Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator, severely impacted by Alphabet mass layoff
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Edit:
A hypothesis I have:
Part of the success of search is in the belief of the elite ness of their engineers. “They are the smartest so why ever try another search product”. The aura of the company is part of the brand/product. It’s brilliant marketing
Google’s problem was never a lack of ability to build and run impressive engineering artifacts. It was always that the business and product side of things was run very poorly.
I've been working professionally for 25+ years depending on when "professionally" starts and almost _never_ has been "the team can't build it" even in the context of companies that are basically mountains of mediocrity. The problem has _always_ been that the team didn't know what to build, and very occasionally, the best way to build it for the long term.
The difference is stark even at large companies. Oncall shifts for friends at places like Amazon and Meta are nightmares of constant pages and stress. Oncall shifts for my friends at Google have tended to be far lower key, with dramatically fewer pages and more straightforward resolutions when issues appear.
That Amazon and Meta are worse than google, well, I will grant that. Meta's internal culture is crazy.
Apple and Microsoft appear far more intentional and successful with the products they choose to launch.
Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind
There's a lot of smart engineers who don't work for FAANG or will never work for FAANG, but your dismissal of engineers who work for FAANG as essentially bad engineers is completely wrong and insulting.
SWE at Google means you're good at interviewing, and that's it. There's a reason why Go was made, because, of of Rob Pike's own admission, most new devs at Google are dumbasses. There's all the half baked products, the dogshit APIs, all working on some internal ad software that runs in O(n^n^n) because who gives a shit, we're google, we have spares in our datacenter. The same applies to Facebook, that has hired up the wazoo and has basically led to a pass-the-interview culture. Passing the interview means you're good at remembering interview questions.
I do have some praise for Netflix engineers, mostly because they remain a small-ish team with insane talent, and Apple and Amazon I can't really speak for. But just like every company, they have mediocre and average software developers.
>most engineers DO want to work there
In the past, maybe. Nowadays, you're in a pretty massive bubble if you see people still interested in joining fucking Meta. Although I guess $400k TC would make me question my morals too.
I agree that FAANG engineers aren't necessarily the geniuses they hype themselves out to be, but making broad assertions needs some baseline aside from personal experience as my personal experience with FAANG engineers has been mostly positive. That's not to say non-FAANG engineers aren't competent either, as I have worked with non-FAANG engineers as well and they were perfectly fine.
The intent of the OP was simply to dismiss anyone working at FAANG and insinuate they were all subpar and average. He thinks you can just say "from my experience" and that just absolves him from any criticism of his statements. It's completely disingenous.
This statement says nothing about the average skill of a FAANG engineer. The bizarre extrapolation of statement A to fabricated statement B is quite astounding. Truly.
Love how you keep reiterating something is a fact without zero evidence.
The fact that is being considered a controversial statement is truly mind boggling to me.
It's pretty absurd that you continue to think you're somehow making a logical argument and somehow think your IQ is above 120.
> "The minimum threshold to get hired for FAANG is ~average talent and the willingness to grind"
> "Some average talent people work for FAANG"
> Thus, somebody who is average can get hired by FAANG
I said absolutely nothing about the skill distribution or histogram of talent across all of FAANG engineering.
Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.
That an untalented person can join FAANG does not say anything about the talent of the FAANG engineer on average.
An interview process threshold defines the left tail of the skill distributions of the hires, and tells you nothing about the shape of the distribution beyond that. Though you can likely assume it's normally distributed.
How many ways do I need to slice it for you?
> Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind >
You have to be specific here, what do you mean "all you need"? Is this time to study algorithms? Because not everyone who studies algorithms, at the same rate, the same number of problems get an offer after an interview. Not only that, you're implying the interviews for other companies are exactly the same in regards to checking for IQ, which is completely laughable.
You simply assert that someone with average IQ that you know (and even underperformers) made it into FAANG, so you then broadly extrapolate, without evidence, that it means the selection criteria S for FAANG is simply a matter of if the person spends time studying and has an average IQ, and is no different than any under interviews.
Astounding.
Solid reasoning there.
> Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.
"Statistically and logically sound" lol
Nothing to see here works. Can't you see the obvious?
Edit: I too believe that FAANG engineers are not special but that belief is not proof of that statement.
> If plenty of average talent people get hired at FAANG (they do, from a statistically reasonably sized sample). Then being above average talent is not a minimum requirement for joining FAANG.
Where is the study or data on that? Just repeating things and sprinkling in terms "statistically reasonably sized sample" doesn't make it true. I know you want it to be true (and it may be true) but that is not evidence for that.
The other thing, of course, is that small companies can afford to be extremely judicious in a way that G/M can't (for example the old thing where Netflix only hired staff-equivalents). But I ultimately agree with you (like I said!) that at that point you're basically saying Google and Microsoft contain the below average engineers only from the index of current-and-former faang employees, which is sort of trivially true.
As for grind, idk I think it's good that my coworkers are below average grind. I am too. Wlb is good. Grind is unhealthy.
But then again none of this is as painful as using Xcode so I can't really complain.
Not quite true. As a hiring manager I lost several really good candidates to competing offers from Google. And these were strong engineers not only interviewing-wise.
It does not matter how good an engineer you are when you produce crap. There are great engineers working for 3 letter agencies and the result of their work is people going to jail or getting killed because they are against the official narative. See Assange for example.
What I said was self contained and factual, nothing more.
That hasn’t been my experience.
How on earth did you come to that conclusion?
The entire pipeline there doesn't even make any sort of coherent sense. WPF was clean, had extensive interest and support, and could have been trivially extended with more refined and "modern" styling/functionality. That's fundamentally all that UWP/WinUI are anyhow. But with each branching off, they splintered and annoyed developers in the XAML domain, to say nothing of the fact that I'm just pretending MAUI/Xamarin doesn't exist here.
I feel that the constant desire to push onto new things is, somewhat ironically, really holding back major progress. Because you put out some new awesome and really exciting tech, but things take time to mature. C# is absolutely awesome now, but was a mediocre java clone when it first emerged. It took decades of incremental and focused progress to get there.
Then we finally have Native AOT, but still fails short from .NET Native capabilities.
I can't speak about Apple but Microsoft is trying to copy Google closely.
The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works.
But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did".
Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling?
I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.
The frequency with which new features point blank did not work at all just blew me away. The problem 100% of the time was that some dev had written a feature given a bug ticket, written some unit tests that covered the code, but never actually brought the serving stack up and played with it themselves. They thought QA meant some test with lots of mocks, not, ya know, actually testing the feature as a user would see it. It was painful to run the servers locally so they just didn't bother a lot of the time.
Can’t separate that from the product - as a user I care about the whole thing
Funny. I don't disagree, but I find Youtube's search much better than Google Search itself lately.
Apart from the "barely related" videos interspersed with real results, it actually shows results related to the keywords I typed.
Some are outstanding.
Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.
That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.
lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ.
In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses.
Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.
They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video.
Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?
My kids only get to use curated experiences where a human has actually picked the content (ie. pretty much every other Kids video app).
The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?
This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.
No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.
Their problems lie in management: executives, line managers, product, etc.
"You are in power saving mode. This function might be affectd." Is it or it is not affected ? What is the result ? On a 1.8 GHz proceesor with 4 GB of RAM this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Separately it'll probably get less coverage than things like the incubator shutting down, but I suspect more external impact will be felt as a result of them firing the head of Open Source who's been there for 19 years. :/ Tech press hasn't picked that up yet though.
Google needs a strategy strategy. They have corporate ADHD and shiny object syndrome at a massive scale.
IMO they are perpetually confused because of the fundamental conflict between a culture of brilliant creative people and the core corporate mission to make ads more pervasive in our lives.
But they like to act like they aren’t at the terminal stage of development, and it causes confusion and customer upset and layoffs.
Ads are Google's oil.
Oil happens to be under UAEs ground, whereas Google has to work and compete for its ads business (vs Facebook, Amazon, others.)
Also, UAE and Venezuela both have oil but one is doing much better than the other. How you exploit your assets (oil or historical position in the ads business) matters a lot.
Then there is the fact that their oil company PdVSA has been under US sanctions which can't help much[3].
[1] https://www.gem.wiki/Venezuela_Tar_Sands
[2] https://knoema.com/infographics/vyronoe/cost-of-oil-producti...
The 2nd paragraph shows why your analogy between ad revenue and oil revenue is flawed.
The third paragraph shows that even sticking with the flawed analogy, how you exploit the asset matters.
I can't find any source that claims this, and a few sources I could find say that it's a loss leader or that it's "roughly break-even".
Everything else is subjective and generally leads to decay.
And there are plenty of objective measures: gross margin, EBITDA, ROA, ROE, lots more. And those are just financial measures! Installed base, CLV, NPS, there are many many objective measures.
He was a real leader in Open Source and a master of all its licensing complications. That's knowledge that's not easily duplicated.
In fact what did it accomplish for the business. Google would have a better roi giving the money to Google Ventures or a16z. Or starting a private equity like firm adding notable startups to the alphabet portfolio.
A120 was a sinking ship for a while
Is there any evidence that Google is better at managing money than its investors, say Warren Buffett? If not, they should raise their dividends instead.
Alternatively if google is viewed as a growth tech stock. I think people would trust google to make investments into growth tech startups. Google ventures performance is pretty decent.
They definitely rated themselves highly though.
He took over a company that was at the top of its game and fucking ran it into the ground in 4-5 years. He’ll be remembered as the worst tech CEO of a major company for years to come.
I couldn’t believe how quickly and radically Google changed and after a while, many of us cut our loses and left. This layoff got rid of many other long-timers for what seems to be no good reason.
We can only hope that all the solid engineers gravitate toward a company where the leadership is not completely incompetent.
He is up against stiff competition for this award. Even getting nominated is difficult.
I worked at Nokia under Stephen Elop.
Sundar has a long way to go.
Never heard of them. Looked at them each now - nope, no bells ringing.
Separately, isn't an inhouse incubator a clear sign of a conglomerate that has gotten too big and slow? Makes me think of old telecom companies and their love of inhouse incubators, so that they can show they also do that innovative dotcom thing.
Innovation needs to happen from within, at every level.
Software obviously doesn't inherit the physical aspects involved with aerospace experimentation (e.g. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works). The limiting factor is typically only employee focus/time.
Then they get "acquired" back into another division of the conglomerate. Startup scratch itched, equity in pocket.
So the real outcome was retention. Though that's hard to measure.
Perhaps that's why I never heard of these things - it was an inhouse holiday resort. Not meant disparagingly. I personally spent a year in such thing, before I was "recalled to duty". Corporate politics is a thing.
Microsoft is trying with Lists (https://lists.live.com). They released the public preview a year ago, missing key features, and failed to release final version.
Amazon tried with Honeycode (https://www.honeycode.aws/). They are no longer trying to build a spreadsheet-like interface to database.
Google tried with Tables (https://tables.area120.google.com/). They were supposed to release GA in 2022, didn't happen.
AirTable remains the king of the hill.
Even though they are not providing machine learning models, Google is still the biggest provider of high quality AI research papers in the world.
As AI models are improving, at some point they will turn into business advantages, it's just not yet big enough business for Google to make a big difference compared to ads.
I agree that they have at least one of the top AI research groups among the corporate players. But is that going to translate into business advantage?
IBM Research was (and is still to some extent) pretty solid, but did that actually translate into business advantage? The "Watson" that competed on Jeopardy was impressive for its time. But we can look back on how the attempt to commercialize that flopped pretty hard.
Note: I'm not saying Google has IBM levels of sclerosis, at least not yet.
But there's no ironclad law that a solid research division will always turn into something profitable.
* Giant Magnetoresistance (gigabyte hard drives)
* Financial Swaps
* Silicon on Insulator Technology
* DRAM
* Fortran
* Copper metallization on silicon dies
Everything we saw from OpenAI we've seen in one way or form from good ol alphabet already, just not accessible or obvious in their products. They're really both blessed with immense science and engineering talent and highly inert and frankly dumb business side.
AI Research papers usually don't contribute to the bottom line.... you need execution chops there.
Google is still one of the special companies that are prepared to take advantage of AI when it gets to the point of capturing trillions of dollars of value.
I will be happy to read something nice from FAIR as well, so please elaborate.
I think they were afraid this tech would cannibalize their existing offerings and wanted to slow-roll things. Now they're sorta f'd.
Reality is Google's primary problem in doing demos of their newest models is the activism and views of their own employees, not the rest of the world.
We can try it, though, so it's great for publicity.
And it's not the Kodak days, Googlers fully understand that they need to disrupt themselves. And to tell you the truth many engineers there are more excited than afraid that things are happening, I think they will have the opportunity to get much more creative than before.
Anyway, however obvious you mind find it, to many people watching Google become...this...is disappointing, or vindicating, or just interesting to see. I grew up with them and they're aging poorly.
For Google this will backfire, former employees will be working for competitors soon.
They had this division whose responsibility was to try pie in the sky ideas and see what sticks.
The problem is essentially the corporate equivalent of people who post on HN saying they want to make a startup but have no good ideas. If you don't have a vision or value proposition, it is impossible to force it. Simply wanting to be an innovator is not enough.
The problem is even worse if you have management deadlines and bureaucracy. You end up simply picking the top bad idea at the next review cycle and running with it.
Existing companies don't have these restrictions. They can finance projects that take 10 years to pay off, projects that require high volumes to be profitable (no startup could have made the iPhone at that price point), or projects that have a 3x ROI at significant investment.
In return, big companies have cultural problems that can make these things difficult. But it's valuable to have both innovation in big companies and in small flexible companies.
On the other hand, correlation is not necessarily causation.