Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
The simplest explanation would be that every cost center/P&L had to offer up 6% of its people, regardless of that cost center's overall trajectory, place in company strategy or open headcount. And that every cost center's VP or general manager or whatever just got collared by HR, was given a list on a piece of paper and couldn't leave until they chose 6% by ...whatever metric they came up with on the spot.
Whatever actually happened I'll never know, but what I've seen was 100% compatible with that theory. Which in turn looks pretty inept.
My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"
Also, the large firing decisions in January 2023 and January 2024 were made up several steps up the ladder. There's been probably just as much firings done informally inbetween, and to your point, some were very purposeful: multiple people in Assistant org. reported independently that new directors and their couterie were grafted onto the org, they were shuffled onto "Still Very Important" Assistant teams, then the not-so-important Assistant teams were let go en masse.
They have 5 (or more) babies in 9 months, which is precisely the point of empire building: being able to handle more than one priority.
And then there's the antipoaching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipoaching
The average total compensation for an engineer is $250k-$350k/yr+
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Sa...
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Citrix,UKG,American%2...
the goog tracks you (and everyone) 24-7, and depending on teams and egos, could be ugly. you spend your whole life tryin to get to FAANG tier, and now it's miserable.
A) Choose to reject the premise entirely because $ is all that matters
B) Faced with a contradiction, check your premises, and interrogate your interlocutors
But, what I'd say in another flippant sentence, since I'm tempted again: exactly, and that's the problem.
I had a great time, will be forever proud and grateful, and there's more to life than work. But, it left me with a permanently jaundiced view of a lot of things I used to admire, and I saw the worst, most careless, self-centered, behavior I've seen in my life there.
That said, so is the rest of the world, at least in my experience. So long as you go into it with open eyes about what it really is, Google is a pretty solid experience. You should never identify with it or sympathize with it, but if you approach it as a parasite hoping to extract as much value from you as it can, it offers a pretty great personal opportunity. You've just got to keep in mind that it is not your friend, it is not looking out for your best interests, and it is definitely not not evil.
I like you. This is my general perspective, however I try to be a greedy symbiote.
Those 12k people they fucked over for zero real benefit, represented due to how Google hires, 240K interviews (5% accept rate). Let’s say they only did the screen. Still minimum 2 hrs, interview plus write up. 500k hours. 250 years of FTE time just in interviews flushed down the fucking toilet. And they are blowing the doors off the place hiring in LATAM.
And the bs just keeps coming by the dump truck full.
I got pushed out, by an overworking bootlicker hiring their friend with 0 domain experience. Ultimate event was them and shiftless PM lying and said design VP had 0 interest in a project they had been asking for three years. They got away with it completely because SWE management closed ranks and pretended that was normal because fuck design, right? And I was very evil for not just being like "oh that totally makes sense that they don't care at all" (i.e. the PM got nuclear pissed because his boss' boss' boss got called in for a 2nd meeting with the design VP)
All that to say, your comment about LATAM reminded me how much it fucking. sucked. having management pull that in December 2022, and realize there wasn't any escape hatch to an anonymous org elsewhere, because all the roles are in Poland / India / etc.
Flashbacks to my 45 year old dad bitterly complaining about mass off-shoring in tech when I was 10. Now I get it. It's not that it doesn't make sense, we all know the $. What's evil is the lying and games.
The conspiracy theory that's making the rounds is that these rounds of layoffs from tech firms have zero to do with financial reports or economy downturns, and are instead a coordinated effort, along with RTO policies, to wrestle negotiation power from tech workers and put downward pressure on tech salaries. Hence the apparent lack of criteria and indiscriminate layoffs complemented with hiring rounds.
I recall that a FANG ordered managers to decimate their teams while ramping up hiring on teams located in the same building, and HR openly rejected the idea of even having employees in the chopping block interview for those positions.
And what's different in Montana?
https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/title_0390/chapter_0020/part_00...
Some states have stronger protections in terms of how much warning an employee gets or severerance. But it's not widespread.
While it sucks for those who get the boot, this has the benefit of raising salaries overall. Because the company that does this usually cuts too much and has to later rehire at market rates which rise over time.
I was an employee, and a friend of mine was interviewing at Google. After one of his interviews, he called me up and asked if I heard of AWU. I was not sure what prompted that, but I said I was roughly familiar with AWU, and then my friend elaborated on what went down.
Turns out, his interviewer spent half the interview just buzzing my friend’s ears off about AWU and trying to recruit him to join before my friend even got the offer.
And then my friend told me the exact details of what was said about AWU and what they do, and my ears just rolled up, because I realized that he was getting coaxed by an AWU member with a bunch exaggerations and half-truths. Mostly about the perceived self-importance of AWU, how much they actually accomplish, and what they actually do.
Left a sour taste in my mouth, because doing this as an interviewer is imo pretty unethical.
I don’t have anything against AWU specifically and am fully in favor of following this tactic for absolutely any group that tries to waste a candidate’s time in similar ways during an interview.
If the candidate asked for more info on this during the informal discussion during first/last 10 mins of the interview, that’s fine. It is also fine if the interviewer decided to disclose the info about their group briefly without being prompted (just like other interviewers might mention being involved in an ERG or some employee club or whatever). But it is imo not fine to shill it without being prompted for half the interview timeslot. Doubly so when you do it using a bunch of half-truths and almost outright lies.
P.S. That experience almost turned away my friend from wanting to work for Google, because he was afraid that this was the “typical Google experience.” I had to assure him that this was an outlier and not representative of how the rest of the people working here were like. Luckily, the rest of his interviewers were great, and he trusted me enough to believe me about this not being normal, so he took the offer once he got it.
The actual decisions about which specific individuals, after the percentage is arrived at, however seems questionable if what you say is true.
The real world is thousands of times more complex then ‘MBA programs’ or theoretical examples from people who haven’t been in the hot seat making such serious decisions.
EDIT: Specifically, replacements were not "cheap".
I went in bright eyed, excited about the challenging work I would get to do, but instead found inept co-workers happy to do minimal amount of work while enjoying the perks and chilling most of the time. Couple that with the undeserved air of smugness many co-workers carried and the cult-like social environment... it was already not a great place to be, at the very least the team I was part of.
That tends to mean broad sweeping layoffs that select whole orgs, functions, lines of business or locations.
Often that means rehiring (sometimes the same people) to rebuild what was lost by some broad sweeping blind decision.
There’s also some gaming that goes on beforehand to protect key people by shifting them around to get them out of the selection group.
So yes, opaque and senseless may have been a purposeful strategy.
Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.
I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play.
If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer.
“Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news.
The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another.
This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up.
It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.
Wilson rephrases the [law] himself many times as "communication occurs only between equals". Celine calls this law "a simple statement of the obvious" and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one's job)....
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/23/google-quantum-computing...
The photo you linked to is only confusing because he's not wearing a suit. Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.
What's missing here is the crown/suit/...
If society were very focused on worker's rights and the recognition of the necessity of labor, such as in an idealized socialist society or a society with a predominance of worker cooperatives in the economy, then the idea of having a monarch or CEO of a company standing in front of the hard work of people whose names are not mentioned and whose faces are not pictured would seem absurd. You would expect and indeed commonly see photos showing many workers in front of the item in question.
Just as an example I went to the wikipedia page for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was quick to find what I would expect: a photo of a large group of workers in front of a dam they constructed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...
Or you might find a focused photo of a worker who is one of the people who built the thing, and representative of the type of workers on the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#/me...
I say this just to say, sure it can "make sense" but I think this is an artifact of the world we live in, where we have a hierarchical government and most firms in our economy are themselves hierarchical in nature. And so when the person at the top of the hierarchy stands for a photo op in front of the thing, we naturally accept that they serve as a "representation" of the output of the company.
But someone with a more worker-focused view would be more inclined to see that and find it off-putting. For the photo of Sundar Pichai up thread, I do in fact find it irritating that they don't even mention the people who were involved with the project he is standing in front of. And wouldn't you know it, I am a very pro-worker in inclination.
That would be different. In that situation it is clear who is doing the work, and who is providing the money.
But posing in front of a widget, he is signaling to the world, “I made this”.
What did you expect him to say? "Yes, moral is low and all the good people are leaving" ?
It fits the contemporary fad of contempt for anyone less powerful than you, including employees, courts (for some), etc.
Somehow, the world changes day to day, year to year, generation to generation; somehow we change the world; and all despite the fact that, as people now copypasta everywhere, 'it's always been that way'. Do people say that at work meetings? Talking to investors? One wonders what all these entrepeneurs and engineers do? No wonder funding is drying up (I think that might be a literal problem - the despair, pessimism and cynicism reaching the executive suite).
We've always had carbon in the atmosphere, warfare, poverty, oppression, ... and people saying that _____ has always been that way.
There’s no other requirement.
You make the board mad you’re fired. You make the board happy, then you’re golden and can do whatever.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.
CEO at this level isn’t a people leader like you’d expect because boards don’t care about people (unless they are unionizing). So anything they say about people issues, you can guarantee is a statement made for the board’s consumption.
This fits that perfectly because what he’s communicating is “we got rid of what we consider dead weight loss because those people worked in what we arbitrarily have deemed cost centers instead of what we used to call [important buzzword like “metaverse”]
The average worker, adhering to Company Culture, trading their mental space and shaving off their own quality of life in favor of the company's growth, are not the point of the business.
It's not really about the board, Google has become a mature company that's not going to grow 20% YoY anymore and this is what happens to such businesses. Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces, they will turn them into IBM.
> Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces
Isnt the board the ultimate force, including the economic one?
You are supporting OPs claim actually. Becoming a mature company brings declining workforce morale.
> they will turn them into IBM.
because
> The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.
The easiest way to make a board happy is to stack it with your friends. Preferably those that are not that rich so that they appreciate the several hundred thousand dollar a year gig for very little work.
As a result, the larger the company, the larger the hierarchy, the larger the inefficencies. At the extreme you approximate the government of a country.
Layers of managers who care only about collecting a paycheck, engaging in company politics and looking busy cause exactly this problem. Managers will pick the best decision for them, not anyone else.
In reality, there’s lot of opportunities that benefit all 3 of user, Google, and decision maker.
it’s kind of the fundamental principle of trade/business - that both sides can proper in a deal.
I'd love to think so, but the truth is that any platform, working correctly, disadvantages those who contribute most of the content. The platform owners earn money in ways that are always contrary to the interests of the content creators.
game developer, musician, mangaka, streamer, etc
Youtube's main source of revenue is ads which they serve regardless of whether the uploader is taking a cut from the upload or not. Most users have always and will continue to upload to and consume from youtube without the expectation of making money from the process.
So, yes in general users have historically been more or less satisfied with the deal: watch ads, get free video platform.
These users don't seem to know what they want. I'll just listen to whomever keeps calling me personally about things. My buddies are successful, so it makes sense.
Eh, these shareholders don't seem to know what they're doing. I'll just listen to myself. Everything I do makes sense to me, so that makes sense.
Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.
And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.
This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.
Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".
You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.
Bad upper management (immediate manager was absolutely 10/10) was the reason I ended up leaving.
Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.
The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.
That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.
Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style.
Takes 5-10 seconds to load.
Avoided fucking it up, huh.
I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.
Starting from February 2024, this version of Gmail (Basic HTML Gmail) will no longer be supported, and you'll automatically start using Standard Gmail. Switch to the latest Gmail version now.
> The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
This is actually the problem and solution in one go - they're all doing data annotation.
That's a lot of the problem. There's no teeth in it for modern day C-class execs. The only difference when they leave is whether they leave a billionaire or a hundred-million aire.
If he can’t find someone better, it’s only because finding that person would be a full time job for him, for an indefinite period.
With the risk of a repeat.
Which may not be an acceptable price to him.
They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.
Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist.
Now add 149,999 nodes.
I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other.
(check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)
This could be a physics model, or an imperative to scale back the free food.
Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.
This is a ridiculous take. You would need way more than that just to maintain Kafka and run ops for it, that LinkedIn heavily relies on. You are trivializing the complexity of running a platform like LinkedIn.
Complexity compounds, so the tradeoff is, continually tame it, or continually hire with less and less impact per employee.
The latter seems to happen a lot when money flows.
Only if you're certain they will never quit their jobs. In tech where the average tenure is supposedly 2-3 years, a large number of employees are hired to make key persons redundant, groom for succession, and to make sure key persons can offload some bandwidth to work on emergent issues. It's irrational to have billions of dollars of revenue (or even tens of millions) riding on a single person who can decide to walk away with 2 weeks notice.
Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is
And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to.
Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B.
It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan.
I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.
> Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia?
There is a clear identity - Google is about hoarding all of the available data (originally web) and making money off of it any way you can. By definition it has to be huge and get their hands into as many pies as humanly possible and then cut away stuff that doesn’t work. So i would say they are being perfectly consistent whether their employees appreciate it or not.
Of course there isn’t an inconsistency there. Its such a non-identity there isn’t anything to be inconsistent with, outside of declaring the company a on-profit.
The problem of lack of identity isn’t always about lack of consistency. It also is a lack of focus.
Lack of focus leaves the door open to vastly increased complexity. The need for more and more employees as per employee impact drops.
The only thing.
On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second week of negotiating class: Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down. <Yawn.>
Sure, but these are humans with no stake in the company. They are not investing in Google because they believe in their mission nor do they even care if Google crashes in 5 years. They believe it's a way to quickly grow their portfolio, and will change as the market does.
This isn't to say they aren't human, just that they are at best more invested in other things or at worst are greedy and selfish.
>Act angry to put things out of reach and to intimidate people into backing down
I don't exactly feel better knowing it's just a facade towards the above spectrum.
Google could likely fire 1000s more and it wouldn’t change their trajectory.
Same with Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc.
Their core businesses are massive empires.
They can make so many stupid mistakes, hire inept layers of management and still cash billions.
They can randomly fire 5% of their workforce with roll of dice. There is enough redundancy and resilience that they’ll bounce back.
We, the average working joes are bound by gravity. We can escape into space, but with immense force and spice of luck. We have to work for money.
Mega trillion corporations are like black holes. They curve space time so hard, money works for them.
MSFT already did-so within the past year (after providing OpenAI funding).
----
All I'm suggesting is that the money fountain isn't forever.
If you make your Job your identity, you're in for a big surprise. The truth is that most of us are replaceable. We are not special snowflakes in the eyes of Mega Tech Corps.
Leadership all the way to the top is completely inept.
Different functions/teams/departments seemed to use very different algorithms, suggesting there was just no leadership at all. I posted a separate top level comment, but seeing one function do last-in/first-out and another jettison its most-tenured (most expensive? non-pristine HR record? who knows!) folks makes it hard for employees to understand what the new rules of engagement are.
It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.
My guess is that he’ll say some off color on a hot mic or email leak. Considering his lack of effort in addressing Caste issues at Google… that’s possibly an issue. Could be antitrust stuff too. He’s been in hot water lately.
Market share wise but not feature wise. Everyone is chasing them in regards to photo quality.
Pixel is assuredly NOT leading in video recording quality though. And the overall package still matters: for example X% superiority in still photos didn't make up for Pixel 6 having a very small photo buffer / a slow camera startup speed. Didn't make up for lens cracking issues in Pixel 7. iPhone just works.
I sit on my couch with a MacBook Air (very couch friendly) developing with many screens of relevant info arranged around me.
A mundane but profound benefit of “spatial computing” is no longer having visual information limited to the “keyholes” of hardware screens.
Apple seems to get that the Vision Pro wants to be a Mac replacement, not an iPad replacement.
Counterintuitively, the stereo 3D is the secondary benefit. Albeit a natural and significant one.
Everything in Vision works with both see-pinch and track/mouse click.
Hoping see-pinch comes to Mac screen in Vision, or simply Mac becomes redundant.
Yeah, vision.
Gemini is much more neutral and easy to work with. Like Alexa or Siri.
Hmmm... would be interesting to go look at LinkedIn data to see if it's really true. Of course it wouldn't fix this problem. Workers are now unhappy with senior management, which is new. Although, I think some of the empire building resulted in a lot of the pandemic over hiring (and departures of long term staff).
"You Deserve a Tech Union" https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union
Put in the work, organize, unionize. The alternative is sisyphusian repetition of the same situations.
I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what but how—is way worse.
There is another alternative, "The executive rallies people behind a vision, encourages people to come up with ideas and solutions, sets up incentives such that low level ICs can bypass all middle management nonsense, encourage failures, and skill themselves up to be able to make tough calls."
But that's not what executives do. They set some vague vision, force middle management to trickle it down to ICs. Everyone is under pressure to do something with no reward for doing that something. Everyone still has to follow the chain of command and everyone still has to manage mediocre middle management politics.
Perhaps this is inevitable, but maybe organizations could become aware of the changes in entropy and try to do the equivalent of maintenance and refactoring at the organizational level. There is probably some of this already happening, but I wonder if information theory can be applied at the people level to optimize and prevent increases in entropy.
I think it’s unavoidable. You hire to grow, but growth changes you. You can’t layoff to un-grow and return to former self because they layoffs take a toll.
Would give both companies and individuals more flexibility and dynamism
In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.
This is especially true for lower wage Americans who've seen great wage growth since 2019.
From the outside, the company looks rudderless, coasting along on (significant) momentum.
If you are looking for groundbreaking innovation, competent management, no politics, freedom from shareholder demands etc. then it's best to steer clear of any multi-trillion dollar corporation.
They probably aren't making anything groundbreaking (outside of some obligatory LLM) but they seem least likely to drop employees as if they were throwing darts on a board.
Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality.
If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. Leave before a company gets that size!
This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so many mediocre people who want to be seen as "doing something", they are literally destroying the innovation by virtue of just existing in that company at that level.
The solution is actually pretty simple - make management track people go on call. That way, they develop empathy for customers, engineers and services. Make them spend less time on committees, promo packets, performance reviews and instead, spend more time on services. Make them fix bugs. Be close to the work that they are supposedly the face of.
I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment.
But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applying at raise an eyebrow over it.
I think there's a tangential tricky element here too, that most financial advice is written for the masses of people who do have predictable career paths and long-term plans. There's nothing wrong with that. Those people need to have plans too.
But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were. I could use decent advice, but "be a different kind of person, because the kind of person you are isn't like me" doesn't really help. I'm financially way ahead of my friends in traditional roles, because risk is often rewarded and ownership matters, but I've yet to find an advisor who has the first idea what to do with me.
>But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were.
like you said, a lot of financial advice is based on stability. The job hop strategy is inherently unstable. No traditional advisor is ever going to suggest going into a job with the mindset to quit in 2 years for better job.
It's also because it's an inherently unique bubble that is tech. Tech moves fast , blazing fast. You can have 3-4 different domains under your belt in a decade if you wanted, whereas you may not even be considered a master of a particular domain if you spent 10 years in more traditional prestige like doctors or lawyers (if you count school you'd just barely be starting in such careers!). And even in tech this is a pretty recent trend isolated to the mid-00's to now (minus a few housing crisis years). the oldest authority exposed to such trends would either be retired and still have spent most of their lives pre-boom, or still currently in the workforce. There's no formal advisor available yet.
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I say all this as someone who wanted to be a "long haul" type. I wanted to be that deep domain tech guru to uncover the various secrets in my field. The reality is I just get laid off every 2-3 years. so what's even the point?
For example, I've searched for but never been able to find actual advice about how to think about private company stock options. Everybody ends up writing them off with a, "Well, there's a decent chance they won't be worth anything, so just ignore them and try to operate within the world we do understand." Nobody quantifies the risk. Nobody talks about how to hedge against it prudently. Nobody talks about what to do when the piddly little number of shares the company tossed you as a customer support agent are suddenly worth half a million dollars and are a life-changing amount of money, never mind what to do if you had a real stake. Nobody talks about how to evaluate which early companies do have a strong shot at "making it" and which ones are doomed.
It's not impossible to think these things through and evaluate them. It's just hard, and not mainstream. For those of us for whom "instability" is a feature, not a bug, advice from someone who gets that and thinks it through would be infinitely more valuable than advice from the hordes who tell us we should just try to be different.
When CEOs say this, you know you have a huge morale and leadership problem. Statements like that are incredulous. It's the boot lickers who say that stuff to the CEO.
Sundar is out of his depth at worse and disconnected at best if he believes that is the way to defend layoffs. I am surprised HR/PR let him say this...
Maybe they think that they don't really have competitors at this point, or rather, no competitors that can meaningfully reduce the market share in key areas, or competitors that are in a position to hire the laid off employees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39101384
“The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,”
That sounds like a massive hyperbolic exaggeration at best and pure fabrication at worst.
If true though it’s a massive indictment on the leadership that shows how inept they are at even having a semblance of knowing what their people do and taking care of them.
Sounds like Pichai has been drinking the linkedin toxic positivity kool-aid.
I would think that quote came from the onion 5 years ago.
People take Waymo on a daily basis without incident. Just because it may not be available to you doesn't mean it's not real. It is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the industry.
Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.
/s
If you have someone who aimlessly kills products and fires people but lacks vision or a decent plan, you could find someone much cheaper, and save tens of millions on executive compensation. If operating margin is so crucial now, then it seems cutting pay of top executives is the easiest way to achieve that with the least damage to the company.
/s
Meaning shares holders, of course.
He's not going anywhere
Welcome to having a regular non-union job? There's several billion other people in the club. It's not exciting, and you will be let go whenever the company wants a boost in their financials. There's also no free snacks or chefs, but you (at Google) still get a bigger salary than anyone else in the world with your job, if that helps. If you want fulfillment, excitement, vision, etc, you could always change jobs to a smaller company whose reason for being isn't selling ads.
I probably wouldn't do it indefinitely but it can make sense to hang around for a while.
Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.
As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.
Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.
Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materially more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, reasonably priced and people love them.
The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.
Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.
Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.
As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).
As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet - we should only be so luck to have bought-and-held that stock. Meanwhile, Google owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.
Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
> Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough.
Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.
FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
> It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone.
The alternative is... giving up on the idea? Just storing anything centrally because end-to-end/client-side encryption/local processing is a lost cause?
> Drive and storage just work.
That's what Google does really well indeed: Things close to infrastructure with as little product/UI aspects as possible. Getting rid of hard links in Drive was a great move too. No complaints there. Voice is another thing in that category: It's a hard infrastructure problem, and Google nailed it. The same goes for the versioning/conflict resolution backend of GSuite: A marvel of engineering.
The hardest part is not accidentally cancelling things that work and that solve problems for actual users in favor of yet another instant messenger.
> Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Quantitatively, sure, maybe. Qualitatively, having unleashed Protobuf onto the world alone undoes a significant amount of goodwill in my view.
>FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)
And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.
It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.
I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
Ready?
It has Markdown mode as an option.
Peak HN, perfectly executed:
- "it's obvious my pet peeve feature X should be added to Y, the company in the article".
- "I don't like X".
- "Can we have both?"
I'm guffawing
And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get lost when exporting and re-importing the same file, or parts of it via copy and paste).
Update: You made me look: Sadly still no Markdown support. I would have been very happy to be wrong here.
Maybe irrelevant, but I will say that my spouse who spends a lot more time in Google docs can’t be bothered to learn even the markdown shortcuts for H tags in docs even though it would save her a ton of time. I imagine that’s a large majority of people.
Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown.
That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
* also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps both are desirable, I'm not sure why you felt deceived that Docs didn't become a Markdown-only editor
And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).
I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.
> That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.
GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.
It’s timesheet software that appears to be a legacy Windows app using an unholy number of compatibility shims to run in the browser. Almost nothing is a native control!
It sometimes refuses to load randomly, and can be really slow at certain hours. Its job is to record a few numbers for each user once a day.
> How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.
Surely we aren't blaming GPT for this.
This exactly hard on Google's caliber.
Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.
WYSWIG is core to the product definition.
There was a time when the name was synonymous for the best software engineering and some of the brightest minds in the world! And here we are arguing whether two different editing paradigms in one word processor might be too hard for them.
Approximately nobody wants this though. Sure, you want it, and I want it, and some other people like us, but we're a rounding error of the user base of Google Docs.
This would be a great plugin, but very difficult to justify building as a first class feature.
And there's nothing wrong with protobuf :)
Of course, if you want non wysiwyg, then don't use Google docs just use markdown in a text editor or install mediawiki or something.
I don’t get to choose, and I bet a considerable fraction of Google Docs users don’t either and it’s just what their workplace prescribes.
Trivializing privacy isn't the same thing as identifying good privacy.
>Cell phone privacy
Sure we make a cell phone and we make a cell phone OS but its best to look the other way and never trust your privacy to a device that society has decided should follow you 24/7.
A secure OS is cute but so what - there's a million other ways to p0wn your privacy.
On the plus side, the digital trail is so intense, citizens have a pretty robust alibi against being framed. For example, sure someone could borrow your phone, but they'd have a real hard time using it exactly the way you do, from accelerometer data to swipes to individual apps and and and...
If google was a small garage startup I would agree that they would have nothing they could do. But they aren't. They are massive. And this is their field. and this is their mission.
When Google sucks up your personal data or compound some profile on you against your will, it’s “ok”. When other people do it, it’s “hacking”.
I've used Google Slides for over a decade and I don't see any real improvement; Google Drawings is just pathetic. Basically "Powerpoint from 2001, but with doc sharing".
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/
This lists literally every new feature it gets. Browse to your heart's content.
Here's everything specific to Slides:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...
I think Sheets has seen the most improvements since that's what power business users need, followed by Docs.
I want to run ads and I am unable to. Chrome never finishes loading ads.google.com so I switched to Firefox. It loads successfully on Firefox but I cannot get it to actually run an ad.
After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.
I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.
The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.
Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.
Let’s not even get started on permissions.
I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.
And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.
I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!
My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.
But I haven't used Google Cloud extensively, so I don't know if it's even worse.
Also, AWS answered the proverbial phone.
Search had become awful well before ChatGPT appeared - the final really visible decline was in 2019 I recall. Recent 1st result for "Likely": "LIKELY - Women's Dresses, Tops & More". They've been happy to put anything commercial first for any term.
IDK when but anything other than Google is better now. Even whatever default Brave has, or ddg. It's like using Google 15 years ago - minimal SEO crap.
Sure I do have to go back to google every few days, but thats due to braindead devs who explicitly only allow google to scrape them.
But the fact that they can kill your online identity in the blink of an eye, with zero recourse is the biggest reason why I personally cannot fully embrace the full Google ecosystem.
If you think the complaint about google search is that it isn't as good as chatgpt, I think you might be not listening. The problem with google search is that it's worse than it was
But to be ultra-fair, the web is worse today because of the perverse incentives created by Google Search and Google Ads.
Is it possible GP was talking about SEO spam enabled by LLMs like ChatGPT? That's the most charitable read on it I can give it.
Because I can guarantee you my problem with Google Search has nothing to do with chat assistants, and if that is sincerely your position, I'd seriously consider trying to find perspective.
What they have done is given people an alternative to interacting with human knowledge via Google search. It was falling in quality before, but in the general case no one had an alternative (and so it would still generate the same revenues). But ChatGPT is not only a substitute but a superior product, so people actually move to it instead of kvetching about the decline.
To address your concern, yes [low quality content] will still exist but it won't look at all like today's stuff. Too soon to tell.
In periods like these, the British saying applies to users: keep calm and carry on. The American saying: bitchin' ain't switchin'.
- Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea. They have been the least innovative company of the big 5 and cancel products and have no long term focus.
- GCP may be good but no one trusts Google to maintain their products and not cancel them under your feet. GCP representatives don’t know how to meet “customers where they are” and their enterprise relationships are so bad when I was at AWS (Professional Services) we didn’t even bother having have “talking points” about GCP vs AWS. GCP wasn’t even on our radar. Azure on the other hand was.
- Google and privacy? Really? Google’s whole purpose is to track you to monetize you. Android consistently has more security issues than iOS and Android devices don’t get security updates like iOS devices.
- Google like every other company only “contributes” to open source software that does not give it a competitive advantage.
1) The Cloud Console is very meh compared to the AWS frontend. Slow and cumbersome. Otherwise GCP is generally playing catch-up, though it's closed the gap significantly in recent years.
2) Morale is low. Googlers used to see themselves as representatives of the most beneficial company in the world. Now, they're much more likely to view themselves as well-compensated cogs in the next IBM. Which is more realistic, but the negative vibe shift is real.
3) Privacy/security wise, I trust Google to do what it promises to do better than anyone. Which is to say, it will extract your data and monetize it to the maximum extent possible and make sure no one else has access to it. Still better than the alternatives, but that's a pretty damn low bar.
And two other points:
4) Hiring standards have dropped. Googlers are more competent than the average SWE on the market, but they are not generally exceptional. And their experience at Google teaches them proprietary tooling and how to navigate bureaucracy.
5) On that note, the core issue is that Google is a bureaucracy split into fiefdoms, living off Ads profits like a Gulf oil state. It hampers execution and makes genuine product vision impossible.
Google has become a utility company, and I believe that's what you are saying. And I agree. I love Gmail, photos, drive etc and I have been a Google user longer than I have been an employee. This is a good thing.
But, I started my career at google, and can tell you with confidence that it is not the best place to build a career, especially if you are a high performer. Google will shape everyones career around average, and will not do much to reward extraordinary contributions, and it shows up also in compensation, promotions etc. google will happily not promote people unless they ask for, and many will not.
And utility? Come on now. Yes it might be doing much less actual innovation than before but compare that to building awful websites at an actual utility company. I’ll wait.
That's not ok here, so please don't. We want curious conversation, not repetition. (Fortunately it doesn't look like you've repeated this more than once, but that is already too often.)
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