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The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporat

The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporate environment. They have completely eroded the perception that Google is this kind of place: > Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered. [1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWeekAtGoogle/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...

roca 3y ago
This was a terrible way to run a company then and now. It leads to an incoherent product strategy. It doesn't provide the persistence required to pursue strategies that take many years to eventuate. Google succeeded in spite of this culture, not because of it; they found an immensely profitable niche, which enabled them to hire huge amounts of incredible talent, which covered up their cultural problems. [Disclaimer: I work at Google.]
- roca 3y ago
  Also, this is a great example of a recurring problem: successful organisations venerate their culture, so that every part of it is assumed to be essential to their success until very painful experiences prove otherwise. Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.
dekhn 3y ago
That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined! It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did. Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust. Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
- dartharva 3y ago
  How was Sundar at the time you joined? According to Wikipedia he spearheaded the development of Chrome, GDrive, GMaps, GMail and the VP8 format which are all monumental products so he sounds like he was quite like every other talented hacker that thrived in early Google culture. Is that not the case? What made him turn to the dark side so abruptly?
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Sundar wasn't a hacker, he was a product manager, and he was very good at identifying growing products, becoming their leader, and riding them to glory. But what really sealed the deal was Sundar's ability to sit in meeting with Larry Page while all the Chief Lieutenants fought, and patiently argue them all down (which Larry never wanted to do). It's news to me that Sundar had anything to do with gdrive, gmaps, and gmail, except that he was head of Apps for a while, long after those products had completely established themselves.
blibble 3y ago
> early every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. maps and earth were both acquisitions
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Local was in-house. What we know of as Maps today is the merger of Google Local (Bret Taylor, in-house), Where2 (Lars & Jens Rasmussen, acquisition), KeyHole (John Hanke, acquisition), and probably a few other projects.
- dylan604 3y ago
  you say acquisitions, others might say stolen.
  - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
    They bought the companies; that’s very literally not stealing.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      So, you're totally discounting the work of Terravision "The Billion Dollar Code" is a Netflix series about the lawsuit of Google trouncing the little guys. [0] is a brief bit from its creator about the impetus for the show. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good. In the [0], they compare it to The Social Network being from the Zucks point of view, aka the winner. This story is told from the view of the losing side. [0] https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billion-dollar-code-google-earth-1235080101/# https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billio...!
      - jart 3y ago
        Don't believe everything you watch on television or read on Wikipedia. Terravision was created by the Stanford Research Institute. Google used to be a Stanford research project. The group called ART+COM that Netflix portrays as a bunch of scrappy innovative hackers is actually just a den of patent trolls. I know reality is a bummer isn't it? > Lau explained that he gave individuals from Art+Com copies of the SRI TerraVision “source code, walked them through it, and talked to them about it.” Id. at 1050–51 https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/17-1016.Opinion.10-19-2017.1.PDF https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-order...
zffr 3y ago
Are there any places today that are like Google in the early days? I would love to work at a place like this.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Probably but by the time the conditions are well known it has started degrading already. I’m convinced that ending up at a place like that in the early days has a massive luck component, even if you are the sort of person who would trivially get in hiring bar wise.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  IMO no. The unique combination of parameters with early-Google were: - Small, relatively young company. - Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose. The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare. Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.
  - gorbachev 3y ago
    Some of the runaway gaming companies were like this as well. Zynga comes to mind. That changed quite quickly.
  - deepGem 3y ago
    I read somewhere that Google had to increase all it's perks just to increase expenses so as to balance out some small revenue %. Their early growth was that insane. No company has such luxury today. The barriers to entry almost everywhere is levelled. No company will have the profit head start that Google had, at least not in tech.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Indeed. I don't know that something like this can ever happen again, barring another major upset. Many people don't realize or remember how transformative the dot-com era really was. The amount of money firehose that was there to go around was staggering. We're just at a much more mature point in the market. Ironically, a lot of the people that make it difficult/impossible to have the money firehose are the ones that made their fortune from that environment! It's still possible for a one-off startup here and there to maybe get into this boat, but at this point the big tech players are there to slurp up the real money makers early and often and assimilate them into the borg. If this sort of environment were what I wanted to work in, I'd probably look at specialized teams/niches inside of big corps. Surely very difficult to find, but they do exist.
cjmcqueen 3y ago
It's not true anymore and started going away during Larry Page's tenure. ~ ex-Googler : 2011 to 2018
- lokar 3y ago
  People don’t give Eric enough credit as CEO
  - jinushaun 3y ago
    I give Eric all the credit. I honestly don’t know if Google would have been hugely successfully without him. Sure, they would not have failed, but they probably would’ve plateaued early like most successful startups.
    - lokar 3y ago
      L&S were very important imo, just not good at being in charge of everything directly.
sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are. The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search. Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative. Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc 20% was always a myth.
- gniv 3y ago
  > Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.
- United857 3y ago
  Google Chrome seems like a success as well.
  - linkgoron 3y ago
    Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)
    - zbowling 3y ago
      1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
      - linkgoron 3y ago
        Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013). The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium. I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.

roca 3y ago

This was a terrible way to run a company then and now. It leads to an incoherent product strategy. It doesn't provide the persistence required to pursue strategies that take many years to eventuate. Google succeeded in spite of this culture, not because of it; they found an immensely profitable niche, which enabled them to hire huge amounts of incredible talent, which covered up their cultural problems. [Disclaimer: I work at Google.]

roca 3y ago
Also, this is a great example of a recurring problem: successful organisations venerate their culture, so that every part of it is assumed to be essential to their success until very painful experiences prove otherwise. Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.

dekhn 3y ago

That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined! It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did. Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust. Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.

dartharva 3y ago
How was Sundar at the time you joined? According to Wikipedia he spearheaded the development of Chrome, GDrive, GMaps, GMail and the VP8 format which are all monumental products so he sounds like he was quite like every other talented hacker that thrived in early Google culture. Is that not the case? What made him turn to the dark side so abruptly?
- dekhn 3y ago
  Sundar wasn't a hacker, he was a product manager, and he was very good at identifying growing products, becoming their leader, and riding them to glory. But what really sealed the deal was Sundar's ability to sit in meeting with Larry Page while all the Chief Lieutenants fought, and patiently argue them all down (which Larry never wanted to do). It's news to me that Sundar had anything to do with gdrive, gmaps, and gmail, except that he was head of Apps for a while, long after those products had completely established themselves.

blibble 3y ago

> early every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. maps and earth were both acquisitions

nostrademons 3y ago
Local was in-house. What we know of as Maps today is the merger of Google Local (Bret Taylor, in-house), Where2 (Lars & Jens Rasmussen, acquisition), KeyHole (John Hanke, acquisition), and probably a few other projects.
dylan604 3y ago
you say acquisitions, others might say stolen.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
  They bought the companies; that’s very literally not stealing.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    So, you're totally discounting the work of Terravision "The Billion Dollar Code" is a Netflix series about the lawsuit of Google trouncing the little guys. [0] is a brief bit from its creator about the impetus for the show. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good. In the [0], they compare it to The Social Network being from the Zucks point of view, aka the winner. This story is told from the view of the losing side. [0] https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billion-dollar-code-google-earth-1235080101/# https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billio...!
    - jart 3y ago
      Don't believe everything you watch on television or read on Wikipedia. Terravision was created by the Stanford Research Institute. Google used to be a Stanford research project. The group called ART+COM that Netflix portrays as a bunch of scrappy innovative hackers is actually just a den of patent trolls. I know reality is a bummer isn't it? > Lau explained that he gave individuals from Art+Com copies of the SRI TerraVision “source code, walked them through it, and talked to them about it.” Id. at 1050–51 https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/17-1016.Opinion.10-19-2017.1.PDF https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-order...

zffr 3y ago

Are there any places today that are like Google in the early days? I would love to work at a place like this.

pfannkuchen 3y ago
Probably but by the time the conditions are well known it has started degrading already. I’m convinced that ending up at a place like that in the early days has a massive luck component, even if you are the sort of person who would trivially get in hiring bar wise.
potatolicious 3y ago
IMO no. The unique combination of parameters with early-Google were: - Small, relatively young company. - Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose. The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare. Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.
- gorbachev 3y ago
  Some of the runaway gaming companies were like this as well. Zynga comes to mind. That changed quite quickly.
- deepGem 3y ago
  I read somewhere that Google had to increase all it's perks just to increase expenses so as to balance out some small revenue %. Their early growth was that insane. No company has such luxury today. The barriers to entry almost everywhere is levelled. No company will have the profit head start that Google had, at least not in tech.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Indeed. I don't know that something like this can ever happen again, barring another major upset. Many people don't realize or remember how transformative the dot-com era really was. The amount of money firehose that was there to go around was staggering. We're just at a much more mature point in the market. Ironically, a lot of the people that make it difficult/impossible to have the money firehose are the ones that made their fortune from that environment! It's still possible for a one-off startup here and there to maybe get into this boat, but at this point the big tech players are there to slurp up the real money makers early and often and assimilate them into the borg. If this sort of environment were what I wanted to work in, I'd probably look at specialized teams/niches inside of big corps. Surely very difficult to find, but they do exist.

cjmcqueen 3y ago

It's not true anymore and started going away during Larry Page's tenure. ~ ex-Googler : 2011 to 2018

lokar 3y ago
People don’t give Eric enough credit as CEO
- jinushaun 3y ago
  I give Eric all the credit. I honestly don’t know if Google would have been hugely successfully without him. Sure, they would not have failed, but they probably would’ve plateaued early like most successful startups.
  - lokar 3y ago
    L&S were very important imo, just not good at being in charge of everything directly.

sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago

Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are. The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search. Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative. Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc 20% was always a myth.

gniv 3y ago
> Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.
United857 3y ago
Google Chrome seems like a success as well.
- linkgoron 3y ago
  Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)
  - zbowling 3y ago
    1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
    - linkgoron 3y ago
      Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013). The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium. I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.