A Googler who just resigned after 18 years reflects on the decline of the company he loved
Open link in next tab
Hixie's Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google
https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
And then don't ever, ever go public. Once you go public all the greedy people will insist that you install more greedy people.
Yeah I'm not holding my breath. Hope Gabe isn't either because if he is, it only speeds up the process.
I think it’s less about going public and moreso about the people that have the ability to get to the head of that line via funds.
Why should Joe Shmoe who’s family fortune is based off mafia and cartel funds get to have say in your company? Just because of the money?
I don’t get it. I’m probably naive to facets of this process - open to hearing/learning more from more informed people
Why should Joe Shmoe who’s family fortune is based off mafia and cartel funds get to have say in your company? Just because of the money?
Yes. Becasue it is Joe Shmoe's money that funds the company while it builds the product. Without the money, there is no product.
I think it’s less about going public
Going public is a big issue, that is how Joe Shmoe gets his payback. He is the one pushing for the IPO so they can get paid.
Once that happens, the founders lose what little control they had, the control is always with the people that supply the money in the end.
Right I get it, money is needed for growth.
But maybe we just don’t need to grow so much. What if we let that excess need (due to lack of supply) spill over into competition with people who also don’t want the whole public traded, board room setup?
Idk taking the money out of business seems impossible no matter how you cut it. Maybe more self hosted and crowd hosted stuff is one solution? What are your thoughts in terms of solutions?
I have no idea how we move forward.
Maybe more self hosted and crowd hosted stuff is one solution?
Currently private finding rounds hinge on convincing a few people who control millions to fund you. Part of that is showing them often highly confidential details of what you are trying to create.
Crowd finding would be much. much more difficult. Now you have to convince millions of people to give you funding, possibly exposing you to having your ideas stolen before you can develop them.
Now you have to convince millions of people to give you funding
There are examples of people doing this. Cooperatives can be owned by the workers or by the customers. They're usually cheaper too.
They don't have the "move fast and break things" mentality however because by nature they don't have a billionaire sponsors, so it's harder to complete in a venture capitalist world. It's when big money dries up, like the great depression, when you'll see them popping up.
It's worked to a fair degree in gaming but yeah, not really a viable solution. Especially because the crowd itself is slowly getting robbed of its money.
the market itself is garbage. its a hot mess of under/over regulation by all the wrong actors.
tax stock trades. ever single one. tax stock ownership. tax the everliving fuck out of the stock market.
The solution I’m most interested in is eliminating the friction to seed/early stage funding coming directly from interested user communities and even better would be to also draw as much of the labor pool as possible from the same group.
I think this eliminates most of the misalignments in stakeholder interest.
We already have equity crowdfunding in the states. We need more innovation in crowdfunding platforms.
Good, healthy, properly running companies that don't owe their existence to a lot of external forces don't go public.
Going public only pays off the stakeholders in the company, like venture capitalists or employees that were under salaried and offered stock as a bonus.
Once you accept venture capital, you're pretty much down the path to going public, because the investors have an expectation of realizing their gains if the company is successful.
with every tech company
Clearly the problem here is unbridled capitalism, so why are you crying about tech companies specifically?? Nothing you highlighted has anything to do with tech but instead company culture in general
Yep. With respect to network effects, culture bifurcates and can do so quickly. Good eggs bring in good eggs, bad (and dangerously, mediocre) bring in bad.
Honestly, this is just big tech all over. I don't think there are many people that work at FAANG companies any more that feel things are better than they were even 3-4 years ago. They are no longer idealised, and CEO's have decided to take company failures out on employees instead of their inability to target long-term success. I've friends at Amazon, Google, and Apple - all say that their "culture" is basically dead.
IMO, we've reached a point where all of the big names in tech are now out of ideas. None of them have innovated in recent years, outside of (maybe) AI, and the culture of supporting moonshot ideas (where someone can work on something new/exciting and not be personally liable if it doesn't work out) is now dead with layoffs in these divisions. The only incentive that big tech has any more is pay, and with no long-term stability and pay decreasing over time, I think we'll see a shift away from FAANG and towards the new breed of tech. FAANG will become the IBM and Oracle's of tech, and things will move on.
Notable exception which must be mentioned is Facebook/Meta: their AR/VR plan is one gigantic moonshot. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, and if it doesn't then obviously the thousands of people employed in that division won't be able to find a home in WhatsApp or whatever.
And the most successful company with VR, Valve, pretty much had its day with it and have moved on to other, profitable ventures. It's too expensive to own, even moreso to develop for, and offers nothing fascinating in terms of experience that other multimedia does.
I know they don't do bootcamp any more, but Facebook were perfectly set up to move people between divisions by not hiring for specific roles, and doing team matching over orientation. It was a system that worked well, and being able to switch teams easily meant that people could jump from WhatsApp to Instagram to Ads with minimal friction.
In terms of numbers, definitely, but a phased rollout could work if it meant keeping services in KTLO, and moving people out gradually as you slow down internal hiring. Sadly, companies find it easier to just sack everyone, and then hire again in a few months.
The hiring process for their AR/VR division is also different than it is for the rest of the company - even when the general rule was to hire without a specific role in mind, that was not the case at Reality Labs. But yeah, the big issue is that you can't absorb 10,000 people into the larger organisation that easily even if they were all generalists.
They aren't even out if ideas, it's management which demands safe ideas only with huge returns, so they block common sense shit because it doesn't boost the quarterly results
That's a symptom of capitalism as a whole.
The whole perpetual growth, and being legally bound to try to provide that to shareholders, means only "safe" ideas are given any traction.
The only time any "innovative" comes out is when billionaires have a pipe dream.
However, they lack the skills or expertise (or even common sense) to execute them.
Musk had ideas, bought his way into leadership, and essentially had to be corralled by handlers while other people did the actual hard work.
Then, at the platform formally known as Twitter, with no handlers... Well, the world has seen how an unleashed Musk handles that. Spoiler: not well.
They are no longer idealised, and CEO’s have decided to take company failures out on employees instead of their inability to target long-term success.
It is not CEO's inability (or at least not always). You cannot think long term when the only thing that matter is the next quarter result.
Big missing piece there: cloud.
In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon's hands.
Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that's why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.
It's business to business, however, so the generak public doesn't hear about it a lot. It's also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.
In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.
I've been in a similar situation. It's heartbreaking when a great company and a unique job that you feel almost defines you deteriorates under a bunch of leeches.
The worst part is knowing that they come only to suck as much profit as possible short term, maybe a while longer, while the company's actual core tries to fight to keep it up against ridiculous decision making processes.
It doesn't even seem that what they do is malicious. What I've felt in my case was that they are not even aware what beauty they trample, as they have seemingly never have been a part of anything similar to what they destroy. It's maddening that you can't simply convey that to them.
It's very hard and painful to let go of a good place, people and cause, but when the odds of survival are impossible and the situation drives you bitter, it's time to leave. The sooner you'll start helping another worthy cause, the better it's going to be for everyone.
The hardest part is to acknowledge that there is nothing else you can do.
It’s maddening that you can’t simply convey that to them.
If these were the kind of people interested in the conveyance of practical, realistic, useful and truthful information, you wouldn't be leaving. The beauty in elegantly crafted work? Entirely lost on that sort. Yet every excellent worker I have ever known has not only seen but thrived on creating just that. When work, especially creative work of any sort, is The Very Best, it stands out, and good people know and love obviously exceptional work.
The loss is theirs, but as you imply, it's much, much more than just losing one employee.
Glad you've made the decision to go, and honestly the whole clashing arrangement sounds like oil and water -- integrity vs greed -- so chances are excellent that at some point they would make the decision for you if you were not making it yourself now.
Watch your back on the way out, and best wishes for a better workplace.
Thank you for the kind words.
It's scary how you are taking words right from my mind.
There is a lot of things originating from such situations to share and talk about, but I guess this is not necessarily a space to do that. What matters is it is done, and it is best to move on.
Thank you again, and I hope you've got a good place of your own.
It’s scary how you are taking words right from my mind.
Sorry about that. Just in case it would help you to hear these words, I sent them your way. It's a simple case of been there done that, and I wish I had allowed myself to see the situation as clearly then as I did when I replied to you. But for me, all that was a long time ago, and all is well these days. Thank you for the kind wishes.
Oh no no. I'm sorry! I'm not a native speaker and my phrasing must have been wrong. What I meant was that what you wrote was very accurate. In fact it was exactly what I was thinking and what my experience has been as well. Thank you for your insight, I appreciate it! I'm sorry you've been through a similar situation, and I hope you've overcame it.
It's very hard and painful to let go of a good place, people and cause, but when the odds of survival are impossible and the situation drives you bitter, it's time to leave. The sooner you'll start helping another worthy cause, the better it's going to be for everyone.
The hardest part is to acknowledge that there is nothing else you can do.
Okay, but how do I get off the planet to go help another one? SpaceX's ships won't be up and running to Mars in my lifetime and the longer I'm here with impossible survival odds the more I start to get bitter!
Wherever you go in the solar system, The Board will reach you and your profit marigins. :) No use for you getting off that rock, except for the view maybe.
Lost me completely at
Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base
Both are ad delivery services that sometimes do something slightly resembling benefiting the end user.
If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and "optimised" for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.
If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and “optimised” for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.
Chrome built its market share on desktop up over many many years.
I also think you're underestimating the number of people who couldn't care less if a company harvests their data for ad personalisation - by this point the majority of people understand Facebook's business strategy, but they still have over a billion users. The preferences of us terminally online folks are not the preferences of the population at large.
Chrome built its market share on desktop up over many many years.
Yes, by making the best product. Then once they'd achieved the market donination necessary to not lose everyone, they changed that product from optimised for best user experience to optimised for maximum ad revenue.
I also think you're underestimating the number of people who couldn't care less
No, I am aware that they're sadly the majority. Hence why I specifically said "anyone who cares enough to know better"
preferences of us terminally online folks are not the preferences of the population at large.
You don't have to be "terminally online" (which is a slur invented by the wilfully ignorant to denigrate people with different interests and priorities than them, no matter how much you try to reclaim it) to care about basic privacy rights, but yeah, that sentence is otherwise correct, as I said earlier.
No, I am aware that they’re sadly the majority. Hence why I specifically said “anyone who cares enough to know better”
I see, I thought you meant by that "anyone who knows about what Google is doing with personal data".
“terminally online” (which is a slur invented by the wilfully ignorant to denigrate people with different interests and priorities than them, no matter how much you try to reclaim it)
I use it self-deprecatingly. Calling it a "slur" is overblowing it, and even though it's used as an insult - I don't care. To be insulted by someone I have to value the person's opinion.
Yeah, I wouldn't take him as a completely reliable narrator, but still an interesting inside perspective
This is exactly why I look at companies and corporations with a side-eye of doubt when they claim to have some sort of "do not be evil" motto baked into thier company culture.
It doesn't matter if a gigantic company has a hundred philanthropy focused CEOs, all ot takes is one greedy or evil one to destroy a company's dogma
After the investors, managers, and profiteers taste easy money, they will continue to demand to be fed that blood flavored stew.
Once that happens, they either need to be lobotomized or put down for the good of all lest those who are not in the know continue to put money into the frothing imitation it has become.
When I first heard Google's "don't be evil", all I could think is a not-evil person doesn't need to say this.
This is the behavior the maximizes short-term shareholder value, not building a long-term profitable, innovative enterprise. When some other company temporarily discovers a money spigot like Google did, there might be a brief resurgence of such an environment, but generally no one values or wants to protect innovation, as dollars are easily quantifiable and future potential is subjective. This is why 99% of the time people keep their head down and collect their paychecks.
Stock purchases should have a minimum investment period of like 5 years. Move the focus towards longer-term goals instead of quarterly profits.
Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base
Key word "was." The teams may not have had that intention, but they sure as fuck do now.
I don't know if I agree.
A lot of of this article is in a very familiar tone for "are we the baddies" corporate employees, and it's less a deterioration of conditions than a realization of ongoing facts.
The language is everywhere. "We made data-driven decisions" is a big red flag for me, for instance. It often translates to "we obsessed over a maximizing a single data point because we confirmation-biased it into a justification for the thing we wanted to do". Real data driven decisions are called science, and nobody in corporations has the time to do actual science, outside of hard research funding, which is not the case of building a UX toolset.
Likewise for his passing defense of tracking cookies or the lack of firewalls between search and ads. And how telling is it that he at one point defines the essence of "don't be evil" as "long term success at the cost of short term losses". That's not what that means.
It really does sound like the culture had convinced itself that it was working for "the greater good" as a strategy for long term success, but you hear the same thing from a lot of other large corporations. It mostly sounds like what actually changed for this guy to dislike Google is management style and working conditions. Which hey, sure, it's a part of it. But not what lies at the core of the issues. If you take short term losses for long term success you're just a corporation with a long term plan for growth, not a nice corporation. It's techbro speak and the attitude that has driven startups through the entirety of the VC-dominated era of business.
The degradation we see in Google is not triggered by a change of ethos, it's the chickens coming home to roost now that tech businesses are switching from a focus on growth to a focus on profit as the tech business ecosystem matures and free money goes away for a while.
I feel like a big part of the change was also due to the US mass surveillance, which became broadly known with the Snowden revelations in 2013.
Before 2013, you could genuinely claim that collecting as much data as possible, might be done with good intentions. Afterwards, collecting more data than necessary for a given task turned into a moral failure. Their whole business model, while it should have felt sketchy beforehand, turned evil over night.
And of course, Google employees weren't forced to reflect on that. The spotlight was on the US government. Everyone expected the US government to just stop with that shit, after they got caught. And well, they didn't. Obama even doubled down on it, Trump certainly didn't drain the swamp either and Biden probably wouldn't even think about it anymore, if the EU didn't constantly get its ass sued for exchanging data with US companies.
The more it became apparent that the US government wouldn't go back on that, and as people had ever more critical data of themselves online, the more the public perception of Google fell down a hole, even if as a Google employee you could still be doing the same things you did in 2005.
It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO's office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google's extensive resources to deliver value to users.
Why would this happen though? The change the author is describing came from the company's shareholders and their desire for profit. Shareholders who have no connection to the core domains of Google, who vote for directors on the board that further profit extraction, who then maintain executive leadership who implements that. You have to convince those shareholders that they should want Google to focus on something other than profit maximization. But they don't understand you. They can dump Google's stock at a moment's notice. Why care about some long term profit when they can make it now and dump the stock as soon as it stops making it? And then, you can't even talk to them because you're sitting behind the exec layer and the board layer, both of which are shareholder creations. So you have to tightrope your exec team into believing you, then they have to tightrope the board, and then the board has to tightrope the shareholders. The odds are stacked against reversing course. If on the other hand you're not acting alone but you are the head of the union that can shutdown Google at a moment's notice, then not only you can talk to the exec layer, you don't have to tightrope while doing it. Better yet, you can simply broadcast your message and it's gonna hit the board and the shareholders directly. That's why I don't think Google can reverse course without a strong union. I think the incentives are simply not there.
Why would a union help at all? Organized workers won’t change the financial and legal obligations at the top. It won’t drive the focus away from quarterly earnings. Unions protect the workers, they don’t drive company culture.
There is no saving Google. The only way out of the hole they’re in is to have the integrity not to fall in in the first place.
Crazy how the declination in the office culture translates to such an obvious downturn from a public perspective as well.
creators made too much money and aren't involved in the work beyond demanding more money. MBAs just do what they do. Hire and fire isn't concerned with not being evil. They were always about indexing the internet. If you are on the internet you will be indexed, categorized and sold as data.
Thank you so much for sharing. I found the rest of this persons web content equally interesting, e.g. their CV. https://hixie.ch/
It's not about him. This started happening before him and has happened in all big tech companies. It's the end of the honeymoon phase of tech companies and the beginning of big-consultancy-like squeezing the employees for every last $ of profit culture.
"There are still great people at Google"
A mind-plague of our time to call mediocrity greatness, as being exceptionally intelligent and being a tech wizard has absolutely nothing to do with being a great person. That is the same as saying the top %1 of Plumbers are great people. When faced with tough life choices, these Plumbers may show negligible character. Stop devaluing greatness.
It's a serious overvaluation of self and commodization of the term, a weakening of the term, so as to devalue it. It's a mind virus to say flippantly, "that person is great" when in reality they are average. The meaning of the word is being dilluted.
Silicon Valley is an immense perspective bubble that is equivalent to personality re-write. That anyone at Google can be thought of as a "great person" is a total and complete failure of perspective. Super smart, great Programmers, great Engineers, sure.
Being a great person almost always involves hardship, perserverance, and success against all odds. Read any classical book. Having a Billion dollar company pay you to turn a digital wrench has not one basis for "greatness" in any way, shape or form.
Think about all the "Great" people in the History of Earth. What did they have in commmon? How many people can be "Great"? Hundreds or even dozens at one Corporation? Gimme a break, that doesn't even fit the definition of greatness, unless your cognitive dissonance is confusing it with mediocrity and that is a societal mind virus.
So, let's be precise with our life terms like an actual programmer would be with technical terms except applied to your own life. So, you follow rules, you get along well with others, you don't hurt anyone physically, verbally or emotionally, you donate and work for causes, you create great stuff. This is expected of all people so that makes you average. You are an average person.
Making a comparative judgement against failed people does not make you great. In fact, that brings you down a notch.
Maybe along with all those other traits instead of creating great stuff you create exceptional stuff. The term applied to you is now "an exceptional 'job title' ".
so you don't like people using the word "great" to mean "very capable"? and that's a "mind-plague"?
and we're suppose to go with your definition because why?
Honestly this is a very good perspective, it's unfortunate that I mostly see this as a poignant reminder that people have only gotten dumber over time that stuff like this needs to be said.
Amazes how can one "love a company". It's just a job. Do it, do it well and get your paycheck. That's it. The company will never love you back anyway.
Find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life. I believe that was Churchill.
I enjoy the line of work I’m in. I don’t always enjoy the companies that I do it in. Some are much better than others. It’s fine to like or even love where you work as long as you realize that you’re in what could easily become an abusive relationship at any time. Do your time and do it well but don’t go out of your way to do it. That’s what I strive for.
Indeed, loving the line of work that you're in is different from loving the company that you're in. It's a very important distinction to make.
Your company doesn't love you back. Someday they may find themselves needing to balance some numbers in a spreadsheet and out you go, regardless of how many years you've spent there and how much you love doing what they're asking you to do. In the meantime, they're using you how they see fit, not necessarily in the way that's best for you. You need to watch out for yourself.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to get a job that you love, just make very sure that you're not misdirecting the love of your job to loving your company. It'll hurt when you find out it's not mutual and you may not be properly prepared for the subsequent job search.
You nailed it at the end. Loving a company, especially these days, is exactly how you end up overworked and underpaid. Like a job/company, don't love it.
why limit yourself when you can get a paycheck and enjoy your job at the same time? consider how many hours of your life you spend at work.
You people need to seriously improve your reading skills: I'm talking about how absurd is "loving a company". You can enjoy the job, of course, but "the company" isn't you friend nor your lover and never will be.
Exactly, you can love "working at a company" but to "love a company" you have to be brainwashed.
What about a small company? What if it's your own business and it only employs family? What if you are the only employee? It's okay to have an emotional stake in a business, just probably not when it's a megacorp you're on the lowest rung of.
I disagree. Forget about the money for a moment and just imagine a club or group of people getting together to tackle a problem, with a common vision, a culture, and social values. It can be more than just liking the people, as the ideals can kept even as the people cycle in and out.
You can like club/organization for what actions it encourages, what it stands for, the benefit it provides people with, and the lines it chooses not to cross.
Now, add revenue and its a business.
Businesses don't have to be soulless, even if all the big ones eventually become that way.
When you join a company early, and there aren't many other people employed, you make much more of a difference than if you're one of thousands. You have much more influence in defining the product, steering the direction of the company, defining the workplace culture.
You're not wrong that employees are replaceable, and the company will replace you if it needs or wants to, but in the beginning, it can very much feel like you're part of a group of people who are working together to effectively build lives, support their families, interests, etc. The company isn't just a legal entity that exchanges money for labor, it's a thing you're helping build with a kind of community, that you're investing time into in exchange for the means to a better life.
Replace the word company with "family", "army" or country and you will see where your description of the discard process is only one imaginary line of "how bad things happen"
They don't really mean love, they mean identity, but we don't have good ways to talk about this stuff.
Obviously you can't love an abstract entity. But you can let it come to be part of how you see yourself, which also happens when you're in a relationship. So often we talk about that feeling of love when we're talking about parts of our identity - jobs, hobbies, music interests, etc.
I disagree with your notion that a person is not or cannot love an abstract entity however I do not care enough to explain or elaborate in this comment, feel free to enquire if you're curious
That's all a bit Stockholm Syndrome.
Sure, make your company your identity when it's your company - i.e. you built it and have at least a say on were it goes to - but otherwise you're just getting attached to something were you have little real power and others tell you what to do to serve their ideas and their interests, not yours.
Frankly the only type of situation were I would see it as healthy to become so entwinned with a company is when it's a tiny thing were you are indeed an irreplaceable member and have a genuine say over at least some of it, and that's not going to be the case with a behemoth as Google were "you're a valued employee" is something that comes on e-mails starting with "dear sir/madam".
Mind you, I've been involved in Tech and Startups on and off since the 90s and the whole "getting employes to bind their identity with the company so that you can make them sacrifice themselves for the company" has been a purposeful strategy used by Tech companies (Google standing out by being unusually heavy users of that HR technique), all the way since the original Internet boom.
(It's a bit like what's done in the Military all over the World, but at least in those the Greater Cause is supposedly one's nation, whilst here the Greater Cause is delivering more profits to some individuals who don't give a rats ass about you)
Having your identity entwinned with your profession itself is understandable, but having it entwinned with a specific employee for whom you're but a "human resource" is incredibly naive and not at all healthy.
Having a pathologically vicious organization like a corporation as part of your identity seems incredibly unhealthy to me as well, about on par with having a religion as part of your identity. Only nations are worse.
Incidentally, Stockholm Syndrome doesn't exist, it's an artifact of the rich warping justice. It was made up by Hurst's lawyers to override his daughter's wish to face the legal consequences of her being an active member of a left wing militant group.
I disagree. Imagine any club or group of people getting together to tackle a problem, with a common vision, a culture, and social values. It can be more than just liking the people, as the group-ideals can kept even as the people cycle in and out.
You can like club/organization for what actions it encourages, what it stands for, the benefit it provides people with, and the lines it collectively agrees not to cross.
Some good organizations have revenue, and we call them businesses.
I agree 99.9% of companies "won't love you back" but it's not 100%.