If you have someone who aimlessly kills products and fires people but lacks vision or a decent plan, you could find someone much cheaper, and save tens of millions on executive compensation. If operating margin is so crucial now, then it seems cutting pay of top executives is the easiest way to achieve that with the least damage to the company.
Improving operating margin helps raise the stock price: the company then can at least temporarily produce the same revenue for lower cost. But firing employees is only one way to do it. Executive compensation is now so bloated that reducing it might produce the same gain as from firing hundreds of employees, with less impact to future growth (talent is retained).
We'll see how short-term thinking works out for them in a decade. "Rich but irrelevant" isn't a good place to end up. But at least shareholders in 2024 got a percentage more in gains.
Tech CEOs seem to have realized the really short-term wins drive stock prices up. Feel especially bad recently. Feels like we're going to see crumbling software soon
> “I guess I will just hang around and do my job until Google no longer wants me,” she finished her post.
Welcome to having a regular non-union job? There's several billion other people in the club. It's not exciting, and you will be let go whenever the company wants a boost in their financials. There's also no free snacks or chefs, but you (at Google) still get a bigger salary than anyone else in the world with your job, if that helps. If you want fulfillment, excitement, vision, etc, you could always change jobs to a smaller company whose reason for being isn't selling ads.
Perhaps not popular but, if you're getting paid well, the work is tolerable enough, the grass is often not actually greener somewhere else, you have mouths to feed, maybe you're close to retiring/semi-retiring, etc. continuing to hang around for a while isn't necessarily the worst strategy.
I probably wouldn't do it indefinitely but it can make sense to hang around for a while.
To be fair disparagement for middle management has been around for ages. Nobody (10 years ago) I knew wanted to be promoted into management, if only because it was so hard to manage. It seemed like there was an outside hiring binge of middle managers who wanted to grow empires (from Amazon/MS etc).
Hmmm... would be interesting to go look at LinkedIn data to see if it's really true. Of course it wouldn't fix this problem. Workers are now unhappy with senior management, which is new. Although, I think some of the empire building resulted in a lot of the pandemic over hiring (and departures of long term staff).
Google - as well as faag, faang adjacent, and wannabe faang companies - all have the same problem: The entire management track is filled with mediocre paper pushers instead of innovators.
Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.
But then you might have to watch it get killed right before your eyes. And the lack of new features and general support for a lot of their products makes me think there are a lot of employees wishing they could continue work on the products they've built, but can't.
I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
Hopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.
Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.
I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search.
Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
Nope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.
Considering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.
It's an interesting test for them. Essentially, it's a free hit - low expectations, few constraints, lots of latitude to throw out prior work, open ended opportunity to be creative and innovate, a clear baseline provided by Apple for them to benchmark success against and little to no regulatory scrutiny. Basically, one of the few opportunities they will ever got for a zero baggage, green field project where, if they actually have the talent and the will power, they could hit something out of the park. Will they do it? Will they not?
I think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.
And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?
Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.
Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".
To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.
You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
Plenty of projects don't get launched to begin with. The ability to "launch" a project is looked at favorably in general. Maybe too favorable, but that's another discussion. If you are someone who is known to be able to deliver a "launch" that's big on your CV in most companies. Believe it or not, in big companies many project never quite reach a minimal viable product status to begin with.
Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.
I know a lot of investors are excited about Waymo, so I assume the executives are as well. I don't have any insight into what the experience is like on the actual engineering team, though.
The worst manager I ever had in 25 years of working in tech went to Google after she finally got fired at my company. Apparently there she fit right in.
> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently?
Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.
The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
> Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.
That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.
I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.
Looks like they're going to kill it later this month. Today when I tried to use the HTML version, a splash screen loaded that said this:
Starting from February 2024, this version of Gmail (Basic HTML Gmail) will no longer be supported, and you'll automatically start using Standard Gmail. Switch to the latest Gmail version now.
"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’"
Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.
This is a serious problem. There will always been a handful of "career-oriented' sycophants who will tell the top bosses exactly what they want to hear. That let's those bosses ignore complaints (if people dare complain) or simply assume everything must be wonderful since they keep getting such positive feedback.
There’s a powerful evolutionary force which provides very rich or powerful people with whatever yes-men are appealing to their particular personalities. The returns to being an accepted yes-man are so high that attempts are going to continually be made until someone clicks. Eventually someone is going to click. It’s near impossible not to become detached from reality under such circumstances. Hence all the legends across many cultures of the king dressing up as a commoner and sneaking around his kingdom.
I forget where I heard this but I once read a saying that “communication is only possible between equals.”
I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play.
If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer.
“Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news.
The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another.
This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up.
It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.
speaking truth to power is difficult when the survival of your social structure depends on your continued income. ironically - or perhaps intentionally - the fact that no one feels safe due to random firings of "top performers", new hires, "underperformers", etc, could result in a work envoronment where everyone finally speaks the truth, because they dont have a guarantee that lying will continue to protect their paycheck.
Works the other way too. Higher ups have an incentive to provide a rosy outlook, explain away problems, and over promise to those under them to stay there. So really everyone in a hierarchy is incentivized to blow smoke.
Celine's Second Law, from the Illuminatus! series:
Wilson rephrases the [law] himself many times as "communication occurs only between equals". Celine calls this law "a simple statement of the obvious" and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one's job)....
What he said probably cannot be verified, even. On another note, has anyone noticed how Pichai likes to take pictures in front of others’ work for the media [1]? To me, it’s a weird feeling—- like someone taking credit for others’ work.
Eh, that's kinda normal. Just because the queen shows up to get photographed cutting a ribbon at a new university building, doesn't mean anyone imagines she laid any bricks or tiled any bathrooms.
The photo you linked to is only confusing because he's not wearing a suit. Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.
It makes more sense if the queen is just a mascot for $country. The whole country got together and made it, but its not practical to get everyone on the photo. So you put a crown on some random person to make clear she's a representation of the whole country, not a real person (at that instant).
I think there is some ideology attached to how "normal" that would be, and whether someone accepts the "mascot" analogy.
If society were very focused on worker's rights and the recognition of the necessity of labor, such as in an idealized socialist society or a society with a predominance of worker cooperatives in the economy, then the idea of having a monarch or CEO of a company standing in front of the hard work of people whose names are not mentioned and whose faces are not pictured would seem absurd. You would expect and indeed commonly see photos showing many workers in front of the item in question.
Just as an example I went to the wikipedia page for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was quick to find what I would expect: a photo of a large group of workers in front of a dam they constructed:
I say this just to say, sure it can "make sense" but I think this is an artifact of the world we live in, where we have a hierarchical government and most firms in our economy are themselves hierarchical in nature. And so when the person at the top of the hierarchy stands for a photo op in front of the thing, we naturally accept that they serve as a "representation" of the output of the company.
But someone with a more worker-focused view would be more inclined to see that and find it off-putting. For the photo of Sundar Pichai up thread, I do in fact find it irritating that they don't even mention the people who were involved with the project he is standing in front of. And wouldn't you know it, I am a very pro-worker in inclination.
> Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.
That would be different. In that situation it is clear who is doing the work, and who is providing the money.
But posing in front of a widget, he is signaling to the world, “I made this”.
Huh, he is the CEO of Google posing with Google's quantum computer. Unless someone is inventing the universe there will always be others' work where ever one poses.
Pichai doesn't need to sincerely believe what he's relaying here to benefit from it, he needs only believe that by saying these things he can steer employee discontent to back within a manageable margin. Therein lies the ineptitude.
You can communicate, even in difficult situations, sincerely, genuinely, and truthfully, while providing good leadership. That is a manager's job description, effectively.
I would not assume it's true; it's typical technique for responding to this kind of criticism - don't address the concerns, express complete rejection of them by claiming it's positive (layoffs are positive, if you only look at them from a certain angle), and most importantly demonstrate the conversation can't move forward - there's such a chasm between you and them that it's hopeless. It's a propaganda technique. It works - look at Ian Hickson, who resigned in despair.
It fits the contemporary fad of contempt for anyone less powerful than you, including employees, courts (for some), etc.
Somehow, the world changes day to day, year to year, generation to generation; somehow we change the world; and all despite the fact that, as people now copypasta everywhere, 'it's always been that way'. Do people say that at work meetings? Talking to investors? One wonders what all these entrepeneurs and engineers do? No wonder funding is drying up (I think that might be a literal problem - the despair, pessimism and cynicism reaching the executive suite).
We've always had carbon in the atmosphere, warfare, poverty, oppression, ... and people saying that _____ has always been that way.
The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.
There’s no other requirement.
You make the board mad you’re fired. You make the board happy, then you’re golden and can do whatever.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.
CEO at this level isn’t a people leader like you’d expect because boards don’t care about people (unless they are unionizing). So anything they say about people issues, you can guarantee is a statement made for the board’s consumption.
This fits that perfectly because what he’s communicating is “we got rid of what we consider dead weight loss because those people worked in what we arbitrarily have deemed cost centers instead of what we used to call [important buzzword like “metaverse”]
The average worker, adhering to Company Culture, trading their mental space and shaving off their own quality of life in favor of the company's growth, are not the point of the business.
Come on, you say it as if every board member is an android focused only on short term results. They've had a board when Eric was CEO and Google was doing it's best work as well.
It's not really about the board, Google has become a mature company that's not going to grow 20% YoY anymore and this is what happens to such businesses. Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces, they will turn them into IBM.
Not agreeing with OP, boards don't always focus on immediate results and CEOs aren't androids that just care about pleasing the board. The world is rarely that simplistic.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to stack it with your friends. Preferably those that are not that rich so that they appreciate the several hundred thousand dollar a year gig for very little work.
I don't think that's really fair. But I also think CEOs have to think about tradeoffs and realistically assess needs and strategies going forward which may not mean keeping everyone on payroll.
Yeah it's pretty unreal how hard Sundar is working to confirm all of the opinions about him being an out of touch and ineffectual manager. That line was unbelievably cringe inducing.
Public markets are not known for combining ten-year-long outlooks with deep domain knowledge. In fact that's the two things they're best known for lacking! (P.S. They've already been left behind by whatever Kagi is doing to filter out LLM garbage.)
+1 to your observation about Kagi’s filtering. Whatever they’re doing sure seems to be working, and cumulatively with the rest of their small, quietly user-centric decisions over the past year or two, has really made them feel like an oasis relative to the sharp and quick deterioration that’s gone on over in Mountain View’s product.
They're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinking decisions ever did."
Except that revenues have been growing for years under him and the stock price has skyrocketed. I personally think he's a terrible CEO but it's impossible to argue to anyone that cares that he should be removed until at least revenue or the stock price drops.
That description perfectly fits another massive tech company CEO: Steve Balmer. Revenue tripled under him. But Microsoft's mindshare, brand image, influence, etc. all went down.
So is it appropriate to predict that Pichai will end his tenure as CEO of Google just like Balmer did, which was when he voluntarily quit ("retirement")?
Probably. The question is less when he retires/quit and more about how he affected the company during his final days (and of course his legacy). Unity is a great anti-example of this: The former CEO IPO'd, made big money for Unity, and on the way out arguably burned the longterm status of the company while he fell with his golden parachute.
That's a lot of the problem. There's no teeth in it for modern day C-class execs. The only difference when they leave is whether they leave a billionaire or a hundred-million aire.
Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Google was one tenth the size and was near-universally loved, the model of having frank fireside conversations with execs was already stretched thin.
They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.
Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.
Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel.
Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist.
There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.
I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes...
I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy.
I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law
> The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other.
(check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)
Organizations can't scale linearly. You need more middle managers as you add more people and organizational layers, who don't contribute any "output" so this is trivially true.
Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.
> I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
This is a ridiculous take. You would need way more than that just to maintain Kafka and run ops for it, that LinkedIn heavily relies on. You are trivializing the complexity of running a platform like LinkedIn.
Perhaps if reducing the complexity was considered an urgent necessity, over hiring more, there would be less complexity and new opportunities would be easier to consider and jump on.
Complexity compounds, so the tradeoff is, continually tame it, or continually hire with less and less impact per employee.
The latter seems to happen a lot when money flows.
>I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products
Only if you're certain they will never quit their jobs. In tech where the average tenure is supposedly 2-3 years, a large number of employees are hired to make key persons redundant, groom for succession, and to make sure key persons can offload some bandwidth to work on emergent issues. It's irrational to have billions of dollars of revenue (or even tens of millions) riding on a single person who can decide to walk away with 2 weeks notice.
Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot.
And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to.
Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B.
It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan.
I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.
> Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia?
There is a clear identity - Google is about hoarding all of the available data (originally web) and making money off of it any way you can. By definition it has to be huge and get their hands into as many pies as humanly possible and then cut away stuff that doesn’t work. So i would say they are being perfectly consistent whether their employees appreciate it or not.
Of course there isn’t an inconsistency there. Its such a non-identity there isn’t anything to be inconsistent with, outside of declaring the company a on-profit.
The problem of lack of identity isn’t always about lack of consistency. It also is a lack of focus.
Lack of focus leaves the door open to vastly increased complexity. The need for more and more employees as per employee impact drops.
It’s not much more generic than “make consumer electronics” from apple which makes everything under the sun now from headphones to cars. Google just increasingly became at odds with its own “dont be evil” motto as the company had scaled so execution had greately suffered
That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.
I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded.
On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second week of negotiating class: Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down. <Yawn.>
>I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded.
Sure, but these are humans with no stake in the company. They are not investing in Google because they believe in their mission nor do they even care if Google crashes in 5 years. They believe it's a way to quickly grow their portfolio, and will change as the market does.
This isn't to say they aren't human, just that they are at best more invested in other things or at worst are greedy and selfish.
>Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down
I don't exactly feel better knowing it's just a facade towards the above spectrum.
These things could be true at the same time. Alphabet stock did reach an all-time-high recently, but its growth could still be slower than Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and several other large tech companies.
People have been saying that for years. I left in 2020 and some people were saying that. Having almost no compelling new products and shutting down multiple high profile flops while dismantling the internal culture that many people appreciated is pretty hard to miss.
I meant "nobody influential". Employees (current and previous) and users of products, sure. But you never hear this from bankers or business pundits. I wasn't tuned in enough back then to say whether there was a similar phenomenon with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.
Lol all that matters is how much money is being made, they don't really give a shit about wrecking developer trust as long as google remains the money printing behemoth it is.
Agreed. They get paid $400k-$600k a year to do 10% work and slack off the rest of the time. Then started complaining when Google told
they needed to start actually working.
Google does plenty of stuff well, but what's their last big exciting new product or even new feature? Bard is good but they're chasing OpenAI. Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung. Or YouTube Shorts and Tiktok.
It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.
More like Sundar is one bad conference away from a viral video of him running around on stage covered in sweat yelling "Shareholders! Shareholders! Shareholders!"
Google is mostly owned by Larry and Sergey, so as long as they’re happy, nothing can be done. And they can have that discussion in private. Sundar just needs to smile through any conference and keep going.
My guess is that he’ll say some off color on a hot mic or email leak. Considering his lack of effort in addressing Caste issues at Google… that’s possibly an issue. Could be antitrust stuff too. He’s been in hot water lately.
I think they're saying Pixel is leading everyone in still image quality.
Pixel is assuredly NOT leading in video recording quality though. And the overall package still matters: for example X% superiority in still photos didn't make up for Pixel 6 having a very small photo buffer / a slow camera startup speed. Didn't make up for lens cracking issues in Pixel 7. iPhone just works.
Google Photos was pretty great. But yeah, Google is a utility company to me at this point. Search, Maps, GSuite, Chromecast, YouTube: it'd be nice if they could keep the things we use running and charge a reasonable price. Why is the Chromecast with Google TV still using such underpowered hardware?!
Every large tech company does one or two things extremely well and prints money from them and then has a hundred other efforts that range from terrible to middling. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon...they are all the same in this regard. When was the last time any of them truly innovated?
Like Microsoft killed Bing AI? I mean, renamed it to Copilot? Oh wait, Copilot already existed but for code. Wait, merged? Or is it the same thing? Hmmm... acquired and killed and rebirthed with a crappy new UI? Who fucking knows but Google gonna Google!
What product does Uber or Lyft or DoorDash or Instacart have?
People take Waymo on a daily basis without incident. Just because it may not be available to you doesn't mean it's not real. It is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the industry.
The technology predates X; X just housed it for a while. There were self-driving cars at Google in 2008, that look almost exactly like the ones that drive around now, except the computer vision hardware was bulkier.
Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.
Google X starting 2010. I saw self-driving cars (large spinning cameras) in the lot of Crittenden within a year of joining. So maybe it was 2009, but it was definitely before X existed.
I think you're just in for a rude awakening if you expect the Google from 20 years ago. It's no longer a scrappy startup, it's closer to Microsoft at this point.
The thing that struck me about Google is that it's a really well running machine. The documentation is all there, the build system is easy, and just about every issue is fixed with a single form submitted or email sent. You quickly develop a very high standard for how an organization should function.
Companies grow and they have to change. I was at a company that grew to about 10x the size of when I joined. It was still pretty successful but it was a different company. I didn't have the freedom and flexibility, there was more process, etc. Not as fun but you really can't run a 10x company like you run a 1x one.
"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed
Because once the company is big enough, it becomes competitive and immoral enough for employees to start to fear each other. So everyone starts to develop an "every man for themselves" mentality.
If you're cashing out all of your RSUs over the next 5 years, you don't necessarily care about the long term ramifications of your decision. Just that it pumps the stock price in the short term
Nothing to do with it.
We're not mature enough to recognize the importance of a flat hierarchy and adopting a startup-like model with our internal teams (business and technical independence, succeed and you'll be rich, fail and you're fired)
As a result, the larger the company, the larger the hierarchy, the larger the inefficencies. At the extreme you approximate the government of a country.
Layers of managers who care only about collecting a paycheck, engaging in company politics and looking busy cause exactly this problem. Managers will pick the best decision for them, not anyone else.
> Every bug fixed and every performance improvement benefits all three.
I'd love to think so, but the truth is that any platform, working correctly, disadvantages those who contribute most of the content. The platform owners earn money in ways that are always contrary to the interests of the content creators.
"Content creators" (assuming by that you mean those who are trying to make a living off the platform) are mostly irrelevant.
Youtube's main source of revenue is ads which they serve regardless of whether the uploader is taking a cut from the upload or not. Most users have always and will continue to upload to and consume from youtube without the expectation of making money from the process.
So, yes in general users have historically been more or less satisfied with the deal: watch ads, get free video platform.
These users don't seem to know what they want. I'll just listen to whomever keeps calling me personally about things. My buddies are successful, so it makes sense.
Eh, these shareholders don't seem to know what they're doing. I'll just listen to myself. Everything I do makes sense to me, so that makes sense.
I've wondered about the connection between organizations at the human level, and entropy. Nothing can avoid the increase in entropy, not even teams and their work culture. The processes used get old and unwieldy, domain knowledge becomes fragmented, features take longer and have more bugs, etc.
Perhaps this is inevitable, but maybe organizations could become aware of the changes in entropy and try to do the equivalent of maintenance and refactoring at the organizational level. There is probably some of this already happening, but I wonder if information theory can be applied at the people level to optimize and prevent increases in entropy.
“Refactoring at the org level” sounds like re-orgs and layoffs.
I think it’s unavoidable. You hire to grow, but growth changes you. You can’t layoff to un-grow and return to former self because they layoffs take a toll.
There have been a lot of trials of UBI now and the evidence is very strong that… it doesn't affect employment much either way. So it doesn't make people lazy, but it's probably a disappointment to people who don't believe in work.
In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.
I hope we'll get there. I see studies and reports of things like UBI and 4 day work weeks and even basic things folks in EU countries get and it's honestly difficult to ever envision any of it actually coming to the US for most of us regular folk.
That's true, although if the analogy holds then it depends on the initial quality of the teams, but I have no idea if there is any solution around incentivizing companies to build long-lasting teams.
Failure is growth. Failure is learning. But sometimes failure is just failure. I think... I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.
I’m not sure Google leadership appreciate how fragile their search business is. The core product has slipped significantly in quality and is ripe for disruption.
From the outside, the company looks rudderless, coasting along on (significant) momentum.
Yup, time to bring in the consultants and MBAs, let them turbocharge the stock price by laying a bunch of people off and switching to single ply toilet paper, and cash out quick to pay for a new mega yacht.
Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.
As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.
Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.
Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materially more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, reasonably priced and people love them.
The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.
Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.
Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.
As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).
As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet - we should only be so luck to have bought-and-held that stock. Meanwhile, Google owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.
> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.
How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
> Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough.
Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.
FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
> It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone.
The alternative is... giving up on the idea? Just storing anything centrally because end-to-end/client-side encryption/local processing is a lost cause?
> Drive and storage just work.
That's what Google does really well indeed: Things close to infrastructure with as little product/UI aspects as possible. Getting rid of hard links in Drive was a great move too. No complaints there. Voice is another thing in that category: It's a hard infrastructure problem, and Google nailed it. The same goes for the versioning/conflict resolution backend of GSuite: A marvel of engineering.
The hardest part is not accidentally cancelling things that work and that solve problems for actual users in favor of yet another instant messenger.
> Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Quantitatively, sure, maybe. Qualitatively, having unleashed Protobuf onto the world alone undoes a significant amount of goodwill in my view.
>Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.
>FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)
And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.
It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.
There's an easy solution here: Offer both! Google can afford to offer two kinds of document editors, and it would make the entire GSuite infinitely more valuable and enjoyable to me.
I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
Peak HN is also claiming Y already supports X without showing any evidence.
And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get lost when exporting and re-importing the same file, or parts of it via copy and paste).
Update: You made me look: Sadly still no Markdown support. I would have been very happy to be wrong here.
Maybe irrelevant, but I will say that my spouse who spends a lot more time in Google docs can’t be bothered to learn even the markdown shortcuts for H tags in docs even though it would save her a ton of time. I imagine that’s a large majority of people.
You redefined Markdown support into "only Markdown support." No refunds, sorry. :)*
Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown.
That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
* also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps both are desirable, I'm not sure why you felt deceived that Docs didn't become a Markdown-only editor
Markdown shortcuts just really aren't markdown, no refund needed, in the same way that supporting j/k keybindings for <- / -> isn't the same thing as Vim. It's about 10-20% of the way there.
And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).
I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.
> That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.
GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.
Costpoint is the UI hell you didn’t even know existed until you see it for yourself.
It’s timesheet software that appears to be a legacy Windows app using an unholy number of compatibility shims to run in the browser. Almost nothing is a native control!
It sometimes refuses to load randomly, and can be really slow at certain hours. Its job is to record a few numbers for each user once a day.
TBH I'm surprised we aren't forced to use it since it's a Microsoft product and whenever there's a Microsoft version of something we seem to get forced to use it. Weird.
>> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.
> How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.
> FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
This exactly hard on Google's caliber.
Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.
I do see that it’s not a simple problem. But this brings us back on topic nicely: This is Google we’re talking about!
There was a time when the name was synonymous for the best software engineering and some of the brightest minds in the world! And here we are arguing whether two different editing paradigms in one word processor might be too hard for them.
> FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG
Approximately nobody wants this though. Sure, you want it, and I want it, and some other people like us, but we're a rounding error of the user base of Google Docs.
This would be a great plugin, but very difficult to justify building as a first class feature.
We have a multi billion dollar machine built by developers with the goal of doing good things and profiting by them.
>Cell phone privacy
Sure we make a cell phone and we make a cell phone OS but its best to look the other way and never trust your privacy to a device that society has decided should follow you 24/7.
Sorry for the flippant comment - I wasn't just referring to the code and apps running on your phone, but the servers and cell towers that collect tons of details about you. Plus, the physical emanations as your phone connects and responds to signals from 4g, 5g, wifi, bluetooth and more.
A secure OS is cute but so what - there's a million other ways to p0wn your privacy.
On the plus side, the digital trail is so intense, citizens have a pretty robust alibi against being framed. For example, sure someone could borrow your phone, but they'd have a real hard time using it exactly the way you do, from accelerometer data to swipes to individual apps and and and...
Yes. The entire system is flawed end to end. No one decrypts anything anymore, they just ask the government for access to your hardware that has already decrypted the message.
If google was a small garage startup I would agree that they would have nothing they could do. But they aren't. They are massive. And this is their field. and this is their mission.
I've used Google Slides for over a decade and I don't see any real improvement; Google Drawings is just pathetic. Basically "Powerpoint from 2001, but with doc sharing".
Try buying some ads through Google ads and you might lose some of your optimism.
I want to run ads and I am unable to. Chrome never finishes loading ads.google.com so I switched to Firefox. It loads successfully on Firefox but I cannot get it to actually run an ad.
>Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin
After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.
AWS is certainly very capable but I haven't at all found that everything AWS is easy or makes sense and that's certainly not the general reputation it has among other devs I know. It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.
> It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.
I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.
The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.
Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.
Let’s not even get started on permissions.
I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.
And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.
I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!
My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.
This is pretty dissonant for me. AWS certainly has a lot, but I wouldn't describe any of it as being easy or making sense. It's all poorly integrated with UX that is just a hair above adequate. The documentation is generally pretty decent though, I'll give you that, and it's nice that everything has an API, though true to form, the client libraries for those APIs leave a lot to be desired.
But I haven't used Google Cloud extensively, so I don't know if it's even worse.
As someone who worked in cloud security for a year, GCP's security mechanisms were a joke next to AWS IAM and Organizations. But some of their products like Bigtable were better.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.
Search had become awful well before ChatGPT appeared - the final really visible decline was in 2019 I recall. Recent 1st result for "Likely": "LIKELY - Women's Dresses, Tops & More". They've been happy to put anything commercial first for any term.
IDK when but anything other than Google is better now. Even whatever default Brave has, or ddg. It's like using Google 15 years ago - minimal SEO crap.
Sure I do have to go back to google every few days, but thats due to braindead devs who explicitly only allow google to scrape them.
I actually don't have a problem with Google myself. I love gmail and I use Google FI for my cellphone service. I agree their security has been fantastic. The only criticism I have for them is that they give up too easily on their new ideas. They're known for not seeing anything new through. And, while they saw things like Android and Gmail through to the bitter end, it has been a long time since they've had a win like that. Bard is impressive, but they were late to the game. Which is ironic, since they pioneered the research that made LLMs possible. They're very careful and don't take risks. To win big, you have to risk big. And, when you're as big as Google you stop taking the big risks. I think if I had any advice for them, it would be to create and announce a new accelerator to fund new startups. Something exciting with lots and lots of cash behind it to whip up innovation. They can steer that and ride the success of all the ventures that it starts. They have some funds but they're pretty low key about them. Companies like Nvidia have been funding some pretty impressive stuff with their accelerator. It is about how much noise you generate with that kind of thing.
But the fact that they can kill your online identity in the blink of an eye, with zero recourse is the biggest reason why I personally cannot fully embrace the full Google ecosystem.
> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.
If you think the complaint about google search is that it isn't as good as chatgpt, I think you might be not listening. The problem with google search is that it's worse than it was
If you had to pin it on a single actor, Google. Ads have corrupted the original vision of the web. When you offer a path for other actors to monetize the web, they will, and Google did that more than anybody.
Google has made so many "death of the web" moves over the past few years that it's hard for them not to be implicated in the current situation. If they've shat in their own pants, well that's too bad.
Is it possible GP was talking about SEO spam enabled by LLMs like ChatGPT? That's the most charitable read on it I can give it.
Because I can guarantee you my problem with Google Search has nothing to do with chat assistants, and if that is sincerely your position, I'd seriously consider trying to find perspective.
LLMs are an obvious threat to web search, and guaranteed Google is already seeing their effects.
What they have done is given people an alternative to interacting with human knowledge via Google search. It was falling in quality before, but in the general case no one had an alternative (and so it would still generate the same revenues). But ChatGPT is not only a substitute but a superior product, so people actually move to it instead of kvetching about the decline.
Apologies, I was making a deeper point, which is that search is going through a period of disruption and the endgame will be something more like ChatGPT and less like a lost of 10 links.
To address your concern, yes [low quality content] will still exist but it won't look at all like today's stuff. Too soon to tell.
In periods like these, the British saying applies to users: keep calm and carry on. The American saying: bitchin' ain't switchin'.
- Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea. They have been the least innovative company of the big 5 and cancel products and have no long term focus.
- GCP may be good but no one trusts Google to maintain their products and not cancel them under your feet. GCP representatives don’t know how to meet “customers where they are” and their enterprise relationships are so bad when I was at AWS (Professional Services) we didn’t even bother having have “talking points” about GCP vs AWS. GCP wasn’t even on our radar. Azure on the other hand was.
- Google and privacy? Really? Google’s whole purpose is to track you to monetize you. Android consistently has more security issues than iOS and Android devices don’t get security updates like iOS devices.
- Google like every other company only “contributes” to open source software that does not give it a competitive advantage.
As another Xoogler, I'd dispute some of your points, though I agree with the rest:
1) The Cloud Console is very meh compared to the AWS frontend. Slow and cumbersome. Otherwise GCP is generally playing catch-up, though it's closed the gap significantly in recent years.
2) Morale is low. Googlers used to see themselves as representatives of the most beneficial company in the world. Now, they're much more likely to view themselves as well-compensated cogs in the next IBM. Which is more realistic, but the negative vibe shift is real.
3) Privacy/security wise, I trust Google to do what it promises to do better than anyone. Which is to say, it will extract your data and monetize it to the maximum extent possible and make sure no one else has access to it. Still better than the alternatives, but that's a pretty damn low bar.
And two other points:
4) Hiring standards have dropped. Googlers are more competent than the average SWE on the market, but they are not generally exceptional. And their experience at Google teaches them proprietary tooling and how to navigate bureaucracy.
5) On that note, the core issue is that Google is a bureaucracy split into fiefdoms, living off Ads profits like a Gulf oil state. It hampers execution and makes genuine product vision impossible.
Google has become a utility company, and I believe that's what you are saying. And I agree. I love Gmail, photos, drive etc and I have been a Google user longer than I have been an employee. This is a good thing.
But, I started my career at google, and can tell you with confidence that it is not the best place to build a career, especially if you are a high performer. Google will shape everyones career around average, and will not do much to reward extraordinary contributions, and it shows up also in compensation, promotions etc. google will happily not promote people unless they ask for, and many will not.
What he really meant is it’s a great career choice financially (see the supporting extended family sentence after that)
And utility? Come on now. Yes it might be doing much less actual innovation than before but compare that to building awful websites at an actual utility company. I’ll wait.
That's not ok here, so please don't. We want curious conversation, not repetition. (Fortunately it doesn't look like you've repeated this more than once, but that is already too often.)
I don't understand the complaint from the guy who has been there for 15 years and doesn't like that it's changed.
Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality.
If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. Leave before a company gets that size!
> contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job.
This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so many mediocre people who want to be seen as "doing something", they are literally destroying the innovation by virtue of just existing in that company at that level.
The solution is actually pretty simple - make management track people go on call. That way, they develop empathy for customers, engineers and services. Make them spend less time on committees, promo packets, performance reviews and instead, spend more time on services. Make them fix bugs. Be close to the work that they are supposedly the face of.
I think it also behooves these smart people just to realize that they're not "one company for the long haul" people.
I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment.
But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applying at raise an eyebrow over it.
I think there's a tangential tricky element here too, that most financial advice is written for the masses of people who do have predictable career paths and long-term plans. There's nothing wrong with that. Those people need to have plans too.
But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were. I could use decent advice, but "be a different kind of person, because the kind of person you are isn't like me" doesn't really help. I'm financially way ahead of my friends in traditional roles, because risk is often rewarded and ownership matters, but I've yet to find an advisor who has the first idea what to do with me.
A bit ironic because oods are the established companies are indeed the ones laying off people (which inevitably targets the 1-3 years more than the 5+ year seniority). If you're not an active detriment to a startup, you're probably not going to get fired unless you get caught in office politics (which can be much more personal and nasty than bigCo politics, admitedly).
>But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were.
like you said, a lot of financial advice is based on stability. The job hop strategy is inherently unstable. No traditional advisor is ever going to suggest going into a job with the mindset to quit in 2 years for better job.
It's also because it's an inherently unique bubble that is tech. Tech moves fast , blazing fast. You can have 3-4 different domains under your belt in a decade if you wanted, whereas you may not even be considered a master of a particular domain if you spent 10 years in more traditional prestige like doctors or lawyers (if you count school you'd just barely be starting in such careers!). And even in tech this is a pretty recent trend isolated to the mid-00's to now (minus a few housing crisis years). the oldest authority exposed to such trends would either be retired and still have spent most of their lives pre-boom, or still currently in the workforce. There's no formal advisor available yet.
---------
I say all this as someone who wanted to be a "long haul" type. I wanted to be that deep domain tech guru to uncover the various secrets in my field. The reality is I just get laid off every 2-3 years. so what's even the point?
It just seems like there are probably enough of us who do thrive in the early-stage startup atmosphere that someone could make good money targeting that niche with advice. We're different enough to be a subculture, but we're still working within a lot of the constraints of systems that weren't actually designed for people like us.
For example, I've searched for but never been able to find actual advice about how to think about private company stock options. Everybody ends up writing them off with a, "Well, there's a decent chance they won't be worth anything, so just ignore them and try to operate within the world we do understand." Nobody quantifies the risk. Nobody talks about how to hedge against it prudently. Nobody talks about what to do when the piddly little number of shares the company tossed you as a customer support agent are suddenly worth half a million dollars and are a life-changing amount of money, never mind what to do if you had a real stake. Nobody talks about how to evaluate which early companies do have a strong shot at "making it" and which ones are doomed.
It's not impossible to think these things through and evaluate them. It's just hard, and not mainstream. For those of us for whom "instability" is a feature, not a bug, advice from someone who gets that and thinks it through would be infinitely more valuable than advice from the hordes who tell us we should just try to be different.
Morale from the initial and continued layoffs have utterly pulled the rug out from underneath the culture at Google. Any productivity savings they think they earned has afaict, but dwarfed by large margin in reduced productivity as people scramble to try and perform for whatever algorithm is being used to remove people.
Leadership all the way to the top is completely inept.
> whatever algorithm is being used to remove people
Different functions/teams/departments seemed to use very different algorithms, suggesting there was just no leadership at all. I posted a separate top level comment, but seeing one function do last-in/first-out and another jettison its most-tenured (most expensive? non-pristine HR record? who knows!) folks makes it hard for employees to understand what the new rules of engagement are.
This is just so totally absurd that I’m surprised nobody has pushed back hard on this claim:
“The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,”
That sounds like a massive hyperbolic exaggeration at best and pure fabrication at worst.
If true though it’s a massive indictment on the leadership that shows how inept they are at even having a semblance of knowing what their people do and taking care of them.
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If you have someone who aimlessly kills products and fires people but lacks vision or a decent plan, you could find someone much cheaper, and save tens of millions on executive compensation. If operating margin is so crucial now, then it seems cutting pay of top executives is the easiest way to achieve that with the least damage to the company.
0 - https://money.com/tech-layoffs-affect-stock-prices/
/s
Meaning shares holders, of course.
He's not going anywhere
Welcome to having a regular non-union job? There's several billion other people in the club. It's not exciting, and you will be let go whenever the company wants a boost in their financials. There's also no free snacks or chefs, but you (at Google) still get a bigger salary than anyone else in the world with your job, if that helps. If you want fulfillment, excitement, vision, etc, you could always change jobs to a smaller company whose reason for being isn't selling ads.
I probably wouldn't do it indefinitely but it can make sense to hang around for a while.
Hmmm... would be interesting to go look at LinkedIn data to see if it's really true. Of course it wouldn't fix this problem. Workers are now unhappy with senior management, which is new. Although, I think some of the empire building resulted in a lot of the pandemic over hiring (and departures of long term staff).
Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920760
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35039360
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36564042
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329
https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.
This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.
Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".
You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.
Bad upper management (immediate manager was absolutely 10/10) was the reason I ended up leaving.
Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.
The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.
That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.
Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style.
Takes 5-10 seconds to load.
Avoided fucking it up, huh.
I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.
Starting from February 2024, this version of Gmail (Basic HTML Gmail) will no longer be supported, and you'll automatically start using Standard Gmail. Switch to the latest Gmail version now.
> The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
This is actually the problem and solution in one go - they're all doing data annotation.
Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.
I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play.
If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer.
“Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news.
The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another.
This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up.
It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/23/google-quantum-computing...
The photo you linked to is only confusing because he's not wearing a suit. Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.
What's missing here is the crown/suit/...
If society were very focused on worker's rights and the recognition of the necessity of labor, such as in an idealized socialist society or a society with a predominance of worker cooperatives in the economy, then the idea of having a monarch or CEO of a company standing in front of the hard work of people whose names are not mentioned and whose faces are not pictured would seem absurd. You would expect and indeed commonly see photos showing many workers in front of the item in question.
Just as an example I went to the wikipedia page for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was quick to find what I would expect: a photo of a large group of workers in front of a dam they constructed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...
Or you might find a focused photo of a worker who is one of the people who built the thing, and representative of the type of workers on the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...
I say this just to say, sure it can "make sense" but I think this is an artifact of the world we live in, where we have a hierarchical government and most firms in our economy are themselves hierarchical in nature. And so when the person at the top of the hierarchy stands for a photo op in front of the thing, we naturally accept that they serve as a "representation" of the output of the company.
But someone with a more worker-focused view would be more inclined to see that and find it off-putting. For the photo of Sundar Pichai up thread, I do in fact find it irritating that they don't even mention the people who were involved with the project he is standing in front of. And wouldn't you know it, I am a very pro-worker in inclination.
That would be different. In that situation it is clear who is doing the work, and who is providing the money.
But posing in front of a widget, he is signaling to the world, “I made this”.
What did you expect him to say? "Yes, moral is low and all the good people are leaving" ?
It fits the contemporary fad of contempt for anyone less powerful than you, including employees, courts (for some), etc.
Somehow, the world changes day to day, year to year, generation to generation; somehow we change the world; and all despite the fact that, as people now copypasta everywhere, 'it's always been that way'. Do people say that at work meetings? Talking to investors? One wonders what all these entrepeneurs and engineers do? No wonder funding is drying up (I think that might be a literal problem - the despair, pessimism and cynicism reaching the executive suite).
We've always had carbon in the atmosphere, warfare, poverty, oppression, ... and people saying that _____ has always been that way.
There’s no other requirement.
You make the board mad you’re fired. You make the board happy, then you’re golden and can do whatever.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.
CEO at this level isn’t a people leader like you’d expect because boards don’t care about people (unless they are unionizing). So anything they say about people issues, you can guarantee is a statement made for the board’s consumption.
This fits that perfectly because what he’s communicating is “we got rid of what we consider dead weight loss because those people worked in what we arbitrarily have deemed cost centers instead of what we used to call [important buzzword like “metaverse”]
The average worker, adhering to Company Culture, trading their mental space and shaving off their own quality of life in favor of the company's growth, are not the point of the business.
It's not really about the board, Google has become a mature company that's not going to grow 20% YoY anymore and this is what happens to such businesses. Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces, they will turn them into IBM.
> Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces
Isnt the board the ultimate force, including the economic one?
You are supporting OPs claim actually. Becoming a mature company brings declining workforce morale.
> they will turn them into IBM.
because
> The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to stack it with your friends. Preferably those that are not that rich so that they appreciate the several hundred thousand dollar a year gig for very little work.
That's a lot of the problem. There's no teeth in it for modern day C-class execs. The only difference when they leave is whether they leave a billionaire or a hundred-million aire.
If he can’t find someone better, it’s only because finding that person would be a full time job for him, for an indefinite period.
With the risk of a repeat.
Which may not be an acceptable price to him.
They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.
Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist.
Now add 149,999 nodes.
I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other.
(check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)
This could be a physics model, or an imperative to scale back the free food.
Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.
This is a ridiculous take. You would need way more than that just to maintain Kafka and run ops for it, that LinkedIn heavily relies on. You are trivializing the complexity of running a platform like LinkedIn.
Complexity compounds, so the tradeoff is, continually tame it, or continually hire with less and less impact per employee.
The latter seems to happen a lot when money flows.
Only if you're certain they will never quit their jobs. In tech where the average tenure is supposedly 2-3 years, a large number of employees are hired to make key persons redundant, groom for succession, and to make sure key persons can offload some bandwidth to work on emergent issues. It's irrational to have billions of dollars of revenue (or even tens of millions) riding on a single person who can decide to walk away with 2 weeks notice.
Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is
And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to.
Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B.
It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan.
I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.
> Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia?
There is a clear identity - Google is about hoarding all of the available data (originally web) and making money off of it any way you can. By definition it has to be huge and get their hands into as many pies as humanly possible and then cut away stuff that doesn’t work. So i would say they are being perfectly consistent whether their employees appreciate it or not.
Of course there isn’t an inconsistency there. Its such a non-identity there isn’t anything to be inconsistent with, outside of declaring the company a on-profit.
The problem of lack of identity isn’t always about lack of consistency. It also is a lack of focus.
Lack of focus leaves the door open to vastly increased complexity. The need for more and more employees as per employee impact drops.
The only thing.
On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second week of negotiating class: Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down. <Yawn.>
Sure, but these are humans with no stake in the company. They are not investing in Google because they believe in their mission nor do they even care if Google crashes in 5 years. They believe it's a way to quickly grow their portfolio, and will change as the market does.
This isn't to say they aren't human, just that they are at best more invested in other things or at worst are greedy and selfish.
>Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down
I don't exactly feel better knowing it's just a facade towards the above spectrum.
It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.
My guess is that he’ll say some off color on a hot mic or email leak. Considering his lack of effort in addressing Caste issues at Google… that’s possibly an issue. Could be antitrust stuff too. He’s been in hot water lately.
Market share wise but not feature wise. Everyone is chasing them in regards to photo quality.
Pixel is assuredly NOT leading in video recording quality though. And the overall package still matters: for example X% superiority in still photos didn't make up for Pixel 6 having a very small photo buffer / a slow camera startup speed. Didn't make up for lens cracking issues in Pixel 7. iPhone just works.
I sit on my couch with a MacBook Air (very couch friendly) developing with many screens of relevant info arranged around me.
A mundane but profound benefit of “spatial computing” is no longer having visual information limited to the “keyholes” of hardware screens.
Apple seems to get that the Vision Pro wants to be a Mac replacement, not an iPad replacement.
Counterintuitively, the stereo 3D is the secondary benefit. Albeit a natural and significant one.
Everything in Vision works with both see-pinch and track/mouse click.
Hoping see-pinch comes to Mac screen in Vision, or simply Mac becomes redundant.
Yeah, vision.
Gemini is much more neutral and easy to work with. Like Alexa or Siri.
People take Waymo on a daily basis without incident. Just because it may not be available to you doesn't mean it's not real. It is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the industry.
Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.
As a result, the larger the company, the larger the hierarchy, the larger the inefficencies. At the extreme you approximate the government of a country.
Layers of managers who care only about collecting a paycheck, engaging in company politics and looking busy cause exactly this problem. Managers will pick the best decision for them, not anyone else.
In reality, there’s lot of opportunities that benefit all 3 of user, Google, and decision maker.
it’s kind of the fundamental principle of trade/business - that both sides can proper in a deal.
I'd love to think so, but the truth is that any platform, working correctly, disadvantages those who contribute most of the content. The platform owners earn money in ways that are always contrary to the interests of the content creators.
https://youtu.be/GQAvce3MA44?si=deP0GG1hICPp9jr8&t=93
game developer, musician, mangaka, streamer, etc
Youtube's main source of revenue is ads which they serve regardless of whether the uploader is taking a cut from the upload or not. Most users have always and will continue to upload to and consume from youtube without the expectation of making money from the process.
So, yes in general users have historically been more or less satisfied with the deal: watch ads, get free video platform.
These users don't seem to know what they want. I'll just listen to whomever keeps calling me personally about things. My buddies are successful, so it makes sense.
Eh, these shareholders don't seem to know what they're doing. I'll just listen to myself. Everything I do makes sense to me, so that makes sense.
Perhaps this is inevitable, but maybe organizations could become aware of the changes in entropy and try to do the equivalent of maintenance and refactoring at the organizational level. There is probably some of this already happening, but I wonder if information theory can be applied at the people level to optimize and prevent increases in entropy.
I think it’s unavoidable. You hire to grow, but growth changes you. You can’t layoff to un-grow and return to former self because they layoffs take a toll.
Would give both companies and individuals more flexibility and dynamism
In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.
This is especially true for lower wage Americans who've seen great wage growth since 2019.
From the outside, the company looks rudderless, coasting along on (significant) momentum.
Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.
As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.
Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.
Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materially more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, reasonably priced and people love them.
The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.
Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.
Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.
As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).
As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet - we should only be so luck to have bought-and-held that stock. Meanwhile, Google owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.
Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
> Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough.
Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.
FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
> It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone.
The alternative is... giving up on the idea? Just storing anything centrally because end-to-end/client-side encryption/local processing is a lost cause?
> Drive and storage just work.
That's what Google does really well indeed: Things close to infrastructure with as little product/UI aspects as possible. Getting rid of hard links in Drive was a great move too. No complaints there. Voice is another thing in that category: It's a hard infrastructure problem, and Google nailed it. The same goes for the versioning/conflict resolution backend of GSuite: A marvel of engineering.
The hardest part is not accidentally cancelling things that work and that solve problems for actual users in favor of yet another instant messenger.
> Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Quantitatively, sure, maybe. Qualitatively, having unleashed Protobuf onto the world alone undoes a significant amount of goodwill in my view.
>FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)
And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.
It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.
I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
Ready?
It has Markdown mode as an option.
Peak HN, perfectly executed:
- "it's obvious my pet peeve feature X should be added to Y, the company in the article".
- "I don't like X".
- "Can we have both?"
I'm guffawing
And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get lost when exporting and re-importing the same file, or parts of it via copy and paste).
Update: You made me look: Sadly still no Markdown support. I would have been very happy to be wrong here.
Maybe irrelevant, but I will say that my spouse who spends a lot more time in Google docs can’t be bothered to learn even the markdown shortcuts for H tags in docs even though it would save her a ton of time. I imagine that’s a large majority of people.
Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown.
That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
* also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps both are desirable, I'm not sure why you felt deceived that Docs didn't become a Markdown-only editor
And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).
I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.
> That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.
GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.
It’s timesheet software that appears to be a legacy Windows app using an unholy number of compatibility shims to run in the browser. Almost nothing is a native control!
It sometimes refuses to load randomly, and can be really slow at certain hours. Its job is to record a few numbers for each user once a day.
> How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.
Surely we aren't blaming GPT for this.
This exactly hard on Google's caliber.
Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.
WYSWIG is core to the product definition.
There was a time when the name was synonymous for the best software engineering and some of the brightest minds in the world! And here we are arguing whether two different editing paradigms in one word processor might be too hard for them.
Approximately nobody wants this though. Sure, you want it, and I want it, and some other people like us, but we're a rounding error of the user base of Google Docs.
This would be a great plugin, but very difficult to justify building as a first class feature.
And there's nothing wrong with protobuf :)
Of course, if you want non wysiwyg, then don't use Google docs just use markdown in a text editor or install mediawiki or something.
I don’t get to choose, and I bet a considerable fraction of Google Docs users don’t either and it’s just what their workplace prescribes.
Trivializing privacy isn't the same thing as identifying good privacy.
>Cell phone privacy
Sure we make a cell phone and we make a cell phone OS but its best to look the other way and never trust your privacy to a device that society has decided should follow you 24/7.
A secure OS is cute but so what - there's a million other ways to p0wn your privacy.
On the plus side, the digital trail is so intense, citizens have a pretty robust alibi against being framed. For example, sure someone could borrow your phone, but they'd have a real hard time using it exactly the way you do, from accelerometer data to swipes to individual apps and and and...
If google was a small garage startup I would agree that they would have nothing they could do. But they aren't. They are massive. And this is their field. and this is their mission.
When Google sucks up your personal data or compound some profile on you against your will, it’s “ok”. When other people do it, it’s “hacking”.
I've used Google Slides for over a decade and I don't see any real improvement; Google Drawings is just pathetic. Basically "Powerpoint from 2001, but with doc sharing".
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/
This lists literally every new feature it gets. Browse to your heart's content.
Here's everything specific to Slides:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...
I think Sheets has seen the most improvements since that's what power business users need, followed by Docs.
I want to run ads and I am unable to. Chrome never finishes loading ads.google.com so I switched to Firefox. It loads successfully on Firefox but I cannot get it to actually run an ad.
After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.
I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.
The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.
Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.
Let’s not even get started on permissions.
I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.
And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.
I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!
My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.
But I haven't used Google Cloud extensively, so I don't know if it's even worse.
Also, AWS answered the proverbial phone.
Search had become awful well before ChatGPT appeared - the final really visible decline was in 2019 I recall. Recent 1st result for "Likely": "LIKELY - Women's Dresses, Tops & More". They've been happy to put anything commercial first for any term.
IDK when but anything other than Google is better now. Even whatever default Brave has, or ddg. It's like using Google 15 years ago - minimal SEO crap.
Sure I do have to go back to google every few days, but thats due to braindead devs who explicitly only allow google to scrape them.
But the fact that they can kill your online identity in the blink of an eye, with zero recourse is the biggest reason why I personally cannot fully embrace the full Google ecosystem.
If you think the complaint about google search is that it isn't as good as chatgpt, I think you might be not listening. The problem with google search is that it's worse than it was
But to be ultra-fair, the web is worse today because of the perverse incentives created by Google Search and Google Ads.
Is it possible GP was talking about SEO spam enabled by LLMs like ChatGPT? That's the most charitable read on it I can give it.
Because I can guarantee you my problem with Google Search has nothing to do with chat assistants, and if that is sincerely your position, I'd seriously consider trying to find perspective.
What they have done is given people an alternative to interacting with human knowledge via Google search. It was falling in quality before, but in the general case no one had an alternative (and so it would still generate the same revenues). But ChatGPT is not only a substitute but a superior product, so people actually move to it instead of kvetching about the decline.
To address your concern, yes [low quality content] will still exist but it won't look at all like today's stuff. Too soon to tell.
In periods like these, the British saying applies to users: keep calm and carry on. The American saying: bitchin' ain't switchin'.
- Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea. They have been the least innovative company of the big 5 and cancel products and have no long term focus.
- GCP may be good but no one trusts Google to maintain their products and not cancel them under your feet. GCP representatives don’t know how to meet “customers where they are” and their enterprise relationships are so bad when I was at AWS (Professional Services) we didn’t even bother having have “talking points” about GCP vs AWS. GCP wasn’t even on our radar. Azure on the other hand was.
- Google and privacy? Really? Google’s whole purpose is to track you to monetize you. Android consistently has more security issues than iOS and Android devices don’t get security updates like iOS devices.
- Google like every other company only “contributes” to open source software that does not give it a competitive advantage.
1) The Cloud Console is very meh compared to the AWS frontend. Slow and cumbersome. Otherwise GCP is generally playing catch-up, though it's closed the gap significantly in recent years.
2) Morale is low. Googlers used to see themselves as representatives of the most beneficial company in the world. Now, they're much more likely to view themselves as well-compensated cogs in the next IBM. Which is more realistic, but the negative vibe shift is real.
3) Privacy/security wise, I trust Google to do what it promises to do better than anyone. Which is to say, it will extract your data and monetize it to the maximum extent possible and make sure no one else has access to it. Still better than the alternatives, but that's a pretty damn low bar.
And two other points:
4) Hiring standards have dropped. Googlers are more competent than the average SWE on the market, but they are not generally exceptional. And their experience at Google teaches them proprietary tooling and how to navigate bureaucracy.
5) On that note, the core issue is that Google is a bureaucracy split into fiefdoms, living off Ads profits like a Gulf oil state. It hampers execution and makes genuine product vision impossible.
Google has become a utility company, and I believe that's what you are saying. And I agree. I love Gmail, photos, drive etc and I have been a Google user longer than I have been an employee. This is a good thing.
But, I started my career at google, and can tell you with confidence that it is not the best place to build a career, especially if you are a high performer. Google will shape everyones career around average, and will not do much to reward extraordinary contributions, and it shows up also in compensation, promotions etc. google will happily not promote people unless they ask for, and many will not.
And utility? Come on now. Yes it might be doing much less actual innovation than before but compare that to building awful websites at an actual utility company. I’ll wait.
That's not ok here, so please don't. We want curious conversation, not repetition. (Fortunately it doesn't look like you've repeated this more than once, but that is already too often.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality.
If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. Leave before a company gets that size!
This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so many mediocre people who want to be seen as "doing something", they are literally destroying the innovation by virtue of just existing in that company at that level.
The solution is actually pretty simple - make management track people go on call. That way, they develop empathy for customers, engineers and services. Make them spend less time on committees, promo packets, performance reviews and instead, spend more time on services. Make them fix bugs. Be close to the work that they are supposedly the face of.
I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment.
But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applying at raise an eyebrow over it.
I think there's a tangential tricky element here too, that most financial advice is written for the masses of people who do have predictable career paths and long-term plans. There's nothing wrong with that. Those people need to have plans too.
But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were. I could use decent advice, but "be a different kind of person, because the kind of person you are isn't like me" doesn't really help. I'm financially way ahead of my friends in traditional roles, because risk is often rewarded and ownership matters, but I've yet to find an advisor who has the first idea what to do with me.
>But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were.
like you said, a lot of financial advice is based on stability. The job hop strategy is inherently unstable. No traditional advisor is ever going to suggest going into a job with the mindset to quit in 2 years for better job.
It's also because it's an inherently unique bubble that is tech. Tech moves fast , blazing fast. You can have 3-4 different domains under your belt in a decade if you wanted, whereas you may not even be considered a master of a particular domain if you spent 10 years in more traditional prestige like doctors or lawyers (if you count school you'd just barely be starting in such careers!). And even in tech this is a pretty recent trend isolated to the mid-00's to now (minus a few housing crisis years). the oldest authority exposed to such trends would either be retired and still have spent most of their lives pre-boom, or still currently in the workforce. There's no formal advisor available yet.
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I say all this as someone who wanted to be a "long haul" type. I wanted to be that deep domain tech guru to uncover the various secrets in my field. The reality is I just get laid off every 2-3 years. so what's even the point?
For example, I've searched for but never been able to find actual advice about how to think about private company stock options. Everybody ends up writing them off with a, "Well, there's a decent chance they won't be worth anything, so just ignore them and try to operate within the world we do understand." Nobody quantifies the risk. Nobody talks about how to hedge against it prudently. Nobody talks about what to do when the piddly little number of shares the company tossed you as a customer support agent are suddenly worth half a million dollars and are a life-changing amount of money, never mind what to do if you had a real stake. Nobody talks about how to evaluate which early companies do have a strong shot at "making it" and which ones are doomed.
It's not impossible to think these things through and evaluate them. It's just hard, and not mainstream. For those of us for whom "instability" is a feature, not a bug, advice from someone who gets that and thinks it through would be infinitely more valuable than advice from the hordes who tell us we should just try to be different.
Leadership all the way to the top is completely inept.
Different functions/teams/departments seemed to use very different algorithms, suggesting there was just no leadership at all. I posted a separate top level comment, but seeing one function do last-in/first-out and another jettison its most-tenured (most expensive? non-pristine HR record? who knows!) folks makes it hard for employees to understand what the new rules of engagement are.
“The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,”
That sounds like a massive hyperbolic exaggeration at best and pure fabrication at worst.
If true though it’s a massive indictment on the leadership that shows how inept they are at even having a semblance of knowing what their people do and taking care of them.
Sounds like Pichai has been drinking the linkedin toxic positivity kool-aid.
I would think that quote came from the onion 5 years ago.