Now it's obvious and commonplace, but an employee-centric company was revolutionary at the time. Things like this changed the lives of every single person here, either directly or indirectly.
And best yet, it's a chance for other companies to take up the mantle. Rather than wishing Google kept playing their same old hits over and over for 2 decades, there's more oxygen for new companies to take the lead.
I can't help but think that in a meeting somewhere someone mentioned that the coding competitions have run forever in response to people complaining how quickly everything dies -- and someone decided to fix the glitch.
Real talk: What companies are filling this role now?
I work at a FAANG, and it just does something to the soul. I can't describe what that thing is... but I routinely look at early-retirement calculators to cope with it.
I think the next gen of employee- first companies will be wfh centric (or something new and flexible) and 4 day work weeks. People realized slides and food wasn’t as good as free time and flexibility. I expect maxing their employees 401ks and generous cultural WLB.
Companies that are advancing technology and gaining a rep as tech first? Look at blog posts that gain lots of traction here: Fly.io, Cloudflare, and many others. etc. Avoid anything too trendy ( AI, blockchain) because they might not last the hype cycles.
But it’s not a startup, and you have very little ownership, and so little actually gets done
The rah rah rah fake cheerleading and silly hats
When you’re a consultant looking back at a FAANG everyone FAANG kinda comes off as an NPC it’s weird
I can’t speak for Netflix, don’t know anyone there
We were told Web3 would be the next disruption. Now we’re told it’s AI. The mere suggestion of Google messing that up tanked its stock price, maybe it’ll be real this time and OpenAI will define tech culture? I’m sceptical but hey, maybe.
We did? Everyone talking about how shitty and staid they've become is comparing to how great they were.
In the world of major software corporations, perhaps, but it's not like it was unknown elsewhere.
We mustn’t confuse the people who make a corp great for the corp itself. The people are (or can be) awesome, while the corp which is a profit-driven institution that won’t hesitate turning against the people that make it great if it has to increase profitability a couple of quarters down the line.
Wake up, folks, they’re in it for themselves, they don’t (want to) care about you either as employees or as consumers if they don’t have to.
"them" likely were layed off, hence they shut down service now.
I don't think that was a good thing.
(And every time there's a story about Google employees rebelling, it's to make things even better for the employees and continue ignoring the users.)
Now they are just another corporation.
I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.
In the late 2000's/early 2010's, google was pictured as the "fun" place to work. In part due to their coding competitions and the various other events they held for students throughout the year. Everyone I knew wanted to work for google. Now? everyone sees FAANG just the same as any other company.
Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere.
Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).
Honest question (this is really not a challenge), care to share where? I always thought of the FAANGs (collectively) giving the best compensation in the business. Which companies are paying more than Google but with more stability?
After the massive layoffs that dwarfed any previous ones at Google (combined), that's no longer a pull to joining Google over other major techs.
What specific services and products are you thinking of there? How do you know they were profitable?
For what it's worth, this was a big part of why I had a positive image of Google. Enterprises are boring, especially when it comes to technology. They make boring decisions about technology because they are almost always made based on bullet lists of half-truths, rather than by the people who actually have to use it.
Google seemed to make things for the users. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, none of these had feature parity with their competitors at the time, but they were just so much better to use that people abandoned those enterprise products, even if their company was the one paying for them, and Google's popularity skyrocketed.
Many years ago my university asked the students to decide between Google and Microsoft for the (student) email platform. The impression I got from IT folks I knew was that they were strongly in favor of Microsoft. But when both companies were asked to make presentations to the students, I remember leaving the Microsoft one thinking they weren't even trying.
The Oompa Loompas are the sycophants that are still drinking the Kool-Aid.
Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade.
“The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.
I can confidently say that this is not the case in India. I have a countless list of people (including myself) who received emails from Google recruiters for advancing to later rounds of Code Jam or securing a top rank in a Kick Start round. Even if people missed out on top ranks, they would put their results on their resume/LinkedIn and would get attention from recruiters anyway. Needless to say, these were strong signals for recruiters, especially for university students. Based on the skewed demand-supply here, they were closer to necessary than sufficient.
the Google Summer of Code still exists (and that other program for high school kids I think).
I think those were the nicest things they did back in the day, and I don't know of any other corp doing it.
The great layoff and such things just made it official.
Can you learn to construct a grammatically sentence before you decide click the submit button?
> as Google retiring for on being Google
I can't tell what this phrase is supposed to mean. Can you explain/edit your comment?
It seems like they meant "as Google retiring from being Google"
The plot twist being that with the Overseer disposed of, your character takes his place, and the second playthrough features a NEW "hacker" player character who etc. And so the cycle continues.
Parallels to the history of Google are left as an exercise.
There is often beauty in good competition problems. And you can even learn something along the way.
Electricity is also a huge productivity booster, but it doesn't advantage any one person, all have access to the same energy infrastructure. Youtube has educational and artistic content for everyone, but we need to actually use it to get the benefits - it depends on us.
All that said, by shutting down without announcing a reason, Google must've known people would speculate and likely assume it's because of the "Google = Oracle" reasoning. So I'm certainly leaning towards the "this is pretty sad" side of things.
Still, I think it's pretty sad that "results don't conform to our ideological results" equates to "it must be a bad metric, let's shut it down!" Hope it's not the same kind of thinking that led to ElectronConf being cancelled a couple years ago for "not having a diverse slate of speakers", despite the fact that all proposals where chosen in a blinded process explicitly set up in a way to eliminate bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!
* Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms
* Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite)
* Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it
At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.
The first two have published some influential works during their academic careers:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=df8TSy4AAAAJ
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Vjo4Tg4AAAAJ
I wonder what the total number of research papers and citations of all Code Jam winners would be. Sadly, it's hard to find reliable info on most of them.
<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>
Steven's been around the community a long time and is pretty well connected, so may know more than he'd stated explicitly in that piece.
The decision to shut down everything at once also looks hasty. Why not at least leave the website running for the times things will get better? Many competitions skipped some difficult years but returned.
Thanks for all these years, Google, still hoping that this decision could be revised.
It's true that Apple makes good devices and Google does good search, but their competitors are good enough.
What distinguishes Apple and Google from their competitors is that we like them more.
Not "we" the technical literati, but "we" billions of users.
As a result, they are SO careful about maintaining that goodwill. But is this careful as in afraid, or careful as in focused?
Google spent time building it, but now seems to want only not to screw up.
Apple is still building. It's always trying to build it, probably because it spent its 1990's adolescence as an outcast.
Twitter and Facebook are similarly large and had similar initial stories, but of late have induced massive distrust. People are there only because they have to be, and they're struggling.
Apple and Google see Twitter and Facebook as examples of what NOT to do with your goodwill.
Apple's growth and technical chops keeps investors at bay. But Alphabet's sprawling failures have heightened criticism, as Google-X and other nice-to-have's haven't turned out any measurable benefit (and measurement is how Sundar justifies his strategies).
So fingers-crossed that Google's quiet retrenchment doesn't result in a Twitter explosion. I'm not confident that switching out Sundar would help more than it hurts (which is the FUD that he lives by).
More importantly, the industry-wide refocusing on AI produces lots of demo-ware, but no business on a scale that could grow Google or Microsoft. That coming implosion worries me.
What's lost in the rush to AI is the question of bureaucracy: how to keep these massive organizations from being self-serving, particularly to the extent they engage with the outsourcing and consultancy that drive financialization.
WFH likely increases bureaucracy by privileging process and work-product over brainstorming and risk-taking, so my bet is still on Apple weathering the storm better than the others.
People don't really have the same good will for Google though. It's an ad company. They simply tolerate it.
One year I was competing from my honey moon.
I was never really good but it was one of the competitions I have greatly enjoyed. Especially when one could still run the code locally and submit solutions in any language possible.
There were pepole who made an effort to solve every problem is different language.
I haven't competed last 5 or so years, but I will shed a tear for Google Code Jam.
It's sad to see Google -- the once very promising small company with big ideas -- getting sucked into the vacuum.
The size of these vacuums is a direct result of policy. Tax policy, liability policy, antitrust policy -- there are a dozen levers we could pull to create a corporate landscape that looks very different. But yes, with the levers in their current positions, what we see here is inevitable.
One common trend in evolution is toward gigantism in places of intense competition. Whales, for example, may be as large as they are to avoid having to compete or be eaten by smaller animals. Being bigger means they eat more, leaving fewer resources for competitors.
It can be quite the winning strategy.
At least so long as the environment can provide enough stability to feed such large organisms in the manner in which they are evolved to exploit.
For companies, being large means you can always buy the competition or make sure the barrier to entry is too high for competition (thinner profit margins, "free" services, regulatory capture, etc.).
It works, and quite well. These large corporations can withstand enormous financial shocks, and if they can't, they get purchased by those that can.
For most mature markets this generally seems to shake out to most of the product area being divided between two or three big players and a host of smaller companies at the edges.
Oddly enough, when things are stable being large may be a winning strategy, but it is also very fragile and if the whole system gets disrupted, can be the first to fail when things change too much.
https://twitter.com/jonathanirvings/status/16220755214872084...
It's strange that they decided to discontinue the entire competition instead of just cancelling this year's one, though.
I'm guessing that's the reason for this. I wonder what this means for Summer of Code.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
They've also taken away the company credit card so that all employees must go through the dreaded Finance hurdle to have any fun.
Riffed, as noted by SJvN at The Register (<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>) and discussed here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576>) about a month ago .
Chris made a brief comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563641>.
“We have enough coders, thank you!”
( pssst … actually we have too many )
Sad to see it go, but hey, it's their thing, they can do whatever they want with it.
Cisco, Oracle and IBM actually have some customer service.
As for Oracle -- never dealing with them again if I can help it.
Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was not going to be the next Facebook, but Microsoft had to try and fail in order to learn those lessons.
The real question is who- if anyone- will be the Satya Nadella of Google, bringing the company back for a third act in the post-AI world. And maybe, in this new world, the limiting factor of human progress is not the number of CS grads who can solve coding puzzles.
No. It's not. Which is to say, why do we value "CEO makes money?" That's NOT valuable to me. Microsoft doesn't pay me, therefore the pure question of whether or not they make money is literally meaningless to me, and should be meaningless to you if you are not in their employ. I'm not saying it's bad either, but it's such a weird gut reaction.
Which is to say -- if you find out the CEO is making the company more money, you still do not yet have enough information as to whether they're good...
2. Microsoft has an actual enterprise business that is stable and not prone to disruption, they can swallow huge projects that fail easily without endangering their cashflows. This is NOT true for google, search (their core channel for ads) is getting grilled in the new future by ChatBots + SocialCommerce + non-existing customer support + known to launch stuff only to kill it shortly after + many people hate/ignore google alltogether. It doesn't matter if they can build a better Bot on their own, these huge margins are gone now, innovators dilemma.
3. "post-AI world" for me means achieving technical singularity, and what comes afterwards is strictly not predictable, including the fact if humans continue to exist at all, let alone the concept of "programming jobs"
Microsoft could have very easily found another Ballmer instead and ended up very different today. Main takeaway is they aren't really comparable and we still don't know where the winds are blowing for Google.
You mean marginally less obnoxious than it used to be?
1. Continue to accrete new revenue sources and pivot slightly forever until you eventually do a bit of everything, "diversifying" to the point where you become in effect a small nation
2. Stick to your plan and go out of business
These are the two possible outcomes as a public company
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc are offensive companies in that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Microsoft in particular is held back by having to support the platforms. Office as a standalone company would be worth more than Microsoft.
Responsibility falls on him at the end of the day to get this stuff right.
If internal politics are in the way of achieving high level goals it's the CEO's job to address those internal power games.
Nobody's flying the plane. It's on search ad autopilot and slowly crashing into the ground. Could make for one of the most catastrophic value destruction stories of our time.
And sure, 99% of his compensation is Google stock, but at those magnitudes the marginal utility of the dollar is zero. What's the difference between $100m and $200m anyway?
Also, even if people do use ChatGPT, that shouldn't be a problem - it's a tool like any other. Programmers use tools all the time. Is it cheating if someone uses Wolfram Alpha or Stack Overflow to solve a programming task at hand?
One can dream.
It may be as simple as "Morale dropped too low for the folks there to feel like it was worth it to continue," or "They let go of the people who were volunteering their 20% time to make this happen."
If we ever get back to having a Google that's competing for the best engineering talent, they'll probably reinstate them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
