Google Internal Comics
goomics.net
goomics.net
And yet, an "average" performer who is happy to build, scale, maintain, and not re-launch a new chat product every 5 years should be rewarded and encouraged to stay and not leave to a competitor.
How do you do it? You have to create intrinsic motivation. Twist: You can't give someone intrinsic motivation. They have to choose it themselves. But you have to give them the space and the options to find it.
"Don't focus too much on promotion" is still bad advice - like "Don't be angry" to someone who is angry. But the sentiment is correct. If you're focusing too much on promotion it means you don't have intrinsic motivation and are focusing on the extrinsic.
If you are well paid, well respected, well supplemented with additional benefits, and well challenged with hard problems (and at Google all of these should all have been YES by all accounts), then it's true - you SHOULDN'T focus too much on promotion.
I welcome counter-counterpoints.
Once at L5 it's okay to just stay there and do good work, the pay is still really good and you're not expected to go beyond that unless you want to (and you're capable of it).
The main issue I've heard is that to go from L3 -> L5 there are incentives around 'impact' and launching products (or leaving for another company/startup and getting hired back).
This means people are incentivized to ship something to get promo, but working on an already shipped thing is bad for career progress.
An oversimplification, but seen through this lens Google's many chat apps make sense.
That leaves the pressure of getting from L3 to L4, which, admittedly, people do feel. But L3->L4 is also a much more straightforward promotion. It's not nearly as sensitive to finding the right project/right team/right boss, and the promo comes more from your impact on the project than your project's impact on the product/company.
"Pay is good enough" yeah sure.
Very difficult in the Bay Area given the housing costs. I guess it's possible if you lucked into a below market rate apartment and qualify for government assistance like Medicaid and food stamps.
0: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Mcdonalds-Crew-Salary-...
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...
If you like to face hard technical problems, don't rise too high...
I think they got that technique from Apple, but optimized it by promoting them directly, instead of giving them a task force to head:
https://books.google.nl/books?id=0DHnCxjX_t8C&pg=PA85&lpg=PA...
>West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, by By Frank Rose, page 85, Package Goods
>[...] Who knew what any of it meant? Certainly not Sculley; this stuff had about as much to do with the prehistoric electronics he'd dabbled in as a kid as it did with soft drinks and potato chips. But he was running a computer company, so he'd better know. He spent hour after hour with Steve going over the basics. By the end of April his speech was peppered with jargon. Convincing people he knew what he was saying took longer.
>On organizational issues, he was able to look more decisive, in part because Markkula had left him so much to do. He didn't say much -- he wasn't warm or friendly or outgoing -- but he did listen, silently, and when he made a move it was invariably a quick one. His first move was to fire John Vennard -- no great shock, since Steve had been demanding his head since February. Vennard was in Japan, working with Alps to fix a problem on a new disk drive for the Apple III, when Scully summoned him back to get the ax. Then he got rid of Wil Houde, who'd been running the Apple II division until the previous fall, when Markkula had decided to replace him and, unable to decide between the division's marketing director and its engineering director, had put them both in charge. Houde had been named to head a special task force to look into ways of streamlining the company. His task force was already streamlined: He was the only one on it. Everyone knew that heading a task force at Apple was like being named vice-president in charge of looking for a new job. Sculley was merely completing the process.
By breaking the bond between responsibility/authority, and remuneration.
Promotions could be increased autonomy (which intrinsically includes responsibility, but it is personal responsibility, not responsibility of others) and/or remuneration without the need for increased responsibility or even seniority.
In yesteryear payrises were to be given on a length of service basis. You got extra bonuses after X years, you were given an (extra, significantly above inflation) raise on your Nth jubilee, Etc.
I think this bond between promotion and "climbing the ladder(s)" is problematic and is a means of wage suppression.
I don't know anything about google specifically, but generally it's not the size or the talent level of a company, but the growth rate. If you want to be promoted, the most important question is whether or not the company is growing. Else the only way to go up is if someone else leaves.
High turnover can also accomplish this effect but is limited to a very small number of industries.
If the place looks like a Paranoia game, is it evidence that an AI has already took over the place?
But that was the only one of those that I've seen - after 14 years, I would imagine I would have seen more. In general, the big weakness in Google's promo process is that projects that are visible to leadership get more attention than those who are grinding it out behind the scenes. There's been genuine attempts to address that, but it's hard from a practical standpoint.
(Obligatory: opinion is my own)
It's very different between teams. My personal experience: everyone I've worked with is trying really hard to put me in a position where I can succeed. I've been put on very visible projects (from day one) and I'm getting constant help from my TL to keep me on a track to get promoted. Everyone I work with directly is amazing.
Google is a magical place but the standard deviation in experiences are large.
I've personally been very happy with my experience/team.
The consequence is that teams are fiefdoms, and the experience varies wildly based on whether a manager knows what the hell they're doing.
This is how you pee
1. Don't verbally discuss project ideas with peers
2. Write up a nice beefy document even if the core idea can be expressed in 2 paragraphs
3. Do some vaguely relevant data analysis etc.
4. Circulate among leadership
Doing the above only protects you from theft within your team. Even if you do all of the above your ideas are liable to be stolen, by someone from other teams. Typically, some one else will prepare a document with a very different title that for the first 2 paragraphs might look like something different. The details will be virtually identical except for some subsections where some arbitrary changes will be made. They will be very eager to not discuss the timelines of when each document was prepared.
Why do they do this? Aren't they paid enough to do the decent thing? The problem is that most FAANG hires are career climber high GPA folks who can't accept the idea that they got into FAANG by grinding on leetcode, not because of any depth in CS knowledge and understanding. Their brain is programmed to ladder climb at all costs. For the untalented hacks that end up at a FAANG, eventually stealing becomes the only option.
It may be important to set a goal of getting promoted but you also need to qualify for the promotion and that's, at least in theory, about actually doing good work, not buttonholing the right people and having the perfect resume.
I occasionally wonder if Google exists primarily to herd smart-ish people towards mostly useless make work.
There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd. I don't have first hand exposure, have only heard things through friends that were employees.
Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if they're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.
Reminds me of this: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s...
The employees also pushed to avoid working for the USG, pushed to avoid the JEDI contract (though they likely would have lost it anyway) while at the same time trying to work within China (while Deep Mind may or may not be indirectly assisting in Uighur camps [0]). I think this is morally wrong and the arguments are often simple/naive.
[0]: ">>Peter Thiel: ...But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently. I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that."
https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...
So far in my career I've worked for a government contractor, doing basically good things that benefit the government and the public, a large service exclusively serving gambling companies some of whom were committing obvious crimes including automatically gender detecting players and rate limiting anyone with a woman's name (under the assumption that any women on their service are men who've been banned or rate limited themselves using their wive's credit cards), and a supermarket, and honestly, the hardest place to leave was the gambling company that I thought constantly about how I should leave.
It took suddenly being made redundant due to the pandemic for me to really try hard to find another job, I'd applied to plenty but I never really pushed myself properly, or took them seriously enough because stability at the cost of bitterness and feeling like the smallest cog in a meat grinder of human misery is a weird sort of comfortable, it's leaving a splinter in because pulling it out is scary, it's not ripping off a bandaid, a "childish" failure of character, but ultimately relatable and human.
And I _wasn't_ making 6 figures. I _didn't_ spend years of my life building up to getting into that position, it was just the first job out of university paying slightly more than the average, I can't imagine if I had got into Google and realised what these people must've realised about themselves and the system and how they are really no exits that aren't steps down unless you're entrepreneurial and willing to take a big risk, you think Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Uber don't make some big moral compromises to sell and produce in China?
I'm not (trying to) justify their decisions, just rather painfully admit that I can relate.
This criticism doesn't just apply to DeepMind. The reason that he is mentioning them specifically is because was an early investor so he has access to their team.
>Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if tthey're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop.
Does the existence of people worse off than you eliminate your right to complain?
It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying. If you're coddled (by some metric) you should... shut up?
If your complaint is “what? Sushi again?!” then you should shut up (imo).
That’s just a subset, others take an overly adversarial stance to drive attention to themselves as activists - rather than have in-good-faith discussions about stuff.
None of the cartoons were saying that though, were they?
>You should have some perspective.
Should my perspective expand to include straw men?
> Hi there. Why are you demonstrating?
> They're laying off one in four workers in the hospital. You?
> They're taking away our M&Ms from building 42's microkitchen.
> Wow, that's harsh.
So apparently the author of TFA didn't think a scenario like this was all that much of a strawman... Either.
Honestly, you're really bending over backwards in defense of privilege here. Why?
OP thinks complaining about the company's terrible behavior and complaining about the lack of M&Ms are more or less the same thing and that if you are bothered about the former you should quietly quit coz hey, not everybody gets sushi twice a week.
I'm not defending privilege. I'm attacking the notion that you should STFU and fuck off when you see injustice because YOU personally happen to be comfortable.
To port it to another context, for instance, Oscar Schindler could have given up his privilege (he was quite privileged!), quit his job and begged on the street for scraps of food and many would have honestly argued that if he was that bothered by what he saw that he should have.
Should he though?
You now appear to be in violent agreement with them, and the misunderstanding seems to be mainly on your side.
The 'You' wasn't you personally, but the general 'you' (similar to what you used in "you should... shut up?")
I'm sensing snark, but I'm genuinely not being snarky and I'm not really interested in fighting over this.
[0]: "After being acquired by Google, we had a “fun day” at the Google campus where we were shown around, wide eyed, to see the facilities. We had lunch in the cafeteria and while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."
But then I looked back to the earliest comics and even most of those come off as fairly critical of the company. There doesn't seem to be so much of an attitudinal shift as this guy has been focused on criticism from day 1. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Every big organization can benefit from reasonable criticism.)
Makes you appreciate the likes of Scott Adams, XKCD and Norman Rockwell, who use parody, irony, and soul respectively, each with skilled nuance that shifts the viewer from their same old place to open the possibilities for some new take.
Part of an aspect of sticking to your guns ethically and morally is making choices that leave you worse off. If your ethics align with what is best for you, personally, it's not much of an ethical code
I can agree with that.
They are motivated by ideals which, by their very nature, cannot be expressed as a negative.
Not so much on this one, one person's ideals could be another's hate speech.
Personally, I find a complete lack of snark to be alienating. I'm not motivated by pure positivity, just creeped out.
He hints that’s the way he feels in this comic: https://goomics.net/309/
(And squinting at the dotted continuations of the red and green lines, looks like he even estimated when that time would come pretty well. EDIT: But yeah, maybe not all that amazing, since it was only a year or so in advance.)
An alternate way of looking at it:
When you work at a place you can help influence the culture to move it in the right direction. When you aren't working there you can't.
If you actually want to have more impact than that as an IC you could try your hand at internal activism, but I'd say you have a dramatically higher chance of damaging your career than creating any real change at a company that scale.
As far as I can tell all of the people quitting have achieved precisely fuck all. Not a single example to the contrary I can think of. Not at a big tech company (at a startup maybe).
Interestingly every time this topic crops up there's a chorus of "just quit if you feel that way about it" as if the exact opposite was true although in reality I think everybody kind of knows it's really not.
From a non American perspective it's really strange watching this play out. Like looking at a culture that cant see the color blue or something.
The idea is that you leave and go work on something else that makes the world better versus contributing to the borg.
It's definitely a trade off thats quite personal.
Unlike other personal trade offs people seem quite comfortable making this one on your behalf.
The thesis being, AIUI, that then they weren't good enough. Because if they had been, the competitor they started after leaving would have buried their original employer.
Assuming that the new company will displace the old one.
However at a large monopoly like google/facebook/amazon, if you want to change the world, you need to first change the company.
The vague thing about "damaging my career" is a bit nebulous.
I was bought out, so most of my remuneration is in stocks. There is almost no incentive for me to "build out my career" year. So I have no issue with calling out obvious bullshit/stuff that goes against publicly stated principles.
> Since starting at Google in 2007, Cornet's use of art to critique the company has become prolific, with ex-Google manager Claire Stapleton describing him to The Information as the tech firm's "moral bellweather." Cornet published a collection of his work, "Goomics", in 2018.
Having someone with first hand experience and knowledge about your organization and making "fun" of some of the sore points it can actually be good for the Org itself, because you have one more data point about how employees are feeling.
[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-carto...
For anyone wondering, that words makes a whole lot more sense when written correctly(?) as: bellwether (the sheep carrying the bell).
Talking about how awesome Google's main search page is? Not very funny. Making fun of Google's endless list of failed chat apps? Much funnier.
https://rodgersnotes.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/google-and-app...
A loss leader is a product which is used to acquire revenue through a different channel, such as game consoles which often sell at a loss on hardware to encourage game sales.
But Nest is, when viewed in a context that understands why most Google products exist. It should be obvious that Search exists to serve Ads. The first result of every search is generally an ad. That one's easy. Android and Chrome both exist to protect Google Search: They ensure that most people's default experience is to search Google for everything, so they get ads.
Nest is about ads, but you have to look at the competitive context. Apple, Microsoft, Google, are all shipping ecosystems. Large catalogs of products which interoperate best with each other. It's absolutely anticompetitive and most likely illegal, but that's a digression: The issue is that for Android and Chrome to protect Search to serve Ads is that people have to pick Google's ecosystem over other ecosystems. Sure, you can pick Apple's, and Google has paid Apple eleventy-billion dollars to still send you to Google Search, but they can change their minds at any time, and it's more beneficial for Google if they don't have to pay another company for your attention. Also sometimes Apple gets on a privacy kick and makes tracking users harder, which Google wants to do to sell ads better, so they gotta fight that too.
So the issue here is that Apple has iOS and then it has Siri, and then it has HomeKit, which all works very well together and provides a very clean unified experience. If Google didn't have an experience comparable to Apple's experience, people might leave Android for Apple, and that's bad. So products like Nest are entirely there to provide a Google ecosystem that is competitive to other tech companies' ecosystems, so that you view ads.
If not, how do you know that data from Nest isn't used to enhance your profile?
I mean: knowing the sounds or patterns of sounds (I'm trying to be generous here and not accuse them of actually using every word spoken near a listening device as input) or just the general pattern of temperature etc could be useful in figuring out what ads to show.
... on a less generous note they mostly don't need that data: their AI has already calculated that if you are a male at least you need to see even more ads for scammy dating sites or - lately - ads for pay-to-win games - possibly with female narrators that could also have been in the aforementioned ads.
I encourage anyone to point to a google product that isn't either selling ads or trying to get people to spend more time on the internet so google can sell them more ads.
The work I do on AI-based medical device infrastructure has nothing to do with ads.
How many people who are active users of these products Bing something when they need to look it up?
Granted, I only use those products because my employer uses them internally.
I'll give you cloud and nest though.
Docs and Drive want to sell you storage and collaboration capabilities. Not ads.
A lot of the work is sorting the incoming goods. Much of this work is done by volunteers. As a result it isn't uncommon for spoiled food to accidentally be stocked and distributed to people. It is a rare but not infrequent occurrence to have someone get sick and report back to the food bank.
Not unequivocally good! :]
I live in the UK, and the BBC is definitely propaganda.
I also agree with you that private broadcasters can definitely be worse.
OTOH, it's a vicious circle: you cannot fix society without fixing propaganda, and if the propaganda is any good, you cannot fix propaganda without fixing society (most people will lend an ear to it, believe it, parrot it, support it, work for it, etc.)... so we just have to learn to live with it :/
EDIT: I see from your profile you're not in the US, which is probably the source of the confusion. Examples of Public Broadcasting are https://www.npr.org and https://www.pbs.org.
Maybe not quite as strongly so as the NYT, but it was definitely there.
There are plenty of organizations that mostly do good. To pick the first example that comes to mind, Partners in Health.
Thank you for sharing that, I was uncertain if it was my own bias that was making me think similar things
But there have been a lot of changes in recent years, and Google is playing with fire in its military and government support projects (as well as struggling with the increased union consciousness that is permeating white-collar Silicon Valley culture at the FAANGs). I'm not profoundly surprised he finally decided the balance had swung too far.
Using Google Maps won't give you lung cancer (unless you are using it to find smoke shops that is). It erodes your privacy, sure, but it won't deteriorate your health...
Let's be real here, China's tech industry revolves around mimicking American/European/Japanese/Korean tech, they rarely ever innovate and create first of their kind things.
If a relationship is bringing you sadness and negativity all the time then it either needs some nurturing or a nuclear option.
The nice thing with employer relationships is you can literally walk away. Relationships with people are worth fixing but no job is worth the sadness, even if it’s with someone as prestigious as Google.com.
If there’s nothing to complain about at the moment, they’ll manufacture it. They need a constant outlet to express how awful and oppressive their employer is, and if they don’t get enough attention internally, they’ll turn to Twitter and try to drum up outrage externally.
If a company has crossed an ethical (not political) line, I’m all for taking a stand. But this goes far beyond that.
https://goomics.net/127/ - poor, poor Google Plus. Somehow it wasn't a warning sign that the big executive-supported project to Win Social was a laughingstock internally.
https://goomics.net/202/ followed years later by https://goomics.net/294/ - everybody expected TGIF to get worse over time, and apparently it did.
https://goomics.net/118/ - the last of three TailGator comics. A more innocent time.
And last, https://goomics.net/106/ - not Google-specific at all, but an instant classic of the industry.
Though I think Zuckerberg has done a good job continuing this despite the leaks (at least that's what it seems like externally).
It might not be just the company that changed, but the employees too (which may have forced Google to change policy as a result).
Both are trying to do things at massive scale and dealing with the problems associated with that.
I think both do things I don't agree with, but are generally unfairly vilified most of the time by their failing competition (the press mostly) and weirdly some of their employees. The sense I get from this is it's mostly political tribalism (affects both far left and far right with different grievances for each).
I don't personally like the ad-driven model, so with the exception of YouTube I avoid their products where possible.
> Size of the pool of candidates for a position at Google <image of the world here>
Yea, no. It's kind of funny that the image of the world is centered at North America. That's how I feel about Google (and a lot of other big tech) hiring practices.
I'm not saying you can't work for Google from the UK, Germany, India, or other places, but it gets a lot harder.
Google has legal representation pretty much everywhere in the world, yet when I see engineering positions, they are mostly "anywhere in the US".
For example, I feel like Oracle, IBM, or Accenture will be happy to hire you in a country like Slovenia, while companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. are more likely to force you to relocate to a place where they've got a large office.
All of the above is my subjective perspective of course, I haven't worked for Google, MS, nor Apple.
I'd love to know which big tech companies are happy to hire a remote-only engineer and let them work from their own country.
D̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶
Pray that nobody notices
This one has a lot of meme opportunity. Imagine a third pane ("Oracle" or something) with guns pointed both inward and outward!
edit: (I failed to realize this was in the same archive ;P. I now see someone else posted that link)
some much about I what dislike about google these days can be traced backed to this comic
Rules for thee, not for me.
It was a tough pill to swallow for quite a few Googlers that the higher-ups knew about Ruben's behavior and golden-parachuted him instead of cutting him loose (especially because the story broke on the heels of the Damore memo fallout). Questions at All Hands became a lot more pointed, leadership responded by becoming significantly less welcoming to open discussion... It got ugly. Or, if you will, "normal corporate-y."
This one is fantastic. Seems a little strange that they're wearing an apple shirt when google does the same thing though and its a google comic that seems generally self-scathing.
Haha, so true.
And there are 30 thousands of him.
Comic sites (e.g. xkcd) usually allow users to navigate sequentially without having to go back a page after each comic.