> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it).
As someone who's very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off to hear.
If true, it does sound terrible. Though, I would focus not so much on one named person. The culture is allowing it, leaders above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and so on.
I don't agree with the author's complaint about the culture changing, it's just that the leadership is weak and directionless, which was also mentioned.
OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important bit:
> I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward". Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you're going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.
Haven't we all? Unfortunately, in most corporate jobs, your main job is looking good in front of your boss, and making your boss look good in front of his boss, who further perpetuates this theatrical shit-show. Your actual work comes a distant second.
I burned myself once or twice by keeping my head down just focused on doing quality work and helping others, but without taking care that it also had the right upward visibility to my boss and the right people above him, and ended up getting laid off, while people who were experts at pretending to work and glorifying every little achievement kept getting the laurels and promotions.
Such is the case in very large orgs with rotten culture and lack of transparency, and you need to withstand the heat if you're gonna be working in the kitchen.
Absolutely, it's hard to overstate the importance of the theatrics and performance art. In many places, it's far more important that you "socialize" and "self-promote" than that you actually do your work. If I could go back 25 years and deliver one message to my old working self starting fresh out of college, it would be: "Buy lots of bitcoin and sell it in October 2021." But if I had a second message, it would be: "Concentrate on self-promotion and managing upward. You'll never get promoted just doing your job really well."
Pretty silly thing to do whether or not you have perfect examples, and strange to follow that up with the fact that you've been offering career advice..
There's not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion out of something like that compared to the pretty personal ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the most constructive attempts look vindictive.
There's very little to be gained by making a post like that focus on an individual. I do think there are often changes in companies over time as they age and grow--but it really isn't so much about some specific individual much of the time. To some degree, it's inevitable.
I also noticed the bit about offering career advice to people in Google, but I found it odd for a different reason. How can someone who's spent 18 years of their career (and I'm guessing, almost all of it) at Google possibly be qualified to give career advice? They can give excellent advice for working at Google. But if they haven't left the company in 18 years, then surely they don't have the experience to give useful career advice that isn't at least heavily biased toward the idiosyncrasies of their one job. Even if they had a decade of experience prior to Google, how useful is pre-2005 career advice now?
That's not to say the author couldn't give valuable advice, especially in more generalized areas like the craft of programming, or even navigating office politics. It's just that any advice will inevitably be specific to Google. It seems strange to offer career advice when you've not had a "career" per se - more like you've had one really long job.
And who's asking him for this advice? Did people get wind that he might be looking for other jobs, and so he became the "career guy?" If so, that's a revealing insight into the culture at Google, evocative of flock animals asking their least risk averse member what he saw on his adventure beyond the paddock...
IMO the leader in question doesn't have a coherent strategy because she's likely trying to justify her org (and keep jobs!) in the face of a lot of developers who just don't care a whole lot about her portfolio. Her org could probably function with less people and achieve the same outcomes, but instead of getting rid of them, she's probably trying to make something happen by moving people around.
In an environment like that, your correct insights about "where we're headed" don't matter. The only thing that matters is that the leader can keep their org and not face layoffs. If that means shoving people around and not listening to what folks are saying, then that's what happens.
You're describing the BigCorp meta, which I think is a good portrayal that people need to see.
However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it sounds like you're trying to defend.
I don't agree.
It's completely rational to play career frogger. The leader is getting compensated (We're talking re-ups of generational wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their leadership is fair for criticism. It sounds like the leader hasn't created a compelling vision, which their staff is craving, let alone delivered team success.
What I suppose I'm saying is that there likely isn't a compelling vision that (a) they could get funding for, or (b) moves the needle enough to matter. I imagine their staff prefers getting paid to not getting paid, so this is the best the leader could do.
I don't like it either, it was my lived experience for several years. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas or people who knew about them, it was usually an inability to drop existing product lines + customers and no approval for the additional headcount needed to pursue bigger opportunities.
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
I've been calling that out for years as it is obvious from the outside: Pichai is not a leader but a care taker. He has no vision that anyone can seem to articulate. And apparently he's restructured the company to not have any people reporting to him that have one either. Shocking to get some inside confirmation of what is clear to see from the outside.
I was reading Hixie's blog when he was working on WhatWG. He was one of the main authors of the HTML 5 spec. Always had great respect for how he communicated. Him being this explicit is a message in itself. He was juggling highly opinionated people arguing all sorts of things when he was writing that spec. Part of the reason why that worked was his pragmatism and ability to stay calm. This is a really strongly worded message and people at Google and in their board would do well to take note of it and take action.
My recommendation: time for some leadership changes. Doing more of the same isn't going to work. Do it more smartly than OpenAI. But don't wait.
We might think it wrong to name and shame, but this is one explicit case where it's the right thing. The autocratic style, the sheer bullying, and the lack of promotion from within have run what was one of the best developer (and developer relations) groups in the world into the ground.
They talk AI - AI - AI but do they walk the walk?
Firebase? Remember when it was the best developer tool there was? Missed the boat with Vector DBs for AI, and when experts within the company raised that it was necessary.
Flutter? Yeah -- didn't they get a community member or an intern to put out a plugin for TensorFlow lite for mobile AI, and when they moved on, nobody cared.
Dart and Go? Don't make me laugh.
TensorFlow and Open Source AI (also under JB) -- Didn't give a crap, zero investment, lots of cuts, and did nothing about advancing TF since, what 2020? When was version 2? What happened to version 3? Literally invigorated the world with AI, and then JB came along and what...?
In the last 6 months? Spun up internal incubators to build new AI products. Trying to replicate Pinecone with less than 5 internal folks who don't have a background in AI at all etc. (Pinecone have ~200 people?)
Trying to build prompt management tools, when there are a million GPT ones out there? Check. I guess she never heard of OSS?
Oh yeah, wait the OSS office @ Google is also under JB.
Thanks for the post. I for one would love to experience the early Google culture. I'm not competent enough but as a middle-aged man I believe I have more fire than many of my peers.
That post is a very good description of Google and matches my experience at Google (2004-2016), both the good and bad. There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN, so hopefully this post will help. (Note: you need to scroll down a bit on the page to get the post.)
> There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN
Is there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the company and what happened there over time.
Having spent a vast amount of time reading comments, there certainly is. HN can frequently become an echo chamber, though pretends not to be; and has very clear favorite tech darlings and near-immovable, predefined villains (Google being one of them).
It's not surprising given how most of HN seems to only see a glimpse of things work internally based on blog posts unhappy xooglers write. It's very biased and folks extrapolate too far. The real picture is far more complex. Unfortunately no one seems to want to read a balanced perspective these days.
> one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today.
Hey if you're cool with me using your hardrive to store data I have a bunch of chia coins that need mining. Its weird how getting somebody's permission before using their stuff is considered unnecessary.
You do say hard drive but you also imply that permission to store cookies is as good as permission to mine cryptocurrency simply because the user allowed access to storage.
The argument these other commenters are trying to make hinges on the idea that the type of storage for cookies wouldn't work that well for crypto mining.
You're calling that argument nonsequitor and I don't think it is. It's immediately applicable to explaining the gap in your reasoning. That gap, for the record, being Cookies Storage == Crypto Mining.
Finally, let me give an example. "I own my house and my land so therefore I'm a sovereign citizen." That's a bad argument for largely the same reasons.
The distinction, and this is an important one, is that cookies have a hard cap of 4Kb of data per domain, making them nigh-useless for that purpose. All they are good for is recognizing a given user server-side across multiple page loads and storage of a few handful of user preferences. Cookies also get sent with every request, so using them as storage is just asking to balloon your bandwidth costs.
On top of that, using localStorage for storing large amounts of data rarely involves anything like a cookie warning because it's 100% client side unless manually sent back to the server. And even then, if you anonymize the data (i.e. you don't care who's storage you are using), you still don't technically need any warning.
All this to say: There is basically no relationship whatsoever between pervasive cookie warnings and the usage concerns you are voicing. Both are valid concerns, both are important stakes, but they have nothing to do with one-another.
Well they're two different APIs. Most people aren't concerned about a few KB to store things like sessions. Most people don't even know what cookies are.
So the cookie warnings have basically become the Prop-8 warnings of the internet, where they're so prevalent people just ignore them, but the cookie warnings are more annoying since they require active dismissal.
It is weird to focus on storage, considering the cache for the HTML/CSS/JS generating the warnings likely takes up much more storage space than the cookies themselves.
I noticed that comment also. It seems like the point of view of an engineer that doesn't really think about security.
Reminded me of when I first discovered that major browsers allow third party cookies by default. And thinking I can't believe they allow this massive privacy leak.
You don't need to show a "cookie warning" to store a cookie. You only need to show a warning if you're tracking a user, regardless of the technology used (cookie, local storage...) But if you want to store someone's language choice, username, or credentials in a cookie, no banner is needed. In fact, this website is the perfect example.
A lot of glorified companies are completely filled with corrupt, inept management. I hope this recession destroys this management culture and brings back the ethos of innovation in engineering and product.
I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who will always prioritize a mix of business needs and engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And then, to shame/call out other "leaders" throwing their people under the bus.
I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only way to maintain company culture in the direction of innovation.
As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can't speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this.
It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured, reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the importing of "business focus" and the "bottom line" (read: short term share price) to Google's management structure wholesale.
Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms.
Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be.
If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice.
Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
"I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!"
or
"I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!"
or
"Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?"
Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
I don't know what you're referring to with the first two. On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay discussions and there's never been any discussion of preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a lot of discussion of unintended consequences and workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held. Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it was because we loved ads.
My memory or the auto-play thing is that some withgoogle.com functionality broke, it was quickly put on the blessed list, and then it was working again. Sadly the rest of the web that was broken by that change didn't get such treatment.
> genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't make it any less of a duck.
Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1].
Sometimes it feels like Google could cure cancer and HN would still react negatively. Companies are not monolithic and it's silly to paint it that way. It's not simple about intent, but premature judgment.
Conversely it feels like Google could say "hey we've found a cure for cancer, we just transplant the brain into a healthy 'donor' body" and Google apologists would insist that there's no possible way that could ever be misused.
> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
This sentence is an oxymoron.
How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
> How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2) indifference to the user from upper management. It's institutional misalignment.
I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling frustrated that public perception isn't able to match your privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I feel my eyes roll involuntarily here.
From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.
The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.
Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism
Well, given that you aren't who I thought I was talking with at least one of us is confused, but I suspect both of us are now.
The post I replied to was stating, essentially, that in their opinion Google had always been evil and only the timescales had changed.
My point is that multiple insiders (including myself) can confirm that Google took "Don't Be Evil" really seriously for a long time and that the cynics were wrong then to believe otherwise.
I'm the one you originally replied to, and yes that's roughly what I'm saying - maybe the individual engineers and designers that built features were trying their best not to be evil, but the company as a whole always had dark motives.
They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.
They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.
Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.
Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.
Being frank, I think you have an ideological position which is both satisfyingly consistent ('google is evil and always has been') and which provides a mechanism to discount any contrary facts ('you were just boots on the ground and didn't understand the corporation as well as I, being an enlightened person, did'). But I was actually there, and while I can't tell you any of the many times I saw Google do the right thing when it hurt its bottom line I can tell you that I saw it happen a lot and in big ways. You don't have to believe me, poor little deluded cog that I am, but I think I will take my messy, complicated, first person understanding of the place over the reductive ideology any day.
> the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of
Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives.
This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.
Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And regardless of the intentions of the engineers, Google is run by its executives, not by its engineers. We don't have the luxury to extend the benefit of the doubt to ultramegacorporations.
> It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious.
How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't anymore.
Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.
What projects you would you say the public has been unfairly/viciously critical of the motives of?
I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion.
For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.
---
I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for.
The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.
Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database.
A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising.
Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted?
I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now.
There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct.
If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly.
That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair.
(There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.)
Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything.
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When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 )
But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall.
Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products.
You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gun...
is this criticism reasonable though? Look at Waymo, for example. Investing in that is very visionary. I mean, someone has to work on the stuff that pays the current bills, right? Or, what about Bard? Sure, Bard kinda sucks compared to chat gpt 4, but it's really at worst number 2 in the most exciting current field?
I think what's been said, and the description of the general ineptness of that particular manager, has been 100% spot on. Middle management as a whole has basically gotten worse, meaner and generally less technically capable since 2018.
> "It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of..."
It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.
That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.
> ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term...
If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"?
Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?
Around 2016 at Google, my entire reporting chain, from manager to CEO, changed. Literally not a single person was left. Laszlo, both Erics, Patrick and the rest of the L team all left in quick succession. I think the old Google of < 2015 and the current Google are two companies that have almost nothing in common.
I guess it was the Alphabet saga? It's all like this. I have decided that if given the chance, I'd never work in companies with more than 1,000 persons.
Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it.
One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of culture going for much longer than people think.
Conversely, I've worked at companies with 500 employees that were the blandest kind of "enterprise business company firm" you can imagine. :)
> I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later.
This is the coolest shit I have ever read.
Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.
I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT department and we have this culture. The IT department alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past weekend I found myself in a different region needing a desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and ideas of them for process improvements. This communal culture is hard to find and I have no intention of leaving until the culture dies.
The industry has changed in a few important ways that I think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain.
First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.
Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting.
Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job.
I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation.
This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.
> First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.
Do you mean that new areas appeared that require specialization that didn't exist previously, or that areas that require some sort of specialization have comparatively grown? (Or something completely different?)
Well, it’s more that the problems in an area like ML or security were solvable if you generally knew how computers work and were smart and good at learning new things. Switching to a new domain took a few months, but ultimately there wasn’t /so much/ you had to learn.
Nowadays, those easy problems are solved. If you want to contribute to an area, you have to learn all the context, read a bunch of papers, it basically takes at least a year. So you can’t quite be a generalist SWE, drop into a random team for three weeks and meaningfully contribute.
Put another way, the relative value of spunk and generalist ability has decreased and the relative value of domain knowledge has increased.
I think this depends on setting ci/cd and good data pipelines are like game changers in research ML projects and generalists definitely can do those it is not that flashy stuff.
It’s funny now, but OKRs as originally conceived were the simple, “just set a simple goal and work on it” lightweight thing, standing in opposition to the old way of corporate planning. I used to have goals like “try X and write a paper about it”.
Of course every process becomes perverted into waterfall eventually.
I like the old times when you could assume everyone around you is smarter than you, so collaboration and communication were never an issue. They never rely on "experts" in other teams to collaborate, they quickly and easily pick up how other systems work in depth themselves. Smart people just shine and work together to create amazing stuff.
Nowadays, you need to explain to people why unit test is needed, why you can't use production as the first place to try a risky experiment, and rely on 20 experts, one in each tiny service, to figure out and to deliver a tiny feature with bloated timeline and messy quality.
This sounds interesting. Maybe it's just me, but all 5000+ people companies (I actually only worked with 200+ or 5000+, never the middle so could be BS) I worked for are a lot of BS and politics. Again this is probably because me not good enough so that I don't get to do deep technical things that I want to do.
conversely, I'm a boomerang Googler who worked there in 2015 and again now. In 2015, I felt like no one cared, that Googler engineering skills were overrated, and 17/23 people on my team quit in a year. In this stint, however, I'm amazed by how smart and passionate people are about a variety of different technologies, and enjoy collaborating across many teams on different things.
I think the takeaway for me is that, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, these experiences are more situational/random/based on what energy you bring to a space/team-based/seniority-based than they are a symptom of universal company culture.
It was a whole bundle of things all at the same time but probably started with G+ and "The Social Wars". That was all happening when I first got there, but it set internal crap on a bad path, plenty of bad feelings as the whole organization was pivoted onto that, but it all basically fizzled out and failed.
And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth & Alphabet. And that's when it got progressively stupider and stupider.
When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going on there. And I'm a pretty cynical person.
> “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.”
Ouch.
I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.
The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader. That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google's share price.
Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don't even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom, OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder. Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves faster than we do!
I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.
Sure, but consider that MS came from Ballmer, whom many of us blame for Microsoft's badness of the 00s (granted, Ballmer of course came from Gates, who probably set back general-purpose computing by decades due to his greed). I do believe Nadella has made MS a much better, likeable company, but I don't think I'll ever trust them to do right by humanity.
Google has gone the other way: Page and Brin seemed to be well-liked outside of Google, as they were the visionaries who started it all. They made the choice to go with Pichai, who cares more about ad revenue than doing anything great. And Page and Brin, sadly, seem to be happy with their choice so far.
I don't see how Microsoft reinvented themselves. For better and worse, they behave the same way I grew to expect in the 00s with Ballmer. New CEO knocked off the Google founders' "nice guy" look, that's about it.
Meanwhile, Google is reinventing themselves... to be more like Microsoft.
I thought about that, but my list was focused on things that Google was leading in but let the market get away. Amazon got into cloud before Google did.
And, as the article postulates, that sort of bean counting goes directly against what used to excite Google's employees, and is leading to their continued disillusionment.
‘Shareholders’ can’t do anything. Different classes of shares confer different voting rights, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin still own shares controlling over 50% of shareholder votes.
IDK, if you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under the leadership of Satya over the last 9 years it's obviously possible to innovate and bean count at the same time
Having spent two decades at a far, far less known company, I think it’s common for long-timers to look back with fondness and a feeling that their early days were Camelot, that the current days are worse, and that the fault lies with a specific leadership change.
It’s way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it’s growing 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.
I don’t have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I’m not at all surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and engaging place to be than 2023 Google.
I've had that experience at a different company. Was really exciting when I joined and I had a very long leash to do pretty much whatever I thought was the right thing. Long-time manager left and did some new interesting stuff for a while. But then I bumped around a bit and I really just counted a couple years until my last major vests and retired.
I sorta agree with you, but sorta don't. While I don't think you can squarely lay the blame on any one person, culture comes from the top. The board/CEO (but mostly the CEO) sets the culture, and hires (or molds) other executives and leadership positions into their vision of that culture.
Page and Brin chose Pichai to succeed them. They, and the rest of their board, share blame as well.
Tech started to have a vision problem the moment big money (and people with big money) entered the picture and started calling the shots. Sundar, Jassy, Satya, Tim Cook are all cut from the same cloth. Their job is to appease the shareholders and not much else.
Zuckerberg is probably the only founder/majority shareholder still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar company day to day and executing his vision, and you have to give him kudos for that. He could easily go buy multiple countries instead and live out his life with a lot less stress.
Jassy was at AWS and in a senior role essentially since its inception. Retail predates Jassy, but I give Jassy a lot more credit than presiding over a company that someone else built.
> I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.
Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.
And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.
I personally felt the best icon of original Google culture was Craig Silverstein, whose departure greatly affected the various intergrouplets that were holding the company culture together. In that sense, I wouldn't place all the blame on Sundar, although he didn't necessarily help.
But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what carries the culture forward.
I'm the "12 years at Google" commenter from below.
Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after that. Good guy.
Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".
They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.
(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )
Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the "Dream Team" of Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is.
Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company to one uninspired direction after another.
Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to go.
I would rather the people go, and use their considerable intellect on things that have interests more aligned with societal benefit. Do we really want a re-ignited Google?
> Google hasn't created a new major product in years
Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway).
But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products. Maybe that's where their strength lies: in throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What they've been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a new project from zero.
And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it's unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more than once, or a handful of times if they're really lucky.
The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they've got one flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads, and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has Facebook really innovated since their original product?
Eh, YouTube was going to crash and burn hard without an acquisition. It was acquired in 2006, and was built into something sustainable by integrating with Google infrastructure.
Not to be an egghead/navel gazer about it, but I’ve grown skeptical of “innovation” as an end in itself: was Facebook innovative, or was it just another small iterative improvement on an existing form? Same with Google and search. My gut tells me companies should focus on more concrete measures of success rather than the abstract “innovation”.
It’s probably not semantically wrong to say that these two cases really were/are innovative, but even so, was that really the cause of their success? And is it replicable as a methodology? My gut tells me that a lot of what gets labeled as a massive innovation is really just a market inevitability, and someone got to the right idea first, either by luck or having a single clever differentiating idea.
Yeah, "innovation" has always been a rather nebulous term for iterative improvement, and more particularly, the iterative improvement that people remember in retrospect. Often the same "innovation" appears almost simultaneously from multiple companies (or inventors, or mathematicians... this phenomenon has existed for a long time). But usually only one of them can win, and it seems relatively arbitrary who it is. Certainly once they're perceived as winning, they benefit from a compounding effect.
Really, "innovation" is a matter of hard work, timing, and luck. You need to work hard to ship a product or publish a theory. You need to recognize the opportunity and execute on it at the right time. And you probably need some luck to get your initial boosts. But even after all that, you still need to be mature and capable enough to turn your small golden egg into a golden goose. It's still a long slog from initial hit to resting on your laurels.
Given Google's current reputation killing of products left and right, lately I don't bother even trying new things they roll out, and building anything dependent on it is completely out of the question. No.
Sundar became CEO in 2015. The author quit this year. Was his "lack of visionary leadership" not that obvious for 8+ years? Or did the author stay because the stock price and his TC kept going up?
"At any rate, after exploring this, I naturally wondered if there wasn’t some easier way to do it; not as statistically valid, maybe, but adequate for the advertiser who just wants to improve his performance. I won’t go into the details here, but let’s just say that everyone wanted a Super Deluxe version even if it did require changing every part of the Ads system. No one wanted something quick-and-dirty that just did the job. This was Google, after all; “quick and dirty” would not get you promoted or get your talk accepted at a conference. It did not make me popular to suggest this."
I had a similar experience at Google--simple improvements such as parameter tuning are looked down on and rejected for being mere tinkering, even if the metrics are good. Meanwhile super complicated deep learning projects keep being added, even if they barely improve metrics. In the short term the complexity looks like hard work and leads to promotions, but long term it makes the system hard to maintain and understand.
This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been.
For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere.
Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.
Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team.
Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.
Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.
The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.
The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over" thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely changed.
Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.
Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.
>Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience
That fear was kind of overblown. In those days of Steve Balmer, Microsoft was far less focused and organized, too high on its success with Windows and Office, for such a slow, large and bloated ship to react quickly and precisely enough on this.
Just look at what they did with Zune before that. It was not a bad product at all, but it was too little too late for consumers to give up on Apple and jump ship to Microsoft.
They did react here as well, but just like before, by the time they had a desirable and competitive mobile OS, Apple and Google had already reached critical mass adoption that no matter how good Microsoft's offering was, they wouldn't have been able to recoup the lead lost to Apple and Google both with consumer and developer adoption.
Microsoft staying on top with Windows Mobile would have been a good thing for developers and consumers for one gigantic reason: Windows Mobile devices were open. No app stores, no Google or Apple bleeding away 30% of your revenue to line their own pockets, no byzantine approval process, just load your executable onto the device and go.
Windows mobile is not windows phone though and iirc from my brief time trying it out it was a mess even in 2008.
My understanding was Android and open handset alliance came into being to tackle the fragmentation in the market. Clearly that's not true if the Android team saw Windows Mobile as it's biggest competitor...
I don't think Windows Phone would have ever happened if the iPhone never existed.
Looks like Microsoft was just happy making money with Visual Studio licenses so I don't know if Visual Studio community edition would even have happened without outside pressure.
> Windows Mobile runs the .NET Compact Framework, which will support development in C# and VB.NET. You can also develop for Windows Mobile using MFC/Win32 APIs in C++ or Embedded Visual Basic. At the end of the day it's a stripped-down Win32-based OS, so there are other options, but these are probably the most popular.
> Depending on your experience, it will probably be easier to get Visual Studio 2008 and develop in a .NET language, the development experience is pretty nice and there is a built-in emulator in Visual Studio, so you don't need to have a device plugged in unless you are working with device-attached or embedded hardware.
> Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (the free versions) do not support Mobile development, you would need to run a trial version or purchase a license.
Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.
I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.
Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.
No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.
I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material/Hardware.[2]
Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.
Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.
As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.
"Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it"
Sounds like every org I worked in at Google, though it got worse as time went on. I started there end of 2011, and left end of 2021. This kind of bullshit is endemic to the tech culture at Google, but was the worst inside smaller sites or in teams with "sexy" products.
And might have been arguably worse when they had explicit "up or out" policies around L4s.
> TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus."
This doesn't resonate. I've been a loyal Android user since Gingerbread (2010), and maybe for the first couple of years it was catching up to Apple, but i would say since pretty much KitKat, it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features. (And arguably putting them out with more stability and polish).
Throughout the main feature that Android was behind on and had to "copy" was performance. iPhones used to (and still) blow even top-tier Android phones away on basic things like scroll smoothness.
I think he may be referring to Android Wear. While I agree with you, Android is rock solid and great to use on most phones in the last few years, Android Wear is anything but. It's buggy, unstable and a long long way behind the Apple platform.
I love my Android phone, but, having had way too many Android Wear devices, it's complete crap.
I'd say y'all are thinking macroscopically of Android as a whole, whereas I'm thinking about my corner of 100-200 on launcher / system UI. There's very explicit examples I can think of, but now that I think of it...it might impossible to tell from the outside because you can't really tell what's The Cool Project from year to year
From the outside, my perspective has been that Android was a free for all in the beginning and had to tighten down permissions later for battery drain problems while iPhone was too locked down initially and had to figure out how to make their devices actually useful for third party apps.
It is just an impression I remember so may not be completely accurate but android made huge progress from a user's perspective in my opinion in terms of battery management (new phones having huge batteries I guess but 5Ah battery means nothing if Android kept wasting it unnecessarily.
I remember at some point there was a funny example something like if you forget your android tablet at home on wifi when you go on a three day trip, you should not come back to see a dead battery on your tablet. It was funny but also got the point across I think. I appreciate that.
For example, on this phone I am typing on, I have set it so by default battery saving kicks in as soon as I drop down to 75%. Then I turn it off manually if I need to do something important (rare).
One thing that bothered me about Android as a user was by default there was no feature for me to say don't allow this app to do anything on boot or in the background without my permission. Don't allow this app to connect to anything on the Internet or don't allow this app to connect to any network at all unless I say it is ok to do so. Any ideas why?
> it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features.
I think you might be in a bit of an Android bubble. Android is plenty "accused" of copying Apple features as well. Really, both copy plenty of ideas from each other.
I had moved on from Android by 2013, so I definitely don't have much insight into what it's become over the past decade. In the earlier years it was very much about working hard to build the platform, products, and ecosystem. The team was pretty small and generally isolated from the rest of the company, which was both good (we got to focus on doing our thing and not get distracted) and bad (integrating with Google properties, services, etc was often rather painful).
Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited about and things getting more political and "too big to fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of scenery.
Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid, generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out, walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools and learning new things while still generally having enough focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with enough compensation to treat them all to great food.
The build tools are not great. Well, maybe the tools are fine, but the build times are killing me. Going from 5ms builds at home to 5 minute builds at work is brutal. 98% of my day is just waiting for builds, tests, CL approvals, experiment results, launch approvals and lunch lines.
I meant more that when I started the job and only had to type one command to run a giant application locally, that tooling blew my mind. No config files, env vars, not even any apt-get or cloning 50 different repos. Just boq run
Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once. But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds natural breaks into the work.
I just joined because I've always wanted to, and when I had the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the fealty of a public corporation lies.
Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.
The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.
Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on it, then it's understandable why he'd stay at Google even if he didn't like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he's still working on Flutter now, so clearly it's a passion project for him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he could?
Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty well.
Eh, I interviewed for both a GCP and multiple Azure teams simultaneously and the difference in talent level was astounding.
The latter team leads were anywhere from disinterested, asking basic level leetcode questions I could breeze through, to fucking incompetent who didn't even understand the coding questions they were asking. I was shocked at how different they were in terms of thoughtfulness and intelligence.
lol no, I got into a big argument having to explain recursion, tail call recursion, etc.
The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent with the exception of stack space.
But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the experience.
My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first interview rescheduled the time and no one told me, etc.
It was a fucking joke.
Also, I interviewed at Netflix as well, and I didn't get the job (passed technical interview but didn't get selected after Director level interview. Just wasn't a good fit in terms of interests) and I can't say enough good things about netflix, everyone I met there, and the overall interview process.
So I'm not just annoyed at Azure folks because I didn't get the job. I'm annoyed cause they're mostly morons.
I was outright hostile by the end. My point was, in my very long history in tech, it was only Microsoft that pushed me to that point. I’ve bombed hard interviews, passed easy ones, bumbled medium ones, and never once lost my cool.
This was my experience too as well as some of my college friends who work at MSFT and GOOG. Microsoft engineers aren't stupid (of course they weren't) but there tends to be more dumb people and fewer very very smart people.
This could also be incentives at the companies. I have a buddy who went to Microsoft, worked 30hr weeks, and was bored. Dude is brilliant and level headed. The team was lazy AF. Worked there for 5 years and went to Facebook and is thriving, going from Senior to Staff rather quickly.
Looking at the innovation of the former and the lack thereof of the latter, it sure seems that way. Even after almost half a century, Microsoft still endures.
I believe it's quoting a survey where you had to pick from "frameworks". Meaning "use the native tools" wasn't a choice on the list. Choices were things like Flutter, React Native, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, etc.
When filtered to "cross platform mobile app frameworks" anyway, which is a huge reduction in scope - 1/3rd of respondents in that study in fact.
So 46% of 33% of mobile app developers that aren't building mobile websites use Flutter. That's not bad at all, but hardly supports a claim of being the "leading mobile app development framework" as you're down to ~15% of mobile app developers using it. And only then since mobile web is being excluded, who knows what it'd be if that was included.
Well assuming Swift and Kotlin split the remaining half 50/50 (I think this is reasonable as most major apps are on both platforms and it is unlikely to use Swit for iOS but flutter for Android), they're probably only 25% each.
Unless you want to count them both as Native at 50%?
To add to this, perhaps anecdotal but I've noticed Flutter to be in that specific area of people who like it and use it feel like they're underdogs, fighting in the war to make it the next big thing. It's not the default way to write an app on either Android nor iOS, so they're vocal about spreading the word and getting/keeping momentum.
People who use Swift/UIKit to make apps may like it, but it's also the default way to make an iOS app, so they don't feel the need to fight a war. That language was handed down from above as the winner of iOS development. Same for Java/Kotlin/native UI libraries on Android.
I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine a situation where someone's actions caused a change in a society, which is no longer attributed to him according to popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
That's an interesting observation considering Sundar is where he is because of early-Google cultural norms.
These paragraphs really pack a punch, and having worked in tech for 20+ years now (but not at Google) I feel this. Every shitty company eventually has layoffs that ruin the culture, and end up with a "Jeanine Banks" manager type. This article was really well written.
> Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google's founders famously told Wall Street "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." but that Google is no more.
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done.
Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.
The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.
I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was.
I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.
That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...
This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.
Googlers that were around when Vic Gundotra was a big player love trashing him. I was surprised when this blog described him in mixed and maybe even positive terms.
Actually I got the date wrong, but it's because I quit my job at Google in late 2020 and my last day was in early 2021 :). I wanted to work somewhere where I'd get to do something interesting and have a meaningful impact in a reasonable time frame. Based on my experience, I felt that would be hard to find at Google.
Great post, epic that he calls out his idiotic upper management. I've only been at Google a little over a year and while I'm mostly happy with my management chain, I have run into directors who clearly should have been fired for overselling and underdelivering huge projects that impact my team.
I am surprised just how 'bottom up' so much is done at Google, and I wonder if that is why Sundar ended up where he is. Unlike so many other large companies, engineers who build consensus have way more influence on upper management's priorities than other places.
So being someone who is good at building consensus is a good way to built clout at google, more so than any other place. But this isn't alawys good. Sometimes I miss old boring "F500" companies where I can go to the one principal engineer (or director or whatever) and show them my idea, and how it doesn't get in anyone else's way, and boom they either approve or deny it.
No spending months convincing everyone and their mother to make a small (but significant) change.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] threadAs someone who's very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off to hear.
I guess that's what this tweet is alluding to: https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273
> I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward". Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you're going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.
Haven't we all? Unfortunately, in most corporate jobs, your main job is looking good in front of your boss, and making your boss look good in front of his boss, who further perpetuates this theatrical shit-show. Your actual work comes a distant second.
I burned myself once or twice by keeping my head down just focused on doing quality work and helping others, but without taking care that it also had the right upward visibility to my boss and the right people above him, and ended up getting laid off, while people who were experts at pretending to work and glorifying every little achievement kept getting the laurels and promotions.
Such is the case in very large orgs with rotten culture and lack of transparency, and you need to withstand the heat if you're gonna be working in the kitchen.
There's not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion out of something like that compared to the pretty personal ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the most constructive attempts look vindictive.
That's not to say the author couldn't give valuable advice, especially in more generalized areas like the craft of programming, or even navigating office politics. It's just that any advice will inevitably be specific to Google. It seems strange to offer career advice when you've not had a "career" per se - more like you've had one really long job.
And who's asking him for this advice? Did people get wind that he might be looking for other jobs, and so he became the "career guy?" If so, that's a revealing insight into the culture at Google, evocative of flock animals asking their least risk averse member what he saw on his adventure beyond the paddock...
My understanding is that that's the kind of mentoring he offerred, yes.
In an environment like that, your correct insights about "where we're headed" don't matter. The only thing that matters is that the leader can keep their org and not face layoffs. If that means shoving people around and not listening to what folks are saying, then that's what happens.
However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it sounds like you're trying to defend.
I don't agree.
It's completely rational to play career frogger. The leader is getting compensated (We're talking re-ups of generational wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their leadership is fair for criticism. It sounds like the leader hasn't created a compelling vision, which their staff is craving, let alone delivered team success.
I don't like it either, it was my lived experience for several years. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas or people who knew about them, it was usually an inability to drop existing product lines + customers and no approval for the additional headcount needed to pursue bigger opportunities.
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
I've been calling that out for years as it is obvious from the outside: Pichai is not a leader but a care taker. He has no vision that anyone can seem to articulate. And apparently he's restructured the company to not have any people reporting to him that have one either. Shocking to get some inside confirmation of what is clear to see from the outside.
I was reading Hixie's blog when he was working on WhatWG. He was one of the main authors of the HTML 5 spec. Always had great respect for how he communicated. Him being this explicit is a message in itself. He was juggling highly opinionated people arguing all sorts of things when he was writing that spec. Part of the reason why that worked was his pragmatism and ability to stay calm. This is a really strongly worded message and people at Google and in their board would do well to take note of it and take action.
My recommendation: time for some leadership changes. Doing more of the same isn't going to work. Do it more smartly than OpenAI. But don't wait.
We might think it wrong to name and shame, but this is one explicit case where it's the right thing. The autocratic style, the sheer bullying, and the lack of promotion from within have run what was one of the best developer (and developer relations) groups in the world into the ground.
They talk AI - AI - AI but do they walk the walk?
Firebase? Remember when it was the best developer tool there was? Missed the boat with Vector DBs for AI, and when experts within the company raised that it was necessary.
Flutter? Yeah -- didn't they get a community member or an intern to put out a plugin for TensorFlow lite for mobile AI, and when they moved on, nobody cared.
Dart and Go? Don't make me laugh.
TensorFlow and Open Source AI (also under JB) -- Didn't give a crap, zero investment, lots of cuts, and did nothing about advancing TF since, what 2020? When was version 2? What happened to version 3? Literally invigorated the world with AI, and then JB came along and what...?
In the last 6 months? Spun up internal incubators to build new AI products. Trying to replicate Pinecone with less than 5 internal folks who don't have a background in AI at all etc. (Pinecone have ~200 people?)
Trying to build prompt management tools, when there are a million GPT ones out there? Check. I guess she never heard of OSS?
Oh yeah, wait the OSS office @ Google is also under JB.
It's nothing short of a catastophe.
Is there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the company and what happened there over time.
(Of course I can't speak for all HNers...)
Hey if you're cool with me using your hardrive to store data I have a bunch of chia coins that need mining. Its weird how getting somebody's permission before using their stuff is considered unnecessary.
If you look back the at the original post I say "Hard drive" not the "localStorage object".
And they are indeed stored are your system and not the servers.
https://allaboutcookies.org/what-is-a-cookie-file#:~:text=In....
The argument these other commenters are trying to make hinges on the idea that the type of storage for cookies wouldn't work that well for crypto mining.
You're calling that argument nonsequitor and I don't think it is. It's immediately applicable to explaining the gap in your reasoning. That gap, for the record, being Cookies Storage == Crypto Mining.
Finally, let me give an example. "I own my house and my land so therefore I'm a sovereign citizen." That's a bad argument for largely the same reasons.
On top of that, using localStorage for storing large amounts of data rarely involves anything like a cookie warning because it's 100% client side unless manually sent back to the server. And even then, if you anonymize the data (i.e. you don't care who's storage you are using), you still don't technically need any warning.
All this to say: There is basically no relationship whatsoever between pervasive cookie warnings and the usage concerns you are voicing. Both are valid concerns, both are important stakes, but they have nothing to do with one-another.
So the cookie warnings have basically become the Prop-8 warnings of the internet, where they're so prevalent people just ignore them, but the cookie warnings are more annoying since they require active dismissal.
Reminded me of when I first discovered that major browsers allow third party cookies by default. And thinking I can't believe they allow this massive privacy leak.
I'm not holding out. Public companies all turn into this.
One solution is to make greed and going public a shameful thing; but who's going to do that?
I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who will always prioritize a mix of business needs and engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And then, to shame/call out other "leaders" throwing their people under the bus.
I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only way to maintain company culture in the direction of innovation.
It's frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.
I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured, reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the importing of "business focus" and the "bottom line" (read: short term share price) to Google's management structure wholesale.
Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be.
If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice.
Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
"I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!"
or
"I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!"
or
"Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?"
Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't make it any less of a duck.
Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1].
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733
This sentence is an oxymoron.
How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?
I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2) indifference to the user from upper management. It's institutional misalignment.
Only the first was a description of the work, the other was a description of the culture to which those doing the work are subjected to from above.
From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.
The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.
Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism
You seem to be telling the GP that they made a (common) mistake in thinking that early Google had non-evil motives.
The post I replied to was stating, essentially, that in their opinion Google had always been evil and only the timescales had changed.
My point is that multiple insiders (including myself) can confirm that Google took "Don't Be Evil" really seriously for a long time and that the cynics were wrong then to believe otherwise.
They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.
They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.
Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.
Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.
Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives.
This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.
Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious.
How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't anymore.
Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.
I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion.
For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.
---
I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for.
The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.
Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database.
A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w...
Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted?
I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now.
There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct.
If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly.
That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair.
(There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.)
Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything.
---
When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 )
But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall.
Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products. You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gun...
It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.
That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.
If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"?
Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?
One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of culture going for much longer than people think.
Conversely, I've worked at companies with 500 employees that were the blandest kind of "enterprise business company firm" you can imagine. :)
This is the coolest shit I have ever read.
Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.
First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.
Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting.
Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job.
I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation.
This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.
Do you mean that new areas appeared that require specialization that didn't exist previously, or that areas that require some sort of specialization have comparatively grown? (Or something completely different?)
Nowadays, those easy problems are solved. If you want to contribute to an area, you have to learn all the context, read a bunch of papers, it basically takes at least a year. So you can’t quite be a generalist SWE, drop into a random team for three weeks and meaningfully contribute.
Put another way, the relative value of spunk and generalist ability has decreased and the relative value of domain knowledge has increased.
Of course every process becomes perverted into waterfall eventually.
Nowadays, you need to explain to people why unit test is needed, why you can't use production as the first place to try a risky experiment, and rely on 20 experts, one in each tiny service, to figure out and to deliver a tiny feature with bloated timeline and messy quality.
I think the takeaway for me is that, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, these experiences are more situational/random/based on what energy you bring to a space/team-based/seniority-based than they are a symptom of universal company culture.
And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth & Alphabet. And that's when it got progressively stupider and stupider.
When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going on there. And I'm a pretty cynical person.
Ouch.
I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.
I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.
Google has gone the other way: Page and Brin seemed to be well-liked outside of Google, as they were the visionaries who started it all. They made the choice to go with Pichai, who cares more about ad revenue than doing anything great. And Page and Brin, sadly, seem to be happy with their choice so far.
Meanwhile, Google is reinventing themselves... to be more like Microsoft.
Shame because Google invented the transformer architecture that enabled the technology.
Outcomes follow incentives
And they noticed that that's a problem - something VERY FEW corporations figure out.
It’s way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it’s growing 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.
I don’t have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I’m not at all surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and engaging place to be than 2023 Google.
Page and Brin chose Pichai to succeed them. They, and the rest of their board, share blame as well.
Andy Jassy + Sudar for example.
off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)
Zuckerberg is probably the only founder/majority shareholder still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar company day to day and executing his vision, and you have to give him kudos for that. He could easily go buy multiple countries instead and live out his life with a lot less stress.
The kid inherits the company built by the parent
Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.
And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.
But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what carries the culture forward.
Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after that. Good guy.
They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.
(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )
Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company to one uninspired direction after another.
Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to go.
Absolutely.
Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway).
But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products. Maybe that's where their strength lies: in throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What they've been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a new project from zero.
And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it's unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more than once, or a handful of times if they're really lucky.
The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they've got one flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads, and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has Facebook really innovated since their original product?
Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Spanner were not.
OpenStreetMap Foundation, 1.5 FTE.
Street View is the perfect example of this. It still seems like an insane-in-a-good-way product to me after all these years.
It’s probably not semantically wrong to say that these two cases really were/are innovative, but even so, was that really the cause of their success? And is it replicable as a methodology? My gut tells me that a lot of what gets labeled as a massive innovation is really just a market inevitability, and someone got to the right idea first, either by luck or having a single clever differentiating idea.
Really, "innovation" is a matter of hard work, timing, and luck. You need to work hard to ship a product or publish a theory. You need to recognize the opportunity and execute on it at the right time. And you probably need some luck to get your initial boosts. But even after all that, you still need to be mature and capable enough to turn your small golden egg into a golden goose. It's still a long slog from initial hit to resting on your laurels.
I wrote a number of articles about working there in the early (or earlier) days. Chronologically:
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-enterp...
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads-co...
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-maps-c...
As well as three others about the best part: the non-work activities.
I had a similar experience at Google--simple improvements such as parameter tuning are looked down on and rejected for being mere tinkering, even if the metrics are good. Meanwhile super complicated deep learning projects keep being added, even if they barely improve metrics. In the short term the complexity looks like hard work and leads to promotions, but long term it makes the system hard to maintain and understand.
For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere.
Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.
https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/
Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.
Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.
The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.
Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.
Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.
That fear was kind of overblown. In those days of Steve Balmer, Microsoft was far less focused and organized, too high on its success with Windows and Office, for such a slow, large and bloated ship to react quickly and precisely enough on this.
Just look at what they did with Zune before that. It was not a bad product at all, but it was too little too late for consumers to give up on Apple and jump ship to Microsoft.
They did react here as well, but just like before, by the time they had a desirable and competitive mobile OS, Apple and Google had already reached critical mass adoption that no matter how good Microsoft's offering was, they wouldn't have been able to recoup the lead lost to Apple and Google both with consumer and developer adoption.
I don't think Windows Phone would have ever happened if the iPhone never existed. Looks like Microsoft was just happy making money with Visual Studio licenses so I don't know if Visual Studio community edition would even have happened without outside pressure.
> Windows Mobile runs the .NET Compact Framework, which will support development in C# and VB.NET. You can also develop for Windows Mobile using MFC/Win32 APIs in C++ or Embedded Visual Basic. At the end of the day it's a stripped-down Win32-based OS, so there are other options, but these are probably the most popular.
> Depending on your experience, it will probably be easier to get Visual Studio 2008 and develop in a .NET language, the development experience is pretty nice and there is a built-in emulator in Visual Studio, so you don't need to have a device plugged in unless you are working with device-attached or embedded hardware.
> Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (the free versions) do not support Mobile development, you would need to run a trial version or purchase a license.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/1702070
I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.
Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.
No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.
Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.
Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.
As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.
[1] https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...
[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-material-you-interview-...
Sounds like every org I worked in at Google, though it got worse as time went on. I started there end of 2011, and left end of 2021. This kind of bullshit is endemic to the tech culture at Google, but was the worst inside smaller sites or in teams with "sexy" products.
And might have been arguably worse when they had explicit "up or out" policies around L4s.
This doesn't resonate. I've been a loyal Android user since Gingerbread (2010), and maybe for the first couple of years it was catching up to Apple, but i would say since pretty much KitKat, it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features. (And arguably putting them out with more stability and polish).
Throughout the main feature that Android was behind on and had to "copy" was performance. iPhones used to (and still) blow even top-tier Android phones away on basic things like scroll smoothness.
I love my Android phone, but, having had way too many Android Wear devices, it's complete crap.
I really want it to be good.
It is just an impression I remember so may not be completely accurate but android made huge progress from a user's perspective in my opinion in terms of battery management (new phones having huge batteries I guess but 5Ah battery means nothing if Android kept wasting it unnecessarily.
I remember at some point there was a funny example something like if you forget your android tablet at home on wifi when you go on a three day trip, you should not come back to see a dead battery on your tablet. It was funny but also got the point across I think. I appreciate that.
For example, on this phone I am typing on, I have set it so by default battery saving kicks in as soon as I drop down to 75%. Then I turn it off manually if I need to do something important (rare).
One thing that bothered me about Android as a user was by default there was no feature for me to say don't allow this app to do anything on boot or in the background without my permission. Don't allow this app to connect to anything on the Internet or don't allow this app to connect to any network at all unless I say it is ok to do so. Any ideas why?
I think you might be in a bit of an Android bubble. Android is plenty "accused" of copying Apple features as well. Really, both copy plenty of ideas from each other.
Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited about and things getting more political and "too big to fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of scenery.
Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once. But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds natural breaks into the work.
Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.
The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.
Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top.
I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.
It's still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely competent. And I still prefer iOS.
The latter team leads were anywhere from disinterested, asking basic level leetcode questions I could breeze through, to fucking incompetent who didn't even understand the coding questions they were asking. I was shocked at how different they were in terms of thoughtfulness and intelligence.
I would really, really love to hear more about this if you would indulge us. If not us, then certainly send me an email, please.
The dude asked me a leetcode hard (that I hadn't seen before!) that I was actually able to code up, and he didn't understand that memoization and bottom up dp are equivalent with the exception of stack space.
But at that point I was so annoyed in general at the experience.
My recruiter quit the day I had an interview, my first interview rescheduled the time and no one told me, etc.
It was a fucking joke.
Also, I interviewed at Netflix as well, and I didn't get the job (passed technical interview but didn't get selected after Director level interview. Just wasn't a good fit in terms of interests) and I can't say enough good things about netflix, everyone I met there, and the overall interview process.
So I'm not just annoyed at Azure folks because I didn't get the job. I'm annoyed cause they're mostly morons.
This could also be incentives at the companies. I have a buddy who went to Microsoft, worked 30hr weeks, and was bored. Dude is brilliant and level headed. The team was lazy AF. Worked there for 5 years and went to Facebook and is thriving, going from Senior to Staff rather quickly.
https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
Btw HN didn't strip them -the submitted URL was https://ln.hixie.ch/. No doubt this was the top post at the time.
We do strip some query strings, but only for larger/known sites.
* Number of developers using it on some daily/weekly/monthly, etc. cadence.
* Number of apps published (to iOS, Android, both).
* Number of jobs available using the framework.
* Various subjective desirability metrics from developers survey like the StackOverflow ones.
It's anyone's guess as to which is the best metric or how they should be combined. Also, it's very hard to actually get accurate data on it.
But, according to Statistica at least, yes Flutter really is the most popular mobile app framework as of 2022:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar...
It looks like that's based on a developer survey. I don't know more about its methodology.
So 46% of 33% of mobile app developers that aren't building mobile websites use Flutter. That's not bad at all, but hardly supports a claim of being the "leading mobile app development framework" as you're down to ~15% of mobile app developers using it. And only then since mobile web is being excluded, who knows what it'd be if that was included.
Unless you want to count them both as Native at 50%?
People who use Swift/UIKit to make apps may like it, but it's also the default way to make an iOS app, so they don't feel the need to fight a war. That language was handed down from above as the winner of iOS development. Same for Java/Kotlin/native UI libraries on Android.
Flutter: 46% React Native: 35% Unity: 10% Cordova: 10% Ionic: 9% Xamarin: 8%
Just one datapoint, of course - a survey of 26,384 developers.
Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?
I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine a situation where someone's actions caused a change in a society, which is no longer attributed to him according to popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?
Please, let's honor the man's fiercely-defended policies.
He is Vivek "Vic" Gundotra. His Real Name is Vivek, and we should refer to him by it.
That's an interesting observation considering Sundar is where he is because of early-Google cultural norms.
Also, coming from Flutter camp, blog is barely readable on mobile without zooming.
Tests are not a best practice but more of a necessary evil for production systems and/or businesses incapable of retaining their best for many years.
> Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google's founders famously told Wall Street "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." but that Google is no more.
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.
The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.
I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.
If you're paying them more money now then your relationship is affected to the positive (from Google Cloud's perspective).
To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).
That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...
This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.
I am surprised just how 'bottom up' so much is done at Google, and I wonder if that is why Sundar ended up where he is. Unlike so many other large companies, engineers who build consensus have way more influence on upper management's priorities than other places.
So being someone who is good at building consensus is a good way to built clout at google, more so than any other place. But this isn't alawys good. Sometimes I miss old boring "F500" companies where I can go to the one principal engineer (or director or whatever) and show them my idea, and how it doesn't get in anyone else's way, and boom they either approve or deny it.
No spending months convincing everyone and their mother to make a small (but significant) change.