I normally don't get much from presentation slides; they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks and they often amount to the bullet points of someone's outline. But in this case, the article is an extremely poor summary of this comparatively rich and substantial presentation. Thanks for sharing this link. It is much more comprehensible than the article itself.
> they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks
Historically, yes, as an aspirational goal. Even if, in practice, a lot of people didn't want to or didn't get around to creating a doc to go along with the presentation.
That said, I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. So it's pretty normal--at least for routine information sharing--to create a text-heavy presentation and just hit the high points when presenting from it. Not sure this is even a bad thing for a lot of purposes--especially to the degree people can put together cogent sets of bullet points but aren't that great at pages of prose.
> I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text.
I prefer long form content... but spending time in the comments section of HN may show a revealed preference.
I concur with your observation. Piling on with a couple examples:
- Axios is a news service that only delivers information in bullet points. Unlike their long-form competitors, they are expanding into local news. [0]
- Long form content, such as books, are less popular. The average number of books read each year has fallen to a 30 year low. [1]
That sounds like the worst of both worlds? You end up with a slide deck that doesn't contain the information added by the presenter, but which are too info-heavy to work well during the talk.
I'm talking more about program updates, "know before you go" information about events, etc. rather than conference keynotes. (Of course, there are many things in between.) For this sort of thing you really do want a canonical source of information--including for those who didn't attend a call that hit the highlights. And these days that tends to be a fairly dense slide deck because that's what a lot of people prefer and you meet people where they are.
My conference presentations don't generally have a lot of words. But that's not all I do and it does mean my conference presentation slide decks aren't super-informative on their own.
The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame.
p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building.
As the corporate organism itself grows larger and faces newer challenges, it may need to evolve and develop new, more specialized organs that a slime mold does not inherently possess or function well at to scale.
Many organisms in the natural world could not scale exactly as-is to 10x or 100x their normal size with their existing structures.
The idea of a slime mold representing the whole company may have once been true a decade or more ago when Google was much smaller and less extended, but the mental model is much like newer people at Google yearning for the "old Google" that never worked there during its earlier days. It's a nice fantasy.
The presentation is 170 slides, and involves statistical arguments modeling work.
- Small projects can tolerate collaborating specialist pools (CSPs).
- CSPs attempting large complicated projects are quickly disastrously unlikely to even be completed due to the network effects of uncertainty and disagreement on commitment efforts, even with a hierarchy stuffed-in (assuming each specialist is necessary)
This presentation is so clear I'm going to show it to my high-schooler so that she can (1) understand why Dad works on Saturday (I confess to some "heroics"), and (2) concepts she can keep in mind on upcoming projects at school, and eventually at a job.
Apart from the intra-company dynamics, there is also the fact that Google do not face the same kind of consumer driven market pressure as, say, Walmart.
I do recommend the excellent "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives"[1] where the greatest incentive individuals face in an organization have involve doing relatively better compared to other individuals in the organization without significant outside indicators of the right direction.
In that sense, Google is like a government behemoth. Most involved in its direction and functioning have incentives that are decoupled from whether the people who are touched by their "products" and "services" are happy with them.
More people == More politics. This varies by person, some people are highly political - you will not get any work out of them, except possibly in service of their political goal. It scales super linearly though, so at some point as you add more people you're actually reducing productivity, because those people are either going to spend all their time navigating the politics, which is bad, or start their own political agenda which is worse. You know what's bad? Hiring 1 unproductive person. What's wores? Hiring 1 unproductive person who persuades you to hire a whole team to serve their bullshit.
I've got good news though. How do you fix this? Simple, don't overhire in the first place! Womp Womp!
Not quite that pessimistic. I don't remember who but someone summarised it as "if you are willing to try many ideas at the same time, you grow innovators. If you are willing to try one idea at a time, you grow politicians."
Basically if you want to force the entire organisation to dance to the exact same beat, you'll get politicians competing for which beat to dance to.
If you accept some disparity and divergence in goals, and have decentralised systems and processes in place to loosely realign efforts, you can have many people and not so much politics.
(Is that inefficient? Maybe, but no worse than the alternative. Besides, perfect alignment of effort implies that someone knows what the future will look like -- never mind that different people have different opinions on this. If looking for a small trinket on a parking lot, would you rather illuminate with floodlight or laser pointer?)
> Office politics is one somewhat cynical perspective
had director colleague say this in same words.
it cynical view, so we pretend it not happening and not rock boat.
well here we are now with layoffs. entire teams who produce no economic value. problem is too many people hired for empire building purposes.
it is easier to ignore real issues causing stagnating product. instead, bring in professional manager class. product owners, program managers, software engineering managers, senior mansgers. layers and layers of competing political incentive. building complexity for promotions and to increase head count.
Game they play is just say right platitudes like “obsessing with customers”, “all about customer journey”, “reduce friction for customer” and humble brag “my org have 120 people report”.
You're not wrong, but I think you're describing a separate issue too, which I also agree with. It's not politics, it's growing too big, too fast, and inventing jobs that were never needed before to meet some expectation of growth.
And, after all the layoffs this past year, it turns out that all the hyper-growth hires post-funding are just pawns to bolster a VC's investment.
Office politics in their pure form are rough, borderline toxic, like having someone threaten your promotion or your pay rise if you don't meet their sudden change of expectations.
There are certainly individuals with a problematic approach to team politics at Google (I have some stories). However I think this comment may put too much weight on the individuals without counting the overhead of ordinary, good faith conmunication. The more people you have working on something and trying to provide good ideas, identify and avert possible problems, and derive the right priorities the more stakeholders you have. The more stakeholders, the more process and communication overhead you will end up with. So even if you could screen out all the "political" and "unproductive" people you'd still be moving slowly in an organization with >100k employees.
Part of the problem is that actually... you don't want more people weighing in on the same priorities. If you hire someone either they should do something new, in which case they shouldn't really be weighing in on something existing as much as possible (certainly not have decision making power) or they should accelerate something existing, in which case they aren't a new stakeholder. If a team depends on your team that's 1 stakeholder. if that's 50 people, fine, but it's still 1 stakeholder. If 50 of them turn up to your "meeting with stakeholders" ask them which 1 is going to represent them. If 1 of them can't represent the other 50, ask them to leave and come back when they have a functioning structure, or fire 49 of htem, whichever is easiest.
In this scenario the team of 50 still needs to sort out what the one person is going to ask for at the stakeholder meeting and that probably requires additional communication within that team of 50, so even though it's contained within that team it contributed to the overall glaciosity of the company when it comes to getting things done.
at the bottom of the article they mentioned they hired 30k people to bring them up to nearly 190k last year, even if they perfectly fit in that's a lot of onboarding
That's actually low by Google standards, onboarding 16% of the company. There's been reports elsewhere that the average tenure at Google is 2.5 years, meaning a typical year sees onboarding 40% of the company.
This is why the theory that companies will inevitably grow until they own the world is false. Companies grow to the point where they are throttled by their own bureaucracy, then they fall to smaller, nimbler competitors.
It happened to Standard Oil, IBM, GE, RCA, Kodak, Sears, all of them.
The same failure happens to government agencies attempting central planned economies. Except that government agencies are never allowed to fail, and we all suffer.
Others have commented on IBM but as far as GE goes it's a shadow of its former self, having been destroyed by hubris and lack of focus, with the CEO responsible for its destruction having resigned and left the problems to his chosen successor.
Your insurance company, every bank transaction you make (ATM withdrawals , money transfers, check payments, etc), flight that you book, and countless other things run on IBM mainframes and and a huge catalog of IBM software. The world would not function without that company. Notice I did not call out any specific companies like a specific airline because it’s truly across the board. Mind blowing isn’t it?
These are not remotely analogous. PG&E solely provides gas and electricity to a subset of California residents. As for IBM?
“ two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers and eight out of the top 10 telcos, which are using mainframes, according to data provided by IBM. Most of those machines come from IBM.”
IBM still defines the backbones of information infrastructure, as already mentioned. GE is literally one of three major jet engine makers (alongside Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce) in the world, to say nothing of their more mundane businessess (eg: household appliances).
A company doesn't have to be a household name to be one of the foundations upon which the modern world depends on.
> IBM still defines the backbones of information infrastructure
Mainframes are just machines some businesses have found it difficult to migrate away from, though they would very much like to. IBM is not the only company who manufactures them, by the way.
> GE is literally one of three major jet engine makers
That part of the GE conglomerate does well because it's floated by the defense industry and commercial aviation. In other words, it depends on government money.
> to say nothing of their more mundane businesses
I internally chuckle a bit when I see "GE Lighting, a Savant company."
> eg: household appliances
GE hasn't made household appliances, as opposed to putting their brand on junk made in China or someplace, in 30 or 40 years. They were the innovator in this space roughly around the time America put a man on the moon.
Throughout the SO anti-trust trial, SO was losing market share steadily. It was being eaten away by smaller, nimbler competitors who had learned how to attack SO.
Maybe in the short period during the lawsuit, but everyone knowns that pretty much all oil companies in the US are descendants of Standard Oil (do your research if you don't believe me).
Google's monopoly over search, email, ads, Android and Youtube will be hard to beat by smaller and nimble competitors. It's far too entrenched and the moat it has built is too tough and impossibly expensive for newcomers to beat. And if newcomers do turn into a threat, they will be swiftly acquired and absorbed into the machine.
If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale.
Same for the likes of Nvidia.
The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.
Search is a disaster now, with the screen resembling a late 90’s teenager’s website with ads taking over everything visually. They’ve increased noise at the cost of signal and that itself will be the downfall. Now they are letting the ad cancer spread to YouTube with multiple unskippable ada before each video.
Ads will go to wherever they are most effective. Google to Facebook, then Tik Tok, etc.
Android - does anything about Android these days seem like it is a driving ambition for a company the scale of Google? And what does it contribute to their bottom line apart from ads via the platforms above that are eating themselves?
Keep in mind that a lot of issues with search are oblivious to the general public. I don’t think I have ever heard a complaint, outside of tech circles.
I dunno, the thing everyone tells me when I say I'm developing a search engine is "oh thank god, Google is so awful lately". Like I've gotten this reaction from my barber and random taxi drivers.
I do think if it's it's less of a conversation topic outside of tech it's because people outside of tech are less reliant on internet search.
If anything I think people have an exaggeratedly poor view of Google's performance. I think it works pretty good, it's just that some of the ways it fails are confusing and frustrating. There's so much magic it's not entirely obvious why you're getting the results you are getting.
Given that there is an increase in people adding “Reddit” to their search terms, it would seem people aren’t getting the information they are looking for directly from Google searches.
I also see a lot of older family members simply query Siri for 99% of what they are looking for.
How much noise can be introduced before the general public feels they aren’t getting meaningful results? It is just a matter of time, because Google shows no ability to restrain itself from selling out to advertisers.
Google is so entrenched they're the default search engine on 3 major browsers and it even became a verb in the English dictionary. Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?
I think most non-tech people don't even realize if they are or aren't getting meaningful results. They got conditioned that whatever is on the first results page of google is what's relevant for what they're looking for and if it's not there then it must not exist.
I really don't see any major market shift away from Google search any time soon. Maybe if Apple launched their own could change things up a bit.
This entrenchment is what makes a company like Google fat and lazy and take their users for granted. Behaviour that we are seeing growing year by year. If they stop paying Apple to be the default in Safari (or the government says they can’t, or Apple just decides to kick them in the shins the way they did to Facebook with anti-tracking tech), users would go to whatever else became default. I.e. there is no sacred loyalty earned that would cause anyone to take actions to switch back.
FWIW, literally every non-tech person who I’ve switched to DDG has been happier with the results when I’ve asked them what they thought.
Meh, if I had a dollar for every time someone said "this time Microsoft is gonna fail for sure", I'd be richer than Elon. People were singing Microsoft's funeral at every new Windows or product launch and assumed it would burry them for good. Turns out, despite many failures, Microsoft is still among us, still growing, buying new companies and IPs, branching in new areas and firing on all cylinders despite all the haters and doomers predicting otherwise for the past 3 decades. Maybe individual products will die, like Windows, but Microsoft as a company will survive, as it grew to be a lot more than the Windows/Office company.
My point is, people are generally bad at making accurate predictions into the future and competent CEOs are good at turning things around.
They had something like a near-death experience under Ballmer. Nadella brought them back from it. For a long time, people really did give them up for dead.
Microsoft produces critical infrastructure. Could it dwindle to become a sort of legacy supplier, keeping the lights on at thousands of industrial facilities?
As soon as the millions of niche use cases on the low end of the compute market get absorbed by ChromeOS or MacOS, which is not likely soon.
I understand the logic behind Google's position. What's the logic in Nvidia being similar?
Nvidia makes graphics chips and they are a large portion of the market at around two-thirds, but it's not like AMD doesn't exist. While Nvidia is doing very well, Intel looked to have an unassailable position and then they had some bad years and AMD caught up and Apple moved to their own chips.
I'm not saying that Nvidia isn't a great company, but Intel was completely destroying all its competition for a long time and then found itself in a bad place it needed to recover from. Couldn't Nvidia find itself in the exact situation that Intel was in? Sure, it wouldn't be due to fabs, but it could be due to something else.
I heard the same things about Microsoft in the 90s. MS still dominates the desktop OS, but newer platforms emerged that reduced the importance of the desktop.
Even now the importance of the surface web, which is Google's bailiwick, is diminishing.
Google gained their monopoly over search when they had only a couple hundred employees, competitors definitely do not need to be very big at all to be a threat to Google technologically. The government interventions that will matter will be stopping Google from bribing companies to use their software--no startup can possibly afford to pay Apple $15 billion per year just to be the default search engine on iOS.
I think these hypothetical "nimble" competitors don't exist, or would be overestimating their nimbleness with respect to Google. Google has spent decades becoming incredibly nimble in the way that counts in their industry: their foundation of software and systems is so refined that they can write and launch a product in no time flat. There are almost no technical hurdles standing in the way of anyone at that company. It's not some kind of abusive behavior by Google, it's just them being a tough competitor.
> their foundation of software and systems is so refined that they can write and launch a product in no time flat
They definitely have way more bureaucratic than even a few years ago. Part of it is regulations and the cost of complying with increasingly complex legal matters. Also, compared to 5 years ago they have almost twice the employee count. That means they’re even more herding to do.
Yes, the underlying tech may be good, but if they spend extra time in meetings and complying with “extra” requirements that smaller companies can avoid, then they’re at a disadvantage. Especially since they’ve shared and open sourced or sold a lot of tech that makes them special (k8, grpc, protos, spanner, etc).
Like I've been saying for a while, if large language models are the future then Google is sitting pretty because they have the absolutely state of the art LLMs and so many training and inference resources to win that race running away.
I actually see this as a feature rather than a bug. It's good that giant companies get too bloated for their own good and lose market share to new upcoming competitors. If this didn't happen, there would be no point in trying to innovate because you would never have a chance against the huge established companies with their money and influence. It's already pretty tough, but at least this natural tendency for bloat and dysfunction as they get older gives the newbies a fighting chance.
> The same failure happens to government agencies attempting central planned economies. Except that government agencies are never allowed to fail, and we all suffer.
As long as we are talking about democracies that is not true. In every election that particular planned economy can be replaced by another planed economy or privatization.
any kind of central planning creates a large bottleneck and creates a brittle system with a single point of potentially catastrophic failure. It's why dictatorships tend to be fragile compared to a more decentralized system.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but the United States happened to Standard Oil. And IBM is still a contender. To 50 company and one of the largest employers in the world.
The decline is especially meaningful for them because the field they used to compete in (tech) exploded over the last 15 years. It has long been turning into a body shop where you would not expect to see any advancement, surely not like the old days.
Amazon is a young company. It has been sputtering recently, ever since Bezos left. Take a look at the stock. I sold my Disney stock a few years ago because the company seemed to have lost its way.
In the case of Google their strive for world domination will fail at the very latest when an HR drone inevitably decides to ban the term "world" for some stupid reason.
By their own admission, monopolies are not efficient and they are actively hurting the consumer by their size.
When will we call the antitrust experiment from the 80s era “Chicago school of economics” an abject failure? Google should instead be several companies, each with a duty to consumers to compete with other companies in their respective businesses.
Even Google knows it, not that their leadership would ever admit it. Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.
A monopoly is basically a Marxist-Leninist command economy writ small which means it inevitably has all of the same dysfunctions.
In other words, Marx was right about how laissez-faire capitalism leads to communism (though of course he was wrong about this being inevitable or good). If monopolies are completely allowed to run amok, eventually you will have a single monopoly of everything that will be powerful enough to control the government and weaponize said government against its critics and anybody who tries to compete with it.
This is appealing to the people at the top of monopolies and those who think they can climb to the top for the same reason why many people prefer being the dictator of an impoverished country over being a commoner in a wealthy country. A significant portion of humanity cares more about relative status than absolute status and, to them, equal treatment feels like oppression.
That’s a direct result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That law will shape this century. It gave us the blessing of the internet as we know it and the curse of the media consolidation and assault on political speech that was accelerated by the elimination of restrictions on media ownership and the eventual Supreme Court decisions that gutted campaign finance rules.
Without that law, the alignment of companies like IBM and AT&T’s derivatives would have dominated big business and prevented the startup ecosystem from developing.
IBM reached its zenith the day before the Compaq PC came out. The Compaq meant the industry had left IBM behind, and IBM's attempt to catch up, the PS/2 and the PCjr, were failures. (The PCjr was a crippled PC, and the PS/2 was deliberately incompatible with all the PC hardware aftermarket.) After that, nobody was afraid of IBM anymore.
All the DECheads (like me) were sure that DEC would swoop in with the LSI-11 packaged as a PC and would wipe the floor in the PC business. Imagine our disappointment when the Rainbow PC came out, a crippled 8086 PC. That was the end of DEC's loyal customer base.
There is no need for continuity of monopolies for them to exist. The monopoly of today can split and be merged with other companies, with the same end result. After all, even monopolies need to reinvent themselves to better serve their owners.
You have a misunderstanding about Marxism. Marx already knew about the monopolistic nature of capitalism. This nature leads to concentration of power in the hands of a few owners of capital, while everybody else is stripped of ownership. This is not very different from the serfdom of middle ages. Marxism proposes to solve this by abolishing ownership, so no-one can control the capital, which becomes a shared resource. So the difference is not on the process (it will happen as he described) only about who controls it.
> Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.
Monopolies offer the most reward to those who would fashion themselves out to be robber barons. There are a lot of people that would take that title, more than there are opportunities. Why settle for millions when you can take billions? The pursuit of money brings out the sociopaths, who by definition do not care about externalities web seeking their fortunes.
Meh. I don't buy this guy's explanation ("it's because we're so non-hierarchical". There's plenty of hier. there and it's getting worse.)
I worked at Google for 10 years (2011-2021) and I don't remember a single time where it didn't feel slow and bureaucratic. Compared to the smaller companies and startups I worked at before. Maybe it's not slow compared to academia or other BigCorps where many other Googlers came from though.
Getting anything done always involved going through piles of "paperwork". Getting in the right MDB/Ganpati groups, finding the right persons to put on code reviews, juggling multiple code reviews at a time in order to make progress because your code reviews are just sitting in someone's review queue, "readability" reviews, applying to get readability, mandatory security reviews, design docs for the smallest features, going through rigorous launch processes, etc.
It all made sense in the context of the kinds of production environments Google has, but it was often applied intensely even for very small pieces of work.
On top of that, going through all that and having the paper trail for it was intimately tied to need to build paperwork for going through the perf & promo process, too. So it was entirely built into the culture there.
Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways.
(Oh, and over half the people you met came directly from academia anyways, and so of course they were used to this kind of crap, because that kind of "defend your work", publish-or-perish, and showboating culture is all over academia.)
Has Google gotten slower over time? Maybe? It was sure bloody slow during COVID WFH.
What did get worse overtime was shitty bureaucratic organizational politics. Or what I'd call "shipping the org chart." Customer impacting decisions clearly made because of the structure of various product areas and organizational empires. Especially in the world of things that were outside of Core/Search/Ads and were consumer facing. Terrible.
Working at Google is a good way to learn about infrastructure at scale and make a lot of money. That's about it. The best career at Google is SRE. I wouldn't recommend a SWE career there.
> Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways.
Didn’t RTFA, but imo a ton of what makes these companies slow and inefficient is the hardcore performance review culture. People focus on the wrong things, or gaming measured metrics, so they can focus on getting more money. If people weren’t absorbed in how their work matches some dumb matrix, they might actually focus on working on the right problems.
Being a group manager at one FAANG and having just gone through a 5-day massive org performance review, I concur. People who actually launched something (however messy it was) may get punished in favor of those who "influenced other orgs".
It is funny because 20 years ago Google was selling itself as the company of the future that would dominate everything in technology. Their "genius" founders were spending billions on new endeavors. In fact, other than the original search engine and associated browser, they only got youtube and other businesses as acquisition (invented by others) and android as a reaction to iOS. Everything else they tried has basically failed or being inexpressive.
I want to say that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google's office suite represented jumps in usability akin to a total revolution for users. The first two I know for sure were developed in house, and are of course still running strong.
To me this is similar to Apple coming in to established markets and dominating them in short order. Not something to be dismissed IMO.
Gmail was handing out email accounts with 1Gb of storage for free, when everyone else was only giving like 5mb. It was a no-brainer to switch back then.
Gmail initially offered very big email storage space comparing the others, and it was going up continuously until its storage area merged with Google Drive.
My belief is that ultimately monopolies are unstable.
Google's engine, which it has been specatacularly successful at, is obviously search. More specifically, it's search advertising. Google is a dominant player in display advertising (eg Google Ad Exchange, AdSense) but, at least when I worked there, these amounted to <10% of AdWords' revenue. They were a sideshow.
Chrome, Android, Maps and Youtube are all key parts of this engine. The latter three were acquisitions and that gets to the key point.
At some point a company becomes too large to innovate because no new business can compete, or will be allowed to compete, with the company's core business.
Google missed the social media boat for this very reason. Google+ came way too late. Google spent billions on this failed effort. The real mistake was not buying Twitter. I mean Google ultimately offered a rumored $6 billion for GroupOn at one point. They dodged a bullet on that one when GroupOn rejected the advance. Rumor also had it Google tried to buy Twitter in ~2010 when Twitter was seeking a $3 billion valuation.
Imagine if Google had slapped down $6 billion to buy Twitter. How much better off would they be?
There is a ton of process to do anything at Google. This matches my experience. And that's an issue but it's not the main issue.
But it's not only the monopolies that cause that, but also the combination with the need for infinite growth. A counter example would be craiglist, it has the monopoly, but the founder decided to stop "growing" 20 years ago.
Imagine what different world if Sergey had said: well pagerank is good enough, the money is good enough. At the very least we wouldnt have this crappy search engine with nlp and other crap mixed in that doesnt matter what search terms you use, always find the same sites.
I'm with you on everything except the Twitter part.
Google doesn't leave most acquisitions alone - YouTube is a notable exception, and I'm really curious how they've been able to more independently than most Google acquisitions. (Perhaps implicit trust placed in Susan Wojcicki?)
We have no reason to think that Twitter wouldn't have become the same kind of mess Google Plus did under Google's stewardship.
Youtube is an outlier but Google generally doesn't mess with success (IME) of substantial acquisitions. Youtube has their own culture (so much so that they call themselves "Youtubers" not "Googlers" and have (had?) their own campus). Android too were deliberately kept separate. Not that it was an acquisition but Chrome too had its own culture and codebase.
Buying things and killing them only seems to happen with smaller talent acquisitions (eg Sparrow, Urchin).
Also recently submitted & on the same topic of effective innovation driving & organizational wayfinding, "Andy Grove on dynamic dialectic"[1], which nicely laid out some of the core top-down vs bottom-up struggles. It pegged bottom-up as "chaotic but smart".
Grove talks about something mentioned very early on in Alex's webpage[2] (right under the top link, to a genericized/not-Google-specific Slime Mold presentation), leadership of the gardening style (although specifically Komoroske is talking about gardening platforms). Making sure those with potential & good ideas are enabled, might be how I'd describe it.
On a personal note to me, it's amazing how much we assume - have left individual isolated groups/teams connected upwards & sometimes side-ways as the organizational structure. Leaving only higher up levels of the org structure to mediate & suss out truth, not having workers also put in their bid for how other projects should execute or where priority should be is the practice. Im fascinated by the potential of trying a more connected & aware org, where we try to spend more effort internally communicating & sharing bids for where we think we ought be placing our efforts, where we ought be redirecting or reshaping efforts.
I'd question the implicit assumption that Google being slow is even a bad thing.
Google owns large chunks of the markets they are in, they are not a startup but at the very top. If you're in that position you pretty much want to maximally exploit what you have and simply make money, there's no comparative advantage to prioritize exploration.
You'd basically want to be more bureaucratic, not less, given that bureaucracy is nothing else but the rational allocation and organisation of resources. If you own everything, making things slightly work better will net you a lot of profit.
I think Facebook with its founder oriented corporate structure now has this exact problem as Zuckerberg went on his Metaverse extravaganza instead of actually making the company print more money which is what they're actually good at.
I sort of agree. I’m a googler, but these are very much just my opinions, and there’s some bias, but…
The bureaucracy I experience as an individual contributor and engineer kinda makes sense. It’s things like ensuring that systems will scale, ensuring that user data is treated in the right way, ensuring that access and security is done correctly, etc.
There is a lot to all of that. A lot of clicking buttons on internal tools to make sure that whole chains of systems understand everything to ensure oversight, and sometimes it’s a huge pain, especially coming from a startup world.
However there have been very few times when I’ve truly thought something wasn’t worth it at the scale we operate at, and responsibility we have (to users, regulation, etc).
It is all about people. When company grows, there is a choice needed to be made between holding the hiring standard and maximizing short term revenue, for public traded companies there is little chance of choosing the former. And it is always exponentially harder to get rid of bad hire than hiring bad people.
For google, at least before 2006, I did not know personally anybody does write bad code got in there. Until I start to see someone will always copy and paste code from internet and try to make some code barely works made to Google by just consistently practicing coding questions, the trend is quite obvious that none of stuff coming out there has a distinct quality differences compared to other technology companies.
Just because you want to be bottom-up doesn't mean you need to be dogmatic about it and can't have good leaders who take a stand when necessary.
The two aren't incompatible. You don't need to take away people's independence and agency to have good leaders. A good leader doesn't need to be authoritarian in order to lead. It's bad leaders who have to force people to follow them.
And just because you want to be agile and flexible doesn't mean you can't plan ahead. You need a little of both.
Is being slow necessarily a bad thing? Google is a large cash generating machine. Maybe making large changes quickly would be detrimental to the over all health of the company. As a counter example one might consider Musk's takeover of Twitter. Although it is still too soon to tell the effects of his "nimbleness" are not looking stellar at the moment.
Having worked in Google like companies they always seem lure talent by dangling tasty projects in front of them. But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between. The talent then starts complaining the company is not nimble enough etc and moves on. One might argue this is the natural order things. One of the reason SV has so many startups. Much of what startups do is likely not that appealing to large companies and far too risky - failing at a high rate.
>But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between.
Back when I was an industry analyst, I still remember a conversation I had with someone at IBM. I don't remember the context and don't quote me on the number but he said something to the effect of "If it doesn't have the potential to be at least a billion dollar business, we're not going to even try."
Basically every project consumes some slice of attention, time, and money up and down the line. You can mitigate this to some degree with decentralization but only up to a point.
At least IBM learnt that lesson. One of the most frustrating things at my previous company was the enthusiasm to throw 50+% of engineering time at projects that even in the most optimistic projections would not bring in even 1% of the profits brought in by the main product. Said main product was very much in need of more care and could have been improved by a lot more than 1% with a doubling of work hours spent on it.
Improving the main product or exiting products is seen as "maintenance". Industry doesn't give bonus/RSUs/promotions for maintenance. It is always gonna be a shiny new project, which gets promotions/bonus/RSUS. After getting bonus/promotions, every one (from the director level down to the bottom) will move laterally to another org. Rinse and repeat, you can see the pattern across FAANG.
That may even be OK. If it really is maintenance, maybe outsourcing it or giving it to entry-level employees may be a reasonable strategy as opposed to trying to keep more senior folks involved, if there are genuinely no interesting new angles involved.
Lots of time good ideas that are almost assuredly self evident still end up needing to be proved out. A ten line code change might take a design doc, a report justifying the impact the change will have, buy in from external teams etc.
There are pros and cons to this but I could also see other companies shipping a small change like the above toy example much much faster.
10 lines can be big or small at the size of Google. They have ~23 years of legacy, tens of billions in revenue, and a product that requires a massive technical infrastructure to operate. Over time that type of money makes a company risk averse as they can afford to be risk averse. Or to simply dump people time onto trivial activities to ensure that things go well.
Ideally they could invest in methods of blast radius protection to speed up the iteration cycle. As I recall, they still allowed teams to get a tiny slice of search traffic diverted to a custom experiment on a custom service without too much overhead.
It's interesting that I hear this story often, but then you look at Berkshire Hathaway, and huge pieces of the company now, were at the time just a piece of another company that they took over that they weren't really that interested in to begin with (ex: Real estate div)
Which demonstrates that a single company will eventually grow too large. Berkshire is successful because it owns wholly independent companies that don't need to engage in political infighting against each other for resources. We're seeing the wild success of that model with Embracer Group.
Examples of the bottom-up approach exist in very large organizations: pod shop hedge funds, investment banks, a lot of the conglomerate industrials are run the same way (although this model has become less popular after GE), some kinds of insurance.
It can and does work. But it requires getting over the instinct to control and monitor which, I think, Google will never surpass. I have been saying for years that Google is like a civil service with a small search company attached...the weirdest part is that Google has somehow maintained this fiction internally that their employees are all wonderful entrepreneurs and dynamic whilst they have grown into the tech equivalent of the DMV. Once that process begins, you will never be able to fire enough people to undo it.
Also, bottom-up doesn't work if you don't have good staff. Top-down is about turning average staff (i.e. most Googlers) into something passable. The example of GE is quite good, they empowered lots of their lower-level execs and that was a terrible idea because doing an MBA or GE's exec training does not suddenly turn you into someone who can do good deals.
You can't have good leaders who perform as such in a world where cooperate process always strives to flatten the deviation and make people interchangeable in the name of business continuity.
I’d like to hear more about in what specific ways is google bottom-up but the article is kinda shallow. Are the roadmap items that teams commit to driven by ICs, and if so does that contribute to becoming bloated and bureaucratic? How?
What does a top-down approach look like by comparison for a company as large as Google, and is that even feasible, given that top management are likely to be many layers away from code being written?
Or is it something like when a company gets past a certain size then it has switch management styles?
Was hoping the article would get closer to talking about these ideas but it’s lacking in substance imo.
It's DAU getting companies like this into over-leveraging, and it's a bubble we're still in. Good tech products are not necessarily capital/personnel intensive.
The "finish line" for Google is not the next Search, or real innovation, it is about longevity, maintaining an ecosystem, and "trading the news."
- Windows applications are risky, and inflexible -- Chrome.
- Laptops and Active Directory confusing ISD administrators -- Chromebook/Workspaces ecosystem.
- TikTok is getting a bad rap on the hill -- Shorts.
These are healthy and understandable business moves, but not everything these companies excrete is, good.
This is where buybacks should be terminated by our legislators. Not to punish these players for their rapid success, but to facilitate natural logistics for these hugely impactful, ubiquitouly embedded service providers.
On the less sane side of things:
- Google Wave beat Slack/Teams/Discord to market by 10 years.
- Google+ was 7-8 years late to the party.
- Stadia, obviously at-odds with AR/VR, and Deep ML.
- The only way to prevent "20% time" from hacking away at your own "terra firma" is to punish it, or make it impossible -- overhire and waste your employees time.
I'm avoiding the term "leverage", and the huge issuances it must have taken to make a Stadia appear, and then suddenly disappear, as well as "the bottom 6%" that appeared and disappeared from the roster over the course of 2022.
Economically speaking, where's the logistic growth peak? Is there growth for each company each business cycle? I don't know that, but in my opinion, the dividend-buyback axis is how FAANG companies got themselves in this "unconstrained, risk-free market participant" position in the first place.
In one sense, buying everyone in the world a graphics card is a cool idea. In another sense, it's extremely risky and probably wasteful. Similar to "Bird" but somehow less noble.
The slime mold only creeps if there's no environmental constraints.
Buybacks are equivalent in effect to dividends except tax implications and small details. You didn’t mention those but did mention buyback dividend axis so I’m taking it you think dividends should be outlawed as well. I’m not sure the stock market would function if that was the case.
Buybacks would be equivalent to dividends if there was 100% consensus that the company's market value was headed up, faster than any other asset -- such that all recipients started trying to buyout others.
We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.
Without commenting on the contents of the memo Komoroske was not some random employee, he was one of the most senior PMs at the company and now heads up strategy for Stripe.
I would argue the top down leadership has been blind or negligent to their Achilles heel. They've let growth in all areas but their single cash cow be needlessly duplicated, rudderless, left to wither on the vine.
To rephrase, I'm not sure that Google leadership has demonstrated the great insight to see what's going wrong and change it. I'd trust just about anyone else at the company to produce an equally plausible hypothesis. Especially if it rhymes with what we see from the outside.
We've discussed these same systemic issues at Google for over a decade now. Google is a dodo.
James Damore argued that the gender gap in the tech industry was not due to discrimination, but rather to biological differences between men and women. I don't think this equals to anti-diversity.
Except that it is. What passes as a cold, rational analysis of cold, scientific facts is rooted on traditionalist biases of the conservative mindsets of scientists in the XIXth century, when the basis of our social sciences were being established. Colonialism and sexism were seen as common-sense a prioris, and those positions permeate a lot of the reasonings and conclusions achieved in these sciences without being put to test (see e.g. myths about the primitive hunter men and gatherer women, or how money originates from barter, which are passed as truisms when studying these disciplines without questioning).
Colonialism and sexism are inherently anti-diversity; and people stating those opinions and usually unable to see how their position derivates from those premises.
Acknowledging the average differences between the sexes is neither colonialism nor sexism. It is a reasonable hypothesis that explains some disparities in individual choices that lead to disparities in aggregate outcome.
To riff on your rather bold assertion: precluding such a hypothesis from consideration is rooted in activist biases of the radical mindset of non-scientists in the 21st century.
Acknowledging the average differences between the sexes is neither colonialism nor sexism. But this on itself only tells you that there are some physical differences in size and muscular weight, and a couple months of the reproductive cycle where women will be physically impaired because of advanced pregnancy; it doesn't account for anything more.
Now, assuming that those minimum physical differences have an impact on social behaviour is sexist, because it fails to recognize the social reinforcement mechanisms that influence those decisions, from the structural separation of professional disciplines (i.e. the hard vs soft sciences divide, which dissipates when using multidisciplinary teams) to the social inertia of lower salaries of caretaking professions traditionally assigned to women.
BTW, assuming that these observations are produced from irrational anti-scientifism is the kind of blind spot of traditionalists that I was referring above.
People can believe both that the physical differences between sexes imply some social/psychological/cognitive differences, and that society has unfairly categorized people according to their sex.
One can be anti-sexist and believe in sex differences writ large at the same time.
It seems more sexist to assume that differences mean one sex is better or worse. Let's let the whole richness of reality come forward, and embrace it for what it is.
You’re positing that the physical differences between men and women are materially inconsequential, have no impact on social behavior, and somehow cease before impacting the brain — and you deign to accuse everyone else of “anti-scientifism”?
You’re welcome to the opinion, but denying obvious, observable, verifiable reality because it fails to fit your dogmatic model of the world is not science; co-opting science and denying biological reality in service of your activism is far closer to both colonialism and sexism than any of the views you’re arguing against.
You accuse me of an assertion I have not made, while ignoring the assertion I have made, and go on name-calling as your only ad-hominem argument. It's clear who's having an irrational behaviour here. Good night.
What about the psychometric differences? Measuring them is not as straight forward as measuring height or weight. But they can be measured nonetheless, and they have predictive power.
It can be argued that the cause of those differences are social, instead of biological. But I'll note that
1. mental is rooted in physical too (e.g. hormones)
2. the sex differences can be seen cross-culturally
The problem of course, is that these assertions about genetic determinism are repeatedly shown to be absolute bullshit.
To bring it back to the initial “Women don’t want to code, because they’re genetically repulsed by it” argument, whe know this isn’t true, because it changed in living memory.
>genetic determinism are repeatedly shown to be absolute bullshit
There is a lot of data that says genes determine various phenotypes: https://www.gwascentral.org/
Stories like these are a prime example of grossly irresponsible historical revisionism born out of either ignorance and/or unethical expedience, unilaterally redefining “key punch operator” to be what we now call a “programmer”.
Redefining what female programmers of the first computers as 'key punch operators' is revisionism.
Those women engineered novel software systems to fit the given specifications, fixed bugs, invented the term 'bug', designed usable programming languages, and even invented the methodology of software validation that took men to the moon. Simply put, women created the pragmatic discipline of software engineering before male mathematicians and physicists devoted much thought to it, as it was deemed an activity accessory to hardware design.
The profession was then taken over by men when it became prestigious, not in a small part because of all this. None of this cultural change was caused by genetic determinism.
He argued something more straightforward and a lot less grandiose claim - at least as I understand (and remember) - he argued that whatever the diversity team was doing is not data driven, and that they are ignoring a lot of data about the sources of the gap.
Agreed. This is just a random employee bemoaning that his large, bureaucratic employer is slow to move, and the opinion document he wrote got leaked for some reason. It doesn't "explain" why Google has become slow. Anyone can work out why Google is slow. Most likely because, like a lot of other large companies, Google has a lot of bureaucracy in the way of getting anything done, and a lots of people and lots of teams leads to mismatched incentives, which aren't necessarily aligned towards shipping product people want.
A month ago a commenter linked to[1] a similar rant from Waze’s ex-CEO bemoaning the same kinds of things. Process yuck! Bureaucracy bad! Too slow! and so on. I imagine it’s a common complaint from people who don’t thrive in a slow, steady, process oriented culture.
Google is widely known to be Slacker central. If you're a Googler/Xoogler who joined post 2018 everyone in the Bay will assume that you'll take a week on simple problems.
There are hotshots there, of course, but the reputation of their engineering team is that they prioritize a 10 to 3 workday, meetings, and a diffstat of 0 most days.
Oh, the many times I've been told "A large ship turns slow". I have no idea what's going on with Google but the sickness is familiar.
I am just trying to get a small thing done, not turn the whole damn ship yet that I am faced with the same bureaucracy and inefficiency. But I have had success overcoming that, at the cost of not being very popular.
But the real solution is managerial. It is remarkably simple: To get anything done, require the least possible number of people to be part of that thing being done.
But for managers, they love to throw people and money at problems.
But really, it is upper management that needs to basically micro-manage everyone under them specifically when it comes to headcount.
I fully expect the CEO of alphabet asking random project managers to justify headcount of not just direct reports but who is being involved in their projects.
If you need 2 devs to code, one to qa/test. That's it. You don't get anyone else. Not for redundancy, not for anything else. You don't involve legal or marketing, change management,etc... because that means rules and procedures and politics and meetings and planning.
The problem is very old: "If all you have is a hammer,everything is a nail". For mid and low level managers, all they have is "get more people" when they want things done. And the arrogance of being a bigcorp compounds this because "we are $bigcorp, we have a team for this and a well tested process for that,such and such team can help with".
You cannot compensate for loss of agility by claiming reduction in risk and liability. You should not let lawyers, marketing and middle management choke your company to death. It's up to top brass to piss off everyone in their immediate surrounding so the bottom line is good and the company is healthy. Ultimately, shareholders need to hold management accountable for wasting their money.
You are making an explicit dichotomy / choice very clearly and eloquently and I agree with most of what you said.
Where not everybody may agree is which side they prefer.
This is an opinion, not a fact : "If you need 2 devs to code, one to qa/test. That's it. You don't get anyone else. Not for redundancy, not for anything else. You don't involve legal or marketing, change management,etc... because that means rules and procedures and politics and meetings and planning."
I.e. For some companies / stakeholders / shareholders / client, risk aversion and predictability absolutely positively is preferred at cost of some agility. It's a willing overhead not necessarily perceived as waste. people driving without insurance may laugh at the suckers who are paying for something they'll probably never use, but risk appetite differs. We don't have to all agree, it's a wonderful diverse world out there, but I will always respect an argument better if it is self-aware of its assumptions and biases.
My point was to shift the burden of bureaucracy to management instead of allowing them to use bureaucracy as a tool. If you think you need a person for liability/insurance reasons, well as a low or mid-level manager, you don't get that authority anymore in my proposal. You have to jump through pro-agility bureaucracy and ultimately justify every small decision like this to upper management and shareholders. So, if like you said the loss of agility is intentional, you make sure every single decision like that goes through almost unbearable scrutiny because it does add up. Your perspective as low/mid tier manager almost never looks at the overall loss of agility or risk appettite of the company. But C-suite gets paid to have that perspective.
Naturally, incentives have it so that this is inverted. Low and
Mid tier management have too much discretion with their limited perspective where they implement bureaucracy that burdens their workers instead of themsleves. Often, the risk aversion is for individuals and teams and when that becomes a culture then every team and manager implements needless inefficiency that brings the whole system to a halt when you scale up. That's why upper management at big companies, including google, just buys and integrates new companies to the most part. That's easier for them than working through the inefficiency of their own org.
The real trick isn’t the staffing, it is the boundary of the systems you need to change. To improve a process in a large system, you almost have to assume none of the other systems you touch have to change anything. Compensate for the large org and large number of critical systems with technical excellence and trickery. Your image upgrade project can’t get any QA resources to sign off on any code changes in the legacy C++ stack? Fix the bug with LD_PRELOAD overrides in your image upgrade program. Take the time to reason very thoroughly about the bug, but go for it. Obviously, use whatever automated validation you have and have a cautious roll out, but whatever you do, don’t be suckered into waiting for a team you don’t absolutely control to do something.
Unpopular opinion: in engineering, control processes are often confused as "bureaucracy". Regulations and adhering to standards is a GOOD thing and worth the time because it reduces risk (and hazards) and failures.
the problem is usually that the process becomes a monolith, loses its efficiency.
the solution is to have more than one way to do something so these processes can keep each other in check. (eg. majority of devs start using process B instead of A then there is a clear signal that A is inefficient, so owners of A are incentivized to make A better...)
I feel that, in general, as an organization grows it is forced to become more bureaucratic as the ability to coordinate a large group of disorganized people grows beyond manageability. Eventually the overly bureaucratic organization grinds to a halt because the different bureaus become too insular, compete for budget, and generally become unaware of how other departments work. Essentially, a company cannot grow too large and still be competitive unless the company purchases politicians for advantage.
Just like the thesis of the slime mold talk, the talk itself is a result of the slime mold and doesn't particularly represent any company-authoritative take on the situation.
Maybe I am stupid, but I cannot make heads or tails of what you're trying to say. I assume it is along the lines of "this document isn't a good representation" but you used so much coded language and obscure references I'm not sure.
Slime molds are a type of organism that can expand quickly as each entity within the mold is independent. As a result, the mold as a whole can resist any one actor being removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold
The analogy used by the talk is that a slime mold is the polar opposite of a top-down control hierarchy although I haven't read the whole talk (yet)
Anyway, the commenter is saying that Google (like a lot of tech companies) is comparable to a slime mold in that it's greatly distributed causing it to be closer to "messy and uncontrollable".
In the same breath however, the author of the document is part of said mold acting in their own capacity. By definition, they can't speak for the entire organisation (or necessarily even observe it) because well, it's a slime mold.
they're saying that "slime mold" culture, where independence and initiative are rewarded, it's possible for one employee to write a document like this. The employee can examine and criticize the culture because they have a high degree of independence. The "slime mold" culture is capable of being more introspective than a more "top down" culture can be.
I think they're also saying that the document is written from the POV of a single employee, and isn't the result of a full study/survey of the whole company
I want to congratulate you for being the first googler i've seen on HN to not write "opinions are my own" at the start of every, single, top-level comment
Don't be a jerk -- Googlers posting in forums like that do this for good reason. All Googlers take mandatory training and among those mandatory training courses are all sorts of notes on how not say things in public which could be construed as reflecting on the company. Making it clear "opinions are my own" is CYA, and a completely reasonable one for people who want to keep their job.
(Ref: Used to work at Google. No longer have to cover my ass.)
I'd venture to guess that the OP knows all this (the practice is pretty much self-explanatory) and nevertheless finds the practice risible. It is funny to watch.
Nobody is saying it, but I will: of course that Google being a gigantic company doesn't help, but what imo really seals the deal in terms of them not being innovative enough is the fact that most of the people now working there are in for the money and money alone.
In the past we've had pretty big companies/organisations that used to be quite innovative, I'm thinking of Xerox, HP, Bell, even Intel at some point, to say nothing of the various departments attached to the US industrial-military complex (starting with NASA), but then the people innovating back then hadn't joined those companies/organisations mostly for the money and money alone.
Get rid of the people who have joined Alphabet only to get the 500-600k yearly comp and you could get, at some point, some innovation in return.
Bureaucracy is certainly not new, as WalterBright and others have observed.
When Xerox was first trying to commercialize PARC inventions, it was estimated that IBM's bureaucracy was so bad that it would take them nine months to ship an empty box.
Honestly sounds like the whole situation could be simplified as, "There's no more passion at Google because there is no real environment for real passionate leaders that naturally drive the company"
Any company that grows to be Google size is going to be slow and bureaucratic. It can mitigate it a bit, but just by the nature of it, it just carry too much momentum and complexity…
Had anyone noticed that the big bad time-sucking "bureaucracy" is always ill-defined? Whether it's Google, GE, or whoever, these co's never discuss the ACTUAL root causes of insufficient productivity.
Leaning up to go faster is code for: our shareholders are complaining, so 1. Corners will be cut or 2. Layoffs of the "slow and weak" are imminent.
It's never about problem solving. Unless your problem is that you need more money right now.
For an industry so enamored with scale and network effects, we sometimes fail to recognize how these work against us organizationally. Or maybe we don't, and the boards/execs just prefer a more controllable organization even at the expense of rigidness and efficiency?
off-topic: How terrible is that site's notification to open the article in the mobile app. The mobile site experience is really getting more intimidating every day. they can't make the same warning text for the desktop because they're sure they'll get a reaction. however, when they do this on mobile, people will leave the site without reading the article.
The source document/presentation ("Coordination Headwinds") and idea are many years old, and from what I recall were not aimed to be critical of the company and its organization, rather to give its employee readers a feeling of solace and understanding for why getting seemingly small things done can feel overly hard and slow… a less humorous, and less SWE-specific version of "Broccoliman" if you will.
Refer to the red panda that merely wants to serve 5TB of data.
I’ll try to continue using the organism-metaphor in my commentary.
While the “slime mold” story provides a convenient and charitable explanation of Google's bureaucracy and dysfunctions, another explanation is:
- As an organism, Google's executive decision-making functions are severely impaired by lack of accurate information, dysfunction of its middle-management “organs” or tiers, and impedance mismatches arising from genetic encodings or mental models associated with the slime-mold idea.
- Despite being on a mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google is far less successful at doing this with its own information. These characteristics are not unique to Google, but some of Google’s cultural history makes this a particularly challenging problem.
It may be convenient to think of Google as a slime-mold organism, and in an individual contributor’s day-to-day engineering activities it may very well be, but as a corporation it is not.
The vast majority of Google’s product areas or business units, are not self-sustaining entities and all rely and draw upon resources, namely headcount, that unavoidably go through a centralized prioritization and allocation process. Ruth (Google CFO) and Sundar’s (Google CEO) jobs are quite difficult if you consider that: (1) they don’t have optimal or very accurate internal information, (2) they are constrained by what is provided to them and what people will actually do, (3) tributary sources of information generally have little understanding of broader processes, aside from what they expect to receive, and also have many incentives to fashion information in a manner that maximizes their own benefit – based on what they assume or understand.
Avery Pennarun (apenwarr@) touched on some of the above internally in a document called “View from Above” (go/vfa) and post-Google, on similar dynamics in a public blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926
From my own experience at Google, where I served in engineering leadership roles and joined as an experienced industry hire, is that over time Google's culture – Namely its performance rating and promotion process, over-weight certain accomplishments and neglect critical characteristics and understandings needed from employees as they move into upper echelons of leveling (middle-management and higher), most importantly in the L6/L7 (manager, sr manager) and L8 (director) levels.
Many Googlers in those ranks continued to operate based on the understandings they held as project / technical leads (“TLs”), typically a Level 5 role, and continued to be promoted based on those understandings and/or increased headcount below them. Meanwhile, these roles, and the corporate organism’s need from these roles, are fundamentally from being a TL or project lead.
Compounding this problem is the fact that for most Googlers in these roles, scarcity of resources was rarely a problem, and getting headcount was easy. Most managers know how to ask for headcount but have no idea how to help support the conditions for its creation.
To be less wishy-washy, many people were promoted for continuing to do their jobs as they understood them, and their expanding team size to some degree, rather than understanding the full scope and understanding of the new level or role they were stepping into. And to some degree, it may not have been their fault as the persons and examples before them did the exact same thing.
Some might say this is the Peter Principle in practice, but at Google-scale.
Anyways… to wrap this up, I regularly encourage people to think about and learn to understand their boss’ boss’ problems, and ensure they are able to evaluate and represent their work in relation to those problems. Without establishing that context, your work may be completely misaligned or difficult to value when viewed from above.
> many people were promoted for continuing to do their jobs as they understood them
While this link below isn't the best take on this, it does get concrete about the kind of thing you're saying. Each level of management is not doing the prior level better. Each level is doing management quite differently:
OKR really should be used as the North Star and constellations. It usually isn't, though, because people write either task completion percentages or KPIs instead of outcome-supporting qualitative measures that can be undershot or overshot based on priorities and effort allocation (much like SLAs, bad, vs. SLOs, good).
Promotions seldom relate with OKRs on tech ladders, and more specifically for SWEs it is rarely the case, as the promotions are judged by committees who evaluate for difficulty and skill by ladder standards, not business objectives.
Launches are catalysts but insufficient for promotion.
Do you have personal experience or are you just playing to a stereotype.
I don’t have experience with either organization but have worked for a big tech company and a big finance org and the finance org was much less bureaucratic and got more done.
I have worked at both. Literally nothing happened the entire time I was in my group at Goldman, because everyone spent 100% of their time on compliance and friction.
That's because you didn't work in a revenue-producing line.
Goldman has people in their mid-20s managing books of business larger than most listed companies and responsible for hundreds of millions in revenue per year. That isn't possible with a bureaucracy (this is how you get the huge insider trading cases, like I know people who worked there, were there for a few years and could not imagine the amount of business they were doing as relatively junior employees...it is a crazy system but seems to work, back in the early 90s they would give prop books worth hundreds of millions to grads a few months out of college...again, it was genuinely mad but it worked).
The compliance framework in the financial organization I worked at was much lower friction than at the tech company. It felt like something they took seriously so integrated it as a first class requirement. As opposed to at the tech org where they seemed to treat it like a chore they had to check off a list.
I suspect that this is something that is organization dependent not a uniform trend in either direction.
Google is slow and institutional because they can afford to be.
At some point the search/ads people are so good, and they are insanely good, that there isn’t much pressure for anyone else to show PnL.
These men and women are gods and goddesses in their fields, and if their worst fault is funding some iffy shit and giving us Blink and Android I can live with it.
Their sideline vertical video business is highly competitive with TikTok and Reels and all they had to do was shit they knew already.
