These major public failures would've caused massive culture shift in most companies. But nothing changed at Google. The reason why? Success hides all failures. For a long time, the ad business was so lucrative and successful, nothing else mattered.
But now with the ad business showing signs of faltering, the impact of those failures will start to become very noticeable. They will try to focus on greatly expanding new revenue streams like Google Cloud. But here, their poor reputation with customer support will hinder making any progress against AWS and Azure. They will try to launch new products, but years of burning customer goodwill by shutting down products (again, look at their messaging apps) will make it difficult for anything to become popular. And with decreasing profit and revenue, they will have to decrease their total compensation packages. Then their hiring pipeline will completely collapse. High total comp is the only thing keeping their hiring going. And even that isn't enough for many senior engineers in the industry because they have angered so many with their arrogant and stupid hiring process. Without the high total comp, they have nothing. And when they start missing the targets during quarterly earnings reports, those fat bonuses, RSUs, free food, other perks, signing bonuses, will be among the first to go. Then come the layoffs.
Does Google have a major issue with their hiring process? They seem to be able to hire the talented people they need. I guess it's an issue for the individuals that get rejected, but not for Google, who seems to get as many people as they want.
If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.
I just mean to say that all hiring criterion have tradeoffs, and none is strictly better than the others.
And I don’t know what a new process should be. Google has the data from literally millions of applications and has decided to just ignore them or not to try different ways of hiring? Give me a break.
We assume somebody competent is looking at this, but for all we know they are using the same dumb myopic evaluation as they use for promotions. I mean the same people came up with both.
If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it.
That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.
What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced.
What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?
Sure, but how are those things relevant? Those are strategic decisions, not decisions made by developers -- and don't concern what we're discussing, if the devs they hire are good for the company.
If somebody at Google C-level decided "let's close down Search and Ads, and just make kitchen juicers" their profits would also tank.
But that's not related to if the devs they hire are good for them. Unless their profit is hampered by dev output (and not one of the other reasons it can go down), their devs are fine for them.
Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.
edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.
And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.
Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.
What does it say about Android that even Eric Schmidt refused to use one years after it was introduced?
https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-eric-schmidt-why-i-love-my...
Can you imagine the CEO of Apple telling reporters how much he loves his Android phone?
The problem is that the VPs were former engineers.
I mean, "only" is relative here.
Back then they didn't sell hardware which is where most iPhone revenue comes from.
No, they were hired long ago via red-black trees and got promoted for building google plus.
* _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up)
* _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent.
* _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really).
There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.
You can only be promoted if you fit a pattern that your job ladder's promo committee recognizes and if you are already performing at the level you're going to be promoted to. May have worked well in a 10000 employee company but it’s extremely conservative in a company of Google's size. It knee caps recognizing innovation outside whatever's considered "traditional" for your ladder, and it is blind to any roles which require cross-ladder, cross-organizational OKRs and accomplishments.
Source: not a Googler, will never be a Googler, but friends of many NYC based Googlers who all seem to be looking to leave out of frustration with the promo process.
As a Googler, I agree. The promo system is fucked up here, and everyone is micro-optimizing for promos. Nobody gives a fuck for developing long-term, stable and scalable solutions. People just want to fling shit on the wall, and if it doesn't stick fling some more. Sooner or later something will stick and they'll be basking in the glow of L_{N+1}, before starting the process all over again. Google is very top-heavy now, with 1000s of people sitting at levels 7+ doing absolutely nothing (since you don't get demoted for lack of production).
The difference I think maybe that Seniors at google may actually be super smart, just not engaged.
I wonder if, looking at these examples, BigCo's are actually doing Tech a disservice by promoting the fuck out of high performers until they reach such a senior level that they don't need to do anything no more. I guess my concern is that these folks could have been accelerating the pace of tech even more, but are basically sitting out committees, managing others, and in general not making the kind of ground breaking progress they would have made otherwise.
Kind of reminds me of Feynman's view of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study; he viewed the institution as the place where good people went and stagnated.
The massive majority of positions out there are perfectly fine with a generalist that doesn't have photographic memory of their old college algorithms book but can code their way out of a variety of bag materials.
Maybe one day AIs will replace that level of software engineering, but we're still far away.
I've kept my mouth shut because I value my job, I don't trust the system to protect me from retaliation, and the guy in question isn't dumb enough to make his confessions in written media.
> In one hiring round, the team was allegedly instructed to cancel all software engineering interviews with non-diverse applicants below a certain experience level, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.”
My central point was not that Google only hires PC engineers (although the James Damore debacle seems to support this), but that engineers like me (since I can only speak for myself and my peers) don't want to work for politically-correct organisations. Why? Because if you want to work on great products, you can't be concerned with politics. If the politics were aligned with product, it would be considered an apolitical organisation, or a product company.
Here in South Africa, racism is economically sanctioned by well-intentioned BBE (black economic empowerment) "diversity" laws, which made it illegal to do business with government unless your company is majority black-owned. This guaranteed the creation of countless rent-seeking middlemen, which increased costs for the poor majority they were designed to protect and caused valuable skills to leave the country. With widespread power outages, South Africa is not doing so well.
If diversity does not arise naturally in an equal opportunity environment, then either the opportunity is unequal, or the homogeneity is inherent in the makeup of the hiring pool. If you try to compensate for this by hiring for diversity in your company instead of excellence, you will lose in the marketplace.
Of course, I support giving everyone an equal opportunity, but I remain unconvinced you can reconcile forced diversity with excellence.
P.S. Life would be easier if you just bit the bullet and finally learned those algorithms. It ain't that hard.
Come on don't add your echo to the chamber of the nuisance of the IT industry which is causing a gatekeeping to brilliant talent from other fields. It's what actually causing a stale in innovation now.
Anyone with sufficient study and grit can master those and come up with excellent implementations. Now what I will consider too stupid is if I ask someone to prove that "knowledge" to me in less than 1 hour.
[Disclosure: I am learning and working on those algorithms on a pretty much daily basis, just from a perspective of broadening your thinking & logical skills during your learning curve (Why we need to learn Pythagoras theorem, if we are not going to ever use it?: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154359309646005 ) they don't serve many purposes except developer's ego. Not to mention that there have been better implementations of these algorithms out there. And you can always pick and choose.]