Meaningless executive speak. <i>How</i> should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker?<p>If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".
Having worked at Google, this is entirely self-inflicted. This once internal now leaked video [1] summed it up pretty well. There is so much process you have to go through to do anything. A lot of it makes sense but it comes at the expense of speed.<p>More than a decade ago OKR (Objectives and Key Results) culture set in where once you just worked on things until they were ready. OKRs are really insidious because what qualifies as an acceptable goal depends on how much you're liked and the political muscle your org has. It also means the smallest unit of time because a quarter and if you had to approach another team for help, the soonest they would help you was the following quarter and that's only if you had the muscle to get onto those OKRs.<p>At a more macro level, Google is <i>insanely</i> profitable. I'm not sure what the current employee count but the per-employee profit is probably sitting at or above $500,000 per year. That's after all expenses. Yet the relentless pursuit of profits (which shrink over time) means further exploitation of surplus labor value.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI</a>
“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said.<p>“There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said.<p>Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.”<p>After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day.<p>Early in my career I'd have been angry, surprised or in denial at hearing this sort of rancid garbage. Now I see this in so many organizations, this is just a symptom of the deeper rot and top-down dysfunction.
>
“People come to us because we are trusted,” Raghavan said. “They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.”<p>Seriously, in which reality-distortion bubble does Prabhakar Raghavan live?
What a clown. Should have thought about 10 minutes into the future before he hobbled the company by laying off staff and sending everyone rushing to the competition. When you're publicly admitting that the competition is eating your lunch, you need to use your $100B cash hoard to invest in catching up, paying people to take the risk on you instead of working for the winners.
Executives need to realize that startups move faster not because they work more hours. They move faster because there is less red tape, less bureaucracy and less process than large companies. Individual employees have more freedom to make their own choices, instead of being restrained by top down OKRs.
> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner"<p>Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit.<p>But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour days 7 days a week is actually disgusting. That he would praise such an idea shows a moral rot within Google that almost certainly goes beyond Prabhakar. No matter how much they're making, these are people being exploited by Google and Google is holding them up as an example to the rest of their employees.<p>"Look at these drones sacrificing their health, life, and families to squeeze another few cents out of my stock compensation package. You should be more like them."
Prabhakar Raghavan has become suddenly famous this week. This is beginning to look like a scapegoating exercise.<p>Google have their serious problems, but they extend far further than just this guy.
I really cannot express how much I dislike these midlevel management figures that do nothing but talk and engage in LinkedIn style virtue signaling.<p>They don't touch code, they don't touch any technologies (not even making prototypes so they they have a grounded understanding). They just regurgitate the socio-business zeitgeist. "Oh we must get more lean. Oh these workers must be lazy. AI AI AI".<p>And yet their multi million dollar pay packages MUST be equitable compensation for their in-the-box unoriginal business thinking. They went to HBS or SBS... they must be thought leaders, right?<p>Instead of sacking the people who dig ditches, what if half the talking heads left? I'm sure THAT would actually clear the air.
He's about 2 years too slow. Mark Zuckerberg already proclaimed 2022 "The year of efficiency."<p>However, I have the billion dollar solution in 4 easy steps:<p>0. LLM completer plugins for editors<p>1. Get everyone escooters that go 60 mph / 96 kph (They exist)<p>2. We need to cut coffee for cost reasons, so why not issue caffeine-methylphenidate pills<p>3. Because RTO is still too inefficient, make everyone live at work<p>Bonus: If you want employees to move faster, encourage them to have kids. Busy people GSD.
> Raghavan clarified that the failure in image generation wasn’t due to a lack of effort.<p>> “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said.<p>So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?
Unless I know exactly what I am looking for, I don't remember the last time I used Google to <i>discover</i> information.<p>First it was one sponsored link - now it's SEVEN. At some point even the masses catch on to the grift.<p>This is a desperate "something DO something" plea.
The notion that startups are more efficient at creating great products is a massive case of survivorship bias, a subclass of selection bias. A full facepalm duh!<p>Either he does not understand that, and that's bad, or he is trying to put one over on some very smart employees who do understand that, and that won't work.<p>You can make a big company less inefficient, but everyone who thinks startup efficiency is simply a culture you can recreate inside a big company is going to be disappointed.