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.