It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.
What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.
I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.
You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.
And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.
> What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends.
A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.
Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.
So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.
Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist, is pretty sure this is because the incentive structure goes bad. An executive who goes for a new project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m -- note the expected value of $2m -- expects a pat on the back, maybe a couple months' salary as bonus, in case (a), and to be fired in case (b). Naturally, the business would love to pursue all these opportunities, while any individual manager would almost never choose to pursue one.
This is a variant of the principal-agent problem.
Thaler's book is titled "Misbehaving" -- well worth listening to the audiobook if you have a commute!
"It's hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks."
And yet, for centuries people have done it.
It's easy to create a big company without a stable business model that refuses to take the right risks when meaningful competition and regulation do not exist, and there are long periods of unconventional monetary policies (QE, ZIRP). Will the company last. Question for the reader to decide.
For example, Big Company A has survived for 172 years by taking the "risk" of hiring journalists to produce news. Big Company B has survived for 25 years by not hiring journalists and instead using the product of Big Company A's employees as bait to lure in ad targets. What "risks" did Big Company B take, if any. Were they the "right" ones. Let the reader decide.
Big Company B just seems like a giant leech. What happens when the blood supply from Big Company A is exhausted. Find another host?
As for the folks Big Company B did hire to share in the immense bounty, as it happens they are just a non-essential expense that can be cut at any time. Some of them brag online about how they only work two hours a day. They loved the benefits. They saw no evil. But what risk was taken in hiring them. Question for the reader to decide.
> It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.
A company can manage to take risks with the right culture and the right business priority, even if it has limited profit. AWS, for instance, gives its services years of runway to prove themselves. The company places enormous demand on its leadership to show "technical boldness" and business initiatives. S3, EC2, Serverless, DDB, and etc, were initially considered risky bets. On the other hand, the same AWS culture does not necessarily encourage long-term applied research. As a result, AWS couldn't come up with breakthroughs like BERT and GPT. Case in point, AWS adopted a German's university's ASR solution so AWS could go to market quickly, even though the cost was that the engineers and scientists were bogged down by maintaining the model instead of coming up with models like Whisper.
Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate.
> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else
At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
> Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.
I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.
From the outside, it looks like many in the industry assumed Covid-induced changes would be permanent. They hired accordingly, beefed up their headcount and in the process ended up getting a lot of talent which wouldn't have gotten in pre-pandemic. Once you recalibrate, you are not left with much choices.
I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.
I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.
And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.
At some point the real world just gets in the way.
I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.
I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.
i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable.
it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.
anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.
This tracks with what I saw as an outside observer; I felt like around 2015 was the inflection point where Google started its slow arc toward mediocrity.
It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.
We did contract work for them in the early teens. I remember going to various Google campuses and being shocked at how little it reminded me of my dotcom days and how much it reminded me of my Hewlett Packard days.
People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit.
When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.
Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.
All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.
The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.
We've seen the vilification of the MBA types over the past decade and a half as a downstream effect too. The technical types always had a distaste, but now it's bled into the mainstream and amplified by the ongoing economic conditions. As the monetary value of Internet-driven services grew, it tilted power to the doers in technical fields. The disrupters in the industry weren't the product people anymore, it was the engineers making things.
I think that's implicit in this. . . a lot of us have held Google in high regard for a long time, knowing that they pioneered a lot for modern big tech companies while also staying cool in the eyes of the nerds.
Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google.
Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft.
tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.
Whenever I see posts like these, whether for Google, or any other company, I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?
I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.
Fulltime employees at Google are basically the same as any other employee. They get the same benefits, can eat the free food, and generally I haven't seen any serious discrimination against them for being "not engineers". However, some of the things you've mentioned (e.g. building maintenance) are often done by contractors or outside firms, and for them things are often very different.
> I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?
Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)
Google isn’t an engine to create wealth out of nothing. Its a place that is/was structured to extract maximum value from its engineers specifically. It isn’t all that surprising that engineers got most of the perks.
I find it useful, in reading this stuff, to remember: the company he joined in 2005 had (apparently) 5,600 employees. In 2022, that number was 190,000.
I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect.
The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.
By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"
I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.
Many Googlers show no drive in their role. Good enough work gives high compensation. Firings are for egregious performance.
If that wasn't enough, the internal culture slows output too. endless infrastructure migrations. Design docs for small changes. "Demonstrate leadership". Strategic timing of "demonstrate trajectory".
This is a very hot take, but does mesh with my own experience with mentors, friends, and family at GOOG at the time.
I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.
There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.
Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.
I agree tbh but it feels like the current environment doesn't reward risk taking and heads down work, especially with diffuse or longer term payoffs, and our AI efforts are still being retardedby safetiests/activists.
Rest & vest types are still doing fine, it's the passionate/care-a-lots that are increasingly burning out and disengaging or leaving.
was speaking about this with my friend, mgr @ google.
He agreed with whatever you said. employees at current google are entitled bunch, non-performing. layoffs at google are justified.
> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.
Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.
But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.
So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.
The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.
I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.
Even in the early days, I don't believe Google was all that fast about launching new products? The "fail fast" stuff was about people working on blue-sky ideas that failed to get traction before they were launched, or maybe just launched in Google Labs [1].
The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name.
There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.
If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.
> So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.
> The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else.
One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.
Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.
The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.
My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.
All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.
Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving.
This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.
I was at a big conference in Dublin years ago where a Google talking head stated to hundreds of people that "google only hires the most intelligent people" with a grotesquely smug look on her face, instantly turned me off from ever considering applying to work there. Incidentally RMS was also there and screamed from the back "WHICH BSD LICENSE?" when the Google drone said google uses "the bsd license", which I thought was hilarious.
Two of the worst colleagues I ever had also went on to thrive at Google. It’s been hard for me to take their claims of only hiring the best since then.
> This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me.
What ruined it for me was interviewing ex googlers. Not the PhD levels, but IC. To be fair none passed the inteview. Perhaps it was just the UK google offices. Similar for facebook. At facebook some of the people I know working there are abolutely vile. The types that threatened their coworkers and somehow got away with it. Each organisation favours a certain type and it all comes down from the top.
My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.
This is the thread I was looking for. In all these glowing odes to the Google that Was that cross Hackernews every day now, about what an incredible and liberating and productive place it was, there's always something missing.
The most toxic, conceited, selfish, inflexible, basically the worst stereotype of "genius asshole" engineers I've ever studied with, or worked with, all wound up at Google.
And is it a surprise when the entire interview process consists of "Are you good at computer science?"
Former friend joined Google and started hitting his pet (violently and angrily) and doing heavy drugs. Anthony Levandowski might be an outlier at Google for criminal behavior as well as total comp, but there are plenty of Googlers who you want to have nothing to do with.
> Let me explain. In a typical company, when priorities shift, you "downsize" (or cancel) a project, and then use the money to add people to a different, more important project. The common way to do this is fire people from the first project, then rehire a bunch of new people in the second project. It's easy, it's simple, it's expected.
This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.
And that email quote is also interesting on its own:
> Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.
I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.
It's a question of trust and societal culture, not company culture.
On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?
In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.
This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.
BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)
It's also incredibly shortsighted, and one of those aspects of business in America that contributes to the problems it has. All that institutional knowledge lost that could have been helpful in the new project. I will say that it is usually the worse run companies that are guilty of such things. The startup crowd that largely makes (made) Hacker News was spared this because a startup couldn't survive doing that. America has been coming down off the Jack Welch school of business for the past decade and a half, which perpetuated the culture that birthed the hate for MBAs and complete lack of faith in any company.
I think the recent treatment by companies of its employees will remove the rosy glass from our eyes. All employee goodiness is a fair weather phenomena. Always keep a healthy distance from your work and company.
For me, the important sentence is "Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things." This is very interesting, but I like that the author notes the outside view, because I still get the feeling I'd like to work there someday.
I just got laid off but working there can be really good. My manager and team were great engineers but also just truly nice and caring people and the pay and benefits were great. On the other hand I found the work to mostly be tedious (for every bit of interesting engineering there was lots of bureaucracy and wrestling with obtuse internal tools).
It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.
Don't go to Google unless it's for the pay/benefits (benefits are basically pay in a costume) or for a very particular role which is unmistakably aligned with your professional priorities. You won't find any of the mythological coolness there, literally all of my buddies say. Additionally, when recruiters sell you the position, they try to make it look like you are working at the core of their most important products, when it's generally about some minute pedestrian detail of their internal ecosystem.
> And so, when priorities would change, Google did not fire people, but rather moved them carefully between projects.
Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.
I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.
It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.
> The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI.
This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).
I don't think it's contradictory. There was an amazing ROI for a long time, so I think it was a very successful strategy early on. It's just clear that as the founders retired and more MBAs got a hold of upper management positions the first thing that happened was that the employee psychological safety was slowly eroded. Did you know that Pichai started his career at Mckinsey? That place is all about making safe choices that erode a companies future to improve short term profits.
I don’t think the working world is at any risk of going too extreme at valuing employees. It is the exception which is why we’re even talking about it.
Their promotion process probably has more to do with product fragmentation as anything.
Dart is an interpreted language created as a replacement for JavaScript, Go is a compiled language created as a replacement for C/C++. Those can hardly converge.
> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.
Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.
Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.
> But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.
Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?
I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.
How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees but it is not a tough decision.
Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.
Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.
It's a vicious part of the cycle and it takes good leadership to pull out of the spiral. Killing off perks and curbing pay to account for the loss of budget growth also has the effect of making the top performers look elsewhere, which in turn curbs the rockstars and moonshots that Google was known for. They need to shed the dead weight and make accountability possible and a point of pride. Unfortunately it's usually the dead weight that hangs on the hardest.
So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground."
Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.
> I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.
There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).
There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.
Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else.
There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
> There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".
Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.
For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.
It’s hard to imagine an absence of resource anxiety in the land of the six figure mortgage payment. Must have been incredible.
Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.
There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot:
> ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal.
Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get.
I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.
Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.
Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Googlers.
Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.
The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.
It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.
I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline.
There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.
i'm sure there are. but google's arc, the engineering culture wasn't just dynamic, it was dynamic and (apologies to use an eric schmidt-ism) impactful.
Google hiring process was always flawed. They didn't hire talented generalists. They hired people who gamed the hiring process. Most of them are mediocre at best. As an anecdote, I worked with a couple of guys who were later hired by Google. They weren't stellar in my team (in fact I was glad they were gone), and I have a hard time to believe they were stellar at Google either.
When you have a lot of mediocre developers, you can shift them around from one project to another all day long, but it won't improve your bottom line. The only solution is to fire them. Unfortunately for Google without the change in the hiring process, they will continue to hire the same kind of people that they just fired. From this perspective Google has become the "normal" company a long time ago.
Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?
Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.
The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.
It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.
It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place
Google is a bit like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. It had lost its way. There was no leadership. Most of what they tried failed or wasn't that great. And yet it was still raking in the profits. And then MS turned it around. All it took was new leadership. They just overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Just a string of good, solid decisive leadership. Satya Nadella turned that company around.
Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.
If historic Broadway theaters in NYC transitioned to blocks of server farms, then many people would have a feeling, "Singing and dancing and live art used to happen here, and that history is worth continuing, here," even if for economic reasons it wouldn't and couldn't anymore. . . and so I don't think it's only wistful or wishfulness speaking.
It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.
> It's time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where innovation happens
I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.
To dissuade potential employees who are thinking to apply because they mistakenly think it's still like the stories they hear from the old days?
To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?
I don't think the part of attacking big targets works in this context, I would care very little about Google and its culture, it's not my business and people who work there decide to stay there autonomously
The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.
For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares
Ben and Brian's Google IO talks were fantastic. Their talks always made me realise that Google was a special place. Sad to see its not the case anymore from Ben himself.
From someone who got out of the corporate rat race in the early 2000's, this is a really balanced article on how companies change to meet the environment they find themselves in.
I'm not sure what the answer is when growth starts to dissipate. Maybe trust the people you already have and work towards downsizing in less artificial way? I feel like the stock market has made this problem worse
I think I'd s/"unlimited abundance"/"nothing to lose" - particularly in startups. In the small businesses I've worked in, it's when the times a tough, the biggest and most critical bets have been made often with the most conviction. That sort of situation I think also drives some of those motivational and incredibly innovative behaviours in people.
It's interesting. When I moved to California in 2012, Google was exciting. They had hot stuff, new platforms, very exciting. Six years later, you were hesitant to hire Google people. Today, it's the Bay Area retirement home.
No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.
In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.
I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their careers, and I can't really imagine the kind of a one-in-a-million company that'd be justified in turning down a Google ex-employee based on just their employer.
I work at Google. Having Google on my CV has been a huge bonus, I get so much more interest from companies trying to hire me and many of them directly reference having Google on there as a positive. I know zero people who are just coasting along, everyone is working super hard. I have seen a few people leave in the last year because they were under too much pressure, despite the pay.
"Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.
If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."
Alphabet has ruined it's entire portfolio if measured by the initial vision of each product. They have decimated the once great platforms they developed in pursuit of ever canabalizing their consumers
My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.
I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?
Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...
The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".
The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.
Ironic tl;dr, the author separates Google culture from business but Google is not just another public company in the NASDAQ. It is a company that impacted and impacts [political] viewpoints of people around the world. In the past "common" people could create content and be visible, now SEO is an impossible game that requires big budgets. Google forgets things (sites) and it is not "Organizing the world's information" [1]. It is just stockpiling it. The company is not a McDonald's. If the soul of the company culture changed it means the seeds for [1] are dead.
> You know how people are much more likely to read an email if it is one
screen long, rather than the length of this :-/ ? It is similar with
contributing code to the kernel. It is much more social and relationship
developing to contribute a screenful or two of code once every week or
two over the course of years. We were dropping 90,000 lines of code on
them all at once, having worked on it in total social isolation for 5
years in Moscow, Socially it was all bad. Small increments are the more
social way to go. Incremental improvements to V3 would have met no
opposition.
This article's site is a rare one for which Firefox's built-in reader mode doesn't currently have a silent cost: the reader mode bypasses uBlock Origin protection against some kinds of trackers.
I know plenty of people raised by grandparents. So alternatives are appropriate.
I’d personally stick with the common “caretaker” or “guardians” though. “Child-raisers” really comes across as just wanting to say something different.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I could be a parent who sends my child to military school in north Korea. No problems with care for me right? I could have adult children, or independent and reliable teens. Point is people raising children specifically need these services.
I generally agree with your sentiment (I abhor 'pass on' and that sort of euphemism for example) but perhaps the point was that most parents have children who no longer require daycare or 'raising'? Or even that your spouse might be mainly responsible for it (they don't work, or have it sorted through work already), so it's not a concern for you when you look for a job.
I was perhaps trying to be more precise than necessary. Thinking of my work colleagues, there's a case where A and B had a child together, so they're both parents, but they've also separated and B (who works at my place) does all the child-raising and so is the one to worry about daycare availability and pricing and such. A is still a parent, but not much involved in the child's life.
This term was not meant to be a commentary on the kind of language that comes out of HR departments, nor a statement on gender identity.
Yes just because you aren't blood and you raise/help raise a kid, you are the parent. To change the verbiage is diminishing to the task, even though you don't mean it to be.
Who's more of a parent, the guy who knocks up a woman and leaves forever, or the step-dad who actually raises the kid for 18+ years?
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
softwaredoug|2 years ago
What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.
I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.
You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.
And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.
hn8305823|2 years ago
A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.
Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.
So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.
zamfi|2 years ago
This is a variant of the principal-agent problem.
Thaler's book is titled "Misbehaving" -- well worth listening to the audiobook if you have a commute!
1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago
And yet, for centuries people have done it.
It's easy to create a big company without a stable business model that refuses to take the right risks when meaningful competition and regulation do not exist, and there are long periods of unconventional monetary policies (QE, ZIRP). Will the company last. Question for the reader to decide.
For example, Big Company A has survived for 172 years by taking the "risk" of hiring journalists to produce news. Big Company B has survived for 25 years by not hiring journalists and instead using the product of Big Company A's employees as bait to lure in ad targets. What "risks" did Big Company B take, if any. Were they the "right" ones. Let the reader decide.
Big Company B just seems like a giant leech. What happens when the blood supply from Big Company A is exhausted. Find another host?
As for the folks Big Company B did hire to share in the immense bounty, as it happens they are just a non-essential expense that can be cut at any time. Some of them brag online about how they only work two hours a day. They loved the benefits. They saw no evil. But what risk was taken in hiring them. Question for the reader to decide.
hintymad|2 years ago
A company can manage to take risks with the right culture and the right business priority, even if it has limited profit. AWS, for instance, gives its services years of runway to prove themselves. The company places enormous demand on its leadership to show "technical boldness" and business initiatives. S3, EC2, Serverless, DDB, and etc, were initially considered risky bets. On the other hand, the same AWS culture does not necessarily encourage long-term applied research. As a result, AWS couldn't come up with breakthroughs like BERT and GPT. Case in point, AWS adopted a German's university's ASR solution so AWS could go to market quickly, even though the cost was that the engineers and scientists were bogged down by maintaining the model instead of coming up with models like Whisper.
lawrenceyan|2 years ago
????
hintymad|2 years ago
> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else
At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok
piva00|2 years ago
And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.
I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.
ankit219|2 years ago
I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.
zamfi|2 years ago
I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.
And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.
At some point the real world just gets in the way.
0xpgm|2 years ago
Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?
Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.
Did Valve corporation do something like that?
altaltson|2 years ago
Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.
The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.
poisonborz|2 years ago
neilv|2 years ago
raxxorraxor|2 years ago
2-718-281-828|2 years ago
_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
unknown|2 years ago
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yard2010|2 years ago
nicoburns|2 years ago
brcmthrowaway|2 years ago
OpenAI?
V-eHGsd_|2 years ago
it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.
anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.
kyrra|2 years ago
My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.
infotainment|2 years ago
It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.
beej71|2 years ago
VirusNewbie|2 years ago
When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.
Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.
All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.
The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.
mlrtime|2 years ago
Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.
a_vanderbilt|2 years ago
tech_tuna|2 years ago
Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google.
Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft.
tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.
flklklklkl|2 years ago
I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.
saagarjha|2 years ago
lmm|2 years ago
Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)
pm90|2 years ago
tptacek|2 years ago
bombcar|2 years ago
With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.
altaltson|2 years ago
The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.
By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"
I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.
But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.
throwaway20045|2 years ago
This take rings true for me.
Many Googlers show no drive in their role. Good enough work gives high compensation. Firings are for egregious performance.
If that wasn't enough, the internal culture slows output too. endless infrastructure migrations. Design docs for small changes. "Demonstrate leadership". Strategic timing of "demonstrate trajectory".
Belt tightening and slimming is a good idea.
alephnerd|2 years ago
I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.
There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.
Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.
andromeduck|2 years ago
Rest & vest types are still doing fine, it's the passionate/care-a-lots that are increasingly burning out and disengaging or leaving.
geekasm|2 years ago
dns_snek|2 years ago
baron816|2 years ago
Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.
But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.
So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.
Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.
voiceblue|2 years ago
mizzao|2 years ago
huevosabio|2 years ago
Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.
skybrian|2 years ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs
eftychis|2 years ago
There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.
If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.
mcmcmc|2 years ago
And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.
unknown|2 years ago
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lutarezj|2 years ago
Rebelgecko|2 years ago
tmpDn2Gw3PeB3|2 years ago
One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.
Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.
The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.
My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.
All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.
redcobra762|2 years ago
This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.
mrintegrity|2 years ago
cageface|2 years ago
gumballindie|2 years ago
What ruined it for me was interviewing ex googlers. Not the PhD levels, but IC. To be fair none passed the inteview. Perhaps it was just the UK google offices. Similar for facebook. At facebook some of the people I know working there are abolutely vile. The types that threatened their coworkers and somehow got away with it. Each organisation favours a certain type and it all comes down from the top.
treprinum|2 years ago
deanCommie|2 years ago
The most toxic, conceited, selfish, inflexible, basically the worst stereotype of "genius asshole" engineers I've ever studied with, or worked with, all wound up at Google.
And is it a surprise when the entire interview process consists of "Are you good at computer science?"
elektrontamer|2 years ago
choppaface|2 years ago
mschuster91|2 years ago
This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.
And that email quote is also interesting on its own:
> Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.
I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.
deanCommie|2 years ago
On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?
In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.
This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.
BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)
Once you grow past a certain size, you lose it.
a_vanderbilt|2 years ago
sidcool|2 years ago
hiAndrewQuinn|2 years ago
tdb7893|2 years ago
It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.
glimshe|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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JKCalhoun|2 years ago
Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.
I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.
It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.
neom|2 years ago
Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...
siwatanejo|2 years ago
This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).
ksplicer|2 years ago
taurath|2 years ago
Their promotion process probably has more to do with product fragmentation as anything.
dieortin|2 years ago
darth_avocado|2 years ago
Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.
Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.
eru|2 years ago
poundofshrimp|2 years ago
Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?
debok|2 years ago
mikpanko|2 years ago
Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.
Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.
Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.
a_vanderbilt|2 years ago
dash2|2 years ago
Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.
pgeorgi|2 years ago
knorker|2 years ago
There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).
Aeolun|2 years ago
What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?
xyst|2 years ago
lordswork|2 years ago
ChicagoDave|2 years ago
pjmlp|2 years ago
Thanks Ben.
siliconc0w|2 years ago
ptmcc|2 years ago
pants2|2 years ago
gmerc|2 years ago
The non profit people never stood a chance.
heads|2 years ago
There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
neilv|2 years ago
From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".
Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.
For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.
closeparen|2 years ago
Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.
red_admiral|2 years ago
> ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal.
Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get.
I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.
Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.
nostrademons|2 years ago
Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.
nigelk|2 years ago
It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.
alephnerd|2 years ago
lumost|2 years ago
There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.
unknown|2 years ago
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DiggyJohnson|2 years ago
kweingar|2 years ago
pompino|2 years ago
throwaway2037|2 years ago
V-eHGsd_|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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alexeiz|2 years ago
When you have a lot of mediocre developers, you can shift them around from one project to another all day long, but it won't improve your bottom line. The only solution is to fire them. Unfortunately for Google without the change in the hiring process, they will continue to hire the same kind of people that they just fired. From this perspective Google has become the "normal" company a long time ago.
petesergeant|2 years ago
Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.
The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.
It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.
It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place
jillesvangurp|2 years ago
Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.
glompers|2 years ago
It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.
Niksko|2 years ago
I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.
eesmith|2 years ago
To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?
avgcorrection|2 years ago
So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?
riku_iki|2 years ago
or abusing monopoly and network effect.
lnxg33k1|2 years ago
The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.
For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares
tock|2 years ago
trinsic2|2 years ago
rimeice|2 years ago
renewiltord|2 years ago
No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.
In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.
tavavex|2 years ago
makerofthings|2 years ago
max_|2 years ago
If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."
Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...
apienx|2 years ago
That explains a lot! ;-)
kderbyma|2 years ago
jacquesm|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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gws|2 years ago
I wish they had valued users above all else
rayxi271828|2 years ago
My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.
I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?
Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...
The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".
The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.
langsoul-com|2 years ago
There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.
unknown|2 years ago
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yard2010|2 years ago
wslh|2 years ago
[1] https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-goog...
ipaddr|2 years ago
gorjusborg|2 years ago
toyg|2 years ago
29athrowaway|2 years ago
neilv|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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Lamad1234|2 years ago
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0881023458168|2 years ago
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edgyquant|2 years ago
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teddyh|2 years ago
John23832|2 years ago
I’d personally stick with the common “caretaker” or “guardians” though. “Child-raisers” really comes across as just wanting to say something different.
dang|2 years ago
We detached this offtopic subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054206.
Grimblewald|2 years ago
stevage|2 years ago
I have friends who are child raisers but not biological parents.
The main point is whether you are a primary carer for a child below school age.
OJFord|2 years ago
red_admiral|2 years ago
This term was not meant to be a commentary on the kind of language that comes out of HR departments, nor a statement on gender identity.
unknown|2 years ago
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rightbyte|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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Ygg2|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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Clubber|2 years ago
Who's more of a parent, the guy who knocks up a woman and leaves forever, or the step-dad who actually raises the kid for 18+ years?
piddydiddy|2 years ago