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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Sundar should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns.

But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too. Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

The laying off Sundar should be what investors want the most.

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Ruth Porat IMHO is a worse offender. After the layoffs last year she was like "I was head of Morgan Stanley during the Global Financial Crisis" and Memegen was all "That is not the flex you think it is." Go from ruining the American economy to ruining Google...

Most of the dysfunction within Google comes from management trying to manipulate a finance department that is not-very-bright to loosen their purse strings for their pet projects. There's a lot of "That Slides presentation seems pretty promising, here's another $250M for you" and not a whole lot of understanding of how to build an enduring product.

> The laying off Sundar should be what investors want the most.

Alphabet union [1] should put forth such a public letter, in keeping with tradition of Google stakeholders publicly demanding unnecessary expenses to be reined in [2].

[1] https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/

[2] https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...

My hot take is any executive who cannot think up of meaningful projects for some of the world's top engineering and research talent should be let go for lack of imagination, if nothing else.

Hiring people is expensive, building infrastructure is expensive, large organizations should be able to make use of that talent.

Even if it means spinning teams off in to separate companies and then "acquiring" them back later (with huge handsome payouts for the team) Microsoft used to do that all the time! It works well, instant funding with startup energy, and everyone is motivated to succeed because you get rich if you pull it off!

Google should figure out their inefficiencies, violently work to solve them so that developer productivity is increased, and then make smaller independent teams that can build on existing infrastructure that empowers teams to get things done faster.

Instead they are just laying people off.

TBF very few large organizations (if any) have figured out how to maintain productivity as they grow. Communication and political overhead becomes so high that large organizations grind to a halt.

Idk man Bard has been better than ChatGPT imho.

It has reduced my time spent on Google Search or watching long youtube videos (which is where most of their Ad revenue comes from). Not sure if thats already showing up in quarterly results but it's a hard job keeping those numbers up while this big transition is happening. Doesn't matter who the CEO is.

Not working for me.

And, I'd like to add, "Hey Google" has also effectively stopped working, despite me having a Pixel phone (I used to use it to dial hands-free. That's no longer possible). And it's literally every feature, even the "hey, Google" recognition has become a crapshoot.

I have seen a similar degradation with my AirPods Pro. However I was thinking that to be an artifact of them aging and the mics to just be degraded…

Weird as I have been noticing all my HomePods (older and newer models) are also less responsive to “Hey Siri”. Used to be I could walk through a room and turn lights on as I went. Now they do nothing. I have to talk directly to them.

I have gotten the feeling they tweaked it to ignore voice if audio fidelity does not hit thresholds that suggest the speaker is being talked to directly. Perhaps it limits false positives, reduces poor translation.

To make users speak directly at it with clear diction would make for “smaller model” to translate which seems en vogue with AI now.

I say old a new because it makes me doubt mic degradation (a couple in the house were brand new Xmas gifts).

I'm not sure my Homepods are less responsive but Siri for sure is. Tons of "hold on" and "there's been a problem" for kitchen timers that I set. I don't know what it needs to do to be able to tell me the time on a timer, but at the end of their life (or before) that'll be it for Homepods.

> Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience

How so? I’ve used it for a while and really liked the experience. It was wayyyy more intuitive than AWS for example (services are named correctly!). The UI is consistent and it even displays the commands to run and Terraform config on each config.

What’s wrong with GCP?

> I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns.

From the time Sundar became CEO to the start of covid Google stock was up 100%. From the start of covid to now Google stock is up 100%

> Search sucks.

Still the best.

> Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers).

A fumble for sure, but all indications Google has massively reoriented toward AI in every product.

> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.

Only HN weirdos like us care about this. Hard to think of a single cancellation that made mainstream headlines.

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

Could anyone give anonymous examples of this? Could the recent waves of layoffs stop this if it was happening?

Wait a minute!

Hire thousands of half genius from the best Universities in the World.Torture them with algorithmic party tricks, give them infinite budget and time for years... And....When they are unable to create competitive products outside of the usual cash cow, blame the CEO?

CEO did not know this was happening? The company is (sadly) it's leadership

And a Coach gets the wind behind the wings from its Players.

Ah yes, I love this argument!

So CEO's are supposed to be magical super-rare humans who do nothing but are worth 1000s of regular workers and take all credit for good returns...

Until things go bad and then it's all the worker's fault! The ship was too big to steer!

If CEOs are worth as much as they think they are then they should have no problems taking all of their comp in stock, and bonuses (if any!) should be handcuffed to hard goals.

I did not argue that CEO's are deserving of their absurd pay, I argued to look into the overall Team results and the players before simply blaming the Coach.

So it's fair that CEO is not going to know how an org does its hiring on a day to day basis. It is too much detail. But leadership is a lot about vision (point to where you want to go - with input of course), setting the culture (how do you wanna behave in getting there - ie be a dick? Don't be dicks?), rewarding the right behaviors (promo cultures, rubriks, leadership principles, bonuses etc). Yes they do it through their generals but you get the point.

When I was at Google, I noticed a very large emphasis on process and "homogeneity". Group think was absurdly high - down to the kind of language you were "encouraged" to use at different settings. Amazon in comparison felt like a more direct (albeit brutal) place. You could see the knife coming at you.

This culture may not have been initiated by Sundar but was highly tolerated by him. And he tolerated it because the cash cow wasn't under threat and they kept hoarding decent talent (and keeping them under utilized just so competition doesn't get them) despite not being the highest paying employer.

Yes the coasters and resters and vesters had fun but allowing them to do so is all leadership.

Yes. You can't just hire a bunch of smart people and be surprised when a product doesn't get made. That's not how building stuff works.

Actually purely stochasticaly if you would distribute cash among them and add a reward function, you should at least have VC performance.

Finally a metric we can work with.

You’re showing very little understanding for how the world works with this reply. Do you think developers have free rein in big companies?

Product Managers and Division Managers and Staff Engineers and Research Scientists do, and there are thousands of each of these at Google.

Maybe the problem is deeper and stem from culture and hiring practices that privilege academia, instead of real world industry and engineering experience?

And who built Google as it is? Both founders were from academia.

This can be spin in any way somebody wants, but after 20 years, no budget limits, no lack of expertise inhouse, and no lack of time for experiments, the malaise is clear. It hints at fundamental cultural and organizational issues, that wont be solved either with layoffs or new management.

Until that is addressed, Google future trend is to become another IBM, only this time with others eating away their lunch much faster.

Your diatribe makes little sense. A healthy company has Product Managers in charge of each product, and in complex products its customary to break them off further into feature sets and even markets, each managed exclusively by a Product Manager.

Staff engineers are the result of having a hierarchical org where you need highly specialized and experienced people to take the lead of technical projects. What problem do you exactly see in this?

Researchers focus in research. What problem do you see in this, exactly?

It sounds like you are desperately trying to find something to complain about in spite of not having any grasp on the subject you're discussing.

The results speak for itself. I offered my diagnostic. Why don't you indulge us with yours?

Unless you look at things with the money lense.

Seems to me Search must be yielding like crazy. Android is too. User trust is high. Youtube is booming even though tiktok.

I think the man is doing great. At least he is printing real money.

Momentum is hard to slow down though. All the new products absolutely have sucked.

At this point though, I don't think layoffs are going to do anything. His approach has fundamentally, and pretty permanently changed Google. It is very easy to ruin the culture of a company top-down, it is nearly impossible to fix it once its been broken.

Google isn't going anywhere anytime soon, it will create strong returns for years to come, but it will no longer be a front-runner in innovation and technology. Although, Google's momentum is no where near as what IBM, Oracle, etc were since they don't have any large-company dependency on them that can't be disrupted.

>Seems to me Search must be yielding like crazy. Android is too. User trust is high. Youtube is booming even though tiktok.

None of which have been built or even improved during his tenure. He's just cashing in on the momentum of the money printers built by those before him. The products shipped under him had flopped.

> The products shipped under him had flopped

He was the PM for Google Chrome and Google Drive, and took over the Android org in 2013.

He has essentially proven himself with 2 major product releases and managing an additional major product line, but Google is a different company in 2024 compared to 2014, let alone 2004.

When you're a large public company who's stock is owned by major pension funds, 401k funds, sovereign wealth funds, PE funds, etc Investor Relations becomes the critical function of a CEO.

Just because a glacier is huge doesn't mean you would say it isn't melting.

> Search sucks.

Subjective, but rings true.

> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.

I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users.

> Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too.

This seems to be consensus, yes.

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

Is this actually true? Seems meme-ish.

> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.

> I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way

This has indeed become a very common take. "I'm not getting involved in another Google product. They'll just cancel it."

> I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users.

For their hardware products, this is definitely the case. Stadia, When they bought Fitbit, Google Home devices are few things that come to mind.

When they shut down Stadia and refunded everyone, "I would have bought games and tried out Stadia if they at least put this as part of their release announcement". What a sad state of things really.

Sundar is coming out as inspiring as Ray Ozzie, let's put it this way

> Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too.

I've had a great experience using GCP over the last 14 years, and I didn't have a rep inside. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

huh?

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