If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".
Google is still, IMO, a good place to work. But it has degraded considerably over the last several years and I've lost pretty much all faith in leadership above the Director level.
Wow, its like you were reading my mind for almost exactly how i was going to describe my current employer. The difference is that i do NOT work for a startup nor a big tech company, etc...I'm just a cog on a digital team at a consumer packaged goods mfg company; sort of a typical corporate America type job...and all that you noted is happening at my job too...so odd that many seem to be experiencing similar tactics from "Above"! Did all the top management companies whisper the same set of tactics to all corporations recently!?!
When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our current projects, but do it more innovatively. When pressed about what this actually meant, he just showed us the graph again.
I resigned shortly after.
We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.
Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday?
Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google so they can rest and vest, which is what Google is famous for and makes it a very desirable place to work.
There was even a Googler's guide on Reddit a few years ago how to pretend to work from home while you play videogames all day and cash in 400k/year, with all the details on the theatrics needed to pass your peer performance review for years while working less than 20h/month, since nobody really checks in detail what your working on and why how long it should take, so you have a lot of avenues to pretend to look busy while relaxing.
Doesn't sounds like the place where you'd need to miss your kid's birthday to me, unless maybe you hate your family.
I asked Gemini for some advice and it gave a better answer suggesting things like “break down silos and empower teams to make decisions without excessive bureaucracy” and “refocus on what made us great – building products that solve real user problems”, not working 120 hour weeks.
“Ok, are you going to remove the mountains of red tape, reviews, and documentation that make a 2 week project take 16 weeks?”
“Well, we can’t do that. Here’s a motivational story about boats”
But the solution was to eliminate the release manager role and move QA away from testing individual tickets and instead toward developing/managing automated testing. And then the devs had to pick up the QA and release responsibilities without any change in our original responsibilities.
Which means that I now waste a massive chunk of my work week doing things other than write code. All the while they're making a big stink about "coding days". Which has pretty much never ended well for developers. I'm sure next they'll be counting total lines of code, too.
Yeah…faster isn’t going to happen.
If you're a huge corporation like Google, you're not even playing the same game as any startup in the first place, and trying to compete with them as if you were is likely to end in tears.
The same is true the other way around. If you're a small company, you're unlikely to beat a major corporation by playing the game that major corporations play.
Being a small company gives strengths and weaknesses that large companies don't have -- and vice versa. Smart companies of any size play to their own strengths rather than trying to play to the competition's strengths.
More than a decade ago OKR (Objectives and Key Results) culture set in where once you just worked on things until they were ready. OKRs are really insidious because what qualifies as an acceptable goal depends on how much you're liked and the political muscle your org has. It also means the smallest unit of time because a quarter and if you had to approach another team for help, the soonest they would help you was the following quarter and that's only if you had the muscle to get onto those OKRs.
At a more macro level, Google is insanely profitable. I'm not sure what the current employee count but the per-employee profit is probably sitting at or above $500,000 per year. That's after all expenses. Yet the relentless pursuit of profits (which shrink over time) means further exploitation of surplus labor value.
Even if you group in half of gsuite for Gmail and all of Android (for the default search app) - that's still not even half of the company.
The profit per employee there is probably close to $1.5M - and that's after average compensation above $500k.
Yes, search and ads are the golden goose but so many things contribute to that success. Chrome, for example, is absolutely crucial to search quality. Maps is huge. Android is also critical. Search and ads use a whole bunch of infra (eg Borg, storage, load balancing, serving infra, traffic management, data center infra and so on). Even the people who manage all the corp Linux distributions and video conferencing infra contribute. Source control, build infra, testing infra and so on.
Deciding who does and doesn't "contribute" for something so interconnected like this quickly devolves into a political exercise at best and a popularity contest at worst.
“There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said.
Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.”
After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day.
Early in my career I'd have been angry, surprised or in denial at hearing this sort of rancid garbage. Now I see this in so many organizations, this is just a symptom of the deeper rot and top-down dysfunction.
But 120 hours? Do they even shower? RTO must be fun for their colleagues.
This level of human depravity is just sick. And for what?
Its just a symptom of all big organizations in the west these days be it private or public.
Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?
Same last words from the Nokia and Blackberry CEOs when that new gizmo from Apple came out in 2007.
>Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?
The Gavin Belson one.
All this stuff is a little handwavey but a 2023 report:
https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Mos...
Has a specific breakout about Google. Interestingly the subbrands (Google Maps particularly) are more trusted than Google as a whole, but it’s still relatively well trusted as a company.
But based on the graph I assume you're talking about page 12 which has a graph of various Google products. The data only goes back to 2018 and ends in Apr 2023. There is a clear downward trend since then Google Maps is the least affected but is still down from the low.
The trend I've seen is people on here have voice a significant lost trust over the past year. A loss of trust that is only growing. I feel its safe to assume we loss trust first since this is our industry.
If we're losing trust and the general public has already losing trust, I expect that general public's trust to catch up soon and show a steeper decline.
Anecdotally, I've already seen dissatisfaction with Google coming up more and more frequently in the areas of the internet I visit where the topics are far less technical. Unlike here those people are less aware of the alternatives.
I expect that when people realize Google is the new Boeing, they will abandon it quickly. There are many alternatives.
> He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said.
psychotic
Praise reveals priorities. They don't care about getting things right the first time. They don't care about important projects. That's the inference.
So, assuming they work 7 days a week, that's 17 hours a day. Leaving 7 hours for commuting, sleep and life. And it feels like he's offering that up as an example of "move faster".
Just wow.
Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit.
But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees.
"Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."
Google have their serious problems, but they extend far further than just this guy.
Companies don't formulate it this way, but in practice, by
- having lots of meetings
- introducing more and more red tape
- introducing more and more layers of management
- introducing more and more reporting requirements
- ...
they actually practice it.
They don't touch code, they don't touch any technologies (not even making prototypes so they they have a grounded understanding). They just regurgitate the socio-business zeitgeist. "Oh we must get more lean. Oh these workers must be lazy. AI AI AI".
And yet their multi million dollar pay packages MUST be equitable compensation for their in-the-box unoriginal business thinking. They went to HBS or SBS... they must be thought leaders, right?
Instead of sacking the people who dig ditches, what if half the talking heads left? I'm sure THAT would actually clear the air.
However, I have the billion dollar solution in 4 easy steps:
0. LLM completer plugins for editors
1. Get everyone escooters that go 60 mph / 96 kph (They exist)
2. We need to cut coffee for cost reasons, so why not issue caffeine-methylphenidate pills
3. Because RTO is still too inefficient, make everyone live at work
Bonus: If you want employees to move faster, encourage them to have kids. Busy people GSD.
> “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said.
So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?
First it was one sponsored link - now it's SEVEN. At some point even the masses catch on to the grift.
This is a desperate "something DO something" plea.
Either he does not understand that, and that's bad, or he is trying to put one over on some very smart employees who do understand that, and that won't work.
You can make a big company less inefficient, but everyone who thinks startup efficiency is simply a culture you can recreate inside a big company is going to be disappointed.
