Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps it's overly reductionist, but I think a lot of The Google's issues come down to their self-image. To this day they're stuck in the year 2006 when everybody and their grandma saw them as "cool", "innovative", "not Micro$oft", and "not evil." Most average joes don't believe those things anymore and just see The Google as the default thingamahoozie for looking up stuff on their phone. The Google believed they could grow rapidly and structure themselves with ordered-chaos because they were the chosen ones. Their road has yet to have become bumpy enough that they get knocked down a peg and forced to look at themselves in the mirror. Their hubris has allowed them to believe that they have no serious competition; just because your competition isn't actively competing now doesn't mean they won't be down the road when you're weak.

In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.

I think there's something to this. Another perspective might be Apple vs Intel, where one of my friends worked (at both) in fairly senior roles 5+ years.

The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years.

The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter anymore-the basis of competition has shifted.

I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it, "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these things need to shift over time, but most companies can't. This is why companies rise and fall.

I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term. Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific things Google has anchored on for the past years.

Their self-image is VERY customer-oriented. It's just that we're not the customers.

Riffing on this: another aspect of how business-life is harder for Google is, who actually is the customer?

For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to orient your entire company around the question of: "but is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until you feel you've established your business model well enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating customer value, and instead turn towards growing your business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares since they all pay fees to Amazon").

For Google, with the nature of the search business and the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers. The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing them off so much that they leave your platform (and even that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing + ChatGPT might be...).

In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is more like this:

- G's search users = A's warehouse workers

- G's advertisers = A's shoppers

How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire employable labor pool too quickly.

Bell Labs and like we’re throwing money at a wall too without a clear customer and yet they still invented the transistor, the PC, digital video cameras and so on.

Wtf is Google doing? They don’t make good products and they don’t invent that much useful stuff. They’re like the rich kid with a bunch of money trying random different things without focusing on one thing to get good at it.

I’m sure at this point Google is just a system to finally pay engineers a lot of money so they can retire earlier. Everyone that I’ve ever known that wants to work for Google is doing it to cash out, myself included.

All good points, and it's even worse for Google: the websites providing ad inventory are another important customer. And their needs (more traffic) are in conflict with end users doing a search (get answer quickly).

Watch Google Talks on youtube - it's really striking. Every single one contains at least one Googler commenting on how smart Googlers are. Stuff like "Everyone at Google is so smart".

> The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years

Had Intel maintained its competency in designing and manufacturing CPUs, their situation would have been much better.

They surrendered the process technology lead to TSMC, and let Apple make far superior laptop CPUs without a good response for years.

They failed in what was supposed to be their core competency.

And, of course, in anything outside CPUs and Chipset, Intel is comically bad.

The take isn't exactly wrong.

There is a lot of stuff that you see come out of google and you have to wonder. Why is this successful in this environment? They have a lot of people that I would say it's fair to claim they're high IQ, but low on experience and the ability to build something wonderful. (Which is why it's frustrating to see their arch [and AWS for the matter] build weird components and force their practices in the industry)

What would be great to see.. foster an engineering culture based on experience there. Encourage their engineers to contribute to the world. (Rather than waiting and spinning out large projects like K8s)

I have generally found that people don’t take project managers very seriously, sort of like a human interface to a spreadsheet. Where are you that they are actually creating projects?

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