When I worked at Google I had the chance to interact with many of the leadership including the founders and CEOs, as well as many SVPs. I have to say, both Larry and Sundar have the personality and motivational skills of limp noodles. When I met Eric Schmidt, he immediately quizzed me about every detail about my product and product plans and further goals and was encouraging, like an actual leader. It was a wonderful discussion and I left the room feeling like I had actually been listened to by a leader who wanted the company to grow in new directions (like cloud and machine learning for health research).
I also got to meet people like Urs Hoezle and Luiz Barroso who are responsible for Google's technical position in computing today; they were both also great leaders who really deserve to have their own sub-company to run (TI and Core).
I was truly lucky to be able to have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat almost every morning for a year, which led to some great research collaborations. I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. That pretty much killed the reputation of Google Research's leader.
> I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit
Jeff had 2 options: pick a safe leader, or a corrosive person. Timnit has shown incredible tone-deafness and arrogance; just view her Twitter exchange with Yann LeCun. She was clearly out of her league, and doubling down every day with newer and newer antics. She needed to go.
Timnit was a bully, the definition of 'toxic employee', so glad Google had the balls to let her go, PR hit be damned, it means they still have true leaders
Do you think Jeff Dean defended the firing because he really understood the circumstances and the consequences of taking the position, or do you think he was naive? Was Jeff involved in the firing of people like Michael Church?
> Larry and Sundar have the personality and motivational skills of limp noodles
And yet they were still more motivating than Sundar, who is so flat he sounds like he's bored to death, even when he's talking about super cool tech like AI and quantum computing.
Page wasn't polished, but he could energize teams about building the future in a way Sundar hasn't been able to.
Anecdotal, but I've talked to a few people at Google who are happy with the pay and perks but absolutely hate the product management culture.
Basically, performance reviews and incentives are structured around doing something with "big impact," so there are a lot of needlessly "ambitious" (quotes intentional) reboots, revamps, redesigns, repackaging, etc. of existing products, mostly so that teams and PM's can say they went big and get a good performance review.
The flip side of that is that there's no incentive to fix bugs (and usability issues) in existing stable products, because unless the bug is losing tens of millions of dollars for Google it's considered wasted time from a performance review perspective.
This is why Google is constantly relaunching and rebranding products, even making them worse, while neglecting long-running problems in, for example, Gmail.
Recently, my main Gmail account was upgraded to the new Chat interface. It actually looks worse (subjectively the new font seems less readable) and has removed the "Pop out to separate window" feature that I used to use all the time. But hey, now the interface has animated transitions and I can forward individual parts of a conversation to an email with one click! Wow!
People say this all the time, but I've really not seen it. I'm in an org with one of the highest promotion rates in the company, and it is focused primarily on what you describe as missing. I've personally seen people promoted to senior staff for literally fixing problems and buried risks in existing stable systems.
I don't know how to address this meme, since it is very clear that managers are telling their reports that this is how things work and leading to this widespread belief, but when I actually go into the promo sessions I don't see this at all.
I have little sentiment for Google, but this article seems to be arranged as part of a campaign. The statements of a small number of x-Googlers is taken as a generalization of the company’s sentiment as a whole and is used to seed doubt, while acknowledging very little specific mistakes.
Unfortunately it feels like this is pretty common for the NYT today: they decide on a conclusion they want to make, and then interview enough people so they can cherry-pick the comments that support their conclusion, and don't bother to present any dissenting viewpoints.
It's really a shame; I feel like this transformation happened in the last 5 years or so. Most articles from NYT that I see posted here have this slant.
I don't mind the slant if it's clear they understand the issue, but it's clear that's not always the case based on what I've seen shared on Hacker News.
Google needs to replace their product management leadership. They have squandered their lead. Google business apps isn’t the top cloud based business platform. I’d pick office365 right now. Gmail/Calendar for businesses hasn’t changed in 10 years. Google cloud has been surpassed by Azure and will be a distant 3rd. Google meets is missing so much functionality that businesses supplement with zoom. I really don’t understand what they are doing with their enterprise offering. They should buy snowflake for Google cloud and slack for business apps to keep them relevant.
Like the article mentioned, they should have bought Shopify when it was much cheaper and provided the Google cloud as a place for shopify app developers for running their apps. Shopify has native event bus support for AWS so app developers favor AWS.
While googles business apps lack in features, office365 seems to be extremely buggy, documents look different online and offline (had the case last week), their authentication is pure horror (multiple accounts with different passwords for the same email address), teams is only logged in to one account at the time, one drive (or how it is called) is always using "significant energy".
We actually wanted to switch and bought a few licenses, but after trying it for 2 weeks with a small group of employees we discarded the idea. I was surprised and very much disappointed.
I have lived in Silicon Valley for two decades and most people I've talked to see Apple as the most prestigious place to work out of all the FAANG companies. I'm not surprised because Apple has had the fortune of having a visionary founder AND Tim Cook, who is one of the best managers in the world.
Out of the people I know who actually work at Apple, they're either incredibly overworked and constantly teetering on the edge of burnout, or they see Apple's market position as a tool they can use to further some goals of their own. While I'm sure some people do consider working at Apple as high-prestige, that's doesn't seem to be reflected in the employees I know, at least.
I've lived in Silicon Valley for over 2 decades as well. Until iPhone, Apple was not prestigious at all. I still remember Brass Ring hiring conventions where the Apple hiring booth was completely empty. In fact, until recently, all I've heard is that Apple underpays engineers compared to most other companies. The fact that the stock as gone up ~300x in the last 8 years changed that equation, so everyone shuts up now, but it has historically never been prestigious. I've in fact never heard of Apple being prestigious unless you worked in design, or worked on the iPhone.
Haha... Apple to me is quite the opposite, more like a cult of personality. I really do not see Apple as visionary. I don't think they are doing anything really special or are market leaders in anyway when it comes to technology.
To me it feels like no one in (big) tech is interested in building products _for_ the customer. They're only interested in building products for extracting money from the customer.
The idea of "charge what the market will bear" has been taken to an extreme by the tech industry. The combination of venture capital, non-ownership (SaaS everything), adhesive ToS, anit-trust levels of monopolization, etc. all work really hard to get customers locked in and dependent on half-assed garbage with a big feature list.
Everyone is building robots that hold you upside down and shake the money from your pockets while calling is SaaS. Boo!
Google needs to get its Search team into the driver seat. Its the information age. They are the ones who should be leading and laying out a path into the future.
Instead, the god damned empire defense crowd is laying out that path, for almost a decade now, and its naturally a road to nowhere.
There is no real big vision coming from Google on what is wrong with how info is being mindlessly generated and pumped into people's heads 24x7.
They are very proud and happy they index 2 billion 'how to make a boiled egg' videos. WTF are they even enabling? They have no clue because its all driven by empire defense.
Here is an example of what I see from Google these days. I get a notification banner telling me that Hangouts is being replaced by Gmail Chat. This comes a year after a rumor that Hangouts was being shut down. Apparently, that was just a rumor or something.
So I continue using Hangouts until now when I'm told it is officially being replaced. Whatever, I think, I'll just switch to Gmail Chat and uninstall Hangouts. Today, I get sent a video from someone still on Hangouts. They fucking play link takes me to the Hangouts page on the play store. I need to install Hangouts to watch the video.
Google has a history of product rot. Most notably where I rot the two most expensive pieces of product rot are the Jamboards. We opted not to renew them when COVID hit and now that things are kind of going back to normal, I’ve found Logitech and a few other companies have come out with better products that integrate with existing whiteboards for what we need in conference rooms.
Things like the jamboard turn me off of buying Google hardware.
I’m confused by the inclusion of the Stochastic Parrot thing. Why did this become such a flashpoint? Did people care about culture wars that happened at HP Labs and Sun in the 90s (I guess the more illustrative point is tha they didn’t)? I don’t see the relevance to profitability or future growth.
The Parrots paper is activism dressed up as research in my opinion. It only complains and offers no solutions. This is bad, that is bad, and that other thing, yes, it's bad...
It might be true, but with the stock at an all-time high (and close to doubling over the past year) I would say that not many people have put their money where the nytime's mouth is.
it doesnt matter who runs google. its literally a money printing monopoly with search. And that will never end. And they can plow that money wherever they want. (even into a furance) and theyll be fine. Especially if you add in youtube money.
> its literally a money printing monopoly with search. And that will never end.
Until it does. Go back 20 years and you could've written the same thing about Microsoft and end-user computing.
Google under Pichai looks increasingly like Microsoft under Balmer. Executing to stellar headline numbers, but increasingly paralyzed in anything other than their one or two anchor products.
It took a change at the top to turn Microsoft around. I expect Pichai to go the same way as Balmer.
Google Execs have an average vote that’s decisively short of “exceeding expectations.” But Google had an additional set of execs go for interviews that gave a more positive vote.
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|4 years ago|reply
I also got to meet people like Urs Hoezle and Luiz Barroso who are responsible for Google's technical position in computing today; they were both also great leaders who really deserve to have their own sub-company to run (TI and Core).
I was truly lucky to be able to have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat almost every morning for a year, which led to some great research collaborations. I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. That pretty much killed the reputation of Google Research's leader.
[+] [-] rejectedandsad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1024core|4 years ago|reply
Jeff had 2 options: pick a safe leader, or a corrosive person. Timnit has shown incredible tone-deafness and arrogance; just view her Twitter exchange with Yann LeCun. She was clearly out of her league, and doubling down every day with newer and newer antics. She needed to go.
[+] [-] actuator|4 years ago|reply
From what has been put outside, don't you think Timnit's mail to employees as a manager was out of line for someone in her role.
Even to me who doesn't have intimate knowledge of the whole thing, that didn't look appropriate.
[+] [-] andyxor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingwageslave|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] choppaface|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|4 years ago|reply
And yet they were still more motivating than Sundar, who is so flat he sounds like he's bored to death, even when he's talking about super cool tech like AI and quantum computing.
Page wasn't polished, but he could energize teams about building the future in a way Sundar hasn't been able to.
[+] [-] swivelmaster|4 years ago|reply
Basically, performance reviews and incentives are structured around doing something with "big impact," so there are a lot of needlessly "ambitious" (quotes intentional) reboots, revamps, redesigns, repackaging, etc. of existing products, mostly so that teams and PM's can say they went big and get a good performance review.
The flip side of that is that there's no incentive to fix bugs (and usability issues) in existing stable products, because unless the bug is losing tens of millions of dollars for Google it's considered wasted time from a performance review perspective.
This is why Google is constantly relaunching and rebranding products, even making them worse, while neglecting long-running problems in, for example, Gmail.
Recently, my main Gmail account was upgraded to the new Chat interface. It actually looks worse (subjectively the new font seems less readable) and has removed the "Pop out to separate window" feature that I used to use all the time. But hey, now the interface has animated transitions and I can forward individual parts of a conversation to an email with one click! Wow!
[+] [-] UncleMeat|4 years ago|reply
I don't know how to address this meme, since it is very clear that managers are telling their reports that this is how things work and leading to this widespread belief, but when I actually go into the promo sessions I don't see this at all.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] robinj6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|4 years ago|reply
It's really a shame; I feel like this transformation happened in the last 5 years or so. Most articles from NYT that I see posted here have this slant.
[+] [-] nitwit005|4 years ago|reply
I still remember their awkward correction about an article on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/pageoneplus/corrections-a...
[+] [-] adrr|4 years ago|reply
Like the article mentioned, they should have bought Shopify when it was much cheaper and provided the Google cloud as a place for shopify app developers for running their apps. Shopify has native event bus support for AWS so app developers favor AWS.
[+] [-] schmidp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] retskrad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ping_pong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encryptluks2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jqpabc123|4 years ago|reply
The fastest way to convince me not to use a product is to put the name "Google" on it.
[+] [-] encryptluks2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerkirkness|4 years ago|reply
A nice guy cannot execute a PMF pivot, but can milk and maximize a money printer. Tool for the job.
[+] [-] swivelmaster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbazetc|4 years ago|reply
It’s all so boring.
[+] [-] donmcronald|4 years ago|reply
The idea of "charge what the market will bear" has been taken to an extreme by the tech industry. The combination of venture capital, non-ownership (SaaS everything), adhesive ToS, anit-trust levels of monopolization, etc. all work really hard to get customers locked in and dependent on half-assed garbage with a big feature list.
Everyone is building robots that hold you upside down and shake the money from your pockets while calling is SaaS. Boo!
[+] [-] ioeru48|4 years ago|reply
Instead, the god damned empire defense crowd is laying out that path, for almost a decade now, and its naturally a road to nowhere.
There is no real big vision coming from Google on what is wrong with how info is being mindlessly generated and pumped into people's heads 24x7.
They are very proud and happy they index 2 billion 'how to make a boiled egg' videos. WTF are they even enabling? They have no clue because its all driven by empire defense.
[+] [-] andyana|4 years ago|reply
So I continue using Hangouts until now when I'm told it is officially being replaced. Whatever, I think, I'll just switch to Gmail Chat and uninstall Hangouts. Today, I get sent a video from someone still on Hangouts. They fucking play link takes me to the Hangouts page on the play store. I need to install Hangouts to watch the video.
You can't make this up.
[+] [-] someonehere|4 years ago|reply
Things like the jamboard turn me off of buying Google hardware.
[+] [-] rejectedandsad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bpodgursky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstrong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffggvv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spinningslate|4 years ago|reply
Until it does. Go back 20 years and you could've written the same thing about Microsoft and end-user computing.
Google under Pichai looks increasingly like Microsoft under Balmer. Executing to stellar headline numbers, but increasingly paralyzed in anything other than their one or two anchor products.
It took a change at the top to turn Microsoft around. I expect Pichai to go the same way as Balmer.
[+] [-] choppaface|4 years ago|reply
Google Execs have an average vote that’s decisively short of “exceeding expectations.” But Google had an additional set of execs go for interviews that gave a more positive vote.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] draw_down|4 years ago|reply
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