12 ms·

If you ask me, one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a

by timr 13y ago

If you ask me, one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company. The way many (otherwise intelligent) people talk about it, you'd think it was a religion. What you're seeing here is not the shattering of a dream, but of an illusion -- Google hasn't been a scrappy, idealistic startup for many years. It's a fine company, but it's a big company -- a collection of tens of thousands of people, all motivated by different hopes and dreams. No institution of that size behaves consistently, let alone consistently benevolently. In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you.

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
You mean it isn't? http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/ http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/
- pantalaimon 13y ago
  > Facebook social plugin HERETICS
alaskamiller 13y ago
While eating my second dinner plate of something delicious on the campus I looked around and saw how many children and families were around. The company provides, so much, for you, for your family. You wouldn't to ever lose what you have now gotten used to, for yourself, for your family. So now you become a company man. What's good for the company must be good for you. What's good about knowing more people, how they think, how they behave, what they want, must be good for the company, which turn must be good for you, good for your family. It's just a series of intricate goodness being passed around from group to group, people to people. No one inherently is evil, but the system can end up be directed towards evil inevitably. Either way, it just was damn good pork chops with quinoa. We didn't get this kind of chow in the Marine Corps, and I would have killed for it.
- chii 13y ago
  tldr; the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
  - DerpDerpDerp 13y ago
    Good intentions and creature comforts.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    It's simpler than that -- bread and circuses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses Calling it Hell detracts from the pragmatism of bread and circuses -- we are quite happy to compromise logic, ethics, and even our own personal feelings. Or, more interestingly, artificially creating public approval through diversion, distraction, and the satisfaction of immediate and shallow desires.
  - Amadou 13y ago
    To add to the list of restatements: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair
- davidgay 13y ago
  From one of those googlers with children: I have to say I read a bit of the classic "people with children aren't like us" here - likely not intentional, but you may want to reread what you write more carefully for subtext.
  - alaskamiller 13y ago
    Not sure what you mean but to your point, you are not like us. In a fire I grab my laptop and get out. You have your family. We're very much different. And likewise are taxed differently.
- chrissnell 13y ago
  I don't know if you served or if you were just alluding to it but your last point got me thinking: In the Army, I lived the most barebones kind of lifestyle and did a job that often put my family through hell but was buoyed by the feeling that I was part of the most noble of professions. In this industry, I've provided incredible privilege, comfort, and stability for my family but have always felt that this industry principally serves those who are a part of it.
css771 13y ago
Well for me personally, it's been a long series of small stuff that convinced me that they were an engineering organization first and a for-profit company next. I remember when Android 2.3 was released and at one of the Google dev conferences, a Google engineer answering a question about why "X feature doesn't exist in stock Anroid" answered that Google thought that was too confusing for the lay user and that one could look to the custom ROM community for adding that feature later. It was something that no large company would ever do it seemed to me, That's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I read something of this nature about Google. I'm sure I could pull up others. But that's the one that comes to mind. But yeah, that was a more open Google undeniably. Before Larry Page took over. Maybe there were a few oases of ideality hiding the vast curtain of reality. But it gave them a soul and connected people to the company. But that's maybe gone now.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  What does all this say about Larry Page? He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research. From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness. Reminds me of his former girlfriend/date Marissa Mayer, who built a nursery next to her office while telling Yahoo employees they should no longer work from home.
  - swombat 13y ago
    Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.
    - ersii 13y ago
      I can't speak for the health care industry or medical research - but considering all the other places I've seen people "anonymise" data.. They probably store too much data, that can aid or completely de-anonymise the anonymised data.
enraged_camel 13y ago
>>In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you. I'd say that it is Google that is setting up false idols with bullshit mantras like "Do no evil."
r0h1n 13y ago
> one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company Interesting. Would you statement hold if I replace Google with Apple, and engineers with consumers?
- timr 13y ago
  Yes. Apple is also a company. Next question.
- Donwangugi 13y ago
  Imo. The difference is the control Steve had over the company when he was alive. At Google, despite how well run the company is, you really do not know the direction or vision for the company although everything _seems_ really cool. Where as at Apple, the idea is you were sacrificing in order to help Steve achieve _his_ vision.
  - alaskamiller 13y ago
    Been at Apple and at Google. Googlers annoy me endlessly because everyone knows the mission and everyone thinks they're on the same mission. Even if their job is indirectly related or even if what they're doing is potentially evil. They all believe they are changing the world. It's what they tell their aging hippie parents when they visit, it's what they brainwash the legions of school children that visit, it's what they insist to the political leaders when they visit. Every Googler thinks they're there to serve humanity and it's pompous. When I was at Apple the goal was helping the user. You made a better thing so someone can use it better. You made something that your mom could use. You tried harder so that a baby can pick it up and it just works. Most people didn't care about Steve. Hell, he walked around the cafeteria, grabbed his cookie, but no one really cares. Just yet another eccentric old dude walking around in a place full of eccentric old dudes in skirts and high heels. What I hated about Apple though was that we loved users so much it became a problem. We suffered from the battered-wives syndrome. Where we tolerated and accepted everything. It became to be a love-hate relationship where on one hand we appreciated users but on the other there was such a disdain for them as well. Every Apple person thinks they're different because they make things work in a world where things don't work because people are too stupid to make it work. It's equally as pompous as Google. Hell the whole of Silicon Valley is really pompous, geeks just do a really good job hiding it when the attention wasn't on this place.
philwelch 13y ago
I was never illusioned about Google in the first place. This is not disillusionment. I just never expected them to turn into Microsoft.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  All companies do when they reach a certain market size. I still remember the days when almost all geeks I knew would dream for a job at Microsoft.
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    This is a key point: they're not doing that so much for Google any more. I have friends at Google, they love it and have suggested I put in my CV. (No chance. I don't have a degree and my algorithmic insight is terrible.) But, ehh. An advertising agency with lovely working conditions and smart people to be around, and it's not like I wanted to see my kid anyway. OH WAIT.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Turning into Microsoft means saddling your users with shitty experiences and shitty products because you're focusing more on monopolizing them than on building something great for your users. Google has done this, but Apple and Amazon never did, despite whatever other evils they might have committed.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Users of Maps, iWork and Final Cut Pro might disagree.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        I never said Apple never shipped a bad product. Apple still tries to ship good products and falls short. Microsoft and Google neglect that because all they try to do is monopolize. That's why Google pulled their maps from iOS.
kamaal 13y ago
A lot of fast growing start ups make amazing places to work, because of the very virtue of what they are. They are small, have lots of money, there is no bureaucracy and there are no managers getting in their way of achieving great things. Microsoft has 95K+ employees and has by and large turned into IBM. Google has 45K+ employees and is rapidly transforming into the next Microsoft.
- objclxt 13y ago
  Of course, you could also say... > A lot of fast growing start ups are terrible places to work, because of the very virtue of what they are. The size of a company has a little to do with its culture. Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft all employ over 80,000 people, but have very different cultures. I have seen some start-ups which have awful cultures, with terrible morale problems. It is really not the size of / number of employees at a company that defines its culture, but the mindset of the people in charge.
giulivo 13y ago
I think maximizing profit is what corporations do by definition. I agree with the poster something is changed at Gogle after Larry Page took over though. Yet in the process of "making my opinion about a corp being evil or not" I enjoy measuring the amount and the quality of free software they release. For software corp, I think this is a good parameter. By this metric it is easy to understand that putting too much hopes into Google is wrong. They release a lot of code, but that code is usually only "a path" for the user to their core products (which they do not release). I encourage you rediscover those corps instead where people work hard to keep their "don't be evil" going, despite not marketing it that much. Let me add something, maybe I'm not good enough for Google, but I'm employed by Red Hat and I enjoy what we do at Red Hat. And I could name a lot of others, in this context, doing great things.
onetwofiveten 13y ago
It's not that people thought Google weren't a company, they thought Google was a company with a long term vision that valued reputation and quality. Google had/has a reputation for paying clever people to produce innovative products. We all want such products to exist, and a lot of us would like to work on making more of them (without necessarily having to join a start up). The fact that they managed to keep that reputation (what you call a religion) for so long means they genuinely valued it. Now it seems like Google is shifting to a more short term vision. They have begun leveraging their market power rather than relying on product quality to gain market share. In doing so they are starting to sacrifice their reputation. For big company this is an attractive approach over the short term. A reputation for high quality can be expensive to maintain, and products can become very long term risky investments. It's more profitable in the short term to create the illusion of quality while using tactics that hamper the competition or restrict consumer choices. However, that leads to stagnation and eventually the company becomes obsolete. You might see start ups as being idealistic, and Google's previous behaviour as being benevolent. However, start ups aren't charities and Google made a boat load of money. It's not really about morality. It's more that big companies have incentives to follow particular short term strategies that ultimately stifle innovation and prevent technological progress. A big company with long term vision forces its competitors to innovate to keep up and helps change the technological landscape in a way that start ups are not able to.
mathattack 13y ago
It's a very fine line between strong corporate cultures that encompass personal identities, and selfish cult-like behavior. If you look at the leading companies across many industries, one thing that jumps out is that the corporate identity is primary in the employees lives. Generally these companies also prefer molding employees straight out of school. This is true for P&G, Accenture, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Look at the leadership - most have been there their entire careers. I am not saying this is good or bad, but I am saying that it's an attribute of many leading companies. Full disclosure: I am not a Google employee, nor have I ever been.
BlackDeath3 13y ago
The Church of Google. Who wants to fund a documentary?

by timr 13y ago

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago

You mean it isn't? http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/ http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/

pantalaimon 13y ago
> Facebook social plugin HERETICS

alaskamiller 13y ago

While eating my second dinner plate of something delicious on the campus I looked around and saw how many children and families were around. The company provides, so much, for you, for your family. You wouldn't to ever lose what you have now gotten used to, for yourself, for your family. So now you become a company man. What's good for the company must be good for you. What's good about knowing more people, how they think, how they behave, what they want, must be good for the company, which turn must be good for you, good for your family. It's just a series of intricate goodness being passed around from group to group, people to people. No one inherently is evil, but the system can end up be directed towards evil inevitably. Either way, it just was damn good pork chops with quinoa. We didn't get this kind of chow in the Marine Corps, and I would have killed for it.

chii 13y ago
tldr; the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- DerpDerpDerp 13y ago
  Good intentions and creature comforts.
- ihsw 13y ago
  It's simpler than that -- bread and circuses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses Calling it Hell detracts from the pragmatism of bread and circuses -- we are quite happy to compromise logic, ethics, and even our own personal feelings. Or, more interestingly, artificially creating public approval through diversion, distraction, and the satisfaction of immediate and shallow desires.
- Amadou 13y ago
  To add to the list of restatements: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair
davidgay 13y ago
From one of those googlers with children: I have to say I read a bit of the classic "people with children aren't like us" here - likely not intentional, but you may want to reread what you write more carefully for subtext.
- alaskamiller 13y ago
  Not sure what you mean but to your point, you are not like us. In a fire I grab my laptop and get out. You have your family. We're very much different. And likewise are taxed differently.
chrissnell 13y ago
I don't know if you served or if you were just alluding to it but your last point got me thinking: In the Army, I lived the most barebones kind of lifestyle and did a job that often put my family through hell but was buoyed by the feeling that I was part of the most noble of professions. In this industry, I've provided incredible privilege, comfort, and stability for my family but have always felt that this industry principally serves those who are a part of it.

css771 13y ago

Well for me personally, it's been a long series of small stuff that convinced me that they were an engineering organization first and a for-profit company next. I remember when Android 2.3 was released and at one of the Google dev conferences, a Google engineer answering a question about why "X feature doesn't exist in stock Anroid" answered that Google thought that was too confusing for the lay user and that one could look to the custom ROM community for adding that feature later. It was something that no large company would ever do it seemed to me, That's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I read something of this nature about Google. I'm sure I could pull up others. But that's the one that comes to mind. But yeah, that was a more open Google undeniably. Before Larry Page took over. Maybe there were a few oases of ideality hiding the vast curtain of reality. But it gave them a soul and connected people to the company. But that's maybe gone now.

yapcguy 13y ago
What does all this say about Larry Page? He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research. From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness. Reminds me of his former girlfriend/date Marissa Mayer, who built a nursery next to her office while telling Yahoo employees they should no longer work from home.
- swombat 13y ago
  Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.
  - ersii 13y ago
    I can't speak for the health care industry or medical research - but considering all the other places I've seen people "anonymise" data.. They probably store too much data, that can aid or completely de-anonymise the anonymised data.

enraged_camel 13y ago

>>In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you. I'd say that it is Google that is setting up false idols with bullshit mantras like "Do no evil."

r0h1n 13y ago

> one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company Interesting. Would you statement hold if I replace Google with Apple, and engineers with consumers?

timr 13y ago
Yes. Apple is also a company. Next question.
Donwangugi 13y ago
Imo. The difference is the control Steve had over the company when he was alive. At Google, despite how well run the company is, you really do not know the direction or vision for the company although everything _seems_ really cool. Where as at Apple, the idea is you were sacrificing in order to help Steve achieve _his_ vision.
- alaskamiller 13y ago
  Been at Apple and at Google. Googlers annoy me endlessly because everyone knows the mission and everyone thinks they're on the same mission. Even if their job is indirectly related or even if what they're doing is potentially evil. They all believe they are changing the world. It's what they tell their aging hippie parents when they visit, it's what they brainwash the legions of school children that visit, it's what they insist to the political leaders when they visit. Every Googler thinks they're there to serve humanity and it's pompous. When I was at Apple the goal was helping the user. You made a better thing so someone can use it better. You made something that your mom could use. You tried harder so that a baby can pick it up and it just works. Most people didn't care about Steve. Hell, he walked around the cafeteria, grabbed his cookie, but no one really cares. Just yet another eccentric old dude walking around in a place full of eccentric old dudes in skirts and high heels. What I hated about Apple though was that we loved users so much it became a problem. We suffered from the battered-wives syndrome. Where we tolerated and accepted everything. It became to be a love-hate relationship where on one hand we appreciated users but on the other there was such a disdain for them as well. Every Apple person thinks they're different because they make things work in a world where things don't work because people are too stupid to make it work. It's equally as pompous as Google. Hell the whole of Silicon Valley is really pompous, geeks just do a really good job hiding it when the attention wasn't on this place.

philwelch 13y ago

I was never illusioned about Google in the first place. This is not disillusionment. I just never expected them to turn into Microsoft.

pjmlp 13y ago
All companies do when they reach a certain market size. I still remember the days when almost all geeks I knew would dream for a job at Microsoft.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  This is a key point: they're not doing that so much for Google any more. I have friends at Google, they love it and have suggested I put in my CV. (No chance. I don't have a degree and my algorithmic insight is terrible.) But, ehh. An advertising agency with lovely working conditions and smart people to be around, and it's not like I wanted to see my kid anyway. OH WAIT.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Turning into Microsoft means saddling your users with shitty experiences and shitty products because you're focusing more on monopolizing them than on building something great for your users. Google has done this, but Apple and Amazon never did, despite whatever other evils they might have committed.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Users of Maps, iWork and Final Cut Pro might disagree.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      I never said Apple never shipped a bad product. Apple still tries to ship good products and falls short. Microsoft and Google neglect that because all they try to do is monopolize. That's why Google pulled their maps from iOS.

kamaal 13y ago

A lot of fast growing start ups make amazing places to work, because of the very virtue of what they are. They are small, have lots of money, there is no bureaucracy and there are no managers getting in their way of achieving great things. Microsoft has 95K+ employees and has by and large turned into IBM. Google has 45K+ employees and is rapidly transforming into the next Microsoft.

objclxt 13y ago
Of course, you could also say... > A lot of fast growing start ups are terrible places to work, because of the very virtue of what they are. The size of a company has a little to do with its culture. Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft all employ over 80,000 people, but have very different cultures. I have seen some start-ups which have awful cultures, with terrible morale problems. It is really not the size of / number of employees at a company that defines its culture, but the mindset of the people in charge.

giulivo 13y ago

I think maximizing profit is what corporations do by definition. I agree with the poster something is changed at Gogle after Larry Page took over though. Yet in the process of "making my opinion about a corp being evil or not" I enjoy measuring the amount and the quality of free software they release. For software corp, I think this is a good parameter. By this metric it is easy to understand that putting too much hopes into Google is wrong. They release a lot of code, but that code is usually only "a path" for the user to their core products (which they do not release). I encourage you rediscover those corps instead where people work hard to keep their "don't be evil" going, despite not marketing it that much. Let me add something, maybe I'm not good enough for Google, but I'm employed by Red Hat and I enjoy what we do at Red Hat. And I could name a lot of others, in this context, doing great things.

onetwofiveten 13y ago

It's not that people thought Google weren't a company, they thought Google was a company with a long term vision that valued reputation and quality. Google had/has a reputation for paying clever people to produce innovative products. We all want such products to exist, and a lot of us would like to work on making more of them (without necessarily having to join a start up). The fact that they managed to keep that reputation (what you call a religion) for so long means they genuinely valued it. Now it seems like Google is shifting to a more short term vision. They have begun leveraging their market power rather than relying on product quality to gain market share. In doing so they are starting to sacrifice their reputation. For big company this is an attractive approach over the short term. A reputation for high quality can be expensive to maintain, and products can become very long term risky investments. It's more profitable in the short term to create the illusion of quality while using tactics that hamper the competition or restrict consumer choices. However, that leads to stagnation and eventually the company becomes obsolete. You might see start ups as being idealistic, and Google's previous behaviour as being benevolent. However, start ups aren't charities and Google made a boat load of money. It's not really about morality. It's more that big companies have incentives to follow particular short term strategies that ultimately stifle innovation and prevent technological progress. A big company with long term vision forces its competitors to innovate to keep up and helps change the technological landscape in a way that start ups are not able to.

mathattack 13y ago

It's a very fine line between strong corporate cultures that encompass personal identities, and selfish cult-like behavior. If you look at the leading companies across many industries, one thing that jumps out is that the corporate identity is primary in the employees lives. Generally these companies also prefer molding employees straight out of school. This is true for P&G, Accenture, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Look at the leadership - most have been there their entire careers. I am not saying this is good or bad, but I am saying that it's an attribute of many leading companies. Full disclosure: I am not a Google employee, nor have I ever been.

BlackDeath3 13y ago

The Church of Google. Who wants to fund a documentary?