12 ms·

Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal t

by zamfi 3y ago

Is any company still like this? I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe. At some point the real world just gets in the way.

brcmthrowaway 3y ago
So the real answer is to join the next Google.. :) OpenAI?
- nequo 3y ago
  What is the company culture of OpenAI like? How does it compare to early Google?
  - ulfw 3y ago
    I didn't see Google's board fire it's CEO and then he gets reinstated and basically fires the board. Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.
    - CSSer 3y ago
      To be fair one could argue that was still in vogue at the time…
      - CSSer 3y ago
        To clarify, this was a sarcastic remark. I wasn't trying to actually imply that it was okay just because everyone else was doing it. I suppose that little /s really can do a lot of work.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      That we know of, at least.
  - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
    Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....
    - tavavex 3y ago
      > providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.
      - leereeves 3y ago
        > In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up. > Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.” > Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said. https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-pay-ai-training-data/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_7c5d364a-988f-4fa9-9717-ddbe9df8d8b5_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi_fallback_cral-top2-2 https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...
      - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
        I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI. Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it. OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.
- choppaface 3y ago
  Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-special-pool-of-stock-comp-to-keep-top-ai-researchers-report https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...
  - mciancia 3y ago
    Is that bad?
0xpgm 3y ago
I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?
- raincole 3y ago
  I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees. It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees. Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
  - michael-online 3y ago
    I agree, I'm in awe of SideFX and have a lot of respect. They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.
- tavavex 3y ago
  I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have that "infinite abundance" mindset - their initiatives in game development, hardware and VR are probably subsidized by Steam many times over.
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.
neilv 3y ago
Thread from yesterday on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569
2-718-281-828 3y ago
> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. _total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
- IX-103 3y ago
  Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in. *By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
- summerlight 3y ago
  If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.
  - andromeduck 3y ago
    I feel like the mistake is not having more local zones of total internal transparency but idk what my org is even thinking nowadays.
poisonborz 3y ago
Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.
- sparrowInHand 3y ago
  This is because, states at some size become immoral power machines deeply distrusting one another.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - JeffSnazz 3y ago
    This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      States are rational actors though
      - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        You're confusing "rational" with "competitive", which is neoliberal sleight of mind. There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.
        edgyquant 3y ago
        Your politics are bleeding through here and it’s clearly fogging your mind of reality. I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations and you’re strawmanning about “neoliberalism” and bringing up climate change. Do better, be less emotional. If you can’t do that you have no business making statements about nations and their relations with one another which are rational.
nicoburns 3y ago
This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies
- foofie 3y ago
  > This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies. It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
  - andromeduck 3y ago
    just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Market sorting it out: "Lots of Employees, Inc licenses our key technology from [and pays large royalties to] Just One Employee, Limited."
raxxorraxor 3y ago
I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.
yard2010 3y ago
Man I wish I could be infected with this disease
altaltson 3y ago
I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012. Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad. The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- flakiness 3y ago
  You don't remember it correctly, or there is a typo. All manager firing happened at 2001 not 2011. And it was not PMs but people managers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by zamfi 3y ago

brcmthrowaway 3y ago

So the real answer is to join the next Google.. :) OpenAI?

nequo 3y ago
What is the company culture of OpenAI like? How does it compare to early Google?
- ulfw 3y ago
  I didn't see Google's board fire it's CEO and then he gets reinstated and basically fires the board. Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.
  - CSSer 3y ago
    To be fair one could argue that was still in vogue at the time…
    - CSSer 3y ago
      To clarify, this was a sarcastic remark. I wasn't trying to actually imply that it was okay just because everyone else was doing it. I suppose that little /s really can do a lot of work.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    That we know of, at least.
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....
  - tavavex 3y ago
    > providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.
    - leereeves 3y ago
      > In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up. > Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.” > Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said. https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-pay-ai-training-data/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_7c5d364a-988f-4fa9-9717-ddbe9df8d8b5_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi_fallback_cral-top2-2 https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...
    - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
      I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI. Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it. OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.
choppaface 3y ago
Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-special-pool-of-stock-comp-to-keep-top-ai-researchers-report https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...
- mciancia 3y ago
  Is that bad?

0xpgm 3y ago

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?

raincole 3y ago
I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees. It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees. Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
- michael-online 3y ago
  I agree, I'm in awe of SideFX and have a lot of respect. They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.
tavavex 3y ago
I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have that "infinite abundance" mindset - their initiatives in game development, hardware and VR are probably subsidized by Steam many times over.
- poisonborz 3y ago
  I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

neilv 3y ago

Thread from yesterday on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569

2-718-281-828 3y ago

> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. _total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.

IX-103 3y ago
Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in. *By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
summerlight 3y ago
If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  I feel like the mistake is not having more local zones of total internal transparency but idk what my org is even thinking nowadays.

poisonborz 3y ago

Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.

sparrowInHand 3y ago
This is because, states at some size become immoral power machines deeply distrusting one another.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JeffSnazz 3y ago
  This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    States are rational actors though
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      You're confusing "rational" with "competitive", which is neoliberal sleight of mind. There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Your politics are bleeding through here and it’s clearly fogging your mind of reality. I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations and you’re strawmanning about “neoliberalism” and bringing up climate change. Do better, be less emotional. If you can’t do that you have no business making statements about nations and their relations with one another which are rational.

nicoburns 3y ago

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies

foofie 3y ago
> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies. It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Market sorting it out: "Lots of Employees, Inc licenses our key technology from [and pays large royalties to] Just One Employee, Limited."

raxxorraxor 3y ago

I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.

yard2010 3y ago

Man I wish I could be infected with this disease

altaltson 3y ago

I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012. Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad. The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flakiness 3y ago
You don't remember it correctly, or there is a typo. All manager firing happened at 2001 not 2011. And it was not PMs but people managers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]