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Comment by markdog12 | Hacker News Reader

> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. 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. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it).

As someone who's very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off to hear.

I guess that's what this tweet is alluding to: https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1727192477264974273

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IMO the leader in question doesn't have a coherent strategy because she's likely trying to justify her org (and keep jobs!) in the face of a lot of developers who just don't care a whole lot about her portfolio. Her org could probably function with less people and achieve the same outcomes, but instead of getting rid of them, she's probably trying to make something happen by moving people around.

In an environment like that, your correct insights about "where we're headed" don't matter. The only thing that matters is that the leader can keep their org and not face layoffs. If that means shoving people around and not listening to what folks are saying, then that's what happens.

You're describing the BigCorp meta, which I think is a good portrayal that people need to see.

However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it sounds like you're trying to defend.

I don't agree.

It's completely rational to play career frogger. The leader is getting compensated (We're talking re-ups of generational wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their leadership is fair for criticism. It sounds like the leader hasn't created a compelling vision, which their staff is craving, let alone delivered team success.

What I suppose I'm saying is that there likely isn't a compelling vision that (a) they could get funding for, or (b) moves the needle enough to matter. I imagine their staff prefers getting paid to not getting paid, so this is the best the leader could do.

I don't like it either, it was my lived experience for several years. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas or people who knew about them, it was usually an inability to drop existing product lines + customers and no approval for the additional headcount needed to pursue bigger opportunities.

If true, it does sound terrible. Though, I would focus not so much on one named person. The culture is allowing it, leaders above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and so on.

OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important bit:

> I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.

I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward". Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you're going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.

>but have worked with many like her in my career

Haven't we all? Unfortunately, in most corporate jobs, your main job is looking good in front of your boss, and making your boss look good in front of his boss, who further perpetuates this theatrical shit-show. Your actual work comes a distant second.

I burned myself once or twice by keeping my head down just focused on doing quality work and helping others, but without taking care that it also had the right upward visibility to my boss and the right people above him, and ended up getting laid off, while people who were experts at pretending to work and glorifying every little achievement kept getting the laurels and promotions.

Such is the case in very large orgs with rotten culture and lack of transparency, and you need to withstand the heat if you're gonna be working in the kitchen.

Absolutely, it's hard to overstate the importance of the theatrics and performance art. In many places, it's far more important that you "socialize" and "self-promote" than that you actually do your work. If I could go back 25 years and deliver one message to my old working self starting fresh out of college, it would be: "Buy lots of bitcoin and sell it in October 2021." But if I had a second message, it would be: "Concentrate on self-promotion and managing upward. You'll never get promoted just doing your job really well."

Yep. It usually is a ship leaking from the top. I have seen it (not from Google).

I don't agree with the author's complaint about the culture changing, it's just that the leadership is weak and directionless, which was also mentioned.

Slightly above that comment is this line:

> 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've been calling that out for years as it is obvious from the outside: Pichai is not a leader but a care taker. He has no vision that anyone can seem to articulate. And apparently he's restructured the company to not have any people reporting to him that have one either. Shocking to get some inside confirmation of what is clear to see from the outside.

I was reading Hixie's blog when he was working on WhatWG. He was one of the main authors of the HTML 5 spec. Always had great respect for how he communicated. Him being this explicit is a message in itself. He was juggling highly opinionated people arguing all sorts of things when he was writing that spec. Part of the reason why that worked was his pragmatism and ability to stay calm. This is a really strongly worded message and people at Google and in their board would do well to take note of it and take action.

My recommendation: time for some leadership changes. Doing more of the same isn't going to work. Do it more smartly than OpenAI. But don't wait.

100%

We might think it wrong to name and shame, but this is one explicit case where it's the right thing. The autocratic style, the sheer bullying, and the lack of promotion from within have run what was one of the best developer (and developer relations) groups in the world into the ground.

They talk AI - AI - AI but do they walk the walk?

Firebase? Remember when it was the best developer tool there was? Missed the boat with Vector DBs for AI, and when experts within the company raised that it was necessary.

Flutter? Yeah -- didn't they get a community member or an intern to put out a plugin for TensorFlow lite for mobile AI, and when they moved on, nobody cared.

Dart and Go? Don't make me laugh.

TensorFlow and Open Source AI (also under JB) -- Didn't give a crap, zero investment, lots of cuts, and did nothing about advancing TF since, what 2020? When was version 2? What happened to version 3? Literally invigorated the world with AI, and then JB came along and what...?

In the last 6 months? Spun up internal incubators to build new AI products. Trying to replicate Pinecone with less than 5 internal folks who don't have a background in AI at all etc. (Pinecone have ~200 people?)

Trying to build prompt management tools, when there are a million GPT ones out there? Check. I guess she never heard of OSS?

Oh yeah, wait the OSS office @ Google is also under JB.

It's nothing short of a catastophe.

Tacky to sling accusations without evidence or examples.

Pretty silly thing to do whether or not you have perfect examples, and strange to follow that up with the fact that you've been offering career advice..

There's not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion out of something like that compared to the pretty personal ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the most constructive attempts look vindictive.

I also noticed the bit about offering career advice to people in Google, but I found it odd for a different reason. How can someone who's spent 18 years of their career (and I'm guessing, almost all of it) at Google possibly be qualified to give career advice? They can give excellent advice for working at Google. But if they haven't left the company in 18 years, then surely they don't have the experience to give useful career advice that isn't at least heavily biased toward the idiosyncrasies of their one job. Even if they had a decade of experience prior to Google, how useful is pre-2005 career advice now?

That's not to say the author couldn't give valuable advice, especially in more generalized areas like the craft of programming, or even navigating office politics. It's just that any advice will inevitably be specific to Google. It seems strange to offer career advice when you've not had a "career" per se - more like you've had one really long job.

And who's asking him for this advice? Did people get wind that he might be looking for other jobs, and so he became the "career guy?" If so, that's a revealing insight into the culture at Google, evocative of flock animals asking their least risk averse member what he saw on his adventure beyond the paddock...

> They can give excellent advice for working at Google.

My understanding is that that's the kind of mentoring he offerred, yes.

There's very little to be gained by making a post like that focus on an individual. I do think there are often changes in companies over time as they age and grow--but it really isn't so much about some specific individual much of the time. To some degree, it's inevitable.

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