[johnasmith]

We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.

[esprehn]

Without commenting on the contents of the memo Komoroske was not some random employee, he was one of the most senior PMs at the company and now heads up strategy for Stripe.

[echelon]

I would argue the top down leadership has been blind or negligent to their Achilles heel. They've let growth in all areas but their single cash cow be needlessly duplicated, rudderless, left to wither on the vine.

To rephrase, I'm not sure that Google leadership has demonstrated the great insight to see what's going wrong and change it. I'd trust just about anyone else at the company to produce an equally plausible hypothesis. Especially if it rhymes with what we see from the outside.

We've discussed these same systemic issues at Google for over a decade now. Google is a dodo.

[allenu]

Agreed. This is just a random employee bemoaning that his large, bureaucratic employer is slow to move, and the opinion document he wrote got leaked for some reason. It doesn't "explain" why Google has become slow. Anyone can work out why Google is slow. Most likely because, like a lot of other large companies, Google has a lot of bureaucracy in the way of getting anything done, and a lots of people and lots of teams leads to mismatched incentives, which aren't necessarily aligned towards shipping product people want.

[ryandrake]

A month ago a commenter linked to[1] a similar rant from Waze’s ex-CEO bemoaning the same kinds of things. Process yuck! Bureaucracy bad! Too slow! and so on. I imagine it’s a common complaint from people who don’t thrive in a slow, steady, process oriented culture.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33905310

[catiopatio]

> I imagine it’s a common complaint from people who don’t thrive in a slow, steady, process oriented culture.

People who don’t thrive in a process-oriented culture? That’s everyone except for administrators and political ladder climbers.