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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.

Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Google was one tenth the size and was near-universally loved, the model of having frank fireside conversations with execs was already stretched thin.

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.

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel.

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.

There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.

Are there any good examples of this?

I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes...

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.

> A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?

No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy.

I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.

Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation:

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)

> spherical developers

This could be a physics model, or an imperative to scale back the free food.

Organizations can't scale linearly. You need more middle managers as you add more people and organizational layers, who don't contribute any "output" so this is trivially true.

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.

> 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.

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.

Perhaps if reducing the complexity was considered an urgent necessity, over hiring more, there would be less complexity and new opportunities would be easier to consider and jump on.

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.

>I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products

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.

But couldn't the founders put a competent CEO in the chair and still pursue their passion projects on the side?

Well, if they could've they would've. Also in unlikely case they could've different thinking about competence than yours.

> Well, if they could've they would've

Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is

Sundar was pretty close to optimal. For internal consumption, it was an inspiring story of an engineer who rose through the ranks to the top, an affirmation of an engineering-centric culture. A foreign-born immigrant to boot.

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.

Sundar was never an engineer.

> 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.

> making money off of it any way you can

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.

It’s not much more generic than “make consumer electronics” from apple which makes everything under the sun now from headphones to cars. Google just increasingly became at odds with its own “dont be evil” motto as the company had scaled so execution had greately suffered

The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about.

The only thing.

That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.

That’s very true. However in this specific case, the OP is correct for anyone with decision making power at Google

I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded.

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.>

>I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded.

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.

The parent comments were about Google management, not investors.

Is it though ? Even Meta's 5y return is higher than Google's, and that includes the enormous pivot-to-VR blunder drop.

These things could be true at the same time. Alphabet stock did reach an all-time-high recently, but its growth could still be slower than Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and several other large tech companies.

People were worried that Google would become the best IBM. Now I think it will become the next Boeing.

Google is still making money every quarter. Doubt they will get rid of him.

They are going to be left behind once enough capable people leave.

Public markets are not known for combining ten-year-long outlooks with deep domain knowledge. In fact that's the two things they're best known for lacking! (P.S. They've already been left behind by whatever Kagi is doing to filter out LLM garbage.)

+1 to your observation about Kagi’s filtering. Whatever they’re doing sure seems to be working, and cumulatively with the rest of their small, quietly user-centric decisions over the past year or two, has really made them feel like an oasis relative to the sharp and quick deterioration that’s gone on over in Mountain View’s product.

They're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinking decisions ever did."

Except that revenues have been growing for years under him and the stock price has skyrocketed. I personally think he's a terrible CEO but it's impossible to argue to anyone that cares that he should be removed until at least revenue or the stock price drops.

stock price is flimsy and on that revenue growth, what are the margins? If they are static, he's just doing more of the same.

That description perfectly fits another massive tech company CEO: Steve Balmer. Revenue tripled under him. But Microsoft's mindshare, brand image, influence, etc. all went down.

So is it appropriate to predict that Pichai will end his tenure as CEO of Google just like Balmer did, which was when he voluntarily quit ("retirement")?

The stock price will be plenty high, but Google will never have been less relevant.

Probably. The question is less when he retires/quit and more about how he affected the company during his final days (and of course his legacy). Unity is a great anti-example of this: The former CEO IPO'd, made big money for Unity, and on the way out arguably burned the longterm status of the company while he fell with his golden parachute.

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.

I have myself found out very confusing that nobody ever seems to suggest that maybe Pichai isn't steering this ship very well...

People have been saying that for years. I left in 2020 and some people were saying that. Having almost no compelling new products and shutting down multiple high profile flops while dismantling the internal culture that many people appreciated is pretty hard to miss.

I meant "nobody influential". Employees (current and previous) and users of products, sure. But you never hear this from bankers or business pundits. I wasn't tuned in enough back then to say whether there was a similar phenomenon with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.

Lol all that matters is how much money is being made, they don't really give a shit about wrecking developer trust as long as google remains the money printing behemoth it is.

who would replace him? I don't think larry has many choices

Who isn’t going to be available to him?

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.

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