Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set

This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.

The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.

Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.

Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.)

> And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.

This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it generalizes to other industries.

I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.

One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.

But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.

Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.

That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.

After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.

There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..

But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.

I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission.

Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.

This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.

No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.

So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.

So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.

You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.

This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.

A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".

Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".

Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.

Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.

But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.

In a word: momentum

This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”

Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.

I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position.

It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality.

Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities.

Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.

When you stop doing that, someone else will and in time your customers will go there instead.

The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.

And shift they did.

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.

C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.

I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.

How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?

Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.

I don't get this.

Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)

If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).

You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.

You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.

I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.

I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.

Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are.

The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff!

People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.

If we could trasport the owners from the past to today, they'd be really confused as to how poor the search results are.

Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.

In 1-2 years you go from: - operating well, get bought - throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower - then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore - leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition

A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example.

Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position.

Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end.

And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.

"Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.

The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).

Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?

>A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?

This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.

The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.

I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't.

I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies.

To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.

Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one!

Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.

So i mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share.

It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.

My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]":

> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.

I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.

I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting).

I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.

I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us.

The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.

But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.

(And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.)

It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.

Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.

"[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools."

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...

   you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.

I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.

Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to.

That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron.

I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead.

Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.

https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/

I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.

Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.

No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.

Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top.

I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.

It's still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely competent. And I still prefer iOS.

Google might deserve more credit than any other company, but there were 20-30 years of innovation at universities beforehand.

And that's a pretty strong indictment of Google! Googlers who worked on this research and technology believed that they'd have a better chance of doing something life-changing and making some bank outside of Google! While that isn't all that uncommon, it's also something Google could have taken steps to prevent. Better culture, better compensation. It's a huge risk to strike out on your own with something like this; Google could have made it both safer and more lucrative (or at least lucrative enough) to stay. But they didn't.

> If as an employee you are nostalgic about the "culture" in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren't coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.

Couldn't agree more. Our brand of capitalism isn't set up to allow for such corporate-culture time travel.

Ironically every AI person I know works on some dumb project with the goal they'll eventually get to work in Google/Meta for the big bucks. Maybe that is just a stepping stone.

It all originated at universities.

I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.

That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...

This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.

It’s way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it’s growing 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.

I don’t have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I’m not at all surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and engaging place to be than 2023 Google.

Andy Jassy + Sudar for example.

off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)

Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.

And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.

But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what carries the culture forward.

Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company to one uninspired direction after another.

Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to go.

Hixie's criticisms of it were correct, and WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.

> The WHATWG began because the W3C told you, “HTML was dead. If you want to do something like HTML5, you should go elsewhere.” Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform?

We tried (2007–2012). It didn’t work out. In fact, we ended up spinning more specs out of the W3C! The WHATWG has about 12 specs spread amongst eight or so editors now.

> Bruce The spec now known as HTML 5 began with a "guerilla" group called WHATWG. How and why did the WHATWG begin?

> Hixie The short answer is the W3C told us to. The long answer: Back in 2003, when XForms was going through its final stages (the "Proposed Recommendation" vote stage), the browser vendors were concerned that it wouldn’t take off on the Web without being made a part of HTML, and out of that big discussion (which unfortunately is mostly hidden behind the W3C‘s confidentiality walls) came a proof of concept showing that it was possible to take some of XForms’ ideas and put then into HTML 4. We originally called it "XForms Basic", and later renamed it "WebForms 2.0". This formed the basis of what is now HTML 5. In 2004, the W3C had a workshop, the "The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents", where we (the browser vendors) argued that it was imperative that HTML be extended in a backwards-compatible way. It was a turning point in the W3C‘s history—you could tell because at one point RedHat, Sun, and Microsoft, arch-rivals all, actually agreed on something, and that never happens. The outcome of that workshop was that the W3C concluded that HTML was still dead, as had been decided in a workshop in 1998, and that if we wanted to do something like HTML 5, we should go elsewhere. So we announced a mailing list, and did it there. At the time I was working for Opera Software, but "we" in this case was Opera and Mozilla acting together (with Apple cheering us from the sidelines).

W3C declared html dead and now you are mad on whatwg for html5?

Is there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the company and what happened there over time.

(Of course I can't speak for all HNers...)

As somebody that really dislikes the way the web generally is nowadays I got a chuckle out of this :)

This is a mostly tongue-in-cheek comment.

Cutting Googlegeist has knock on effects that create problems like this. The rank and file no longer have a way to communicate back up the chain honestly and things like this come out.

As an investor, though, calling the “top” for a company like Google (or Microsoft) is so challenging — not “top” in terms of all time high valuation, but “top” in terms of differential forward-looking, annualized, and adjusted-for-tax returns vs VGT or VOO (i.e. a more challenging target).

These are some of the most entrenched and profitable companies in modern history. Even as they mediocratize, they remain value-accretive for years. It’s difficult to imagine them losing to inflation.

Buffet choosing Apple over any of the other FAANG/M may be looked upon even more favorably, 10-20 years from now, than it is today. Google and Microsoft are tight together in second, but I think you’re right that we’ll look back on 2018-??? as Google’s equivalent to the Ballmer years.

Anyway, I don't see much worrisome news about GOOG. It's true that they are not innovating and surprising us anymore, but neither is AAPL or AMZN. Good execution seems to be rewarded better nowadays than innovation. (Yes, some products are stagnating or getting worse, but some are getting better. I'm not sure there's really a trend. Also, to me, all this culture decline talk is mostly noise.)

The challenge is that we are all simultaneously part of many groups whose behavior we don't always agree with.

Should you be piled up with all the others because you're a member of a species that is destroying the planet's natural resources? Should you be piled up with all the others because you pay taxes to a country that used that money to build weapons that killed innocents? Should you be piled up because you live in a city whose cops commit police brutality? Should you be piled up because you bought a product and gave money to a corporation that uses child labor?

Life is not so black and white. We have some responsibility for the behavior of the groups we are part of, but only fractional. We should exert our agency towards good when we can, but believing that we have all of the stains on our hands of every community or group we've ever touched or participated in is not a path to a better world, it's just a path to individual shame and misery.

This premise seems a stretch when applying it to Google. Most of us "sell our souls" to more-or-less terrible corporations for money. The point with Google is that it set much higher standards for corporate behavior, and those standards are now reverting to mean.

Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?

Please, let's honor the man's fiercely-defended policies.

He is Vivek "Vic" Gundotra. His Real Name is Vivek, and we should refer to him by it.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing "well he meant well" doesn't make it any less of a duck.

Saying "the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]" is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733

This sentence is an oxymoron.

How can the work both be "genuinely well-intentioned" and at the same time have "complete absence of concern for the user"?

From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.

The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.

Actions speak louder than words and I don't see how someone could look at Google's actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn't always been the poster child of capitalism

Is it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it's reasonable to question their motives.

This isn't the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn't change the reality of the company's behavior as a whole.

Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious.

How could we tell if it wasn't malicious? I definitely can't anymore.

Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I've been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that's basically my name.

I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion.

For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.

---

I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for.

The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.

Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database.

A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w...

Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted?

I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now.

There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct.

If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly.

That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair.

(There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.)

Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything.

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When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 )

But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall.

Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products. You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a mandate from the top.

Products that were poorly executed, violated the law, dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early promises, etc.

There's a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The company simply isn't user-centric, full stop. I can't see anyone argue otherwise.

What's the most user-centric improvement from Google in the last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago. My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated rapidly.

In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.

It's inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and/or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.

That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.

If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"?

Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?

You aren’t wrong. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. I could throw in a bunch more complaints and the kitchen sink but the point is we should expect better things from these companies and they should expect more from themselves as well.

I mean, you can add before:2011-01-01 to your search.

But I'm not sure how accurate the publishing dates on every page are.

He wasn't the snake in the garden of Eden-- google completed rather than began its transition with his ascension-- but he would definitely have been Team Snake once he saw the fig leaf sales figures.

Not even close.

The computer revolution happened and the automotive industry was displaced in the economy by other sectors, namely tech. [0] Car usage/ownership has gone down.

[0] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/spotlight/a...

* Number of developers using it on some daily/weekly/monthly, etc. cadence.

* Number of apps published (to iOS, Android, both).

* Number of jobs available using the framework.

* Various subjective desirability metrics from developers survey like the StackOverflow ones.

It's anyone's guess as to which is the best metric or how they should be combined. Also, it's very hard to actually get accurate data on it.

But, according to Statistica at least, yes Flutter really is the most popular mobile app framework as of 2022:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar...

It looks like that's based on a developer survey. I don't know more about its methodology.

Flutter: 46% React Native: 35% Unity: 10% Cordova: 10% Ionic: 9% Xamarin: 8%

Just one datapoint, of course - a survey of 26,384 developers.

I suspect a few high level departures more and it'd be dead.

Do you mean he's going to continue working on it or just that he had been for the past 8 or 9 years?

Corporation can decimate their workforce in the search for better earnings but god forbid the drones speak up.

Reminded me of when I first discovered that major browsers allow third party cookies by default. And thinking I can't believe they allow this massive privacy leak.

I was over the moon because I was a more traditional tech nerd and felt I had really lucked out, coming in as an iOS programmer and ended up at the core of Android UI.

We lost half the team in that transition to other things, the vast majority of that 50% transferred to other things within Google.

That occurred exactly along the lines you mention, with some side help of them accepting there was something genuinely wrong with Android's culture that needed to be avoided, as Ian mentions.

That self-selection combined with the...qualities...of Android completely changed the job. For the first time at Google I was working with people who genuinely, firmly, at their core, had no real interest in anything except the paycheck. I do believe this is very well-adjusted and have a hard time explaining the feeling and what it leads to without sounding derogetary. Your post does such an excellent job of pointing at it.