Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.

It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.

I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being.

I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...

There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often.

Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.

It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat.

What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.

Except you don't have to be an asshole to be that person, just in charge.

But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.

Compare that to just being an asshole in a petty way that doesn't have a positive outcome, and just causes fear or stress in those you interact with.

Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is?

I often think it also has to do with the person positioning himself/herself in crowds that appreciate/respect/value him/her. For instance, it's hard to imagine someone like Jobs at an Oracle-style corporation, or imagine Elon Musk running a bank. It seems like these types of people soon understand that certain groups match their "vibe" better, and it works as a positive feedback loop for them.

[0] I've written about this: https://kyefox.com/2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/

People want to believe in the genius that conquered the world, because it gives them the impression that success is a function of individual agency. It is much less impressive to hear that some world changing product was made by hundreds of engineers who all have been in the industry for decades working late nights on boring engineer stuff. These Jobs like figures are then chosen by the masses, because they are the only ones putting themselves out there and thus receive a disproportionate amount of the credit.

You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question.

[1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=4fMzMqFS8lLbMZJr

Yes, but not every CEO is able to give the response he gave. At least, he tried to connect with the developers. When was the last time Google's CEO interacted with devs?

This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be.

Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.

And if people hate him as an CEO so much, then no other CEO in tech history would get the pass mark.

But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized.

I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?

I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.

Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year.

Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth.

Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.

Was it? A lot of people here think the transistor was one of the most important inventions to come out of Bell Labs. Here's Wiki's description of its creation:

> In 1945, Bell Labs reorganized and created a group specifically to do fundamental research in solid state physics, relating to communications technologies. Creation of the sub-department was authorized by the vice-president for research, Mervin Kelly. An interdisciplinary group, it was co-led by Shockley and Stanley O. Morgan. The new group was soon joined by John Bardeen. Bardeen was a close friend of Brattain's brother Robert, who had introduced John and Walter in the 1930s. They often played bridge and golf together. Bardeen was a quantum physicist, Brattain a gifted experimenter in materials science, and Shockley, the leader of their team, was an expert in solid-state physics.

> According to theories of the time, Shockley's field effect transistor, a cylinder coated thinly with silicon and mounted close to a metal plate, should have worked. He ordered Brattain and Bardeen to find out why it wouldn't. During November and December the two men carried out a variety of experiments, attempting to determine why Shockley's device wouldn't amplify.

It hardly sounds like they just gave a bunch of smart people a playground and told them to have fun. The problem with many historical examples is that people sometimes only pay attention to the fun parts they want to hear (a lot of focus was put on engineers and they were given some leeway) and often ignore the hard work that went into it (a lot of management, structure, and focus). We get left with overly simplistic solutions that sound wonderful, but then fail when people try to implement them.

In a somewhat-parallel to early Google, it's worth noting that Bell Labs was funded by, and operated in service to, a near-total national-scale monopoly. When that monopoly was deconstructed, it triggered a decline in the output of the research organization as well (there's a clear decline in the ground-breaking output of Bell Labs after the 1984 Ma Bell breakup).

What turned me off tech culture is not just that tech companies became more like banks. It's that there is a monoculture of thought, and highly arrogant thought at that. It's the place where developers are royalty and everyone else is regarded as mouth breathing servants. Of course, most companies, for damn good reason, are not structured with developers running everything, and so you get a constant stream of toxic comments complaining about how every other role at the company is useless and holding back the oh-so-brilliant developers.

That's not diversity, it's not inclusion, and it's not a recipe for actually changing the world for the better.

More like Xerox PARC. I wish we could re-create the secret to how productive that engineer playground was. Yes, Xerox HQ (across the country) had little interest in monetizing their output but as an invention factory it was an immense success and we use their ideas every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Parc

But the discussion here is around Google's inability to create good products, so I don't think the comparison is apt.

How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.

Well one component that has changed there is that the marginal tax rate on the inflation-equivalent of a Google Director pay back then was 80-90%, so there wasn't really a point in enticing people with large salaries.

Also, the factory workers you mentioned could afford houses in a big city on a single income. Now a single FAANG eng struggles to do the same unless they get N promotions, and even moreso if you tack childcare costs on top.

Absolutely not: re factory workers affording houses in big city on single income in 1960s.

Initiatives like Google Fiber flaming out were certainly not the fault of anyone at the company. Maybe for drastically underestimating the difficulty of the problem. Actually, maybe that’s a reoccurring issue with these moonshots.

At the cultural level, though, during periods like the space race and cold war, there seemed to be a national zeitgeist such that companies, their owners, their directors, were all willing to sacrifice some profit to serve a common national mission. Maybe it was just the fact that the CEOs had grown up in a time when food was rationed and factories were ordered by federal fiat to produce war materiel.

I don't actually think this type of culture is completely dead, for what it's worth. But it's not exactly in vogue. I personally work in defense, I served in the Army, and I make more than enough money but quite a bit less than Netflix likely would have paid me, but I work on products that serve US strategic interests. Entire companies exist explicitly for this purpose, but they're not Google scale and never will be. I don't think very many people on Hacker News would even consider this good, though. Witness the backlash to OpenAI even being willing to work on military applications at all. The readership is so cynical that they can't imagine a military serving any purpose aside from valueless destruction. In the 20th century when militaries saved the world from German and Japanese conquest and mass genocide, that kind of thinking was a lot less prevalent.

I also don't think these are the only two options, either. People can also be motivated purely by the science itself or by the global wellbeing of all mankind. I just don't know that, historically speaking, those bring large-scale resource mobilization to bear quite as well as getting rich and ensuring the continued strategic dominance of a way of life represented by a country of birth you deeply believe in. As people come to believe less and less in their own countries, we seem to be left mostly with getting rich as the only viable option.

The public has had substantial loss of faith in its institutions in the past couple of decades, and the military is not exempt from it. America's foreign policy has come a long way since WWII.

Politics aside, I've also seen cynicism towards Silicon Valley tech from the defense world- USAF vet and commentator Mike Black's vitriolic criticism of Anduril and other defense startups, for instance (e.g. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575677683211505665.html https://twitter.com/mikeblack114/status/1730453326817276026 https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1736481633358770353 https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1741366626006560864). Though that is tangential to your point.

But I don't think all is lost. I'm pretty sure solidly civilian organizations like United States Digital Service and 18F have good reputations, much like the Postal Service does. But all of them receive a pittance of investment compared to defense spending.

And growth is not just in physical size but in intelligence. 40 year old me knows a whole lot more even than 20 year old me thought he did.

Sustainability is hard. Would Google still be a favorite if it had never gone beyond a handful of products? Well never know, but has chasing new shiny worked out?

I guess for the billionaires, it has.

Elon does the same externally ("visionary") - and I expect internally.

Maybe Jobs' strength was that he had strong visions in multiple areas, and was able to have a few different stacks of people really in line with each and keep them moving separately?

I suppose the todo table could have many columns. What are the great unsolved mysteries or challenges? How useful are they to humanity? How hard are they? What does it cost? How does one sort the rows?

Say each human is assigned a column with the value of the todo item. Most fields would be empty. We would need a column with virtual min-max values.

Then, while expanding the data set, you dump it onto the internet, sit back and eat popcorn for a while?

The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains.

And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe.

The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running.

All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.

That said, yes there are a lot of SWEs and projects that are wasting engineering talent.

I’m guessing you were closer to the hardware than me, and also left at least several years ago, but I’m under the impression that the rest of industry has mostly caught up to where Google was in DC tech. They’re still at the tip of the spear with things like ML and unmatched in sheer scale, it’s just that the rest of the world has had a lot of time to play catch up.

(I worked the first couple years in display ads, then some time on Jetstream/Google WiFi then some very brief time in Fiber, then many years in DSPA/Nest, and then for my last year in some Core stuff. So I only got to really use Borg & friends for the first two years and last year of my time there. Left two years ago.)

All the ore reason to mourn as the Bell labs output benefited humanity while the Google innovations are poised to disappear when the company fails.

It’s like an Oil Rich Nation. Pumping oil is the only thing they know. They’ll build shiny cities, crazy buildings, and fund moonshots. But nothing else will compare to the profits of oil/ads, so nothing else can possibly matter.

The only big oil economy that isn’t totally dependent on their energy industry is the US, and only because we had other natural resources that allowed us to diversify early.

To divest Google from ads they need another source of infinite cash. If you can discover that, it’s way more valuable to you on its own instead of within Google. Maybe they can find a few thousand smaller side businesses to supplement revenue, but they’ll always be individually disposable (as we see now) and subject to cancellation.

A subset of people around here don't think that way. Why? I have my own opinion, not very flattering.

By the same logic, our biology must think cancer is pretty valuable because of how many resources it dedicates to feeding cancerous cells. Wealth and value are not correlated.

How is the market saying that the richest man is pretty valuable? Because the richest man owns a significant number of shares in a company the market deems as valuable?

Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation.

But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned.

As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly.

I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care.

It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job.

Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.

This is completely wrong. Their style was deliberate indifference about aesthetics, but their products (maps, search and gmail in particular) were absolute masterpieces of product design when first launched.

Edit to add: even Chrome itself was like this.

Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design, it offered an escape from spam and manually managing your mailbox storage. Back then, if you used a free email experience, you were bombarded with banner ads, had 100MB of storage, and 99% of that was eaten by the spam sent directly to your inbox. Features are not product design.

Chrome might be a good exception, though. I still get the sense that it was primarily driven by inspired engineers. The reason for Chrome's success is probably not it's innovative design (it was it's performance), but it certainly was an incredible advance.

Mapquest would beg to differ. To me, the interface was the killer feature for Maps. The data and trip planning functionality existed already on the web (as my print outs of driving routes in the late 90s can attest to). But being able to just scroll around a new city was amazing. Every other site required clicking through every North or West button with a round trip to the server.

It wasn’t until later that the satellite data and street view data became the next killer feature.

Well, let's hit up Yahoo! Maps to find the dopest route

I prefer MapQuest; (that's a good one, too)

Google Maps is the best; (true that;) double true!

So yeah, there was a third competitor-

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2005/12/27/saturday-night-...

It popularized instant search, tagging and threading to such a degree you have clearly forgotten how elegant it was!

If I remember my thoughts back when Gmail was launched I was clearly awestruck. Gmail showed what was possible to do if one had fast internet connection. All those little interactions enabled through ajax! I think it was the first time, atleast for me, a product was as good as a desktop app w.r.t interactions and usability.

For comparison, with Yahoo mail one had to hit compose button and wait for a few seconds for compose window to open up. With Gmail it was extremely nifty and nearly instantaneous because I think it was done clientside and Ajax.

SUPERCUT Every "And loving it" in Get Smart (1965-1970)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aeETaCsop8

Product design is what something does, how it is structured and how it behaves to user interaction, _and_ how it appears, not just one of them. GMail was almost to email what the iPhone was to smartphones.

This is product design.

[1] https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...

Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.

The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.

It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.

Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"

It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.

They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.

All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.

> Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.

Just by definition search predated any culture or strategy at Google since its launch came before any hiring or incorporation. Certainly it was refined and maintained well for years but I’d argue this is an exception to the culture as refining and maintaining things well are not regarded as Google’s strong suit. Search dominates revenue in a big way so they had to do that for search and made it happen.

And a second bit of pushback - Maps, Gmail and Street View were certainly best in category from a user standpoint but my impression is they are a rounding error when it comes to revenue (actual businesses success) compared with search. Maybe this has changed. But assuming it hasn’t, a common critique of engineering led orgs is that they tend to stop at technical sweetness and fail to fully follow through on delivering great businesses and all that entails (revenue, support, incremental evolution, maintenance). That shoe seems to fit.

Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google.

First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions on anything people care about until you’re a well-established L6 or L7. Even then, you’re more of a voice in the room with the Product Managers and Directors/VPs (you might have 5 directors+ VPs who also are on your product) and business stakeholders for the little chunk you’re actually responsible for. Google is extremely hierarchical, not just in terms or a deep org chart but in empowerment, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Nobody will listen to you or care until you’re at this point, your ideas and suggestion will be treated like a child at the Thanksgiving kid’s table asking for a glass of wine.

Ok, so become a product manager. Well then you have to deal with the fact that you are amazingly constrained by things outside of your control, like the headcount and capacity of engineering teams who have to handle a bunch of internal migration bullshit, want to refactor or rewrite something for no business reason except because it’s easy coasting material, and handle requests from a dozen other PMs. You have to deal with a ton of bureaucracy and process bullshit just to get your product ideas turned into reality. You have no idea what’s easy and what’s hard because engineering at Google is different than at other companies (the “impossible” is just hard, but the “easy” is also hard). You’re not empowered to step in and code and design even if you can and want to. You are gonna spend a lot of time writing SQL and docs nobody cares about and still need to make it to a high “level” to matter.

Well what happens if you do get to that high level? Then you’re in charge of a million and one things and mostly doing performance management. You don’t have time to care about a product - you are the gatekeeper of it and can have strong opinions, but you simply do not have time to be passionate about it, because you have too many responsibilities and are too far removed from the actual work/product/users. You still have a deep management chain above you to contend with, you play political games for HC and need short term wins to secure it, you’re probably in a different stage of your life where your passion project is either career (not product) and/or family.

It’s still a great place to learn, the pay and benefits are still good, you still probably get to work on something cool. But your ambitions and passion will be crushed unless you can endure a decade+ of being a ~nobody. If you truly want to build something amazing you’ll have to go elsewhere.

Much of what you wrote here seems familiar with those who work for LARGE orgs or companies. The individual simply cannot have much influence when your org is > 10000 people.

I suspect the thing unique to Google is how (or so I hear) the technology stack is more or less a monolith, always designed to scale, and you can't (or are discouraged to) start "small" projects, so you're basically stuck with the huge orgs and don't have a choice to run/join a relatively small and isolated operation where you have more control.

Calling attention to this specifically, because do we want a single 'Google' to have foothold on every ground? Innovation needs a healthy dose of competition, after all.

Furthermore, even if that were true, companies (especially ones like Google) look for project and product managers that have CS degrees or other STEM degrees.

Personally, my frustration with project/product managers often comes from (ironically) underspecified requirements and highly unrealistic deadlines. Neither of those I consider a failing of their education or skills, but a failing of the company's reward structures.

Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this. So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?

After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.

I remember when I was really young I thought batman (the original series) was an adventure show, but watching years later as an adult... lol, it was a comedy!!

Remember the big fuss about no managers?

>not many amazing new products were happening.

And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs

To me Google is simply a technology company, and are constantly innovating with Technology and looking for uses cases with the new tech they have. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple because the current Apple is looking more and more like Google. Are a consumer company that identify a problem and work backwards to look for a technology solution.

Unfortunately, it turns out Technology, Business, and Consumer understanding is an extremely rare set of combination.

But maybe it was just luck.

Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof.

What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market".

I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.

I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unified payments infrastructure, it's become pretty clear. The engineers are spending too much time mucking through the garbage left behind by M&A tech merging and code left behind by hotshot college grads on their way to early retirement at 25.

EDIT: M&A

As far as I can tell, seems to be a lack of a cohesive vision from leadership and an absolute willing ignorance of existing challenges, as you’ve mentioned.

90% of my personal Google services appear to be tied to the organization one for some reason, but a few recent ones from the Google Store are now tied to my personal one, meaning I need to use the profile switcher to access and manage them. There is no way to move subscriptions between payment profiles and the only option is to close one which will terminate the services immediately and remove the billing history. The one I should remove is the Organization one, as I'm not an organization...

-.-

Meanwhile, I have a single owner LLC that had GCP projects in play before the company was founded. I had tried to set up two separate GCP billing accounts, one owned by my GSuite admin and one owned by my personal account, to bifurcate the projects that fell under the new company.

Somehow that resulted in the one and only payment profile associated with my GSuite business GAIA identity being that same organization payment profile from my personal account! So I can see and manage personal subscriptions on payments.google.com. There's no way to change this that I'm aware of short of working with GSuite support.

You can in fact make a new payment profile, and Google says you should do this when you move to another country, but the help docs themselves note that your existing services will continue to charge on the old one. Which I guess means you are expected to cancel all your Google services, delete your old payment profile so that you can sign back up for all of them in the new payment profile manually, and lose all history of your previous payments.

So there's Billing Accounts which point to Payment Accounts, and Payment Accounts which point to Payment Profiles. In true Google fashion, there's a tooltip on the Payment profile ID which says it used to be called Billing ID. That's not confusing at all.

This is just a few of the utterly baffling things I found while trying to work this out. It reminds me of how PayPal has active subscriptions that it's UI literally cannot manage because they are too old and were incorrectly migrated from one of the zillions of older M&A subscription products that they merged in in their history.

* What is P&A tech?

* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.

They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.

levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.

All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/on...

There are 2 dimensions in this equations (1) best programmers (2) management.

They might have hired best engineers, but not the best management. Maybe the management ruined them, by putting profits above everything else.

Keep in mind, some of those management/MBA people have tendency to put promotion above anything else.

What decline are you talking about? They have hundreds of billions revenue and climbing.

It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.

Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.

The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.

Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.

Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products.

A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there.

Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

> And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives.

My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization:

- a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design)

- research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes

- etc etc

- meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting

- at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates

Still everything worked for a while:

- DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc.

- Same goes for Bing until GPT

But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today:

- results are as bad as the search engines they replaced

- the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads

- search operators are gone

- and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google

Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.

But

1. so has their processing power

2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale

3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.

That is, I think folks generally have seen, and commented on, Google's rot for many years now. For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so, whenever Google drastically reduced the differentiation between ads and organic results, and began loading more and more ads into the top or the results page. I felt it was the first actively user hostile change that was solely in the service of revenue for Google. So I feel it's a tad rich that all these posts are coming out from ex-Googlers lamenting Google's decline now that it's really affecting Google's employees personally. I guess in their defense it seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be posting/commenting while they were currently Googlers, but still, it seems a bit lacking in insight/introspection to see all these posts pointing to the demise of Google's culture as when they had "uncaring" layoffs. I'm thinking, no, Google's demise started a decade-plus ago; they could just paper over it for a long time with good food.

It was February 11, 2011 in Tahrir Square. That, as far as I can tell, was the place and moment where 'tech' changed.

Governments and other organizations were very rudely shaken awake by how 'tech' had just toppled an otherwise stable government at a key choke point of a populous country. How all this newfangled communications tech and silly meme culture came together out of seemingly nowhere and threatened everything.

After Tahrir Square, every government and agency and whatever else saw tech as a very powerful and possibly threatening 'thing'. And they slowly but surely managed to change 'tech', work with it, get hired in it buy it off, and make it and themselves more to their liking and plans. The adolescence was over.

Tahrir Square was when the suits woke up and then went to work in 'tech' because everyone could see that was the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square#2011_revolution

Big Tech in a nutshell

So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.

This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company.

The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to structure your career around financial success, but I met many people like her who were attempting to get jobs at Google or Amazon just to cash in as much as they could for a few years, then bounce. At some point your company is bound to become filled with people like this.

Once a company is overwhelmingly infested with folks who are cashing-in-till-they-bounce, should you stick around anyway, even though that'll hurt your career?

Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code.

I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.

This is a problem when the decision-maker doesn't act on advice from staff or is incapable of understanding the advice. Now give that leader an ego and abandon all hope.

There are many rungs to fall below "competent, but not passionate". In fact, I think I prefer my leaders to be dispassionate and competent.

I've seen PM's and PO's that claim 1-5 years experience as developers who are shite because they're not very technical.

The underlying issue is that these positions should be filled by senior developers but instead they became their own career track.

Case in point: the Hacktoberfest fiasco.

Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)

Thanks for sharing, really insightful.

There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, surely they could have come up with something in 25 years besides ads that made money and could stand on its own two feet. Instead, there is:

- Youtube (unprofitable 18 years running)

- Android (dead in the water w/o Samsung)

- Google Cloud Platform

- Google Workspace

- hundreds of smaller projects that were sunset

For all the non-Ads people lamenting the end of the good ol' days, has there been any reflection from them on the fact that all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?

I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices.

Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani...

It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance

Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded.

Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.

Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle.

When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...

(… at least until they get shut down for not being as successful as ads)

Not only were they not profitable they wouldn't even get funded if not for the money printer of Ads business.

It also was allegedly a "special" place, where you had autonomy as an engineer, yada yada. From what I hear about openai, that doesn't really apply there. Are there any small-but-large-ish companies (100-1k employees) out there today that have a culture similar to the early google?

Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google) discusses it here: https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154

Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced.

Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.

Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works

There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.

> The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.

Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that.

More controversially Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement, and with that came floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead. That agreement was bad but the absolute avarice among modern tech people is stunningly depressing for those of us that have been around to see the change.

Google mainly remind me of SGI, and it is their office after all.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f...

Wither Google ?

FYI. This is my recollection of events, but it's been twenty or so years now, so if my memory is fuzzy on the details, please forgive the ramblings of an old engineer :-).

Many years ago, I was working at SGI when the company started to do poorly under the leadership of Rick Belluzzo. In those days the company sponsored the Friday afternoon "beer-bust", when all the employees hung out on what is now the Google volleyball court, drank beer and socialized. Rick cancelled the beer busts as a cost cutting measure.

One of SGI's lead engineers, Casey Leedom (known internally as Mr. IRIX, for SGI's version of UNIX - a codebase he knew inside-out) took it upon himself to self-organize replacement beer-busts with the rest of the engineering staff. We all chipped in to buy the beer, and the Friday afternoon festivities continued as normal.

Rick Belluzzo heard about this, and embarrassed, called Casey into a meeting. "Things aren't that bad", he told Casey. "We can fund the beer-busts again". "No", said Casey. "We know the company is having some hard times, and we're all in this together, so the engineering staff are happy to continue to self-fund the beer-busts".

"There is one thing you could do", Casey added. "I know you are a busy man, but if you could take it upon yourself to occasionally attend a beer-bust, it would be much appreciated by the employees".

"Great idea !", said Rick, and promised to do so. Six or so months later, Rick Belluzzo ran away from SGI over a weekend, and on Monday it was announced that Microsoft had a new VP. "We appear to have lost our CEO" was the email announcement from now acting CEO Bob Bishop.

In the time since Casey asked him to the time he joined Microsoft, Rick attended zero self-sponsored beer busts at SGI.

For some reason I can't see Sundar attending any self-sponsored Google beer-busts either.

And 1000's of non Google and Meta employees have benefitted from this, so I say this is good.

The argument may be that this invited the wrong type of people to VC. I would say, They were already there, just not as obvious.

Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?