Google wants employees to move faster | Hacker News Reader

Google wants employees to move faster

cnbc.com

42 pointssalil99972 comments

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker?

If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".

The whole underlying message of move faster is:

We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.

>we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday

Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday?

Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google so they can rest and vest, which is what Google is famous for and makes it a very desirable place to work.

There was even a Googler's guide on Reddit a few years ago how to pretend to work from home while you play videogames all day and cash in 400k/year, with all the details on the theatrics needed to pass your peer performance review for years while working less than 20h/month, since nobody really checks in detail what your working on and why how long it should take, so you have a lot of avenues to pretend to look busy while relaxing.

Doesn't sounds like the place where you'd need to miss your kid's birthday to me, unless maybe you hate your family.

In the story, he calls out a team working 120 hours a week, after first ramping to 100 hours/week for a while...in what seems like a example he's wanting people to follow.

Oh for sure, there are always some, like the original Android team who was working like crazy to catch up to Apple after they unveiled their first iPhone, but Google is such a big and diverse company now with several monopolist positions, I doubt all teams at Google are in wartime mode crunching like crazy like their Gemini team is.

Yeah, we get the same crap constantly. “You have to be faster”

“Ok, are you going to remove the mountains of red tape, reviews, and documentation that make a 2 week project take 16 weeks?”

“Well, we can’t do that. Here’s a motivational story about boats”

the C-level equivalent of poking the business with a stick and mumbling, "c'mon, do something..." when youve clearly run off all the talented, sidelined all the most dedicated, and turned your once thriving tech company into an ambling rudderless dumpster fire that occasionally immolates its best products for no reason and runs down pointless features because you spend more time reading Gartner than reading O'Reilly.

I launched what was ostensibly a web analytics platform that was just an Google Sheet we shared with partners attached to a JavaScript snippet for webpages. Very lean and unusual for Google. But we had to use internal tools and libraries to ensure this tiny tool was “Google Scale” and were subject to company-wide deployment restrictions as well as PR-sensitive launch dates that took what was mocked up internally as a JavaScript MVP by one of our engineers in 1 week almost 10 months to launch formally and with the exact same shit MVP Google Sheets interface. This was a “no red tape” project where execs cleared a path as best they could.

Yeah…faster isn’t going to happen.

We got the same pep talk at the beginning of the year. They wanted to give us developers more autonomy, the ability to move faster, etc. Sounds great on paper as there were a lot of useless meetings and chat channels we wasted a lot of time in.

But the solution was to eliminate the release manager role and move QA away from testing individual tickets and instead toward developing/managing automated testing. And then the devs had to pick up the QA and release responsibilities without any change in our original responsibilities.

Which means that I now waste a massive chunk of my work week doing things other than write code. All the while they're making a big stink about "coding days". Which has pretty much never ended well for developers. I'm sure next they'll be counting total lines of code, too.

In fairness, he seems to effectively have CNBC reporters sitting in with the crowd at the company all-hands. He would probably come off the worse if he started saying things of substance. In his position I'd cancel the all-hands.

He’s deservedly being criticized for not saying anything of substance. If he had something to say worthy of his paycheck, it’d be less newsworthy than the “Google has no idea what they’re doing” stories which come out of consultant babble like “faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution”. Google had the reputation they’ve been working so hard to shed because they used to actually innovate and build things which the average person could immediately see as better; telling people to do more with less becomes the story because it announces that the old Google is gone.

I asked Gemini for some advice and it gave a better answer suggesting things like “break down silos and empower teams to make decisions without excessive bureaucracy” and “refocus on what made us great – building products that solve real user problems”, not working 120 hour weeks.

Exactly. My experience at Google over the past two years has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so the net effect of all of this is that people move slower.

Google is still, IMO, a good place to work. But it has degraded considerably over the last several years and I've lost pretty much all faith in leadership above the Director level.

> ...has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so the net effect of all of this is that people move slower...

Wow, its like you were reading my mind for almost exactly how i was going to describe my current employer. The difference is that i do NOT work for a startup nor a big tech company, etc...I'm just a cog on a digital team at a consumer packaged goods mfg company; sort of a typical corporate America type job...and all that you noted is happening at my job too...so odd that many seem to be experiencing similar tactics from "Above"! Did all the top management companies whisper the same set of tactics to all corporations recently!?!

> so odd that many seem to be experiencing similar tactics from "Above"! Did all the top management companies whisper the same set of tactics to all corporations recently!?!

They all read the same HBR articles, they all take advice from the same management consulting companies, they all study the same business school curriculum, etc.

It's quite rare that executives have innovative ways to do business, as in any job if you try to step too much out of the line of the status quo you will have to deliver much more value to empirically prove yourself right or you will be fired.

So many of those folks are just going through the same motions because it's safer. A very good example is Google itself under Sundar Pichai, there's no real vision or business innovation, he's been trying to just not rock the boat and keep milking the cow but now the cow is running dry and he doesn't know what to do. It's pretty clear that Google could have any other professional CEO and go through the same issues because most of them are just there to follow the business schools Zeitgeist.

> ...They all read the same HBR articles, they all take advice from the same management consulting companies, they all study the same business school curriculum, etc...

Yep, sadly, the evidence is clear that they're all lemmings and staying that way! Also, your 100% correct on your other points as well...And said truth is quite frankly sad; sad for both Google, but also for all other corporate-type companies, at least that I know about in the U.S. :-(

Look at how aligned they all are on Returning To Office work. Nearly every major company is saying the exact same things, to the point where you can probably find exact wording matches between internal memos. They're obviously getting all their ideas from the same place.

True and so sad!

This rot is everywhere in both private companies and public institutions

I absolutely believe it, and this is one of the reasons I am staying at Google. I'm not convinced that going anywhere else would be massively better. I mostly just miss what it was like working there in 2016.

This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right.

When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our current projects, but do it more innovatively. When pressed about what this actually meant, he just showed us the graph again.

I resigned shortly after.

"conjoined triangles of success"

>he just showed us the graph again.

The conjoined triangles of success?

Moving faster... but in which direction exactly?

> If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resource

If you're a huge corporation like Google, you're not even playing the same game as any startup in the first place, and trying to compete with them as if you were is likely to end in tears.

The same is true the other way around. If you're a small company, you're unlikely to beat a major corporation by playing the game that major corporations play.

Being a small company gives strengths and weaknesses that large companies don't have -- and vice versa. Smart companies of any size play to their own strengths rather than trying to play to the competition's strengths.

Having worked at Google, this is entirely self-inflicted. This once internal now leaked video [1] summed it up pretty well. There is so much process you have to go through to do anything. A lot of it makes sense but it comes at the expense of speed.

More than a decade ago OKR (Objectives and Key Results) culture set in where once you just worked on things until they were ready. OKRs are really insidious because what qualifies as an acceptable goal depends on how much you're liked and the political muscle your org has. It also means the smallest unit of time because a quarter and if you had to approach another team for help, the soonest they would help you was the following quarter and that's only if you had the muscle to get onto those OKRs.

At a more macro level, Google is insanely profitable. I'm not sure what the current employee count but the per-employee profit is probably sitting at or above $500,000 per year. That's after all expenses. Yet the relentless pursuit of profits (which shrink over time) means further exploitation of surplus labor value.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

Google makes >90% of profits from Search and Ads.

Even if you group in half of gsuite for Gmail and all of Android (for the default search app) - that's still not even half of the company.

The profit per employee there is probably close to $1.5M - and that's after average compensation above $500k.

And we arrive at collectivism vs individualism and the tendency of people to privatize gains but socialize losses.

Yes, search and ads are the golden goose but so many things contribute to that success. Chrome, for example, is absolutely crucial to search quality. Maps is huge. Android is also critical. Search and ads use a whole bunch of infra (eg Borg, storage, load balancing, serving infra, traffic management, data center infra and so on). Even the people who manage all the corp Linux distributions and video conferencing infra contribute. Source control, build infra, testing infra and so on.

Deciding who does and doesn't "contribute" for something so interconnected like this quickly devolves into a political exercise at best and a popularity contest at worst.

Maps is part of the search org.

Chrome is part of the android org.

I already included those.

I'm basically not counting YouTube, Cloud, most of Gsuite, Waymo (and all the other bets).

> Maps is part of the search org

Is that true now? It certainly wasn't when I worked there.

> Chrome is part of the android org.

This only happened in the last month.

> I'm basically not counting YouTube ...

Youtube revenue was 20% of search's revenue in Q4 [1] and it's of strategic importance on many levels, including to search directly.

> ... Cloud ...

Cloud is of strategic importance too. Why? Because it helps keep data center costs down. Why? Because Cloud increases the demand for RAM, CPUs, hard drives and flash storage. This allows Google to demand lower prices for all of these things from suppliers.

> ... Waymo

This one is fair. It's a vestige of GoogleX AFAIK. I'm kinda surprised it still exists in the same company that de-prioritized Google Fiber, which realy is core to Google's business.

[1]: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/alphabet-google-q4-2024-e...

> Is that true now? It certainly wasn't when I worked there.

It depends how you define "org".

“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said.

“There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said.

Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.”

After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day.

Early in my career I'd have been angry, surprised or in denial at hearing this sort of rancid garbage. Now I see this in so many organizations, this is just a symptom of the deeper rot and top-down dysfunction.

Its really just the effect of empire building. Too much money allowing non operative people to flourish and new administrative layers to be added that then have to justify themselves by making operative employees report thing they can quantify to show their bosses in the hope to climb the ladder.

Its just a symptom of all big organizations in the west these days be it private or public.

I've worked 100 hours a week for a few months to finish my thesis on time. It felt like the upper limit of mental work you can sustain for more than a single-digit number of weeks when you are 100% motivated and deeply care about the work.

But 120 hours? Do they even shower? RTO must be fun for their colleagues.

This level of human depravity is just sick. And for what?

> “People come to us because we are trusted,” Raghavan said. “They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.”

Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?

>“They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to [us]

Same last words from the Nokia and Blackberry CEOs when that new gizmo from Apple came out in 2007.

>Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?

The Gavin Belson one.

Isn't he the Google ads guy ?

He used to be. Now he is head of Search. He became Head of Search at exactly the same time as when Google Search started becoming completely shit.

Google deserves to burn at this point. They had the rest of the field lapped, they were set up for a victory prance into one of the most lucrative markets of all time, and Sundar has just burned all of it. Dude has zero long term strategic vision, he's a MBA bot set to "plunder light" and he's getting embarrassingly outplayed by Satya Nadella.

I actually think he’s right. Us Hacker News types don’t trust Google at all but for the average person it’s where they go to find information, and we’ve seen time and time again that the majority either don’t understand or don’t care about many privacy concerns.

All this stuff is a little handwavey but a 2023 report:

https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2023/05/Mos...

Has a specific breakout about Google. Interestingly the subbrands (Google Maps particularly) are more trusted than Google as a whole, but it’s still relatively well trusted as a company.

Slide decks like that make me feel like there is another species out there for which brands matter. It's literally disorienting.

Those decks feel absurd but brands do matter. There’s a slide in there about hospitality brands… when staying in a new city I absolutely look to the hotel brand when making a reservation, because the experience tends to be very consistent across locations. It’s not like “ooh I have such a fondness for the Marriott logo”, it’s “I’d like a consistent experience so I go to Marriott”.

Data dumping a 57 page pdf about Global brands is the best way to communicate something specifically about Google.

But based on the graph I assume you're talking about page 12 which has a graph of various Google products. The data only goes back to 2018 and ends in Apr 2023. There is a clear downward trend since then Google Maps is the least affected but is still down from the low.

The trend I've seen is people on here have voice a significant lost trust over the past year. A loss of trust that is only growing. I feel its safe to assume we loss trust first since this is our industry.

If we're losing trust and the general public has already losing trust, I expect that general public's trust to catch up soon and show a steeper decline.

Anecdotally, I've already seen dissatisfaction with Google coming up more and more frequently in the areas of the internet I visit where the topics are far less technical. Unlike here those people are less aware of the alternatives.

I expect that when people realize Google is the new Boeing, they will abandon it quickly. There are many alternatives.

> The trend I've seen is people on here

Right but my point is that we’re weird outliers. I can absolutely believe that the general public’s trust in Google is lower than it was a decade ago but from what to what? If people really didn’t trust Google would Chrome still be the overwhelmingly popular browser choice?

I simply don’t see the evidence that the level of distrust seen in HN is reflected in the general population.

He's got problems... He says his teams are working 120hrs a week, but he wants them to work more. I think that this is not going to happen!

I thought you must be misrepresenting the article, but no, its almost as bad as you said:

> He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner. That helped the team fix roughly 80% of the issues in just 10 days, he said.

psychotic

I mean, if those engineers were doing it by choice and getting million dollar bonuses each, maybe not. But probably.

But image generation doesn't matter. It's a fun toy but it's not part of any professional workflow they care about, doesn't impact long term strategic goals, etc. It's literally just PR mistake they're covering for.

Praise reveals priorities. They don't care about getting things right the first time. They don't care about important projects. That's the inference.

"He praised the teams working on Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models. He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner."

So, assuming they work 7 days a week, that's 17 hours a day. Leaving 7 hours for commuting, sleep and life. And it feels like he's offering that up as an example of "move faster".

Just wow.

I hope the executives are at least sharing some of their PEDs. Coffee is not enough for those teams...

I find this hilariously ironic considering Gemini was supposed to be all about equity and inclusion and that. This is a perfect example of an inclusive policy that supports 40 year single mothers and other people with different needs /s

What a clown. Should have thought about 10 minutes into the future before he hobbled the company by laying off staff and sending everyone rushing to the competition. When you're publicly admitting that the competition is eating your lunch, you need to use your $100B cash hoard to invest in catching up, paying people to take the risk on you instead of working for the winners.

Executives need to realize that startups move faster not because they work more hours. They move faster because there is less red tape, less bureaucracy and less process than large companies. Individual employees have more freedom to make their own choices, instead of being restrained by top down OKRs.

“Shorter wavelength execution” is the kind of twaddle only someone that far from actually building things could spout. Contemptible!

It sounds like something a management consultant dressed up in an engineer costume would say.

> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner"

Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit.

But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees.

"Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."

It's probably also worth clarifying that workload necessarily excludes anyone who observes the Sabbath.

"Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” " - well, use Math to work out that people working 100-120 hours a week is not productive

Prabhakar has been enabled by Sundar at every step. The two are in alignment. If you are disgusted by Prabhakar, you should be disgusted by Sundar too, he has just as much contempt for the workers, he just hides his cards better.

Prabhakar Raghavan has become suddenly famous this week. This is beginning to look like a scapegoating exercise.

Google have their serious problems, but they extend far further than just this guy.

I've never heard of a company that wants their employees to move slower.

Boeing?

> I've never heard of a company that wants their employees to move slower.

Companies don't formulate it this way, but in practice, by

- having lots of meetings

- introducing more and more red tape

- introducing more and more layers of management

- introducing more and more reporting requirements

- ...

they actually practice it.

My dad likes to tell the story of him working at a post office as a teenager. He was very motivated and worked fast, so his colleagues urged him to slow down, otherwise they would get more work.

I really cannot express how much I dislike these midlevel management figures that do nothing but talk and engage in LinkedIn style virtue signaling.

They don't touch code, they don't touch any technologies (not even making prototypes so they they have a grounded understanding). They just regurgitate the socio-business zeitgeist. "Oh we must get more lean. Oh these workers must be lazy. AI AI AI".

And yet their multi million dollar pay packages MUST be equitable compensation for their in-the-box unoriginal business thinking. They went to HBS or SBS... they must be thought leaders, right?

Instead of sacking the people who dig ditches, what if half the talking heads left? I'm sure THAT would actually clear the air.

He's about 2 years too slow. Mark Zuckerberg already proclaimed 2022 "The year of efficiency."

However, I have the billion dollar solution in 4 easy steps:

0. LLM completer plugins for editors

1. Get everyone escooters that go 60 mph / 96 kph (They exist)

2. We need to cut coffee for cost reasons, so why not issue caffeine-methylphenidate pills

3. Because RTO is still too inefficient, make everyone live at work

Bonus: If you want employees to move faster, encourage them to have kids. Busy people GSD.

> Raghavan clarified that the failure in image generation wasn’t due to a lack of effort.

> “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said.

So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?

"Our problems aren't due to lack of effort. But you all have to put in more time and effort to fix our problems."

Makes perfect sense.

The article drops that quote with no context, but presumably he's admitting in this case it was an error of judgement/design, not execution.

Looks like Prabhakar Raghavan has become interwebs enemy nr1. Interesting.

Unless I know exactly what I am looking for, I don't remember the last time I used Google to discover information.

First it was one sponsored link - now it's SEVEN. At some point even the masses catch on to the grift.

This is a desperate "something DO something" plea.

The notion that startups are more efficient at creating great products is a massive case of survivorship bias, a subclass of selection bias. A full facepalm duh!

Either he does not understand that, and that's bad, or he is trying to put one over on some very smart employees who do understand that, and that won't work.

You can make a big company less inefficient, but everyone who thinks startup efficiency is simply a culture you can recreate inside a big company is going to be disappointed.

Google wants employees to move to another company faster

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