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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

• occz 3y ago
  Sad times. If not Google, what's the place to be nowadays? Has high interest rates killed tech as a great place to work in entirely, or is there any oasis left?
  • riku_iki 3y ago
    it is also industry maturing, there are tons of people came to the industry in the latest years because of money and not because of passion about tech.
  • jhaenchen 3y ago
    I'd say startups. At the very least, it seems like companies where the founder stays on after getting rich tend to do better. Avoid Day 2 companies.
    • occz 3y ago
      Startups are shit on pay and as an early tech employee you are basically the one that gets screwed the hardest of all. A huge gamble with very little upside even in the best of cases. I'm gonna have to pass.
• blakesterz 3y ago
  I think this link should point to the post at https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
  • dang 3y ago
    Yup. Changed from https://ln.hixie.ch/ https://ln.hixie.ch/. Thanks!
• markdog12 3y ago
  > Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). As someone who's very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off to hear. I guess that's what this tweet is alluding to: https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273 https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273
  • tyingq 3y ago
    If true, it does sound terrible. Though, I would focus not so much on one named person. The culture is allowing it, leaders above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and so on.
    • hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
      Yep. It usually is a ship leaking from the top. I have seen it (not from Google).
      • hot_gril 3y ago
        I don't agree with the author's complaint about the culture changing, it's just that the leadership is weak and directionless, which was also mentioned.
    • ryandrake 3y ago
      OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important bit: > I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward". Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you're going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.
• amelius 3y ago
  [flagged]
• hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  Thanks for the post. I for one would love to experience the early Google culture. I'm not competent enough but as a middle-aged man I believe I have more fire than many of my peers.
• kens 3y ago
  That post is a very good description of Google and matches my experience at Google (2004-2016), both the good and bad. There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN, so hopefully this post will help. (Note: you need to scroll down a bit on the page to get the post.)
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    hi Ken. I don't think I mentioned you in the Enterprise article!
  • kelnos 3y ago
    > There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN Is there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the company and what happened there over time. (Of course I can't speak for all HNers...)
    • politelemon 3y ago
      Having spent a vast amount of time reading comments, there certainly is. HN can frequently become an echo chamber, though pretends not to be; and has very clear favorite tech darlings and near-immovable, predefined villains (Google being one of them).
      • surajrmal 3y ago
        It's not surprising given how most of HN seems to only see a glimpse of things work internally based on blog posts unhappy xooglers write. It's very biased and folks extrapolate too far. The real picture is far more complex. Unfortunately no one seems to want to read a balanced perspective these days.
• lesuorac 3y ago
  > one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. Hey if you're cool with me using your hardrive to store data I have a bunch of chia coins that need mining. Its weird how getting somebody's permission before using their stuff is considered unnecessary.
  • Chabsff 3y ago
    I think you might be confusing cookies and local storage.
    • lesuorac 3y ago
      Where do you think cookies get stored?
      • nostrademons 3y ago
        Not localStorage.
        • lesuorac 3y ago
          Non-sequitor. If you look back the at the original post I say "Hard drive" not the "localStorage object". And they are indeed stored are your system and not the servers. https://allaboutcookies.org/what-is-a-cookie-file#:~:text=In%20general%2C%20to%20get%20to,Windows%208%20or%20Windows%208.1 https://allaboutcookies.org/what-is-a-cookie-file#:~:text=In....
          • LargeTomato 3y ago
            You do say hard drive but you also imply that permission to store cookies is as good as permission to mine cryptocurrency simply because the user allowed access to storage. The argument these other commenters are trying to make hinges on the idea that the type of storage for cookies wouldn't work that well for crypto mining. You're calling that argument nonsequitor and I don't think it is. It's immediately applicable to explaining the gap in your reasoning. That gap, for the record, being Cookies Storage == Crypto Mining. Finally, let me give an example. "I own my house and my land so therefore I'm a sovereign citizen." That's a bad argument for largely the same reasons.
• nine_zeros 3y ago
  A lot of glorified companies are completely filled with corrupt, inept management. I hope this recession destroys this management culture and brings back the ethos of innovation in engineering and product.
  • financltravsty 3y ago
    Be the change you want to see. I'm not holding out. Public companies all turn into this. One solution is to make greed and going public a shameful thing; but who's going to do that?
    • nine_zeros 3y ago
      > Be the change you want to see. I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who will always prioritize a mix of business needs and engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And then, to shame/call out other "leaders" throwing their people under the bus. I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only way to maintain company culture in the direction of innovation.
• pkasting 3y ago
  As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this. It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google. I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured, reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the importing of "business focus" and the "bottom line" (read: short term share price) to Google's management structure wholesale.
  • liveoneggs 3y ago
    Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.
    • pkasting 3y ago
      Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms. Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be. If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice. Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
      • liveoneggs 3y ago
        the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
• t8sr 3y ago
  Around 2016 at Google, my entire reporting chain, from manager to CEO, changed. Literally not a single person was left. Laszlo, both Erics, Patrick and the rest of the L team all left in quick succession. I think the old Google of < 2015 and the current Google are two companies that have almost nothing in common.
  • hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
    I guess it was the Alphabet saga? It's all like this. I have decided that if given the chance, I'd never work in companies with more than 1,000 persons.
    • TheRealPomax 3y ago
      Not even if they pay well enough that you can quit and still afford having a family in only 5 years, instead of 20?
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        Can't speak for OP, of course, but for me -- no, not even then. There really are things money can't buy.
    • t8sr 3y ago
      Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it. One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of culture going for much longer than people think. Conversely, I've worked at companies with 500 employees that were the blandest kind of "enterprise business company firm" you can imagine. :)
      • cbozeman 3y ago
        > I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. This is the coolest shit I have ever read. Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.
• alberth 3y ago
  > “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.” Ouch. I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.
  • Dudester230602 3y ago
    I think Pichai tries his best within his abilities, maybe it's time to pay attention to the ones who had chosen him?
    • _heimdall 3y ago
      It may be more helpful to pay attention to the ones leaving him in charge if its clear his abilities may not be the right fit.
  • paxys 3y ago
    The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader. That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google's share price.
    • hot_gril 3y ago
      Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don't even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom, OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder. Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves faster than we do! I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.
      • bcrosby95 3y ago
        Yes, Microsoft really re-invented itself. Maybe Google can turn itself around too after a decade or two of malaise.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  Yet another "famous" Googler whom I didn't know. He joined one month before I did. I did know Chris DiBona, at least. Didn't know this Jeanine person. I wrote a number of articles about working there in the early (or earlier) days. Chronologically: 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 https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads-continued https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads-co... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps-continued https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps-c... As well as three others about the best part: the non-work activities.
  • g-b-r 3y ago
    He was famous (or infamous) way before joining Google
    • AlbertCory 3y ago
      Now that I think of it, the name IS vaguely familiar.
  • kbrosnan 3y ago
    If you were involved with W3C around the time of XHTML 2.0 through to HTML 5.0 via WHATWG Ian is a well known person.
  • gregw134 3y ago
    "At any rate, after exploring this, I naturally wondered if there wasn’t some easier way to do it; not as statistically valid, maybe, but adequate for the advertiser who just wants to improve his performance. I won’t go into the details here, but let’s just say that everyone wanted a Super Deluxe version even if it did require changing every part of the Ads system. No one wanted something quick-and-dirty that just did the job. This was Google, after all; “quick and dirty” would not get you promoted or get your talk accepted at a conference. It did not make me popular to suggest this." I had a similar experience at Google--simple improvements such as parameter tuning are looked down on and rejected for being mere tinkering, even if the metrics are good. Meanwhile super complicated deep learning projects keep being added, even if they barely improve metrics. In the short term the complexity looks like hard work and leads to promotions, but long term it makes the system hard to maintain and understand.
• fidotron 3y ago
  This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere. Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google: https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/ https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/
    • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team. Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective. Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them. The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Is Google the new Microsoft?
  • chpatrick 3y ago
    Yep. I quit after a year in 2015 because it already felt like that.
  • VirusNewbie 3y ago
    Eh, I interviewed for both a GCP and multiple Azure teams simultaneously and the difference in talent level was astounding. The latter team leads were anywhere from disinterested, asking basic level leetcode questions I could breeze through, to fucking incompetent who didn't even understand the coding questions they were asking. I was shocked at how different they were in terms of thoughtfulness and intelligence.
    • cbozeman 3y ago
      It's a little scary that Azure team leads are that clueless. I would really, really love to hear more about this if you would indulge us. If not us, then certainly send me an email, please.
    • Dudester230602 3y ago
      Did you pass the Azure ones then?
      • VirusNewbie 3y ago
        lol no, I got into a big argument having to explain recursion, tail call recursion, etc. The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent with the exception of stack space. But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the experience. My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first interview rescheduled the time and no one told me, etc. It was a fucking joke. Also, I interviewed at Netflix as well, and I didn't get the job (passed technical interview but didn't get selected after Director level interview. Just wasn't a good fit in terms of interests) and I can't say enough good things about netflix, everyone I met there, and the overall interview process. So I'm not just annoyed at Azure folks because I didn't get the job. I'm annoyed cause they're mostly morons.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  Yup, sounds like a classic company that became manager'd to death. Explains silly features or changes we see all the time. Move on, Google's dead.
• js2 3y ago
  The submitted link is missing the query params (or HN stripped them) that lead directly to the post: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
  • dang 3y ago
    Fixed now. Thanks! Btw HN didn't strip them -the submitted URL was https://ln.hixie.ch/ https://ln.hixie.ch/. No doubt this was the top post at the time. We do strip some query strings, but only for larger/known sites.
• bufferoverflow 3y ago
  Flutter is a leading framework? Maybe in some niche. It's not even in the top 10 for me.
  • tyingq 3y ago
    I believe it's quoting a survey where you had to pick from "frameworks". Meaning "use the native tools" wasn't a choice on the list. Choices were things like Flutter, React Native, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, etc.
  • meowtimemania 3y ago
    I’m also curious what he meant by that statement. By leading does he mean most used?
• liveoneggs 3y ago
  "Flutter is amazingly successful. It's already the leading mobile app development framework" ???
  • wg0 3y ago
    Where is that happening? I want to move there.
  • munificent 3y ago
    There are a lot of reasonable metrics one might use to define "leading mobile app development framework": * Number of developers using it on some daily/weekly/monthly, etc. cadence. * Number of apps published (to iOS, Android, both). * Number of jobs available using the framework. * Various subjective desirability metrics from developers survey like the StackOverflow ones. It's anyone's guess as to which is the best metric or how they should be combined. Also, it's very hard to actually get accurate data on it. But, according to Statistica at least, yes Flutter really is the most popular mobile app framework as of 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hours/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar... It looks like that's based on a developer survey. I don't know more about its methodology.
    • kllrnohj 3y ago
      When filtered to "cross platform mobile app frameworks" anyway, which is a huge reduction in scope - 1/3rd of respondents in that study in fact. So 46% of 33% of mobile app developers that aren't building mobile websites use Flutter. That's not bad at all, but hardly supports a claim of being the "leading mobile app development framework" as you're down to ~15% of mobile app developers using it. And only then since mobile web is being excluded, who knows what it'd be if that was included.
      • julianozen 3y ago
        Well assuming Swift and Kotlin split the remaining half 50/50 (I think this is reasonable as most major apps are on both platforms and it is unlikely to use Swit for iOS but flutter for Android), they're probably only 25% each. Unless you want to count them both as Native at 50%?
• benrapscallion 3y ago
  Another article that highlights Vic Gundotra’s arrival and rise at Google as the beginning of their decline.
  • bipson 3y ago
    I almost forgot about Vic! He hasn't been relevant for quite some time though, right? Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?
    • robryk 3y ago
      > Are you suggesting his influence still lingers? I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine a situation where someone's actions caused a change in a society, which is no longer attributed to him according to popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?
  • simoncion 3y ago
    > ...Vic Gundotra... Please, let's honor the man's fiercely-defended policies. He is Vivek "Vic" Gundotra. His Real Name is Vivek, and we should refer to him by it.
  • towway23111257 3y ago
    I have almost never heard a single good thing about Vic from people who were there around same time as him
• guiomie 3y ago
  > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. That's an interesting observation considering Sundar is where he is because of early-Google cultural norms.
• wg0 3y ago
  Seems like Google is being managed by consuming lots of managerial literature. Also, coming from Flutter camp, blog is barely readable on mobile without zooming.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Dudester230602 3y ago
  > We also didn't follow engineering best practices for the first few years. For example we wrote no tests... Tests are not a best practice but more of a necessary evil for production systems and/or businesses incapable of retaining their best for many years.
  • g-b-r 3y ago
    Ehm no tests are a best practice
  • mparnisari 3y ago
    Lmao 'tests are not a best practice". Please, never be in my team.
• dbg31415 3y ago
  These paragraphs really pack a punch, and having worked in tech for 20+ years now (but not at Google) I feel this. Every shitty company eventually has layoffs that ruin the culture, and end up with a "Jeanine Banks" manager type. This article was really well written. > Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google's founders famously told Wall Street "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." but that Google is no more. > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
• aappleby 3y ago
  12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done. Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left. The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.
  • tdeck 3y ago
    And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and nobody was held accountable for that failure.
    • shaftway 3y ago
      There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen, search for the phrase "vicg" among others.
      • tdeck 3y ago
        (un?)fortunately I haven't had access to Memegen since 2020.
        • sawyna 3y ago
          Why don't you have access? I'm curious
          • Rebelgecko 3y ago
            Non-FTEs lost access in 2020 or 2021 IIRC
            • nunez 3y ago
              That's super unfortunate; memegen is one of the best perks of working at Google
• VirusNewbie 3y ago
  Great post, epic that he calls out his idiotic upper management. I've only been at Google a little over a year and while I'm mostly happy with my management chain, I have run into directors who clearly should have been fired for overselling and underdelivering huge projects that impact my team. I am surprised just how 'bottom up' so much is done at Google, and I wonder if that is why Sundar ended up where he is. Unlike so many other large companies, engineers who build consensus have way more influence on upper management's priorities than other places. So being someone who is good at building consensus is a good way to built clout at google, more so than any other place. But this isn't alawys good. Sometimes I miss old boring "F500" companies where I can go to the one principal engineer (or director or whatever) and show them my idea, and how it doesn't get in anyone else's way, and boom they either approve or deny it. No spending months convincing everyone and their mother to make a small (but significant) change.
• bandofthehawk 3y ago
  I find it refreshing that this post actually calls out specific problems and people. IMO, too many of these company culture posts keep the complaints somewhat vague which makes them harder to evaluate.
• suddenexample 3y ago
  What an amazingly well-written article. It's incredible how well it describes the feelings that I've struggled to vocalize on my own.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jimbokun 3y ago
  > I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's mission statement (to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful). I'm not sure if I agree. That mission seems to be largely achieved. And maybe has something to do with the decay in Google's overall culture.
  • iainmerrick 3y ago
    Was that mission achieved by Google, or by Wikipedia?
    • jimbokun 3y ago
      Mostly Google.
• g-b-r 3y ago
  Of course Hickson was behind Flutter
• Osmose 3y ago
  This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now. No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.
  • dazzlefruit 3y ago
    The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      Has it drifted? I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too. Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.
      • dazzlefruit 3y ago
        Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't. The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their performance improvements or did hardware get better faster than they grew?) Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together. Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources. That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.
• jmkd 3y ago
  It's not often discussed but there is a cultural gulf between pre-IPO and post-IPO Googlers that still impacts almost 20 years later. To put it crudely, one dwindling set of idealistic millionaires vs a growing set of capitalist thousandaires, each set with very different motivations to login to their computer each morning.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• scamworld 3y ago
  Most large tech companies grew by >30% during the covid lockdowns, so I don't think company culture is much of a priority for them.
• pardoned_turkey 3y ago
  Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt. Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job? I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
  • vkou 3y ago
    Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it. > She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces. The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.
    • southwesterly 3y ago
      A good manager does not always a good SWE make.
    • pardoned_turkey 3y ago
• sidcool 3y ago
  The following is a pretty damning statement. > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management.
  • debatem1 3y ago
    Completely accurate IMO. He wasn't the snake in the garden of Eden-- google completed rather than began its transition with his ascension-- but he would definitely have been Team Snake once he saw the fig leaf sales figures.
• paxys 3y ago
  Agree with everything he said, but then again nothing written here is unique to Google. Every company starts off with a coherent vision, competent leadership and bought-in employees, and then as the valuation goes up into the tens/hundreds of billions/trillions and employee count balloons to hundreds of thousands, it all inevitably goes to shit. It is impossible to have any semblance of "culture" at that scale. Google isn't the first to run into this and will not be the last.
• satvikpendem 3y ago
  Glad to see Hixie still working on Flutter though, as I'm a big user of it. For the Google specific parts, I can't comment much on the internal development structure of the company, having not worked there, but as a user of their products over the past 20 years or so, there really has been a slowdown of innovation from them. I mean, what did they really create in the last decade that endures?
  • silenced_trope 3y ago
    I literally came in here to say I'll probably stop using it given all the people at Google who Flutter depends on. I suspect a few high level departures more and it'd be dead. Do you mean he's going to continue working on it or just that he had been for the past 8 or 9 years?
    • satvikpendem 3y ago
      Read his latest posts, he's still working on Flutter, but now he doesn't have to answer to its boss, which seems like why he left based on a paragraph in this blog post.
    • CrimsonRain 3y ago
      Eric and Tim already left awhile ago. It is very much possible that Tim left for the same reason as Hixie or at least fully supports Hixie for this decision.
• lapcat 3y ago
  Don't Larry and Sergey still have 51% of the voting shares? (There are different classes of shares.) If so, then everything that happens at Google now is with the consent of the company founders.
  • okdood64 3y ago
    I had the same thought.
• Modified3019 3y ago
  > The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. Well said. Just watched exactly this happen after some surprise layoffs in an entirely different industry.
• drevil-v2 3y ago
  This is not going to be popular but I have noticed the same phenomenon at other companies where hiring decisions (especially for management hires) is a diversity quota exercise. The decline is slow at first but compounds rapidly. Smart and lazy people leave first. Average but ambitious employees leave. Smart and hard working folks are the last to leave. Leaving the grifters and dumb & lazy to pick through the remains.
  • lins1909 3y ago
    What the hell
  • dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
    >(especially for management hires) is a diversity quota exercise. Tangential, but a less obvious way of decline is hiring people you trust ( old friends, classmates etc.) but who are be other wise incompetent.
• johnnyworker 3y ago
  > I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights have had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. If you don't track users and store personal info about them, there is no need for a banner. You could have an opt-in link for being tracked to hell and back in the footer. It is amazing to me how many "engineers" and "webmasters" cannot understand something so simple. Might as well say all those boneheaded laws made by people who aren't even professional rapists require you to ask random strangers if it's okay if you spike their drink; yes, you might say they do, but if you're the kind of person who doesn't spike drinks, you will never even know, the issue will not come up once, it will not take one second out of your life. Even just scrolling by the FUD still spread by people against the GDPR takes more away from me than the GDPR does.
• drubio 3y ago
  > Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. What a shellacking. I never heard of her, so did a quick search, she's on X/Twitter https://twitter.com/femtechie https://twitter.com/femtechie ; and yes, her Linkedin vanity url is, get this: https://linkedin.com/in/winner https://linkedin.com/in/winner
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    It sounds like the generic complaints of everyone who doesn't like their manager ever and frankly I would have thought twice before attaching my name to a broadside that attacks a former manager by name. But hey, what do I know, I never worked at Google.
    • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      Even in my “I quit Google” post I was careful to make it impossible for an outsider to determine who I was complaining about, even scrubbing my team info from LinkedIn. But I think 18 years at Google means the author has plenty of “fuck you” money.
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        You are probably right; I just don't really see what's to be gained by going public with it considering the complaints are pretty inside-baseball and not that interesting to outsiders (I mean, hard to imagine someone thinking "I'm not going to deal with Google because so-and-so's subordinates say they don't understand her strategy").
• wg0 3y ago
  Stadia. Bought studios, games, pumped up hiring, custom controller - Promising 60fps 4k game streamed in real time. Wrapped it up all in just three years. Discontinued.
• RomanPushkin 3y ago
  "I see you've been working for 18 years in a corporate environment, do you have startup experience?"
• fgsfds028374 3y ago
  [dead]
• dekhn 3y ago
  There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor leadership and become utterly banal. It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and making and stuff (like Hixie, all thanks to Chris Dibona) as well as a number of state of the art machine learning systems. There really was an amazing feeling being surrounded by so many highly competent people (many of whom I see in this post's comments) who had similar vision to mine. But ultimately, so many things started to chip away at my enjoyment that I had to leave. Middle management was a big part of that. Once you're on the outside, so many things that seem obvious (borg, beyondcorp, flume, google3, etc) aren't. It's almost like the future is here, it's not evenly distributed.
  • yifanl 3y ago
    The word would be "Kwisatz Haderach" ;)
  • gregw134 3y ago
    Ex-googler here as well. What are you guys using instead of flume for data pipelines? Beam on Spark?
    • SpaceManNabs 3y ago
      I am also a bit confused by that comment. Flink, Spark, Beam, Flume are all pretty similar...
  • hnthrowaway0315 3y ago
    That experience sounds so great. How did you get hired?
• paxys 3y ago
  Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots. This example is the perfect microcosm of the economics of innovation at large companies. Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and the like have zero incentive to continue to be the companies they were 20 years ago. They don't need to take risks. They don't need to disrupt anything. They instead need leaders like Pichai who will keep the ship steady and keep the shareholders happy, and will keep investing in or purchasing smaller companies that are either a threat or an opportunity for growth, all while keeping their existing revenue streams flowing. If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.
  • chubot 3y ago
    Not disagreeing with your larger point, but Google paid $40M+ for the 3 people from U Toronto responsible for AlexNet (according to Cade Metz's book). Google might deserve more credit than any other company, but there were 20-30 years of innovation at universities beforehand.
    • foobiekr 3y ago
      more like 50
  • downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    Google is getting beat badly on multiple fronts, even Search, and has pissed away a mountain of goodwill. It's living off of declining 15 year old achievements. I wouldn't call Sundar a steady hand, he has destroyed much more potential than he has created, even if the stock has continued to go up it won't for much longer. I sold a significant position in GOOG a few years ago and I'm certain it was the right call.
• jra_samba 3y ago
  I used to "share" an office with Hixie at Google. Hixie used to store his board game collection in the office we nominally "shared", but he himself very rarely visited. I liked that just fine (let's just say I'm not a fan of "open" shared office spaces). My fondest Google office memories were sharing an office with Hixie, and "Mr Big Printer" which the Google Open Source Team used to print posters. We made an office CD label for "Mr Big Printer".
  • cdibona 3y ago
    It was a very big printer, Jeremy.
    • ilamont 3y ago
      Would be very interested to hear your take on Hixie’s essay and the many reactions from other Xooglers from different eras.
• codewiz 3y ago
  > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. I left 3 years ago for the same reason: I couldn't stand seeing Google continue to decline under Sundar's leadership.
• okdood64 3y ago
  > it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious Seems just like the recent news where YouTube was intentionally throttling Firefox, which turned out to be a not accurate representation.
• hcks 3y ago
  « Google workers are nice humans therefore the company is doing good (tm) things » Maybe it’s time to stop drinking the koolaid.
• thumbsup-_- 3y ago
  Wouldn't be surprised if he receives a subpoena to testify in Google's anti-trust case
• scamworld2 3y ago
  Most large tech companies grew by >30% during the covid lockdowns, so I don't think company culture is much of a priority for them.
• eigenvalue 3y ago
  None of this surprises me as an outsider. Google has been in obvious, uncontrolled freefall for several years now. Search barely works anymore, they squandered a massive lead in AI, they are losing in cloud services, Android is so awful it kills me when I have to use it for more than a few minutes. I can't think of any good new projects or services that were created under Sundar's tenure (maybe Colab was cool when it came out, but it hasn't improved at all in years and is now badly lagging). And their propensity to kill services without a thought has made it so that any new service they introduce is met with eye rolls from people who have been burned way too many times. The solution seems clear to me: they should acquire a really well run, innovative smaller company and then replace all the top executives with the new team. Sundar should be removed immediately before he destroys even more value. And then they need to do relentless cleaning up, quickly getting rid of unproductive middle managers like the person described in this post. That should give a burst of energy to demoralized devs. Then they need to desperately work to fix search so that it doesn't suck so much that you need to add "reddit" to every query to not get 100% blog spam. And they need to get their act together and start very rapidly releasing impressive AI tools that aren't worse than stuff from companies that are 1/100th of the size. No matter what they do, I can't help but think their sustainable earnings trajectory is headed downwards for the next few years (they can continue to push short term earnings in various ways but that will run out of steam soon enough); the question is whether they can stop the decline.
• Night_Thastus 3y ago
  >It's definitely not too late to heal Google. Yes, it is. This was inevitable. It's due to 3 factors: * Becoming publicly traded * Size * Scale of public and private use of products You cannot have a "don't be evil" company when these 3 are like they are for Google and there is no going back.
  • jhaenchen 3y ago
    Says something rather concerning about our economy's ability to innovate. Short term profits always end up eating at the core like this. I see why Elon has kept several of his companies private. The market lacks vision.
• znpy 3y ago
  > The oft-mocked "don't be evil" truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time It is oft-mocked precisely because it "was".
• cat_plus_plus 3y ago
  I think the post is spot on, but I don't agree with naming names especially when the other person doesn't get an opportunity to tell their side of the story. What if Ian's manager posted her own nasty missive criticizing him as an employee? Such things can damage someone's future career without any fair process to sort out the facts. I wouldn't at all be surprised that such manager exists and is not being held accountable internally, but it would be unfair to make conclusions based on unsubstantiated accusations,
  • compiler-guy 3y ago
    In the past, such criticism of a leader would show up internally via Googlegeist and the leader and their reports would all know and possibly adjust. Cutting Googlegeist has knock on effects that create problems like this. The rank and file no longer have a way to communicate back up the chain honestly and things like this come out.
    • justin66 3y ago
      The vast majority of professionals resist the urge to call out their manager on a blog after they quit a job. Even without Googlegeist.
      • pluto_modadic 3y ago
        so things like glassdoor shouldn't exist? or people shouldn't warn of bad managers/jobs?
        • justin66 3y ago
          I've derived some entertainment from the crappy Glassdoor reviews one of the shitty companies I worked at gets. There's a world of difference between those anonymous reviews on Glassdoor, which are sometimes useful and almost never call out by name anyone below the executive level, and what we're talking about here today.
      • ajkjk 3y ago
• antipaul 3y ago
  Snippets that stood out to me: Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision The effects of layoffs are insidious… people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now
• rantee 3y ago
  Xoogler here - Totally agree that the bulging middle management layers and lack of crisp CEO vision have dismantled the company's ability to weather the changes of "growing up". Had a few managers and multiple reorgs in my < two years there, during a time of record profits. Peers said that wasn't an uncommon thing. Who cares about vision or management so long as the ads money printer goes brrr? Still, there are definitely people trying to do the right thing for users despite frequent bu$iness side overrides, and IMO still some best-of-breed products amongst the sprawling graveyard/zombies. I could even get through to a real person at Nest customer support a few weeks ago!
• ainzzorl 3y ago
  When did it become acceptable to write things about other people as he writes about Jeanine Banks? Even if everything he says about her is true, it still feels incredibly rude to say it in public.
  • x86x87 3y ago
    Why? Corporation can decimate their workforce in the search for better earnings but god forbid the drones speak up.
  • globular-toast 3y ago
    Why? Jeanine Banks is probably paid millions a year. People in such roles with such disproportionately high rewards should be constantly evaluated. But if you read between the lines here she's basically unfirable for reasons nobody would dare to mention. I think people should go even further.
• artzmeister 3y ago
  You see a lot of people here in the comments, as well as the author in the article, talking about how "there are good and well-meaning people working at Google" and "it sucks that people unfortunately hate us =(". A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money. People think of a dystopia as if it would come from an evil dictator, or a greedy corporate man, but the reality is that the dystopia will come with a charismatic smile and a promise of something better. You'd perhaps be right to criticize my calling of it a "dystopia" (for now), but my point stands.
  • munificent 3y ago
    > A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money. The challenge is that we are all simultaneously part of many groups whose behavior we don't always agree with. Should you be piled up with all the others because you're a member of a species that is destroying the planet's natural resources? Should you be piled up with all the others because you pay taxes to a country that used that money to build weapons that killed innocents? Should you be piled up because you live in a city whose cops commit police brutality? Should you be piled up because you bought a product and gave money to a corporation that uses child labor? Life is not so black and white. We have some responsibility for the behavior of the groups we are part of, but only fractional. We should exert our agency towards good when we can, but believing that we have all of the stains on our hands of every community or group we've ever touched or participated in is not a path to a better world, it's just a path to individual shame and misery.
    • artzmeister 3y ago
      You're right, and it makes sense. Let me propose another perspective then: would a well-meaning, good person not be liable to culpability if he or she worked on a feature that actively monitored its users for data to sell to advertisors, much more than if such a person was working with something like Flutter or Go, since the latter workers are doing net positive things? I suppose I got a bit carried away originally, but the point is just that - can one truly be well-meaning if he works in such a feature as that of the first example? Moreover, when it comes to the examples you cited, I agree that we all share fractional culpability, some more than others. But we do not have a choice in being humans, or in paying taxes to our governments. We do, however, have a choice when it comes to working for Google.
• SilverBirch 3y ago
  I think the conclusion is really interesting. Maybe this was just well written, but I was thinking "What should the CEO of Google be pursuing as a strategy", and then he drops the mission statement. I don't know if the mission statement is the best articulation of the goal. But it's a clear goal. And it's a goal that Google aren't pursuing. It's an interesting goal in the context of large language models. Now, more than ever, having a accessible and organised store of credible information would be incredibly valuable to me. I was literally saying this to someone earlier today - the web today sucks. I google something, I click the first link it's popup hell. I click through all the links on the first page, half of them are the same information re-garbled for Google. Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010. Just let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes anything published in the last 15 years. Well this post turned into a rant...
  • xigency 3y ago
    > Well this post turned into a rant... You aren’t wrong. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. I could throw in a bunch more complaints and the kitchen sink but the point is we should expect better things from these companies and they should expect more from themselves as well.
  • hbn 3y ago
    > Boy, what I wouldn't pay to Google the web from 2010. Just let me tick a box that says "Classic web" that excludes anything published in the last 15 years. I mean, you can add before:2011-01-01 to your search. But I'm not sure how accurate the publishing dates on every page are.
• neilv 3y ago
  I didn't see them mention rank&file careerism culture. Are they attributing the root cause to leadership, and believe the old culture is merely dormant, or could be inspired in people who never saw it, and who weren't hired for it?
• neilv 3y ago
  Which companies today are the Google of 20 years ago?
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    The stuff people say plagued google i’ve seen in much smaller companies in the last few years. It’s not Google it’s the whole damn industry
    • neilv 3y ago
      The industry has a lot of problems, but I remember when Google was just starting, and it was obviously a place to go, and for years after that it was obviously the place to go. Hopefully there are some other obviously the place to go companies now?
  • jhaenchen 3y ago
    Start by filtering out every publicly traded company. Eliminate every company not still run by the founder. Nothing that's about to IPO. Nothing involving ads. That's a start.
• asim 3y ago
  "...She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set..." You know, I remember a time I said, management just think of engineers as a resource and refer to us as such. But when the word "dehumanising" is used it strikes me a lot clearer. When this disconnected occurs between different layers of the same corporation people just become a resource, they are no longer humans , they are a means to an end, and that end doesn't even serve the purpose of the company but the merits of that individual. I really wish developers had a way to empower themselves out of this hellscape.
  • jhaenchen 3y ago
    It's called a union. This is what will always happen as long as the employees do not collectively bargain. Their strength in numbers is completely neutered by a lack of organization.
  • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Engineers at Google are referred to as “headcount”. Managers fight each other for headcount. When someone leaves they are lamented for their net loss of .67 headcount (right now you only get one hire for 3 attritions).
    • devnullbrain 3y ago
      Does that mean managers are incentivised not to let go of underperformers?
      • andromeduck 3y ago
        That's "durable savings" for ya.
      • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Yes absolutely. I was explicitly told I could get away with doing nothing for 12 months before I’d get fired. I decided to quit instead.
• janmo 3y ago
  "Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter" Seems like they fired the Google Adsense support team. I have been using Google Adsense for many years, and since last year there is no way of contacting any support, there IS NO WAY, I have lost over 10k in revenue because of it, and was only able to get my problem fixed after 2 months by joining a third party publisher network. Keep in mind that Adsense is one of Google's main sources income, and that they take a 32% cut as an intermediary (So they have ample money to pay for a 5 star support)!
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    I doubt that retail adsense is very large - it’s probably mostly large enterprise deals where you do get your personal poc for support and whatnot
    • janmo 3y ago
      You are probably right, because once I got accepted in the network, they were able to get to talk to the Google MCM/Adsense support and within one week I got MCM approved and my Adsense account was reinstated. Hadn't they be there I would still be stuck.
• worik 3y ago
  A very interesting article Very interesting they were working on Flutter I have just spent 18 months with Dart, supporting Flutter development I formed the view that Fludder (as I called it) was built by brilliant engineers who were directionless. As a replacement for Javascript it is an utter failure, sadly Made this a very interesting read
• cubefox 3y ago
  He doesn't mention it, but it is curious that Google has apparently also lost the lead in the AI race to OpenAI, after being unquestionably on top for many years. PaLM 2 was inferior to GPT-4, despite being younger, and Gemini is set to release a whole year later. What's going on?
  • afjeafaj848 3y ago
    Does it really matter though? Whatever OpenAI does google will just copy and incorporate into GCP, similar to how they lost the race with AWS
• lapcat 3y ago
  > I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion. > For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards (https://whatwg.org/ https://whatwg.org/). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google's interests). I feel as though Hixie is lacking in self-awareness here. Googlers tend to be biased toward themselves and their own power. Have Googlers considered the possibility that the best thing for the web, and the world, is for Google to keep its grubby hands off the web? Is Google Search's dominant market share good for the web? And the market shares of Android, Chrome, and Gmail? I would answer no, no, no, no. It's funny that Hixie mentions WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) as a "good" example. What actually happened is that Hixie was a ringleader in a coup d'état by the browser vendors to overthrow the W3C and take over the HTML standards. Is that good for the web, and the world? Here I would also say no.
  • mkozlows 3y ago
    I think this criticism of WHATWG forgets how moribund and ossified W3C was at the time, up its own ass with semantic web nonsense and an imaginary suite of XHTML 2.0 technologies that had no path to reality. Hixie's criticisms of it were correct, and WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.
    • lapcat 3y ago
      I think the fact that I'm bringing up the history shows that I haven't forgotten. There are legimate disagreements over whether switching to XML was a good idea. Nonetheless, these disagreements were not a good excuse to overthrow W3C entirely, merely a convenient excuse for the browser vendors. Moreover, I don't think the HTML standards need to move as fast as Google wants them to move. HTML is now a "living standard", in other words, constantly changing, and I don't think that's good for the web. These things should move slowly. The giant browser vendors themselves are selfishly the main beneficiaries of forcing everyone else on the web to move at their pace. It consolidates their monopolization of the web. > WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again. Relevant things like... not controlling the HTML standard anymore? WHATWG has stolen a lot of the relevance of W3C.
• throwaway678808 3y ago
  Overall reasonable post, but thanking Chris DiBona in this post honestly makes me question the whole narrative. When I was at Google he was on the short list of petty tyrants to avoid at all costs. Just a mean person having way too much fun running a tiny Kingdom Of No.
  • jra_samba 3y ago
    I am a personal friend of Chris, and was with him through most of his tenure at Google (we both got laid off at the same time). When Chris said no (and it was rare), it was usually because people were thinking of themselves over the good of the company (and usually around personal projects they wanted to own instead of Google). You might disagree with it (and I'm sure you do), but Chris always thought of the company first. He was the personal embodiment of early Google culture and a fantastic manager. I just wish they'd made him a VP of Open Source (a position IMHO Google sorely needs). He probably could have staved off some of the failures.
• darajava 3y ago
  Flutter is such a brilliant tool. Not just the framework, but everything surrounding it. Tooling, the standard of cross compatibility, pub.dev, the Dart language itself, the friendly community… it’s the best developer experience I’ve found and this article makes me really hope that Google pulls through.
  • fakedang 3y ago
    Honestly, it's the community that brought me to learn Flutter as my first development framework. I tried learning React, React Native, Kotlin, etc. after asking around (even here), but often I got crickets or the snide remark that I shouldn't be developing on that framework. But Flutter? Nah, beginners welcome! Hixie and Sneath would personally reply to queries on reddit, and the community thrives on sharing open source code for all their cool projects. It's a pity that Flutter may not win the development wars, but it definitely has won way too many developers' hearts.
• hintymad 3y ago
  > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google One thing I find bizarre in Google is lack of accountability. If someone builds a lousy product, we are not supposed to criticize it, not even objectively. That's because, well you guessed it, "it hurts feelings". Or per Pichai's words, "let's be thoughtful". So many teams have instead learned to launch failed products to advance their levels in Google.
  • tdeck 3y ago
    I don't think this began under Sundar. I remember that lack of accountability under Larry also.
  • compiler-guy 3y ago
    I don’t know where this idea comes from. Five minutes on any of the half-dozen internal communications sites reveals vast amounts of criticism on every google decision made, most of it thoughtful, but some quite sharp, and some quite bitter and unfair.
• Lammy 3y ago
  > it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious Intent doesn't matter if the outcome is the same as intentional malice. """Hanlon's razor""" is total bullshit.
• mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  The article mentions a very keen observation. There are lasting consequences to over-hiring and then subsequently laying people off; it doesn't bring the company back to the starting point: > The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.
• _the_inflator 3y ago
  I give Hixie exactly this: he is not brownnosing and he openly speaks up. There is nothing insulting from his side, and I personally like people with the standards Hixie has. It sounds like he acted internally in the same way which is fine. Hixie has seen some things at Google. I will be forever thankful to him for realizing HTML5. I read many document changes back then and when people left out of protest or whatever reason, Hixie kept things going in the right direction. The web would not be what it is like without him.
  • ddejohn 3y ago
    > The web would not be what it is like without him. As somebody that really dislikes the way the web generally is nowadays I got a chuckle out of this :) This is a mostly tongue-in-cheek comment.
    • _the_inflator 3y ago
      I totally side with you, I had exactly this in mind, too. :)
• boyesm 3y ago
  In 18 years from now, which company will have employees writing blog posts like this about it? I hear amazing stories about the early days of Google and I can’t help but think, which engineering company that is in its infancy right now will have employees reminiscing so fondly of the early days? An AI startup?
• xorvoid 3y ago
  Around 2008 when I was starting college, I was really excited about Google and wanted to work there. By 2013 I began to feel like they weren’t the same anymore and no longer interested me. By 2023, I can say that Not pursuing a job at Google was my best career decision. You can go watch old Google Tech Talks circa 2010 and they’re fabulous. I can’t imagine them putting out that kind of content these days. It’s rather sad, I bet 2005 Google was a remarkable place that’s now lost to time
  • realprimoh 3y ago
    What are you up to now and what did you join instead?
• pneill 3y ago
  I see these posts and just shrug. Tech companies have lifecycles. There is that early startup energy where "we're all in this together." Then, if they're lucky, success and growth, but the startup mentality remains. But as the company grows, it can't maintain the startup culture. It's simply not possible. And then companies mature and you have bureaucracy and leaks and empire building and layoffs, etc. It's inevitable. What surprises me about Google is not that its changing, but that it's taken so long to change.
• Ericson2314 3y ago
  The corporate form is disappointing. Everything described is inevitable. Puts me in a UBI + cooperatives mood.
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  "Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now." My father, a machine mechanic, gave me the same advice years ago. In my mind stuff like this only applied to blue collars so I didn't give it too much thought. Only later did I realize (after the company I was at became so mismanaged) he was 100% right.
• lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  >Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to be good for society. > Take Jeanine Banks, for example, ... Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. So, when Ian does sincere things that were intended to be good, they get criticized for them unfairly. But this Jeanine Banks is [fucking incompetent] and Ian could not possibly be an outsider making the same mistake he claims everyone else is. Also seems like a defamation suit waiting to happen.
• ChuckMcM 3y ago
  Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ... Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious. I think calling it an unforced error is generous. When I left in 2010 I pointed out to Google that their falling CPC rates meant that the profit margin on search advertising was eroding faster than they were developing new income and faster than they were reducing costs[1] and as a result they were going to find themselves compromising their principles to appease wall street. Before they laid off people they compromised every other principle they had, they added advertising to places they earlier boasted about not advertising, they started selling more and more demographic information about their users to sketchier people. All so they could show that revenue number going up and to the right. I predicted they would lay off people a lot sooner than they eventually did but I blame my misprediction on my misunderstanding of just how much money they could develop when they stopped worrying about whether or not it was good for their users. I completely concur though with how a layoff really changes people. I was at Intel when they did their first layoff in 1984 and suddenly everyone's attitude changed to "how do I stay off the layoff list?" That doesn't foster a creative, risk taking culture. Someday the story of Google will make a good read, kind of like 'Bad Blood' but where the enemy isn't a sociopathic leader but a bunch of regular people who got addicted to being massively wealthy and threw out all of their principles when that wealth was threatened. Altruism of the rich is a function of their excess wealth. [1] The primary reason I left was because the project I delivered which saved them $10M/yr year-after-year was considered "not significant" (read unpromotable).
  • InCityDreams 3y ago
    Would like more info on [1]. I work in the area of cutting costs (also privately - gave up coffee as it was a waste of money, for me): with money being finite, what you can save is often worth more than what you can earn.
    • ChuckMcM 3y ago
• jakubmazanec 3y ago
  > Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to be good for society. Google Books, for example. Yes, Google books was great endeavor that could benefit all humanity. What happened to all those scans? Are they still stored somewhere?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• lopiar 3y ago
  This is the result of having leadership with MBA or finance background instead of engineering. All they see is short term money, product is a 2nd class citizen. This is what happened to the automotive industry. In the past companies tried to build the best car. Now? Profit is all that matters.
  • caminante 3y ago
    > This is what happened to the automotive industry. Not even close. The computer revolution happened and the automotive industry was displaced in the economy by other sectors, namely tech. [0] Car usage/ownership has gone down. [0] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/spotlight/automobile-impact-us-economy.html https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/spotlight/a...
• idlewords 3y ago
  The whole post is a good illustration of what made early Google so insufferable.
• Krontab 3y ago
  > Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. I worked under a VP at a job once who was exactly like this when I was a manager. Truly one of the most demoralizing experiences; always trying to do the best for the people under you and sheild them from this kind of nonsense, but in middle management you can only do so much sigh.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  Slight change of company name for anyone interested: I'm currently finishing this book by an unabashed fan boy: https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/1591841526/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp...? about how HP went from the coolest company in the world (50's and 60's) to dorky old mediocre place that Fiorina/Hurd/Apotheker/Whitman just finished the destruction that was already underway. Like a lot of Valley folks, I blamed Carly, but some other long time HP'ers said it was already in process of destroying itself. And while people like to hold up IBM as the canonical bad example for Microsoft and then Google, HP could equally well play that role. I think. Still pondering this one.
• zem 3y ago
  I was surprised to see him savage Jeanine Banks by name like that, but if this bit is true I can at least understand the impulse: "She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set." as another longish-term google employee, the one thing I absolutely depend on among all the org and culture changes is the ability to have a fair bit of choice and input when it comes to the specific projects I am working on, where the company can trust me to pick something that will work with my skills and interests and also align with the team and department objectives. losing that would likely impact me more than any of the other changes over the last 12 or so years I've been here.
• whoknowsidont 3y ago
  At some point we really need to admit our domain (and maybe society at large) is in a "Managerial Crisis."
• google234123 3y ago
  Honestly, Flutter, Dart, Go, dont provide much for Google in my opinion. Google shouldn't be wasting money on them
• axiomdata316 3y ago
  Interesting to read this as an outsider and to pretty much confirm what you suspected. Very interesting is the take on Vic Gundotra. I knew him briefly on a personal level and he came across as a nice guy but you don't want to cross him. The comment on how he doesn't do well when things go wrong lines up perfectly with what my impressions were of him.
• RivieraKid 3y ago
  I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he's busy with windy.com now) and it's funny how similar my feelings are. What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave, and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate environment as long as they're getting paid tend to stay or join. I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity can be reversed. I actually can't decide what would be the best strategy from the CEO's point of view. I.e. how best to govern an aging, established tech company like Google? I really like what Aswath Damodaran said about Google - there's a "sugar daddy effect" - the various departments lack desperation to make it, unlike startups.
  • refulgentis 3y ago
    This is really really incisive, I almost shivered: I went through a "defrag" from Android Wear to Android (i.e. they shut down Boston Android Wear and offered us jobs on Boston Android) I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI. We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the vast majority of that 50% transferred to other things within Google. That occurred exactly along the lines you mention, with some side help of them accepting there was something genuinely wrong with Android's culture that needed to be avoided, as Ian mentions. That self-selection combined with the...qualities...of Android completely changed the job. For the first time at Google I was working with people who genuinely, firmly, at their core, had no real interest in anything except the paycheck. I do believe this is very well-adjusted and have a hard time explaining the feeling and what it leads to without sounding derogetary. Your post does such an excellent job of pointing at it.
    • RivieraKid 3y ago
      Thanks. What also surprises me is that coworkers have little desire to start side-projects or startups. But that's probably because those who do have left already. By the way, I was developing for Android since its early days (before the first Android phone was released) and mostly switched to iOS development few years ago. I have to say that the Android SDK (and the UI/UX too) was underwhelming, although it started to get better at some point. It felt like the developers were not top talent and / or were under pressure to ship functionality quickly without having the time to step back and think hard about design and simplicity. The most notable example of this is the activity / fragment lifecycle (also known as the "lolcycle").
• knorker 3y ago
  > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google These are the Balmer years. Or as we'll start saying in a few years: The Sundar years.
• next_xibalba 3y ago
  > A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example Wow. Shots fired. More seriously, his description of this manager has been my typical experience of managers in large companies. Very sad to see what Google has become.
• temptemptemp111 3y ago
  [dead]
• hubraumhugo 3y ago
  First thing I noticed were the Swiss trains :) I guess Google is pretty big in Zurich by now? I remember the beginnings of Google maps here
• J2pRPhgd 3y ago
  Long time Googler, this resonates. I feel very unhappy at Google, certainly I would have left at this point if the job market were a little better. I’ve had a successful career here with multiple product launches which had significant revenue or other measurable impact and several promotions. But reflecting on all of it, I feel burnt out and used, dispirited with the directionless race to the bottom Google is now engaged in. Most of my last year was spent in bitter political fights, escalations, failed attempts at “alignment”, retrospectives on what went wrong, and very little actual software engineering. I’m going to lose the ability to do anything but be a cog in the enormous Google bureaucracy if something doesn’t change. It’s definitely time to go, but I wish I could have come to this realization when the opportunities were more plentiful.
• mrb 3y ago
  I too believe the company has entered a phase of stagnancy or even decline. In fact, so much that two weeks ago I put my money where my mouth is by selling $1M worth of GOOG I was given as part of a stock grant when I was hired by Google in 2014. (I promptly reinvested this capital in a generic S&P 500 index fund.) From 2014 to mid 2015, when I quit, I found Google had a great engineering culture and I loved my time at the company, but I was having gut feelings of the start of a decline. I saw engineering hires who weren't so skilled. I saw Larry and Sergei seemingly lack the spark in their eyes when giving candid answers at our TGIF meetings. I saw a buildup of red tape and overhead. Then, long after quitting Google, more problems crop up. In the last year or so I saw a noticeable decline in the quality of Google search engine results. In the last 2 months I saw an even more noticeable decrease of the quality of Gmail's spam filters (today I get ~10 spams daily out of ~50 legitimate emails.) I keep stumbling on more and more annoying bugs in Google's Android apps that remain unfixed for years. No one knows how long this stagnancy or decline is going to last. In the case of Microsoft they have stagnated (IMHO because of Ballmer) roughly between 2005 and 2017 (6% annual revenue growth on average). Since 2017, thanks to Satya Nadella's turnaround, their annual revenue growth was 13% on average. I think Google needs to see leadership change to whip the company back into shape. But this probably won't happen for another few years. There is so much inertia in market forces of a huge mastodon like Google that it will take another couple years for such sub-par products and services quality to start noticeably affecting revenue growth. That inertia is the same reason it took 3 years of Nadella as CEO before Microsoft saw revenue growth starting to bounce back up.
  • gen220 3y ago
    Disclaimer that I also sold my GOOG recently, also largely in compliance with my biases as an engineer. As an investor, though, calling the “top” for a company like Google (or Microsoft) is so challenging — not “top” in terms of all time high valuation, but “top” in terms of differential forward-looking, annualized, and adjusted-for-tax returns vs VGT or VOO (i.e. a more challenging target). These are some of the most entrenched and profitable companies in modern history. Even as they mediocratize, they remain value-accretive for years. It’s difficult to imagine them losing to inflation. Buffet choosing Apple over any of the other FAANG/M may be looked upon even more favorably, 10-20 years from now, than it is today. Google and Microsoft are tight together in second, but I think you’re right that we’ll look back on 2018-??? as Google’s equivalent to the Ballmer years.
• greatgib 3y ago
  I think this guy has a Stockholm syndrom like I saw multiple times with Google employees: ; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion. That is very fun because he thinks that they were trying to do good for the world but all was messed up because of cookie banners. Where, in fact, doing good for the world would have been to not abuse of cookies for tracking and evil use that would mean that they would not need bad cookies and would not have been needed to produce cookie banners...
  • JSavageOne 3y ago
    The internet would be better without mandated cookie banners. It's so damn frustrating using the internet in the EU. If you don't want to be tracked just browse in Incognito mode.
    • slavik81 3y ago
      Browsing in incognito mode does not prevent the sites you visit from tracking you.
    • speedgoose 3y ago
      GDPR doesn’t mandate cookies banner but requires informed consent. Browsing in incognito doesn’t prevent all kinds of tracking by the way.
      • JSavageOne 3y ago
        Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply with EU regulations is not only a UX nightmare, but it doesn't even prevent tracking. Horrible pointless legislation.
        • Kbelicius 3y ago
          > Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply with EU regulations As it was pointed out, no, EU regulations don't mandate cookie banners. It seem you have an axe to grind with the EU. > but it doesn't even prevent tracking Incognito mode doesn't prevent all forms of tracking was what GP said...
• mclanett 3y ago
  Interesting to hear the author complain about Android, which today is held up as the one part of Google which knows how to ship product.
• carabiner 3y ago
  > A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example ... Giving a specific manager's name is ballsy! I suspect a deleted LinkedIn profile in 5...4...
• gigatexal 3y ago
  I was not expecting them to name names and torch everything on their way out. They paint a really terrible picture. Still, one day I’d love to join the GCP team working on BigQuery or something in that arena Google problems notwithstanding.
• cavisne 3y ago
  Its not very cool IMO to name & shame anyone lower than Sundar. Nevertheless the article is spot on with the effect of layoffs, and the general culture of big tech.
  • x86x87 3y ago
    Why? Why do we feel the need to protect people that are bad at what they do? Maybe this was something that applied in the "good old times" but nowadays since anything goes for corpos the same should go for drones.
  • compiler-guy 3y ago
    I disagree generally, but in specific, CFO Ruth Prost is clearly fair game.
    • compiler-guy 3y ago
      Ruth Porat. Autocorrect ruins things.
• nektro 3y ago
  Google needs to be broken up.
• gerdesj 3y ago
  "Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google." "The oft-mocked "don't be evil" truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time" A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder value. That is its overt and stated purpose when it goes public. In return for investment, the company must ensure a return on that investment. It's not that you've sold out or sold your soul - it is simply the market and how it works. If you want to try to be the nice guy then don't go public. "Don't be evil" is a lovely idea but it does not wash if you want lots of loverly shareholder cash. Stay private and raise capital via the old fashioned method of convincing some rich people to buy into your idea and become private shareholders.
  • Vicinity9635 3y ago
    >A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder value. People always say this but I've never seen a law or regulation enforcing it. Care to enlighten me?
    • gerdesj 3y ago
      It's part of the tacit agreement when you list on an exchange - Initial Public Offering (IPO). You kick off with a nominated "value" ie I think I am worth x so I will sell y shares at z (where x = y * z). Hopefully all your shares are bought and you are fully capitalized and you can crack on with whatever you are doing. You now have two major forms of "money in and out" - what your business makes and loses by doing its thing and lolly from investment by shareholders and the vagaries of the stockmarkets. You can make and sell stuff to make loot - old school. You can also convince people that your ability to make and sell stuff is so good that you are really cool - your share price rises and so does your "value" via capitalization. You don't list unless you actually want to become a generator of increasing shareholder value. There is no law or regulation because it is what it is. You need more capitalization and listing is a method. In return you sell your soul!
• Vicinity9635 3y ago
  [dead]
• yterdy 3y ago
  >Charlie's patio at Google, 2011. Image has been manipulated to remove individuals. I don't know if they are trying to make a point here, but this is screaming one.
• cageface 3y ago
  Very interesting that he plans to continue working on Flutter after leaving Google: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 I agree with him that Flutter is on a good trajectory.
• physhster 3y ago
  "Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is so painfully accurate. Everything is geared towards the individual's needs to appear good under the lens of promotion and compensation.
• hakdbha 3y ago
  [dead]
• dmazzoni 3y ago
  I worked at Google for 15 years and I was lucky enough to work with Ian a few times. I might quibble about a few things, but I largely agree with his overall conclusions. In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly. To the extent that Google's culture is still "good", it's for the most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies have caught up to the best parts of Google's culture, and exceeded it in many ways. I totally relate to his experience with middle management. Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little interest in the actual product they were managing. There will still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too much of their time just playing politics to do any good. There's one way that Google is still leading, and that's in employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google still offers one of the most generous free food / meal benefits in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google's Vision plan that let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.
  • nick222226 3y ago
    Dude, get your prescription then go to eyebuydirect.com
• totorovirus 3y ago
  The author is roasting Jeanine Banks and she is probably the real motivation that drove the author writing a whole long article of google's culture when things were beautiful.
• SpaceManNabs 3y ago
  Ok... Where am I supposed to go after Google tho?
• mparnisari 3y ago
  I wonder if anyone reached out to Jeanine over this post lol
• michaelkaufman 3y ago
  Nicely written. Can't tell you how many times I've seen companies ruined by too many middle managers; some of whom are greatly under qualified to make certain decisions they do. Unrelated, does anyone here or OP have a ballpark ETA on when Google's Quantum and AI might meet and become friends? I'm really hoping to see this in my lifetime.
• gerash 3y ago
  It’s very difficult to assign credit or blame to outcomes in a large organization. It's like trying to see which weight in a large neural net caused a specific outcome. That said, IMO what Elon Musk did to Twitter can be done to Google and many other bloated tech companies. There are so many technically weak middle management and executives that need to be removed.
• arthurofbabylon 3y ago
  The soulful software artisans I know would never consider working at Google. Why is that?
• smoyer 3y ago
  "Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase." Brutal but should we do more name-naming to allow people to avoid working for inept managers?
• ot1138 3y ago
  > Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious). The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic. Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the first search intelligence business in 2005 as a side business. Again, Google engineers were awesome to work with. Then in 2009 or so, they began to get territorial. Some outsider sales person was brought in and IIRC, he bought a boat and named it, "AdSense". The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded. We had extensive crawling capabilities but needed to correlate it to API data to give a holistic picture of the competitive AdWords landscape. We spent the next two years gaming the system. We had 100 API accounts. We launched our own bare metal "cloud" with 1300 distinct IP addresses which we throttled to hit Google no more than once per minute. This worked. We monitored Google in over 50 countries. Clients loved us because we could tell them exactly how they were doing on AdWords, both good and bad. Any intelligent person could use our data to improve their ads and excel. Our IPs would occasionally get banned but we would just temporarily shut them off and use one of our reserves. And even then, we eventually developed a crowd sourced solution to solve captchas which got them reinstated. Another three years of the cat and mouse game passed. We were acquired by the world's largest advertising company. Guess what? A call from the CEO to Matt Cutts ended the war. No promises were made but our access was simply restored. Everything worked again. So yeah, Google is just like every other company in the world. The corruption has been there for at least 15 years. Please stop worshipping it.
  • ryloric 3y ago
    Did you really have to say "some engineer in India"? What exactly are you trying to imply there?
    • ayewo 3y ago
      I don't see anything wrong with their phrasing. The full context of the quote: "The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded." seems to imply that Google had outsourced engineering help to India to save on operating costs. This type of outsourcing [1] was pretty common back in those days. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat
• thom 3y ago
  You can’t go home again.
• tomrod 3y ago
  > Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious). Perhaps the individuals the author knows were pernicious, but clearly someone is. Look at the current state of YouTube demonetization and war on adblocking (ads are a vector for malware).
• bazingaaplop 3y ago
  [flagged]
• shoker 3y ago
  Bold to call out an org director so...directly. Normally you leave and keep quiet about the abusive people you meet in case it backfires because the industry is small and you can be blacklisted.
• issafram 3y ago
  "We essentially operated like a startup, discovering what we were building more than designing it." I guess that's how the chat apps were created as well
• Threeve303 3y ago
  Google employees should be put on a Government watchlist for life
• brundolf 3y ago
  Amazingly, my company has done something in three years that took google 18 years!
• uptownfunk 3y ago
  I don’t see how Sundar stays after the repeated fumbling of the AI ball. I think it just goes to show, you need someone radically bold and different.
• tjr225 3y ago
  [dead]
• ta93754829 3y ago
  Google is the next Blackberry, it just hasn't happened yet. Unless they can get a Nadella, and really transform the company asap, they're in a death spiral.
• ken47 3y ago
  The issue is quite simple IMHO. The company has a motto that is almost completely PR. If they truly cared about doing the right thing, don’t be evil, to the extent they imply by making it their motto, then they would have an interview process which evaluates the ethics and morality of their candidates, even if only a little bit. It is well known that entry to Google is, at least for engineers, basically little more than a leetcode mastery test.
• fargle 3y ago
  as another engineer from another company, i'm sad to relate that i see point-by-point the same things with different names of course. i sympathize. it's sad to see the cancer, the nepotism, the grifters that move in on the now weakened, once great, company. f*ck them. just say it. it's useless, but good for your psyche.
• matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google's interests). > Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision. Brutal. I can only imagine the disillusionment.
• fsndz 3y ago
  We just have his version of the story though... He might be wrong. It's natural after spending so many years in a company to see change as bad, to miss the good old days... And he sure seems to have a problem with that black leader Jeanine... A guy who never rose from his technical roles is lecturing a VP and the CEO of Google for their "lack of vision and strategy". Come on. Managing is startup and managing a huge behemoth like Alphabet will never be the same
  • volkk 3y ago
    wow, truly one of the stupider, if not the most stupid take--well done!
• LarsDu88 3y ago
  Ah I got really excited about Flutter back in 2018. Hard to believe it's been 5 years! A commendable project. I just wish they went with something other than dart for it
• scaramanga 3y ago
  There's a great documentary about waco on Netflix and at the end, the guy who is was in command of the troops who massacred 80 women and children concluded (after 30 years of reflection), "you know the real victim was? Me, because the whole fiasco made me look bad." It's interesting to see how those who appear outwardly evil manage to cling to a self-serving and distorted view of the world in which, if anything, they are the maligned victims. You can just as easily imagine a SWAT member saying "when we were training to assault civilian homes, it was a wonderful time, everybody was competent and had the right motivations, we were there to protect the good guys and hurt the bad guys - but only as a last resort! Then when we got to the branch davidian compound we applied all of our methods and tactics and it all went downhill from there and, tragically, we ended up in a dark place." When, from the perspective of even the most casual observer, it was evident from very early on that given the material, resources, methods, tactics, organization, and leadership that was deployed, the outcome that unfolded was actually inevitable. Getting back on topic, it's not particularly news to anyone to find out that there can be very well run, collegiate, bubbles full of well-meaning individuals doing great work who nevertheless operate within institutions which, on the whole, are a cancer upon society. It's a wonderful privilege and a joy to find yourself inside one of these bubbles compared to all of the worse things that you could be doing to make a living.
  • ryloric 3y ago
    Felt the same reading this post. These people are unable to see the bigger picture of what their work has been used to do to the world.
  • mathteddybear 3y ago
    An oddly dramatic response to a blog post of someone working on a, what is this flutter, some frontend framework library? Counterpoint - since I left Google, little birds told me good things happened, for example, cranking down on the travel expenses (that higher-ups used to spent with little to none oversight)
• sidcool 3y ago
  I haven't seen anyone [at] Sundar on X (FKA Twitter) yet. I am not sure how Sundar would be feeling about this. Hostility for Hixie probably. And it's safe to say that Hixie's return to Google has no chances now, not that he would want to return anyway.
• shanghaikid 3y ago
  is this the fate of big company?
• JSavageOne 3y ago
  What a sad but refreshingly honest article. I never worked at Google, but this aligns with my impressions from the outside, as well as everything else I've read (eg. that recent article here from a founder who's startup was acquired by Google and she left due to the stifling bureaucracy). The company hasn't innovated much recently and its products like Google Search have deteriorated in quality tremendously. At this rate Google may be on its way to becoming the next has-been tech company (eg. sort of like what happened to IBM). The management and bureaucracy depicted in the article sound like a corporate nightmare and unappealing place to work. I didn't know that Google had non-engineers running dev tool teams. Can this VP even reverse a linked list? /s Seems like Google needs a change in leadership, starting with replacing CEO Sundar Pichar.
• osdotsystem 3y ago
  Funny that it mentions the Android team. Sometimes back I wanted to contribute to Android. It's a source-open product, unfortunately. And development goes on, silently, eerily without as much public docs as I would like!
• mgaunard 3y ago
  Staying within the same company for 18 years sounds like a mistake to begin with.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y ago
  I'm waiting if any CEO can maneuver this gigantic complex organization.
• SadCordDrone 3y ago
  I don't know if the author is reading this. But thanks for this article. One day I want to grow up, become a big shot engineer, and Name-and-shame all clueless middle managers who have tortured me.
• pelasaco 3y ago
  > I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. I experienced it the beginning of the Corona pandemics, where I demo'ed some workflows and documented some step by step guide to use Google classroom to be able to offer a great experience regarding home-schooling in Germany. We presented to some Department of Education in Germany, they all declined it because of the "privacy advocates" doing FUD in a super conspiracy level.. we ended up spending millions of Euros and every State having it's on half baked solution and a super weak home-schooling infrastructure in general. I'm pretty confident that we definitely could have done better just using Google classroom.
• bobba27 3y ago
  Very early google was full of passion and people that wanted to build cool things for users. There was a passion where building things that would surprise and delight users. The process when this changed was slow but I think started 2008-2010 where passion for building something was no longer what drove people but instead the promo-process, having impact and moving the needle became what drove people. Not passion but promo-process changed the culture dramatically over time. Me and friends used to call it the LPA cycle. (L)aunch, get (P)romo, (A)bandon and switch team. And towards the second half of the 2010s it became a de-facto rule. Once something launches with a big fanfare, after next promo-cycle almost l5 and higher engineers leave to chase their next promo in a different team. You can see this over and over after ~2015. High velocity and innovation until launch and shortly after it grinds to a stop. very sad to see this change from early google.
• lysecret 3y ago
  Sounds like someone who would be sufficiently candid with his board to me.
• ur-whale 3y ago
  Given: - the string of missed opportunities in the last 10 years (specifically AI) - the string of user-hostile product decisions (latest: adblockers vs YT) - the complete lack of innovation (name a cool product launched by G in the last 5 years) - the clear and present competitive threat to their flagship product (search vs. OpenAI) - the once great culture that is rotting in place (see article) - the stock price completely flat or slightly down for the past two years - the enormous waste of goodwill Google had accumulated with both the world and their own employees, now all spilt on the floor (I mean, they've chosen to turn predatory, I'm not going to say fine, but ultimately: their choice. BUT: they don't even have the financial numbers that would justify such an about turn). How that ball-less wonder Sundar still has a job as CEO, or at all for that matter, is nothing short of amazing. Board is asleep at the wheel.
• snickmy 3y ago
  There are few points that resonate with my personal experience (2012-2017). - Finance is running the company - HR has lost the original shepherding of the culture in favour of risks mitigation - Reduction of transparent leadership comms in favour of corp speak - Horrible middle management (senior managers up to VP1). Either because we promoted great engineers into a people role, or because we hired consultants to run engineering organization (favouring navigating the complexity of the org, over managing innovation). I did rationalise all those changes as something that was obvious from a short term optimization standpoint: the company was in the mist of PR fights, leaks , growing incredibly fast, etc. It's clear, 6 years later, that a sustained approach to this type of leadership has reduced the company to a shadow of itself. Less innovative, less talent driven.
• xyzelement 3y ago
  I couldn’t help but hear a desire for lack of accountability in this post. The guy worked at Google for 20 years but really just worked on open source projects he liked without regard for whether it added value to the company (and in fact fondly recalls someone telling him that googles interests shouldn’t matter.) I get why that’s fun but you can’t run a company forever in that way. In my eye even the layoffs are a signal that headcount is not infinite and you have to align what people work on to what makes money. His ranting against his VP and Sundar seem hollow, for all I can tell he’s just upset the gravy train of no accountability is over.
• vitiral 3y ago
  Larry and Sergey just need to come back from their vacation and clean house. So much of Google culture used their humor and candidness at TGIF as a lighthouse.
• mkmi 3y ago
  [flagged]
• maikemi 3y ago
  [flagged]
• thenoblesunfish 3y ago
  A good read, but I feel a little bit of "OK Boomer" rising up in me, to listen to someone pointing out institutional issues with the system that made them rich, at the same time as they bow out and encourage someone else to fix things.
• revskill 3y ago
  The search and the gmail is trash now. I'm not sure what the teams at Google is doing besides serving Ads at top of search ?
• gttalbot 3y ago
  Yeah I saw this process unfold over my decade there as well. I'm very grateful for my time there, my colleagues, and the great work we did (go Monarch team!). The latest evolutions there make me sad.
• hendler 3y ago
  Excellent and succinct description of risk to all institutions > Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ible 3y ago
  > I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion. This is part and parcel of working for a visible/impactful organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be wrong. They'll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-simplifications, political perspectives, etc. This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that because most of the feedback is nonsense, that all of it is nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful to you or critical of your team or values. I found a bit of Neil Gaiman's MasterClass very helpful when reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone is telling you something doesn't work for them, and what you should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn't work for them, but that the author is much better placed than the reader to know how and if to fix it. In my context I try to understand why someone is saying something, what information I can take from it, and whether there is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can or should be done about it. (If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)
• omerxx 3y ago
  “People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers”. This strengthens my understanding that as a manager and as a team member who’s being manage, communication skills are so much more important than engineering skills. It was a good and interesting read regardless.
• iteratethis 3y ago
  The handful of trillion dollar companies have a problem that is unique: virtually all projects and innovation are not interesting enough even when successful. Only big bets remain. Google pulled in 280 billion $ last year. Now imagine a nice little side project within Google making it into market success with a 100m$ annual revenue. That's basically useless to Google. A line item that doesn't move the needle and adds weight to the company. Yet to any other company it would be an extraordinary success. If I'd arbitrarily say that 10% of annual revenue is "moving the needle" that means you need to innovate a new product raking in 30 billion a year. Good luck with that. And it would require to be entangled with the unique ecosystem benefits of Google, because a stand-alone product would easily be countered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. So the bottom line is that your new product needs to be of the monopoly-type, a new money printer. Anything less than that is not worthwhile. That's why Meta's big bet on the Metaverse wasn't as crazy as reported. When you make this much revenue yet social networking has peaked, you need to differentiate by adding a new revenue stream, and it would need to bring in a billion a month. You can only achieve that by building a brand new ecosystem and being the first at it.
  • eviks 3y ago
    Better to have the same weight without the revenue
• negus 3y ago
  > Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious). What a coincidence that in the only country outside the US where Google search has a worthy competitor in the open market, search engine choosing dialog should not appear in all chromium-based web browsers. Certainly this is the care for the users https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81578 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81578 https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/kz5cn/google_disables_search_engine_selection_in_russia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/kz5cn/google_disabl...
• husamia 3y ago
  I am really interested in the solution. I have some ideas and I think there are potential solutions.
• dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
  Takeaways: A sort of boiling frog phenomenon. The creep sets in because the founders hired or promoted people who did not uphold the core principles, and prioritized short terms gains. My comment: Sieving and assessing multitudes of prospective candidates for a job is a very time consuming, exhausting work, and people are often willing to settle for less, especially if the organization is really successful and the founders feel the need to expand rapidly.
• CareyDRasmus 3y ago
  What I don't understand is that Ian has been at Google for 18 years with little to no real recognition for his work except that he was a tech writer for HTML5. Is it that Ian has the problem? This seems to be the sentiment of all his leaders over the last 18 years.
• weetniet 3y ago
  Not the first high-profile Flutter team member to leave Google in the past year.