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Culture Change at Google

• 0881023458168 3y ago
  [flagged]
• heads 3y ago
  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?
  • neilv 3y 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? 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 3y ago
    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.
    • lmm 3y ago
      Everyone else's salary is going up at the same rate, more and more jobs are there, and it's de facto illegal to build any more housing anywhere nearby. Of course house prices are growing without limit.
• V-eHGsd_ 3y ago
  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.
  • infotainment 3y ago
    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.
    • V-eHGsd_ 3y ago
      yeah, eric stepped down in 2011 and larry took over as CEO and from the inside it felt fine for a while. but larry definitely got disinterested after a few years and the company felt rudderless by like the end of 2014.
    • k2enemy 3y ago
      > It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence. Another option is that he saw the trajectory of the company culture and wanted out.
  • kyrra 3y ago
    Eric leaving. Larry and Sergey stepping back. And the hiring of Ruth Porat as CFO. My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.
• siliconc0w 3y ago
  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.
  • ptmcc 3y ago
    And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty.
    • travisgriggs 3y ago
      It has always been my theory/belief that long periods of demoralization actually get rid of a disproportionately higher amount of good talent. When the company starts to smell, those that can move on, because they’re in demand elsewhere as well, will do so. You’re then left with those that hope you don’t let them go, but are less confident or capable in their abilities to find employment elsewhere.
    • antupis 3y ago
      I think there are two ways. The first is basically what good sports teams do (or Netflix at least was doing) where you continuously fire people who don't perform wanted at levels but also do very rigorous hiring and pay very well. Then there is cut fast and deep and shuffle organization at the same time which also works if you do that when needed and very rarely like once in 10-15 years Facebook might have pulled this and the company looks like it is in much better shape than Google or Amazon.
    • Clubber 3y ago
      >And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty. It's a huge red flag. Layoffs typically lead to more people leaving the company after the fact because of the instability. I was one of the "last man standing," after a company did this over a period of a few quarters and I ended up leaving shortly after. They no longer had anyone to maintain their software. Oops. They taught this in business school back in the 1990s. I don't know why a company the caliber of Google wouldn't understand this. It could be the execs think that Google is such a stellar place to work that none of the remaining people would dare leave. It could be the execs are so self concerned, they don't care about anything other than their bonuses and just make sure to get cuts in before each quarter ends to pad their bonus. It could be business schools just don't teach this anymore.
• baron816 3y ago
  > 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.
  • huevosabio 3y ago
    They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP. Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.
    • vlovich123 3y ago
      Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons: * Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google * most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP * A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk * Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere). It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
• max_ 3y ago
  "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." Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleExitLetter/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...
• neom 3y ago
  Reminds me of the recent blog post by Sir Adrian Cockcroft. Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-company-5f8759ad018e https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...
• ChicagoDave 3y ago
  Ben was also a co-creator of the once ubiquitous Subversion source control software.
  • pjmlp 3y ago
    Very happy user until 2019, until the winds of change were forced upon me. Thanks Ben.
• petesergeant 3y 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
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    > Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares? So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?
    • galkk 3y ago
      Noogler - new googler. not “never googler”.
      • avgcorrection 3y ago
        When you can’t parody reality because it just outdoes your efforts.
    • petesergeant 3y ago
      My eyes are frequently googly
  • riku_iki 3y ago
    > they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. or abusing monopoly and network effect.
  • eesmith 3y ago
• darth_avocado 3y ago
  > 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.
  • eru 3y ago
    Sounds like their internal interest rates have gone up?
• zamfi 3y ago
  Is any company still like this? 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.
  • 2-718-281-828 3y ago
    > You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year. _total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.
    • IX-103 3y ago
      Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in. *By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.
    • summerlight 3y ago
      If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.
      • 3y ago
• kweingar 3y ago
  Is there any tech company, big or small, with the same kind of dynamic engineering culture that Google once had?
  • V-eHGsd_ 3y ago
    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.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    I can think of two: Digital Equipment Corp and Sun. Also, first 10 years of AWS was probably ridiculous good.
  • pompino 3y ago
    They permanently harmed the world with their spying technologies, what exactly is there to celebrate of their culture?
• kderbyma 3y ago
  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
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    As well as lots of stuff they acquired and left to rot.
    • a_vanderbilt 3y ago
      I think that's Google hemartia. They execute really well initially, but falter on maintaining and nurturing ideas and products. The internal incentives regarding promotions and pay amplify the problem. Maintaining or improving a product isn't as impactful to one's career as creating an entirely new one. They have a half dozen chat apps because they unintentionally created an engineering "crabs in the bucket" situation. Not to say they are anywhere near as bad as the companies who do it on purpose a la stack ranking though.
      • jacquesm 3y ago
        I think another important factor is that what's a viable business to one party isn't worth it to Google simply because they can use that engineering talent more effectively in a monetary sense elsewhere. Even spinning them out doesn't make sense from a numbers perspective. The big problem with that is that they utterly ruin the landscape for everybody who isn't Google and who would operate just fine if it weren't for the size 20 boots giant that tramples all over the space before giving up on it.
• hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  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.
  • glimshe 3y ago
    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.
    • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
      >unless it's for the pay Luckily, that's the only reason I do anything at all!
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • tdb7893 3y ago
    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.
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Pro tip: Turn reader mode on
  • neilv 3y ago
    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.
• Lamad1234 3y ago
  [dead]
• 0881023458168 3y ago
  [flagged]
• tock 3y ago
  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.
• poundofshrimp 3y ago
  > 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?
  • debok 3y ago
    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.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  > 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.
  • a_vanderbilt 3y ago
    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.
  • deanCommie 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• tptacek 3y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Which is the difference between a very small town (might have a Walmart!) and the entire population of Montgomery, AL. With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.
• gmerc 3y ago
  If anything OpenAI demod just how quickly culture can be changed by paying massive salary packages. The non profit people never stood a chance.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  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.
  • tavavex 3y ago
    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.
    • thowawatp302 3y ago
      I work at one of those SV Fortune 500 companies and I’d absolutely give pause during hiring if I saw google in their resume I might be an outlier
    • OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
      He's like 30% correct. Before, hiring someone from Google was an accomplishment, because they were so rare. Now, there's so many people with Google on their resume, most refusing to downsize in TC, that even mediocre positions are filled with ex-Google applicants.
      • tavavex 3y ago
        Is that really because Google workers are seen as worse employees (like what the original post said), or just because the job market is now suddenly loaded with thousands of Google employees who'd just been laid off?
• hintymad 3y ago
  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
  • piva00 3y ago
    > 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.
    • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • englishspot 3y ago
      I've been hesitant to comment on this to avoid sounding "bitter", but you're absolutely right.. it's telling that quite a number of folks are so laser-focused on the money as opposed to the innovation. at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.
      • erhaetherth 3y ago
• redcobra762 3y ago
  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.
  • elektrontamer 3y ago
    How is that even possible? Won't he just get exposed in the first performace review? Or is he in some cushy managerial role?
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      Your boss got no clue how hard or easy your work is usually. Even if he is a good programmer you need to more or less work side by side to get a grip on someones performance. And smooth talkers game peer reviews.
    • romanovcode 3y ago
      I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud. The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job. That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that experience because I was just starting out, the scammer indirectly taught me much more about how to scam and lie your way to the top, how to sell your ideas to unaware management and most importantly - that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.
      • boxed 3y ago
        You learned how to assume the world is broken, and not fix it. That's the path back to a hunter gatherer society. I think that's the wrong lesson to learn.
• VirusNewbie 3y ago
  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.
  • mlrtime 3y ago
    You're not wrong, likewise I've heard Meta can be seen as the company that started the TC war by paying 99% for their IC positions. 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 3y ago
    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.
  • tech_tuna 3y ago
    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.
• sidcool 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
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• ipaddr 3y ago
  There is pre IPO Google culture and post
  • gorjusborg 3y ago
    Probably true for most public companies.
• flklklklkl 3y ago
  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.
  • saagarjha 3y ago
    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.
    • taurath 3y ago
      Red badges and the equivalent elsewhere make up an astounding amount of who actually works at most major companies. They’re the poor and working class to the gentry (FTEs) and the elites (FTE executives). They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties, for goodness sake.
      • flklklklkl 3y ago
        While I'm hesitant to give in to my inner cynic, the anecdote about walking into the local, on-site IT in the post about his first day at google linked in the first post, especially stood out in my mind. Someone's manning that walk-in station - do they have the same benefit as the engineers? Half of which allegedly have PhD's, mind you.
        • taurath 3y ago
• gws 3y ago
  “The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else” I wish they had valued users above all else
  • langsoul-com 3y ago
    That's Amazon. There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.
  • rayxi271828 3y ago
    > wish they had valued users above all else 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.
• siwatanejo 3y ago
  > 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...).
  • ksplicer 3y ago
    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.
  • taurath 3y ago
    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.
  • dieortin 3y ago
    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.
• apienx 3y ago
  > The unstated cultural principle was: "products come and go“ That explains a lot! ;-)
• dash2 3y ago
  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.
  • xyst 3y ago
    I see you went to the b-school that taught the “cOnJoInEd tRiAnGlEs oF sUcCeSs!1!1”
  • knorker 3y ago
    > 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).
    • themaninthedark 3y ago
      See also the Boeing and MD merger. Also GE.
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    It seems like things were fine for the engineers when they ran things? What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?
  • pgeorgi 3y ago
    Google was most successful when it was "like a giant grad-school". Its downward trajectory coincides with it being run by McKinsey alums.
    • dash2 3y ago
      Maybe, but here's an alternative interpretation. Google discovered a money spigot. At first the money spigot funded lots of smart people having fun. (But not making any more money.) Then, as tends to happen, the money spigot attracted parasites. Now the spigot is, if not running dry, at least not growing. Times get tough. Management wants to focus. And so everything is less fun than it was. And the playground culture, which was irrelevant when the spigot was gushing, is an impediment to change. I think it's fair to say that Google's leadership is also not up to the job. But even if Satya Nadella were in charge, he'd still have to deal with the "grad school playground" aspect, which has as many negatives as positives from the vulgar point of view of making money. More generally, I want to argue that the common HN meme, "management and politics ruins everything from the point of view of us heroic engineers", is self-serving and naive. Management and politics are how companies run. If you don't want to do that job, fine; if you want to grumble about its pathologies, fine and you'll often be right; but don't kid yourself that it can be avoided.
• toyg 3y ago
  > 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.
• lnxg33k1 3y ago
  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
• wslh 3y ago
  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. [1] https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-google-search/ https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-goog...
• red_admiral 3y ago
  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.
  • alephnerd 3y ago
    Their onsite daycare was out of the way and oversubscribed. It was basically created for the Wojcicki sisters' children.
    • swozey 3y ago
      I'd never heard of Wojcicki. Nor this story from her Wiki. I was curious how a CEO of youtube was worth $800 million. > Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023. And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..
      • alephnerd 3y ago
        That's Susan Wojcicki (former Youtube CEO). Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the IB turned co-founder and CEO of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife
• edgyquant 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Ygg2 3y ago
    Honestly `child-raisers` is such an old and bigoted term. We now use `human-larva-caretakers`.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • teddyh 3y ago
    Because not everyone who raises a child is their actual parent. See also the need for terms like “caretaker”, and “legal guardian”.
    • bombcar 3y ago
      Child-raisers is the type of language you see from companies ending daycare.
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • n6242 3y ago
      Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Parents is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say parents we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.
      • truculent 3y ago
        Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Child-raiser is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say child-raisers we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > 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.
• tmpDn2Gw3PeB3 3y ago
  > 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.
• yard2010 3y ago
  Evil is not something that applies to a person only. A company can be evil too. Look at facebook
• softwaredoug 3y ago
  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.
  • hn8305823 3y 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. 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.
    • N1H1L 3y ago
      True. Honestly they should have taken the second bet in the 2010s and come up with a clean sheet 737 successor. It would have been bold, but the company would have been in far better shape today
• deleted 3y ago
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• altaltson 3y ago
  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. But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.
  • alephnerd 3y ago
    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.
  • dns_snek 3y ago
    Do you care to speculate about why the culture changed?
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• mikpanko 3y ago
  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. Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.
  • a_vanderbilt 3y ago
    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.
• rimeice 3y ago
  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.
• trinsic2 3y ago
  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
• piddydiddy 3y ago
  This is all a joke right? The "limited resources" party pooper fucking up your unsustainable "I wish uni could go on for ever" lifestyle?
• alexeiz 3y ago
  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.