Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else.
There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
> There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".
Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.
For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.
It’s hard to imagine an absence of resource anxiety in the land of the six figure mortgage payment. Must have been incredible.
Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.
Everyone else's salary is going up at the same rate, more and more jobs are there, and it's de facto illegal to build any more housing anywhere nearby. Of course house prices are growing without limit.
i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable.
it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.
anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.
This tracks with what I saw as an outside observer; I felt like around 2015 was the inflection point where Google started its slow arc toward mediocrity.
It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.
yeah, eric stepped down in 2011 and larry took over as CEO and from the inside it felt fine for a while. but larry definitely got disinterested after a few years and the company felt rudderless by like the end of 2014.
it was less fun having beers on a thursday afternoon for sure, but I at least understood the fact that the company had thousands of non-US employees and TGIF on a friday afternoon for us was TGIM for everyone else.
Not the same - Ruth is far more effective version. Guessing you missed the whole “scrappiness to help investors out oops nvm we are investors” thing or just hadn’t yet run out of coolaid at the time
We did contract work for them in the early teens. I remember going to various Google campuses and being shocked at how little it reminded me of my dotcom days and how much it reminded me of my Hewlett Packard days.
> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.
Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.
But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.
So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.
The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.
Thanks for that list! One of my favorite Wikipedia-isms are these very “list of” pages.
I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however.
> As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized.
> […]
> While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded.
Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases.
>Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is.
It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia:
- >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1....
The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project:
- >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”
: https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
The product they often presented as started in 20% time is Google news. I don't know the actual details, just this is what I remember from my time at Google (2006-2012).
It's not a myth. I had a successful 20% project when I was there and I was nobody special. I started an anti-bot system in 2010 and by 2014 it had become integrated into most of the top products. Last I heard there is a whole team working on it still, and there were also spinoffs.
That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.
It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.
I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.
I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.
* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google
* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP
* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk
* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).
It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.
I'm hard pressed to remember a feature in Wave that does not exist in Docs now. What is it that you miss? I just remember it being dog slow with a lot of latency.
Wave was supposed to be "equal parts conversation and document" (their description). It seems like they separated out the conversation part to Google Talk and made the document part Docs. Wave was kind of the precursor to the state of affairs we have now with Slack and Discord.
So, Google’s choice of architecture prevents them from open-sourcing or maintaining projects a tad longer than absolute necessary. I’d say they dug their own grave, if it has such a large impact on the trust of customers. Maybe Google3’s architecture was excellent for worldwide scalability and costs, but let’s see which one matters in the long term.
Google and their codebase architecture have been around for a while now in the scale of software lifecycle. How far out do we need to wait before its "long term", and how will we know if failure was from decades of business decisions vs repo architecture?
Let’s say their repo architecture didn’t help soften the blow of various business decisions of abandoning products.
There was a time when Google was also Guava and a myriad of Java libraries helping the rest of the world. It’s a design choice, they chose to stop helping, because of their repo. Perhaps it also helped avoid leaks, since copied code can’t be used outside of Google.
If anything Google releases more open source now than ever. Because of TensorFlow (if I recall correctly - my memory is fuzzy on timeline of what product it was) they released Bazel and then Abseil. Chrome didn’t have the clout to accomplish that but those things are open sourced and very high quality libraries. Tcmalloc is open sourced even though Google reaps no rewards from that. There’s a bunch of stuff released by Googlers as open source.
I listed many reasons why open sourcing wouldn’t make sense and you seem to have hyperfixated on just one.
Yes - Google chose a monorepo because of the engineering and business advantages it gave them. For example, all binaries had a common dependency that implemented all sorts of common functionality they found binaries on their servers needed out of the box - that’s why a simple c++ hello world on Google3 results in a many many mib binary that includes an http server for performance monitoring. It’s an opinionated codebase but the opinions are largely documented and explained and aren’t crazy (just because you may make other decisions or prioritize things differently doesn’t mean Google’s choice are wrong). And again, please don’t hyper focus on what I wrote as “oh it only has this one advantage”. There’s lots of advantages and I’m just giving very basic examples. It’s been a fairly long time since I worked at Google and someone who works there is going to have a more authoritative explanation of how things work now as things will inevitably changed some.
You may say they dug their own grave while the internal teams find it helps them run services and maintain things because there’s 1 way of interacting with the artifacts of lots of different teams. And they weren’t going to open source EOL projects anyway and maintenance decisions have nothing to do with google3 and are product and engineering led decisions.
Also, they have a bunch of tooling to manage open source projects that mirror google3 projects. It’s doable for projects that care / who it’s important to but it is also a lot of work (eg can write rules that bidirectionally rename files, functions, c++ namespaces, comments that can strip out code before outgoing synchronization, etc etc). if I recall correctly the tool itself was open sourced too.
As for customer trust, again I point out that not only is the Google3 aspect a minor detail, open sourcing wouldn’t even impact customer trust in a large way. It might with a certain segment of the technical population, but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust. And any open sourcing also has to find motivated maintainers who are not going to be motivated by 0 pay and a huge amount of bug reports and feature requests from users who started with maintenance support of paid engineers and focused product vision. Make sure not to extrapolate your own predilections as a tech engineer onto the general population.
I didn’t mean to focus entirely on Google’s approach to developers. However, one has to notice that Google has lost the upper hand over the web since ChatGPT came about. It can still be summarized in your sentence:
> but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust
Exactly. At the beginning, Google cared a lot about perception from technology-minded people. It was necessary to rise. Now, this original audience doesn’t matter to them, as you very well explain it, with your explanation that they weighed nothing in the balance of choices for all of the (perceived) upsides of their architecture. Because it’s a megalith with well-established business streams, which puts them outside of danger from the whims of public perception.
The business streams are:
- Workplace: Google is an email provider,
- GCP: Infrastructure company (who doesn’t care about developers, remember),
- Ads: Basically a leech. Everyone associates Google’s services to spying people by any means necessary (hi Chrome, hi Analytics, hi Google Search).
- Youtube: Who likes Youtubers? It’s the most degrading title in society, no-one would like their son-in-law to be a youtuber.
Morally, it has lost its stance. Technologically, it’s behind Microsoft. Socially, it has incentivized verbosity on the web so much that nothing is searchable anymore, shooting their own foot, and shooting the entire web with it.
The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.
> At the beginning, Google cared a lot about perception from technology-minded people. It was necessary to rise.
Sorry no. You’re overestimating the importance of techies here. Techies were the first on the web but in no way were techies critical for Google’s growth. Heck I was in junior high in Canada when I first came across Google and our librarian thought Yahoo was the better approach because manual expert indexing was surely better - we may have been nerds but none of us cared about open source. Google was just a novel technology that was better than its predecessors. And in terms of what made Google a success was figuring out AdSense. Without that Google would have died.
> However, one has to notice that Google has lost the upper hand over the web since ChatGPT came about.
That’s a nice claim but there’s no actual objective indication that’s actually true yet. It may well be true that the inflection point happened but please point to concrete data suggesting this rather than a blind assertion.
> The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.
The glorious USSR arguably came back around under Putin’s regime (call it whatever but it’s a very Soviet style political and social culture again).
Google is a massive player in the search space - bigger than MS was with operating systems in the 90s and MS still maintains its healthy dominance in that space for laptops/desktops even though Apple is the “cool” one and ships a lot of iOS devices and Google ships a lot of Android devices and only marginally beats out Windows market share (38% vs 31% vs 17% for ios [1]).
Anyway, you don’t like Google. We get it. But none of this has any relevance about whether open sourcing sunsetted products would in any way alter their trust in a broader sense - their customer base hasn’t been tech heavy since GMail took over from Hotmail (maybe even before then) and I think you’re over thinking how much influence tech nerds have especially as the broader community has gotten more technically adept than they were at the beginning. People now ask their “techie” friends for advice where techie now means I buy and use a lot of electronics gadgets and software tools and not I’m an engineer working in the field.
Indeed in the critiques you outlined of why you don’t like their income streams, nowhere do you even bother mentioning any sunsetted products you thought would be good. If anything, the lesson business leaders probably take away from what happened at Google is that letting engineers make product decisions is a bad idea and results in products being launched without strategy that then hurts the company image because you can’t keep running unsustainable products indefinitely if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of fiduciary responsibility. This is because they look at Facebook and Apple and Microsoft who rarely if ever cut products and only do so if they’re changing strategy drastically or there’s no significant user base (for Apple since they primarily do hardware this is easier and just means they don’t do refreshes of a failed product line or postpone that refresh for a few years).
Are you Gavin Belson defending Google on HN? You seem to be defending Google so much that you might be blindsided about how unpopular and irrelevant it’s becoming.
Just look here regarding the supposed popularity of Google, and supposedly only worldclass developers in small circles noticed:
Yes, 9Gag is a decent source of what random kiddos around the world think. Look at the comments. Google’s loss of monopoly will be slow at the beginning, then very sudden.
And when a company collapses, suddenly the 50-year readiness of its architecture doesn’t matter as much as immediate features, such as being built by geeks, for geeks.
> Also, they have a bunch of tooling to manage open source projects that mirror google3 projects. ... if I recall correctly the tool itself was open sourced too.
I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo.
Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there too? Is Chromium in there too? What about the whole golang project?
Even if I’m off about some of this, it feels like the statement “Code at Google is one giant monolith” needs some qualifiers.
To be fair though, the baseline hello world C++ binary is quite hefty (10s or 100s of MiB - can't recall) & comes with a bunch of command-line options & an HTTP server out of the box. Or at least did when I was there & I doubt it's changed much. All that functionality is to integrate the baseline set of SRE ops tooling that are common to all services that are deployed on Google servers (eg. HTTP server is to support scraping for performance monitoring integration similar to Prometheus/OpenTracing). It's mildly annoying because any command line tools you write pick up all of that useless functionality but it is easy to teach so trade offs.
There are certainly a few notable exceptions (Chrome and Android), but google3 really is a massive monorepo.
It does contain forks of tons of open source code in the third party folder. I don't recall if the Linux kernel is in /third_party but I would not be surprisied if it is.
Note that google3 is a subset of the entire Google codebase. But it still contain more than half of its code (>2B LoC), mostly those running over their cloud. In contains all the infrastructure code as well, including Linux kernel, compiler, tool chain... literally everything needed. When you build some big binaries, you may see more than 500k~1M build targets analyzed and built (or pulled from cache).
Even in the early days, I don't believe Google was all that fast about launching new products? The "fail fast" stuff was about people working on blue-sky ideas that failed to get traction before they were launched, or maybe just launched in Google Labs [1].
The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name.
There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.
If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.
> There is little to no “this is an experimental project by x team”
They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long.
Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1].
They do that, this is what their various Labs and subsidiaries and internal accelerators are there for. The issue is that people figure out it's associated with Google and then expect it to be maintained as such.
I do wonder how people figured out that Google was associated with Google+, Google Inbox, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Video, Google Wave, ...
(I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)
That's fair enough, I suppose, though I think those are also primarily where the "Google kills everything" reputation comes from - not the Labs products.
I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.
I had several 20% projects from 2012 to 2016, all of which were on the Cloud Business side (ie not engineering). It was very much a thing up until Larry Page stepped down as CEO
> So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.
There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.
It has always been my theory/belief that long periods of demoralization actually get rid of a disproportionately higher amount of good talent. When the company starts to smell, those that can move on, because they’re in demand elsewhere as well, will do so. You’re then left with those that hope you don’t let them go, but are less confident or capable in their abilities to find employment elsewhere.
I think there are two ways. The first is basically what good sports teams do (or Netflix at least was doing) where you continuously fire people who don't perform wanted at levels but also do very rigorous hiring and pay very well. Then there is cut fast and deep and shuffle organization at the same time which also works if you do that when needed and very rarely like once in 10-15 years Facebook might have pulled this and the company looks like it is in much better shape than Google or Amazon.
>And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty.
It's a huge red flag. Layoffs typically lead to more people leaving the company after the fact because of the instability. I was one of the "last man standing," after a company did this over a period of a few quarters and I ended up leaving shortly after. They no longer had anyone to maintain their software. Oops.
They taught this in business school back in the 1990s. I don't know why a company the caliber of Google wouldn't understand this. It could be the execs think that Google is such a stellar place to work that none of the remaining people would dare leave. It could be the execs are so self concerned, they don't care about anything other than their bonuses and just make sure to get cuts in before each quarter ends to pad their bonus. It could be business schools just don't teach this anymore.
I suppose every layoff is different, but they are not completely random. There are many factors involved, performance can be one of them. My assumption is that leaders craft some query on the employees list and tweak parameters until they get the right number of people to lay off.
"Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.
If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."
Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?
Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.
The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.
It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.
It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place
To dissuade potential employees who are thinking to apply because they mistakenly think it's still like the stories they hear from the old days?
To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?
If historic Broadway theaters in NYC transitioned to blocks of server farms, then many people would have a feeling, "Singing and dancing and live art used to happen here, and that history is worth continuing, here," even if for economic reasons it wouldn't and couldn't anymore. . . and so I don't think it's only wistful or wishfulness speaking.
It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.
Google is a bit like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. It had lost its way. There was no leadership. Most of what they tried failed or wasn't that great. And yet it was still raking in the profits. And then MS turned it around. All it took was new leadership. They just overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Just a string of good, solid decisive leadership. Satya Nadella turned that company around.
Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.
Absolutely they need a leader to turn it around, but Apple and Microsoft don’t feel like Google did: it’s still going to be a mature tech giant, run by spreadsheets, even if they can start producing some cool stuff again
As much hate Microsoft gets these days they are doing a great job recovering from Ballmer. Satya's moonshot investment in OpenAI is probably going to be what cements them a place in the future despite Windows' mindshare eroding and Azure providing lukewarm service.
> It's time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where innovation happens
I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.
> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.
Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.
Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.
I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.
And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.
At some point the real world just gets in the way.
To clarify, this was a sarcastic remark. I wasn't trying to actually imply that it was okay just because everyone else was doing it. I suppose that little /s really can do a lot of work.
Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....
> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways
That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.
> In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up.
> Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.”
> Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said.
I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI.
Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it.
OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.
I think the characterization is unfair to generative AI, because the information that is retained in the model is a very lossy and rough generalization of the training data - that situation is a lot less direct than what it's like with search engines. In my mind, the lawsuits against search engines have a lot more ground to stand on. Saying that something "provides access to copyrighted content" almost implies that there's some mechanism that allows the user to wholesale download complete, unedited and exact copies of some copyrighted material - I could see that argument with a search engine, but not really with a text or image generator.
It's 100% dependent on copyrighted material at least, even though you can't access an exact copy of it without access to the material it wouldn't exist. It's a messy issue, I have no idea how it will be solved since it's a rather new development for humanity, in the past when humans would collect knowledge from different sources to use them in a novel way there would be at least some kind of attribution, recognition of the sources, either being cited or acknowledged in a preface. With GenAI there's nothing, and probably not even a way for GenAI to tell us where it got "inspired" from to generate something.
It's going to be a very messy landscape for copyrights and intellectual property in the next years.
A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world; rather, they suck the marrow out of all the text and art and everything in the world and use it to sell their own replacement service for all the text and art and everything in the world. Google has done some questionable things to become a gateway to the world's work, but they're (mostly) still a gateway, not a copy.
Maybe we can agree they are still _mostly_ at gateway. But their ambition to answer your question through zero-clicks (i.e., show the answer right in their search results) does make them profit from direct copying. The copyright owner will not get any clicks, show any adds, or get any other kind of feedback to their work, in those cases.
Yeah, for sure, Google wants to show the answer on the results page, and for many search queries they're able to achieve this in one way or another -- either through the knowledge graph, the question-answering slop, or in the snippets of text pulled from the search results themselves. They do, at least, show links to sources in these cases, which is better than ChatGPT (or Bard, to the extent that it's used). But I agree that there's not a lot of short-term incentive for Google to cite sources in a prominent way, and there is a lot of incentive for them to develop features that replace the websites that made them valuable in the first place. There's always been an uneasy bargain between Google and webmasters, and there's always been a tension between what's best for the Google user, best for Google, and best for the Web. If there's a similar bargain with OpenAI, I don't see them approaching it with nearly as much respect: source attribution has not been prioritized in any meaningful way.
> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways
This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.
How is calling out violations of the GPL license helping copyright trolling?
If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.
Citation very much needed, in particular if you're claiming that OpenAI would need to GPL license the OpenAI code ("their stuff") in order to provide the answer (as opposed to the lesser question of whether the code in the text of that answer ought to be covered by GPL).
GPL stipulates that derivative works must be licensed under GPL.
Just because an entire industry has their entire future riding on courts eventually deciding that "Yeah, but copyright doesn't apply to AI", that doesn't make it so.
Indeed; I think there's a genuine question as to whether the output of ChatGPT is a derivative work under the law or under our feelings of what's moral.
I've read a lot of code in my career, much of it GPL. When I now write code, it's based in part on that previous code reading. I think most people agree that doesn't mean that all code that I write must be licensed under GPL. In other words, they agree it's not derivative. Even if I write a C strcpy implementation that's functionally identical to one in glibc, I think most of us agree it's not derivative, even if I've read glibc's implementation before. Or if someone asks me "how can I write strcpy in terms of memcpy and strlen?" and I answer them with code I write that's very close to glibc's implementation.
Is AI-written code fundamentally different from bio-intelligence-written code in that regard? (I think the answer is uncertain in terms of "how should it work?", not that it's clearly one way or the other.)
I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees.
It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.
Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have that "infinite abundance" mindset - their initiatives in game development, hardware and VR are probably subsidized by Steam many times over.
I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.
I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success?
There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.
I think that's their point. If Google or Facebook had stayed with a Valve-sized team and stuck to their knitting, would they really have made any less money?
Would this preclude buying Instagram? That was considered expensive at the time, but I think was a great buy for them and is a significant part of keeping Facebook competitive now and for the next half-decade.
Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.
both had slump but I think Facebook has been much better shape after Zuck did layoffs and pivoted away from metaverse. Llama and Meta Smart Glasses both feel like groundbreaking products.
I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days.
One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree.
YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network).
Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).
And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.
I strongly believe that Google Video would have been killed by Google long ago. They bought YouTube because they couldn't create it themselves. And they never managed to turn that into a real product, IMO.
It's not that it's not big. It's that it's not as big as it could be. It's not gmail-big or maps-big, at least for me. It is outclassed by many other, in their respective niches (video streaming, music, and social networking), and despite the huge efforts, Google never managed to turn it into a subscription-based service.
It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.
Atleast according to average daily watch time reported in 2019, Netflix was at 164 million hours and YouTube was at 1 billion. I doubt that ratio has changed much since then
How do you think YouTube failed? If you tried to get someone to name a search engine that's not Google, they could maybe think of Bing or DuckDuckGo or something. If you tried to get someone to name a email service that's not Gmail, they could maybe say Outlook or Yahoo if they're older. But try to get someone to name a user-generated video platform that's not YouTube? YouTube has comparable revenue to Netflix. And Netflix has direct competitors -- such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ to name a few that are pretty big on their own right.
I don't know about that, they made some good products, or invested in ones that already existed.
I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.
I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.
> There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve.
What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...
* EA/Origin
* Epic
* Ubisoft
EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).
Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".
I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.
Ah, of course, I knew I was forgetting one. They did start that way although they've branched out since then. For example they sell Everspace 2, which is a much newer game.
They actually might be my favorite since all the games they sell are DRM-free. You can download the installer of every one of their games locally and they'll run "forever" without any dependency on GOG or their Galaxy library app (unlike Steam). Though their selection is more limited since IIRC they manually review every game they list.
However, even they tend to favor their "in-house" games (they're a sibling company of CDPR which developed the Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll frequently see those featured prominently there). Not as bad as Epic, though. More in the style of how Steam advertised Half Life 2 and Portal in the early days of Steam.
And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.
I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.
Not only not working there, but distinctly said he left because he complained that too much money was being sent down the money hole and productivity per capita was abysmal
To play devil's advocate for my own point, Michael Abrash was swiped from Valve by Facebook. The dude is a hardcore hacker. Even the rendering code in Age of Empires II owes him credit for performance optimizations!
> yet they[Valve] crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.
Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died.
Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you mean "Meta Quest"? Literally, each division within Meta is fighting in a different sector
Valve has been operating in the same market for 27 years and has consequently built a loyal and enthusiastic fan base.
Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.
> Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.
Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.
Same can be said for a company like Microsoft or Google. They have their core products and milk cows for years.
And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.
Steam doesn’t exist without Valve’s catalog of games and especially Half-Life 2. Its continued success can’t be simple luck given how much competition they have, although at times it does seem like Microsoft, Google (Stadia), Epic, Ubisoft simply want Steam to win.
Valve had the advantage of Newell/Harrington starting the company with a pile of money from being former MS staff, which gave them the ability to say "when it's done" for their first game. As the resulting first game was a hit and they didn't owe much (if anything) to their publisher Sierra [1], from that point on they've kept rolling the success forwards. Being a private company there's no details I'm aware of on how much has been taken out of the business, although Harrington left not long after Half-life.
[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.
I remember the forums (and slashdot comments) just hammering valve for thinking of creating steam and introducing DRM to their games, and that they would never, ever use it because of that.
But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.
Mullvad ( a much smaller company) seems to have a similar set of goals and values. Not everything needs to be under the umbrella of a 800lb gorilla multinational. I hope that some of those entities can learn to be more creative rather than trying to reduce everything to something bean counters who need to report quarterly gains or get fired. It disincentivises taking risks at all.
> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.
Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.
Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.
> Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse'
I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.
I see it them taking a risk and while I thought it was a silly idea, I applaud them for trying. It's hard to imagine Google taking a risk like this, which is the crux of this post and these threads.
Their employees and executives make the majority of their income from RSUs. You can't exactly run a company if your entire workforce gets a huge pay cut each year from a poorly performing stock.
That’s a great point as well. People blame investors but at FAANGs the workforce itself are investors and very important ones since they’ll bail if the stock stops going up.
There is actually evidence that the market doesn't demand growth - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=JpB4 suggests that the market is chasing the base rate of monetary creation.
If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?
[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]
If SAS is the paragon of a company not pursuing growth at all costs, then maybe we do need to start looking at quarterly metrics. As a customer their business model sucks and they are doubling down on "either we're a solution for your whole enterprise or else."
Little capacity for code sharing and lack of reasonable tools to do so. That and the fact that newer statistical / ML techniques are extremely expensive mean that if you wanted to do e.g. a transformer you'd have to either pay out the nose or roll your own from scratch.
That and my department of about a dozen can't justify the cost to upgrade to their more enterprise focused, cloud ready new version Viya, but there's not really an upgrade path for 9.4 other than minor maintenance releases. Since no young new hires come in with SAS experience and the whole thing seems like a ticking clock, we decided just supporting Python for new development is a better plan.
>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.
>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:
No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions:
https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025
Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...
The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?
Financial markets in general do not demand this. As someone else said, the return expected is just a basic risk-free rate plus some compensation for the added risk of owning equities instead of treasuries, which isn't nothing but it doesn't mean you need to double in size every year indefinitely.
The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.
Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.
It’s not the “growth at all costs” mindset at all.
It’s growth period.
It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.
But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.
You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.
That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.
> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.
My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.
Bingo - you hit the nail on the head. Keeping the investor pool small and close-in is how you avoid this. If you go public, eventually you will succumb to this "growth above all" mindset, even if your culture was set up to resist it.
I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.
I think you have to have a separate entity(ies) that is strictly eggheads trying new shit. They need a big budget and have to keep the bean counters away, otherwise they will steal all the soul out of the enterprise. That's why so many thing come out of places like universities and NASA, you don't have bean counters killing the soul of the engineers/scientists. I'm not saying that situation is always possible, just putting out a theory. Also a lot of the low hanging fruit in science and math has already been discovered/invented, so it gets harder. This is where I hope AGI comes in, even if it's risky.
It takes a super special set of conditions to be able to bootstrap a >10 billion dollar company like Valve. Most >10b companies need immense capital injections to work
Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in.
*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.
This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.
Your politics are bleeding through here and it’s clearly fogging your mind of reality. I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations and you’re strawmanning about “neoliberalism” and bringing up climate change. Do better, be less emotional. If you can’t do that you have no business making statements about nations and their relations with one another which are rational.
when in the history of anything was that the case? democracies make terrible choices, with voters often voting against their interests all the time.
dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).
It’s generally accepted in international relations that it’s always the case long term. States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well. Erdogan has greatly expanded turkeys influence in the region and been relatively successful in playing the west and russia off each other for instance.
Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to his removal and it can be argued Iraq didn’t have many good options as historically it’s been controlled by one or more of the surrounding nations so it may just not working realistically due to geography and ethnic strife
> States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well.
This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.
Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.
That sounds like it is true, but is it really? I'd love to read a well written hypothesis which goes through a cause and effect and is backed up by at least some peer reviewed research.
Beau of The Fifth Column (Justin King) emphasizes ... states/countries don't have friends, they have interests. He delves into specific cases all the time and is one of the clearest-eyed political commentators out there.
> no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine
I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.
> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies.
It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.
I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
i'm sure there are. but google's arc, the engineering culture wasn't just dynamic, it was dynamic and (apologies to use an eric schmidt-ism) impactful.
Alphabet has ruined it's entire portfolio if measured by the initial vision of each product. They have decimated the once great platforms they developed in pursuit of ever canabalizing their consumers
I think that's Google hemartia. They execute really well initially, but falter on maintaining and nurturing ideas and products. The internal incentives regarding promotions and pay amplify the problem. Maintaining or improving a product isn't as impactful to one's career as creating an entirely new one. They have a half dozen chat apps because they unintentionally created an engineering "crabs in the bucket" situation. Not to say they are anywhere near as bad as the companies who do it on purpose a la stack ranking though.
I think another important factor is that what's a viable business to one party isn't worth it to Google simply because they can use that engineering talent more effectively in a monetary sense elsewhere. Even spinning them out doesn't make sense from a numbers perspective. The big problem with that is that they utterly ruin the landscape for everybody who isn't Google and who would operate just fine if it weren't for the size 20 boots giant that tramples all over the space before giving up on it.
For me, the important sentence is "Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things." This is very interesting, but I like that the author notes the outside view, because I still get the feeling I'd like to work there someday.
Don't go to Google unless it's for the pay/benefits (benefits are basically pay in a costume) or for a very particular role which is unmistakably aligned with your professional priorities. You won't find any of the mythological coolness there, literally all of my buddies say. Additionally, when recruiters sell you the position, they try to make it look like you are working at the core of their most important products, when it's generally about some minute pedestrian detail of their internal ecosystem.
I just got laid off but working there can be really good. My manager and team were great engineers but also just truly nice and caring people and the pay and benefits were great. On the other hand I found the work to mostly be tedious (for every bit of interesting engineering there was lots of bureaucracy and wrestling with obtuse internal tools).
It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.
This article's site is a rare one for which Firefox's built-in reader mode doesn't currently have a silent cost: the reader mode bypasses uBlock Origin protection against some kinds of trackers.
Ben and Brian's Google IO talks were fantastic. Their talks always made me realise that Google was a special place. Sad to see its not the case anymore from Ben himself.
> But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.
Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?
I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.
> Let me explain. In a typical company, when priorities shift, you "downsize" (or cancel) a project, and then use the money to add people to a different, more important project. The common way to do this is fire people from the first project, then rehire a bunch of new people in the second project. It's easy, it's simple, it's expected.
This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.
And that email quote is also interesting on its own:
> Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.
I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.
It's also incredibly shortsighted, and one of those aspects of business in America that contributes to the problems it has. All that institutional knowledge lost that could have been helpful in the new project. I will say that it is usually the worse run companies that are guilty of such things. The startup crowd that largely makes (made) Hacker News was spared this because a startup couldn't survive doing that. America has been coming down off the Jack Welch school of business for the past decade and a half, which perpetuated the culture that birthed the hate for MBAs and complete lack of faith in any company.
It's a question of trust and societal culture, not company culture.
On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?
In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.
This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.
BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)
I find it useful, in reading this stuff, to remember: the company he joined in 2005 had (apparently) 5,600 employees. In 2022, that number was 190,000.
It's interesting. When I moved to California in 2012, Google was exciting. They had hot stuff, new platforms, very exciting. Six years later, you were hesitant to hire Google people. Today, it's the Bay Area retirement home.
No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.
In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.
I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their careers, and I can't really imagine the kind of a one-in-a-million company that'd be justified in turning down a Google ex-employee based on just their employer.
He's like 30% correct. Before, hiring someone from Google was an accomplishment, because they were so rare. Now, there's so many people with Google on their resume, most refusing to downsize in TC, that even mediocre positions are filled with ex-Google applicants.
Is that really because Google workers are seen as worse employees (like what the original post said), or just because the job market is now suddenly loaded with thousands of Google employees who'd just been laid off?
Right, we're not talking about some random company. Accenture or whatever will 100% hire a Xoogler. But everyone else knows that most Google engineers work really hard "making sure all stakeholders are on the same page regarding moving this to a service to reduce tech debt" and are in meetings all day to determine which team they're "blocked on" which is a thing, sure, but not something you really want to hire for usually.
I work at Google. Having Google on my CV has been a huge bonus, I get so much more interest from companies trying to hire me and many of them directly reference having Google on there as a positive. I know zero people who are just coasting along, everyone is working super hard. I have seen a few people leave in the last year because they were under too much pressure, despite the pay.
Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate.
> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else
At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
> Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.
I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.
I've been hesitant to comment on this to avoid sounding "bitter", but you're absolutely right.. it's telling that quite a number of folks are so laser-focused on the money as opposed to the innovation.
at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.
I got into programming because I enjoyed programming. My first "real" job was not in FAANG, just some small company with about 2 other developers. And it was great, I had a lot of fun, I got to work with great technology and try new things.
Then I got lured into FAANG for the $$$ and free food. Now it's boring. There's no room to innovate. I'm not allowed to make any big decisions or play with fun technology. What's left? I enjoy my TC and that gets me through the day. You can't blame folks for focusing on TC when there's no innovation to be had.
Yeah I get the impression that people don't take as much pride in their work for its own sake anymore - more assembly line worker than master craftsman.
From the outside, it looks like many in the industry assumed Covid-induced changes would be permanent. They hired accordingly, beefed up their headcount and in the process ended up getting a lot of talent which wouldn't have gotten in pre-pandemic. Once you recalibrate, you are not left with much choices.
I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadThere’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".
Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.
For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.
Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.
it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.
anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.
It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.
Another option is that he saw the trajectory of the company culture and wanted out.
My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.
But Ruth: she could be anywhere in the corporate world.
and I don't say that disparagingly. that was endearing.
(i'm probably getting some details of that wrong, it was ... dear lord, a long time ago)
Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.
But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.
So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.
Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.
DoubleClick and Waze are two other big ones that I remember seeming important at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History
https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
From that page:
> As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized.
> […]
> While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.c...
Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_...
Be like Chad Hurley.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054947
I’d be glad to hear your perspective or thoughts in this thread or as a reply to my post re: Google Earth/Keyhole.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions
- https://medium.com/@lewgus/the-untold-story-about-the-foundi...
It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia:
- >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1....
The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project:
- >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.” : https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.
It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.
I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.
I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.
That being said, I’m not sure whether it is you or I who does not know what “quasi” means.
Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.
* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google
* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP
* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk
* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).
It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
There was a time when Google was also Guava and a myriad of Java libraries helping the rest of the world. It’s a design choice, they chose to stop helping, because of their repo. Perhaps it also helped avoid leaks, since copied code can’t be used outside of Google.
Yes - Google chose a monorepo because of the engineering and business advantages it gave them. For example, all binaries had a common dependency that implemented all sorts of common functionality they found binaries on their servers needed out of the box - that’s why a simple c++ hello world on Google3 results in a many many mib binary that includes an http server for performance monitoring. It’s an opinionated codebase but the opinions are largely documented and explained and aren’t crazy (just because you may make other decisions or prioritize things differently doesn’t mean Google’s choice are wrong). And again, please don’t hyper focus on what I wrote as “oh it only has this one advantage”. There’s lots of advantages and I’m just giving very basic examples. It’s been a fairly long time since I worked at Google and someone who works there is going to have a more authoritative explanation of how things work now as things will inevitably changed some.
You may say they dug their own grave while the internal teams find it helps them run services and maintain things because there’s 1 way of interacting with the artifacts of lots of different teams. And they weren’t going to open source EOL projects anyway and maintenance decisions have nothing to do with google3 and are product and engineering led decisions.
Also, they have a bunch of tooling to manage open source projects that mirror google3 projects. It’s doable for projects that care / who it’s important to but it is also a lot of work (eg can write rules that bidirectionally rename files, functions, c++ namespaces, comments that can strip out code before outgoing synchronization, etc etc). if I recall correctly the tool itself was open sourced too.
As for customer trust, again I point out that not only is the Google3 aspect a minor detail, open sourcing wouldn’t even impact customer trust in a large way. It might with a certain segment of the technical population, but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust. And any open sourcing also has to find motivated maintainers who are not going to be motivated by 0 pay and a huge amount of bug reports and feature requests from users who started with maintenance support of paid engineers and focused product vision. Make sure not to extrapolate your own predilections as a tech engineer onto the general population.
> but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust
Exactly. At the beginning, Google cared a lot about perception from technology-minded people. It was necessary to rise. Now, this original audience doesn’t matter to them, as you very well explain it, with your explanation that they weighed nothing in the balance of choices for all of the (perceived) upsides of their architecture. Because it’s a megalith with well-established business streams, which puts them outside of danger from the whims of public perception.
The business streams are:
- Workplace: Google is an email provider,
- GCP: Infrastructure company (who doesn’t care about developers, remember),
- Ads: Basically a leech. Everyone associates Google’s services to spying people by any means necessary (hi Chrome, hi Analytics, hi Google Search).
- Youtube: Who likes Youtubers? It’s the most degrading title in society, no-one would like their son-in-law to be a youtuber.
Morally, it has lost its stance. Technologically, it’s behind Microsoft. Socially, it has incentivized verbosity on the web so much that nothing is searchable anymore, shooting their own foot, and shooting the entire web with it.
The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.
Sorry no. You’re overestimating the importance of techies here. Techies were the first on the web but in no way were techies critical for Google’s growth. Heck I was in junior high in Canada when I first came across Google and our librarian thought Yahoo was the better approach because manual expert indexing was surely better - we may have been nerds but none of us cared about open source. Google was just a novel technology that was better than its predecessors. And in terms of what made Google a success was figuring out AdSense. Without that Google would have died.
> However, one has to notice that Google has lost the upper hand over the web since ChatGPT came about.
That’s a nice claim but there’s no actual objective indication that’s actually true yet. It may well be true that the inflection point happened but please point to concrete data suggesting this rather than a blind assertion.
> The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.
The glorious USSR arguably came back around under Putin’s regime (call it whatever but it’s a very Soviet style political and social culture again).
Google is a massive player in the search space - bigger than MS was with operating systems in the 90s and MS still maintains its healthy dominance in that space for laptops/desktops even though Apple is the “cool” one and ships a lot of iOS devices and Google ships a lot of Android devices and only marginally beats out Windows market share (38% vs 31% vs 17% for ios [1]).
Anyway, you don’t like Google. We get it. But none of this has any relevance about whether open sourcing sunsetted products would in any way alter their trust in a broader sense - their customer base hasn’t been tech heavy since GMail took over from Hotmail (maybe even before then) and I think you’re over thinking how much influence tech nerds have especially as the broader community has gotten more technically adept than they were at the beginning. People now ask their “techie” friends for advice where techie now means I buy and use a lot of electronics gadgets and software tools and not I’m an engineer working in the field.
Indeed in the critiques you outlined of why you don’t like their income streams, nowhere do you even bother mentioning any sunsetted products you thought would be good. If anything, the lesson business leaders probably take away from what happened at Google is that letting engineers make product decisions is a bad idea and results in products being launched without strategy that then hurts the company image because you can’t keep running unsustainable products indefinitely if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of fiduciary responsibility. This is because they look at Facebook and Apple and Microsoft who rarely if ever cut products and only do so if they’re changing strategy drastically or there’s no significant user base (for Apple since they primarily do hardware this is easier and just means they don’t do refreshes of a failed product line or postpone that refresh for a few years).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...
Just look here regarding the supposed popularity of Google, and supposedly only worldclass developers in small circles noticed:
https://9gag.com/gag/a04BOgq
Yes, 9Gag is a decent source of what random kiddos around the world think. Look at the comments. Google’s loss of monopoly will be slow at the beginning, then very sudden.
And when a company collapses, suddenly the 50-year readiness of its architecture doesn’t matter as much as immediate features, such as being built by geeks, for geeks.
YouTuber might be degrading to you but it’s one of the most desired position among teens.
https://github.com/google/copybara
I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo.
Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there too? Is Chromium in there too? What about the whole golang project?
Even if I’m off about some of this, it feels like the statement “Code at Google is one giant monolith” needs some qualifiers.
It does contain forks of tons of open source code in the third party folder. I don't recall if the Linux kernel is in /third_party but I would not be surprisied if it is.
A fair amount of the operations are actually documented publicly, ex. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs
There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.
If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.
They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long.
Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1].
[1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...
(I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)
And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.
It's a huge red flag. Layoffs typically lead to more people leaving the company after the fact because of the instability. I was one of the "last man standing," after a company did this over a period of a few quarters and I ended up leaving shortly after. They no longer had anyone to maintain their software. Oops.
They taught this in business school back in the 1990s. I don't know why a company the caliber of Google wouldn't understand this. It could be the execs think that Google is such a stellar place to work that none of the remaining people would dare leave. It could be the execs are so self concerned, they don't care about anything other than their bonuses and just make sure to get cuts in before each quarter ends to pad their bonus. It could be business schools just don't teach this anymore.
If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."
Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...
Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...
Thanks Ben.
Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.
The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.
It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.
It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place
To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?
It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.
We should get a "Landmarks Preservation Commission" for corporate cultures.
Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.
or abusing monopoly and network effect.
I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.
… at Google. Which comes back to my point that why should anyone except Google ex employees care if it’s happening there or somewhere else?
So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?
Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.
Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.
I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.
And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.
At some point the real world just gets in the way.
OpenAI?
Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.
That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.
> Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.”
> Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said.
https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...
Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it.
OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.
Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.
It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.
It's going to be a very messy landscape for copyrights and intellectual property in the next years.
I agree that Google should have been forced to pay licensing fees, and OpenAI should too.
We know from history that's unlikely to happen.
They do, juste look at all the art being generated that uses well known brands and characters.
Whats the solution ?
This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.
If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.
Just because an entire industry has their entire future riding on courts eventually deciding that "Yeah, but copyright doesn't apply to AI", that doesn't make it so.
I've read a lot of code in my career, much of it GPL. When I now write code, it's based in part on that previous code reading. I think most people agree that doesn't mean that all code that I write must be licensed under GPL. In other words, they agree it's not derivative. Even if I write a C strcpy implementation that's functionally identical to one in glibc, I think most of us agree it's not derivative, even if I've read glibc's implementation before. Or if someone asks me "how can I write strcpy in terms of memcpy and strlen?" and I answer them with code I write that's very close to glibc's implementation.
Is AI-written code fundamentally different from bio-intelligence-written code in that regard? (I think the answer is uncertain in terms of "how should it work?", not that it's clearly one way or the other.)
Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?
Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.
Did Valve corporation do something like that?
It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.
Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.
There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.
One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network). Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).
And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.
Before YouTube there was Google Video, which was moderately successful (it was just that YouTube was more successful, so it got acquired).
But there are just my opinions, of course.
It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.
See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation
Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...
I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.
I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.
Google3/Borg ecosystem should have been productized but that'll never happen now the way things are evolving.
What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...
* EA/Origin
* Epic
* Ubisoft
EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).
Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".
I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.
They actually might be my favorite since all the games they sell are DRM-free. You can download the installer of every one of their games locally and they'll run "forever" without any dependency on GOG or their Galaxy library app (unlike Steam). Though their selection is more limited since IIRC they manually review every game they list.
However, even they tend to favor their "in-house" games (they're a sibling company of CDPR which developed the Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll frequently see those featured prominently there). Not as bad as Epic, though. More in the style of how Steam advertised Half Life 2 and Portal in the early days of Steam.
I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.
Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died.
Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you mean "Meta Quest"? Literally, each division within Meta is fighting in a different sector
Valve has been operating in the same market for 27 years and has consequently built a loyal and enthusiastic fan base.
Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.
Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.
And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.
[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.
But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.
If you go public, no way to prevent it.
You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.
Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.
Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.
I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.
But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.
(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)
You might be right about some executives, or people who have been with the company for a very long time.
Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value
It’s not the MBAs alone that demand an increasing stock price.
Growth and private investment are part and parcel.
If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?
Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.
SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.
Update: Looks like they are:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute
[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]
That and my department of about a dozen can't justify the cost to upgrade to their more enterprise focused, cloud ready new version Viya, but there's not really an upgrade path for 9.4 other than minor maintenance releases. Since no young new hires come in with SAS experience and the whole thing seems like a ticking clock, we decided just supporting Python for new development is a better plan.
>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:
No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025
Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...
the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.
for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.
The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?
The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.
Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.
It’s growth period.
It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.
But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.
You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.
That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.
My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.
I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.
_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.
This is typically termed a "belief".
dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).
Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to his removal and it can be argued Iraq didn’t have many good options as historically it’s been controlled by one or more of the surrounding nations so it may just not working realistically due to geography and ethnic strife
This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.
Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.
I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.
It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
Luckily, that's the only reason I do anything at all!
It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.
Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?
This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.
And that email quote is also interesting on its own:
> Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.
I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.
On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?
In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.
This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.
BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)
Once you grow past a certain size, you lose it.
With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.
The non profit people never stood a chance.
No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.
In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.
I might be an outlier
> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else
At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.
I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.
at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.
I got into programming because I enjoyed programming. My first "real" job was not in FAANG, just some small company with about 2 other developers. And it was great, I had a lot of fun, I got to work with great technology and try new things.
Then I got lured into FAANG for the $$$ and free food. Now it's boring. There's no room to innovate. I'm not allowed to make any big decisions or play with fun technology. What's left? I enjoy my TC and that gets me through the day. You can't blame folks for focusing on TC when there's no innovation to be had.
I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.