> The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI.
This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).
I don't think it's contradictory. There was an amazing ROI for a long time, so I think it was a very successful strategy early on. It's just clear that as the founders retired and more MBAs got a hold of upper management positions the first thing that happened was that the employee psychological safety was slowly eroded. Did you know that Pichai started his career at Mckinsey? That place is all about making safe choices that erode a companies future to improve short term profits.
I don’t think the working world is at any risk of going too extreme at valuing employees. It is the exception which is why we’re even talking about it.
Their promotion process probably has more to do with product fragmentation as anything.
Dart is an interpreted language created as a replacement for JavaScript, Go is a compiled language created as a replacement for C/C++. Those can hardly converge.
This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).