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Comment by V-eHGsd_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

it was less fun having beers on a thursday afternoon for sure, but I at least understood the fact that the company had thousands of non-US employees and TGIF on a friday afternoon for us was TGIM for everyone else.

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.

Not the same - Ruth is far more effective version. Guessing you missed the whole “scrappiness to help investors out oops nvm we are investors” thing or just hadn’t yet run out of coolaid at the time

I guess you missed out on the notion of "fun." Thoughts and prayers.

Yes it’s very apt to have it in quotes

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.

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