from Hacker News

Culture Change at Google

by kfogel on 1/19/24, 4:46 AM with 483 comments

• by softwaredoug on 1/19/24, 1:57 PM

  It’s easy to have a culture of taking risks when you have unlimited revenue.

  What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.

  I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.

  You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.

  And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.

• by hintymad on 1/19/24, 7:05 AM

  Isn’t it obvious? When the company had 1000 people or fewer yet was printing money, it could of course use Putnam questions or Matin-Gardneresque puzzles or ICPC programming problems to pick the brightest and smartest, and maintain a geek culture. But when the company grew to 130K people yet still managed to hire another 25K in a year, the culture was destined to change, if not deteriorate.

  > he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else

  At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

• by zamfi on 1/19/24, 6:21 AM

  Is any company still like this?

  I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

  And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.

  At some point the real world just gets in the way.

• by V-eHGsd_ on 1/19/24, 5:58 AM

  i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable.

  it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.

  anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.

• by VirusNewbie on 1/19/24, 7:06 AM

  People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit.

  When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.

  Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.

  All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.

  The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.

• by flklklklkl on 1/19/24, 7:41 AM

  Whenever I see posts like these, whether for Google, or any other company, I can't stop thinking about the people not working as engineers - the sales guys, CS reps, building maintenance, the IT guys. Did they have 20% of their time dedicated to "personal projects", whatever that might be? Did they have free food? Are their titles attached to their person? Do they feel their employer value its employees above all else?

  I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.

• by tptacek on 1/19/24, 6:58 AM

  I find it useful, in reading this stuff, to remember: the company he joined in 2005 had (apparently) 5,600 employees. In 2022, that number was 190,000.

• by altaltson on 1/19/24, 2:37 PM

  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.

• by baron816 on 1/19/24, 6:06 AM

  > Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

  Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.

  But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.

  So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

  Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.

• by tmpDn2Gw3PeB3 on 1/19/24, 12:29 PM

  > The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else.

  One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.

  Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.

  The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.

  My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.

  All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.

• by redcobra762 on 1/19/24, 7:05 AM

  Someone I used to work with was acquihired into Google, despite being one of the most manipulative, conniving, duplicitous people I’ve ever met. A person like this can get found out at companies that value talent (he has none), but at Google, he’s thriving.

  This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.

• by mschuster91 on 1/19/24, 6:54 AM

  > Let me explain. In a typical company, when priorities shift, you "downsize" (or cancel) a project, and then use the money to add people to a different, more important project. The common way to do this is fire people from the first project, then rehire a bunch of new people in the second project. It's easy, it's simple, it's expected.

  This is funny for me as a German, because here as a company you are not allowed to fire people essentially on a whim - you have to find new roles for them in the company, and can only lay off people if you can't reasonably do so. Obviously you can try nevertheless but if you can't prove in front of a court that you did reasonable effort, then you'll lose.

  And that email quote is also interesting on its own:

  > Even the IT department works differently. In every building, there are little offices called "tech stops". They sort of look like miniature computer stores. If you have a problem with your computer, just walk it right into the tech stop and show a technician. They generally help you on the spot. If you need hardware, just ask. "Hey, I need a new mouse"... "sure, what kind would you like?", says the tech, opening a cabinet full of peripherals. No bureaucracy, no forms, no requests. Just ask for hardware, and get it. The same goes for office supplies... cabinets full of office supplies everywhere, always stocked full. Just take what you need, whenever you feel like it.

  I think that in the end all this bureaucracy is part of what makes people feel like they're just another cog in the machine, and it's intended to do so. Just think about it from the outside... a company that pays you 60k a year, but adds about 100$ worth of "management overhead" for a simple mouse for 15 €? It certainly shows that you, or anyone else, isn't to be trusted even with minuscule amounts.

• by sidcool on 1/19/24, 7:12 AM

  I think the recent treatment by companies of its employees will remove the rosy glass from our eyes. All employee goodiness is a fair weather phenomena. Always keep a healthy distance from your work and company.

• by hiAndrewQuinn on 1/19/24, 6:30 AM

  For me, the important sentence is "Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things." This is very interesting, but I like that the author notes the outside view, because I still get the feeling I'd like to work there someday.

• by JKCalhoun on 1/19/24, 12:25 PM

  > And so, when priorities would change, Google did not fire people, but rather moved them carefully between projects.

  Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.

  I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.

  It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.

• by neom on 1/19/24, 6:16 AM

  Reminds me of the recent blog post by Sir Adrian Cockcroft.

  Signs that it’s time to leave a company… https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...

• by siwatanejo on 1/19/24, 8:13 AM

  > The takeaway here is this: we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI.

  This paragraph (which is the ending one) feels like it is contradicting the rest of the article. Because if those things really led to an awesome ROI, then Google would not be where it is now, but in a much better position than before. I guess?

  Don't get me wrong, I'm not against valuing employees above everything else, but if this becomes too extreme maybe it's normal that the company creates too much fragmentation? For example, why did Google create both Go and Dart? Shouldn't they converge into one? (Shouldn't Flutter have been written in Go?) And I'm sure there are more examples like this (e.g. we can talk about Fucshia...).

• by darth_avocado on 1/19/24, 6:20 AM

  > Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

  Something that is amazing that often leadership fails to realize is the above. During my last days at X (formerly known as Twitter :P), everyone was just risk averse because it automatically meant a middle of the night firing. So much engineering time was wasted on non productive stuff, that could otherwise be spent on generating more profits for the company. Somehow management wanted you to constantly work towards making more money, while also punishing you for executing on ideas because it was taking you longer than 2 weeks to build and therefore were not working on something that made money immediately.

  Edit: it’s not just innovation that takes a hit, it creates a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive for the company. People hoard information to make themselves irreplaceable, a very small percentage of psychopaths actively sabotage others, people steal ideas and have multiple competing groups work on the same thing, people refrain from raising issues that later create bigger problems, people only work on shiny new things that have the leadership’s blessing while dumping their unstable tech debt on others etc.

• by poundofshrimp on 1/19/24, 6:38 AM

  > But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.

  Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?

• by mikpanko on 1/19/24, 3:47 PM

  How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees but it is not a tough decision.

  Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.

  Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.

  Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.

• by dash2 on 1/19/24, 9:49 AM

  So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground."

  Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.

• by ChicagoDave on 1/19/24, 6:19 AM

  Ben was also a co-creator of the once ubiquitous Subversion source control software.

• by siliconc0w on 1/19/24, 6:08 AM

  There is no evidence layoffs are a good idea from a fiscal perspective either, except in the short term. They're basically random so you loose good talent and you demoralize the best that stay. It should be reserved for dire circumstance.

• by gmerc on 1/19/24, 7:03 AM

  If anything OpenAI demod just how quickly culture can be changed by paying massive salary packages.

  The non profit people never stood a chance.

• by heads on 1/19/24, 5:55 AM

  Infinite abundance — free boiled eggs and T-shirts — just felt like an extension of freedom to perform at the fullest of my abilities (which started out pretty meh, but grew quickly over time more than any other time in my career) without having to worry about anything else.

  There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?

• by red_admiral on 1/19/24, 11:24 AM

  There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot:

  > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal.

  Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get.

  I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.

  Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.

• by kweingar on 1/19/24, 6:25 AM

  Is there any tech company, big or small, with the same kind of dynamic engineering culture that Google once had?

• by alexeiz on 1/20/24, 10:33 AM

  Google hiring process was always flawed. They didn't hire talented generalists. They hired people who gamed the hiring process. Most of them are mediocre at best. As an anecdote, I worked with a couple of guys who were later hired by Google. They weren't stellar in my team (in fact I was glad they were gone), and I have a hard time to believe they were stellar at Google either.

  When you have a lot of mediocre developers, you can shift them around from one project to another all day long, but it won't improve your bottom line. The only solution is to fire them. Unfortunately for Google without the change in the hiring process, they will continue to hire the same kind of people that they just fired. From this perspective Google has become the "normal" company a long time ago.

• by petesergeant on 1/19/24, 6:20 AM

  Other than people who worked there, and miss the old days … who cares?

  Google has transitioned into a mature tech company, which basically means they’re just an investment vehicle now managing assets. They’ll buy the innovation they need, but otherwise management’s job is to predictably manage share prices and profit.

  The nostalgia is nice for people who worked there, but the maturity of the business being presented as decline rather than natural transition is weird.

  It’s time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where the innovation happens.

  It feels like people complaining about gentrification of happening neighbourhoods. The yuppies or shareholders move in, and the neighbourhood transitions, meanwhile smaller, harder to get to, edgier places are taking their place

• by lnxg33k1 on 1/19/24, 10:30 AM

  I don't think the part of attacking big targets works in this context, I would care very little about Google and its culture, it's not my business and people who work there decide to stay there autonomously

  The big target attacking is when those big targets abuse dominant positions to push other products, are anti-competitive, and unreliable, that is what affects the people who are critical.

  For the other stuff, if big tech makes you happy, fires you or puts a teddy bear every morning on your desk, or the CEO comes to tickle you, who cares

• by tock on 1/19/24, 6:37 AM

  Ben and Brian's Google IO talks were fantastic. Their talks always made me realise that Google was a special place. Sad to see its not the case anymore from Ben himself.

• by trinsic2 on 1/19/24, 5:40 PM

  From someone who got out of the corporate rat race in the early 2000's, this is a really balanced article on how companies change to meet the environment they find themselves in. I'm not sure what the answer is when growth starts to dissipate. Maybe trust the people you already have and work towards downsizing in less artificial way? I feel like the stock market has made this problem worse

• by rimeice on 1/19/24, 4:14 PM

  I think I'd s/"unlimited abundance"/"nothing to lose" - particularly in startups. In the small businesses I've worked in, it's when the times a tough, the biggest and most critical bets have been made often with the most conviction. That sort of situation I think also drives some of those motivational and incredibly innovative behaviours in people.

• by renewiltord on 1/19/24, 7:04 AM

  It's interesting. When I moved to California in 2012, Google was exciting. They had hot stuff, new platforms, very exciting. Six years later, you were hesitant to hire Google people. Today, it's the Bay Area retirement home.

  No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work.

  In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistribution in the world.

• by max_ on 1/19/24, 6:09 AM

  "Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff.

  If you're someone building a company, challenge yourself to value employees above all else, then watch and be amazed at the ROI."

  Relevant post from the same author — FAQ on leaving Google https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...

• by apienx on 1/19/24, 8:22 AM

  > The unstated cultural principle was: "products come and go“

  That explains a lot! ;-)

• by kderbyma on 1/19/24, 6:28 AM

  Alphabet has ruined it's entire portfolio if measured by the initial vision of each product. They have decimated the once great platforms they developed in pursuit of ever canabalizing their consumers

• by gws on 1/19/24, 7:47 AM

  “The most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else”

  I wish they had valued users above all else

• by yard2010 on 1/19/24, 1:05 PM

  Evil is not something that applies to a person only. A company can be evil too. Look at facebook

• by wslh on 1/19/24, 10:56 AM

  Ironic tl;dr, the author separates Google culture from business but Google is not just another public company in the NASDAQ. It is a company that impacted and impacts [political] viewpoints of people around the world. In the past "common" people could create content and be visible, now SEO is an impossible game that requires big budgets. Google forgets things (sites) and it is not "Organizing the world's information" [1]. It is just stockpiling it. The company is not a McDonald's. If the soul of the company culture changed it means the seeds for [1] are dead.

  [1] https://blog.google/products/search/information-sources-goog...

• by ipaddr on 1/19/24, 7:32 AM

  There is pre IPO Google culture and post

• by toyg on 1/19/24, 9:56 AM

  > You know how people are much more likely to read an email if it is one screen long, rather than the length of this :-/ ? It is similar with contributing code to the kernel. It is much more social and relationship developing to contribute a screenful or two of code once every week or two over the course of years. We were dropping 90,000 lines of code on them all at once, having worked on it in total social isolation for 5 years in Moscow, Socially it was all bad. Small increments are the more social way to go. Incremental improvements to V3 would have met no opposition.

• by 29athrowaway on 1/19/24, 6:31 AM

  Pro tip: Turn reader mode on

• by piddydiddy on 1/19/24, 6:13 PM

  This is all a joke right? The "limited resources" party pooper fucking up your unsustainable "I wish uni could go on for ever" lifestyle?