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.
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.