dl. Google Drive offers some of the best storage and you can encrypt your files, and there is no proof that they are using your storage to spy on you. Google Cloud was also one of the first providers to offer confidential computing. Google also contributes a lot to open source and so Android has a lot of options and different ROMs to use. Compare that to the proprietary OSs like Microsoft and Apple. With Microsoft, no matter what I do they keep uploading my activity history of every App that I open just because I signed into the Microsoft Store to play Minecraft.
      - jqpabc123 5y ago
        Because on my Google account I can turn off all the history settings, same for YouTube. LOL! So with this setting off, Google forgets the IP you use to sign in to your Google Drive and GMail account and doesn't use it to identify and track you across the estimated 80% of web sites that have embedded Google trackers? And you've verified this how? Did they show you their tracking source code?
bpodgursky 5y ago
It might be true, but with the stock at an all-time high (and close to doubling over the past year) I would say that not many people have put their money where the nytime's mouth is.
grumblenum 5y ago
So the NYT editorial board greenlit a hit piece against Google? Well, that's gratitude for you. I hope others learn from this. The reward for bowing to such "prestigious" institutions is getting whipped for not bowing low enough.
- goodrubyist 5y ago
  It's a news piece, not an editorial.
  - grumblenum 5y ago
    The editorial board dictates tone and content of the paper, not just editorial pieces. They determine narratives long in advance and news articles must conform to it. You should not believe that nobody at the NYT considered the effect this story could have on GOOG shareholder value. In all likelihood, that was the only objective, given how little substance there is to the article.
jstrong 5y ago
this article is pretty thin gruel.
adrr 5y ago
Google needs to replace their product management leadership. They have squandered their lead. Google business apps isn’t the top cloud based business platform. I’d pick office365 right now. Gmail/Calendar for businesses hasn’t changed in 10 years. Google cloud has been surpassed by Azure and will be a distant 3rd. Google meets is missing so much functionality that businesses supplement with zoom. I really don’t understand what they are doing with their enterprise offering. They should buy snowflake for Google cloud and slack for business apps to keep them relevant. Like the article mentioned, they should have bought Shopify when it was much cheaper and provided the Google cloud as a place for shopify app developers for running their apps. Shopify has native event bus support for AWS so app developers favor AWS.
- schmidp 5y ago
  While googles business apps lack in features, office365 seems to be extremely buggy, documents look different online and offline (had the case last week), their authentication is pure horror (multiple accounts with different passwords for the same email address), teams is only logged in to one account at the time, one drive (or how it is called) is always using "significant energy". We actually wanted to switch and bought a few licenses, but after trying it for 2 weeks with a small group of employees we discarded the idea. I was surprised and very much disappointed.
  - philsnow 5y ago
    > multiple accounts with different passwords for the same email address Amazon (retail) does this too. My wife's email address can log into two different accounts depending on what password you use.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Yes and the synchronization system with parallel editing in office365 is completely buggy compared to google docs, during our trial we lost parts of our test documents...
- deleted 5y ago
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ioeru48 5y ago
Google needs to get its Search team into the driver seat. Its the information age. They are the ones who should be leading and laying out a path into the future. Instead, the god damned empire defense crowd is laying out that path, for almost a decade now, and its naturally a road to nowhere. There is no real big vision coming from Google on what is wrong with how info is being mindlessly generated and pumped into people's heads 24x7. They are very proud and happy they index 2 billion 'how to make a boiled egg' videos. WTF are they even enabling? They have no clue because its all driven by empire defense.
swivelmaster 5y ago
Anecdotal, but I've talked to a few people at Google who are happy with the pay and perks but absolutely hate the product management culture. Basically, performance reviews and incentives are structured around doing something with "big impact," so there are a lot of needlessly "ambitious" (quotes intentional) reboots, revamps, redesigns, repackaging, etc. of existing products, mostly so that teams and PM's can say they went big and get a good performance review. The flip side of that is that there's no incentive to fix bugs (and usability issues) in existing stable products, because unless the bug is losing tens of millions of dollars for Google it's considered wasted time from a performance review perspective. This is why Google is constantly relaunching and rebranding products, even making them worse, while neglecting long-running problems in, for example, Gmail. Recently, my main Gmail account was upgraded to the new Chat interface. It actually looks worse (subjectively the new font seems less readable) and has removed the "Pop out to separate window" feature that I used to use all the time. But hey, now the interface has animated transitions and I can forward individual parts of a conversation to an email with one click! Wow!
- deleted 5y ago
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- UncleMeat 5y ago
  People say this all the time, but I've really not seen it. I'm in an org with one of the highest promotion rates in the company, and it is focused primarily on what you describe as missing. I've personally seen people promoted to senior staff for literally fixing problems and buried risks in existing stable systems. I don't know how to address this meme, since it is very clear that managers are telling their reports that this is how things work and leading to this widespread belief, but when I actually go into the promo sessions I don't see this at all.
  - swivelmaster 5y ago
    If people say this all the time but you haven't seen it, there are two possibilities: - People are right and your org is an exception - People are wrong and your org is the norm My experience with Google products as a consumer seems to point towards the former. Also, kudos on the Zappa-inspired username! It's not one of his best albums but it's certainly an interesting one.
foobarbazetc 5y ago
It’s not really only Google though… the entire industry has an air of malaise to it that is papered over by stock prices. It’s all so boring.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  To me it feels like no one in (big) tech is interested in building products _for_ the customer. They're only interested in building products for extracting money from the customer. The idea of "charge what the market will bear" has been taken to an extreme by the tech industry. The combination of venture capital, non-ownership (SaaS everything), adhesive ToS, anit-trust levels of monopolization, etc. all work really hard to get customers locked in and dependent on half-assed garbage with a big feature list. Everyone is building robots that hold you upside down and shake the money from your pockets while calling is SaaS. Boo!
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/3DmfW https://archive.is/3DmfW
andyana 5y ago
Here is an example of what I see from Google these days. I get a notification banner telling me that Hangouts is being replaced by Gmail Chat. This comes a year after a rumor that Hangouts was being shut down. Apparently, that was just a rumor or something. So I continue using Hangouts until now when I'm told it is officially being replaced. Whatever, I think, I'll just switch to Gmail Chat and uninstall Hangouts. Today, I get sent a video from someone still on Hangouts. They fucking play link takes me to the Hangouts page on the play store. I need to install Hangouts to watch the video. You can't make this up.
someonehere 5y ago
Google has a history of product rot. Most notably where I rot the two most expensive pieces of product rot are the Jamboards. We opted not to renew them when COVID hit and now that things are kind of going back to normal, I’ve found Logitech and a few other companies have come out with better products that integrate with existing whiteboards for what we need in conference rooms. Things like the jamboard turn me off of buying Google hardware.

107 points by goodrubyist 5y ago

NY Times backs into Peacetime CEO vs. Wartime CEO. A nice guy cannot execute a PMF pivot, but can milk and maximize a money printer. Tool for the job.

swivelmaster 5y ago
Sounds like Google made the Microsoft "Gates to Ballmer" pivot and is experiencing similar issues.

dekhn 5y ago

When I worked at Google I had the chance to interact with many of the leadership including the founders and CEOs, as well as many SVPs. I have to say, both Larry and Sundar have the personality and motivational skills of limp noodles. When I met Eric Schmidt, he immediately quizzed me about every detail about my product and product plans and further goals and was encouraging, like an actual leader. It was a wonderful discussion and I left the room feeling like I had actually been listened to by a leader who wanted the company to grow in new directions (like cloud and machine learning for health research). I also got to meet people like Urs Hoezle and Luiz Barroso who are responsible for Google's technical position in computing today; they were both also great leaders who really deserve to have their own sub-company to run (TI and Core). I was truly lucky to be able to have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat almost every morning for a year, which led to some great research collaborations. I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. That pretty much killed the reputation of Google Research's leader.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
….how did you manage to get into this position? Were you a senior principal engineer?
- dekhn 5y ago
  I have a long history. I started out as a Biophysics PhD doing MD simulations and applying machine learning to biology (search for 'David Konerding' in Google Scholar). Since Google is very much like academia, my research training prepared me to be successful inside. Getting inside was the hardest part! When I joined google, the only way I could get hired was as a test engineer on an SRE team, which I then converted into an SRE via mission control and wrote docs and shared them internally with folks until the principal engineers read them, and then they gave me infinite resources (Google Exacycle) to do everything I described above. I used that to get promoted to Staff SWE, and used that to launch a product (Google Cloud Genomics) and do some interesting machine learning for drug discovery (BTW, at this point mny career was effectively complete- I had set out to do everything I wanted, and was interested in what to do next). The above happened because (beyond a wide range of boosts provided by parents and country) I have an intense drive, wanted to work at Google more than anything, and exploited the internal structure of the company to maximize my power. I kept networking to meet more and more people, and by meeting those people I got more access and support. I helped build up a team- Google Accelerated Sciences- which does basically what I thought Google should be doing all along. unfortunately, at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    > I have an intense drive, wanted to work at Google more than anything, and exploited the internal structure of the company to maximize my power > at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club. It sounds like a power struggle gone the other way from reading this. And it certainly doesn't seem like either of the sides are more noble than the other. But props for you for doing what you loved best, if only one day any of these can be decoupled from politics.
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
      There's a difference from politicking into a club and politicking others out of a club.
codingwageslave 5y ago
Classic name dropping from a Google employee. This is why the companies products are mediocre, the employees care more about the fact that they work at Google. No mention of product possibilities, innovation, or anything. Just prestige.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  Based on what I read of dekhn's internal Google+ posts when he was at Google, that couldn't be further from the truth. This is someone who cares greatly about both good engineering and making a positive impact on the world.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Strangely enough it feels like you’re proving OPs point here?
    - QuercusMax 5y ago
      I'd love for you to explain how. I've never met him personally. Reading internal blogposts is a very common thing that people do.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        It feels like a second order name drop (perhaps a prestige drop?) by immediately indicating your access to internal posts and identification of him by his username. I've been aware of him before but not enough to know his HN or common username!
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        Must be exhausting to be that cynical.
        rejectedandsad 5y ago
choppaface 5y ago
Do you think Jeff Dean defended the firing because he really understood the circumstances and the consequences of taking the position, or do you think he was naive? Was Jeff involved in the firing of people like Michael Church?
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Understanding the circumstances and consequences of taking a position, and not being naive, is almost definitionally the job of a leader. Technical wizards who are clueless n00bs should be individual contributors, not the head of Google Brain.
  - choppaface 5y ago
    And I actually mean the question seriously and thoughtfully, although the downvote barrage wants to take it as flame bait. Jeff’s calibration towards firings is unquestionably different than the rest of industry, but how different? And how much training / preparation did he really have? Important questions for any org head. The thing here is a lot of current and past Googlers seem to agree Jeff messed up. I’d like to understand why through the lens of evaluating what bar we set for the people-managing skills for engineering leaders industry-wide.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      In 2020 if you can't figure out that a white man firing a black woman for something related to race and AI is going to be a big problem for you as the head of AI for perhaps the world's most potent AI juggernaut facing increasing calls for regulatory scrutiny you really have no fucking clue what you are doing. Overall the entire situation needed to be handled far more carefully even if the outcomes were the same. He thought that because he was the boss he could do whatever the hell he wanted to, and the fact of the matter is that there are forces more powerful than him.
nostromo 5y ago
> Larry and Sundar have the personality and motivational skills of limp noodles And yet they were still more motivating than Sundar, who is so flat he sounds like he's bored to death, even when he's talking about super cool tech like AI and quantum computing. Page wasn't polished, but he could energize teams about building the future in a way Sundar hasn't been able to.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I think you misread- Sergey has lots of personality and motivational skill (he's a brilliant natural leader with an amazing sense of humor). The main problem with Sergey (told to me by several SVPs) is that he's so smart (but not wise) , 10 minutes into your well-prepared presentation he'll ask "well, why didn't you do it this other way? It's faster and simpler?". This will cause your presentation to halt, you have to waste a bunch of time epxlaning why that is a cool academic idea that won't actually work in the real world, and then everybody on the team is amotivated.
actuator 5y ago
> Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. From what has been put outside, don't you think Timnit's mail to employees as a manager was out of line for someone in her role. Even to me who doesn't have intimate knowledge of the whole thing, that didn't look appropriate.
- GVIrish 5y ago
  I think the email can be inappropriate and Dean's response can be problematic at the same time.
- dekhn 5y ago
  Yes, Timnit definitely pushed the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse at work. But, speaking both as an ex-manager, and an engineer who worked there (and resigned twice), it definitely wasn't a resignation. To resign at Google you tell your manager you're resigning and then fill out a form (that's the process that makes it an official resignation). What Megan did to Timnit was immediate termination, combined with an advanced exit date, which only happens if you're truly and deeply violating Google rules or your country's laws. When I brought up the Timnit firing situation my VP literally said: "It takes me a year and a half to fire a bad employee, I don't know how Megan did it so fast".
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    > It takes me a year and a half to fire a bad employee What? I could understand 6 months, but how the hell do you add a year to that?
    - neaanopri 5y ago
      "Performance Improvement Plan"
      - Judgmentality 5y ago
        I've seen lots of those before, but never anything that could remotely approach 18 months (I typically see them last only 1 month). I cannot imagine the frustrating bureaucracy that is Google.
andyxor 5y ago
Timnit was a bully, the definition of 'toxic employee', so glad Google had the balls to let her go, PR hit be damned, it means they still have true leaders
- dekhn 5y ago
  my complaint is merely that they continue to insist she resigned. She didn't- she was terminated without cause. I personally think Timnit shouldn't have been hired in the first place, but if they were going to fire her, they needed to follow the path, which takes about 1-2 years, of establishing that she was not a good employee for Google.
  - mchusma 5y ago
    Thank you for following up with some nuance. I did read her email, and do disagree with your stance that she did not quit, and presumably Googles legal team did as well. But I appreciate your thoughts.
  - ksd482 5y ago
    Why shouldn't Timnit have been hired according to you?
    - dekhn 5y ago
      According to her, she was recruited by Jeff at a conference specifically to work on improving Google's machine learning equity. As part of hiring somebody, I don't just meet them at a conference and read their papers. I interact with their prior employment network and read their social media. I think if Jeff had paid any attention to her tweets before she was hired, he would have thought twice about bringing her on.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        I wonder if anyone's compared Timnit's firing to Apple's firing of Antonio García Martínez. It sounds like both are politically opposite versions of the same mishire situation.
1024core 5y ago
> I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit Jeff had 2 options: pick a safe leader, or a corrosive person. Timnit has shown incredible tone-deafness and arrogance; just view her Twitter exchange with Yann LeCun. She was clearly out of her league, and doubling down every day with newer and newer antics. She needed to go.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I didn't say that Timnit shouldn't be fired.
  - thu2111 5y ago
    Are you objecting to Google's refusal to let her "unresign" then? Btw plenty of us ex Googlers think Jeff Dean's reputation was enhanced still further by that move. Gebru was acting in crazy ways, she really should have been fired much earlier, but taking the opportunity when she so helpfully presented it seems like a no brainer. Sad that the rest of Google lacks that approach.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      I don't think Google should unresign her. I think it should admit it fired her (technically speaking), and pay her a bunch of money (to make up for the bad handling of the firing). I agree, she should have been fired earlier. However, she was just promoted, which meant she must have had several quarters of excellent perf. I think one thing that would be truly excellent, but won't happen, would be to have Megan Kacholia defend herself by explaining her actions to the wider Google community. In particular: Why was Megan, a person with effectively no research experience, a VP in Google Research and making decisions about research papers being withdrawn? Her lack of experience in the area seems to have led to an exacerbation of tensions. Why did Megan convert an offer to have a discussion about a resignation into an interpretation that Timnit resigned voluntarily, coupled with an accelerated departure (immediate, with termination of all Google services)? Why was Megan pushing so hard to have the paper withdrawn, given that the paper wouldn't be that impactful on Google's reputation, made some useful (if obvious and a bit overstated) points, and wasn't being published in a prominent venue? To Jeff and Megan: to what extent did Jeff support Megan's decision to fire Timnit over a refusal to withdraw a paper, or did his support come after learning Megan had fired Timnit? To what extent did Timnit's previous tweets calling out her employees and mentioning confidential Google Research activities play a role in her firing? Was her discouraging email really a reasonable justification for accelerating her termination? My guess about all of this is that Megan and Jeff decided to fire timnit when timnit posted several negative tweets attacking Jeff and google Research, and used the paper and the email (and vague offer to resign) to justify the firing and they didn't think through the implications of firing a twitterati like Timnit in a roughshod manner. This seems most consistent with all the evidence I've seen.

draw_down 5y ago

Record profits, so clearly their problem is the uppity workers. Sure we want them to be autonomous, we’re not monsters, but why do they have to air their yucky opinions? Why won’t they just shut up?

choppaface 5y ago

tl;dr https://mobile.twitter.com/daiwaka/status/1407011388711608323 https://mobile.twitter.com/daiwaka/status/140701138871160832... Google Execs have an average vote that’s decisively short of “exceeding expectations.” But Google had an additional set of execs go for interviews that gave a more positive vote.

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jstrong 5y ago

slightly unrelated, I used to open nytimes.com articles with a new private browswer session to avoid paywall, but this no longer works. any other ways to avoid registering/paywall to read their articles?

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yellow_lead 5y ago
I use Firefox and time the refresh / hitting the "outline mode" button before the paywall appears.
ForHackernews 5y ago
Have you considered just paying? People on this site often complain about freeloaders wanting software or support without offering anything in return, yet they also prefer to bypass paywalls on content.
- blakesterz 5y ago
  I have seriously considered paying for the NY Times and that's the only site I've considered. I still haven't seen any reason to pay, yet. Seems like I can always find something somewhere else to read, and nothing that's exclusive to The Times has really drawn me in that much, at least not yet. I am aware of the freeloaders thing, and I end up feeling like one sometimes.
- kelnos 5y ago
  The problem that I face is that I don't get $20/mo of value out of any one publication (ok, I guess NYT is $17 per 4 weeks, which is a bizarre billing cycle). I certainly get (more than) $20/mo of value out of "online news" as a whole, but it's spread out, and any given site would probably only get a few dollars a month (and many sub-$1) if allocated what I'd consider fairly. But pretty much no news website will let me subscribe for that little, or will give me a cheap plan that limits me to, say, 10 or 12 articles per month (which would still be overkill for many of the paid sites I'll occasionally click through to). If I were to subscribe to every site where I've bypassed a paywall even once in the last few months (of have just given up without reading), I'd easily be spending over $300 per month. I don't feel like my consumption warrants that price.

robinj6 5y ago

I have little sentiment for Google, but this article seems to be arranged as part of a campaign. The statements of a small number of x-Googlers is taken as a generalization of the company’s sentiment as a whole and is used to seed doubt, while acknowledging very little specific mistakes.

kelnos 5y ago
Unfortunately it feels like this is pretty common for the NYT today: they decide on a conclusion they want to make, and then interview enough people so they can cherry-pick the comments that support their conclusion, and don't bother to present any dissenting viewpoints. It's really a shame; I feel like this transformation happened in the last 5 years or so. Most articles from NYT that I see posted here have this slant.
- ra7 5y ago
  > they decide on a conclusion they want to make, and then interview enough people so they can cherry-pick the comments that support their conclusion, and don't bother to present any dissenting viewpoints. I've said this exact thing in the past about NYT. This seems to be their MO these days and is especially apparent in their international reporting.
- forgingahead 5y ago
  You're spot on with the timing because that's when the scion of the family business took over: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Sulzberger#The_New_York_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Sulzberger#The_New_York_... Along his goals of "doubling digital revenue" and maximising subscriber numbers, the place obviously turned towards clickbait and left-wing cheer-leading. Give the customers what they want - and they definitely don't want to be told their worldview is wrong or that their opinion of certain issues has valid counterpoints. So it's been a huge cratering of credibility and honest reporting.
nitwit005 5y ago
I don't mind the slant if it's clear they understand the issue, but it's clear that's not always the case based on what I've seen shared on Hacker News. I still remember their awkward correction about an article on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/pageoneplus/corrections-august-7-2019.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/pageoneplus/corrections-a...

rejectedandsad 5y ago

I’m confused by the inclusion of the Stochastic Parrot thing. Why did this become such a flashpoint? Did people care about culture wars that happened at HP Labs and Sun in the 90s (I guess the more illustrative point is tha they didn’t)? I don’t see the relevance to profitability or future growth.

visarga 5y ago
The Parrots paper is activism dressed up as research in my opinion. It only complains and offers no solutions. This is bad, that is bad, and that other thing, yes, it's bad...

retskrad 5y ago

I have lived in Silicon Valley for two decades and most people I've talked to see Apple as the most prestigious place to work out of all the FAANG companies. I'm not surprised because Apple has had the fortune of having a visionary founder AND Tim Cook, who is one of the best managers in the world.

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encryptluks2 5y ago
Haha... Apple to me is quite the opposite, more like a cult of personality. I really do not see Apple as visionary. I don't think they are doing anything really special or are market leaders in anyway when it comes to technology.
kelnos 5y ago
Out of the people I know who actually work at Apple, they're either incredibly overworked and constantly teetering on the edge of burnout, or they see Apple's market position as a tool they can use to further some goals of their own. While I'm sure some people do consider working at Apple as high-prestige, that's doesn't seem to be reflected in the employees I know, at least.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  I used to want to work at Apple until I got to know people who work there. Very heavy secrecy + burnout culture, plus weird things like some projects get free meals where others don't.
- Bhilai 5y ago
  This mirrors my impressions from friends and family who work at Apple as well. My friends do get paid well for working there but its quite a stressful place to work.
ping_pong 5y ago
I've lived in Silicon Valley for over 2 decades as well. Until iPhone, Apple was not prestigious at all. I still remember Brass Ring hiring conventions where the Apple hiring booth was completely empty. In fact, until recently, all I've heard is that Apple underpays engineers compared to most other companies. The fact that the stock as gone up ~300x in the last 8 years changed that equation, so everyone shuts up now, but it has historically never been prestigious. I've in fact never heard of Apple being prestigious unless you worked in design, or worked on the iPhone.

ffggvv 5y ago

it doesnt matter who runs google. its literally a money printing monopoly with search. And that will never end. And they can plow that money wherever they want. (even into a furance) and theyll be fine. Especially if you add in youtube money.

spinningslate 5y ago
> its literally a money printing monopoly with search. And that will never end. Until it does. Go back 20 years and you could've written the same thing about Microsoft and end-user computing. Google under Pichai looks increasingly like Microsoft under Balmer. Executing to stellar headline numbers, but increasingly paralyzed in anything other than their one or two anchor products. It took a change at the top to turn Microsoft around. I expect Pichai to go the same way as Balmer.

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jqpabc123 5y ago

I see one big giant crack --- their entire business model is built around data collection and privacy invasion. The fastest way to convince me not to use a product is to put the name "Google" on it.

encryptluks2 5y ago
LOL.. I actually feel much safer using Google than Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.
- nitinreddy88 5y ago
  Instead of LOL, care to explain why?!
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Because on my Google account I can turn off all the history settings, same for YouTube. Despite possibly being invasive with YouTube, they actually allow third party clients like NewPipe and youtube-dl. Google Drive offers some of the best storage and you can encrypt your files, and there is no proof that they are using your storage to spy on you. Google Cloud was also one of the first providers to offer confidential computing. Google also contributes a lot to open source and so Android has a lot of options and different ROMs to use. Compare that to the proprietary OSs like Microsoft and Apple. With Microsoft, no matter what I do they keep uploading my activity history of every App that I open just because I signed into the Microsoft Store to play Minecraft.
    - jqpabc123 5y ago
      Because on my Google account I can turn off all the history settings, same for YouTube. LOL! So with this setting off, Google forgets the IP you use to sign in to your Google Drive and GMail account and doesn't use it to identify and track you across the estimated 80% of web sites that have embedded Google trackers? And you've verified this how? Did they show you their tracking source code?

bpodgursky 5y ago

It might be true, but with the stock at an all-time high (and close to doubling over the past year) I would say that not many people have put their money where the nytime's mouth is.

grumblenum 5y ago

So the NYT editorial board greenlit a hit piece against Google? Well, that's gratitude for you. I hope others learn from this. The reward for bowing to such "prestigious" institutions is getting whipped for not bowing low enough.

goodrubyist 5y ago
It's a news piece, not an editorial.
- grumblenum 5y ago
  The editorial board dictates tone and content of the paper, not just editorial pieces. They determine narratives long in advance and news articles must conform to it. You should not believe that nobody at the NYT considered the effect this story could have on GOOG shareholder value. In all likelihood, that was the only objective, given how little substance there is to the article.

jstrong 5y ago

this article is pretty thin gruel.

adrr 5y ago

Google needs to replace their product management leadership. They have squandered their lead. Google business apps isn’t the top cloud based business platform. I’d pick office365 right now. Gmail/Calendar for businesses hasn’t changed in 10 years. Google cloud has been surpassed by Azure and will be a distant 3rd. Google meets is missing so much functionality that businesses supplement with zoom. I really don’t understand what they are doing with their enterprise offering. They should buy snowflake for Google cloud and slack for business apps to keep them relevant. Like the article mentioned, they should have bought Shopify when it was much cheaper and provided the Google cloud as a place for shopify app developers for running their apps. Shopify has native event bus support for AWS so app developers favor AWS.

schmidp 5y ago
While googles business apps lack in features, office365 seems to be extremely buggy, documents look different online and offline (had the case last week), their authentication is pure horror (multiple accounts with different passwords for the same email address), teams is only logged in to one account at the time, one drive (or how it is called) is always using "significant energy". We actually wanted to switch and bought a few licenses, but after trying it for 2 weeks with a small group of employees we discarded the idea. I was surprised and very much disappointed.
- philsnow 5y ago
  > multiple accounts with different passwords for the same email address Amazon (retail) does this too. My wife's email address can log into two different accounts depending on what password you use.
- ta988 5y ago
  Yes and the synchronization system with parallel editing in office365 is completely buggy compared to google docs, during our trial we lost parts of our test documents...
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ioeru48 5y ago

Google needs to get its Search team into the driver seat. Its the information age. They are the ones who should be leading and laying out a path into the future. Instead, the god damned empire defense crowd is laying out that path, for almost a decade now, and its naturally a road to nowhere. There is no real big vision coming from Google on what is wrong with how info is being mindlessly generated and pumped into people's heads 24x7. They are very proud and happy they index 2 billion 'how to make a boiled egg' videos. WTF are they even enabling? They have no clue because its all driven by empire defense.

swivelmaster 5y ago

Anecdotal, but I've talked to a few people at Google who are happy with the pay and perks but absolutely hate the product management culture. Basically, performance reviews and incentives are structured around doing something with "big impact," so there are a lot of needlessly "ambitious" (quotes intentional) reboots, revamps, redesigns, repackaging, etc. of existing products, mostly so that teams and PM's can say they went big and get a good performance review. The flip side of that is that there's no incentive to fix bugs (and usability issues) in existing stable products, because unless the bug is losing tens of millions of dollars for Google it's considered wasted time from a performance review perspective. This is why Google is constantly relaunching and rebranding products, even making them worse, while neglecting long-running problems in, for example, Gmail. Recently, my main Gmail account was upgraded to the new Chat interface. It actually looks worse (subjectively the new font seems less readable) and has removed the "Pop out to separate window" feature that I used to use all the time. But hey, now the interface has animated transitions and I can forward individual parts of a conversation to an email with one click! Wow!

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UncleMeat 5y ago
People say this all the time, but I've really not seen it. I'm in an org with one of the highest promotion rates in the company, and it is focused primarily on what you describe as missing. I've personally seen people promoted to senior staff for literally fixing problems and buried risks in existing stable systems. I don't know how to address this meme, since it is very clear that managers are telling their reports that this is how things work and leading to this widespread belief, but when I actually go into the promo sessions I don't see this at all.
- swivelmaster 5y ago
  If people say this all the time but you haven't seen it, there are two possibilities: - People are right and your org is an exception - People are wrong and your org is the norm My experience with Google products as a consumer seems to point towards the former. Also, kudos on the Zappa-inspired username! It's not one of his best albums but it's certainly an interesting one.

foobarbazetc 5y ago

It’s not really only Google though… the entire industry has an air of malaise to it that is papered over by stock prices. It’s all so boring.

donmcronald 5y ago
To me it feels like no one in (big) tech is interested in building products _for_ the customer. They're only interested in building products for extracting money from the customer. The idea of "charge what the market will bear" has been taken to an extreme by the tech industry. The combination of venture capital, non-ownership (SaaS everything), adhesive ToS, anit-trust levels of monopolization, etc. all work really hard to get customers locked in and dependent on half-assed garbage with a big feature list. Everyone is building robots that hold you upside down and shake the money from your pockets while calling is SaaS. Boo!

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/3DmfW https://archive.is/3DmfW

andyana 5y ago

Here is an example of what I see from Google these days. I get a notification banner telling me that Hangouts is being replaced by Gmail Chat. This comes a year after a rumor that Hangouts was being shut down. Apparently, that was just a rumor or something. So I continue using Hangouts until now when I'm told it is officially being replaced. Whatever, I think, I'll just switch to Gmail Chat and uninstall Hangouts. Today, I get sent a video from someone still on Hangouts. They fucking play link takes me to the Hangouts page on the play store. I need to install Hangouts to watch the video. You can't make this up.

someonehere 5y ago

Google has a history of product rot. Most notably where I rot the two most expensive pieces of product rot are the Jamboards. We opted not to renew them when COVID hit and now that things are kind of going back to normal, I’ve found Logitech and a few other companies have come out with better products that integrate with existing whiteboards for what we need in conference rooms. Things like the jamboard turn me off of buying Google hardware.