Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused significant growing pains later.
Is the situation the same now? I'm not so sure. I think this economic shock is potentially far more serious and could last much longer. But also, I don't think Google really knows what Google is anymore. We're long passed the mission statement of making the world's information accessible and useful. And certainly my impression from working there (now >3 years ago) was that even then there were a ton of teams and orgs that didn't really have a reason to exist.
Have people sitting around and they will find things that "need" doing. I saw many a project that was simply rewriting something where I at least had questions as to the real need for that. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy as they say.
And there was (and I imagine still is) too many layers of middle management. The ideal is (IMHO) CEO -> SVP (PA level) -> VP -> Eng Director -> Manager (of managers) -> Manager (of ICs) -> IC. That's 7 levels. I don't know what Google's mean org depth is in engineering but my guess is it's closer to 11, maybe even 12.
In fact this would be a good metric:
Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees)
where
Mean org depth = Mean of how many layers each IC has above them
That's a whole different ballpark than what hiring was in 2008. A slowdown in this scale can easily mean "just" hiring more people than anyone else.
1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company?
To be fair I can't think of any other search engine that returns better results. But I feel like Google's gotten very complacent with their search, which is not surprising given the fact that it's practically a monopoly.
2. Is there any initiative to rewrite gmail on the web? The damn thing takes like 30 seconds to load. For a company pioneering progressive web apps and web performance, it boggles my mind that they've put no effort into improving gmail's atrocious load times over the last decade.
I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.
It was always a curious product, never really seemed to have management buy-in, and was pretty much a one-man product, which a 'subscription to get rid of ads across the whole web' shouldn't have been.
> 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company?
Search quality is kind of Google's secret sauce, so it doesn't get talked about a lot. But here's one public example of a huge engineering task that ultimately led to improved search results: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...
Using BERT in search is about much more than plugging an algorithm into the query pipeline. Google is one of the main contributors to the field of deep learning, and developed BERT. And Google also designed and built an entirely new chip (TPUs) to run this model in production.
I believe that you're not seeing improvements. And changing things without breaking other people is always hard, but particularly hard on software that billions of people use many times a day like Google search. That slows things down for sure. Honestly I was amazed they managed to roll out BERT on TPUs for search despite those obstacles. That should show a little bit of how committed they are to improving things.
Highly recommend giving up on Gmail as an interface, and treat it as an IMAP/SMTP server only.
Then they killed Inbox. Presumably because they could not figure out how to capitalize on an extraordinarily useful, fast paradigm-shifting email client.
1. How about an option to Maps to stop suggesting unprotected left turns at busy intersections?
2. Also, a Maps option to stop routing me through residential neighborhoods to save ten seconds.
3. Find existing, dormant Google accounts that obviously belong to the same human as another active Google account, and offer to restore access.
The U.S. Army uses the concept of a span of control that dictates each level of hierarchy should have between 2 and 5 reports. There's about 10 levels between a private and the secretary of the army. The Active Duty Army is about 470k which works out to 3.7 reports per level from 470000^(1/10). There's about 1M total personnel which works out to 3.9 reports per level.
Google has 114k employees. With your ideal of 7, that works out to 5.3 reports per level given by 114000^(1/7). I'd be pretty surprised if there's a depth of 12 at Google. That's 2.6 reports per level.
If we were going to be fully remote forever this would be different, but since this is (very likely!) temporary that's a reason to prefer to hire more later.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself) (Well, I guess I work at home, but Google is my employer)
Acquire skilled people (it would be much harder to do it after crisis), buy land, buy companies, build buildings, build tech.
He had the benefit of hindsight. In 2008 noone could predict if the GFC would last for one year or three years and how deep it would be.
In the 90s through the 00s there was a massive reduction in hiring for civil servants. So you had a lot of people who were there from the 80s and early 90s, and then a massive drop. Around 2010 or so they started ramping up hiring again, because they finally acknowledged the need (they had a huge percentage of civil servants who could literally retire at any point). So you ended up with (in some orgs) 30-40% of the staff being able to retire, 30-40% under 28, and the rest spread randomly from the age of about 28-55.
As people retired (biggest loss of personnel before other kinds of attrition), teams were literally losing centuries of experience in a year. The mid-career people were moving into leadership roles, and leaving the junior people to learn the processes and technical work largely on their own.
I saw something similar in private industry as well, but that was due to a preference to hire junior people over experienced people (either the manager wanted people who could be molded or cost).
Sometimes hiring freezes/slowdowns are important. But if your business is healthy, it'll end up backfiring on you more often than not. Even a year or two of this can create problems, though not as dramatic as what the DoD experienced.
In a healthy organizational culture, the org grows steadily at a pace that's not too quickly, and more senior members acculturate new recruits into the organization. Acculturation can't be rushed; it's the process of transferring all the unconscious, tacit knowledge about how and why things are done the way they are, and because it's unconscious, it happens only through long exposure.
When you have a hiring freeze, the existing culture ossifies and becomes more insular without any new blood. And then when the hiring freeze lifts, you usually need to "catch up" on hiring, which means that you have a sudden rush of new recruits and relatively few senior people. The new people don't have enough old hands to acculturate them, which means that they end up forming their own culture that may be entirely divorced from the existing org culture. Because the new culture outnumbers the old, eventually the old hands leave (taking their institutional knowledge with them), and the dominant org culture reflects that which the newbies brought with them.
Google's culture changed dramatically from 2011-2013, driven by the combination of rapid hiring, a new CEO (this may've been deliberate: if you want to change the culture, one way to do it is bring on a lot of people who agree with you), and the departure of key early employees like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Marissa Mayer, et al.
Come to think of it, the U.S's culture wars are largely a result of the "birth dearth" of Gen X. Instead of a continuous shift in culture, you have two "big" generations of Boomers and Millenials and the latter developed a distinctive culture amongst themselves without regards to existing American culture.
There is some difference in the current situation, however I am not sure how much it factors into this decision.
Hiring and onboarding people is logistically very difficult when travel has been affected worldwide and everyone is working from home.
Your model is in the right direction but misses more important aspects. When consulting I measure overhead of the orgs I'm working for in great detail.
Cultural aspects like fear, autonomy, transparency, etc have a much higher impact on management overhead than the org chart structure itself.
I often come in and ask people to stop doing meaningless tasks, just to be told that the previous, much more expensive, consultant had told them it's the bees knees.
There is also a common misunderstanding that if a bigger or cooler company is doing something it must be the right thing.
Cargo cult.
Was this covered by the media? Having a hard time finding anything about it.
I was an engineering program manager and people manager at Google previously and around 2010-2012, there were opportunities for the company to really accelerate revenue, product development but they couldn't hire fast enough to take advantage. This stemmed from many orgs freezing hiring for a significant period (maybe 12-18 months).
At large companies, you have queues setup for most roles because you often growing the n count of that role by 5-10% per annum.
Also very few orgs plan for attrition (I don't get why because it's always been in the range of 4-20% in my opinion). Freezing hiring means a company's ability to execute reduces. Sometimes that is needed but often you must backfill to keep the lights on. Guess the messaging is easy ("no hiring. No exceptions").
Nope. That was perhaps the case in the 50-80s, but today we can do much better, and it's dependent on the people, the culture, and the market/product structure and strategy.
An observation from my work experience is that, while things run efficiently with smaller teams overall, small teams also tend to make it easier for any given leader to have a reasonably good idea what's going on across their org (it's easier to grok a 50 person team's work when it's split into 10 mgr teams than if it were completely flat), but that also puts the lower level managers' jobs at risk because their director is more likely not to consider them essential -- ironically, because things are running smoothly.
Smaller companies tend to have stronger focus of just getting stuff done. It's clear who has responsibility. People can more easily make a decision on their own or in small groups and just get it done, without involving a clown car of middle managers.
When I build projects I only have two "levels". Management have final say on budgets, targets and priorities. Experts/devs/techs get the work done. They generally make decisions with full autonomy and self organise. If they need help with coordination, planning, followup, etc then management steps in. Management also monitor and track. Usually my management has very strong technical skills and tend to be part of the daily work in the trenches.
That assumes a fanout of 7-8 at the current size of Google. I think that's too much at certain levels.
Obviously a lot of people don't like them, but it's not obvious to me that they would naturally break up into more focused parts.
> In fact this would be a good metric:
On a slightly different note: this isn't a good metric. It's a metric of how "balanced" the company is, not the management overhead. If you imagine a company with 150000 engineers and one salesperson, with sales reporting directly to the CEO, hiring more people under the sales director will decrease this metric, while increasing the mean org depth. That probably doesn't measure what you want it to.
CEO -> SVP -> VP -> Eng manager -> IC
Or, alternatively,
CEO -> Director -> Manager of managers -> Manager -> IC
I didn't feel like either needed more middle management (each had about ~2k employees), but in the case of the latter some reorganization would have helped (some managers had 50+ reports).
If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.
There are only so many Google searches I can do in a day. Many of them end on Amazon where I may or may not purchase something.
That was a message to the stock market. In reality I haven't heard from a Facebook recruiter in a month now.
IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1].
I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift several out of poverty in India (Most of them being the first graduate in their family).
But, obviously those who pass out this year especially the Engineering freshers are going to be the worst hit.
[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
Facebook may well be the worlds most powerful sentiment capture and analysis engine ever built but Google tracks conversions and has pretty stellar sentiment capture/analysis capabilities.
Google appears to also have twice as much cash on hand as Facebook. Wonder what they’ll use it for if not to hire competent people to prevent them from starting the next big thing...
Also, back in 2008, Google didn't hire/freezed its hiring, but Facebook and Amazon were still hiring like mad, and it worked well for them. They are used to ride out recessions.
True, but their value to advertisers depends on users. Facebook is likely seeing a massive spike in (ad-viewing) users, whereas Google a much more modest one. I'm sure Google Search and YouTube have gone up, but the former won't have gone up much, and the latter has not yet been profitable for Google in the first place.
> I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion
Neither needs to tighten belts. Both have enormous amounts of cash.
Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core, etc), and that depends on whether or not there are openings in any teams. You are matched with a team before you are even hired.
So, like, obviously, if you have the cash to burn, now is the right time to hire employees. You can get good talent pretty cheap right now. So it's in Google's best interest to ramp up hiring. Unfortunately Google's recruiting pipeline does not support hiring a bunch of people and figuring out what team to be on later.
So yeah, basically, Google has shitty hiring practices. It has nothing to do with them "losing money", they have so much cash in the bank which will easily last till this is over.
2. All companies are facing a cash crunch, gov loans are slow to arrive and they have fixed costs like rent
3. Companies need to conserve cash, turning off ads is a click of a button, and given no demand, it's an obvious choice
This is going to be bad for google and Facebook if it lasts any significant amount of time.
Lots of companies out there, especially retail, are taking huge hits and I would suspect that an advertising budget is one of the first things to be reduced.
Which apparently becomes self fulfilling.
Anecdotally, I wonder the same thing myself.
And then if this recession persists then more and more knives come out as people fight each other for jobs within each company. Many people behave like shit when their livelihoods are on the line. Fun times.
Also this bloodletting is happening at several levels. The VCs are performing the same decimation to their portfolio companies that companies are to their workers and vendors. Departments or groups in the company are drawing up lists.
There is a question, each time, of concurrent or even deeper cycles coinciding. The last recession is often thought to have been a prime factor in the revolutions of 2011 (Arab Spring etc). Regardless of their eventual conclusion, the push is deemed to stem (as always in history) from the economic situation. European kings knew all too well that hunger is a pretty sure path to insurrection.
I wonder, given the predictable magnitude of this (by predictable I mean "even if we low-ball it"), what will happen in the next few years worldwide, and in particular in the US. I reckon "Occupy Wall Street" didn't really go far itself (although it's very likely a major factor in Bernie's rise in the years after, among many other things ofc).
I expect to see a much deeper, less superficial reaction this time. A real history-mover. Time will tell.
The initial reaction from the private sector we're witnessing as we speak is unprecedented in magnitude already; hitting the middle-upper class super hard (when Occupy Wall Street was mostly a lower-middle class fight versus the lavish establishment, from one extreme to the other; this is by contrast very "core").
Biological knowledge points to the current perception largely underestimating the eventual situations we'll have to face for the next 12-18 months (at least, assuming we are extremely lucky with a vaccine on first try, essentially; which I've heard no expert claim as particularly easy let alone a done deal, they're all cautious and don't even claim to be "certain" a vaccine is even possible, although "confident" certainly).
Could be 24, 36 months of living with this thing disrupting the economy left and right, two steps forward, one back, two forward, three back, and on and on.
The bloodletting and free-for-all has only just begun. I'm extremely afraid it'll be worse than any of us has seen since before WWII.
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.
A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.
This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.
But it'll give you a reputation that makes it difficult to entice the sort of people whose current employers don't want them to leave.
At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.
I wonder whether their approach has been alienating entire large categories of people, and what diversity of ideas and influences they're missing as a result.
You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)
But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.
My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!
But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.
If you so lack in trust that the people on your team can make good hiring decisions, even to the point of rejecting somebody you haven’t actually met...well... that’s just nuts.
Note: I don't represent Google.
Guess who got to tell me I didn't get it (again)?
Note to recruiters: don't say that stuff.
Fortunately, I'm still happy in my current job.
Yeah but they were like 500 employees back then, so only really significant as relative growth.
Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long as you can effectively use it.
edit: I want to clarify it's strictly ad spend/booking. It's companies committing budgets. They know they will want to run ads and will run more ads. The ads haven't actually run yet, so ad payouts will tank.
I would guess spend is up only among companies that still have robust revenue. Tons of sectors have essentially been frozen for the time being.
Don’t doubt there are companies going against the tide but seems clear as spend has declined. Clearly an opportunity to get good rates for those looking to spend.
If I had to guess, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat will come out of this better than Google would.
> The ad reductions will occur in news programming, late-night NBC and Bravo shows, reality programming, competition shows like America’s Got Talent and other cable originals.
The only reason they're doing this is they don't have enough buyers to fill the slots. Traditional media is great for brand advertising, but it's so hard to show ROI, I can see the wisdom to shifting budget to Facebook and Google.
1: https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/nbcuniversal-will-permanentl...
They don't send a good signal to investors.
Micromanaging makes sense when you are in deep trouble - see LA Times. Is Google in trouble? I believe not. Yet they send the message they are in trouble.
I always pose this a little more colorfully, but the part that gets the response is the two years.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-s...
Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
Nothing new in a capitalist world...
Take for instance YouTube. Just imagine the cost to operate the site increasing exponentially overnight (because of all the quarantined people) while their ad business goes down. You're in the worst possible situation for a business with a model that is heavily dependent on that particular ad revenue.
That's like a supermarket having three times more foot traffic but people only buying gum.
The spike in usage means that YT needs content creators to make more, but also earn less money. A forward-thinking startup could capitalize on this by paying content creators more to migrate to their own service, and work to get the attention of those eyeballs which are bored of YT content.
When things go south is when consumers stop purchasing. The unemployment and cut in disposable income will have a massive effect on purchasing power... but the federal government is deficit spending like crazy. So... it’s not clear what the consumer market will look like just yet.
I’m genuinely asking.
In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another subcontractor (usually cheaper).
In the end it is only a question of money!
Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper workers anywhere in the world. Even more with restricted green cards thanks to Donald TRUMP. :-)
AFAIK, jobs have stopped going to India for sometime now. Indian IT companies which relied heavily on offshoring had significant contraction as a result. A lot of modern IT jobs in India are in fact for new startups/companies meant for Indian population itself. Before COVID, India was seeing China like internal uprising with equivalent of many US tech companies poping up all over with jobs that were starting to match US salaries outside of tech hubs. Also, visa process had became unsustainably hard for most companies there so on-shore workforce augmentation sector has been quickly drying up as well.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/how-indian-it...
It probably doesn't help that elsewhere in the thread they're making comments that make them sound kind of crazy:
> [open source orgs are] communist organizations living on private money from anticompetitive tech giants.
Probably some of the less than 20 % of indian readers who prefer to hide the destruction of american jobs by India but actually by overpaid american tech leaders in the silicon valley. ;-)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/bytedance...
Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D
Open source have to die to give back value to the software industry.
