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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier.

Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.

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Google is better but it's an incredibly low bar.

Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).

Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.

> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.

Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.

They should be fine as long as they remember to use the new cover sheets. I'm sure they got a copy of the memo.

Don't worry, I'll send them another copy just in case.

Ooo yeah. Mmk that’d be great.

> Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).

Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?

Really no idea, just asking.

I'm actually curious too, haven't been there in a while. It's possible that the MBR pyramid has become LLM assisted on all sides but the cultural themes are surely all still there.

Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.

LLM to write it, then all the managers just use LLM to summarise it :)

The next logical step to ensure MBR quality would be to introduce MBR reviews before filing, also done by LLMs of course.

> (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month)

Couldn't have said it any better myself having worked at AWS for close to 8y. I was there during their peak growth years and remember very well how some of these processes that were once not as maddening, devolved.

Why don't they hire MBR specialists and embed them? Leave the development groups alone.

They do, they’re TPMs and PMs. If you’re a development team at Amazon stressing over MBRs, you’ve failed to give those people the tools to pull important metrics themselves.

To be fair, I suspect most of the core team is effectively rich after an acqu-hire.

If I had 5 million I’m going to retire and never code for money again.

I do want to make small video games though, make some music. Pay for a friend’s kids college.

I wouldn’t waste a single extra hour making more money. Usually the golden handcuffs fall off after a year or two. That’s why Heroku went to crap, all the core people left.

Google Maps is also an acquisition from more than 2 decades ago, by the way.

Youtube is another famous example.

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