Google has no visionary leaders and a pervasive sense of nihilism
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Other note - I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders".
Google is a massive organization. The only thing that's likely true of majority of the disparate, heterogeneous, wildy different teams, is that they're unlikely to feel like a 5 person early-stage startup. At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. All of which is not everybody's cup of tea granted. But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.
That all being said, working standard hours doesn't mean a person can't get something done (assuming the conditions are still good). Outside of the tech world, Eminem has been very prolific and he surprises people when they collaborate with him. He shows up at 9am, starts work in the studio, takes a lunch break, and leaves at 5pm. He treats it like any other job.
https://genius.com/a/akon-explains-how-eminem-treats-recordi...
In this case, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Engineers aren’t allowed to do things and are forced to follow executive orders. And due to the lack of executive vision, engineers end up following executive orders to build random things without any good rhyme or reason (and certainly without any long-term vision). And sometimes it works, but often enough, it doesn’t.
At least that’s been my 2 years of experience within google.
That actually does sound like it would doom a tech company, especially one competing in fast evolving web services. The competition is only a few clicks away in that market. Why wouldn't those strong headwinds spell doom?
They may not make any new innovative products, but certainly can buy those. And how many start-ups are effectively competing in ads?
Just enough to claim Google does not have market power whenever antitrust issues are raised.
Successful large orgs succeed by being good at being large and balancing the necessary parts of that, not pretending they’re not.
If I am not wrong, that's exactly what Eric Schmidt meant when he misquoted Mao Zedong, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" and Sergey Brin when he said "But once they do bloom, at some point you want to make a coherent bouquet". https://archive.is/wsTUO
Also: It takes a special type of analysis to claim things are going downhill at a company making $500m/day! May be, some folks do idealize the start-up grind way too much because all they see are survivors and not the ones that withered away. If I am allowed to be reductive, at FAANG scale, the only games that matter are M&A (to avoid being disrupted) and govt contacts / contracts.
I'm guessing that a lot of people have to pick up kids from school or daycare. I know a lot of parents do a bit of work at home in the evening or get in earlier.
Which I suppose is not very magical I guess so fair point for the author :)
(The example of Steve Jobs might suggest that founders might have some magic after all. Maybe in this one way: he was a brutal editor and simplifier, and he was a good talent spotter. So if he had any founder magic it was _focus_, not some “spark” of indulging dreamy creativity.)
Together, Page and Brin own about 14% of the publicly-listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.
If anything they are supporters (and more likely, originators) of some of the changes that have been occurring over the last couple of years, including layoffs and other things people describe as “decline”.
Or they decided that they don't care too much and focus on their fun projects.
Or something in between.
From a governance point of view, they’re both on the Board of Directors: http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance
Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc.
One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight.
Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.
Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
It appears to me that he has absolutely turned to politics, if you look at his tweets, they are almost entirely political these days.
He wanted to buy Twitter purely for political reasons, and said as much.
Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
They achieved what they initially wanted, and left Google closer to its peak. At some point, you want to move on. Especially when you quit as a winner, and now you can relax or deal with more fun and interesting ventures.
Coming in to save a company in a decline is not as fun and satisfying as creating something new and awesome from scratch. Especially when you’ve made enough to not have to worry about it ever, so that you can afford to only pursue things that are fun for you.
Plus, “decline” of Google is relative. Sure, they have not a good reputation anymore, and they do not push out new and exciting products that kill it in the market. But guess what? The share price isn’t tanking, so from the perspective of Sergei and Larry (who are still significant shareholders), that decline isn’t hitting them much.
Look at IBM. They’ve been dead in the eyes of the tech industry as an innovator and a success story for the longest time. Their Watson for medical applications is mostly considered to be somewhere between a failure and a scam. However, their share price is doing just fine.
That there's something wrong with Google that needs fixing. that its founders are,or feel, responsible for fixing it. That they are allowed or capable of fixing it. That they can or should be bothered. That a large company of 175k people can be "magical". That any two hacker news folks will agree on what "magical" is or feels like :-)
I think the turning point was the Google+ failure. It was perhaps the first major initiative at Google that was not engineering led, and when it failed, it seems like the shift began in earnest to restructure the company for top down initiatives, led by business instead of engineering.
Google+ indeed happened under Page's leadership, so I agree with you that this is where it fell off the rails, but I think you have the reason backwards.
(And to be clear, I don't think that's a personal failing. I don't think I'd do any better in his place! But I think knowing your own limits is very important, and knowing that I'd be a terrible megacorp CEO is part of that.)
(I've been on the outside looking in so I have a slightly different perspective on the last 10+ years of GOOG compared to many people.)
No, I think you're right in talking more about the "professional managers". The only way for a company to break this fast is if it was already hollow. Don't blame the (still awful) layoffs. Blame the rotten management layers that led up to... everything.
And this is not even considering the other structural barriers to innovation! The vast income streams create their own disincentives to disruption. Coordination is hard when you need to get buy-in of many departments. And despite best efforts, at scale, you end up promoting people good at politics or appearances. But even if all that were somehow eliminated, and true startup-style innovation was possible inside a giant company, the company must be careful to defend their existing winners.
If Google ever started to enter a death spiral like Apple in the 90s, maybe they could pivot if they were lucky enough to get visionary leadership. But now? Why would they?
I worked at Google briefly during the post-IPO period. It was a kind of wonderland, I won’t deny that. But all the really big hits were acquisitions or extensions of Google’s core competencies: search and ads. Everything else was unfocused and half-baked, and this especially applied to ideas that came directly from the founders. (Anyone remember Google Base?)
If you really want Google to return to those days you’d have to tolerate a lot of crap that gets abandoned later. (Which is the other complaint that people have about Google. Too experimental or not experimental enough, make up your minds!)
Google in its present form is illegal, or at minimum is the outcome of a series of illegal anti-competitive actions that for various reasons we decided not to prosecute for an entire generation.
Antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason. Because markets don’t function without active competition.
The monopoly power Google holds over many of its markets insulates it from market pressure and has removed the pressure of competition.
The outcome of this is as predictable as summer. Google doesn’t innovate because it doesn’t have to. That’s not how it makes its money any more.
Anyone can spin up an AWS app and so they do, and aim junior engineers at a vague “billion dollar market” waiting for those juniors to spin gold from the BS an empty eyed MBA emits.
I am done with software “brands”. I took a job fixing cars for a little less pay (fortunately for me I grew up fixing cars and have an EE BSc, not a CS degree).
I tinker at home on AI and LLM projects but will never work for a company focused on software development as their main business ever again. Such a joke and waste of human effort.
Some self-awareness is lacking.
- break up the timeline into two eras: the triumvirate era TE(Page/Brin/Schmidt), and the Sundar era SE.
Financials
TE CFO Pichette's job was to point the money hose at places that needed the gusher, and do it quickly. He had almost no control on the tap.
Every year at the last TGIF before Christmas he would come to Charlie's with his famed bright orange backpack full of cash to give Googlers their $1k holiday bonus in cold hard cash. It was grossed up to make sure it was 1k after taxes.
The financial tone is set by the folks at the top. L+S never really cared about money. To them it was just fuel to do more cool stuff, not some number to chase. Schmidt was supposed to be the counterweight to this youthful optimism, but he was still a technologist at heart, and by background. They were certainly not profligate, but also viewed it as worthwhile to fly the entire company to Tahoe to ski for a weekend every year.
SE CFO Ruth Porat, of Morgan Stanley pedigree, was a "real" CFO. A real message that Google needs to shed it's "playground for PhD hackers" image, start acting like a responsible adult.
Please understand that I'm not judging either era as "good" or "bad", a trap I see many commenters (inside and outside Google) fall into. I'm not sure a public corporation with the size and scope of Google could viably continue and grow under TE attitudes. SE is in many ways an aggregate expression of the competitive, financial, legal and regulatory environment. But others have made the opposite case, go read them.
Work environment
The layoffs, two Januarys in a row, have made the mood somber. The hope that Jan 2023 was a one-time rare correction is utterly dashed. SVPs and up should excise the word "excited" from all their communications.
BUT-- if you wiped history clean and looked at it objectively today, among its big tech peers, Google remains a great place to work.
If you ask most Googlers they will tell you that whatever misgivings they harbor about leadership direction, their immediate team is good/great. That says something.
Technology
15 yrs ago Google was a decade ahead in raw tech. It laid the hardware and software foundation for how to do planet-scale reliable distributed computing, and built giant apps like search and gmail on top of that. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable, Borg etc. But by now that knowledge has diffused.
Seems like an eternity ago, but up until a year ago, the perception was Google had a similar lead in AI. Yes, the transformer architecture was invented at Google. But OpenAI ran away with it.
Many insiders are worried that OpenAI is doing to Google what Apple did to PARC. Note that even after copying the GUI from PARC, it was miles ahead in raw innovation.
Personal
Mourn not a change in culture that you have little control over. Figure out what you want your career arc to be, chase that. Try to be useful in the meanwhile.
Be kind to those you interact with. Keep your skills sharp and options open. I know this is easier said than done, but if at all possible, try to live a lifestyle not inflated by big tech comp.
If you are a manager, do your best to mentor and inspire your reports. Sometimes you have to shield them, but also know when to explain hard truths. Don't coddle.
is this even the right flex?
I can’t speak to the leadership part but is stuff not getting done in time and engineers need to work more hours?
But they still keep winning. I doubt there are more than a handful of engineers there who are any good in a sense of achieving objectives. Perhaps fewer than in 2005 even. But the product suite is great: search ads, contextual ads, targeted ads, own platform.
There's been a lot of poo pooing the letting engineers go free idea, but the follow up questions of whether there's been any support, any servant leadership... is the company supporting free ideas, or is it disinterested & just letting chaos & churn happen? That's was a question.
How do you both provide support & coalesceing, while also not becoming a command organization? How do you have upper levels of management that don't turn into real politick political gamesmanship? I feel like there's such a beautiful idea of anarchy that we wanted to love, and there such obvious failure now, but I feel like we went to blame the idea at large (of engineering free orgs) without spending a moment to consider it's execution & or how the org adapted or failed to adapt to this notion.
Do y'all think we'll see notable winners, who again live the more anarchistic or less top down engineering mentalities again? How much has the window closed; how much of a negative impact has the legacy of Google left?