It's interesting to me that everyone talks so much about the recent layoffs as the problem. They've been awful, don't get me wrong, but they shouldn't have destroyed the company like this.
(I've been on the outside looking in so I have a slightly different perspective on the last 10+ years of GOOG compared to many people.)
No, I think you're right in talking more about the "professional managers". The only way for a company to break this fast is if it was already hollow. Don't blame the (still awful) layoffs. Blame the rotten management layers that led up to... everything.
What is particularly puzzling to me about the decline of Google is that the founders are still alive and active. It's not strange to me to hear that IBM is in decline: it's just too old, the founders are long-dead, etc. Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built?
Imagine you're incredibly wealthy. You have access to all the finest things in the entire world. You have access to the most elite, exclusive, desirable places and people in the world.
Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. He seems very drawn to a crazy lifestyle.
> He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities.
Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
He’s not running for office but he sure does seem to waste a ton of time arguing politics on Twitter and getting into public battles with people.
I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.
This. The founders are not hungry, and "running the world's largest advertising firm" is a far, far cry from the "don't be evil" and "make all the world's information free" ethos that they espoused in their 20s. I honestly wonder what Sergey and Larry think of what their creation has become.
“Huh. It's funny how you stop caring about these things when you can afford to jet off to Saint Tropez for the weekend just because you have a hankering for bouillabaisse.”
>Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight.
Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
And more so, you’re not digging in to work on cool technology. You’re likely just fighting board members and investors to do something that’s not immediately or obviously “make more money.”
Much as he was criticized, a fair bit of which was deserved, the one thing that you could say about Steve Ballmer is that he was still very, very passionate about making Microsoft succeed right up until he was ousted.
Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
"I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale."
No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc.
One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
The weird thing to me is that this hasn't happened to Zuckerberg—despite having more money than anyone can imagine, he's still plugging away, showing up to work, trying to juice the stock price of his corrosive adware company. Amazing how he can have those kinds of resources, that insane drive...and such a pedestrian imagination.
That there's something wrong with Google that needs fixing. that its founders are,or feel, responsible for fixing it. That they are allowed or capable of fixing it. That they can or should be bothered. That a large company of 175k people can be "magical". That any two hacker news folks will agree on what "magical" is or feels like :-)
Your question implies that you think Page and/or Brin think the company is moving in the wrong direction AND Sundar Pichai is not the right leader.
Together, Page and Brin own about 14% of the publicly-listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.
If anything they are supporters (and more likely, originators) of some of the changes that have been occurring over the last couple of years, including layoffs and other things people describe as “decline”.
Because they don't know how to. They hired Eric Schmidt for a reason, and then stopped worrying about business things. It's about time they stepped back up, but are they even able to?
Larry Page (the cofounder) took over after Eric Schmidt. And that was a long, long time ago. Read up on the History section of Google's wikipedia page for more ancient history.
And Larry's term as CEO following Eric's departure is one of the main reasons why I say he doesn't know how to fix this. I lived through it, I don't need to read the history books. Larry didn't seem to have any ability to keep the ship on course in mild conditions, nor the inclination to learn, so why would he have the ability to get out of a major storm?
(And to be clear, I don't think that's a personal failing. I don't think I'd do any better in his place! But I think knowing your own limits is very important, and knowing that I'd be a terrible megacorp CEO is part of that.)
I don't know much about Brin, but from what I know about Page his management is probably a big aspect of Alphabets problems. The idea that the company should be all engineers, all the time, and nobody can tell them no or delegate a task to them probably doesn't create the most coherent and stable product development environment.
Google is no such place. I've worked in several product areas, and while there is no formal one-size-fits-all process, generally engineers build products specified by PM written PRDs, often informed by UXR, designed by UX. At least for the last 12 years, it's not been a wild west of rogue engineers.
Google is far from an engineering led company today. It is the same product management situation as at any other company. That engineering led vision for the company is what produced their early successes. Their later failures aren't because of being an engineering led company...
I think the turning point was the Google+ failure. It was perhaps the first major initiative at Google that was not engineering led, and when it failed, it seems like the shift began in earnest to restructure the company for top down initiatives, led by business instead of engineering.
Google+ indeed happened under Page's leadership, so I agree with you that this is where it fell off the rails, but I think you have the reason backwards.
> Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built?
They achieved what they initially wanted, and left Google closer to its peak. At some point, you want to move on. Especially when you quit as a winner, and now you can relax or deal with more fun and interesting ventures.
Coming in to save a company in a decline is not as fun and satisfying as creating something new and awesome from scratch. Especially when you’ve made enough to not have to worry about it ever, so that you can afford to only pursue things that are fun for you.
Plus, “decline” of Google is relative. Sure, they have not a good reputation anymore, and they do not push out new and exciting products that kill it in the market. But guess what? The share price isn’t tanking, so from the perspective of Sergei and Larry (who are still significant shareholders), that decline isn’t hitting them much.
Look at IBM. They’ve been dead in the eyes of the tech industry as an innovator and a success story for the longest time. Their Watson for medical applications is mostly considered to be somewhere between a failure and a scam. However, their share price is doing just fine.
I guess I'm at a point in my life where "people go home on time and nobody wants to work entire weekend just for funsies!! :-<" is no longer as scary portent of doom as it may have been intended by the author.
Other note - I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders".
Google is a massive organization. The only thing that's likely true of majority of the disparate, heterogeneous, wildy different teams, is that they're unlikely to feel like a 5 person early-stage startup. At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. All of which is not everybody's cup of tea granted. But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.
I assume people who have been there for a few years have seen Google in its successful "no longer a startup" phase and can reasonably compare it to the current iteration.
To be clear, I think you can and should avoid a “pervasive sense of nihilism” at any organization. My quibble is with the people who think somehow Google should overcome this by finding their inner Googliness or tapping into founder magic. The solutions exist but they are hard work. They are probably more about abandoning illusions like that.
(The example of Steve Jobs might suggest that founders might have some magic after all. Maybe in this one way: he was a brutal editor and simplifier, and he was a good talent spotter. So if he had any founder magic it was _focus_, not some “spark” of indulging dreamy creativity.)
Focus is a pretty vague term. It feels like Jobs had a talent for recognizing and promoting good product ideas and for promoting talented people to management positions. The technical leadership hierarchy at Apple also never felt extremely deep, whereas at today’s Google nobody seems to know who makes product decisions, and there’s very little unified technical direction. (Or rather, this is what I’ve heard from multiple current and former Google folks.)
> At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. [...] But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.
That actually does sound like it would doom a tech company, especially one competing in fast evolving web services. The competition is only a few clicks away in that market. Why wouldn't those strong headwinds spell doom?
The OP also says "The buildings are half empty at 4:30."
I'm guessing that a lot of people have to pick up kids from school or daycare. I know a lot of parents do a bit of work at home in the evening or get in earlier.
Even if they didn't... I mean look, how often do you look around the office and half the people around you are looking at their phones, reading some news article on their desktop, or otherwise goofing off?
That's the thing. It's 2024, remote work is part of equation - and, average googleer may no longer be a single 22 year old work enthusiast. As technical startup grows, I assume its workforce population age does as well, and for a lot of them it will be just work.
Which I suppose is not very magical I guess so fair point for the author :)
> we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works
If I am not wrong, that's exactly what Eric Schmidt meant when he misquoted Mao Zedong, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" and Sergey Brin when he said "But once they do bloom, at some point you want to make a coherent bouquet". https://archive.is/wsTUO
Also: It takes a special type of analysis to claim things are going downhill at a company making $500m/day! May be, some folks do idealize the start-up grind way too much because all they see are survivors and not the ones that withered away. If I am allowed to be reductive, at FAANG scale, the only games that matter are M&A (to avoid being disrupted) and govt contacts / contracts.
I used to be the person who worked late every night. 60 hour weeks were the norm, but on some projects I'd put in 100 hour weeks of several months. That was fine when I was young and had nothing else going on, but at some point a person realizes they need a life outside of work. There is something to be said for being able to sustain a pace over decades. Interestingly, I worked significantly more when I had a high level of autonomy and I was working on my ideas. When things changed and the orders were given by senior management, didn't make sense, and there was no room for discussion, I felt no desire to ever work late again. At that point it might as well be factory work. No one is putting in extra hours at the factory for free.
That all being said, working standard hours doesn't mean a person can't get something done (assuming the conditions are still good). Outside of the tech world, Eminem has been very prolific and he surprises people when they collaborate with him. He shows up at 9am, starts work in the studio, takes a lunch break, and leaves at 5pm. He treats it like any other job.
> I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders".
In this case, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Engineers aren’t allowed to do things and are forced to follow executive orders. And due to the lack of executive vision, engineers end up following executive orders to build random things without any good rhyme or reason (and certainly without any long-term vision). And sometimes it works, but often enough, it doesn’t.
At least that’s been my 2 years of experience within google.
The whole "let engineers do whatever idea" seems like it hasn't been very true for a long while. Yet there's also no vision from above, no hooks to engage folks well.
There's been a lot of poo pooing the letting engineers go free idea, but the follow up questions of whether there's been any support, any servant leadership... is the company supporting free ideas, or is it disinterested & just letting chaos & churn happen? That's was a question.
How do you both provide support & coalesceing, while also not becoming a command organization? How do you have upper levels of management that don't turn into real politick political gamesmanship? I feel like there's such a beautiful idea of anarchy that we wanted to love, and there such obvious failure now, but I feel like we went to blame the idea at large (of engineering free orgs) without spending a moment to consider it's execution & or how the org adapted or failed to adapt to this notion.
Do y'all think we'll see notable winners, who again live the more anarchistic or less top down engineering mentalities again? How much has the window closed; how much of a negative impact has the legacy of Google left?
I mean. They had massive success. Today, they will tell you how hard they work aligning stakeholders on their Q1 goals to unify systems and clear tech debt. That's what winning gets you when you rest. You lose a step.
But they still keep winning. I doubt there are more than a handful of engineers there who are any good in a sense of achieving objectives. Perhaps fewer than in 2005 even. But the product suite is great: search ads, contextual ads, targeted ads, own platform.
People are begging for Sundar to do something unexpected or ambitious, his job is just to manage things uncontroversially as possible for a company that with that size and influence. The Google doomerism here is strong (as it's been for 10+ years) but don't be surprised when they roll over the LLM competition this year. They still have enormous advantages that people are inclined to look over in their infra and just the number of people doing research no matter how much faster everyone thinks they should be.
I feel like no one is willing to face up to the obvious truth: founders are not magical, they’re lucky. There isn’t a magic spark that gets lost. They get lucky with breakthrough products. They are incredibly smart annd hardworking but also lucky. Even under ideal circumstances of fostering and developing new ideas, there is no reason to believe their luck will continue, no matter how much talent there is under one roof.
And this is not even considering the other structural barriers to innovation! The vast income streams create their own disincentives to disruption. Coordination is hard when you need to get buy-in of many departments. And despite best efforts, at scale, you end up promoting people good at politics or appearances. But even if all that were somehow eliminated, and true startup-style innovation was possible inside a giant company, the company must be careful to defend their existing winners.
If Google ever started to enter a death spiral like Apple in the 90s, maybe they could pivot if they were lucky enough to get visionary leadership. But now? Why would they?
I worked at Google briefly during the post-IPO period. It was a kind of wonderland, I won’t deny that. But all the really big hits were acquisitions or extensions of Google’s core competencies: search and ads. Everything else was unfocused and half-baked, and this especially applied to ideas that came directly from the founders. (Anyone remember Google Base?)
If you really want Google to return to those days you’d have to tolerate a lot of crap that gets abandoned later. (Which is the other complaint that people have about Google. Too experimental or not experimental enough, make up your minds!)
The Leo Tolstoy theory. But I think there's something to it too, considering how infrequently "genius executives'" reputation survives an attempt to revive a dying company.
War and Peace contains a lot of essays about his thoughts on how history moves along with Napoleon's invasion of Russia as a case study. Tolstoy argues that the conventional understanding that great men move history forward is wrong; rather, such men are carried along by events they have no control over and are simply obliged to ratify faits accomplis to appear to be leading anything. (he also argues Kutuzov was a great commander for intuitively understanding this and not trying to resist the current of history, unlike Napoleon)
That comports with my observations. But there are still differences to explain. For example, we even have natural experiments across the Chinese internet and American/European internet. The outcomes aren’t entirely fixed in advance, and individual actions, personalities and values do matter, when something new is being created.
Well, we could explain this by simply saying that different conditions shaped the two different things, regardless of what their leaders might have wanted. It's an interesting question how much you can ever attribute to one person.
The issue here is actually fairly straightforward.
Google in its present form is illegal, or at minimum is the outcome of a series of illegal anti-competitive actions that for various reasons we decided not to prosecute for an entire generation.
Antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason. Because markets don’t function without active competition.
The monopoly power Google holds over many of its markets insulates it from market pressure and has removed the pressure of competition.
The outcome of this is as predictable as summer. Google doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t have to. That’s not how it makes its money any more.
Looking at the writings of people like Sussman, it seems to me that Google is in an identity crisis. Management is half clinging to the old culture of brilliant PhD engineers creating ambitious new products, but the reality is that this doesn't happen anymore. The reason Google is starting to feel like a conventional company is because Googlers are conventional employees. Many of their best and brightest have left to found their own companies, and they're left wondering why the remaining tier 2, or 3 engineers can't carry them anymore.
Former Googler here. It's worse than this. Google's perf/promo culture ensured that good ideas from the bottom never made it anywhere and created a disincentive for anyone to collaborate across teams. It's not a fun place to work. The pay is good and you get free food and massages and that sort of thing, but it's such a toxic work environment that those things don't make up for it unless you really only care about the money.
They didn't set an "expiration date", the founders and Eric Schmidt just made a pact to stay at Google for 20 years together. It's a promise that Eric Schmidt already broke in 2020 anyways, so putting any weight into this is nothing but wishful thinking
Joined Google in 2014 - from the people on my team I heard the place was much more magical in the years before. When Sundar started I remember the first thing people were upset about was the handling of the holiday gift - Google changed it to a donation to charity instead and the communication of it upset. It wasn’t that we were not getting a holiday gift anymore (everyone acknowledged we had grown too large for that to last forever). It was that things were communicated as if it was not a cost saving measure and instead phrased that it was net generosity. IMO those kinds of things are what snowballed into Google becoming less of a magical place to work over time.
Will hit 18 yrs as a SWE at Google in a couple of months. Some thoughts, all my subjective opinion of course:
- break up the timeline into two eras: the triumvirate era TE(Page/Brin/Schmidt), and the Sundar era SE.
Financials
TE CFO Pichette's job was to point the money hose at places that needed the gusher, and do it quickly. He had almost no control on the tap.
Every year at the last TGIF before Christmas he would come to Charlie's with his famed bright orange backpack full of cash to give Googlers their $1k holiday bonus in cold hard cash. It was grossed up to make sure it was 1k after taxes.
The financial tone is set by the folks at the top. L+S never really cared about money. To them it was just fuel to do more cool stuff, not some number to chase. Schmidt was supposed to be the counterweight to this youthful optimism, but he was still a technologist at heart, and by background. They were certainly not profligate, but also viewed it as worthwhile to fly the entire company to Tahoe to ski for a weekend every year.
SE CFO Ruth Porat, of Morgan Stanley pedigree, was a "real" CFO. A real message that Google needs to shed it's "playground for PhD hackers" image, start acting like a responsible adult.
Please understand that I'm not judging either era as "good" or "bad", a trap I see many commenters (inside and outside Google) fall into. I'm not sure a public corporation with the size and scope of Google could viably continue and grow under TE attitudes. SE is in many ways an aggregate expression of the competitive, financial, legal and regulatory environment. But others have made the opposite case, go read them.
Work environment
The layoffs, two Januarys in a row, have made the mood somber. The hope that Jan 2023 was a one-time rare correction is utterly dashed. SVPs and up should excise the word "excited" from all their communications.
BUT-- if you wiped history clean and looked at it objectively today, among its big tech peers, Google remains a great place to work.
If you ask most Googlers they will tell you that whatever misgivings they harbor about leadership direction, their immediate team is good/great. That says something.
Technology
15 yrs ago Google was a decade ahead in raw tech. It laid the hardware and software foundation for how to do planet-scale reliable distributed computing, and built giant apps like search and gmail on top of that. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable, Borg etc. But by now that knowledge has diffused.
Seems like an eternity ago, but up until a year ago, the perception was Google had a similar lead in AI. Yes, the transformer architecture was invented at Google. But OpenAI ran away with it.
Many insiders are worried that OpenAI is doing to Google what Apple did to PARC. Note that even after copying the GUI from PARC, it was miles ahead in raw innovation.
Personal
Mourn not a change in culture that you have little control over. Figure out what you want your career arc to be, chase that. Try to be useful in the meanwhile.
Be kind to those you interact with. Keep your skills sharp and options open. I know this is easier said than done, but if at all possible, try to live a lifestyle not inflated by big tech comp.
If you are a manager, do your best to mentor and inspire your reports. Sometimes you have to shield them, but also know when to explain hard truths. Don't coddle.
I think Google's situation is due to its promotion culture. As Hasting of Netflix said, culture is all about who gets rewarded and who punished. When so many people got promoted for so-called impact and complexity yet their project ultimately failed, many employees' mentality simply changed to chase short-term personal gain instead of what's right for the company.
This generally describes every software only company I’ve worked at for the last 8-10 years.
Anyone can spin up an AWS app and so they do, and aim junior engineers at a vague “billion dollar market” waiting for those juniors to spin gold from the BS an empty eyed MBA emits.
I am done with software “brands”. I took a job fixing cars for a little less pay (fortunately for me I grew up fixing cars and have an EE BSc, not a CS degree).
I tinker at home on AI and LLM projects but will never work for a company focused on software development as their main business ever again. Such a joke and waste of human effort.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread(I've been on the outside looking in so I have a slightly different perspective on the last 10+ years of GOOG compared to many people.)
No, I think you're right in talking more about the "professional managers". The only way for a company to break this fast is if it was already hollow. Don't blame the (still awful) layoffs. Blame the rotten management layers that led up to... everything.
Some self-awareness is lacking.
Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
It appears to me that he has absolutely turned to politics, if you look at his tweets, they are almost entirely political these days.
He wanted to buy Twitter purely for political reasons, and said as much.
I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.
Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight.
Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc.
One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
That there's something wrong with Google that needs fixing. that its founders are,or feel, responsible for fixing it. That they are allowed or capable of fixing it. That they can or should be bothered. That a large company of 175k people can be "magical". That any two hacker news folks will agree on what "magical" is or feels like :-)
Together, Page and Brin own about 14% of the publicly-listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.
If anything they are supporters (and more likely, originators) of some of the changes that have been occurring over the last couple of years, including layoffs and other things people describe as “decline”.
Or they decided that they don't care too much and focus on their fun projects.
Or something in between.
From a governance point of view, they’re both on the Board of Directors: http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance
(And to be clear, I don't think that's a personal failing. I don't think I'd do any better in his place! But I think knowing your own limits is very important, and knowing that I'd be a terrible megacorp CEO is part of that.)
I think the turning point was the Google+ failure. It was perhaps the first major initiative at Google that was not engineering led, and when it failed, it seems like the shift began in earnest to restructure the company for top down initiatives, led by business instead of engineering.
Google+ indeed happened under Page's leadership, so I agree with you that this is where it fell off the rails, but I think you have the reason backwards.
They achieved what they initially wanted, and left Google closer to its peak. At some point, you want to move on. Especially when you quit as a winner, and now you can relax or deal with more fun and interesting ventures.
Coming in to save a company in a decline is not as fun and satisfying as creating something new and awesome from scratch. Especially when you’ve made enough to not have to worry about it ever, so that you can afford to only pursue things that are fun for you.
Plus, “decline” of Google is relative. Sure, they have not a good reputation anymore, and they do not push out new and exciting products that kill it in the market. But guess what? The share price isn’t tanking, so from the perspective of Sergei and Larry (who are still significant shareholders), that decline isn’t hitting them much.
Look at IBM. They’ve been dead in the eyes of the tech industry as an innovator and a success story for the longest time. Their Watson for medical applications is mostly considered to be somewhere between a failure and a scam. However, their share price is doing just fine.
Other note - I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders".
Google is a massive organization. The only thing that's likely true of majority of the disparate, heterogeneous, wildy different teams, is that they're unlikely to feel like a 5 person early-stage startup. At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. All of which is not everybody's cup of tea granted. But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.
(The example of Steve Jobs might suggest that founders might have some magic after all. Maybe in this one way: he was a brutal editor and simplifier, and he was a good talent spotter. So if he had any founder magic it was _focus_, not some “spark” of indulging dreamy creativity.)
That actually does sound like it would doom a tech company, especially one competing in fast evolving web services. The competition is only a few clicks away in that market. Why wouldn't those strong headwinds spell doom?
They may not make any new innovative products, but certainly can buy those. And how many start-ups are effectively competing in ads?
Just enough to claim Google does not have market power whenever antitrust issues are raised.
Successful large orgs succeed by being good at being large and balancing the necessary parts of that, not pretending they’re not.
I'm guessing that a lot of people have to pick up kids from school or daycare. I know a lot of parents do a bit of work at home in the evening or get in earlier.
Which I suppose is not very magical I guess so fair point for the author :)
If I am not wrong, that's exactly what Eric Schmidt meant when he misquoted Mao Zedong, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" and Sergey Brin when he said "But once they do bloom, at some point you want to make a coherent bouquet". https://archive.is/wsTUO
Also: It takes a special type of analysis to claim things are going downhill at a company making $500m/day! May be, some folks do idealize the start-up grind way too much because all they see are survivors and not the ones that withered away. If I am allowed to be reductive, at FAANG scale, the only games that matter are M&A (to avoid being disrupted) and govt contacts / contracts.
That all being said, working standard hours doesn't mean a person can't get something done (assuming the conditions are still good). Outside of the tech world, Eminem has been very prolific and he surprises people when they collaborate with him. He shows up at 9am, starts work in the studio, takes a lunch break, and leaves at 5pm. He treats it like any other job.
https://genius.com/a/akon-explains-how-eminem-treats-recordi...
In this case, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Engineers aren’t allowed to do things and are forced to follow executive orders. And due to the lack of executive vision, engineers end up following executive orders to build random things without any good rhyme or reason (and certainly without any long-term vision). And sometimes it works, but often enough, it doesn’t.
At least that’s been my 2 years of experience within google.
There's been a lot of poo pooing the letting engineers go free idea, but the follow up questions of whether there's been any support, any servant leadership... is the company supporting free ideas, or is it disinterested & just letting chaos & churn happen? That's was a question.
How do you both provide support & coalesceing, while also not becoming a command organization? How do you have upper levels of management that don't turn into real politick political gamesmanship? I feel like there's such a beautiful idea of anarchy that we wanted to love, and there such obvious failure now, but I feel like we went to blame the idea at large (of engineering free orgs) without spending a moment to consider it's execution & or how the org adapted or failed to adapt to this notion.
Do y'all think we'll see notable winners, who again live the more anarchistic or less top down engineering mentalities again? How much has the window closed; how much of a negative impact has the legacy of Google left?
But they still keep winning. I doubt there are more than a handful of engineers there who are any good in a sense of achieving objectives. Perhaps fewer than in 2005 even. But the product suite is great: search ads, contextual ads, targeted ads, own platform.
And this is not even considering the other structural barriers to innovation! The vast income streams create their own disincentives to disruption. Coordination is hard when you need to get buy-in of many departments. And despite best efforts, at scale, you end up promoting people good at politics or appearances. But even if all that were somehow eliminated, and true startup-style innovation was possible inside a giant company, the company must be careful to defend their existing winners.
If Google ever started to enter a death spiral like Apple in the 90s, maybe they could pivot if they were lucky enough to get visionary leadership. But now? Why would they?
I worked at Google briefly during the post-IPO period. It was a kind of wonderland, I won’t deny that. But all the really big hits were acquisitions or extensions of Google’s core competencies: search and ads. Everything else was unfocused and half-baked, and this especially applied to ideas that came directly from the founders. (Anyone remember Google Base?)
If you really want Google to return to those days you’d have to tolerate a lot of crap that gets abandoned later. (Which is the other complaint that people have about Google. Too experimental or not experimental enough, make up your minds!)
Google in its present form is illegal, or at minimum is the outcome of a series of illegal anti-competitive actions that for various reasons we decided not to prosecute for an entire generation.
Antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason. Because markets don’t function without active competition.
The monopoly power Google holds over many of its markets insulates it from market pressure and has removed the pressure of competition.
The outcome of this is as predictable as summer. Google doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t have to. That’s not how it makes its money any more.
- break up the timeline into two eras: the triumvirate era TE(Page/Brin/Schmidt), and the Sundar era SE.
Financials
TE CFO Pichette's job was to point the money hose at places that needed the gusher, and do it quickly. He had almost no control on the tap.
Every year at the last TGIF before Christmas he would come to Charlie's with his famed bright orange backpack full of cash to give Googlers their $1k holiday bonus in cold hard cash. It was grossed up to make sure it was 1k after taxes.
The financial tone is set by the folks at the top. L+S never really cared about money. To them it was just fuel to do more cool stuff, not some number to chase. Schmidt was supposed to be the counterweight to this youthful optimism, but he was still a technologist at heart, and by background. They were certainly not profligate, but also viewed it as worthwhile to fly the entire company to Tahoe to ski for a weekend every year.
SE CFO Ruth Porat, of Morgan Stanley pedigree, was a "real" CFO. A real message that Google needs to shed it's "playground for PhD hackers" image, start acting like a responsible adult.
Please understand that I'm not judging either era as "good" or "bad", a trap I see many commenters (inside and outside Google) fall into. I'm not sure a public corporation with the size and scope of Google could viably continue and grow under TE attitudes. SE is in many ways an aggregate expression of the competitive, financial, legal and regulatory environment. But others have made the opposite case, go read them.
Work environment
The layoffs, two Januarys in a row, have made the mood somber. The hope that Jan 2023 was a one-time rare correction is utterly dashed. SVPs and up should excise the word "excited" from all their communications.
BUT-- if you wiped history clean and looked at it objectively today, among its big tech peers, Google remains a great place to work.
If you ask most Googlers they will tell you that whatever misgivings they harbor about leadership direction, their immediate team is good/great. That says something.
Technology
15 yrs ago Google was a decade ahead in raw tech. It laid the hardware and software foundation for how to do planet-scale reliable distributed computing, and built giant apps like search and gmail on top of that. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable, Borg etc. But by now that knowledge has diffused.
Seems like an eternity ago, but up until a year ago, the perception was Google had a similar lead in AI. Yes, the transformer architecture was invented at Google. But OpenAI ran away with it.
Many insiders are worried that OpenAI is doing to Google what Apple did to PARC. Note that even after copying the GUI from PARC, it was miles ahead in raw innovation.
Personal
Mourn not a change in culture that you have little control over. Figure out what you want your career arc to be, chase that. Try to be useful in the meanwhile.
Be kind to those you interact with. Keep your skills sharp and options open. I know this is easier said than done, but if at all possible, try to live a lifestyle not inflated by big tech comp.
If you are a manager, do your best to mentor and inspire your reports. Sometimes you have to shield them, but also know when to explain hard truths. Don't coddle.
is this even the right flex?
I can’t speak to the leadership part but is stuff not getting done in time and engineers need to work more hours?
Anyone can spin up an AWS app and so they do, and aim junior engineers at a vague “billion dollar market” waiting for those juniors to spin gold from the BS an empty eyed MBA emits.
I am done with software “brands”. I took a job fixing cars for a little less pay (fortunately for me I grew up fixing cars and have an EE BSc, not a CS degree).
I tinker at home on AI and LLM projects but will never work for a company focused on software development as their main business ever again. Such a joke and waste of human effort.