23 ms·

Mourning Google

548 points by cdme 3y ago

wscourge 3y ago
While the article's content brings nothing to my life whatsoever, I did enjoy your writing style.
- amelius 3y ago
  ?
willvarfar 3y ago
Hot on the heels of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655, today is going to turn into pining for the past google day :( I remember everyone wanting to work for them, back in their cultural heyday...
gardenhedge 3y ago
> I got a $90K bonus that year That's why they liked google.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I see you've attracted at least 2 downvotes. Never really gotten any insight into the minds of the downvoters myself - and in this case you can only be right. It isn't like the current wave of blog posts are talking about the wonderful place Google is in culturally. They're pointing out that Google - under the stewardship of people who've been at Google for a long time - is converging to the corporate culture mean. If they're working at a company and they're just watching it drift to the mean, we can safely conclude that they're in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that, but let us not get distracted by razzle-dazzle on the side. People work because they get paid.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    It's moving from "paying the bills plus ..." to "paying the bills". Since the latter is _kinda_ important, it's difficult to let go when the "plus ..." part has left the building (and stopping that from happening is beyond the management level of most) - moreso, when there's no obvious place it went to that you could follow.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      The plus was contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing that is Google. Google was - still is - a lot more responsible than most companies with that responsibility. But the risks are high and obvious. How good are these people at assessing this "plus"? I'd rather just be in it for the money if I were involved in Google. Being in it for the money is a respectable thing.
      - pgeorgi 3y ago
        Not sure if people consider "contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing" a benefit based on which they choose their career preferences. It's more "pays the bills plus doesn't consider you merely a cost center", "pays the bills plus lets you try weird stuff of your interest with ~unlimited infrastructure at your disposal". _That_ was the appeal of Google. Not anymore. On the other hand, the advertising machine (however you want to characterize it) is still alive and kicking, so that part isn't gone.
- frou_dh 3y ago
  Who knew psychological analysis was as easy as homing in on a sensational tidbit? Masterful stuff. /s
duringmath 3y ago
Things were better when I was younger and still worked there I don't know how much of it is a perspective thing but it's probably a decent amount.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >"Things were better when I was younger and still worked there" You make it sound like having actually worked there, and knowing how Google was, versus what it is now, is a bad thing, that somehow "taints" your critique. It's, on the contrary, one of the most important prerequisites to be able to evaluate current Google.
  - duringmath 3y ago
    Sure, but it comes with its own biases and a certain conviction about how things should be.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      And why would the conviction of "how things should be" should be assumed to be wrong, and the way things are now should be taken as better? Is 2024 Google better than 2010 Google? How about 2001 Google?
  - closewith 3y ago
    The real issue the OP has is that they’re aging and seeing things differently. The Google they remember never existed - it’s just how they felt at the time.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!
      - 3y ago
verisimi 3y ago
My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from a more messy handmade internet, into a corporate one. A way to dominate and intercept everyone's actions online when searching. And you have to say, it was a good strategy! Do the younger generation even know that there are pages outside of the corporate held companies?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.
  - closewith 3y ago
    I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites. I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.
VBprogrammer 3y ago
I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.
- bigallen 3y ago
  I will be devastated when (hopefully if!) this happens. If I use a standard search engine to look up a question, I typically get endless “okay” results with piles of moneygrabbing shit mixed in. If I ask chatGPT, I get a contextually relevant, straightforward answer that is probably as accurate as anything else I could reasonably find. It’s like a breath of fresh air
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    Sure, but for now. ChatGPT results will also be enshitified, and since the cycle of everything is much faster now, it will take much less than 20 years.
    - kmac_ 3y ago
      Nah, the fruit hangs very low here, I bet that fine-tuning with ads is in MS and Google backlogs already. Try to ad block that.
      - Rebelgecko 3y ago
        OpenAI has some hiring reqs out for people with AdTech experience too
- _heimdall 3y ago
  edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is. They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.
Wonnk13 3y ago
Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it (acknowledging I'm only one of nearly 150k employees) was basically IBM with better food.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I'm glad you posted this. Honestly, while I agree with the flood of recent posts mourning Google in the wake of their layoffs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 ), some of these posts (not necessarily this one by Tim Bray, as he left Google a decade ago, but certainly lots of the other ones) kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth because they strike me as a bit self-serving. That is, I think folks generally have seen, and commented on, Google's rot for many years now. For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so, whenever Google drastically reduced the differentiation between ads and organic results, and began loading more and more ads into the top or the results page. I felt it was the first actively user hostile change that was solely in the service of revenue for Google. So I feel it's a tad rich that all these posts are coming out from ex-Googlers lamenting Google's decline now that it's really affecting Google's employees personally. I guess in their defense it seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be posting/commenting while they were currently Googlers, but still, it seems a bit lacking in insight/introspection to see all these posts pointing to the demise of Google's culture as when they had "uncaring" layoffs. I'm thinking, no, Google's demise started a decade-plus ago; they could just paper over it for a long time with good food.
  - ipnon 3y ago
    In companies of this size it takes decades to expire from the mortal blow. All the while investors crowd around and give reassurances of a full recovery. Always optimize for the long-term.
  - Balgair 3y ago
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
"Psychopaths" seems to be a running theme in the various reminisces that people are sharing in comments here on Google stories.
- test77777g 3y ago
  I’ve noticed developers have a pretty low bar for being a “psychopath” I’ve found psychopaths to mostly be people that see programmers as disposable. This is pretty much true, hence the psychopaths everywhere.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Hum... Seeing people as disposable is a quite reasonable definition for that word.
    - test77777g 3y ago
      No it’s not, you’re just seizing on a particular word to warp the social perception of what I said.
cousin_it 3y ago
I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself. It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.
- steve1977 3y ago
  I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate. But maybe it was just luck.
  - herval 3y ago
    I wouldn't say creating something like Google search is purely _luck_, but having the right skill and hitting it at the right timing_is indeed a big component of success
- coldtea 3y ago
  "The non-normal culture wasn't proving itself." Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof. What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market". I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.
fancyfredbot 3y ago
Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was jealous of them. Then they always seemed to end up spending their time on Google+ or Play Store or some other application which was not as glamorous or interesting as you were expecting. It felt like a huge disconnect between the perception and reality. I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. I am glad though that these days people may judge the idea of a big-tech career more objectively.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  > I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.
  - AlexCoventry 3y ago
    The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.
      - _bohm 3y ago
        Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC
throwawaylolx 3y ago
>It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around. A pseudo-communist critique of Google. >But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at. A nostalgia-driven critique of Google. This post is a bit of a mess. There is valid criticism too, but it sounds like the author doesn't know exactly what he doesn't like about Google anymore. I can also say I used to find better articles on HN but clearly the userbase of this website has changed, despite the guidelines trying to insist HN doesn't change and it's just a "semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills". No, HN is worse just like most of the tech space.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  A nostalgia-driven critique of HN and of tech, delicious Tim Bray has been shared on this site for the last seventeen years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&query=tim%20bray&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&q...
  - throwawaylolx 3y ago
    None of this is relevant to my comment.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Your comment isn’t very relevant.
  - timbray 3y ago
    Wow, didn't know about that, thanks. But the query has to be "timbray" not tim bray
vanderZwan 3y ago
> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me) Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features). If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. (this is not a defense of Big Tech, btw)
- rezonant 3y ago
  > If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.
  - asah 3y ago
    Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list. Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them. The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc. Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular. Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water. Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features. As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor). As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price. Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
samirillian 3y ago
I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. (People I read and liked btw). But the people I now hear regurgitating the phrase make me wonder what happened. For Marxists I think the implication is that capitalism will soon die with its host. Which like all prophecies will probably be proven ironic in retrospect, but who knows. But I'm starting to think the way people use it now, it's like they sub-consciously think there was a good capitalism time just like there was a good Google time. Hegel observed that the US was founded on greed. When I look at tech, I see greedy people. That's more general and just as specific as the ambiguous term "late stage capitalism".
- jdub 3y ago
  You question the phrase "late stage capitalists" and use the phrase "cultural marxists"? Shoo.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Meme words attract other meme words. On average people's brains tend to operate on simple reductive trends, things get grouped with over simplified patterns. You can fight it but they'll just express the same ideas in double speak if you make it a no no phrase. I wouldn't use it personally but like what OP is saying, it used to he "neoliberal" then that became boring/overused so they invented "late stage capitalism" as the new bucket to throw every criticism of modern economics into. Likewise with "cultural Marxism" for popular social justice trends. There will be a new phrase for these same groupings that we'll all get upset about in a few years once these get fully played and become taboo.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      It’s not a no-no phrase because it’s taboo; it’s a virtue signifier that denotes the user is a meme-parroting, trend-following, partisan rube. It’s gauche.
herval 3y ago
> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- coldpie 3y ago
  Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.
  - moritzwarhier 3y ago
    Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary. So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      "psychotic" seems to have been a typo as the subheading is "Psychopaths".
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Sorry, I was (trying to) use the same term as the person I was replying to.
      - moritzwarhier 3y ago
        Should have answered to that then, sorry. Was just a quick lunch break thought.
fidotron 3y ago
There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success. Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that. More controversially Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement, and with that came floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead. That agreement was bad but the absolute avarice among modern tech people is stunningly depressing for those of us that have been around to see the change. Google mainly remind me of SGI, and it is their office after all.
- fancyfredbot 3y ago
  > floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?
  - DanielHB 3y ago
    More
    - fancyfredbot 3y ago
      Another great service big tech has provided to the world then!
  - yedava 3y ago
    I would say less if they had stayed on Wall St. The past decade has laid the groundwork for an Orwellian society. Digital communication and commerce is now centralized to a few big firms and that is going to hurt us as a civilization.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  >Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement And 1000's of non Google and Meta employees have benefitted from this, so I say this is good. The argument may be that this invited the wrong type of people to VC. I would say, They were already there, just not as obvious.
Xcelerate 3y ago
> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.
- redrove 3y ago
  I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.
  - jbaber 3y ago
    Are there enough people like this who want to deal with the unpleasantness of being managers? The only enticement we have is money.
    - redrove 3y ago
      > The only enticement we have is money. Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end. Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code. I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.
alimbada 3y ago
> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that "<X> works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.
- stevage 3y ago
  Yeah there is nothing that doesn't work fine on FF. Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.
  - Perz1val 3y ago
    I use chromium browsers (Brave), only because of the dev tools - I'm just not used to Firefox devtools and don't want to invest time in learning their quirks.
  - jpc0 3y ago
    YouTube and Google Drive large file uploads sorted? Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load? If so I will be very excited since I want off of Chrome but for work it was broken last time I check and that was like early December.
    - stevage 3y ago
      >YouTube and Google Drive large file uploads sorted? Can't say I've tried. > Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load? Definitely no problems.
- aorth 3y ago
  > I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. Yep, me too. A conscious decision on my part. I run Firefox Developer Edition, though (which is essentially Firefox Beta). It has a comfortable freshness somewhere between stable and nightly.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Lot of that, going 'round...
hello_computer 3y ago
Zero self-awareness. Larry and Sergey "empower(ed) psychotic pricks" because they are psychotic pricks. Look up how Larry talked to his marketing team in the early days, or his dalliances with subordinates (i.e. Melissa). Birds of a feather. Like attracts like. "Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage. The comic books are more on-point: > You Either Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain
- wharvle 3y ago
  > “Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage. I dislike that term, but do think post-war optimization of management and finance have built toward… something, which we are now in, which is different from how things were earlier in this process (50s, 60s, at least part of the 70s) and certainly different from pre-war American capitalism. Calling it “late” seems silly though.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    The financialization of everything
  - hello_computer 3y ago
    It's twitterati short-hand for, "I don't like the n-th order consequences of the choices that I've made (and would totally make again)." Everything is someone else's fault. No introspection. Never a mea culpa.
nailer 3y ago
> Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work. No. We were losing all our staff to Facebook and embarking on Google Plus, giving ourselves bonuses for 'success' in social. The last major successful google products had already stopped being produced (last one was android, which deliberately siloed itself off from the rest of the company). Wave team negotiated a huge bonus with no success criteria and then left the company. We threw serverless away because the App Engine team didn’t feel like doing their jobs. It was fucked by then too. Maybe everyone else just didn’t know it.
prepend 3y ago
> For now, here’s the direction I think I’m going: Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests. This is my approach. I used to really like google products. Not I keep chrome to run the google products I haven’t gotten rid of yet.
puchatek 3y ago
I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or something like that.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Try MagicEarth
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  It violates copyright, yes. If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Facts like that would be more likely to be a T&C issue than a copyright one. Unless you scraped the data as screenshots that you presented directly to the user, or something nutty like that. Of course, if Google decided to fight it as a copyright issue you’d still probably be screwed, even if you were in the right.
  - osmsucks 3y ago
    Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to shout at me multiple times about it (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Geographical_size_of_changesets https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Geographical_s...).
    - 3y ago
ImaCake 3y ago
> It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around. Blaming “late capitalism” for google’s institutional problems provides absolutely zero insight. Rapidly growing orgs have turned rotten since ancient times. OP’s other comments on institutional dysfunction are more informative and it made this well worth the read. Sorry for your loss OP, it sounds like google was once a great place and I hope you find something like it again <3
robofanatic 3y ago
Everything is a “No Evil Zone” when money flows freely.
mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
Big Tech can't be immune to human psychology and how we have organized ourselves to do work for hundreds of years. Any organization beyond some size starts to exhibit bureaucracy, politics, in-fighting, sociopaths, etc. Would a different corporate structure have different outcomes? (i.e. not mimicking medieval fiefdom structures that allow peasants/individual contributors to make bank) I think if massive profits and growth are the goals then this will always be the way things go when those goals are achieved. Look at any other large corporation and you'll see the same things. In Big Tech the massive money one can make via stock/bonuses means the gas pedal is on the floor as the car speeds towards dysfunction.
jqpabc123 3y ago
This is really mourning the human condition. This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity. I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't. I watched as even my own family ignored my warnings and succumbed to the allure and promise of "free service" without really questioning why or how it was possible. Some yearning deep inside the human psyche drives people to just "believe" in the impossible without questioning. Those who recognize and tap into this typically don't have altruism as their objective. "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished --- to the surprise of few even though some holdouts still refuse to accept it out of fear for what it implies about themselves.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture. The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate culture successfully. Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all. If you want to "not be evil", you must be prepared to remain small, and probably niche. That doesn't mean you're unimportant, but you're definitely not Google as we know it today.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    People forget how common this cycle reappears in tech. Jobs founded Apple in opposition to IBM culture alongside Wozniak the ultimate hobbyist tinkerer. Musk was lauded for open-sourcing Tesla’s patents, ten years ago. I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s. Though some of this was just public posturing, of course.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
gdsdfe 3y ago
I think it's time to disrupt the disruptors and stop longing for what was and what wasn't
defanor 3y ago
I thought the non-evil phase of Google is commonly viewed to be considerably earlier, sometime before Gmail (2004). While the article mentions 2010 as still being in it. I wonder whether by 2040 somebody will lament the good old Google of 2024.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  I guess we are talking about the time before they literally scraped it from their mission statement?
23B1 3y ago
[flagged]
TomMasz 3y ago
His take on Google's search is spot-on. It's not totally useless but it no longer stands apart from everything else. Who in 2010 would have predicted that?
nbittich 3y ago
I remember the day I decided to switch from Yahoo to Google, finally I could find relevant things on the internet. It was in 2001 iirc. At the time I really thought Google will never become the corporate mess it is now, it felt like a cool company.
eigenvalue 3y ago
What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered. Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s operating profit and stock price start falling and all their best developers jump ship to better companies (this part has already started). Then they will fully follow the model trailblazed by such erstwhile innovators as Polaroid, Kodak, and Xerox.
- pcurve 3y ago
  I agree about the Sundar and Satya comparison, but I also feel Microsoft has always been in more stable position in terms of diversified revenue sources and its stronghold in business / enterprise market that served as platform for growing other lines of their business.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  What makes it late stage is that these decrepit monopolies or pseudo-monopolies are so ensconced in their markets that the share price will not fall appreciably long after calcification has set in.
  - eigenvalue 3y ago
    It always catches up to them eventually. Xerox and Polaroid continued to grow revenues and operating profit for a couple years even after the writing was on the wall that their days were numbered without some kind of big change. It's usually fairly easy to pull various levers to juice those metrics in the short run (especially when there was a lot of fat in costs to start with, and a lot of remaining customer surplus), but this tends to be a one-off thing because it generally pisses of customers/users/employees and hastens the end.
- waylandsmithers 3y ago
  > has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” Couldn't agree more, and the ironic thing about this phrase is that it's really more reminiscent of the pre-depression era of robber barons, price fixing, no workers rights, Panic of 18XX where companies really got too powerful and ran wild because there wasn't enough regulation yet
knorker 3y ago
Some context here left out that may matter is that it looks like Bray left Google a decade ago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbraysoftwareguy/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbraysoftwareguy/ Reading this it wasn't clear if this was a recent inside view, at outside view, or a historical inside view.
bogwog 3y ago
Google used to be truly great. Their business was inherently evil, yet they were somehow not. They actually did good, and as a naive highschooler with a programming hobby, they inspired me to try to be the best I can at it. But they crashed hard. Almost as soon as I started college, they began the quick descent into evilness (about the time Pichai became CEO). They're irredeemable at this point, and the only solution left is a breakup or a massive amount of regulation. Still, I think Google is unique among the tech giants because they really were a force for good at one point. That's why I hate them the least, even though they're probably at #2 or #3 in the evil leaderboard.
kosolam 3y ago
Well, this is definitely TLDR. That said, I don’t mourn Google - nostalgia is for the privileged. Google is pure evil, and should be dismantled.
aws_ls 3y ago
Good post. But it ended as soon as I was sinking in deep to read it. Not blaming, just felt it ended abruptly.
- aws_ls 3y ago
  Just wanted to thank folks, who helped me cross 500 Karma points :) ... It may not be a big deal for you all. But it seems to matter to me.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> “Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number. > But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at. Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile. Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.
- the_doctah 3y ago
  Tik tok as a search engine on mobile? Huh? Does it search outside its own content?
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    No, but that's exactly why kids prefer it on mobile. It's a consistent experience that loads fast and doesn't show a cookie banner between every step.
- SadCordDrone 3y ago
  > There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile. That's because kids are dumb and have no attention span to read anything. Source: I am from the same generation you talk of.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Reading is a skill. The more you read, the better you get. The laptop encourages you to surf (and surfing is reading), the phone encourages you to scroll, usually through images and videos. Attention span is a separate issue. I lack the attention span to watch a short youtube video, but I can easily read long essays.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests. Using a different browser for different websites doesn't make sense because of links. As web user and web developer, a browser that's made by a web company is aligned with my interest, not a browser by a company for which the web is a kind of tax haven, a way for companies to avoid paying the 30% tax they're supposed to pay when selling to their users.
ericyd 3y ago
I really don't understand people who throw their arms up in exasperation and wonder what alternatives exist to Google (or other big tech) products. It's takes a little dedication because it's not as easy as using a conglomerate, but there are a bunch of easy and stable alternatives to core Google products just a... ahem... internet search away.
- scythmic_waves 3y ago
  My personal exasperation is less about being unable to find alternatives (e.g. [1]). It's more that those alternatives aren't 1) as good, 2) free, or 3) part of the same platform. And even if I use an alternative, my friends, family, and workplace do not. So I'm still fighting the use of Google products after I stop using them. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google
  - ericyd 3y ago
    I don't really disagree, I just feel like that choice is pretty well known at this point. Big tech provides a high degree of polish, an economical cost, and probably mind-blowing amounts of data collection. Alternatives are slightly less polished, perhaps more expensive, and probably more favorable from a privacy perspective. Sure it would be nice to have it all, but I see this as just another tradeoff we have to make to live in the modern world. I sympathize with the viewpoint, I guess I just react differently to the options.
lumost 3y ago
The mammal metaphor may not be accurate. This period could easily be equivalent to 2000-2010 where for the most part, big tech continued to exist and layoff while small firms struggled. The giants of today weren’t particularly giant back then, but we famously had the balmer era, Cisco’s decline, and Yahoo’s slow death. Presuming that interest rates stay high, it will be difficult to justify speculative bets in tech. Even SaaS models may see investors discount future cash flow potential. This means investors will look for higher payouts from existing firms, and underinvest in new firms - a few new firms will have special privileges due to who invested in them and what they do.
bogomipz 3y ago
>"And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives." I wished the author had elaborated on both of these points. Can people say what are the things that Google can't find? What do people consider the compelling alternatives in 2024?
- user_7832 3y ago
  I think Kagi, and MS Bing/copilot are considered “good” nowadays.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
rchaud 3y ago
These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads. There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, surely they could have come up with something in 25 years besides ads that made money and could stand on its own two feet. Instead, there is: - Youtube (unprofitable 18 years running) - Android (dead in the water w/o Samsung) - Google Cloud Platform - Google Workspace - hundreds of smaller projects that were sunset For all the non-Ads people lamenting the end of the good ol' days, has there been any reflection from them on the fact that all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?
- GNOMES 3y ago
  Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment. I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices. Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-companies-world-232717539.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani... It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance
  - rchaud 3y ago
    The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s. Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded. Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
wslh 3y ago
It is the moment in history to create new services with the mission of "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.". Stay tuned. One of them will be first published in a few months here.
swader999 3y ago
The author's calling out of 'Late Capitalism' is misplaced. Oligarchy, monoploy, cronyism, corporate and state collusion, corporate dominance in election funding are all anti competitive and lead to nothing representing Capitalism.
frankfrank13 3y ago
Its interesting that Google always staked itself on "being google-y" and now that its lost that its not clear what value prop it has to new hires beyond brand name and high pay. Other companies that are highly corporate, and have never tried not to be (or at least in 20+ years), are not having an identity crisis -- Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.
Marazan 3y ago
The sad slow death of Google Search is close to genuinely upsetting. At one point it felt like Google cared about defeating SEO spam. Now it feels like they actively encourage it.
tortoise_in 3y ago
Google plus and hangouts were best
camdenlock 3y ago
Anyone who unironically uses the phrase “late capitalism” or “late-stage capitalism” is outing themselves as a deeply silly person.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Just replace it with Cory Doctorow's enshittification, or platform decay.
lgkk 3y ago
The problem with these companies is the stat padder employees these days. How many people do you genuinely know who are actual well.. engineers or at least creative minded? 90% of the people I meet these days (I’m in Bay Area) who work in tech just want to get these companies on their resume. People whose bio is basically I’m ex meta ex Amazon ex google. When most of your employees are only in it for the money and prestige, and nothing more, imo this dullness and stagnation is what you get. It’s quite toxic.. a culture focused on TC instead of creativity and earnest. Just people chasing a check for the sake of it. Compare that to the innovations that came out of these companies prior to the mid 2010s. Everything “cool” since then has just been to support their massive scale and not really to promote new and interesting things. Just my opinion.
AlbertCory 3y ago
The best things about being there were things I'd probably never be able to do anywhere else: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-one-the-movies https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-two-the-authors https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-more-authors-plus https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-more-a... Oh yeah. I did do some work, too.
gdiamos 3y ago
“Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”.” That sounds pretty negative about people who were “good at business”. How is that different from engineers who join because they wanted to be cool?
hintymad 3y ago
I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. I feel that the 14 leadership principles offer a more balanced and actionable framework than Google's "do no evil", which unfortunately also gives a small number of activists room to do evil. An interesting observation is that Amazon used to promote slowly. A new grad would join Amazon as L4, and took more than 10 years or more to get promoted to L6. Making L6 used to be a big deal. L7 engineers were like demigods. In the early years, Amazon got most of its L7 through internal promotion, and gave them enormous power at the institutional level. Those old-timer L7s didn't give a shit about political pressures from their peer managers, so they held a really high bar on promotion. Interestingly, Amazon engineers were pretty cool with the promotion process, probably because the promotion anxiety came from comparing with one's coworkers. I heard the culture dilution accelerated in the past few years because, no surprise, Amazon hired and promoted faster. Many L7s were hired externally and could easily succumb to the pressure from peer managers. Going to the next level in three years or less has become a thing. The L8 is the new L7, yada yada yada.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. Really??? Bezos only left the CEO role in 2021. I've already seen tons of posts and commentary talking about how "It's well into Day 2 and beyond at Amazon", and the founder has only been out of his post for not even 3 years. Perhaps in plain years he kept things going longer than at Google, but that's just because he held the reins more directly.
  - hintymad 3y ago
    > that's just because he held the reins more directly. Fair point. It is ultimately CEO's responsibility to shape a company's culture, as culture is really just "who gets rewarded and who gets punished". After a CEO steps down, it will be hard to uphold the same standards, for good or for bad, at the highest level.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gerash 3y ago
The promo process at Google was broken even 10 years ago. The executives including the CEO are also way overpaid. My suggestion: anybody who wants to be a decision maker (executives, CEO, middle management) need to do actual technical work on a continuous basis otherwise they're more of a liability with their out-of-date knowledge than an asset

Mourning Google

548 points by cdme 3y ago

wscourge 3y ago

While the article's content brings nothing to my life whatsoever, I did enjoy your writing style.

amelius 3y ago
?

willvarfar 3y ago

Hot on the heels of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655, today is going to turn into pining for the past google day :( I remember everyone wanting to work for them, back in their cultural heyday...

gardenhedge 3y ago

> I got a $90K bonus that year That's why they liked google.

roenxi 3y ago
I see you've attracted at least 2 downvotes. Never really gotten any insight into the minds of the downvoters myself - and in this case you can only be right. It isn't like the current wave of blog posts are talking about the wonderful place Google is in culturally. They're pointing out that Google - under the stewardship of people who've been at Google for a long time - is converging to the corporate culture mean. If they're working at a company and they're just watching it drift to the mean, we can safely conclude that they're in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that, but let us not get distracted by razzle-dazzle on the side. People work because they get paid.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  It's moving from "paying the bills plus ..." to "paying the bills". Since the latter is _kinda_ important, it's difficult to let go when the "plus ..." part has left the building (and stopping that from happening is beyond the management level of most) - moreso, when there's no obvious place it went to that you could follow.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    The plus was contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing that is Google. Google was - still is - a lot more responsible than most companies with that responsibility. But the risks are high and obvious. How good are these people at assessing this "plus"? I'd rather just be in it for the money if I were involved in Google. Being in it for the money is a respectable thing.
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      Not sure if people consider "contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing" a benefit based on which they choose their career preferences. It's more "pays the bills plus doesn't consider you merely a cost center", "pays the bills plus lets you try weird stuff of your interest with ~unlimited infrastructure at your disposal". _That_ was the appeal of Google. Not anymore. On the other hand, the advertising machine (however you want to characterize it) is still alive and kicking, so that part isn't gone.
frou_dh 3y ago
Who knew psychological analysis was as easy as homing in on a sensational tidbit? Masterful stuff. /s

duringmath 3y ago

Things were better when I was younger and still worked there I don't know how much of it is a perspective thing but it's probably a decent amount.

coldtea 3y ago
>"Things were better when I was younger and still worked there" You make it sound like having actually worked there, and knowing how Google was, versus what it is now, is a bad thing, that somehow "taints" your critique. It's, on the contrary, one of the most important prerequisites to be able to evaluate current Google.
- duringmath 3y ago
  Sure, but it comes with its own biases and a certain conviction about how things should be.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    And why would the conviction of "how things should be" should be assumed to be wrong, and the way things are now should be taken as better? Is 2024 Google better than 2010 Google? How about 2001 Google?
- closewith 3y ago
  The real issue the OP has is that they’re aging and seeing things differently. The Google they remember never existed - it’s just how they felt at the time.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!
    - 3y ago

verisimi 3y ago

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from a more messy handmade internet, into a corporate one. A way to dominate and intercept everyone's actions online when searching. And you have to say, it was a good strategy! Do the younger generation even know that there are pages outside of the corporate held companies?

robertlagrant 3y ago
I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.
- closewith 3y ago
  I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites. I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.

VBprogrammer 3y ago

I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.

bigallen 3y ago
I will be devastated when (hopefully if!) this happens. If I use a standard search engine to look up a question, I typically get endless “okay” results with piles of moneygrabbing shit mixed in. If I ask chatGPT, I get a contextually relevant, straightforward answer that is probably as accurate as anything else I could reasonably find. It’s like a breath of fresh air
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  Sure, but for now. ChatGPT results will also be enshitified, and since the cycle of everything is much faster now, it will take much less than 20 years.
  - kmac_ 3y ago
    Nah, the fruit hangs very low here, I bet that fine-tuning with ads is in MS and Google backlogs already. Try to ad block that.
    - Rebelgecko 3y ago
      OpenAI has some hiring reqs out for people with AdTech experience too
_heimdall 3y ago
edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is. They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.

Wonnk13 3y ago

Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it (acknowledging I'm only one of nearly 150k employees) was basically IBM with better food.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I'm glad you posted this. Honestly, while I agree with the flood of recent posts mourning Google in the wake of their layoffs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 ), some of these posts (not necessarily this one by Tim Bray, as he left Google a decade ago, but certainly lots of the other ones) kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth because they strike me as a bit self-serving. That is, I think folks generally have seen, and commented on, Google's rot for many years now. For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so, whenever Google drastically reduced the differentiation between ads and organic results, and began loading more and more ads into the top or the results page. I felt it was the first actively user hostile change that was solely in the service of revenue for Google. So I feel it's a tad rich that all these posts are coming out from ex-Googlers lamenting Google's decline now that it's really affecting Google's employees personally. I guess in their defense it seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be posting/commenting while they were currently Googlers, but still, it seems a bit lacking in insight/introspection to see all these posts pointing to the demise of Google's culture as when they had "uncaring" layoffs. I'm thinking, no, Google's demise started a decade-plus ago; they could just paper over it for a long time with good food.
- ipnon 3y ago
  In companies of this size it takes decades to expire from the mortal blow. All the while investors crowd around and give reassurances of a full recovery. Always optimize for the long-term.
- Balgair 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

"Psychopaths" seems to be a running theme in the various reminisces that people are sharing in comments here on Google stories.

test77777g 3y ago
I’ve noticed developers have a pretty low bar for being a “psychopath” I’ve found psychopaths to mostly be people that see programmers as disposable. This is pretty much true, hence the psychopaths everywhere.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Hum... Seeing people as disposable is a quite reasonable definition for that word.
  - test77777g 3y ago
    No it’s not, you’re just seizing on a particular word to warp the social perception of what I said.

cousin_it 3y ago

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself. It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.

steve1977 3y ago
I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate. But maybe it was just luck.
- herval 3y ago
  I wouldn't say creating something like Google search is purely _luck_, but having the right skill and hitting it at the right timing_is indeed a big component of success
coldtea 3y ago
"The non-normal culture wasn't proving itself." Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof. What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market". I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.

fancyfredbot 3y ago

Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was jealous of them. Then they always seemed to end up spending their time on Google+ or Play Store or some other application which was not as glamorous or interesting as you were expecting. It felt like a huge disconnect between the perception and reality. I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. I am glad though that these days people may judge the idea of a big-tech career more objectively.

bluetomcat 3y ago
> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.
- AlexCoventry 3y ago
  The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.
    - _bohm 3y ago
      Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC

throwawaylolx 3y ago

>It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around. A pseudo-communist critique of Google. >But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at. A nostalgia-driven critique of Google. This post is a bit of a mess. There is valid criticism too, but it sounds like the author doesn't know exactly what he doesn't like about Google anymore. I can also say I used to find better articles on HN but clearly the userbase of this website has changed, despite the guidelines trying to insist HN doesn't change and it's just a "semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills". No, HN is worse just like most of the tech space.

Apocryphon 3y ago
A nostalgia-driven critique of HN and of tech, delicious Tim Bray has been shared on this site for the last seventeen years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&query=tim%20bray&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&q...
- throwawaylolx 3y ago
  None of this is relevant to my comment.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Your comment isn’t very relevant.
- timbray 3y ago
  Wow, didn't know about that, thanks. But the query has to be "timbray" not tim bray

vanderZwan 3y ago

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me) Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features). If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. (this is not a defense of Big Tech, btw)

rezonant 3y ago
> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.
- asah 3y ago
  Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list. Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them. The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc. Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular. Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water. Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features. As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor). As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price. Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)

samirillian 3y ago

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. (People I read and liked btw). But the people I now hear regurgitating the phrase make me wonder what happened. For Marxists I think the implication is that capitalism will soon die with its host. Which like all prophecies will probably be proven ironic in retrospect, but who knows. But I'm starting to think the way people use it now, it's like they sub-consciously think there was a good capitalism time just like there was a good Google time. Hegel observed that the US was founded on greed. When I look at tech, I see greedy people. That's more general and just as specific as the ambiguous term "late stage capitalism".

jdub 3y ago
You question the phrase "late stage capitalists" and use the phrase "cultural marxists"? Shoo.
- dmix 3y ago
  Meme words attract other meme words. On average people's brains tend to operate on simple reductive trends, things get grouped with over simplified patterns. You can fight it but they'll just express the same ideas in double speak if you make it a no no phrase. I wouldn't use it personally but like what OP is saying, it used to he "neoliberal" then that became boring/overused so they invented "late stage capitalism" as the new bucket to throw every criticism of modern economics into. Likewise with "cultural Marxism" for popular social justice trends. There will be a new phrase for these same groupings that we'll all get upset about in a few years once these get fully played and become taboo.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    It’s not a no-no phrase because it’s taboo; it’s a virtue signifier that denotes the user is a meme-parroting, trend-following, partisan rube. It’s gauche.

herval 3y ago

> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
coldpie 3y ago
Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary. So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    "psychotic" seems to have been a typo as the subheading is "Psychopaths".
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Sorry, I was (trying to) use the same term as the person I was replying to.
    - moritzwarhier 3y ago
      Should have answered to that then, sorry. Was just a quick lunch break thought.

fidotron 3y ago

There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success. Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that. More controversially Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement, and with that came floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead. That agreement was bad but the absolute avarice among modern tech people is stunningly depressing for those of us that have been around to see the change. Google mainly remind me of SGI, and it is their office after all.

fancyfredbot 3y ago
> floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?
- DanielHB 3y ago
  More
  - fancyfredbot 3y ago
    Another great service big tech has provided to the world then!
- yedava 3y ago
  I would say less if they had stayed on Wall St. The past decade has laid the groundwork for an Orwellian society. Digital communication and commerce is now centralized to a few big firms and that is going to hurt us as a civilization.
mlrtime 3y ago
>Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement And 1000's of non Google and Meta employees have benefitted from this, so I say this is good. The argument may be that this invited the wrong type of people to VC. I would say, They were already there, just not as obvious.

Xcelerate 3y ago

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.

redrove 3y ago
I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.
- jbaber 3y ago
  Are there enough people like this who want to deal with the unpleasantness of being managers? The only enticement we have is money.
  - redrove 3y ago
    > The only enticement we have is money. Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)
- lxgr 3y ago
  Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end. Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code. I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.

alimbada 3y ago

> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that "<X> works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.

stevage 3y ago
Yeah there is nothing that doesn't work fine on FF. Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.
- Perz1val 3y ago
  I use chromium browsers (Brave), only because of the dev tools - I'm just not used to Firefox devtools and don't want to invest time in learning their quirks.
- jpc0 3y ago
  YouTube and Google Drive large file uploads sorted? Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load? If so I will be very excited since I want off of Chrome but for work it was broken last time I check and that was like early December.
  - stevage 3y ago
    >YouTube and Google Drive large file uploads sorted? Can't say I've tried. > Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load? Definitely no problems.
aorth 3y ago
> I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. Yep, me too. A conscious decision on my part. I run Firefox Developer Edition, though (which is essentially Firefox Beta). It has a comfortable freshness somewhere between stable and nightly.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Lot of that, going 'round...

hello_computer 3y ago

Zero self-awareness. Larry and Sergey "empower(ed) psychotic pricks" because they are psychotic pricks. Look up how Larry talked to his marketing team in the early days, or his dalliances with subordinates (i.e. Melissa). Birds of a feather. Like attracts like. "Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage. The comic books are more on-point: > You Either Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain

wharvle 3y ago
> “Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage. I dislike that term, but do think post-war optimization of management and finance have built toward… something, which we are now in, which is different from how things were earlier in this process (50s, 60s, at least part of the 70s) and certainly different from pre-war American capitalism. Calling it “late” seems silly though.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  The financialization of everything
- hello_computer 3y ago
  It's twitterati short-hand for, "I don't like the n-th order consequences of the choices that I've made (and would totally make again)." Everything is someone else's fault. No introspection. Never a mea culpa.

nailer 3y ago

> Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work. No. We were losing all our staff to Facebook and embarking on Google Plus, giving ourselves bonuses for 'success' in social. The last major successful google products had already stopped being produced (last one was android, which deliberately siloed itself off from the rest of the company). Wave team negotiated a huge bonus with no success criteria and then left the company. We threw serverless away because the App Engine team didn’t feel like doing their jobs. It was fucked by then too. Maybe everyone else just didn’t know it.

prepend 3y ago

> For now, here’s the direction I think I’m going: Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests. This is my approach. I used to really like google products. Not I keep chrome to run the google products I haven’t gotten rid of yet.

puchatek 3y ago

I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or something like that.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
Try MagicEarth
YoshiRulz 3y ago
It violates copyright, yes. If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).
- wharvle 3y ago
  Facts like that would be more likely to be a T&C issue than a copyright one. Unless you scraped the data as screenshots that you presented directly to the user, or something nutty like that. Of course, if Google decided to fight it as a copyright issue you’d still probably be screwed, even if you were in the right.
- osmsucks 3y ago
  Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to shout at me multiple times about it (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Geographical_size_of_changesets https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Geographical_s...).
  - 3y ago

ImaCake 3y ago

> It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around. Blaming “late capitalism” for google’s institutional problems provides absolutely zero insight. Rapidly growing orgs have turned rotten since ancient times. OP’s other comments on institutional dysfunction are more informative and it made this well worth the read. Sorry for your loss OP, it sounds like google was once a great place and I hope you find something like it again <3

robofanatic 3y ago

Everything is a “No Evil Zone” when money flows freely.

mattbrewsbytes 3y ago

Big Tech can't be immune to human psychology and how we have organized ourselves to do work for hundreds of years. Any organization beyond some size starts to exhibit bureaucracy, politics, in-fighting, sociopaths, etc. Would a different corporate structure have different outcomes? (i.e. not mimicking medieval fiefdom structures that allow peasants/individual contributors to make bank) I think if massive profits and growth are the goals then this will always be the way things go when those goals are achieved. Look at any other large corporation and you'll see the same things. In Big Tech the massive money one can make via stock/bonuses means the gas pedal is on the floor as the car speeds towards dysfunction.

jqpabc123 3y ago

This is really mourning the human condition. This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity. I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't. I watched as even my own family ignored my warnings and succumbed to the allure and promise of "free service" without really questioning why or how it was possible. Some yearning deep inside the human psyche drives people to just "believe" in the impossible without questioning. Those who recognize and tap into this typically don't have altruism as their objective. "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished --- to the surprise of few even though some holdouts still refuse to accept it out of fear for what it implies about themselves.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture. The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate culture successfully. Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all. If you want to "not be evil", you must be prepared to remain small, and probably niche. That doesn't mean you're unimportant, but you're definitely not Google as we know it today.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  People forget how common this cycle reappears in tech. Jobs founded Apple in opposition to IBM culture alongside Wozniak the ultimate hobbyist tinkerer. Musk was lauded for open-sourcing Tesla’s patents, ten years ago. I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s. Though some of this was just public posturing, of course.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

gdsdfe 3y ago

I think it's time to disrupt the disruptors and stop longing for what was and what wasn't

defanor 3y ago

I thought the non-evil phase of Google is commonly viewed to be considerably earlier, sometime before Gmail (2004). While the article mentions 2010 as still being in it. I wonder whether by 2040 somebody will lament the good old Google of 2024.

Zetobal 3y ago
I guess we are talking about the time before they literally scraped it from their mission statement?

23B1 3y ago

[flagged]

TomMasz 3y ago

His take on Google's search is spot-on. It's not totally useless but it no longer stands apart from everything else. Who in 2010 would have predicted that?

nbittich 3y ago

I remember the day I decided to switch from Yahoo to Google, finally I could find relevant things on the internet. It was in 2001 iirc. At the time I really thought Google will never become the corporate mess it is now, it felt like a cool company.

eigenvalue 3y ago

What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered. Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s operating profit and stock price start falling and all their best developers jump ship to better companies (this part has already started). Then they will fully follow the model trailblazed by such erstwhile innovators as Polaroid, Kodak, and Xerox.

pcurve 3y ago
I agree about the Sundar and Satya comparison, but I also feel Microsoft has always been in more stable position in terms of diversified revenue sources and its stronghold in business / enterprise market that served as platform for growing other lines of their business.
Apocryphon 3y ago
What makes it late stage is that these decrepit monopolies or pseudo-monopolies are so ensconced in their markets that the share price will not fall appreciably long after calcification has set in.
- eigenvalue 3y ago
  It always catches up to them eventually. Xerox and Polaroid continued to grow revenues and operating profit for a couple years even after the writing was on the wall that their days were numbered without some kind of big change. It's usually fairly easy to pull various levers to juice those metrics in the short run (especially when there was a lot of fat in costs to start with, and a lot of remaining customer surplus), but this tends to be a one-off thing because it generally pisses of customers/users/employees and hastens the end.
waylandsmithers 3y ago
> has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” Couldn't agree more, and the ironic thing about this phrase is that it's really more reminiscent of the pre-depression era of robber barons, price fixing, no workers rights, Panic of 18XX where companies really got too powerful and ran wild because there wasn't enough regulation yet

knorker 3y ago

Some context here left out that may matter is that it looks like Bray left Google a decade ago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbraysoftwareguy/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbraysoftwareguy/ Reading this it wasn't clear if this was a recent inside view, at outside view, or a historical inside view.

bogwog 3y ago

Google used to be truly great. Their business was inherently evil, yet they were somehow not. They actually did good, and as a naive highschooler with a programming hobby, they inspired me to try to be the best I can at it. But they crashed hard. Almost as soon as I started college, they began the quick descent into evilness (about the time Pichai became CEO). They're irredeemable at this point, and the only solution left is a breakup or a massive amount of regulation. Still, I think Google is unique among the tech giants because they really were a force for good at one point. That's why I hate them the least, even though they're probably at #2 or #3 in the evil leaderboard.

kosolam 3y ago

Well, this is definitely TLDR. That said, I don’t mourn Google - nostalgia is for the privileged. Google is pure evil, and should be dismantled.

aws_ls 3y ago

Good post. But it ended as soon as I was sinking in deep to read it. Not blaming, just felt it ended abruptly.

aws_ls 3y ago
Just wanted to thank folks, who helped me cross 500 Karma points :) ... It may not be a big deal for you all. But it seems to matter to me.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> “Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number. > But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at. Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile. Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.

the_doctah 3y ago
Tik tok as a search engine on mobile? Huh? Does it search outside its own content?
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  No, but that's exactly why kids prefer it on mobile. It's a consistent experience that loads fast and doesn't show a cookie banner between every step.
SadCordDrone 3y ago
> There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile. That's because kids are dumb and have no attention span to read anything. Source: I am from the same generation you talk of.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Reading is a skill. The more you read, the better you get. The laptop encourages you to surf (and surfing is reading), the phone encourages you to scroll, usually through images and videos. Attention span is a separate issue. I lack the attention span to watch a short youtube video, but I can easily read long essays.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests. Using a different browser for different websites doesn't make sense because of links. As web user and web developer, a browser that's made by a web company is aligned with my interest, not a browser by a company for which the web is a kind of tax haven, a way for companies to avoid paying the 30% tax they're supposed to pay when selling to their users.

ericyd 3y ago

I really don't understand people who throw their arms up in exasperation and wonder what alternatives exist to Google (or other big tech) products. It's takes a little dedication because it's not as easy as using a conglomerate, but there are a bunch of easy and stable alternatives to core Google products just a... ahem... internet search away.

scythmic_waves 3y ago
My personal exasperation is less about being unable to find alternatives (e.g. [1]). It's more that those alternatives aren't 1) as good, 2) free, or 3) part of the same platform. And even if I use an alternative, my friends, family, and workplace do not. So I'm still fighting the use of Google products after I stop using them. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google
- ericyd 3y ago
  I don't really disagree, I just feel like that choice is pretty well known at this point. Big tech provides a high degree of polish, an economical cost, and probably mind-blowing amounts of data collection. Alternatives are slightly less polished, perhaps more expensive, and probably more favorable from a privacy perspective. Sure it would be nice to have it all, but I see this as just another tradeoff we have to make to live in the modern world. I sympathize with the viewpoint, I guess I just react differently to the options.

lumost 3y ago

The mammal metaphor may not be accurate. This period could easily be equivalent to 2000-2010 where for the most part, big tech continued to exist and layoff while small firms struggled. The giants of today weren’t particularly giant back then, but we famously had the balmer era, Cisco’s decline, and Yahoo’s slow death. Presuming that interest rates stay high, it will be difficult to justify speculative bets in tech. Even SaaS models may see investors discount future cash flow potential. This means investors will look for higher payouts from existing firms, and underinvest in new firms - a few new firms will have special privileges due to who invested in them and what they do.

bogomipz 3y ago

>"And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives." I wished the author had elaborated on both of these points. Can people say what are the things that Google can't find? What do people consider the compelling alternatives in 2024?

user_7832 3y ago
I think Kagi, and MS Bing/copilot are considered “good” nowadays.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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rchaud 3y ago

These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads. There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, surely they could have come up with something in 25 years besides ads that made money and could stand on its own two feet. Instead, there is: - Youtube (unprofitable 18 years running) - Android (dead in the water w/o Samsung) - Google Cloud Platform - Google Workspace - hundreds of smaller projects that were sunset For all the non-Ads people lamenting the end of the good ol' days, has there been any reflection from them on the fact that all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?

GNOMES 3y ago
Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment. I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices. Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-companies-world-232717539.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani... It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance
- rchaud 3y ago
  The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s. Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded. Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago

wslh 3y ago

It is the moment in history to create new services with the mission of "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.". Stay tuned. One of them will be first published in a few months here.

swader999 3y ago

The author's calling out of 'Late Capitalism' is misplaced. Oligarchy, monoploy, cronyism, corporate and state collusion, corporate dominance in election funding are all anti competitive and lead to nothing representing Capitalism.

frankfrank13 3y ago

Its interesting that Google always staked itself on "being google-y" and now that its lost that its not clear what value prop it has to new hires beyond brand name and high pay. Other companies that are highly corporate, and have never tried not to be (or at least in 20+ years), are not having an identity crisis -- Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.

Marazan 3y ago

The sad slow death of Google Search is close to genuinely upsetting. At one point it felt like Google cared about defeating SEO spam. Now it feels like they actively encourage it.

tortoise_in 3y ago

Google plus and hangouts were best

camdenlock 3y ago

Anyone who unironically uses the phrase “late capitalism” or “late-stage capitalism” is outing themselves as a deeply silly person.

Apocryphon 3y ago
Just replace it with Cory Doctorow's enshittification, or platform decay.

lgkk 3y ago

The problem with these companies is the stat padder employees these days. How many people do you genuinely know who are actual well.. engineers or at least creative minded? 90% of the people I meet these days (I’m in Bay Area) who work in tech just want to get these companies on their resume. People whose bio is basically I’m ex meta ex Amazon ex google. When most of your employees are only in it for the money and prestige, and nothing more, imo this dullness and stagnation is what you get. It’s quite toxic.. a culture focused on TC instead of creativity and earnest. Just people chasing a check for the sake of it. Compare that to the innovations that came out of these companies prior to the mid 2010s. Everything “cool” since then has just been to support their massive scale and not really to promote new and interesting things. Just my opinion.

AlbertCory 3y ago

The best things about being there were things I'd probably never be able to do anywhere else: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-one-the-movies https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-two-the-authors https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t... https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-more-authors-plus https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-more-a... Oh yeah. I did do some work, too.

gdiamos 3y ago

“Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”.” That sounds pretty negative about people who were “good at business”. How is that different from engineers who join because they wanted to be cool?

hintymad 3y ago

I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. I feel that the 14 leadership principles offer a more balanced and actionable framework than Google's "do no evil", which unfortunately also gives a small number of activists room to do evil. An interesting observation is that Amazon used to promote slowly. A new grad would join Amazon as L4, and took more than 10 years or more to get promoted to L6. Making L6 used to be a big deal. L7 engineers were like demigods. In the early years, Amazon got most of its L7 through internal promotion, and gave them enormous power at the institutional level. Those old-timer L7s didn't give a shit about political pressures from their peer managers, so they held a really high bar on promotion. Interestingly, Amazon engineers were pretty cool with the promotion process, probably because the promotion anxiety came from comparing with one's coworkers. I heard the culture dilution accelerated in the past few years because, no surprise, Amazon hired and promoted faster. Many L7s were hired externally and could easily succumb to the pressure from peer managers. Going to the next level in three years or less has become a thing. The L8 is the new L7, yada yada yada.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. Really??? Bezos only left the CEO role in 2021. I've already seen tons of posts and commentary talking about how "It's well into Day 2 and beyond at Amazon", and the founder has only been out of his post for not even 3 years. Perhaps in plain years he kept things going longer than at Google, but that's just because he held the reins more directly.
- hintymad 3y ago
  > that's just because he held the reins more directly. Fair point. It is ultimately CEO's responsibility to shape a company's culture, as culture is really just "who gets rewarded and who gets punished". After a CEO steps down, it will be hard to uphold the same standards, for good or for bad, at the highest level.

deleted 3y ago

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gerash 3y ago

The promo process at Google was broken even 10 years ago. The executives including the CEO are also way overpaid. My suggestion: anybody who wants to be a decision maker (executives, CEO, middle management) need to do actual technical work on a continuous basis otherwise they're more of a liability with their out-of-date knowledge than an asset