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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

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
    Are there any good examples of this?
- quatrefoil 3y ago
  I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes... I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    > A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
    - dzdt 3y ago
      Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
      - ghaff 3y ago
        No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy. I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
      - rlanday 3y ago
        Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other. (check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)
buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
But couldn't the founders put a competent CEO in the chair and still pursue their passion projects on the side?
- geodel 3y ago
  Well, if they could've they would've. Also in unlikely case they could've different thinking about competence than yours.
  - buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
    > Well, if they could've they would've Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is
- quatrefoil 3y ago
  Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot. And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to. Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B. It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan. I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.

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
  Are there any good examples of this?
quatrefoil 3y ago
I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes... I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
  - dzdt 3y ago
    Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy. I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
    - rlanday 3y ago
      Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other. (check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)

buzzerbetrayed 3y ago

But couldn't the founders put a competent CEO in the chair and still pursue their passion projects on the side?

geodel 3y ago
Well, if they could've they would've. Also in unlikely case they could've different thinking about competence than yours.
- buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
  > Well, if they could've they would've Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is
quatrefoil 3y ago
Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot. And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to. Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B. It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan. I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.