But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more".

That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.

> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company.

It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality.

Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.

While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes.

No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person.

What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his.

Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.

Sometimes I find reading HN comment to be a bizarre experience because people seeming read an entirely different article than I did. All the article's author is saying that at large corporates the incentives are about personal promotion as opposed to delivering user experiences. He justifies this by saying that individual contributions get diluted in large organization. To me, this makes a lot of sense and is an interesting and thoughtful conversation.

Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.

> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product.

If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.

> Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.

Is that really something we should take at face value? There are plenty of instances of people getting unreasonably offended but it's also extremely common for people to be shitty to their colleagues and use this as an excuse. He provides no actual examples.

> offensive to a small vocal minority

I really don't see how this is an excuse. it's like saying "black people are a minority in the US so who cares if they say they are oppressed"

Why would you ever prioritize your users over yourself? They have no idea who you are and they don't care. Don't you have your own goals to worry about?

That's a bit unfair. He's clearly passionate about the product and its customers. The ask to sacrifice for your customers is a reasonable position to take, especially in weird one of situations. It also ties into his risk/reward compensation section.

I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think he was frustrated with his employees going to the townhall or yoga class in the quad instead of working on the customer outage.