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Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

The Google of 2005 wouldn't do this. The Google of 2005 would use this as opportunity to monopolize all the talent and move into some new space and eat everything with fantastic software.

* I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night. Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was buying geographic satellite companies and innovating with lazy loading javascript maps. It went from, websites can't provide anywhere near the functionality of desktop apps to why would ever use a desktop app for that.

* I was building phone software and mobile search engines before, during, and after the launch of android so I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability. The carriers began going through the stages of grief, while they were still on anger, like the sound of thunder[0] android launched, and reality shifted under their feet. After that it seemed like nothing else had ever been possible or true.

Hungry Google was sight to behold.

[0]: The Sound of Thunder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder

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Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there.

The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.

Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.

Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't understand the problems they are facing day to day.

Pinchai has been a Terrible pick. He made google just worse. Like a passive aggressive leader...

Do you attribute that to his lack of EECS background like the poster above you? Also, is Pinchai a typo or a play on words with "penny-pincher"?

Not to defend him, but I think by 2015 google has already lost its way, focusing not on developing groundbreaking technology, but on using it's dominance to squeeze any money even if it meant encouraging addictive behaviors.

2015 sounds about right. Three Years of Misery Inside Google is one of the best articles you can find about the seemingly sudden change of culture that made working at Google miserable.

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...

Wow, thanks for that article. It’s quite a long read, though a bit sad/disappointing, as someone who once believed in Google.

I interned at Google around 2015 and again 2019 as a grad student. The culture was dramatically different, even in a very similar team.

Care to elaborate. In what way? I have always though their crazy hiring rate would erase their "culture" like every two years.

TGIF was not a thing people watched or went to anymore. The number of meetings doubled. Employees were actively discouraged to look through code in google3 and design documents that did not concern their work (search for 'need to know' in Memegen if it still exists).

The main thing that weirded me out and ultimately caused me to decide not to work for Google was that everyone was talking about perf and promotions all the time. Everyone in the team structured their work accordingly, and tales of people who obtained promotions because of heroic effort for achieving something was a recurring topic in group conversations.

There was cost cutting efforts everywhere. There was significantly more red tape involved in requisitioning a heavy duty computer needed for my work (compiler development). The food in the micro kitches were toned down in variety and quality. Food trucks disappeared. The food in the cafes was unchanged but dinner was no longer served at about half of the cafes.

Stadia was launched after 2015, best streaming service for games by far.

Then they killed it.

I always assumed his appointment was strategic, Pichai got his position shortly after Nadella took over Microsoft. This coincided with announcements like Android One and other products targeting or focusing on the Indian market which is emerging as a force on the global stage.

You think they chose an Indian CEO to appeal to the Indian market? I can’t imagine they’d make such a huge decision over a factor like that.

Companies do it all the time for diversity and inclusion reasons. I'm not suggesting either CEO is un/under qualified for the position, but rather given a pool of highly qualified candidates they chose to sort the list for a particular attribute.

I’ve seen him speak in person, and this is completely correct. He just chases shiny things; there’s no vision for the company at all, just “oh well this seems interesting”.

He’s thoughtful

> just “oh well this seems interesting”

To play devil's advocate (I'm no fan of Google in any way), but this is also how Elon Musk operates, and it seems to be going well for him.

Is that sarcasm? I can’t tell

Not at all. He did lose a lot of money recently, but most of that is "on paper" - he still has at least that much left over. I'd be more than happy to have his problems. He's in a valley right now, but his batting average is very high.

Elon Musk is strongly outspoken, and has strong vision, communicates the vision, although it can change in a day. But at least everybody in the company (or rather everybody on Twitter) knows the plan to execute on.

When Sundar speaks he speaks politically, so that he can never be wrong (at the same time if I just watched his talks, I couldn't even know that I'm at a search company).

> communicates the vision

He seemed to do a pretty good job with that at Tesla/SpaceX, but I’d argue he’s really dropped the ball at Twitter. No one seems to have any idea what “Twitter 2.0” even is supposed to be.

I agree that he really dropped the ball (I moved to nostr because of him not allowing links to nostr). I think it was because he lost tens of billions of dollars because of the amount of leverage he had, the market downturn, and advertisers dropping so much because of the political uncertainty that Elon brought (advertisers are risk averse by default).

I think all of us have an idea of what social media should be compared to what it is now (looking at what my friends and people I'm interested in it are doing), but it's not compatible with the amount of advertising revenue that needs to be generated to justify a $40B valuation.

There's a deep conflict between the value provided to the users and the value created to advertisers, and Elon highly underestimated that conflict, so now he's (and Tesla investors are) paying the price.

I often wonder why Larry and Sergey aren't more active. They seemed to have a pretty good vision.

Maybe. But they should really keep the companies leaner than it currently is …

The self motivated bottom up Google way can’t scale like this.

Who has the harder/worse job: CEO of Microsoft or CEO of Alphabet/Google?

Neither? My prediction is the latter will retire coming up and have the next one clean the mess.

Personal opinion and jaded perspective of course. Disclaimer: don't like shortsighted "follow the shiny thing" decisions. I haven't seen evidence the CEO of Google has positioned the company for the long term or to survive. Namely, the bus would have been going fine if not better without some if not all of the Google leadership on the wheel.

I hope I am wrong.

Google market cap has more than doubled since he took over.

> Also the new CEO is not a software engineer

I looked up Sundar's background before joining Google out of curiosity and it looks like his educational background is in "metallurgical engineering" (IIT Kharagpur), materials science (Stanford), and MBA (UPenn). And stints at Applied Materials and McKinsey.

It’s safe to say he is intelligent and effective in all the ways that matter.

Is it though? He hasn't really moved the needle for Google at all other than capitalizing on growth laid out by his predecessors. Satya is far more admired for his accomplishments comparitivly.

Satya is favorably compared to Balmer, whose effectiveness is constantly understated for reasons unknown to me. Anyone who takes over from an unpopular leader gets bimus points for not being unpopular.

Agreed. I have seen this similar scenario played in many context An organization is failing. Owners / Board of directors decides to put in new leader and outgoing leader will take all the blame, valid or not. I think all parties agree on this so that incoming leader can start afresh and also taking credit successes of past initiatives while failures attributed to past leaders. That way they can add to credibility of new leader.

> The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.

Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?

For companies of this size this is the norm, not the exception.

Google's sole purpose now is to increase profit by > 15% till eternity. No innovative tech can give >15% growth in profit every year like a clockwork. So they attracted bunch of number pushers who kept on putting more and more ads in youtube and search. They started chasing Amazon or Apple in Cloud or Phone hardware. They became 100% competition focussed and completely ignored their strength. They completely forgot that they are sitting on the next goldmine like LLM. It baffles me the the company which invented Transformer and has the worlds largest index can not build something like ChatGPT. But that is not going increase their profit in the next quarterly earning.

They say they have a better ChatGPT, but it’s too dangerous to let into the hands of the genpop.

Growing past thousands of people is very hard to do “correctly”. Maybe it’s not even possible.

Large organizations are pulled very strongly toward mediocrity.

What's unique about Google is not that they ended up there. It's how they avoided it for so long.

It was a response to real issues that had to be addressed. When 3 different teams ship 3 different chat apps over the course of just 5 years, that’s the kind of thing that typically signals more leadership and better organization is needed.

Doesn't seem like they've addressed it yet based on the Meet/Hangout fiasco that is still unravelling. Mid-2010's Google was already showing signs of corporate lethargy.

That's because of something called the institutional imperative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287430

Natural end stage of organization growth.

> Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there.

I lost touch with Google's internal culture around 2011-ish. What is your take? When did you think Google changed and what drove the change? How gradual was?

For me the two big changes were when Larry took over from Eric and when Amit was fired for harassment.

Larry may have been good or bad leader, but he was just super serious and boring. Eric was amazing at trying to make us think in grand visions and be optimists, what is needed in tech.

With Sundar TGIFs were not about organizing Google to a common goal, it was much more like watching advertisements.

Big team meetings started to be anti-harassment training camps.

I started to not participate in any team events and just code, as the leaders stopped giving us real honest guideance.

During the deep dark days of Google+, at one TGIF a senior (very senior) search engineer stood up and asked Larry why they had to do everything Vic asked, like removing long-term search features and counting logins to Google as Google+ users, and Larry just sort of stood there, confused, and asked the crowd "can't you all just get along?"

It was at that moment I saw the stark difference between Eric and Larry (and later, the difference between them and Sundary). Eric was a leader. He knew how to rally the troops (his speech at TGIF right after the US economy shut down was amazing). he saw economic downturns as times for Google to grow its strengths, not shed its weaknesses.

What's amazing is how much the engineers at Google had to do to convince leadership that our pursuit of social (with the exception of youtube comments) was hurting our brand, and distracting us from the next profitable venture (cloud). I have eternal respect for the people who patiently convinced Yonatan Zunger (who wrote the infrastructure code implementing Real Names) that Real Names was a huge waste of time.

At this point it's clear there's nobody at the top of Google who really has a clue how to move the company forward. They should just put Ruth in charge and complete their transition to being a post-innovator focused entirely on maintaining their monopoly positions.

I’d honestly read a book about these anecdotes. Do you have more?

better to join google and go through all the internal history docs, memes (from the beginning) and ask the old timers.

The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The Valley.

Time to apply! ;)

Here's another. After working in Ads for a while somehow I convinced senior management to let me use all the idle cycles in prod. I spent the next three years building and running the equivalent of Folding@Home at scale (the largest number I'm allowed to share is that we used more than 700K Xeon cores 24/7 to run protein folding, drug design, and telescope simulations). We published a few high profile papers and then I shut down the project because it was using far too much energy and it made sense to free the resource up for more important projects.

How about this one? When I was working on my idle cycle harvester I happened to sit near Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. I got invited to have coffee with them many mornings. I told them how I thought Google could contribute to managing genome data, and a few weeks later, they opened up a chat window and said "We wrote a mapreduce to compress DNA. Can you tell us if this is helpful?" and that's how Google Cloud Genomics was born.

What! That’s crazy. Is your background in biology or genomics? How’d you grow an interest towards these topics?

yes, my training is in biology and it came about because I thought that biology would be more interesting to hack than computers (all this happened when I was in middle school and high school, hacking on the internet and taking biology classes). It's like being put in front of a magical new computer and being told "we have this thing in the lab, we don't know how it works, so can you sort of play with it and tell us how?"

But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".

That's an interesting career turn. Thank you for these stories from a younger engineer just starting out. :)

There was a big change in 2015 when Ruth replaced Patrick as CEO.

Most of the cost cutting dates to then. She has been undeniably good for the share price, but it's a two-edged sword. There is a lot you can't do when you're focused on the share price.

This sounds very Ginni Rometty at IBM.

The share price did well, the company and its reputation much less so.

It's not exactly news that if you want to goose a share price, a big round of layoffs will "reassure investors." Especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.

The MBAification of Google.

SOP for a McKinsey product.

I worked on Sundars team at Google in 2006. He is highly technical and understands the nuance of software.

Could he have lost that in the intervening time?

As somebody who started my software company in 2007 and stopped coding full time around 2012/2013 I'd say if you did it long enough you never lose the abstract concepts.

I understand everything my head of engineering tells me and don't need it ELI5'd. However being told it, and being asked to do it are two different things. I would be a very useful or productive coder if I went back in to the trenches.

> I would be a very useful or productive coder if I went back in to the trenches.

Would or would not?

After being in management for years I sometimes feel like I would not be, at least not without 6-12 months of doing it every day.

I doubt you can "understand the nuance of software" without having been in the trenches, even a little. Managing software roadmaps and projects or people is vastly different to dealing with systems and code.

CEO of Google should be a software engineer. There are many execs at Google that can do a better job than uninspiring Sundar.

If I were a shareholder of Google/Alphabet, I would be demanding a better CEO.

Sorry, but I haven't seen his code base, and I don't know any significant technical achievement of his other than spamming everybody with Chrome download links everywhere to make it the number 1 browser (it was a great strategy, but not enough to run a company).

Google is paying Jeff Dean, the guy who even after was famous for a lot of things, after imagenet challenge result came out, stopped everything else, read research papers for a week, and implemented a system that separates dogs from cats with unprecedented precision.

People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen to them when they say that the company should go into a direction.

> People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen to them when they say that the company should go into a direction.

I wonder if maybe these people are too principled to spy on people to the extent that Google does to profit the way they do. Maybe they select for a CEO who is talented, but also driven by money enough to prioritize that at all costs.

Demis is a super hard negotiator who was the only person able to get bought while keeping full control. I think he's more than capable of doing business.

Jeff Dean may not care that much about business, as he spent all his life on scalability, but he understands more than most people the exact data needed to be collected to be able to train the neural networks for launching / improving products. He may not want to be CEO, but I don't think that's a bad trait for a CEO.

Around '08 or '09 is when IMO it became visible from the outside that Google's culture had shifted radically.

I've read comments before claiming that when Google acquired DoubleClick, Google became more DoubleClick than the other way around. Basically, that the Google we liked was destroyed by that acquisition, and something new emerged. That certainly squares with the timeline.

> DoubleClick Inc. was an advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google

Checks out alright.

Google buying Double Click is actually the most profitable acquisition in the history of business, nearly dwarfing the Robber Baron era and the Russians selling us Alaska.

Makes sense that they would become the dominant culture in Google then, no?

No, Search Ads dwarfs it.

Google is too big to be efficient

Layoff would be inevitable. Reading its past history, the current Google is nothing like what is was. It used to be a pretty intense place where creators are eager to work (check the history of Android book, it is very informative on that)

Now it is famous for getting paid without caring

It's really unfair that the incompetent have so much power over the competent and block their potential.

Only if the competent let them.

You could argue that the whole point of something like Y Combinator is to back hungry competent founders over stagnant incompetent people working at behemoth companies.

You could also argue that the whole point of YC is to provide a passive(ish) income for Paul Graham by turning small hungry companies into behemoths via rapid forced growth and IPO. Like some kind of battery farming.

Foie gras

Eh, Google long ago passed the point where it was about making things, and has been at the point where 99.99% of its energy has to go towards stopping itself from imploding.

Which means processes, approvals, triple checks, departments/groups fighting each other (to protect themselves), etc.

It’s a natural part of the lifecycle and every organization gets there eventually.

What you’re talking about is frustration when you’re part of the picture (and individual ability to get things done) is blocked by the overall organizations dysfunction/morass.

> over the competent and block their potential

“I’m competent but I can’t reach my potential because others are blocking me.”

I mean that’s literally what happens. Best to get out of people’s way and let them be excellent

> The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.

This seems to be inevitable anywhere. In the social games, biz types beat the nerds.

> Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.

We're in the middle of rewriting our auth system because Google Sign In is being replaced with Sign In With Google.

Incredibly, I didn't just make that up: https://developers.googleblog.com/2021/08/gsi-jsweb-deprecat...

I tried Google APIs as well, and also gave up at authentication, even though I just wanted something super simple and small (push messages to mobile phone).

Nowdays I'm just using nostr for storing simple data, as it's super simple with no vendor lockin (I can encrypt messages if needed).

> Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.

This was a good 15% of what I used to do at Facebook. Adapting to the useless changes, that is, not making them.

It felt like if your changes weren't backwards incompatible then they were less visible, and therefore less impactful for your performance reviews. If you made them backwards incompatible you could boast about coordinating hundreds of engineers to transition to the new system. If the transition is seamless, all you have to brag about are improvements from the old system, and frequently there were none.

I made it my goal to get to Google several years back precisely because of stories like these about the Google of 2005 and whatever, Bock’s “Work Rules!” and all that. And I made it! And now I have lost it, I am part of the unfortunate 6%.

The old-timers I knew there must be shocked. They all said “that's just not what we do” when this was rumored months ago. “If those conversations are happening, I haven't heard about it, my managers haven't either.”

The culture that hired them told them both explicitly and implicitly “we did not hire you to do a job, we hired you because you are smart and effective, we trust that you will hate boredom and use your grit to make hard things happen and do the best work of your life.”

The reality from my little spot inside Google Cloud was much more sobering. In my first performance review I was making my bosses happy but not pleasing some faceless committee so the rating came as a shock to both of us. We worked our way out of that pit and then all our incoming headcount was cancelled because Sundar demanded we “sharpen focus,” and so we had to cancel a bunch of planned growth tasks and work on tech debt cleanup and security features, which are less sexy but keep the lights running.

The kicker is, just yesterday I was talking to the team about an experiment for a better way to improve our work, I was helping our new team lead onboard, AND I put out some new code for review that would solve a major pain point. So like I was “in the zone” today, I was legit ready to create a ton of business value. And like last night I woke up hearing the work laptop reboot in the other room and thought “that was weird” but did not give it much more thought, and then today I go to quickly skim HN, “all right let's kick some a... ... ... The affected have already gotten an email, I didn't get an email, I am safe right? ... I also didn't get the emails that we're over some quota, but maybe Kate or Martin fixed that ...? Okay work phone isn't helping, let's check the work laptop....”

Amazingly bad. Just have my manager tell the group, let us all cry together... Not like this.

Did your manager survive the cut? Google should have started there before ICs.

I think so? I don't have contact with my immediate manager, only my skip-level, who is still there. (I was reorged under a new manager middle of last year and then again at the end of last year.)

It's funny to me because this has been happening in tech a long time and is happening to the current giants. The old giants like IBM, GE, Motorola, etc. all suffered similar fates. And it's been discussed ad nauseum by disgruntled engineers who then go and make new companies/start ups to get away from the "suits".

It's called "Takeover by MBA". You know it's happened when you start hearing phrases like "Cut costs", "Make things more efficient", "LEAN process", etc. Basically the garbage pioneered by Jack Welch and taught at MBA schools everywhere to boost stock prices in the short to medium term.

It’s an anecdote but it’s also what I heard from my doctor dad working in the NHS. There was a time when the UK health system was actually run by doctors or people with medical knowledge. Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead, both in staff and bureaucracy.

In his opinion that’s what ruined the NHS not underfunding.

Business and management courses are not necessarily good.

> Business and management courses are not necessarily good.

I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish" thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting, etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.

I worked in a UK government office once where they had stopped giving teabags to staff as a cost-cutting measure. The project was £50 million over budget. That's a lot of teabags.

That's tragically hilarious.

I interned at a large well-known tech company. When I started, in the break room, there was a Keurig machine and they would keep a large drawer stocked with plenty of k-cups.

Then one day, they stopped refilling it, saying they're cutting costs. I was like, really? Each employee, at most, is drinking $2 worth of k-cups/day. Meanwhile, you're paying them at LEAST $400/day.

The kicker is that the location had a cafeteria where they could get free coffee, but it was a much longer round trip to get there. It could easily be a 10+ minute ordeal. The productivity loss outdid any savings gains.

I suspect there was a big meeting with a bunch of managers about the need to make up a 7-figure budget deficit and 50 of the 60 minutes was spent bikeshedding about k-cups. :)

Much like social media in general, "sending a signal" is much more important than doing anything.

Doctors abuse the system to their own benefit when given the chance. Putting them in charge produces terrible results as well.

> Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead

It's kind of interesting being in a small to mid-size organisation and leading a team where the need to introduce this kind of middle management is asserting itself. I'm instinctively resisting it but the downsides are clear. I have way too many direct reports. I am constantly bogged down in generic meetings - everything from desk arrangements, COVID safety, leave management, etc. Meanwhile most of my staff spend large amounts of their time blocked from their top priority task because they lack input or direction. My unique technical skills are being completely wasted. Yet it kills me that we might decide we have to blow $150k/year which could employ another coal-face engineer simply because we can't figure out how to organise ourselves better.

So should I put in place a generic middle manager to deal with all this stuff? Or not? It may seem like it's obvious in happens to large megacorps that the end result of this is bad. But you can see completely how you end up there. Certainly the people who are doing that are getting way more cred in the organisation and arguably actually getting more done in real terms.

Jack Welch was a PhD chemical engineer, not an MBA.

It’s easy to pick a group to ‘other’ and blame them for everything.

Really, it’s a general organizational scaling issue IMO.

What's fascinating is how long it took for this generation of giants for people to realise it's just the same big enterprise world again, just more shiny. Maybe it's because they revolutionised corporate marketing: Google was a symbol for my generation, a fun tech oriented company completely in rupture with what was before (i.e. wear a suit in a cubicle). The cycle is also complete with "modern" tech stacks starting to feel like enterprise framework at the time like JBoss/Hibernate/...

The conjoined triangles of Success!!

It's worth stating that Google has been hiring like crazy for years. In their Q3 earnings[0], their year-over-year number of employees increased by 36,751.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422...

Back when I was in school Google was the company that had an aura where it's reserved for geniuses and next to impossible to get into.

That was a number of years ago, I can't help but notice this perception changed among the people I know. I don't think it was entirely because I graduated and start having experience (disclaimer: did not work for Google).

This perception changed 5-7 years ago. I actually can't think of a single software company that induces the same level of awe in university students anymore. Places like Jane Street do but they aren't really Silicon Valley tech companies.

I've never heard of Jane Street before. It's kind of hard to have awe of a place you've never heard of. How did you hear of Jane Street?

Most recently due to FTX leadership being Jane Street alumni but they get mentioned a lot here due to OCaml.

They used to be quite a niche trading company, known in the functional language community for their use of OCaml. But they grew to one of the highest paying company in the world.

They've been on radar forever, but I used to work in finance and like Ocaml.

This profile in the times caught my interest

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-new-b...

Jane Street is huge in HFT space. SBF started at Jane Street.

I work in the HFT space. Jane Street in not an HFT, they are not trading in a very latency sensitive asset class.

Jane Street did outreaches at MIT (dunno which other schools), wrote blog-like things, used an exotic language, paid a lot of money (word gets around), etc.

Openai is probably the highest status employer among my network, but I don't know any university students

Deepmind is high status as well. However with both these companies - they are looking for experienced researchers usually rather than new grads. Google was famous for hiring bright eyed young geniuses and building their careers.

The Internship is now almost 10 years old. I almost wonder whether that had anything to do with it.

It's probably just size. People might believe a company of 20,000 is filled with geniuses, but it's hard to imagine a company of 200,000 filled the same way

I'm sure there were tons of great engineers at Google, and they probably were incredibly picky with college grads. But I also saw them hire people I had worked with that were experienced but not amazing performers. There are people who have good resumes in that they went to a good school and somewhere along the line worked at a well regarded company. The funny thing is that people like that are typically well regarded their entire career even if they just bounce around. The pedigree doesn't go away. It's hard to evaluate people.

"A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z players."

I could tell their hiring standards are much lower when I finally passed the interview bar last year. But then, hiring freeze, and now layoffs.

> I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability

This - and also the iPhone. The two of those were just so much better for the user than Symbian, and also short-circuited all the egregious billing of mobile carriers. It once used to cost £1 to send a message with a picture attached (MMS).

But a lot of anticompetitive hurdles had to be overcome to let that happen. The worst possible outcome for users is where the old company has enough energy to squash competition, usually by cheating, but not enough to actually do so by improving its products - because "improving" to the user would mean cutting into their revenue stream.

Whatever’s happening is a prime example of how disruptions happen in tech industry. Previous giants become fossils and new incumbents take the spot. IBM -> GE -> Google etc will all follow the same trajectory towards irrelevance.

Too many of us kid ourselves about 'irrelevance'

The companies you list build a legal moat around their business (establishing some amount of monopoly) and then begin sucking taxpayer money

In general I agree that these companies retract from the forefront and maybe aren't the innovative powerhouses that they once were, however both IBM and GE do fine as businesses and will probably be around for a long time. And I think it's important we have a bit of both in the world.

The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech, but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive projects. Google has been a driving force in laying sub-sea internet cables across Africa and South America for a good chunk of time now, enabling billions of people to come online. I don't think a small company could achieve that since it costs billions of dollars to do.

While I think you're right and GE is a fine example, I'm not so sure with IBM. They seem to really have lost any direction or vision of what they actually want to do.

GE hasn't really been doing fine since the great Recession. The GE of the mid-2000's was a behemoth. If I have to guess and adjusted for inflation, GE hasn't been this poor since the mid-80's.

>Previous giants become fossils and new incumbents take the spot.

Or, alternatively, the giants focus on maintenance and "innovate" through acquiring the new incumbents.

I think this is an old myth that is no longer relevant. Sure, it might happen, but many companies now fully understand "the disruption game" and know how to adjust, primarily through acquisitions. The only way to break this is with more muscular antitrust, which (at least for now) seems to be happening.

For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most important game in town. Furthermore, dominant companies actually rarely get disrupted in the sense that someone comes along to take their business, it's that new markets open up that make the old business obsolete. But IBM is still the leader in mainframes, Microsoft still has dominance for desktop operating systems, Google is still dominant in search despite what feels like weekly articles about how search quality has gone down.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One of my favorite poems. In my language arts class in high school we could memorize poems and recite them to our teacher for up to 0.3 added to our GPA. This was one of them.

This should be framed in the the office or every CEO. Although the point of the poem is the inevitability - maybe a good reminder nonetheless.

Memento mori but for businesses.

I like that for years (and maybe it's still there) the back of the Facebook logo sign out front was a molding and decrepit Sun Microsystems logo. It was there on purpose as a reminder that regardless of how many brilliant engineers you hire, death awaits you when complacency arrives. And if you paid attention you could find little Sun logos still lingering around the MPK campus...

The poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history of television [0], which will be studied in high schools 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)

First time I watched Emperor's Club, I was like hey isn't this just Ozymandias ? It turned out that's a very common confusion, mined by English highschool teachers

https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&...

Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial Hollywood feature film centered around that poem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_Club

Elsethread I was reminded of one of my favorite collection of essays on software development. The last post in its collection is titled "Ozymandias" http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234

    I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: 
    a stack of printouts, tall as any man, 
    that in decaying boxes had been stowed. 
    Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. 
    Abandoned in the blackness to erode, 
    what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. 
    The language is unused in this late year. 
    The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. 
    Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, 
    a line of code and then these words appear: 
    
    # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE 
    
    The code beside persisting to the last—
    as permanent as aught upon this sphere—
    while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...

> For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most important game in town.

There was a period about 10-12 years ago when Microsoft was basically left for dead

Microsoft is surprisingly hard to kill. They do a little of everything, and internally act much less like one company and more like a conglomerate. This means there is more politics than needed, but also that the company can survive some pretty massive changes. Microsoft isn't perfect, but it can probably survive even if they lost their top 3 revenue generators, which I'm not sure would be true for Google or Amazon...

for real, everyone was saying microsoft was the new ibm

I think in a way, MSFT is only doing fine because all the alternatives are doing awful. Google, Apple, Amazon, they're all not exactly at the top of their game. Also MSFT is in a huge dev. marketing campaign phase, so we as dev probably are exposed a lot more to their charm offensive than the rest of the population. Our perspective might be biased.

Azure launched 13 years ago in 2010. Before that, Microsoft had Windows and Office.

> Microsoft is famously still doing quite well

IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.

Every incumbent will be replaced eventually². What really matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo packet and kill products loved by users.

1: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GE:NYSE?window=MAX

2: https://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

> IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.

Literally, what are you talking about? IBM and GE have both been shrinking for YEARS now. Even the graph you linked above shows GE's stock where it was in 1997. Just compare either GE or IBM to https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=MAX

In my orientation (2017) an executive was there giving a speech about how great the company is. I still remember he said something to the effect of we never layoff people because we’re family. Oh well.

Executives lie left and right. Stay at a company long enough and you will see their stories shift. They are essentially politicians.

I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent. It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise.

The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.

> I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent.

If you just announce a layoff, you are already getting rid of talent.

> It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise.

Large companies can't lose fat in large strokes. There is simply no way to organize a mass layoff that results in "fat trimming".

> fat trimming exercise

The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively difficult interview process has "fat"? How?

Hiring process is never perfect, you find after 6-12 months you made a mistake. I saw that many times, I did that myself 3 times (hired people that were later fired, even after being promoted, as they did not perform well even if they were really good on paper and in interviews).

Perhaps the interview process is not as good as they think.

How did they get promoted, when they did not perform well?

Diversity targets.

No hiring process prevents bad oncall rotations.

Are your examples also examples of survivorship bias?

I was reading in the WSJ how all tech seems to be paring back their moonshot programs. I think the Google example was a program cut that had $1B in revenue but $6B in costs. (forgive me if the exact numbers are wrong). It seems like prioritizing and cutting back on programs that lose money (despite being innovative or inspiring) is a natural consequence of economic downturns.

There’s definitely some risk of that but I’d put it more at 2008: that’s when Google acquired DoubleClick, and the sea change away from building products which people wanted to use seemed to start a bit later when the ad focus had set in. It’s hard to think of something they’ve done since then which has been a popular success.

>when the ad focus had set in

Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do much for the "business" other than supporting the data for targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me, has real insight)

Yes it is. OP is pointing out that wasn't always the case - Google became an ads company, they didn't start as one.

You’re right and thanks for the re-focus. I guess I don’t know what else people would expect? All the incentives are for a publicly traded company to focus on what makes money. If you want to work on R&D solely for the sake of R&D, there are other options (notably in the public sphere). Expecting a company to continually funnel money into cool, but ultimately unsuccessful (by business metrics) ventures seems confused.

To be clear, my argument isn’t that they should ignore profitability but that they could have multiple revenue models for different products, not to mention a better understanding of what it takes to succeed in different fields.

I’d use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services but their sales guys showed up like “we’re Google, of course we’re the best” and put approximately as much effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton of people available, listens to what you need (and actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked on it, … and none of that matters if you give up after begging them to show up to sell it.

I think it’s a little more subtle: the ad focus means they’re unwilling to consider other revenue models or deeply appreciate how customers are different than high volume ad impressions.

The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to make a profit on its own would not have been. Their executives just weren’t sweating the way they would have if they knew their shares would go down when they didn’t execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are running the service in a way which makes it clear they have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the parent company and thus aren’t blowing off customer support, features, security, etc.

G-suite definitely was held back by that approach. I was there during the critical years. Very frustrating.

I can only imagine. It amazed me how many great people you’d talk to and the company just squandered their efforts.

The Chromecast was pretty market defining, and they’ve made huge inroads in education if you count that as “popular”. Chrome was technically around in late 2008 but it took a while after that to reach its current dominance.

Yeah, I don’t want to say there’s a line in the sand because nothing happens instantly or completely at a large organization but I’d say most of their successes were started before the ad culture became deeply entrained.

Chromecast is definitely good but it was years after Apple and Roku, and feeds data to the ad impression system so I’m not sure how much it defined the market rather than very successfully competing in it.

Google’s educational efforts are actually super interesting to consider: they had some initial success but seem to have lost their way. My wife is a teacher so we hear people talking about this: most of the districts around us have switched to Office 365 and almost all of the people who’ve mentioned that have been happy because it’s a better product without so many of the never-fixed warts they hit with G-Suite. That feels eerily similar to what I see with GCP where you really get the impression that incremental improvements aren’t favored by whatever incentives their management sets.

Do you have any idea on what the Chromecast revenue stream was? I couldn't find it after a cursory look. I'm wondering if it's lumped into one of the "other" categories.

I think part of the distinction is how "success" is being defined. A product may be innovative and market defining, yet still not contribute much to the bottom line. It's still cool to work on, but these companies are still trying to make money at the end of the day. I assume their moonshot ideas still have the explicit long-term goal of being profitable.

ChromeOS was a game-changer too.

That also explains why carriers are obsessed with buying media companies; they just can't let go of their dreams of a walled garden.

Carriers are doing their best to avoid becoming a "dumb pipe" utility-style service where other people make all the money.

I call this "the plumbing law of the internet business."

The unspoken question: who does get to make all the money?

At which point should the quasi-monopoly with the moat be? Hardware manufacturer? Retailer? Mobile carrier? ISP? Search engine? Social network? All of those companies have valuations which assume they'll work towards capturing most of the value, leaving the others competed away to nothing ..

I dug up the original story* and read it for the first time just now, it was a great read. I particularly like the imagery of Apple and Google dealing the deathblow to that idiotic app-rental scam the carriers had been running

It seems like we've pretty much come full circle in the 10-15 years since then. I wonder who'll be the ones to put old Google to sleep..

* A PDF of it popped right up in search results

> I wonder who'll be the ones to put old Google to sleep..

Hopefully soon, I make a concerted effort to avoid using Google services wherever possible. Even in cases where the alternatives are inferior.

Poetic but misguided. The Google of 2005 didn't have so much fat to trim. When you have 150k employees, there's no escaping it. Not everyone is going to be hungry, and certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better. Many are happy to collect their paycheck while doing 20 hours of unambitious work per week.

Now the remainder will do 50 hours of "ambitious" work for projects that will eventually get axed, redone, reorganized etc.

It was never a raw productivity per hour problem, it was an organizing productivity behind meaningful, useful and profitable projects problem.

> certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better

in an organizational complexity of 150k -> 138k workforce, no one is in a position to make things 10x better, let alone 100x. Shedding 12k is a scapegoating gesture as if there is such a possibility, merely to ease the anxiety of the market price of shares. It doesn't even directly move the needle for profit/asset ratio, but it will help depressing wages with the theatre of "look what we had to do".

This sounds great, but obliterating tiny markets isn't going to move the needle anymore. Google Cloud is the size of bet required these days. And they are still investing heavily in it.

Uhhhh, Google didn’t make Android, Google bought Android…

Though, note that both Android and Google Maps were acquisitions. Someone needed the vision to acquire those companies, for sure, but their initial incarnations aren't great examples of Google innovation.

YouTube as well…

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