That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies.
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.
I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result).
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.
Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels.
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.
They fixed the VPs but they're way too busy to appeal to, even when they agree with you and everyone was told as much. And now you have extremes of rest-and-vest and "if I get the Visibility(tm) for this, maybe I'll get one more promo..." behavior from the L7s and lower.
Just having the power isn't enough. Nobody respects pushovers. Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect.
But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.
I think Jobs as an example here is confusing, because he's noted as being an asshole and also an asshole, so people will read it your way and people will read it the other way.
I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code.
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.
I don't need to know anything about masonry to respect a skilled mason or for it to be mutual. Why would it be any different for a programmer and a leader? I don't know much about programming and avoid it at all costs [0], but all my programmer friends appreciate insights I have when they bounce ideas off me.
> I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code.
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.
How do you resolve that with the fact that the same hundreds of engineers doing boring engineer stuff nearly bankrupted the company before they brought Jobs back?
Some of the groups that kept Apple alive were also among first to axe.
What Jobs did fix (and some claim it was due to getting bitter pills few times before returning to Apple), was to play on the feelings when you buy apple gear. And that you stopped being important the moment you paid, though some support orgs were on life support until income stream became just too stable to worry.
> You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question.
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.
Exactly. Most people on HN dont commenting on Steve Jobs not only has never worked directly with or under him. They dont even bother to actually research into his real personality. Instead they rely on hearsay or very selective reporting or comments.
And if people hate him as an CEO so much, then no other CEO in tech history would get the pass mark.
I think it's literally just notoriety. There's collaborative and visionary leadership styles but nobody bats an eye because there's no conflict. People just work and its another Tuesday. Product gets delivered. Everyone moves on.
If the only X moonshot that lands is Waymo, I think that still counts as having a transformative impact.
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?
You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer.
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.
I’m biased, as I am guessing you are too, but there is at least some innovation in infrastructure at Google outside of search and ads. Spanner, Borg/Kubernetes/GKE, PAAS, BigQuery and the successive internal query systems just to name a few. Sure many of these were funded by ads or motivated by their problems/use case originally - you’d expect that of a company that started with search and exclusively made money from ads for a long stretch - but they’ve all been developed to solve for many for workloads now, and even made available for external consumption as infrastructure products. For some they have made huge impacts on the entire software industry.
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.
Yeah I tend to think of all the core things you listed as outcroppings of search and ads :-) They're infra needed for that.
(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.)
How do we break ads for Google? More generally, what do we do to make ads disappear or weakened? I guess that's the only way current Google would want to innovate more.
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.
I don't really care if Google innovates. The good thing that is coming out of these layoffs and recent departures is that talent locked up in Google will scatter out into other places, instead of being locked up inside. In the long run it will be good for the tech industry.
> 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.
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.
> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top?
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.
One thing everyone here always forgets about places like Bell Labs and Xerox parc, was that it was NOT a monoculture of developers working on things. These places encouraged collaboration between many different disciplines. They encouraged diversity.
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.
> 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.
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).
The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory describes how the Labs was working.
The last chapter tries to figure out why it was working and one of the conclusion is that the Labs was always guided by the long term idea that it might help the telephone company (and that the breakup removed a) the long-term funding b) some kind of direction )
Bell Labs worked during the Cold War, in a Keynesian economic system. They were focused at fundamental technology, not in creating an end-user service to conquer the world.
Bell Labs did that, but they worked in service to the rest of the Bell system that was precisely targetting "creating an end-user service to conquer the world". Citing Bell Labs as if they were "an entire company" is misleading - they were the R&D wing for what was essentially a monopoly in telecoms.
> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was?
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.
But did Bell Labs put those out as products? There are things that have come out Google (Kubernetes, their contributions to Linux and containers, gRPC, HTTP/2-3, Bazel, Go, compression, etc.) that have been similarly useful for others to build businesses on, the same way Bell and Xerox's research stuff became the foundations for other things outside of those companies.
But the discussion here is around Google's inability to create good products, so I don't think the comparison is apt.
This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or DARPA from that. Moonshot basic research like that may or may not make money. Your fundamental motivating force has to be doing cool shit, not getting rich. If you want something like Google X to work, the culture has to be such that no one is going to jump ship when Netflix offers to double your cash compensation.
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.
You make a lot of good points, but was the failure of Google moonshots really the fault of the workers who were easily lured by comp, or management who were impatient about seeing material results? Seems like either could have been chasing higher returns.
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.
I try to look at systems level more than blaming certain individuals. I'm sure a lot of engineers working on Google X projects honest to God cared deeply about the specific problem they were tackling. My own wife was once pretty close to taking a job there. But unless they're going to donate labor by working for free, they can't fund the projects themselves. The company has to be willing to lose money on most if not all of their work. I guess that worked for a while when ads were so profitable and no one else did them well enough. I may be misremembering my history, but as far as I understood, Bell Labs had to do this kind of public good work as a condition of being granted a national monopoly.
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.
If I had to guess, it's because from the Iraq War to modern day border theater, popular image of the military ain't what it used to be. It also seems like tech intended for defense is adjacent to civilian intelligence and law enforcement use, of which there is also cynicism and fears of surveillance- see Palantir viewed as the commercial equivalent to PRISM, for instance.
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.
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?
Having someone with a strong vision to rally around and attract others with similar views probably works wonders in itself. This could be someone powerful at a large company attracting like minded employees, or a small company whose founder and mission mission attracts specific hires, which explains to a degree some of the performance of small companies (or lack of performance of large ones if you see it that way).
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?
> The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable.
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.
When you really analyze at how many/most of the richest people in the world got so rich, they tended to extract (i.e. more parasitic) much of the value rather than create (i.e. more symbiotic) it. They have also often done so at the direct expense of others simply so they could have more... when they already had much more than they could ever use. Our economic system allows for this, but to praise these folks for much of what they did leaves a bad taste.
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?
What should one do with power once one has it? After immaturity wears thin, what should one become? The most simple answers seem to make an effort to hold onto power, expansion of power seems a method but I think popularity might be a greater preservant which in turn depends on what one chooses to become. Gluttony, specially on it's own, is pretty useless to everyone else. You could convert popularity into power, it isn't a net gain necessarily.
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?
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-...