Google went public is what happened. You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
The leading statement of the law's view on corporate social responsibility goes back to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co, a 1919 decision that held that "a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders." That case — in which Henry Ford was challenged by shareholders when he tried to reduce car prices at their expense — also established that "it is not within the lawful powers of a board of directors to shape and conduct the affairs of a corporation for the merely incidental benefit of shareholders and for the primary purpose of benefiting others."
Despite contrary claims by some academics and Occupy Wall Street-type partisans, this remains the law today. A 2010 decision, for example, eBay Domestic Holdings Inc. v. Newmark, held that corporate directors are bound by "fiduciary duties and standards" which include "acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders."Entropy forces new relative perspective. Humans need to do better about accepting figurative and literal death and chill. There quite literally is nowhere else to go except insane from repeating ourselves.
A rewrite of philosophical priority is a necessity for anyone under 50 and the species. That has to be taken sincerely and seriously because, well they kind of outnumber the ossified pensioner, and if they’re staring down forced obligation to choke on fire smoke for 60 years or dump gramps overboard, no one around to see it happen will be around long enough to insure it’s a footnote in any discussion of history.
Self proclaimed STEM minded secular people seem just fine ignoring evidence that does not fit the civic life narrative they’ve been spoon fed like it’s immutable truth. Seems to have latched itself onto whatever quirk of biology religion accidentally exploited; like a nihilism cause it’s all gods plan kind of woo.
“Hey look at me, mom! My life goal is making computers do what they were intentionally designed to do!”
That can be automated; any acceptable experience is a finite set of constraints. DOOM is pretty DOOMy. Same for Halo. Email clients. But hey we have figurative career ambitions, man; Google Fellow! Boom goes the dynamite.
Smaller models first; let’s make an AI to replace the CEO by assigning project management to vetted candidates via publicly audited randomizer. Term limits for geniuses who always seem to end up enjoying their own farts.
“I’m sorry general manager of capital intense AI infrastructure, you are tonight’s… weakest link! dropped into literal shark tank”
It’s been a long day. Sorry not sorry for the more unhinged off gassing.
* As a larger ownership moves towards investors, decisions are made that sacrifice the special sauce in order to increase returns.
* Appeasing general investors leads towards enshittification.
Sometimes a strong leader (Jobs, Cook) can keep the investor class as bay for a period. Sometimes leadership can be consolidated for long periods of time to delay the process (Walton, Zuck), but it feels inevitable after IPO.
As far as I know the only duty a company has towards shareholders is "protect them" (aka: don't mess up and make money). As long as the company eventually does that there is no issue. Even if it takes 8 quarters to become profitable (or 10+ years, see Amazon).
There are probably ways in which shareholders can get together and request something (in court?), but that almost never happens? Maybe I'm wrong. If so, would love to see examples.
These days the vast majority of executive comp is in stock - imagine if bad optics could force you to take a 60% pay cut, you'd be pretty conservative with your choices.
If a too good offer comes by, for instance, for one to buy Google:
the offer has to be disclosed; and regardless if the founders like it or not -- or what the voting majority says, there is a price where the remaining shareholders can force Google to be sold.
If too many of them do, the stock goes down, and essentially everyone at the company (especially the executives) take a pay cut. The executives aren't even just thinking about their own pay. The entire company's ability to attract and retain talent depends on the stock price going up.
1. Duty of Care
2. Duty of Loyalty
3. Duty of Disclosure
4. Duty of Confidentiality
5. Duty of Prudence
6. Duty of Good Faith
You can start looking at this rabbit hole here (and it is a rabbit hole): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty
P.S. Just a (fly-by)comment; not advice of any short or kind -- either investment or legal. P.S.2 Oh it does happen that share/stake holders seek enforcement for breach of fiduciary duties. I would say it is quite common.
Ironically, Google doesn't care about their shareholders and quarters like other tech companies. They don't provide a guidance, their earnings calls have little substance, and their disclosure is atrocious.
just because it's a US tech-world cultural norm for companies to mostly be run in fucking stupid short term ways, it doesn't mean it's actually required. especially in the case of Google, where 1) Eric, Larry and Sergey have stiched up the entire board's voting power, 2) doesn't need to raise cash via bonds or stock at all and 3) it's a magic money tree, so investors will accept being told to fuck off and let the CEO run the company however they think it'll work best.
Google also IPOed in 2004...are you seriously suggesting that it hasn't been a
> forward thinking and innovative company
for ... 19 years? that's a pretty bold take.
so why is the lack of monitor personalization cursed, 90% of my coworkers seem great with those options and Iv'e seen a ton with just a laptop and to black monitors or one in use.
yeah lack of decorations, I got you... it's a we-work at that point.
I agree, hotdesking when you're in the office most of the time is horrible. But if you want to primarily WFH, I don't understand why you also think you should get nice office space at a second location. When you go to another location for work (e.g. a client if you are a consultant), you don't have a nice personalized desk.
1. "Commit" to being in the office 4+ days a week. You get a dedicated desk as normal.
2. Accept a shared desk - assigned to you 2 days of the week and another person from another team 2 days of the week. Each team has its 2 office days selected by local site leadership. In this setup, your desk assignment and partner are static, so you'd coordinate e.g. what kind of monitor setup you want.
3. Give up your desk entirely and use drop-in hot desks. There's still an expectation you're in the office 2 days a week. So far, this mostly seems to have been chosen by folks with so many meetings that they're rarely at their desk anyway.
4. Get an accommodation if you have specific desk needs that can't reasonably be met with a desk partner.
5. Go remote and free yourself of the office. (As of today, apparently this requires a special exception...)
To be honest, as much as I find it distasteful, I can absolutely see why they did it - walk around any office lately and you'd find >50% of desks totally unoccupied, practically every day. Real estate is expensive. It seems like pretty clear wastage. And this system is way better than blanket hot desking.
And, of course, theoretically 2 days each week you get all of the supposedly-proven benefits of in-person collaboration ... modulo the dozens of exceptions.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.
But yeah, they care about productivity.
Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.
I wonder how 2 will work. it'll be interesting. I have too much shit at the office for that, but I also have a lot of unoffical work stuff at my desk, like the tools to fix the monitors (hex wrenches screwdrivers), and the whiskey stash.
3 - I do see a ton of non-eng doing this. I see a lot more eng also just chilling in 'flex spaces' like phone boths, lounges, etc... the stuff that never got used when everyone had desks and now is even tho my office isn't over full. our little mini-single desk rooms I call our intern offices as they seem to just work in there.
is the 2 days a week just the RTO minimum?
4 - this is me but also 1 is kinda me.. I'm in a lot but I travel a lot, and I have very specialized setup that I do use.
5 - I can get this, my whole management chain is remote... I'm senior enough. I'm actually well above average on in office attendance, and just below the rto requirements esp if you account for me working from office for a month in the last 2 months while bein in other cities. or last 3 weeks because there were "synergies" for folks for me to meet.
The true answer for me is I get to pick and choose between days when I need to get stuff done coding, by clearing my calendar, and slamming out code at home... or at the office. Or by forcing a lot of in person meetings and getting 8 months of design convs done in 4 hours. I got a solid 1.5 hour convo done while waiting for traffic to die down on thursday that I had been trying for 2 years to do on remote.
but I had this flexibility in the before times and I'm pretty senior.
The thing I do think sucks is that I suspect everyone is single car riding into the office so traffic in seattle is actually WORSE than pre-pandemic. Traffic sucks till 9:30 am now.
The only true benefit of the march of time is that there's so many "enhanced" cars now that I can just HOV way to the front of the line then cut off a tesla or obviously expensive mercedes in the exit lane at the last second and know they'll stop :)
basically I'm a bad one to ask and I'm making it work well for me.
I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it
Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO
My view of Eric Schmidt is pretty neutral, but it was a little weird how Larry pushed him aside and ushered Sundar in, then formed Alphabet, etc
This was very chaotic and people got used to neglecting things like search quality and spam in that time
But, yes, from what I understand they could hardly have botched it more if they tried.
I'm thinking of details like using the opportunity to latch onto Facebooks "Real Name policy", and using the same name as their deeply unpopular single sign-on solution + killing their existing social network at the same time.
It's funny how both sides of this debate present their opinions as fact
I've been remote for 14 years, I love it, but I've worked with plenty of people who didn't and went back to an office.
I've seen this level of reasonability probably less than 10 times when the remote vs. office debate breaks out. It's a real shame that sites like HN behave identically to twitter and reddit wrt actual conversation and debate about working environments.
We just added a month and a half to wildfire season, just to keep that true!
Given that we’ve proven that remote work is viable even without next gen AR VR devices, a lot of corporate PR supporting the environment feels very empty when we learn their stance on remote work
See? Conversation is useless if we ignore context or intent.
Under capitalism at least you get free speech and therefore some public pressure to impose various regulations.
I was just observing that WFH is better for the environment than WFO, which I would again say is just an objective fact. Obviously peoples priorities differ, and I guess some people don’t see climate change as real so would fight me on it being a fact, but I feel completely certain about that assertion.
Re: capitalism, I mean, yeah… isn’t that also true? Much much more subjective but capitalism sure seems to be doing a number on the planet. Again what we want to do with that fact is up to priorities but… well tbh I’m confused about what you’re cross about!
I don't know a single person who prefers in-office work who thinks that remote is more effective, but I know many who have the opposite opinion but prefer the flexibility.
Maybe there isn't a realistic way to make remote as productive. I'm honest enough to say that the social pressure that people bemoan makes me significantly more productive. I wish it didn't, but it absolutely does. The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think.
Managers and leaders have acknowledged this and finally we're moving towards getting work done again.
If you know a person does not like being interrupted don't be selfish and write a message. Why does your productivity matter more than mine?
I was a naive intern at my first paid software gig, so I towed the line, but I watched as a startup went from hiring some very smart people to the engineers realizing they could come in at 11 hungover and leave at 4 because they were all smart, management was treating them like crap and they couldn't just fire everyone. There were other issues, but power tripping over personal productivity and not giving engineers time for help or questions about the business was a huge issue at that job.
This is not a promotion of the anti-WFH control busy body managers, but just know if your coworkers are asking you questions so they can do their job you should be mentoring them so they need to ask less questions. If you're the type to answer a slack message hours later, people are slowly growing to hate you and will eventually sabotage you.
I feel like people don’t treat achieving business goals as part of their job in dev. I’ve never had people treat this as a problem across other job roles.
I do believe that there is room for better tools in this area, and I'm working on it. Tools that help users solve their problems collaboratively without imposing undue burden on their coworkers.
Of course people should make themselves available and not be jerks but I strongly believe that a culture that encourages unrestricted interruptions will achieve worse business outcomes in the long run.
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A long time ago when I worked there, I didn't like working in the office sometimes, but sitting out on the balcony with a laptop wasn't so bad. Can't do that on a sub :-)
Their AI strategy has been a joke as far as I can tell. That’s not helping.
Their “regular” services are ok, but nothing I would pay for.
They are downsizing and dropping staff left and right. This might be a good signal: they are being realistic and riding this one out, but I’m not getting good vibes.
And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role?
Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.
When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on.
So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…”
I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction.
So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.
The new developers managed to convince the leadership that we needed "better" processes, and other technologies. The result of this was rewiting the system into more micro services than developers in different languages and multiple frameworks. The new processes ensured that teams didn't talk together because each team should be independent. The startup failed hard and barely survived even after major cuts
Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.
“Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting.
Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.
I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.
In 95%+ cases that’s a pretty terrible idea
Everyone expects them to be building Kubernetes, Terraform, and other useless bullshit that a startup with a total critical traffic of 10QPS absolutely doesn't need.
We've also had ex-Facebookers back in the day who would throw out perfectly fine coding processes and get everyone to use Phabricator. Bloated software that took many engineering hours to design processes around, and came with features that no one with Atlassian would ever downgrade to use. It was like coding with PHPBB.
2. Terraform isn't a Google product. It's by Hashicorp
Also, do you really need it when you're a startup running 3 EC2 clusters with "potentially tons of customers"? No.
I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.
With squash and merge you get chunky, meaningful commits that (with discipline) are tagged to a specific issue/feature so it's really easy to understand the history.
I think ‘stg’ with a GitHub publish/stack sync option would be a winner.
Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart.
GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done.
I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud.
Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly.
Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works".
[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...
I've always been impressed by the software quality at Google. My biggest complaint is... I'm kind of a test fanatic. In my mind, 100% code coverage is a great starting point for software that might run OK in production and delight customers. But at Google, people are so smart that they can keep a million line system completely bug free just out of sheer willpower. Every CL they write or review, they know exactly what it will break, and just tell the author to not break that. The end result is that there are 0 tests for the most critical software around and it all works out somehow! Ever visit google.com only to see "google.com is not responding"? Nope! You don't need tests when you're a super genius.
Overall, I think Google builds really good software internally. Everything I used while I was there, I long for in the "real world". Github's code review system just makes me cry every time I use it, even 6 years after I left Google. Critique was so much better! It looked nicer, the UI told you who actually needed to approve the CL, there was a dashboard that told you what work you actually needed to do, etc. Great software. Monarch is another favorite of mine. It is light years ahead of anything you can get in the open source world. When I left Google I begrudgingly selected Prometheus and Grafana as my "hey is production down?" system of choice? And every day they make me sad because they're so fucking primitive compared to what I could use at Google. I remember a long discussion thread between me and an InfluxDB founder on HN about whether or not it's possible to write certain queries. The query in question was a query that I had on a public dashboard at Google, that ran in milliseconds over a stream of 1 million plus cardinality. "There's no way a computer can do that efficiently," he told me. I don't know, I've had a computer do it efficiently before with the literal first query I typed in. And that's the market leader in time series data, probably two decades behind some unloved internal tool at Google. Their software is top fucking notch. They just have no idea that it's even something that can be sold. (The people at Google selling software rewrite or acquire sub-par alternatives. At least there's Cloud Spanner. That's a good database!)
I think I'm inclined to agree you about management at the highest level. Like I said before, Google has no idea they can sell their internal tools and make more money than most startups rewriting the tool from scratch could ever dream of making. They choose to go on multi-year tangents that yield nothing. Google Buzz? Google+? You got slapped on the wrist by the FTC for that shit, it didn't sell a single ad, and then the market leader you were trying to kill died anyway because everyone got bored with social media. Dumb. Let's talk about GSuite. As a card-carrying Google fanboi, I never believe that anyone else could make good webmail or a calendar. The startup I work at got acquired recently and we had to switch from Gsuite or actually is it Google Workspace For Your Domain or something now, anyway we had to switch to Outlook. Outlook on the web is great! The web design is beautiful, it's super fast, and it has a million more features than Google's stuff. Thinking back, I'm not sure anyone has typed a single line of code into any of those products in over a decade. They're just a dinosaur waiting to die! (Microsoft has it's own problems, though. They write a bunch of great code, and then ... just specify dumb shit. Like at work, my name is "Rockway, Jonathan". Who the fuck calls anyone by their last name? It's dehumanizing. It makes me not want to go to work. But that's how some intern coded up Active Directory Nineteen Ninety Four edition, and so it persists to this day).
I don't know where I was going with this comment, but yeah, the tech behemoths of yesteryear area dead. Remember "FAANG"? Facebook, completely dead, fired all their employees. Amazon? I guess they still exist to take CFOs out for golf in exchange for paying $1,000,000 for a $2000 server and $20 of electricity, and send me the best fire hazards from the Shenzhen market overnight. Apple? Honestly they're doing OK for a big company. Sure, they're working on VR goggles instead of a Clock app that works, but you know... marketing. Netflix? Dead. Google? Top Three In Cloud. Amazing. You know what they say, if you can't be second best, at least you can be third best.
This post was long and incoherent and I am now quite inebriated. I hope it was moderately enjoyable to read. I'm not a crazy person, I promise. It makes me sad to see what the MBAs and CFOs did to Google. Great company, and I'll never stop loving it.
The tools you use are culture-defining.
But it's not even just Google. I haven't been back to my company's office because they insist on not assigning a desk. Every time I wanna go in I have find a random desk to sit in.
Tbh I love the project I work on and I’m still learning tons. But I wish we could have more confidence in our leadership instead of hoping to be insulated from whatever their whims are this month.
Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query in Google these days.
Does Google search have a QA dept? Are they able to compare how accurate search is today compared to a year / decade ago? Does anyone at Google listen to them?
Wouldn't some sort of LRU scheme work better as some sort of PAGE-ing algorithm? Maybe RANK the employees to group by locality.
It's the circle of business life.
Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst way of working which is in-office.
What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? These "geniuses" can't use their superior big brains just barely hiding under those infantilizing propeller hats to figure out a way to make remote work effective? You're literally a tech company, you make all kinds of collaborative technology.
I'm selling my Google stock. They've gone full IBM and are legacy tech.