throwawa_goog (u/throwawa_goog)

toasterlovin · 2 years ago

Yeah, that's def not our plan (nor is it even possible at this point). But, for what it's worth, I don't see many families with > 6-7 kids, so I think your notion of what is meant by "want a lot of kids" is skewed by your experience.

throwawa_goog · 2 years ago

I mean, is it? I'd say anything above 2 (the number of parents around usually) is "a lot of kids". Anything above 2 and you start running into the problems I listed. In this society, I think most people who want more than three or so are narcissists who want to be praised as super-parents and/or highly impractical (or just happen to be extremely wealthy). My whole point is that, there's a fun fantasy around having lots of children but it comes with huge cons for the kids themselves in today's society.

hn_throwaway_99 · 2 years ago

While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points to some profound organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I've seen from current/ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I've had with some of these folks.

If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have thought you were insane. Google invented the transformer architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with Bard, and it wasn't even close - ChatGPT was the "Google" to Bard's "AltaVista" circa 2000 or so.

Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way". I can't express enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search, whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of "the Ballmer years" before they turned around).

throwawa_goog · 2 years ago

Current Googler for close to a decade.

Another big problem is that the current leadership formed their leadership skills in history's longest bull run (2009-2020), and none of them seem to know how to be scrappy and get stuff done. Our engineering leadership loves to just sit around and pontificate about theoreticals. Without blinking an eye they'll happily block projects for months on end over minutiae that don't matter. Often even simple features would languish in design reviews for 6-12 months. A lot of my job is "driving for alignment" between dozens of stakeholders on any given project, often at the request of our eng leaders. There is an incredible amount of bureaucracy to get anything done. People who don't leap through every hoop get labeled as having "not enough technical rigor".

Our product team has begun to wisen up on how we need to start shipping more things. Currently a lot of the eng teams are caught between our eng leaders who move at the rate as molasses, and product teams who are pushing us to actually get things done. It'll be interesting to see who wins here.