The Story Of Larry Page's Comeback
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
1) Larry was targeting engineering management, not project management.
2) Nobody was fired. The engineering managers shifted to pure engineering roles (an easy move, since they all had technical backgrounds).
On many teams, the managers continued managing, but they did it more discreetly, taking care to stay out of Larry's way. A year or so later, after the engineering staff had doubled in size, it became clear hat it wasn't practical for one VP (Wayne Rosing) to have 200 direct reports, and engineering management came back out of the shadows.
Ignoring the facts to further a pre-determined narrative would more commonly be called a lie.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial...
I've seen too much journalism, especially in tech, which has scant regard for the truth and focuses on pushing some line that the author thought would make a good story.
>In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle.
"In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization"
"Rosing explained that engineering was getting a reorganization. All engineers would now report to him. All project managers were out of a job."
* A basically coherent, well-run, thriving place to work; except:
* Lots of executive infighting, especially certain execs; and:
* Larry's eccentric, seemingly bored behavior during high-level reviews.
Larry definitely seemed frustrated and out of touch with the rest of the management team. And Eric seemed to see it as his responsibility to try to manage that dynamic while keeping the ship pointed in a safe direction.
Possibly there is a lot more source material about this phase of Google history for the author to draw from.
"The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle."
1.) Tech lead. This is the technical point of contact for the project as a whole. Responsible for deciding overall system architecture (usually by acting as the tiebreaker when there're debates within the team), determining priorities, either assigning work or creating systems where the team can identify what needs to be done and do it, interfacing with their PM, pitching in technically when needed, and ensuring the overall engineering success of the project.
2.) Engineering management, or more generally, people management. This is what's reflected in the official org chart. Responsible for career development of subordinates, keeping reports happy and ideally still employed at Google, dealing with personnel issues, HR issues when necessary, managing performance, coaching, giving feedback, getting their reports promoted, stepping in when the employee has done something inappropriate, etc.
3.) Product manager. Drives the product vision of the project forward. In theory (and hopefully often in practice) they represent the user and are responsible for building something users want. Daily duties include negotiating with other functional areas of the org (legal, PR, security, privacy, accessibility, etc.), doing market research, analyzing data, representing the team in meetings, keeping the product vision, coming up with new ideas, often building mockups (although this is often outsourced to UX), ordering T-shirts, getting approvals, and generally doing everything necessary to get the project to launch.
4.) Program managers. These are process-oriented managers that are often attached to infrastructure or devrel teams that have ongoing responsibilities that impact a number of consumers. Their job is basically organization and communication: they make sure everyone knows what they need to know and that all external requests are eventually handled with nothing important being dropped on the floor.
#1 and #2 are both done by engineers, although #2 is sometimes done by dedicated engineering managers. #3 and #4 are specific job titles. Sometimes #1 and #2 are the same person, sometimes they are separate people; many people find things run more fairly and more efficiently if technical decisions are not made by people with direct authority over your career, although others prefer to have their manager be intimately familiar with their work because it helps come promotion time.
#1 and #3 also map to startups, where a "tech lead" is basically the "hacker" while a "product manager" is basically the "hustler". #2 maps to the "adult supervision CEO", while #4 maps to "super talented admin who keeps the books, knows all the employees, and keeps the company running."
> What’s less well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive
This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense.
First: Jobs was petulant, mean and destructive to people he disagreed with – for his whole life. He never dropped this trait. It might have appeared that he mellowed but he really just left an Apple that he no longer controlled and started another company where he had full control (he owned Pixar as well as NeXT but never exerted full control there).
Second: Was Apple really right to fire Jobs? In his first 7 years at Apple, Jobs oversaw (not designed or engineered) the only successful product lines in Apple's first 20 years: the Apple 2, the Mac and the Laserwriter. The latter two happened against the best wishes of the board who only wanted to focus on the Apple 2. In the 12 years after Jobs left, Apple never launched another successful hardware product line, it merely upgrading the existing products (Mac II, PPC Mac or unsuccessful ideas like the Newton). The early 90's at Apple's R&D in particular was completely chaotic and directionless sinking billions into Pink, Taligent, OpenDoc, CHRP and other doomed initiatives.
Jobs didn't need to leave Apple to fix himself. He left Apple because he disagreed with everyone (in hindsight: probably rightfully so) and he couldn't fire them. When he returned, he had the authority to fire everyone he disliked (and he did).
As for the comparison to Larry Page – I don't think they were as similar as the article implies. Jobs – for better and worse – was his own special brand of crazy.
I would argue that Jobs had any influence in the Apple II whatsoever, in fact according to Wozniak in iWoz, Jobs attempts to influence the Apple II originated the only fights the two of them ever had.
On the other hand, Apple II was originating the vast majority of the revenue and in comparison the original mac had a very limited success.
You don't think age, experience and his spirituality made any difference at all to these tendencies and the ways he applied them?
Of course we'll never know what would've happened had he stayed at Apple.
But I find it very plausible that had he stayed, the company could have ended up in even worse trouble, and that the maturity, experience and outsider's perspective he developed in his time away were critical in enabling him to attain the level of success he achieved on his return.
You speculated that had he stayed, the company could have ended up in worse trouble. But try to imagine if he did have the power to fire everyone like he did upon his return to Apple from the start. That might have made a difference too.
But like you said, we'll never know
Dear god, those are words that still chill me with the memory of hype and shattered expectations.
The rest of your analysis is fairly spot on. Although I do think that Steve grew some outside of Apple. The reality is that Apple needed its years of failures without Jobs to realize how much he was needed. Really, even when they brought him back, they didn't understand how huge his impact would be. They just thought that they were buying NeXT with a bonus.
That's a very sweeping statement. I take it you have first hand experience (worked for Apple in the early days) or have extensive apple reporting experience. I don't think the point being made is that he "needed" to be away from Apple to improve himself. The point is that he was a very bad manager at Apple and had considerably improved when he came back. I think I read somewhere Woz saying he had to learn a lot about being a good manager from Mike Markula and others in the early days and I think in part John Sculley was brought in to correct these deficiencies. In that sense Larry Page and Jobs are similar - they were both green managers who made some awful decisions and had to learn a lot, if grudgingly from professional managers before becoming the great business leaders we see them to be.
I assume you know this from first hand interactions with him.
Whether Jobs would have learned the same without NeXT/Pixar is anyone's guess. I suspect he would have.
It strikes me the author would far rather be writing Mills & Boon novels than articles for Business Insider.
Others here clearly enjoyed the writing style very much!
Example from the same article: "Finally Rosing, a bald man in glasses, began to speak"
Journalists have a tendency of portraying figures in tech circles as being on the spectrum, while very often that isn't the case.
http://www.autismspeaks.org/dsm-5/faq#asperger
The above means people can use the word "Asperger's" if they want, but it has been denied any clinical meaning. The reason is that it didn't have a clearly defined clinical meaning to begin with.
Not to say that autism doesn't exist, just saying that, IMO, far too many 'normal' kids are being labeled as autistic.
First it was ADD - adolescent boys who were fidgety and distractible now had an illness, previously this was considered normal for young boys - then we decided that people who are not as social, perhaps shy - were now ill as well, whereas before again, this was considered within the definition of normal human behavior.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/health/idea-of-new-attenti...
Quote: "With more than six million American children having received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, concern has been rising that the condition is being significantly misdiagnosed and overtreated with prescription medications."
"Yet now some powerful figures in mental health are claiming to have identified a new disorder that could vastly expand the ranks of young people treated for attention problems. Called sluggish cognitive tempo, the condition is said to be characterized by lethargy, daydreaming and slow mental processing. By some researchers’ estimates, it is present in perhaps two million children."
The article goes on to say that drug companies are partly behind the push for this new diagnosis. Surprise, surprise. :)
Right: Since it was nearly only the boys and normal girls are not like that, it must be an 'illness'! Whenever boys and girls are not the same, there must be an illness because, as we know now from the feminists, boys and girls are the same, exactly the same, with no differences at all except illnesses!
Not exactly. The problem is that anything outside that narrow definition is seen as "illness".
If you instead see it as a different, but equally valid, way of perceiving the world then the fact that so many people seem to have ASD, ADD or other "D"s makes much more sense.
This is not a matter of politically correct terms - I'm talking about a genuine difference in attitude. ASD is a very broad spectrum. Some people on it really do have an "illness" in the sense that they cannot function independently. Others are just a bit "different" and you may never even know they're not normal unless you happen to see them at their worst. Is it still worth diagnosing those? Generally, yes, because it allows them to get the help they need when they need it or, at least, understand themselves better, so they can help themselves.
Diagnosing mental illness is a very inexact science since multiple etiologies can create very similar symptoms. And a single etiology or difference can create many divergent ones [edit for clarity: symptoms].
It wasn't cast out because everyone was suffering from it. It was simply put into the lump categorization of Autism Spectrum Disorder: http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/Autism%20Spectrum%20Disorder%2...
From the document:
"Researchers found that these separate diagnoses were not consistently applied across different clinics and treatment centers. Anyone diagnosed with one of the four pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) from DSM-IV should still meet the criteria for ASD in DSM-5 or another, more accurate DSM-5 diagnosis."
Yes, true, and that means it is not science. Science requires evidence on which similarly equipped observers can agree, and falsifiability. Psychological diagnoses don't have either of these properties.
> It wasn't cast out because everyone was suffering from it.
It was cast out because of an epidemic of overdiagnosis (as it was put by the editor of DSM-IV), one that forced psychologists to realize they had made a mistake including it in the previous DSM. So, taking the high road, they voted it out of the present DSM.
But I ask that you notice something -- mental illnesses aren't identified by microscopes and lab assays, they move into and out of existence by way of votes. That by itself should give people pause about the scientific nature of the process.
Psychologists are reluctant to give up on a diagnosis like Asperger's, and such a reversal has only happened once before. Can you guess which behavior, now regarded as a civil right, defended by a number of federal laws, was branded a treatable mental illness until the 1970s?
It's just meaningless speculation, in my view. People have widely different personalities, and also the tendency to categorize other people as having some pathology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum
For a time about ten years ago, it seemed as though everyone would be placed on the Autism spectrum, but psychologists realized what that would mean (i.e. if everyone is mentally ill, then no one is), so they threw out Asperger's, said it wasn't a real mental illness after all, thus postponing the day or reckoning. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Say what you want about Asperger's, but my son has autism and I can assure you it's a real mental health disorder, however many kids might somehow get diagnosed with it.
Yes, but you're mixing different things. Autism is a category that includes a "Rain Man" level of functioning, but Asperger's was a diagnosis du jour that picked out brighter-than-normal kids, plus a raft of historical figures including Albert Einstein, in a way that made it seem like an attractive diagnosis, such that now, we have people objecting, saying, "No! I'm an Aspie and I don't care what you psychologists say!"
Such a thing has never happened before -- there has never been a reverse stigma to a mental illness diagnosis. When psychologists saw people lining up to get this cool new diagnosis, they knew they had gone too far, so they started a process to remove Asperger's from the diagnostic manuals before their credibility was further eroded.
Remember when you read about Asperger's that psychologists, who have every reason to hold onto established diagnoses, couldn't wait to get rid of Asperger's and the embarrassment it caused them.
No, not possible. That would be as likely as schizophrenia being labeled a fad diagnosis, or seriously questioned as to its reality. The reason that cannot happen is there are a handful of real physical ailments, ailments rooted in genetics and body chemistry, not just mental illness. I'm saying that "real" mental illnesses are actually behavioral symptoms of physical ailments. If you cure the physical disease, the mental symptoms will go also.
Schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, autism and a handful of other conditions aren't fads, they're physical diseases with behavioral symptoms. On the other hand, purely mental illnesses whose diagnosis relies entirely on the opinion of a clinical psychologist and that have no associated physical properties or diagnostic indicators, like Asperger's, that's a different story -- that's an obvious area for abuse by mental health practitioners.
Eventually there will be a day of reckoning in which conditions like autism, schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome will be scientifically understood, and when that happens, psychiatry and psychology will take an entirely new form.
This is why President Obama recently announced a brain initiative rather than a mind initiative -- people are becoming distrustful of claims about mind diseases.
I think I actually would argue that it should be possible for a neural net in an otherwise physically-fine human brain to form various psychoses but I can definitely seek how a brain injury or deformation would be considered something different.
There is a sort of "aspie boom" and now everyone is a aspie, and claiming (rightfully or not) to be one makes people think you are a narcissistic or egoistical liar instead.
What I do is just try to fix my social problems as I can, and say sorry when I do something bad (that happily, is becoming more and more uncommon after I learned that Asperger's existed, plainly because it helped me become self aware of what exactly I was doing wrong that piss off other people).
Also recently I started to think that maybe almost everyone of the MBTI type INTP (and some INTJ) are aspies (not that they have a disorder, but in their sense that their normal behavior gets labelled as a disorder symptom), but that idea is too new on my head for now, I did not dwelled too much on it.
I am in the camp that being aspie is a different way of being, not a disorder.
It's weird to me, because I don't think being nervous around people you're not familiar with is at all odd. Plenty of people I have worked with are very shy around new people, but absolutely open up as you get to know them. I don't think many of them at all are with any significance "on the spectrum", ignoring the trivial argument you can make for everyone being on it to unnoticeable degrees.
It can't be compared to the cruel jokes I would hear in school about anyone below average either physically or mentally. It's in a different category.
To an extent, yes, the audience is meant to laugh at the protagonist's expense when these jokes pop up. But he's getting the last laugh in the end, and the show makes that pretty clear.
For whatever it's worth, the show's leads really don't come across as having Aspergers. They come across as being socially awkward, perhaps even to a painful degree. But Mike Judge & co seem pretty sensitive in drawing that line. They might go for a cheap laugh every now and then, but we're not meant to take those "diagnoses" literally.
That said, I really enjoyed the article, which I find really well-researched and well-written. Most of all I appreciate the fact that you, unlike writers on most publications, didn't waste time on useless descriptions of physical features or buildings and surroundings, and kept them to a minimum . Also, it's great that you reached out here on HN.
"he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy."
How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps. I mean, yeah, obviously? And how weird it is to have such a big life choice distilled down to the possibility of creating popular apps or not. Such black and white-ification with the intention of creating a conflict heavy narrative, with a healthy dose of current tech mindset splashed onto it.
And that whole "Page is the Jobs of Google" section was entirely grasping at reader-revelations, without actually creating any. It's lazy thinking to compare two iconic tech heads, especially if one of them is Jobs. Another one in the long row of heirs (cook, ive, musk etc etc).
"Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.
This was Larry Page."
If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!
I appreciated the info in the article, but the writing was so sloppy.
I read that as the dilemma that Page was facing, not an absolute truism. This is an article about Larry Page at Google. It seems silly to be annoyed at the author for simplifying the dichotomy between academia and industry to move us through his life.
> If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!
Oh shut up, that was a nice piece of writing. It was an interesting hook, a nice way to introduce a main theme of the article; Larry Page's admiration of Nikola Tesla. It may have been flashy but considering how well it fits into the rest of the article (and indeed, the quality of the writing) I'd hardly call it sloppy. Although maybe we just have different standards.
No, I get that it was about Larry, and I see why the author set it up like that. But writing "...the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications", seems like such a simplification of what it's actually about: A choice between two very different ways of expressing your creativity (granted you do research/publicise in academia). I really hope Larry built a company with more thought behind it than making the next Flappy Bird. I.e. SpaceX wasn't founded because Musk wanted to be an "inventor" of top 40 apps, and it seems like Larry didn't either, judging from the article.
And the other phrase "... would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy". Something about that rubs me the wrong way as well. Maybe it's a bit too soft? I mean, sucks to be you Larry, not enjoying socialising, but welcome to the real world.
I don't want to seem too harsh, I'm only replying because it's nice to put ones thoughts into writing once in a while.
> Although maybe we just have different standards.
Maybe, but starting that discussion means that we'll probably start talking about "high/low" standards, and I try not to think like that.
> Maybe, but starting that discussion means that we'll probably start talking about "high/low" standards, and I try not to think like that.
I was thinking more in terms of the entertainment/pragmatism scale. I think this is good writing more because it made me go "wow, I enjoyed reading that", whereas it seems like you're coming from more of a "this was kinda lame because some of the things they said were questionable" standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, but if we didn't recognize it we'd be yelling at each other for hours.
Certainly not perfect, but it really put into perspective a lot of the things I'd seen from Google. I never realized how much of it came directly from Larry Page until this article.
So while it may not be 100% accurate (could it ever be?), I found it to be extremely informative in a high level way.
1. Highly educated parents. His father has Ph.D. and is considered pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence ( source : wikipedia) 2. Mother : Comp. Science professor 3. His brother Carl Page Jr. sold company called eGroups to Yahoo!. So when you consider all this facts together, with kind of upbringing he had it less surprise that he followed the suit and created search engine. I bet this sort of environment must have played crucial role when he went for VC capital. If you have read crossing the chasm it talks about how a company with few hundered people can go mainstream. Larry leveraged all his background, upbringing and knowledge he had to create one of great software product.
I'm sure Google's engineers could get the page load time down if it was a priority. I think at this point everyone is so invested in Gmail they just aren't that worried about losing users because of slower UI load times.
The article gets the timeline wrong though. This anecdote happened very early in the development of gmail -- it was rewritten several times between then and launch.
The idea of investors bringing in a "professional" CEO has largely died, thankfully. It must have been incredibly frustrating for Sergey/Larry to see a younger Mark Zuckerberg go from strength to strength as Founder/CEO while they had to pretend Schmidt was in charge for "adult supervision".
In particular the whole "Larry as a visionary", "Larry is socially awkward", "Larry is not traditional" makes me feel more welcome in this world. I too am that kind of person (it is up for future to judge whether I am visionary :)). But this is the exact article I need to pursue my dream of making things "happening". If you want to carry out your vision, you need to delegate. You need to set the tone "this is what we do, and we do this this way."
Ideas just happen to come to us every minute but we are too caught up in fighting the current. That's the big Google problem: it is too huge too slow too bureaucratic to get things done, even after Larry is back as CEO. This is why I am more leading toward startup environment (I am about to graduate soon), this is why people leave big corporations. I wasn't appreicating why Google was moving in so many directions. But it is true. I long know Google is outside my tech tweets. Not enough hype for me to notice until special events. Nothing exciting. I hope one day they realize simplicity is the key (please fix your UX). Outside of privacy and security worries, I believe Google does have the collective power and sum to make a life-dependent integrated platform. It is up to Google executives to decide whether they will make such platform as open as possible, as friendly as possible, to both end users, sales and engineers.
I truly envy him being a genius and intelligent at making things. I hope one day I too will be recognized. Enough said, there is always an opportunity for everything. Only I can make that happen.
Oh come on. As owner of history's largest ad platform and someone who's made ungodly amounts of money from it, this seems like a massively hypocritical and un-self-aware thing to say.
* for varying definitions of the truth.
A good product can be marketed with the truth, a bad product however ...
I had the privilege/fun of consulting at Google for four months last year and getting a glimpse inside the company was more than interesting.
I think the filter that projects should offer 10x improvements sets high expectations. If Google is the first to develop a general purpose AI then their valuation will approach infinity.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-...
Great article !
You need to build things with your name on it in big letters for people to remember you. Larry has not as of yet done this in a big way at least not given his present net worth.
Search engines existed before Page, granted not as good but they existed. Google rode the internet explosion, whereas Jobs and (drumroll...) Gates brought a computer in every home.
What he will be remembered is for tainting the Google brand. It was golden, now in many circles they see them as biased, full of ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600532 , deceiving consumers and a behemoth deserving to be taken down. Downhill has started
There has rarely been an industrial force with the ambition Page gives to Google. If they succeed in even half measures on some of these initiatives, it will be transformative.
Everything you said is in early stages or very limited markets. Sure Google has bought a lot of things and rushes to do press releases but what can be bought in the store right now? GFiber in a few cities? That's all.
Search is just the cash engine for the truly transformative tech.
Got any numbers on ho much Google spent on "transformative tech"? It looks peanuts to me, everything they spend real money and resources on seems to be linked to getting users click those ads.
As for R&D spending: http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/r_and_d_expense
Over 2.1b quarterly.
Not exactly peanuts.
Everyone and their mom has a self-driving car prototype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#2010s
I guess Microsoft is "beating" Google with $2.74 Billion a year. http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/r_and_d_expense
I think that R&D is too wide of an entry, a breakdown would be useful.
I've seen nothing to suggest that Google is only doing this to force AT&T's hand - and even if that IS the case, they are the entity responsible for catalyzing FTTH on a national scale.Edit: Also - why would G aquire massive amounts of dark fiber backbone starting way back in 05 if they just wanted to astroturf AT&T into doing the dirty work? Unless its just all just long con to meter the other isps on backbone traffic. Doubtful.
Oh, so MSFT is "beating" GOOG in R&D - MSFT's research isnt prototyping autonomous cars or actually planning space elevators, or acquiring Boston Dynamics. It's hardly"peanuts" by any definition.
Yes, there are lots of companies now rushing for a driverless car, but G is recognized as by far the industry leader and will likely license its technology to Toyota starting in 2016.Protype Prius's and Lexus RX SUVs have been logging hundreds of thousands of miles the past couple of years. They will beat GM to market most likely. Others will follow with licensing.
Since I cant reply to you below - You said G was investing "peanuts" in R&D. This is demonstrably false. Anyhow, you can brandhate on them all you want, but they are pushing the envelope in ways that few other companies in industrial history ever have. I see no reason to continue this conversation.
Ah, so it's autonomous cars or you're R&D-ing.
"or actually planning space elevators" Tell us about it, how much did Google spend on it and far did they go? Oh, someone at Google thought about it.
"or acquiring Boston Dynamics." so what? You said that Google is spending a fortune on R&D and I used the same criteria to show that MSFT is spending more. My point was to say that "R&D" as reported may include a lot of normal existing product development.
"Yes, there are lots of companies now rushing for a driverless car, but G is recognized as by far the industry leader"
By whom? Have they actually miniaturized it yet and how much does it cost per car?
From what the article discloses about his personality I don't much like him but will never deny his inestimable impact.
The last 4-5 tweets