Hacker News Reader

Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.

In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.

View on HN

In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful," everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole thing blows over. That does not incentivize responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but in doing so, he loses control.

There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either:

* "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or

* "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies"

He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over.

This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

This seems like a popular management style at big tech companies. I've seen exactly this kind of behavior at MS too. It's a kind of "pacifist management".

Just agree with everything and everyone so you're not seen as someone who creates conflict. But then just silently ignore or drop issues you don't want to deal with.

Don't take risks or take responsibility for difficult problems so your reputation is clean of any failures.

Jump on board only the largest and most well supported of company initiatives so you can claim success.

And the thing is, I'm not sure it's the fault of these managers that behave this way. I think it's the result of the promo system adopted by so many tech companies. As long as you have some good things to write about each promo cycle and nobody has anything bad to say about you, you can coast your way up the management chain. And with each promotion comes more money. There is no incentives to take risks as it can only hurt your promo chances and then once you're high enough up the chain, why would you risk the huge comp package? Pichai complained about engineers who "rest and vest" but only because that is exactly the behavior incentivized by the company culture and the absolutely stupid promo process and comp structure.

With leadership like that, it's sure that nothing will ever change.

Well said. I rocketed up the chain early in my career for inventing some truly innovative stuff (that's been published in top conferences). Then I fought against stupid shit. I spoke out. I had strong technical opinions. Eventually I was pushed aside and my career has tanked (but rest-and-vest baby...except I'm slowly recovering and still seen as a company intellectual resource). Meanwhile I watch all the mediocre managers keep rising who are "yes, sir" and don't make any enemies. They don't do shit except follow the status quo and build their empires.

This isn't just tech per se, if you look around you in society that's literally how countries are governed.

Basically a lot of people have promoted weak leaders all the way up to premierships and presidencies and have pushed out anyone that could potentially criticize them. The result is this shitshow we're in right now.

For anyone reading this deep in the thread: read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. A variations of a few simple rules result in virtually all models of government. And none of them involve technical competence.

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Or watch the CGP grey 'rules for rulers' adaption of it on youtube

I rewatch that video from time to time. It's amazing how accurate that is, despite what academics say.

What do academics say?

This is why democracy is so rad. We can vote out the idiots whenever we feel like it. Of course, we don't always agree on who the idiots are.

Democracy for Realists, 2016

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 112-113

Scholars who have quoted Key’s colorful phrase have mostly failed to note that he used it derisively. “The Founding Fathers,” he wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”

In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times

Even before it could be said that the national Government could do much of anything to improve their condition…. Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

It doesn't have to be a huge tech company this is pretty universal even at mid-sized companies.

This starts all the way at the interview btw. If you go out of your way to do something extra, you’ll be suddenly judged on it even if it wasn’t originally in the scope of the interview, so you’re pushed to be the most average you can get.

It is still their fault. Personal accountability is the only thing that can improve a situation. At all levels.

When has personal accountability really solved any systemic issues we humans have faced?

Personal accountability isn't meant to solve problems. It is meant to prevent them by forcing individuals to put something ahead of their own career advancement. In other words, it aligns incentives in favor of preventing problems rather than in favor of solving them - you can only be the hero who slays a dragon if there is a dragon.

The laws around medical malpractice don't fix it when doctors screw up, but they make it a lot less likely for the screw-ups to happen, since those laws force doctors to adopt reasonable standards of care.

My question still stands, when has that really solved issues if they aren't regulated? Personal accountability without regulations is moot, toothless and I don't recall any instance of it ever solving anything.

To me what you are describing is basically regulations. Personal accountability only derives from regulations because there are punishments, in that case it aligns incentives.

Democracies and republics create personal accountability through regulations, since there is no single boss and power tends to come from legislative bodies or the people directly - those people want to provide input. Dictatorships (which companies fundamentally are) do not need regulations and rule-making processes to have personal accountability. Instead, the CEO can determine if you screwed up and fire you (or the dictator can shoot you) if you did. The specter of being fired (or shot) aligns your incentives to "do the right thing" even if the rules are not well-communicated, although you are better at doing the right thing if the dictator tells you what they value and what they want you to do.

Regulations are only one form of personal accountability. Regulations, in theory, create uniformity and transparency. These can be good things. In practice, regulations are often selectively enforced, which leads back to the same situation as in a dictatorship, but with a formalized process of input for the dictator.

I actually disagree with you that malpractice lawsuits are examples of regulation. More often, when something goes wrong and a doctor is involved, there is an argument about whether the doctor was negligent or not. There is no fixed "standard of care" that is written down, only a set of practices that are known throughout the industry. Experts argue about whether negligence occurred or not. There are regulations that the experts can cite in their determination of negligence (some of those rules carry separate penalties too), but you don't need to have broken any rules to commit malpractice. This is a prime example of accountability without regulation.

So you'd like government regulations?

Answer my question first and I can answer yours after :)

No manager who leads in demand software engineers will ever be able to change anything unless their reports believe in the vision. The minute things don’t go their way, we can just get another job,

It’s really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the current success of the company to have any type of credibility with employees.

Let’s look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.

- Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from the time it was broke until today.

- Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division from its “real” founding until he became CEO.

- Facebook - still founder led

- Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision for what the “new MS” should look like - completely different than “Windows Everywhere”

There's some bizarre PR campaign going on to try and brand Sundar as the next Steve Jobs: lots of the photos of him looking thoughtful with steepled hands overlaid with anodyne quotes about technology or AI. It's unclear to me if he's much more than a tech billionaire by luck.

No kind of strategy is ever communicated to employees, just defensive + responsive TGIF responses. Truly bizarre.

That's funny. Yes, for me this bizarre PR campaign shows up as promoted content when I scroll through my Google news feed.

Sundar's claim to fame is Google Toolbar for MSIE. It was a big deal at that time. It locked Google search on MSIE and ultimately enable navboost in search quality.

Then he was the product lead on the Chrome team. I don't know if it was him who lobbied Page to create Chrome.

>believe in the vision

Which means there has to actually be a vision. As far as I can tell, the vision at google is just to keep making boatloads of money off AdWords, and not really care about anything else.

Just think of the dividend they could pay if they admitted they are an advertising company, instead of distracting people with the carousel of "innovation".

> making boatloads of money off AdWords

You forgot "and spending it on annual chat apps"

Marc Andreesen recently has been talking a lot about the professional managerial class (PMC) and how it's causing the principle actor problem. Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot. Nobody really makes any hard and decisive moves because there is much to lose and not that much more to win. This was different when we had companies owned by individuals or families.

This was one of the reasons why Nokia died. When the organization grew, everything was taken over by middle management whose safest option in any scenario was “Please do not change anything.”

Yes, but the takeaway isn't that they should start making bold moves, it's that we actually want them to churn out and be surpassed over time. It's the entrenching of them through regulatory capture or predatory behaviour that's bad.

There are still a lot of companies owned by individuals or families. You just don't hear about them because they seldom take the big risks necessary to produce disruptive innovations.

Mark @Meta seems to be making bold moves.

Doesn't that pretty much prove the point of the comment you are replying to?

> Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot.

Mark has majority of the voting shares of Meta. He could run it into the ground and still could stay in control.

> His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

This is what really sunk Eastman Kodak. The popular wisdom about them missing digital isn’t really true. Heck they owned many of the key patents. But everyone was too busy focusing on growing their little fiefdom for the company to use its assets and market position effectively.

I recall one year the CEO announced he was reducing headcount by some number and the next year it had actually gone up.

Why would VPs be interested in using different building entrances?

The buildings were designed for much more open access prior to security policy changes that made most of the useful paths exit only.

Oh man, is that something that changed in the last few years? One thing I always liked about the Mountain View campus is that every door, no matter how minor, had a badge reader on it, so you could always take the most direct path between two possible points.

At the same time, there were a lot of stories on the internal social network about people walking in behind them, so I kind of get why the policy might have been changed. I would have been one of the people mad about it!

(I posted one of these following-me-in stories once; I unlocked the door and someone pushed me out of the way to go into the office ahead of me, and I didn't see their badge. I tracked down security, they reviewed the tapes, and it turned out to be a legitimate coworker. I shared the story with the angle "this is what you should do if someone follows you in", but I got panned for not doing enough to protect my coworkers. I probably didn't post this, but my takeaway was "if your security depends on me being able to beat someone up that is larger than me, you're already dead". One of the few times the internal social media hive mind turned against me, and it was really really weird.)

I think it was a kneejerk to the YouTube shooter.

There are also now rules about how many badge readers need to be between public and private areas. This turns into a mess in historic buildings that have technically-public stairwells littered throughout. (The Munich campus is particularly bad for this.)

Ah, I forgot about that incident.

In the NYC office, when I was there, we definitely had to badge in from a lot of stairwells. Also, the bathrooms that weren't completely contained in Google spaces had number pad locks on them.

(I was very annoyed when I worked on a floor that didn't have any dedicated Google-only bathrooms; I asked to have the locks removed just out of principle and was told that "people will wander in from the street and set up camp in there." You had to badge into the building though, so I wondered how true that actually was. I wish for once in my life someone would just tell me the truth instead of making something up to get me to go away. "We don't feel like paying someone to disconnect them, and other tenants in the building will complain if we do." That's totally fair!)

There are floors in One Market that are the same and equally nonsensical. The kicker is that Google stocks them with tampons and toothbrushes and all that, even though they're communal, which makes the locking even more silly.

They don't need to be bigger than you either. If someone just pushes you out of the way, and are really a bad actor, they could have a box cutter on them or just be more prepared to confront another person. Are you going to directly confront a person that has you surprised? No.

Sounds like they need to make reporting dead simple. Put an alarm button on every badge reader. Hit the button. Pre-recorded “intruder who did not badge present. Everyone present please wait for security.” Then locks second internal door. Or even better just automate counting bodies vs badging on every entrance/exit. Lots of nfc/face recognition type technology to tell who is who.

There's an internal social network?

Like, what do people post on it?

There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter, and an internal meme site. Occasionally, some real work (setting up collaborations with colleagues) happens on the social network.

So... Google Plus is actually one of the company's longest-lived services? The irony.

> There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter

So they maintain google plus code, but shut down it for general public?

>Facebook and Twitter

That's gotta get axed or Google will stagnate even more than it already is.

Then again, I'm not sure what can come in and usurp its place as a "global-leader-company". Maaaaybe Tesla if every single little thing goes right for them (and that's a stretch)?

Or perhaps, the way things are going lately, a defense company... I hope not.

It can be a massive time sink too. Have seen the debates on there about everything (politics, finances and other random stuff) eat hours out of coworkers days.

I remember when Sundar became CEO the first thing he did was hole himself up in 2000 Amphitheatre Pkwy and block access to all Google staff not in that building. The next thing he did was get bullied by the board and their CFO, but I digress.

In all seriousness, it did seem like Ruth Porat (the CFO) was the real brains of the operation. Sundar is the fall guy.

At some offices, the exit only doors are in significantly more convenient locations.

The lobbies get very crowded around 9 and 5, and so do the elevators near them.

Can't have the executives possibly smelling the rabble.

All executives exit effectively immediately!

"Thoughtful" - what does he mean by that? That he's thinking about it?

It's kind of an internal meme: he says "we have to be thoughtful about this" or "we have to approach this thoughtfully." Almost every tough question from inside Google is met with an answer that contains the word "thoughtful."

It seems to mean "there is no easy win for me in this situation, so I am passing the buck to (presumably) a committee of other people who will think about it instead, or perhaps a power-hungry VP who has a vested interest in making it happen."

Ah so. I had a colleague who would say "I suspect I shall have to think about this."

In retrospect, I realise it was his code phrase for not doing anything at all.

> In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it.

What?? Sundar is the CEO. All the buck stops with him. Why are you pretending as if he doesn't have agency? The problem here is his actions and/or lack thereof, not people under him doing stupid things and he's somehow the victim. He gets paid the big bucks to lead.

That is what the person is saying. I'm not sure what you are questioning here. Sundar has agency and authority and he refuses to use it. This enables his underlings to have free reign.

Ah, then I misinterpreted the post I was replying to and we are in agreement.

It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's the problem. Or engineering.

It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks.

Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas.

So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.

I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells nerding out things. Accidentally some of the technologies become useful and popular. But there is no grounds up thought about 'how can we make it useful for customers', in relative comparison to products from companies like Amazon and Slack.

Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead.

Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow.

But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.

Google Analytics was also an acquisition. Look up Urchin Software.

> Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company

That, also it feels like it replicates the college environments like MIT, where projects get funded by the university, large enterprises or the state (especially defense), so when a project gets 'deprecated' its generally due to the project funders wanting it. Since these are the end users, there is absolutely no problem in it - the end user wants it deprecated anyway. As far as I know, Google was born literally from such a state-funded project in MIT. This likely makes Google environment somewhat like a postdoc extension of that environment.

But this attitude is totally destructive when facing end users: Small businesses, individuals, artists, freelancers, NGOs, municipialities - practically ENTIRE rest of the world do not have the large funding and time that Google has inside and outside Google.

They can't risk their businesses getting broken every other year, less every 6 months, because some people at Google thing that v2 is something is 'better' even if its incompatible with v1 of the earlier product, breaking everyone's sites, apps, whatever and expecting them to spend the money and time they don't have to jump through those upgrade hooks.

Worst, are 'deprecations'. They are literal 'f*k you's to end users. Even if some service is deprecated with 3 months' of warning, the small business or individual won't have the time or energy to salvage everything and move it to somewhere else. It will cost a lot to them, and it will affect their income and livelihoods.

So people just avoid Google. Build on or use the most reliable organization that does not literally sh*t on their users whenever they feel like it.

> I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste.

Good example. How complicated analytics have become shows just how little Google understands its users and how little it is able to accommodate them. Yes, there is 'great engineering' behind a lot of the stuff, but the complexit, ugprade hoops, backwards-incompatible updates and outright deprecations literally kill any benefit.

In the case of analytics, all that complication is not really worth wasting time (and therefore money) for upgrading. The products came to a point of looking like phd thesis projects more than anything intended for the end users - you have to spend considerable time even as a technical person to learn the system to be able to even use it at an entry level.

I also have analytics on all my sites. I will probably replace it with something else when the upgrade time comes. No way in hell I want to go through another upgrade hoop in 2-3 years and spend all that precious effort and time for doing that.

> looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem

I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users.

Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.

All corporations are sociopaths, Google is only different in that they think their success is because of their lack of care about users instead of in spite of it.

Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.

> The only metric that most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.

Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.

Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.

Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily…

In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.

Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.

Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash these days it's reflected in their hiring where they don't even know where they want to place people half the time

  > The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be

sounds like... bullshit jobs? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years

This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.

1/10th the size of google (who has 140k employees) is still a massive company.

> Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.

> The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

This is very common. Every large company I worked with is like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com