6 ms·

I saw a similar situation once where a funded company hired "the smartest" people with the downside that they felt they had to let them do what they wanted to b

I saw a similar situation once where a funded company hired "the smartest" people with the downside that they felt they had to let them do what they wanted to be competitive. The downside was you got people who wanted to do what they wanted instead of work on business-relevant stuff (almost with the kind of academic allergy to something "applied") which ends up being a pretty entitled, political and disagreeable group, and that once you've given people the freedom, it's almost impossible to go back and ask them to do something.

nyokodo 4y ago
> it's almost impossible to go back But, if they’re all working on business irrelevant things it’s unusually low risk to fire them all for cause and hire new employees.
- version_five 4y ago
  In the example I saw, they had convinced investors that this critical mass of "geniuses" would eventually usher in profitability somehow. I think that's part of the idea with google as well, hire the best let them work and they'll do great things. Just firing them admits that was a bad idea, I'd expect making it not so simple
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    > I think that's part of the idea with google as well, hire the best let them work and they'll do great things. Google also has big impact focused culture, if employee doesn't produce business relevant impact, he is not rewarded (bonuses, promotion).
    - version_five 4y ago
      If that is (and had historically been) true, what is the article about then, or do you believe it's inaccurate? The whole thesis is that people are now being asked to be productive who were not previously held to productivity Edit: or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk?
      - dekhn 4y ago
        Google is an incredibly complicated situation. Yes, it's impact-driven. But many other variables affect how your impact is perceived. For amusing reasons, over the past decade, the number of people who can and want to work on the core parts of google3- the load balancer/front end/web server/search/ads- has been dropping. No CS grad wants to work on a 15 year old web server that is mostly patches to deal with odd cases and a million tests that fail if you look at a load bearing comment oddly. The dwindling pool of experts has seized the memes of production (ha) and has the ability to work less because they are absolutely needed. The best anecdote I ever heard from an SRE was "the VP was chagrined when I told them it didn't matter I was in a nerf war, because nothing was broken or needed to be fixed, but they still saw my point and let me continue" (I used to work in an SRE area that overlapped with an SVP's preferred meeting room so Susan Wojcicki was always getting pinged by a rogue nerf bullet). As for slackers? Sure, when I joined around 2008 there were definitely folks who were slacking off. in fact they got rid of sabbatical because so many people were taking it then coming back and quitting.
        dc-programmer 4y ago
        Going to have to steal “load bearing comment”
        MomoXenosaga 4y ago
        Nothing wrong with slacking off unless you have a real job as a firefighter or ER nurse.
        gammarator 4y ago
        I once walked through a park on a fine spring day and saw an EMT team playing whiffleball using their stretcher as a backstop. Great way to wait for a call if you ask me.
        Brian_K_White 4y ago
        Considering their low pay and high responsibility, I would never take away what little they have such as a little park time.
    - ceeplusplus 4y ago
      Google has a big focus on technical excellence and complexity. Facebook is the one with the impact focused culture. You need to get your PRs approved by language experts at G, while at FB people frequently ship things that are terribly written and have few tests. Anywhere where there are committees that decide who gets promoted are not impact focused.
      - notacoward 4y ago
        I have bad news for you, then: Facebook, which you laud as being impact driven, does exactly this. They call them "calibrations" but I've been in them and I can assure you that they're committees with all that implies.
        ceeplusplus 4y ago
        Oh they certainly still do have some bureaucracy, but you will never see an L3 at Google being promoted to L5 in 1 year whereas that is a (very rare) possibility at FB.
        UncleMeat 4y ago
        I specifically know a person who was double promoted from 3 to 5 in their second full cycle at Google. Just over one year.
    - not2b 4y ago
      Except that they over-reward "design a completely new project in market X" where they already have a product, and under-reward fixing the existing product in a backward-compatible way. That means customers can't count on Google supporting anything long-term.
    - moandcompany 4y ago
      > Google also has big impact focused culture, if employee doesn't produce business relevant impact, he is not rewarded (bonuses, promotion). Xoogler here. I see how people may view Google as having an impact-focused culture, but I would argue that Google has a perception-of-impact focused culture. Google historically has sought to hire clever people-- clever people that understand and care about optimization. It should be no surprise that Googlers also applied their cleverness to optimize their behavior toward what they understood about the reward system called perf/promo (some of those understandings weren't necessarily correct, but when enough people share an understanding or behavior, correct or not, it can have a reflexive effect on the system itself). Google has reached a critical mass point where values it cultivated in its people through these reward systems now drive the culture and common behavior. There are a few major components to this: Perceived Impact: Perf/promo-optimizing Googlers optimized for things that they understood or believed to be perceived by promotion committees as "impactful." This does not mean that those things are actually impactful, but perceived as impactful. Impact isn't Technical Skill: What counts as "impact" and the need for impact varies by an employee's ladder (job family) and their level. Generally for individual contributor SWEs, levels were meant to be representative of an individual's technical skill/ability and leadership. Generally, assessing and gating a technical individual contributor's performance rating and promotion based on business impact doesn't lead to fair or correct outcomes for the person when the business impact isn't associated or driven by that individual's work. Also, from the reviewer's side, a person's work/contributions generally needs to be viewable as the driving factor for the impact portrayed. This creates a bias toward things that can be seen as 'technically complex' or 'technically challenging.' Perceivability and Overemphasis on Visibility/Measurability: Many important things in life and engineering are not easily measurable, nor can the explanation of how to appreciate the "why this matters" be condensed into ~300 words. You have likely had scenarios in life where your intuition, experience, or judgment for what the right or good thing to do made something obvious for you, but the explanation would probably take too many words to fit into a promotion packet or a few minutes during an short interview, so you'd have to select obviously understandable and relatable examples when sharing with others -- This drives a bias toward doing things that can be easily perceived and visible to group of reviewers in a calibration and promotion committee. Lowest Common Denominators: "Perf" (performance review) ratings and Promotion are separate processes. Performance ratings are recommended by managers, and calibrated/adjudicated amongst a set of managers from the same calibration group, typically people from your own team or adjacent teams. Promotion nominations are adjudicated by small committees of ladder (job family) representatives drawn from across the company (this was later changed to representatives across the person's Product Area/Division as the company got bigger). Sometimes the important things for a person to do are contextually related to the dynamics, circumstances, or needs of the local organization, but those very things wouldn't be appreciated or understood by a person in a similar role elsewhere (see previous paragraph), so a person often has to make a tradeoff on where to apply their time -- doing the right thing for the team/organization, or doing something that could be more generally perceived as impactful by a committee of people that don't know you, probably wouldn't appreciate why fixing ___/paying off technical debt/etc was important, and might not understand that the nature of your work is very different where you are than in other teams/orgs/product areas. Overburdened and Sometimes Lazy Reviewers: Calibration group participants aren't volunteers, but promotion committee members are. Both groups often have more packets to evaluate and assess than they have time to commit while also doing their regular jobs. In "perf" and the promotion process, the person being reviewed typically has to author their own statements for why their work represents the characteristics of strong performance for their level and/or the next level -- those statements can often be a lot, or hard, to read. Checking and verifying that a launch happened and that a person had associated code (CLs) and design docs is a lot quicker and easier than reading through a bunch of code, design docs, etc and trying to verify the "impact." So you could imagine why "I launched _______" becomes a common focus for perf/promotion optimizers, and a common understanding amongst the larger community on what's important to be rewarded...
hotpotamus 4y ago
I wonder if the Google Graveyard is full of business-relevant stuff or personal projects. Either way, it's funny to think that a more productive Google might just mean more tombstones.
- version_five 4y ago
  Well even if 1% of projects become profitable or valuable and the rest get killed, more tombstones should mean more value overall (Edit: what's the objection to this comment? Usually I can tell, here I have no idea)
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    That is if you don't count the cost of them or the possible damage to the brand that the killed projects might result in.
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      Yeah you're right nobody is using anything Google makes
      - viscanti 4y ago
        It's possible for there to be damage to a brand without it sending overall usage to zero. Maybe someone would be skeptical of future social networks or URL shorteners or news reading apps or video chat apps from Google. It's conceivable that some of those (or any of a number of other failed products) could keep them from getting adoption elsewhere in the future.
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        I'm not sure how to answer this. Do you really believe you addressed what I wrote with a logically sound rebuttal? I would be happy to try to explain my position if you were making a genuine attempt.
kidfiji 4y ago
Isn't this kind of how Valve's (Steam) corporate structure is set up?
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Exactly.
- namelessoracle 4y ago
  Valve has been called out as fairly dysfunctional. They havent made any quality games in awhile. The last major project they got out the door was what the handheld device? That they are taking losses on? And how much of that was contracted out?
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    Steamdeck, Alyx, SteamOS, Proton
  - swalsh 4y ago
    Also, the index hardware kind sucks (ive had constant hardware issues, and quest 2 is kind of superior in every category that isnt FOV). Facebook is proving to iterate on VR much better, despite Valve taking VR seriously for several years.
    - urthor 4y ago
      I can only speculate. I assumed Valve decided that competing witu literally Apple, and Facebook, for VR headware wasn't clever.
- lamp987 4y ago
  yes and they dont produce anything anymore, only collect free money from Steam that they created many years ago. makes you think...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    They can’t even finish the team fortress comic. I check once a year.
oneepic 4y ago
IBM I believe kept a research group around for 2 years and let them work on whatever they wanted. Results? Basically nothing. So they disbanded the group.
- not2b 4y ago
  IBM still has a research group. Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off. AT&T I believe kept a research group for much longer than that and they only invented or co-invented the transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, information theory, Unix, the C language, and the photovoltaic cell.
  - trelane 4y ago
    > Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off Almost like research is not a guaranteed thing. Kinda like you're trying to figure out the unknown.
    - not2b 4y ago
      So is venture capitalism; it's expected that most bets don't pay off and money is made because, if the VC makes good choices, some will pay off hugely. I think it's a matter of hiring the right people and managing them well.
      - trelane 4y ago
        in my experience, management is the problem rather than a hello, let alone the solution
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    My understanding was that Bell labs was full of researchers from wartime labs. These researchers were used to freedom, quick iteration and a focus on application to wartime efforts. I think it would be hard to replicate this with modern day researchers. There just isn't the same pressure or importance that wartime provides.

nyokodo 4y ago

> it's almost impossible to go back But, if they’re all working on business irrelevant things it’s unusually low risk to fire them all for cause and hire new employees.

version_five 4y ago
In the example I saw, they had convinced investors that this critical mass of "geniuses" would eventually usher in profitability somehow. I think that's part of the idea with google as well, hire the best let them work and they'll do great things. Just firing them admits that was a bad idea, I'd expect making it not so simple
- riku_iki 4y ago
  > I think that's part of the idea with google as well, hire the best let them work and they'll do great things. Google also has big impact focused culture, if employee doesn't produce business relevant impact, he is not rewarded (bonuses, promotion).
  - version_five 4y ago
    If that is (and had historically been) true, what is the article about then, or do you believe it's inaccurate? The whole thesis is that people are now being asked to be productive who were not previously held to productivity Edit: or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk?
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Google is an incredibly complicated situation. Yes, it's impact-driven. But many other variables affect how your impact is perceived. For amusing reasons, over the past decade, the number of people who can and want to work on the core parts of google3- the load balancer/front end/web server/search/ads- has been dropping. No CS grad wants to work on a 15 year old web server that is mostly patches to deal with odd cases and a million tests that fail if you look at a load bearing comment oddly. The dwindling pool of experts has seized the memes of production (ha) and has the ability to work less because they are absolutely needed. The best anecdote I ever heard from an SRE was "the VP was chagrined when I told them it didn't matter I was in a nerf war, because nothing was broken or needed to be fixed, but they still saw my point and let me continue" (I used to work in an SRE area that overlapped with an SVP's preferred meeting room so Susan Wojcicki was always getting pinged by a rogue nerf bullet). As for slackers? Sure, when I joined around 2008 there were definitely folks who were slacking off. in fact they got rid of sabbatical because so many people were taking it then coming back and quitting.
      - dc-programmer 4y ago
        Going to have to steal “load bearing comment”
      - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
        Nothing wrong with slacking off unless you have a real job as a firefighter or ER nurse.
        gammarator 4y ago
        I once walked through a park on a fine spring day and saw an EMT team playing whiffleball using their stretcher as a backstop. Great way to wait for a call if you ask me.
        Brian_K_White 4y ago
        Considering their low pay and high responsibility, I would never take away what little they have such as a little park time.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    Google has a big focus on technical excellence and complexity. Facebook is the one with the impact focused culture. You need to get your PRs approved by language experts at G, while at FB people frequently ship things that are terribly written and have few tests. Anywhere where there are committees that decide who gets promoted are not impact focused.
    - notacoward 4y ago
      I have bad news for you, then: Facebook, which you laud as being impact driven, does exactly this. They call them "calibrations" but I've been in them and I can assure you that they're committees with all that implies.
      - ceeplusplus 4y ago
        Oh they certainly still do have some bureaucracy, but you will never see an L3 at Google being promoted to L5 in 1 year whereas that is a (very rare) possibility at FB.
        UncleMeat 4y ago
        I specifically know a person who was double promoted from 3 to 5 in their second full cycle at Google. Just over one year.
  - not2b 4y ago
    Except that they over-reward "design a completely new project in market X" where they already have a product, and under-reward fixing the existing product in a backward-compatible way. That means customers can't count on Google supporting anything long-term.
  - moandcompany 4y ago
    > Google also has big impact focused culture, if employee doesn't produce business relevant impact, he is not rewarded (bonuses, promotion). Xoogler here. I see how people may view Google as having an impact-focused culture, but I would argue that Google has a perception-of-impact focused culture. Google historically has sought to hire clever people-- clever people that understand and care about optimization. It should be no surprise that Googlers also applied their cleverness to optimize their behavior toward what they understood about the reward system called perf/promo (some of those understandings weren't necessarily correct, but when enough people share an understanding or behavior, correct or not, it can have a reflexive effect on the system itself). Google has reached a critical mass point where values it cultivated in its people through these reward systems now drive the culture and common behavior. There are a few major components to this: Perceived Impact: Perf/promo-optimizing Googlers optimized for things that they understood or believed to be perceived by promotion committees as "impactful." This does not mean that those things are actually impactful, but perceived as impactful. Impact isn't Technical Skill: What counts as "impact" and the need for impact varies by an employee's ladder (job family) and their level. Generally for individual contributor SWEs, levels were meant to be representative of an individual's technical skill/ability and leadership. Generally, assessing and gating a technical individual contributor's performance rating and promotion based on business impact doesn't lead to fair or correct outcomes for the person when the business impact isn't associated or driven by that individual's work. Also, from the reviewer's side, a person's work/contributions generally needs to be viewable as the driving factor for the impact portrayed. This creates a bias toward things that can be seen as 'technically complex' or 'technically challenging.' Perceivability and Overemphasis on Visibility/Measurability: Many important things in life and engineering are not easily measurable, nor can the explanation of how to appreciate the "why this matters" be condensed into ~300 words. You have likely had scenarios in life where your intuition, experience, or judgment for what the right or good thing to do made something obvious for you, but the explanation would probably take too many words to fit into a promotion packet or a few minutes during an short interview, so you'd have to select obviously understandable and relatable examples when sharing with others -- This drives a bias toward doing things that can be easily perceived and visible to group of reviewers in a calibration and promotion committee. Lowest Common Denominators: "Perf" (performance review) ratings and Promotion are separate processes. Performance ratings are recommended by managers, and calibrated/adjudicated amongst a set of managers from the same calibration group, typically people from your own team or adjacent teams. Promotion nominations are adjudicated by small committees of ladder (job family) representatives drawn from across the company (this was later changed to representatives across the person's Product Area/Division as the company got bigger). Sometimes the important things for a person to do are contextually related to the dynamics, circumstances, or needs of the local organization, but those very things wouldn't be appreciated or understood by a person in a similar role elsewhere (see previous paragraph), so a person often has to make a tradeoff on where to apply their time -- doing the right thing for the team/organization, or doing something that could be more generally perceived as impactful by a committee of people that don't know you, probably wouldn't appreciate why fixing ___/paying off technical debt/etc was important, and might not understand that the nature of your work is very different where you are than in other teams/orgs/product areas. Overburdened and Sometimes Lazy Reviewers: Calibration group participants aren't volunteers, but promotion committee members are. Both groups often have more packets to evaluate and assess than they have time to commit while also doing their regular jobs. In "perf" and the promotion process, the person being reviewed typically has to author their own statements for why their work represents the characteristics of strong performance for their level and/or the next level -- those statements can often be a lot, or hard, to read. Checking and verifying that a launch happened and that a person had associated code (CLs) and design docs is a lot quicker and easier than reading through a bunch of code, design docs, etc and trying to verify the "impact." So you could imagine why "I launched _______" becomes a common focus for perf/promotion optimizers, and a common understanding amongst the larger community on what's important to be rewarded...

hotpotamus 4y ago

I wonder if the Google Graveyard is full of business-relevant stuff or personal projects. Either way, it's funny to think that a more productive Google might just mean more tombstones.

version_five 4y ago
Well even if 1% of projects become profitable or valuable and the rest get killed, more tombstones should mean more value overall (Edit: what's the objection to this comment? Usually I can tell, here I have no idea)
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  That is if you don't count the cost of them or the possible damage to the brand that the killed projects might result in.
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    Yeah you're right nobody is using anything Google makes
    - viscanti 4y ago
      It's possible for there to be damage to a brand without it sending overall usage to zero. Maybe someone would be skeptical of future social networks or URL shorteners or news reading apps or video chat apps from Google. It's conceivable that some of those (or any of a number of other failed products) could keep them from getting adoption elsewhere in the future.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      I'm not sure how to answer this. Do you really believe you addressed what I wrote with a logically sound rebuttal? I would be happy to try to explain my position if you were making a genuine attempt.

kidfiji 4y ago

Isn't this kind of how Valve's (Steam) corporate structure is set up?

xwolfi 4y ago
Exactly.
namelessoracle 4y ago
Valve has been called out as fairly dysfunctional. They havent made any quality games in awhile. The last major project they got out the door was what the handheld device? That they are taking losses on? And how much of that was contracted out?
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Steamdeck, Alyx, SteamOS, Proton
- swalsh 4y ago
  Also, the index hardware kind sucks (ive had constant hardware issues, and quest 2 is kind of superior in every category that isnt FOV). Facebook is proving to iterate on VR much better, despite Valve taking VR seriously for several years.
  - urthor 4y ago
    I can only speculate. I assumed Valve decided that competing witu literally Apple, and Facebook, for VR headware wasn't clever.
lamp987 4y ago
yes and they dont produce anything anymore, only collect free money from Steam that they created many years ago. makes you think...
- bombcar 4y ago
  They can’t even finish the team fortress comic. I check once a year.

oneepic 4y ago

IBM I believe kept a research group around for 2 years and let them work on whatever they wanted. Results? Basically nothing. So they disbanded the group.

not2b 4y ago
IBM still has a research group. Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off. AT&T I believe kept a research group for much longer than that and they only invented or co-invented the transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, information theory, Unix, the C language, and the photovoltaic cell.
- trelane 4y ago
  > Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off Almost like research is not a guaranteed thing. Kinda like you're trying to figure out the unknown.
  - not2b 4y ago
    So is venture capitalism; it's expected that most bets don't pay off and money is made because, if the VC makes good choices, some will pay off hugely. I think it's a matter of hiring the right people and managing them well.
    - trelane 4y ago
      in my experience, management is the problem rather than a hello, let alone the solution
- brutusborn 4y ago
  My understanding was that Bell labs was full of researchers from wartime labs. These researchers were used to freedom, quick iteration and a focus on application to wartime efforts. I think it would be hard to replicate this with modern day researchers. There just isn't the same pressure or importance that wartime provides.