Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.
I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first."
But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).
On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup.
This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.
There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project?
And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.
I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff.
This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.
I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.
There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.
Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.
> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."
Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?
This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete
However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.
I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers.
I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission.
Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.
This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.
Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a straight answer or get something done that wasn’t formally planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it, especially engineers who don’t share priorities, timelines, conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally also the best way to get promoted at a large company that believes in breaking down silos.
As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently bad. Indeed, in a large company, they're necessary to avoid dysfunction. You want stable groups of competent people who share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for their thing.
"Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments.
But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.
Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.
How do you distinguish "I can fix them" companies that will not improve because they are where they are because of organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual improve and are ready for you?
I joined my current company 5 years ago, and I feel like we’ve ‘fixed’ a lot of things, but the effort to do so is so absurd.
And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.
Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that.
Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.
> Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.
Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more than that.
For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.
Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.
All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.
Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it.
> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set
This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.
The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.
I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth.
It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.
Joined Microsoft in the early 2010s, and Google recently in the 2020s. I see the same bad company culture traits in both cases (incompetent & feuding middle managers, silos of information, promotion based on launches not business impact, hired too many people, etc.).
I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't.
I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies.
To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.
Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.
I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position.
It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality.
Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities.
Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.
Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every growing / successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse, but even at our size being disruptive / staying innovative gets harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having capable people taking bets on new products, even when you know that such a product (if successful) is possibly years from making a dent in your revenue stream.
That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.
I think it’s fine if big companies stick to their core competencies, return money to shareholders, and the shareholders can then re-invest into innovative startups.
Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.
Has nothing to do with Google “being bad” and everything to do with emerging social trends questioning the corporatization of everything.
Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are.
The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff!
People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.
> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
I don't get this.
Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)
If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).
I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.
But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.
All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift.
This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.
A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".
Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".
Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.
This is my experience having been through 3 acquisitions.
In 1-2 years you go from:
- operating well, get bought
- throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower
- then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore
- leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition
I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.
`why rock the boat` is spot on! Most large organisations eventually go into a mode of maximising the free cash flow for shareholders. I guess more or less this is by design. Investors, Founders and early employees take risks in short run for the rewards in the long run. A company cannot keep saying the promised green land is delayed by another 5 years.
Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one!
Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.
>But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?"
Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?
>A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.
Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a tobacco company or Chevron.
> they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way
The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.
> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:
As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”
Yes, Google couldn't find a good way to scale out its early model. Talents are not something easy to scale out. Transparency is inherently in tension against confidentiality, and when you have lots of eyes then the latter tends to win unless you're comfortable of spending your daily life with all those media outlets. If you want to do the right thing, then you'll figure out that there's too many "right things" at its scale because there are too many people with different, conflicting goals. The list goes on.
Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.
But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.
Companies confuse their initial product success with general success. "We made this amazing thing, so everything we do is amazing". The logic is flawed but can carry the company a tremendous distance before becoming unsustainable. Google is reaching the early steps of the unsustainable phase, and their initial product success is finally being threatened via AI. Working on an open source library for 9 years and then complaining that the company is changing is ironic.
I've seen a hypothesis that Google has never created anything new worth anything to anyone, after it created search and ads. Gmail is a clone of Hotmail, and YouTube and Android were acquisitions.
> why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have... It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.
I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting).
I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.
I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us.
The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.
It's less about risk aversion than it is about position, size, and complexity. As these things grow, the incentives change and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible.
A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example.
Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position.
Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end.
And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.
Well-said. I think this is all pretty well encapsulated in the truth that "we tend to become what we hate", or "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's talking to Google?
It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.
Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.
> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it."
How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?
Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.
> ... what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.
So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.
So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.
You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.
Then what's your incentive to work at the company instead of starting the project externally? If the product is a sustainable business model in isolation, surely it's sustainable without the external resources.
This is a good way to be biased towards the most lucky and the most cutthroat. Also, why would the best talent look to work for you if they have to take so much personal risk without the possibility of the upside of stock options of a startup?
> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.
C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.
I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.
> C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations.
The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.
> Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.
My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]":
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
Observing how companies evolve and face challenges as they grow is interesting. Priorities, risk tolerance, and organizational structures often change this process. While newcomers may emphasize innovation and disruption, market-dominant companies may prioritize maintaining the status quo to protect what they have achieved. Various factors, including the potential impact on careers and incomes, can influence this shift in mindset. Additionally, due to its uncertainty, established processes and experienced personnel may resist starting from scratch. In some cases, companies that aim to differentiate themselves from traditional models may operate similarly over time, realizing the reasons behind established practices.
> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share.
It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.
This is spot on. I'll only add that the necessity of showing perpetual growth in the quarterly income report strongly incentivizes big companies to act this way, especially where--as in most tech companies--the employees have equity.
You've described why older companies do not inevitably grow into monopolies and take over the world. They get so set in their ways and bureaucratic that they get destroyed by the next wave of upstart companies.
Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and things feel like ground hog day.
After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.
There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..
But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.
logical move is to get better at splitting off their research and innovation into startups by licensing or funding employees who leave. Spinoff anything risky into an independent company so it can move faster and isn't slowed down by Google's risk aversion and bureaucracy. Basically what Microsoft did with OpenAI, give them cash and compute resources but have plausible deniability if things go wrong
I honestly think it’s possible to have large/mature companies that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It’s just really, really, really hard.
You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.
You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.
I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.
It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executive oversees a single layer of middle management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing telephone, and you have an echo chamber.
The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.
> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
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.
Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.
A cutthroat environment is going to encourage plenty of people to behave conservatively so that their rivals do not seize on their failures, real or perceived.
I find the real comedy here is the emotional attitude towards an employer TBH, especially with GOOG doing just fine.
The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).
Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.
The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.
> Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.
This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.
You've just described why once prominent companies fade into shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be avoided with better leadership.
But not a problem, either. Turnover is natural. Nobody but the investors care very much whether Kodak pivots to digital cameras, or whether Kodak remains the leading film camera company as the industry shrinks, and a different company makes digital cameras. In fact the latter is often better for the economy and consumers, due to the better specialization.
"Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.
Thing is, under capitalism large companies get significant control over the governments' actions. And large companies don't like not being allowed to be as powerful as possible, holding monopolies.
It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block..
One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.
This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil, corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.
This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism.
People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now.
No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.
Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees. They look at their immediate team/group, love the autonomy/transparency/"don't be evil"-mandate/etc. that they have and follow, and look around and see some of that in other groups, and think, "wow, this company is great, doesn't care about all that big-bad-company stuff".
But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.
(And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.)
It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.
> My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees.
Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.
What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.
As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action that the company takes.
However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context.
The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive." Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society.
This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey "oh but no one would be that evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry"
large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.
> and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now
This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.
But then again, everyone says Google is evil to have made their own browser, but most of the world is using it - one would guess they must have done some good things with it (so taking humanity forward in some capacity etc.). Some are even criticizing Google from its own browser - I hate the fact that it made Firefox lose their market share, but I also understand it can't all be because the big corp brainwashed everyone (sure it would be a significant part though).
In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management's responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management completely fails at that.
Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg's admonition to Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]:
"[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools."
The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.
I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too.
Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.
Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten.
Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It's still super light and zippy.
When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on destruction, you'd probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent, maybe even offended. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you?
Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.
> No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products
Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to.
That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron.
I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead.
Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.
5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.
Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is that they are doing their best to stay in business and deliver and improve that tool. It's all they have. So your incentives are credibly aligned.
Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.
I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling.
But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme.
I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.
Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness/vision required to long term success like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.
I'm friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at Google.
I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.
you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.
This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.
There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar.
But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.
Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.
Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.
This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been.
For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere.
Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.
Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.
I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.
Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.
No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.
I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material/Hardware.[2]
Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.
Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.
As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.
Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on it, then it's understandable why he'd stay at Google even if he didn't like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he's still working on Flutter now, so clearly it's a passion project for him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he could?
I just joined because I've always wanted to, and when I had the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the fealty of a public corporation lies.
Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.
The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.
Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team.
Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.
Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.
The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.
Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty well.
Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots.
This example is the perfect microcosm of the economics of innovation at large companies. Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and the like have zero incentive to continue to be the companies they were 20 years ago. They don't need to take risks. They don't need to disrupt anything. They instead need leaders like Pichai who will keep the ship steady and keep the shareholders happy, and will keep investing in or purchasing smaller companies that are either a threat or an opportunity for growth, all while keeping their existing revenue streams flowing.
If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.
> When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead
Ironically every AI person I know works on some dumb project with the goal they'll eventually get to work in Google/Meta for the big bucks. Maybe that is just a stepping stone.
Google is getting beat badly on multiple fronts, even Search, and has pissed away a mountain of goodwill. It's living off of declining 15 year old achievements. I wouldn't call Sundar a steady hand, he has destroyed much more potential than he has created, even if the stock has continued to go up it won't for much longer. I sold a significant position in GOOG a few years ago and I'm certain it was the right call.
> Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they'd rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots.
And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.
> If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.
Couldn't agree more. Our brand of capitalism isn't set up to allow for such corporate-culture time travel.
> And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.
For a while Microsoft was infamous for having talented engineers leave, found a startup, and then MS acquiring that startup for a lot of money.
It was, in hindsight, a really great system that worked out well for everyone involved.
Just the other week had a team meeting that was partly to discuss a possible round 21 of team charter/organization changes. Personally, I basically have bounced around multiple rounds of managers/teams/responsibilities in just the past few years. As the team lead philosophically said, many of you (senior) folks have seen maybe 10x employee growth since you joined and it's just a different company and the old one isn't coming back.
It's not an indictment of Google but every large company in existence. That's just how our current corporate structure works, and is the reason entrepreneurship is a thing.
While it's easy to agree with you, I find that my opinion here has shifted after leaving a large tech company for a seed stage startup. Competing against these giant companies is really challenging, you have to me more than 2x better to get a customer to look at you a second time.
12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done.
Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.
The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.
That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...
This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.
Googlers that were around when Vic Gundotra was a big player love trashing him. I was surprised when this blog described him in mixed and maybe even positive terms.
I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was.
I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.
I was surprised to see him savage Jeanine Banks by name like that, but if this bit is true I can at least understand the impulse: "She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set."
as another longish-term google employee, the one thing I absolutely depend on among all the org and culture changes is the ability to have a fair bit of choice and input when it comes to the specific projects I am working on, where the company can trust me to pick something that will work with my skills and interests and also align with the team and department objectives. losing that would likely impact me more than any of the other changes over the last 12 or so years I've been here.
I worked at Google for 15 years and I was lucky enough to work with Ian a few times. I might quibble about a few things, but I largely agree with his overall conclusions.
In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly.
To the extent that Google's culture is still "good", it's for the most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies have caught up to the best parts of Google's culture, and exceeded it in many ways.
I totally relate to his experience with middle management. Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little interest in the actual product they were managing. There will still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too much of their time just playing politics to do any good.
There's one way that Google is still leading, and that's in employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google still offers one of the most generous free food / meal benefits in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google's Vision plan that let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.
I think this guy has a Stockholm syndrom like I saw multiple times with Google employees:
; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
That is very fun because he thinks that they were trying to do good for the world but all was messed up because of cookie banners. Where, in fact, doing good for the world would have been to not abuse of cookies for tracking and evil use that would mean that they would not need bad cookies and would not have been needed to produce cookie banners...
Indeed. But Google is a company built on 3p cookies, perhaps more than any other. Innovating is very difficult at Google in general, but in the search/ads pipeline it must have been near-impossible. I’d imagine that any replacement that isn’t entirely feature complete (ie does the same thing 3p cookies do today) would have been politically impossible to push seriously. The higher leadership (VPs etc) act mostly like middle-management but with more kool-aid and corp speech. The few who were more bold usually came from acquisitions and left for more impactful work elsewhere, after their bonus payouts (me speculating, but lines up).
The internet would be better without mandated cookie banners. It's so damn frustrating using the internet in the EU. If you don't want to be tracked just browse in Incognito mode.
You don't need a cookie banner if you don't have 3rd party tracking cookies. It's really that simple.
The fact that all sites have them, shows us a terrifying truth: all websites are tracking us with 3rd party tools. "all" websites send our browsing habits off to (many) companies that will sell, mine or otherwise monetize our data.
Again: A cookie banner is not needed if you don't have 3rd party and/or tracking cookies. E.g. With matomo on your own domain, plausible analytics, or simply mining your servers logs with math, you won't need cookie banners.
Readit News
I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first."
But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.
And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.
[1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...
This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.
I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.
Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg
Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?
I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.
sounds like Clayton Christensen
I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission.
Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.
This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.
"Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.
Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.
And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.
Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.
Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.
Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.
For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.
Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.
All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.
> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set
This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.
The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.
It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.
I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't.
I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies.
To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.
Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.
I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position.
It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality.
Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities.
Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.
Nothing changes, psychopaths still cling on to some nebulous notion to make labor work harder to capture more excess value.
That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.
Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.
Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are.
The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff!
People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.
I don't get this.
Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)
If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).
But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.
All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.
A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".
Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".
In 1-2 years you go from: - operating well, get bought - throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower - then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore - leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition
I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.
Kind of like Apple.
When you stop doing that, someone else will and in time your customers will go there instead.
Be it due to fashion, social pressure, brand recognition, cultural norms, et cetera and so forth.
Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one!
Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.
Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?
>A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.
So i mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.
This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:
As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”
Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.
But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.
I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.
I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting).
I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.
I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us.
The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.
A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example.
Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position.
Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end.
And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.
What makes it impossible?
That dude just made the number up.
It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.
Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.
How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?
Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.
No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.
So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.
So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.
You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.
No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.
C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.
I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.
The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.
My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]":
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share.
It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.
After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.
There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..
But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.
You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.
You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.
I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.
The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.
And shift they did.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
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.
So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of dollars?
The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).
In a word: momentum
The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.
This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.
"Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.
If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd be really confused as to how poor the search results are.
Dead Comment
One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.
People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now.
No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.
But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.
(And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.)
It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.
Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.
What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.
However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context.
The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive." Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society.
This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey "oh but no one would be that evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry"
large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.
This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.
"[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools."
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too.
Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.
Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten.
Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It's still super light and zippy.
Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.
Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to.
That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron.
I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead.
Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.
Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.
But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme.
I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.
I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.
But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.
For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn't understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn't notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere.
Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.
I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.
Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.
No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.
Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.
Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.
As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.
[1] https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...
[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-material-you-interview-...
Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.
The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.
https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/
Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.
Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.
The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.
It's still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely competent. And I still prefer iOS.
Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top.
I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.
Dead Comment
This example is the perfect microcosm of the economics of innovation at large companies. Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and the like have zero incentive to continue to be the companies they were 20 years ago. They don't need to take risks. They don't need to disrupt anything. They instead need leaders like Pichai who will keep the ship steady and keep the shareholders happy, and will keep investing in or purchasing smaller companies that are either a threat or an opportunity for growth, all while keeping their existing revenue streams flowing.
If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.
Google might deserve more credit than any other company, but there were 20-30 years of innovation at universities beforehand.
Ironically every AI person I know works on some dumb project with the goal they'll eventually get to work in Google/Meta for the big bucks. Maybe that is just a stepping stone.
And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.
> If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.
Couldn't agree more. Our brand of capitalism isn't set up to allow for such corporate-culture time travel.
For a while Microsoft was infamous for having talented engineers leave, found a startup, and then MS acquiring that startup for a lot of money.
It was, in hindsight, a really great system that worked out well for everyone involved.
It all originated at universities.
Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.
The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.
That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...
This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.
Deleted Comment
I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.
To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).
as another longish-term google employee, the one thing I absolutely depend on among all the org and culture changes is the ability to have a fair bit of choice and input when it comes to the specific projects I am working on, where the company can trust me to pick something that will work with my skills and interests and also align with the team and department objectives. losing that would likely impact me more than any of the other changes over the last 12 or so years I've been here.
In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly.
To the extent that Google's culture is still "good", it's for the most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies have caught up to the best parts of Google's culture, and exceeded it in many ways.
I totally relate to his experience with middle management. Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little interest in the actual product they were managing. There will still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too much of their time just playing politics to do any good.
There's one way that Google is still leading, and that's in employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google still offers one of the most generous free food / meal benefits in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google's Vision plan that let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.
The fact that all sites have them, shows us a terrifying truth: all websites are tracking us with 3rd party tools. "all" websites send our browsing habits off to (many) companies that will sell, mine or otherwise monetize our data.
Again: A cookie banner is not needed if you don't have 3rd party and/or tracking cookies. E.g. With matomo on your own domain, plausible analytics, or simply mining your servers logs with math, you won't need cookie banners.