Yup. Changed from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;</a>. Thanks!

I think this link should point to the post at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373&amp;count=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373&amp;count=1</a>

Yep. It usually is a ship leaking from the top. I have seen it (not from Google).

OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important bit:&gt; I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to &quot;handle&quot; her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.I don&#x27;t know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it&#x27;s exhausting. You spend half your time &quot;managing upward&quot;. Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you&#x27;re going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.

If true, it does sound terrible.  Though, I would focus not so much on one named person.  The culture is allowing it, leaders above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and so on.

Pretty silly thing to do whether or not you have perfect examples, and strange to follow that up with the fact that you&#x27;ve been offering career advice..There&#x27;s not a lot of benefit to making a public discussion out of something like that compared to the pretty personal ramifications to the person brought up, which makes even the most constructive attempts look vindictive.

Tacky to sling accusations without evidence or examples.

You&#x27;re describing the BigCorp meta, which I think is a good portrayal that people need to see.However, in the context of the discussion and parent, it sounds like you&#x27;re trying to defend.I don&#x27;t agree.It&#x27;s completely rational to play career frogger. The leader is getting compensated (We&#x27;re talking re-ups of generational wealth for however long they can survive.) However, their leadership is fair for criticism. It sounds like the leader hasn&#x27;t created a compelling vision, which their staff is craving, let alone delivered team success.

IMO the leader in question doesn&#x27;t have a coherent strategy because she&#x27;s likely trying to justify her org (and keep jobs!) in the face of a lot of developers who just don&#x27;t care a whole lot about her portfolio. Her org could probably function with less people and achieve the same outcomes, but instead of getting rid of them, she&#x27;s probably trying to make something happen by moving people around.In an environment like that, your correct insights about &quot;where we&#x27;re headed&quot; don&#x27;t matter. The only thing that matters is that the leader can keep their org and not face layoffs. If that means shoving people around and not listening to what folks are saying, then that&#x27;s what happens.

Slightly above that comment is this line:&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.I&#x27;ve been calling that out for years as it is obvious from the outside: Pichai is not a leader but a care taker. He has no vision that anyone can seem to articulate. And apparently he&#x27;s restructured the company to not have any people reporting to him that have one either. Shocking to get some inside confirmation of what is clear to see from the outside.I was reading Hixie&#x27;s blog when he was working on WhatWG. He was one of the main authors of the HTML 5 spec. Always had great respect for how he communicated. Him being this explicit is a message in itself. He was juggling highly opinionated people arguing all sorts of things when he was writing that spec. Part of the reason why that worked was his pragmatism and ability to stay calm. This is a really strongly worded message and people at Google and in their board would do well to take note of it and take action.My recommendation: time for some leadership changes. Doing more of the same isn&#x27;t going to work. Do it more smartly than OpenAI. But don&#x27;t wait.

100%We might think it wrong to name and shame, but this is one explicit case where it&#x27;s the right thing. The autocratic style, the sheer bullying, and the lack of promotion from within have run what was one of the best developer (and developer relations) groups in the world into the ground.They talk AI - AI - AI but do they walk the walk?Firebase? Remember when it was the best developer tool there was? Missed the boat with Vector DBs for AI, and when experts within the company raised that it was necessary.Flutter? Yeah -- didn&#x27;t they get a community member or an intern to put out a plugin for TensorFlow lite for mobile AI, and when they moved on, nobody cared.Dart and Go? Don&#x27;t make me laugh.TensorFlow and Open Source AI (also under JB) -- Didn&#x27;t give a crap, zero investment, lots of cuts, and did nothing about advancing TF since, what 2020? When was version 2? What happened to version 3? Literally invigorated the world with AI, and then JB came along and what...?In the last 6 months? Spun up internal incubators to build new AI products. Trying to replicate Pinecone with less than 5 internal folks who don&#x27;t have a background in AI at all etc. (Pinecone have ~200 people?)Trying to build prompt management tools, when there are a million GPT ones out there? Check. I guess she never heard of OSS?Oh yeah, wait the OSS office @ Google is also under JB.It&#x27;s nothing short of a catastophe.

&gt; Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn&#x27;t leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn&#x27;t even acknowledge it).As someone who&#x27;s very invested in Dart, this really pisses me off to hear.I guess that&#x27;s what this tweet is alluding to: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timsneath&#x2F;status&#x2F;1727192477264974273" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timsneath&#x2F;status&#x2F;1727192477264974273</a>

Thanks for the post. I for one would love to experience the early Google culture. I&#x27;m not competent enough but as a middle-aged man I believe I have more fire than many of my peers.

hi Ken. I don&#x27;t think I mentioned you in the Enterprise article!

Having spent a vast amount of time reading comments, there certainly is. HN can frequently become an echo chamber, though pretends not to be; and has very clear favorite tech darlings and near-immovable, predefined villains (Google being one of them).

&gt; There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HNIs there, though? I mean, yes, I am very cynical about Google (and never worked there, so I have no insider information), but this article lines up very well with my assumptions about the company and what happened there over time.(Of course I can&#x27;t speak for all HNers...)

That post is a very good description of Google and matches my experience at Google (2004-2016), both the good and bad. There is a lot of cynicism and misunderstanding of Google on HN, so hopefully this post will help. (Note: you need to scroll down a bit on the page to get the post.)

I think you might be confusing cookies and local storage.

Your understanding of web technology is incredible. You should run for congress.

It is weird to focus on storage, considering the cache for the HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS generating the warnings likely takes up much more storage space than the cookies themselves.

I noticed that comment also. It seems like the point of view of an engineer that doesn&#x27;t really think about security.Reminded me of when I first discovered that major browsers allow third party cookies by default. And thinking I can&#x27;t believe they allow this massive privacy leak.

You don&#x27;t need to show a &quot;cookie warning&quot; to store a cookie. You only need to show a warning if you&#x27;re tracking a user, regardless of the technology used (cookie, local storage...) But if you want to store someone&#x27;s language choice, username, or credentials in a cookie, no banner is needed. In fact, this website is the perfect example.

&gt; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today.Hey if you&#x27;re cool with me using your hardrive to store data I have a bunch of chia coins that need mining. Its weird how getting somebody&#x27;s permission before using their stuff is considered unnecessary.

&gt; Be the change you want to see.I have done it at my job - by being the leader myself who will always prioritize a mix of business needs and engineering needs - with transparency and blamelessness. And then, to shame&#x2F;call out other &quot;leaders&quot; throwing their people under the bus.I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is the only way to maintain company culture in the direction of innovation.

Be the change you want to see.I&#x27;m not holding out. Public companies all turn into this.One solution is to make greed and going public a shameful thing; but who&#x27;s going to do that?

A lot of glorified companies are completely filled with corrupt, inept management. I hope this recession destroys this management culture and brings back the ethos of innovation in engineering and product.

Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms.Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it&#x27;s about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it&#x27;s irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be.If you don&#x27;t like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice.Google&#x27;s size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.

Not intending harm does not excuse causing it over and over.

Sometimes it feels like Google could cure cancer and HN would still react negatively. Companies are not monolithic and it&#x27;s silly to paint it that way. It&#x27;s not simple about intent, but premature judgment.

&gt; genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives ofIf it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits all over your lawn like a duck, hearing &quot;well he meant well&quot; doesn&#x27;t make it any less of a duck.Saying &quot;the public are unfairly critical of the motives [of Google]&quot; is like saying cows are unfairly critical of the motives of abattoir workers [1].1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37035733">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37035733</a>

&gt; How can the work both be &quot;genuinely well-intentioned&quot; and at the same time have &quot;complete absence of concern for the user&quot;?I think the author is distinguishing between (1) well-intentioned work from workers in the trenches and (2) indifference to the user from upper management. It&#x27;s institutional misalignment.

&gt; How can the work both be &quot;genuinely well-intentioned&quot; and at the same time have &quot;complete absence of concern for the user&quot;?Only the first was a description of the work, the other was a description of the culture to which those doing the work are subjected to from above.

It is only an oxymoron in the worst possible interpretation to the point of maliciousness.

&gt; It&#x27;s frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.This sentence is an oxymoron.How can the work both be &quot;genuinely well-intentioned&quot; and at the same time have &quot;complete absence of concern for the user&quot;?

The point being made is exactly that your inference about Google&#x27;s motives early on was wrong. Common. But wrong.

I can empathize with you and the linked writer feeling frustrated that public perception isn&#x27;t able to match your privileged perspective as an insider... but in both cases I feel my eyes roll involuntarily here.From the outside looking in, Google has acted as a giant self-serving monopolistic hoarder of wealth and power, and has spent decades systematically absorbing and puppeteering creativity and optimism to squeeze as much long term profit as possible.The only difference we can see recently is they are more interested in short term profit than long term, which makes their insidious power grabs more obvious and less convoluted.Actions speak louder than words and I don&#x27;t see how someone could look at Google&#x27;s actions over the past 20 years and objectively claim the company hasn&#x27;t always been the poster child of capitalism

Right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And regardless of the intentions of the engineers, Google is run by its executives, not by its engineers. We don&#x27;t have the luxury to extend the benefit of the doubt to ultramegacorporations.

&gt; the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives ofIs it unfair, though? I went from being a huge fan of Google to being a huge Google critic because of real changes in what Google did. I think it&#x27;s reasonable to question their motives.This isn&#x27;t the same as questioning the motives of the engineers, though. I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people who work there. However, their presence doesn&#x27;t change the reality of the company&#x27;s behavior as a whole.

&gt; It&#x27;s frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.Criticism of Google stems exactly from the culture shift, us customers (even more the tech savvy ones) noticed pretty clearly when that shift started to happen, when we felt betrayed by believing in old-Google. The erosion of this trust fostered the cynicism, the vicious criticism veil was cast over any action that looked, at a glance, somewhat malicious.How could we tell if it wasn&#x27;t malicious? I definitely can&#x27;t anymore.Google 2005 had almost my complete trust, Google 2015 much less, Google 2023 is the one I&#x27;ve been actively moving away from, closing accounts, including letting go my GMail account from 2004 with a handle that&#x27;s basically my name.

Her linkedin profile is &#x27;winner&#x27; if it helps provide any backstory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;winner&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;winner&#x2F;</a>

What projects you would you say the public has been unfairly&#x2F;viciously critical of the motives of?I&#x27;m a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don&#x27;t recall many &quot;unfair&quot; ones. It&#x27;s more of a difference of opinion.For example, I mentioned the other day that it&#x27;s sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don&#x27;t view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry&#x2F;authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.---I also think there are many issues that Google hasn&#x27;t gotten ENOUGH flack for.The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the &quot;war driving&quot; and the SSISD database.A hilarious thing is I just searched for &quot;list of settlements paid out by Google&quot;, and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn&#x27;t know that, but it&#x27;s unsurprising.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-location-tracking-data-william-tong-392-million-settlement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-location-tracking-data-w...</a>Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted?I don&#x27;t know the details of that case, but I&#x27;ve seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of &quot;dark patterns&quot; has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don&#x27;t even understand what a dark pattern is. It&#x27;s just cultural now.There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don&#x27;t even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that&#x27;s approximately correct.If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly.That culture is completely gone. It&#x27;s not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn&#x27;t been unfair.(There was also the product manager who coined &quot;default opt-in&quot; -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and &quot;interested&quot; thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren&#x27;t even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what&#x27;s rewarded.)Another early one was when Google had a &quot;Windows deskbar&quot;, and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional &quot;dark pattern&quot; checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn&#x27;t change anything.---When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend&#x27;s OpenAI drama - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37399239">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37399239</a> )But I don&#x27;t think the public has been unfair to Google overall.Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products. 
You can say that&#x27;s one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a mandate from the top.Products that were poorly executed, violated the law, dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early promises, etc.There&#x27;s a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The company simply isn&#x27;t user-centric, full stop. I can&#x27;t see anyone argue otherwise.What&#x27;s the most user-centric improvement from Google in the last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago. My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated rapidly.In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.

is this criticism reasonable though?  Look at Waymo, for example.  Investing in that is very visionary.  I mean, someone has to work on the stuff that pays the current bills, right?  Or, what about Bard?  Sure, Bard kinda sucks compared to chat gpt 4, but it&#x27;s really at worst number 2 in the most exciting current field?

I think what&#x27;s been said, and the description of the general ineptness of that particular manager, has been 100% spot on. Middle management as a whole has basically gotten worse, meaner and generally less technically capable since 2018.

&gt; &quot;It&#x27;s frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of...&quot;It&#x27;s inevitable that the top business in any sector gets loads of uninformed and&#x2F;or just plain dumb haters. Ask Amazon, Microsoft, etc. employees about it. One gets used to it.That being said, Google probably deserves it more than most (yes, even more than MS) among top tech companies since its revenue is primarily from advertising, the air pollution of the online world.

&gt; ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term...If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be &quot;well-intentioned&quot;?Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?

As a current Googler of approximately the same tenure, I can&#x27;t speak to the comments on Jeanine Banks (never met her), but I agree with every other word of this.It&#x27;s frustrating to continue to see both the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term, and the company culture at the highest levels of Google.I care about my team and believe in their skills and intents. But the Google I joined in early 2006, as a whole, is fractured, reeling, and has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the importing of &quot;business focus&quot; and the &quot;bottom line&quot; (read: short term share price) to Google&#x27;s management structure wholesale.

Not even if they pay well enough that you can quit and still afford having a family in only 5 years, instead of 20?

Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it.One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of culture going for much longer than people think.Conversely, I&#x27;ve worked at companies with 500 employees that were the blandest kind of &quot;enterprise business company firm&quot; you can imagine. :)

It was a whole bundle of things all at the same time but probably started with G+ and &quot;The Social Wars&quot;. That was all happening when I first got there, but it set internal crap on a bad path, plenty of bad feelings as the whole organization was pivoted onto that, but it all basically fizzled out and failed.And then a couple years later, yeah, it was Ruth &amp; Alphabet. And that&#x27;s when it got progressively stupider and stupider.When I started it was like 25k engineers, and while it was big I still felt there was a very cool internal thing going on there. And I&#x27;m a pretty cynical person.

I guess it was the Alphabet saga? It&#x27;s all like this. I have decided that if given the chance, I&#x27;d never work in companies with more than 1,000 persons.

Around 2016 at Google, my entire reporting chain, from manager to CEO, changed. Literally not a single person was left. Laszlo, both Erics, Patrick and the rest of the L team all left in quick succession. I think the old Google of &lt; 2015 and the current Google are two companies that have almost nothing in common.

It may be more helpful to pay attention to the ones leaving him in charge if its clear his abilities may not be the right fit.

I think Pichai tries his best within his abilities, maybe it&#x27;s time to pay attention to the ones who had chosen him?

Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don&#x27;t even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom, OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder. Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves faster than we do!I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. &quot;Bard performs better,&quot; &quot;we&#x27;re more ethical,&quot; etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.

And, as the article postulates, that sort of bean counting goes directly against what used to excite Google&#x27;s employees, and is leading to their continued disillusionment.

Yeah that’s what I don’t understand, what is the incentive to preserve the culture?Outcomes follow incentives

‘Shareholders’ can’t do anything. Different classes of shares confer different voting rights, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin still own shares controlling over 50% of shareholder votes.

IDK, if you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under the leadership of Satya over the last 9 years it&#x27;s obviously possible to innovate and bean count at the same time

The thing is it&#x27;s not Sundar&#x27;s job to be a visionary leader. That&#x27;s not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google&#x27;s share price.

I&#x27;ve had that experience at a different company. Was really exciting when I joined and I had a very long leash to do pretty much whatever I thought was the right thing. Long-time manager left and did some new interesting stuff for a while. But then I bumped around a bit and I really just counted a couple years until my last major vests and retired.

I sorta agree with you, but sorta don&#x27;t. While I don&#x27;t think you can squarely lay the blame on any one person, culture comes from the top. The board&#x2F;CEO (but mostly the CEO) sets the culture, and hires (or molds) other executives and leadership positions into their vision of that culture.Page and Brin chose Pichai to succeed them. They, and the rest of their board, share blame as well.

Having spent two decades at a far, far less known company, I think it’s common for long-timers to look back with fondness and a feeling that their early days were Camelot, that the current days are worse, and that the fault lies with a specific leadership change.It’s way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it’s growing 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.I don’t have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I’m not at all surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and engaging place to be than 2023 Google.

Tech started to have a vision problem the moment big money (and people with big money) entered the picture and started calling the shots. Sundar, Jassy, Satya, Tim Cook are all cut from the same cloth. Their job is to appease the shareholders and not much else.Zuckerberg is probably the only founder&#x2F;majority shareholder still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar company day to day and executing his vision, and you have to give him kudos for that. He could easily go buy multiple countries instead and live out his life with a lot less stress.

It’s a tale as old as timeThe kid inherits the company built by the parent

It feels like tech generally has a CEO vision problem.Andy Jassy + Sudar for example.off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)

&gt; I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.

I&#x27;m the &quot;12 years at Google&quot; commenter from below.Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after that. Good guy.

I personally felt the best icon of original Google culture was Craig Silverstein, whose departure greatly affected the various intergrouplets that were holding the company culture together. In that sense, I wouldn&#x27;t place all the blame on Sundar, although he didn&#x27;t necessarily help.But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what carries the culture forward.

I would rather the people go, and use their considerable intellect on things that have interests more aligned with societal benefit. Do we really want a re-ignited Google?

&gt; Google hasn&#x27;t created a new major product in yearsIndeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway).But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products. Maybe that&#x27;s where their strength lies: in throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can&#x27;t be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What they&#x27;ve been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a new project from zero.And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it&#x27;s unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more than once, or a handful of times if they&#x27;re really lucky.The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they&#x27;ve got one flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads, and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has Facebook really innovated since their original product?

Given Google&#x27;s current reputation killing of products left and right, lately I don&#x27;t bother even trying new things they roll out, and building anything dependent on it is completely out of the question. No.

Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the &quot;Dream Team&quot; of Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is.Google hasn&#x27;t created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company to one uninspired direction after another.Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to go.

I would bet that the average tech-savvy outsider has a higher opinion of Sundar than the average Googler does.

Just because you stay in a job doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t criticize the company and its leadership.

Sundar became CEO in 2015. The author quit this year. Was his &quot;lack of visionary leadership&quot; not that obvious for 8+ years? Or did the author stay because the stock price and his TC kept going up?

&gt; “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.”Ouch.I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.

Now that I think of it, the name IS vaguely familiar.

He was famous (or infamous) way before joining Google

If you were involved with W3C around the time of XHTML 2.0 through to HTML 5.0 via WHATWG Ian is a well known person.

Yeah. Like I said, the dream never died. Almost ten years later, it was revived &amp; made real.

&quot;At any rate, after exploring this, I naturally wondered if there wasn’t some easier way to do it; not as statistically valid, maybe, but adequate for the advertiser who just wants to improve his performance. I won’t go into the details here, but let’s just say that everyone wanted a Super Deluxe version even if it did require changing every part of the Ads system. No one wanted something quick-and-dirty that just did the job. This was Google, after all; “quick and dirty” would not get you promoted or get your talk accepted at a conference. It did not make me popular to suggest this.&quot;I had a similar experience at Google--simple improvements such as parameter tuning are looked down on and rejected for being mere tinkering, even if the metrics are good. Meanwhile super complicated deep learning projects keep being added, even if they barely improve metrics. In the short term the complexity looks like hard work and leads to promotions, but long term it makes the system hard to maintain and understand.

Yet another &quot;famous&quot; Googler whom I didn&#x27;t know. He joined one month before I did. I did know Chris DiBona, at least. Didn&#x27;t know this Jeanine person.I wrote a number of articles about working there in the early (or earlier) days. Chronologically:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-enterprise" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-enterp...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-ads" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-ads</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-ads-continued" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-ads-co...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-maps" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-maps</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-maps-continued" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;working-at-google-maps-c...</a>As well as three others about the best part: the non-work activities.

Yeah, I definetly wouldn&#x27;t want to have been on the early Android team.Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you&#x27;re close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.Mind you, the iPhone employees didn&#x27;t have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.

This podcast reinforces what you&#x27;re saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corecursive.com&#x2F;android-with-chet-haase&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corecursive.com&#x2F;android-with-chet-haase&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I&#x27;m a couple generations after you, joined Google&#x2F;Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material&#x2F;Hardware.[2]Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I&#x27;ve seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can&#x27;t figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was &quot;let&#x27;s burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus.&quot; This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it&#x27;s somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it&#x27;s OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;assistant&#x2F;next-generation-google-assistant-io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;assistant&#x2F;next-generation-googl...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidpolice.com&#x2F;google-material-you-interview-james-oleary&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidpolice.com&#x2F;google-material-you-interview-...</a>

Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently &quot;unhealthy&quot; and not &quot;solving real problems for users.&quot; Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social&#x2F;G+ effort. I attribute much of Android&#x27;s success to Larry &amp; Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can&#x27;t fully control.No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.

Doesn&#x27;t seem like the worst plan in the world.

I just joined because I&#x27;ve always wanted to, and when I had the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the fealty of a public corporation lies.Now that I&#x27;ve checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.The &quot;powers that be&quot; seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.

Surely they could do something better for humanity, such as selling heroin to middle schoolers.

Seems like most of the people who want to join google these days, &quot;why do you want to join google&quot;, &quot;for the tc and prestige&quot;

Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on it, then it&#x27;s understandable why he&#x27;d stay at Google even if he didn&#x27;t like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he&#x27;s still working on Flutter now, so clearly it&#x27;s a passion project for him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he could?

He spent the last 9 years in competition with Android so it&#x27;s not surprising that he has some biases about it

Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty well.

&gt; to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squanderedNowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;os-market-share&#x2F;mobile&#x2F;worldwide" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;os-market-share&#x2F;mobile&#x2F;worldwide</a> - only North America has iOS on top.I think it&#x27;s not good we&#x27;re down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn&#x27;t survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.

Indeed, I also find the critique of the Android team amusing (except for the implied overtime).It&#x27;s still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely competent. And I still prefer iOS.

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been.For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn&#x27;t Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is wider Google doesn&#x27;t understand how to work with other companies. The Android unit did have certain ludicrous habits (I recall huge laundry bins in the reception of their building at one point) but the reason for this was they understood what was at stake. (People forget just how much needed to be done between Android 1.6 and 4.1 to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered). There have been other units that also fail to assimilate and then just peter out, but Google under Mr Pichai never learns from acquired companies, it just imposes their way on to them. If you came from the Chrome side of the fence you wouldn&#x27;t notice this because it was your way being imposed elsewhere.Mr Pichai has always had a singular vision, to be CEO of Google, and then stay there. What to do with that never seemed to cross his mind.

Yep. I quit after a year in 2015 because it already felt like that.

It&#x27;s a little scary that Azure team leads are that clueless.I would really, really love to hear more about this if you would indulge us. If not us, then certainly send me an email, please.

This was my experience too as well as some of my college friends who work at MSFT and GOOG. Microsoft engineers aren&#x27;t stupid (of course they weren&#x27;t) but there tends to be more dumb people and fewer very very smart people.This could also be incentives at the companies. I have a buddy who went to Microsoft, worked 30hr weeks, and was bored. Dude is brilliant and level headed. The team was lazy AF. Worked there for 5 years and went to Facebook and is thriving, going from Senior to Staff rather quickly.

Eh, I interviewed for both a GCP and multiple Azure teams simultaneously and the difference in talent level was astounding.The latter team leads were anywhere from disinterested, asking basic level leetcode questions I could breeze through, to fucking incompetent who didn&#x27;t even understand the coding questions they were asking. I was shocked at how different they were in terms of thoughtfulness and intelligence.

Looking at the innovation of the former and the lack thereof of the latter, it sure seems that way. Even after almost half a century, Microsoft still endures.

Yup, sounds like a classic company that became manager&#x27;d to death.  Explains silly features or changes we see all the time. Move on, Google&#x27;s dead.

Fixed now. Thanks!Btw HN didn&#x27;t strip them -the submitted URL was <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;</a>. No doubt this was the top post at the time.We do strip some query strings, but only for larger&#x2F;known sites.

The submitted link is missing the query params (or HN stripped them) that lead directly to the post:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373&amp;count=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373&amp;count=1</a>

I believe it&#x27;s quoting a survey where you had to pick from &quot;frameworks&quot;.  Meaning &quot;use the native tools&quot; wasn&#x27;t a choice on the list. Choices were things like Flutter, React Native, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, etc.

I’m also curious what he meant by that statement.  By leading does he mean most used?

Flutter is a leading framework? Maybe in some niche. It&#x27;s not even in the top 10 for me.

Where is that happening? I want to move there.

When filtered to &quot;cross platform mobile app frameworks&quot; anyway, which is a huge reduction in scope - 1&#x2F;3rd of respondents in that study in fact.So 46% of 33% of mobile app developers that aren&#x27;t building mobile websites use Flutter. That&#x27;s not bad at all, but hardly supports a claim of being the &quot;leading mobile app development framework&quot; as you&#x27;re down to ~15% of mobile app developers using it. And only then since mobile web is being excluded, who knows what it&#x27;d be if that was included.

Huh, that’s hard to believe. If you go by job postings, React Native is miles ahead.

There are a lot of reasonable metrics one might use to define &quot;leading mobile app development framework&quot;:* Number of developers using it on some daily&#x2F;weekly&#x2F;monthly, etc. cadence.* Number of apps published (to iOS, Android, both).* Number of jobs available using the framework.* Various subjective desirability metrics from developers survey like the StackOverflow ones.It&#x27;s anyone&#x27;s guess as to which is the best metric or how they should be combined. Also, it&#x27;s very hard to actually get accurate data on it.But, according to Statistica at least, yes Flutter really is the most popular mobile app framework as of 2022:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;869224&#x2F;worldwide-software-developer-working-hours&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;869224&#x2F;worldwide-softwar...</a>It looks like that&#x27;s based on a developer survey. I don&#x27;t know more about its methodology.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;lp&#x2F;devecosystem-2023&#x2F;development&#x2F;#mobile_crossplatform_frmwrk_two_years" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;lp&#x2F;devecosystem-2023&#x2F;development&#x2F;#...</a>Flutter: 46%
React Native: 35%
Unity: 10%
Cordova: 10%
Ionic: 9%
Xamarin: 8%Just one datapoint, of course - a survey of 26,384 developers.

&quot;Flutter is amazingly successful. It&#x27;s already the leading mobile app development framework&quot; ???

&gt; Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?I think this is a poorly specified question. One can imagine a situation where someone&#x27;s actions caused a change in a society, which is no longer attributed to him according to popular opinion. Does influence of that person linger?

I almost forgot about Vic! He hasn&#x27;t been relevant for quite some time though, right?Are you suggesting his influence still lingers?

&gt; ...Vic Gundotra...Please, let&#x27;s honor the man&#x27;s fiercely-defended policies.He is Vivek &quot;Vic&quot; Gundotra. His Real Name is Vivek, and we should refer to him by it.

I have almost never heard a single good thing about Vic from people who were there around same time as him

Another article that highlights Vic Gundotra’s arrival and rise at Google as the beginning of their decline.

&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.That&#x27;s an interesting observation considering Sundar is where he is because of early-Google cultural norms.

Seems like Google is being managed by consuming lots of managerial literature.Also, coming from Flutter camp, blog is barely readable on mobile without zooming.

Lmao &#x27;tests are not a best practice&quot;. Please, never be in my team.

&gt; We also didn&#x27;t follow engineering best practices for the first few years. For example we wrote no tests...Tests are not a best practice but more of a necessary evil for production systems and&#x2F;or businesses incapable of retaining their best for many years.

These paragraphs really pack a punch, and having worked in tech for 20+ years now (but not at Google) I feel this. Every shitty company eventually has layoffs that ruin the culture, and end up with a &quot;Jeanine Banks&quot; manager type. This article was really well written.&gt; Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google&#x27;s erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot;). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it&#x27;s not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google&#x27;s founders famously told Wall Street &quot;Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.&quot; but that Google is no more.&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn&#x27;t leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn&#x27;t even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to &quot;handle&quot; her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.

GCP has also been bringing in Oracle execs to run things. The results are very much so affecting our relationship with Google to the negative.

Its pretty heartening that among all this drama and activism I&#x27;ve never heard of a users data being maliciously leaked from Google.To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).

I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was.I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.

Googlers that were around when Vic Gundotra was a big player love trashing him. I was surprised when this blog described him in mixed and maybe even positive terms.

&gt; Google+ and &quot;Real Names Considered Harmful&quot;That happened right after I&#x27;d accepted an offer from Google but before I&#x27;d started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It&#x27;s funny what happens to one&#x27;s motivation when unable to do meaningful work...This author&#x27;s remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.

There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen, search for the phrase &quot;vicg&quot; among others.

And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and nobody was held accountable for that failure.

12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they&#x27;d find a way to get it done.Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and &quot;Real Names Considered Harmful&quot; was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn&#x27;t watched one in years by the time I left.

Great post, epic that he calls out his idiotic upper management. I&#x27;ve only been at Google a little over a year and while I&#x27;m mostly happy with my management chain, I have run into directors who clearly should have been fired for overselling and underdelivering huge projects that impact my team.I am surprised just how &#x27;bottom up&#x27; so much is done at Google, and I wonder if that is why Sundar ended up where he is. Unlike so many other large companies, engineers who build consensus have way more influence on upper management&#x27;s priorities than other places.So being someone who is good at building consensus is a good way to built clout at google, more so than any other place. But this isn&#x27;t alawys good. Sometimes I miss old boring &quot;F500&quot; companies where I can go to the one principal engineer (or director or whatever) and show them my idea, and how it doesn&#x27;t get in anyone else&#x27;s way, and boom they either approve or deny it.No spending months convincing everyone and their mother to make a small (but significant) change.

I find it refreshing that this post actually calls out specific problems and people.  IMO, too many of these company culture posts keep the complaints somewhat vague which makes them harder to evaluate.

What an amazingly well-written article. It&#x27;s incredible how well it describes the feelings that I&#x27;ve struggled to vocalize on my own.

Was that mission achieved by Google, or by Wikipedia?

&gt; I still believe there&#x27;s lots of mileage to be had from Google&#x27;s mission statement (to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful).I&#x27;m not sure if I agree. That mission seems to be largely achieved. And maybe has something to do with the decay in Google&#x27;s overall culture.

Has it drifted?I don&#x27;t see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too.Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.

Did it really?Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you&#x27;ll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten.Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It&#x27;s still super light and zippy.

It also looked much nicer. These thick curved tab decorations, unnecessary ovals everywhere, yuck.

The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It&#x27;s insane how it has drifted since then.

That&#x27;s the beauty of mega coporations. 99% of employees can be genuinely trying to improve the lives of others and it still does evil as a whole.

&gt; and of course management knows that when you&#x27;re bootstrapping a new project&#x2F;product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what&#x27;s best for the user... at least for nowThis is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it&#x27;s funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the &quot;do what&#x27;s best for user&quot; part and then get surprised when the &quot;at least for now&quot; part kicks in.

In the end it&#x27;s still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees&#x27; duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management&#x27;s responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google&#x27;s management completely fails at that.

&gt; My view is that the people on the inside often can&#x27;t see the forest for the trees.Agreed. But it&#x27;s also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be &quot;evil&quot;, but usually isn&#x27;t the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.What I&#x27;ve usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something &quot;bad&quot;, people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google&#x2F;Microsoft does it, it was definitely &quot;intended to be evil&quot;. Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.

But then again, everyone says Google is evil to have made their own browser, but most of the world is using it - one would guess they must have done some good things with it (so taking humanity forward in some capacity etc.). Some are even criticizing Google from its own browser - I hate the fact that it made Firefox lose their market share, but I also understand it can&#x27;t all be because the big corp brainwashed everyone (sure it would be a significant part though).

As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the &quot;outside&quot; reading too much into an action that the company takes.However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context.The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: &quot;wow thats really useful&quot; and &quot;wow that&#x27;s fucking intrusive.&quot; Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society.This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey &quot;oh but no one would be that evil&#x2F;stupid&#x2F;malevolent&#x2F;power hungry&quot;large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than &quot;why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?&quot; Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people&#x27;s eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.

Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often can&#x27;t see the forest for the trees. They look at their immediate team&#x2F;group, love the autonomy&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;&quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot;-mandate&#x2F;etc. that they have and follow, and look around and see some of that in other groups, and think, &quot;wow, this company is great, doesn&#x27;t care about all that big-bad-company stuff&quot;.But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they&#x27;re also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what&#x27;s best for the user, and to not care about what&#x27;s best for that company, there&#x27;s no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.(And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they&#x27;d be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you&#x27;re bootstrapping a new project&#x2F;product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what&#x27;s best for the user... at least for now.)It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn&#x27;t see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don&#x27;t know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.

Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.

It&#x27;s the old: &quot;It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.&quot;

Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free&#x2F;libre copyleft ... which they did not do.

&quot;No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.&quot; - Stanisław J. Lec

When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person&#x2F;group harmed, it just doesn&#x27;t register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you&#x27;d probably not even notice. If the cockroach&#x27;s relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on destruction, you&#x27;d probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent, maybe even offended. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you?Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don&#x27;t make money from.

Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg&#x27;s admonition to Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]:&quot;[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools.&quot;[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motherjones.com&#x2F;kevin-drum&#x2F;2010&#x2F;02&#x2F;daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motherjones.com&#x2F;kevin-drum&#x2F;2010&#x2F;02&#x2F;daniel-ellsbe...</a>

Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is that they are doing their best to stay in business and deliver and improve that tool. It&#x27;s all they have. So your incentives are credibly aligned.Whereas with Google, unless the product you&#x27;re talking about is &quot;Ads&quot; (or Search or Android or YouTube), it&#x27;s very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, &quot;oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let&#x27;s kill this thing&quot; and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.

I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I&#x27;ve seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren&#x27;t mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling.But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme.I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.

Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains&#x2F;inbox&#x2F;travel&#x2F;reader&#x2F;cloud print&#x2F;code&#x2F;podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness&#x2F;vision required to long term success like stadia&#x2F;Chrome OS&#x2F;Nest&#x2F;plus&#x2F;news etc.

5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn&#x27;t manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same &quot;oh no, what if they shut down&quot; scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it&#x27;s some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.

<pre><code> you&#x27;re _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

</code></pre>
This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.

There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar.But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar&#x27;s case, a soft noodle.

I&#x27;m friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at Google.I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.

&gt; No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today&#x27;s Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google&#x27;s ad productsExcept for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn&#x27;t have to.That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron.I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead.Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.

This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism.People outside Google don&#x27;t have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It&#x27;s Google that&#x27;s making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now.No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today&#x27;s Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google&#x27;s ad products. That&#x27;s one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don&#x27;t get to just be yourself anymore, you&#x27;re _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

It&#x27;s not often discussed but there is a cultural gulf between pre-IPO and post-IPO Googlers that still impacts almost 20 years later.To put it crudely, one dwindling set of idealistic millionaires vs a growing set of capitalist thousandaires, each set with very different motivations to login to their computer each morning.

Most large tech companies grew by &gt;30% during the covid lockdowns, so I don&#x27;t think company culture is much of a priority for them.

A good manager does not always a good SWE make.

I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else&#x27;s backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth.It&#x27;s a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don&#x27;t kind of a deal.

Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you&#x27;ve never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it.&gt; She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill setThis is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.

&gt; All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Great, market has matured from that.Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.

Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it&#x27;s ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that.Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I&#x27;ve become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar&#x27;s leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.

So when Bezos says &quot;your margin is my opportunity,&quot; he&#x27;s talking to Google?It&#x27;s not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It&#x27;s more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.

Google has the margins to take risks. If you don&#x27;t disrupt yourself somebody else will.

&quot;Of course none of this will happen to Google. You&#x27;re too innovative.&quot;I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.

I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff.This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.

&gt; At the end of it, he made a comment like, &quot;Of course none of this will happen to Google. You&#x27;re too innovative.&quot;Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?

Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg</a>

This is called Scumpeter&#x27;s creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Creative_destruction" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Creative_destruction</a>However. it&#x27;s hard to see Google&#x27;s core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It&#x27;s also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.

There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir</a>

On paper, Google&#x27;s throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup.This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google&#x27;s internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they&#x27;ve given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn&#x27;t somehow AI-related.

&gt;&gt; at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor...sounds like Clayton Christensen

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google&#x27;s moonshot &#x27;x division&#x27;, in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn&#x27;t sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a &#x27;moonshot&#x27; and a regular new project?And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google&#x27;s &#x27;moonshots&#x27; ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their &#x27;moonshots&#x27; are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-at-x" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...</a>

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, &quot;Of course none of this will happen to Google. You&#x27;re too innovative.&quot; But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).

&gt;perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.So an over 100 year old company that makes 10s of billions of dollars?

A cutthroat environment is going to encourage plenty of people to behave conservatively so that their rivals do not seize on their failures, real or perceived.

Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that&#x27;s how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.

&gt; what&#x27;s the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environmentSure. Isn&#x27;t that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that&#x27;s more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they&#x27;re in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they&#x27;ll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you&#x27;d expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.)&gt; And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.This may be true in tech companies, but I&#x27;m not sure it generalizes to other industries.I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.

Having children can awake antisocial impulses in people but it can awake prosocial impulses just as easily and just as strongly.

This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil, corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.

Idk why you are downvoted. It&#x27;s become a cultural trope to use &quot;I did it for my family&quot; as an excuse to justify absolutely heinous stuff.

It&#x27;s people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block..One of the reasons old people can&#x27;t look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.

I feel so much exactly what you&#x27;re describing here...

This reminds me of the &quot;Explore&#x2F;Exploit&quot; chapter from &quot;Algorithms to live by&quot; :)

How do you distinguish &quot;I can fix them&quot; companies that will not improve because they are where they are because of organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual improve and are ready for you?

I joined my current company 5 years ago, and I feel like we’ve ‘fixed’ a lot of things, but the effort to do so is so absurd.And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.

I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments.But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2&#x2F;3 or 3&#x2F;4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.

It was easier to thread this needle in an easy-money environment than now, when everyone has suddenly grown much more conservative.

I think it’s fine if big companies stick to their core competencies, return money to shareholders, and the shareholders can then re-invest into innovative startups.Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.

Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every growing &#x2F; successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse, but even at our size being disruptive &#x2F; staying innovative gets harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having capable people taking bets on new products, even when you know that such a product (if successful) is possibly years from making a dent in your revenue stream.That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a &quot;dent in the revenue stream&quot; at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.

Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and things feel like ground hog day.After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I&#x27;ve only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.There&#x27;s benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.

Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team&#x2F;cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a straight answer or get something done that wasn’t formally planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it, especially engineers who don’t share priorities, timelines, conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally also the best way to get promoted at a large company that believes in breaking down silos.

As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently bad. Indeed, in a large company, they&#x27;re necessary to avoid dysfunction. You want stable groups of competent people who share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for their thing.&quot;Founder-led&quot; companies are more dynamic mostly because they&#x27;re smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.

I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers.I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals&#x2F;mission.Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.

Ian&#x27;s post is pretty incisive, although I&#x27;ve read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.I don&#x27;t really think that&#x27;s possible. When you&#x27;re a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You&#x27;re bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like &quot;we&#x27;re building a new kind of a company&quot; or &quot;the user comes first.&quot;But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It&#x27;s no longer &quot;why wouldn&#x27;t you try this&quot; or &quot;let&#x27;s do the right thing.&quot; It&#x27;s &quot;why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?&quot; It&#x27;s not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that&#x27;s not necessarily a bad thing, because what&#x27;s the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you&#x27;re never sure about the future of your job?I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they &quot;get it.&quot; And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.

Reflecting on 18 Years at Google