What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.
I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.
You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.
And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.
A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.
Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.
So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.
This is a variant of the principal-agent problem.
Thaler's book is titled "Misbehaving" -- well worth listening to the audiobook if you have a commute!
And yet, for centuries people have done it.
It's easy to create a big company without a stable business model that refuses to take the right risks when meaningful competition and regulation do not exist, and there are long periods of unconventional monetary policies (QE, ZIRP). Will the company last. Question for the reader to decide.
For example, Big Company A has survived for 172 years by taking the "risk" of hiring journalists to produce news. Big Company B has survived for 25 years by not hiring journalists and instead using the product of Big Company A's employees as bait to lure in ad targets. What "risks" did Big Company B take, if any. Were they the "right" ones. Let the reader decide.
Big Company B just seems like a giant leech. What happens when the blood supply from Big Company A is exhausted. Find another host?
As for the folks Big Company B did hire to share in the immense bounty, as it happens they are just a non-essential expense that can be cut at any time. Some of them brag online about how they only work two hours a day. They loved the benefits. They saw no evil. But what risk was taken in hiring them. Question for the reader to decide.
A company can manage to take risks with the right culture and the right business priority, even if it has limited profit. AWS, for instance, gives its services years of runway to prove themselves. The company places enormous demand on its leadership to show "technical boldness" and business initiatives. S3, EC2, Serverless, DDB, and etc, were initially considered risky bets. On the other hand, the same AWS culture does not necessarily encourage long-term applied research. As a result, AWS couldn't come up with breakthroughs like BERT and GPT. Case in point, AWS adopted a German's university's ASR solution so AWS could go to market quickly, even though the cost was that the engineers and scientists were bogged down by maintaining the model instead of coming up with models like Whisper.
????
> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else
At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.
I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.
at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.
I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.
I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.
And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.
At some point the real world just gets in the way.
Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?
Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.
Did Valve corporation do something like that?
My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.
Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.
Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.
It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.
Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.
It’s growth period.
It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.
But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.
You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.
That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.
If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?
Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.
SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.
Update: Looks like they are:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute
[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]
If you go public, no way to prevent it.
You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.
Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value
The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.
Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.
The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?
the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.
for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.
Growth and private investment are part and parcel.
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.
_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.
OpenAI?
it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.
anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.
My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.
But Ruth: she could be anywhere in the corporate world.
It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.
Another option is that he saw the trajectory of the company culture and wanted out.
When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.
Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.
All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.
The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.
Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.
Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google.
Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft.
tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.
I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.
They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties, for goodness sake.
Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)
With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.
The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.
By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"
I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.
But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.
This take rings true for me.
Many Googlers show no drive in their role. Good enough work gives high compensation. Firings are for egregious performance.
If that wasn't enough, the internal culture slows output too. endless infrastructure migrations. Design docs for small changes. "Demonstrate leadership". Strategic timing of "demonstrate trajectory".
Belt tightening and slimming is a good idea.
I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.
There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.
Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.
Rest & vest types are still doing fine, it's the passionate/care-a-lots that are increasingly burning out and disengaging or leaving.
Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.
But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.
So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.
That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.
It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.
I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.
I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.
Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.
* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google
* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP
* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk
* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).
It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.
If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.
They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long.
Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1].
[1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...
And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.
One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.
Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.
The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.
My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.
All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.
This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.
What ruined it for me was interviewing ex googlers. Not the PhD levels, but IC. To be fair none passed the inteview. Perhaps it was just the UK google offices. Similar for facebook. At facebook some of the people I know working there are abolutely vile. The types that threatened their coworkers and somehow got away with it. Each organisation favours a certain type and it all comes down from the top.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I had a boss who was a manager at one of Google's flagship products, and he made it his point to not let anyone forget it. He pushed people to work nights and weekends, he berated team members and threatened firing them during daily meetings, he overrode engineer's calls to not release a product to claim he released it before schedule, he threatened the same engineers if anything went wrong during the illadvisable release, etc.
He was since hired as a VP of engineering of another global company.
Eh, I've seen these in every kind of company, none are immune.
The most toxic, conceited, selfish, inflexible, basically the worst stereotype of "genius asshole" engineers I've ever studied with, or worked with, all wound up at Google.
And is it a surprise when the entire interview process consists of "Are you good at computer science?"
The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job.
That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that experience because I was just starting out, the scammer indirectly taught me much more about how to scam and lie your way to the top, how to sell your ideas to unaware management and most importantly - that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.
And smooth talkers game peer reviews.
This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.
And that email quote is also interesting on its own:
> Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.
I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.
On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?
In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.
This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.
BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)
Once you grow past a certain size, you lose it.
It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.
Luckily, that's the only reason I do anything at all!
Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.
I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.
It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.
Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...
This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).
Their promotion process probably has more to do with product fragmentation as anything.
Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.
Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.
Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?
Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.
Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.
Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.
Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.
I think it's fair to say that Google's leadership is also not up to the job. But even if Satya Nadella were in charge, he'd still have to deal with the "grad school playground" aspect, which has as many negatives as positives from the vulgar point of view of making money.
More generally, I want to argue that the common HN meme, "management and politics ruins everything from the point of view of us heroic engineers", is self-serving and naive. Management and politics are how companies run. If you don't want to do that job, fine; if you want to grumble about its pathologies, fine and you'll often be right; but don't kid yourself that it can be avoided.
There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).
What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?
Thanks Ben.
It's a huge red flag. Layoffs typically lead to more people leaving the company after the fact because of the instability. I was one of the "last man standing," after a company did this over a period of a few quarters and I ended up leaving shortly after. They no longer had anyone to maintain their software. Oops.
They taught this in business school back in the 1990s. I don't know why a company the caliber of Google wouldn't understand this. It could be the execs think that Google is such a stellar place to work that none of the remaining people would dare leave. It could be the execs are so self concerned, they don't care about anything other than their bonuses and just make sure to get cuts in before each quarter ends to pad their bonus. It could be business schools just don't teach this anymore.
The non profit people never stood a chance.
There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".
Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.
For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.
Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.
> ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal.
Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get.
I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.
Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.
Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.
I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left.
Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits.
A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and wanted a bar or something added for them.
I've never worked anywhere with a daycare except a Golds Gym in high school so I'm not familiar with how they usually go.
I might be parsing this incorrectly, but isn't this sentence saying "too many people used the daycare (long waitlist), so not many people could use it"?
That's not a service, that's a profit center !
It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.
> Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023.
And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..
There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.
Arguably, many already do.
As "main child-raiser" (as opposed to "parent", again a place where this matters) is not equally distributed across the sexes in our society, I would say though that (1.) this does leave you at risk of legal challenges over structural discrimination and (2.) it leaves a bad taste when a corporation one the one hand does this, and on the other hand bemoans how few women in "tech" (or any other sector) they're getting.
Pushing off kids until the late 30s also has a different risk profile if it's your womb those kids might be coming out of.
When you have a lot of mediocre developers, you can shift them around from one project to another all day long, but it won't improve your bottom line. The only solution is to fire them. Unfortunately for Google without the change in the hiring process, they will continue to hire the same kind of people that they just fired. From this perspective Google has become the "normal" company a long time ago.
Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.
The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.
It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.
It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place
Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.
It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.
We should get a "Landmarks Preservation Commission" for corporate cultures.
I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.
… at Google. Which comes back to my point that why should anyone except Google ex employees care if it’s happening there or somewhere else?
To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?
So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?
or abusing monopoly and network effect.
The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.
For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares
No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.
In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.
I might be an outlier
If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."
Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...
That explains a lot! ;-)
I wish they had valued users above all else
My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.
I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?
Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...
The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".
The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.
There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.
[1] https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-goog...
