Google Confirms Susan Wojcicki Is New YouTube Head | Hacker News Reader

Google Confirms Susan Wojcicki Is New YouTube Head

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52 pointsturing44 comments

I'm pretty sure you all have this back-asswards. Susan's garage is where google was headquartered in the early days (1998). She didn't get the job because she is Sergey's wife's sister. Sergey met his wife through one of his first employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki

Susan introduced Anne to Sergey.

I never said that was the case - I just thought I recognized the name before & it was from her sister. I didn't mean to imply anything about her not getting the job because of merit. Sorry if that didn't come across.

I wonder if she had to create a Google+ account in order to hold the position.

Why are HN comments becoming so much more like comments on crappy tech blogs and reddit?

because that's exactly where people like me came from. Not sure what to do differently here. Maybe it's a matter of poor opinion mixed with horrible sense of humor.

The only place HN really accepts attempts at humor (or unfounded speculation, for that matter) are as tossed-off epilogues to more substantive and serious commentary. Picture an HN comment as an (extremely short) journal article: you have to summarize your data and experimental method first--and then, optionally, can state some conclusions.

Probably because all the people who complain online about witty comments -- but have none of their own to contribute -- have been driven here.

This wasn't a witty comment. Just an often repeated meme.

"I DO have a sense of humor!"

Susan's quite sharp. She ran the product team for ads (AdWords and AdSense) in the early days and made some pretty big moves, including pre-buying premium ad content on NYTimes and other sites to make the content network attractive to advertisers when it was initially seen as lower-quality goods. She's very quantitative.

Hooray, once again it's the generic boilerplate executive or product manager who gets the big bucks, while the PROGRAMMERS are stuck toiling away.

Thank god for people like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds, great programmers who are recognised as leaders and given the respect that this profession so badly needs.

That Susan is quite smart in no way takes away from the programmers who are also quite smart. Search leadership is engineers all the way down, from Larry (invented PageRank) to Alan (started as a hardware engineer at Compaq) to Amit (one of the leading academic figures in information retrieval before he invented Google's ranking algorithm) to Ben (authored much of the early utility code for Google).

But hey, if you'd like to give props to the programmers toiling away on Google, I'll be happy to take 'em. ;-)

I thought Google's ranking algorithm was PageRank.

Not at all. PageRank is a way of assessing relevant importance of pages; the only input is link structure. If that was the sole ranking algorithm, every query would give the same results.

Explain how Susan is "generic"? Do you think Google would have had its success sellings ads (or whatever) to make more programmers into millionaires than any other company has done, if someone else had been in her place?

Marissa Mayer hired a guy, paid him millions, then fired him because he was crap. What makes you think Susan is any different? Right time, right place, right connections, you get the job.

We'll never know if somebody else could have been as successful or not at selling ads at Google, but guess what, given that Google has been the #1 search engine for so many years, it's kind of hard to screw up, right?

At the end of the day, I don't even know why I'm commenting on this thread, because I don't actually give a damn who's running YouTube. All I care about is that the site is literally going down the tubes because of a poor user experience, and in an attempt to monetize, it's only going to get worse.

Maybe she'll start fixing all the horrible ui garbage that's either accumulated or been left unattended. Youtube is barely usable, I only use it due to its ubiquity.

If anyone else thought that last name looked really familiar it's Sergey Brin's sister-in-law.

I think you mean Sergey Brin's ex-wife's* sister.

* Technically separated, not yet divorced

Technically they're just living apart - not even legally separated [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Wojcicki

Well Brin has certainly moved on: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408421/Amanda-Rosen...

Open marriages are a thing.

How do you pronounce it...?

Wo-jis-ki.

The wiki for her sister mentions it's actually /woʊˈdʒɪtski/ woh-jit-skee

She pronounces it somewhere in between the two. The 't' in 'jit-skee' isn't very hard or emphasized.

Is she the only female executive left at Google?

Who cares?

People who are interested in gender relations in business?

It was pretty unusual for a company to have had so many female executives and even more unusual to have them all pushed out after Page became CEO.

(Thanks for the senseless down-vote.)

Out of curiosity, how many were there before?

I don't know exactly. Off the top of my head

Shona Brown

Marissa Mayer

Sheryl Sandberg

"pushed out" is hardly fair in relation to Marissa Mayer; she left to become the CEO of a huge tech company, which was a pretty significant promotion.

Sheryl Sandberg is crying all the way to the bank as well, I assume.

She was actually demoted within Google before she left (not that I'm trying to support OPs claim).

Maybe females at Google who are interested in becoming managers?

Why don't you google it? http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/

Yes.

more ads on youtube?

Eventually, everything stays on family

Meritocracy™!

I hear ya... but there is also something to be said about those who seek power within an organization, Signal to Noise ratio has got to be difficult.

She's been with the company since the beginning.

so who's going to run ads now? Neal Mohan most likely

"Meanwhile, back at the ads and commerce division that Wojcicki is leaving behind, her co-leader Sridhar Ramaswamy will now be in charge of the whole unit."

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