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Former CEO has a big rant on why it's impossible to do things at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-did-i-leave-google-stay-so-long-noam-bardin https://

by wffurr 3y ago

Former CEO has a big rant on why it's impossible to do things at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-did-i-leave-google-stay-so-long-noam-bardin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-did-i-leave-google-stay-s... Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165809

Spivak 3y ago
> This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy to continue to act as Waze and we believed them. Why does this keep happening? It is false 100% of the time. Are people really watching the sun come up every morning and thinking, "okay but tomorrow it won't." > I believed that I could build out Waze within Google, breaking the myth about what happens to companies after being acquired by large corporations Nice cautionary tale, but I'm different. > Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns. Performance based incentives never work for people who are not directly revenue generating. One piston in your engine working extra hard is meaningless, the credit to getting you to your destination is the driver. And when cogs in the machine lose out on their "performance" incentive because they never had any control to begin with they get angry, burnt out, and leave. Within a corporation you have to make the labor theory of value true and reward effort even if it's pointless. You put the responsibility of delivering meaningful value on the people directing where that effort goes. > while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement. But several months later, we had been co-opted as well and it was Waze employees complaining about the food This both completely misunderstands and exactly gets why entitlement is the wrong concept. Everyone's happiness and contentment regresses to the mean eventually when their lives get better and when they get worse. Someone complaining about the sushi is genuinely and reasonably annoyed because that very literally made their day worse. People see that as entitlement because they're forgetting how happiness in humans actually works. Whether this is a comfort or nihilistic is up to you but Elon Musk is not happier than you.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Tbf, they were acquired back when Google wasn’t seen as evil yet. A lot of things seemed more promising in 2013.
jeffbee 3y ago
TL;DR he wanted to be a dick to his org and Google wouldn't enable that. He wanted to move fast by ignoring privacy and security. He wanted to abuse Google's market position to get his app pre-installed and artificially ranked in the Play store. Sounds like a real prince.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  To be fair..lets be honest with ourselves: Google bought Waze for exactly one brutally obvious reason: To prevent competition for Google Maps. Google has sat on it since, eventually they will port features to Maps and kill it when it is convenient. As for installing...uh..Google Maps? It's Google's Android, Google could do whatever they want. That was the whole point of the 'Free' OS Phone post yesterday.
  - jader201 3y ago
    I’m not arguing that will never happen, but it seems like if their only reason was to prevent competition for Google Maps, they would have killed it a long time ago. The fact that it’s still around 10 years later suggests it wasn’t their only motivation behind the acquisition.
  - mft_ 3y ago
    I always assumed they bought it to augment Google Maps with Waze's superior real-time stream of road condition data?
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      Is that actually a different idea though? Augment and protect.
  - kyawzazaw 3y ago
    They already combined under Geo
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  In all fairness, Google's security record is the best of any FAANG. I still treat my phone as compromised, but no one got (0 click) Pegaus'd.

by wffurr 3y ago

Spivak 3y ago

> This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy to continue to act as Waze and we believed them. Why does this keep happening? It is false 100% of the time. Are people really watching the sun come up every morning and thinking, "okay but tomorrow it won't." > I believed that I could build out Waze within Google, breaking the myth about what happens to companies after being acquired by large corporations Nice cautionary tale, but I'm different. > Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns. Performance based incentives never work for people who are not directly revenue generating. One piston in your engine working extra hard is meaningless, the credit to getting you to your destination is the driver. And when cogs in the machine lose out on their "performance" incentive because they never had any control to begin with they get angry, burnt out, and leave. Within a corporation you have to make the labor theory of value true and reward effort even if it's pointless. You put the responsibility of delivering meaningful value on the people directing where that effort goes. > while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement. But several months later, we had been co-opted as well and it was Waze employees complaining about the food This both completely misunderstands and exactly gets why entitlement is the wrong concept. Everyone's happiness and contentment regresses to the mean eventually when their lives get better and when they get worse. Someone complaining about the sushi is genuinely and reasonably annoyed because that very literally made their day worse. People see that as entitlement because they're forgetting how happiness in humans actually works. Whether this is a comfort or nihilistic is up to you but Elon Musk is not happier than you.

vxNsr 3y ago
Tbf, they were acquired back when Google wasn’t seen as evil yet. A lot of things seemed more promising in 2013.

jeffbee 3y ago

TL;DR he wanted to be a dick to his org and Google wouldn't enable that. He wanted to move fast by ignoring privacy and security. He wanted to abuse Google's market position to get his app pre-installed and artificially ranked in the Play store. Sounds like a real prince.

agloe_dreams 3y ago
To be fair..lets be honest with ourselves: Google bought Waze for exactly one brutally obvious reason: To prevent competition for Google Maps. Google has sat on it since, eventually they will port features to Maps and kill it when it is convenient. As for installing...uh..Google Maps? It's Google's Android, Google could do whatever they want. That was the whole point of the 'Free' OS Phone post yesterday.
- jader201 3y ago
  I’m not arguing that will never happen, but it seems like if their only reason was to prevent competition for Google Maps, they would have killed it a long time ago. The fact that it’s still around 10 years later suggests it wasn’t their only motivation behind the acquisition.
- mft_ 3y ago
  I always assumed they bought it to augment Google Maps with Waze's superior real-time stream of road condition data?
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    Is that actually a different idea though? Augment and protect.
- kyawzazaw 3y ago
  They already combined under Geo
hospitalJail 3y ago
In all fairness, Google's security record is the best of any FAANG. I still treat my phone as compromised, but no one got (0 click) Pegaus'd.