Now a Giant, Google Works to Retain Nimble Minds | Hacker News Reader

Now a Giant, Google Works to Retain Nimble Minds

nytimes.com

41 pointsjakarta17 comments

What I wonder is, how much of this is simply inevitable? As a company grows larger it is bound to have more bureaucracy and become more sluggish. The best and brightest, especially those looking to work somewhere that is more agile will inevitably leave which causes a slow and painful brain drain in the company.

I have to think this has happened at most other tech companies in the past. I am sure at one time, Microsoft was looked at as a great place to work. Apple may have experienced a similar brain drain, especially in the 90s when Steve Jobs was out.

Then I have to wonder how you can counteract it. The only thing I can really think of is maybe if you ran the company like a decentralized flat organization where teams/products are virtually autonomous. I can only think of maybe one case where this has worked out, but its outside of tech.

what case are you referring to?

Berkshire Hathaway. Almost all of the business units are run by hungry entrepreneurs that live and breathe the business. They sold to Berkshire as a means of cashing out but most of the managers love to compete and stay on. As a result, they get to operate with an unusually high level of autonomy, I believe some of the managers only communicate with the home office once a year.

I think though the only reason that works is because Berkshire is buying great businesses with great managers at the helm. When you get into turnarounds/distressed businesses you end up having to roll up your sleeves and get involved much more frequently.

If you want to run a decentralized conglomerate, you have to look at what service you're providing the managers who actually run the business units. Otherwise, they're better off remaining independent, and you'll end up with a portfolio of mediocre businesses that consume more than they produce.

For Berkshire Hathaway, that service is liquidity. Buffett provides businesses with a large lump sum of cash, enough to ensure that they and their heirs will never have to work again unless they choose to. In return, they can continue running the business exactly as they did before. For many entrepreneurs, that's a very useful service.

The solution is to spin off sections of the company, so that the parent works more like a holding company.

The story about Google engineers taking offers from Facebook is seriously overblown. Google is a huge company (>10k employees) and there's always going to be some amount of churn. People don't work at a single company for their whole life anymore. Sure, Lars Rasmussen leaving was newsworthy, but was it really surprising to anybody after the death of Google Wave?

Overall Google still hires orders of magnitude more people than it loses.

They're missing the real story of what's going on right now. Because of a variety of circumstances, like...

* recession

* weak job market

* convergence of mobile/web/social technologies

* cloud computing reducing startup costs

... we are experiencing one of the biggest technological entrepreneurial boom times in history. That's why Google can't hold onto their brightest developers... but it's probably also happening to every big company in the computing industry.

While it's true that we have entrepreneurial boom, I don't think it's caused by the things you listed.

Recession/weak job market for programmers is a thing of the past, at least in Silicon Valley. See the hiring volume of Google and other established companies and Google and others publicly declaring it's a "war for talent". In a recession a company doesn't give 10% raise to every employee and has 2000+ open jobs.

Startup costs for web-based companies have been ridiculously low for the past 5 years. Several years ago I've been leasing a decent server for $100/month. Reducing this to $50/month has no meaningful impact on startup costs.

As to convergence - I don't see how that's relevant. There's always some "next big thing" that fires up people's imagination and fueling their startup ambitions.

If I were to opine, I would say that the biggest reason for the boom is stratospheric raise of Y Combinator and other companies following that model + raise of TechCrunch which focuses on reporting happenings in the startup world.

You've got it backwards. Techcrunch and YC are not in any way responsible for the economic environment that has been forming over the past decade. We're experiencing the second wave of the tech boom from the 1990's. TC and YC are cheerleaders for what was already occurring.

* Recession/weak job market for programmers is a thing of the past, at least in Silicon Valley.

The job market is weak, in terms of quality jobs and pay. Outside SV the job market for job seekers is absymal. There are many skilled programmers who don't live in SV and can earn more money developing websites and web apps than they can in the job market. Companies are being left with open jobs and unable to fill them because the talent is being eliminated from the job pool.

* Reducing this to $50/month has no meaningful impact on startup costs.

I was referring to the large-scale cloud computing, not replacing virtual dedicated hosts with VPS. I don't have exact numbers but I'd gamble that it costs 2 orders of magnitude less money to develop a large-scale datacenter than it did a decade ago.

From the outside, as a mere user of Google's services, it seems like unless you're working on something like Chrome OS, the most/best you can do as a developer is make sure nothing breaks. What are the biggest stories you read about Gmail?

At Facebook on the other hand, virtually any internal project could change, well, everything. There's an excitement to that which Google can't/won't offer. Facebook's business is change; all they think about all day is how to change things. Google has a vested interest in things staying the same (again, with the exception of Chrome OS).

Maybe the coding challenges Google faces just don't have the sex appeal Facebook's have. Maybe the "slowing down" they say Google is going through isn't about size or the limitations that come with. Maybe Google's just not as cutting-edge, not as thrilling as it once was. Maybe working for Zuckerberg and his 500 million closest friends, changing the way we communicate, and with a chance at being part of something revolutionary, is now most thrilling thing out there. Maybe by a lot.

I seem to have taken the same set of facts and arrived at the complete opposite conclusion from you. Facebook is sitting on one of the most popular, trafficked web sites in history and what have they given us: IM, photo sharing, a Twitter clone, a FourSquare clone, a social bookmarking knockoff, and now, wait for it ... e-mail!! "A chance at being part of something revolutionary" ... talk about understatement.

Say what you will about Google, they have failed at more original concepts over the past couple years than Facebook has attempted over the course of its entire existence.

I think you got it backwards. Sure, maybe Gmail didn't change that much over the years, but the pace at which Google is iterating and innovating is still impressive. Some of new products fail and many are not as visible as established services like Gmail, but they are still not afraid to take the risk and challenge their programmers. It may be less visible because Google is more decoupled, consisting of a number of more or less interconnected services, in contrast to the monolithic Facebook.

Finally I haven't heard about any autonomous vehicles coming from Facebook :)

"And like many big companies, Google has been acquiring new technologies, like Android, instead of inventing them."

Google acquired Android? Did I miss something or should that be reversed?

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/android

Thanks for the link. Totally missed that.

No new information in the article, I wonder why so many newspapers keep rehashing this 'story'.

Because they like these types of conflict narratives. It has a really good hook: Underdog vs Giant Corp who not long ago was everybody's favorite.

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