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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

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.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.
  - microtherion 4y ago
    Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily… In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful," everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole thing blows over. That does not incentivize responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but in doing so, he loses control. There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either: * "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or * "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies" He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over. This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.
- cosmotron 4y ago
  Why would VPs be interested in using different building entrances?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The lobbies get very crowded around 9 and 5, and so do the elevators near them.
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      Can't have the executives possibly smelling the rabble.
      - galaxyLogic 4y ago
        All executives exit effectively immediately!
  - stoltzmann 4y ago
zepppotemkin 4y ago
Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash these days it's reflected in their hiring where they don't even know where they want to place people half the time
andrekandre 4y ago
> 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 sounds like... bullshit jobs? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
unity1001 4y ago
It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's the problem. Or engineering. It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks. Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas. So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.
- z9znz 4y ago
  > looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users. Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.
  - kbenson 4y ago
    All corporations are sociopaths, Google is only different in that they think their success is because of their lack of care about users instead of in spite of it. Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.
- havercosine 4y ago
  I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells nerding out things. Accidentally some of the technologies become useful and popular. But there is no grounds up thought about 'how can we make it useful for customers', in relative comparison to products from companies like Amazon and Slack. Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead. Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow. But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.
pmontra 4y ago
> The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. This is very common. Every large company I worked with is like that.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
> 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 This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.
- ido 4y ago
  1/10th the size of google (who has 140k employees) is still a massive company.
User23 4y ago
> 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. Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.

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.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.
- microtherion 4y ago
  Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily… In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful," everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole thing blows over. That does not incentivize responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but in doing so, he loses control. There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either: * "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or * "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies" He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over. This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

cosmotron 4y ago
Why would VPs be interested in using different building entrances?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The lobbies get very crowded around 9 and 5, and so do the elevators near them.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Can't have the executives possibly smelling the rabble.
    - galaxyLogic 4y ago
      All executives exit effectively immediately!
- stoltzmann 4y ago

zepppotemkin 4y ago

Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash these days it's reflected in their hiring where they don't even know where they want to place people half the time

andrekandre 4y ago

> 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 sounds like... bullshit jobs? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

unity1001 4y ago

It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's the problem. Or engineering. It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks. Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas. So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.

z9znz 4y ago
> looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users. Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.
- kbenson 4y ago
  All corporations are sociopaths, Google is only different in that they think their success is because of their lack of care about users instead of in spite of it. Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.
havercosine 4y ago
I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells nerding out things. Accidentally some of the technologies become useful and popular. But there is no grounds up thought about 'how can we make it useful for customers', in relative comparison to products from companies like Amazon and Slack. Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead. Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow. But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.

pmontra 4y ago

> The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. This is very common. Every large company I worked with is like that.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

> 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 This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.

ido 4y ago
1/10th the size of google (who has 140k employees) is still a massive company.

User23 4y ago

> 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. Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.