Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
Ian Hickson (2023, via Hacker News):
I feel very lucky to have experienced the early post-IPO Google; unlike most companies, and contrary to the popular narrative, Googlers, from the junior engineer all the way to the C-suite, were genuinely good people who cared very much about doing the right thing. The oft-mocked “don’t be evil“ truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time (largely a reaction to contemporaries like Microsoft whose operating procedures put profits far above the best interests of customers and humanity as a whole).
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Early Google was also an excellent place to work. Executives gave frank answers on a weekly basis, or were candid about their inability to do so (e.g. for legal reasons or because some topic was too sensitive to discuss broadly). Eric Schmidt regularly walked the whole company through the discussions of the board. The successes and failures of various products were presented more or less objectively, with successes celebrated and failures examined critically with an eye to learning lessons rather than assigning blame. The company had a vision, and deviations from that vision were explained. Having experienced Dilbert-level management during my internship at Netscape five years earlier, the uniform competence of people at Google was very refreshing.
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Flutter grew in a bubble, largely insulated from the changes Google was experiencing at the same time. Google’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’t know anyone at Google who could explain what Google’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.
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’s erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of “don’t be evil”).
Ben Collins-Sussman (2005, via Hacker News):
I sent this email to my wife and friends as I was wrapping up my first week of “noogler” orientation at Google’s headquarters in 2005. It’s a bit of a glimpse into Silicon Valley at the start of its peak ‘creative culture’ era.
Ben Collins-Sussman (2024, via Hacker News, Dan Luu):
When I was laid off from Google, I knew I’d be deluged with questions. I wrote this FAQ to share with friends and family, to prevent repeated explanation. But my other goal was to help so many of my co-workers process and understand the repeated waves of mass layoffs.
Collins-Sussman was a co-founder of both the Subversion project and Google’s Chicago office.
Ben Collins-Sussman (Hacker News):
Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things. My goal here is to call out a unique, beautiful thing that happened… put it out into the universe, with the hope that it can come back again someday, somewhere.
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And so, when priorities would change, Google did not fire people, but rather moved them carefully between projects. The unstated cultural principle was: “products come and go, but we worked so hard to get our employees… so we should preserve them at all costs. They are our most precious resource.” And so a tremendous amount of energy was put into high-touch resettlement of each employee into new projects. They were generalists. We knew they’d thrive, and that Google would continue to make use of their talent in new ways.
But things change. In my first month at Google, I remember a co-worker whispering to me, “the day Google revenue stops growing without bound, is also the day all of this will change.” The change was very gradual for a long time -- but then things accelerated during the pandemic. Revenue began to slow, and now, coming out of the pandemic, we’re seeing waves of layoffs. Yes, we knew things would change, but we didn’t expect it would accelerate this quickly, in the span of just a couple of years. The academic founders are gone, much of the C-suite is now former Wall Street execs; combine that with revenue flattening toward a stable horizontal asymptote, and the obvious, expected thing happens: the company suddenly moves from a ”culture of infinite abundance” to a standard “culture of limited resources.” It’s a predictable regression toward becoming a ‘normal’ company.
Tim Bray (Hacker News, John Gruber):
On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.
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This is in my mind these days as I’m on a retired-Googlers mailing list where the current round of layoffs is under discussion and, well, it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex.
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For my money, that was the center of Google’s problem. Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious.
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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. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.
Previously:
- Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs
- Vlad Prelovac on Kagi Search and Orion
- Incentives in Product Design and Development
