(Edit: what's the objection to this comment? Usually I can tell, here I have no idea)
But I'm not personally looking to use anything _new_ that Google makes. Wave, reader, goofke+, hangouts, and a bunch of others came and went. Basically when compared to behemoths like search and Gmail most really good things are complete failures.
Unfortunately this reputation is starting to ge an issue outside, and inside, the company. Outside I'm personally reluctant to use anything "Google new". I can imagine that inside when you're working on your 3rd or 4th cancelled Google project, you passion is, well, dulled.
Like yes, Google is probably not going to kill GCP. But it's not doing very well compared to Amazon, and then there's no guarantee that any product within GCP is going to exist for the long run. To think that a major part of your cloud infrastructure might just be dropped, that makes it too risky for me personally.
There's a general expectation that if I'm going to take a risk on a product, that they're in it for the long haul. Google is too big to be "in for the long haul" on really anything except their core products.
Obviously damage to the brand does not mean their users will immediately go to zero. You can see the damage to their brand that their project cancellation strategy causes in nerd forums like this all the time. Now probably that's not a big concern in the large scheme and they've decided the impact is reasonable, but if people think public moves like these are not considered carefully considered in this light, they just don't have a grasp of the reality of how corporations manage an asset worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
And the idea that because the balance may not be hurting them now, that the marginal costs and benefits for increasing the number of projects and project failures remain static and therefore increasing them can only help, is just laughable, and you don't need an economics degree to figure that out.
So I try to give the benefit of the doubt and give the benefit of the doubt even this kind of cheap rhetorical device and illogical point, but it's hard to imagine someone actually thought they were making a good point.
That’s why assumed it wasn’t sarcastic. As a sarcastic comment it feels flippant and dismissive. So I thought a better perspective was that they were referencing Google’s social and messaging products.
I have no way to know but fortunately, it matters not.
Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off.
AT&T I believe kept a research group for much longer than that and they only invented or co-invented the transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, information theory, Unix, the C language, and the photovoltaic cell.
I think it would be hard to replicate this with modern day researchers. There just isn't the same pressure or importance that wartime provides.
Almost like research is not a guaranteed thing. Kinda like you're trying to figure out the unknown.
- This is an "I know a guy..." story from a podcast. I don't have any blog posts or written pieces for you.
- The setting: Intel in the 90's
- Allegedly, they hired a team of PhDs to look into designing some "mobile" software -- pretty new back then. No deadlines, management essentially just said "go look into this"
- The project went on for 2 years. Code was designed, but no code came out of it. They more or less just blew millions of $$$.
[1] https://softskills.audio/2016/05/02/episode-9-deadlines-and-... Roughly 8 minutes and 20 seconds into the podcast.
The last major project they got out the door was what the handheld device? That they are taking losses on? And how much of that was contracted out?
I assumed Valve decided that competing witu literally Apple, and Facebook, for VR headware wasn't clever.
makes you think...
But, if they’re all working on business irrelevant things it’s unusually low risk to fire them all for cause and hire new employees.
Google also has big impact focused culture, if employee doesn't produce business relevant impact, he is not rewarded (bonuses, promotion).
Edit: or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk?
The best anecdote I ever heard from an SRE was "the VP was chagrined when I told them it didn't matter I was in a nerf war, because nothing was broken or needed to be fixed, but they still saw my point and let me continue" (I used to work in an SRE area that overlapped with an SVP's preferred meeting room so Susan Wojcicki was always getting pinged by a rogue nerf bullet).
As for slackers? Sure, when I joined around 2008 there were definitely folks who were slacking off. in fact they got rid of sabbatical because so many people were taking it then coming back and quitting.
Yes, I think they collected lots of mediocre employees through the aggressive hiring.
Also, some of them may be not productive by common metrics (say bugs closed, lines of code implemented), others are good at those metrics, but produce high quantity/low quality work, and make more damage than impact: systems are overengineered, buggy, etc. I think second type is likely makes companies suffer much more than first one, they are much harder to trace and fire.
Xoogler here.
I see how people may view Google as having an impact-focused culture, but I would argue that Google has a perception-of-impact focused culture.
Google historically has sought to hire clever people-- clever people that understand and care about optimization. It should be no surprise that Googlers also applied their cleverness to optimize their behavior toward what they understood about the reward system called perf/promo (some of those understandings weren't necessarily correct, but when enough people share an understanding or behavior, correct or not, it can have a reflexive effect on the system itself).
Google has reached a critical mass point where values it cultivated in its people through these reward systems now drive the culture and common behavior.
There are a few major components to this:
Perceived Impact: Perf/promo-optimizing Googlers optimized for things that they understood or believed to be perceived by promotion committees as "impactful." This does not mean that those things are actually impactful, but perceived as impactful.
Impact isn't Technical Skill: What counts as "impact" and the need for impact varies by an employee's ladder (job family) and their level. Generally for individual contributor SWEs, levels were meant to be representative of an individual's technical skill/ability and leadership. Generally, assessing and gating a technical individual contributor's performance rating and promotion based on business impact doesn't lead to fair or correct outcomes for the person when the business impact isn't associated or driven by that individual's work. Also, from the reviewer's side, a person's work/contributions generally needs to be viewable as the driving factor for the impact portrayed. This creates a bias toward things that can be seen as 'technically complex' or 'technically challenging.'
Perceivability and Overemphasis on Visibility/Measurability: Many important things in life and engineering are not easily measurable, nor can the explanation of how to appreciate the "why this matters" be condensed into ~300 words. You have likely had scenarios in life where your intuition, experience, or judgment for what the right or good thing to do made something obvious for you, but the explanation would probably take too many words to fit into a promotion packet or a few minutes during an short interview, so you'd have to select obviously understandable and relatable examples when sharing with others -- This drives a bias toward doing things that can be easily perceived and visible to group of reviewers in a calibration and promotion committee.
Lowest Common Denominators: "Perf" (performance review) ratings and Promotion are separate processes. Performance ratings are recommended by managers, and calibrated/adjudicated amongst a set of managers from the same calibration group, typically people from your own team or adjacent teams. Promotion nominations are adjudicated by small committees of ladder (job family) representatives drawn from across the company (this was later changed to representatives across the person's Product Area/Division as the company got bigger). Sometimes the important things for a person to do are contextually related to the dynamics, circumstances, or needs of the local organization, but those very things wouldn't be appreciated or understood by a person in a similar role elsewhere (see previous paragraph), so a person often has to make a tradeoff on where to apply their time -- doing the right thing for the team/organization, or doing something that could be more generally perceived as impactful by a committee of people that don't know you, probably wouldn't appreciate why fixing ___/paying off technical debt/etc was important, and might not understand that the nature of your work is very different where you are than in other teams/orgs/product areas.
Overburdened and Sometimes Lazy Reviewers: Calibration group participants aren't volunteers, but promotion committee members are. Both groups often have more packets to evaluate and assess than they have time to commit while also doing their regular jobs. In "perf" and the promotion process, the person being reviewed typically has to author their own statements for why their work represents the characteristics of strong performance for their level and/or the next level -- those statements can often be a lot, or hard, to read. Checking and verifying that a launch happened and that a person had associated code (CLs) and design docs is a lot quicker and easier than reading through a bunch of code, design docs, etc and trying to verify the "impact."
So you could imagine why "I launched _______" becomes a common focus for perf/promotion optimizers, and a common understanding amongst the larger community on what's important to be rewarded...
In some ways, it's both terrifying and comforting that highly competent people in difficult disciplines are also like this.
Years ago, they tried to temper the bias-toward launches with a need for actual "impact" -- this led to a common saying of "Landings, not launches."
We end up with an amalgamation of technical complexity and launches as demonstrations of impact instead.
The problem is... The visibility and measurement of "landings" usually takes time, and the amount of time needed can be well-beyond the horizon of when a regular-level employee needs to be able to have their performance and promotion assessed. The effects of some things may take a year or longer to see. And as said above, measuring actual impact isn't always easy.
Anywhere where there are committees that decide who gets promoted are not impact focused.