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The majority? Definitely not. He does run the Knowledge team, which is quite large, but Urs' org alone is quite a bit bigger. But then again, Urs hasn't jumped

The majority? Definitely not. He does run the Knowledge team, which is quite large, but Urs' org alone is quite a bit bigger. But then again, Urs hasn't jumped from the stratosphere.

nostrademons 12y ago
Alan's org has grown and shrunk in size over time. When I joined in 2009 it was indeed "the majority of engineering" - I think he had something like 5000 people under him when the company was only a little of 20,000 strong, including all of Search, the various search property teams (which were their own departments at the time), Research, I think Commerce, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Chrome and Android were tiny - they'd just launched 6 months before - and Social and Cloud didn't exist, although they had precursor projects that were under Apps. I'm trying to remember if Apps was itself under Alan; it might've been, IIRC the three big engineering SVPs were Alan, Urs, and Bill Coughran, with Urs focused on platforms & hardware, Bill on infrastructure, and Alan on everything product-related. Since then I think a lot of infrastructure components have been pulled out of the individual product teams they were supporting and centralized under Urs, the company as a whole has been reorganized along product area lines with each PA getting its own SVP, and many product areas that were brand new then are huge 1000-person orgs. But Google's org chart now certainly doesn't reflect what it was when any given ex-Googler left (not even when I did, a scant 5 months ago; I hear there were at least 2 big re-orgs in the last week).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarqux 12y ago
  Apparently Pichai was put in charge of product this afternoon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8506215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8506215
joshu 12y ago
You just be a newer employee. Why are you talking about this stuff publically at all?
- mikeg8 12y ago
  First rule of Google - don't talk about the Google!

The majority? Definitely not. He does run the Knowledge team, which is quite large, but Urs' org alone is quite a bit bigger. But then again, Urs hasn't jumped from the stratosphere.

nostrademons 12y ago

Alan's org has grown and shrunk in size over time. When I joined in 2009 it was indeed "the majority of engineering" - I think he had something like 5000 people under him when the company was only a little of 20,000 strong, including all of Search, the various search property teams (which were their own departments at the time), Research, I think Commerce, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Chrome and Android were tiny - they'd just launched 6 months before - and Social and Cloud didn't exist, although they had precursor projects that were under Apps. I'm trying to remember if Apps was itself under Alan; it might've been, IIRC the three big engineering SVPs were Alan, Urs, and Bill Coughran, with Urs focused on platforms & hardware, Bill on infrastructure, and Alan on everything product-related. Since then I think a lot of infrastructure components have been pulled out of the individual product teams they were supporting and centralized under Urs, the company as a whole has been reorganized along product area lines with each PA getting its own SVP, and many product areas that were brand new then are huge 1000-person orgs. But Google's org chart now certainly doesn't reflect what it was when any given ex-Googler left (not even when I did, a scant 5 months ago; I hear there were at least 2 big re-orgs in the last week).

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
foobarqux 12y ago
Apparently Pichai was put in charge of product this afternoon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8506215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8506215

joshu 12y ago

You just be a newer employee. Why are you talking about this stuff publically at all?

mikeg8 12y ago
First rule of Google - don't talk about the Google!