Google stopping coding competitions
developers.googleblog.com
developers.googleblog.com
Now it's obvious and commonplace, but an employee-centric company was revolutionary at the time. Things like this changed the lives of every single person here, either directly or indirectly.
And best yet, it's a chance for other companies to take up the mantle. Rather than wishing Google kept playing their same old hits over and over for 2 decades, there's more oxygen for new companies to take the lead.
('you' here not meaning the poster I just commented, but, well, you know who.)
When Google falters, Microsoft will be there to scavenge. I'm worried that Microsoft again will become the dominant software company.
Something that WinDev killed with politics (Longhorn, Singularity, Midori,...).
"them" likely were layed off, hence they shut down service now.
We did? Everyone talking about how shitty and staid they've become is comparing to how great they were.
I can't help but think that in a meeting somewhere someone mentioned that the coding competitions have run forever in response to people complaining how quickly everything dies -- and someone decided to fix the glitch.
In the world of major software corporations, perhaps, but it's not like it was unknown elsewhere.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
There had to be early Google employees who read that.
One could even argue that Joel and Jeff both having popular dev blogs drove the early adoption for Stack Overflow.
(And every time there's a story about Google employees rebelling, it's to make things even better for the employees and continue ignoring the users.)
I don't think that was a good thing.
We mustn’t confuse the people who make a corp great for the corp itself. The people are (or can be) awesome, while the corp which is a profit-driven institution that won’t hesitate turning against the people that make it great if it has to increase profitability a couple of quarters down the line.
Wake up, folks, they’re in it for themselves, they don’t (want to) care about you either as employees or as consumers if they don’t have to.
Real talk: What companies are filling this role now?
I work at a FAANG, and it just does something to the soul. I can't describe what that thing is... but I routinely look at early-retirement calculators to cope with it.
I think the next gen of employee- first companies will be wfh centric (or something new and flexible) and 4 day work weeks. People realized slides and food wasn’t as good as free time and flexibility. I expect maxing their employees 401ks and generous cultural WLB.
Companies that are advancing technology and gaining a rep as tech first? Look at blog posts that gain lots of traction here: Fly.io, Cloudflare, and many others. etc. Avoid anything too trendy ( AI, blockchain) because they might not last the hype cycles.
You'd come into work at 9, wander off campus to a nearby restaurant with coworkers for a relaxing lunch at noon (granted, because the food in the cafeterias sucked and cost money), and after a bit of exercise or a nice game of racquetball at the gym, you'd go home at 6. Or if you were single and it was a weeknight, you might stay late in the office watching movies in a conference room and doing a bit of coding.
Of course, fifteen years ago, Google paid more and had a reputation as a place where the really smart people came to grow their careers, whereas Microsoft was sleepier and more middle-aged.
But it had "WLB" in spades.
But it’s not a startup, and you have very little ownership, and so little actually gets done
The rah rah rah fake cheerleading and silly hats
When you’re a consultant looking back at a FAANG everyone FAANG kinda comes off as an NPC it’s weird
I can’t speak for Netflix, don’t know anyone there
We were told Web3 would be the next disruption. Now we’re told it’s AI. The mere suggestion of Google messing that up tanked its stock price, maybe it’ll be real this time and OpenAI will define tech culture? I’m sceptical but hey, maybe.
Now they are just another corporation.
I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.
I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that.
What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out.
No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing).
Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade.
“The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
Dallas has a lot of parallel highways/roads, and Apple Maps seems to get really confused and have to recalculate the route every few minutes when I'm down there. Google seems to understand it perfectly and simply doesn't do that.
What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades.
(After going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, would they respond to a threat by jumping on a real emerging technology, or a buzzword technology? That's why you can't cut your researchers and simply bring them back when your competitors are getting close.)
I know many non nerd complainers, but they don't know any alternatives.
Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore.
It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report.
Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.
For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.
I would say the change towards “less exciting” is driven by risk-averse management. Even their latest “risk” (Bard) was driven by Microsoft’s Bing release. I would even argue that releasing Bard represents the lower-risk approach. The risk incurred by being silent is undoubtedly what moved Google executives to rush out a half-baked and even more poorly executed “demo”.
In the late 2000's/early 2010's, google was pictured as the "fun" place to work. In part due to their coding competitions and the various other events they held for students throughout the year. Everyone I knew wanted to work for google. Now? everyone sees FAANG just the same as any other company.
Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere.
What specific services and products are you thinking of there? How do you know they were profitable?
Consider, eg, shutting down their (Stadia's) game studio before the release of their first game. First release was scheduled a few months later, with no significant delays having occurred. Nevertheless, shutdown.
No one would expect it to have made a profit without a release. But apparently there was no way they could be profitable enough to warrant keeping.
After the massive layoffs that dwarfed any previous ones at Google (combined), that's no longer a pull to joining Google over other major techs.
Honest question (this is really not a challenge), care to share where? I always thought of the FAANGs (collectively) giving the best compensation in the business. Which companies are paying more than Google but with more stability?
I can't answer where pays better than FAANG, but companies in the bay (eg. Uber) are starting to approach the salary. Even smaller no-name bay companies are starting to match on base salary (equity+bonus is harder to match).
FWIW- I see a lot of places with matching or better base than FANG, but it's precisely because the equity at FAANG is so high.
The only places I see with meaningfully higher pay than FAANG + hot tech companies of the day (ex. Doordash, Datadog, ...) are hedge funds. Curious if there is anywhere else
I’m curious. Does this mean you’ve left Google and returned multiple times at the same level while having better jobs elsewhere?
Not to be critical but why? (I ask because I’m considering returning to old places down/equileveled after being laid off somewhere and curious your reasons)
So doing a few jobs as an L4 is what’s unexpected because after experience at another role, and additional knowledge gained, etc ideally they’d be able to return as L5+.
I feel a little bit bad because I very much used their benefits and then left again to go to a more appropriately leveled job. But going back to L4 at a megacorp was kind of mind numbing, and the compensation got so bad after the stock drop and location based pay cuts that I couldn’t justify staying any longer.
Thus, I'm going to be a little skeptical when I hear about people taking higher paying jobs with more stability elsewhere.
edit: Ah, he's counting start-up equity as not worthless. That's definitely one way to value it.
I've never worried about compensation details so much, and instead tried to find projects with interesting technical problems that bring intrinsic value to humanity, and a company of people worth spending my life with. My first job out of school, my salary was 40k below other offers I had. It just seemed like the best use of my time and energy. In time it brought me what I can only describe as an embarrassment of riches. My coworkers on the self driving car project at Google were perhaps the most brilliant people I've ever met. To paraphrase Zipline's CEO, they want employees doing the best work of their lives, and it's a marathon rather than a sprint. I have countless examples of the company, its employees, and its management going above and beyond. We're literally saving lives, too.
Of course, this was a few years back, I'm not sure if the landscape has changed now for better or for worse.
Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).
Cue Amazon's efforts to stay away from 'Day 2'...
I'm not sure I'd give them that much credit in executing on any strategy.
Google sat on perhaps the biggest moat any recent company has known. They had cash to burn for decades and to their credit put a lot of that towards employee happiness.
But I'm not sure they ever really got anything off the ground for the "post" search era.
For what it's worth, this was a big part of why I had a positive image of Google. Enterprises are boring, especially when it comes to technology. They make boring decisions about technology because they are almost always made based on bullet lists of half-truths, rather than by the people who actually have to use it.
Google seemed to make things for the users. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, none of these had feature parity with their competitors at the time, but they were just so much better to use that people abandoned those enterprise products, even if their company was the one paying for them, and Google's popularity skyrocketed.
Many years ago my university asked the students to decide between Google and Microsoft for the (student) email platform. The impression I got from IT folks I knew was that they were strongly in favor of Microsoft. But when both companies were asked to make presentations to the students, I remember leaving the Microsoft one thinking they weren't even trying.
Boring is good, sometimes. Especially when boring means "reliable" and "gets things done without being the center of attention".
Scott Hanselman's old analogy here is that enterprise software is something like the "dark matter" of the software universe. It's obviously boring, and mostly kind of hidden, but yet still so heavily influences the gravity all around it.
On the other side, if you live by the "exciting" technologies, you sometimes die by the "flash-in-the-pan" effect. It's unfortunate for Google that they seem determined to prove that in the ways that they support and maintain products.
The Oompa Loompas are the sycophants that are still drinking the Kool-Aid.
Can you learn to construct a grammatically sentence before you decide click the submit button?
> as Google retiring for on being Google
I can't tell what this phrase is supposed to mean. Can you explain/edit your comment?
It seems like they meant "as Google retiring from being Google"
the Google Summer of Code still exists (and that other program for high school kids I think).
I think those were the nicest things they did back in the day, and I don't know of any other corp doing it.
I can confidently say that this is not the case in India. I have a countless list of people (including myself) who received emails from Google recruiters for advancing to later rounds of Code Jam or securing a top rank in a Kick Start round. Even if people missed out on top ranks, they would put their results on their resume/LinkedIn and would get attention from recruiters anyway. Needless to say, these were strong signals for recruiters, especially for university students. Based on the skewed demand-supply here, they were closer to necessary than sufficient.
The great layoff and such things just made it official.
>One thing perfectly
I'll admit I've not looked particularly hard, but as far as I can tell nobody has a competing product, so Atlassian basically owns the whole field at this time.
There are lots of good modern alternatives to Jira. The reason people still use them is the same as why Oracle DBs are still so popular – they have a large sales team and corporate contacts, and so their products are pushed down your throat.
The plot twist being that with the Overseer disposed of, your character takes his place, and the second playthrough features a NEW "hacker" player character who etc. And so the cycle continues.
Parallels to the history of Google are left as an exercise.
Electricity is also a huge productivity booster, but it doesn't advantage any one person, all have access to the same energy infrastructure. Youtube has educational and artistic content for everyone, but we need to actually use it to get the benefits - it depends on us.
There is often beauty in good competition problems. And you can even learn something along the way.
Google seems to have skipped out on the prize and substituted branding
At the same time at least Google Code Jam which I participated in, is an event for the masses where while there are winners in the end the focus is on great experience of thousands students and recreationals who participate.
All that said, by shutting down without announcing a reason, Google must've known people would speculate and likely assume it's because of the "Google = Oracle" reasoning. So I'm certainly leaning towards the "this is pretty sad" side of things.
I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!
* Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms
* Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite)
* Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it
At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.
The first two have published some influential works during their academic careers:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=df8TSy4AAAAJ
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Vjo4Tg4AAAAJ
I wonder what the total number of research papers and citations of all Code Jam winners would be. Sadly, it's hard to find reliable info on most of them.
Still, I think it's pretty sad that "results don't conform to our ideological results" equates to "it must be a bad metric, let's shut it down!" Hope it's not the same kind of thinking that led to ElectronConf being cancelled a couple years ago for "not having a diverse slate of speakers", despite the fact that all proposals where chosen in a blinded process explicitly set up in a way to eliminate bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>
Steven's been around the community a long time and is pretty well connected, so may know more than he'd stated explicitly in that piece.
The decision to shut down everything at once also looks hasty. Why not at least leave the website running for the times things will get better? Many competitions skipped some difficult years but returned.
Thanks for all these years, Google, still hoping that this decision could be revised.
It's true that Apple makes good devices and Google does good search, but their competitors are good enough.
What distinguishes Apple and Google from their competitors is that we like them more.
Not "we" the technical literati, but "we" billions of users.
As a result, they are SO careful about maintaining that goodwill. But is this careful as in afraid, or careful as in focused?
Google spent time building it, but now seems to want only not to screw up.
Apple is still building. It's always trying to build it, probably because it spent its 1990's adolescence as an outcast.
Twitter and Facebook are similarly large and had similar initial stories, but of late have induced massive distrust. People are there only because they have to be, and they're struggling.
Apple and Google see Twitter and Facebook as examples of what NOT to do with your goodwill.
Apple's growth and technical chops keeps investors at bay. But Alphabet's sprawling failures have heightened criticism, as Google-X and other nice-to-have's haven't turned out any measurable benefit (and measurement is how Sundar justifies his strategies).
So fingers-crossed that Google's quiet retrenchment doesn't result in a Twitter explosion. I'm not confident that switching out Sundar would help more than it hurts (which is the FUD that he lives by).
More importantly, the industry-wide refocusing on AI produces lots of demo-ware, but no business on a scale that could grow Google or Microsoft. That coming implosion worries me.
What's lost in the rush to AI is the question of bureaucracy: how to keep these massive organizations from being self-serving, particularly to the extent they engage with the outsourcing and consultancy that drive financialization.
WFH likely increases bureaucracy by privileging process and work-product over brainstorming and risk-taking, so my bet is still on Apple weathering the storm better than the others.
People don't really have the same good will for Google though. It's an ad company. They simply tolerate it.
That sounds like something that might actually improve the products.
One year I was competing from my honey moon.
I was never really good but it was one of the competitions I have greatly enjoyed. Especially when one could still run the code locally and submit solutions in any language possible.
There were pepole who made an effort to solve every problem is different language.
I haven't competed last 5 or so years, but I will shed a tear for Google Code Jam.
It's sad to see Google -- the once very promising small company with big ideas -- getting sucked into the vacuum.
One common trend in evolution is toward gigantism in places of intense competition. Whales, for example, may be as large as they are to avoid having to compete or be eaten by smaller animals. Being bigger means they eat more, leaving fewer resources for competitors.
It can be quite the winning strategy.
At least so long as the environment can provide enough stability to feed such large organisms in the manner in which they are evolved to exploit.
For companies, being large means you can always buy the competition or make sure the barrier to entry is too high for competition (thinner profit margins, "free" services, regulatory capture, etc.).
It works, and quite well. These large corporations can withstand enormous financial shocks, and if they can't, they get purchased by those that can.
For most mature markets this generally seems to shake out to most of the product area being divided between two or three big players and a host of smaller companies at the edges.
Oddly enough, when things are stable being large may be a winning strategy, but it is also very fragile and if the whole system gets disrupted, can be the first to fail when things change too much.
The size of these vacuums is a direct result of policy. Tax policy, liability policy, antitrust policy -- there are a dozen levers we could pull to create a corporate landscape that looks very different. But yes, with the levers in their current positions, what we see here is inevitable.
Large businesses are the ones that tend to abuse their power, gather data inappropriately, promote monopolies, squash competitors using underhanded tactics, make inappropriate financial deals, lie to investors, and rent-seek at a grand scale -- in other words, all the anti-patterns of badly regulated capitalism.
And mom-and-pop businesses are totally capable of bad behavior and especially are worse to their employees! If they're too small to have HR departments they are perfectly capable of doing business based on personal grudges, wage theft, and accidentally doing things up to and including hiring slave labor.
> lie to investors
This one's funny because startup investors actually demand you lie to them (because they think it shows the right personality traits for a CEO, psychotic optimism), whereas large companies are public and the SEC will sue you if you lie in your investor reports.
Small companies require more overhead (per size) for compliance, yes, but they also have to compete with each other and they can't fight back nearly as effectively with lawyers and lobbyists.
> If you're a small company, that means you're not good enough
...at the game of monopoly, which is not a game any of us should be particularly invested in.
Though it's not the full Thiel monopolies are good philosophy. I merely think that large companies are not all monopolies, and that they can be monopsonies too, which can be good for consumers. (And they can also pay better and treat employees better than small companies because of the reasons I said above.)
> they can also pay better and treat employees better than small companies because of the reasons I said above
On the other side of every "easy dollar" is someone getting squeezed hard. Google employees and shareholders love the easy ad dollars, but everyone else pays through the nose for marketing. Apple employees and shareholders love the easy app store dollars, but independent devs and end customers get taken to the cleaners. Your ability to only see one side of this equation represents an extreme failure of imagination. We all pay a heavy price to keep things this way.
https://twitter.com/jonathanirvings/status/16220755214872084...
It's strange that they decided to discontinue the entire competition instead of just cancelling this year's one, though.
I'm guessing that's the reason for this. I wonder what this means for Summer of Code.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
They've also taken away the company credit card so that all employees must go through the dreaded Finance hurdle to have any fun.
Riffed, as noted by SJvN at The Register (<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>) and discussed here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576>) about a month ago .
Chris made a brief comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563641>.
“We have enough coders, thank you!”
( pssst … actually we have too many )
Sad to see it go, but hey, it's their thing, they can do whatever they want with it.
As a matter of fact, I think we could crowdfund this. Watch this space for a link to my Patreon, where you can pay a mere $10 per month to blame me for things that upset you.
If you'd like to sign up for my special High Flyers VIP pricing, you can even call me and rant at me for the decisions of companies and governments that bother you.
I can take it! The buck stops here!
Responsibility falls on him at the end of the day to get this stuff right.
If internal politics are in the way of achieving high level goals it's the CEO's job to address those internal power games.
Nobody's flying the plane. It's on search ad autopilot and slowly crashing into the ground. Could make for one of the most catastrophic value destruction stories of our time.
And sure, 99% of his compensation is Google stock, but at those magnitudes the marginal utility of the dollar is zero. What's the difference between $100m and $200m anyway?
As others in the thread are trying to explain, there is a huge stratification at those levels. A $1B net-worther has a very different ability to project his will onto the world than a $.1B net-worther, or a $10B net-worther. That matters to them.
Presumably sundar is motivated to remain CEO for as long as possible regardless of the specific motivations, right?
Whether he is motivated by earning a billion dollars over a decade or he’s achieved pure altruism and simply wants to make Google the greatest company in history doesn’t really matter. He can only achieve his goals if he remains CEO. And as a public company, that means keeping shareholders happy. No?
>Whether he is motivated by earning a billion dollars over a decade or he’s achieved pure altruism and simply wants to make Google the greatest company in history doesn’t really matter. He can only achieve his goals if he remains CEO.
I don't buy this argument at all. For one, his goals are unknowable and might be what he plans to do with $200m/year, and he could justify anything to attain that $200m up to and including total destruction of the organization. Secondly, many people abdicate power if it's false power i.e. someone forces their hand in critical decisions. He hasn't done that presumably because $200m is more important to him than his pride or (Google) legacy.
Cisco, Oracle and IBM actually have some customer service.
As for Oracle -- never dealing with them again if I can help it.
Meanwhile in google land, you can literally be bring in millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue on your channel and asking for help from your dedicated Youtube contact/representative can get your entire channel retroactively demonitized
This means that even if you have 2 million subscribers and a youtube rep for support, asking google for help is just as likely to ruin you as actually fix anything.
In any case it didn't ruin him. He's still making videos for YT.
Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was not going to be the next Facebook, but Microsoft had to try and fail in order to learn those lessons.
The real question is who- if anyone- will be the Satya Nadella of Google, bringing the company back for a third act in the post-AI world. And maybe, in this new world, the limiting factor of human progress is not the number of CS grads who can solve coding puzzles.
Google is the web monopolist, and would never build apps like YouTube or Maps for a Windows phone product, since it would compete with Android, and not have the market share of the iphone.
Microsoft tried making their own YouTube app, which Google had taken down. Without access to the Google web products, a new phone ecosystem is going to be dead on arrival
I agree Microsoft flubbed the strategy, same with Zune where they had a technically superior product but no commitment.
Platform reboots killed any developer momentum they built - Windows Phone 8 apps were not backwards compatible with Windows Phone 7 which itself was a clean break with Windows Mobile. A lot of trending apps like Instagram and Snapchat never released apps on the platform, so you had to use third party knock-offs that chased private APIs. Microsoft did build some great social media integrations that tied your contacts into a single local profile across platforms (Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook).
They also kept rebranding and shuffling services on the phones - for example Zune became Xbox Music became Groove.
There were 200K apps in the windows phone store, that would have run on day one when windows 8 released. Instead Sinofsky wanted to kneecap devdiv, and created windows rt API, which was a C++ mess that led to developers completely abandoning the windows platform.
All app development on windows phone stopped when windows rt for windows 8 was announced. Windows phone was miles ahead of Android at that point. In terms of apps they had 200K in comparison to Androids 500-800K apps.
You mean marginally less obnoxious than it used to be?
Sorry, that isn't fair, but still I think they were less obnoxious back in the Windows 3.1 days.
If you're looking at business practices, they're a little less obnoxious than they used to be.
No. It's not. Which is to say, why do we value "CEO makes money?" That's NOT valuable to me. Microsoft doesn't pay me, therefore the pure question of whether or not they make money is literally meaningless to me, and should be meaningless to you if you are not in their employ. I'm not saying it's bad either, but it's such a weird gut reaction.
Which is to say -- if you find out the CEO is making the company more money, you still do not yet have enough information as to whether they're good...
Surely you understand that jrm4's interests, specifically, don't factor much into corporate/national decision-making?
Microsoft could have very easily found another Ballmer instead and ended up very different today. Main takeaway is they aren't really comparable and we still don't know where the winds are blowing for Google.
2. Microsoft has an actual enterprise business that is stable and not prone to disruption, they can swallow huge projects that fail easily without endangering their cashflows. This is NOT true for google, search (their core channel for ads) is getting grilled in the new future by ChatBots + SocialCommerce + non-existing customer support + known to launch stuff only to kill it shortly after + many people hate/ignore google alltogether. It doesn't matter if they can build a better Bot on their own, these huge margins are gone now, innovators dilemma.
3. "post-AI world" for me means achieving technical singularity, and what comes afterwards is strictly not predictable, including the fact if humans continue to exist at all, let alone the concept of "programming jobs"
1. Continue to accrete new revenue sources and pivot slightly forever until you eventually do a bit of everything, "diversifying" to the point where you become in effect a small nation
2. Stick to your plan and go out of business
These are the two possible outcomes as a public company
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc are offensive companies in that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Microsoft in particular is held back by having to support the platforms. Office as a standalone company would be worth more than Microsoft.
Also feature wise, why do I need a LinkedIn option on Excel.
But that’s what you get when there is 0 competition.
What we need in competition and anti-monopolistic policies. Not splitting up companies.
For starts let’s get rid of the fucking patents for all software.
However, I can see Google execs thinking the same and using this explanation as the reason to close the competition.
Also, even if people do use ChatGPT, that shouldn't be a problem - it's a tool like any other. Programmers use tools all the time. Is it cheating if someone uses Wolfram Alpha or Stack Overflow to solve a programming task at hand?
One can dream.
It may be as simple as "Morale dropped too low for the folks there to feel like it was worth it to continue," or "They let go of the people who were volunteering their 20% time to make this happen."
If we ever get back to having a Google that's competing for the best engineering talent, they'll probably reinstate them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.