East coaster tech guy here, but I've met a handful of GOOG employees over here over my career and this fits the bill.

Every single one seemed to hold two contradictory ideas in their head - they were changing the world & their work was nowhere near any actual product or something that produced revenue.

It's like GOOG screened for this kind of person for over a decade, and now they are the majority of their staff.

Last I interviewed there over a decade ago, I got filtered out due to my lack of math skills. And this was not for software development, but infrastructure.

If you want math 'from first principle' theory types because that's your proxy for competence in unrelated area or perhaps even IQ...

The funny thing about being tied to a product/revenue at a megacorp, is that people can hold you accountable - in fact because hundreds of teams depend on your team's revenue to survive, you may be forced to work ungodly hours.

On the other hand, you could go work on a team which is ... not tied to revenue, or even a product. Then your value is whatever you can convince others of, or you can simply be forgotten about as there is no way to tell whether you are doing your job. I've seen people spend 4+ years delivering not a thing in this manner while product focused teams work 80 hours a week.

Which group would you choose to be in?

The fact that GOOG has so many of the latter tells you something about the monopoly profit they get from the former.

The latter are often first in the chopping block and you’ll spend quite a bit of time trying to validate your own team’s existence. The aggressive product teams will probably have better career opportunities. Both paths are fine, it’s a trade off

When the latter group gets big enough, they may command enough sway to ensure the opposite occurs at chopping time. There is no guarantee that a business optimizes for the correct metrics, that the business has any ability to influence those metrics, or that the metrics are even valid/optimized for.

Anecdotal observation is that extremely successful businesses are often marvels of inefficiency as there is simply no need to make the business efficient. Efficiency is often contrary to employee goals as well.

Making a successful and well run business is very difficult.

> When the latter group gets big enough, they may command enough sway to ensure the opposite occurs at chopping time.

This is true. Metrics are really about who owns the narrative and who runs the org. If the latter group get their guy into power then decisions will be made that cause inefficiency, waste and even reduced revenue far longer than is logical.

That's interesting. Some of Paul Graham's old essays are about the kind of people who went into law or finance for the money, that there is a mindset where people pursue things for other reasons than making useful products (money, prestige).

I've noticed over the last 10-15 years that computer science became the most popular major at my alma mater. It literally used to be the least popular a couple decades ago. A professor even showed us the data. It's also one of the easier majors now by grade distribution. My thought is that computer science has become like a new business/finance degree and that it attracts people who aren't interested in product creation anymore. Maybe this coincides with what you are seeing.

perhaps this explains how, tangentially, someone like sam bankman fried got a "genius" pass

SBF probably is a genius for some definition of genius. He was also eloquent and persuasive (imagine that, for a guy whose parents are both lawyers).

Doesn't mean he could/should run a business.

Many such cases of tech geniuses who have the mental capacity to deliver, and the verbal skills to advocate for their own power.. but not the mindset to actually deliver the things they've advocated for!

Pretty hard to screen for, and can do a lot of damage to an org as they siphon off resources from the teams of doers, squander them, and then take their ball & leave when it stops being fun.

I used to work as a Google Cloud consultant in my past life. I had to frequently visit Google’s offices and talk to engineers there to advise on our clients for project specific requirements.

Once we had a large news publication client who had a requirement of optimizing their backend for costs as they were spending something like north of $4000 per month in server costs. This was with Cloudflare on top since the homepage and some sections could never be cached as it had to be real time. To address this issue, we consulted an engineer who had no idea about even the database offerings Google had. He recommended something like a NoSQL solution. The more we grilled him for info on implementation and why he suggested it the more empty talk he gave us. And he wasn’t the only one. Google is really large, so we talked to a handful of them and almost all of them seemed very incompetent.

Frustrated, I walked past one of the areas where people were supposed to be working. And there were a lot of empty seats. And the few that were there were watching some Korean drama on YouTube, etc.

The rest were either sleeping off in couches and/playing snookers downstairs. For an outsider, it felt like a great culture thing to me. But later, after a dozen more visits and same working style observations, it occured to me that this no accountability cozy environment actually didn’t allow them to weed out the bad ones who didn’t even know the product they were supposed to specialize in and nothing good comes out of a company that is built on such levels of incompetence.

Soon after, I quit consulting for Google Cloud products as they also managed to increase prices without justifying the value proposition. I am not alone, many consultants who worked with Google would tell you the same. Their work culture or lack thereof is their worst enemy.

>And the few that were there were watching some Korean drama on YouTube, etc.

Ugh, plus 1 to that. As much as people love hating "the new orange guy", there's a lesson behind the fact that he got rid of 80% of staff in a big company in an afternoon and pretty much nothing adverse happened.

Nothing adverse besides widespread outages and revenue collapse.

To be clear the revenue collapse might be unrelated to the full but I'd call it adverse.

Incorrect.

It is completely unrelated. Revenue collapsed due to the powers that be getting angry at him for ending the censorship regime.

As for outages, the issues were little to none.

"censorship"

Yes, the lucrative Nazi market of CatTurd2 and friends

You mean advertisers don't like to see their ads next to bigoted content? Truly terrible.

remember when he published the actual algorithm for twitter and everyone could look at the code that was reportedly boosting the woke and canceling maga, and it turned out not to have any kind of censorship regime or boosting, except it boosted his account? That was a great time.

And also it wasn't "the algorithm" at all but just some boilerplate python you use to feed stuff into the actual model, literally "let's put an ML model here" 101 kinda stuff. It was such a dumb stunt.

Have you read Twitter files?!

The boosting was done deliberatly and paid for by government agencies (of which some ex-employees where on Twitter's payroll).

It's quite irrelevant IMO whether the deliberate censorship for a certain US political flavor was done automatically or manually.

have you reread Twitter files after it was debunked and defanged.

it's amazing how bad information fluffed up by the angry news media gets thoroughly routed in people's mind, then gets quietly defanged and drilled to earth to the point it's a completely innocuous gossip chain.

see currently the Biden impeachment and Russian propaganda laundering.

people really want to believe salacious stories that cut against popular perception to the point they just get to keep riding that wave of mental backflips to suit their increasingly deranged phantasm.

it didn't happen either way as it turns out. Definitely go back and check it out!

SN igger

I worked there and had to quit after 15 months due to the broken systems. So many people are there purely because of the pay (and I don't blame someone for wanting an easy job that pays $300,000+). But personally I do not want to work among people that are optimizing that hard for income. When I joined my team the first question I got was "Are you trying to get a promotion?". My manager was trying to be helpful so that he could assign promote-able projects. But the system is broken if that's how things work. I should instead be doing my best work on a project that needs to exist and by doing so get promoted.

There were so many broken systems there. Once I made it clear to my boss I wanted to quit Google entirely he told me to just stick around for a year as he didn't want to do the paperwork to fire me.

Thankfully I'm back at a startup. These days if I see a lot of YOE at Google on a resume it is a red flag.

This just shows that you don't really need 50K employees to make what Google does. You just need a few hundred brilliant ones who churn out something that makes super normal profits and carries the rest of the thousands of employees through. The rest of the staff will surely do something useful, but it could be just like finding the best screws to secure the covering of the already functioning nuclear reactor.

Google ads is indeed a mess - I was surprised to see this is their cash cow, as the experience is just horrible.

Got access the other day to their latest AI models, and while everyone in the market will let you a) create an API token and b) use it, for Google you've a mess of service accounts, badly named permissions, services that change name all the time, 'just works' authorization that's basically a lock in to their own cloud. After spending a few hours with their docs, I just gave up - not worth the effort for now.

We're now also being asked to revalidate our integrations with them in the name of security (no change on our end, thousands of users using it every day). Another absolutely useless, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque process, with rules changing all the time, and not properly applied.

Google has long lost its way on software...

People want to keep changing things to make it look like progress. This includes app icons.

I would rather have consistency. Think of all the users that figured out how to buy ads the first time that might have stopped buying ads when the UI changed.

It is really hard to get users to change. The old MS Excel interface to many people a long time to adjust to the ribbon. I know people who have still not figured out the new pivot table UI.

Other than search, what would you consider Google's best software?

Maps is still good. GMail still works. Most of their big products aren't awful. It's funny that Search seems to be going down faster than the others, given that this one actually makes most of their money. I'd have thought they would put the best people on it and been very conservative about changing it.

Search is going downhill at least in part because they're dealing with an entire industry that's adversarial to them. SEO companies are spending billions of dollars and countless man-hours with the explicit goal of making search worse. The fact that they've gotten even better tools in the form of GenAI for manipulating search hasn't helped.

I'd argue a much bigger part is their various nerfs.

Reddit and SO are barely recommended.

Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites.

During Trump they decided allowing anything except for MSNBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/etc on the first five pages of anything remotely news related were the only allowable results. This mirrors exactly the Gemini/OpenAI nerfs for PC.

Given 90% of my searches are for questions about what people think about things, code/food/drugs/health/medicine/etc, and topical events, it's become completely useless without adding "reddit" or something after.

I won't deny that there's nerfs, but do you not see how "Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites." and "People trying to sell you things are spending billions of dollars on SEO to junk up your results" are related

I strongly don't think it's caused by SEO, it's caused by them not liking that having too much reliance on certain sources. There was an update a while back where Wikipedia/Reddit were turned way down suddenly, this is a knob they are using specifically.

This propaganda issue also applies in full to YouTube.

Youtube, Maps (mobile, the web version has been getting worse), Gmail are pretty good.

So, their core services are fine; for anything that is not in the 'hot money making' path, good luck, some are great some are bad.

Kubernetes, or do you mean software that Google sells?

> Kubernetes, or do you mean software that Google sells?

I am presuming you are referring to Anthos.

Anthos is very well suited for the needs of large enterprise. It makes Kubernetes less painful for our development teams. It has reduced the learning curve for our teams.

Gmail

Yes, not even just that the UIs are worse, but just they're not really even that different? At least the last Google Ads UI change was because the existing interface was very clearly dated...

GA4 is even worse as well. I often find it just straight up doesn't load correctly.

GSuite/Google Docs is just a bad product at this point. Very marginal changes and feature additions while day-to-day limitations never get fixed.

Still no syntax highlighting for their own language.

Google just has too many employees ... So they change things that don't need to be changed just to have something to do?