6 ms·

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

by 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.
    - skisatwork 3y ago
      I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT department and we have this culture. The IT department alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past weekend I found myself in a different region needing a desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and ideas of them for process improvements. This communal culture is hard to find and I have no intention of leaving until the culture dies.
    - antupis 3y ago
      Is there currently companies where you can do this?
      - t8sr 3y ago
        The industry has changed in a few important ways that I think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain. First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized. Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting. Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job. I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation. This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It was a whole bundle of things all at the same time but probably started with G+ and "The Social Wars". That was all happening when I first got there, but it set internal crap on a bad path, plenty of bad feelings as the whole organization was pivoted onto that, but it all basically fizzled out and failed. And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth & Alphabet. And that's when it got progressively stupider and stupider. When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going on there. And I'm a pretty cynical person.

by t8sr 3y ago

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.
  - skisatwork 3y ago
    I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT department and we have this culture. The IT department alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past weekend I found myself in a different region needing a desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and ideas of them for process improvements. This communal culture is hard to find and I have no intention of leaving until the culture dies.
  - antupis 3y ago
    Is there currently companies where you can do this?
    - t8sr 3y ago
      The industry has changed in a few important ways that I think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain. First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized. Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting. Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job. I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation. This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It was a whole bundle of things all at the same time but probably started with G+ and "The Social Wars". That was all happening when I first got there, but it set internal crap on a bad path, plenty of bad feelings as the whole organization was pivoted onto that, but it all basically fizzled out and failed. And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth & Alphabet. And that's when it got progressively stupider and stupider. When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going on there. And I'm a pretty cynical person.