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Comment by kderbyma | Hacker News Reader

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

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’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”.

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

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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.

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

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