from Hacker News

Incompetent Middle Management Killed Google

by whoiskatrin on 1/11/24, 6:44 PM with 22 comments

• by bogwog on 1/11/24, 7:16 PM

  > The author made this story available to Medium members only.

  What are the incentives for doing this?

• by Someone on 1/11/24, 8:45 PM

  The blog post this discusses is freely available: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373.

  I don’t see it agreeing fully with the title of this post. It says:

  “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.”

  So, it claims “inept middle management” is a symptom, not a cause.

• by blamestross on 1/11/24, 7:20 PM

  I feel a much stronger urge to blame the c-suite.

  Ultimately it is so much simpler. Google is a growth stock. It's value isn't in revenue. It isn't even in the YoY growth. The value is in the second derivative of revenue. It's value is predicated on the company staying on the "fun and super linear growth" part of the sigmoid growth curve.

  The growth is changing inflection and they have to do everything they can to keep the illusion that it isn't alive because once Google stops accelerating the stock will crash and it will "fail".

  So the c-suite could manage the transition from a growth stock to a dividend stock, or they could keep chopping off bits to keep the old dream alive for one more quarter.

• by ramesh31 on 1/11/24, 7:19 PM

  It's just the money. The stakes are simply too high. You are dealing collectively with millions of dollars in total compensation between just a few people in a room having a meeting. Every single gesture or slight or brilliant idea or suggestion made can have a direct consequential impact measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. It becomes completely impossible to be truly open and honest and collaborative when that's the case. Everything becomes a life and death struggle of competition. People with $800,000 mortgages and $70,000 car payments to make are thinking about very little else. It's pure game theory at this point, where any productive work is a side effect.

• by dave333 on 1/12/24, 9:25 AM

  It makes sense to manage the search and ad business quarter to quarter, but if that's all they do then they will soon get disrupted by the next big thing like AI. They also need to keep thousands of internal startups running in "change the world" mode so they can disrupt themselves and stay in the game long term. I thought thats what they were doing with letting everyone do their Friday projects.

• by moose_man on 1/11/24, 7:03 PM

  Don't forget Sundar

• by AnimalMuppet on 1/11/24, 7:16 PM

  <loads google.com>

  <checks search engine market share>

  <looks at Alphabet's latest P&L>

  Uh... they're sure showing a lot of life for having been killed...

• by whoiskatrin on 1/11/24, 7:20 PM

  Use https://12ft.io/ to read if you aren’t a member

• by TriangleEdge on 1/11/24, 9:45 PM

  Should be changed to "Incompetent Middle Management Kills All Companies".

• by cdme on 1/11/24, 7:18 PM

  And Medium killed the blog only to replace it with more paywalls.

• by 28304283409234 on 1/12/24, 6:44 PM

  “The author made this story available to Medium members only.“

  Bye