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The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can some

The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago. I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me what that is.

snek_case 4y ago
It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?
tmpz22 4y ago
The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those. If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.
UncleMeat 4y ago
The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages." It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.
- tomp 4y ago
  "GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great servers to the platform."
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Unlike Stadia, I do actually think that killing GCP would destroy the company. So I don't expect the same end outcome.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Right, they're trapped in a terrible position where it's sucking the company dry of its profits while also being necessary to continue or they will lose all credibility with enterprise and developers forever. That said, they could shut down Verily and save some $1B/year.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        The thing that is bizarre to me is that Google has absolute shitloads of money. 120B+ in the bank. Megabillions in profit each quarter. Like, they could buy Nintendo for less than half of their cash on hand. I understand that the market demands infinite growth but internally it feels like horseshit to see the ridiculous numbers and also get told that basically nothing is high priority enough to get funded.
        lmm 4y ago
        Nothing is high priority enough to get funded because they have a firehose of money coming out of ads, compared to which nothing looks like a good enough opportunity.
        gsibble 4y ago
        Exactly. The IRR in investing more into ad platforms for Google is still higher than any other project so they keep investing in it and increasing their ad revenue. Alongside Meta, they have a duopoly (monopoly?) on that market for now so they are just milking it for all its worth. You don't just build stuff for the sake of it. It has to be a better investment than what you currently have, and Google doesn't have anything better than doubling and tripling down on ads.
myko 4y ago
"More wood, fewer arrows" has destroyed the longevity of Google as a company for anything beyond search/ads Alphabet seems to have been a mistake, too. Instead of shielding their bets they flounder and wither. Just terrible strategic thinking.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I’m not sure what bets they should have better shielded. Probably social generally but that seems so counter their DNA.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ksec 4y ago
>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it. It is funny I was extremely sceptical but I remember all the hype around Sundar Pichai becoming CEO and how it would improve Google. Repeating something similar to what Satya Nadella did to Microsoft. And it wasn't media / VC or submarine PR article hype, it was real hype on HN, by Silicon Valley fellows. And Google wasn't considered "evil" back then, even though nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  > The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it. Sure, but you don't get a company working in concert or particularly well if all you have is "go make money"
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is earning as much money for himself (into his own bank account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if the company is working in concert etc. when Google can coast on ad revenue for many years. 1. Get stock grants 2. Sell it as soon as it vests 3. Apres moi le deluge.
- flavius29663 4y ago
  > nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public. I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.
  - tektekX 4y ago
    At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
His goal is to keep the peace. And he's good at it. It's a little bit "game of thrones" in there.
- bigiain 4y ago
  You you’re saying he’s Tyrion Lannister? That sorta checks out…
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    Lol no no, I think Tyrion drinks a lot more than Sundar... and Sundar certainly doesn't seem like the womanizing type either. But hey, I didn't know him personally so who knows. Maybe closer to Varys..?
hintymad 4y ago
I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact. In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.
- vosper 4y ago
  > The only metric that most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.
kodah 4y ago
imo, your eye is on the wrong ball. Google died when it's founders moved their attention to Alphabet. Google has moved from a bespoke kitchen to the catering kitchen that keeps the lights on for Alphabet while they build a strategy.
- usrusr 4y ago
  But how much "alphabet" is there still left, other than Google and YouTube? In hindsight it almost seems as if alphabet was deliberately set up as a pasture for the various doomed "moonshots" to die more quietly, with less impact on the main brand.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    What moonshot--at least that is known about--is possibly transformative at Alphabet/Google scale? Waymo seems increasingly unlikely both in terms of time-scale and differentiation in a crowded field. And what else is there?
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Loon could have made them the ISP for the developing world.
    - pb7 4y ago
      Waymo is very far ahead of the competition. It may be hard to compare given all the fly-by-night competitors but it has had many more years in development and the result is more dependable.
- lupire 4y ago
  The founders retired in all but name only almost 10 years ago.
obviouslynotme 4y ago
It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades. Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.
- hintymad 4y ago
  Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.
- andybak 4y ago
  > Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.
  - akmarinov 4y ago
    Both are nice, but very niche. Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.
    - almenon 4y ago
oofbey 4y ago
> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? I'd say he's trying not to be remembered as the "Steve Ballmer" of Google. You know - that second-run CEO who drove the company into the ground while keeping the wall street numbers looking good. Cuz that's exactly where he's heading right now. I think he knows he needs to fundamentally change the culture of the company. He's been making public statements as such. He knows it's a problem that Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done. And despite this obvious rot, most of the world (like everybody here who dreams of a google job) still reveres Google as an idyllic place to work. Which makes it all the harder for the company to admit to itself that anything is wrong. Cultural change is really hard. And it's not at all clear that he's got what it takes to do it successfully. Googlers are so pampered that any attempt to push them out of their comfort zone is going to get serious pushback. I say this as a former googler. There was a hilarious post on HN not long ago which I can't find where a googler said something to the effect of "no way in hell my manager is gonna make me work." The entire company is built around solving HARD problems, not USEFUL problems. Obviously they've pulled off a lot of truly amazing things, but that difference is pretty important when your company's entire revenue stream is still coming from key insights made in the late 1990s. To me it's clear they need to change their promotion criteria, which solidifies this and drives so much of people's energy and bad patterns. But the arrogance built into the culture of "solving the world's hardest problems" means that any changes there are likely to insult the fragile egos of all those snowflakes and cause them to go on strike or make the good ones just leave.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  He structured it as Alphabet. As in 26 different companies. Google can't VC new projects with a 50 billion to play with in excess/above line revenue to fund them a year? How does google not have self driving car revenue? They should have highway driving (as in trucks on superhighways) solved 10 years ago and been rolling in money. How does google not have a competitive IaaS offering? How does google not have THREE competitive IaaS offerings? Buy one or two, and have them compete against each other internally and externally. Why doesn't google have a competitive Desktop OS based on some combination of Linux / Android / Chrome and Macbook pro level hardware? Their AI products are all dystopian. ChatsChatsChatsChatsChatsChats. Why didn't they buy Java/Sun. Stupid. Why don't they buy Keybase? Actually don't then the servers will be shut down. Silicon Valley is too woke? Start new branches. What is the biggest recent success of Google? Chrome. Why not repeat that a dozen times over? Take important Open Source software, and make it good, and don't make it utterly dystopian until 10 years later. Linux Desktop? Open Office? WINE? Steam clone on Linux? You know, why not have a hardware division that can deliver? For IoT, Google Glasses, an actual decent phone, self driving sensors. Be good at software. Be good at hardware. What a clown show.
ginger2016 4y ago
I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise. Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      "scale and backing?" The just ended it because it didn't scale.
      - bigiain 4y ago
        I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?
madeofpalk 4y ago
On the other hand, Google still just prints money with ads. Everything else is just a talent retention program. 'Success hides all problems', but exactly what real problems does Google have making money?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The fact that it can't keep doing it forever, and its investors expect that if Google is going to keep expanding its headcount and keep spending tons of money that it will produce results. Nobody would mind if Google just printed money with ads. That is what the trade desk basically does (TTD), and it's a comparatively very small company. Google could be the most profitable company per employee in history if it wanted to, and it wouldn't lose anything from its core money-making functions. Instead, Google wanted to build a grand technology empire. If you're going to act like a rockstar, when the lights come on, you better be dancing up on the stage. The lights are turning on right now, and I don't think anyone sees anyone dancing.
itstomkent 4y ago
I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs want to work on new and exciting shit, so google continuously mints projects and kills them off when they are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working as intended.
antipaul 4y ago
Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for companies that are decently strong and have stable growth. I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up. In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't someone else there who would screw up more. They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth stable". There is no requirement about "solving existing issues" because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough" and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose everything. Why this profile for CEOs? These days, everything is amplified and the smallest mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad attention. If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything up". That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1] The danger could be that the companies may become complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the JD) – and they buy out any competitors that get too haughty, as needed. [1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ), he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones, such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.
- lovich 4y ago
  Zuck is still there because he didn’t give up control. These companies weren’t wrested from their founders grasp, they were sold
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Nonsense. Apple and Microsoft are both objectively thriving under their respective current CEOs, who have both made some tough calls and been responsible for important new products, and both now have sufficient road behind them that we can believe in their ability to call shots for the long term to at least some degree. These companies are not just treading water. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone outside Facebook has much respect for Zuck in terms of decisionmaking for products or anything else in particular. This may look different to a Facebook employee, of course.
nimbius 4y ago
>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? Fighting a growing wave of calls from all political sides to regulate Alphabet and Google in the US, and paying an endless stack of compliance fines to the EU who already regulate Google and Alphabet.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  It's not only fighting them, but also forming them: The "right" regulation can become an entry barrier for competitors.
_HMCB_ 4y ago
When was there last big win?
- ok_coo 4y ago
  Android and Chrome... so it looks like around 2008-2009?
lumost 4y ago
It's really hard to diversify away from a major cash cow product. Everyone else's success gets compared to the cash machine. Ask for another 30 engineers to work on a product with only 100 MM profit, why aren't you more successful? People get wise to this dynamic and just start selling dreams. Everyone can buy into the dream of the next Billion dollar product, it's harder to get buy-in to just grind out a measly 50% YoY growth.
jgalt212 4y ago
> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? His primary job is to keep the FTC at bay.
devwastaken 4y ago
The majority of Google's income is still ads. Stadia and all others are pennies in comparison. These are little pet projects for insane millionaires, not products that solve real problems. That's what happens when you get too big, you lose focus of what's important.
firecall 4y ago
Has there been a lack of direction, mission and purpose since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO?
dataflow 4y ago
> He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. https://retailwire.com/discussion/google-rethinks-employee-reviews-and-promotions-process/ https://retailwire.com/discussion/google-rethinks-employee-r...
cavisne 4y ago
His goal was to expand Google into china [1], then he folded on that due to employee pushback. Similarly with all the other mini dramas (working with the military, "AI principles"). He may not even be wrong, the biggest risk to google is some regulator getting unhappy so playing it safe makes sense. [1]https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11830654/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-china https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11830654/google-ceo-sundar-pich...
hericium 4y ago
> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question YoY only. Tim Cook seems to be heading the same way, trashing the quality of almost everything Apple has achieved for the sake of financial results.
invig 4y ago
The law of large numbers. Nothing other than the core ad products makes a difference to Google. The next biggest "successes" are just things that build a moat around the core ad product. What's embarrassing is that they keep trying other random things. Give the money back to the shareholders and let them invest in new founders. Small team success is great for the world but impossible to care about at a Google scale.
roydivision 4y ago
This is the way Google works, it's their operating model. Big fanfare when they launch things so the muggles continue to believe that 'Google' is still relevant, and then quiet shuttering when the product either doesn't add to their ad revenue, their overarching interest, or it was never even meant to be a success in the first place. There is no failure here, it's working exactly the way they planned it to. Google sells attention. Anything else it does is flim flam to support that.

snek_case 4y ago

It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?

tmpz22 4y ago

The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those. If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.

UncleMeat 4y ago

The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages." It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.

tomp 4y ago
"GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great servers to the platform."
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Unlike Stadia, I do actually think that killing GCP would destroy the company. So I don't expect the same end outcome.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Right, they're trapped in a terrible position where it's sucking the company dry of its profits while also being necessary to continue or they will lose all credibility with enterprise and developers forever. That said, they could shut down Verily and save some $1B/year.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      The thing that is bizarre to me is that Google has absolute shitloads of money. 120B+ in the bank. Megabillions in profit each quarter. Like, they could buy Nintendo for less than half of their cash on hand. I understand that the market demands infinite growth but internally it feels like horseshit to see the ridiculous numbers and also get told that basically nothing is high priority enough to get funded.
      - lmm 4y ago
        Nothing is high priority enough to get funded because they have a firehose of money coming out of ads, compared to which nothing looks like a good enough opportunity.
        gsibble 4y ago
        Exactly. The IRR in investing more into ad platforms for Google is still higher than any other project so they keep investing in it and increasing their ad revenue. Alongside Meta, they have a duopoly (monopoly?) on that market for now so they are just milking it for all its worth. You don't just build stuff for the sake of it. It has to be a better investment than what you currently have, and Google doesn't have anything better than doubling and tripling down on ads.

myko 4y ago

"More wood, fewer arrows" has destroyed the longevity of Google as a company for anything beyond search/ads Alphabet seems to have been a mistake, too. Instead of shielding their bets they flounder and wither. Just terrible strategic thinking.

ghaff 4y ago
I’m not sure what bets they should have better shielded. Probably social generally but that seems so counter their DNA.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ksec 4y ago

>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it. It is funny I was extremely sceptical but I remember all the hype around Sundar Pichai becoming CEO and how it would improve Google. Repeating something similar to what Satya Nadella did to Microsoft. And it wasn't media / VC or submarine PR article hype, it was real hype on HN, by Silicon Valley fellows. And Google wasn't considered "evil" back then, even though nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.

ryanbrunner 4y ago
> The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it. Sure, but you don't get a company working in concert or particularly well if all you have is "go make money"
- chihuahua 4y ago
  The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is earning as much money for himself (into his own bank account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if the company is working in concert etc. when Google can coast on ad revenue for many years. 1. Get stock grants 2. Sell it as soon as it vests 3. Apres moi le deluge.
flavius29663 4y ago
> nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public. I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.
- tektekX 4y ago
  At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

His goal is to keep the peace. And he's good at it. It's a little bit "game of thrones" in there.

bigiain 4y ago
You you’re saying he’s Tyrion Lannister? That sorta checks out…
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  Lol no no, I think Tyrion drinks a lot more than Sundar... and Sundar certainly doesn't seem like the womanizing type either. But hey, I didn't know him personally so who knows. Maybe closer to Varys..?

hintymad 4y ago

I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact. In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.

vosper 4y ago
> The only metric that most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.

kodah 4y ago

imo, your eye is on the wrong ball. Google died when it's founders moved their attention to Alphabet. Google has moved from a bespoke kitchen to the catering kitchen that keeps the lights on for Alphabet while they build a strategy.

usrusr 4y ago
But how much "alphabet" is there still left, other than Google and YouTube? In hindsight it almost seems as if alphabet was deliberately set up as a pasture for the various doomed "moonshots" to die more quietly, with less impact on the main brand.
- ghaff 4y ago
  What moonshot--at least that is known about--is possibly transformative at Alphabet/Google scale? Waymo seems increasingly unlikely both in terms of time-scale and differentiation in a crowded field. And what else is there?
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Loon could have made them the ISP for the developing world.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Waymo is very far ahead of the competition. It may be hard to compare given all the fly-by-night competitors but it has had many more years in development and the result is more dependable.
lupire 4y ago
The founders retired in all but name only almost 10 years ago.

obviouslynotme 4y ago

It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades. Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.

hintymad 4y ago
Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.
andybak 4y ago
> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Both are nice, but very niche. Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.
  - almenon 4y ago

oofbey 4y ago

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? I'd say he's trying not to be remembered as the "Steve Ballmer" of Google. You know - that second-run CEO who drove the company into the ground while keeping the wall street numbers looking good. Cuz that's exactly where he's heading right now. I think he knows he needs to fundamentally change the culture of the company. He's been making public statements as such. He knows it's a problem that Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done. And despite this obvious rot, most of the world (like everybody here who dreams of a google job) still reveres Google as an idyllic place to work. Which makes it all the harder for the company to admit to itself that anything is wrong. Cultural change is really hard. And it's not at all clear that he's got what it takes to do it successfully. Googlers are so pampered that any attempt to push them out of their comfort zone is going to get serious pushback. I say this as a former googler. There was a hilarious post on HN not long ago which I can't find where a googler said something to the effect of "no way in hell my manager is gonna make me work." The entire company is built around solving HARD problems, not USEFUL problems. Obviously they've pulled off a lot of truly amazing things, but that difference is pretty important when your company's entire revenue stream is still coming from key insights made in the late 1990s. To me it's clear they need to change their promotion criteria, which solidifies this and drives so much of people's energy and bad patterns. But the arrogance built into the culture of "solving the world's hardest problems" means that any changes there are likely to insult the fragile egos of all those snowflakes and cause them to go on strike or make the good ones just leave.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
He structured it as Alphabet. As in 26 different companies. Google can't VC new projects with a 50 billion to play with in excess/above line revenue to fund them a year? How does google not have self driving car revenue? They should have highway driving (as in trucks on superhighways) solved 10 years ago and been rolling in money. How does google not have a competitive IaaS offering? How does google not have THREE competitive IaaS offerings? Buy one or two, and have them compete against each other internally and externally. Why doesn't google have a competitive Desktop OS based on some combination of Linux / Android / Chrome and Macbook pro level hardware? Their AI products are all dystopian. ChatsChatsChatsChatsChatsChats. Why didn't they buy Java/Sun. Stupid. Why don't they buy Keybase? Actually don't then the servers will be shut down. Silicon Valley is too woke? Start new branches. What is the biggest recent success of Google? Chrome. Why not repeat that a dozen times over? Take important Open Source software, and make it good, and don't make it utterly dystopian until 10 years later. Linux Desktop? Open Office? WINE? Steam clone on Linux? You know, why not have a hardware division that can deliver? For IoT, Google Glasses, an actual decent phone, self driving sensors. Be good at software. Be good at hardware. What a clown show.

ginger2016 4y ago

I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise. Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.

numpad0 4y ago
Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    "scale and backing?" The just ended it because it didn't scale.
    - bigiain 4y ago
      I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?

madeofpalk 4y ago

On the other hand, Google still just prints money with ads. Everything else is just a talent retention program. 'Success hides all problems', but exactly what real problems does Google have making money?

pclmulqdq 4y ago
The fact that it can't keep doing it forever, and its investors expect that if Google is going to keep expanding its headcount and keep spending tons of money that it will produce results. Nobody would mind if Google just printed money with ads. That is what the trade desk basically does (TTD), and it's a comparatively very small company. Google could be the most profitable company per employee in history if it wanted to, and it wouldn't lose anything from its core money-making functions. Instead, Google wanted to build a grand technology empire. If you're going to act like a rockstar, when the lights come on, you better be dancing up on the stage. The lights are turning on right now, and I don't think anyone sees anyone dancing.

itstomkent 4y ago

I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs want to work on new and exciting shit, so google continuously mints projects and kills them off when they are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working as intended.

antipaul 4y ago

Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for companies that are decently strong and have stable growth. I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up. In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't someone else there who would screw up more. They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth stable". There is no requirement about "solving existing issues" because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough" and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose everything. Why this profile for CEOs? These days, everything is amplified and the smallest mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad attention. If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything up". That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1] The danger could be that the companies may become complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the JD) – and they buy out any competitors that get too haughty, as needed. [1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ), he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones, such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.

lovich 4y ago
Zuck is still there because he didn’t give up control. These companies weren’t wrested from their founders grasp, they were sold
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
KerrAvon 4y ago
Nonsense. Apple and Microsoft are both objectively thriving under their respective current CEOs, who have both made some tough calls and been responsible for important new products, and both now have sufficient road behind them that we can believe in their ability to call shots for the long term to at least some degree. These companies are not just treading water. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone outside Facebook has much respect for Zuck in terms of decisionmaking for products or anything else in particular. This may look different to a Facebook employee, of course.

nimbius 4y ago

>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? Fighting a growing wave of calls from all political sides to regulate Alphabet and Google in the US, and paying an endless stack of compliance fines to the EU who already regulate Google and Alphabet.

johannes1234321 4y ago
It's not only fighting them, but also forming them: The "right" regulation can become an entry barrier for competitors.

_HMCB_ 4y ago

When was there last big win?

ok_coo 4y ago
Android and Chrome... so it looks like around 2008-2009?

lumost 4y ago

It's really hard to diversify away from a major cash cow product. Everyone else's success gets compared to the cash machine. Ask for another 30 engineers to work on a product with only 100 MM profit, why aren't you more successful? People get wise to this dynamic and just start selling dreams. Everyone can buy into the dream of the next Billion dollar product, it's harder to get buy-in to just grind out a measly 50% YoY growth.

jgalt212 4y ago

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? His primary job is to keep the FTC at bay.

devwastaken 4y ago

The majority of Google's income is still ads. Stadia and all others are pennies in comparison. These are little pet projects for insane millionaires, not products that solve real problems. That's what happens when you get too big, you lose focus of what's important.

firecall 4y ago

Has there been a lack of direction, mission and purpose since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO?

dataflow 4y ago

> He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. https://retailwire.com/discussion/google-rethinks-employee-reviews-and-promotions-process/ https://retailwire.com/discussion/google-rethinks-employee-r...

cavisne 4y ago

His goal was to expand Google into china [1], then he folded on that due to employee pushback. Similarly with all the other mini dramas (working with the military, "AI principles"). He may not even be wrong, the biggest risk to google is some regulator getting unhappy so playing it safe makes sense. [1]https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11830654/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-china https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11830654/google-ceo-sundar-pich...

hericium 4y ago

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question YoY only. Tim Cook seems to be heading the same way, trashing the quality of almost everything Apple has achieved for the sake of financial results.

invig 4y ago

The law of large numbers. Nothing other than the core ad products makes a difference to Google. The next biggest "successes" are just things that build a moat around the core ad product. What's embarrassing is that they keep trying other random things. Give the money back to the shareholders and let them invest in new founders. Small team success is great for the world but impossible to care about at a Google scale.

roydivision 4y ago

This is the way Google works, it's their operating model. Big fanfare when they launch things so the muggles continue to believe that 'Google' is still relevant, and then quiet shuttering when the product either doesn't add to their ad revenue, their overarching interest, or it was never even meant to be a success in the first place. There is no failure here, it's working exactly the way they planned it to. Google sells attention. Anything else it does is flim flam to support that.