There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either:
* "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or
* "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies"
He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over.
This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.
Just agree with everything and everyone so you're not seen as someone who creates conflict. But then just silently ignore or drop issues you don't want to deal with.
Don't take risks or take responsibility for difficult problems so your reputation is clean of any failures.
Jump on board only the largest and most well supported of company initiatives so you can claim success.
And the thing is, I'm not sure it's the fault of these managers that behave this way. I think it's the result of the promo system adopted by so many tech companies. As long as you have some good things to write about each promo cycle and nobody has anything bad to say about you, you can coast your way up the management chain. And with each promotion comes more money. There is no incentives to take risks as it can only hurt your promo chances and then once you're high enough up the chain, why would you risk the huge comp package? Pichai complained about engineers who "rest and vest" but only because that is exactly the behavior incentivized by the company culture and the absolutely stupid promo process and comp structure.
With leadership like that, it's sure that nothing will ever change.
Basically a lot of people have promoted weak leaders all the way up to premierships and presidencies and have pushed out anyone that could potentially criticize them. The result is this shitshow we're in right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 112-113
Scholars who have quoted Key’s colorful phrase have mostly failed to note that he used it derisively. “The Founding Fathers,” he wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”
In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times
Even before it could be said that the national Government could do much of anything to improve their condition…. Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
The laws around medical malpractice don't fix it when doctors screw up, but they make it a lot less likely for the screw-ups to happen, since those laws force doctors to adopt reasonable standards of care.
To me what you are describing is basically regulations. Personal accountability only derives from regulations because there are punishments, in that case it aligns incentives.
Regulations are only one form of personal accountability. Regulations, in theory, create uniformity and transparency. These can be good things. In practice, regulations are often selectively enforced, which leads back to the same situation as in a dictatorship, but with a formalized process of input for the dictator.
I actually disagree with you that malpractice lawsuits are examples of regulation. More often, when something goes wrong and a doctor is involved, there is an argument about whether the doctor was negligent or not. There is no fixed "standard of care" that is written down, only a set of practices that are known throughout the industry. Experts argue about whether negligence occurred or not. There are regulations that the experts can cite in their determination of negligence (some of those rules carry separate penalties too), but you don't need to have broken any rules to commit malpractice. This is a prime example of accountability without regulation.
It’s really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the current success of the company to have any type of credibility with employees.
Let’s look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.
- Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from the time it was broke until today.
- Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division from its “real” founding until he became CEO.
- Facebook - still founder led
- Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision for what the “new MS” should look like - completely different than “Windows Everywhere”
No kind of strategy is ever communicated to employees, just defensive + responsive TGIF responses. Truly bizarre.
Then he was the product lead on the Chrome team. I don't know if it was him who lobbied Page to create Chrome.
Which means there has to actually be a vision. As far as I can tell, the vision at google is just to keep making boatloads of money off AdWords, and not really care about anything else.
You forgot "and spending it on annual chat apps"
> Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot.
Mark has majority of the voting shares of Meta. He could run it into the ground and still could stay in control.
This is what really sunk Eastman Kodak. The popular wisdom about them missing digital isn’t really true. Heck they owned many of the key patents. But everyone was too busy focusing on growing their little fiefdom for the company to use its assets and market position effectively.
I recall one year the CEO announced he was reducing headcount by some number and the next year it had actually gone up.
At the same time, there were a lot of stories on the internal social network about people walking in behind them, so I kind of get why the policy might have been changed. I would have been one of the people mad about it!
(I posted one of these following-me-in stories once; I unlocked the door and someone pushed me out of the way to go into the office ahead of me, and I didn't see their badge. I tracked down security, they reviewed the tapes, and it turned out to be a legitimate coworker. I shared the story with the angle "this is what you should do if someone follows you in", but I got panned for not doing enough to protect my coworkers. I probably didn't post this, but my takeaway was "if your security depends on me being able to beat someone up that is larger than me, you're already dead". One of the few times the internal social media hive mind turned against me, and it was really really weird.)
There are also now rules about how many badge readers need to be between public and private areas. This turns into a mess in historic buildings that have technically-public stairwells littered throughout. (The Munich campus is particularly bad for this.)
In the NYC office, when I was there, we definitely had to badge in from a lot of stairwells. Also, the bathrooms that weren't completely contained in Google spaces had number pad locks on them.
(I was very annoyed when I worked on a floor that didn't have any dedicated Google-only bathrooms; I asked to have the locks removed just out of principle and was told that "people will wander in from the street and set up camp in there." You had to badge into the building though, so I wondered how true that actually was. I wish for once in my life someone would just tell me the truth instead of making something up to get me to go away. "We don't feel like paying someone to disconnect them, and other tenants in the building will complain if we do." That's totally fair!)
Like, what do people post on it?
So they maintain google plus code, but shut down it for general public?
That's gotta get axed or Google will stagnate even more than it already is.
Then again, I'm not sure what can come in and usurp its place as a "global-leader-company". Maaaaybe Tesla if every single little thing goes right for them (and that's a stretch)?
Or perhaps, the way things are going lately, a defense company... I hope not.
It seems to mean "there is no easy win for me in this situation, so I am passing the buck to (presumably) a committee of other people who will think about it instead, or perhaps a power-hungry VP who has a vested interest in making it happen."
In retrospect, I realise it was his code phrase for not doing anything at all.
What?? Sundar is the CEO. All the buck stops with him. Why are you pretending as if he doesn't have agency? The problem here is his actions and/or lack thereof, not people under him doing stupid things and he's somehow the victim. He gets paid the big bucks to lead.
It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks.
Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas.
So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.
Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead.
Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow.
But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.
That, also it feels like it replicates the college environments like MIT, where projects get funded by the university, large enterprises or the state (especially defense), so when a project gets 'deprecated' its generally due to the project funders wanting it. Since these are the end users, there is absolutely no problem in it - the end user wants it deprecated anyway. As far as I know, Google was born literally from such a state-funded project in MIT. This likely makes Google environment somewhat like a postdoc extension of that environment.
But this attitude is totally destructive when facing end users: Small businesses, individuals, artists, freelancers, NGOs, municipialities - practically ENTIRE rest of the world do not have the large funding and time that Google has inside and outside Google.
They can't risk their businesses getting broken every other year, less every 6 months, because some people at Google thing that v2 is something is 'better' even if its incompatible with v1 of the earlier product, breaking everyone's sites, apps, whatever and expecting them to spend the money and time they don't have to jump through those upgrade hooks.
Worst, are 'deprecations'. They are literal 'f*k you's to end users. Even if some service is deprecated with 3 months' of warning, the small business or individual won't have the time or energy to salvage everything and move it to somewhere else. It will cost a lot to them, and it will affect their income and livelihoods.
So people just avoid Google. Build on or use the most reliable organization that does not literally sh*t on their users whenever they feel like it.
> I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste.
Good example. How complicated analytics have become shows just how little Google understands its users and how little it is able to accommodate them. Yes, there is 'great engineering' behind a lot of the stuff, but the complexit, ugprade hoops, backwards-incompatible updates and outright deprecations literally kill any benefit.
In the case of analytics, all that complication is not really worth wasting time (and therefore money) for upgrading. The products came to a point of looking like phd thesis projects more than anything intended for the end users - you have to spend considerable time even as a technical person to learn the system to be able to even use it at an entry level.
I also have analytics on all my sites. I will probably replace it with something else when the upgrade time comes. No way in hell I want to go through another upgrade hoop in 2-3 years and spend all that precious effort and time for doing that.
I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users.
Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.
Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.
I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.
In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.
> The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be
This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.
Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.
In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.