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This 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 so

This 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 ago
  They’re talking about market cap. It just disappears :)
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Yes, I know it's market cap. The question is, what's the (perceived) advantage of a temporary addition to it?
    - bbor 3y ago
      Apologies 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.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Was it $230M cash? Or $230M worth of GOOG with stipulations on when he can sell it? Edit: it does not look like there are stipulations on when he can sell it, but he was compensated GOOG, not USD, and it was specifically formulated to be based on GOOG’s stock price performance compared to SP100: ~Page 49 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923000736/lgoog2023_def14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923... It was also a triennial bonus, spanning some period of 2019 to 2022. Does anyone think they can come up with a better compensation formula? If so, what would it be?
        bbor 3y ago
        I know this won’t be appreciated on here, but I figure it should be pointed out that there exists another way. My alternate compensation formula is simple: a 100% marginal tax rate above, say, $5M/y, with corresponding laws to make sure it’s not easily dodged through non-taxable compensation. Does society really need ceos who earn many hundreds of millions? Do we care if all those people “leave the country” as the typical refrain goes? I personally say no. Let google suffer the incompetence of someone only earning a paltry 75x the average individual income in CA
        YellOh 3y ago
        I mean, I think outright saying that you don't care if extremely successful, powerful people leave the country (taking their skill, experience, and creations with them) is not a particularly strong rhetorical move. I quite like being in a wealthy developed nation with an abundance of well-paid jobs.
    - freddie_mercury 3y ago
      I don't know this specific example but I've been in many C-level discussions where similar things happen. There is rarely a belief that it will be temporary. There is usually a lot of confidence (even if misguided) that there will be sufficient follow through to quickly justify the addition. In my experience people over-attribute to malice or cynicism what is usually just crossing the very thin line between entrepreneurial confidence and self-delusion.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
The article does blame the management though, with respect to its concern over cancelled products. > some talented executive wanted to do them, and other Googlers joined him or her. I think you're right in there are issues in the article. I think the article is generally just trying to clarify a more abstract point: current high tech top-down corporate culture favors appearances more than the fundamentals of what makes good things good.
bbor 3y ago
Thanks for taking the time to share the unique perspective. As an ex-googler with SO much less authority: this article reads like someone working backwards from first principles, and in this case pretty boring/typical ones like “great man theory”, “the liberal elite are weak/dumb”, and “no one wants to work anymore”
moneywoes 3y ago
Have you ever written about your biggest learnings from that google experience? Well done
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Thank you, sir. There are quite a few articles on my channel about my time at Google, both work-related and non-work (movies, author-hosting), e.g. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterprise https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterp... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads Feel free to browse.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    I love how he was referring or me but you’re so arrogant you thought he was talking to you.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
> And sundars customer is the board and their customer is the shareholders This is by design. As CEO you are supposed to have your shareholder's interests as your main priority. And as you say, your shareholders are often served better by making upbeat announcements than making actual products for customers. Large corporations have different dynamics than small businesses, and different goals. It's not even vaguely surprising that Alphabet has a different culture than Google did 20 years ago. What I find surprising is that everyone seems to ignore this and think that Googlers must be awesome at their job because they work at Google. Those days are long gone.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  Are you saying that google’s engineers aren’t above average in the industry? I certainly know they don’t have a monopoly on rock stars, but in aggregate do you think they have the same hiring bar as a boring f500 company or even Microsoft or oracle?
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    Define the standard you're averaging. Quality of code? Speed of development? CS knowledge? Ability to interpret arcane customer requirements correctly? What does Google's recruitment process optimise for? The ability to whiteboard an algorithm and complete difficult HackerRank puzzles from what I've heard. Is this a good set of criteria for recruiting "the best"? Once in Google, are they learning more than their peers outside Google? Or are they learning how to survive the internal politics? Which helps them not get made redundant more? I would expect "the best engineers" to be in small tech companies where they can make a huge difference and really contribute to the company and see the things they build get used by customers every day. Not in a vast organisation drowning in bureaucracy and politics. As the article says, Googlers tend to think of themselves as special without any real justification.
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      My experience says otherwise because of Googles unique mix of 1) giving engineers experience at scale with sophisticated systems 2) solid mentorship opportunities 3) training them with the social skills that show them their code matters as much as their ability to work with their team and execute 4) resources to execute and learn about how to execute fast 5) the reality of pokitics In general, when I’m hiring for a startup, I see snr+ google engineers as great hires. I find that other startups CEOs that try to complain are actually really saying, honestly, they are less talented than their prospective google alumn and they don’t understand the value.
KerrAvon 3y ago
I think you’re missing the point, which is that it’s the fault of the executives who created and incentivized that culture. Attack from another angle: if it’s the scale of their success that causes the issues, why doesn’t Apple have these problems?
x86x87 3y ago
the way I read it is that management is to blame. there is absolutely no way the workers - no matter how exceptional they think they are - can thrive in an environment that does not enable this kind of behavior.
xivzgrev 3y ago
I didn’t see an attack on rank and file away at all. This article was squarely aimed at Google’s later leaders ie Sundar. He’s a peacetime general and he missed the coming war. He also has continued, like past leaders, a strategy of letting inmates run the asylum (“talent” driving their own projects without a firm connection to overall strategy and customers). “Talent” will do what you tell it to do. My current company also believes in hiring talented people, but our CEO is also extremely clear about overall strategy and customer orientation, so I rarely find that people wander too far off in unproductive directions.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  That talent you are insulting literally created the breakthrough LLM technology which then was ignored by Sundar for years. What this author has completely wrong was that the talent actually came up with tons of great products that with focus could grow and add revenue. But that was nothing compared to vaporware on stage at IO for execs.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    So it's: "we, the talented, made great products, but the management screwed them up." ??? ok then.
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      I think the response here shows both your lack of seriousness and experience here. And a note of elitest bitterness. I was an snr leader, not the talent. I am freely admitting where the value came from. Brilliant workers smarter than me. I really question why you’d argue with that when it was ICs who did breakthrough work like transformers that are now fundamentally changing computing. What an arrogant and foolish perspective.
      - kortilla 3y ago
        Take a deep breath, you’re reading into it far much more than is actually there. Nobody said anything about lack of pockets of cutting edge research. This is about products. LLMs are a perfect example of them being squandered because nobody converted them into a useful product that could be “sold as a vision” by execs. The people working on them were arrogant enough to think that LLMs would sell themselves and building a tool for users was someone else’s job. The product managers weren’t innovative enough to come up with a product to let people interact with LLMs in a useful way. The execs were too blind to not see the vision of AI doing everything, which is a narrative that drove nvidia to a trillion dollar company. The people who implemented LLMs will be famous… as academics. The machine they are a part of completely failed to execute on them.
Cupertino95014 3y ago
What was this "billion dollar revenue division at google"? Are you going to tell us?

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 ago
They’re talking about market cap. It just disappears :)
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Yes, I know it's market cap. The question is, what's the (perceived) advantage of a temporary addition to it?
  - bbor 3y ago
    Apologies 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.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Was it $230M cash? Or $230M worth of GOOG with stipulations on when he can sell it? Edit: it does not look like there are stipulations on when he can sell it, but he was compensated GOOG, not USD, and it was specifically formulated to be based on GOOG’s stock price performance compared to SP100: ~Page 49 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923000736/lgoog2023_def14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923... It was also a triennial bonus, spanning some period of 2019 to 2022. Does anyone think they can come up with a better compensation formula? If so, what would it be?
      - bbor 3y ago
        I know this won’t be appreciated on here, but I figure it should be pointed out that there exists another way. My alternate compensation formula is simple: a 100% marginal tax rate above, say, $5M/y, with corresponding laws to make sure it’s not easily dodged through non-taxable compensation. Does society really need ceos who earn many hundreds of millions? Do we care if all those people “leave the country” as the typical refrain goes? I personally say no. Let google suffer the incompetence of someone only earning a paltry 75x the average individual income in CA
        YellOh 3y ago
        I mean, I think outright saying that you don't care if extremely successful, powerful people leave the country (taking their skill, experience, and creations with them) is not a particularly strong rhetorical move. I quite like being in a wealthy developed nation with an abundance of well-paid jobs.
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    I don't know this specific example but I've been in many C-level discussions where similar things happen. There is rarely a belief that it will be temporary. There is usually a lot of confidence (even if misguided) that there will be sufficient follow through to quickly justify the addition. In my experience people over-attribute to malice or cynicism what is usually just crossing the very thin line between entrepreneurial confidence and self-delusion.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

The article does blame the management though, with respect to its concern over cancelled products. > some talented executive wanted to do them, and other Googlers joined him or her. I think you're right in there are issues in the article. I think the article is generally just trying to clarify a more abstract point: current high tech top-down corporate culture favors appearances more than the fundamentals of what makes good things good.

bbor 3y ago

Thanks for taking the time to share the unique perspective. As an ex-googler with SO much less authority: this article reads like someone working backwards from first principles, and in this case pretty boring/typical ones like “great man theory”, “the liberal elite are weak/dumb”, and “no one wants to work anymore”

moneywoes 3y ago

Have you ever written about your biggest learnings from that google experience? Well done

AlbertCory 3y ago
Thank you, sir. There are quite a few articles on my channel about my time at Google, both work-related and non-work (movies, author-hosting), e.g. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterprise https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterp... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads Feel free to browse.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  I love how he was referring or me but you’re so arrogant you thought he was talking to you.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

> And sundars customer is the board and their customer is the shareholders This is by design. As CEO you are supposed to have your shareholder's interests as your main priority. And as you say, your shareholders are often served better by making upbeat announcements than making actual products for customers. Large corporations have different dynamics than small businesses, and different goals. It's not even vaguely surprising that Alphabet has a different culture than Google did 20 years ago. What I find surprising is that everyone seems to ignore this and think that Googlers must be awesome at their job because they work at Google. Those days are long gone.

VirusNewbie 3y ago
Are you saying that google’s engineers aren’t above average in the industry? I certainly know they don’t have a monopoly on rock stars, but in aggregate do you think they have the same hiring bar as a boring f500 company or even Microsoft or oracle?
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  Define the standard you're averaging. Quality of code? Speed of development? CS knowledge? Ability to interpret arcane customer requirements correctly? What does Google's recruitment process optimise for? The ability to whiteboard an algorithm and complete difficult HackerRank puzzles from what I've heard. Is this a good set of criteria for recruiting "the best"? Once in Google, are they learning more than their peers outside Google? Or are they learning how to survive the internal politics? Which helps them not get made redundant more? I would expect "the best engineers" to be in small tech companies where they can make a huge difference and really contribute to the company and see the things they build get used by customers every day. Not in a vast organisation drowning in bureaucracy and politics. As the article says, Googlers tend to think of themselves as special without any real justification.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    My experience says otherwise because of Googles unique mix of 1) giving engineers experience at scale with sophisticated systems 2) solid mentorship opportunities 3) training them with the social skills that show them their code matters as much as their ability to work with their team and execute 4) resources to execute and learn about how to execute fast 5) the reality of pokitics In general, when I’m hiring for a startup, I see snr+ google engineers as great hires. I find that other startups CEOs that try to complain are actually really saying, honestly, they are less talented than their prospective google alumn and they don’t understand the value.

KerrAvon 3y ago

I think you’re missing the point, which is that it’s the fault of the executives who created and incentivized that culture. Attack from another angle: if it’s the scale of their success that causes the issues, why doesn’t Apple have these problems?

x86x87 3y ago

the way I read it is that management is to blame. there is absolutely no way the workers - no matter how exceptional they think they are - can thrive in an environment that does not enable this kind of behavior.

xivzgrev 3y ago

I didn’t see an attack on rank and file away at all. This article was squarely aimed at Google’s later leaders ie Sundar. He’s a peacetime general and he missed the coming war. He also has continued, like past leaders, a strategy of letting inmates run the asylum (“talent” driving their own projects without a firm connection to overall strategy and customers). “Talent” will do what you tell it to do. My current company also believes in hiring talented people, but our CEO is also extremely clear about overall strategy and customer orientation, so I rarely find that people wander too far off in unproductive directions.

tsunamifury 3y ago
That talent you are insulting literally created the breakthrough LLM technology which then was ignored by Sundar for years. What this author has completely wrong was that the talent actually came up with tons of great products that with focus could grow and add revenue. But that was nothing compared to vaporware on stage at IO for execs.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  So it's: "we, the talented, made great products, but the management screwed them up." ??? ok then.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    I think the response here shows both your lack of seriousness and experience here. And a note of elitest bitterness. I was an snr leader, not the talent. I am freely admitting where the value came from. Brilliant workers smarter than me. I really question why you’d argue with that when it was ICs who did breakthrough work like transformers that are now fundamentally changing computing. What an arrogant and foolish perspective.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      Take a deep breath, you’re reading into it far much more than is actually there. Nobody said anything about lack of pockets of cutting edge research. This is about products. LLMs are a perfect example of them being squandered because nobody converted them into a useful product that could be “sold as a vision” by execs. The people working on them were arrogant enough to think that LLMs would sell themselves and building a tool for users was someone else’s job. The product managers weren’t innovative enough to come up with a product to let people interact with LLMs in a useful way. The execs were too blind to not see the vision of AI doing everything, which is a narrative that drove nvidia to a trillion dollar company. The people who implemented LLMs will be famous… as academics. The machine they are a part of completely failed to execute on them.

Cupertino95014 3y ago

What was this "billion dollar revenue division at google"? Are you going to tell us?