8 ms·

Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO. Start with a chaotic management style that is constantl

• dheera 4y ago
  * shrug * If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet. They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up. Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.
  • ohazi 4y ago
    Other than the pay and the residual prestige from "this is the coolest place to work if you pretend it's still 2004" -- I'm not so sure I'd describe the average Google employee as "happy." "Begrudgingly willing to tolerate it" seems more common.
  • rantee 4y ago
    Since employees, (many) customers, and investors aren't happy, seems like time for a change. It's the layers between the puppet and army that cause the most issues IMO, but vision starts at the top. And it isn't there these days. And I totally agree on the botched demo; it's just like the stock's unfair punishment after recent great quarters. Expecting that pandemic growth would continue forever just shows the irrationality of markets. +1 to your comment that it's time for new Googles to rise up. [edit to fix typo]
  • csa 4y ago
    > If the… customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. Do you think their customers are happy? Google’s thought leader customers are extremely unhappy with pretty much all of their products to the point that Google is ripe for disruption. The main thing Google has going for them is their incredibly massive moat that limits viable competitors. IMHO, that moat will only protect them for so long if they don’t reorient themselves. The only people I know who like Google products are relatively unsophisticated consumers. I realize that this is a large part of the market and is also a very lucrative segment of the market, but they will follow the thought leaders when the thought leaders move on to something else.
    • petra 4y ago
      Sure, marketing for a great new search engine would be pretty easy. But the demands of the regular user and the power user are very different. So before ChatGPT, I'm not sure that also catering to the power users would have helped Google with their regular users.
  • badloginagain 4y ago
    Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance. A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.
    • dheera 4y ago
      This is an extremely flawed way to structure a society. In what messed up world does the CEO of a company have more responsibility to some armchair drugged suit-people eating Michelin food on high-rises in Manhattan than the actual billions of people who use the product on a day to day basis, and the tens of thousands of people who work half of their lives to deliver that?
    • abakker 4y ago
      this is kinda true, but only if you say, "In the short term". In the long term, things are recursive - poor employee morale loses productivity and product quality suffers and customers leave and shareholders lose. And that is only one of many loops. A CEO may appear to be rewarded in the short term, and may make short term choices, but, rest assured that they must please all 3 constituencies or they will not have a long run timeframe to worry about. (of course, boards and ceos make mistakes and act poorly and suffer the consequences, too).
    • twblalock 4y ago
      "Deliver value to the shareholders" is an outcome, not an action. How a CEO delivers value is generally by running the company well, making the right decisions, hiring the right people, making sure the company has the right product vision, etc. If the customers aren't happy, they will buy fewer products and revenue will decline. Since a large portion of a company's stock price is connected to expectations about future earnings, that will put downward pressure on the stock and hurt the shareholders.
      • aliswe 4y ago
        Excellent point
    • 4y ago
  • twblalock 4y ago
    > it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. An army of ten thousand people marching in the wrong direction is what you get with bad leadership. There is a lot of "real" work going on at a company like Google. Leadership really does matter, and there are a number of examples of bad CEOs running a company into the ground (e.g. HP) and good CEOs completely turning failing companies around (e.g. Steve Jobs coming back to Apple). None of those things would have happened if the CEO was just a figurehead. Some engineers, notably junior ones without a lot of life experience, seem to believe that engineering teams could run the company by themselves and that leadership and other orgs don't provide any value. It's an immature world view that doesn't even work very well at startups, and certainly doesn't make any sense at large companies.
• cutenewt 4y ago
  I talked to a friend about what's she's seeing inside Google right now and the amount of corporate and cultural dysfunction is shocking. Politics, games, entitlement, and decreased productivity. Is there a company that's more dysfunctional?
  • scottyah 4y ago
    ...yes? You just described every large organization/company ever.
    • eitally 4y ago
      No. This is absolutely false. I don't think anyone who hasn't been inside of Google can possibly understand how "differently" (one might even say "Googley") dysfunctional it is.
      • scottyah 4y ago
        Have you worked in government/defense? I only know two people who have jumped to google and they did not think google was as bad.
    • twblalock 4y ago
      And academia is even worse! Any large organization where people have the ability to create little fiefdoms will result in this eventually.
  • twunde 4y ago
    Plenty. Look outside of tech and you'll see that's the norm in many places.
  • jarl-ragnar 4y ago
    Any large aerospace company. Especially those that have been bought and merged with others as the sector has consolidated over the years. Having watched it from the inside of one through 4 aquire/merge cycles over 10 years I speak from experience.
• CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  > and buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? My pet conspiracy theory is that a significant motivating factor for why some of these big tech companies are so bullish on returning everyone to the office is that otherwise all of the real estate purchases and leases make the executives look like fools.
  • alfalfasprout 4y ago
    it's not even a conspiracy theory... investors have outright called for RTO for that reason.
    • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
      Why would investors want that? The building's already paid for. It doesn't seem like putting people into it or not would matter at that point, assuming RTO is employee performance neutral. And unlike executives, investors have no need to fool people into thinking they're making sensible decisions.
      • Rzor 4y ago
        Maybe they feel hurt every time they are reminded of the empty buildings because it's a waste of money and to get everyone back wouldn't hurt anybody in their assessment, it's actually how it was done before and it worked well, yadda yadda, so why not. I do think the reasoning applies much better to executives, though. tl;dr human stuff
      • the_third_wave 4y ago
        Those buildings will be worth much less if the culture of working from home becomes ingrained since the demand for this type of office space will permanently decline. Those who invested in office real estate may stand or fall with people returning to their offices.
        • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
• potatolicious 4y ago
  This is it exactly. I'm a Xoogler also and you've nailed it on the head - honestly while there are many other narratives about Google they mostly feel like distractions to this core problem. Google's management and leadership tenure is very short relative to other companies and the org structure is intensely unstable relative to peer companies. I lost count of how many "5 year plans" I went through that was summarily reset 1.5-2 years in because there was a leadership reorg. Google has no product strategy for two reasons: - leadership generally is much more interested in org-building than products. The nitty gritty of products is left to leaf node teams that have wide latitude to decide what gets built. This is great for individual autonomy and getting ICs promoted, but it's bad for products. - any leader with an actual product strategy has no time to actually build it. It's practically guaranteed that the winds will shift and they'll be out, to be replaced by the next manager with their own vision and the need for a near-total reset. I'm at a company now where leadership tenure is shockingly long (at least by Google standards) - and you see the payoff: multi-year strategies actually get built, actually pay off. Reorgs happen but is generally infrequent, and when they occur they are close to leaf node teams - rather than the wholesale "we're replacing all critical leaders" type that happens a lot at Google.
  • Infinitesimus 4y ago
    What company are you at now?
  • jay_kyburz 4y ago
    I've been reading this whole thread and playing my favorite game called "If I were CEO of Google this is what I would do differently" It must be incredibly difficulty to evaluate how well people are doing, and how valuable peoples work is when only one or two departments make any money and everything else indirectly supports that work. How do you reward people for doing boring maintenance work on existing products? How do you give people the time to build the products, but also keep them happy and well paid enough to prevent them being poached? How to reward a talented engineer who's job it is to add some small feature to a massive product like Maps or Docs? I can't help but think I would explode the company into thousands of tiny startups each managing themselves and their own budgets, staff, and salaries, and literately pay bounties for every little feature I wanted implemented. There is no ladder to climb, only bounties to claim.
• nus07 4y ago
  Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.
  • subsubzero 4y ago
    100% this. You do not want MBA types in your company, let alone running it! I couldn't think of a worse choice for leading Google, and it sounds like he is pulling that classic MBA trick where you are getting teams to work against each other instead of for a greater mission. No wonder nothing is shipping, projects are getting culled for no reason etc. I think google will be seeing a decline that may shock many if bing/chatGPT starts seeing wider adoption.
    • smugma 4y ago
      Apple and Microsoft both run by CEO’s with MBA’s, but you could argue that they are not “MBA types”, which is fair enough, but then we’re really talking about an straw man MBA.
• subsubzero 4y ago
  > I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much Curious on what you [were] using? Something created in house? I am not a fan of Jira but not having it to track issues or create bug requests does indeed sound like a nightmare.
  • rantee 4y ago
    The bug tracker, deployment, and testing tools are very mature. It was the task tracking by spreadsheet on my teams that got to me, and lack of unified project management tooling across teams. This made tracking dependencies and planning more difficult (leading to more meetings). There are definitely in-house tools available. It's just another "YMMV considerably" element of things. A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front edit: formatting
• hintymad 4y ago
  Speaking of product, Ben Thompson mentioned in his podcast that Google planned to use their low-margin GDocs suite to undermine Microsoft Office's dominance. I wonder what happens to that strategy. If any company can pull off an office killer, I'd imagine it's Google. Yet somehow I'm still bitching that Quip is better than Google Docs. On the other hand, Microsoft CEO is saying in unequivocal terms that Microsoft can use low-margin bing to undermine Google search. I'd not imagine such a day, but here it was.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]