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That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies. I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being. I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-us-jet-packs-they-promised-the-bosses-profit.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...

fidotron 3y ago
I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result). There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often. Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.
- vharish 3y ago
  The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels. It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat. What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      So basically Microsoft under Ballmer?
      - dralley 3y ago
        As per the famous "engineering org chart" comic
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      They fixed the VPs but they're way too busy to appeal to, even when they agree with you and everyone was told as much. And now you have extremes of rest-and-vest and "if I get the Visibility(tm) for this, maybe I'll get one more promo..." behavior from the L7s and lower.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  > Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone. Except you don't have to be an asshole to be that person, just in charge.
MrPatan 3y ago
The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable. A subset of people around here don't think that way. Why? I have my own opinion, not very flattering.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable. By the same logic, our biology must think cancer is pretty valuable because of how many resources it dedicates to feeding cancerous cells. Wealth and value are not correlated.
- azemetre 3y ago
  Care to share your opinion? I’m curious.
- cogman10 3y ago
  I honestly don't follow your line of thinking. How is the market saying that the richest man is pretty valuable? Because the richest man owns a significant number of shares in a company the market deems as valuable?
- blihp 3y ago
  When you really analyze at how many/most of the richest people in the world got so rich, they tended to extract (i.e. more parasitic) much of the value rather than create (i.e. more symbiotic) it. They have also often done so at the direct expense of others simply so they could have more... when they already had much more than they could ever use. Our economic system allows for this, but to praise these folks for much of what they did leaves a bad taste.
ponderings 3y ago
What should one do with power once one has it? After immaturity wears thin, what should one become? The most simple answers seem to make an effort to hold onto power, expansion of power seems a method but I think popularity might be a greater preservant which in turn depends on what one chooses to become. Gluttony, specially on it's own, is pretty useless to everyone else. You could convert popularity into power, it isn't a net gain necessarily. I suppose the todo table could have many columns. What are the great unsolved mysteries or challenges? How useful are they to humanity? How hard are they? What does it cost? How does one sort the rows? Say each human is assigned a column with the value of the todo item. Most fields would be empty. We would need a column with virtual min-max values. Then, while expanding the data set, you dump it onto the internet, sit back and eat popcorn for a while?
Multicomp 3y ago
> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there. Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year. Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth. Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  Don't think the Bell Labs people were pulling Google tier TC.
  - nonameiguess 3y ago
    This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or DARPA from that. Moonshot basic research like that may or may not make money. Your fundamental motivating force has to be doing cool shit, not getting rich. If you want something like Google X to work, the culture has to be such that no one is going to jump ship when Netflix offers to double your cash compensation. How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer. The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains. And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe. The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running. All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  How do we break ads for Google? More generally, what do we do to make ads disappear or weakened? I guess that's the only way current Google would want to innovate more.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I don't really care if Google innovates. The good thing that is coming out of these layoffs and recent departures is that talent locked up in Google will scatter out into other places, instead of being locked up inside. In the long run it will be good for the tech industry.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    You can’t break ads without breaking Google. It’s like an Oil Rich Nation. Pumping oil is the only thing they know. They’ll build shiny cities, crazy buildings, and fund moonshots. But nothing else will compare to the profits of oil/ads, so nothing else can possibly matter. The only big oil economy that isn’t totally dependent on their energy industry is the US, and only because we had other natural resources that allowed us to diversify early. To divest Google from ads they need another source of infinite cash. If you can discover that, it’s way more valuable to you on its own instead of within Google. Maybe they can find a few thousand smaller side businesses to supplement revenue, but they’ll always be individually disposable (as we see now) and subject to cancellation.
theptip 3y ago
If the only X moonshot that lands is Waymo, I think that still counts as having a transformative impact. But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized. I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?
hyperthesis 3y ago
Jobs-as-coach, guiding by valuing what you value but more so, by its contribution to a valued goal. https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html Elon does the same externally ("visionary") - and I expect internally.
kbenson 3y ago
Having someone with a strong vision to rally around and attract others with similar views probably works wonders in itself. This could be someone powerful at a large company attracting like minded employees, or a small company whose founder and mission mission attracts specific hires, which explains to a degree some of the performance of small companies (or lack of performance of large ones if you see it that way). Maybe Jobs' strength was that he had strong visions in multiple areas, and was able to have a few different stacks of people really in line with each and keep them moving separately?

fidotron 3y ago

I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result). There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often. Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.

vharish 3y ago
The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.
- fidotron 3y ago
  Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels. It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat. What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    So basically Microsoft under Ballmer?
    - dralley 3y ago
      As per the famous "engineering org chart" comic
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    They fixed the VPs but they're way too busy to appeal to, even when they agree with you and everyone was told as much. And now you have extremes of rest-and-vest and "if I get the Visibility(tm) for this, maybe I'll get one more promo..." behavior from the L7s and lower.
psunavy03 3y ago
> Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone. Except you don't have to be an asshole to be that person, just in charge.

MrPatan 3y ago

The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable. A subset of people around here don't think that way. Why? I have my own opinion, not very flattering.

coldpie 3y ago
> The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable. By the same logic, our biology must think cancer is pretty valuable because of how many resources it dedicates to feeding cancerous cells. Wealth and value are not correlated.
azemetre 3y ago
Care to share your opinion? I’m curious.
cogman10 3y ago
I honestly don't follow your line of thinking. How is the market saying that the richest man is pretty valuable? Because the richest man owns a significant number of shares in a company the market deems as valuable?
blihp 3y ago
When you really analyze at how many/most of the richest people in the world got so rich, they tended to extract (i.e. more parasitic) much of the value rather than create (i.e. more symbiotic) it. They have also often done so at the direct expense of others simply so they could have more... when they already had much more than they could ever use. Our economic system allows for this, but to praise these folks for much of what they did leaves a bad taste.

ponderings 3y ago

What should one do with power once one has it? After immaturity wears thin, what should one become? The most simple answers seem to make an effort to hold onto power, expansion of power seems a method but I think popularity might be a greater preservant which in turn depends on what one chooses to become. Gluttony, specially on it's own, is pretty useless to everyone else. You could convert popularity into power, it isn't a net gain necessarily. I suppose the todo table could have many columns. What are the great unsolved mysteries or challenges? How useful are they to humanity? How hard are they? What does it cost? How does one sort the rows? Say each human is assigned a column with the value of the todo item. Most fields would be empty. We would need a column with virtual min-max values. Then, while expanding the data set, you dump it onto the internet, sit back and eat popcorn for a while?

Multicomp 3y ago

> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there. Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year. Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth. Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.

sneed_chucker 3y ago
Don't think the Bell Labs people were pulling Google tier TC.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or DARPA from that. Moonshot basic research like that may or may not make money. Your fundamental motivating force has to be doing cool shit, not getting rich. If you want something like Google X to work, the culture has to be such that no one is going to jump ship when Netflix offers to double your cash compensation. How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer. The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains. And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe. The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running. All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.

behnamoh 3y ago
How do we break ads for Google? More generally, what do we do to make ads disappear or weakened? I guess that's the only way current Google would want to innovate more.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I don't really care if Google innovates. The good thing that is coming out of these layoffs and recent departures is that talent locked up in Google will scatter out into other places, instead of being locked up inside. In the long run it will be good for the tech industry.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  You can’t break ads without breaking Google. It’s like an Oil Rich Nation. Pumping oil is the only thing they know. They’ll build shiny cities, crazy buildings, and fund moonshots. But nothing else will compare to the profits of oil/ads, so nothing else can possibly matter. The only big oil economy that isn’t totally dependent on their energy industry is the US, and only because we had other natural resources that allowed us to diversify early. To divest Google from ads they need another source of infinite cash. If you can discover that, it’s way more valuable to you on its own instead of within Google. Maybe they can find a few thousand smaller side businesses to supplement revenue, but they’ll always be individually disposable (as we see now) and subject to cancellation.

theptip 3y ago

If the only X moonshot that lands is Waymo, I think that still counts as having a transformative impact. But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized. I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?

hyperthesis 3y ago

Jobs-as-coach, guiding by valuing what you value but more so, by its contribution to a valued goal. https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html Elon does the same externally ("visionary") - and I expect internally.

kbenson 3y ago

Having someone with a strong vision to rally around and attract others with similar views probably works wonders in itself. This could be someone powerful at a large company attracting like minded employees, or a small company whose founder and mission mission attracts specific hires, which explains to a degree some of the performance of small companies (or lack of performance of large ones if you see it that way). Maybe Jobs' strength was that he had strong visions in multiple areas, and was able to have a few different stacks of people really in line with each and keep them moving separately?