It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community, and the programming community at large. In addition to gccgo, Ian wrote the gold linker, has blogged prolifically about compiler toolchains, and maintains huge swaths of the gcc codebase [0]. And probably much, much more that I’m not aware of.
I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.
I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.
Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.
It's very important for both the compiler tools chains of go to continue working well for redundancy and feature design validation purposes. However, I'm generally curious -- do people / organizations use gcc-go for some use cases ?
When I worked at Google, Ian Lance Taylor was in the pool of randomly assigned code reviewers. He was polite, firm, and informative. It speaks well of Taylor and the project that he was doing this kind of review--- it's a version of the YC advice about founders doing customer support.
And maybe I'm shallow, but it was a thrill to see his initials show up on my code reviews. Thanks for all your work on golang.
What a nice praise. It is refreshing to see someone being remembered as 'polite'. It is a critical life-lesson I've learned myself, it is better to be considered things like polite, kind and nice instead of smart, 10x <whatever>, capable.
I've found a lot of value in the habits of politeness, especially in written communication. It's disappointing when it's not a first class citizen in a company culture for things like code review. There are plenty of rationalizations for how it might not be needed, but that just feels like laziness.
As an “insignificant” outside contributor to Go (I think I worked on half a dozen proposals and PRs), I can say just the same, even for things that in the end got dropped or rejected: polite, firm, informative; I'd add curious.
Had a great experience contributing to the project, and Ian was a big part of that. Which for a big project like Go says a lot.
I also really enjoyed the Go readability process. It made me a much better programmer.
I did Python readability at Google and "take this one massive CL and if they make it good by the end of the process they're done" never felt quite as useful as Go's process. I'm glad they made their own rules; it benefited me. (Even if during the process I was thinking "I JUST NEED TO CHECK IN THIS CODE SO I CAN GO BACK TO BED" when getting paged in the middle of the night ;)
I'm glad you had that experience with Go readability, because mine was far from that. Java readability taught me loads. Go readability taught me almost nothing and took far longer. In the end I was given it when I emailed the admins to say "either give me some feedback or give me readability". I'm fully behind the readability concept, but it's hard to scale and keep the quality high.
I was at Google 2014-2017, and I think Ian shared how he did his promo package in order to help others (if I'm not mistaken I think it was him). This was just wow!
> But Gooogle [sic] has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.
That's kinda surprising to hear. I wonder what happened. It would have been easy to leave out these 3 sentences or replace them with fluff. The author choosing to write this out suggests that there is some weight here.
I've seen a lot of high level engineers at Google leave over the past couple of years. There's vastly more pressure from management and much less trust. And a bunch of L7+ folks have been expected to shift to working on AI stuff to have "enough impact." The increased pressure has created a lot of turf wars among these folks, as it isn't enough to be a trusted steward but now you need your name at the top of the relevant docs (and not the names of your peers).
Prior to 2023 I pretty much only ever saw the L7s and L8s that I work with leave Google because there was an exciting new opportunity or because they were retiring. Now most of the people I see leave at this level are leaving because they are fed up with Google. It's a mess.
Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers.
Today big tech is just a place people go to make money, and they don’t necessarily care about long term vision.
Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types who have little “passion” for engineering or computers. Zero imagination and outside the box thinking. Just rote memorization to get in and then getting PIP’d or laid off to go do the same at the other big corps. TC or GTFO types.
Better luck at startups that are the Google’s of yesteryear.
I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock!
But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.
In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.
But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.
20-30 years ago when you graduated if you wanted to get paid you targeted banks, accountancies or consultancies.
Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.
> Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types
What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.
Whenever I read these "I was at <faang> for 20 years and am now leaving" it always translates to "I have become unreasonably wealthy, mostly due to the company itself N-tuppling in value. And now after 20 years I don't need or care to have a day job that requires me to show up when I don't feel like it."
I'm sure people who have worked at FAANG for 20 years aren't starving in the streets, but you don't know enough about their financial situation to predict whether they are "unreasonably wealthy." How much of their salary went straight in to their landlord's pockets? Towards student loan interest? Towards health issues, childcare, or taking care of extended family members? Maybe they tried investing and lost money. Heck, maybe they just prioritized travel over saving money, or something. You can't just assume someone has F-you money just because they worked for 20 years.
I'm reading something else; I think they would have been financially secure, if not rich, for the biggest part of those 20 years already - if they weren't, during the boom times they could've jumped ship a dozen times over already.
Very, very few people actually work for that long for a tech company these days, at least in the IT sector in Europe.
Dude you have no clue what you’re talking about. I used to love when I’d see him as my reviewer because somehow he had the code reviews back in minutes and was always great to work with.
When they put Sundar Pichai, a person of little brilliance, to lead Google, it was clear that they want to transform the place into just another money maker and destroy the original culture of the company.
Huh, who is stopping person of great brilliance to launch their own companies and preserve culture forever?
If there are no large companies with original culture after few decades of their founding it would just imply it is nature of things instead of being a particular person as chief executive.
Sundar is brilliant, just not in the ways you want. He went from developing an IE browser extension to a web browser to running the world's most powerful company. He understood that what Google needed to keep the numbers going up was not better search, but better market capture.
The appreciation for engineering and phd research is missing. All focus stems from the CEO on profitability and revenue and commerce.
Edit: seems like he wrote about this before:
> 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
This mostly sounds like "Look I have made my money but don't let that stop me from shitting on leadership (which kinda enabled making money) on my way out.
It kind of make sense also since people blasting management while leaving are mostly not looking to launch their own companies so they will not be proven wrong about their "incisive critique" of management.
One would think that someone prominent like Ian Lance Taylor or Russ Cox (who also left within this past year, as noted by another commenter) would be relatively insulated from that.
Or management is cynically thinking they could get more bang for their buck with multiple people (I gotta imagine at 19 years at google gets you a healthy multiple compared to new hires)
On a second reading, the extra "o" might not have been a typo, but instead a reference to the early days of the Google search results page, where extra letters "o" were used for pagination.
This theme has been repeated a bunch over the last 10 years or so. Google has been in a constant state of decline since the employment surge in the back half of 2010s culminating with a hiring fervor in 2020 that diluted out all of the extremely talented employees.
This severe decline of the median engineer means comp gets cut back, perks get cut back, and most importantly, autonomy gets cut back. Oppressive process and political gamesmanship reign supreme.
Even when I left nearly a decade ago, the idea that something like Gmail could be made in 20% time was a joke. 20% time itself was being snuffed out and dipshit PMs in turf wars would kill anything that did manage to emerge because it wasn’t “polished enough”.
At this point Google is far beyond recovery because it is inundated with B, C and now D players. It’s following the same trajectory of Intel, Cisco, and IBM.
I'm surprised you find it surprising. It's well established among ex-Googlers that it jumped the shark with Emerald Sea. There will always be pockets of sanity within such a large corp but it's been decadent for over a decade.
And yet, he chooses to say nothing at all. You say there's no fluff. I say that's nothing more than fluff. I wish people would find the courage to actually talk about issues instead of keeping quiet.
Back in 2016 when I was at google, I started on a team that was all golang. I was working on my first project, building out a new service and got many readability approvals from Ian. One time I got an an approval with some follow up requests, which I somehow didn’t notice and landed the change. He got back to me asking me to follow up. I didn’t realize he was one of the core Golang developers! He was super gracious, even though he didn’t need to be and I’ll always remember that. It’s really something that he invested so much time into seeing how the language was actually used and identifying core problems. Very admirable.
> ... Gooogle has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.
I wish I had more elaboration on this paragraph. It seems like a real change happened of which Ian took notice.
What’s there to elaborate? It’s well documented in public.
Anti-trust trouble.
Poor leadership selling out the company for short term gains.
Palpable shift from a technology company that was unrivaled for a long time to yet another Microsoft/IBM clone.
No longer a leader in the industry and simply following trends and riding the waves (the AI trend…)
Bending the knee to governments with questionable history and supporting projects with implication of death of citizens.
"Do no evil", my ass.
Bro was fed up with the constant smoke that was blown up his ass. And lies pushed down his throat. Probably timed this exit with vesting/options maturity.
> No longer a leader in the industry and simply following trends and riding the waves (the AI trend…)
While they missed out on the first major commercialization of LLMs, they invented transformers and now have the leading LLM for coding and second best or potentially best training hardware in the world, designed in house, which they started working on before the current boom and kept improving.
> What’s there to elaborate? It’s well documented in public.
What is there to elaborate is what the author really thinks. "Well documented in public" is such nonsense. First of all, what you mean by that is purely subjective. Second, you still don't know what the author really thinks.
My take is the 2005 google does not and cannot exist again because it was born in an era where the underlying tech became so much more powerful. Any company that happened to invest creatively in tech during that era became unfathomably wealthy.
I joined google in 2022 (and have since left), even as a newcomer it was obvious that not only was the golden era over, but the era after the golden era was winding down too. The atmosphere wasn't "The reckless innovation is over but lets make the product as great as we can" - it was "Just don't break anything and squeeze out 1 or 2% improvements where possible"
Isn't that a good thing? When millions of people are relying on those products day in and day out, I think we don't want them to be reckless. Leave that to others.
As a spectator, the golden age has to have ended around 2013/2014.
Tech culture is so rampant with ruthless capitalism that it'll never happen again. You used to at least have the sense that there was a will to innovate and experiment. Now it's just oiling the machine.
In most countries there are hardly glamour tech culture jobs, capitalism has always been there.
Developers are seen as yet another office job, and unless you make it into manager, you will be always looked down has not having made a name for yourself.
Written as someone approaching 50y, that has been trying to avoid the management trap forever.
There isn't one yet / We can't see it. You're trying to predict an Industry (like the Tech Industry) that will grow beyond $1 Trillion and a company that provides a fundamental and ubiquitous tool (like Search).
Not trying to create a conspiracy theory, but I wonder whether this has any relation to Ian Hickson's departure from Google/Flutter team [1], where he specifically called out some names:
> 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. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
> 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
She's not alone.
Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.
The lower salaried locale for the python team is Germany no? Which isn't exactly like your tradional outsourcing. I find it hard to believe we won't see more of it in the coming years with how much cheaper engineers are in Europe especially when they are english speaking and go to good universities like Cambridge/Oxford/EPFL/ETH etc...
> Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.
This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review.
One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.
> My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers.
Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it.
Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
I don’t know about Google but many places I have worked had people who say a lot of things but those words don’t actually mean anything. You listen to them for half hour but you can’t summarize why they said in those 30 minutes, no matter how hard you try. Lots of buzzwords and word salads. It isn’t unique to Google. Reminds me of politicians
Thanks for sharing. One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. The company should have changed names when Pichai took the reins because it metamorphised into something unrecognizable. Most people you'll meet who worked for Google worked under his regime.
The company was restructured and become a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet Inc. just after this, so the company did, in fact, change names at that point!
Let's not pretend that Google pre Pichai was anything special, the rot was already instilled long before he came along. Other than very early days, Google has mostly been a force that corrupts, commoditizes and destroys. Sundar Pichai just made it explicit, a bagman-beancounter far removed from any engineering ethos.
I've often wondered, when people say this, do they mean their direct managers or the management hierarchy in general? If direct manager only, this only makes sense if they have a lot of leeway to run things how they want. For instance, if a company decides to cut 30% of the workforce and more people (naturally) leave afterward, is it really the direct manager that caused them to leave?
I think people leave "the situation" for all kinds of reasons. If you have a really horrible direct manager, that might be why you leave but it certainly isn't universal.
I don’t understand why this aphorism appeals to people.
I’ve most definitely left bad companies where I’ve had good managers and I know my experience is not unique.
When it gets to the point where people are pointing at executives as the “managers” that they’re leaving, do people just not realize that companies are run by high-level managers?
It’s a vacuous statement that holds some strange appeal for some people, but it’s not particularly insightful nor accurate.
Not at Google, but in a different American company of similar size (not capitalization): the quote about the strategy applies exactly the same, the criticism of middle management is the same. Internally we have an official name for the politics that brought us to that situation, but I cannot write it here because it would be immediately downvoted and flagged; in any case, it is an official policy not to have a strategy, not even to measure results of the projects and, lately, to eliminate the idea of roles and responsibilities and replacing it with "we all need to contribute and jump in as needed".
Readit News
I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.
I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.
Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.
[0]: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
And maybe I'm shallow, but it was a thrill to see his initials show up on my code reviews. Thanks for all your work on golang.
Had a great experience contributing to the project, and Ian was a big part of that. Which for a big project like Go says a lot.
I did Python readability at Google and "take this one massive CL and if they make it good by the end of the process they're done" never felt quite as useful as Go's process. I'm glad they made their own rules; it benefited me. (Even if during the process I was thinking "I JUST NEED TO CHECK IN THIS CODE SO I CAN GO BACK TO BED" when getting paged in the middle of the night ;)
I tried to push back on one of his comments as well.
Imo it just feels kinda cool that someone who really really knows what they are doing gave you a stamp of approval on something.
That's kinda surprising to hear. I wonder what happened. It would have been easy to leave out these 3 sentences or replace them with fluff. The author choosing to write this out suggests that there is some weight here.
Prior to 2023 I pretty much only ever saw the L7s and L8s that I work with leave Google because there was an exciting new opportunity or because they were retiring. Now most of the people I see leave at this level are leaving because they are fed up with Google. It's a mess.
I joined in 2021. I feel like I caught the tail end of old Google. Any decent idea was greenlit.
Now, it is a lot harder to find resources to do things. (This is of course relative. It is still far easier than any other place I've worked at).
The company has transitioned into something a little more traditional.
Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers.
Today big tech is just a place people go to make money, and they don’t necessarily care about long term vision.
Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types who have little “passion” for engineering or computers. Zero imagination and outside the box thinking. Just rote memorization to get in and then getting PIP’d or laid off to go do the same at the other big corps. TC or GTFO types.
Better luck at startups that are the Google’s of yesteryear.
But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.
In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.
But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.
Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.
What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.
in 1992?
But they probably haven't for many years.
So their reasons for choosing now to leave are probably a bit more interesting not wanting to show up if they don't need the money.
Very, very few people actually work for that long for a tech company these days, at least in the IT sector in Europe.
My dad and before him my uncle “retired” from tech at ~61 too, neither didn’t wrote a blog post
If there are no large companies with original culture after few decades of their founding it would just imply it is nature of things instead of being a particular person as chief executive.
Edit: seems like he wrote about this before:
> 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
It kind of make sense also since people blasting management while leaving are mostly not looking to launch their own companies so they will not be proven wrong about their "incisive critique" of management.
This severe decline of the median engineer means comp gets cut back, perks get cut back, and most importantly, autonomy gets cut back. Oppressive process and political gamesmanship reign supreme.
Even when I left nearly a decade ago, the idea that something like Gmail could be made in 20% time was a joke. 20% time itself was being snuffed out and dipshit PMs in turf wars would kill anything that did manage to emerge because it wasn’t “polished enough”.
At this point Google is far beyond recovery because it is inundated with B, C and now D players. It’s following the same trajectory of Intel, Cisco, and IBM.
Pockets of brilliance drowning in mediocrity
https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
What do the other engineers have to do with this? Why are they mediocre?
That hasn’t really been happening - perks and comp have been pretty stable for the past 3+ years at least, so…
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
I wish I had more elaboration on this paragraph. It seems like a real change happened of which Ian took notice.
"Please add Gemini to the go compiler errors, or take a hike."
Anti-trust trouble.
Poor leadership selling out the company for short term gains.
Palpable shift from a technology company that was unrivaled for a long time to yet another Microsoft/IBM clone.
No longer a leader in the industry and simply following trends and riding the waves (the AI trend…)
Bending the knee to governments with questionable history and supporting projects with implication of death of citizens.
"Do no evil", my ass.
Bro was fed up with the constant smoke that was blown up his ass. And lies pushed down his throat. Probably timed this exit with vesting/options maturity.
While they missed out on the first major commercialization of LLMs, they invented transformers and now have the leading LLM for coding and second best or potentially best training hardware in the world, designed in house, which they started working on before the current boom and kept improving.
What is there to elaborate is what the author really thinks. "Well documented in public" is such nonsense. First of all, what you mean by that is purely subjective. Second, you still don't know what the author really thinks.
The meta meta question is how long was Google ever really in the state that so many engineers remember as a golden age?
I joined google in 2022 (and have since left), even as a newcomer it was obvious that not only was the golden era over, but the era after the golden era was winding down too. The atmosphere wasn't "The reckless innovation is over but lets make the product as great as we can" - it was "Just don't break anything and squeeze out 1 or 2% improvements where possible"
Except countless companies did - many went out of business, and few became Googles.
The historical context is essential but there are so many factors that set them apart.
There is an opportunity to build it.
I think the problem with this gen of companies isn’t tech, it’s culture.
Tech culture is so rampant with ruthless capitalism that it'll never happen again. You used to at least have the sense that there was a will to innovate and experiment. Now it's just oiling the machine.
- College students just in it for the money hadn't taken over yet
- Low interest rates led to lots of investment
- Most people had broadband in developed countries
- Most people had cell LTE smart phones in developed countries
- Compute tech (CPUs, memory) was mature, adequate, and stable
Developers are seen as yet another office job, and unless you make it into manager, you will be always looked down has not having made a name for yourself.
Written as someone approaching 50y, that has been trying to avoid the management trap forever.
> 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. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
[1]: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373
She's not alone.
Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.
This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review.
One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.
Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it.
Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
That was mostly an artifact of the free money that gets thrown off as tech advancements are integrated into society.
I've often wondered, when people say this, do they mean their direct managers or the management hierarchy in general? If direct manager only, this only makes sense if they have a lot of leeway to run things how they want. For instance, if a company decides to cut 30% of the workforce and more people (naturally) leave afterward, is it really the direct manager that caused them to leave?
I think people leave "the situation" for all kinds of reasons. If you have a really horrible direct manager, that might be why you leave but it certainly isn't universal.
I’ve most definitely left bad companies where I’ve had good managers and I know my experience is not unique.
When it gets to the point where people are pointing at executives as the “managers” that they’re leaving, do people just not realize that companies are run by high-level managers?
It’s a vacuous statement that holds some strange appeal for some people, but it’s not particularly insightful nor accurate.