Larry and Sergey: A Valediction
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And yet, I think it is safe to say that Google basically defined the post-dot-com-bubble era, in a good way. So many things that comprise 'company culture' today and that have been emulated (whether willingly or out of pressure to stay competitive to other companies in the hiring market) by tech and non-tech companies around the world were pioneered by Google. Anyone who has actually worked in other industries will attest how much a breath of fresh air Google brought to corporate life. It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job.
So many of Larry's and Sergey's ideas were truly about organizing the world's information. That vision statement wasn't just words. It affected how Google and Googlers thought of things. My favorite example is Google Books. Is it an obvious ad-funnel? I doubt it. Or Google Street Maps, for that matter. And yet it has provided so much value to the world.
It's almost never a good idea to make gods out of people. But it is at the same time a terrible idea to make absolute demons out of them. And I think we stray too much into the latter territory just because it has become fashionable to shit on Google for the tiniest of things.
A potent element of Silicon Valley’s filter bubble is casting complaints against highly profitable, breathtakingly damaging behaviour as trivial.
This seems typically hyperbolic. What are examples of Google's "breathtakingly damaging behavior"?
It's easy to put the target on Google and ad-words and SEO but literally no one has ever scaled payment for internet content.
The countless people in India, Brazil etc who make livelihoods out of producing content make it out of Youtube ads, not Patreon.
I find roughly the same amount of useful information now as 20 years ago, buried by the content-mill spam from the “countless people” you mention.
I’d argue peak content may have been 2002 to 2007 or so. The original content mills (HuffPo 2005; Buzzfeed 2006) even had mostly useful content while honing in on the viral content form.
There’s likely more substance now than then, but the signal to noise ratio is so much worse you’d have a better chance of finding the needle in the haystack then.
I’d like to imagine people with something to say can and do still self-publish. Perhaps a reason posts about personal blogs are so popular here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
There’s also the project to build a government logged and censored search engine to get back into China.
https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-...
I’m not a proponent of wage-fixing, but I wouldn’t call the damage breathtaking.
Google allegedly was planning to re-enter the Chinese market, but Yahoo and Microsoft currently operate search engines there that comply with Chinese government regulation. Where is the outrage?
Google Street Maps was an incredible tool in dense urban environments before it became overwhelmed with sponsored pins. 2016 was the beginning of the effort to monetize it, and now it's overloaded with sponsored pins/badges that it's nearly nearly useless for most visual search tasks due to the noise.
>>> It's funny how much public perception is tied to the media pulse of a company. If you read comments on online boards today, you'd think Google was one of the worst companies out there.
Google's brand/reputation is suffering precisely because they positioned themselves as benevolent unstoppable underdog saviors (remember the whole "do no evil" thing?) who have since failed to live up to their mission.
Hypocrisy is lethal to branding narratives.
>>> It's a separate matter how some of it is coming back to bite them now that they have hired too many people who are more interested in activism than doing their job.
Dissonance poisons culture, and privilege doesn't toil in the mines for the sake of toil.
Alright lol
I think that's a reaction against how it's also fashionable to worship whatever Google does. And just cargo culting google practices can be damaging, at least from a selfish perspective. I lose developer hours because our entire 13-person company's (with 2.5-ish developers but 7 years worth of code) is hosted in a monorepo. I've now worked at two out of two companies that have gotten stuck because they built with an Angular stack and management refuses to switch to a stack that I can reliably hire or train juniors out of a bootcamp for, etc.
* The ridiculous nosql fad that led to a tsunami of databases with horribly invalid data because constraints aren't sexy.
* The ridiculous academic fetish that triggered the leetcode phenomenon and led to a tsunami of developers who can code a quicksort in their sleep but still don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly.
I don't understand this belief. Where does it come from? Junior engineers don't have the first clue about structuring code or data properly, whereas senior engineers do. Google's belief (probably) is that anyone able to quicksort in their sleep is either already good at the other stuff too, or is smart enough to pick it up over time. If they're wrong, companies will outhire and outcompete them eventually.
Exactly. This belief that the two correlate closely enough that you can supplant one kind of test (physically writing code, discussing it and architecting it) with another (leetcode) is massively, horre ndously wrong and damaging. The two do not correlate well. They correlate very badly.
Do you have any evidence? It seems to be working rather well for the companies that follow these practices.
You may speak derisively of "leetcoding" but it does demonstrate persistence, grit, speed of thought, and/or the ability to learn something difficult (algorithms, data structures, competition-style programming). It's not crazy to posit that people who are able to learn one hard thing well will probably also learn other hard things well. In fact, it should be the other way around. Why in the world would someone hardworking and intelligent not be able to pick up new skills?
To me it's absolutely insane that being good at architecture and good at algorithms and data structures are seen as mutually exclusive skills. They're not skiing and barbecuing.
Now I'll concede that Leetcode-style interviews are a terrible and stupid way for smaller companies to hire, because they don't have the candidate pipeline of a Google or FB or Amazon. But it isn't a wrong approach in and of itself. If that's true, someone should be making bank by hiring all the scores of talented devs that the megacorps reject for not being good "Leetcoders".
Plus, surely you're aware that the megacorps also have system-design interviews for all but entry-level candidates? That's where you're asked about architecture, tradeoffs, and high-level design decisions.
And while hacking the programming interview does demonstrate grit and persistence, it doesn't demonstrate actual programming skills. The worst part though is that it generates a mindset that "good programming skills" means "even more advanced leetcode".
I don't begrudge these people. A set of absurd incentives was put in place and they reacted to them accordingly.
It isn't good for Google either. The hires that came after this philosophy have achieved very little of note. The vast majority of post Gmail abject project failures have been built in house while the successes (maps, android) were bought.
Cool, so anecdotes, not actual data.
> it doesn't demonstrate actual programming skills.
It demonstrates ability to learn difficult things. You still haven't answered why junior devs hired this way are somehow incapable of learning good architectural practices. You also didn't address the fact that most of these companies also interview senior hires for system design and architecture.
> The hires that came after this philosophy have achieved very little of note
Photos. Chrome. Brain. Tensorflow. Kubernetes. Even Android didn't take off until 6 years after its acquisition. I don't have the time to research more but you get the idea.
The first thing I learned out of school was the developer's triangle. The triangle has three sides: fast, quality, and cheap. From the outside no matter where you stand you can only see three sides. If you want cheap its not going to be both fast and excellent quality. If you want fast its not going to be both cheap and great quality. Finally, if you want excellent quality its not going to be both fast and cheap.
It takes years for a developer to move from beginning through proficiency towards mastery. If you hire junior developers assume you are sacrificing both speed and quality for cheap. If you fail to develop your juniors your code will not achieve quality and your people will not become faster. Frameworks, or any layers of unnecessary abstraction, are not a replacement for training and experience. While this is mostly true for all platforms/technologies it is especially true for web technologies where everything is defined against the same set of standards that work the same cross browser and cross OS.
If your leadership were interested in product quality first then developers would be allowed to fail internally so that they could learn. You learn a lot from failure. It is part of growing, innovation, and making better product decisions. You separate the product from that learning through test automation, continuous integration, performance metrics, and automated complexity analysis.
No argument there. You know not everyone gets to work under a 10x leader. Probably the median leader in any sector is -x, because the skillset required to raise money is not necessarily the skillset required to lead.
> The triangle has three sides: fast, quality, and cheap
I think that should not be a universal rule. You can leverage open-source solutions to cheat more than one of those sides, with a little bit of expertise, or by stumbling on the right framework by accident.
Dependency management, or the lack of, is one of those "be careful what you wish for" type scenarios. At my current team we perform a lot of manual copy/pasting of directories they many contain hundreds of not managed dependencies. I really think it would be substantially faster to burn it all down and do it right with few, or no, dependencies and an emphasis on automation at every level. That perceived speed increase takes into account the costs and lost time for reinventing many wheels.
It is sad that we could have millions of books searchable and publicly available, but it got shot down in publishers and authors guilds litigation crossfire :(
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
And why authors would object their works being copied if they were out of print already? They weren't exactly making money in the first place. And wouldn't it have been easy to ask Google to delist their books if they wanted? I can see why Google was so eager to digest yet another big lump of information but the authors wouldn't have been left empty-handed. Now they got nothing, and I guess Google saved a lot of money too.
On the one hand, it would be great to have some sort (any sort) of online access to millions and millions of books that would otherwise require a physical trip to a library or a slow, painful hunt through used book stores to obtain and would otherwise not be searchable online at all.
On the other hand, I'm very reluctant to have Google be my gateway to that data.
Take a look at what it did with the Usenet archive it acquired. In order to access those archives, I'm forced to use Google's awful web interface instead of a sane, capable standalone news reader of my choice, and I'm unable to download their archive to use for my own purposes. All access is through Google. Their way or the highway.
This is not to mention all of the tracking and privacy concerns that giving Google access to my reading history would entail. Nor all the ads I'd have to swallow to read books through them.
A future where access to valuable information such as this is of necessity mediated through corporations, Google or otherwise, is not one I am looking forward to.
I'd much rather this information reside in the hands of public organizations like the Library of Congress, whose mission is to be a steward of such information for the public good rather than its own profit.
It'd be like having patrons choose a book from a library by delivering every last book to their house and have them pick one. It's not going to work for any large archive.
> A future where access to valuable information such as this is of necessity mediated through corporations, Google or otherwise, is not one I am looking forward to.
Necessity ? You still have all access to books you had before. Google is providing more and better information about books, and is in fact NOT providing access to the books, except for excerpts.
This naturally attracts people who are interested in making a difference and want to work somewhere that aligns with their values. You don’t go and work for somewhere like Phillip Morris or Oracle if you care about making the world a better place - and neither company would claim they’re trying to do so.
But Google said they were different, and it’s disillusioning to discover that somewhere you love and have worked hard for is just as evil as everywhere else - moreso as it wasn’t up-front about it.
And then you’re going to want to do something about it.
I don't think Google's internal troubles are due to attracting people who want to "make a difference." I don't see employee activism getting out of hand at medical device companies where the products they make literally save lives. Nor do I see these same issues at non-profits.
That’s a reach. Global interconnected private enterprise was widespread before both ww1 and ww2. We haven’t had a war between major global powers after ww2 because of MAD and Pax Americana.
But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919.
Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise.
Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?
The reason people are willing to buy US government debt is because they are confident the US government will be able to pay them back, with interest. Why are people confident in the US government's ability to pay...and where does this money come from? The strength of the growing US economy and the money the government will derive from taxes on this growth.
Or conversely, let's look at what the US government spent that money on: supplying the war machine via US industrial capacity. That industrial capacity wasn't created out of thin air. Take a look at Detroit for example. Absent the existing industrial capacity enabled by the automotive industry, the allies would likely have not won the war.
Both the ability of the US government to deficit spend, and the things they spent that money on, were a direct result of the strength of the US's private enterprise.
If you include the millions who died in various famines as well as those that were executed directly by Stalin, the number of victims of the USSR has been estimated to be anywhere between 6 and 15 million people.
The Soviet Union has to be the worst counterpoint to anybody arguing against private enterprise.
So long as Google's recruiters pitch jobs by saying "Change the world, build a better future, don't be evil" and not "Optimize click-through rates on animated ads by a few fractions of a percent," I'm not so sure that there's a difference between activism and doing their job.
> My favorite example is Google Books. Is it an obvious ad-funnel?
Definitely. Hard to imagine many better places to sell ads for books.
Nick writes:
> they introduced Google to the world, they warned that if the search engine were ever to leave the “academic realm” and become a business, it would inevitably be corrupted. It would become “a black art” and “be advertising oriented.”
This is verbatim from the original paper:
> Aside from tremendous growth, the Web has also become increasingly commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of Web servers were on .com domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997. At the same time, search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A in the full version). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.
The meaning is not even close to what Nick suggests!
When that paper was written, "Google" referred to an academic research project, not a company. Page and Brin indicate that because other search engines were developed at corporations, they were "largely a black art" and advertising oriented.
Since Google has become a company, and is no longer a research project in the academic realm, it has become a black art and advertising oriented, just as Page and Brin said happened to search engines developed at corporations.
Lear must have been worth a billion or two, in today’s dollars.
Far more, I would say! The way I see it, if you converted the wealth of medieval monarchs, relative to the world they lived in, into modern day terms, they would be the richest people alive. Lear was the king of Britain in an era where the king was an absolute ruler, and nominally owned the entire country. How much is Britain worth? Nowadays the GDP of the UK is over 2 trillion dollars a year.
https://www.google.com/search?q=britain+gdp
GDP isn't a great match to the wealth of an absolute monarch, but government spending in the UK is about a trillion dollars a year. How much of that is an obligation, and how much could be extracted to count as personal wealth? I estimate about half of it, for an income the modern equivalent of 500 billion dollars.
In terms of net worth, that income stream would be worth a present value maybe $5 trillion.
So, obviously this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation of something that doesn't make all that much sense, but in relative terms I would argue those medieval absolute monarchs were far richer than any modern rich person.
In absolute terms, of course, it's a much different story.
That's an impressive feat in this day an age. I mean, birth certificates are public record. I'm surprised no one has looked it up and leaked it. Good for him for working hard to keep it a secret, so they can reveal themselves when/if they choose.
Ps. If you know his kid's names, please don't out them here.
> There are no photos of me on the web.
Unless Page divests of his wealth before passing it on to his children (in any form - education, etc.), they will have the influence and opportunity that that wealth embodies. It's absolutely in the public interest to at least know who they are.
Flipping the script: I'd like to know what interest HN's readers and moderation have in censoring their identities.
imho, the foundations of the corporate ecology that we've built seems to favour the creation of large companies with quite dehumanizing values at their core. The fact that Google has grown to such size and existed at all (even as imperfect form), that is a triumph of these two citizens.
They've built a metropolis out of plutonium, and miraculously we live good lives in it, largely without illness ;)
Rather like how a hundred years ago people happily put radium in toothpaste and soap. Nothing better than a healthy glow to your morning routine - until the consequences arrive.
What will be the result of building the sort of global, hyper-targeted surveillance and propaganda machines spearheaded by google and Facebook, and will our descendants think we’re as dangerously naive as we do about those who made radioactive chocolate?
Sinking money into moonshots (though sometimes misguided) and a diversity of experiments; that is much better than Bezos' unartful "growth above all else" mentality.
I don't actually recall anyone proclaiming the messiah-ness of these guys and the inevitable social justice juggernaut of Google back then. It was a better search engine. they (justly) got rich off it. If the author had more hope of what "the Internet will mean to Mankind" back then and is dissapointed in what he's got now, perhaps he shoulda jumped in then or even now, and fix it.
I’m on mobile, so I don’t have the time to collect a full timeline for you. But I’d suggest you look closer at their organizational history and messaging. There’s a reason people are feeling jaded, and it’s not because they misinterpreted Google’s mission and vision.
> October 12, 2005
> SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. is financing its promise to make the world a better place with an initial commitment of nearly $1 billion to a philanthropic arm devoted to causes that mesh with the online search engine leader's crusade.
> The altruistic effort, formally disclosed yesterday under the umbrella of Google.org, follows through on a pledge that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company made last year as it prepared its ballyhooed initial public offering of stock.
http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/...
"Of the Google triumvirate, Schmidt makes sure the company stays on course financially and strategically; Page keeps busy in the R&D lab, cranking out new features; and the 29-year-old Brin, in his role as Google's conscience and head policymaker, spends his days gripping the moral tiller - and in so doing, imposes his worldview on everyone else."
Sooner or later this will all be public knowledge. Will this tarnish their legacy?
Damn
I really don't get this kind of writing. The millennial angst that suffuses all my social circles is just bizarre. Is this guy also a millennial or is he just trying to emulate one?
Hyperbole is a literary tool to get you to think for yourself and relate it to your knowledge and experiences to agree or disagree. So, by nature of your attention to read it and then take a further action to respond, the writer was successful.
It's not dishonest because anybody can clearly reason the statement is tautologically false, there are no tricks like numbers or misleading statistics or anything explicitly duplicitous and dishonest.
You may dislike that the author effectively caused you to do this, thinking for yourself is dark and scary versus gently pulling you along for the ride but then would you have even read or commented? All I see is a skilled writer ruminating on an interesting topic. The comments on this thread already greatly outweigh the length of the piece, it's a pretty nice piece of writing.
Carr was born in 1959.
It's called depression.
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Still, I take a lot away, inasmuch as his character is concerned, from his regard for us. One would think that singular and eminent success such as his would consider the role of every community he passed through in the shaping of his fortunes.
For comparison, Martin Lawrence at least got his teacher a car (RIP Froggie).
That said, I think what I'm advocating for approaches a sort of noblesse oblige, in that Brin has been SO successful that any deviation from his existing path might have lead to much less success, obliging consideration of every step along the way; and in that even a marginal actor in his life would be worth giving back to, from the point of view of the actor, commensurate to their involvement. ERHS is a school that could benefit hugely from a modest grant, or periodic appearance (if not personal, perhaps from a Google rep), which would presumably be a incredibly small sacrifice on his part. But most who went their didn't even know he had.
It just seems weird.
There are arguments against big endowments to famous institutions. But for more modest schools, seems like a no brainer.
Nobody is obligated to donate anything. But giving back is one of those things that every successful society promotes a lot of.
I also can’t resist pointing out that even a million dollar grant which would hardly even register to Brin would go a long long way in funding a school that’s not doing all that well.
This might not hold for other cases, but it really does in this one.
No. I promote creating a culture of contributing back to educational institutions if you have the means to do so.
> Also donations from rich guys to their schools creates so many bad incentives even if you don't consider the direct effects. It means that rich kids will be valued more since they are tied to donations, it means that schools will seek out people who might become rich in the fuuture etc.
Schools have no way of knowing which of their kids will become rich and therefore there is 0 substance to your assertion that donating to schools will change their structure in perverse ways. Public Schools by definition don't select their students anyways.
More to the point, kids with affluent backgrounds are far more likely to develop means of their own