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It's hard to take this post seriously when basic facts are off. > To support this company strategy, Google makes it really, really easy for anyone to start up

• bitL 4y ago
  Google Cloud is not the real Google. Culture-wise, you are closer to Oracle.
  • sneak 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
    • otalp 4y ago
      It’s a separate org with a big culture difference.
      • romwell 4y ago
        Exactly, hence no true Scotsman: "Oh, it's not a true Google org!". No, it is a Google org. Whatever was said in the top comment was applicable to Geo a few years back. And the infamous "need-to-know" memo, which required everyone to start siloing tech docs and made using the internal search engine potentially a fireable offense (!) was company-wide.
  • nickmooney 4y ago
  • johnasmith 4y ago
    I mean, I've worked in search, android, and c&c, and the above is pretty close to my experience in all three.
  • romwell 4y ago
    >Google Cloud is not the real Google. Culture-wise, you are closer to Oracle. Incorrect. Google's culture has shifted. Culture-wise, Google is closer to Oracle than what people think is Google. 20% hasn't been a thing in Google for a long time. Exists only on paper. Source: I worked at Google when we all got the memo that all information access within the company is now on a need-to-know basis, and that accessing information that you don't need to know for your job is a fireable offense. Default level of sharing technical documentaiton is fully private, so tech docs are not searchable in company search engine (read this again). Good luck re-using the code without design docs. Also good luck starting a project if your team doesn't own the data. Hot take: Google doesn't have a strategy, period. Neither copmany, nor product.
    • vrc 4y ago
      To further your point — 20% time was barely a thing in 2010… And they killed all of the OC/Founders awards subsequently so there was really no focus on maverick innovation from then on. Coincided with the end to oysters on Fridays
    • htrp 4y ago
      > Google doesn't have a strategy, period Probably not so hot of a take. They basically have a monopoloy (kinda like late 1990s Microsoft)
    • throwaway_gc 4y ago
      Google cloud has a strategy / OKR process. It’s called Amazon Re:invent. The blog had some good points but was totally off of Cloud being bottom up. It couldn’t be as it was so far behind others — you don’t have time to think up something new when the competition has already done something. Decisions came from the top down. The author was right in that there’s a lot of smart people there. By far the best place I’ve been for that.
      • romwell 4y ago
        >The author was right in that there’s a lot of smart people there. By far the best place I’ve been for that. Oh, Google had the most amazing intelligent bright coworkers when I was there. The saddest part was seeing these people directing their energy into great hamster wheels that Google made for them.
  • edmundsauto 4y ago
    Wow, hot take. Care to qualify why your perspective is more relevant than an actual Googler?
  • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    Whatever Google is, is the “real” Google
  • pradn 4y ago
    It's a substantial part of the company. There are as many employees in Google Cloud as there were in all of Google a few years ago.
• verdagon 4y ago
  Even when I was there a couple years ago, 20% time was already basically dead. They had to be approved by those above one's direct managers, needed compelling justification, and getting the go-ahead was pretty rare. This was even for things not in the main products. In other words, 20% projects are the opposite of what they started out as. I also saw Google shutting down or downsizing a lot of small projects that weren't related to the core business (ads, search, cloud), though that might vary per PA so my read might be off.
  • birken 4y ago
    When I worked at Google in 2007, it was a known fact among employees that 20% was not a real thing. It was 120% time even then. You could in theory work on your own thing, but you basically had to do it on your own time. And I did actually do the 120% time thing for a few months because there was a specific project I really wanted to do, and it would have been nice fit for Google, but my attempts to stir up interest within the company and get any sort of resources were basically dead ends. One of the reasons I eventually left to join a startup.
    • fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
      20% time never made much sense to me as a concept. If the 20% is not part of your performance evaluation, then that would imply everyone is on 80% time. What does that mean and how is it worked into the process? Would you get a 125% score if you did only your normal work instead of a side-project? If you failed to do 20% of your work, do you get a pass? It seems to me that your work should get graded on some standard, and what % of your time you spent on side-projects should be irrelevant.
      • birken 4y ago
        In theory the idea was that everybody should want to do a 20% time for the good of the company, and thus failure to seize the 20% opportunity would count against you in the promotion process. In practice though your promotion was really just graded against your main job and nobody cared about 20% time, thus actually doing something in 20% time would be bad because it would hurt your performance for your main job. Even in 2007 everybody would talk about how things were so much better in 2004 and if only you'd seen it then, and so I imagine that maybe back in 2004 you could do 20% time and it would be beneficial for your career, but you'd have to ask somebody who worked there at that time. As far as I could tell there were a bunch of very talented, very senior engineer who could basically just do whatever they wanted as 100% time, and they did a lot of really great stuff that was helpful to the company as a whole but didn't fit neatly into a specific team. But it didn't seem like that was accessible for mere mortals, nor would you be able to make as large an impact if you were only working on it one day a week.
• justinwp 4y ago
  Same experience in two non-cloud orgs over the last 4 years.
• andreygrehov 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, what's your level and position at Google?
• etchalon 4y ago
  It seems like the author's experience at Google and Microsoft was a fairly long time ago. I'm sure a lot has changed.
• mji 4y ago
  Having worked at both, 20% time is the only part of the article that is somewhat off-base. In particular the following string of paragraphs match exactly what I’ve seen at both: > With all that up-front planning, the actual product decisions and working code were reviewed much less. Only the other PMs on my team reviewed my specs, and only me and the tester (also new grads usually) reviewed the working changes before they were added to the branch. For what it’s worth, I think this is why the quality of the details on Microsoft products is often lacking—a random PM made a decision and no one bothered to push back on it. > Contrast that with Google. > At Google, I never saw a strategy document. I went to every Friday all-hands, but I didn’t hear the leaders talk about a broad vision of what we needed to build. The people above me didn’t set direction and ask me to follow it. > Instead, leaders encouraged teams to generate their own ideas. The founders had ideas of their top priorities and worked with the relevant teams on those, but the list of the top company OKRs was a subset of all the OKRs, not a roll-up. Some people were not working on anything the company cared about strategically!
  • pradn 4y ago
    Again, I can only speak for Cloud. I find product changes are reviewed by a dozen people at least and take months to finalize. It can be slow, but usually we're sure why we're making the decisions, and where risks lie. A large weight is given to customers asking for features, so they're in the loop. It's absurd that there's no Google strategy documents. There's company-wide and division-wide OKRs that get major events to publicize them, with large Q&As and all. It's easy to learn what the priorities are and why. But, usually you just pay attention to what your local group is working on. At a smaller level, every feature has a business rationale backed by customers requesting them or hard dollar figures. I really don't know what's going on here. Do people think Google runs the same way as it did in its early years? It's a fairly mature company with a good track record of revenue growth, especially for such a massive company. These things don't happen haphazardly.
    • mji 4y ago
      We seem to be looking at the same text and drawing wildly different conclusions from it. When the blog post says "the actual product decisions and working code were reviewed much less. Only the other PMs on my team reviewed my specs" referring to Microsoft, to me that lines up with you saying "I find product changes are reviewed by a dozen people at least and take months to finalize." referring to Google. The distinction the author is drawing is that Microsoft doesn't review day-to-day engineering work like this, because fundamental product decisions are made at a higher level, while smaller design decisions might be made by individual PMs or engineers and make it into the product without ever being reviewed. When the author says "The founders had ideas of their top priorities and worked with the relevant teams on those, but the list of the top company OKRs was a subset of all the OKRs, not a roll-up. Some people were not working on anything the company cared about strategically!" referring to Google, that sounds very aligned with you saying "There's company-wide and division-wide OKRs that get major events to publicize them, with large Q&As and all. It's easy to learn what the priorities are and why. But, usually you just pay attention to what your local group is working on."
• bruce511 4y ago
  >> its hard to take this post seriously when basic facts are off. For context I don't work and have never worked at Google. So I can't speak to whether 20% time is a thing or not, or whether managers manage or not. The article does however reinforce a fact which is obvious to pretty much everyone outside Google - which is that Google has a perception problem - in my perception "everything gets cancelled" [everything except the super successful money machines that are Search and YouTube. Gmail has enough benefit to search, maps as well, but outside that what has survived? GCP suffers from this perception (and the perception of lack of phone support.) given the lackluster performance of GCP its hard to be _sure_ it'll survive and that's a problem. Annecdotally i'll never use GCP - you can thank Reader et al for that. To be fair I also would never use it because AWS and Azure have better support. I understand why you want to correct the record, and that's fair enough, but the details in the article are irrelevant. Regardless of the "how", the "what" remains the same,which is that I have zero trust in Google to act in _my_ best interest, and that means never using them for anything important.
  • pradn 4y ago
    Google suffers from a perception problem for consumer-oriented products, agreed. I don't think anyone faults Google for haphazardly closing down enterprise products. The enterprise world runs differently - deprecations have long timelines, are well-telegraphed ahead of time, and sudden deprecations may come with contractual penalties. Which Cloud products are analogous to Google Reader? Stadia, I think, is the biggest example of a Google product failing bc of this perception. But it had other, big problems as well.
    • bruce511 4y ago
      >> I don't think anyone faults Google for haphazardly closing down enterprise products. I think you meant "consumer products" here? I mean, I'd definitely fault them for haphazardly closing down enterprise products. I confess I don't differentiate Google into "Google Consumer" and "Google Enterprise". So, to me, an issue with say Gmail or Reader is a "Google issue" - not a "Google Consumer" issue. I don't think to myself "oh yeah, well Google+ is a consumer product so closing that has no bearing on their enterprise offerings". So sure, GCP maybe an entirely different beast. But my perceptions are for all of Google. If you want GCP to be judged on "non-google" standards, then perhaps don't put Google in the name... To be clear I've never tried GCP. It could be 10% of the price, run 10 times as fast, and have magnificent support for all I know. However I likely still wouldn't use it (for anything meaningful) because I don't _trust_ Google. This is a trust issue, not a price or performance issue.
• somrand0 4y ago
  so google still does that 20% thing? I thought that went away when google's unofficial company motto stopped being "do no evil"... in the time before Schmidt CEO.
• Arainach 4y ago
  [Bias disclaimer: I have worked at both Microsoft and Google] Google Cloud is different from Google. Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses. This whole article struck a deep chord from me - in fact, I've given the exact same answer to countless interview candidates when asked about companies I've worked at that Google gives ICs far more leeway to decide what they build compared to other companies who are very top-down. Google culture, in my personal opinion, struggles with enterprise sales and the customer support, long-term stability, and overall business plans it takes to attract enterprise users, convince them to use your product, and convince them that you're serious about supporting the things they care about. This is quite obvious when you compare them to a Microsoft or an Oracle. Cloud is the first major business group that has had to come to terms with this, and they've taken several steps to address this. Some people have complained that the culture in Google cloud isn't the same as in Google at large and that it feels more like certain other companies, but what they miss is that this is absolutely essential, and if you tried to run a cloud compute product with the traditional Google model it would (in my opinion) fail miserably.
  • jxramos 4y ago
    That’s an interesting angle, how ones B2B dedication and competencies align with business customers who have a lot on the line vs flippant and irritated end consumers playing with free products. The stakes are definitely not equal there.
    • 6figurelenins 4y ago
      Significant sectors of us (irritated end consumers) are not merely "playing with free products." We purchase hardware (Assistant, Pixel, Nest). We make a living (Play, YouTube, Ads, gSuite). We're vastly outnumbered by free users, but they aren't "playing" with Maps and Messages either. (Side note: Photos is fantastic. That team should be a case study in product stewardship.)
      • fphhotchips 4y ago
        In case anyone from the Photos team sees this: Photos is the reason I still use a personal Google account, and I pay for Google One. It just works. Everytime I notice a change, it seems like it tangibly benefits me. When I don't notice a change, everything is smooth, fast, and easy.
• jedc 4y ago
  +1 to basic facts being off. The line that stuck out to me was: "Some APMs had convinced company leadership that we needed a Facebook competitor." Ummmm... no. This was very much a top-down strategy choice from Larry on down. There's no way the product goals COMPANY-WIDE is driven by anything but an executive edict.