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> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engi

> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing. Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven. Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  all those individual contributor people got rich and left the company.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I can believe half of them did, or maybe 2/3, but that still leaves hundreds of original Googlers who could speak up.
    - inconceivable 3y ago
      how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? especially something worth millions and millions of dollars? this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        > have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? Yes I have actually, several times. It's not easy, and of course it gets exponentially harder as the group grow, but these folks also have access to exponentially greater resources and exponentially greater motivation to do so. (Assuming their desire is to remain loyal shareholders of the company for the long term)
- revelio 3y ago
  I was there early on (not in the first 1000 though), and some people did try to point it out, but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish. So such sentiments tended to be voiced in private. Also it's just so vague. What is the right size for a company like Google? How many people should you hire for projects like AI or self driving cars? And finally, it was totally against the founder's and top executives self image. They felt that the potential of the company was nearly unlimited, that they would never run out of ideas. So they just kept hiring, over and over again, without any connection between headcount and need.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish.' Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources) The straightforward logic of: linear increase in organization size = exponential increase in organization complexity = exponential frictional losses would have been much clearer.
    - revelio 3y ago
      >> since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources Since when? You're assuming the pool of employees available to recruit is infinite which is clearly not true.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        It's clearly larger then 1 million worldwide, which is what matters to a company of Google's size. It will breakdown if the company wants to run multiple Manhattan Projects simultaneously, but anything short of that is technically possible.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing. Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven. Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.

inconceivable 3y ago
all those individual contributor people got rich and left the company.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I can believe half of them did, or maybe 2/3, but that still leaves hundreds of original Googlers who could speak up.
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? especially something worth millions and millions of dollars? this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      > have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? Yes I have actually, several times. It's not easy, and of course it gets exponentially harder as the group grow, but these folks also have access to exponentially greater resources and exponentially greater motivation to do so. (Assuming their desire is to remain loyal shareholders of the company for the long term)
revelio 3y ago
I was there early on (not in the first 1000 though), and some people did try to point it out, but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish. So such sentiments tended to be voiced in private. Also it's just so vague. What is the right size for a company like Google? How many people should you hire for projects like AI or self driving cars? And finally, it was totally against the founder's and top executives self image. They felt that the potential of the company was nearly unlimited, that they would never run out of ideas. So they just kept hiring, over and over again, without any connection between headcount and need.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish.' Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources) The straightforward logic of: linear increase in organization size = exponential increase in organization complexity = exponential frictional losses would have been much clearer.
  - revelio 3y ago
    >> since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources Since when? You're assuming the pool of employees available to recruit is infinite which is clearly not true.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      It's clearly larger then 1 million worldwide, which is what matters to a company of Google's size. It will breakdown if the company wants to run multiple Manhattan Projects simultaneously, but anything short of that is technically possible.