5 ms·

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 pa

by 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.
germanjoey 4y ago
I worked with the author for a couple of years, pre- and post- acquisition, and I have to admit that he drove me somewhat crazy sometimes too. Leaving that aside, I also had an immense amount of personal respect for him as I could see how much he very genuinely cares about what he is doing. And, that's actively doing his best to do right by his customers. I think the author is 110% spot-on with his critique of Google here.
jjfoooo4 4y ago
Indeed, and additionally the proposed fixes aren’t all that inspiring. Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything. It’s funny that he cites the Waze blog, which similarly gives the impression of a blameless author
- mochomocha 4y ago
  > Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything. I am of the opposite sentiment. I think it would do wonders. It's very easy in a mega-corp to completely lose track of what the product is, who the customers are. And my intuition is that most VPs at mega-corps think about products in the abstract and focus more on politics & empire building/strategy than actually caring about the customers - and it definitely shows for companies like Google. Just last week I tried to spawn a GPU instance on GCP, and despite being very familiar with the space (I work on cloud infra), after 20 minutes of fighting the overly complex UI and ridiculously broken flows, I still hadn't my instance up. In the next 3 minutes, I signed up for Lambda Labs, entered a CC, clicked a single button and ssh'ed into my VM. That's what any start-up focuses on: the product. And that's why they always win over bloated mega-corps focused on internal processes and infighting, whose employees self-select for being complacent about mediocre products as long as the monopoly keeps printing fat paychecks.
  - jjfoooo4 4y ago
    It’s an incredibly condescending exercise, both to the managers (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?), and to the people who actually run support (who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers). Google’s products aren’t bad because the VP’s have lost the meaning of holding your customer dear. Maybe their senior managers are stuffed with former startup founders, all visionaries in their own minds, who collect big windfalls to join, play at empire building for a few years, then quit in a huff and blog about how it’s everyone else’s fault.
    - 4y ago
thorwagoog 4y ago
ex-googler here, who has had similar criticisms but was able to recognize their own flaws and mistakes, chipping in. Doesn't the culture, as described, exacerbate certain flaws in certain people while hiding flaws of a different kind in others? At google it's easy to see how a flawed engineer might suffer from impatience, lack of tact, inability to read the room, poor social skills, not being attentive to details or to everyone's needs. It's easy to ascribe flaws to someone who makes mistakes and, instead of writing a lengthy postmortem and installing a process, goes ahead and fixes them while pleading for everyone to move on and keep shipping. Yet at the same time, the sins of complacency, cowardice, inability to make decisions or take calculated risks, rigidity, and aversion to hard, uncomfortable work remain well-hidden. Sometimes, they are even elevated to praise! At Google, it's better to waste everyone's time or do nothing, than take a risk and ruffle some feathers (and I'm not even talking about taking externally visible risks here--a decision to build a certain piece of infra or shut down a project). And the cycle repeats. A brilliant but "flawed" engineer realizes they can't work in that culture. They blow up and move on. Everyone says "eh, they make mistakes, can't read the room, and are difficult to work with. Poor culture fit". Well, for them, a bunch of complacent do-nothings is also extremely difficult to work with. But the do-nothings are in charge, and they are not. So they leave. Rinse and repeat.
- timmg 4y ago
  In every failed relationship there are two sides. Maybe one is entirely at fault, maybe the other, maybe both share blame of maybe there's just a basic incompatibility. This is true for work just like it is for marriage. In each case, it is easy for one to point out flaws in the other. And in some cases, "the other" is the only one that has flaws. But in most cases it is probably a combination. Just because a company has culture issues doesn't mean that every employee is blameless or perfect. When someone doesn't work out for a job it is hard to disentangle how much of the blame belongs on each party. In this case, I'm fairly familiar with a lot of the facts on the ground. As I said above the article makes a good critique of the real problems Google has. But it also blames some of those problems for mistakes/failures the author himself made (in my opinion).
  - 4y ago
JohnFen 4y ago
> he fails to recognize his own mistakes and shortcomings. Which in no way impacts how right or wrong his criticisms of Google are, and is unrelated to the topic he was speaking about.

by timmg 4y ago

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.

germanjoey 4y ago

I worked with the author for a couple of years, pre- and post- acquisition, and I have to admit that he drove me somewhat crazy sometimes too. Leaving that aside, I also had an immense amount of personal respect for him as I could see how much he very genuinely cares about what he is doing. And, that's actively doing his best to do right by his customers. I think the author is 110% spot-on with his critique of Google here.

jjfoooo4 4y ago

Indeed, and additionally the proposed fixes aren’t all that inspiring. Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything. It’s funny that he cites the Waze blog, which similarly gives the impression of a blameless author

mochomocha 4y ago
> Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything. I am of the opposite sentiment. I think it would do wonders. It's very easy in a mega-corp to completely lose track of what the product is, who the customers are. And my intuition is that most VPs at mega-corps think about products in the abstract and focus more on politics & empire building/strategy than actually caring about the customers - and it definitely shows for companies like Google. Just last week I tried to spawn a GPU instance on GCP, and despite being very familiar with the space (I work on cloud infra), after 20 minutes of fighting the overly complex UI and ridiculously broken flows, I still hadn't my instance up. In the next 3 minutes, I signed up for Lambda Labs, entered a CC, clicked a single button and ssh'ed into my VM. That's what any start-up focuses on: the product. And that's why they always win over bloated mega-corps focused on internal processes and infighting, whose employees self-select for being complacent about mediocre products as long as the monopoly keeps printing fat paychecks.
- jjfoooo4 4y ago
  It’s an incredibly condescending exercise, both to the managers (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?), and to the people who actually run support (who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers). Google’s products aren’t bad because the VP’s have lost the meaning of holding your customer dear. Maybe their senior managers are stuffed with former startup founders, all visionaries in their own minds, who collect big windfalls to join, play at empire building for a few years, then quit in a huff and blog about how it’s everyone else’s fault.
  - 4y ago

thorwagoog 4y ago

ex-googler here, who has had similar criticisms but was able to recognize their own flaws and mistakes, chipping in. Doesn't the culture, as described, exacerbate certain flaws in certain people while hiding flaws of a different kind in others? At google it's easy to see how a flawed engineer might suffer from impatience, lack of tact, inability to read the room, poor social skills, not being attentive to details or to everyone's needs. It's easy to ascribe flaws to someone who makes mistakes and, instead of writing a lengthy postmortem and installing a process, goes ahead and fixes them while pleading for everyone to move on and keep shipping. Yet at the same time, the sins of complacency, cowardice, inability to make decisions or take calculated risks, rigidity, and aversion to hard, uncomfortable work remain well-hidden. Sometimes, they are even elevated to praise! At Google, it's better to waste everyone's time or do nothing, than take a risk and ruffle some feathers (and I'm not even talking about taking externally visible risks here--a decision to build a certain piece of infra or shut down a project). And the cycle repeats. A brilliant but "flawed" engineer realizes they can't work in that culture. They blow up and move on. Everyone says "eh, they make mistakes, can't read the room, and are difficult to work with. Poor culture fit". Well, for them, a bunch of complacent do-nothings is also extremely difficult to work with. But the do-nothings are in charge, and they are not. So they leave. Rinse and repeat.

timmg 4y ago
In every failed relationship there are two sides. Maybe one is entirely at fault, maybe the other, maybe both share blame of maybe there's just a basic incompatibility. This is true for work just like it is for marriage. In each case, it is easy for one to point out flaws in the other. And in some cases, "the other" is the only one that has flaws. But in most cases it is probably a combination. Just because a company has culture issues doesn't mean that every employee is blameless or perfect. When someone doesn't work out for a job it is hard to disentangle how much of the blame belongs on each party. In this case, I'm fairly familiar with a lot of the facts on the ground. As I said above the article makes a good critique of the real problems Google has. But it also blames some of those problems for mistakes/failures the author himself made (in my opinion).
- 4y ago

JohnFen 4y ago

> he fails to recognize his own mistakes and shortcomings. Which in no way impacts how right or wrong his criticisms of Google are, and is unrelated to the topic he was speaking about.