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Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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?

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. :)

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.

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! ;)

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.

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