This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

I sometimes wonder what people expect innovation is. You try and try and try. One thing is good and you must know how to use it - it can make history.

If I understood right, chatgpt comes from one of such ideas.... so the question is also: who evaluates the ideas? How come that Google was not able to capitalize on that idea?

So yeah, instead of treating the cause they treat the symptoms, like usual.

I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards for success)…..but at that point just join a startup

It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives).

In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.

Not every company can afford these "paid vacations", but they do have some use at times.

I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.

But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked with in my decade at the company.

Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.

Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.

A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google’s reputation as a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.

So basically google had a shed where they hoarded talented people, to prevent competition? :)

That's a succinct description of why Microsoft Research was created.

2) in general, early Google used to hoard talent all the time. The founders would keep great people (or their friends) on payroll for ~ever just to have them stick around. That was most prevalent in the first decade of Google’s life, to my knowledge, and mostly applied to very senior people.

By the time Area 120 was pitched and approved (circa 2014), those days were largely gone. Area 120 was primarily filled with junior people (L4-L6) and constantly had to sing for its supper - it was not at all a sinecure.

These are rather the top 10 % sycophants, not the top 10 % researchers or top 10 % programmers.

Still so damn bitter about that death.

I think after inbox died I just gave up on it and moved to fastmail.

I think / suspect that many people develop habits of this type in their 20's and never move away from it for the next 60 years because it works. Example, people who still use vi(m) / emacs. Nothing personal, but as an example, they use it because they're used to it and have been for decades. And no editor that claims to be better will ever replace it for them.

You don't have to be a "normie" to appreciate simple or old fashioned things. Most of the e-mails I receive is not for quick-consumption, and I prefer the standard way over Inbox's way.

Maybe it was a solution trying to find a problem, IDK. I used it for 30 minutes tops.

If you can't innovate at the base level of app design .... how do you have any hope of innovating for AI apps that require research/engineering/product/marketing collaboration?

Why was this effort unsuccessful? Perhaps they were unable to get rid of middle management? I have had lengthy discussions with employees from several of their companies, e.g. Calico, and that seemed to be the case. This article only reinforces my view.

i suspect that they are unsuccessful for two reasons: failure is not death, and success is not riches (for those who did the work).

Again, this was not entirely unpredictable. While I don't remember the details of that lecture, I remember the professor calling out these sorts of big shifts in cultural values as being typical of startups transforming into large companies. And Larry himself was part of the transformation, turning into (presumably, what he believed to be) what was needed to lead Google into its next stage as a large company.

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-few...

Yeah, I think Google is looking more like an IBM in the long run, while Microsoft manages to innovate despite its age and size.

You can use your main brand for the launch, but then you have to be willing to support the child.

Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).

> Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).

Google Cloud is built on top of Google's tech ecosystem, not the other way around.

That's why VCs take a minority stake in start-ups. The trouble usually begins when the founders dilute to the point that they no longer have a majority.

Is this the right strategy? I'm tempted to say Yes.

This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.

I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.

Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display the data.

All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point the relationship died.

Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.

To me Bing as a minority competitior in search, and facebook on ads for instance would be candidates to the same kind of duopoly.

(And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)

Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus.

Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's Spotlight is better for that.

I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).

I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.

And it's impossible to know what you mean by it without specifics: are you complaining that a top search result is a useless page of advertisement and AI-generated text (which would be bad), or just that e.g. "tutorialspoint.com"[1] or whatever is above Stack Overflow on some search (hardly a disaster).

Maybe you have some examples we could try?

[1] Or some other vaguely low quality but still legitimate site.

I tried "El Dorado" because I happened to have that boardgame on a shelf in front of me. Actually the results were pretty good - wikipedia, national geographic, IMDB, no ads. But yeah, not something there's going to be many ads on, so let's try something more adworthy.

So I switched to an Incognito window (many, many captchas) and tried "erectile dysfunction". Whole bunch of decent results, no ads until the bottom half of the page (and then it was solid ads of course).

I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised - it's not nearly as swamped with ads and shitty SEO as I remember. But that's the thing, isn't it? I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that ;) But yeah, you're correct - the first page of Google isn't all ads and SEO crap. HN must be hallucinating that.

Well, that's the thing... maybe you did? I mean, clearly from context you live in a world awash in the kind of rhetoric we're seeing in this topic, with hyperbolic claims about the Descent of Google into Vice and Decay everywhere. And... it's easy to fit stuff into a frame if that's how you're already thinking. One bad result or one unexpected pop up ad can sway a *lot* of opinion even if it's an outlier.

Thus: "alternative facts". In the real world search results are boring and generally high quality because that's the way they've been for 20+ years (I mean, come one: it's a mature product in a mature market, you really expect it to change much?). But here on HN testimony like that gets voted down below the hyperbolic negativity, so what you read are the outliers.

HN, to wit, has become the Fox News of tech.

HN is useful but like all new sources and social media sites, it's not the unbiased pure stream of news and educated opinion that we'd like. Humans are weird.

Google doesn’t publish a search quality report, or publicly index their results for the same queries over time, so you can’t objectively compare whether the quality has changed or not. Plus, the Google search signals and the product itself are constantly changing day to day and there’s no way to see those changes.

So if Google went through a spell of bad results, or their algorithm entered a degenerate state, or SEO figured out how to break through their algorithmic walls, or even their algorithm deemed you interested in something you aren’t, then “you’re remembering it wrong” because it’s fixed today, but at the time it really was worse.

I do agree though, people remember bad experiences far more than positive ones, there’s a definite bias in the human psyche there. But also, anecdotally, I’ve never been so annoyed with Google results as I have lately. I know I’m not alone, my low-tech wife even complains that Google has become useless for so many things. True or not, it’s a bad omen for Google because it’s very hard to rebuild a reputation.

One of the most annoying things about Google the last few years has been searching reviews, and they’ve just added a widget to combine product reviews which is nice to see, so they do seem like they’re working on these issues.

I'm just saying that right now HN has become an echo chamber of this kind of logic, with people writing and voting more for the visceral rush of anger against a shared enemy and not "truth", so much. Hence, the Fox News of tech.

Twitter shouldn't be considered a proper source anymore. It's closed without an account and the access is severely limited. You can't see follow-up messages, questions, or whole threads.

Also I don't have Walmart here but it does show opening hours from Google Maps which is often better than official websites.

I specifically searched just now something I searched recently, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off".

I naturally blocked ads, but it shows "Cast", "People also ask", the official Netflix result (good), "Trailers and Clips", "Reviews", "Episodes", "Top Stories" with some gossip, and then Wikipedia and IMDB.

However this is also not so bad! I will make sure to document all my problematic Googling experiences.

You can argue that those things are "noise that my brain should block" or that "they're actually useful", and that's entirely true. But Google is no longer returning the results I used to expect from it, and that's a fact. Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore? Well, that's not a big deal, there are other products. But my point still stands. Sorry but not sorry: Apple's Spotlight is still better for this and needs zero scrolling to take me to Wikipedia.

1. Removed the yellow background that easily distinguished ads.

2. Zero organic results above the fold.

Obviously #2 doesn't happen every day on every query, but I saw it during the crypto craze and I have seen it during the AI craze.

There is also what I would call a phase delay. Google has a really bad issue with SEO, takes forever to get rid of it, but by the time you can check, its mostly resolved.

Finally. What you see as an end user is only partially Google. A lot of the page is farmed out to Real-Time Bidding (RTB) networks based on your user tracking. So its often difficult to correlate if someone else's user profile delivers wildly different experience. [2] You might get spammed by SEO and near constant TEMU ads, and others might get nothing.

Finally. Finally. 'Cause its spec.' I expect there are client side or man-in-the-middle viruses that mess with search results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

[2] https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidde...

what's hilarious is the conversation that must have happened inside google about linking to pages vs giving the answer on the search result page, and now where we are with ChatGPT.

I suspect that folk who opted into this would be the ones getting lots of ads (hence the most valuable.)

If Google said "you can opt out for $99 a month" you'd freak out. But you're probably worth that (or more).

People aren't really flocking to ChatGPT though - not yet. Not at Google Scale. It's not like my mom will pay $20 a month when she just uses Google for free...

Plus folk moving now are folk who'll move back later when they get disgruntled there. (No disrespect.) First movers are not the loyal customer base. Movers gotta be moving..

(I say this as a general rule not making an assumption about you personally.)

It's like even everyone "left" Facebook for google+.

Person 2: "Well, they pissed me off so I left completely and now they make nothing off of me."

Person 1: "They already knew you would move so they figured out they would make nothing off of you in the long run!"

Person 2: "..."

It's an interesting mental shift - I wasn't googling because I wanted to find a web page, I was googling because I wanted an answer to a question. An AR or mixed-mode personal assistant is going to be a game changer.

I use a mix of that and chatGPT together depending on the specific thing I’m searching for, and it’s truly better than even the old Google.

The more I eliminate anything to do with ads from my life, the better things get,

I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.

It's a polite fiction.

Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.

Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like.

We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes.

They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures.

For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation.

Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

On the other hand, Google did change the world. Everything's just more mature nowadays. There's less blue ocean in its business segments.

I wonder if a company could stay "evergreen" by constantly finding new business areas and somehow spinning off old ones? Apple for example almost died in between before really coming back with the iPhone.

https://hbr.org/2013/08/the-innovation-mindset-in-acti-3

Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?

sounds like Clayton Christensen

And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.

[1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...

It demands that google’s mopnshots need to be something no other investor has considered.

The same comment translated to 1965 — “The US is trying to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I’d hardly call it a “moonshot” “

(Edited to change typo of “potential layoffs” to “potential payoffs”, possibly more fitting though)

It only feels normal now because they took the risk and pulled everyone else in the industry forward.

Levandowski had already created a self driving motorcycle for a DARPA challenged in 2004. In 2008 Discovery contacted him for a show about it, but being unable to lend them the vehicle - he instead built a new self driving pizza delivery car for them. He asked Google if they wanted to participate in the show or get involved in self driving, but they were uninterested due to liability. After they show aired and went off without a hitch, they decided to get involved.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Pribot

I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission.

Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.

This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.

...for things that align with that silo structure. If you try to build new things that necessitate conceptual integrity across org boundaries, then teams that think this way will first debate ownership and responsibility breakdown before it's even clear how the thing should work at a high level. I've seen too many examples of horrible engineering done by silo'ed teams, where they build down blind alleys that turn out to be unmaintainable and net-negative producing over time because they approached it based on what services they could touch rather than what made sense from an overall system and UX perspective.

Obviously "breaking down silos" involves greater coordination and communication overhead, and thus is harder to pull of successfully, so it's a tradeoff that should be weighed carefully in the context of business needs.

At the same time, seems possibly easy to game? If two friends make unnecessary suggestions, and stop each other's suggestions.

If it becomes well known that this question is being asked?

Not much work required to pretend one stopped sth from getting built

Most of the most successful projects and incredible feats of engineering happen by tiny teams full of very talented people NOT a 4-layer management pyramid of people who are here for a nice stable 9-5. Not to say you can’t be successful with WLB but you need a certain fire in your gut and a hunger to execute as a small and efficient team.

Too often do people just throw more time and/or bodies at a problem to make it go away.

They can famously work, e.g. Skunkworks. But they also decay into fiefdoms.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Google in the mid aughts still had tightly aligned teams with clear priorities. But they were also transparent in what they were doing, and open to collaboration where it made sense. Teams felt empowered to reject requests that would trip them up, but also empowered to do small things to help another team (and got rewarded for doing so).

The reality at a large org is you’re going to have dependencies. In my experience, highly-siloed orgs have tremendous coordination barriers to even the smallest request across teams. Your one-line API change didn’t make it onto your dependency’s roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in three months.

And I’m not sure we have the same understanding of “fiefdom.” I’m talking about the pattern where middle managers try to grow their headcount as large as possible without a clear purpose other than building status within the org. This often manifests as disparate and disjoint teams aggregated under a leader who has little understanding or care as to what exactly it is they’re doing. It is hard to find value in this arrangement.

Isn’t this solved by having cross-team project managers who can perform this coordination?

I certainly agree that the failure case you describe is possible, but it’s also solvable (in my experience).

This is one of the key problems of working across teams, and its impact is amplified by a culture that says you should turn everything into a cross-team project that you possibly can. The whole company grinds to a near halt on these sorts of blockages.

It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.

It’s hard to believe you could have a nimble and cohesive team at the scale of a large corporation, because the number of communication edges gets silly. Dunbar’s number and all that. You can have team nimble and cohesive teams within large corporations. But having several distinct networks is otherwise known as being siloed.

Step one: build Aa and Bb with the A and a people together, and the B and b people together.

Step two: realize you need AB and ab.

Step three: keep the same organizational structure, and try to get the A team to work with the B team ten managers and five hundred miles away.

But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc. teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference or having to constantly coordinate with every other organization in the company.

It can go both ways.

But even without that in mind, breaking silos can also put the right people in the loop - for every successful silo you mentioned, I bet there is a successful company which was able to have a good mix of people from different teams.

For me it always boils down to: what does the company want? Who they want to be in the next 3-5-10 years? Based on this you need to have proper management training. Without that, they simply throw engineers at the problem, which as you mentioned, can backfire. If you as an organization are able to scale well (even with some small and monitored silos) I don't see why it should be a problem.

Reality is: companies want to be able to scale like Google for their pet projects, fire fast upon need, have a lot of teams all with the performance of 10x engineers, etc etc. That's the BS they write on their about page.

Do they have agile coaches? Do they have people that help them organize work? Skilled people, not random guy that developed software all his life and now he/she wants to try something new, and he/she read a book over the weekend or listened to some podcasts..

People have high expectations by paying little. It takes effort to do things right. That's in my opinion the truth.

"Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.

My point though is there is a difference between having a leader who got there by politicking versus a leader who got there by building a great company. They're both going to have different strengths and weaknesses, but there's at least a chance the founder isn't going to tolerate the sycophants.

An example: I was at Google 2005-2008. My manager's manager's manager was one of the early empire builders. He hired like crazy with no plan at all for the people he was hiring, and kept getting promoted for managing such a rapidly growing org. Eventually he rose high enough up that someone near the top realized what was going on, and promptly fired the guy, leaving behind a fair-sized mess as folks tried to figure out what to do with all his hires.

From what I've read lately, if this guy had just shown up to Google a few years later, he'd still be getting promoted.

But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.

Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.

As a polymath my natural instinct is to learn by observation and doing rather than engage a teacher directly. Fortunately I can also learn by interviewing, so I’m not completely hopeless. If I’m asking you a ton of questions odds are good I think you’re a mentor or I think you need one.

The problem is that I’ve worked for a couple places that I thought could teach me a lot more than they did, I mistook individual attributes as a pattern that wasn’t there, and what I saw was more (or less) what I got. So at the end of the day I am probably the wrong person to ask. Thankfully other people replied.

And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.

Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are.

The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff!

People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.

Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.

Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.

How well they are succeeding at that is up to interpretation but they are chipping away at Ads' percentage of revenue. It used to be higher than 85% but as of 2022 it's down to only being 58% of operating revenue[0].

0. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-mon...

Then it went to Netflix where it became a big hit.

There was another show I liked named Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television. They constantly broke the third wall making fun of YouTube Red being confused with some kind of adult content service.

https://www.mediagistic.com/blog/how-many-youtube-users-will...

Even HBO is partially an ad company, I imagine their own shows include product placement.

YouTube has its own content while Search ofc doesn't, and its advertising model is different. I wouldn't lump it in with Search. But still, they've decided ads aren't enough and they need YT Premium subscriptions.

Ads in early 2000s > Mega-valuation

Could be "Don't be evil" was the answer to the business model question of early google. My memory is that it spawned during an interview with Larry and Sergey regarding the business model.

Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.

For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.

Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.

I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if their hand had not been forced, but I don't think pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was not done before TikTok.

I think short form video is just hard to monetize in comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if it does succeed?

If Google were to try this early, it is uncertain that Google will discover a monetization strategy before the product joins the Google graveyard.

Let's not even talk about short form video, just YouTube. How many years did Google subsidize YouTube with Search money before it really turned up advertising on YouTube? Do we know how much effort Google expended in experimenting with monetization strategies for YouTube?

Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever reason there's almost zero attention to TikTok.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...

It's hard to even know if the methodology of the paper you cited (analyzing comment trajectories) is a good one, given YT is constantly tweaking their algorithms, including in response to public outcry, and this phenomenon does not show up in other analysis: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...

I assume the methodological questions are even trickier for TikTok which has many more creators than YT.

I would love to see someone actually study TikTok though, since people love to ascribe blame to platforms for radicalizing people rather than accepting that some users just have views we find unacceptable regardless of the platform.

I wouldn't be so sure, in my case ChatGPT passes the bar of being mildly useful but Bard is still absolutely useless. I can see two equally likely explanations for this: they simply can't manage to pull it off due to their culture or they can't release something that isn't massively more nerfed than the competition.

This was not my view being somewhat close to the technologies there. Lamda did exist internally for several years, with pretty good demos.

It was clearly not GPT-4, but there was a lot of exec-level fear about releasing these systems and having them say something offensive.

"Responsibility" is kind of bullshit, but fear of bad press is very real.

This doesn't really match the reality of the layoffs. They weren't team/project based or performance based, they were seemingly random. If they were concernee about too many low performing products and employees they went about it in completely the wrong way.

The whole industry didn't magically accumulate debt weight all at the same time in the same proportions.

And before someone says opportunity cost, if the treasury offering a 5% ROI on your dollar is enough to dissuade you from executing on your business plan, that was never a very good business plan.

The layoffs weren't just low performers and killing unwanted projects.

I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.

Kind of like Apple.

That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.

Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.

I don't get this.

Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)

If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).

But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.

There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.

All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)

The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.

This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.

A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".

Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".

Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.)

> And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.

This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it generalizes to other industries.

I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.

that probably describes a lot of people in tech megacorps too

It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.

The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and then beyond that it's a question of who is the most productive, effective at getting things done, etc.

So while they do have "something to measure," these metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable project, while another team barely works but ships a profitable product.

So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of dollars?

But yes, Google is a money printer, and it's printing at a higher speed than it was ten years ago. But in that same ten years, Microsoft has grown at a faster rate and even displaced Google in some areas, like developer tooling and AI. In fact, Google has lost its ability to innovate to such an extent that a startup was able to beat them to market by productizing research that originated from Google! And now Microsoft basically owns that startup. That's an embarrassing failure of leadership.

Whereas, as you suggest, Google's cloud strategy has been marginal except for Google Docs and they're still mostly an ad company.

Are you sure? This feels a little bit like when I read the American capitalism is going to collapse because there are a lot of homeless people. Just because something has the effect of making some people miserable doesn't mean that it's unstable or doomed to fail. IBM, GE, Boeing, or any number of other "dinosaur" companies haven't gone anywhere. And Microsoft itself shows that even a conservative culture can manage to adapt to changing circumstances when it's necessary.

So perhaps such a conservative culture does have its merits, but claiming that Google sought those merits is post-facto rationalization of their failure to innovate. Google never intended to turn into IBM (which, btw, they havent - at least IBM has more diversified sources of revenue!).

That said, you make a good point that Microsoft itself is a counterexample. So maybe there is still hope for Google. But IMO, that hope is not aligned with the path they're currently traveling. They need to fire Sundar and make some drastic cultural changes if they want to outcompete Microsoft between now and 2035.

So yeah, bloated and underperforming.

It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-th...

Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.

When you stop doing that, someone else will and in time your customers will go there instead.

Be it due to fashion, social pressure, brand recognition, cultural norms, et cetera and so forth.

Largely I agree with the OP though - treat your customers bad enough and unless there's something stopping them, they'll go elsewhere. That's how the free market works.

No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.

C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.

I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.

The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.

You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.

You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.

I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.

- Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility, letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you fight to keep this person if they told you they were leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and candid communication, and generally a smart and driven group doing great work

- I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep going a really high performing group, that were passionate about their work and hustling hard to build great things. Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and lack of work/life balance

- Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be

The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.

Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.

But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.

This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”

And shift they did.

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set

This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.

The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.

It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.

Even if it's a bit frustrating it can also be more fun to be in an environment where it's more of a make your own adventure sort of thing. Mature companies though mostly have to be very structured about how they operate.

I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor job.

After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.

There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..

But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.

Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.

I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position.

It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality.

Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities.

Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.

Nothing changes, psychopaths still cling on to some nebulous notion to make labor work harder to capture more excess value.

In a word: momentum

How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?

Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.

No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.

So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.

So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.

You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.

One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.

But re-reading it several times now, I don't see it. When I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, they might make good husbands/wives for my own kids" where is the Freudian?

I am on the lookout for my kids. I can't tell them who to marry, but I can put them in circumstances where there are people their age that I approve of, such that familiarity might blossom into something more. I've seen how it turns out with other people's kids when they act like that's none of their business and actively avoid the thinking, and I don't much like the outcomes.

(Not that I agree with what the OP said either - I think most people have a protective instinct towards all children without thinking of them as potential spouses for their own offspring. We see this behavior in other primates too, eg: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2021/mountain-gorillas-ad... )

He is using personal pronouns consistently: "myself" and "my children". "Their" children is the other children he is observing, and he is thinking to himself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

In truth, all humans are equally worthless.

If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd be really confused as to how poor the search results are.

Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.

In 1-2 years you go from: - operating well, get bought - throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower - then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore - leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition

A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example.

Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position.

Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end.

And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.

What makes it impossible?

You might suggest refactoring, which is what companies do too. They create departments, promotion ladders, org charts, and mission statements. The problem is that abstractions leak by design. As your abstractions accumulate and change outside your view, your ability to understand the entirety reduces.

If you have such a code base and you hire people that are not equipped, either through inexperience or capability, of managing that code base that is a resourcing issue.

If your executives cannot understand and control the organization they are tasked with controlling and cultivating, then they should be fired.

Which is basically what this dude is getting at.

And most importantly, humans are more complicated than code. With enough time and knowledge, I can accurately tell you what any piece of code does on a single expression or statement. Humans regularly do things they don't even know for purposes they don't understand.

The same thing regularly happens with smaller companies or code bases. The size exacerbates the issue, but it's not the cause of it.

Which is largely this OP's point regarding the subject of calling out culture rot and a particular executive.

So controls and processes are put in place to ensure no bad outcomes are possible, but this also prevents good, innovative outcomes from sprouting.

Fundamentally, it's a loss of trust that can exist in a smaller organization.

That dude just made the number up.

"Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.

The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).

Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?

>A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?

This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.

Paradoxically, Microsoft now looks newer, fresher and more innovative than this.

I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the time.

I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over the years.

You could also say there were digital music players before the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were smart phones before the iPhone.

The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.

This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.

I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't.

I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies.

To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.

Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one!

Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.

So i mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share.

It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.

My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]":

> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.

I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.

I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting).

I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.

I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us.

The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.