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So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treat
by dash2 3y ago
So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground."
Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.
- xyst 3y agoI see you went to the b-school that taught the “cOnJoInEd tRiAnGlEs oF sUcCeSs!1!1”
- knorker 3y ago> I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so. There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).
- themaninthedark 3y agoSee also the Boeing and MD merger. Also GE.
- Aeolun 3y agoIt seems like things were fine for the engineers when they ran things? What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?
- pgeorgi 3y agoGoogle was most successful when it was "like a giant grad-school". Its downward trajectory coincides with it being run by McKinsey alums.
- dash2 3y agoMaybe, but here's an alternative interpretation. Google discovered a money spigot. At first the money spigot funded lots of smart people having fun. (But not making any more money.) Then, as tends to happen, the money spigot attracted parasites. Now the spigot is, if not running dry, at least not growing. Times get tough. Management wants to focus. And so everything is less fun than it was. And the playground culture, which was irrelevant when the spigot was gushing, is an impediment to change. I think it's fair to say that Google's leadership is also not up to the job. But even if Satya Nadella were in charge, he'd still have to deal with the "grad school playground" aspect, which has as many negatives as positives from the vulgar point of view of making money. More generally, I want to argue that the common HN meme, "management and politics ruins everything from the point of view of us heroic engineers", is self-serving and naive. Management and politics are how companies run. If you don't want to do that job, fine; if you want to grumble about its pathologies, fine and you'll often be right; but don't kid yourself that it can be avoided.
- lordswork 3y agoIMO Google DeepMind is like this today, for better and worse.