In the late 2000's/early 2010's, google was pictured as the "fun" place to work. In part due to their coding competitions and the various other events they held for students throughout the year. Everyone I knew wanted to work for google. Now? everyone sees FAANG just the same as any other company.
Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere.
Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).
Cue Amazon's efforts to stay away from 'Day 2'...
I'm not sure I'd give them that much credit in executing on any strategy.
Google sat on perhaps the biggest moat any recent company has known. They had cash to burn for decades and to their credit put a lot of that towards employee happiness.
But I'm not sure they ever really got anything off the ground for the "post" search era.
Honest question (this is really not a challenge), care to share where? I always thought of the FAANGs (collectively) giving the best compensation in the business. Which companies are paying more than Google but with more stability?
I can't answer where pays better than FAANG, but companies in the bay (eg. Uber) are starting to approach the salary. Even smaller no-name bay companies are starting to match on base salary (equity+bonus is harder to match).
FWIW- I see a lot of places with matching or better base than FANG, but it's precisely because the equity at FAANG is so high.
The only places I see with meaningfully higher pay than FAANG + hot tech companies of the day (ex. Doordash, Datadog, ...) are hedge funds. Curious if there is anywhere else
I’m curious. Does this mean you’ve left Google and returned multiple times at the same level while having better jobs elsewhere?
Not to be critical but why? (I ask because I’m considering returning to old places down/equileveled after being laid off somewhere and curious your reasons)
So doing a few jobs as an L4 is what’s unexpected because after experience at another role, and additional knowledge gained, etc ideally they’d be able to return as L5+.
I feel a little bit bad because I very much used their benefits and then left again to go to a more appropriately leveled job. But going back to L4 at a megacorp was kind of mind numbing, and the compensation got so bad after the stock drop and location based pay cuts that I couldn’t justify staying any longer.
Thus, I'm going to be a little skeptical when I hear about people taking higher paying jobs with more stability elsewhere.
edit: Ah, he's counting start-up equity as not worthless. That's definitely one way to value it.
I've never worried about compensation details so much, and instead tried to find projects with interesting technical problems that bring intrinsic value to humanity, and a company of people worth spending my life with. My first job out of school, my salary was 40k below other offers I had. It just seemed like the best use of my time and energy. In time it brought me what I can only describe as an embarrassment of riches. My coworkers on the self driving car project at Google were perhaps the most brilliant people I've ever met. To paraphrase Zipline's CEO, they want employees doing the best work of their lives, and it's a marathon rather than a sprint. I have countless examples of the company, its employees, and its management going above and beyond. We're literally saving lives, too.
Of course, this was a few years back, I'm not sure if the landscape has changed now for better or for worse.
After the massive layoffs that dwarfed any previous ones at Google (combined), that's no longer a pull to joining Google over other major techs.
What specific services and products are you thinking of there? How do you know they were profitable?
Consider, eg, shutting down their (Stadia's) game studio before the release of their first game. First release was scheduled a few months later, with no significant delays having occurred. Nevertheless, shutdown.
No one would expect it to have made a profit without a release. But apparently there was no way they could be profitable enough to warrant keeping.
I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that.
What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out.
No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing).
Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade.
“The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.
What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades.
(Before you ask "why can't they just re-increase spending when threatened," think about whether, after going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, whether they would try to jump on a real emerging technology or a buzzword technology when the time came.)
I know many non nerd complainers, but they don't know any alternatives.
Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore.
It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report.
Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
Dallas has a lot of parallel highways/roads, and Apple Maps seems to get really confused and have to recalculate the route every few minutes when I'm down there. Google seems to understand it perfectly and simply doesn't do that.
For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.
I would say the change towards “less exciting” is driven by risk-averse management. Even their latest “risk” (Bard) was driven by Microsoft’s Bing release. I would even argue that releasing Bard represents the lower-risk approach. The risk incurred by being silent is undoubtedly what moved Google executives to rush out a half-baked and even more poorly executed “demo”.
For what it's worth, this was a big part of why I had a positive image of Google. Enterprises are boring, especially when it comes to technology. They make boring decisions about technology because they are almost always made based on bullet lists of half-truths, rather than by the people who actually have to use it.
Google seemed to make things for the users. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, none of these had feature parity with their competitors at the time, but they were just so much better to use that people abandoned those enterprise products, even if their company was the one paying for them, and Google's popularity skyrocketed.
Many years ago my university asked the students to decide between Google and Microsoft for the (student) email platform. The impression I got from IT folks I knew was that they were strongly in favor of Microsoft. But when both companies were asked to make presentations to the students, I remember leaving the Microsoft one thinking they weren't even trying.
Boring is good, sometimes. Especially when boring means "reliable" and "gets things done without being the center of attention".
Scott Hanselman's old analogy here is that enterprise software is something like the "dark matter" of the software universe. It's obviously boring, and mostly kind of hidden, but yet still so heavily influences the gravity all around it.
On the other side, if you live by the "exciting" technologies, you sometimes die by the "flash-in-the-pan" effect. It's unfortunate for Google that they seem determined to prove that in the ways that they support and maintain products.
The Oompa Loompas are the sycophants that are still drinking the Kool-Aid.
Can you learn to construct a grammatically sentence before you decide click the submit button?
> as Google retiring for on being Google
I can't tell what this phrase is supposed to mean. Can you explain/edit your comment?
It seems like they meant "as Google retiring from being Google"
the Google Summer of Code still exists (and that other program for high school kids I think).
I think those were the nicest things they did back in the day, and I don't know of any other corp doing it.
I can confidently say that this is not the case in India. I have a countless list of people (including myself) who received emails from Google recruiters for advancing to later rounds of Code Jam or securing a top rank in a Kick Start round. Even if people missed out on top ranks, they would put their results on their resume/LinkedIn and would get attention from recruiters anyway. Needless to say, these were strong signals for recruiters, especially for university students. Based on the skewed demand-supply here, they were closer to necessary than sufficient.
Now they are just another corporation.
I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.