25 ms·

The maze is in the mouse: what ails Google

• mcenedella 4y ago
  A remarkable piece of writing, and I’m enthralled that the author has taken the lyrics of an extremely famous cover song and made it seem fresh, new and relevant to this very moment. I will forever hear “Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line, know what any of it is worth” differently now. btw, the Waze founder’s (similar) goodbye post is also worth reading.
  • sanderjd 4y ago
    > the lyrics of an extremely famous cover song Actually he used the lyrics of an extremely famous original song, which were written by Bob Dylan :)
    • wpietri 4y ago
      The version of the song that is most famous is the cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Along_the_Watchtower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Along_the_Watchtower
      • sanderjd 4y ago
        Perhaps, but the article explicitly attributes its quotes to the original. But I was just making a silly joke.
        • wpietri 4y ago
          No, the article attributes the lyrics to the songwriter, which is the same for all versions of the song.
• nfRfqX5n 4y ago
  lots of people here piling on google over the past 2 weeks, interested to see how it goes
  • quags 4y ago
    I see that too and wonder if this will lead to an over sold stock and a similar Microsoft lost decade which may be a few years in. Google overall is very profitable and just needs 2-3 wins over the next few years and they have the cash to do it.
  • Ocerge 4y ago
    As a Googler: Not just the past 2 weeks, pretty much every Google-related article on HN is a dogpile. And that's fine, I even agree with like 95% of this article (minus the negative characterization of the No Heroes mantra, that exists for good reasons). Just important to note the general (understandable) anti-FAANG bias on HN.
    • FailMore 4y ago
      How do you think Google will fare in the world of AI? From the outside it feels like Google has the lead in tech, but reading this article makes me question the management/if they can use that advantage to win in the long run
      • Ocerge 4y ago
        I don't work anywhere near AI, but the talent is here to do it. Just have to fix the organizational issues that are pretty severe at the moment.
• larrymyers 4y ago
  tl;dr Acquihire founder is shocked when the giant behemoth that did the acquisition is motivated to protect its billions of quarterly profit at the expense of empowering all the brainpower it employs to do innovative and inherently risky things. Really good piece of writing though, it never loses the plot despite being a longer read.
  • mcenedella 4y ago
    “it never loses the plot” - great assessment. it really does hold your attention throughout.
  • pif 4y ago
    Your comment is spot on, and the line you wrote summarizes perfectly the article. If you are wondering about the downvotes, it's because HN'ers hate when you state the truth about the world being larger than the web startups microcosm.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    Why do you position this as a binary option? Google must have tens of thousands of people not directly working on ads. What exactly is so "risky" about this "subsidized" surplus working on risky bets?
    • riku_iki 4y ago
      but they do lots of risky bets.
• ethbr0 4y ago
  >> on the other hand, any individual customer you dissatisfy creates zero risk unless it is a mega-customer, so customer satisfaction is just a concept on a dashboard to be trotted out at an all-hands meeting, tut-tutted about, and then forgotten about From my exposure to GCP from the enterprise side, this rings true. The folks we worked with were polite, but seemed to be asking us about our needs as a one-off / outside the normal process. With credit to the teams we interacted with, they were helpful and acted on our feedback (things like "As a customer, I need a dashboard that tracks my GCP spending"), but it was apparent this wasn't something they frequently did with customers. "The maze is in the rat" is a great metaphor. Execs want certain things ("Realtime visibility into all projects!" or "Stability!") but underappreciate the organizational opportunity cost in requiring them. Is it more important to have perfectly tracked projects or projects which ship 20% faster? And if the former, we all understand you're training your people to be like forever, right?
  • bruce511 4y ago
    Google is famous for basically just ignoring customers. Or more accurately, ignoring users, since users are not customers. Customers are those spending money posting ads on search. Frankly even they get crap customer support, but at least they are customers. I'm no googler but it's clear "user support" (and "customer support") are not priorities at google, and that means other people _are_ priorities. So it's not exactly a shock to discover employees optimize to make other employees happy (measured) versus keeping users happy (not measured.) I factor that in when I decide if I want to be more than a user, if I want to be a customer. (So far the answer is basically "no".) And, as a user, I understand I'm not a customer and Google doesn't care about me, or my gmail account... So I treat my gmail account with the importance it deserves. So what though? This makes them happy, and they're all paid, so what does it matter what the outside world think or care?
    • motoboi 4y ago
      I have been a enterprise customer of google cloud. There is a chasm between google cloud and microsoft azure. Azure sucks as a product, but they really, really, really want you as costumer. Damn, I get a weekly one-to-one with the guy which was part of the team that created their kubernetes offering, just because I needed someone with expertise in the matter to help us maximize the benefit or ours. NO EXTRA COST. With Google I got a guy that knows Kubernetes less than me. I sometimes get embarrassed asking them questions because they don't know how to answer but must come up with something to answer because the account manager is in the call. It feels like their poor account managers take a uphill battle just to get someone to talk to us. I feel sorry for them. Guess what happens? must deployments are in azure, even if the azure CLI sucks, the azure portal is a mess and azure products are inconsistent. But Google's GKE ingress takes 20 minutes to update (there is a years old bug opened, nobody cares), vs Azure application gateway taking 30 seconds. Both being very bad for us, but I get to talk to the Microsoft the guy who worked on that integration and discussing with him the pros and cons of using ingress-nginx instead. Google don't want us as costumers, they just want to brag about having a better cloud (they don't). (as a PS, please microsoft your employees don't like to answer questions on stack overflow. But great to be able to get stackoverflow answers from the product managers).
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  I don't feel articles like this are "wrong". I feel like they fail to go deep enough and if they went one layer deeper then it would be clear why the problems they describe are at best actually features and at worst the "least bad" option. Specifically, all the issues being discussed are actually just features of Google (and the rest of FAANG really) being a mature company in a mature industry. Google cannot (it seems) launch and maintain new services. Why? Because it already has a single, ultra successful, profitable service: advertising (primarily via search, gmail, youtube etc). When you have no existing business (say you are a start up) you have an urgent need to get one. But when you have a multi billion dollar core business asset (search), you have no urgency to create another. Instead you "urgently" need to not break your existing asset. This is the same reason GE and AT&T etc did NOT beat Google to the online space. This is the natural result of success. This is the healthy, efficient, economically correct position for a company like google to be in. People have a weird expectation that Google (etc) will be a start up forever. Or an incubator for start ups. Only thats basically functionally impossible. So the problem here is people's expectations not being realistic and refusal to accept the reality that google (with 175000 employees) is no longer a plucky 10 person startup...
  • hbrn 4y ago
    > when you have a multi billion dollar core business asset (search), you have no urgency to create another Tell that to Apple.
  • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yep, the primary distorting effect at a place like Google is the seemingly infinite source of revenue from something which is in large-part fully automated. The ad revenues are a crazy firehose. Yes it takes a large crew of SREs and SWEs to keep that firehose fully primed, but nothing close to the labour force that Google employs. When I joined Google at the end of 2011 there was something like 20,000 full time employees. At that point it was already clearly a company that had already transitioned from a disruptor of the industry to a maintainer of the status quo. e.g. they clearly bought the ad-tech company I was an employee at just to make us shut up and go away. The conservative review and permissions structures in place there that the writer is complaining about are in place to avoid fucking up the firehose. And they're legit important. One of the most intimidating times I had working in my career was on the Ad Exchange release rotation, where I had production access for the deployment of binaries to thousands of machines in many datacentres that produced millions out transactions per second and were responsible for buckets and buckets of revenue. Please Don't Fuck Up was like an airplane banner circling around in my skull the whole time. Any innovations that happen at Google happen because there are very smart keen people there, and Google is constantly seeking out alternate $$-firehoses. But it's never happened and I doubt it ever will. It's not a culture accustomed to being hungry enough to work aggressively to hunt $$. Politics is eating everything there.
• mschuster91 4y ago
  > Decide which (few!) products need legal review and let the others run faster. That is unfortunately not really possible. At the scale of Google, you have to keep up with a ton of different regulatory environments - the US and EU as large blocks which lead with regulation like GDPR, but also the 150+ other countries that have their specific demands. On top of that come all the diversity issues - something completely innocent and expected in the US and EU can become a criminal offense in other countries (e.g. Saudi-Arabia and women's or LGBT rights, China/Russia and anything democracy, India and running afoul of the BJP).
• iinnPP 4y ago
  It's odd reading this because none of it is surprising. Despite never working there and doing absolutely nothing to research the culture. It's obvious because it is everywhere, every company and government is so risk adverse as to be useless. Why? That I have pondered significantly. My current thought process leads to virtual organizations formed using the existing employees as members of a virtualized democratic business. The CEO is voted in, the employee is the citizen, the managers are voted in. I believe it would be different than the government we have because the government we have is possibly too large to function as it did closer to founding. For example, Walmart has more employees than the USA had people when the USA was founded.
  • bruce511 4y ago
    Companies are not democracies, and companies that are democracies do not work at scale. Google is struggling precisely _because_ there is "too much democracy" and not enough leadership. In a democracy it's not important to have happy customers, or ship product, as long as internally everyone is popular. So we spend all our time doing politics and getting nothing done. >> It's obvious because it is everywhere, every company and government is so risk adverse as to be useless. clearly this is not true - there are plenty of companies, and startups, that are very much not risk adverse. Large companies become risk adverse because bad outcomes affect huge numbers of people.
    • skinnymuch 4y ago
      Are you saying co-ops don’t work? Mondragon is “at scale”. The US is failing at [affordable] health care compared to a country like Cuba. Worker unions are closer to democracies and work well too.
      • iinnPP 4y ago
        Thanks for that. I didn't know about Mondragon, but given the size it's a subject I am now very interested in.
        • 4y ago
• SanjayMehta 4y ago
  > trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. Sounds like any large corporation after 20 years.
  • hoseja 4y ago
    Turns out that's about the natural lifespan of the Polyhomo corporaticus
• onphonenow 4y ago
  I always wondered why glaring customer facing problems could go years without a fix despite literally thousands of posts. I’m not talking free users, but google apps (workspace) stuff etc. I’d describe support as nice but not helpful. This really explains it. They also seem to have weird eventual consistency type bugs that can get you into weird states you can’t get out of, I wonder - what tech stack is this? Do they not use sql for this?
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    I'd assume those are interface (both user- and code-to-code) complexity at scale. I.e. 0.0001% of accounts end up in a state (across multiple services) that was never expected, and therefore code to handle it never written, and thus is unable to ever transition because there are circular dependencies
    • onphonenow 4y ago
      For sure. But the path to resolution is weirdly hard at google in these cases.
• davemp 4y ago
  >> Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about “organizing the world’s information”? This is the poignant question IMO. The texture of the internet has changed drastically since the golden age of "Googling" for things. I feel like the current search vs. SEO paradigm has become a losing battle. The bad actors have adapted to Google's algorithms and now resemble the holes in Search's strategy like some over evolved contagion. The main issues I see as a lay person are: - Bounce time and other metrics actively incentivizing content to be obfuscated and waste user's time. - Content theft being viable and disincentivizing high quality content that can be copied easily. - Walled garden sites that don't want to surrender their content for ad impressions and aren't easily or impossible to index. I feel like solutions to the above problems would involve Google killing its own golden advertisement goose. Maybe there are high influence Googlers that do come into work and think about “organizing the world’s information . . .” but a "in way that makes Google the most money" is inevitably tacked on.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    The web as a whole never came up with an answer to the question "As someone in possession of valuable information, why would I want to allow that information to be indexed, which would allow someone to trivially copy it?" "Information wants to be free" was fine for ~1990-2010, until Google et al. took advantage of it to build walled gardens they could profit from. In retrospect, I feel like if the in-web-standards micromonetization efforts had been adopted, we'd be in a better place today, because there would have been better revenue channels than "Whoever controls ads." And/or differentiate and regulate search as a privileged common carrier-style business class, prevented from reusing their web scraping for other products.
    • davemp 4y ago
      It certainly feels like there are some regulatory loopholes/oversights being abused. Maybe just make it illegal (or actually just enforce existing laws) to link to websites that violate copyright laws (from pages with monetization) and force the market to sort things out? It would be the end of an era for the internet in many different ways, but maybe the wild west needs to just end?
• college_physics 4y ago
  Lots of stereotypical phrases: "Lead with commitment to a mission", "Embrace agile or lean development", "Winnow the layers of middle management" etc., the sort of low-risk generalities that are maybe suitable for expertise-lite consultancies but don't really shed new light. What truly "ails" an entity that prints billions? Does it take an insider to figure out? Does it take a technologist? If you go back to startup school and try to map the entity into the Business Model Canvas [0] you immediately spot the obvious peculiarity: the incongruous mix of customers (advertisers versus infrastructure users). What is the value proposition, to whom? All the money and brainpower in the world don't help if you have your moral values messed up. Its a soul thing. [0] https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas
• timmg 4y ago
  This is a good article and it does a nice job of explaining some of the problems at Google. Of course, much of them are overstated and others overfit to the particular group this person was hired into. As someone who has first-hand knowledge of this person and the project he led, I can say (and I'm sure everyone would expect this): he does a great job of seeing all the things wrong with the org and the company; but he fails to recognize his own mistakes and shortcomings. I would love to see one of these kinds of blog posts where the author owns up to their own mistakes.
  • helicalmix 4y ago
    How exactly does having a blog post about the author’s own mistakes affect the validity of his criticisms against Google?
    • scubbo 4y ago
      Where exactly does the comment you are replying to state that it does?
      • sweezyjeezy 4y ago
        So you agree that it was irrelevant? Why interrupt an interesting conversation about Google with a comment about how the author is not perfect either?
        • scubbo 4y ago
          Because conversations can and should (sometimes) meander off on tangents. As interested and engaged people, we should not only always confine ourselves to the topic at hand, but wonder about patterns and parallels and what they can teach us. "Hey, I've noticed that a lot of these critical blog posts often show a lack of self-awareness about ones own failings or contributions to the problem. I wonder if this is a psychological pattern that we should be aware of in ourselves?". To return to the implicit point that helicalmix appears to be making - timmg was not saying that "a lack of self-awareness makes this post invalid" (in fact, they specifically led with "This is a good article and it does a nice job of explaining some of the problems at Google") - it was acknowledging the quality of the article, and then using the form of the article as a jumping-off point to a related observation. A conversation which remains laser-focused on one particular topic at the expense of all others is (sometimes!) helpful in narrow technical domains - but expanding to broader context is usually more interesting and more illuminating.
• dekhn 4y ago
  I built and launched a fairly simple project at Google- a web site for the upcoming North American solar eclipse. At some point I had to do a legal review to launch the website and come up with a "GDPR narrative" for EU users. But our users were almost 100% american and the entire project was centered around an event occurring in the US. SO I am very open to the idea that Google needs to relax its process around its lower-impact projects.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• spicyusername 4y ago
  Very well written and insightful. Thank you for sharing.
• magicloop 4y ago
  One thing I can't figure out (genuine question) is why they don't have 20% time anymore for innovation. I thought it was a key driver for new products at Google. Does such a thing cause career risk, or political strife? Also, I'd like to understand if their AI lab, Deep Mind, also suffers the same problem, or does it have a different culture? Does Deep Mind have 20% time? I'd appreciate it if anyone within the company could explain it please.
  • AlbertCory 4y ago
    It was always a myth. Back in the day, a few people would have 20% projects. Most did not, or did so only once in a while.
    • aix1 4y ago
      I can only speak from my experience, but: For the decade that I've been at Google it has always been the case that quite a few people around me had 20% projects. This includes myself, my teammates, people reporting to me, people reporting to someone else doing a 20% project on my team and so on.
      • AlbertCory 4y ago
        "Quite a few" is pretty imprecise. Did you ever do a count? I did, around 2007: 8 or 9 engineers around a table. Maybe 1 or 2 had a 20%.
  • akomtu 4y ago
    The corporate environment demands results every quarter, so everyone who cares about career must show measurable progress every 3 months. That's why the corporate crowd looks like a bunch of blind men with walking sticks, looking down precisely 3 feet ahead. They are the type that will walk thru an amazon forest, and their only memories will be mud and potholes on their way.
    • magicloop 4y ago
• williadc 4y ago
  Google erased more than $100B in shareholder value with a single botched demo. I imagine events like this will only further increase their risk aversion.
  • ggm 4y ago
    I have sympathy to both sides of this problem because the truth is, ALL the GPT do this, and what google botched was the message. I don't understand why it wasn't a similar share price plummet in Bing, OpenAI when the lies sold as truth surfaced there. In part, and I know this is 'blame the victim' I think shareholders truly are dumb, if they thought it was AGI and some god given uplift to the cloud-mind: it was never going to do what they wanted, and rather than 'Google erased' I'd say google communications/marketing erased: they really didn't prepare this package for release well. Too much infeasible community expectations on something which was incapable of doing what they wanted. No matter what the $100b is gone. I'd say the buyers at the bottom picked up a bargain btw.
    • logicchains 4y ago
      > I don't understand why it wasn't a similar share price plummet in Bing, OpenAI when the lies sold as truth surfaced there. Maybe most consumers ultimately core more about the improved search capacity of Bing than that it might say weird or offensive stuff in some prompt-engineered worse cases. Plus it doesn't need to be 100% accurate, just no less accurate than the average person's SEO-laden Google search results.
    • kryptiskt 4y ago
      > I don't understand why it wasn't a similar share price plummet in Bing, OpenAI when the lies sold as truth surfaced there. Because Bing isn't a material profit generator for Microsoft right now, AI search is a lottery ticket for Microsoft while Google is playing defense for their main revenue stream.
• collinmcnulty 4y ago
  How does this square with Google’s reputation for releasing and then abandoning many, many products? Like their dozen chat apps, Stadia, seemingly every other Alphabet subsidiary, etc. It seems like Google is pretty good at releasing things, just not at following though on supporting them to become a real line of business. The perception that Google can’t release seems new and odd to me as an outsider.
  • blululu 4y ago
    One of the author's primary critiques is that nobody cares about the users/customers. All actions are aimed at an internal audience rather than an external audience. Thus product releases are done for internal reasons (i.e. impressing senior managers and getting promoted). They aren't done for the sake of external customer/users - hence the lack any long term commitment.
    • oh_sigh 4y ago
      This rings true to me. I worked at Google after being at Amazon for a few years and the customer focus was like night and day.
      • ggm 4y ago
        Amazon must hate it's customers. Otherwise, why would they try to sell me books "in the style of" an author before they sell me the books BY THE AUTHOR when I search on author name? Hint: I asked Amazonians. They told me it generates higher revenue for them, and so "works as required". I know nobody who wants, or expects this behaviour in a search box.
        • midoridensha 4y ago
          Obviously, Amazon makes more money doing this. People who really just want books from that author will scroll past the other authors to the rest of the results with that author, but many people will spot something else and look at that (in addition to the author they're actually searching for), and then buy more books overall. And people who get really annoyed by these extra unwanted results will just complain on tech discussion forums, while still buying their books from Amazon anyway.
• laidoffamazon 4y ago
  I think all of this is just a symptom of the fundamental problem - Google employees have been told they're special and coddled so much they believe it. They genuinely think they are inherently superior to the rest of us - either customers or even just other practitioners at other companies. I saw a talk about an upstream change to submodule initialization in Git being made by a Google engineer and she was asked about the specifics of how submodules ordering would work for the default use case. Her response boiled down to "I don't know, how we do it is we <XYZ> and we're more interested in our use case".
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  This is a pretty insightful article. I would just add that nearly every large company follows this same arc. It used to be said about IBM, back in their dominant days, that their product bureaucracy was such that it would take them nine months to ship an empty box. Relative to yesterday's comments about "wartime CEOs and peacetime CEOs", he says: > a soft peacetime culture Also: > Within Google, there is a collective delusion that the company is exceptional. And as is the case in all such delusions, the deluded ones are just mortals standing on the shoulders of the truly exceptional people who went before them and created an environment of wild success. Eventually, the exceptional environment starts to fade, but the lingering delusion has abolished humility among the mere mortals who remain. I summarized this yesterday (quoting someone else) as "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."
  • akomtu 4y ago
    That's the good old saying: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." ― G. Michael Hopf
    • jimduk 4y ago
      Not sure it is a good saying. Brett Devereaux covers it in detail in his "fremen mirage" articles which I find a good read. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
      • AlbertCory 4y ago
        A strawman argument, which no one is actually saying: > Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies. > Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them. I prefer real history to science fiction, myself. The 30s were indisputably hard times, but they produced the people who won WW II and went to the moon.
• iandanforth 4y ago
  The question the author doesn't answer is, "Why?". Who the hell cares if Google is innovating and making the world a better place? They jettisoned their idealism with the founders and are a standard company. A standard, ludicrously profitable company. The more likely and rational approach to the situation described by the author is seeking efficiency in support of the core profit generating business. Google is ripe for huge, painful cuts that further consolidate wealth in the hands of shareholders. If that absolutely massive R&D spend isn't doing much, or doing anything efficiently, cut it. Personally I hate this approach and would love to see Google to return to its nimble and "Don't be evil" roots, but I have yet to identify sufficient motivation for it to do so.
  • ReflectedImage 4y ago
    You can't sell the same tech product forever. Do you think the original iPhone if being sold today would make any revenue for Apple?
  • DharmaPolice 4y ago
    I think in general it's depressing that a non-trivial number of very capable people are spending years in companies like Google not really benefiting humankind. It's like reading the intellectual history of pre-renaissance Europe and realising how many of the smartest people of their time spent huge numbers of hours (and mental energy) on obscure and ultimately pointless theological matters.
• hamilyon2 4y ago
  Google is already running critical infrastructure of modern world. Of course risk mitigation is paramount. What would be 1000-s in list of risks of fresh startup easily worth full-time employee working at it in Google working exclusively on some bs like optimising talent acquisition reporting pipeline.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• carom 4y ago
  This is dead on. When I worked there I summed the culture up as code bureaucracy. Truly awful place to work for someone who likes to build. It taught me what I don't want in a company I work for or run. Side note, I really enjoyed the interspersed poetry excerpts in this article. Refreshing from normal articles whose call outs just have you reading the same sentence twice.
• ChuckMcM 4y ago
  Wow. When I read this I was so struck by just how accurately it captured Google culture. Things that really resonated; The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement. For history, my first big contribution inside Google was criticized for being "not technical enough." (and that was fair because the technology was straight forward), however it had pushed through the organizational inertia of "don't change anything" across several groups to get into product. My contribution was to skillfully push things through the org without activating the organizational antibodies that resist change at all cost. But this was not a skill that was appreciated at the time by the people that mattered. The second thing was this; Any disagreement with the management chain is career risk, so always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the senior VP, all the way up. People who were there when I was often didn't know me personally, but did know "of" me by my calling out management on their bogosity. I was not so enamored with "working at Google" to bury my irritation with bad faith communications and actions. To the point where I got direct feedback from my management chain that they would have an easier time in "calibration" if I was not causing so much friction. :-) I suggested they might get a lot less friction if they stopped doing the kinds of things they were being called out on. I have never been one of those "go along to get along" people in the presence of basically evil[1] people. When people ask me if they should work for Google this is the litmus test I give them, "Can you suppress all of your feelings of justice or ethics in the face of senior leaders making unethical choices chasing promotion, market monopoly, or additional profits for the company?" If the answer is "no" then I suggest they look to work elsewhere. [1] I know that reads hypercritically, I don't have a good neutral way of describing people who make decisions that help advantage them at the cost of disadvantaging others. Especially when that decision is unnecessary or frivolous.
• sanderjd 4y ago
  I'm going to call out one specific point I disagree with, which I'm curious whether others will or won't agree with me on: google3 and the associated set of internal tools actually are better than what exists "in the real world". I went from startup world (mostly rails and frontend frameworks of the early teens) early in my career to google3 for about half a decade to the whole suite of public cloud stuff starting about a year ago and I really miss google's internal tooling. It's not at all that any given component is much or at all better than any given public competitor. Indeed I think the article is right that on an individual component basis there are strong competitors to everything google has internally. But taken as a whole, I found it much easier to figure out what tool to use for a given job and get it working well for my task within google than it is with all the public tools. But it's an integration and analysis paralysis / paradox of choice and sales cycle problem, rather than a technical problem. Do I go with a fully managed service or self-host? How well does the self-hosting work with my infrastructure? What about cost comparisons? Do these three tools work together at all? Do they support my particular sso setup? It's just so much crap before even getting to the point where the technical capabilities are important. And it is either prohibitively time consuming or just actually impossible to do any sort of objective analysis of different options, so everyone just guesses and cargo cults. "This seems to have the most mindshare in the community." I experienced variants of some of these same problems with google internal tools, but there were easy and good answers to a large enough set of the questions that it always seemed a lot easier to get an answer and move on.
  • dastbe 4y ago
    this is something i've really felt moving from aws to a company that isn't a cloud provider. even when most aws services are third best at best in their category, you still get the following benefits 1. everything works reasonably well together and share the same cross cutting primitives (IAM, VPC). 2. you have service teams and support all under the same roof, so you get deep access to them and can get them to work together on solving your problem 3. you do not get a choice in the matter, so you do not have to waste time deliberating the choice. you also get rock bottom prices guaranteed. this all made things much simpler to work with, much simpler to debug/get support for, and removed a lot of the churn we would've had if we had to re-evaluate services every N years.
• Animats 4y ago
  > "the stated core values of the company are rock solid" What is Google using after "Don't be evil"? > "... problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins." Right. Google has only one product that generates real profits, and it has one main user entry point. So they have to be very cautious and not break what happens at that entry point. That fuels the culture. (The other products: [1]. All either lose money or are small markets relative to ads.) For the first time in decades, Google now faces a real threat - somebody else has technology that can disrupt their position in search. Yes, ChatGPT produces some bogus results as an answer engine right now, but a year from now? Microsoft is willing to spend a few billion dollars on that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
• pc_edwin 4y ago
  Google with its highly concentrated pool of galaxy brains has the potential create world-changing products at the same level of SpaceX or Tesla. Its a pity, I recall the days when I was so excited to use Google Cloud or just watch their keynotes. Regrettably, as the years went by it got more and more diluted. Unlike Microsoft, the obstacle for Google is not greed or hubris, its tolerance. I hesitate to elaborate further, as the specifics are likely to attract scrutiny or censure.
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• ejb999 4y ago
  "delusions of exceptionalism" Love that description - and of the 4 faults the author points out, that is the one that is going to hurt them the most. No way a company fixes having 'no mission', 'no urgency' and 'mismanagement' if a large portion of the staff things they are exceptional at everything they do.
• dangus 4y ago
  This is a lot of detail without a lot of business substance that matters. It's not true insider information, it's opinion-based, and it's not really all that relevant to whether Google is "in trouble." The premise is that people are catching up to Google while Google mismanages. Microsoft is coming out strong and refreshed (and, I agree, they are seemingly very well managed), and small competitors are nipping at their heels. The intro of this article touts the new Bing AI search engine as a major threat to Google. But...is it? Microsoft released what is essentially a proof of concept piggybacking on OpenAI's work. So is Google really in trouble? Let's look at this through the lens of revenue [2]: - Google is essentially a search monopoly. It's impressive that Bing has gotten anywhere, but it's too early to say if gaining 4% marketshare in a year [1] is the sign of a lasting trend. The fact that Bing and Edge are persistent defaults with constant nags in Windows 10/11 as well as being integrated into Windows search and 90%+ of people still switch their browser and search to Google tells you a whole lot about consumers' preferences. (On this note, remember that the better product doesn't always "win" in capitalism. For example, Microsoft Teams has more active users than Slack by far [3], but that's not because it's the better app - that's because it's part of an ecosystem and a migration path for Microsoft's army of business clients) - GCP will be a cash cow forever, just like AWS and Azure. - Android and the Google Play store are also forever cash cows. Android and iOS are a forever duopoly with no chance of disruption. - YouTube: another cash cow with both ad and subscription revenue with no sign of disruption. Sure, if Google Search fails, the company is basically less than half the size. But the idea that a company like Google is going to screw up on search in the long term isn't based on any sort of evidence in my mind. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... [2] https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-breakdown/ https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-breakdown/ [3] https://kinsta.com/blog/microsoft-teams-vs-slack/ https://kinsta.com/blog/microsoft-teams-vs-slack/
  • dastbe 4y ago
    I would point out > - GCP will be a cash cow forever, just like AWS and Azure. GCP is still losing something like a billion dollars a year.
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  I can't remember where it's from, but one thing I read put it something like this: as a company grows, the proportion of people working to further organisation's goals shrinks compared to the proportion working for the organisation.
• Willish42 4y ago
  Like many have said, this contains a ton of insightful valuable criticism. That said, I take immense issue with the characterization of the "heroism bad" sentiment at Google: > There are documents that explicitly and proudly deride “heroism” and assert that not only should product teams not encourage “heroes”, they should actively dissuade them. If someone chooses to work twice as hard as is expected of them, they usually will be prevented from doing so because they have to work with others and doing so would force the others to work harder too. As it's been explained to me, this is actually a principle primarily around avoiding inefficient hard work to keep a system healthy, more of a "work smart not hard" thing. Being the only person on the team who can keep prod healthy is not valuable when you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and this behavior doesn't scale well. That's the gist of the argument and I think it is a good one. His criticism of people not taking enough risk is apt but that's not what this particular piece of culture is about.
  • twayt 4y ago
    Yea but then you also disincentivize the one guy who could potentially make an outsized contribution to the innovation of the company. What you’re saying is a virtue in peacetime and a sin in wartime. Precisely the argument the author is trying to make
    • pm90 4y ago
      I don’t think Big Tech needs to overtax its engineers to deliver innovation. They can afford to hire enough folks to keep the innovation engine humming without requiring heroics from ICs. I understand there are some exceptions: sometimes during outages/emergencies, you do want folks to fix issues ASAP regardless of how long they are up.
      • kevinventullo 4y ago
        I don’t think innovation hums, it bursts.
        • thuuuomas 4y ago
• hintymad 4y ago
  > Risk mitigation trumps everything else Yet, Google has no problem shutting down services that millions of users use daily (greader), and worse, tens of thousands of customers use (IoT Core). It seems their reward-and-punishment system, aka culture, has some issues.
• akomtu 4y ago
  "This is a closed world where almost everyone is working only for other Googlers, and the feedback loop is based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work." That is no divergence, in other words: div u = 0, no influx or outflux, a self contained, closed system. The bane of such organisations, not mentioned in the article, is groupthink: a powerful force that pulls you into the center of mediocre sameness. Imagine if IRS solicited feedback from yoir neighbors to determine how much taxes you pay. A religious neighbor across the street knows that you don't go to church, so he writes a negative feedback to IRS. Eventually, you're either forced to behave, or the group kicks you out. That's groupthink.
• nitwit005 4y ago
  > Don’t bother being innovative or doing something that wasn’t in the official plan set six months ago, because even if you did, your managers will not line up the associated dev, PM, Pgm, UX, docs, legal, and marketing resources to make it launchable anyway. A six month planning cycle does seem slow, but this use of "being innovative" appears to mean "stealing resources from some other project".
• obviouslynotme 4y ago
  What ails Google is its management, starting at the very top. They have created a culture of idiocy that can't be fixed internally. Everyone knows their issues. They just can't fix them. They can't even acquire new companies without killing them anymore. Google's only hope is to find a new leader who can realign their products onto a shared vision that includes basic business realities like giving a flying duck about customers. I don't think they can find that leader, and wouldn't give them the political capital necessary to fix anything if they did. Google has many years of suffering left before the people who matter realize how severe the problem is.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  > They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. I remember way back when Google was a Good Guy. They bought Doubleclick, and most people, myself included, thought that could be an excellent thing. Doubleclick was a nasty company, and perhaps Google will make them into something good, or at least not nasty. In fact, the influence went the other way. Purchasing Doubleclick sealed Google's fate, and their mindset came to permeate Google, turning it into what it is now. I consider it one of the great tragedies of the industry.
  • pch00 4y ago
    > In fact, the influence went the other way. Purchasing Doubleclick sealed Google's fate, and their mindset came to permeate Google, turning it into what it is now. This has always been my view. Google died in 2007, the thing that's still calling itself Google since then is Doubleclick.
• seydor 4y ago
  > 175,000+ capable capability is measured on output, and if they are not producing much, then they are not really capable. Potentially capable more likely
  • diceduckmonk 4y ago
    Capable literally means having the ability to do something. Doesn’t actually mean you must do it. There are capable hackers who don’t feel compelled to take systems down. There are plenty of trust fund babies who are intelligent and can output economic value. Doesn’t mean they do. In Google’s case, the individuals can be capable but the org may not be. The sum is worst than the parts.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    "capability is measured on output" No, it isn't. That's effectiveness or impact. As an example, I'm capable of running 10 miles per day but can't be bothered.
• nunez 4y ago
  This article speaks to me. > But very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user. They usually serve some process (“I’m responsible for reviewing privacy design”) or some technology (“I keep the CI/CD system working”). They serve their manager or their VP. They serve other employees. They will even serve some general Google technical or religious beliefs (“I am a code readability expert”, “I maintain the SWE ladder description document”) From my short time there, this is absolutely spot-on and was a driving factor behind Google being the only place I've worked where I legitimately hated my job. > You don’t wake up everyday thinking about how you should be doing better and how your customers deserve better and how you could be working better. Instead, you believe that things you are doing already are so perfect that they are the only way to do it. Propaganda becomes important internally and externally. When new people join your company, you indoctrinate them. You insist on doing things because “that’s the way we do it at Google”. Never mind if most people quietly complain about the overall inefficiency and incompetence When I got into Google, our team was using a unified and centralized logging system for everything. This system made sense, though it took a bit of time to grok. By the time I groked it a few months in, I learned that this logging system was getting deprecated and that we shouldn't use it. The alternative? It wasn't in production yet. Deprecating something in favor of something else that hasn't even shipped was CRAZY to me. So much value wasted. At the time, I felt like there were examples of this EVERYWHERE. Despite having the world's largest monorepo, there was SO. MUCH. DUPLICITY. Bike-shedding to bike shed the bike shed in hopes of chasing that promo to P4 or whatever (which, let's be real, everyone's chasing for the RSU grants). > At the junior levels, Google has a challenging interview process and the general caliber of hires is good. Most of this raw talent is wasted and their skills gradually atrophy (but enjoy some free massages to help get over that!). The Leetcode interview they foist onto candidates is completely unnecessary and is, I believe, a major driver behind the rot that they are experiencing. When you over-index on hiring devs who can solve LC hards, you get devs who are very good...at solving LC hards. They'll build hella interesting data structures and algorithms that have been built, like, seven times before. But building boring "soft" stuff to help drive adoption, like documentation or bugfixes? Not impactful enough. (Documentation was not weighted heavily in promo decisions when I was there, and it showed.) I am particularly salty about this because I was down-leveled due to a single question I didn't answer well (despite nailing everything else) on a topic that I never EVER used during my time there. The guy that asked it was a nice guy, but it was definitely trivia. > Google Cloud in particular has grown rapidly by hiring mid-level and senior talent from every enterprise company around. In most cases, the skills needed to become a director at not-so-elite enterprise company X are not aligned with the skills needed to become an effective director at Google. If I had to guess, these might be strategic hires to build deeper roots into their prospective/current customers to help proliferate GCP. I think AWS and Azure use the same strategy. > And finally, for all the employees, don’t spend your time on memegen. It is a wallow chamber and all that internal finger pointing doesn’t help anything. I wasted so much time on Memegen. I agree with Praveen. It's a huge time sink and (at the time) was about as FUD-laden as /r/popular.
• cromwellian 4y ago
  The whole problem is rapid size increase. The whole "grow big fast" mentality led to many tech companies hiring like mad to grab all territory they could, diluting their mission, they basically entered every vertical they could and any time a startup drew attention to an area, they'd rush to hire and occupy it. Google in particular, took in a huge influx of people from Microsoft and Oracle, and that also ended up changing the culture, but that might be unfair to them (correlation), because they were already big companies, and Google was becoming a big company. When you add a huge number of people, they're going to spawn thousands of projects, and most of them aren't going to ship, so the probability you're on a team that ships something tends to go down with company size increase. The monorepo IMHO is not a problem, it's a huge boon. The google infrastructure is fantastic and still has features that you won't get on GitHub. In particular, Code Review and Code Search is much better. The build/test/CI infra is IMHO better than external alternatives (e.g. jenkins/circle/etc) Moreover, when you want to make changes that cross over N different projects, you don't have to checkout N different siloed repos, or worry about different versioning, as Google's repo (mostly) guarantees a single version of everything. There are external libraries however that are better than the Google equivalents, especially in the world of Web frontends. It would be good for Google if they allowed each team to decide what external libraries they wanted to use for smaller scale projects (e.g. use React/Vue/Next/etc instead of say, Closure Compiler compatible internal frameworks) The tech stack stuff tho isn't the real issue with Google, as the original essay pointed out, there's no real connection to customers and no urgency to ship anything. There's also a preference for rewriting into new stuff vs maintaining old stuff.
• teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I've been at Google for 8 months and this is all true. The ads machine keeps pumping out money but the organization is dying before my eyes.
• beachy 4y ago
  > From what I saw at Google Cloud, they could do a lot better identifying and nurturing talent, moving talent to the best fit roles, and overall optimizing the people already in the company. Instead, the pattern seems to be wait till someone is unhappy and leaves, then just open a req to replace them. Way back in time, when employment was a lifetime gig and jumping between companies was rare, IBM invested a lot of effort in an elaborate internal mobility computer system that did this sort of thing. The system could do succession planning, training needs analysis and much more. Companies talk tht talk on this stuff nowadays but hardly anyone does it effectively because of the core problem - when talent is scarce and employees have no loyalty, what's the point of training someone up only to see them jump ship to a competitor who gets the benefit? This simple economic fact also underlies the strange anomolies in the marketplace for talent, such as your best bet for a big pay raise being to jump to another company rather than to strive at your current gig. Over the years, job hoppers (as long as it's not taken to excess) will do much better than loyal employees who stick it out. I don't know if things are any different for Google. Perhaps the great pay, the gifted colleagues and the opportunity to work on the very biggest systems make Google special, the sort of place that can invest heavily in internal development and internal talent mobility. I suspect not though, making it just as hard for Google to meet up with the article's lofty recommendations as any other mega corp.
  • nickstinemates 4y ago
    > employees have no loyalty lol. wonder why?
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    What's the point of being loyal when you get more money for job-hopping, and your current company will hire a new person for much more money than they're already paying a long-time loyal employee doing the same or more advanced work? If they want loyalty, they should demonstrate it themselves first.
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    It pays more to jump ship. Until that stops being the case (employers pay their existing "loyal" employees more to retain them) that will continue happening. Unfortunately, it seems that tech companies value fresh grads willing to do unpaid overtime more than retaining mountains of knowledge. We are witnessing the sowing of not valuing domain knowledge by businessfolks whose domain knowledge starts and stops at 'synergy' and 'growth hacking'.
• pm90 4y ago
  This is valid criticism but … Google faces the very difficult problem of operating a really big organization. In such a place, there is bound to be hyper specialization. An L5 engineer doesn’t worry about customers because they don’t interact directly with them. And this is good. I think the author is just pointing out the difficulties involved in operating a large organization. There’s certainly ways in which Google can improve, but Im not sure the author has provided any valuable insight into how to fix its deficiencies. We’ve seen this before several times. The behemoths of yesteryears are todays laggards (IBM, HP etc.). Its the cycle of life for Tech companies.
  • whiplash451 4y ago
    The author points to Microsoft as an example of company that did not end up like HP. Not all large tech companies have to end up like IBM. It takes a very special CEO to turn things around, but it can happen. I found the article insightful in that sense.
    • amf12 4y ago
      Microsoft was in that position not too long ago. Satya turned it around. Google also needs someone to turn it around.
      • cyphereal 4y ago
        Interesting. Has MS in fact turned the corporate culture around? When I was there, the Windows org was full of fiefdoms with, at times, petty alpha nerds running things. The culture at Google, while far from perfect, was more respectful and data-driven.
        • atonse 4y ago
          I’ve never worked at MS but have gone in and out of their ecosystem as a dev over the years. With Azure and those kinds of moves, a lot of MS tech clearly became more about getting the tech right rather than protecting some random other MS product. At least the .NET stuff did for sure as you saw more and more open source stuff flourish, pragmatic decisions getting made, elegant APIs, etc. Google seems to be hopeless right now but as the author states, they need their own Nadella. Sundar Pichai seems to be one hell of a dud, clearly a Ballmer-like figure.
• sloyyhailand 4y ago
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• sloyyhailand 4y ago
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• rullelito 4y ago
  > I am a code readability expert Can someone explain why this is religious?
  • marmee 4y ago
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• gukov 4y ago
  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think once a company is past its garage phase (a group of engineers in a room + a pizza), think Amazon/Facebook/Microsoft, its velocity gets reduced drastically.
  • temp_praneshp 4y ago
    This isn't a very insightful observation though, velocity is not the be all and end all of everything.
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• jjfoooo10 4y ago
  Maybe managers like the author are the problem. Startup founders who cash in, join Google, and are unpleasantly surprised to find that they are now just another middle manager who founded some startup nobody's heard of or cares about. The empathy for the customer doesn't exactly ooze from the essay ("at the expiry of my three year mandatory retention period" == "now that I am all paid up"). Part one of the fix is vague management cliches, high minded mission statements and war metaphors. I seriously doubt Google lacks these. And the fix for endless middle manager meddling? Endless reorgs? "Winnow the layers of middle management" (read: reorgs), and mandate that customers, support staff, and managers all waste their time on a weekly heart to heart (you'll note that the author doesn't mention going through the exercise himself).
  • achow 4y ago
    > Maybe managers like the author are the problem... Startup founders who cash in, join Google, and are unpleasantly surprised to find that they are now just another middle manager.. The author was a Distinguished Engineer at Google and before founding AppSheet he was a Partner Architect at Microsoft. Holds a PhD. I found the article very well written and would trust it over any other media reports.
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• kachurovskiy 4y ago
  It's curious how HM conventional wisdom is "Google is too powerful" and "Google needs to work harder" at the same time.
  • progbits 4y ago
    Also "doesn't respect privacy" but "too much bureaucracy and privacy reviews".
  • eloisant 4y ago
    Just like Microsoft in the 90's, they're too powerful and one consequence is that they can get away with inefficiencies and slacking. Like a landlord who doesn't work because he's getting rent money every month, and don't even make sure the appartments are in a good condition, and ignore tenants calls because he knows that if they leave he'll find new tenants anyway.
• magwa101 4y ago
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• cyclecount 4y ago
  One things alluded to but not mentioned explicitly: many Googlers (especially in middle management roles) have work at Google all or almost all of their career. If you left university and went straight to Google, you might have a warped perception of the tech world and what's "normal". I think this contributes to the arrogant culture at Google because if you firmly believe that this company is the best of the best and you've never seen actual industry best practices, you might not even be aware of how weird and bad some of the internal processes and tools really are.
  • quelltext 4y ago
    It's even worse that these Googlers (managers in particular) are picked up by other companies as a shining example, e.g.: "They'll know how to run a team / organisation." And usually it's just them doing things like they did before which apparently isn't necessarily a good thing (sometimes is but often isn't). I cannot fault them, given the hiring expectation. But that's the problem. There's this cult that if Google does something ot must be the right way. It's filling books. It's similar for Amazon hire in my experience.
  • bitcharmer 4y ago
    Had the exact same experience in Goldman Sachs. People with 20 year tenures in the bank still advocating for CVS and Ant build system in 2017. They're just stuck in their narrow mindsets and don't know any better. That and the superiority complex made me leave quite quickly.
    • dr-detroit 4y ago
      pshh thats everywhere. and yes I know Im shadow banned but I thought it was important to comment on this thread BECAUSE I am shadow banned due to the fact that I bring facts to the discussion but the current "lets disrupt google" forced zeitgeist moment. This "lets disrupt google" marketing push happening on ycombinator right now reeks of bad ideas from people who dont work in search.
      • Bilal_io 4y ago
• leokennis 4y ago
  I don't claim to have answers, but to be fair some parts of Google are almost a utility by now so I appreciate if they are run as such. I would not want my electricity company to "move fast and break things", and I like that they reserve loads of their people's thinking power and productivity on boring stuff like "risk mitigation" and "preventive maintenance". Please Google, apply the same to Search, Gmail etc. What is difficult is how to be a company that is a utility, but that at the same time "needs" to jump aboard hype trains to stay relevant/rich so they can continue to be a utility.
  • foogazi 4y ago
    > I would not want my electricity company to "move fast and break things", and I like that they reserve loads of their people's thinking power and productivity on boring stuff like "risk mitigation" and "preventive maintenance". What about embracing solar / nuclear instead of maintaining the rent-seeking status quo and preventing adoption of renewable energy sources.
• habosa 4y ago
  Within the genre of “Xoogler complains about Google” this is one of the better posts I’ve ever read. They really hit the nail on the head in most areas without overstating their points or reducing any of the complex systems to trivial hot takes. If you’ve worked at Google most of this post will ring true. My main criticism would be the consistent references to the Waze cofounders blog post which I thought was entitled whining and probably the worst entry in this genre I’ve ever read.
• 1024core 4y ago
  This bit jumped out at me (about hiring): > The problem and negative impact lies in the manager ranks and intensifies at the director level and higher. Hiring interviews at this level are entirely subjective and the quality of the interviewers matters. Google Cloud in particular has grown rapidly by hiring mid-level and senior talent from every enterprise company around. In most cases, the skills needed to become a director at not-so-elite enterprise company X are not aligned with the skills needed to become an effective director at Google. And when people are hired from an elite tech company Y, is it really because they were killing it there but still got lured away, or it is because they ran out of runway there and Google was a good place to land. Once you start hiring bad middle-managers and directors, you might as well bid the company goodbye. Like a parasite, they will intertwine themselves in the various processes to make themselves indispensable.
  • pm90 4y ago
    There’s only so many good managers/directors with that sort of experience. So either you have to promote from within or lower your standards a bit.
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• ryloric 4y ago
  Things were already pretty screwed up atleast a decade ago when I was there for a short while, this was around the time Google+ was being "dogfooded", so it wasn't even quarter the size it is now. I was only an intern but the other older programmers I was working with were all bored and doing minimal work, with no sense of pride or purpose, treating it like a government job with a good lunch program and free massages. The pay is high and work relaxed, so a lot of 'local maximizers' tend to seep in, the type of people who want to do just enough and avoid any sort of extra effort or experiment with anything new. The kind of people who would choose courses based on how easy it is to get a high grade and not based on how interesting or useful it would be. For people to innovate constantly, they need to feel a sense of pride in service to customers and a sense of purpose as to why they are doing their work. For an organization to innovate they need fear that they will go extinct if they don't. As long as the firehose of revenue that is search keeps going, they will keep sucking at everything else.