[Periodic]

I tried to clarify the wording. I'm specifically trying to call out the structure of Google's management and the general way they approach problems.

For example, even within the profitable Google portion of the business, they often have many competing projects. There will be competing search features, competing chat applications, competing cloud services. Google will make big speculative bets or internally competitive bets because it can afford to just let people build things and see what happens. Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.

Many companies can't do that. If you are a medium-sized company you probably don't have the market position or revenue to afford to be unfocused.

[user5994461]

> Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.

Correct... but also correct if you replace Google by any company.

I've worked from zero management company (ala. Valve) to large fixed hierarchical structure (government).

The company never knows what people are actually doing. If it tries to find it, people will either game the system or waste time to justify they're doing instead of doing it.

[hkmurakami]

>For example, even within the profitable Google portion of the business, they often have many competing projects. There will be competing search features, competing chat applications, competing cloud services. Google will make big speculative bets or internally competitive bets because it can afford to just let people build things and see what happens. Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.

This sounds exactly like how Microsoft works. They (famously) even had 2 versions of Windows 95.

[tajen]

I didn't know – and haven't found – the 2 versions of Windows 95 you're talking about. Source? Is it Windows 93 vs 95? Is it 95 vs "Plus!" ?

[dgant]

Might be referring to NT

[vkou]

Yet, free markets beat out top-down managed economies because they have competing teams seeking to provide the same services.

Tech is, to an extent, a winner-takes-all market. If you build out two competing products internally, in the long run, it will cost you less then building one product, and having an outside competitor fight you for market share, by building that second product.

Case in point: I'm sure that Facebook would have loved it if one of their teams built Whatsapp. For 20 billion dollars, they could have funded a hundred competing internal products.

[nostrademons]

For most companies, having two competing products internally does not also prevent you from having two competing products externally. There's no law preventing an outsider from starting a competitor just because you've already got two alternatives.

Whatsapp is a great example - Facebook already had Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Chat, internally. Google had GChat and Hangouts and whatever else they're working on these days. It didn't prevent the outside company with half a dozen employees from eating their lunch.

The parent's point is that because of their core markets in search & social networking, Google and Facebook have the luxury of no major competitors, and so they can afford the internal competition to advance the state of these markets. The market structure came first, not the corporate structure. And if you try that in a market with few barriers to entry (like mobile chat, before everyone had built their network effects), it's just as likely that a competitor outside the company will eat the market, not one inside the company. Probably more likely, since internal projects are hamstrung by things like executive approvals, PR worries, and potential legal issues while startups can just take their product to market and see where the market takes it.

[dispose13432]

They don't seem to play free market. They seem to play "new guy takes all".

For example, Google Voice was put in maintenance mode and Hangouts took off. Then Allo, then ... ?

They very rarely actively push two products with the same purpose.

[vkou]

No, it's not a free market. They also don't try to poach other teams' employees with higher salary offers, push bad press about the other team, try to be ramen-profitable, etc.

But you can get some of the benefits of a free market by having teams work on multiple solutions to one problem. You can also squander them by making the wrong high-level decisions.

[Animats]

Google Voice, previously Grand Central, was in maintenance mode from when it was first acquired. Google never improved it much.

[jrochkind1]

Pretty much _every_ google product is in maintenance mode from when it is first released, and never improved much.

This may be part of the strategy, those that somehow turn into 'profit' are the ones that actually have full-time engineering assigned to them, and get improved? I couldn't say.

For example that I ran into recently, Google Custom Search/Site Search theoretically _has_ an API for creating/modifying custom searches... but it's completely inaccessible, because the only auth method it supports is one that no longer exists. I suspect it is still running on a server somewhere with zero traffic though. If you Google around, you can see for at least a year, _some_ people (prob those with the paying 'Site Search', not the free 'Custom Search') have managed to get answers from this from google support -- the answer is "There is an internal feature request ticket to add OAuth 2 support to this API, but I can't give you an ETA".

[euyyn]

> Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.

This isn't true. Even I, as a software engineer, can look up with ease what the majority of other people work on.

[nunez]

I hope you're not talking about peoples OKRs or internal profiles on Grow or whatever it's called now because you know that stuffs not accurate

[euyyn]

Wasn't thinking of those, no.

[gonehome]

It may end up that even Google can't afford to be unfocused - if they do end up losing their search engine ad revenue because it and standard websites become less relevant it'll probably be what's pointed at.

You can see their disorganization in their software and products - letting ideas like Google Voice that were ahead of their time languish until iMessage comes and takes over, lots of failed software launches etc.

[bitmapbrother]

>Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.

Isn't that basically the job of the manager?

[muninn_]

I don't disagree with your follow up. Thanks for the post.