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Comment by rawrmaan | Hacker News Reader

The new CEO is the former President of Product Development at Oracle...I wanna puke. Oracle has some of the most hated products in the industry. I hope he's able to adapt to Google's style and not the other way around.

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He's going to be used as the heavy-hitter salesman that goes around and says "I see you're using Oracle, I know Oracle, trust me when I say GCP will meet your needs" and he'll have tremendous credibility saying that.

That's great and all, and I'm sure he'll be very successful at that, but what if he also tries to develop some products?

That's not what someone in his role is expected to be doing. He may support, or defund, certain initiatives, but he won't be the "originator" of anything major.

The better question is, "But what type of people will he gravitate towards hiring to develop some products?"

That's a reason to bring on an Account Executive, not leadership for the whole department. I doubt he'll be on sales calls.

Depends who the customer is. If you're trying to grab another Spotify, you absolutely put your department leadership on the sales call.

The CEO is the most important salesperson. Meeting customers is 50% of the job.

For a small startup, yes. I could totally be wrong here, but I doubt that GCP will operate on that model.

It's just as important at a bigger company. CEOs end up traveling more as the company gets larger, mainly to meet customers, and it's especially critical if the customers are also big companies.

Not to be rude, but yes you are totally wrong here. Meeting with customers is 50% or more of the time commitment for a world-class enterprise-sales-company CEO.

Other companies are huge contracts, and simply won't sign on without that level of dedication. They demand it, and the CEO's give it.

CEOs and CTOs are often involved when working with a very large business. CTOs often end up giving presentations to the top brass about security and technological advantage. If you are high enough to have major influence on the product, you will end up doing sales.

We are an early GCP enterprise customer and Diane has met us numerous times. A class act.

Can you share anything more about this? I'd love to hear it. I think you shared the most relevant experience of any post so far.

he'll have tremendous credibility saying that

Why? A salesman says whatever he’s paid to say. Tomorrow he could move again and be flogging IBM’s joke of a cloud.

A good salesman knows keeping credibility is more important than keeping a job. I quit my position as a sales engineer when the company asked me to lie about the product's capabilities.

Except he's a deeply technical product guy with 20 years experience managing the development of the worlds most profitable database.

Its funny that Hacker News hates on Oracle, but their database is far ahead of the competition in a highly competitive market. Say what you want about their other products (that are indeed terrible), but that core database gets them billions in revenue for a reason.

Just a small correction. He was the applications VP. That's business software such as Fusion / EBiz. He wasn't responsible for the database.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Applications

False, at the time that Kurian left he was head of all product development reporting directly to Larry Ellison.

This isn't the first time Google has gone outside the company for a top leadership role. Vic Gundotra was another one--and that didn't work out too well.

But this is happening with increasing frequency even for mid-level leadership positions, and it is showing more and more in the culture.

Is there a reason to why google is doing this? From what I get from my friends Google has issues with employee growth and it's pretty easy to stagnate. If google keeps going outside for leadership roles then is it overlooking capable internal employees?

Companies typically hire outside people for leadership roles when they want to change their culture or gain some new industry connections. Promoting someone from within will reinforce the existing culture, for better or worse.

I think Google just can't find people internally who want to do it.

I know of two groups (one of maybe 10, and another maybe 30 engineers) that sat essentially leaderless for several months each before Google hired a manager from outside the company. Neither one of these, in my opinion, have a good handle on Google culture.

There is no real reward for becoming a manager (no more pay, no more level, no more nothing), but a lot of hassle, so very few engineers want to do it.

At least that is what I see from my limited vantage point.

It's also hard for those Googlers who want to do it to be given the chance, unless already senior enough on the technical ladder to correspond to the top 20% of technical people at Google (a far higher bar than the technical competence required of a manager).

Source: personal experience circa 2013-2015, when I was there and trying to transition from individual contributor and tech lead to first-time people manager. Of course I wasn't considering executive roles like this article is about.

It's because Google's culture is engineering focussed while pretending to be product focussed. As a result, Google breeds great engineers but not great product people. Also, their promotion process shamelessly promotes peer cannibalization. So, its easy for naive people to stagnate.

Source: Ex-googler.

> their promotion process shamelessly promotes peer cannibalization.

What does "peer cannibalization" mean?

It means that making your peers looks bad is as important as making yourself look good. There's only so many spots for promotion, so employees have to stab each other in the back in order to look impressive enough to be promoted.

Not sure that's a culture that only exists at Google... pretty much true at the higher levels of almost any big company that I've worked at.

i’ve only noticed at least teams/products in google that are more stagnant or don’t have as much work to do. therefore they compete and are territorial with the work. other products that are growing there is plenty for everyone

Wasn't Diane greene from VMWare?

She was one of its founders and its former CEO.

"hope he's able to adapt to Google's style and not the other way around"

For some areas, I agree. But Google does need some outside influence on how to sell/service the Fortune 500.

They are ceding business to Amazon not because Amazon is great at it, but only because Amazon is less terrible at it.

is Amazon (AWS) really bad at selling to the F500? What are they doing wrong?

They are good in their space, but aren't as good as companies that have more experience.

IBM, CA, etc can sell pure garbage because their sales folks understand how the game is played, who to please, etc. Amazon won't even do simple stuff like relatively minor redline changes to contract terms.

Also, by "good" I mean maximize revenue/sales/renewals. Not specifically delivering something good in the end.

At that level, he just isn't the guy making the decision to add a boolean type to the DB server or not. According to wikipedia, Oracle has 3000 products, each with their own management.

The role is organisation and team psychologist more than API design. If you want to rate his performance, the products are a worse indicator than, say, how well-adjusted and mentally stable his teams were...yeah, you're right. GCP is fucked.

Oh this is a huge red flag.

Although I'm not so sure what Google's style is, it's been changing so much in the past few years, and a lot of their slimy stuff has been exposed too.

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