Oh yeah, that paragraph really nailed it. Every place I've worked that's started to go downhill, it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it.

I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

Innovation no longer happens at these places. I can't think of the last thing Google did that was all that impressive. The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.

These companies no longer need to innovate to stay relevant. They focus instead on stifling competition, lobbying politicians, marketing, advertising, dark patterns, etc. The good people eventually get shut out and shut down and leave or stop trying to influence change. The bureaucracy wins and eventually the music stops.

> I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

The problem is power is too concentrated. Companies no longer need to innovate. This isn't just in tech. Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.

> Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.

Which is sad and short sighted, because the best way to increase the absolute value of your assets is to encourage large scale societal innovation. Grow the pie, not your relative share of the pie.

Sadly, I think there are too many people who would rather be king of the wastelands than relatively equal to all others in a post scarcity world.

We need to become collectively better about extracting these dark personalities from power if we want a good future.

> best way to increase the absolute value of your assets is to encourage large scale societal innovation

but from a company & shareholder perspective, this sort of societal innovation and improvement is not privately capturable. Back in the 70-80's, Bell labs did this sort of innovation, but they were funded directly via a gov't subsidy (because they are given a monopoly on telecommunications), and so management didn't have to care that the expenditure on R&D returned profit, as long as it is innovative.

I wish we could return to those days, but i dont believe it is possible today.

I think Google innovates plenty!

You might only use Maps, Gmail, and Search, but you've probably also:

- Used a ton of services hosted in Google Cloud (which Google built outright),

- interacted with data that was filtered through BigQuery or Cloud Spanner (which Google built)

- Edited something in Sheets, Docs, Slides, or Forms (all acquisitions, I think)

- Viewed a photo on Google Photos,

- Used Chrome,

- etc.

And that's before all of the stuff Google has produced that's open-source (Golang, Kubernetes, Flutter/Dart, V8, etc), or their AI stuff (DeepMind, AlphaGo, Brain), or their autonomous driving stuff (Waymo, which is probably a patent factory on its own accord)

Also, let's not discount that Maps has gotten a LOT of innovations over time. Is there another mapping service that can give you historical street view of almost any road in the US within seconds?

I worked there in 2015 and also disliked my experience, but Google definitely definitely moves the needle on stuff.

I don't think anything in your list is all that impressive or innovative, other companies do most of those things, or do them better. In any case, none of them changed the way I interacted with the world like Search did. If any of them disappeared, I wouldn't really notice.

Google's "innovations" are minor evolutions now. They have some moonshots, sure, if Waymo is succesful, but nothing impacted the world like search did. Historical street view? Really?

Give me some easy to use and not self-hosted alternatives and I'll switch right now.

Also, as the article points out, they're huge contributors to Web standards like Webassembly. HTTP/2, QUIC, and HTTP/3 are also huge.

The whole GSuite (Google Docs, Google Drive, Etc.) have been very productive tools in my experience. (Although Google Drive was launched in like 2012, and Docs in 2006)

The Dart language and Flutter framework have been a rather innovative attempt at making cross platform apps.

But yeah, the amount of innovation at Google has certainly decreased over time.

The gsuite is very much a product of a bunch of acquisitions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs

That's not to say Google didn't do a ton to advance the concept, but it wasn't their idea originally, and they acquired a lot of the technology.

> The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.

Its even worse than that for me in that not only am I not using any new products Google is producing, but they killed off a number of the ones I did use (some which they produced, some which they acquired and killed).

So not only are they not producing products I care about to begin with, even if they managed to change this I'd be super hesitant to adopt the product because of the reasonable expectation they will kill it off after I start to depend on it.

> The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.

Never stopped to think about it, but you are right.

100% yes.

Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions without understanding the impacts to the rest of the organization, and when objections or concerns are raised, they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top levels.

Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.

> dismissed at the top levels.

The issue, IMO, is the only accountability C levels face is from either a board or stock prices. Otherwise, nothing they do has any real impact on them personally.

Another major problem is the effects of their decisions are long delayed. Do something that slows development to a crawl and you still have a functional product for years (even if you can't add new features to it). Tying the original decision to the impact on the org is hard, and even harder since whoever made that decision isn't likely to want to take responsibility for it.

From my management experience the leaders are actually doing their job when they do this. Leaders at that level are expected to make strong decisions and to stick with them. It is thought better to have a leader make the wrong decisions firmly and adjust later with a well planned change than the business wobling down the road. So the senior executives are actually doing what the board expects/tasked them to do, keep the direction stable until the next planned/controlled correction. That is why it feels like you are talking to a wall. You are. What you see as a 'bug' the board sees as a 'feature' and the expected output of a C-level.

Bad analogy (I'm old) the light at the intersection is going to stay red until it is time to turn green, even though it would make more sense right now for it to turn green for you because you are the only one at the intersection. Bigger picture, having the lights on timers works better than everyone having a stop sign, even though it looks/feels stupid waiting at a red light with no one else there. The lights seem stupid sometimes, but it scales better than a bunch of stop and go stop signs. (Yes, I know that now lights have sensors, bad analogy now like I said).

TLDR; What if it's not a bug, but it's actually the output the board wants.

That's a misunderstanding.

What should be kept stable are the goals the company wants to reach, not the details in execution.

When you notice your navigation app is sending you down a cliff, do you still follow that route? Of course not.

It's the same with organizations, except a lot of organizations are not intelligent and agile enough to course-correct. Just imagine what they could accomplish with better leadership.

> When you notice your navigation app is sending you down a cliff, do you still follow that route? Of course not.

Good point. A person or organization has to be careful about blindly following or being blind to the situation they are in.

I think there's also an element of overestimating how much power "people in power" actually have. Unless you're at the point in the org chart where you can actually move money and people you're stuck trying to keep your little zen garden clean inside a massive constantly shifting system you have no control over.

Power in an organization should probably be measured by "resources they have unilateral control over" instead of "authority." Because if all you have is authority you're a glorified manager.

There's an incredible amount of soft power in simple leadership, which is extraordinarily rare in both politics and business. Simply setting out an agenda in clear terms and getting people on board.

If you can do that, you don't need to micromanage all the levers yourself, because people will eagerly working with you towards your shared goal.

OMG yes. Leadership and vision are essential for success. There is an absolute shit-ton of asshat, visionless leadership in the world, and in my experience they act so entitled and worldly while they crush the business that feeds them. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I highlighted this in TFA,

> Any team needs expert leadership to thrive, and expert leaders need support from the people they report to so they can do what’s necessary.

But isn't vision just holding firmly to a plan and sticking with it? The same thing people here are complaining about C-Levels doing? Rigidly plunging ahead (driving towards the vision) and not sidetracking from the vision instead taking everyone's input?

Not the same, no. Plans are tactical; vision is strategic, or maybe even above strategy. And in my experience, people really struggle to understand that some plans just aren’t compatible with the vision, and should be abandoned.

>Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Hahahahah. Me neither man, me neither.

A good definition of power is from Hannah Arendt, it's "the ability to coordinate voluntary collective action". If you can do this you have power because you can't coerce everyone at once all the time.

We hold people responsible. Scapegoats. Low-ranking staff.

The managerial class can be rewarded for failure (learning experience) but is so rarely held responsible that it's newsworthy when it happens.

>I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

Well the problem is you try and then you disappear either because you self-select out of that environment or you get managed out because that's an easier problem for the manager to solve because it doesn't involve admitting they're the problem.

It's sad but true.

I wonder if presenting concerns to them in the form of problem-consequences would compel them to action.

If an employee is just complaining to them they are likely to just be annoyed, but if they are told about future negative impact then they would need to take some form of action (presumably).

> it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it

Wow I see a lot of executive hate on HN. Sure some is probably deserved, but I have seen a lot projects and companies (after being brought in as a consultant to fix) where the technologists had a pretty clear business vision given to them and were left to their own devices with good budgets, platform, and process freedom fail miserably due to team dysfunction and all too often—incompetence.

I 100% agree with your last generalization.

Part of me wonders if this could be an intentional strategy at big orgs.

Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues.

Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate.

Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It.

Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings.

Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.

In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should."

Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.

Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.

That people within an organization wrap their careers around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive to present success, to project positively.

We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply woven into most company's genes.

Related reading: The pre-CIA OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"

When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-ma...

Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."

Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.

>Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."

This. I've learned to completely ignore what companies state their values are and/or these slogans they trot out. Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.

> Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.

Good one.

Yeah, that's not great, but I still highly prefer that truthful "nothing is going to change" over false promises. At least you have the information you need to make a real decision for yourself.

You're absolutely right about that. It's demoralizing, but in a "devil you know" kind of way.

I zeroed-in in that quote as well. What good does it do to optimize your hiring process to select for candidate ability implement middle-out bubblesort at the whiteboard when ... this is the kind of toxicity they can expect to have crashing down on their heads when they actually get there?

The middle-out bubblesort stuff is so they don't have to decide where to put you. You're a cog with a certain amount of learning in you and can be put anywhere someone wants your butt in a seat. It's credentialism at its base, but it's also resource engineering to cut down on management overhead. Just like hint-based management in general, except in these cases the hint is the person's skills.