The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.
Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.
Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't understand the problems they are facing day to day.
I looked up Sundar's background before joining Google out of curiosity and it looks like his educational background is in "metallurgical engineering" (IIT Kharagpur), materials science (Stanford), and MBA (UPenn). And stints at Applied Materials and McKinsey.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
The main thing that weirded me out and ultimately caused me to decide not to work for Google was that everyone was talking about perf and promotions all the time. Everyone in the team structured their work accordingly, and tales of people who obtained promotions because of heroic effort for achieving something was a recurring topic in group conversations.
There was cost cutting efforts everywhere. There was significantly more red tape involved in requisitioning a heavy duty computer needed for my work (compiler development). The food in the micro kitches were toned down in variety and quality. Food trucks disappeared. The food in the cafes was unchanged but dinner was no longer served at about half of the cafes.
Then they killed it.
To play devil's advocate (I'm no fan of Google in any way), but this is also how Elon Musk operates, and it seems to be going well for him.
When Sundar speaks he speaks politically, so that he can never be wrong (at the same time if I just watched his talks, I couldn't even know that I'm at a search company).
He seemed to do a pretty good job with that at Tesla/SpaceX, but I’d argue he’s really dropped the ball at Twitter. No one seems to have any idea what “Twitter 2.0” even is supposed to be.
I think all of us have an idea of what social media should be compared to what it is now (looking at what my friends and people I'm interested in it are doing), but it's not compatible with the amount of advertising revenue that needs to be generated to justify a $40B valuation.
There's a deep conflict between the value provided to the users and the value created to advertisers, and Elon highly underestimated that conflict, so now he's (and Tesla investors are) paying the price.
The self motivated bottom up Google way can’t scale like this.
Personal opinion and jaded perspective of course. Disclaimer: don't like shortsighted "follow the shiny thing" decisions. I haven't seen evidence the CEO of Google has positioned the company for the long term or to survive. Namely, the bus would have been going fine if not better without some if not all of the Google leadership on the wheel.
I hope I am wrong.
I lost touch with Google's internal culture around 2011-ish. What is your take? When did you think Google changed and what drove the change? How gradual was?
Larry may have been good or bad leader, but he was just super serious and boring. Eric was amazing at trying to make us think in grand visions and be optimists, what is needed in tech.
With Sundar TGIFs were not about organizing Google to a common goal, it was much more like watching advertisements.
Big team meetings started to be anti-harassment training camps.
I started to not participate in any team events and just code, as the leaders stopped giving us real honest guideance.
It was at that moment I saw the stark difference between Eric and Larry (and later, the difference between them and Sundary). Eric was a leader. He knew how to rally the troops (his speech at TGIF right after the US economy shut down was amazing). he saw economic downturns as times for Google to grow its strengths, not shed its weaknesses.
What's amazing is how much the engineers at Google had to do to convince leadership that our pursuit of social (with the exception of youtube comments) was hurting our brand, and distracting us from the next profitable venture (cloud). I have eternal respect for the people who patiently convinced Yonatan Zunger (who wrote the infrastructure code implementing Real Names) that Real Names was a huge waste of time.
At this point it's clear there's nobody at the top of Google who really has a clue how to move the company forward. They should just put Ruth in charge and complete their transition to being a post-innovator focused entirely on maintaining their monopoly positions.
The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The Valley.
But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".
Most of the cost cutting dates to then. She has been undeniably good for the share price, but it's a two-edged sword. There is a lot you can't do when you're focused on the share price.
The share price did well, the company and its reputation much less so.
It's not exactly news that if you want to goose a share price, a big round of layoffs will "reassure investors." Especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.
Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?
What's unique about Google is not that they ended up there. It's how they avoided it for so long.
I understand everything my head of engineering tells me and don't need it ELI5'd. However being told it, and being asked to do it are two different things. I would be a very useful or productive coder if I went back in to the trenches.
Would or would not?
After being in management for years I sometimes feel like I would not be, at least not without 6-12 months of doing it every day.
If I were a shareholder of Google/Alphabet, I would be demanding a better CEO.
Google is paying Jeff Dean, the guy who even after was famous for a lot of things, after imagenet challenge result came out, stopped everything else, read research papers for a week, and implemented a system that separates dogs from cats with unprecedented precsision.
People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen to them when they say that the company should go into a direction.
I wonder if maybe these people are too principled to spy on people to the extent that Google does to profit the way they do. Maybe they select for a CEO who is talented, but also driven by money enough to prioritize that at all costs.
Jeff Dean may not care that much about business, as he spent all his life on scalability, but he understands more than most people the exact data needed to be collected to be able to train the neural networks for launching / improving products. He may not want to be CEO, but I don't think that's a bad trait for a CEO.
I've read comments before claiming that when Google acquired DoubleClick, Google became more DoubleClick than the other way around. Basically, that the Google we liked was destroyed by that acquisition, and something new emerged. That certainly squares with the timeline.
Checks out alright.
Layoff would be inevitable. Reading its past history, the current Google is nothing like what is was. It used to be a pretty intense place where creators are eager to work
Now it is famous for getting paid without caring
You could argue that the whole point of something like Y Combinator is to back hungry competent founders over stagnant incompetent people working at behemoth companies.
Which means processes, approvals, triple checks, departments/groups fighting each other (to protect themselves), etc.
It’s a natural part of the lifecycle and every organization gets there eventually.
What you’re talking about is frustration when you’re part of the picture (and individual ability to get things done) is blocked by the overall organizations dysfunction/morass.
“I’m competent but I can’t reach my potential because others are blocking me.”
This seems to be inevitable anywhere. In the social games, biz types beat the nerds.
We're in the middle of rewriting our auth system because Google Sign In is being replaced with Sign In With Google.
Incredibly, I didn't just make that up: https://developers.googleblog.com/2021/08/gsi-jsweb-deprecat...
Nowdays I'm just using nostr for storing simple data, as it's super simple with no vendor lockin (I can encrypt messages if needed).
This was a good 15% of what I used to do at Facebook. Adapting to the useless changes, that is, not making them.
It felt like if your changes weren't backwards incompatible then they were less visible, and therefore less impactful for your performance reviews. If you made them backwards incompatible you could boast about coordinating hundreds of engineers to transition to the new system. If the transition is seamless, all you have to brag about are improvements from the old system, and frequently there were none.
The old-timers I knew there must be shocked. They all said “that's just not what we do” when this was rumored last week. “If those conversations are happening, I haven't heard about it, my managers haven't either.”
The culture that hired them told them both explicitly and implicitly “we did not hire you to do a job, we hired you because you are smart and effective, we trust that you will hate boredom and use your grit to make hard things happen and do the best work of your life.”
The reality from my little spot inside Google Cloud was much more sobering. In my first performance review I was making my bosses happy but not pleasing some faceless committee so the rating came as a shock to both of us. We worked our way out of that pit and then all our incoming headcount was cancelled because Sundar demanded we “sharpen focus,” and so we had to cancel a bunch of planned growth tasks and work on tech debt cleanup and security features, which are less sexy but keep the lights running.
The kicker is, just yesterday I was talking to the team about an experiment for a better way to improve our work, I was helping our new team lead onboard, AND I put out some new code for review that would solve a major pain point. So like I was “in the zone” today, I was legit ready to create a ton of business value. And like last night I woke up hearing the work laptop reboot in the other room and thought “that was weird” but did not give it much more thought, and then today I go to quickly skim HN, “all right let's kick some a... ... ... The affected have already gotten an email, I didn't get an email, I am safe right? ... I also didn't get the emails that we're over some quota, but maybe Kate or Martin fixed that ...? Okay work phone isn't helping, let's check the work laptop....”
Amazingly bad. Just have my manager tell the group, let us all cry together... Not like this.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422...
That was a number of years ago, I can't help but notice this perception changed among the people I know. I don't think it was entirely because I graduated and start having experience (disclaimer: did not work for Google).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-new-b...
It's called "Takeover by MBA". You know it's happened when you start hearing phrases like "Cut costs", "Make things more efficient", "LEAN process", etc. Basically the garbage pioneered by Jack Welch and taught at MBA schools everywhere to boost stock prices in the short to medium term.
In his opinion that’s what ruined the NHS not underfunding.
Business and management courses are not necessarily good.
I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish" thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting, etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.
Then one day, they stopped refilling it, saying they're cutting costs. I was like, really? Each employee, at most, is drinking $2 worth of k-cups/day. Meanwhile, you're paying them at LEAST $400/day.
The kicker is that the location had a cafeteria where they could get free coffee, but it was a much longer round trip to get there. It could easily be a 10+ minute ordeal. The productivity loss outdid any savings gains.
It's kind of interesting being in a small to mid-size organisation and leading a team where the need to introduce this kind of middle management is asserting itself. I'm instinctively resisting it but the downsides are clear. I have way too many direct reports. I am constantly bogged down in generic meetings - everything from desk arrangements, COVID safety, leave management, etc. Meanwhile most of my staff spend large amounts of their time blocked from their top priority task because they lack input or direction. My unique technical skills are being completely wasted. Yet it kills me that we might decide we have to blow $150k/year which could employ another coal-face engineer simply because we can't figure out how to organise ourselves better.
So should I put in place a generic middle manager to deal with all this stuff? Or not? It may seem like it's obvious in happens to large megacorps that the end result of this is bad. But you can see completely how you end up there. Certainly the people who are doing that are getting way more cred in the organisation and arguably actually getting more done in real terms.
Really, it’s a general organizational scaling issue IMO.
For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most important game in town. Furthermore, dominant companies actually rarely get disrupted in the sense that someone comes along to take their business, it's that new markets open up that make the old business obsolete. But IBM is still the leader in mainframes, Microsoft still has dominance for desktop operating systems, Google is still dominant in search despite what feels like weekly articles about how search quality has gone down.
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&...
Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial Hollywood feature film centered around that poem.
I chanced upon an ancient cache of code:
a stack of printouts, tall as any man,
that in decaying boxes had been stowed.
Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran.
Abandoned in the blackness to erode,
what steered a ship through blackness to the moon.
The language is unused in this late year.
The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin.
Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope,
a line of code and then these words appear:
# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE
The code beside persisting to the last—
as permanent as aught upon this sphere—
while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.
There was a period about 10-12 years ago when Microsoft was basically left for dead
IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.
Every incumbent will be replaced eventually². What really matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo packet and kill products loved by users.
Literally, what are you talking about? IBM and GE have both been shrinking for YEARS now. Even the graph you linked above shows GE's stock where it was in 1997. Just compare either GE or IBM to https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=MAX
The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech, but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive projects. Google has been a driving force in laying sub-sea internet cables across Africa and South America for a good chunk of time now, enabling billions of people to come online. I don't think a small company could achieve that since it costs billions of dollars to do.
Or, alternatively, the giants focus on maintenance and "innovate" through acquiring the new incumbents.
The companies you list build a legal moat around their business (establishing some amount of monopoly) and then begin sucking taxpayer money
At which point should the quasi-monopoly with the moat be? Hardware manufacturer? Retailer? Mobile carrier? ISP? Search engine? Social network? All of those companies have valuations which assume they'll work towards capturing most of the value, leaving the others competed away to nothing ..
I was reading in the WSJ how all tech seems to be paring back their moonshot programs. I think the Google example was a program cut that had $1B in revenue but $6B in costs. (forgive me if the exact numbers are wrong). It seems like prioritizing and cutting back on programs that lose money (despite being innovative or inspiring) is a natural consequence of economic downturns.
Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do much for the "business" other than supporting the data for targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me, has real insight)
I’d use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services but their sales guys showed up like “we’re Google, of course we’re the best” and put approximately as much effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton of people available, listens to what you need (and actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked on it, … and none of that matters if you give up after begging them to show up to sell it.
The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to make a profit on its own would not have been. Their executives just weren’t sweating the way they would have if they knew their shares would go down when they didn’t execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are running the service in a way which makes it clear they have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the parent company and thus aren’t blowing off customer support, features, security, etc.
I think part of the distinction is how "success" is being defined. An product may be innovative and market defining, yet still not contribute much to the bottom line. It's still cool to work on, but these companies are still trying to make money at the end of the day. I assume their moonshot ideas still have the explicit long-term goal of being profitable.
Chromecast is definitely good but it was years after Apple and Roku, and feeds data to the ad impression system so I’m not sure how much it defined the market rather than very successfully competing in it.
Google’s educational efforts are actually super interesting to consider: they had some initial success but seem to have lost their way. My wife is a teacher so we hear people talking about this: most of the districts around us have switched to Office 365 and almost all of the people who’ve mentioned that have been happy because it’s a better product without so many of the never-fixed warts they hit with G-Suite. That feels eerily similar to what I see with GCP where you really get the impression that incremental improvements aren’t favored by whatever incentives their management sets.
It seems like we've pretty much come full circle in the 10-15 years since then. I wonder who'll be the ones to put old Google to sleep..
* A PDF of it popped right up in search results
Hopefully soon, I make a concerted effort to avoid using Google services wherever possible. Even in cases where the alternatives are inferior.
The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.
If you just announce a layoff, you are already getting rid of talent.
> It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise.
Large companies can't lose fat in large strokes. There is simply no way to organize a mass layoff that results in "fat trimming".
The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively difficult interview process has "fat"? How?
This - and also the iPhone. The two of those were just so much better for the user than Symbian, and also short-circuited all the egregious billing of mobile carriers. It once used to cost £1 to send a message with a picture attached (MMS).
But a lot of anticompetitive hurdles had to be overcome to let that happen. The worst possible outcome for users is where the old company has enough energy to squash competition, usually by cheating, but not enough to actually do so by improving its products - because "improving" to the user would mean cutting into their revenue stream.
It was never a raw productivity per hour problem, it was an organizing productivity behind meaningful, useful and profitable projects problem.
> certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better
in an organizational complexity of 150k -> 138k workforce, no one is in a position to make things 10x better, let alone 100x. Shedding 12k is a scapegoating gesture as if there is such a possibility, merely to ease the anxiety of the market price of shares. It doesn't even directly move the needle for profit/asset ratio, but it will help depressing wages with the theatre of "look what we had to do".
* I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night. Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was buying geographic satellite companies and innovating with lazy loading javascript maps. It went from, websites can't provide anywhere near the functionality of desktop apps to why would ever use a desktop app for that.
* I was building phone software and mobile search engines before, during, and after the launch of android so I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability. The carriers began going through the stages of grief, while they were still on anger, like the sound of thunder[0] android launched, and reality shifted under their feet. After that it seemed like nothing else had ever been possible or true.
Hungry Google was sight to behold.
[0]: The Sound of Thunder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder