Seen on Blind: “Chat with a googler was horrifying” | Hacker News Reader

Seen on Blind: “Chat with a googler was horrifying”

teamblind.com

50 pointsGalenErso16 comments

Wow. I've gotten glimpses of this from friends who have almost all now left Google. From the outside, it seems that the political structure in place within Google exists purely to perpetuate it's own existence as a political structure, vs driving towards a deliberate balance of customer value/employee happiness.

My friends used to talk about how they loved it there, and got to work on impactful things. But slowly that shifted to "all we do is take a half year to add a field to a proto", and then "at least it pays well".

I don't have anything in particular to add here, but it seems a shame that Google has fallen so far.

This is somewhat validating to read as someone who started semi recently.

> it seems that the political structure in place within Google exists purely to perpetuate it's own existence

This is true of any system. What has changed is the perceived "greatest threat". In the past the greatest threat was that the entire operation ceased to exist. They might be outcompeted or fail to deliver value. Now that Google has firmly cemented itself as a stable monopoly, in the economy but even more importantly in the minds of the manager, the greatest threat is that their department is deemed unimportant and allocated fewer resources.

There's no longer any perceived threat to the collective, so instead the whole thing turn cannibalistic.

This post makes me wonder if emotional responses follow a normal(ish) distribution. On one end you have somebody who's completely unfazed by what's happening and on the other tail you have... this googler.

With number of employees being larger than many cities and some countries... You probably get everything and anything.

The trait of negative emotions in the Big 5 model of personality does have a normal distribution (like all other traits).

,,Google may be a lot worse inside than we're hearing''

Google's Q4 financials were already much worse than anything before (1% YoY growth). Right now with 2 real competitors (Bing and ChatGPT) just putting only ads on the front page may stop working as a ,,product strategy''.

Even if Google is executing great (and I'm an optimist on that front), that won't translate to clear revenue growth, as margins have to shrink.

My best buddy works at Google. We talk a lot.

People are in fear due to ChatGPT and the lack of a cohesive plan to get Google to be competitive. Putting lots of hours on a failed strategy makes no sense, and as long as Sundar is leading the company, the rational strategy is rest and vest while working on skills for the next gig.

My take is that leadership feels the same, and Sundar is also resting and vesting...

Are anonymous Blind posts really worth of HN front page?

How can one even make a non-Company linked Blind account?

It accepts any custom domain I think.

"Se non è vero, è ben trovato" clause, perhaps.

even if not true, it's a good story

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/se_non_%C3%A8_vero,_%C3%A8_...

(Doesn't sound better in Italian)

Not enough Rust in it?

Could someone make money shorting google at this point in time?

Cool

Sounds like the organization is being sensibly rationalized.

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