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I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scal

by titzer 5y ago

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  collective systemic greed
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 3grdlurker 5y ago
  Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    // See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them. I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      There are family owned businesses where others try to beat them, but those businesses are so tied to their space that it is hard for others to step in and as these companies don't try to expand too much, they are free to cooperate with anybody, which gives them a beneficial network. However that is heavily industry specific and in tech, where scales are very different only works for very small niches.
    - nl 5y ago
      There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.
      - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
        These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s essentially regressive despite being applied only to wealthy families.
        8note 5y ago
        The owners of public companies dont have to pay the estate tax when they die, as their children inherit the stock? I thought it was for the total value exchanged?
  - a-dub 5y ago
    or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do. that's why we have public benefit corporations.
- icelancer 5y ago
  Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.
    - googthrow234 5y ago
      I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.
      - ido 5y ago
        Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.
        ghaff 5y ago
        Yes. They've stayed small and focused but while AFAIK they're still doing OK, the latest numbers I've seen on them listed about 50 employees. And I'm willing to bet most of them aren't unusually well compensated. I'm also not sure when I last heard Craigslist come up in conversation although I expect especially people in urban areas still use them for classified advertising.
- benzible 5y ago
  Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions. [1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6 https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I thought the tech companies we are talking about do do some very hefty R&D, at least compared to other companies. For example, Amazon plowing all revenue back into expanding for 2 decades, Apple obviously invests quite a bit and just came out with a leap in processors, Google with its many services including Maps and self driving cars, Facebook and VR, etc.
- capableweb 5y ago
  No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.
  - emsy 5y ago
    According to Peter Thiel, Google is a de-facto monopoly in search-engines and online advertising (apart from social media). I think that's an accurate take. They are in this position because of their "winner takes it all" attitude. So to say they would "easily survive" is short sighted as well as ignoring where Google came from.
  - mehrdada 5y ago
    Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. I am not sure if that is called survival. And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.
    - 8note 5y ago
      You could compensate the employees with things other than stock
    - abdabab 5y ago
      > employees would leave due to poor compensation With a gross profit of 100 billion dollars a year [1] they can easily outbid the market compensation if they want to and stay with current revenue. But again how many Jeff Deans can one company need before it calls itself The Man? [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...
- lifeformed 5y ago
  Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    This does not seem too dissimilar to a country or tribe’s leader promising their constituents a better life in the future. And I cannot imagine a country/tribe selecting a leader that does not promise progress and growth over one that does.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. Indeed as one of the richest countries, with global climate change, the responsibility is to lower consumption (which many would see as reduce the standard of living). But maybe the analogy doesn't stretch that far.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        >I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. If it was common, then they would not have gotten to be the richest country in the world in the first place. The same game plays out over and over in nature where the one that fights for resources gets more of it, and while they can choose to stop fighting for it, in the long run they will not be the survivors. Cooperation works best if the goal is maximizing the average return over all participants in the game, but inevitably, tribes will split off and start prioritizing their own populations over others. On a global, national, and even familial scale.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  That’s only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    There are countless examples of companies who used to be at the head of the pack and seemingly not under threat. Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Sears, IBM, Xerox, etc. A common sentiment on this forum is that companies who fail to keep challenging themselves and get complacent on rent seeking from one product/service will eventually lose to an upstart.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  The trillion dollar companies won't be able to survive? They're in danger? I simply cannot muster any sympathy. Actually I think they're not in enough danger. They take things for granted, our attention and private information for example. Denying Google, Facebook those should put some real fear in them.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Is there anything significant about a trillion dollars in 2021? Was it not $10B+ in the 1980s and $100B in the 2000s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0 I do not know what you mean by sympathy, I am just opining on the economic reasons for why successful businesses keep trying to expand, and that is if they do not, then they risk falling behind.
huma 5y ago
When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.
- greatgib 5y ago
  It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.
  - M0r13n 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on that? Why do you think is Gitlab turning evil?
    - greatgib 5y ago
      It is not necessarily evil, but corporate interest led. When it was created, gitlab core value was to be the open source alternative to GitHub. Then, it started to add light premium features. Now, free versions have a lot of frustratingly limited features with nag screens to push you to subscribe. The free core is less and less a priority and less and less sufficient. After the ipo, things will get even worse. Most of new shareholders (Ie owners) are just profit led. It's an investment for them and they will want the net result to grow at whatever cost. Management has no choice else than to follow what shareholders require. So, if it is economically viable, nothing prevent gitlab to stop new versions to be open source if they think that will make them more profitable.
ultrasounder 5y ago
As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it’s too late for you to learn how the “rest of the world” does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Well paying jobs typically don't look for people with experience in specific technologies, rather they look for people with experience in relevant domains. And the domain experience you learn at FAANG is worth a ton, lots of companies wants to be more like FAANG. Example: You are making a search engine, you use technology X. Would you rather hire a person who worked on Google search but didn't work with technology X, or would you want an expert on technology X?
  - puglr 5y ago
    In my recent interviewing cycle I got dinged in most interviews for not being a React expert. Every panel knew going in that my React experience was recent and limited. I have 4+ years of relevant domain experience at a FAANG on my resume. I laughed with interviewers about how every few years the de facto tech stack changes and every team I've ever joined required me to learn completely new (to me) frameworks. Still got dinged. I wish what you're saying was the truth but I think it's very much the minority.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry
hintymad 5y ago
> And scale is simply because greed. This seems over simplified. A large company is a complex system that is shaped by all kinds of forces. I'm not sure we can attribute Google's scale to a single heinous factor
shoto_io 5y ago
Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private. This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?
    - capableweb 5y ago
      > Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis? Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.
      - poisonborz 5y ago
        Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.
        capableweb 5y ago
        Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.
jsemrau 5y ago
Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  In the US, the vast, vast majority of people have effectively no upload capacity and are behind huge CGNATs. I do not see any alternative future until the vast majority of residential dwellings have quality internet connections providing symmetric up and down bandwidth (i.e. fiber to the home) and ipv6. Only then would people be able to roll out peer to peer solutions that bypass the big tech companies.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane. The alternative is to not borrow from the future. Then your country/tribe is at a severe competitive disadvantage on the global playing field.
rurban 5y ago
I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do. My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.
- azornathogron 5y ago
  Microsoft has a pretty good reputation for investing in research too.
- infinitezest 5y ago
  Can you shed some light on what the right and wrong incentive structure looks like?
simonh 5y ago
If Google doesn't take that next $200bn share in ad revenue over the next 5 years, where else will that revenue go? What about the additional $400bn of potential growth 5 years after that? Somebody in the online ad space is going to eat that conventional ad revenue, or "build that value", or whatever we want to call it. If it isn't Google it will be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple, or Tiktok, etc. What happens to Google if Facebook has a $1tn online ad business in 10 years time, and Google's ad business is still 'only' worth their current $200bn? This is absolutely about survival. In a super high-growth industry, you grow or you die.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > This is absolutely about survival. You grow or you die. How? With that argument, neither Facebook nor any other ad networks would already be dead since Google basically owns the space already, but they are not, they are also pulling in huge profits, just not as huge as Google, but they are still well off.
  - simonh 5y ago
    The others are surviving because they are growing too. If they stall out and stop growing, they will become a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as the rest of it grows around them. They would become less and less relevant, and therefore find it harder to get new business. In a high growth business there is no stable static strategy. Staying the same is functionally equivalent to shrinking, in terms of scale effects and relevance, as the rest of the market dwarfs you. As long as you keep growing, you can keep relevant. If facebook had a $1tn ad business and Google still had $200bn, would Google's business actually be the same as it is now? Would they still be able to hire the cream of graduates? Would they find it as easy to replace lost business from natural attrition with new clients? Would they find it as easy to launch new ad products and get attention for them?
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Do you have sort of research/statistics that backs up your statements or are you just echoing what you've heard others say about these "high growth businesses"?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andi999 5y ago
Let's pray they don't start to manufacture paperclips.
CheezeIt 5y ago
Revenue growth means customer growth which means more people benefit from google’s product (advertising). This is not some sort of bad thing.

by titzer 5y ago

lotsofpulp 5y ago

> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

bsedlm 5y ago
collective systemic greed
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
3grdlurker 5y ago
Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  // See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them. I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    There are family owned businesses where others try to beat them, but those businesses are so tied to their space that it is hard for others to step in and as these companies don't try to expand too much, they are free to cooperate with anybody, which gives them a beneficial network. However that is heavily industry specific and in tech, where scales are very different only works for very small niches.
  - nl 5y ago
    There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.
    - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
      These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s essentially regressive despite being applied only to wealthy families.
      - 8note 5y ago
        The owners of public companies dont have to pay the estate tax when they die, as their children inherit the stock? I thought it was for the total value exchanged?
- a-dub 5y ago
  or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do. that's why we have public benefit corporations.
icelancer 5y ago
Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.
  - googthrow234 5y ago
    I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.
    - ido 5y ago
      Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Yes. They've stayed small and focused but while AFAIK they're still doing OK, the latest numbers I've seen on them listed about 50 employees. And I'm willing to bet most of them aren't unusually well compensated. I'm also not sure when I last heard Craigslist come up in conversation although I expect especially people in urban areas still use them for classified advertising.
benzible 5y ago
Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions. [1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6 https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I thought the tech companies we are talking about do do some very hefty R&D, at least compared to other companies. For example, Amazon plowing all revenue back into expanding for 2 decades, Apple obviously invests quite a bit and just came out with a leap in processors, Google with its many services including Maps and self driving cars, Facebook and VR, etc.
capableweb 5y ago
No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.
- emsy 5y ago
  According to Peter Thiel, Google is a de-facto monopoly in search-engines and online advertising (apart from social media). I think that's an accurate take. They are in this position because of their "winner takes it all" attitude. So to say they would "easily survive" is short sighted as well as ignoring where Google came from.
- mehrdada 5y ago
  Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. I am not sure if that is called survival. And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.
  - 8note 5y ago
    You could compensate the employees with things other than stock
  - abdabab 5y ago
    > employees would leave due to poor compensation With a gross profit of 100 billion dollars a year [1] they can easily outbid the market compensation if they want to and stay with current revenue. But again how many Jeff Deans can one company need before it calls itself The Man? [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...
lifeformed 5y ago
Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  This does not seem too dissimilar to a country or tribe’s leader promising their constituents a better life in the future. And I cannot imagine a country/tribe selecting a leader that does not promise progress and growth over one that does.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. Indeed as one of the richest countries, with global climate change, the responsibility is to lower consumption (which many would see as reduce the standard of living). But maybe the analogy doesn't stretch that far.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      >I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. If it was common, then they would not have gotten to be the richest country in the world in the first place. The same game plays out over and over in nature where the one that fights for resources gets more of it, and while they can choose to stop fighting for it, in the long run they will not be the survivors. Cooperation works best if the goal is maximizing the average return over all participants in the game, but inevitably, tribes will split off and start prioritizing their own populations over others. On a global, national, and even familial scale.
Aeolun 5y ago
That’s only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  There are countless examples of companies who used to be at the head of the pack and seemingly not under threat. Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Sears, IBM, Xerox, etc. A common sentiment on this forum is that companies who fail to keep challenging themselves and get complacent on rent seeking from one product/service will eventually lose to an upstart.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
The trillion dollar companies won't be able to survive? They're in danger? I simply cannot muster any sympathy. Actually I think they're not in enough danger. They take things for granted, our attention and private information for example. Denying Google, Facebook those should put some real fear in them.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Is there anything significant about a trillion dollars in 2021? Was it not $10B+ in the 1980s and $100B in the 2000s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0 I do not know what you mean by sympathy, I am just opining on the economic reasons for why successful businesses keep trying to expand, and that is if they do not, then they risk falling behind.

huma 5y ago

When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.

greatgib 5y ago
It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.
- M0r13n 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on that? Why do you think is Gitlab turning evil?
  - greatgib 5y ago
    It is not necessarily evil, but corporate interest led. When it was created, gitlab core value was to be the open source alternative to GitHub. Then, it started to add light premium features. Now, free versions have a lot of frustratingly limited features with nag screens to push you to subscribe. The free core is less and less a priority and less and less sufficient. After the ipo, things will get even worse. Most of new shareholders (Ie owners) are just profit led. It's an investment for them and they will want the net result to grow at whatever cost. Management has no choice else than to follow what shareholders require. So, if it is economically viable, nothing prevent gitlab to stop new versions to be open source if they think that will make them more profitable.

ultrasounder 5y ago

As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it’s too late for you to learn how the “rest of the world” does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.

Jensson 5y ago
Well paying jobs typically don't look for people with experience in specific technologies, rather they look for people with experience in relevant domains. And the domain experience you learn at FAANG is worth a ton, lots of companies wants to be more like FAANG. Example: You are making a search engine, you use technology X. Would you rather hire a person who worked on Google search but didn't work with technology X, or would you want an expert on technology X?
- puglr 5y ago
  In my recent interviewing cycle I got dinged in most interviews for not being a React expert. Every panel knew going in that my React experience was recent and limited. I have 4+ years of relevant domain experience at a FAANG on my resume. I laughed with interviewers about how every few years the de facto tech stack changes and every team I've ever joined required me to learn completely new (to me) frameworks. Still got dinged. I wish what you're saying was the truth but I think it's very much the minority.
dilyevsky 5y ago
HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry

hintymad 5y ago

> And scale is simply because greed. This seems over simplified. A large company is a complex system that is shaped by all kinds of forces. I'm not sure we can attribute Google's scale to a single heinous factor

shoto_io 5y ago

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private. This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

dilyevsky 5y ago
There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis? Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.
    - poisonborz 5y ago
      Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.

jsemrau 5y ago

Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
In the US, the vast, vast majority of people have effectively no upload capacity and are behind huge CGNATs. I do not see any alternative future until the vast majority of residential dwellings have quality internet connections providing symmetric up and down bandwidth (i.e. fiber to the home) and ipv6. Only then would people be able to roll out peer to peer solutions that bypass the big tech companies.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane. The alternative is to not borrow from the future. Then your country/tribe is at a severe competitive disadvantage on the global playing field.

rurban 5y ago

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do. My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

azornathogron 5y ago
Microsoft has a pretty good reputation for investing in research too.
infinitezest 5y ago
Can you shed some light on what the right and wrong incentive structure looks like?

simonh 5y ago

If Google doesn't take that next $200bn share in ad revenue over the next 5 years, where else will that revenue go? What about the additional $400bn of potential growth 5 years after that? Somebody in the online ad space is going to eat that conventional ad revenue, or "build that value", or whatever we want to call it. If it isn't Google it will be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple, or Tiktok, etc. What happens to Google if Facebook has a $1tn online ad business in 10 years time, and Google's ad business is still 'only' worth their current $200bn? This is absolutely about survival. In a super high-growth industry, you grow or you die.

capableweb 5y ago
> This is absolutely about survival. You grow or you die. How? With that argument, neither Facebook nor any other ad networks would already be dead since Google basically owns the space already, but they are not, they are also pulling in huge profits, just not as huge as Google, but they are still well off.
- simonh 5y ago
  The others are surviving because they are growing too. If they stall out and stop growing, they will become a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as the rest of it grows around them. They would become less and less relevant, and therefore find it harder to get new business. In a high growth business there is no stable static strategy. Staying the same is functionally equivalent to shrinking, in terms of scale effects and relevance, as the rest of the market dwarfs you. As long as you keep growing, you can keep relevant. If facebook had a $1tn ad business and Google still had $200bn, would Google's business actually be the same as it is now? Would they still be able to hire the cream of graduates? Would they find it as easy to replace lost business from natural attrition with new clients? Would they find it as easy to launch new ad products and get attention for them?
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Do you have sort of research/statistics that backs up your statements or are you just echoing what you've heard others say about these "high growth businesses"?

deleted 5y ago

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andi999 5y ago

Let's pray they don't start to manufacture paperclips.

CheezeIt 5y ago

Revenue growth means customer growth which means more people benefit from google’s product (advertising). This is not some sort of bad thing.