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When Talent Is Not Enough
- btilly 3y agoHere is one concrete example of something that Google simply gets wrong. They should pay external competent programmers to come in. Ask the programmer, using Google's public documentation, figure out how to do standard task X that the programmer has never done before. Say, build a Google script connector for a Looker report. Or navigate OAuth 2. Give them any necessary resources. And film it. Do you have any idea how many ways that they would find to improve their documentation for this kind of use case? Or how much they would improve adoption of technically excellent products.
- roflyear 3y agoWhat benefit would this give Google?
- SQueeeeeL 3y agoSubstantially more usable documentation
- candiddevmike 3y agoLevelset what kind of skills their customers actually have vs what their libraries and documentation assume they have. Google tends to create things that work only for Google.
- btilly 3y agoImproved adoption of their platform and products.
- x86x87 3y agopeople actually using their products once they fix it?
- bbor 3y agoI’ve always found this somewhat absurd. I get that big companies are complex and projects come and go, but it is SO bad. I consider myself a decent SWE in the relevant domain, and after a certain amount of hours spent just trying to make some calls to Google Maps API from a non-colab python server without rolling my own interface around raw URLs, I just had to blame google a little bit. Of course, in the end there’s a beautiful dead-simple solution
- x86x87 3y agothese things happen (maybe not at Google) and they are called UX studies. I have been part of them and it's very enlightening for the team that builds something and understands the ins and outs to see just how poor the experience is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 3y ago> Once you’ve been in some smart environments, you learn to talk the talk. To say nothing of if you've been trained on 40 Gb of text and you have silicon memory.
- nojs 3y agoThis is actually one of the long term effects of these LLMs that I’m most excited about. Once “sounding smart” becomes a commodity, and anyone can whip up a 300 page smart-sounding report in 5 minutes, it’s a whole lot less valuable. Industries based on this (of which there are many) are in for a shock in the next decade and that’s a good thing.
- voidhorse 3y agoGoogle made two major mistakes: 1. They scaled up new hiring too quickly, and did so when they couldn't adequately vet applicants (around pandemic times) the company grew its headcount too much in a very short period during a windfall and did so likely without due diligence. 2. The windfall ended. The board got upset because now the company was hemorrhaging money during a downturn because they hired too many people. Leadership never had to face these poor economic conditions or pressures from a board before, and did not know how to effectively make good decisions to turn things around. So they made poor decisions. Then more poor decisions. Then more poor decisions. Their own public panic over chat-gpt then made them look worse in the eyes of investors. This led to, on top of the layoffs, high-performing, long-tenured employees suddenly feeling it might be time to retire/leave, and those that remained now have abysmal morale. It's poor leadership in the face of change, and inability to manage the rate of wide-scale internal upheavals. It's basically just mismanagement happening at a huge scale.
- tsunamifury 3y agoThis is a much better recent tactical take than the article.
- dietr1ch 3y agoAt some point it felt like FAANG companies were just drowning competition by hiring everyone decent enough instead of keeping up with their high bars, but you could say that at the time everyone wanted people who could code. So much that Bootcamps started being a popular way of getting people up to speed without going through the 4yr+ education that was deemed not entirely required and relevant anymore by more and more practicing engineers in the startup world. The not-so-evil view is that some MBAs figured each engineer was worth on average 3-5x their salary, so why not hire everyone until that almost evens out?
- Hermitian909 3y ago> So much that Bootcamps started being a popular way of getting people up to speed without going through the 4yr+ education that was deemed not entirely required and relevant anymore by more and more practicing engineers in the startup world. Bootcamps seem unlikely to go away even without zero percent interest. At most companies the amount of CS you need during your day job is usually laughably small. The most important question is whether you can ship, and plenty of people with CS degrees can't for one reason or another. If you're somewhere like FAANG, you need more CS, but if you have a quantitative background it's pretty straightforward to achieve that level of competency or exceed it. e.g. anyone who works through all the exercises in Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces[0] is likely to have better OS fundamentals than the median FAANG Staff level engineer I've worked with. CS is pretty unusual in this way because ultimately for most of these learnings the computer can tells us whether we're right and have learned something correctly. [0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
- tsunamifury 3y agoThis is ridiculously off base and goes to great lengths to blame the workers at google instead of the management all while appealing to great-man theory. As someone who built a billion dollar revenue division at google, I have some small authority to speak in this matter. The issue is almost entirely that VPs’ customer is not the user, it’s sundar. And sundars customer is the board and their customer is the shareholders. The company has reached a rare position where adding a billion dollars in revenue only adds 25 billion to the market cap. But getting up on stage and laying out a very tenuous and hand wavy vision you abandon a quarter later can add 200 billion. It’s a set of circumstances that is entirely unique to their scale of success and ultimately very toxic for actual product performance and innovation. But I entirely reject what this writer has diagnosed here. Sorry. It’s not workers who “think too much if themselves” and I think it’s a downright shameful conclusion.
- AlbertCory 3y ago> getting up on stage and laying out a very tenuous and hand wavy vision you abandon a quarter later can add 200 billion. Do you have an example of that? Abandoning something a quarter later? Presumably you had something specific in mind. And where did that 200 billion go when it was abandoned?
- bbor 3y agoThey’re talking about market cap. It just disappears :)
- AlbertCory 3y agoYes, I know it's market cap. The question is, what's the (perceived) advantage of a temporary addition to it?
- bbor 3y agoApologies for correcting you then! I’ll let them answer, but it seems there’s a fairly obvious one: the shareholders can sell their stock for more money than they paid for it. Or do other rich people liabilities-financial-instrument wizardry to take advantage of a bigger NW on paper. But could be off base! If nothing else, sundar specifically gets huge bonuses based on the performance of GOOG - I think his 2y bonus this year was something ridiculous like $230,000,000.
- mberning 3y agoSome organizations have the opposite problem. The culture has a baked in assumption of things going sideways and taking forever. Under such circumstances there is a learned helplessness and unwillingness to even try that is soul crushing. If you get hired in as a fresh graduate or from a less dysfunctional place over time you may come to believe that you are as slow, dopey, and unmotivated as everyone else.
- ramraj07 3y agoIts funny, this person writes a poorly proofread article (while actually expecting people to pay for it) and then puts nuggets with completely unsubstantiated judgement but still wants to weasel out some image of being logical and objective about it. The Berkeley professors are “clearly leftist and should be ignored”, except for the one cherry picked nugget that supports your argument for the day? What’s the point of that statement? Who’s the political whack job, the person making a point with data or the person trying their level best to disregard the data because it’s from a leftist? What’s with arguments like this becoming popular anyway? Should we be worried about it?
- bbor 3y agoI loved that part! “He says he has done studies proving that rich people are mean, which is clearly wrong because he’s biased. But this is proof that people from different cultural/socioeconomic backgrounds I don’t like are broken!”
- AlbertCory 3y ago> poorly proofread article (while actually expecting people to pay for it) what's an example of an error that proofreading would have caught? And your comment uses "cherry picked" which needs a hyphen: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cherry-pick https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cherry-pick "still wants to weasel out some image of being logical" isn't even good English. As for "expecting people to pay for it" -- you didn't pay, did you? In fact, no one did. I don't have a paid subscription plan.
- stubybubs 3y agoArticle criticizes an general named Fredenall, saying his lack of combat experience doomed him. He was basically a military MBA type. > After service in the Philippines and other overseas and stateside assignments, Fredendall shipped out to the Western Front with the 28th Infantry Regiment in August 1917, four months after the American entry into World War I. He held a succession of instructor assignments in the army's schools in France, and commanded one of its training centers. He built a record as an excellent teacher, trainer, and administrator, and ended the war as a temporary lieutenant colonel. This article says look at all these great wartime generals, they had in the trenches experience, and lists Eisenhower, saying this: > Eisenhower was desperate to get into combat, but he finally made it to France only as the war was ending. Eisenhower did not see combat, he trained troops, just like Fredenall. He was basically also a military MBA type. Very similar backgrounds. So maybe the difference between them was... talent? It undermines the authors point rather than making it. Most of the American generals all went to West Point! They might as well be Ivy Leaguers! The part about the 5 extremely successful tech execs not graduating it disingenuous. Look at the schools they did attend, even if they didn't graduate. They had connections. They had family money. Gates and Zuckerberg for sure. Ted Turner went to private schools and then Brown. Jobs, sure, one in a million. Maybe Ellison too. So that was also talent? Kind of a mess here. Basically this article is terrible. You need talent, plus agency, funding, C-level support. Seems more like they're not actually letting talent do what it's supposed to do?
- AlbertCory 3y agoEllison didn't graduate. Nor Gates or Zuck. We're talking about top-school MBA's here, which was the topic (Enron). As for Eisenhower & Fredendall: you can't really be serious. Fredendall was not a wartime general, nor was he a good planner. Plus, he was a coward who refused to listen to people, and disposed his troops ignorantly. This section was a discussion of wartime vs. peacetime generals, not MBA's.
- stubybubs 3y agoI don't think you understood the article or what I wrote. I understand that Ellison, Gates, and Zuckerberg didn't graduate, then I said they still attended top schools. They had connections. MBAs at top schools are only really worth it if you're under 25, and even then, only for the connections. The entire list has almost nothing to do with having talent or not, or having an MBA or not. The key is almost exclusively to be born into an at least somewhat wealthy family so that you can buy connections. Or if you're not rich you have to work super hard and be lucky. Very few people really believe getting an MBA requires talent. I don't really understand how this connects to most of those people being talented or not. They all became the CEOs of enormously successful companies. Maybe this list would make more sense if you said, look at these awful CEOs, they had no talent even though they had MBAs? Neither Eisenhower nor Fredenall were wartime generals before WW2. Fredenall actually became a general before Eisenhower. Both performaned administrative work and training between the wars; neither directed troops in combat. Fredenall actually did command troops in combat, although as noted it was disastrous. Important to note, Eisenhower actually selected Fredenall to command those troops. I don't really see how Eisenhower was less of a peacetime general than than Fredenall. It's a really strange comparison to make. The article has a bunch of points it tries to make and I just picked two of them that didn't make any sense.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoGoogle has never been a product company. The last and maybe only major product success they have had after search is gmail. Everything else they bought and sold. So I don't know why people are getting shocked now that when they suddenly have to innovate, they are falling behind. Google is great at algorithms and a huge amount of data processing etc but how to turn it into a product is extremely unclear to them.
- holoduke 3y agoYoutube? Android? Maps? All extremely succesfull platforms/products. But yeah, they are falling behind slowely.
- toomim 3y agoYoutube and Android were bought. Maps is the only one he's missing after Search and Gmail.
- throaway3432 3y agoMaps was also bought
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoGoogle Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at Sydney-based Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be separately downloaded by users, but the company later pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google management, changing the method of distribution.
- toomim 3y agoThe web version was still developed in-house. I guess we can call maps "half-built, half-bought."
- AlbertCory 3y agoFor Maps, they bought Keyhole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps and Brian McClendon was the head of Geo for a long time.
- fenomas 3y ago> ..a professor at UC Berkeley, gave a TedX talk .. The extreme leftist bias of virtually every social science and humanities faculty at Berkeley is more than enough reason to discount this heavily. .. Nonetheless, we have to admit that maybe he’s onto something there. This amounts to saying: "normally I'd dismiss this research based on an ad-hominem, but in this case I agree with its conclusions so I won't". Which is certainly one way to write a think-piece, I guess?
- justabaldguy 3y ago[flagged]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI agree with pretty much all the other comments here - I always find it amusing when an article bemoans the lack of humility in others with a style that is supremely self-assured and cocksure. Note the author mentions the Dunning-Krueger effect. The DK effect is a statistical artifact, not a psychological phenomenon: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/ https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
- Cupertino95014 3y agoI searched and found one instance of the word humility, and he's quoting an article by someone else. Where are you getting that?
- kashunstva 3y ago> The extreme leftist bias of virtually every social science and humanities faculty at Berkeley is more than enough reason to discount this heavily. You won’t be surprised that he found what he wanted to find Granted, motivated reasoning may be alive and well in the academy; but this statement asserts personal motives where the author almost certainly cannot make this claim with any certainty.
- dredmorbius 3y agoNB, Google+ shut down to the public on 1 April 2019. There was some continuation after that date, though effectively Google+ as anyone knew of ended then. The last (non-public) relics of Google+ were rebranded as "Currents" on 6 July 2020: <https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/05/and-thats-really-it-for-google/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/05/and-thats-really-it-for-go...>