16 ms·

Internal document explains why Google has become slow and bureaucratic

184 points by atombender 4y ago

atombender 4y ago
Another presentation by the author (who no longer works at Google, apparently): "Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds" [1]. [1] https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Isn't it the same content?
- arebop 4y ago
  I normally don't get much from presentation slides; they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks and they often amount to the bullet points of someone's outline. But in this case, the article is an extremely poor summary of this comparatively rich and substantial presentation. Thanks for sharing this link. It is much more comprehensible than the article itself.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    > they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks Historically, yes, as an aspirational goal. Even if, in practice, a lot of people didn't want to or didn't get around to creating a doc to go along with the presentation. That said, I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. So it's pretty normal--at least for routine information sharing--to create a text-heavy presentation and just hit the high points when presenting from it. Not sure this is even a bad thing for a lot of purposes--especially to the degree people can put together cogent sets of bullet points but aren't that great at pages of prose.
    - mikea1 4y ago
      > I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. I prefer long form content... but spending time in the comments section of HN may show a revealed preference. I concur with your observation. Piling on with a couple examples: - Axios is a news service that only delivers information in bullet points. Unlike their long-form competitors, they are expanding into local news. [0] - Long form content, such as books, are less popular. The average number of books read each year has fallen to a 30 year low. [1] [0] https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2022/11/22/introducing-axios-cleveland-sam-allard-troy-smith https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2022/11/22/introducing-... [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-...
    - mort96 4y ago
      That sounds like the worst of both worlds? You end up with a slide deck that doesn't contain the information added by the presenter, but which are too info-heavy to work well during the talk.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I'm talking more about program updates, "know before you go" information about events, etc. rather than conference keynotes. (Of course, there are many things in between.) For this sort of thing you really do want a canonical source of information--including for those who didn't attend a call that hit the highlights. And these days that tends to be a fairly dense slide deck because that's what a lot of people prefer and you meet people where they are. My conference presentations don't generally have a lot of words. But that's not all I do and it does mean my conference presentation slide decks aren't super-informative on their own.
- meltyness 4y ago
  The presentation is 170 slides, and involves statistical arguments modeling work. - Small projects can tolerate collaborating specialist pools (CSPs). - CSPs attempting large complicated projects are quickly disastrously unlikely to even be completed due to the network effects of uncertainty and disagreement on commitment efforts, even with a hierarchy stuffed-in (assuming each specialist is necessary) - One solution is to minimize team size. - Another solution is planning projects better.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    It arguably says rather than planning, iterate with a goal in mind.
- wistlo 4y ago
  This presentation is so clear I'm going to show it to my high-schooler so that she can (1) understand why Dad works on Saturday (I confess to some "heroics"), and (2) concepts she can keep in mind on upcoming projects at school, and eventually at a job.
  - lantry 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - juancb 4y ago
    Can you elucidate on how the presentation explains why you choose to work on Saturdays?
- eternalban 4y ago
  Here's a podcast to go with that: https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/138 https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/138 The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame. p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building. https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-real-value-of-middle-managers https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-real-value-of-middle-managers
  - moandcompany 4y ago
    Yes. I wrote about exactly this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381884#34385570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381884#34385570 As the corporate organism itself grows larger and faces newer challenges, it may need to evolve and develop new, more specialized organs that a slime mold does not inherently possess or function well at to scale. Many organisms in the natural world could not scale exactly as-is to 10x or 100x their normal size with their existing structures. The idea of a slime mold representing the whole company may have once been true a decade or more ago when Google was much smaller and less extended, but the mental model is much like newer people at Google yearning for the "old Google" that never worked there during its earlier days. It's a nice fantasy.
- nanis 4y ago
  Apart from the intra-company dynamics, there is also the fact that Google do not face the same kind of consumer driven market pressure as, say, Walmart. I do recommend the excellent "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives"[1] where the greatest incentive individuals face in an organization have involve doing relatively better compared to other individuals in the organization without significant outside indicators of the right direction. In that sense, Google is like a government behemoth. Most involved in its direction and functioning have incentives that are decoupled from whether the people who are touched by their "products" and "services" are happy with them. [1]: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/164/1/WRAP_Harrison_jel05.pdf https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/164/1/WRAP_Harrison_jel05.pdf
rektide 4y ago
Also recently submitted & on the same topic of effective innovation driving & organizational wayfinding, "Andy Grove on dynamic dialectic"[1], which nicely laid out some of the core top-down vs bottom-up struggles. It pegged bottom-up as "chaotic but smart". Grove talks about something mentioned very early on in Alex's webpage[2] (right under the top link, to a genericized/not-Google-specific Slime Mold presentation), leadership of the gardening style (although specifically Komoroske is talking about gardening platforms). Making sure those with potential & good ideas are enabled, might be how I'd describe it. On a personal note to me, it's amazing how much we assume - have left individual isolated groups/teams connected upwards & sometimes side-ways as the organizational structure. Leaving only higher up levels of the org structure to mediate & suss out truth, not having workers also put in their bid for how other projects should execute or where priority should be is the practice. Im fascinated by the potential of trying a more connected & aware org, where we try to spend more effort internally communicating & sharing bids for where we think we ought be placing our efforts, where we ought be redirecting or reshaping efforts. [1] https://www.leadingsapiens.com/andy-grove-balancing-top-down-vs-bottom-up-approaches-leadership/ https://www.leadingsapiens.com/andy-grove-balancing-top-down... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381928 [2] https://komoroske.com/ https://komoroske.com/
nynx 4y ago
https://archive.is/7BYDG https://archive.is/7BYDG
deleted 4y ago
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JonChesterfield 4y ago
I'm wholly convinced by that argument. Anyone have a counter?
adrianmonk 4y ago
Just because you want to be bottom-up doesn't mean you need to be dogmatic about it and can't have good leaders who take a stand when necessary. The two aren't incompatible. You don't need to take away people's independence and agency to have good leaders. A good leader doesn't need to be authoritarian in order to lead. It's bad leaders who have to force people to follow them. And just because you want to be agile and flexible doesn't mean you can't plan ahead. You need a little of both.
- johnday 4y ago
  In fact, planning ahead (when done properly) maximises the chance that you can be flexible. It's hard to adapt and change flexibly if you're busy dealing with the upshot of yesterday's unforeseen disaster.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  Is being slow necessarily a bad thing? Google is a large cash generating machine. Maybe making large changes quickly would be detrimental to the over all health of the company. As a counter example one might consider Musk's takeover of Twitter. Although it is still too soon to tell the effects of his "nimbleness" are not looking stellar at the moment. Having worked in Google like companies they always seem lure talent by dangling tasty projects in front of them. But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between. The talent then starts complaining the company is not nimble enough etc and moves on. One might argue this is the natural order things. One of the reason SV has so many startups. Much of what startups do is likely not that appealing to large companies and far too risky - failing at a high rate.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between. Back when I was an industry analyst, I still remember a conversation I had with someone at IBM. I don't remember the context and don't quote me on the number but he said something to the effect of "If it doesn't have the potential to be at least a billion dollar business, we're not going to even try." Basically every project consumes some slice of attention, time, and money up and down the line. You can mitigate this to some degree with decentralization but only up to a point.
deleted 4y ago
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meltyness 4y ago
It's DAU getting companies like this into over-leveraging, and it's a bubble we're still in. Good tech products are not necessarily capital/personnel intensive. The "finish line" for Google is not the next Search, or real innovation, it is about longevity, maintaining an ecosystem, and "trading the news." - Windows applications are risky, and inflexible -- Chrome. - Laptops and Active Directory confusing ISD administrators -- Chromebook/Workspaces ecosystem. - TikTok is getting a bad rap on the hill -- Shorts. These are healthy and understandable business moves, but not everything these companies excrete is, good. This is where buybacks should be terminated by our legislators. Not to punish these players for their rapid success, but to facilitate natural logistics for these hugely impactful, ubiquitouly embedded service providers. On the less sane side of things: - Google Wave beat Slack/Teams/Discord to market by 10 years. - Google+ was 7-8 years late to the party. - Stadia, obviously at-odds with AR/VR, and Deep ML. - The only way to prevent "20% time" from hacking away at your own "terra firma" is to punish it, or make it impossible -- overhire and waste your employees time.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  > but to facilitate natural logistics for these hugely impactful, ubiquitouly embedded service providers. What does this mean?
  - meltyness 4y ago
    I'm avoiding the term "leverage", and the huge issuances it must have taken to make a Stadia appear, and then suddenly disappear, as well as "the bottom 6%" that appeared and disappeared from the roster over the course of 2022. Economically speaking, where's the logistic growth peak? Is there growth for each company each business cycle? I don't know that, but in my opinion, the dividend-buyback axis is how FAANG companies got themselves in this "unconstrained, risk-free market participant" position in the first place. In one sense, buying everyone in the world a graphics card is a cool idea. In another sense, it's extremely risky and probably wasteful. Similar to "Bird" but somehow less noble. The slime mold only creeps if there's no environmental constraints.
_8j50 4y ago
Oh, the many times I've been told "A large ship turns slow". I have no idea what's going on with Google but the sickness is familiar. I am just trying to get a small thing done, not turn the whole damn ship yet that I am faced with the same bureaucracy and inefficiency. But I have had success overcoming that, at the cost of not being very popular. But the real solution is managerial. It is remarkably simple: To get anything done, require the least possible number of people to be part of that thing being done. But for managers, they love to throw people and money at problems. But really, it is upper management that needs to basically micro-manage everyone under them specifically when it comes to headcount. I fully expect the CEO of alphabet asking random project managers to justify headcount of not just direct reports but who is being involved in their projects. If you need 2 devs to code, one to qa/test. That's it. You don't get anyone else. Not for redundancy, not for anything else. You don't involve legal or marketing, change management,etc... because that means rules and procedures and politics and meetings and planning. The problem is very old: "If all you have is a hammer,everything is a nail". For mid and low level managers, all they have is "get more people" when they want things done. And the arrogance of being a bigcorp compounds this because "we are $bigcorp, we have a team for this and a well tested process for that,such and such team can help with". You cannot compensate for loss of agility by claiming reduction in risk and liability. You should not let lawyers, marketing and middle management choke your company to death. It's up to top brass to piss off everyone in their immediate surrounding so the bottom line is good and the company is healthy. Ultimately, shareholders need to hold management accountable for wasting their money.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  You are making an explicit dichotomy / choice very clearly and eloquently and I agree with most of what you said. Where not everybody may agree is which side they prefer. This is an opinion, not a fact : "If you need 2 devs to code, one to qa/test. That's it. You don't get anyone else. Not for redundancy, not for anything else. You don't involve legal or marketing, change management,etc... because that means rules and procedures and politics and meetings and planning." I.e. For some companies / stakeholders / shareholders / client, risk aversion and predictability absolutely positively is preferred at cost of some agility. It's a willing overhead not necessarily perceived as waste. people driving without insurance may laugh at the suckers who are paying for something they'll probably never use, but risk appetite differs. We don't have to all agree, it's a wonderful diverse world out there, but I will always respect an argument better if it is self-aware of its assumptions and biases.
johnasmith 4y ago
We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.
- esprehn 4y ago
  Without commenting on the contents of the memo Komoroske was not some random employee, he was one of the most senior PMs at the company and now heads up strategy for Stripe.
- echelon 4y ago
  I would argue the top down leadership has been blind or negligent to their Achilles heel. They've let growth in all areas but their single cash cow be needlessly duplicated, rudderless, left to wither on the vine. To rephrase, I'm not sure that Google leadership has demonstrated the great insight to see what's going wrong and change it. I'd trust just about anyone else at the company to produce an equally plausible hypothesis. Especially if it rhymes with what we see from the outside. We've discussed these same systemic issues at Google for over a decade now. Google is a dodo.
- allenu 4y ago
  Agreed. This is just a random employee bemoaning that his large, bureaucratic employer is slow to move, and the opinion document he wrote got leaked for some reason. It doesn't "explain" why Google has become slow. Anyone can work out why Google is slow. Most likely because, like a lot of other large companies, Google has a lot of bureaucracy in the way of getting anything done, and a lots of people and lots of teams leads to mismatched incentives, which aren't necessarily aligned towards shipping product people want.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    A month ago a commenter linked to[1] a similar rant from Waze’s ex-CEO bemoaning the same kinds of things. Process yuck! Bureaucracy bad! Too slow! and so on. I imagine it’s a common complaint from people who don’t thrive in a slow, steady, process oriented culture. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33905310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33905310
gymbeaux 4y ago
Mythical Man Month
brilee 4y ago
(disclaimer: am googler) Just like the thesis of the slime mold talk, the talk itself is a result of the slime mold and doesn't particularly represent any company-authoritative take on the situation. It's turtles all the way down!
- Someone1234 4y ago
  Maybe I am stupid, but I cannot make heads or tails of what you're trying to say. I assume it is along the lines of "this document isn't a good representation" but you used so much coded language and obscure references I'm not sure.
  - lantry 4y ago
    they're saying that "slime mold" culture, where independence and initiative are rewarded, it's possible for one employee to write a document like this. The employee can examine and criticize the culture because they have a high degree of independence. The "slime mold" culture is capable of being more introspective than a more "top down" culture can be. I think they're also saying that the document is written from the POV of a single employee, and isn't the result of a full study/survey of the whole company
  - spondyl 4y ago
    The commenter is referring to the following talk by the same author as the document: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ Slime molds are a type of organism that can expand quickly as each entity within the mold is independent. As a result, the mold as a whole can resist any one actor being removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold The analogy used by the talk is that a slime mold is the polar opposite of a top-down control hierarchy although I haven't read the whole talk (yet) Anyway, the commenter is saying that Google (like a lot of tech companies) is comparable to a slime mold in that it's greatly distributed causing it to be closer to "messy and uncontrollable". In the same breath however, the author of the document is part of said mold acting in their own capacity. By definition, they can't speak for the entire organisation (or necessarily even observe it) because well, it's a slime mold.
Barrin92 4y ago
I'd question the implicit assumption that Google being slow is even a bad thing. Google owns large chunks of the markets they are in, they are not a startup but at the very top. If you're in that position you pretty much want to maximally exploit what you have and simply make money, there's no comparative advantage to prioritize exploration. You'd basically want to be more bureaucratic, not less, given that bureaucracy is nothing else but the rational allocation and organisation of resources. If you own everything, making things slightly work better will net you a lot of profit. I think Facebook with its founder oriented corporate structure now has this exact problem as Zuckerberg went on his Metaverse extravaganza instead of actually making the company print more money which is what they're actually good at.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I sort of agree. I’m a googler, but these are very much just my opinions, and there’s some bias, but… The bureaucracy I experience as an individual contributor and engineer kinda makes sense. It’s things like ensuring that systems will scale, ensuring that user data is treated in the right way, ensuring that access and security is done correctly, etc. There is a lot to all of that. A lot of clicking buttons on internal tools to make sure that whole chains of systems understand everything to ensure oversight, and sometimes it’s a huge pain, especially coming from a startup world. However there have been very few times when I’ve truly thought something wasn’t worth it at the scale we operate at, and responsibility we have (to users, regulation, etc).
rndmnflnce 4y ago
Honestly sounds like the whole situation could be simplified as, "There's no more passion at Google because there is no real environment for real passionate leaders that naturally drive the company"
paganel 4y ago
Nobody is saying it, but I will: of course that Google being a gigantic company doesn't help, but what imo really seals the deal in terms of them not being innovative enough is the fact that most of the people now working there are in for the money and money alone. In the past we've had pretty big companies/organisations that used to be quite innovative, I'm thinking of Xerox, HP, Bell, even Intel at some point, to say nothing of the various departments attached to the US industrial-military complex (starting with NASA), but then the people innovating back then hadn't joined those companies/organisations mostly for the money and money alone. Get rid of the people who have joined Alphabet only to get the 500-600k yearly comp and you could get, at some point, some innovation in return.
sylware 4y ago
This _might_ have originated once vanguard/blackrock people took over from the founders...
ergonaught 4y ago
I somehow never connected these issues with probability. Nice!
pictur 4y ago
off-topic: How terrible is that site's notification to open the article in the mobile app. The mobile site experience is really getting more intimidating every day. they can't make the same warning text for the desktop because they're sure they'll get a reaction. however, when they do this on mobile, people will leave the site without reading the article.
SilverBirch 4y ago
More people == More politics. This varies by person, some people are highly political - you will not get any work out of them, except possibly in service of their political goal. It scales super linearly though, so at some point as you add more people you're actually reducing productivity, because those people are either going to spend all their time navigating the politics, which is bad, or start their own political agenda which is worse. You know what's bad? Hiring 1 unproductive person. What's wores? Hiring 1 unproductive person who persuades you to hire a whole team to serve their bullshit. I've got good news though. How do you fix this? Simple, don't overhire in the first place! Womp Womp!
- ljm 4y ago
  Office politics is one somewhat cynical perspective (even if it is accurate as a hierarchy grows taller). The other simple fact is that a larger team or a larger org requires more communication, more co-ordination, and more management. Beyond a point, adding parallelism doesn’t improve performance, it kills it.
  - birdymcbird 4y ago
    > Office politics is one somewhat cynical perspective had director colleague say this in same words. it cynical view, so we pretend it not happening and not rock boat. well here we are now with layoffs. entire teams who produce no economic value. problem is too many people hired for empire building purposes. it is easier to ignore real issues causing stagnating product. instead, bring in professional manager class. product owners, program managers, software engineering managers, senior mansgers. layers and layers of competing political incentive. building complexity for promotions and to increase head count. Game they play is just say right platitudes like “obsessing with customers”, “all about customer journey”, “reduce friction for customer” and humble brag “my org have 120 people report”.
    - ljm 4y ago
      You're not wrong, but I think you're describing a separate issue too, which I also agree with. It's not politics, it's growing too big, too fast, and inventing jobs that were never needed before to meet some expectation of growth. And, after all the layoffs this past year, it turns out that all the hyper-growth hires post-funding are just pawns to bolster a VC's investment. Office politics in their pure form are rough, borderline toxic, like having someone threaten your promotion or your pay rise if you don't meet their sudden change of expectations.
jaimebuelta 4y ago
Any company that grows to be Google size is going to be slow and bureaucratic. It can mitigate it a bit, but just by the nature of it, it just carry too much momentum and complexity…
jeffbee 4y ago
Compared to? Google of 2008? Believable. Goldman Sachs? No.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  Do you have personal experience or are you just playing to a stereotype. I don’t have experience with either organization but have worked for a big tech company and a big finance org and the finance org was much less bureaucratic and got more done.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I have worked at both. Literally nothing happened the entire time I was in my group at Goldman, because everyone spent 100% of their time on compliance and friction.
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      The compliance framework in the financial organization I worked at was much lower friction than at the tech company. It felt like something they took seriously so integrated it as a first class requirement. As opposed to at the tech org where they seemed to treat it like a chore they had to check off a list. I suspect that this is something that is organization dependent not a uniform trend in either direction.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        That’s why I posed it concretely instead of as FAANG vs finance.
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      That's because you didn't work in a revenue-producing line. Goldman has people in their mid-20s managing books of business larger than most listed companies and responsible for hundreds of millions in revenue per year. That isn't possible with a bureaucracy (this is how you get the huge insider trading cases, like I know people who worked there, were there for a few years and could not imagine the amount of business they were doing as relatively junior employees...it is a crazy system but seems to work, back in the early 90s they would give prop books worth hundreds of millions to grads a few months out of college...again, it was genuinely mad but it worked).
deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
By their own admission, monopolies are not efficient and they are actively hurting the consumer by their size. When will we call the antitrust experiment from the 80s era “Chicago school of economics” an abject failure? Google should instead be several companies, each with a duty to consumers to compete with other companies in their respective businesses. Even Google knows it, not that their leadership would ever admit it. Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  > Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies. Monopolies offer the most reward to those who would fashion themselves out to be robber barons. There are a lot of people that would take that title, more than there are opportunities. Why settle for millions when you can take billions? The pursuit of money brings out the sociopaths, who by definition do not care about externalities web seeking their fortunes.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  A monopoly is basically a Marxist-Leninist command economy writ small which means it inevitably has all of the same dysfunctions. In other words, Marx was right about how laissez-faire capitalism leads to communism (though of course he was wrong about this being inevitable or good). If monopolies are completely allowed to run amok, eventually you will have a single monopoly of everything that will be powerful enough to control the government and weaponize said government against its critics and anybody who tries to compete with it. This is appealing to the people at the top of monopolies and those who think they can climb to the top for the same reason why many people prefer being the dictator of an impoverished country over being a commoner in a wealthy country. A significant portion of humanity cares more about relative status than absolute status and, to them, equal treatment feels like oppression.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    In 1989 I read about how IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut that would rule the world. IB-who?
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Meh. I don't buy this guy's explanation ("it's because we're so non-hierarchical". There's plenty of hier. there and it's getting worse.) I worked at Google for 10 years (2011-2021) and I don't remember a single time where it didn't feel slow and bureaucratic. Compared to the smaller companies and startups I worked at before. Maybe it's not slow compared to academia or other BigCorps where many other Googlers came from though. Getting anything done always involved going through piles of "paperwork". Getting in the right MDB/Ganpati groups, finding the right persons to put on code reviews, juggling multiple code reviews at a time in order to make progress because your code reviews are just sitting in someone's review queue, "readability" reviews, applying to get readability, mandatory security reviews, design docs for the smallest features, going through rigorous launch processes, etc. It all made sense in the context of the kinds of production environments Google has, but it was often applied intensely even for very small pieces of work. On top of that, going through all that and having the paper trail for it was intimately tied to need to build paperwork for going through the perf & promo process, too. So it was entirely built into the culture there. Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways. (Oh, and over half the people you met came directly from academia anyways, and so of course they were used to this kind of crap, because that kind of "defend your work", publish-or-perish, and showboating culture is all over academia.) Has Google gotten slower over time? Maybe? It was sure bloody slow during COVID WFH. What did get worse overtime was shitty bureaucratic organizational politics. Or what I'd call "shipping the org chart." Customer impacting decisions clearly made because of the structure of various product areas and organizational empires. Especially in the world of things that were outside of Core/Search/Ads and were consumer facing. Terrible. Working at Google is a good way to learn about infrastructure at scale and make a lot of money. That's about it. The best career at Google is SRE. I wouldn't recommend a SWE career there.
- abdabab 4y ago
  > Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways. This happens in every company.
BirAdam 4y ago
I feel that, in general, as an organization grows it is forced to become more bureaucratic as the ability to coordinate a large group of disorganized people grows beyond manageability. Eventually the overly bureaucratic organization grinds to a halt because the different bureaus become too insular, compete for budget, and generally become unaware of how other departments work. Essentially, a company cannot grow too large and still be competitive unless the company purchases politicians for advantage.
- jackcosgrove 4y ago
  Turns out Leviathan, far from being of one mind, is confused and lazy.
saool 4y ago
For an industry so enamored with scale and network effects, we sometimes fail to recognize how these work against us organizationally. Or maybe we don't, and the boards/execs just prefer a more controllable organization even at the expense of rigidness and efficiency?
cletus 4y ago
My belief is that ultimately monopolies are unstable. Google's engine, which it has been specatacularly successful at, is obviously search. More specifically, it's search advertising. Google is a dominant player in display advertising (eg Google Ad Exchange, AdSense) but, at least when I worked there, these amounted to <10% of AdWords' revenue. They were a sideshow. Chrome, Android, Maps and Youtube are all key parts of this engine. The latter three were acquisitions and that gets to the key point. At some point a company becomes too large to innovate because no new business can compete, or will be allowed to compete, with the company's core business. Google missed the social media boat for this very reason. Google+ came way too late. Google spent billions on this failed effort. The real mistake was not buying Twitter. I mean Google ultimately offered a rumored $6 billion for GroupOn at one point. They dodged a bullet on that one when GroupOn rejected the advance. Rumor also had it Google tried to buy Twitter in ~2010 when Twitter was seeking a $3 billion valuation. Imagine if Google had slapped down $6 billion to buy Twitter. How much better off would they be? There is a ton of process to do anything at Google. This matches my experience. And that's an issue but it's not the main issue.
- gtmb 4y ago
  I agree. We have seen this cycle many times. But it's not only the monopolies that cause that, but also the combination with the need for infinite growth. A counter example would be craiglist, it has the monopoly, but the founder decided to stop "growing" 20 years ago. Imagine what different world if Sergey had said: well pagerank is good enough, the money is good enough. At the very least we wouldnt have this crappy search engine with nlp and other crap mixed in that doesnt matter what search terms you use, always find the same sites.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  I'm with you on everything except the Twitter part. Google doesn't leave most acquisitions alone - YouTube is a notable exception, and I'm really curious how they've been able to more independently than most Google acquisitions. (Perhaps implicit trust placed in Susan Wojcicki?) We have no reason to think that Twitter wouldn't have become the same kind of mess Google Plus did under Google's stewardship.
WalterBright 4y ago
This is why the theory that companies will inevitably grow until they own the world is false. Companies grow to the point where they are throttled by their own bureaucracy, then they fall to smaller, nimbler competitors. It happened to Standard Oil, IBM, GE, RCA, Kodak, Sears, all of them. The same failure happens to government agencies attempting central planned economies. Except that government agencies are never allowed to fail, and we all suffer.
- michaelbrave 4y ago
  any kind of central planning creates a large bottleneck and creates a brittle system with a single point of potentially catastrophic failure. It's why dictatorships tend to be fragile compared to a more decentralized system.
- miohtama 4y ago
  Schumpeter's creative destruction will eventually clean up the companies if they are allowed to fail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Google's monopoly over search, email, ads, Android and Youtube will be hard to beat by smaller and nimble competitors. It's far too entrenched and the moat it has built is too tough and impossibly expensive for newcomers to beat. And if newcomers do turn into a threat, they will be swiftly acquired and absorbed into the machine. If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale. Same for the likes of Nvidia. The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I heard the exact same thing about every previous giant that failed. It was always "this time it's different!"
seattle_spring 4y ago
Didn’t RTFA, but imo a ton of what makes these companies slow and inefficient is the hardcore performance review culture. People focus on the wrong things, or gaming measured metrics, so they can focus on getting more money. If people weren’t absorbed in how their work matches some dumb matrix, they might actually focus on working on the right problems.
- danrocks 4y ago
  Being a group manager at one FAANG and having just gone through a 5-day massive org performance review, I concur. People who actually launched something (however messy it was) may get punished in favor of those who "influenced other orgs".
seydor 4y ago
unfortunately the regulatory environment has also become bureaucratic. Too hard to start a competitor and kick them when they re down
alexchantavy 4y ago
I’d like to hear more about in what specific ways is google bottom-up but the article is kinda shallow. Are the roadmap items that teams commit to driven by ICs, and if so does that contribute to becoming bloated and bureaucratic? How? What does a top-down approach look like by comparison for a company as large as Google, and is that even feasible, given that top management are likely to be many layers away from code being written? Or is it something like when a company gets past a certain size then it has switch management styles? Was hoping the article would get closer to talking about these ideas but it’s lacking in substance imo.
coliveira 4y ago
It is funny because 20 years ago Google was selling itself as the company of the future that would dominate everything in technology. Their "genius" founders were spending billions on new endeavors. In fact, other than the original search engine and associated browser, they only got youtube and other businesses as acquisition (invented by others) and android as a reaction to iOS. Everything else they tried has basically failed or being inexpressive.
- djtriptych 4y ago
  I want to say that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google's office suite represented jumps in usability akin to a total revolution for users. The first two I know for sure were developed in house, and are of course still running strong. To me this is similar to Apple coming in to established markets and dominating them in short order. Not something to be dismissed IMO.
  - TYMorningCoffee 4y ago
    Google Ads, kubernetes, go to name some more
- mwint 4y ago
  Gmail might be considered a resounding in-house success, for market penetration & data harvesting potential.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    What did Gmail offer that Hotmail or Yahoo didn't? I don't remember why people started using it.
    - sercand 4y ago
      Gmail initially offered very big email storage space comparing the others, and it was going up continuously until its storage area merged with Google Drive.
up2isomorphism 4y ago
It is all about people. When company grows, there is a choice needed to be made between holding the hiring standard and maximizing short term revenue, for public traded companies there is little chance of choosing the former. And it is always exponentially harder to get rid of bad hire than hiring bad people. For google, at least before 2006, I did not know personally anybody does write bad code got in there. Until I start to see someone will always copy and paste code from internet and try to make some code barely works made to Google by just consistently practicing coding questions, the trend is quite obvious that none of stuff coming out there has a distinct quality differences compared to other technology companies.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Bureaucracy is certainly not new, as WalterBright and others have observed. When Xerox was first trying to commercialize PARC inventions, it was estimated that IBM's bureaucracy was so bad that it would take them nine months to ship an empty box.
renewiltord 4y ago
Google is widely known to be Slacker central. If you're a Googler/Xoogler who joined post 2018 everyone in the Bay will assume that you'll take a week on simple problems. There are hotshots there, of course, but the reputation of their engineering team is that they prioritize a 10 to 3 workday, meetings, and a diffstat of 0 most days. Or as Blind would call it, "decent WLB, high TC".
benreesman 4y ago
Google is slow and institutional because they can afford to be. At some point the search/ads people are so good, and they are insanely good, that there isn’t much pressure for anyone else to show PnL. These men and women are gods and goddesses in their fields, and if their worst fault is funding some iffy shit and giving us Blink and Android I can live with it. Their sideline vertical video business is highly competitive with TikTok and Reels and all they had to do was shit they knew already. The Google people are scary good.
- benreesman 4y ago
  Jesus when did it become unpopular to know that Google in general and Brain in particular is the friggin NBA? I never worked there, I don’t know Jeff, I’m just a fan. I’m not bragging or anything. But it sucks that acknowledging the real ballers in the room gets slammed by haters.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > Jesus when did it become unpopular to know that Google in general and Brain in particular is the friggin NBA What the hell does any of this mean?
    - benreesman 4y ago
      Those around people are crazy good, insane good, Jeff Dean good. I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m not that good. Apparently many are not.
moandcompany 4y ago
I am a Xoogler. The source document/presentation ("Coordination Headwinds") and idea are many years old, and from what I recall were not aimed to be critical of the company and its organization, rather to give its employee readers a feeling of solace and understanding for why getting seemingly small things done can feel overly hard and slow… a less humorous, and less SWE-specific version of "Broccoliman" if you will. Refer to the red panda that merely wants to serve 5TB of data. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082014 I’ll try to continue using the organism-metaphor in my commentary. While the “slime mold” story provides a convenient and charitable explanation of Google's bureaucracy and dysfunctions, another explanation is: - As an organism, Google's executive decision-making functions are severely impaired by lack of accurate information, dysfunction of its middle-management “organs” or tiers, and impedance mismatches arising from genetic encodings or mental models associated with the slime-mold idea. - Despite being on a mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google is far less successful at doing this with its own information. These characteristics are not unique to Google, but some of Google’s cultural history makes this a particularly challenging problem. It may be convenient to think of Google as a slime-mold organism, and in an individual contributor’s day-to-day engineering activities it may very well be, but as a corporation it is not. The vast majority of Google’s product areas or business units, are not self-sustaining entities and all rely and draw upon resources, namely headcount, that unavoidably go through a centralized prioritization and allocation process. Ruth (Google CFO) and Sundar’s (Google CEO) jobs are quite difficult if you consider that: (1) they don’t have optimal or very accurate internal information, (2) they are constrained by what is provided to them and what people will actually do, (3) tributary sources of information generally have little understanding of broader processes, aside from what they expect to receive, and also have many incentives to fashion information in a manner that maximizes their own benefit – based on what they assume or understand. Avery Pennarun (apenwarr@) touched on some of the above internally in a document called “View from Above” (go/vfa) and post-Google, on similar dynamics in a public blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 From my own experience at Google, where I served in engineering leadership roles and joined as an experienced industry hire, is that over time Google's culture – Namely its performance rating and promotion process, over-weight certain accomplishments and neglect critical characteristics and understandings needed from employees as they move into upper echelons of leveling (middle-management and higher), most importantly in the L6/L7 (manager, sr manager) and L8 (director) levels. Many Googlers in those ranks continued to operate based on the understandings they held as project / technical leads (“TLs”), typically a Level 5 role, and continued to be promoted based on those understandings and/or increased headcount below them. Meanwhile, these roles, and the corporate organism’s need from these roles, are fundamentally from being a TL or project lead. Compounding this problem is the fact that for most Googlers in these roles, scarcity of resources was rarely a problem, and getting headcount was easy. Most managers know how to ask for headcount but have no idea how to help support the conditions for its creation. To be less wishy-washy, many people were promoted for continuing to do their jobs as they understood them, and their expanding team size to some degree, rather than understanding the full scope and understanding of the new level or role they were stepping into. And to some degree, it may not have been their fault as the persons and examples before them did the exact same thing. Some might say this is the Peter Principle in practice, but at Google-scale. Anyways… to wrap this up, I regularly encourage people to think about and learn to understand their boss’ boss’ problems, and ensure they are able to evaluate and represent their work in relation to those problems. Without establishing that context, your work may be completely misaligned or difficult to value when viewed from above.
puppydups 4y ago
Unpopular opinion: in engineering, control processes are often confused as "bureaucracy". Regulations and adhering to standards is a GOOD thing and worth the time because it reduces risk (and hazards) and failures.
- pas 4y ago
  the problem is usually that the process becomes a monolith, loses its efficiency. the solution is to have more than one way to do something so these processes can keep each other in check. (eg. majority of devs start using process B instead of A then there is a clear signal that A is inefficient, so owners of A are incentivized to make A better...)
puppydups 4y ago
The irony of this: slime molds are very efficient at the tasks they're designed for.
puppydups 4y ago
Had anyone noticed that the big bad time-sucking "bureaucracy" is always ill-defined? Whether it's Google, GE, or whoever, these co's never discuss the ACTUAL root causes of insufficient productivity. Leaning up to go faster is code for: our shareholders are complaining, so 1. Corners will be cut or 2. Layoffs of the "slow and weak" are imminent. It's never about problem solving. Unless your problem is that you need more money right now.
nowherebeen 4y ago
I think this is the document the article is referring to? https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

184 points by atombender 4y ago

Another presentation by the author (who no longer works at Google, apparently): "Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds" [1]. [1] https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

hgsgm 4y ago
Isn't it the same content?
arebop 4y ago
I normally don't get much from presentation slides; they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks and they often amount to the bullet points of someone's outline. But in this case, the article is an extremely poor summary of this comparatively rich and substantial presentation. Thanks for sharing this link. It is much more comprehensible than the article itself.
- ghaff 4y ago
  > they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks Historically, yes, as an aspirational goal. Even if, in practice, a lot of people didn't want to or didn't get around to creating a doc to go along with the presentation. That said, I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. So it's pretty normal--at least for routine information sharing--to create a text-heavy presentation and just hit the high points when presenting from it. Not sure this is even a bad thing for a lot of purposes--especially to the degree people can put together cogent sets of bullet points but aren't that great at pages of prose.
  - mikea1 4y ago
    > I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. I prefer long form content... but spending time in the comments section of HN may show a revealed preference. I concur with your observation. Piling on with a couple examples: - Axios is a news service that only delivers information in bullet points. Unlike their long-form competitors, they are expanding into local news. [0] - Long form content, such as books, are less popular. The average number of books read each year has fallen to a 30 year low. [1] [0] https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2022/11/22/introducing-axios-cleveland-sam-allard-troy-smith https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2022/11/22/introducing-... [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-...
  - mort96 4y ago
    That sounds like the worst of both worlds? You end up with a slide deck that doesn't contain the information added by the presenter, but which are too info-heavy to work well during the talk.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I'm talking more about program updates, "know before you go" information about events, etc. rather than conference keynotes. (Of course, there are many things in between.) For this sort of thing you really do want a canonical source of information--including for those who didn't attend a call that hit the highlights. And these days that tends to be a fairly dense slide deck because that's what a lot of people prefer and you meet people where they are. My conference presentations don't generally have a lot of words. But that's not all I do and it does mean my conference presentation slide decks aren't super-informative on their own.
meltyness 4y ago
The presentation is 170 slides, and involves statistical arguments modeling work. - Small projects can tolerate collaborating specialist pools (CSPs). - CSPs attempting large complicated projects are quickly disastrously unlikely to even be completed due to the network effects of uncertainty and disagreement on commitment efforts, even with a hierarchy stuffed-in (assuming each specialist is necessary) - One solution is to minimize team size. - Another solution is planning projects better.
- Terretta 4y ago
  It arguably says rather than planning, iterate with a goal in mind.
wistlo 4y ago
This presentation is so clear I'm going to show it to my high-schooler so that she can (1) understand why Dad works on Saturday (I confess to some "heroics"), and (2) concepts she can keep in mind on upcoming projects at school, and eventually at a job.
- lantry 4y ago
  [flagged]
- juancb 4y ago
  Can you elucidate on how the presentation explains why you choose to work on Saturdays?
eternalban 4y ago
Here's a podcast to go with that: https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/138 https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/138 The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame. p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building. https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-real-value-of-middle-managers https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-real-value-of-middle-managers
- moandcompany 4y ago
  Yes. I wrote about exactly this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381884#34385570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381884#34385570 As the corporate organism itself grows larger and faces newer challenges, it may need to evolve and develop new, more specialized organs that a slime mold does not inherently possess or function well at to scale. Many organisms in the natural world could not scale exactly as-is to 10x or 100x their normal size with their existing structures. The idea of a slime mold representing the whole company may have once been true a decade or more ago when Google was much smaller and less extended, but the mental model is much like newer people at Google yearning for the "old Google" that never worked there during its earlier days. It's a nice fantasy.
nanis 4y ago
Apart from the intra-company dynamics, there is also the fact that Google do not face the same kind of consumer driven market pressure as, say, Walmart. I do recommend the excellent "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives"[1] where the greatest incentive individuals face in an organization have involve doing relatively better compared to other individuals in the organization without significant outside indicators of the right direction. In that sense, Google is like a government behemoth. Most involved in its direction and functioning have incentives that are decoupled from whether the people who are touched by their "products" and "services" are happy with them. [1]: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/164/1/WRAP_Harrison_jel05.pdf https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/164/1/WRAP_Harrison_jel05.pdf

rektide 4y ago

Also recently submitted & on the same topic of effective innovation driving & organizational wayfinding, "Andy Grove on dynamic dialectic"[1], which nicely laid out some of the core top-down vs bottom-up struggles. It pegged bottom-up as "chaotic but smart". Grove talks about something mentioned very early on in Alex's webpage[2] (right under the top link, to a genericized/not-Google-specific Slime Mold presentation), leadership of the gardening style (although specifically Komoroske is talking about gardening platforms). Making sure those with potential & good ideas are enabled, might be how I'd describe it. On a personal note to me, it's amazing how much we assume - have left individual isolated groups/teams connected upwards & sometimes side-ways as the organizational structure. Leaving only higher up levels of the org structure to mediate & suss out truth, not having workers also put in their bid for how other projects should execute or where priority should be is the practice. Im fascinated by the potential of trying a more connected & aware org, where we try to spend more effort internally communicating & sharing bids for where we think we ought be placing our efforts, where we ought be redirecting or reshaping efforts. [1] https://www.leadingsapiens.com/andy-grove-balancing-top-down-vs-bottom-up-approaches-leadership/ https://www.leadingsapiens.com/andy-grove-balancing-top-down... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381928 [2] https://komoroske.com/ https://komoroske.com/

nynx 4y ago

https://archive.is/7BYDG https://archive.is/7BYDG

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JonChesterfield 4y ago

I'm wholly convinced by that argument. Anyone have a counter?

adrianmonk 4y ago

Just because you want to be bottom-up doesn't mean you need to be dogmatic about it and can't have good leaders who take a stand when necessary. The two aren't incompatible. You don't need to take away people's independence and agency to have good leaders. A good leader doesn't need to be authoritarian in order to lead. It's bad leaders who have to force people to follow them. And just because you want to be agile and flexible doesn't mean you can't plan ahead. You need a little of both.

johnday 4y ago
In fact, planning ahead (when done properly) maximises the chance that you can be flexible. It's hard to adapt and change flexibly if you're busy dealing with the upshot of yesterday's unforeseen disaster.
strangattractor 4y ago
Is being slow necessarily a bad thing? Google is a large cash generating machine. Maybe making large changes quickly would be detrimental to the over all health of the company. As a counter example one might consider Musk's takeover of Twitter. Although it is still too soon to tell the effects of his "nimbleness" are not looking stellar at the moment. Having worked in Google like companies they always seem lure talent by dangling tasty projects in front of them. But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between. The talent then starts complaining the company is not nimble enough etc and moves on. One might argue this is the natural order things. One of the reason SV has so many startups. Much of what startups do is likely not that appealing to large companies and far too risky - failing at a high rate.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between. Back when I was an industry analyst, I still remember a conversation I had with someone at IBM. I don't remember the context and don't quote me on the number but he said something to the effect of "If it doesn't have the potential to be at least a billion dollar business, we're not going to even try." Basically every project consumes some slice of attention, time, and money up and down the line. You can mitigate this to some degree with decentralization but only up to a point.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

meltyness 4y ago

It's DAU getting companies like this into over-leveraging, and it's a bubble we're still in. Good tech products are not necessarily capital/personnel intensive. The "finish line" for Google is not the next Search, or real innovation, it is about longevity, maintaining an ecosystem, and "trading the news." - Windows applications are risky, and inflexible -- Chrome. - Laptops and Active Directory confusing ISD administrators -- Chromebook/Workspaces ecosystem. - TikTok is getting a bad rap on the hill -- Shorts. These are healthy and understandable business moves, but not everything these companies excrete is, good. This is where buybacks should be terminated by our legislators. Not to punish these players for their rapid success, but to facilitate natural logistics for these hugely impactful, ubiquitouly embedded service providers. On the less sane side of things: - Google Wave beat Slack/Teams/Discord to market by 10 years. - Google+ was 7-8 years late to the party. - Stadia, obviously at-odds with AR/VR, and Deep ML. - The only way to prevent "20% time" from hacking away at your own "terra firma" is to punish it, or make it impossible -- overhire and waste your employees time.

travisjungroth 4y ago
> but to facilitate natural logistics for these hugely impactful, ubiquitouly embedded service providers. What does this mean?
- meltyness 4y ago
  I'm avoiding the term "leverage", and the huge issuances it must have taken to make a Stadia appear, and then suddenly disappear, as well as "the bottom 6%" that appeared and disappeared from the roster over the course of 2022. Economically speaking, where's the logistic growth peak? Is there growth for each company each business cycle? I don't know that, but in my opinion, the dividend-buyback axis is how FAANG companies got themselves in this "unconstrained, risk-free market participant" position in the first place. In one sense, buying everyone in the world a graphics card is a cool idea. In another sense, it's extremely risky and probably wasteful. Similar to "Bird" but somehow less noble. The slime mold only creeps if there's no environmental constraints.

_8j50 4y ago

Oh, the many times I've been told "A large ship turns slow". I have no idea what's going on with Google but the sickness is familiar. I am just trying to get a small thing done, not turn the whole damn ship yet that I am faced with the same bureaucracy and inefficiency. But I have had success overcoming that, at the cost of not being very popular. But the real solution is managerial. It is remarkably simple: To get anything done, require the least possible number of people to be part of that thing being done. But for managers, they love to throw people and money at problems. But really, it is upper management that needs to basically micro-manage everyone under them specifically when it comes to headcount. I fully expect the CEO of alphabet asking random project managers to justify headcount of not just direct reports but who is being involved in their projects. If you need 2 devs to code, one to qa/test. That's it. You don't get anyone else. Not for redundancy, not for anything else. You don't involve legal or marketing, change management,etc... because that means rules and procedures and politics and meetings and planning. The problem is very old: "If all you have is a hammer,everything is a nail". For mid and low level managers, all they have is "get more people" when they want things done. And the arrogance of being a bigcorp compounds this because "we are $bigcorp, we have a team for this and a well tested process for that,such and such team can help with". You cannot compensate for loss of agility by claiming reduction in risk and liability. You should not let lawyers, marketing and middle management choke your company to death. It's up to top brass to piss off everyone in their immediate surrounding so the bottom line is good and the company is healthy. Ultimately, shareholders need to hold management accountable for wasting their money.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
You are making an explicit dichotomy / choice very clearly and eloquently and I agree with most of what you said. Where not everybody may agree is which side they prefer. This is an opinion, not a fact : "If you need 2 devs to code, one to qa/test. That's it. You don't get anyone else. Not for redundancy, not for anything else. You don't involve legal or marketing, change management,etc... because that means rules and procedures and politics and meetings and planning." I.e. For some companies / stakeholders / shareholders / client, risk aversion and predictability absolutely positively is preferred at cost of some agility. It's a willing overhead not necessarily perceived as waste. people driving without insurance may laugh at the suckers who are paying for something they'll probably never use, but risk appetite differs. We don't have to all agree, it's a wonderful diverse world out there, but I will always respect an argument better if it is self-aware of its assumptions and biases.

johnasmith 4y ago

We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.

esprehn 4y ago
Without commenting on the contents of the memo Komoroske was not some random employee, he was one of the most senior PMs at the company and now heads up strategy for Stripe.
echelon 4y ago
I would argue the top down leadership has been blind or negligent to their Achilles heel. They've let growth in all areas but their single cash cow be needlessly duplicated, rudderless, left to wither on the vine. To rephrase, I'm not sure that Google leadership has demonstrated the great insight to see what's going wrong and change it. I'd trust just about anyone else at the company to produce an equally plausible hypothesis. Especially if it rhymes with what we see from the outside. We've discussed these same systemic issues at Google for over a decade now. Google is a dodo.
allenu 4y ago
Agreed. This is just a random employee bemoaning that his large, bureaucratic employer is slow to move, and the opinion document he wrote got leaked for some reason. It doesn't "explain" why Google has become slow. Anyone can work out why Google is slow. Most likely because, like a lot of other large companies, Google has a lot of bureaucracy in the way of getting anything done, and a lots of people and lots of teams leads to mismatched incentives, which aren't necessarily aligned towards shipping product people want.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  A month ago a commenter linked to[1] a similar rant from Waze’s ex-CEO bemoaning the same kinds of things. Process yuck! Bureaucracy bad! Too slow! and so on. I imagine it’s a common complaint from people who don’t thrive in a slow, steady, process oriented culture. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33905310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33905310

gymbeaux 4y ago

Mythical Man Month

brilee 4y ago

(disclaimer: am googler) Just like the thesis of the slime mold talk, the talk itself is a result of the slime mold and doesn't particularly represent any company-authoritative take on the situation. It's turtles all the way down!

Someone1234 4y ago
Maybe I am stupid, but I cannot make heads or tails of what you're trying to say. I assume it is along the lines of "this document isn't a good representation" but you used so much coded language and obscure references I'm not sure.
- lantry 4y ago
  they're saying that "slime mold" culture, where independence and initiative are rewarded, it's possible for one employee to write a document like this. The employee can examine and criticize the culture because they have a high degree of independence. The "slime mold" culture is capable of being more introspective than a more "top down" culture can be. I think they're also saying that the document is written from the POV of a single employee, and isn't the result of a full study/survey of the whole company
- spondyl 4y ago
  The commenter is referring to the following talk by the same author as the document: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ Slime molds are a type of organism that can expand quickly as each entity within the mold is independent. As a result, the mold as a whole can resist any one actor being removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold The analogy used by the talk is that a slime mold is the polar opposite of a top-down control hierarchy although I haven't read the whole talk (yet) Anyway, the commenter is saying that Google (like a lot of tech companies) is comparable to a slime mold in that it's greatly distributed causing it to be closer to "messy and uncontrollable". In the same breath however, the author of the document is part of said mold acting in their own capacity. By definition, they can't speak for the entire organisation (or necessarily even observe it) because well, it's a slime mold.

Barrin92 4y ago

I'd question the implicit assumption that Google being slow is even a bad thing. Google owns large chunks of the markets they are in, they are not a startup but at the very top. If you're in that position you pretty much want to maximally exploit what you have and simply make money, there's no comparative advantage to prioritize exploration. You'd basically want to be more bureaucratic, not less, given that bureaucracy is nothing else but the rational allocation and organisation of resources. If you own everything, making things slightly work better will net you a lot of profit. I think Facebook with its founder oriented corporate structure now has this exact problem as Zuckerberg went on his Metaverse extravaganza instead of actually making the company print more money which is what they're actually good at.

danpalmer 4y ago
I sort of agree. I’m a googler, but these are very much just my opinions, and there’s some bias, but… The bureaucracy I experience as an individual contributor and engineer kinda makes sense. It’s things like ensuring that systems will scale, ensuring that user data is treated in the right way, ensuring that access and security is done correctly, etc. There is a lot to all of that. A lot of clicking buttons on internal tools to make sure that whole chains of systems understand everything to ensure oversight, and sometimes it’s a huge pain, especially coming from a startup world. However there have been very few times when I’ve truly thought something wasn’t worth it at the scale we operate at, and responsibility we have (to users, regulation, etc).

rndmnflnce 4y ago

Honestly sounds like the whole situation could be simplified as, "There's no more passion at Google because there is no real environment for real passionate leaders that naturally drive the company"

paganel 4y ago

Nobody is saying it, but I will: of course that Google being a gigantic company doesn't help, but what imo really seals the deal in terms of them not being innovative enough is the fact that most of the people now working there are in for the money and money alone. In the past we've had pretty big companies/organisations that used to be quite innovative, I'm thinking of Xerox, HP, Bell, even Intel at some point, to say nothing of the various departments attached to the US industrial-military complex (starting with NASA), but then the people innovating back then hadn't joined those companies/organisations mostly for the money and money alone. Get rid of the people who have joined Alphabet only to get the 500-600k yearly comp and you could get, at some point, some innovation in return.

sylware 4y ago

This _might_ have originated once vanguard/blackrock people took over from the founders...

ergonaught 4y ago

I somehow never connected these issues with probability. Nice!

pictur 4y ago

off-topic: How terrible is that site's notification to open the article in the mobile app. The mobile site experience is really getting more intimidating every day. they can't make the same warning text for the desktop because they're sure they'll get a reaction. however, when they do this on mobile, people will leave the site without reading the article.

SilverBirch 4y ago

More people == More politics. This varies by person, some people are highly political - you will not get any work out of them, except possibly in service of their political goal. It scales super linearly though, so at some point as you add more people you're actually reducing productivity, because those people are either going to spend all their time navigating the politics, which is bad, or start their own political agenda which is worse. You know what's bad? Hiring 1 unproductive person. What's wores? Hiring 1 unproductive person who persuades you to hire a whole team to serve their bullshit. I've got good news though. How do you fix this? Simple, don't overhire in the first place! Womp Womp!

ljm 4y ago
Office politics is one somewhat cynical perspective (even if it is accurate as a hierarchy grows taller). The other simple fact is that a larger team or a larger org requires more communication, more co-ordination, and more management. Beyond a point, adding parallelism doesn’t improve performance, it kills it.
- birdymcbird 4y ago
  > Office politics is one somewhat cynical perspective had director colleague say this in same words. it cynical view, so we pretend it not happening and not rock boat. well here we are now with layoffs. entire teams who produce no economic value. problem is too many people hired for empire building purposes. it is easier to ignore real issues causing stagnating product. instead, bring in professional manager class. product owners, program managers, software engineering managers, senior mansgers. layers and layers of competing political incentive. building complexity for promotions and to increase head count. Game they play is just say right platitudes like “obsessing with customers”, “all about customer journey”, “reduce friction for customer” and humble brag “my org have 120 people report”.
  - ljm 4y ago
    You're not wrong, but I think you're describing a separate issue too, which I also agree with. It's not politics, it's growing too big, too fast, and inventing jobs that were never needed before to meet some expectation of growth. And, after all the layoffs this past year, it turns out that all the hyper-growth hires post-funding are just pawns to bolster a VC's investment. Office politics in their pure form are rough, borderline toxic, like having someone threaten your promotion or your pay rise if you don't meet their sudden change of expectations.

jaimebuelta 4y ago

Any company that grows to be Google size is going to be slow and bureaucratic. It can mitigate it a bit, but just by the nature of it, it just carry too much momentum and complexity…

jeffbee 4y ago

Compared to? Google of 2008? Believable. Goldman Sachs? No.

kasey_junk 4y ago
Do you have personal experience or are you just playing to a stereotype. I don’t have experience with either organization but have worked for a big tech company and a big finance org and the finance org was much less bureaucratic and got more done.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  I have worked at both. Literally nothing happened the entire time I was in my group at Goldman, because everyone spent 100% of their time on compliance and friction.
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    The compliance framework in the financial organization I worked at was much lower friction than at the tech company. It felt like something they took seriously so integrated it as a first class requirement. As opposed to at the tech org where they seemed to treat it like a chore they had to check off a list. I suspect that this is something that is organization dependent not a uniform trend in either direction.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      That’s why I posed it concretely instead of as FAANG vs finance.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    That's because you didn't work in a revenue-producing line. Goldman has people in their mid-20s managing books of business larger than most listed companies and responsible for hundreds of millions in revenue per year. That isn't possible with a bureaucracy (this is how you get the huge insider trading cases, like I know people who worked there, were there for a few years and could not imagine the amount of business they were doing as relatively junior employees...it is a crazy system but seems to work, back in the early 90s they would give prop books worth hundreds of millions to grads a few months out of college...again, it was genuinely mad but it worked).

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

By their own admission, monopolies are not efficient and they are actively hurting the consumer by their size. When will we call the antitrust experiment from the 80s era “Chicago school of economics” an abject failure? Google should instead be several companies, each with a duty to consumers to compete with other companies in their respective businesses. Even Google knows it, not that their leadership would ever admit it. Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.

voakbasda 4y ago
> Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies. Monopolies offer the most reward to those who would fashion themselves out to be robber barons. There are a lot of people that would take that title, more than there are opportunities. Why settle for millions when you can take billions? The pursuit of money brings out the sociopaths, who by definition do not care about externalities web seeking their fortunes.
bdw5204 4y ago
A monopoly is basically a Marxist-Leninist command economy writ small which means it inevitably has all of the same dysfunctions. In other words, Marx was right about how laissez-faire capitalism leads to communism (though of course he was wrong about this being inevitable or good). If monopolies are completely allowed to run amok, eventually you will have a single monopoly of everything that will be powerful enough to control the government and weaponize said government against its critics and anybody who tries to compete with it. This is appealing to the people at the top of monopolies and those who think they can climb to the top for the same reason why many people prefer being the dictator of an impoverished country over being a commoner in a wealthy country. A significant portion of humanity cares more about relative status than absolute status and, to them, equal treatment feels like oppression.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  In 1989 I read about how IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut that would rule the world. IB-who?

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Meh. I don't buy this guy's explanation ("it's because we're so non-hierarchical". There's plenty of hier. there and it's getting worse.) I worked at Google for 10 years (2011-2021) and I don't remember a single time where it didn't feel slow and bureaucratic. Compared to the smaller companies and startups I worked at before. Maybe it's not slow compared to academia or other BigCorps where many other Googlers came from though. Getting anything done always involved going through piles of "paperwork". Getting in the right MDB/Ganpati groups, finding the right persons to put on code reviews, juggling multiple code reviews at a time in order to make progress because your code reviews are just sitting in someone's review queue, "readability" reviews, applying to get readability, mandatory security reviews, design docs for the smallest features, going through rigorous launch processes, etc. It all made sense in the context of the kinds of production environments Google has, but it was often applied intensely even for very small pieces of work. On top of that, going through all that and having the paper trail for it was intimately tied to need to build paperwork for going through the perf & promo process, too. So it was entirely built into the culture there. Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways. (Oh, and over half the people you met came directly from academia anyways, and so of course they were used to this kind of crap, because that kind of "defend your work", publish-or-perish, and showboating culture is all over academia.) Has Google gotten slower over time? Maybe? It was sure bloody slow during COVID WFH. What did get worse overtime was shitty bureaucratic organizational politics. Or what I'd call "shipping the org chart." Customer impacting decisions clearly made because of the structure of various product areas and organizational empires. Especially in the world of things that were outside of Core/Search/Ads and were consumer facing. Terrible. Working at Google is a good way to learn about infrastructure at scale and make a lot of money. That's about it. The best career at Google is SRE. I wouldn't recommend a SWE career there.

abdabab 4y ago
> Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways. This happens in every company.

BirAdam 4y ago

I feel that, in general, as an organization grows it is forced to become more bureaucratic as the ability to coordinate a large group of disorganized people grows beyond manageability. Eventually the overly bureaucratic organization grinds to a halt because the different bureaus become too insular, compete for budget, and generally become unaware of how other departments work. Essentially, a company cannot grow too large and still be competitive unless the company purchases politicians for advantage.

jackcosgrove 4y ago
Turns out Leviathan, far from being of one mind, is confused and lazy.

saool 4y ago

For an industry so enamored with scale and network effects, we sometimes fail to recognize how these work against us organizationally. Or maybe we don't, and the boards/execs just prefer a more controllable organization even at the expense of rigidness and efficiency?

cletus 4y ago

My belief is that ultimately monopolies are unstable. Google's engine, which it has been specatacularly successful at, is obviously search. More specifically, it's search advertising. Google is a dominant player in display advertising (eg Google Ad Exchange, AdSense) but, at least when I worked there, these amounted to <10% of AdWords' revenue. They were a sideshow. Chrome, Android, Maps and Youtube are all key parts of this engine. The latter three were acquisitions and that gets to the key point. At some point a company becomes too large to innovate because no new business can compete, or will be allowed to compete, with the company's core business. Google missed the social media boat for this very reason. Google+ came way too late. Google spent billions on this failed effort. The real mistake was not buying Twitter. I mean Google ultimately offered a rumored $6 billion for GroupOn at one point. They dodged a bullet on that one when GroupOn rejected the advance. Rumor also had it Google tried to buy Twitter in ~2010 when Twitter was seeking a $3 billion valuation. Imagine if Google had slapped down $6 billion to buy Twitter. How much better off would they be? There is a ton of process to do anything at Google. This matches my experience. And that's an issue but it's not the main issue.

gtmb 4y ago
I agree. We have seen this cycle many times. But it's not only the monopolies that cause that, but also the combination with the need for infinite growth. A counter example would be craiglist, it has the monopoly, but the founder decided to stop "growing" 20 years ago. Imagine what different world if Sergey had said: well pagerank is good enough, the money is good enough. At the very least we wouldnt have this crappy search engine with nlp and other crap mixed in that doesnt matter what search terms you use, always find the same sites.
deanCommie 4y ago
I'm with you on everything except the Twitter part. Google doesn't leave most acquisitions alone - YouTube is a notable exception, and I'm really curious how they've been able to more independently than most Google acquisitions. (Perhaps implicit trust placed in Susan Wojcicki?) We have no reason to think that Twitter wouldn't have become the same kind of mess Google Plus did under Google's stewardship.

WalterBright 4y ago

This is why the theory that companies will inevitably grow until they own the world is false. Companies grow to the point where they are throttled by their own bureaucracy, then they fall to smaller, nimbler competitors. It happened to Standard Oil, IBM, GE, RCA, Kodak, Sears, all of them. The same failure happens to government agencies attempting central planned economies. Except that government agencies are never allowed to fail, and we all suffer.

michaelbrave 4y ago
any kind of central planning creates a large bottleneck and creates a brittle system with a single point of potentially catastrophic failure. It's why dictatorships tend to be fragile compared to a more decentralized system.
miohtama 4y ago
Schumpeter's creative destruction will eventually clean up the companies if they are allowed to fail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Google's monopoly over search, email, ads, Android and Youtube will be hard to beat by smaller and nimble competitors. It's far too entrenched and the moat it has built is too tough and impossibly expensive for newcomers to beat. And if newcomers do turn into a threat, they will be swiftly acquired and absorbed into the machine. If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale. Same for the likes of Nvidia. The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I heard the exact same thing about every previous giant that failed. It was always "this time it's different!"

seattle_spring 4y ago

Didn’t RTFA, but imo a ton of what makes these companies slow and inefficient is the hardcore performance review culture. People focus on the wrong things, or gaming measured metrics, so they can focus on getting more money. If people weren’t absorbed in how their work matches some dumb matrix, they might actually focus on working on the right problems.

danrocks 4y ago
Being a group manager at one FAANG and having just gone through a 5-day massive org performance review, I concur. People who actually launched something (however messy it was) may get punished in favor of those who "influenced other orgs".

seydor 4y ago

unfortunately the regulatory environment has also become bureaucratic. Too hard to start a competitor and kick them when they re down

alexchantavy 4y ago

I’d like to hear more about in what specific ways is google bottom-up but the article is kinda shallow. Are the roadmap items that teams commit to driven by ICs, and if so does that contribute to becoming bloated and bureaucratic? How? What does a top-down approach look like by comparison for a company as large as Google, and is that even feasible, given that top management are likely to be many layers away from code being written? Or is it something like when a company gets past a certain size then it has switch management styles? Was hoping the article would get closer to talking about these ideas but it’s lacking in substance imo.

coliveira 4y ago

It is funny because 20 years ago Google was selling itself as the company of the future that would dominate everything in technology. Their "genius" founders were spending billions on new endeavors. In fact, other than the original search engine and associated browser, they only got youtube and other businesses as acquisition (invented by others) and android as a reaction to iOS. Everything else they tried has basically failed or being inexpressive.

djtriptych 4y ago
I want to say that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google's office suite represented jumps in usability akin to a total revolution for users. The first two I know for sure were developed in house, and are of course still running strong. To me this is similar to Apple coming in to established markets and dominating them in short order. Not something to be dismissed IMO.
- TYMorningCoffee 4y ago
  Google Ads, kubernetes, go to name some more
mwint 4y ago
Gmail might be considered a resounding in-house success, for market penetration & data harvesting potential.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  What did Gmail offer that Hotmail or Yahoo didn't? I don't remember why people started using it.
  - sercand 4y ago
    Gmail initially offered very big email storage space comparing the others, and it was going up continuously until its storage area merged with Google Drive.

up2isomorphism 4y ago

It is all about people. When company grows, there is a choice needed to be made between holding the hiring standard and maximizing short term revenue, for public traded companies there is little chance of choosing the former. And it is always exponentially harder to get rid of bad hire than hiring bad people. For google, at least before 2006, I did not know personally anybody does write bad code got in there. Until I start to see someone will always copy and paste code from internet and try to make some code barely works made to Google by just consistently practicing coding questions, the trend is quite obvious that none of stuff coming out there has a distinct quality differences compared to other technology companies.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Bureaucracy is certainly not new, as WalterBright and others have observed. When Xerox was first trying to commercialize PARC inventions, it was estimated that IBM's bureaucracy was so bad that it would take them nine months to ship an empty box.

renewiltord 4y ago

Google is widely known to be Slacker central. If you're a Googler/Xoogler who joined post 2018 everyone in the Bay will assume that you'll take a week on simple problems. There are hotshots there, of course, but the reputation of their engineering team is that they prioritize a 10 to 3 workday, meetings, and a diffstat of 0 most days. Or as Blind would call it, "decent WLB, high TC".

benreesman 4y ago

Google is slow and institutional because they can afford to be. At some point the search/ads people are so good, and they are insanely good, that there isn’t much pressure for anyone else to show PnL. These men and women are gods and goddesses in their fields, and if their worst fault is funding some iffy shit and giving us Blink and Android I can live with it. Their sideline vertical video business is highly competitive with TikTok and Reels and all they had to do was shit they knew already. The Google people are scary good.

benreesman 4y ago
Jesus when did it become unpopular to know that Google in general and Brain in particular is the friggin NBA? I never worked there, I don’t know Jeff, I’m just a fan. I’m not bragging or anything. But it sucks that acknowledging the real ballers in the room gets slammed by haters.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > Jesus when did it become unpopular to know that Google in general and Brain in particular is the friggin NBA What the hell does any of this mean?
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Those around people are crazy good, insane good, Jeff Dean good. I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m not that good. Apparently many are not.

moandcompany 4y ago

I am a Xoogler. The source document/presentation ("Coordination Headwinds") and idea are many years old, and from what I recall were not aimed to be critical of the company and its organization, rather to give its employee readers a feeling of solace and understanding for why getting seemingly small things done can feel overly hard and slow… a less humorous, and less SWE-specific version of "Broccoliman" if you will. Refer to the red panda that merely wants to serve 5TB of data. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082014 I’ll try to continue using the organism-metaphor in my commentary. While the “slime mold” story provides a convenient and charitable explanation of Google's bureaucracy and dysfunctions, another explanation is: - As an organism, Google's executive decision-making functions are severely impaired by lack of accurate information, dysfunction of its middle-management “organs” or tiers, and impedance mismatches arising from genetic encodings or mental models associated with the slime-mold idea. - Despite being on a mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google is far less successful at doing this with its own information. These characteristics are not unique to Google, but some of Google’s cultural history makes this a particularly challenging problem. It may be convenient to think of Google as a slime-mold organism, and in an individual contributor’s day-to-day engineering activities it may very well be, but as a corporation it is not. The vast majority of Google’s product areas or business units, are not self-sustaining entities and all rely and draw upon resources, namely headcount, that unavoidably go through a centralized prioritization and allocation process. Ruth (Google CFO) and Sundar’s (Google CEO) jobs are quite difficult if you consider that: (1) they don’t have optimal or very accurate internal information, (2) they are constrained by what is provided to them and what people will actually do, (3) tributary sources of information generally have little understanding of broader processes, aside from what they expect to receive, and also have many incentives to fashion information in a manner that maximizes their own benefit – based on what they assume or understand. Avery Pennarun (apenwarr@) touched on some of the above internally in a document called “View from Above” (go/vfa) and post-Google, on similar dynamics in a public blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 From my own experience at Google, where I served in engineering leadership roles and joined as an experienced industry hire, is that over time Google's culture – Namely its performance rating and promotion process, over-weight certain accomplishments and neglect critical characteristics and understandings needed from employees as they move into upper echelons of leveling (middle-management and higher), most importantly in the L6/L7 (manager, sr manager) and L8 (director) levels. Many Googlers in those ranks continued to operate based on the understandings they held as project / technical leads (“TLs”), typically a Level 5 role, and continued to be promoted based on those understandings and/or increased headcount below them. Meanwhile, these roles, and the corporate organism’s need from these roles, are fundamentally from being a TL or project lead. Compounding this problem is the fact that for most Googlers in these roles, scarcity of resources was rarely a problem, and getting headcount was easy. Most managers know how to ask for headcount but have no idea how to help support the conditions for its creation. To be less wishy-washy, many people were promoted for continuing to do their jobs as they understood them, and their expanding team size to some degree, rather than understanding the full scope and understanding of the new level or role they were stepping into. And to some degree, it may not have been their fault as the persons and examples before them did the exact same thing. Some might say this is the Peter Principle in practice, but at Google-scale. Anyways… to wrap this up, I regularly encourage people to think about and learn to understand their boss’ boss’ problems, and ensure they are able to evaluate and represent their work in relation to those problems. Without establishing that context, your work may be completely misaligned or difficult to value when viewed from above.

puppydups 4y ago

Unpopular opinion: in engineering, control processes are often confused as "bureaucracy". Regulations and adhering to standards is a GOOD thing and worth the time because it reduces risk (and hazards) and failures.

pas 4y ago
the problem is usually that the process becomes a monolith, loses its efficiency. the solution is to have more than one way to do something so these processes can keep each other in check. (eg. majority of devs start using process B instead of A then there is a clear signal that A is inefficient, so owners of A are incentivized to make A better...)

puppydups 4y ago

The irony of this: slime molds are very efficient at the tasks they're designed for.

puppydups 4y ago

Had anyone noticed that the big bad time-sucking "bureaucracy" is always ill-defined? Whether it's Google, GE, or whoever, these co's never discuss the ACTUAL root causes of insufficient productivity. Leaning up to go faster is code for: our shareholders are complaining, so 1. Corners will be cut or 2. Layoffs of the "slow and weak" are imminent. It's never about problem solving. Unless your problem is that you need more money right now.

nowherebeen 4y ago

I think this is the document the article is referring to? https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/