I don't feel articles like this are "wrong". I feel like they fail to go deep enough and if they went one layer deeper then it would be clear why the problems they describe are at best actually features and at worst the "least bad" option.
Specifically, all the issues being discussed are actually just features of Google (and the rest of FAANG really) being a mature company in a mature industry.
Google cannot (it seems) launch and maintain new services. Why? Because it already has a single, ultra successful, profitable service: advertising (primarily via search, gmail, youtube etc). When you have no existing business (say you are a start up) you have an urgent need to get one. But when you have a multi billion dollar core business asset (search), you have no urgency to create another. Instead you "urgently" need to not break your existing asset.
This is the same reason GE and AT&T etc did NOT beat Google to the online space.
This is the natural result of success.
This is the healthy, efficient, economically correct position for a company like google to be in.
People have a weird expectation that Google (etc) will be a start up forever. Or an incubator for start ups. Only thats basically functionally impossible.
So the problem here is people's expectations not being realistic and refusal to accept the reality that google (with 175000 employees) is no longer a plucky 10 person startup...
Yep, the primary distorting effect at a place like Google is the seemingly infinite source of revenue from something which is in large-part fully automated. The ad revenues are a crazy firehose.
Yes it takes a large crew of SREs and SWEs to keep that firehose fully primed, but nothing close to the labour force that Google employs.
When I joined Google at the end of 2011 there was something like 20,000 full time employees. At that point it was already clearly a company that had already transitioned from a disruptor of the industry to a maintainer of the status quo. e.g. they clearly bought the ad-tech company I was an employee at just to make us shut up and go away.
The conservative review and permissions structures in place there that the writer is complaining about are in place to avoid fucking up the firehose. And they're legit important. One of the most intimidating times I had working in my career was on the Ad Exchange release rotation, where I had production access for the deployment of binaries to thousands of machines in many datacentres that produced millions out transactions per second and were responsible for buckets and buckets of revenue. Please Don't Fuck Up was like an airplane banner circling around in my skull the whole time.
Any innovations that happen at Google happen because there are very smart keen people there, and Google is constantly seeking out alternate $$-firehoses. But it's never happened and I doubt it ever will. It's not a culture accustomed to being hungry enough to work aggressively to hunt $$.
This reminds me a lot of AT&T and Xerox in their prime: they both had a firehose of seemingly-infinite revenue (phone calls and photocopies), and used some of that money to hire a bunch of really smart people and have them work on research projects, which the company then completely mismanaged and wasted.
Even a hefty FAANG salary is still ~1% of what you can make once you 'escape' and carve out your own software legacy.
Ironically many capable, intelligent and driven people end up joining Google, et al. thinking it's the place for them ...not realizing it's where you go to (mentally) retire.
>Even a hefty FAANG salary is still ~1% of what you can make once you 'escape' and carve out your own software legacy.
Huh? How do you figure? No one makes ridiculous amounts of money just writing software unless they're incredibly lucky. This sounds like typical American thinking: "if you just work hard, you'll be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs!" Bullshit. For every guy like them, there's thousands of people who spent countless hours and sacrificing their best years working on stuff that went nowhere; they would have been better off working at a FAANG.
Every offer I've ever received from a series A or seed stage startup has had compensation and equity potentials that -- even when imagining a successful exit via IPO or acquire -- totalled (when amortized over a 5 year period) to 2/3rds or 1/2 of what I was getting at Google. There is literally no financial reason to go to an early stage startup as an employee vs going to a FAANG. The founders and VCs don't give enough equity for it to even be close to a "lottery ticket."
As for forming my own startup means a) having an idea that VCs want to fund b) having connections to said VCs c) foregoing income while in the prototyping phase.
I have a family to feed.
I ended up leaving my Google job simply out of job satisfaction. Finances, nope. Makes no sense.
You're thinking of a particular type of startup here. Most startups don't involve VCs, for instance.
But you're right, there is a period where the founder makes little to nothing from the startup. You need to be able to weather that. And, if you're betting on the startup making you an instant millionaire, you're betting on the wrong horse. I mean, it can happen, but it's not the most likely result. The most likely result is that it will fail, and you'll have to try again with a different startup.
The difference between successful founders and unsuccessful ones is the unsuccessful ones gave up. The successful ones almost always have a string of failures before the one that succeeded.
That said, starting your own company can be much more profitable in the long run than working for someone else. And more fulfilling.
Thank you for phrasing the comment I came here to make better than I could.
This article (much like a lot of views expressed on this site) mostly just reads as someone jumping from a startup to large-business environment for the first time, and not grokking the very legitimate and unshakable reasons such an org has for being more conservative and process-heavy. Yes, that kind of thing has to be monitored and constantly worked on to ensure it doesn't grow out of control, but some level of bureaucracy is a feature, not a bug, for a large, successful organization. At Google's scale, that "some level" is quite high.
The author had worked at Microsoft for 12 years before starting the company that Google acquired. So, not only does he have a fair amount of experience from both sides, he's also worked at MS during its "lost decade" i.e. the Ballmer years.
The similarities between what MS was going through then and what Google is now facing is to me the most interesting aspect of the story. Whether you're printing money via OS or search monopoly, it seems like both the direction and timing of what's going to eventually happen to your business are almost inevitable.
MS today is quite different from what it was 10 years ago when the writer left. By getting acquired by Google in 2020, it's almost as he travelled back in time, into another Big Tech company at that same stage of the enterprise lifecycle.
That's quite true; but then again, if the goal is to change nothing, not make waves, and let the ad billions roll in, do they need 175,000 people to do that?
Well now you will be labelled an "activist investor"! :)
I think this is an excellent question.
I think Google has tried to be an incubator etc. And it's management have had a go at new products. That means hiring
I think they have also been pretty big acquirers. That also pushes the headcount up. Cynically people also say Google acquires companies to stop those companies becoming anything. When you do that, you need to keep those employees on the books too (or they will just go re-found the thing you just paid to kill). Not sure how true that is, I leave it to the reads discretion.
When both these sources of new services have failed, they have NOT fired people. Closing Stadia did not lead to firing 90% of the "Stadia Team". Ditto 101 other initiatives and take overs. It was actually a joke on "Silicon Valley" (the TV show) that no one ever get's let go by tech giants. No matter if they are useless or incompetent.
So the head count is probably pretty bloated (I have no idea how many people are actually needed to run Google).
And that brings us to actual Activist Investors and last months lay-offs.
I think investors are finally calling for efficiency not growth. I think management are finally listening. I say finally not because I think I would have done it sooner, only because I think it makes sense in hind sight.
Specifically, all the issues being discussed are actually just features of Google (and the rest of FAANG really) being a mature company in a mature industry.
Google cannot (it seems) launch and maintain new services. Why? Because it already has a single, ultra successful, profitable service: advertising (primarily via search, gmail, youtube etc). When you have no existing business (say you are a start up) you have an urgent need to get one. But when you have a multi billion dollar core business asset (search), you have no urgency to create another. Instead you "urgently" need to not break your existing asset.
This is the same reason GE and AT&T etc did NOT beat Google to the online space.
This is the natural result of success.
This is the healthy, efficient, economically correct position for a company like google to be in.
People have a weird expectation that Google (etc) will be a start up forever. Or an incubator for start ups. Only thats basically functionally impossible.
So the problem here is people's expectations not being realistic and refusal to accept the reality that google (with 175000 employees) is no longer a plucky 10 person startup...