Culture Change at Google | Hacker News Reader

Culture Change at Google

social.clawhammer.net

573 pointskfogel483 comments

It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.

What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.

I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.

You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.

And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.

> What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends.

A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.

Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.

So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.

True. Honestly they should have taken the second bet in the 2010s and come up with a clean sheet 737 successor. It would have been bold, but the company would have been in far better shape today

Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist, is pretty sure this is because the incentive structure goes bad. An executive who goes for a new project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m -- note the expected value of $2m -- expects a pat on the back, maybe a couple months' salary as bonus, in case (a), and to be fired in case (b). Naturally, the business would love to pursue all these opportunities, while any individual manager would almost never choose to pursue one.

This is a variant of the principal-agent problem.

Thaler's book is titled "Misbehaving" -- well worth listening to the audiobook if you have a commute!

I'm nitpicking, but the expected value for a project with a 50/50 chance of either (a) making $3m or (b) losing $1m is $1m. Not $2m.

Just wondering, is it because 3 * 0.5 + (-1) * 0.5 = 1.5 - 0.5 = $1M?

Ugh, you are totally right. I originally had making $5m but then changed it and not the EV :facepalm:

"It's hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks."

And yet, for centuries people have done it.

It's easy to create a big company without a stable business model that refuses to take the right risks when meaningful competition and regulation do not exist, and there are long periods of unconventional monetary policies (QE, ZIRP). Will the company last. Question for the reader to decide.

For example, Big Company A has survived for 172 years by taking the "risk" of hiring journalists to produce news. Big Company B has survived for 25 years by not hiring journalists and instead using the product of Big Company A's employees as bait to lure in ad targets. What "risks" did Big Company B take, if any. Were they the "right" ones. Let the reader decide.

Big Company B just seems like a giant leech. What happens when the blood supply from Big Company A is exhausted. Find another host?

As for the folks Big Company B did hire to share in the immense bounty, as it happens they are just a non-essential expense that can be cut at any time. Some of them brag online about how they only work two hours a day. They loved the benefits. They saw no evil. But what risk was taken in hiring them. Question for the reader to decide.

> It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.

A company can manage to take risks with the right culture and the right business priority, even if it has limited profit. AWS, for instance, gives its services years of runway to prove themselves. The company places enormous demand on its leadership to show "technical boldness" and business initiatives. S3, EC2, Serverless, DDB, and etc, were initially considered risky bets. On the other hand, the same AWS culture does not necessarily encourage long-term applied research. As a result, AWS couldn't come up with breakthroughs like BERT and GPT. Case in point, AWS adopted a German's university's ASR solution so AWS could go to market quickly, even though the cost was that the engineers and scientists were bogged down by maintaining the model instead of coming up with models like Whisper.

> Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.

????

Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate.

> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else

At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

> Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.

I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.

I've been hesitant to comment on this to avoid sounding "bitter", but you're absolutely right.. it's telling that quite a number of folks are so laser-focused on the money as opposed to the innovation.

at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.

It's stifling.

I got into programming because I enjoyed programming. My first "real" job was not in FAANG, just some small company with about 2 other developers. And it was great, I had a lot of fun, I got to work with great technology and try new things.

Then I got lured into FAANG for the $$$ and free food. Now it's boring. There's no room to innovate. I'm not allowed to make any big decisions or play with fun technology. What's left? I enjoy my TC and that gets me through the day. You can't blame folks for focusing on TC when there's no innovation to be had.

Yeah I get the impression that people don't take as much pride in their work for its own sake anymore - more assembly line worker than master craftsman.

From the outside, it looks like many in the industry assumed Covid-induced changes would be permanent. They hired accordingly, beefed up their headcount and in the process ended up getting a lot of talent which wouldn't have gotten in pre-pandemic. Once you recalibrate, you are not left with much choices.

I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.

Is any company still like this?

I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.

At some point the real world just gets in the way.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?

Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.

Did Valve corporation do something like that?

I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have that "infinite abundance" mindset - their initiatives in game development, hardware and VR are probably subsidized by Steam many times over.

I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success?

There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

Steam doesn’t exist without Valve’s catalog of games and especially Half-Life 2. Its continued success can’t be simple luck given how much competition they have, although at times it does seem like Microsoft, Google (Stadia), Epic, Ubisoft simply want Steam to win.

And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.

I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.

Same can be said for a company like Microsoft or Google. They have their core products and milk cows for years.

And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.

Mullvad ( a much smaller company) seems to have a similar set of goals and values. Not everything needs to be under the umbrella of a 800lb gorilla multinational. I hope that some of those entities can learn to be more creative rather than trying to reduce everything to something bean counters who need to report quarterly gains or get fired. It disincentivises taking risks at all.

Valve had the advantage of Newell/Harrington starting the company with a pile of money from being former MS staff, which gave them the ability to say "when it's done" for their first game. As the resulting first game was a hit and they didn't owe much (if anything) to their publisher Sierra [1], from that point on they've kept rolling the success forwards. Being a private company there's no details I'm aware of on how much has been taken out of the business, although Harrington left not long after Half-life.

[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.

I remember the forums (and slashdot comments) just hammering valve for thinking of creating steam and introducing DRM to their games, and that they would never, ever use it because of that.

But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.

There's a classic tweet I remember about Valve, about someone who finally learned who his boss was the day he fired him.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.

Bingo - you hit the nail on the head. Keeping the investor pool small and close-in is how you avoid this. If you go public, eventually you will succumb to this "growth above all" mindset, even if your culture was set up to resist it.

I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.

Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.

Their employees and executives make the majority of their income from RSUs. You can't exactly run a company if your entire workforce gets a huge pay cut each year from a poorly performing stock.

That’s a great point as well. People blame investors but at FAANGs the workforce itself are investors and very important ones since they’ll bail if the stock stops going up.

When I was working for Google, only a minority of my income came from RSUs.

You might be right about some executives, or people who have been with the company for a very long time.

> Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse'

I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.

That's plausible, and perhaps what Mr Zuckerberg had in mind?

But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.

(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)

I see it them taking a risk and while I thought it was a silly idea, I applaud them for trying. It's hard to imagine Google taking a risk like this, which is the crux of this post and these threads.

I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees.

It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.

Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.

I agree, I'm in awe of SideFX and have a lot of respect.

They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.

It’s not the “growth at all costs” mindset at all.

It’s growth period.

It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.

But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.

You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.

That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.

There is actually evidence that the market doesn't demand growth - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=JpB4 suggests that the market is chasing the base rate of monetary creation.

If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.

SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.

Update: Looks like they are:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute

[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:

No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025

Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...

Part of the reason they are going public is Goodknight is getting up there in years and something about a succession plan.

If SAS is the paragon of a company not pursuing growth at all costs, then maybe we do need to start looking at quarterly metrics. As a customer their business model sucks and they are doubling down on "either we're a solution for your whole enterprise or else."

Why does their business model suck for you as a customer? Interested to know.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

If you go public, no way to prevent it.

You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value

You think employees will stick around when their vested options are underwater?

It’s not the MBAs alone that demand an increasing stock price.

I think you have to have a separate entity(ies) that is strictly eggheads trying new shit. They need a big budget and have to keep the bean counters away, otherwise they will steal all the soul out of the enterprise. That's why so many thing come out of places like universities and NASA, you don't have bean counters killing the soul of the engineers/scientists. I'm not saying that situation is always possible, just putting out a theory. Also a lot of the low hanging fruit in science and math has already been discovered/invented, so it gets harder. This is where I hope AGI comes in, even if it's risky.

Financial markets in general do not demand this. As someone else said, the return expected is just a basic risk-free rate plus some compensation for the added risk of owning equities instead of treasuries, which isn't nothing but it doesn't mean you need to double in size every year indefinitely.

The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.

Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.

> pay off the VCs then don't go public?

The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?

Unpopular opinion - avoid taking VC cash at all costs?

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.

for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.

It takes a super special set of conditions to be able to bootstrap a >10 billion dollar company like Valve. Most >10b companies need immense capital injections to work

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Growth and private investment are part and parcel.

I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.

Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.

The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.

You don't remember it correctly, or there is a typo. All manager firing happened at 2001 not 2011. And it was not PMs but people managers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.

> no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine

I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.

This is because, states at some size become immoral power machines deeply distrusting one another.

Beau of The Fifth Column (Justin King) emphasizes ... states/countries don't have friends, they have interests. He delves into specific cases all the time and is one of the clearest-eyed political commentators out there.

That sounds like it is true, but is it really? I'd love to read a well written hypothesis which goes through a cause and effect and is backed up by at least some peer reviewed research.

This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.

States are rational actors though

Thread from yesterday on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569

I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.

> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.

Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in.

*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.

If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.

I feel like the mistake is not having more local zones of total internal transparency but idk what my org is even thinking nowadays.

Man I wish I could be infected with this disease

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies

> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies.

It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.

just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out

Market sorting it out: "Lots of Employees, Inc licenses our key technology from [and pays large royalties to] Just One Employee, Limited."

So the real answer is to join the next Google.. :)

OpenAI?

Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...

Is that bad?

What is the company culture of OpenAI like? How does it compare to early Google?

Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....

> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.

> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.

I didn't see Google's board fire it's CEO and then he gets reinstated and basically fires the board.

Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.

That we know of, at least.

To be fair one could argue that was still in vogue at the time…

i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable.

it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.

anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.

Eric leaving. Larry and Sergey stepping back. And the hiring of Ruth Porat as CFO.

My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.

Could be. Patrick was just so perfect as a Google CFO. Only-at-Google. His backpack full of hundreds (supposedly).

But Ruth: she could be anywhere in the corporate world.

patrick "sorry I missed the last tgif I was running a marathon in paris with my daughter" pichette.

and I don't say that disparagingly. that was endearing.

(i'm probably getting some details of that wrong, it was ... dear lord, a long time ago)

Speaking of TGIF, the day it moved to Thursday is where I start my "beginning of the end" counter.

Imo patrick was no better with his “we saved 200M on snacks this year oh btw guess what my bonus was”

If you think Ruth and Patrick are the same, I'd hate to work at whatever company you actually admire.

This tracks with what I saw as an outside observer; I felt like around 2015 was the inflection point where Google started its slow arc toward mediocrity.

It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.

yeah, eric stepped down in 2011 and larry took over as CEO and from the inside it felt fine for a while. but larry definitely got disinterested after a few years and the company felt rudderless by like the end of 2014.

> It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.

Another option is that he saw the trajectory of the company culture and wanted out.

We did contract work for them in the early teens. I remember going to various Google campuses and being shocked at how little it reminded me of my dotcom days and how much it reminded me of my Hewlett Packard days.

People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit.

When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.

Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.

All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.

The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.

You're not wrong, likewise I've heard Meta can be seen as the company that started the TC war by paying 99% for their IC positions.

Also TC wars bled into Finance rolls where typically the smartest quants were going to trading firms, now could go to FAANGS for the same comp.

We've seen the vilification of the MBA types over the past decade and a half as a downstream effect too. The technical types always had a distaste, but now it's bled into the mainstream and amplified by the ongoing economic conditions. As the monetary value of Internet-driven services grew, it tilted power to the doers in technical fields. The disrupters in the industry weren't the product people anymore, it was the engineers making things.

I think that's implicit in this. . . a lot of us have held Google in high regard for a long time, knowing that they pioneered a lot for modern big tech companies while also staying cool in the eyes of the nerds.

Not anymore. They feel like a 21st century IBM. I've said this for a long time, if you could send me back in time 15 - 20 and describe what the world of cloud computing would become and then you asked me who would be the leader in that world in 2024. . . I would have said Google.

Not Amazon and definitely not Microsoft.

tl;dr like a lot of folks, I used to think quite highly of Google and now. . .meh.

Whenever I see posts like these, whether for Google, or any other company, I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?

I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.

Fulltime employees at Google are basically the same as any other employee. They get the same benefits, can eat the free food, and generally I haven't seen any serious discrimination against them for being "not engineers". However, some of the things you've mentioned (e.g. building maintenance) are often done by contractors or outside firms, and for them things are often very different.

Red badges and the equivalent elsewhere make up an astounding amount of who actually works at most major companies. They’re the poor and working class to the gentry (FTEs) and the elites (FTE executives).

They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties, for goodness sake.

If I have $100 to pay someone in the US, about 25% of that will go to "fringe" (taxes, health insurance, unemployment/worker's comp, 401k match, PTO/sick, etc) and that percentage is probably higher for lower-paid employees. So, start with $100, fringe expenses take $25-30, agency middleman profit/overhead/flex-risk takes maybe 20% ($20), and the end worker gets $50-55 out of the $100 the original company is paying for them.

That the end worker is getting ~50% isn't that crazy to me. If directly employed, they'd be getting only about ~65-70%. (which is less than the direct fringe ratio because someone has to fade the PTO/sick/hiring lag flex to ensure the trash cans get emptied consistently and the agency is doing that in the other case).

All those taxes are already being paid. It’s to ensure that the contract worker gets worse insurance and next to no benefits and therefore costs less, and also so that you can get rid of them whenever you want for someone even cheaper.

While I'm hesitant to give in to my inner cynic, the anecdote about walking into the local, on-site IT in the post about his first day at google linked in the first post, especially stood out in my mind. Someone's manning that walk-in station - do they have the same benefit as the engineers? Half of which allegedly have PhD's, mind you.

It’s a person who commutes from Tracy and lives with 5 other people in a 3 bedroom house and doesn’t have health insurance because they can’t afford the subsidized rate nor the deductible. Their mask is impenetrable and only drops once they pull into the drive thru in Hayward for some McChickens to tide them over for the last hour of the commute.

Some services are, like you said, obviously done by contractors, but I can't help to think that you rarely see any testament from other employees than engineers to how great an employer Google is, or was, and if you're looking at the bigger picture - while Google's up until recently practically been drowning in cash, they're at the same time outsourcing CS to sweatshops like Teleperformance.

> I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?

Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)

Google isn’t an engine to create wealth out of nothing. Its a place that is/was structured to extract maximum value from its engineers specifically. It isn’t all that surprising that engineers got most of the perks.

I find it useful, in reading this stuff, to remember: the company he joined in 2005 had (apparently) 5,600 employees. In 2022, that number was 190,000.

Which is the difference between a very small town (might have a Walmart!) and the entire population of Montgomery, AL.

With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.

I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect.

The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.

By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"

I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.

But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.

2015-current Googler here.

This take rings true for me.

Many Googlers show no drive in their role. Good enough work gives high compensation. Firings are for egregious performance.

If that wasn't enough, the internal culture slows output too. endless infrastructure migrations. Design docs for small changes. "Demonstrate leadership". Strategic timing of "demonstrate trajectory".

Belt tightening and slimming is a good idea.

This is a very hot take, but does mesh with my own experience with mentors, friends, and family at GOOG at the time.

I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.

There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.

Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.

I agree tbh but it feels like the current environment doesn't reward risk taking and heads down work, especially with diffuse or longer term payoffs, and our AI efforts are still being retardedby safetiests/activists.

Rest & vest types are still doing fine, it's the passionate/care-a-lots that are increasingly burning out and disengaging or leaving.

was speaking about this with my friend, mgr @ google. He agreed with whatever you said. employees at current google are entitled bunch, non-performing. layoffs at google are justified.

Do you care to speculate about why the culture changed?

> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.

But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.

So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.

The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.

It's not a myth. I had a successful 20% project when I was there and I was nobody special. I started an anti-bot system in 2010 and by 2014 it had become integrated into most of the top products. Last I heard there is a whole team working on it still, and there were also spinoffs.

That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.

It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.

I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.

I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.

I appreciate your comment and anecdata, and I’m glad you commented here.

That being said, I’m not sure whether it is you or I who does not know what “quasi” means.

Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. Buchheit was asked to work on it.

>Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is.

It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia:

- >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1....

The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project:

- >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.” : https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...

The product they often presented as started in 20% time is Google news. I don't know the actual details, just this is what I remember from my time at Google (2006-2012).

I thought Gmail or its predecessor was a third party/acquihire situation?

I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.

I don't understand why they never fixed the incentives.

They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP.

Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.

Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons:

* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google

* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP

* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk

* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).

It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.

Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.

> Code at Google3 is one giant monolith

I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo.

Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there too? Is Chromium in there too? What about the whole golang project?

Even if I’m off about some of this, it feels like the statement “Code at Google is one giant monolith” needs some qualifiers.

So, Google’s choice of architecture prevents them from open-sourcing or maintaining projects a tad longer than absolute necessary. I’d say they dug their own grave, if it has such a large impact on the trust of customers. Maybe Google3’s architecture was excellent for worldwide scalability and costs, but let’s see which one matters in the long term.

I like that idea

Even in the early days, I don't believe Google was all that fast about launching new products? The "fail fast" stuff was about people working on blue-sky ideas that failed to get traction before they were launched, or maybe just launched in Google Labs [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs

The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name.

There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.

If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.

They do that, this is what their various Labs and subsidiaries and internal accelerators are there for. The issue is that people figure out it's associated with Google and then expect it to be maintained as such.

I do wonder how people figured out that Google was associated with Google+, Google Inbox, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Video, Google Wave, ...

(I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)

Those were official products, right?

> There is little to no “this is an experimental project by x team”

They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long.

Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1].

[1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...

Google Domains was born in 2015, exited beta in 2022, and was killed in 2023.

> So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.

https://gcemetery.co/ Google’s reputation is not only in innovation

FWIW, the only person I've ever actually met with a 20% project was working on quantum

I had several 20% projects from 2012 to 2016, all of which were on the Cloud Business side (ie not engineering). It was very much a thing up until Larry Page stepped down as CEO

> The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else.

One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.

Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.

The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.

My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.

All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.

Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving.

This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.

I was at a big conference in Dublin years ago where a Google talking head stated to hundreds of people that "google only hires the most intelligent people" with a grotesquely smug look on her face, instantly turned me off from ever considering applying to work there. Incidentally RMS was also there and screamed from the back "WHICH BSD LICENSE?" when the Google drone said google uses "the bsd license", which I thought was hilarious.

Two of the worst colleagues I ever had also went on to thrive at Google. It’s been hard for me to take their claims of only hiring the best since then.

> This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me.

What ruined it for me was interviewing ex googlers. Not the PhD levels, but IC. To be fair none passed the inteview. Perhaps it was just the UK google offices. Similar for facebook. At facebook some of the people I know working there are abolutely vile. The types that threatened their coworkers and somehow got away with it. Each organisation favours a certain type and it all comes down from the top.

My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

Check out the Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

>the Gervais Principle

Which it's not really, as it only considers the US version. "The characters portrayed here are based upon other characters that RG invented."

> My very first boss that I believe is an undiagnosed psychopath is now director level over there. That told me everything I needed to know about any possible direction of the company. I no longer use anything made by them and actively steer everyone I know away to alternatives.

I had a boss who was a manager at one of Google's flagship products, and he made it his point to not let anyone forget it. He pushed people to work nights and weekends, he berated team members and threatened firing them during daily meetings, he overrode engineer's calls to not release a product to claim he released it before schedule, he threatened the same engineers if anything went wrong during the illadvisable release, etc.

He was since hired as a VP of engineering of another global company.

"The typical company is like a septic tank.

It's the biggest chunks that rise to the top."

After being in multiple orgs and having been in touch with c-suite, I have suspicions that lack of total empathy and psychopathic tendencies are a must to get to really high social-based positions.

They are practically a must just to get there... to thrive in this 'layer' of society, a person is quite far away from regular average human in various worst ways possible

What alternatives do you recommend for email? That's my one google service I have difficulty getting away from.

Fastmail is great and worth the small cost imo

Self-host, easy. No matter the hordes of detractors who will tell you this is impossible and that all your mail will be /dev/nulled by all the usual suspects (Microsoft, Microsoft and Microsoft being the main culprit here, Gmail comes in second) the truth is that you'll be fine as long as you make sure to configure things like SPF and DKIM correctly and you're either using a smarthost for outgoing mail (ask your IAP whether they provide one) or are on a reputable network.

A SBC like a Raspberry Pi is sufficient to host mail services for a fairly large number of people. Filter out spam with Spamassassin and a greylist, run sieve to organise your incoming mail flow, use specific mail addresses when communicating with commercial and government organisations and you'll end up asking yourself why so many people insist that self-hosting mail is not an option.

Now that you're self-hosting mail you can also self-host XMPP using the same address making it possible for people to reach you through either SMTP (mail) or XMPP (instant messaging/voice/video calling) using that address. This can be hosted on that same SBC without problems.

Source: my own experience self-hosting mail (and more) since the 90's. If it worked on a 486DX2-66 it should work on a quad-core 1.5GHz 64-bit ARM...

I use Protonmail. Free tier I think, but I pay $10 a month for a bundle that allows custom domains, calendar, VPN, and storage.

https://posteo.de/en

Runbox is good.

Runbox

>undiagnosed psychopath

Eh, I've seen these in every kind of company, none are immune.

If you’re in a business still in control of your own destiny, you could do what we did and keep a weather eye out for sociopathy-aligned behaviours and gently work them out while minimising danger.

It worked reasonably well at one place I was at for about 8 years, estimating one of those characters popping up every 200-500 hires.

It’s the strategic side to your internal integrity function. Typically recruit folks who are lightning rods for these kinds of behaviours: young, female, brown, queer members of staff - don’t forget reception annf cleaning personnel! - and train them (often not necessary!) to spot abuse of power, bullying, threats and gaslighting and to confidentially report it.

Catch people with these behaviours early and divert the smart ones, fire the dumb ones. Sure, you’ll lose your next CEO, but did you want to work for that kind of person?

This is the thread I was looking for. In all these glowing odes to the Google that Was that cross Hackernews every day now, about what an incredible and liberating and productive place it was, there's always something missing.

The most toxic, conceited, selfish, inflexible, basically the worst stereotype of "genius asshole" engineers I've ever studied with, or worked with, all wound up at Google.

And is it a surprise when the entire interview process consists of "Are you good at computer science?"

How is that even possible? Won't he just get exposed in the first performace review? Or is he in some cushy managerial role?

I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud.

The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job.

That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that experience because I was just starting out, the scammer indirectly taught me much more about how to scam and lie your way to the top, how to sell your ideas to unaware management and most importantly - that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.

> that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies

My experience (5 startups) is that office politics are 100x more important in small startups. Everything is more concentrated, including the politics. That's why there is so much cofounder drama to go around.

At least in a big company there's a lot of inertia and process to tone down the politics a little bit.

You learned how to assume the world is broken, and not fix it. That's the path back to a hunter gatherer society. I think that's the wrong lesson to learn.

> that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies.

's/big //'

Your boss got no clue how hard or easy your work is usually. Even if he is a good programmer you need to more or less work side by side to get a grip on someones performance.

And smooth talkers game peer reviews.

Former friend joined Google and started hitting his pet (violently and angrily) and doing heavy drugs. Anthony Levandowski might be an outlier at Google for criminal behavior as well as total comp, but there are plenty of Googlers who you want to have nothing to do with.

> Let me explain. In a typical company, when priorities shift, you "downsize" (or cancel) a project, and then use the money to add people to a different, more important project. The common way to do this is fire people from the first project, then rehire a bunch of new people in the second project. It's easy, it's simple, it's expected.

This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.

And that email quote is also interesting on its own:

> Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.

I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.

It's a question of trust and societal culture, not company culture.

On Halloween, can you leave a bowl of candy outside your door with a sign that says "Happy halloween! Please take one!" and trust that kids will just take only one?

In Germany you can. In Canada you can. In the USA, it seems you cannot.

This permeates through to high paid software engineers too. If you have a cabinet full of office supplies, will some people start stealing for home? Turns out, even high paid software engineers at some companies will.

BUT if you have a culture of high trust, and high inclusivity (into the in group), then they won't. Google had that. A lot of companies had that. A shared sense of mission. (Buoyed by constantly rising stock price)

Once you grow past a certain size, you lose it.

It's also incredibly shortsighted, and one of those aspects of business in America that contributes to the problems it has. All that institutional knowledge lost that could have been helpful in the new project. I will say that it is usually the worse run companies that are guilty of such things. The startup crowd that largely makes (made) Hacker News was spared this because a startup couldn't survive doing that. America has been coming down off the Jack Welch school of business for the past decade and a half, which perpetuated the culture that birthed the hate for MBAs and complete lack of faith in any company.

I think the recent treatment by companies of its employees will remove the rosy glass from our eyes. All employee goodiness is a fair weather phenomena. Always keep a healthy distance from your work and company.

For me, the important sentence is "Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things." This is very interesting, but I like that the author notes the outside view, because I still get the feeling I'd like to work there someday.

I just got laid off but working there can be really good. My manager and team were great engineers but also just truly nice and caring people and the pay and benefits were great. On the other hand I found the work to mostly be tedious (for every bit of interesting engineering there was lots of bureaucracy and wrestling with obtuse internal tools).

It definitely wasn't for me (I was already looking for other jobs so the day I got laid off I literally celebrated) but I would say if you have a high tolerance for big corporate bullshit it's a pretty great workplace. What got to me in the end was a little bit that I was just bored there but the bigger reason was a misalignment of values with the company, I think they've done a lot of unethical things across their products for money and also they are extremely hostile to any sort of employee organizing there. I recognize though that the significant value misalignment is a personal thing and for many people they won't have the same issue.

Don't go to Google unless it's for the pay/benefits (benefits are basically pay in a costume) or for a very particular role which is unmistakably aligned with your professional priorities. You won't find any of the mythological coolness there, literally all of my buddies say. Additionally, when recruiters sell you the position, they try to make it look like you are working at the core of their most important products, when it's generally about some minute pedestrian detail of their internal ecosystem.

>unless it's for the pay

Luckily, that's the only reason I do anything at all!

> And so, when priorities would change, Google did not fire people, but rather moved them carefully between projects.

Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.

I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.

It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.

Reminds me of the recent blog post by Sir Adrian Cockcroft.

Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...

> The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI.

This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).

I don't think it's contradictory. There was an amazing ROI for a long time, so I think it was a very successful strategy early on. It's just clear that as the founders retired and more MBAs got a hold of upper management positions the first thing that happened was that the employee psychological safety was slowly eroded. Did you know that Pichai started his career at Mckinsey? That place is all about making safe choices that erode a companies future to improve short term profits.

I don’t think the working world is at any risk of going too extreme at valuing employees. It is the exception which is why we’re even talking about it.

Their promotion process probably has more to do with product fragmentation as anything.

Dart is an interpreted language created as a replacement for JavaScript, Go is a compiled language created as a replacement for C/C++. Those can hardly converge.

> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.

Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.

Sounds like their internal interest rates have gone up?

> But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.

Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?

I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.

How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees but it is not a tough decision.

Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.

Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.

Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.

It's a vicious part of the cycle and it takes good leadership to pull out of the spiral. Killing off perks and curbing pay to account for the loss of budget growth also has the effect of making the top performers look elsewhere, which in turn curbs the rockstars and moonshots that Google was known for. They need to shed the dead weight and make accountability possible and a point of pride. Unfortunately it's usually the dead weight that hangs on the hardest.

So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground."

Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

Google was most successful when it was "like a giant grad-school". Its downward trajectory coincides with it being run by McKinsey alums.

Maybe, but here's an alternative interpretation. Google discovered a money spigot. At first the money spigot funded lots of smart people having fun. (But not making any more money.) Then, as tends to happen, the money spigot attracted parasites. Now the spigot is, if not running dry, at least not growing. Times get tough. Management wants to focus. And so everything is less fun than it was. And the playground culture, which was irrelevant when the spigot was gushing, is an impediment to change.

I think it's fair to say that Google's leadership is also not up to the job. But even if Satya Nadella were in charge, he'd still have to deal with the "grad school playground" aspect, which has as many negatives as positives from the vulgar point of view of making money.

More generally, I want to argue that the common HN meme, "management and politics ruins everything from the point of view of us heroic engineers", is self-serving and naive. Management and politics are how companies run. If you don't want to do that job, fine; if you want to grumble about its pathologies, fine and you'll often be right; but don't kid yourself that it can be avoided.

> I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).

See also the Boeing and MD merger. Also GE.

It seems like things were fine for the engineers when they ran things?

What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?

I see you went to the b-school that taught the “cOnJoInEd tRiAnGlEs oF sUcCeSs!1!1”

IMO Google DeepMind is like this today, for better and worse.

Ben was also a co-creator of the once ubiquitous Subversion source control software.

Very happy user until 2019, until the winds of change were forced upon me.

Thanks Ben.

There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.

And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty.

It has always been my theory/belief that long periods of demoralization actually get rid of a disproportionately higher amount of good talent. When the company starts to smell, those that can move on, because they’re in demand elsewhere as well, will do so. You’re then left with those that hope you don’t let them go, but are less confident or capable in their abilities to find employment elsewhere.

I think there are two ways. The first is basically what good sports teams do (or Netflix at least was doing) where you continuously fire people who don't perform wanted at levels but also do very rigorous hiring and pay very well. Then there is cut fast and deep and shuffle organization at the same time which also works if you do that when needed and very rarely like once in 10-15 years Facebook might have pulled this and the company looks like it is in much better shape than Google or Amazon.

>And if you must, cut deep and cut only once. Trickling out monthly layoffs is far more demoralizing and instills a culture of fear and uncertainty.

It's a huge red flag. Layoffs typically lead to more people leaving the company after the fact because of the instability. I was one of the "last man standing," after a company did this over a period of a few quarters and I ended up leaving shortly after. They no longer had anyone to maintain their software. Oops.

They taught this in business school back in the 1990s. I don't know why a company the caliber of Google wouldn't understand this. It could be the execs think that Google is such a stellar place to work that none of the remaining people would dare leave. It could be the execs are so self concerned, they don't care about anything other than their bonuses and just make sure to get cuts in before each quarter ends to pad their bonus. It could be business schools just don't teach this anymore.

Are the layoffs actually completely random? Is there some reason to do that instead of performance-based layoffs?

I suppose every layoff is different, but they are not completely random. There are many factors involved, performance can be one of them. My assumption is that leaders craft some query on the employees list and tweak parameters until they get the right number of people to lay off.

If anything OpenAI demod just how quickly culture can be changed by paying massive salary packages.

The non profit people never stood a chance.

Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else.

There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?

> There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?

From the outside, this was much of the appeal of Google earlier on (and rare other places, at times): personal finances are taken care of, low corporate BS, no startup runway anxiety, no "if only we could spend resources on that thing", no "if only I could combine efforts with more people like me".

Instead of stress about modern cost of living, stress about whether there's going to be layoffs or bankruptcy, stress from untrustworthy leadership, etc., there's only... Hmmm, I just encountered another tricky application of technology problem that I want to solve, and it seems hard, but I can just focus on it and solve it.

For me, the appeal wasn't the myths about "smartest people in the world", nor the prestige (other than not being a downward arc on resume), nor the perks, nor the hip decor. Though, as you say, maybe some of the perks also gave a very base reinforcement of the sense of resource non-scarcity.

It’s hard to imagine an absence of resource anxiety in the land of the six figure mortgage payment. Must have been incredible.

Resource anxiety is exactly the phrase. Two things utterly surprised me about my experience in Silicon Valley: the unbelievable level and growth of TC, and its utter inadequacy/precarity next to the insatiable vacuum of a mortgage here. Strange place.

Everyone else's salary is going up at the same rate, more and more jobs are there, and it's de facto illegal to build any more housing anywhere nearby. Of course house prices are growing without limit.

There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot:

> ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal.

Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get.

I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.

Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.

Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Googlers.

Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.

You had to pay.. 4-5k/mo for daycare, at work?

I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left.

Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits.

A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and wanted a bar or something added for them.

I've never worked anywhere with a daycare except a Golds Gym in high school so I'm not familiar with how they usually go.

That’s crazy. Couldn’t you basically hire a day-time nanny for that price?

>Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists

I might be parsing this incorrectly, but isn't this sentence saying "too many people used the daycare (long waitlist), so not many people could use it"?

A better model is "The daycare was supply-constrained and never expanded at the same rate as Google's employee base, so it ended up having little influence on the overall population." That resolves the contradiction while still being an accurate representation of reality.

It's the same phenomena as the housing market or California's population today. Both are super expensive and not growing. The reason they are super expensive is that they are not growing, while the pool of potential buyers is.

"Nobody Goes There Anymore. It’s Too Crowded" - Yogi Berra

The point isn't about popularity (or not) of the daycare. The point is that on-site daycare isn't a competitive advantage for Google, because it is understood that the perk is rarely available.

But the people on the waitlist are not using the daycare. I don’t know the numbers in this case but you could imagine a daycare with 10 slots and 1000 people on the waitlist.

> (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month)

That's not a service, that's a profit center !

The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.

It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.

It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.

Their onsite daycare was out of the way and oversubscribed. It was basically created for the Wojcicki sisters' children.

I'd never heard of Wojcicki. Nor this story from her Wiki. I was curious how a CEO of youtube was worth $800 million.

> Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023.

And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..

That's Susan Wojcicki (former Youtube CEO).

Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the IB turned co-founder and CEO of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife

I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline.

There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.

> There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents.

Arguably, many already do.

As "main child-raiser" (as opposed to "parent", again a place where this matters) is not equally distributed across the sexes in our society, I would say though that (1.) this does leave you at risk of legal challenges over structural discrimination and (2.) it leaves a bad taste when a corporation one the one hand does this, and on the other hand bemoans how few women in "tech" (or any other sector) they're getting.

Pushing off kids until the late 30s also has a different risk profile if it's your womb those kids might be coming out of.

Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.

Stylistic choice, no deeper meaning. I know people who are the sole child-raiser after separating from the child's other parent, and people who are parents but they work full-time and their partner looks after the child.

Cool cool, appreciate the explanation.

Is there any tech company, big or small, with the same kind of dynamic engineering culture that Google once had?

They permanently harmed the world with their spying technologies, what exactly is there to celebrate of their culture?

I can think of two: Digital Equipment Corp and Sun. Also, first 10 years of AWS was probably ridiculous good.

i'm sure there are. but google's arc, the engineering culture wasn't just dynamic, it was dynamic and (apologies to use an eric schmidt-ism) impactful.

Google hiring process was always flawed. They didn't hire talented generalists. They hired people who gamed the hiring process. Most of them are mediocre at best. As an anecdote, I worked with a couple of guys who were later hired by Google. They weren't stellar in my team (in fact I was glad they were gone), and I have a hard time to believe they were stellar at Google either.

When you have a lot of mediocre developers, you can shift them around from one project to another all day long, but it won't improve your bottom line. The only solution is to fire them. Unfortunately for Google without the change in the hiring process, they will continue to hire the same kind of people that they just fired. From this perspective Google has become the "normal" company a long time ago.

Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?

Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.

The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.

It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.

It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place

Google is a bit like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. It had lost its way. There was no leadership. Most of what they tried failed or wasn't that great. And yet it was still raking in the profits. And then MS turned it around. All it took was new leadership. They just overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Just a string of good, solid decisive leadership. Satya Nadella turned that company around.

Could happen to Google as well. But not with their current CEO. They have a lot of stuff that they are working on but very little of it has any real impact on their revenue. Their strategy is a mess. And they have a huge expensive work force not delivering more revenue to justify their existence. And they've been hiring non stop for 20 years just mindlessly growing their staff adding tens of thousands of people per year. The Google that built the company was much smaller and nimbler. The layoffs slow down the bloat but it's still a bloated company. The reason they get away with that is that revenue hasn't stopped growing either. But it's increasingly detached from staff size. Staff reductions at this point merely increase profits.

As much hate Microsoft gets these days they are doing a great job recovering from Ballmer. Satya's moonshot investment in OpenAI is probably going to be what cements them a place in the future despite Windows' mindshare eroding and Azure providing lukewarm service.

Absolutely they need a leader to turn it around, but Apple and Microsoft don’t feel like Google did: it’s still going to be a mature tech giant, run by spreadsheets, even if they can start producing some cool stuff again

If historic Broadway theaters in NYC transitioned to blocks of server farms, then many people would have a feeling, "Singing and dancing and live art used to happen here, and that history is worth continuing, here," even if for economic reasons it wouldn't and couldn't anymore. . . and so I don't think it's only wistful or wishfulness speaking.

It's positive to believe that places where creativity happened and was on display and at least nominally prized were places that need to continue in some form or fashion. I agree with you that the form and fashion may just be less visible now to these people wherever it has moved on to, now.

> If historic Broadway theaters in NYC transitioned ...

We should get a "Landmarks Preservation Commission" for corporate cultures.

> It's time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where innovation happens

I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.

> and now there isn’t

… at Google. Which comes back to my point that why should anyone except Google ex employees care if it’s happening there or somewhere else?

To dissuade potential employees who are thinking to apply because they mistakenly think it's still like the stories they hear from the old days?

To provide inside to employees in other companies which are undergoing a similar transition, so they can get insight about the transition they are experiencing?

> Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?

So you’re not a Googler? Or a Xoogler? Maybe you identify as a Noogler (never-Googler)?

Noogler - new googler. not “never googler”.

When you can’t parody reality because it just outdoes your efforts.

My eyes are frequently googly

> they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets.

or abusing monopoly and network effect.

I don't think the part of attacking big targets works in this context, I would care very little about Google and its culture, it's not my business and people who work there decide to stay there autonomously

The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.

For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares

Ben and Brian's Google IO talks were fantastic. Their talks always made me realise that Google was a special place. Sad to see its not the case anymore from Ben himself.

From someone who got out of the corporate rat race in the early 2000's, this is a really balanced article on how companies change to meet the environment they find themselves in. I'm not sure what the answer is when growth starts to dissipate. Maybe trust the people you already have and work towards downsizing in less artificial way? I feel like the stock market has made this problem worse

I think I'd s/"unlimited abundance"/"nothing to lose" - particularly in startups. In the small businesses I've worked in, it's when the times a tough, the biggest and most critical bets have been made often with the most conviction. That sort of situation I think also drives some of those motivational and incredibly innovative behaviours in people.

It's interesting. When I moved to California in 2012, Google was exciting. They had hot stuff, new platforms, very exciting. Six years later, you were hesitant to hire Google people. Today, it's the Bay Area retirement home.

No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.

In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.

I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their careers, and I can't really imagine the kind of a one-in-a-million company that'd be justified in turning down a Google ex-employee based on just their employer.

He's like 30% correct. Before, hiring someone from Google was an accomplishment, because they were so rare. Now, there's so many people with Google on their resume, most refusing to downsize in TC, that even mediocre positions are filled with ex-Google applicants.

Is that really because Google workers are seen as worse employees (like what the original post said), or just because the job market is now suddenly loaded with thousands of Google employees who'd just been laid off?

Right, we're not talking about some random company. Accenture or whatever will 100% hire a Xoogler. But everyone else knows that most Google engineers work really hard "making sure all stakeholders are on the same page regarding moving this to a service to reduce tech debt" and are in meetings all day to determine which team they're "blocked on" which is a thing, sure, but not something you really want to hire for usually.

I work at one of those SV Fortune 500 companies and I’d absolutely give pause during hiring if I saw google in their resume

I might be an outlier

I work at Google. Having Google on my CV has been a huge bonus, I get so much more interest from companies trying to hire me and many of them directly reference having Google on there as a positive. I know zero people who are just coasting along, everyone is working super hard. I have seen a few people leave in the last year because they were under too much pressure, despite the pay.

"Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."

Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...

> The unstated cultural principle was: "products come and go“

That explains a lot! ;-)

Alphabet has ruined it's entire portfolio if measured by the initial vision of each product. They have decimated the once great platforms they developed in pursuit of ever canabalizing their consumers

As well as lots of stuff they acquired and left to rot.

I think that's Google hemartia. They execute really well initially, but falter on maintaining and nurturing ideas and products. The internal incentives regarding promotions and pay amplify the problem. Maintaining or improving a product isn't as impactful to one's career as creating an entirely new one. They have a half dozen chat apps because they unintentionally created an engineering "crabs in the bucket" situation. Not to say they are anywhere near as bad as the companies who do it on purpose a la stack ranking though.

I think another important factor is that what's a viable business to one party isn't worth it to Google simply because they can use that engineering talent more effectively in a monetary sense elsewhere. Even spinning them out doesn't make sense from a numbers perspective. The big problem with that is that they utterly ruin the landscape for everybody who isn't Google and who would operate just fine if it weren't for the size 20 boots giant that tramples all over the space before giving up on it.

“The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else”

I wish they had valued users above all else

> wish they had valued users above all else

My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.

I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?

Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...

The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".

The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.

That's Amazon.

There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.

Evil is not something that applies to a person only. A company can be evil too. Look at facebook

Ironic tl;dr, the author separates Google culture from business but Google is not just another public company in the NASDAQ. It is a company that impacted and impacts [political] viewpoints of people around the world. In the past "common" people could create content and be visible, now SEO is an impossible game that requires big budgets. Google forgets things (sites) and it is not "Organizing the world's information" [1]. It is just stockpiling it. The company is not a McDonald's. If the soul of the company culture changed it means the seeds for [1] are dead.

[1] https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-goog...

There is pre IPO Google culture and post

Probably true for most public companies.

> You know how people are much more likely to read an email if it is one screen long, rather than the length of this :-/ ? It is similar with contributing code to the kernel. It is much more social and relationship developing to contribute a screenful or two of code once every week or two over the course of years. We were dropping 90,000 lines of code on them all at once, having worked on it in total social isolation for 5 years in Moscow, Socially it was all bad. Small increments are the more social way to go. Incremental improvements to V3 would have met no opposition.

Pro tip: Turn reader mode on

This article's site is a rare one for which Firefox's built-in reader mode doesn't currently have a silent cost: the reader mode bypasses uBlock Origin protection against some kinds of trackers.

This is all a joke right? The "limited resources" party pooper fucking up your unsustainable "I wish uni could go on for ever" lifestyle?

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