20 ms·

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 rea

• 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
    I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth. It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.
    • vkou 3y ago
      Sure. It's an incentives problem. It's very difficult to align the incentives in any organizations with six levels of reporting chain so that people with the most day-to-day power over the direction of the firm (mid-level directors) are marching in the right direction. I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor job.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      And the degree to having some level of org structure ossification is to have lots of people sort of going off and doing their own thing. Which probably worked at Google for a longer time than is often the case just because they were printing money. So what if they were doing projects and then just killing them, living with duplication, or having a bunch of random activities that led to nowhere. Even if it's a bit frustrating it can also be more fun to be in an environment where it's more of a make your own adventure sort of thing. Mature companies though mostly have to be very structured about how they operate.
• hot_gril 3y ago
  Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that. Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.
  • satvikpendem 3y ago
    > All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Great, market has matured from that. Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.
    • detourdog 3y ago
      I loved old google they refused to share a business model. Google ~2006 I think is just past peaked google. I think they developed ads because it was the only model that fit their valuation.
      • khazhoux 3y ago
        You have the history backwards. Ads in early 2000s > Mega-valuation
        • detourdog 3y ago
          Could be, they also had a pre-iso valuation that needed justifying. The signal to me that it was really over was when they stopped supporting jabber/XMPP and look where it go them. I never experienced Google as a stock. My only experience with google is as a search engine and a mail delivery system that broke all the rules of polite society. Could be "Don't be evil" was the answer to the business model question of early google. My memory is that it spawned during an interview with Larry and Sergey regarding the business model.
• esafak 3y ago
  Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will.
  • chatmasta 3y ago
    So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's talking to Google? It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.
    • deckard1 3y ago
      Amazon is already there. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-the-most-powerful-advertising-machine-in-the-world-135753395.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-th... Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.
• eslaught 3y ago
  When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).
  • cbsmith 3y ago
    "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.
    • capableweb 3y ago
      Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.
      • hot_gril 3y ago
        I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.
        • EdiX 3y ago
          To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.
    • tobinfricke 3y ago
      "Present company excluded" It's a polite fiction.
• chatmasta 3y ago
  > what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.) > And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way. This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it generalizes to other industries. I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    >perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM. So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of dollars?
    • chatmasta 3y ago
      Sure. But people in this thread aren't complaining that Google's profitable. They're complaining about the culture. Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability. And it's even less sustainable when the company is dependent on an undiversified revenue stream, since they need to be innovating to mitigate that risk, and a poisonous culture is toxic to innovation. But yes, Google is a money printer, and it's printing at a higher speed than it was ten years ago. But in that same ten years, Microsoft has grown at a faster rate and even displaced Google in some areas, like developer tooling and AI. In fact, Google has lost its ability to innovate to such an extent that a startup was able to beat them to market by productizing research that originated from Google! And now Microsoft basically owns that startup. That's an embarrassing failure of leadership.
      • ghaff 3y ago
• 3seashells 3y ago
  It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block.. One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    Having children can awake antisocial impulses in people but it can awake prosocial impulses just as easily and just as strongly.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Sure, if I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, those might make good husbands/wives for my own kids when they grow up".
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        Should I take it to be some kind of Freudian slip that you’ve written “myself” rather than “themselves” here?
        • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
          I'm half senile, and so when you replied I wondered if I did that. But re-reading it several times now, I don't see it. When I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, they might make good husbands/wives for my own kids" where is the Freudian? I am on the lookout for my kids. I can't tell them who to marry, but I can put them in circumstances where there are people their age that I approve of, such that familiarity might blossom into something more. I've seen how it turns out with other people's kids when they act like that's none of their business and actively avoid the thinking, and I don't much like the outcomes.
          • emodendroket 3y ago
• hinkley 3y ago
  I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments. But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification. Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.
  • busterarm 3y ago
    I feel so much exactly what you're describing here...
  • tazjin 3y ago
    This reminds me of the "Explore/Exploit" chapter from "Algorithms to live by" :)
  • henham 3y ago
    How do you distinguish "I can fix them" companies that will not improve because they are where they are because of organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual improve and are ready for you?
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      It’s simple, you just assume none are ready for change, and you’ll have a pretty much 100% accurate heuristic.
      • hinkley 3y ago
• metanonsense 3y ago
  Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every growing / successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse, but even at our size being disruptive / staying innovative gets harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having capable people taking bets on new products, even when you know that such a product (if successful) is possibly years from making a dent in your revenue stream. That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    It was easier to thread this needle in an easy-money environment than now, when everyone has suddenly grown much more conservative.
  • konschubert 3y ago
    I think it’s fine if big companies stick to their core competencies, return money to shareholders, and the shareholders can then re-invest into innovative startups. Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.
• hfjjbf 3y ago
  [dead]
• steveBK123 3y ago
  Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and things feel like ground hog day. After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since. There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement.. But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.
• yojo 3y ago
  I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers. I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission. Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral. This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.
  • closeparen 3y ago
    Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a straight answer or get something done that wasn’t formally planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it, especially engineers who don’t share priorities, timelines, conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally also the best way to get promoted at a large company that believes in breaking down silos.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      Silos and fiefdoms are normally seen as negative things. And that's not entirely wrong. But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc. teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference or having to constantly coordinate with every other organization in the company. It can go both ways.
      • 3y ago
• JohnFen 3y ago
  Well-said. I think this is all pretty well encapsulated in the truth that "we tend to become what we hate", or "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
• jokethrowaway 3y ago
  > ... what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job? No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control. So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model. So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results. You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    Some companies do something like this with some success, but this was also the theory of the guy who drove Sears into the ground.
    • throwboatyface 3y ago
      The guy who drove Sears into the ground also did the classic private-equity self-dealing to carve off all the valuable bits and saddle the company with debt. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of a company that owns lots of businesses which are mostly independent
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        I’d theorize it has something to do with whether the separation actually makes sense. Berkshire Hathaway owns separate businesses that have zero to do with each other and may spin off or bring in new ones anytime. Sears had different departments of the same store trying to beggar each other which is counterproductive.
  • compiler-guy 3y ago
    Gonna be awfully hard to comply with all the consent decrees and regulatory scrutiny with zero bureaucracy.
• Laremere 3y ago
  > But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today. A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth". Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".
  • pardoned_turkey 3y ago
    Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.
    • cellu 3y ago
      I’m curious to understand your perspective:m as to why a business that focus on the user may expose to risk? Doesn’t meeting user needs equals to making users happy which in turn equals to making more money?
      • lupire 3y ago
        Not when your users are not your paying customers
• tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  > Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt. Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.
  • pardoned_turkey 3y ago
    Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more than that. For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels. Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose. All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.
    • Eridrus 3y ago
      > Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose. I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if their hand had not been forced, but I don't think pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was not done before TikTok. I think short form video is just hard to monetize in comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if it does succeed?
• summerlight 3y ago
  Yes, Google couldn't find a good way to scale out its early model. Talents are not something easy to scale out. Transparency is inherently in tension against confidentiality, and when you have lots of eyes then the latter tends to win unless you're comfortable of spending your daily life with all those media outlets. If you want to do the right thing, then you'll figure out that there's too many "right things" at its scale because there are too many people with different, conflicting goals. The list goes on. Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well. But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  > the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way In a word: momentum
• ra7 3y ago
  > 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. This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company: As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  logical move is to get better at splitting off their research and innovation into startups by licensing or funding employees who leave. Spinoff anything risky into an independent company so it can move faster and isn't slowed down by Google's risk aversion and bureaucracy. Basically what Microsoft did with OpenAI, give them cash and compute resources but have plausible deniability if things go wrong
• WalterBright 3y ago
  You've described why older companies do not inevitably grow into monopolies and take over the world. They get so set in their ways and bureaucratic that they get destroyed by the next wave of upstart companies.
• stillwithit 3y ago
  > People will get hurt. Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt. I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position. It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality. Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities. Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.
  • financltravsty 3y ago
    Slowly but steadily we age out "divine mandate" for "hustle mandate." Nothing changes, psychopaths still cling on to some nebulous notion to make labor work harder to capture more excess value.
• rkagerer 3y ago
  You're never too big put the user first. When you stop doing that, someone else will and in time your customers will go there instead.
  • surgical_fire 3y ago
    This is provably false. Customers are anything but rational, and pick things out that play against their best interests all the time. Be it due to fashion, social pressure, brand recognition, cultural norms, et cetera and so forth.
    • davedx 3y ago
      I doubt it's provably true or false, as psychology tends to be. Largely I agree with the OP though - treat your customers bad enough and unless there's something stopping them, they'll go elsewhere. That's how the free market works.
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  > they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.
  • andromeduck 3y ago
    But that's what equity driven comp is supposed to resolve - give them small refreshers until they leave.
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      Sorry - could you expand? I'm not sure how that relates.
      • andromeduck 3y ago
        You effectively cut their pay by 30-70% over 4 years but not giving refreshes.
• sonicanatidae 3y ago
  >But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. And shift they did. https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
• mathgradthrow 3y ago
  If google's mantra had been "Don't rock the boat" since they achieved market dominance, we would still have xmpp.
• 01100011 3y ago
  > what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done. C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant. I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.
  • Animats 3y ago
    > C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.
• ajross 3y ago
  > 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." How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't? Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.
• zepearl 3y ago
  > 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. I don't get this. Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion) If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).
  • deckard1 3y ago
    I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth. But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price. There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie. All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      You can build a very solid business empire on a large collection of small offerings.
    • bariswheel 3y ago
      Though one key issue: Winning hearts and minds matter, public perception matters, they do indirectly affect the bottom line. Requires some nuance/between the lines sight to see this.
• yashap 3y ago
  I honestly think it’s possible to have large/mature companies that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It’s just really, really, really hard. You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent. You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time. I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.
  • esafak 3y ago
    Which companies did you have in mind?
    • yashap 3y ago
      I haven't worked personally at these places, so just going on what I've heard: - Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility, letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you fight to keep this person if they told you they were leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and candid communication, and generally a smart and driven group doing great work - I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep going a really high performing group, that were passionate about their work and hustling hard to build great things. Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and lack of work/life balance - Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be
  • solatic 3y ago
    It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executive oversees a single layer of middle management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing telephone, and you have an echo chamber. The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > the prescription is always to go back in time I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.
  • davedx 3y ago
    > A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Kind of like Apple.
• johngossman 3y ago
  This is spot on. I'll only add that the necessity of showing perpetual growth in the quarterly income report strongly incentivizes big companies to act this way, especially where--as in most tech companies--the employees have equity.
• stillwithit 3y ago
  Has nothing to do with Google “being bad” and everything to do with emerging social trends questioning the corporatization of everything. Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are. The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff! People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.
  • immibis 3y ago
    Your comment has been removed for threatening violence, and your user account has been permanently suspended. Have a nice day. - corporate censors
• alliao 3y ago
  kind of interesting how bell was able to spun off so much while modern companies aren't able to do so
• ljm 3y ago
  Google fought against Microsoft’s EEE strategy until they could do it themselves. Enter Chrome.
• eikenberry 3y ago
  > But once you achieve market dominance [..] Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.
• cyanydeez 3y ago
  Google has entirely become a corporate capitalist driven by short term profit. If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd be really confused as to how poor the search results are.
• simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  Your username is genius, BTW. Assume you are a regular on HN but decided to post with a new account?
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  This is my experience having been through 3 acquisitions. In 1-2 years you go from: - operating well, get bought - throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower - then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore - leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition
• obviouslynotme 3y ago
  It's less about risk aversion than it is about position, size, and complexity. As these things grow, the incentives change and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible. A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example. Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position. Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end. And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.
  • whoknowsidont 3y ago
    >and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible. What makes it impossible?
    • obviouslynotme 3y ago
      I explain it in the third paragraph but to illustrate it further: Consider a function. A function that is 1 line long is immediately understandable. At 10 lines, it is readable within a minute or two. At 100 lines, it is maybe legible to someone who lives in that function. At 1000 lines, it is a black box. Human organizations are the same way. You might suggest refactoring, which is what companies do too. They create departments, promotion ladders, org charts, and mission statements. The problem is that abstractions leak by design. As your abstractions accumulate and change outside your view, your ability to understand the entirety reduces.
• Zambyte 3y ago
  > But once you achieve market dominance "Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.
  • crashmat 3y ago
    Thing is, under capitalism large companies get significant control over the governments' actions. And large companies don't like not being allowed to be as powerful as possible, holding monopolies.
    • Zambyte 3y ago
      Alas, we have stumbled upon the fact that capitalism only works on paper
• timenova 3y ago
  I highly recommend you read the paper Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt (1960).
• tannhaeuser 3y ago
  I find the real comedy here is the emotional attitude towards an employer TBH, especially with GOOG doing just fine. The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).
• yterdy 3y ago
  >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?" Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think? >A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job? This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.
• strangescript 3y ago
  Companies confuse their initial product success with general success. "We made this amazing thing, so everything we do is amazing". The logic is flawed but can carry the company a tremendous distance before becoming unsustainable. Google is reaching the early steps of the unsustainable phase, and their initial product success is finally being threatened via AI. Working on an open source library for 9 years and then complaining that the company is changing is ironic.
  • immibis 3y ago
    I've seen a hypothesis that Google has never created anything new worth anything to anyone, after it created search and ads. Gmail is a clone of Hotmail, and YouTube and Android were acquisitions.
    • donny2018 3y ago
      The hypothesis is not wrong. Google is still just ads and search. It’s a utility “nothing to see here” company now. Paradoxically, Microsoft now looks newer, fresher and more innovative than this.
    • wilsynet 3y ago
      There were Internet search engines before Google, but Google did it way better. I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the time. I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over the years. You could also say there were digital music players before the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were smart phones before the iPhone.
• dclowd9901 3y ago
  Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money. The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.
  • webmaven 3y ago
    > Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money. This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.
• JSavageOne 3y ago
  You've just described why once prominent companies fade into shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be avoided with better leadership.
  • immibis 3y ago
    But not a problem, either. Turnover is natural. Nobody but the investors care very much whether Kodak pivots to digital cameras, or whether Kodak remains the leading film camera company as the industry shrinks, and a different company makes digital cameras. In fact the latter is often better for the economy and consumers, due to the better specialization.
    • JSavageOne 3y ago
      Yes it is a problem if a company is failing not just for the investors but the workers. Nobody wants to work for a sinking ship. Can't believe this even needs to be said.
      • immibis 3y ago
        It doesn't have to sink. Isn't Kodak still a respected company in the niche realm of film cameras?
  • donny2018 3y ago
    Microsoft has managed to resurrect from the dead though. Now it feels like a “fresher” company than Google.
• toasted-subs 3y ago
  Eventually everybody has to grow up and realize Santa isn’t a real person.
• eVoLInTHRo 3y ago
  Joined Microsoft in the early 2010s, and Google recently in the 2020s. I see the same bad company culture traits in both cases (incompetent & feuding middle managers, silos of information, promotion based on launches not business impact, hired too many people, etc.). I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't. I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies. To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.
• havercosine 3y ago
  `why rock the boat` is spot on! Most large organisations eventually go into a mode of maximising the free cash flow for shareholders. I guess more or less this is by design. Investors, Founders and early employees take risks in short run for the rewards in the long run. A company cannot keep saying the promised green land is delayed by another 5 years. Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one! Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.
• brandall10 3y ago
  The book "The Innovator's Dillemma" is about this concept.
• ronhews 3y ago
  Observing how companies evolve and face challenges as they grow is interesting. Priorities, risk tolerance, and organizational structures often change this process. While newcomers may emphasize innovation and disruption, market-dominant companies may prioritize maintaining the status quo to protect what they have achieved. Various factors, including the potential impact on careers and incomes, can influence this shift in mindset. Additionally, due to its uncertainty, established processes and experienced personnel may resist starting from scratch. In some cases, companies that aim to differentiate themselves from traditional models may operate similarly over time, realizing the reasons behind established practices.
• scaramanga 3y ago
  Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a tobacco company or Chevron. So i mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• davedx 3y ago
  > 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. Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share. It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.
• voytec 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. My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]": > 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.
• etruong42 3y ago
  > 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. I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc. I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting). I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo. I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us. The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.