6 ms·

Google wants employees to move faster

42 points by salil999 2y ago

xkbarkar 2y ago
Looks like Prabhakar Raghavan has become interwebs enemy nr1. Interesting.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> “People come to us because we are trusted,” Raghavan said. “They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.” Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >“They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to [us] Same last words from the Nokia and Blackberry CEOs when that new gizmo from Apple came out in 2007. >Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live? The Gavin Belson one.
- leosanchez 2y ago
  Isn't he the Google ads guy ?
  - Marazan 2y ago
    He used to be. Now he is head of Search. He became Head of Search at exactly the same time as when Google Search started becoming completely shit.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  Google deserves to burn at this point. They had the rest of the field lapped, they were set up for a victory prance into one of the most lucrative markets of all time, and Sundar has just burned all of it. Dude has zero long term strategic vision, he's a MBA bot set to "plunder light" and he's getting embarrassingly outplayed by Satya Nadella.
- afavour 2y ago
  I actually think he’s right. Us Hacker News types don’t trust Google at all but for the average person it’s where they go to find information, and we’ve seen time and time again that the majority either don’t understand or don’t care about many privacy concerns. All this stuff is a little handwavey but a 2023 report: https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Most-Trusted-Brands-2023.pdf https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Mos... Has a specific breakout about Google. Interestingly the subbrands (Google Maps particularly) are more trusted than Google as a whole, but it’s still relatively well trusted as a company.
  - Zigurd 2y ago
    Slide decks like that make me feel like there is another species out there for which brands matter. It's literally disorienting.
    - afavour 2y ago
      Those decks feel absurd but brands do matter. There’s a slide in there about hospitality brands… when staying in a new city I absolutely look to the hotel brand when making a reservation, because the experience tends to be very consistent across locations. It’s not like “ooh I have such a fondness for the Marriott logo”, it’s “I’d like a consistent experience so I go to Marriott”.
  - Clent 2y ago
    Data dumping a 57 page pdf about Global brands is the best way to communicate something specifically about Google. But based on the graph I assume you're talking about page 12 which has a graph of various Google products. The data only goes back to 2018 and ends in Apr 2023. There is a clear downward trend since then Google Maps is the least affected but is still down from the low. The trend I've seen is people on here have voice a significant lost trust over the past year. A loss of trust that is only growing. I feel its safe to assume we loss trust first since this is our industry. If we're losing trust and the general public has already losing trust, I expect that general public's trust to catch up soon and show a steeper decline. Anecdotally, I've already seen dissatisfaction with Google coming up more and more frequently in the areas of the internet I visit where the topics are far less technical. Unlike here those people are less aware of the alternatives. I expect that when people realize Google is the new Boeing, they will abandon it quickly. There are many alternatives.
paxys 2y ago
Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  The whole underlying message of move faster is: We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday? Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google so they can rest and vest, which is what Google is famous for and makes it a very desirable place to work. There was even a Googler's guide on Reddit a few years ago how to pretend to work from home while you play videogames all day and cash in 400k/year, with all the details on the theatrics needed to pass your peer performance review for years while working less than 20h/month, since nobody really checks in detail what your working on and why how long it should take, so you have a lot of avenues to pretend to look busy while relaxing. Doesn't sounds like the place where you'd need to miss your kid's birthday to me, unless maybe you hate your family.
    - 2y ago
sgt101 2y ago
He's got problems... He says his teams are working 120hrs a week, but he wants them to work more. I think that this is not going to happen!
- letmeinhere 2y ago
  I thought you must be misrepresenting the article, but no, its almost as bad as you said: > He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said. psychotic
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    I mean, if those engineers were doing it by choice and getting million dollar bonuses each, maybe not. But probably.
  - hawkice 2y ago
    But image generation doesn't matter. It's a fun toy but it's not part of any professional workflow they care about, doesn't impact long term strategic goals, etc. It's literally just PR mistake they're covering for. Praise reveals priorities. They don't care about getting things right the first time. They don't care about important projects. That's the inference.
- tyingq 2y ago
  "He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner." So, assuming they work 7 days a week, that's 17 hours a day. Leaving 7 hours for commuting, sleep and life. And it feels like he's offering that up as an example of "move faster". Just wow.
  - 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
    I hope the executives are at least sharing some of their PEDs. Coffee is not enough for those teams...
intexpress 2y ago
Google wants employees to move to another company faster
renegade-otter 2y ago
Unless I know exactly what I am looking for, I don't remember the last time I used Google to discover information. First it was one sponsored link - now it's SEVEN. At some point even the masses catch on to the grift. This is a desperate "something DO something" plea.
cletus 2y ago
Having worked at Google, this is entirely self-inflicted. This once internal now leaked video [1] summed it up pretty well. There is so much process you have to go through to do anything. A lot of it makes sense but it comes at the expense of speed. More than a decade ago OKR (Objectives and Key Results) culture set in where once you just worked on things until they were ready. OKRs are really insidious because what qualifies as an acceptable goal depends on how much you're liked and the political muscle your org has. It also means the smallest unit of time because a quarter and if you had to approach another team for help, the soonest they would help you was the following quarter and that's only if you had the muscle to get onto those OKRs. At a more macro level, Google is insanely profitable. I'm not sure what the current employee count but the per-employee profit is probably sitting at or above $500,000 per year. That's after all expenses. Yet the relentless pursuit of profits (which shrink over time) means further exploitation of surplus labor value. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  Google makes >90% of profits from Search and Ads. Even if you group in half of gsuite for Gmail and all of Android (for the default search app) - that's still not even half of the company. The profit per employee there is probably close to $1.5M - and that's after average compensation above $500k.
  - cletus 2y ago
    And we arrive at collectivism vs individualism and the tendency of people to privatize gains but socialize losses. Yes, search and ads are the golden goose but so many things contribute to that success. Chrome, for example, is absolutely crucial to search quality. Maps is huge. Android is also critical. Search and ads use a whole bunch of infra (eg Borg, storage, load balancing, serving infra, traffic management, data center infra and so on). Even the people who manage all the corp Linux distributions and video conferencing infra contribute. Source control, build infra, testing infra and so on. Deciding who does and doesn't "contribute" for something so interconnected like this quickly devolves into a political exercise at best and a popularity contest at worst.
rdtsc 2y ago
> Raghavan clarified that the failure in image generation wasn’t due to a lack of effort. > “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said. So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?
- paxys 2y ago
  "Our problems aren't due to lack of effort. But you all have to put in more time and effort to fix our problems." Makes perfect sense.
- aikinai 2y ago
  The article drops that quote with no context, but presumably he's admitting in this case it was an error of judgement/design, not execution.
korginator 2y ago
“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said. “There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said. Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.” After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day. Early in my career I'd have been angry, surprised or in denial at hearing this sort of rancid garbage. Now I see this in so many organizations, this is just a symptom of the deeper rot and top-down dysfunction.
- christkv 2y ago
  Its really just the effect of empire building. Too much money allowing non operative people to flourish and new administrative layers to be added that then have to justify themselves by making operative employees report thing they can quantify to show their bosses in the hope to climb the ladder. Its just a symptom of all big organizations in the west these days be it private or public.
- 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
  I've worked 100 hours a week for a few months to finish my thesis on time. It felt like the upper limit of mental work you can sustain for more than a single-digit number of weeks when you are 100% motivated and deeply care about the work. But 120 hours? Do they even shower? RTO must be fun for their colleagues. This level of human depravity is just sick. And for what?
MiscIdeaMaker99 2y ago
I've never heard of a company that wants their employees to move slower.
- markild 2y ago
  Boeing?
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > I've never heard of a company that wants their employees to move slower. Companies don't formulate it this way, but in practice, by - having lots of meetings - introducing more and more red tape - introducing more and more layers of management - introducing more and more reporting requirements - ... they actually practice it.
- Traubenfuchs 2y ago
  My dad likes to tell the story of him working at a post office as a teenager. He was very motivated and worked fast, so his colleagues urged him to slow down, otherwise they would get more work.
frob 2y ago
> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner" Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit. But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees. "Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."
- hawkice 2y ago
  It's probably also worth clarifying that workload necessarily excludes anyone who observes the Sabbath.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  Prabhakar has been enabled by Sundar at every step. The two are in alignment. If you are disgusted by Prabhakar, you should be disgusted by Sundar too, he has just as much contempt for the workers, he just hides his cards better.
- philk10 2y ago
  "Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” " - well, use Math to work out that people working 100-120 hours a week is not productive
lupire 2y ago
What a clown. Should have thought about 10 minutes into the future before he hobbled the company by laying off staff and sending everyone rushing to the competition. When you're publicly admitting that the competition is eating your lunch, you need to use your $100B cash hoard to invest in catching up, paying people to take the risk on you instead of working for the winners.
jinushaun 2y ago
Executives need to realize that startups move faster not because they work more hours. They move faster because there is less red tape, less bureaucracy and less process than large companies. Individual employees have more freedom to make their own choices, instead of being restrained by top down OKRs.
fidotron 2y ago
Prabhakar Raghavan has become suddenly famous this week. This is beginning to look like a scapegoating exercise. Google have their serious problems, but they extend far further than just this guy.
Zigurd 2y ago
The notion that startups are more efficient at creating great products is a massive case of survivorship bias, a subclass of selection bias. A full facepalm duh! Either he does not understand that, and that's bad, or he is trying to put one over on some very smart employees who do understand that, and that won't work. You can make a big company less inefficient, but everyone who thinks startup efficiency is simply a culture you can recreate inside a big company is going to be disappointed.
dwb 2y ago
“Shorter wavelength execution” is the kind of twaddle only someone that far from actually building things could spout. Contemptible!
- ryandrake 2y ago
  It sounds like something a management consultant dressed up in an engineer costume would say.
John23832 2y ago
I really cannot express how much I dislike these midlevel management figures that do nothing but talk and engage in LinkedIn style virtue signaling. They don't touch code, they don't touch any technologies (not even making prototypes so they they have a grounded understanding). They just regurgitate the socio-business zeitgeist. "Oh we must get more lean. Oh these workers must be lazy. AI AI AI". And yet their multi million dollar pay packages MUST be equitable compensation for their in-the-box unoriginal business thinking. They went to HBS or SBS... they must be thought leaders, right? Instead of sacking the people who dig ditches, what if half the talking heads left? I'm sure THAT would actually clear the air.
thedonkeycometh 2y ago
[dead]
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
He's about 2 years too slow. Mark Zuckerberg already proclaimed 2022 "The year of efficiency." However, I have the billion dollar solution in 4 easy steps: 0. LLM completer plugins for editors 1. Get everyone escooters that go 60 mph / 96 kph (They exist) 2. We need to cut coffee for cost reasons, so why not issue caffeine-methylphenidate pills 3. Because RTO is still too inefficient, make everyone live at work Bonus: If you want employees to move faster, encourage them to have kids. Busy people GSD.

42 points by salil999 2y ago

Looks like Prabhakar Raghavan has become interwebs enemy nr1. Interesting.

> “People come to us because we are trusted,” Raghavan said. “They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.” Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?

Rinzler89 2y ago
>“They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to [us] Same last words from the Nokia and Blackberry CEOs when that new gizmo from Apple came out in 2007. >Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live? The Gavin Belson one.
leosanchez 2y ago
Isn't he the Google ads guy ?
- Marazan 2y ago
  He used to be. Now he is head of Search. He became Head of Search at exactly the same time as when Google Search started becoming completely shit.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
Google deserves to burn at this point. They had the rest of the field lapped, they were set up for a victory prance into one of the most lucrative markets of all time, and Sundar has just burned all of it. Dude has zero long term strategic vision, he's a MBA bot set to "plunder light" and he's getting embarrassingly outplayed by Satya Nadella.
afavour 2y ago
I actually think he’s right. Us Hacker News types don’t trust Google at all but for the average person it’s where they go to find information, and we’ve seen time and time again that the majority either don’t understand or don’t care about many privacy concerns. All this stuff is a little handwavey but a 2023 report: https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Most-Trusted-Brands-2023.pdf https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Mos... Has a specific breakout about Google. Interestingly the subbrands (Google Maps particularly) are more trusted than Google as a whole, but it’s still relatively well trusted as a company.
- Zigurd 2y ago
  Slide decks like that make me feel like there is another species out there for which brands matter. It's literally disorienting.
  - afavour 2y ago
    Those decks feel absurd but brands do matter. There’s a slide in there about hospitality brands… when staying in a new city I absolutely look to the hotel brand when making a reservation, because the experience tends to be very consistent across locations. It’s not like “ooh I have such a fondness for the Marriott logo”, it’s “I’d like a consistent experience so I go to Marriott”.
- Clent 2y ago
  Data dumping a 57 page pdf about Global brands is the best way to communicate something specifically about Google. But based on the graph I assume you're talking about page 12 which has a graph of various Google products. The data only goes back to 2018 and ends in Apr 2023. There is a clear downward trend since then Google Maps is the least affected but is still down from the low. The trend I've seen is people on here have voice a significant lost trust over the past year. A loss of trust that is only growing. I feel its safe to assume we loss trust first since this is our industry. If we're losing trust and the general public has already losing trust, I expect that general public's trust to catch up soon and show a steeper decline. Anecdotally, I've already seen dissatisfaction with Google coming up more and more frequently in the areas of the internet I visit where the topics are far less technical. Unlike here those people are less aware of the alternatives. I expect that when people realize Google is the new Boeing, they will abandon it quickly. There are many alternatives.

paxys 2y ago

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".

nine_zeros 2y ago
The whole underlying message of move faster is: We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday? Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google so they can rest and vest, which is what Google is famous for and makes it a very desirable place to work. There was even a Googler's guide on Reddit a few years ago how to pretend to work from home while you play videogames all day and cash in 400k/year, with all the details on the theatrics needed to pass your peer performance review for years while working less than 20h/month, since nobody really checks in detail what your working on and why how long it should take, so you have a lot of avenues to pretend to look busy while relaxing. Doesn't sounds like the place where you'd need to miss your kid's birthday to me, unless maybe you hate your family.
  - 2y ago

sgt101 2y ago

He's got problems... He says his teams are working 120hrs a week, but he wants them to work more. I think that this is not going to happen!

letmeinhere 2y ago
I thought you must be misrepresenting the article, but no, its almost as bad as you said: > He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said. psychotic
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  I mean, if those engineers were doing it by choice and getting million dollar bonuses each, maybe not. But probably.
- hawkice 2y ago
  But image generation doesn't matter. It's a fun toy but it's not part of any professional workflow they care about, doesn't impact long term strategic goals, etc. It's literally just PR mistake they're covering for. Praise reveals priorities. They don't care about getting things right the first time. They don't care about important projects. That's the inference.
tyingq 2y ago
"He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner." So, assuming they work 7 days a week, that's 17 hours a day. Leaving 7 hours for commuting, sleep and life. And it feels like he's offering that up as an example of "move faster". Just wow.
- 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
  I hope the executives are at least sharing some of their PEDs. Coffee is not enough for those teams...

intexpress 2y ago

Google wants employees to move to another company faster

renegade-otter 2y ago

Unless I know exactly what I am looking for, I don't remember the last time I used Google to discover information. First it was one sponsored link - now it's SEVEN. At some point even the masses catch on to the grift. This is a desperate "something DO something" plea.

cletus 2y ago

Having worked at Google, this is entirely self-inflicted. This once internal now leaked video [1] summed it up pretty well. There is so much process you have to go through to do anything. A lot of it makes sense but it comes at the expense of speed. More than a decade ago OKR (Objectives and Key Results) culture set in where once you just worked on things until they were ready. OKRs are really insidious because what qualifies as an acceptable goal depends on how much you're liked and the political muscle your org has. It also means the smallest unit of time because a quarter and if you had to approach another team for help, the soonest they would help you was the following quarter and that's only if you had the muscle to get onto those OKRs. At a more macro level, Google is insanely profitable. I'm not sure what the current employee count but the per-employee profit is probably sitting at or above $500,000 per year. That's after all expenses. Yet the relentless pursuit of profits (which shrink over time) means further exploitation of surplus labor value. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Google makes >90% of profits from Search and Ads. Even if you group in half of gsuite for Gmail and all of Android (for the default search app) - that's still not even half of the company. The profit per employee there is probably close to $1.5M - and that's after average compensation above $500k.
- cletus 2y ago
  And we arrive at collectivism vs individualism and the tendency of people to privatize gains but socialize losses. Yes, search and ads are the golden goose but so many things contribute to that success. Chrome, for example, is absolutely crucial to search quality. Maps is huge. Android is also critical. Search and ads use a whole bunch of infra (eg Borg, storage, load balancing, serving infra, traffic management, data center infra and so on). Even the people who manage all the corp Linux distributions and video conferencing infra contribute. Source control, build infra, testing infra and so on. Deciding who does and doesn't "contribute" for something so interconnected like this quickly devolves into a political exercise at best and a popularity contest at worst.

rdtsc 2y ago

> Raghavan clarified that the failure in image generation wasn’t due to a lack of effort. > “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said. So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?

paxys 2y ago
"Our problems aren't due to lack of effort. But you all have to put in more time and effort to fix our problems." Makes perfect sense.
aikinai 2y ago
The article drops that quote with no context, but presumably he's admitting in this case it was an error of judgement/design, not execution.

korginator 2y ago

“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said. “There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said. Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.” After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day. Early in my career I'd have been angry, surprised or in denial at hearing this sort of rancid garbage. Now I see this in so many organizations, this is just a symptom of the deeper rot and top-down dysfunction.

christkv 2y ago
Its really just the effect of empire building. Too much money allowing non operative people to flourish and new administrative layers to be added that then have to justify themselves by making operative employees report thing they can quantify to show their bosses in the hope to climb the ladder. Its just a symptom of all big organizations in the west these days be it private or public.
0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
I've worked 100 hours a week for a few months to finish my thesis on time. It felt like the upper limit of mental work you can sustain for more than a single-digit number of weeks when you are 100% motivated and deeply care about the work. But 120 hours? Do they even shower? RTO must be fun for their colleagues. This level of human depravity is just sick. And for what?

MiscIdeaMaker99 2y ago

I've never heard of a company that wants their employees to move slower.

markild 2y ago
Boeing?
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> I've never heard of a company that wants their employees to move slower. Companies don't formulate it this way, but in practice, by - having lots of meetings - introducing more and more red tape - introducing more and more layers of management - introducing more and more reporting requirements - ... they actually practice it.
Traubenfuchs 2y ago
My dad likes to tell the story of him working at a post office as a teenager. He was very motivated and worked fast, so his colleagues urged him to slow down, otherwise they would get more work.

frob 2y ago

> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner" Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit. But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees. "Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."

hawkice 2y ago
It's probably also worth clarifying that workload necessarily excludes anyone who observes the Sabbath.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
Prabhakar has been enabled by Sundar at every step. The two are in alignment. If you are disgusted by Prabhakar, you should be disgusted by Sundar too, he has just as much contempt for the workers, he just hides his cards better.
philk10 2y ago
"Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” " - well, use Math to work out that people working 100-120 hours a week is not productive

lupire 2y ago

What a clown. Should have thought about 10 minutes into the future before he hobbled the company by laying off staff and sending everyone rushing to the competition. When you're publicly admitting that the competition is eating your lunch, you need to use your $100B cash hoard to invest in catching up, paying people to take the risk on you instead of working for the winners.

jinushaun 2y ago

Executives need to realize that startups move faster not because they work more hours. They move faster because there is less red tape, less bureaucracy and less process than large companies. Individual employees have more freedom to make their own choices, instead of being restrained by top down OKRs.

fidotron 2y ago

Prabhakar Raghavan has become suddenly famous this week. This is beginning to look like a scapegoating exercise. Google have their serious problems, but they extend far further than just this guy.

Zigurd 2y ago

The notion that startups are more efficient at creating great products is a massive case of survivorship bias, a subclass of selection bias. A full facepalm duh! Either he does not understand that, and that's bad, or he is trying to put one over on some very smart employees who do understand that, and that won't work. You can make a big company less inefficient, but everyone who thinks startup efficiency is simply a culture you can recreate inside a big company is going to be disappointed.

dwb 2y ago

“Shorter wavelength execution” is the kind of twaddle only someone that far from actually building things could spout. Contemptible!

ryandrake 2y ago
It sounds like something a management consultant dressed up in an engineer costume would say.

John23832 2y ago

I really cannot express how much I dislike these midlevel management figures that do nothing but talk and engage in LinkedIn style virtue signaling. They don't touch code, they don't touch any technologies (not even making prototypes so they they have a grounded understanding). They just regurgitate the socio-business zeitgeist. "Oh we must get more lean. Oh these workers must be lazy. AI AI AI". And yet their multi million dollar pay packages MUST be equitable compensation for their in-the-box unoriginal business thinking. They went to HBS or SBS... they must be thought leaders, right? Instead of sacking the people who dig ditches, what if half the talking heads left? I'm sure THAT would actually clear the air.

thedonkeycometh 2y ago

[dead]

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

He's about 2 years too slow. Mark Zuckerberg already proclaimed 2022 "The year of efficiency." However, I have the billion dollar solution in 4 easy steps: 0. LLM completer plugins for editors 1. Get everyone escooters that go 60 mph / 96 kph (They exist) 2. We need to cut coffee for cost reasons, so why not issue caffeine-methylphenidate pills 3. Because RTO is still too inefficient, make everyone live at work Bonus: If you want employees to move faster, encourage them to have kids. Busy people GSD.