7 ms·

Google has no visionary leaders and a pervasive sense of nihilism

133 points by vhiremath4 3y ago

holoduke 3y ago
Its taken over by mba types of people and people from elite backgrounds. The image of leading engineers is gone.
- exmadscientist 3y ago
  It's interesting to me that everyone talks so much about the recent layoffs as the problem. They've been awful, don't get me wrong, but they shouldn't have destroyed the company like this. (I've been on the outside looking in so I have a slightly different perspective on the last 10+ years of GOOG compared to many people.) No, I think you're right in talking more about the "professional managers". The only way for a company to break this fast is if it was already hollow. Don't blame the (still awful) layoffs. Blame the rotten management layers that led up to... everything.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    It's the straw that broke the camel's back, at least for all the lamenting of Google here on HN lately.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Maybe because that way of working doesn't actually work for a company of Google's size.
kyrra 3y ago
This is just a screenshot of this LinkedIn Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-google-does-not-have-one-single-activity-7153269568893775872-9xzp/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-googl...
- muglug 3y ago
  This should be the submission link. Love when people post screenshots without attribution.
- angarg12 3y ago
  A tweet with screenshots of a LinkedIn post. Not HN finest moment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 3y ago
  That person… they decry management yet their LinkedIn bio says “I am the technical lead / manager for metrics…” Some self-awareness is lacking.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Even so, it's just one person's opinion with no evidence. Can't we do better?
- greenyoda 3y ago
  Thanks, looks like it has now been fixed to point to the original source.
d_burfoot 3y ago
What is particularly puzzling to me about the decline of Google is that the founders are still alive and active. It's not strange to me to hear that IBM is in decline: it's just too old, the founders are long-dead, etc. Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built?
- Solvency 3y ago
  Imagine you're incredibly wealthy. You have access to all the finest things in the entire world. You have access to the most elite, exclusive, desirable places and people in the world. Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. He seems very drawn to a crazy lifestyle.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Musk has said he has a goal of going to Mars and getting humanity off fossil fuels. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but he has a mission. Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
NikolaNovak 3y ago
I guess I'm at a point in my life where "people go home on time and nobody wants to work entire weekend just for funsies!! :-<" is no longer as scary portent of doom as it may have been intended by the author. Other note - I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders". Google is a massive organization. The only thing that's likely true of majority of the disparate, heterogeneous, wildy different teams, is that they're unlikely to feel like a 5 person early-stage startup. At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. All of which is not everybody's cup of tea granted. But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  I assume people who have been there for a few years have seen Google in its successful "no longer a startup" phase and can reasonably compare it to the current iteration.
  - neilk 3y ago
    To be clear, I think you can and should avoid a “pervasive sense of nihilism” at any organization. My quibble is with the people who think somehow Google should overcome this by finding their inner Googliness or tapping into founder magic. The solutions exist but they are hard work. They are probably more about abandoning illusions like that. (The example of Steve Jobs might suggest that founders might have some magic after all. Maybe in this one way: he was a brutal editor and simplifier, and he was a good talent spotter. So if he had any founder magic it was _focus_, not some “spark” of indulging dreamy creativity.)
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      Focus is a pretty vague term. It feels like Jobs had a talent for recognizing and promoting good product ideas and for promoting talented people to management positions. The technical leadership hierarchy at Apple also never felt extremely deep, whereas at today’s Google nobody seems to know who makes product decisions, and there’s very little unified technical direction. (Or rather, this is what I’ve heard from multiple current and former Google folks.)
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The whole "let engineers do whatever idea" seems like it hasn't been very true for a long while. Yet there's also no vision from above, no hooks to engage folks well. There's been a lot of poo pooing the letting engineers go free idea, but the follow up questions of whether there's been any support, any servant leadership... is the company supporting free ideas, or is it disinterested & just letting chaos & churn happen? That's was a question. How do you both provide support & coalesceing, while also not becoming a command organization? How do you have upper levels of management that don't turn into real politick political gamesmanship? I feel like there's such a beautiful idea of anarchy that we wanted to love, and there such obvious failure now, but I feel like we went to blame the idea at large (of engineering free orgs) without spending a moment to consider it's execution & or how the org adapted or failed to adapt to this notion. Do y'all think we'll see notable winners, who again live the more anarchistic or less top down engineering mentalities again? How much has the window closed; how much of a negative impact has the legacy of Google left?
thr0away 3y ago
For all the shady stuff Google is doing it might not be a bad thing that it is slowly dying! Seems like a natural progression of things!
renewiltord 3y ago
I mean. They had massive success. Today, they will tell you how hard they work aligning stakeholders on their Q1 goals to unify systems and clear tech debt. That's what winning gets you when you rest. You lose a step. But they still keep winning. I doubt there are more than a handful of engineers there who are any good in a sense of achieving objectives. Perhaps fewer than in 2005 even. But the product suite is great: search ads, contextual ads, targeted ads, own platform.
mugivarra69 3y ago
google dna is now cost cutting this is what u get when u have mackenzie peneterate u
emodendroket 3y ago
It was never a realistic expectation to become one the biggest companies on earth and remain "innovative" for years and years.
sidibe 3y ago
People are begging for Sundar to do something unexpected or ambitious, his job is just to manage things uncontroversially as possible for a company that with that size and influence. The Google doomerism here is strong (as it's been for 10+ years) but don't be surprised when they roll over the LLM competition this year. They still have enormous advantages that people are inclined to look over in their infra and just the number of people doing research no matter how much faster everyone thinks they should be.
neilk 3y ago
I feel like no one is willing to face up to the obvious truth: founders are not magical, they’re lucky. There isn’t a magic spark that gets lost. They get lucky with breakthrough products. They are incredibly smart annd hardworking but also lucky. Even under ideal circumstances of fostering and developing new ideas, there is no reason to believe their luck will continue, no matter how much talent there is under one roof. And this is not even considering the other structural barriers to innovation! The vast income streams create their own disincentives to disruption. Coordination is hard when you need to get buy-in of many departments. And despite best efforts, at scale, you end up promoting people good at politics or appearances. But even if all that were somehow eliminated, and true startup-style innovation was possible inside a giant company, the company must be careful to defend their existing winners. If Google ever started to enter a death spiral like Apple in the 90s, maybe they could pivot if they were lucky enough to get visionary leadership. But now? Why would they? I worked at Google briefly during the post-IPO period. It was a kind of wonderland, I won’t deny that. But all the really big hits were acquisitions or extensions of Google’s core competencies: search and ads. Everything else was unfocused and half-baked, and this especially applied to ideas that came directly from the founders. (Anyone remember Google Base?) If you really want Google to return to those days you’d have to tolerate a lot of crap that gets abandoned later. (Which is the other complaint that people have about Google. Too experimental or not experimental enough, make up your minds!)
- emodendroket 3y ago
  The Leo Tolstoy theory. But I think there's something to it too, considering how infrequently "genius executives'" reputation survives an attempt to revive a dying company.
  - neilk 3y ago
    How does this relate to Tolstoy? I don’t know much about him other than reputation as an author and moral reformer.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
CPLX 3y ago
The issue here is actually fairly straightforward. Google in its present form is illegal, or at minimum is the outcome of a series of illegal anti-competitive actions that for various reasons we decided not to prosecute for an entire generation. Antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason. Because markets don’t function without active competition. The monopoly power Google holds over many of its markets insulates it from market pressure and has removed the pressure of competition. The outcome of this is as predictable as summer. Google doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t have to. That’s not how it makes its money any more.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
zeroCalories 3y ago
Looking at the writings of people like Sussman, it seems to me that Google is in an identity crisis. Management is half clinging to the old culture of brilliant PhD engineers creating ambitious new products, but the reality is that this doesn't happen anymore. The reason Google is starting to feel like a conventional company is because Googlers are conventional employees. Many of their best and brightest have left to found their own companies, and they're left wondering why the remaining tier 2, or 3 engineers can't carry them anymore.
occidentalcoder 3y ago
Former Googler here. It's worse than this. Google's perf/promo culture ensured that good ideas from the bottom never made it anywhere and created a disincentive for anyone to collaborate across teams. It's not a fun place to work. The pay is good and you get free food and massages and that sort of thing, but it's such a toxic work environment that those things don't make up for it unless you really only care about the money.
greyface- 3y ago
At IPO, Google set a 20 year expiration date. August 19, 2024 is less than a year away. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-google-execs-pledged-to-stay-20-years-report-idUSN3026301220080131/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo... https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortune/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortu...
- n2d4 3y ago
  They didn't set an "expiration date", the founders and Eric Schmidt just made a pact to stay at Google for 20 years together. It's a promise that Eric Schmidt already broke in 2020 anyways, so putting any weight into this is nothing but wishful thinking
globallyunique 3y ago
Joined Google in 2014 - from the people on my team I heard the place was much more magical in the years before. When Sundar started I remember the first thing people were upset about was the handling of the holiday gift - Google changed it to a donation to charity instead and the communication of it upset. It wasn’t that we were not getting a holiday gift anymore (everyone acknowledged we had grown too large for that to last forever). It was that things were communicated as if it was not a cost saving measure and instead phrased that it was net generosity. IMO those kinds of things are what snowballed into Google becoming less of a magical place to work over time.
gandalfgeek 3y ago
Will hit 18 yrs as a SWE at Google in a couple of months. Some thoughts, all my subjective opinion of course: - break up the timeline into two eras: the triumvirate era TE(Page/Brin/Schmidt), and the Sundar era SE. Financials TE CFO Pichette's job was to point the money hose at places that needed the gusher, and do it quickly. He had almost no control on the tap. Every year at the last TGIF before Christmas he would come to Charlie's with his famed bright orange backpack full of cash to give Googlers their $1k holiday bonus in cold hard cash. It was grossed up to make sure it was 1k after taxes. The financial tone is set by the folks at the top. L+S never really cared about money. To them it was just fuel to do more cool stuff, not some number to chase. Schmidt was supposed to be the counterweight to this youthful optimism, but he was still a technologist at heart, and by background. They were certainly not profligate, but also viewed it as worthwhile to fly the entire company to Tahoe to ski for a weekend every year. SE CFO Ruth Porat, of Morgan Stanley pedigree, was a "real" CFO. A real message that Google needs to shed it's "playground for PhD hackers" image, start acting like a responsible adult. Please understand that I'm not judging either era as "good" or "bad", a trap I see many commenters (inside and outside Google) fall into. I'm not sure a public corporation with the size and scope of Google could viably continue and grow under TE attitudes. SE is in many ways an aggregate expression of the competitive, financial, legal and regulatory environment. But others have made the opposite case, go read them. Work environment The layoffs, two Januarys in a row, have made the mood somber. The hope that Jan 2023 was a one-time rare correction is utterly dashed. SVPs and up should excise the word "excited" from all their communications. BUT-- if you wiped history clean and looked at it objectively today, among its big tech peers, Google remains a great place to work. If you ask most Googlers they will tell you that whatever misgivings they harbor about leadership direction, their immediate team is good/great. That says something. Technology 15 yrs ago Google was a decade ahead in raw tech. It laid the hardware and software foundation for how to do planet-scale reliable distributed computing, and built giant apps like search and gmail on top of that. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable, Borg etc. But by now that knowledge has diffused. Seems like an eternity ago, but up until a year ago, the perception was Google had a similar lead in AI. Yes, the transformer architecture was invented at Google. But OpenAI ran away with it. Many insiders are worried that OpenAI is doing to Google what Apple did to PARC. Note that even after copying the GUI from PARC, it was miles ahead in raw innovation. Personal Mourn not a change in culture that you have little control over. Figure out what you want your career arc to be, chase that. Try to be useful in the meanwhile. Be kind to those you interact with. Keep your skills sharp and options open. I know this is easier said than done, but if at all possible, try to live a lifestyle not inflated by big tech comp. If you are a manager, do your best to mentor and inspire your reports. Sometimes you have to shield them, but also know when to explain hard truths. Don't coddle.
hintymad 3y ago
I think Google's situation is due to its promotion culture. As Hasting of Netflix said, culture is all about who gets rewarded and who punished. When so many people got promoted for so-called impact and complexity yet their project ultimately failed, many employees' mentality simply changed to chase short-term personal gain instead of what's right for the company.
- PikachuEXE 3y ago
  "Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger
foogazi 3y ago
> nobody works late anymore is this even the right flex? I can’t speak to the leadership part but is stuff not getting done in time and engineers need to work more hours?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thrw4w4y0 3y ago
This generally describes every software only company I’ve worked at for the last 8-10 years. Anyone can spin up an AWS app and so they do, and aim junior engineers at a vague “billion dollar market” waiting for those juniors to spin gold from the BS an empty eyed MBA emits. I am done with software “brands”. I took a job fixing cars for a little less pay (fortunately for me I grew up fixing cars and have an EE BSc, not a CS degree). I tinker at home on AI and LLM projects but will never work for a company focused on software development as their main business ever again. Such a joke and waste of human effort.

133 points by vhiremath4 3y ago

holoduke 3y ago

Its taken over by mba types of people and people from elite backgrounds. The image of leading engineers is gone.

exmadscientist 3y ago
It's interesting to me that everyone talks so much about the recent layoffs as the problem. They've been awful, don't get me wrong, but they shouldn't have destroyed the company like this. (I've been on the outside looking in so I have a slightly different perspective on the last 10+ years of GOOG compared to many people.) No, I think you're right in talking more about the "professional managers". The only way for a company to break this fast is if it was already hollow. Don't blame the (still awful) layoffs. Blame the rotten management layers that led up to... everything.
- rezonant 3y ago
  It's the straw that broke the camel's back, at least for all the lamenting of Google here on HN lately.
emodendroket 3y ago
Maybe because that way of working doesn't actually work for a company of Google's size.

kyrra 3y ago

This is just a screenshot of this LinkedIn Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-google-does-not-have-one-single-activity-7153269568893775872-9xzp/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-googl...

muglug 3y ago
This should be the submission link. Love when people post screenshots without attribution.
angarg12 3y ago
A tweet with screenshots of a LinkedIn post. Not HN finest moment.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 3y ago
That person… they decry management yet their LinkedIn bio says “I am the technical lead / manager for metrics…” Some self-awareness is lacking.
skybrian 3y ago
Even so, it's just one person's opinion with no evidence. Can't we do better?
greenyoda 3y ago
Thanks, looks like it has now been fixed to point to the original source.

d_burfoot 3y ago

What is particularly puzzling to me about the decline of Google is that the founders are still alive and active. It's not strange to me to hear that IBM is in decline: it's just too old, the founders are long-dead, etc. Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built?

Solvency 3y ago
Imagine you're incredibly wealthy. You have access to all the finest things in the entire world. You have access to the most elite, exclusive, desirable places and people in the world. Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. He seems very drawn to a crazy lifestyle.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Musk has said he has a goal of going to Mars and getting humanity off fossil fuels. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but he has a mission. Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago

NikolaNovak 3y ago

I guess I'm at a point in my life where "people go home on time and nobody wants to work entire weekend just for funsies!! :-<" is no longer as scary portent of doom as it may have been intended by the author. Other note - I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders". Google is a massive organization. The only thing that's likely true of majority of the disparate, heterogeneous, wildy different teams, is that they're unlikely to feel like a 5 person early-stage startup. At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. All of which is not everybody's cup of tea granted. But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
I assume people who have been there for a few years have seen Google in its successful "no longer a startup" phase and can reasonably compare it to the current iteration.
- neilk 3y ago
  To be clear, I think you can and should avoid a “pervasive sense of nihilism” at any organization. My quibble is with the people who think somehow Google should overcome this by finding their inner Googliness or tapping into founder magic. The solutions exist but they are hard work. They are probably more about abandoning illusions like that. (The example of Steve Jobs might suggest that founders might have some magic after all. Maybe in this one way: he was a brutal editor and simplifier, and he was a good talent spotter. So if he had any founder magic it was _focus_, not some “spark” of indulging dreamy creativity.)
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Focus is a pretty vague term. It feels like Jobs had a talent for recognizing and promoting good product ideas and for promoting talented people to management positions. The technical leadership hierarchy at Apple also never felt extremely deep, whereas at today’s Google nobody seems to know who makes product decisions, and there’s very little unified technical direction. (Or rather, this is what I’ve heard from multiple current and former Google folks.)

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The whole "let engineers do whatever idea" seems like it hasn't been very true for a long while. Yet there's also no vision from above, no hooks to engage folks well. There's been a lot of poo pooing the letting engineers go free idea, but the follow up questions of whether there's been any support, any servant leadership... is the company supporting free ideas, or is it disinterested & just letting chaos & churn happen? That's was a question. How do you both provide support & coalesceing, while also not becoming a command organization? How do you have upper levels of management that don't turn into real politick political gamesmanship? I feel like there's such a beautiful idea of anarchy that we wanted to love, and there such obvious failure now, but I feel like we went to blame the idea at large (of engineering free orgs) without spending a moment to consider it's execution & or how the org adapted or failed to adapt to this notion. Do y'all think we'll see notable winners, who again live the more anarchistic or less top down engineering mentalities again? How much has the window closed; how much of a negative impact has the legacy of Google left?

thr0away 3y ago

For all the shady stuff Google is doing it might not be a bad thing that it is slowly dying! Seems like a natural progression of things!

renewiltord 3y ago

I mean. They had massive success. Today, they will tell you how hard they work aligning stakeholders on their Q1 goals to unify systems and clear tech debt. That's what winning gets you when you rest. You lose a step. But they still keep winning. I doubt there are more than a handful of engineers there who are any good in a sense of achieving objectives. Perhaps fewer than in 2005 even. But the product suite is great: search ads, contextual ads, targeted ads, own platform.

mugivarra69 3y ago

google dna is now cost cutting this is what u get when u have mackenzie peneterate u

emodendroket 3y ago

It was never a realistic expectation to become one the biggest companies on earth and remain "innovative" for years and years.

sidibe 3y ago

People are begging for Sundar to do something unexpected or ambitious, his job is just to manage things uncontroversially as possible for a company that with that size and influence. The Google doomerism here is strong (as it's been for 10+ years) but don't be surprised when they roll over the LLM competition this year. They still have enormous advantages that people are inclined to look over in their infra and just the number of people doing research no matter how much faster everyone thinks they should be.

neilk 3y ago

I feel like no one is willing to face up to the obvious truth: founders are not magical, they’re lucky. There isn’t a magic spark that gets lost. They get lucky with breakthrough products. They are incredibly smart annd hardworking but also lucky. Even under ideal circumstances of fostering and developing new ideas, there is no reason to believe their luck will continue, no matter how much talent there is under one roof. And this is not even considering the other structural barriers to innovation! The vast income streams create their own disincentives to disruption. Coordination is hard when you need to get buy-in of many departments. And despite best efforts, at scale, you end up promoting people good at politics or appearances. But even if all that were somehow eliminated, and true startup-style innovation was possible inside a giant company, the company must be careful to defend their existing winners. If Google ever started to enter a death spiral like Apple in the 90s, maybe they could pivot if they were lucky enough to get visionary leadership. But now? Why would they? I worked at Google briefly during the post-IPO period. It was a kind of wonderland, I won’t deny that. But all the really big hits were acquisitions or extensions of Google’s core competencies: search and ads. Everything else was unfocused and half-baked, and this especially applied to ideas that came directly from the founders. (Anyone remember Google Base?) If you really want Google to return to those days you’d have to tolerate a lot of crap that gets abandoned later. (Which is the other complaint that people have about Google. Too experimental or not experimental enough, make up your minds!)

emodendroket 3y ago
The Leo Tolstoy theory. But I think there's something to it too, considering how infrequently "genius executives'" reputation survives an attempt to revive a dying company.
- neilk 3y ago
  How does this relate to Tolstoy? I don’t know much about him other than reputation as an author and moral reformer.
  - emodendroket 3y ago

CPLX 3y ago

The issue here is actually fairly straightforward. Google in its present form is illegal, or at minimum is the outcome of a series of illegal anti-competitive actions that for various reasons we decided not to prosecute for an entire generation. Antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason. Because markets don’t function without active competition. The monopoly power Google holds over many of its markets insulates it from market pressure and has removed the pressure of competition. The outcome of this is as predictable as summer. Google doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t have to. That’s not how it makes its money any more.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

zeroCalories 3y ago

Looking at the writings of people like Sussman, it seems to me that Google is in an identity crisis. Management is half clinging to the old culture of brilliant PhD engineers creating ambitious new products, but the reality is that this doesn't happen anymore. The reason Google is starting to feel like a conventional company is because Googlers are conventional employees. Many of their best and brightest have left to found their own companies, and they're left wondering why the remaining tier 2, or 3 engineers can't carry them anymore.

occidentalcoder 3y ago

Former Googler here. It's worse than this. Google's perf/promo culture ensured that good ideas from the bottom never made it anywhere and created a disincentive for anyone to collaborate across teams. It's not a fun place to work. The pay is good and you get free food and massages and that sort of thing, but it's such a toxic work environment that those things don't make up for it unless you really only care about the money.

greyface- 3y ago

At IPO, Google set a 20 year expiration date. August 19, 2024 is less than a year away. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-google-execs-pledged-to-stay-20-years-report-idUSN3026301220080131/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo... https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortune/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortu...

n2d4 3y ago
They didn't set an "expiration date", the founders and Eric Schmidt just made a pact to stay at Google for 20 years together. It's a promise that Eric Schmidt already broke in 2020 anyways, so putting any weight into this is nothing but wishful thinking

globallyunique 3y ago

Joined Google in 2014 - from the people on my team I heard the place was much more magical in the years before. When Sundar started I remember the first thing people were upset about was the handling of the holiday gift - Google changed it to a donation to charity instead and the communication of it upset. It wasn’t that we were not getting a holiday gift anymore (everyone acknowledged we had grown too large for that to last forever). It was that things were communicated as if it was not a cost saving measure and instead phrased that it was net generosity. IMO those kinds of things are what snowballed into Google becoming less of a magical place to work over time.

gandalfgeek 3y ago

Will hit 18 yrs as a SWE at Google in a couple of months. Some thoughts, all my subjective opinion of course: - break up the timeline into two eras: the triumvirate era TE(Page/Brin/Schmidt), and the Sundar era SE. Financials TE CFO Pichette's job was to point the money hose at places that needed the gusher, and do it quickly. He had almost no control on the tap. Every year at the last TGIF before Christmas he would come to Charlie's with his famed bright orange backpack full of cash to give Googlers their $1k holiday bonus in cold hard cash. It was grossed up to make sure it was 1k after taxes. The financial tone is set by the folks at the top. L+S never really cared about money. To them it was just fuel to do more cool stuff, not some number to chase. Schmidt was supposed to be the counterweight to this youthful optimism, but he was still a technologist at heart, and by background. They were certainly not profligate, but also viewed it as worthwhile to fly the entire company to Tahoe to ski for a weekend every year. SE CFO Ruth Porat, of Morgan Stanley pedigree, was a "real" CFO. A real message that Google needs to shed it's "playground for PhD hackers" image, start acting like a responsible adult. Please understand that I'm not judging either era as "good" or "bad", a trap I see many commenters (inside and outside Google) fall into. I'm not sure a public corporation with the size and scope of Google could viably continue and grow under TE attitudes. SE is in many ways an aggregate expression of the competitive, financial, legal and regulatory environment. But others have made the opposite case, go read them. Work environment The layoffs, two Januarys in a row, have made the mood somber. The hope that Jan 2023 was a one-time rare correction is utterly dashed. SVPs and up should excise the word "excited" from all their communications. BUT-- if you wiped history clean and looked at it objectively today, among its big tech peers, Google remains a great place to work. If you ask most Googlers they will tell you that whatever misgivings they harbor about leadership direction, their immediate team is good/great. That says something. Technology 15 yrs ago Google was a decade ahead in raw tech. It laid the hardware and software foundation for how to do planet-scale reliable distributed computing, and built giant apps like search and gmail on top of that. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable, Borg etc. But by now that knowledge has diffused. Seems like an eternity ago, but up until a year ago, the perception was Google had a similar lead in AI. Yes, the transformer architecture was invented at Google. But OpenAI ran away with it. Many insiders are worried that OpenAI is doing to Google what Apple did to PARC. Note that even after copying the GUI from PARC, it was miles ahead in raw innovation. Personal Mourn not a change in culture that you have little control over. Figure out what you want your career arc to be, chase that. Try to be useful in the meanwhile. Be kind to those you interact with. Keep your skills sharp and options open. I know this is easier said than done, but if at all possible, try to live a lifestyle not inflated by big tech comp. If you are a manager, do your best to mentor and inspire your reports. Sometimes you have to shield them, but also know when to explain hard truths. Don't coddle.

hintymad 3y ago

I think Google's situation is due to its promotion culture. As Hasting of Netflix said, culture is all about who gets rewarded and who punished. When so many people got promoted for so-called impact and complexity yet their project ultimately failed, many employees' mentality simply changed to chase short-term personal gain instead of what's right for the company.

PikachuEXE 3y ago
"Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger

foogazi 3y ago

> nobody works late anymore is this even the right flex? I can’t speak to the leadership part but is stuff not getting done in time and engineers need to work more hours?

deleted 3y ago

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thrw4w4y0 3y ago

This generally describes every software only company I’ve worked at for the last 8-10 years. Anyone can spin up an AWS app and so they do, and aim junior engineers at a vague “billion dollar market” waiting for those juniors to spin gold from the BS an empty eyed MBA emits. I am done with software “brands”. I took a job fixing cars for a little less pay (fortunately for me I grew up fixing cars and have an EE BSc, not a CS degree). I tinker at home on AI and LLM projects but will never work for a company focused on software development as their main business ever again. Such a joke and waste of human effort.