His explanation for Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI: "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning."
What a tremendous lack of self-awareness. Let's put aside all the leadership issues, all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home.
(Not saying there aren't folks at Google who are just cruising, etc... but that's a fraction of the problem compared to the leadership issues)
Considering that in Meta I heard (from friends) it is/was easier to work remotely and even easier to get into (they are less leetcode oriented) I would expect the problem with Google loosing is somewhere else. Google was loosing on many fronts for a while:
- dart lost to typescript on web
- angular lost to react
- tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper [0]
- IMHO flutter will loose with react-native or kotlin compose multiplatform - compare github insights for details
Meta on the other hand kickstarted open source Llama community. In this situation it's hard to bet on Gemmini or Gemma as 3rd party developer considering google projects kill records. The only project they were really to bet on and invest for the long run without getting tired early on was Chrome and Android.
i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.
It's the same reason why google products die when they don't reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently).
Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else - so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.
I'd go further and bet that those "impact" metrics likely came from a spreadsheet pusher like Schmidt.
Schmidt still takes the gold medal in my estimate for destroying a company he ran by not understanding how the business actually works (as CEO of Novell he decided to screw their channel partners not understanding that the channel relationships were the company's entire moat against Microsoft).
Channel relationships were a boat anchor around Novell's neck. The channel helped Novell grow rapidly in the early days then building a file server and installing an office network took some real technical skill. But then Microsoft released Windows NT and a new generation of hardware came out which allowed any idiot to set up a LAN. Microsoft beat Novell in part by distributing their server software more widely instead of forcing customers to go through channel partners. Of course, it also didn't help that Novell failed to innovate on their products and tried to coast on past success.
Network installers are still used to this day on big network buildouts, simply because office IT departments aren't staffed for that kind of work regardless of how easy the software is.
But it's not like Schmidt had any strategy to bypass the network installers. He just decided to screw them hard so he could make a quarter look good, which lead inevitably to them deciding not to be Novell's low-paid salesforce anymore, which lead rapidly to the vastly premature collapse of the business.
I felt like I could rationalize a lot of Google decisions to kill products, such as Inbox or Reader, but retiring Google Domains really shook my confidence in GCP.
Absolutely staggering. Google Domains complemented GCP perfectly and would make thanks to Cloud DNS a stellar seamless end-to-end integration. I'm in disbelief as to why they removed this crucial feature while at the same time going full in with GCP.
I could understand deprecating Google Domains for B2C, but for B2B?! What went through their heads?
It is actually insane that they did this. I literally stopped recommending people use GCP over this - you can't get started easily because you have to use another platform for the domain. Why even use GCP at all?
It was also incredibly sticky with GSuite. Setting up security and everything was a breeze -- DMARC email records, SMTP, etc all magic -- I truly couldn't believe when this was announced. It was incredibly sad and I still feel upset about it a year later.
Porkbun is my go to registrar now. And I switched my email to Migadu.
Google Cloud Domains is still a thing, and you can purchase domains from the console still. The registrar changed to square space, but it didn't really impact Google Cloud's usage.
Even though I was a Google fanboy, this was a nail in the head. Had a .dev domain which expired and squarespace asked like 6 times more to let me buy it back. Waited till the grace period was over and bought it back for the original price from NameCheap.
> I believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.
Meta's performance reviews are also heavily weighted for measurable impact.
I think that the reason why it's beating Alphabet in so many fronts is team culture. Most new product teams are small and have a reasonably flat hierarchy. It's easy to make impact that's both effective and measurable, and the amount of engineering time working in "useless work" is minimised.
Their search isn't even so great any more. They tend to forcefully switch the user input to some generic terms. More than often duckduckgo produces better results for me. I started feeling comfortable using duckduckgo instead of google.
You are just ignorant, Google search is 57% of their total revenue, remaining advertisement is just 19%, people really overestimate how much Google ad network is worth when its just 9.2% of their revenue and YouTube is just 10%. In fact if you remove search Google makes more money from selling subscriptions and services than they do from ads, so they would no longer be an ad company!
Facebook makes much more money than 19% of Google.
Edit: And I wonder why I got downvoted for being right, many here just blindly believe that Google gets their money from ads on third party sites when most of it comes from search.
But I guess your second post is right, it isn't close, Facebook would be much bigger.
> Google ad manager is the cornerstone of pretty much all internet advertising.
That money is a part of Googles revenue, so there isn't as much there as you might think. Maybe you mean there is quantity there but advertisers doesn't pay as much for it as they would for Facebook or Google search ads, then yeah that is possible, but normally in a market segment you count big players by revenue and not numbers sold.
Fuchsia is part of the problem not the solution. It was the retirement home to keep a bunch of smart people busy who didn't have any rush to ship anything real for as long as possible. Architecture astronaut porn to the max.
On the other hand there's zero desire at Google to try and build the best phone. They have conceded that to Apple a long time ago.
No desire to be number one in Cloud. They are fighting for number 3 spot.
They are the Xerox of AI with a full stack solution. If they had the drive they would be HYPING THE SHIT out of TPU and making it the best solution to run all the real workloads people have.
Guess what. On average a Googler even still today with low bar to entry is probably 10 IQ points higher than average Amazon or Microsoft or Apple. But no; no drive.
I hadn't heard the term "architecture astronaut porn" before. Seems highly accurate in this context and wondered if you could point me to other resources on this term?
I know nothing about what makes an industry succeed or fail, and also nothing about web tech, but working in the field I can comment on:
> tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper
Well, TensorFlow doesn't "look like currently losing", it has already lost since a long time. I haven't seen a decent paper release code in TensorFlow in years, and all the references I see to TF online are job posts from "older" companies (to the point that, if you are looking for a job in data science, seeing TF mentioned in the job post is kind of a red flag of a place you don't want to be).
That said, I am quite certain that this has only a small impact on why Google is losing terrain, and even on why it is behind in AI (which is also debatable: narrative aside, Gemini is not that much lacking behind competitors). Certainly if TensorFlow + TPUs turned out to be better than PyTorch + GPUs they would have had a lead to start from, but if that was so important, Meta or NVIDIA would have created the first LLM, not OpenAI.
Simply, sometimes stuff happens, you can't predict it all.
> Considering that in Meta I heard (from friends) it is/was easier to work remotely and even easier to get into (they are less leetcode oriented)
This is a weird take. It might pertain to 2020 during Covid when Meta encouraged remote working, but it's not like that anymore. Interviews were always leetcode focused so nothing changed there.
Meta is an interesting comparison because the performance culture has historically been way tougher than Google (sans Covid years). It's quite a shock for a lot of Xooglers who join. One Xoogler at Meta who told me they only used to work 4-6 hours a day at Google. That is basically impossible in Meta - you have to constantly prove your value and the perf bar is high.
I think Google is changing now though and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them adopt Meta/Amazon style perf cultures in the future.
Source: I work at Meta, and have close friends at Google.
Compared to at least as bad, or even worse ‘toll’, for dramatically less pay in literally every other industry and 95% of every other companies in this one? Bwaha.
Have you ever worked in another industry? Retail? Healthcare? Trades? Public safety?
Healthcare? Public safety? Most construction work?
All of them have the same thing going on. Hell, healthcare has even formalized it in some cases into 24+ hr shifts for residents.
In all these industries, there are areas where it isn’t a thing, and areas where it is absolutely a thing. But they do (often) get paid overtime. Not residents though.
Meta is less leetcode oriented? I'm shocked to read this. Meta is the poster child for leetcode style interviews. Meta requires you to solve 2 leetcode style questions in 35 mins (out of 45 mins - first 5 mins for initial pleasantries, last 5 mins for asking questions). For each question, you're required to (based on the signals they look for) ask clarifying questions, present a solution to the interviewer, get buy-in, code, verify with test cases - all this in 17.5 mins/question. Go figure! :-)
Tensorflow losing has nothing to do with Google getting bored -- it's vice versa.
Tensorflow is a symbolic framework, which is less intuitive to work with for most people than the Pytorch. Not to mention the errors Tensorflow generates are more annoying to debug (again more an issue with the fact that it's symbolic than any lack of effort on part of Google)
Google tried to fix it by introducing an eager mode in Tensorflow but by then it was too late.
> Google tried to fix it by introducing an eager mode in Tensorflow but by then it was too late.
And the fix was "new major version with a fundamentally different programming paradigm"
But it turns out when your users are irritated with your product, and you tell them to change to a fundamentally different programming paradigm, the new programming paradigm they change to might not be yours.
Intuitive has nothing to do with it. Developers will tend to prefer things that make their lives easier. Debuggability is a huge part of that. Tf 1.0 having a static execution graph was a major pain. No wonder people switched to PyTorch and didn’t look back.
All of those examples (except maybe tensorflow, I don't know enough to say for sure) are interesting because they highlight a more "googly" approach to the problems.
Typescript is a superset of javascript, Dart isn't (though it transpiles).
Flutter implements its own widgets, react native controls native widgets.
Dart, angular don't matter in business. They are just "passionate" projects. Google's culture of having multiple teams trying to build and scrape and never commit to a product is a big problem. They aren't slow to adopt to trends but they always seem to "overthink" about products. So when they lose the edge they close the door on the product. In the case of Google Meet, Good Lord, they renamed at least six times before they finally settled.
I recently did interviews with Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia... Meta leetcoded the ** out of me. They were insisting on 3 days in office. Definitely the hardest interviews out of the bunch. Never got around to answering Netflix recruiter to get the tradition "N" in FAANG out of the way, I took the first offer I got, I was so tired of interviewing.
>dart lost to typescript on web
>angular lost to react
>tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper
Google seems to have a deep-seated distrust for programming language theory, as well as a deep-seated distrust for its users. This combination produces awkward software and APIs that ignore modern PLT and take a "Google knows best" approach.
As someone who's been working with them a lot at the moment I'm going to say that the problems that google has are not anything to do with tensorflow or programming language theory and everything to do with the fact that the place is absolutely jam-packed with MBAs and other ex-McKinsey-type professional meeting attendees. This is really apparent if you are reasonably senior in an enterprise and deal with google as a vendor.
Every meeting I attend with them has one or two engineers[1] struggling to breathe because there are at least 6 or 7 sales people, relationship managers or other non-doing non-technical middle-management spreadsheet jockeys stealing all the oxygen in the room.[2]
I can only imagine how terrible it is to work there given that these folks have all the power internally. I've genuinely never dealt with an organization that seems this bad.
[1] who are usually pretty good.
[2] It's an internal joke at my enterprise how every meeting another new person from google shows up introduces themselves as head of some other microscopic facet of the corporate relationship.
As someone two years into working at Google this resonates hard and has absolutely been my experience as an engineer there too. It's certainly not the culture I was expecting for sure.
Longer-time Googler here. We went blindingly fast from "A few engineers decide to use the most powerful computing cluster in the world to make a meme generator because it would be a cool project" to "Let's have a sync meeting with 15 people, including five managers, to discuss buying a $20,000 test instrument, which will need to be approved by four directors, three of whom are OOO for the next two months."
Something changed recently though because yes there are those MBA types but the engineer in the room used to be not a sales type person. Now (earlier this year, just before IO), even the engineers are becoming more like salespeople in my experience. My guess is there is pressure for everyone to make more money somehow?
this is the end result of all publicly traded companies. eventually you'll hit Sears-level of selling where the CEO just straight up puts departments in conflict with each other until the whole thing just falls apart.
If I had to guess you're probably an Enterprise customer of Google cloud? I'm not sure that's a representative take.. of course there's going to be a lot of sales and relationship manager types because you're a customer of their Enterprise offering.. internally Google's completely different
I think the reporting of his quote overemphasizes on "work from home" piece of his sentence as that fits right into a continuous obsession/bike sheds.
Whether "work from home" is the cause or not, I think he is absolutely right on the latter part of his sentence, that contrary to startups, almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win. If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. "Work" from home is just one way that nobody-cares attitude is manifesting itself. [BTW, that attitude is by no means exclusive to ICs; definitely leadership has it as well, perhaps more so.]
> almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win
Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.
If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.
If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview.
So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.
I think you would have to target the scope even smalller to particular areas of finance probably quant or trading within a hedge fund. The majority of jobs at a large bank are mostly fixed salary with limited bonus. There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate. For example processing transactions is essential for a bank but typically doesn't pay large bonuses in that area.
Large banks can pay very well for the right software role, but there's so much more nepotism than big tech that it's pretty much impossible to land these unless you have a godfather in the industry AND you are a recognized prodigy.
The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.
the law in the UK is that material risk takers bonus pay over a certain amount (couple of hundred thousand) is deferred over 3-5 years and can be clawed back
I see quite a few SWE jobs here in Singapore in finance, mostly realtime C++ order management. If the advertised salaries are real, they're very well-paid (300-700k USD, plus bonus).
This is oversimplifying too much IMO. Obviously the potential reward working at startups is much higher than megacorps, and you can very safely say that people working at startups have a higher risk appetite. However, plenty of people work 9h-12h a day (say, at Meta) in wish to get promoted at rocket-speed and play to "win" the higher TC at megacorps, and it happens often enough that very-driven people do join megacorps.
A lot of people at a megacorp play to win, they've just realized that the company's value is so much higher than the value they could add to it, that for them, winning means capturing part of the company's value for themselves. In a sense the company becomes the market and their friends become the company.
>>but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.
System was designed by the people, more specifically people with ability to make decisions a.k.a management
There might not have been one person making all the wrong decisions. But more like lots of small wrong decisions, but it doesn't reduce the fact that it is management that is always responsible for the state of affairs.
> Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.
I agree that many want the stable and low hours career but how many people at these big companies are getting that? I mostly see it as a FOB farm and trying to overwork the overwhelming majority of workers at these companies. For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.
> If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.
I don’t really see startups rewarding that much either. Maybe it’s more rewarding if you’re a founder. I’m speaking as someone who has been an early engineer at startups and gone public with them. I still don’t see them as that rewarding unless you’re a founder.
Also, incentives aren’t the same. You might make a great thing but unless you’re near the top - you’re probably not going to get properly rewarded regardless of how good your ideas and whatnot are. People at the top will steal credit because that’s what they do. (“Look at how good I am at hiring/managing/inspiring/etc.”)
> For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.
This is absolutely right. For every senior person in a glamorous role at a FAANG making $400k/yr, there are probably five less senior, less glamorous people making $150k/yr, grinding away trying to justify a promotion to the next level. The people posting to HN that their brother's girlfriend's nephew's roommate makes $400k think that's every FAANG developer.
To be more balanced on this, I don't think that many are making <=$150k/yr if they're in NYC/Seattle/SF and are in engineering. I think many are making $300-400k/yr but have a high workload.
Levels gives a clear direction that if you work at big tech as an engineer, you'll usually make decent to good income. Whether it's worth the WLB/PIPing/misery is what you have to figure out.
There's a reason a ton of the people at FAANG are all on H1B. It's not a lack of domestic talent - it's a lack of Americans willing to be worked that hard and go through insane hoops to get said jobs. (justifiably so btw) I think a large reason why most of the crowd at FAANG is way more autistic than average is because autists can put up with such insane working conditions/hoops. Either cause they enjoy it or because they just have something about them that allows them to ignore it. I'm not even going to get in on how so many people in SV are also on various stimulants.
Insane working conditions? At least at Google I'd say you have better working conditions than the sales staff at Anthropologie. They are not mining coal over there. Laptop class is indeed spoiled.
If you're lumping together all the big corporations you're missing my point. Sure size is a parameter but not precisely what I meant to communicate, which is more true about Google than Tesla for example.
That said, it is up to the individual to work at Google or not, so it's not like they are a self-selecting population of maximally driven people. At least not the recently-joined folks.
By and large, Google is branded as the company people choose to go and coast maximally recently.
>If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly.
I don't agree, but there are challenges at Google that don't exist in other large companies.
Google's monorepo along with the 'bottom up' driven culture means that to enact any non trivial change, you need many sign-offs, which means an iron clad design doc, and either you have to be brave enough to make huge disparate changes across other teams codebasse, OR to wait multiple quarters to have respective teams execute.
Sometimes this is awesome, and it means you can do really complex things over the course of a year.
Often, it just means experimenting with non trivial changes takes 3x longer than it would at say Amazon or more silo'd companies.
> almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win
No one with such a drive would stay in, or even go to Google, neither any GAFAM-like corp. Those have been the establishment for 10+ years now.
A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely.
The bigger the corp, the slower, duller and more rigid it becomes _unless_ someone at the CxO level actively fights against it in a opinionated manner (which still doesn't often register well with boards and major shareholders).
It may be sad, it's quasi a law of physics for corporations. If you have that kind of fire in you, go first hunt into to the woods, don't go to the factories.
> A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely.
I am not so sure it's that cut and dry. Even among the FANG, the desire to play to win is vastly different. I'd say Apple still has that mojo. Facebook also more than Google although that ship went south post-2018, I'd say.
Tesla comparatively underpaid and overworked people but I think they play to win.
SpaceX even more so. Folks who work hard there are excited to do so because they feel their work matters.
There are non-monetary structural features of large corporations that make them different on that metric. I think the desire at the top to want to win in the first place is critical, plus the autonomy at the lower level to ship cool ideas without much roadblock or dilution of contribution among way too many people.
How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?
People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.
Indeed, if I actually felt like the work I was doing was directly benefiting my coworkers and community members I would be really excited about it! Hard to get motivated when all your work goes to making sure your manager gets a kitchen remodel and a third house.
You can't influence the course of the company (hence the 'beating drive out of you' comment I made). I am not root-causing the issue and putting the blame on leaf-level folks, just describing it. Quite the contrary.
I was riding a gBike (single-speed for those who aren't familiar with one) ~10 years ago with my friend and I told him this bike is a perfect representative of Google's culture. No matter how hard you pedal it goes the same speed.
> People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.
There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform. There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster (for the workers themselves, for the environment, for business productivity, for overall societal welfare, for human dignity, the list goes on).
> How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?
They do not consistently underperform. Just go to wikipedia:
> According to Virginie Pérotin's research which looked at two decades worth of international data, worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses. Another 1987 study of worker cooperatives in Italy, the UK, and France found "positive" relationships with productivity. It also found that worker cooperatives do not become less productive as they get larger. A 1995 study of worker cooperatives in the timber industry in Washington, USA found that "co-ops are more efficient than the principal conventional firms by between 6 and 14 percent".
I wonder why there aren’t more worker co-ops then. Maybe they’re more productive per worker but struggle to grow big enough? Or maybe they’re less likely to survive a downturn because layoffs are harder?
Because it takes capital to start a business. People with capital like to retain control over their capital, so they don’t start cooperatives.
Coops don’t have the same incentive structure as external-investor-beholden corporations, so they don’t pursue “growth at all costs”, but rather survival at all costs (job preservation), and then growth where appropriate (pie expansion).
It’s kind of like the trade off between authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. One is fast but flimsy, the other is slow but robust.
Banks dont want to lend money to them as often/much/favorably, coops usually don’t want investment.
To start a business you need capital, if you have enough on your own, you do not need a coop, much more difficult to convince a group of people to risk together unless they’ve all had previous experience with one another.
No they are not, there are so few co-ops that nobody cares about them. No politician campaigns promising to destroy co-ops, not even Trump, because there is no reason to.
I doubt the demographics of coop participation are even partisan. Urban organic food coops probably skew left, but all those rural infrastructure coops, fuel/etc service for farmers, probably skew right. Attacking coops wouldn't win you votes with many people on either side.
Perhaps you could name some worker-managed companies under socialism that did well - for example, East German companies that subsequently managed to compete against their West German peers. I can think of one - Zeiss Jena - though I don't know how truly worker-managed it was. (For some reason, the East Germans were very expert at manufacturing lenses ...)
> > How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?
> Bonuses, raises, equity.
And significant ones, too. None of this "Hey, you saved the company $1M, here's a $500 bonus!" bullshit.
I once had a founder privately lament to me the this employees don't play to win, and don't "treat the company as if they owned it," and it took all my willpower not to fire back with: "Dude, you're the sole shareholder with 100% of the equity, what do you expect?"
Most employees have hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars of stake in the company they work for. Are you completely unfamiliar with how the tech industry actually works?
Capitalism (or rather 'free' in the technical sense markets) solve a coordination problem. They don't solve the tragedy of the commons (unless you start paying people not to polute the commons, but that is very perverse).
They are by far our best bet at solving large coordination problems through price signals. Even though they are far from perfect. I do believe that free markets require capitalism (i.e. profits go to the owner of the capital rather than those who do the labour). But nothing there is against strong regulation, collective bargaining, and anti-trust. Nor is there anything about companies being soley beholden to their shareholders.
Also, 'free' markets can only exist with a whole bunch of regulation, and even then some markets (e.g. emergency care) can never be free.
Socialism, or anarchy. I watched an old Charlie Rose episode with David Graeber. Charlie asked him to define anarchy. It was then that I realized I was a born anarchist. From day one I have validated, questioned, and ignored any authority I could. When people refer to me as their employee, I wretch with disgust. It's really tough to function in our society surrounded by all these sycophants and boot lickers worshiping hierarchy.
See problem, fix problem. Don't bring it to management. They are just going to tell you to fix it and then take the credit. Protesters confuse me, they are appealing to the cause of the problem for help and redress.
It blows me away how people bathe themselves in hierarchy. Its almost like oxygen to them. Of course, many anarchists become authority figures because of their raw affinity for getting shit done without asking for permission to think.
Great theory when it's just a little quip. Not so great when it comes time to put into practice.
I have a problem, one of my coworkers is being lazy, he isn't cleaning up after himself and his mess is becoming a general hazard (slipping, fire.) I try to tell him to fix it but he's not concerned about the risks and tells me to fuck off. I can clean the mess myself, sometimes, but I have my own work to get done and he can create new mess a lot faster than I can clean it. I could try to organize other workers into a lynch mob.. err... I mean struggle session- wait no... I mean "intervention", but this asshole isn't responsive to social pressure and the people I work with don't have the stomach for violence...
You know what solves this neatly? Going to management. And if that fails, going to government regulators.
Sometimes these CEOs and "leaders" make mask-off comments and it just demonstrates the gulf between how they and normal people think. It can be quite frightening sometimes to imagine that these kinds of people are the people who wield power in our world, these people who share such little in common with you
Eric Schmidt is scary, Julian Assange spoke of him :' in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, Schmidt and "an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton" visited for several hours and "locked horns" with the Wikileaks founder.
For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-western countries to American companies and markets'.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/julian-assange...
> While Mr. Schmidt was chief executive of Google, he had an extramarital relationship with Marcy Simon, a public relations executive. A decade after they split, things are still messy. John Carreyrou sifted through hundreds of pages of court filings for this article [1].
what a shallow ad-hominem. during his tenure he was extremely well liked and growth was booming. why would his spousal relationships make him a bad leader? do you look to your managers for moral leadership?
Even if that’s true, it misses the entire point of the parent comment. His marital issues, infidelity, that one time he made out under a bridge when he was 14… none of it matters to this discussion as anything other than tabloid-fodder.
Dating a coworker does not necessarily imply you are “behaving like a sexual predator.” Many people met their partners at work; some even worked for them. Sometimes you meet people in places, and sometimes that place is work. That doesn’t mean you’re walking around hitting on everything that moves.
Yes, he was married. Yes, maybe a serial cheater. Or an awful marriage. Or a great one. I have no idea. But I don’t care?
> Dating a coworker does not necessarily imply you are “behaving like a sexual predator.”
Dating a coworker (or many) when you are the boss and married is exactly what a sexual predator do. Being a predator doesn't mean he "predate" on every walking thing.
Dating a coworker is a thing a lot of people do. Sometimes it is done by sexual predators who are preying on others. That is also true outside work.
Dating someone at work doesn’t automatically make you a sexual predator. That’s an absurd statement. Plenty of relationships start that way, and sometimes one of them is a boss, and companies have processes for these situations because they happen and the majority of situations are not due to predation.
Imbalanced power dynamics are bad if they are abused, and they are easy to abuse.
However, not every CEO that dates a subordinate is a sexual predator. Again, that is an absurd statement; life is never that black and white. Sometimes, people meet and fall in love regardless of their lot in life. Stating that anytime that happens and one person happens to be a CEO instantly makes that person a sexual predator is not based in any kind of reality.
A CEO that abuses their power or engages in any kind of non-consensual relationship is a different story.
I agree it’s generally a bad idea, because of perception, favoritism, the power imbalance, and a dozen other reasons. But it being a bad idea doesn’t necessarily imply that the CEO is a sexual predator, either.
Sometimes even people in power care about consent.
And sometimes people in power are predators. That happens too. Maybe even more often; I don’t have stats.
I’m not defending Schmidt. I have no idea about him or his sexual proclivities, nor do I know the details about any of his personal relationships. Neither do you. He may be a monster! But dating someone at work isn’t the thing that makes him one.
Life is quite black and white in many things, unless you are a CEO dating someone that you have power over. if you need this much to explain that some times CEOs abusing their position at WORK for sex maybe aren't sexual predators it just prove that yes, in 99% of the cases they are.
And yes, you are defending not only Schmidt but maybe yourself too?
Now I’m too verbose? Walking around saying “the sky is always black” just because it’s nighttime is short and pithy, but untrue. An explanation might be longer than just saying “99%” as if that is some actual data instead of a number you made up. So what?
Now that we’ve moved solidly from discussion to ad hominems, have a nice day and a nice life.
> it misses the entire point of the parent comment
Not really. I would say cheating on your wife with your PR executive is extremely bad for morale and an all around leadership failing. Just because sex is involved doesn't make it tabloid fodder. I can't just punch a coworker and call it "my personal life."
More importantly, you're ignoring the part of the comment that said he was extremely well liked, which was the baseless claim I responded to. You can say that's not the point of the comment, but that's just because acknowledging it weakens the argument.
Unless he is schizophrenic, its still the same mind that keeps continuously lying to most important persons in his life and keeps pretending nothing is happening. This sort of hard character flaw/weakness never goes alone, there are more if you care/can take a deeper look.
If you are OK with serious liars as leaders, thats fine for you I guess. Definitely not OK for me. Albeit for purely work performance, most of us can turn off our moral radar temporarily, mortgages ain't gonna pay for themselves with just good honest heart. But that's not a definition of leader, quite far away from that actually.
Pretty sure when Google was leading the industry (more than a decade ago now?), people was attributing the success to exactly the same thing - good work environment, work life balance, etc.
What's even funnier is that I've heard from someone working at OpenAI is that (at least in their office) they are hybrid, working from the office 3 days a week.
From talking to people who've worked/work at Google it sounds like a lot of the issues stem from too few employees dogfooding their products (especially hardware), and huge inertia to get anything off the ground/make large changes.
Add to that the lack of cohesive product direction (constantly deprecating and replacing messaging products as the main example) and you get Google.
Absolutely true. The layoffs appear to have been 100% random. Lots of loafers and do-nothing types on my friend's team who did not get laid off, but other people who consistently do great work did get laid off.
There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work.
Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.
Not really. When I lived and worked in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s, we used to joke that Yahoo! is where you go to retire.
I think Google is starting to become that. It's just the nature of older very large corporations, I suppose. There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.
> There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.
And that is where the leadership issue lies. Either because they can’t identify them, or can’t motivate them, or can’t fire them. Who is responsible for doing that? I don’t think it is the janitors. It is the leadership, very much.
> all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home.
IMO this came first and is a driver for people stepping back and defending their boundaries with Google. Most of the eng I know just cared about their work (some driven by the ladder, for sure). Google made it difficult and put a bad taste in people's mouths about "work[ing] like hell". Meanwhile, on the startup side that I've seen, people work a lot but in much more harmonious way.
I don't know why we keep thinking about "GenAI" as a product. It's an enabling technology that may (or may not) be appropriate for building actual products.
We should be asking "Is our company winning in Search, or in Shopping, or in Chat, or in Developer Tools?" Not "Is our company winning in GenAI?" This is like saying "Is our company winning in Python use?" It makes no sense.
My take is more Google having like a 80-90% share in search and browsers and email and phone os and online advertising probably wasn't too worried about dominating everything and perhaps a little worried about being criticized as a monopoly. Hence them open sourcing the transformers model and instead working on protein folding and the like.
Now they have competition in GenAI they can take it seriously without looking like monopolists there.
I mean it might be causing some of Googles problems but the AI stuff is very obviously because their teams are academia-brained as in they have the mind virus that the work is making papers and getting citations not shipping products into the real world and making money.
Google had a decade headstart on several AI unicorns tech and did nothing but write a paper and say "No you can't see the code, no you can't use the model, oh maybe here's a video of it working or at best a Google Labs project that shows a small fraction of its potential in a gimmicky way only available in the US and that stops working after a few months".
Google will forever be playing catchup from now, where they had such a massive headstart.
It's not lack of self-awareness. It's the opposite. It's a lack of awareness of the environment beyond himself-- a failure to appraise organizations on salient features.
Eric kind of dated himself with that one. That is old-school thinking that resonates with CEOs because they too are struggling to keep up with the times, but is completely tone-deaf as far as keeping engineers happy and productive is concerned.
Real explanation: Google turned into a company of activists who spend 50% of their time with politics. Additionally, part of the company are second class citizens (exercise for the reader).
OpenAI had many Europeans like Sutskever who presumably were still allowed to focus on work.
I know many people at Google, none of whom I would call an “activist”. They all describe Google as overly bureaucratic. They just happen to be sitting on a money printer internet monopoly.
It's more of a "not even wrong" statement. It's the kind of useless and reductive analysis poor leaders trot out from a position of personal frustration after failing to surmount the challenges involved in steering a complex, messy, human institution towards success.
It's incredible how consistently this maladaptive "everyone just work harder!!" mentality crops up among failed leadership in institutions of all kinds and sizes. In this respect, Schmidt is no different to the average frustrated restaurant owner, blaming his business failures on his staff's work ethic, "no one wants to work hard these days" and other copes.
Let's say we go ahead and assume that long grinds and 100% in-office attendance is the only way a successful and highly engaged team can look. Getting to that point would still require leadership to perform the actual hard work of creating the right conditions and incentives for that successful, engaged work to emerge. Shaking your fists at the air and saying "work harder people! we need to win!" doesn't cut it.
If Schmidt allowed himself to look more closely and reflect more deeply, he would realize that Google is and was full of extremely hard workers. But their "hard work" more likely took the form of navigating Google's political structures and chasing up internal promotions and prestige.
This is all very true for a small startup and some kinds of skunk works projects.. Many companies Google's size don't allow you to work that way in general, and in some sense don't benefit from it because gaps caused by no need to write things down are too hard to fix later and more critical to them than not shipping at all.
If I had to guess, Google's problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.
You are assuming the business is entirely located in one city or at least region which is rarely the case beyond a certain size. It would also be an argument against function specific offices or locations (eg a NYC sales office) which has been a characteristic of companies for a very long time.
Function specific offices typically only exist for roles that can be done alone. Sales is a great example; it benefits from the competitive atmosphere, but sales people aren’t generally sharing leads or collaborating on deals. That, like engineering, is actually a role that could work just fine WFH.
Fairness is not important to businesses - it's important to people (employees of the company). The other people aren't blind. They see devs being able to WFH but they can't. They're not going to like that.
"They" don't like bonus for sales reps either, see it as unfair, and yet it exists. Good working conditions is the developer's incentive in many places.
Whew... unfair? Having trouble with that one. What is fairness? Why do developers owe everyone else suffering; to preserve some perceived social order? Does not compute.
>There's nothing like a team sitting together working towards a common goal. WFH can't duplicate it.
They're gonna need to put up more money to get people back in the office then. Maybe even get rid of the open office bullshit. Remember when everyone actually had offices with actual doors?
Not only are people choosing the WFH job over the in office job given the same salary and benefits, but they'll likely choose a less-paying WFH job. Your in-office job pay needs to overcome both the convenience and getting-people-to-change-jobs taxes now. Otherwise you are getting people desperate for a job or that aren't skilled enough to land a WFH job.
So it's simple: you ask for more, you pay more. We know Schmidt's comment "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning." is just trying to get more out of workers for no additional pay. Convincing people to work harder with words only costs time.
But companies aren't doing that. They're going the opposite direction and making return to office a threatening and oppressive response. Then they are also turning around and doing layoffs on top of it. Those who are good can go find a WFH job.
None of what the CEOs are doing coincide with what they are saying, and no one trusts them. Why would you actually want to do good work for a company/CEO like that? You'd just be saving them from themselves for no additional pay and a lot more driving to work!
Google doesn't use more WFH than the competition so that's obviously a loser's excuse. The failure is in the leadership which they won't admit ever. Google will be split into 5 companies because of WFH, sure.
This feels like a generalization which isn't true across the age spectrum. I manage two products teams which are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One which has been working for more time than I have (10-20 years) and another which got their first jobs right before the pandemic so most of them have never worked outside hybrid settings. Both teams work on the same complexity and produce similar products (model optimizations mostly). These are not skunk works teams either, they are coming up with new models for lithography machines. These products run on most semiconductor fabs in the world.
I observe the younger team is way better than anyone else at remote work. Even the other more senior teams in my department. They are in fact the more social team, sometimes even I can't keep up with their in jokes. I'm not surprised, most of these people grew up with the internet (I had some teenage years without it). Many of their personal relationships are also online.
To put it crudely, if you find WFH disconnecting its a skill issue.
What a tremendous lack of self-awareness. Let's put aside all the leadership issues, all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home.
(Not saying there aren't folks at Google who are just cruising, etc... but that's a fraction of the problem compared to the leadership issues)