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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

This is a good article and it does a nice job of explaining some of the problems at Google. Of course, much of them are overstated and others overfit to the particular group this person was hired into.

As someone who has first-hand knowledge of this person and the project he led, I can say (and I'm sure everyone would expect this): he does a great job of seeing all the things wrong with the org and the company; but he fails to recognize his own mistakes and shortcomings.

I would love to see one of these kinds of blog posts where the author owns up to their own mistakes.

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I worked with the author for a couple of years, pre- and post- acquisition, and I have to admit that he drove me somewhat crazy sometimes too. Leaving that aside, I also had an immense amount of personal respect for him as I could see how much he very genuinely cares about what he is doing. And, that's actively doing his best to do right by his customers. I think the author is 110% spot-on with his critique of Google here.

How exactly does having a blog post about the author’s own mistakes affect the validity of his criticisms against Google?

Where exactly does the comment you are replying to state that it does?

So you agree that it was irrelevant? Why interrupt an interesting conversation about Google with a comment about how the author is not perfect either?

Because conversations can and should (sometimes) meander off on tangents. As interested and engaged people, we should not only always confine ourselves to the topic at hand, but wonder about patterns and parallels and what they can teach us. "Hey, I've noticed that a lot of these critical blog posts often show a lack of self-awareness about ones own failings or contributions to the problem. I wonder if this is a psychological pattern that we should be aware of in ourselves?".

To return to the implicit point that helicalmix appears to be making - timmg was not saying that "a lack of self-awareness makes this post invalid" (in fact, they specifically led with "This is a good article and it does a nice job of explaining some of the problems at Google") - it was acknowledging the quality of the article, and then using the form of the article as a jumping-off point to a related observation.

A conversation which remains laser-focused on one particular topic at the expense of all others is (sometimes!) helpful in narrow technical domains - but expanding to broader context is usually more interesting and more illuminating.

Indeed, and additionally the proposed fixes aren’t all that inspiring. Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything.

It’s funny that he cites the Waze blog, which similarly gives the impression of a blameless author

> Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going to change anything.

I am of the opposite sentiment. I think it would do wonders. It's very easy in a mega-corp to completely lose track of what the product is, who the customers are. And my intuition is that most VPs at mega-corps think about products in the abstract and focus more on politics & empire building/strategy than actually caring about the customers - and it definitely shows for companies like Google.

Just last week I tried to spawn a GPU instance on GCP, and despite being very familiar with the space (I work on cloud infra), after 20 minutes of fighting the overly complex UI and ridiculously broken flows, I still hadn't my instance up. In the next 3 minutes, I signed up for Lambda Labs, entered a CC, clicked a single button and ssh'ed into my VM.

That's what any start-up focuses on: the product. And that's why they always win over bloated mega-corps focused on internal processes and infighting, whose employees self-select for being complacent about mediocre products as long as the monopoly keeps printing fat paychecks.

It’s an incredibly condescending exercise, both to the managers (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?), and to the people who actually run support (who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers).

Google’s products aren’t bad because the VP’s have lost the meaning of holding your customer dear. Maybe their senior managers are stuffed with former startup founders, all visionaries in their own minds, who collect big windfalls to join, play at empire building for a few years, then quit in a huff and blog about how it’s everyone else’s fault.

> (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?

This assumption that every manager has complete agency over their own meeting schedule is equally flawed. I've never attended a meeting for fun, but I've attended countless meetings that were of absolutely zero value to me just because someone up the food chain from me decided I should be there.

> who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers

I'd argue that managers being untrained in customer service and, especially, resentful of being forced to do it illustrates the author's point pretty well.

In my opinion, managers with little understanding of the customer experience should be condescended to. If they think it's beneath them to do a little actual work, doubly so.

I have limited knowledge about Google, but this sounds overly simplistic for at least GCP.

Large contracts are locked behind FedRAMP compliance, DoD ILx, and so on, and I happen to know that all large cloud providers listen very closely to customers in this space.

Your harsh criticism is valid under the assumption that GCP is an unsuccessful consumer product. I think it is only partially so and features are mostly driven by larger b2b and governments, where it is successful (in the sense that it delivers most features customers care about).

You're missing the point.

If you think talking to customers for an hour is pointless, then you are part of the problem...no matter who you work for.

No, because its "symbolic". Customer outreach is important, but just talking to customers for an hour may or may not help change anything. Maybe have actual outreach programs other than "one hour, and once".

ex-googler here, who has had similar criticisms but was able to recognize their own flaws and mistakes, chipping in.

Doesn't the culture, as described, exacerbate certain flaws in certain people while hiding flaws of a different kind in others?

At google it's easy to see how a flawed engineer might suffer from impatience, lack of tact, inability to read the room, poor social skills, not being attentive to details or to everyone's needs. It's easy to ascribe flaws to someone who makes mistakes and, instead of writing a lengthy postmortem and installing a process, goes ahead and fixes them while pleading for everyone to move on and keep shipping.

Yet at the same time, the sins of complacency, cowardice, inability to make decisions or take calculated risks, rigidity, and aversion to hard, uncomfortable work remain well-hidden. Sometimes, they are even elevated to praise! At Google, it's better to waste everyone's time or do nothing, than take a risk and ruffle some feathers (and I'm not even talking about taking externally visible risks here--a decision to build a certain piece of infra or shut down a project).

And the cycle repeats. A brilliant but "flawed" engineer realizes they can't work in that culture. They blow up and move on. Everyone says "eh, they make mistakes, can't read the room, and are difficult to work with. Poor culture fit". Well, for them, a bunch of complacent do-nothings is also extremely difficult to work with. But the do-nothings are in charge, and they are not. So they leave. Rinse and repeat.

In every failed relationship there are two sides. Maybe one is entirely at fault, maybe the other, maybe both share blame of maybe there's just a basic incompatibility. This is true for work just like it is for marriage.

In each case, it is easy for one to point out flaws in the other. And in some cases, "the other" is the only one that has flaws. But in most cases it is probably a combination.

Just because a company has culture issues doesn't mean that every employee is blameless or perfect. When someone doesn't work out for a job it is hard to disentangle how much of the blame belongs on each party.

In this case, I'm fairly familiar with a lot of the facts on the ground. As I said above the article makes a good critique of the real problems Google has. But it also blames some of those problems for mistakes/failures the author himself made (in my opinion).

You make good points. I'm not in a rush to ascribe blame to anyone. It's just that sometimes certain culture prompts people of certain mindset to make certain mistakes. Repeatedly and predictably. Is the culture to blame, or is that person to blame (each and every time)? And is it productive to even use the word "blame" in this situation, or should other concepts be used?

Since you're more familiar with the facts of the case, I can contribute nothing more than to offer a different angle to look at this.

And I'll leave the author's self-improvement journey to the author.

> he fails to recognize his own mistakes and shortcomings.

Which in no way impacts how right or wrong his criticisms of Google are, and is unrelated to the topic he was speaking about.

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