6 ms·

Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.

by andrewstuart 3y ago

vondur 3y ago
Google is still making money every quarter. Doubt they will get rid of him.
- yreg 3y ago
  They are going to be left behind once enough capable people leave.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Public markets are not known for combining ten-year-long outlooks with deep domain knowledge. In fact that's the two things they're best known for lacking! (P.S. They've already been left behind by whatever Kagi is doing to filter out LLM garbage.)
    - alwa 3y ago
      +1 to your observation about Kagi’s filtering. Whatever they’re doing sure seems to be working, and cumulatively with the rest of their small, quietly user-centric decisions over the past year or two, has really made them feel like an oasis relative to the sharp and quick deterioration that’s gone on over in Mountain View’s product.
- DanHulton 3y ago
  They're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinking decisions ever did."
  - blindriver 3y ago
    Except that revenues have been growing for years under him and the stock price has skyrocketed. I personally think he's a terrible CEO but it's impossible to argue to anyone that cares that he should be removed until at least revenue or the stock price drops.
    - pseudosavant 3y ago
      That description perfectly fits another massive tech company CEO: Steve Balmer. Revenue tripled under him. But Microsoft's mindshare, brand image, influence, etc. all went down.
      - kccqzy 3y ago
        So is it appropriate to predict that Pichai will end his tenure as CEO of Google just like Balmer did, which was when he voluntarily quit ("retirement")?
        pseudosavant 3y ago
        The stock price will be plenty high, but Google will never have been less relevant.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Probably. The question is less when he retires/quit and more about how he affected the company during his final days (and of course his legacy). Unity is a great anti-example of this: The former CEO IPO'd, made big money for Unity, and on the way out arguably burned the longterm status of the company while he fell with his golden parachute. That's a lot of the problem. There's no teeth in it for modern day C-class execs. The only difference when they leave is whether they leave a billionaire or a hundred-million aire.
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      stock price is flimsy and on that revenue growth, what are the margins? If they are static, he's just doing more of the same.
dekhn 3y ago
who would replace him? I don't think larry has many choices
- Nevermark 3y ago
  Who isn’t going to be available to him? If he can’t find someone better, it’s only because finding that person would be a full time job for him, for an indefinite period. With the risk of a repeat. Which may not be an acceptable price to him.
quatrefoil 3y ago
Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Google was one tenth the size and was near-universally loved, the model of having frank fireside conversations with execs was already stretched thin. They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.
- curt15 3y ago
  Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel. Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist. Now add 149,999 nodes.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.
    - shostack 3y ago
golergka 3y ago
People were worried that Google would become the best IBM. Now I think it will become the next Boeing.
blindriver 3y ago
The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about. The only thing.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    That’s very true. However in this specific case, the OP is correct for anyone with decision making power at Google
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded. On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second week of negotiating class: Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down. <Yawn.>
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded. Sure, but these are humans with no stake in the company. They are not investing in Google because they believe in their mission nor do they even care if Google crashes in 5 years. They believe it's a way to quickly grow their portfolio, and will change as the market does. This isn't to say they aren't human, just that they are at best more invested in other things or at worst are greedy and selfish. >Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down I don't exactly feel better knowing it's just a facade towards the above spectrum.
sanderjd 3y ago
I have myself found out very confusing that nobody ever seems to suggest that maybe Pichai isn't steering this ship very well...
- tdeck 3y ago
  People have been saying that for years. I left in 2020 and some people were saying that. Having almost no compelling new products and shutting down multiple high profile flops while dismantling the internal culture that many people appreciated is pretty hard to miss.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I meant "nobody influential". Employees (current and previous) and users of products, sure. But you never hear this from bankers or business pundits. I wasn't tuned in enough back then to say whether there was a similar phenomenon with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.
zyncronet 3y ago
Lol all that matters is how much money is being made, they don't really give a shit about wrecking developer trust as long as google remains the money printing behemoth it is.

Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.

vondur 3y ago

Google is still making money every quarter. Doubt they will get rid of him.

yreg 3y ago
They are going to be left behind once enough capable people leave.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Public markets are not known for combining ten-year-long outlooks with deep domain knowledge. In fact that's the two things they're best known for lacking! (P.S. They've already been left behind by whatever Kagi is doing to filter out LLM garbage.)
  - alwa 3y ago
    +1 to your observation about Kagi’s filtering. Whatever they’re doing sure seems to be working, and cumulatively with the rest of their small, quietly user-centric decisions over the past year or two, has really made them feel like an oasis relative to the sharp and quick deterioration that’s gone on over in Mountain View’s product.
DanHulton 3y ago
They're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinking decisions ever did."
- blindriver 3y ago
  Except that revenues have been growing for years under him and the stock price has skyrocketed. I personally think he's a terrible CEO but it's impossible to argue to anyone that cares that he should be removed until at least revenue or the stock price drops.
  - pseudosavant 3y ago
    That description perfectly fits another massive tech company CEO: Steve Balmer. Revenue tripled under him. But Microsoft's mindshare, brand image, influence, etc. all went down.
    - kccqzy 3y ago
      So is it appropriate to predict that Pichai will end his tenure as CEO of Google just like Balmer did, which was when he voluntarily quit ("retirement")?
      - pseudosavant 3y ago
        The stock price will be plenty high, but Google will never have been less relevant.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Probably. The question is less when he retires/quit and more about how he affected the company during his final days (and of course his legacy). Unity is a great anti-example of this: The former CEO IPO'd, made big money for Unity, and on the way out arguably burned the longterm status of the company while he fell with his golden parachute. That's a lot of the problem. There's no teeth in it for modern day C-class execs. The only difference when they leave is whether they leave a billionaire or a hundred-million aire.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    stock price is flimsy and on that revenue growth, what are the margins? If they are static, he's just doing more of the same.

dekhn 3y ago

who would replace him? I don't think larry has many choices

Nevermark 3y ago
Who isn’t going to be available to him? If he can’t find someone better, it’s only because finding that person would be a full time job for him, for an indefinite period. With the risk of a repeat. Which may not be an acceptable price to him.

quatrefoil 3y ago

Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Google was one tenth the size and was near-universally loved, the model of having frank fireside conversations with execs was already stretched thin. They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.

curt15 3y ago
Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.
- 23B1 3y ago
  Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel. Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist. Now add 149,999 nodes.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.
  - shostack 3y ago

golergka 3y ago

People were worried that Google would become the best IBM. Now I think it will become the next Boeing.

blindriver 3y ago

The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about. The only thing.

wolverine876 3y ago
That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  That’s very true. However in this specific case, the OP is correct for anyone with decision making power at Google
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded. On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second week of negotiating class: Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down. <Yawn.>
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded. Sure, but these are humans with no stake in the company. They are not investing in Google because they believe in their mission nor do they even care if Google crashes in 5 years. They believe it's a way to quickly grow their portfolio, and will change as the market does. This isn't to say they aren't human, just that they are at best more invested in other things or at worst are greedy and selfish. >Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down I don't exactly feel better knowing it's just a facade towards the above spectrum.

sanderjd 3y ago

I have myself found out very confusing that nobody ever seems to suggest that maybe Pichai isn't steering this ship very well...

tdeck 3y ago
People have been saying that for years. I left in 2020 and some people were saying that. Having almost no compelling new products and shutting down multiple high profile flops while dismantling the internal culture that many people appreciated is pretty hard to miss.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I meant "nobody influential". Employees (current and previous) and users of products, sure. But you never hear this from bankers or business pundits. I wasn't tuned in enough back then to say whether there was a similar phenomenon with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.

zyncronet 3y ago

Lol all that matters is how much money is being made, they don't really give a shit about wrecking developer trust as long as google remains the money printing behemoth it is.