Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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

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

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

Every bit of innovation in the AI space today originated at Google. The company poured probably tens of billions into its Brain division, sponsored and made public every bit of research, and pretty much created the field of modern AI. So what was the outcome? When the employees realized they had struck gold they figured they&#x27;d rather go join startups or found their own companies instead, because regardless of the amount of success they achieved at Google they would never 1000x the share price or be the ones calling the shots.<p>This example is the perfect microcosm of the economics of innovation at large companies. Google&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Amazon and the like have zero incentive to continue to be the companies they were 20 years ago. They don&#x27;t need to take risks. They don&#x27;t need to disrupt anything. They instead need leaders like Pichai who will keep the ship steady and keep the shareholders happy, and will keep investing in or purchasing smaller companies that are either a threat or an opportunity for growth, all while keeping their existing revenue streams flowing.<p>If as an employee you are nostalgic about the &quot;culture&quot; in the early days of such a company then you should realize that it is not coming back, just like the carefree days of your own childhood aren&#x27;t coming back. Quit and join a smaller company instead.

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

I was surprised to see him savage Jeanine Banks by name like that, but if this bit is true I can at least understand the impulse: &quot;She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set.&quot;<p>as another longish-term google employee, the one thing I absolutely depend on among all the org and culture changes is the ability to have a fair bit of choice and input when it comes to the specific projects I am working on, where the company can trust me to pick something that will work with my skills and interests and also align with the team and department objectives. losing that would likely impact me more than any of the other changes over the last 12 or so years I&#x27;ve been here.

I worked at Google for 15 years and I was lucky enough to work with Ian a few times. I might quibble about a few things, but I largely agree with his overall conclusions.<p>In the early days Google really was an amazing place to work. I agree wholeheartedly that for years nearly all Google products focused on just building awesome products for users, not maximizing revenue. The bean counters took over very, very slowly.<p>To the extent that Google&#x27;s culture is still &quot;good&quot;, it&#x27;s for the most part no longer remarkable. Most of the other tech companies have caught up to the best parts of Google&#x27;s culture, and exceeded it in many ways.<p>I totally relate to his experience with middle management. Towards the last few years at Google, my experience was that directors who moved on from a team were replaced with new middle-managers who knew how to play the game, but seemed to have little interest in the actual product they were managing. There will still plenty of fantastic people, but they had to spend way too much of their time just playing politics to do any good.<p>There&#x27;s one way that Google is still leading, and that&#x27;s in employee benefits. While they have been cut back somewhat, Google still offers one of the most generous free food &#x2F; meal benefits in Silicon Valley. I sincerely missed Google&#x27;s Vision plan that let me purchase both a brand-new pair of glasses and contact lenses annually with just a modest copay; since leaving Google it typically costs me over $350 to get just one pair of glasses.

I think this guy has a Stockholm syndrom like I saw multiple times with Google employees:<p><pre><code> ; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion. </code></pre> That is very fun because he thinks that they were trying to do good for the world but all was messed up because of cookie banners. Where, in fact, doing good for the world would have been to not abuse of cookies for tracking and evil use that would mean that they would not need bad cookies and would not have been needed to produce cookie banners...

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

&gt; I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.<p>&gt; For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatwg.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatwg.org&#x2F;</a>). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google&#x27;s interests).<p>I feel as though Hixie is lacking in self-awareness here. Googlers tend to be biased toward themselves and their own power. Have Googlers considered the possibility that the best thing for the web, and the world, is for Google to keep its grubby hands off the web? Is Google Search&#x27;s dominant market share good for the web? And the market shares of Android, Chrome, and Gmail? I would answer no, no, no, no.<p>It&#x27;s funny that Hixie mentions WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) as a &quot;good&quot; example. What actually happened is that Hixie was a ringleader in a coup d&#x27;état by the browser vendors to overthrow the W3C and take over the HTML standards. Is that good for the web, and the world? Here I would also say no.

&gt; The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it&#x27;s not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.<p>Well said. Just watched exactly this happen after some surprise layoffs in an entirely different industry.

&gt; Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it&#x27;s surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious).<p>The author is refreshingly candid but hopelessly myopic.<p>Speaking as an outsider and a rather large advertiser, Google was great to work with in the early years (2004-2008). I founded the first search intelligence business in 2005 as a side business. Again, Google engineers were awesome to work with.<p>Then in 2009 or so, they began to get territorial. Some outsider sales person was brought in and IIRC, he bought a boat and named it, &quot;AdSense&quot;. The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded. We had extensive crawling capabilities but needed to correlate it to API data to give a holistic picture of the competitive AdWords landscape.<p>We spent the next two years gaming the system. We had 100 API accounts. We launched our own bare metal &quot;cloud&quot; with 1300 distinct IP addresses which we throttled to hit Google no more than once per minute.<p>This worked. We monitored Google in over 50 countries. Clients loved us because we could tell them exactly how they were doing on AdWords, both good and bad. Any intelligent person could use our data to improve their ads and excel. Our IPs would occasionally get banned but we would just temporarily shut them off and use one of our reserves. And even then, we eventually developed a crowd sourced solution to solve captchas which got them reinstated.<p>Another three years of the cat and mouse game passed. We were acquired by the world&#x27;s largest advertising company.<p>Guess what? A call from the CEO to Matt Cutts ended the war. No promises were made but our access was simply restored. Everything worked again.<p>So yeah, Google is just like every other company in the world. The corruption has been there for at least 15 years. Please stop worshipping it.

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

There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor leadership and become utterly banal.<p>It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and making and stuff (like Hixie, all thanks to Chris Dibona) as well as a number of state of the art machine learning systems. There really was an amazing feeling being surrounded by so many highly competent people (many of whom I see in this post&#x27;s comments) who had similar vision to mine. But ultimately, so many things started to chip away at my enjoyment that I had to leave. Middle management was a big part of that.<p>Once you&#x27;re on the outside, so many things that seem obvious (borg, beyondcorp, flume, google3, etc) aren&#x27;t. It&#x27;s almost like the future is here, it&#x27;s not evenly distributed.

None of this surprises me as an outsider. Google has been in obvious, uncontrolled freefall for several years now. Search barely works anymore, they squandered a massive lead in AI, they are losing in cloud services, Android is so awful it kills me when I have to use it for more than a few minutes. I can&#x27;t think of any good new projects or services that were created under Sundar&#x27;s tenure (maybe Colab was cool when it came out, but it hasn&#x27;t improved at all in years and is now badly lagging). And their propensity to kill services without a thought has made it so that any new service they introduce is met with eye rolls from people who have been burned way too many times.<p>The solution seems clear to me: they should acquire a really well run, innovative smaller company and then replace all the top executives with the new team. Sundar should be removed immediately before he destroys even more value. And then they need to do relentless cleaning up, quickly getting rid of unproductive middle managers like the person described in this post. That should give a burst of energy to demoralized devs.<p>Then they need to desperately work to fix search so that it doesn&#x27;t suck so much that you need to add &quot;reddit&quot; to every query to not get 100% blog spam. And they need to get their act together and start very rapidly releasing impressive AI tools that aren&#x27;t worse than stuff from companies that are 1&#x2F;100th of the size. No matter what they do, I can&#x27;t help but think their sustainable earnings trajectory is headed downwards for the next few years (they can continue to push short term earnings in various ways but that will run out of steam soon enough); the question is whether they can stop the decline.

I give Hixie exactly this: he is not brownnosing and he openly speaks up. There is nothing insulting from his side, and I personally like people with the standards Hixie has. It sounds like he acted internally in the same way which is fine.<p>Hixie has seen some things at Google.<p>I will be forever thankful to him for realizing HTML5. I read many document changes back then and when people left out of protest or whatever reason, Hixie kept things going in the right direction.<p>The web would not be what it is like without him.

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

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

I think the post is spot on, but I don&#x27;t agree with naming names especially when the other person doesn&#x27;t get an opportunity to tell their side of the story. What if Ian&#x27;s manager posted her own nasty missive criticizing him as an employee? Such things can damage someone&#x27;s future career without any fair process to sort out the facts. I wouldn&#x27;t at all be surprised that such manager exists and is not being held accountable internally, but it would be unfair to make conclusions based on unsubstantiated accusations,

The article mentions a very keen observation. There are lasting consequences to over-hiring and then subsequently laying people off; it doesn&#x27;t bring the company back to the starting point:<p>&gt; The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it&#x27;s not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.

I used to &quot;share&quot; an office with Hixie at Google. Hixie used to store his board game collection in the office we nominally &quot;shared&quot;, but he himself very rarely visited. I liked that just fine (let&#x27;s just say I&#x27;m not a fan of &quot;open&quot; shared office spaces). My fondest Google office memories were sharing an office with Hixie, and &quot;Mr Big Printer&quot; which the Google Open Source Team used to print posters. We made an office CD label for &quot;Mr Big Printer&quot;.

I too believe the company has entered a phase of stagnancy or even decline. In fact, so much that two weeks ago I put my money where my mouth is by selling $1M worth of GOOG I was given as part of a stock grant when I was hired by Google in 2014. (I promptly reinvested this capital in a generic S&amp;P 500 index fund.)<p>From 2014 to mid 2015, when I quit, I found Google had a great engineering culture and I loved my time at the company, but I was having gut feelings of the start of a decline. I saw engineering hires who weren&#x27;t so skilled. I saw Larry and Sergei seemingly lack the spark in their eyes when giving candid answers at our TGIF meetings. I saw a buildup of red tape and overhead. Then, long after quitting Google, more problems crop up. In the last year or so I saw a noticeable decline in the quality of Google search engine results. In the last 2 months I saw an even more noticeable decrease of the quality of Gmail&#x27;s spam filters (today I get ~10 spams daily out of ~50 legitimate emails.) I keep stumbling on more and more annoying bugs in Google&#x27;s Android apps that remain unfixed for years.<p>No one knows how long this stagnancy or decline is going to last. In the case of Microsoft they have stagnated (IMHO because of Ballmer) roughly between 2005 and 2017 (6% annual revenue growth on average). Since 2017, thanks to Satya Nadella&#x27;s turnaround, their annual revenue growth was 13% on average. I think Google needs to see leadership change to whip the company back into shape. But this probably won&#x27;t happen for another few years. There is so much inertia in market forces of a huge mastodon like Google that it will take another couple years for such sub-par products and services quality to start noticeably affecting revenue growth. That inertia is the same reason it took 3 years of Nadella as CEO before Microsoft saw revenue growth starting to bounce back up.

&quot;...She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set...&quot;<p>You know, I remember a time I said, management just think of engineers as a resource and refer to us as such. But when the word &quot;dehumanising&quot; is used it strikes me a lot clearer. When this disconnected occurs between different layers of the same corporation people just become a resource, they are no longer humans , they are a means to an end, and that end doesn&#x27;t even serve the purpose of the company but the merits of that individual. I really wish developers had a way to empower themselves out of this hellscape.

Xoogler here - Totally agree that the bulging middle management layers and lack of crisp CEO vision have dismantled the company&#x27;s ability to weather the changes of &quot;growing up&quot;. Had a few managers and multiple reorgs in my &lt; two years there, during a time of record profits. Peers said that wasn&#x27;t an uncommon thing. Who cares about vision or management so long as the ads money printer goes brrr?<p>Still, there are definitely people trying to do the right thing for users despite frequent bu$iness side overrides, and IMO still some best-of-breed products amongst the sprawling graveyard&#x2F;zombies. I could even get through to a real person at Nest customer support a few weeks ago!

&quot;Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter&quot;<p>Seems like they fired the Google Adsense support team. I have been using Google Adsense for many years, and since last year there is no way of contacting any support, there IS NO WAY, I have lost over 10k in revenue because of it, and was only able to get my problem fixed after 2 months by joining a third party publisher network.<p>Keep in mind that Adsense is one of Google&#x27;s main sources income, and that they take a 32% cut as an intermediary (So they have ample money to pay for a 5 star support)!

You see a lot of people here in the comments, as well as the author in the article, talking about how &quot;there are good and well-meaning people working at Google&quot; and &quot;it sucks that people unfortunately hate us =(&quot;. A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of &quot;oh, the leadership fell off!&quot; or &quot;because I had good intentions&quot;? At all? No, you&#x27;d be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money. People think of a dystopia as if it would come from an evil dictator, or a greedy corporate man, but the reality is that the dystopia will come with a charismatic smile and a promise of something better. You&#x27;d perhaps be right to criticize my calling of it a &quot;dystopia&quot; (for now), but my point stands.

Snippets that stood out to me:<p>Google&#x27;s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision<p>The effects of layoffs are insidious… people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now

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

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

&gt; I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.<p>This is part and parcel of working for a visible&#x2F;impactful organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be wrong. They&#x27;ll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-simplifications, political perspectives, etc.<p>This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that because <i>most</i> of the feedback is nonsense, that <i>all</i> of it is nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful to you or critical of your team or values.<p>I found a bit of Neil Gaiman&#x27;s MasterClass very helpful when reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone is telling you something doesn&#x27;t work for them, and what you should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn&#x27;t work for them, but that the author is much better placed than the reader to know how and if to fix it.<p>In my context I try to understand <i>why</i> someone is saying something, what information I can take from it, and whether there is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can or should be done about it.<p>(If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)

I think the conclusion is really interesting. Maybe this was just well written, but I was thinking &quot;What <i>should</i> the CEO of Google be pursuing as a strategy&quot;, and then he drops the mission statement. I don&#x27;t know if the mission statement is the best articulation of the goal. But it&#x27;s a clear goal. And it&#x27;s a goal that Google aren&#x27;t pursuing. It&#x27;s an interesting goal in the context of large language models. Now, more than ever, having a accessible and organised store of credible information would be incredibly valuable to me. I was literally saying this to someone earlier today - the web today sucks. I google something, I click the first link it&#x27;s popup hell. I click through all the links on the first page, half of them are the same information re-garbled for Google. Boy, what I wouldn&#x27;t pay to Google the web from 2010. Just let me tick a box that says &quot;Classic web&quot; that excludes anything published in the last 15 years. Well this post turned into a rant...

The handful of trillion dollar companies have a problem that is unique: virtually all projects and innovation are not interesting enough even when successful. Only big bets remain.<p>Google pulled in 280 billion $ last year.<p>Now imagine a nice little side project within Google making it into market success with a 100m$ annual revenue.<p>That&#x27;s basically useless to Google. A line item that doesn&#x27;t move the needle and adds weight to the company. Yet to any other company it would be an extraordinary success.<p>If I&#x27;d arbitrarily say that 10% of annual revenue is &quot;moving the needle&quot; that means you need to innovate a new product raking in 30 billion a year. Good luck with that.<p>And it would require to be entangled with the unique ecosystem benefits of Google, because a stand-alone product would easily be countered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. So the bottom line is that your new product needs to be of the monopoly-type, a new money printer. Anything less than that is not worthwhile.<p>That&#x27;s why Meta&#x27;s big bet on the Metaverse wasn&#x27;t as crazy as reported. When you make this much revenue yet social networking has peaked, you need to differentiate by adding a new revenue stream, and it would need to bring in a billion a month. You can only achieve that by building a brand new ecosystem and being the first at it.

&quot;Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now.&quot;<p>My father, a machine mechanic, gave me the same advice years ago. In my mind stuff like this only applied to blue collars so I didn&#x27;t give it too much thought. Only later did I realize (after the company I was at became so mismanaged) he was 100% right.

Long time Googler, this resonates.<p>I feel very unhappy at Google, certainly I would have left at this point if the job market were a little better.<p>I’ve had a successful career here with multiple product launches which had significant revenue or other measurable impact and several promotions. But reflecting on all of it, I feel burnt out and used, dispirited with the directionless race to the bottom Google is now engaged in.<p>Most of my last year was spent in bitter political fights, escalations, failed attempts at “alignment”, retrospectives on what went wrong, and very little actual software engineering. I’m going to lose the ability to do anything but be a cog in the enormous Google bureaucracy if something doesn’t change.<p>It’s definitely time to go, but I wish I could have come to this realization when the opportunities were more plentiful.

Don&#x27;t Larry and Sergey still have 51% of the voting shares? (There are different classes of shares.) If so, then everything that happens at Google now is with the consent of the company founders.

The following is a pretty damning statement.<p>&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management.

This is the result of having leadership with MBA or finance background instead of engineering. All they see is short term money, product is a 2nd class citizen.<p>This is what happened to the automotive industry. In the past companies tried to build the best car. Now? Profit is all that matters.

Around 2008 when I was starting college, I was really excited about Google and wanted to work there. By 2013 I began to feel like they weren’t the same anymore and no longer interested me. By 2023, I can say that Not pursuing a job at Google was my best career decision. You can go watch old Google Tech Talks circa 2010 and they’re fabulous. I can’t imagine them putting out that kind of content these days. It’s rather sad, I bet 2005 Google was a remarkable place that’s now lost to time

Flutter is such a brilliant tool. Not just the framework, but everything surrounding it. Tooling, the standard of cross compatibility, pub.dev, the Dart language itself, the friendly community… it’s the best developer experience I’ve found and this article makes me really hope that Google pulls through.

&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.<p>I left 3 years ago for the same reason: I couldn&#x27;t stand seeing Google continue to decline under Sundar&#x27;s leadership.

There are few points that resonate with my personal experience (2012-2017).<p>- Finance is running the company - HR has lost the original shepherding of the culture in favour of risks mitigation - Reduction of transparent leadership comms in favour of corp speak - Horrible middle management (senior managers up to VP1). Either because we promoted great engineers into a people role, or because we hired consultants to run engineering organization (favouring navigating the complexity of the org, over managing innovation).<p>I did rationalise all those changes as something that was obvious from a short term optimization standpoint: the company was in the mist of PR fights, leaks , growing incredibly fast, etc. It&#x27;s clear, 6 years later, that a sustained approach to this type of leadership has reduced the company to a shadow of itself. Less innovative, less talent driven.

&gt; A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example<p>Wow. Shots fired.<p>More seriously, his description of this manager has been my typical experience of managers in large companies. Very sad to see what Google has become.

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

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

&gt; it&#x27;s surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious<p>Seems just like the recent news where YouTube was intentionally throttling Firefox, which turned out to be a not accurate representation.

Glad to see Hixie still working on Flutter though, as I&#x27;m a big user of it. For the Google specific parts, I can&#x27;t comment much on the internal development structure of the company, having not worked there, but as a user of their products over the past 20 years or so, there really has been a slowdown of innovation from them. I mean, what did they really create in the last decade that endures?

&quot;Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase.&quot;<p>Brutal but should we do more name-naming to allow people to avoid working for inept managers?

Interesting to read this as an outsider and to pretty much confirm what you suspected. Very interesting is the take on Vic Gundotra. I knew him briefly on a personal level and he came across as a nice guy but you don&#x27;t want to cross him. The comment on how he doesn&#x27;t do well when things go wrong lines up perfectly with what my impressions were of him.

The corporate form is disappointing. Everything described is inevitable.<p>Puts me in a UBI + cooperatives mood.

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

&gt;It&#x27;s definitely not too late to heal Google.<p>Yes, it is. This was inevitable. It&#x27;s due to 3 factors:<p>* Becoming publicly traded<p>* Size<p>* Scale of public and private use of products<p>You cannot have a &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; company when these 3 are like they are for Google and there is no going back.

Very early google was full of passion and people that wanted to build cool things for users. There was a passion where building things that would surprise and delight users.<p>The process when this changed was slow but I think started 2008-2010 where passion for building something was no longer what drove people but instead the promo-process, having impact and moving the needle became what drove people. Not passion but promo-process changed the culture dramatically over time.<p>Me and friends used to call it the LPA cycle. (L)aunch, get (P)romo, (A)bandon and switch team. And towards the second half of the 2010s it became a de-facto rule. Once something launches with a big fanfare, after next promo-cycle almost l5 and higher engineers leave to chase their next promo in a different team.<p>You can see this over and over after ~2015. High velocity and innovation until launch and shortly after it grinds to a stop. very sad to see this change from early google.

When did it become acceptable to write things about other people as he writes about Jeanine Banks? Even if everything he says about her is true, it still feels incredibly rude to say it in public.

What a sad but refreshingly honest article. I never worked at Google, but this aligns with my impressions from the outside, as well as everything else I&#x27;ve read (eg. that recent article here from a founder who&#x27;s startup was acquired by Google and she left due to the stifling bureaucracy). The company hasn&#x27;t innovated much recently and its products like Google Search have deteriorated in quality tremendously. At this rate Google may be on its way to becoming the next has-been tech company (eg. sort of like what happened to IBM).<p>The management and bureaucracy depicted in the article sound like a corporate nightmare and unappealing place to work. I didn&#x27;t know that Google had non-engineers running dev tool teams. Can this VP even reverse a linked list? &#x2F;s<p>Seems like Google needs a change in leadership, starting with replacing CEO Sundar Pichar.

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

Sad times. If not Google, what&#x27;s the place to be nowadays? Has high interest rates killed tech as a great place to work in entirely, or is there any oasis left?

I work at a company that is very similar to Google (similar products, similar age, founder not there anymore - he&#x27;s busy with windy.com now) and it&#x27;s funny how similar my feelings are.<p>What I think is happening is that the best people tend to leave, and those who prefer safety and are fine with the corporate environment as long as they&#x27;re getting paid tend to stay or join. I doubt this downward spiral to mediocrity can be reversed.<p>I actually can&#x27;t decide what would be the best strategy from the CEO&#x27;s point of view. I.e. how best to govern an aging, established tech company like Google? I really like what Aswath Damodaran said about Google - there&#x27;s a &quot;sugar daddy effect&quot; - the various departments lack desperation to make it, unlike startups.

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

A very interesting article<p>Very interesting they were working on Flutter<p>I have just spent 18 months with Dart, supporting Flutter development<p>I formed the view that Fludder (as I called it) was built by brilliant engineers who were directionless. As a replacement for Javascript it is an utter failure, sadly<p>Made this a very interesting read

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

Interesting to hear the author complain about Android, which today is held up as the one part of Google which knows how to ship product.

I don&#x27;t know if the author is reading this. But thanks for this article. One day I want to grow up, become a big shot engineer, and Name-and-shame all clueless middle managers who have tortured me.

&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google<p>One thing I find bizarre in Google is lack of accountability. If someone builds a lousy product, we are not supposed to criticize it, not even objectively. That&#x27;s because, well you guessed it, &quot;it hurts feelings&quot;. Or per Pichai&#x27;s words, &quot;let&#x27;s be thoughtful&quot;. So many teams have instead learned to launch failed products to advance their levels in Google.

I see these posts and just shrug. Tech companies have lifecycles. There is that early startup energy where &quot;we&#x27;re all in this together.&quot; Then, if they&#x27;re lucky, success and growth, but the startup mentality remains. But as the company grows, it can&#x27;t maintain the startup culture. It&#x27;s simply not possible. And then companies mature and you have bureaucracy and leaks and empire building and layoffs, etc. It&#x27;s inevitable.<p>What surprises me about Google is not that its changing, but that it&#x27;s taken so long to change.

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

Agree with everything he said, but then again nothing written here is unique to Google. Every company starts off with a coherent vision, competent leadership and bought-in employees, and then as the valuation goes up into the tens&#x2F;hundreds of billions&#x2F;trillions and employee count balloons to hundreds of thousands, it all inevitably goes to shit. It is impossible to have any semblance of &quot;culture&quot; at that scale. Google isn&#x27;t the first to run into this and will not be the last.

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

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

I don’t see how Sundar stays after the repeated fumbling of the AI ball. I think it just goes to show, you need someone radically bold and different.

Its not very cool IMO to name &amp; shame anyone lower than Sundar.<p>Nevertheless the article is spot on with the effect of layoffs, and the general culture of big tech.

&gt; Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it&#x27;s surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious).<p>What a coincidence that in the only country outside the US where Google search has a worthy competitor in the open market, search engine choosing dialog should not appear in all chromium-based web browsers. Certainly this is the care for the users<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=81578" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=81578</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;google&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kz5cn&#x2F;google_disables_search_engine_selection_in_russia&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;google&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kz5cn&#x2F;google_disabl...</a>

Given:<p><pre><code> - the string of missed opportunities in the last 10 years (specifically AI) - the string of user-hostile product decisions (latest: adblockers vs YT) - the complete lack of innovation (name a cool product launched by G in the last 5 years) - the clear and present competitive threat to their flagship product (search vs. OpenAI) - the once great culture that is rotting in place (see article) - the stock price completely flat or slightly down for the past two years - the enormous waste of goodwill Google had accumulated with both the world and their own employees, now all spilt on the floor (I mean, they&#x27;ve chosen to turn predatory, I&#x27;m not going to say fine, but ultimately: their choice. BUT: they don&#x27;t even have the financial numbers that would justify such an about turn). </code></pre> How that ball-less wonder Sundar still has a job as CEO, or at all for that matter, is nothing short of amazing.<p>Board is asleep at the wheel.

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

Nicely written. Can&#x27;t tell you how many times I&#x27;ve seen companies ruined by too many middle managers; some of whom are greatly under qualified to make certain decisions they do.<p>Unrelated, does anyone here or OP have a ballpark ETA on when Google&#x27;s Quantum and AI might meet and become friends? I&#x27;m really hoping to see this in my lifetime.

In 18 years from now, which company will have employees writing blog posts like this about it?<p>I hear amazing stories about the early days of Google and I can’t help but think, which engineering company that is in its infancy right now will have employees reminiscing so fondly of the early days? An AI startup?

He doesn&#x27;t mention it, but it is curious that Google has apparently also lost the lead in the AI race to OpenAI, after being unquestionably on top for many years. PaLM 2 was inferior to GPT-4, despite being younger, and Gemini is set to release a whole year later. What&#x27;s going on?

Very interesting that he plans to continue working on Flutter after leaving Google:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627532&amp;count=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627532&amp;count=1</a><p>I agree with him that Flutter is on a good trajectory.

&gt; Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to be good for society. Google Books, for example.<p>Yes, Google books was great endeavor that could benefit all humanity. What happened to all those scans? Are they still stored somewhere?

I was not expecting them to name names and torch everything on their way out. They paint a really terrible picture. Still, one day I’d love to join the GCP team working on BigQuery or something in that arena Google problems notwithstanding.

Takeaways:<p>A sort of boiling frog phenomenon. The creep sets in because the founders hired or promoted people who did not uphold the core principles, and prioritized short terms gains.<p>My comment: Sieving and assessing multitudes of prospective candidates for a job is a very time consuming, exhausting work, and people are often willing to settle for less, especially if the organization is really successful and the founders feel the need to expand rapidly.

&gt;Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to be good for society.<p>&gt; Take Jeanine Banks, for example, ... Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable.<p>So, when Ian does sincere things that were intended to be good, they get criticized for them unfairly. But this Jeanine Banks is [fucking incompetent] and Ian could not possibly be an outsider making the same mistake he claims everyone else is.<p>Also seems like a defamation suit waiting to happen.

The author is roasting Jeanine Banks and she is probably the real motivation that drove the author writing a whole long article of google&#x27;s culture when things were beautiful.

Ah I got really excited about Flutter back in 2018. Hard to believe it&#x27;s been 5 years! A commendable project. I just wish they went with something other than dart for it

<i>&gt;Charlie&#x27;s patio at Google, 2011. Image has been manipulated to remove individuals.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know if they are trying to make a point here, but this is <i>screaming</i> one.

The issue is quite simple IMHO. The company has a motto that is almost completely PR. If they truly cared about doing the right thing, don’t be evil, to the extent they imply by making it their motto, then they would have an interview process which evaluates the ethics and morality of their candidates, even if only a little bit. It is well known that entry to Google is, at least for engineers, basically little more than a leetcode mastery test.

Larry and Sergey just need to come back from their vacation and clean house. So much of Google culture used their humor and candidness at TGIF as a lighthouse.

What I don&#x27;t understand is that Ian has been at Google for 18 years with little to no real recognition for his work except that he was a tech writer for HTML5. Is it that Ian has the problem? This seems to be the sentiment of all his leaders over the last 18 years.

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

&gt; Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it&#x27;s surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious).<p>Perhaps the individuals the author knows were pernicious, but clearly someone is. Look at the current state of YouTube demonetization and war on adblocking (ads are a vector for malware).

Stadia. Bought studios, games, pumped up hiring, custom controller - Promising 60fps 4k game streamed in real time.<p>Wrapped it up all in just three years. Discontinued.

&gt; My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google&#x27;s interests).<p>&gt; Google&#x27;s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.<p>Brutal. I can only imagine the disillusionment.

&gt;<i>Flutter grew in a bubble, largely insulated from the changes Google was experiencing at the same time. Google&#x27;s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would eagerly attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was happening, I found myself now able to predict the answers executives would give word for word. Today, I don&#x27;t know anyone at Google who could explain what Google&#x27;s vision is. Morale is at an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google.</i><p>I invested in Google back in 2005. I sold off my shares and stopped using google search a few years ago when they started making obviously politically movivated alterations to search results and started using Brave in lieu of Chrome.<p>I wonder when that happened relative to the time period he&#x27;s talking about. Unfortunately I can&#x27;t go back that far in my bank to see exactly when I divested myself of their stock. But it has to be more than 3 years (my bank&#x27;s limitation)

At some point we really need to admit our domain (and maybe society at large) is in a &quot;Managerial Crisis.&quot;

« Google workers are nice humans therefore the company is doing good (tm) things »<p>Maybe it’s time to stop drinking the koolaid.

“People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers”. This strengthens my understanding that as a manager and as a team member who’s being manage, communication skills are so much more important than engineering skills. It was a good and interesting read regardless.

I haven&#x27;t seen anyone [at] Sundar on X (FKA Twitter) yet. I am not sure how Sundar would be feeling about this. Hostility for Hixie probably. And it&#x27;s safe to say that Hixie&#x27;s return to Google has no chances now, not that he would want to return anyway.

&quot;Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.&quot;<p>This is so painfully accurate. Everything is geared towards the individual&#x27;s needs to appear good under the lens of promotion and compensation.

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

&gt; Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google<p>These are the Balmer years. Or as we&#x27;ll start saying in a few years: The Sundar years.

The soulful software artisans I know would never consider working at Google. Why is that?

I didn&#x27;t see them mention rank&amp;file careerism culture.<p>Are they attributing the root cause to leadership, and believe the old culture is merely dormant, or could be inspired in people who never saw it, and who weren&#x27;t hired for it?

Excellent and succinct description of risk to all institutions<p>&gt; Google&#x27;s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

Yeah I saw this process unfold over my decade there as well. I&#x27;m very grateful for my time there, my colleagues, and the great work we did (go Monarch team!). The latest evolutions there make me sad.

Funny that it mentions the Android team.<p>Sometimes back I wanted to contribute to Android. It&#x27;s a source-open product, unfortunately. And development goes on, silently, eerily without as much public docs as I would like!

Bold to call out an org director so...directly. Normally you leave and keep quiet about the abusive people you meet in case it backfires because the industry is small and you can be blacklisted.

Is Google the new Microsoft?

&gt; A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example ...<p>Giving a specific manager&#x27;s name is ballsy! I suspect a deleted LinkedIn profile in 5...4...

Google is the next Blackberry, it just hasn&#x27;t happened yet. Unless they can get a Nadella, and really transform the company asap, they&#x27;re in a death spiral.

&quot;We essentially operated like a startup, discovering what we were building more than designing it.&quot;<p>I guess that&#x27;s how the chat apps were created as well

A good read, but I feel a little bit of &quot;OK Boomer&quot; rising up in me, to listen to someone pointing out institutional issues with the system that made them rich, at the same time as they bow out and encourage someone else to fix things.

Which companies today are the Google of 20 years ago?

First thing I noticed were the Swiss trains :) I guess Google is pretty big in Zurich by now? I remember the beginnings of Google maps here

Not the first high-profile Flutter team member to leave Google in the past year.

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

&gt; I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users.<p>I experienced it the beginning of the Corona pandemics, where I demo&#x27;ed some workflows and documented some step by step guide to use Google classroom to be able to offer a great experience regarding home-schooling in Germany. We presented to some Department of Education in Germany, they all declined it because of the &quot;privacy advocates&quot; doing FUD in a super conspiracy level.. we ended up spending millions of Euros and every State having it&#x27;s on half baked solution and a super weak home-schooling infrastructure in general. I&#x27;m pretty confident that we definitely could have done better just using Google classroom.

The search and the gmail is trash now.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what the teams at Google is doing besides serving Ads at top of search ?

I am really interested in the solution. I have some ideas and I think there are potential solutions.

&quot;I see you&#x27;ve been working for 18 years in a corporate environment, do you have startup experience?&quot;

Slight change of company name for anyone interested:<p>I&#x27;m currently finishing this book by an unabashed fan boy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1591841526&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest&#x2F;dp...</a>?<p>about how HP went from the coolest company in the world (50&#x27;s and 60&#x27;s) to dorky old mediocre place that Fiorina&#x2F;Hurd&#x2F;Apotheker&#x2F;Whitman just finished the destruction that was already underway.<p>Like a lot of Valley folks, I blamed Carly, but some other long time HP&#x27;ers said it was already in process of destroying itself. And while people like to hold up IBM as the canonical bad example for Microsoft and then Google, HP could equally well play that role.<p>I think. Still pondering this one.

&gt; Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set.<p>I worked under a VP at a job once who was exactly like this when I was a manager. Truly one of the most demoralizing experiences; always trying to do the best for the people under you and sheild them from this kind of nonsense, but in middle management you can only do so much <i>sigh</i>.

Of course Hickson was behind Flutter

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

Staying within the same company for 18 years sounds like a mistake to begin with.

Amazingly, my company has done something in three years that took google 18 years!

Great insight, Ian joined a year before I did and left 13 years after I left :-). This stuck out for me though ...<p><i>Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google&#x27;s erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot;). The effects of layoffs are insidious.</i><p>I think calling it an unforced error is generous. When I left in 2010 I pointed out to Google that their falling CPC rates meant that the profit margin on search advertising was eroding faster than they were developing new income and faster than they were reducing costs[1] and as a result they were going to find themselves compromising their principles to appease wall street. Before they laid off people they compromised every other principle they had, they added advertising to places they earlier boasted about not advertising, they started selling more and more demographic information about their users to sketchier people. All so they could show that revenue number going up and to the right.<p>I predicted they would lay off people a lot sooner than they eventually did but I blame my misprediction on my misunderstanding of just how much money they could develop when they stopped worrying about whether or not it was good for their users. I completely concur though with how a layoff really changes people. I was at Intel when they did their first layoff in 1984 and suddenly everyone&#x27;s attitude changed to &quot;how do I stay off the layoff list?&quot; That doesn&#x27;t foster a creative, risk taking culture.<p>Someday the story of Google will make a good read, kind of like &#x27;Bad Blood&#x27; but where the enemy isn&#x27;t a sociopathic leader but a bunch of regular people who got addicted to being massively wealthy and threw out all of their principles when that wealth was threatened. Altruism of the rich is a function of their excess wealth.<p>[1] The primary reason I left was because the project I delivered which saved them $10M&#x2F;yr year-after-year was considered &quot;not significant&quot; (read unpromotable).

I&#x27;m waiting if any CEO can maneuver this gigantic complex organization.

Sounds like someone who would be sufficiently candid with his board to me.

Overall reasonable post, but thanking Chris DiBona in this post honestly makes me question the whole narrative. When I was at Google he was on the short list of petty tyrants to avoid at all costs. Just a mean person having way too much fun running a tiny Kingdom Of No.

It’s very difficult to assign credit or blame to outcomes in a large organization. It&#x27;s like trying to see which weight in a large neural net caused a specific outcome.<p>That said, IMO what Elon Musk did to Twitter can be done to Google and many other bloated tech companies.<p>There are so many technically weak middle management and executives that need to be removed.

This is not going to be popular but I have noticed the same phenomenon at other companies where hiring decisions (especially for management hires) is a diversity quota exercise.<p>The decline is slow at first but compounds rapidly. Smart and lazy people leave first. Average but ambitious employees leave. Smart and hard working folks are the last to leave. Leaving the grifters and dumb &amp; lazy to pick through the remains.

Ok... Where am I supposed to go after Google tho?

&gt; The oft-mocked &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time<p>It is oft-mocked precisely because it &quot;was&quot;.

The whole post is a good illustration of what made early Google so insufferable.

Google needs to be broken up.

I wonder if anyone reached out to Jeanine over this post lol

Wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if he receives a subpoena to testify in Google&#x27;s anti-trust case

You can’t go home again.

as another engineer from another company, i&#x27;m sad to relate that i see point-by-point the same things with different names of course. i sympathize. it&#x27;s sad to see the cancer, the nepotism, the grifters that move in on the now weakened, once great, company.<p>f*ck them. just say it. it&#x27;s useless, but good for your psyche.

&gt; it&#x27;s surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious<p>Intent doesn&#x27;t matter if the outcome is the same as intentional malice. &quot;&quot;&quot;Hanlon&#x27;s razor&quot;&quot;&quot; is total bullshit.

is this the fate of big company?

&gt; <i>Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn&#x27;t leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn&#x27;t even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to &quot;handle&quot; her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.</i><p>What a shellacking. I never heard of her, so did a quick search, she&#x27;s on X&#x2F;Twitter <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;femtechie" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;femtechie</a> ; and yes, her Linkedin vanity url is, get this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;winner" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;winner</a>

&gt; I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights have had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today.<p>If you don&#x27;t track users and store personal info about them, there is no need for a banner. You could have an opt-in link for being tracked to hell and back in the footer. It is <i>amazing</i> to me how many &quot;engineers&quot; and &quot;webmasters&quot; cannot understand something so simple.<p>Might as well say all those boneheaded laws made by people who aren&#x27;t even professional rapists require you to ask random strangers if it&#x27;s okay if you spike their drink; yes, you might say they do, but if you&#x27;re the kind of person who doesn&#x27;t spike drinks, you will never even know, the issue will not come up once, it will not take one second out of your life. Even just scrolling by the FUD <i>still</i> spread by people against the GDPR takes more away from me than the GDPR does.

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

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

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

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

Honestly, Flutter, Dart, Go, dont provide much for Google in my opinion. Google shouldn&#x27;t be wasting money on them

Google employees should be put on a Government watchlist for life

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

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

I couldn’t help but hear a desire for lack of accountability in this post. The guy worked at Google for 20 years but really just worked on open source projects he liked without regard for whether it added value to the company (and in fact fondly recalls someone telling him that googles interests shouldn’t matter.)<p>I get why that’s fun but you can’t run a company forever in that way. In my eye even the layoffs are a signal that headcount is not infinite and you have to align what people work on to what makes money.<p>His ranting against his VP and Sundar seem hollow, for all I can tell he’s just upset the gravy train of no accountability is over.

We just have his version of the story though... He might be wrong. It&#x27;s natural after spending so many years in a company to see change as bad, to miss the good old days... And he sure seems to have a problem with that black leader Jeanine... A guy who never rose from his technical roles is lecturing a VP and the CEO of Google for their &quot;lack of vision and strategy&quot;. Come on. Managing is startup and managing a huge behemoth like Alphabet will never be the same

&quot;Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.&quot;<p>&quot;The oft-mocked &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time&quot;<p>A company with public shareholding loses the ability to be anything other than a generator of increasing shareholder value. That is its overt and stated purpose when it goes public. In return for investment, the company must ensure a return on that investment. It&#x27;s not that you&#x27;ve sold out or sold your soul - it is simply the market and how it works.<p>If you want to try to be the nice guy then don&#x27;t go public. &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; is a lovely idea but it does not wash if you want lots of loverly shareholder cash. Stay private and raise capital via the old fashioned method of convincing some rich people to buy into your idea and become private shareholders.

There&#x27;s a great documentary about waco on Netflix and at the end, the guy who is was in command of the troops who massacred 80 women and children concluded (after 30 years of reflection), &quot;you know the real victim was? Me, because the whole fiasco made me look bad.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s interesting to see how those who appear outwardly evil manage to cling to a self-serving and distorted view of the world in which, if anything, they are the maligned victims.<p>You can just as easily imagine a SWAT member saying &quot;when we were training to assault civilian homes, it was a wonderful time, everybody was competent and had the right motivations, we were there to protect the good guys and hurt the bad guys - but only as a last resort! Then when we got to the branch davidian compound we applied all of our methods and tactics and it all went downhill from there and, tragically, we ended up in a dark place.&quot;<p>When, from the perspective of even the most casual observer, it was evident from very early on that given the material, resources, methods, tactics, organization, and leadership that was deployed, the outcome that unfolded was actually inevitable.<p>Getting back on topic, it&#x27;s not particularly news to anyone to find out that there can be very well run, collegiate, bubbles full of well-meaning individuals doing great work who nevertheless operate within institutions which, on the whole, are a cancer upon society. It&#x27;s a wonderful privilege and a joy to find yourself inside one of these bubbles compared to all of the worse things that you could be doing to make a living.