What is Google doing with its open source teams?
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I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one.
Google engineering culture has long been described as permitting coasters and encouraging employees to structure their work around what might get them promoted; that might be great for an innovative growing company, but I suspect Sundar & Co. know that that label doesn’t really fit google’s position anymore. I really don’t see any other reason they’d lay off high performing employees on important projects - especially OSS giants.
If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades.
There’s still massive innovation and builder spirit there, but I’m betting that we’ll have a much easier time poaching our favorite employees from Google now than we have over the last few years.
I’ve been part of several companies that have gone through layoffs, and one thing I’ve learned is that companies that haven’t done it in a while (or ever) typically do it poorly.
As far as I know the rankings were
- Facebook (but I don’t hate myself enough to consider working there)
- Amazon
- Apple
- Microsoft
But Facebook has had a worse stock price drop than the rest.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-links-more-ceo-p... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21031629/google-ceo-sund...
There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reeling from this, but it’s really just another day in corporate America.
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
Few people think Google is special in 2023. They just pay well.
AT&T and whatever company inherited the Bell Labs might have done rounds after rounds of layoffs but never fired Dennis Ritchie, for example.
People such as DiBona and Allison are assets to any company who can afford to hire them. This is simply unexplainable.
The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.
The Big Names are actually filled with so many smart and productive people that it doesn't matter who they lay off.
The more I read about this stuff, the more I realize that a lot of is out of sheer luck of hitting product market fit. Google monopolized open internet ads 20 years ago and except for protecting their moat they haven't done much else, 90% of their money still comes from there. They're trying to expand with the cloud, but they're a distant 3rd or 4th.
Have you forgotten this is the same company that had a backroom non-poaching pact with Apple (and probably other SV firms) a decade ago? And got caught red handed and got in a shitload of trouble for it?
When I joined Google in 2011 they were still dealing the fallout from that.
Its as if someone has forgotten that they can increase revenue instead.
It still hasn't stopped, though it may have slowed a bit in its increase. But there's no danger on the revenue front. Just danger on stock price, because investors really want Number Go Up continually.
So the moves last week were really about making investors think Google is Doing Something and exercising downward pressure on wages.
Its a sector-wide move to put downward pressure on wages and bargaining power, and Google is only a small part of it.
Ads is a money printing machine. The most important roles there are SRE, data centre, and ops/infra jobs that keep the machine up and running.
"Profits [in Q3 2022] were at $13.9 billion, down from $18.9 billion in Q3 2021"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/google-profits-plumm...
Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.
I know both Chris and Jeremy well and I wouldn't imagine either of them trying to "maintain a veneer"
Pretty comparable is "Developer Advocate". The job is to grease the wheels between people using your services and the developers developing them. In that role, they playact as both customer and provider, both to developers and consumers. An awful lot of Developer Advocates are mediocre at both, but you don't need to be good; In fact, in some ways being mediocre is a plus, because the point is to represent each side to the other.
Whereas, the people who have done great things and spend their time on brand instead of "Doing X"; Often they are coasting on reputation, but it's a form of retirement for them. They still like X. They still want to do X, but as a hobby, and getting paid to talk about X and get others excited about X is like having your cake and eating it.
Your suspicion is what would need to be substantiated. Contributions made by these people are well known.
The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.
The ROIC Renaissance
"You’re not in the same situation as oppressed workers of the past." I don't have to be to recognize that a soul-sucking job sucks... If we're just comparing levels of oppression, then yes, you are making the "just shut up and be glad you only have one boot on your face instead of two" argument.
If you can, without comparing levels of oppression, make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty, then I'm all ears. "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
> I'll be forced into the "shit pay plus 2 hour commute per day, sit for nine hours in a tiny cubicle"
That's not exactly how jobs in Bay Area at least look. I mean 2 hrs commute can happen, if you live in a cheap place and not in walk distance from Google campus, but the pay likely would be not "shit" at all, especially for somebody who worked at good salary in Google.
> make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty,
That's it, from the point of view of about 99.9999% of Earth population, it will still be dream come true. From the point of somebody who has been living in the paradise, they will be living in a bit less luxurious paradise, and that would, I agree, sting and be very distressing. I mean, it is natural for people to strive for perfection, and for improvement of their own conditions. If you are hungry, you want to be sated. If you are never hungry, you want tasty food. If you have tasty food, you want it prepared specially well, be of appropriate spiciness, be healthy, have variety, maybe get some exotic foods from foreign lands, or authentic food from specific region, or prepared in some special ways by uniquely creative cooks. There's always something that can be better. Or, as it happens, worse. But if somebody who had access to Michelin three-stars restaurants, now has to eat in star-less ones, he shouldn't complain he is dying of hunger. His soul may be distressed, but it's not distressed in the same way as would be if he was actually hungry. Yes, there are levels, and yes, understanding them is good.
> "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
Maybe that's why somebody else has to tell it. As they say, you can't tickle yourself. So maybe you realize this point, and maybe realize that the suffering that you are feeling may be caused by framing, and also cured by framing too.
Side note, but it also strikes me as a sign of how normalized corporate treatment of people is that people is when we're on a thread about an article that talks about an exec making over 5 times a googlers salary per day and instead of people going "what the fuck? If that's true, 500k should be the norm for more people!", I get pushback on my comment about how this is a bad omen for the rest of us and called whiny.
Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.
I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or seem like they will do.
How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
My understanding from somebody in a position to know is each VP was given a target/quota of cuts. Then they basically had big spreadsheets with salaries and performance ratings, and then pseudo-blindly cut teams or people to make quotas without input from directors/managers, and gave those lists to SPVs. On receipt of these lists some of the VPs were then canned.
To avoid lawsuits for discrimination in the USA they then added some statistical “noise” by firing a number of people randomly so the numbers balanced out with no “bias”.
The company is run by total morons in my opinion. I’m an extremely high performer with world class expertise. I didn’t get cut, but I’m interviewing elsewhere. I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll. I’d rather take PIP culture. Ultimately Google needs me more than the other way around.
There was I'm sure a way to make a whole restructuring or cost cutting process happen in a way that could have salvaged their reputation. But they didn't spend any effort trying to find it.
And if ad spend drops significantly and/or there's actual anti-monopoly enforcement against them, it will really accelerate things.
They have enough $$ they can coast for years, but it isn't going to be pretty.
Having lived through multiple layoffs in the last few years, I'm not sure there's any org larger than, just handwaving here, 1k people that doesn't do this.
I think you'd have to go to a startup before your absence is actually felt.
It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.
On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.
All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.
Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.
First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."
“Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.” - https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311....
“Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation” - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
“Microsoft Uses Layoffs to Push Underperforming Employees Out” - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-p...
“They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...
Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors.
Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit.
It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.
Do you actually believe this to be the case? Why on Earth would Google do this? You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews, so at best this is just a hunch you have. Ask yourself if it's a hunch that makes sense.
Sundar is never going to actively cast shade on the people he just let go, but he did emphatically say "the process was far from random".
I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by the layoffs, while people who were high performers in the current and/or prior cycles were impacted by the layoffs. The experiences of other people managers within the company (and at Amazon and Microsoft) agree with this.
I don't want to get too into Kremlinology, because I don't have enough data to say for sure how people in my org were selected beyond "performance wasn't a major consideration". But there is definite high-level tilt towards cutting people from certain areas in the company (parts of maps and devices were hit hard, most of cloud was barely impacted).
My own anecdata confirms that /only/ low performers or people working on projects that should never have existed to begin with were let go.
For example, one friend mentioned that someone on his team was let go while they were on call and actively handling a security incident.
Another person had two people critical to their project laid off. They didn't cut the whole team, just the two most critical people. Regardless, that team is kinda up shit creek now, but still employed by Google.
Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
That usually means laying off a mass of people without consideration for their individual attributes.
Layoffs are literally never personal… at least in theory.
Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.
From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter.
Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up.
I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.
Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).
AWS bills Amazon an internal rate. It’s a closely held secret that few employees know but supposedly it’s better than at-cost.
Everyone has access! Everyone I worked with at Amazon knew the prices they were spending for the different services they were using or thinking of using.
Not exactly making a strong case.
Ads + Twitch = 9.5B, AWS = 20.5B
Edit: my experience is with aws not gcp. Gcp is a bit of a non entity in enterprise cloud.
Culturally it didn’t get enterprise, e.g. “ditch oracle and move to spanner”.
Technology wise it was not setup for enterprise.
Staff wise it was paying way too high of a total-comp for non revenue roles. TAMs making 400k/year on accounts spending < 5M/year.
However it could have addressed all those. There were people inside advocating for those changes. Eng and Product leadership refused to listen. And the CEO refused to reward business success and instead rewarded product launches od multiple un-successful messaging apps.
Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.
It's a podcast first and foremost so the URL is still good for the direct links in various podcast players.
Last year google started warning some internal teams that they had to limit usage. It’s possible they’re running out of compute.
What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity?
Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.
They’re the same CPUs they just use an internal API to provision and not AWS APIs. I’m pretty sure the internal APIs also just wrap ec2 et al at this point (for backwards compatibility)
Much of the Amazon infrastructure predates AWS and was built on homegrown systems. A lot of wasn’t ported over.
If you want to see what it looks like to have an Amazon product made available to AWS and that wasn’t designed specifically for AWS, look no further than Amazon Connect. There were no publicly available APIS for years to automate anything. Every AWS native service is API first.
S3 was built from the old image hosting designs, but better.
StepFunctions and SWF before it are re-designed based on the 5 internal workflow engines that existed (and still do exist).
SQS is a re-do of AMP.
DynamoDB is a re-do of Sable.
Redshift is a re-do of their internal partitioning and querying of Oracle databases but on non-Oracle databases. Their new iteration of Redshift is designed to replicate Andes + Dryad/Cradle.
The people responsible for writing and maintaining AWS Services are my coworkers…
Your comment above doesn’t seem to reflect that history, so I just wanted to make sure it was stated.
AWS is also entirely built on Amazons builder tools like Apollo and Pipelines. So it’s really unfair to say “AWS was built from the ground up”
But that doesn’t mean they just took a few extra computers they had to spare and start hosting external customers on the same metal used by Amazon retail.
The only product that I know of in recent history that came from Amazon to AWS without many changes (and without any API or automation story) is Amazon Connect.
You wouldn't say something is built "on" Github.
Your continuous deployment and continuous delivery toolset isn't really what's running a multi-tenant cloud environment.
Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.
The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only.
This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support.
I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.
The only company I've ever dealt with which was worse at taking your money was IBM. In both cases, it was eerily similar: you could get a room full of people to do a demo but the salespeople seemed to assume their reputation meant success was inevitable and they didn't have to actually do anything like … eeew … work to close deals. In neither case were we the biggest deal in town but also far from the smallest, and in both cases the experience meant they missed out on larger sales later.
IBM was similar: we were trying to buy Opteron servers, let our rep know, had a bunch of people show up, ended with them saying they’d send us a quote, no reply to multiple requests. Maybe they weren’t interested in mere 6 figure purchases but they could have said so.
(And, sure, we aren’t the biggest customer but you don’t get large deals if you can’t handle medium size deals. AWS shows up & they get considerably more business.)
I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.
The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.
Now that's not to say Microsoft doesn't hold any monopolistic positions or engage in monopolistic behavior, most large companies eventually do and Microsoft still does where opportunity presents.
But if you think Microsoft is a monopoly and Google isn't, you have a view of the industry that is two decades out of date.
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome and Android either have direct competitors in other ecosystem or are open source. YouTube and search are the only ones I can think of without direct competition. And the competition for these products come from Apple and Microsoft who are more/just as entrenched in owning and growing their entire platform.
While ignoring all these huge monopolies, you claim search has no competition. Ironically, about a third of global search queries are serviced by Bing! I would go so far as to say the monopolies above are as powerful, or moreso, than Google's grip on search.
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients
And “email is for old people”. How much important personal communication even goes over email?
Chromium and AOSP also aren't trivial contributions to open source and having the ability to fork those projects is much preferable to me than a proprietary solution that's more democratic once it achieves market dominance. Manufacturers building their own devices having nowhere to go was a problem pre-Android and a reason they'd rather license Google's OS rather than compete against Apple. And I think the decision of web standards has grown to be a bigger issue beyond what W3C or Google should be handling at this point, we treat the internet as public utility with the promise of standards without actual regulations and our browsers are an extension of that mess currently (not to say government is actually equipped to solve the issue).
I wasn't ignoring those other services I was doubting their monopolies unless we're changing the definition. I'd say the majority of dominant tech products have a large market share with few competitors but which are monopolies? I'd agree Android/Chrome was a monopoly if iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Safari, Windows, Azure, AWS and I guess bing all start getting a look at for markets with seemingly only one/two other competitors, especially when you look at the fact they contribute little to nothing back for public benefit.
So in a sense they had a lot of the parts of the winning recipe. They just didn't have capacitive touchscreens. Or decent batteries. Or affordable flash memory. Or gorilla glass. Or an on-screen keyboard you could usefully use without a stylus. And mobile data was slow and very expensive.
The rest of the phone market, at the time, was off doing weird things like WAP.
Microsoft missed the market in the sense they weren't on the flight when it took off - but they didn't miss it, in the sense they were at the right departure gate hours before any of the other passengers.
Microsoft recognized that GUIs were important enough to their future to make what were arguably the best mice available. If they had “caught” mobile, they would have done the same for phones.
They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.
As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.
For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...
> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.
To be fair, I think, in retrospect, the iPod and iTunes sync process and system gave Apple a multi-year headstart with building and developing a consumer-friendly backup and sync process.
Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius.
With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their OS to multiple 3rd party vendors, trying to create a commodity marketplace for their OS on other people's devices.
Apple won on vertical integration, created a focus product, and profited off the experiences and reputation they had with iPod in order to make a winner.
But people also forget that at this point in Apple's history, it was kind of... make or break. The iPod and then iPhone were huge gambles, that paid off in spades. If they had failed Apple would have continued to be a minority PC producer with poor profit margins and a reputation for being "weird" and "niche." Even after the success of the iMac in the late 90s, they were still in quite a bit of $$ risk.
The intense vertical integration and the product focus in the iPhone could also have failed. It was risky but it paid off for them. MS (and others) had a lot more to lose, and was more conservative.
> They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat
So...they missed mobile.
alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard.
No magic here.
Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
And they still own YouTube, don’t forget.
(And by some stories I heard, “literally nothing” might even have been Pichai’s approach had it been his choice.)
The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
In the extreme case, one route might take no fuel at all vs one that climbs a mountain before dropping
Beats me how it was supposed to be a fuel saving road, other than doing that by virtue of destroying the car.
And it turns out Connie Sue is still out there, running desert tours except not now because of lingering Covid restrictions.
> Connie's work background started with 10 years of general nursing and midwifery, 14 years as a violinist in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and has studied Computer Systems Engineering at TAFE part-time.
Interesting people!
If you're interested in the landscape those roads pass through, here's a 13 minute intro:
Good roads until 6:00 minutes in .. and then they take the David Carnegie Rd.
Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death
It feels like the sensitivity to traffic is turned up way too high.
While you are driving on the "closed" road Maps keeps insisting on turning back and suggesting silly alternate routes.
Had guests who trusted Google and took the Google alternate route losing 30 minutes in the process .
This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903016 [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
see https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/tech/google-waze-maps-merge/i...
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents).
This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day?
As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
That is no longer the case.
What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting.
Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.
And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.
By that same token, there is no one to blame but the founders now that Google has turned into another mediocre big corporation without vision.
Thanks for watching!
Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.
The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t.
I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play.
Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff.
- Your Average Xoogler
I'm really curious as to the motivation and background to this. How much can you tell us without revealing your identity?
My only intention was to provide a little bit more nuanced depth to the original conversation. It’s not just puppies and rainbows. People and organizations are complex and operate in shades of gray.
That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.
Chris then invited me to meet at a playground where our kids could play and we could talk tech. He also brought along his colleague, Guido Van Rossum! We had a fun chat but in the end I decided bigco was not for me.
No regrets.
(I seem to recall that was about Facebook at the time, not Google, but same same.)
They own the front, middle, and back of the whole thing, and strangle (even if they have to acquire) any other business that tries to break in and get a better deal for publishers, or advertisers both.
Take a read through this, it's a good read: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/downl...
(It was especially disheartening/confirming to see them outright admit (in quotes the DOJ acquired) that they bought my former employer (AdMeld) explicitly to make it disappear from the "competitive landscape." When I worked at Google, I seem to recall having to take yearly training courses on how I should say stuff like that, but these people... felt free)
Its ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING that MS and Alphabet are being pushed into laying off collectively over 20K people so this billionaire can recover a bit. Like, could this not be a national security issue? This man is able to have Google trash their open source initiatives on a whim, making the company weaker. It should be very very illegal.
1: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4567705-chris-hohn-tci-fund... 2: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fun...
This is broad and across the industry.
It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem.
Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer stories of gmail accounts getting shut off for no reason after 15 years with no recourse.
Ah, a man can dream.
> a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
So yeah, I would hope that an algorithm was used. As opposed to what? "I like that guy more than the other guy".
You seem to have the interpretation that some guy in finance wrote a script, it output some employee IDs, and then no one checked the output before laying them all off, as if slaves to the machine. Do you really believe that?
And based on that, absolutely I think Google did that. They run everything with data and statistics without humans. That's how they are so efficient.
This is backed up by the fact that the managers who work there were simply told who they were losing and had no input into the process, and aren't even aware of who has been let go yet.
I know some people who used to be on the team. Given that they built analytics to automatically sort resumes, automatically identify retention risks, and automatically set salaries, it wouldn't surprise me that they had developed a system to determine layoffs.
Google isn't the only company that does it. It's not like it's unique to Google or anything. But yes, I absolutely believe that Google used an AI to determine the layoffs, at least to inform them if nothing else.
[0] https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/people-anal...
Managers were not informed because there are so many of them at Google that it would have leaked long before the process was over. The process was conducted manually by 750 directors and VPs.
No, of course not. But that doesn't say anything about their firing process. Also they brag about their people analytics team and how they manage their people with the same automation that they manage other parts of the business. So it's not that ridiculous of a take. Especially when you consider how much automation they use in the parts of their business that should use humans, like customer service.
...
What a destructive 'growth at all costs' economic culture. I guess those hedge funds and shareholders will pick up the slack in those open source projects...
I think their profit margin reduced, so company became less healthy and balanced.
It sucks for those fired but let's be honest, just a bit. They're household names in their respective industries, and they'll be welcomed in no time onto new projects.
It's like a fire sweeping in a forest, clearing the undergrowth and making space for a new growth frenzy.
Of course badges stop working when you're let go. What possible good can come of leaving the badges on? All it takes is one in 12000 disgruntled ex-employees to make it not worth it.
I'm not convinced that announcing them in advance is actually better anyways. We have partner teams in Europe who get to spend a month or more after the announcement worrying about whether or not they still have a job. Morale on the teams in the US took a noticeable hit, but the teams in EU have seemed utterly miserable for the last week.
I think it’s better to have some warning, but it would have been great if they could have said “your job ends in three months, here are your options” instead of leaving people hanging while they figured out the details on the corporate side. Or even, if paranoid about disgruntled employees, to say “welcome to your garden leave, here are your options.”
Laying them off? It is quite sad to see.
IBM-style “consulting”?
Given the choice, I know a lot of people deeply involved in the OSS community who would rather leave for another OSS-friendly role at another company rather than get pulled into something that pulls their time and attention away from their OSS activities.
That’s good for us that they were let go. Google sucked them up and nailed their feet to the floor with amazing comp.
Now they’ll innovate elsewhere.
Google has never had a particularly coherent open source strategy (look at how many repos are on the github.com/google org) and I don’t think this latest layoff says much about what the future of the strategy holds either.
Supabase, Vercel, etc. all stepped in to fill that massive void that Google could have taken care of so long ago. IMO that's a massive miss and failure on Google's part.
At the hands of Google, open source is just a weapon of the complement commoditization. So no wonder they are letting those people go now. In this way, they are trying to lower the antimonopoly pressure against them. The second benefit is preserving all those money that would go to the salaries of those fired people.
I doubt this will change the trajectory of accusations. But it gives some momentum in terms of reaping the peak monetary benefits to shareholders before a possible company division through legislation.
(Unless they demand to work on only open-source software then it may take a bit longer)
Still: IBM/RedHat should hire right?
FTA:
> It has been widely reported that … those fired included staffers who had just received high performance reviews … with annual compensation packages of $500,000 to $1 million. … Many … were the best of the best in Google's open source program office (OSPO) and other open source efforts.
FWIW, we are actively hiring a handful of engineers in this competency+range, into a well funded (founder funded, not VC backed) startup. We are doing interesting things and intend to release generally useful patterns as open source. It's also an entrepreneurial change of pace for builders/makers after an enterprise, even an SV enterprise.
My username at the freemail owned by the company in the article.
Sibling comment excepted, there aren't many companies hiring for this. 18+ years also makes it challenging because for the last two decades, you've only known Google, and it's not clear if you can operate in another environment.
step two: profit
step two: profit from people willing to code for enterprises for free
There has to be some reason that Google released PyTorch under BSD-3 by Meta and TensorFlow being released under Apache by Google.
Full disclosure: I got my current job before I had contributed anything to open source but I was asked a lot about it while applying to companies like it's expected that you work in your free time
No wonder Microsoft loves it.
Even LGPL is super challenging here due to requiring dynamic linking. This is fine in Java (unless you use Graal AOT compilation) and Python, impossible in Go, and at best discouraged in other compiled languages like Rust and C++.
I think there's likely a copyleft middle ground - something like the Mozilla public license seems about right, where it copylefts improvements without infecting users. I don't know why Google chose Apache 2.0 over MPL or the like - for something like Android it makes sense, for something like Guava it's not clearcut. But, when people talk copyleft, they're rarely, rarely talking MPL.
I think it's unlikely that Google opensourced Tensorflow with a view to getting some free dev hours, they're doing it to push their OSS agenda, to wield influence over how everyone else does work.
Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourced, the world reinvented in Hadoop and the progress started happening there instead of in MR) and wanted to avoid becoming the bit player in a space they pioneered in. It's a reasonable strategy. (The risk is that you're giving away something that could be a competitive advantage.)
(worked on tensorflow at Google for four years.)
Google really hates copyleft and the GPL.
US government policy is that software developed with public funding is a public good. Current policy encourages government software to released under the most permissive license possible (ideally Public Domain, but practically permissive licenses like MIT/BSD). GPL is farther from the Public Domain than licenses like MIT/BSD. To enter the rabbit hole of material on this topic start at https://code.gov/about/overview/introduction/.
That's not remotely consistent with the way that term is used in practice...
This is "source available".
Open source software and free software are philosophically different but refer to mostly the set of programs (with two different but equivalent definitions [1,2]).
[1] https://opensource.org/definition
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en#fs-definition
I’m pretty sure when you say “look but not touch,” you’re talking about project governance, where outside contributors have limited input into the direction of the project. If that’s the case, I don’t like this conflation of governance and “freedom”. Google’s open source software is free software by all definitions (including FSF).
For a project to be open source or free software, users need to have the “four essential freedoms”. The ability to get your changes merged upstream is not one of those freedoms.
It is totally valid to criticize the corporate governance model of open source software. But it’s best not to confuse our already overloaded definitions by saying that corporate software with a free license isn’t really “free.”
Except it didn't. It's still there.
Where is the innovation here? How are these moves cutting edge? It's the opposite - reactionary, megalomaniacal, short-term greed drives. That is not a culture that will produce innovation.
And why is this in Google’s best interest?
I'm being facetious here but this is in line with what I would expect from an organisation that continually reaches for automation over human interaction
Because it's impossible to be evil if it's in your motto not to be evil. Right?
But those with a longer tenure did get a more generous severance package (more than a year's salary for a 20 year Googler), so they weren't treated with disrespect. They now have an entire year to figure out what to do next --- although someone who was there for Google's IPO is likely to be in a position to retire if they so choose.