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How Google Works

by anvarik on 10/16/14, 5:11 AM with 108 comments

• by WoodenChair on 10/16/14, 8:03 AM

  I found these slides rather shallow. Smart, creative people are the best employees? Who knew! The Internet led to massive disruptions in traditional businesses? Wow!

  Sorry for my cynicism/sarcasm, but I see the book campaign as Eric Schmidt positioning himself for his next role. He's trying to secure his personal Google legacy as he gets ready for an exit. I can't imagine it's all that enticing to go from CEO to chairman in a company where the founder takes back the CEO role... how much influence does that leave you?

• by q_revert on 10/16/14, 6:39 AM

  I started work at google pretty recently, and expressed an interest in working on a particular project. I made some notes about some of my ideas, and was putting some stuff together to show to one of the teams, to get some input before prototyping.

  I asked a senior team member to have a look at the notes I had made, and see if they were ready to show to the wider team.

  His advice?

  "Go build something, then we can have meetings"

  Coming from an academic background I find this type of thinking very refreshing.

• by sz4kerto on 10/16/14, 7:50 AM

  This is not how Google works, this is a PR product -- it's full of fashionable and/or trivial things that we see on various blogs every single day. I don't see why is this interesting to the HN crowd, but well, who am I to judge this. :)

• by dalke on 10/16/14, 4:19 PM

  The answer to "What has changed? Which assumptions do people make that are no longer true? Why does everything feel like it's speeding up?" is supposedly "Technology is transforming virtually every business sector."

  It list three examples which are mostly true. But the same answer could easily have been said any time in at least the last 120 years -- and it was. I think the complaint about the shallow content in this presentation is completely justified, because there's nothing really new about the idea of change.

  Steam power. Electricity. Telegraph. Telephone. Mechanical calculators. Slide rules. Cheap aluminum. Flight. Punch card sorting machines. Linotype machines. Each of those are examples where technology transformed business sectors.

  The telegraph made it possible for information to reach around the world on the same day it happened. Ham radio enthusiasts talked to each other around the world, including bouncing TV signals off the moon. Scratch off the names and it's the same ideas that this presentation promotes as something somehow new. It's assumes the fallacy that what you grew up with was slow and unchanging.

  It's difficult to read much of the research literature from the 1960s without hearing people talk about the "information explosion" and there being too much change and things out of balance.

  Mail order is an 1800s example of "barriers to entry melting away" and is how Sears gained its fame. So was the rise of the daily newspaper, subsidized by advertising that made is possible for people to know what was available.

  "Power has shifted from companies to consumers" ... Hello, the 1930s called. Consumer Reports wants to know if you would like a subscription so they can pay for rigorous testing. Or do you seriously think that mass edited unrestricted feedback can't be gamed?

  "Individuals and small teams have a massive impact." etc. That sounds a lot like the HP Way, which has as point #1 "We have trust and respect for individuals"

  Except, oddly enough, the Google way doesn't mention ethics. Compare to the HP Way where "We conduct our business with uncompromising integrity." and that as a good corporate citizen HP will "meet the obligations of good citizenship by making contributions to the community and to the institutions in our society which generate the environment in which we operate.

  Does Google consider ethics less important than business nirvana?

  What is new in this presentation that HP didn't cover in the 1960s?

• by skrebbel on 10/16/14, 6:51 AM

  And then Larry Page walked in and said "Focus! Everybody's goal is to push Google+ now!"

• by msutherl on 10/16/14, 6:34 AM

  My hope is that this is partly the case due to what is often lamented as an endemic sense of entitlement in Generation Y. Capable, well-off, "smart creatives," having been raised to believe that they can and will make a positive impact if only they try hard enough and make the right decisions. Cumulatively (not collectively, yet), they demand the conditions they need to execute and to feel like they're getting a fair bargain for their most precious resource: their "passion."

  This might mean that we can make the world a better place by raising their expectations even higher. In other words, if no one will work for Google unless they are given the environment and autonomy to do truly great things, as measured by a well-considered external standard, then Google might just be forced to do great things.

  We all know Google has done some things that are not so great. Regulation is one tool the public wields, but perhaps we can do something about that from the inside as well.

• by g123g on 10/16/14, 7:17 AM

  In addition to obviously selling the upcoming book this also seems to be selling Google to potential "smart creative" types. Kind of saying that Google is the one which has the ability to give "smart creative" types the freedom they need to flourish. So in addition to selling copies of the book Eric is also selling Google to potential employees.

• by rmsaksida on 10/16/14, 10:42 AM

  The presentation is a little silly, yes, but if there's any truth to it - if Google actually works this way - that could make all the difference.

  There are places that simply don't give a shit about "smart creative" types, and there are places that claim to have a Google-like culture but in practice are just regular old boss-centric jobs. Every CEO wants to be like Google, but very few actually commit to it.

  It usually starts like this: the CEO wants to have smart creatives and delegate decisions. But then he thinks about all that hard-won money he'll be throwing at an employee, so he hires someone middle level or fresh out of college "with huge potential". Then he systematically micromanages the guy, because he just can't make that jump. The poor soul either abides (not so smart creative after all) or quickly runs out of steam (this guy will quickly start looking at job posts). Eventually the new hire disappoints in some way and the CEO cynically complains about the failed promises of the cool tech company culture which he tried to implement.

  Seeing a very successful company like Google follow these principles, and win, might influence decision makers in a positive way.

• by galago on 10/16/14, 6:55 AM

  “As a result, barriers to entry that have stood for decades are melting away. Every incumbent business is vulnerable to competition and disruption.”

  Upper middle class dudes from elite academic institutions create businesses. What's the new thing? Maybe I'm misstating this and I'm just going to piss away what few points I have less, but hasn't business always been this way?

  Railroads killed the stagecoach, the lightbulb killed gas lamps, Craigslist killed the newspapers. Amazon might well kill Google, but if they do, its not necessarily a new thing.

• by plainOldText on 10/16/14, 9:06 AM

  One line from the slides (33) - "Optimize for growth, not revenue."

  I'm curious, why is everyone nowadays so obsessed with growth? Is growth really that much more important than revenue? What if you strike a balance between the two?

  I remember reading what one of the WhatsApp's founders once said: "[..] we focused on business sustainability and revenue rather than getting big fast [..]" And it looks like they did alright.

• by christiangenco on 10/16/14, 6:37 AM

  These slides are a summary (introduction? teaser?) for Schmidt and Rosenberg's new book, How Google Works[1].

  1. http://www.howgoogleworks.net/

• by ardoi on 10/16/14, 9:04 AM

  Interesting how on slide 15 when describing characteristics of smart creatives, out of technical knowledge, business expertise and creativity it is business expertise that is associated with needing brain power.

• by andy_ppp on 10/16/14, 8:18 AM

  Wow! I Love him talking about creating company culture for smart creative people! Those are presumably the same smart creative people that Google illegally stopped from competing in the job market. Nice one!

• by dothething on 10/16/14, 2:32 PM

  Seems like a desperate attempt to drum up book sales. Whomever created this could have just found motivational posters and pasted them in all 50 slides. I found nothing in this but same old tired cliches; try hard, don't give up, think big. "What's different now?"

• by freshflowers on 10/16/14, 12:08 PM

  The fact that this content-free advertisement for Google gets upvoted to the front-page of a community where most people can see right through it (regardless of how they personally feel about Google) suggest HN is getting astro-turfed.

  Seriously, who upvotes this?

• by bsaul on 10/16/14, 8:38 AM

  I think google's culture has become quite of a joke, and only the people inside the company are still not aware of it. "Do no evil" has been replaced by "pay no tax".

  They've launched two succesful products in their entire history (search engine and gmail), the rest has been bought or only work because they're given away for free.

  An from what i've heard, internal culture with meetings that explain what should people at google think to really be a "googler" is turning into an orwelian nightmare ("but it's for the general good" isn't an answer to limited personnal opinion).

• by barrystaes on 10/16/14, 7:55 AM

  That stupid webpage keeps forwarding me to an empty page after a few seconds in.

• by quickdraw46 on 10/16/14, 6:52 AM

  Loved the presentation, makes me realise how much more difficult it is to hire and foster innovative culture here in India where the office space is still marred by the age old 'BOSS Rules' culture.

• by pXMzR2A on 10/16/14, 7:26 AM

  I didn't know Google as a startup that needed showcasing on HN.

• by junto on 10/16/14, 8:20 AM

  Page 54. For the success of those products we need to add two extra components (in my opinion):

  http://image.slidesharecdn.com/howgoogleworksfinal1-14101217...

  (Technical knowledge + business expertise + creativity)

  You also need:

  Luck + Hard (smarter) work

• by Leander_B on 10/16/14, 11:14 AM

  And then you apply for a job and wait... wait... and wait some more with no updates. Rather fix/speed up recruiting than making bogus slides. If a customer (or applicant) expresses interest in your company, also be humble and give an answer within acceptable time.

• by modx07 on 10/16/14, 11:17 PM

  "Focus on growth, not on revenue"

  Not an exact quote but an idea that was expressed in the slides. I'm curious as to how one achieves this....if this was a sincere bit of advice then I'd love to learn more about what he meant!

• by jason_slack on 10/16/14, 3:17 PM

  I can't seem to find it but Jeff Dean did a talk a long while back about How Google's search works, how they predict. I wish I could see it again. He talks about "shard" servers.

  Anyone remember this?

• by peterwwillis on 10/16/14, 2:39 PM

  > "Never forget that hiring is the most important thing you do."

  Uhh.... I think at least a hundred commenters on HN who've gone through Google hiring would disagree with you.

• by dennisgorelik on 10/18/14, 9:37 PM

  These slides are one of recruiting tools for Google.

• by pibefision on 10/16/14, 8:00 AM

  I've received the book last week and read it during the weekend. It has plenty of insights and great ideas that you can take and try to use in your current area of work.

• by general_failure on 10/16/14, 8:11 AM

  Dunno but I found most of it fairly clichéd

• by tonydiv on 10/16/14, 5:57 AM

  I love the illustrations!

• by phreanix on 10/16/14, 8:28 AM

  Was that a little nod to Apple in slide 42?

• by codeonfire on 10/16/14, 7:03 AM

  The motivation of Google is not even discussed here. Why do you want to create a certain environment for "smart creatives?" Oh yeah, almost forgot... so they'll make products that will make Google lots of money. This always leads to a logic contradiction. If they are so smart and creative, why do they need Google? Everyone knows if you create the next g-mail you still walk in on Monday and get a salary, not equity. You might get a huge bonus, or Google might choose get another airliner instead. That's a risk you'll be taking.

• by frozenport on 10/16/14, 11:03 AM

  If you are the top tech company is it hard to attract talent?

• by diltonm on 10/16/14, 2:34 PM

  The images were distracting, the text was not prominent enough and slide 29 is religiously and humanly offensive to several billion people.