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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive structure was completely set up to reward launching products and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at playing the promo game.

There was talk about the need to "land" rather than just launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.

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I was at Google 2009-2014 and again from 2020-present. Larry and Sergey absolutely understand incentives - one of the things that stood out about early Google (pre-2005) was just how well they understood incentives, and they were able to build basically an unassailable $250B/year business based on it.

It wasn't just Larry & Sergey either - early Google was filled with people like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Paul Buchheit, Eric Veach, Matt Cutts, Peter Norvig, Hal Varian, et al who all thought deeply about just what the human consequences of a given social policy would be. Things like Google's promo & interview system were very well-designed for a company of 2000 people.

IMHO, the problem is that all of those folks ended up richer than you could imagine, which gave them the option of not putting up with the people that came after them. When the company grows from 2000 to 20,000 (which is what it was when I joined in 2009), 90+% of the people were not when it was 2000, i.e. you are outvoted 9 to 1 by ordinary people who don't think very much about incentives. If you're filthy rich, it's much easier to just jet off to some private island and let the tricky problem of incentives become somebody else's problem than it is to stick around and explain to tens of thousands of people why systems are the way they and modify them to fit the company's new reality.

I guess this could explain it. I struggle a little with this explanation though, Larry appeared engaged in 2014. The problem is big and obvious. I guess there isn't an obvious solution though, so maybe they just kept kicking the can down the road?

Anyway, good insight, appreciate it. They both always seemed like smart dudes with a blindspot. Maybe it wasn't such after all.

Larry's blindspot IMHO is that when he isn't connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is terrible (and conversely, when he is connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is awesome, which is why he was able to spot so many of the product cycles of the 00s). He was a terrible CEO, probably for this reason: he made company-wide decisions based on the experiences of the L-team. I remember mocking how the very first dictum when he became CEO was "Meetings should have a single decider and end 5 minutes early", which was probably important at the exec level but was so far removed from the problems that actually faced software engineers at Google in 2011. When you're CEO the information you get is very carefully curated by your lieutenants to produce outcomes desirable to them. Larry was either oblivious to this dynamic or powerless to change it

I wrote a description of the actual incentives Googlers see here a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704

What if I told you that perf has been abolished in the meantime?

It's even public: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad

This sounds like a re-brand...

From the point of view of an IC so far at least it's *significantly* different from how perf worked. I have yet to see the results though.

I guess that's interesting. Does the promotion process seem different? Ie different in the sense that you are finding yourself incentivized differently from before?

I never really cared much about promo and I haven't yet gone for promo with this new system so I can't really say. I think as far as incentives go in general nothing really has changed much, but what has changed is the amount of time we (ICs) waste on doing perf instead of doing actual work. From a manager's point of view it might be different, but for us it's more "forward" facing, we focus on what we'd like to achieve over the year and as we move forward we adjust our expectations and do regular check-ins to see if we're still on track or we need to adjust things. It feels more dynamic, but it's only been a few months so who knows.

Yup, both the mechanics and incentive structure have changed. Nobody knows the outcome yet, but the intentions were to align personal incentives with business goals. Seems promising thus far.

Yep but incentives haven't shifted, and the organizational inertia to fight in their fiefdoms is super strong

Actually incentives have shifted a lot. Personally I now skip a lot of work that was useful only for perf purposes.

It does seem to be that way from the outside: tons of products launched, acquired,and then nothing happens, as they either rot or get killed after a few years.

Agreed with this take. It's frustrating to see people in this thread pinning this on Sundar. I certainly think he could've done better as CEO, but the incentive structure and culture around products was baked in from Larry & Sergey's time.

I was around during the pivot to "landings" - which didn't actually make many practical differences. For the most part people simply redefined "landing" to "releasing a product"... which was also the definition of "launching" :)

2014 was when they retired.

Nope, wrong.

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