altaltson

I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.

Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.

The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.

I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect.

The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.

By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"

I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.

But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.

Google has solid to excellent engineering depending on where you are. The problem is and always has been that the leadership hires mid HR and business talent. It’s hard to watch smart people with 40 years of experience having to jump to the tune of some MBA bro with a massive ego whose only qualification was going to the right school and a massive ego.

Google’s problem was never a lack of ability to build and run impressive engineering artifacts. It was always that the business and product side of things was run very poorly.

I really think things started heading south when Sundar became CEO and proceeded to exchange much of the leadership.

He took over a company that was at the top of its game and fucking ran it into the ground in 4-5 years. He’ll be remembered as the worst tech CEO of a major company for years to come.

I couldn’t believe how quickly and radically Google changed and after a while, many of us cut our loses and left. This layoff got rid of many other long-timers for what seems to be no good reason.

We can only hope that all the solid engineers gravitate toward a company where the leadership is not completely incompetent.