Sundar Pichai Tells Employees They Don't Need Money to Have Fun Amid Cost Cuts
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
The problem is that now the work is not fun outside of the money. In the '00s we were working on problems that mattered, we had a green field to play with, smart coworkers that could understand a crazy new CS innovation, and just a sense of discovery and excitement. Nowadays, we are trying to squeeze blood from a cash cow for shareholder benefit, every innovative new product gets killed by some exec who's afraid that it'll make them look bad, the codebase has ossified, most of the employees are also just in it for the money, they have no passion for software or deep understanding of technology, and we're basically just noodling around looking for the one tiny feature that we can launch within the constraints of org politics and crappy code and legal/privacy restrictions and innovator's dilemma.
Attracting employees that don't need money to have fun requires that you have fun in the first place. Sundar is doing a shit job at providing an inspiring vision or even a reason for the company to exist in the first place, so of course he attracts employees that are just in it for the money.
It just feels like Google has been on a long long slide into becoming just another product company. G+ promised eventually they would have APIs but actually shut down before that became a thing (aside from a single limited & sad read endpoint). Like everyone else, they gave up on chatbots & have 95% shut down the 3rd party custom actions & hub integrations system. Android has erected ever fiercer sandboxing, eroding more and more the possibility of apps & the ecosystem working together.
We just had Google IO which is nominally a developer conference. But it was overheelmingly Google talking about how they are building AI into products.
Tim O'Reilly's maxim used to be writ large & obvious, implicitly, on the walls of every product at Google. But today these words feel forgotten: "create more value than you capture."
Having a teaming ecosystem of other developers and companies hacking with and extending & rolling with your shit is the sure-fire way to have fun. Every action you do is echoed back with a dozen fold excitement. Withdrawing into your own product cycles & planning & keeping tight ecosystem control is boring and lame.
If Sundar wants everyone to act like its back to the "small and scrappy" days then his paycheck and stock comp should reflect that too!
If your CEO is running the company with bond villain type logic its gonna be a REAL bad time...
“I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” Pichai said at the meeting, as reported by CNBC. “Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”
I don’t disagree but google is far from a startup now the work is not exciting.
But maybe better framing would be the time to be responsible is when things are going good rather than when it’s too late and leads to job cuts. What’s fun is having a job altogether?
For all the comparisons Pichai gets for what he's doing to what Steve Ballmer did at MSFT, at least Ballmer was employee 30 and his war stories were from lived experience. Sundar walked in to a 6 figure job, free food, and the Googleplex and is talking like he was hot-swapping harddrives in the original garage.
Maybe he should just pass out copies of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Songs_of_the_United_Stat...