[rantee]

Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO.

Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around.

Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy.

Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes.

To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up.

[edit - fixed typo]

[potatolicious]

This is it exactly. I'm a Xoogler also and you've nailed it on the head - honestly while there are many other narratives about Google they mostly feel like distractions to this core problem.

Google's management and leadership tenure is very short relative to other companies and the org structure is intensely unstable relative to peer companies. I lost count of how many "5 year plans" I went through that was summarily reset 1.5-2 years in because there was a leadership reorg.

Google has no product strategy for two reasons:

- leadership generally is much more interested in org-building than products. The nitty gritty of products is left to leaf node teams that have wide latitude to decide what gets built. This is great for individual autonomy and getting ICs promoted, but it's bad for products.

- any leader with an actual product strategy has no time to actually build it. It's practically guaranteed that the winds will shift and they'll be out, to be replaced by the next manager with their own vision and the need for a near-total reset.

I'm at a company now where leadership tenure is shockingly long (at least by Google standards) - and you see the payoff: multi-year strategies actually get built, actually pay off. Reorgs happen but is generally infrequent, and when they occur they are close to leaf node teams - rather than the wholesale "we're replacing all critical leaders" type that happens a lot at Google.

[jay_kyburz]

I've been reading this whole thread and playing my favorite game called "If I were CEO of Google this is what I would do differently"

It must be incredibly difficulty to evaluate how well people are doing, and how valuable peoples work is when only one or two departments make any money and everything else indirectly supports that work.

How do you reward people for doing boring maintenance work on existing products? How do you give people the time to build the products, but also keep them happy and well paid enough to prevent them being poached?

How to reward a talented engineer who's job it is to add some small feature to a massive product like Maps or Docs?

I can't help but think I would explode the company into thousands of tiny startups each managing themselves and their own budgets, staff, and salaries, and literately pay bounties for every little feature I wanted implemented. There is no ladder to climb, only bounties to claim.

[JohnFen]

> How do you reward people for doing boring maintenance work on existing products?

Maybe start by hiring people who don't find maintenance work boring? I've known tons of excellent engineers who very much prefer maintenance work.

[potatolicious]

This seems unlikely to work and in fact probably exacerbates a bunch of issues:

- it's impossible to collaborate across org boundaries. If each org has their own budget/staff/salaries and their sole source of income are claimed bounties, there is no incentive to contribute one iota of work that isn't related to a bounty they can claim. You can of course split bounties but a) then you have interminable fights about the exact way bounties should be split, and b) the meta-game likely still rewards only pursuing bounties that one's org can achieve by themselves, causing orgs to refuse to collaborate.

- orgs will become more and more short-term focused since claiming bounties is critical to survival. A smaller bounty that can be claimed in 4 months is better than a larger bounty that can be claimed with 2 years of work. This is extra true if the orgs compete with each other - your odds of being pre-empted is lower with a 4 month bounty than a 2 year bounty, where you can burn a ton of work only to get beat by another org. The meta-game will almost certainly heavily favor fast small features rather than long-term work, and will absolutely preclude self-disruption type projects that are both time-consuming and risky.

You can, of course, insert some layer of managerial judgment into this to offset the meta-incentive flaws in the system - so you can force investment in long-term projects and force inter-org collaboration, etc. But at that point you've replicated a traditional corporate structure, just with "bounties" in place of "promotions".

But most importantly a bounty-based system doesn't solve the core problem here: who makes decisions about the company's products?

In a bounty-based system like you describe, there would be some kind of central cabal that issues bounties - in essence determining what products and features should be built. But then you have some pretty obvious issues:

- does the central cabal know enough about the product domains to be the most qualified to make these determinations? Or will the products suffer because the cabal doesn't understand the product's domains deeply enough to make smart decisions about it? Does it not make intuitive sense that the people building the product knows more about it than a group of far-removed decision makers? How do you consider the views of those who are closest to the product and most keenly aware of its tactical needs, in balance with the views of those who are furthest, but have more inter-product and strategic knowledge?

- besides the problems of the cabal knowing what should be built, how does the cabal know what can be built? It is entirely possible for the cabal to issue bounties that are unimplementable (give me a system that can diagnose cancers with a 0% error rate!). Besides the challenges of a highly centralized product org knowing what the market wants, they would have little way of knowing what is expedient or efficient for the company to achieve.

Again, you can insert some layer of managerial judgment into this to offset the problems here, but again you'd end up replicating a traditional corporate structure.

[hintymad]

I actually don't believe 5-year plan would work. Great products are built, not planned. A plan to keep management patient for 5 years, though, will work better. In AWS, a newly launched service will not seek profitability but user growth for at least the first two years, if not three. And then the GM of the service needs to pursue profitability and margin, while keeping user growth healthy. That said, product features are planned on a 6-month basis, and GMs have have moving target of profitability as market conditions often change.

[potatolicious]

Agreed, in part - and agreed with the other poster here that great products are both.

Google tends to suffer from the worst of both worlds: an over-abundance of 5-year plans that do not offer sufficient interim value to justify their continued work.

Part of this is bad projections - Google projects are often highly-ambitious multi-year affairs with some interim checkpoints like growth rate, but those numbers are usually poorly estimated, poorly sourced, wildly overly optimistic, and don't actually pan out. So when the team inevitably whiffs the checkpoints by a wide margin entire products get shut down. This is at least one of the larger causes of the leadership churn I described above.

But yes, if your idea is that you can have a 5-year budget to go do [insert big ambitious thing] and management won't cry about it, that's a fantasy.

That said, the opposite is also not a great way to pursue a product - which mostly rests on the theory that pursuing near-term improvements repeatedly naturally wins.

In reality you want a mixture of long-term strategy with short-term tactics. Product teams that are too heavily in one direction fail for it.

[pg_1234]

To bring it back to the CEO question.

This is because they have a "caretaker CEO".

Google wa sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.

In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.

They don't have this.

That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.

Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.

[potatolicious]

Ehh, I would not be hasty in blaming things on Sundar as a "caretaker CEO". My impression has been that this inability to ship started well before Sundar's reign, and goes into a core belief that the company has been built around since its early days.

The problem with Google is that far too much product authority is devolved into leaf node teams. But this isn't a quirk of Sundar's leadership, this is practically a shibboleth built into the DNA of Google itself. The idea is that autonomous teams of very smart people, given maximum freedom to pursue what they think is necessary, produces the best products.

This is one of the fundamental buildings blocks of Google and long pre-dates Sundar as CEO. And it is the thing that is failing.

What we're witnessing is IMO a repudiation of the idea that if you take smart people and "free range" them, they will spontaneously invent world-changing products. FWIW, I think the strategy has been clearly failing for a long time - the only product that came out of this system was Gmail. Quite literally everything else at Google that has survived the test of time was acquired (see: YouTube, Maps).

I think Sundar may end up taking the fall for being caught flat-footed, and surely as CEO he should rightly shoulder some of the blame, but Google's problems far pre-date him. It's also why I don't think the triumphant return of Larry and Sergey will necessarily fix things - they're the ones who instituted the system of autonomous teams.

[umeshunni]

The terms "Wartime CEO" and "Peacetime CEO" come to mind.

https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/

[hintymad]

Yeah, my statement went too far. I was just trying to emphasize that many aspects of a product will emerge from iterations, therefore 5-year plan sounds a gross waterfall model. That said, some planning is needed.

[JohnFen]

> Great products are built, not planned.

Great products are both.

[Infinitesimus]

What company are you at now?

[pschuegr]

What company are you at now, if you don't mind me asking?

[nus07]

Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.

[subsubzero]

100% this. You do not want MBA types in your company, let alone running it! I couldn't think of a worse choice for leading Google, and it sounds like he is pulling that classic MBA trick where you are getting teams to work against each other instead of for a greater mission. No wonder nothing is shipping, projects are getting culled for no reason etc. I think google will be seeing a decline that may shock many if bing/chatGPT starts seeing wider adoption.

[smugma]

Apple and Microsoft both run by CEO’s with MBA’s, but you could argue that they are not “MBA types”, which is fair enough, but then we’re really talking about an straw man MBA.

[CobrastanJorji]

> and buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid?

My pet conspiracy theory is that a significant motivating factor for why some of these big tech companies are so bullish on returning everyone to the office is that otherwise all of the real estate purchases and leases make the executives look like fools.

[cvhashim04]

Not really a conspiracy when it’s a fact of the matter. Expensive offices are sitting around empty.

[alfalfasprout]

it's not even a conspiracy theory... investors have outright called for RTO for that reason.

[CobrastanJorji]

Why would investors want that? The building's already paid for. It doesn't seem like putting people into it or not would matter at that point, assuming RTO is employee performance neutral. And unlike executives, investors have no need to fool people into thinking they're making sensible decisions.

[the_third_wave]

Those buildings will be worth much less if the culture of working from home becomes ingrained since the demand for this type of office space will permanently decline. Those who invested in office real estate may stand or fall with people returning to their offices.

[CobrastanJorji]

Oh, right! Excellent point.

[Rzor]

Maybe they feel hurt every time they are reminded of the empty buildings because it's a waste of money and to get everyone back wouldn't hurt anybody in their assessment, it's actually how it was done before and it worked well, yadda yadda, so why not.

I do think the reasoning applies much better to executives, though.

tl;dr human stuff

[chestervonwinch]

it's their unused treadmill in the living room they bought back in November

[hintymad]

Speaking of product, Ben Thompson mentioned in his podcast that Google planned to use their low-margin GDocs suite to undermine Microsoft Office's dominance. I wonder what happens to that strategy. If any company can pull off an office killer, I'd imagine it's Google. Yet somehow I'm still bitching that Quip is better than Google Docs.

On the other hand, Microsoft CEO is saying in unequivocal terms that Microsoft can use low-margin bing to undermine Google search. I'd not imagine such a day, but here it was.

[cutenewt]

I talked to a friend about what's she's seeing inside Google right now and the amount of corporate and cultural dysfunction is shocking. Politics, games, entitlement, and decreased productivity.

Is there a company that's more dysfunctional?

[twunde]

Plenty. Look outside of tech and you'll see that's the norm in many places.

[scottyah]

...yes? You just described every large organization/company ever.

[twblalock]

And academia is even worse!

Any large organization where people have the ability to create little fiefdoms will result in this eventually.

[eitally]

No. This is absolutely false. I don't think anyone who hasn't been inside of Google can possibly understand how "differently" (one might even say "Googley") dysfunctional it is.

[scottyah]

Have you worked in government/defense? I only know two people who have jumped to google and they did not think google was as bad.

[jarl-ragnar]

Any large aerospace company. Especially those that have been bought and merged with others as the sector has consolidated over the years.

Having watched it from the inside of one through 4 aquire/merge cycles over 10 years I speak from experience.

[meepmorp]

Boeing?

[Perceval]

Sure. Raytheon Space also going through its Game of Thrones at the moment.

[subsubzero]

> I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much

Curious on what you [were] using? Something created in house? I am not a fan of Jira but not having it to track issues or create bug requests does indeed sound like a nightmare.

[rantee]

The bug tracker, deployment, and testing tools are very mature. It was the task tracking by spreadsheet on my teams that got to me, and lack of unified project management tooling across teams. This made tracking dependencies and planning more difficult (leading to more meetings). There are definitely in-house tools available. It's just another "YMMV considerably" element of things.

A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front

edit: formatting

[dheera]

* shrug *

If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet.

They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up.

Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.

[csa]

> If the… customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO.

Do you think their customers are happy?

Google’s thought leader customers are extremely unhappy with pretty much all of their products to the point that Google is ripe for disruption.

The main thing Google has going for them is their incredibly massive moat that limits viable competitors. IMHO, that moat will only protect them for so long if they don’t reorient themselves.

The only people I know who like Google products are relatively unsophisticated consumers. I realize that this is a large part of the market and is also a very lucrative segment of the market, but they will follow the thought leaders when the thought leaders move on to something else.

[petra]

Sure, marketing for a great new search engine would be pretty easy.

But the demands of the regular user and the power user are very different. So before ChatGPT, I'm not sure that also catering to the power users would have helped Google with their regular users.

[rantee]

Since employees, (many) customers, and investors aren't happy, seems like time for a change. It's the layers between the puppet and army that cause the most issues IMO, but vision starts at the top. And it isn't there these days.

And I totally agree on the botched demo; it's just like the stock's unfair punishment after recent great quarters. Expecting that pandemic growth would continue forever just shows the irrationality of markets.

+1 to your comment that it's time for new Googles to rise up.

[edit to fix typo]

[ohazi]

Other than the pay and the residual prestige from "this is the coolest place to work if you pretend it's still 2004" -- I'm not so sure I'd describe the average Google employee as "happy." "Begrudgingly willing to tolerate it" seems more common.

[twblalock]

> it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work.

An army of ten thousand people marching in the wrong direction is what you get with bad leadership.

There is a lot of "real" work going on at a company like Google. Leadership really does matter, and there are a number of examples of bad CEOs running a company into the ground (e.g. HP) and good CEOs completely turning failing companies around (e.g. Steve Jobs coming back to Apple). None of those things would have happened if the CEO was just a figurehead.

Some engineers, notably junior ones without a lot of life experience, seem to believe that engineering teams could run the company by themselves and that leadership and other orgs don't provide any value. It's an immature world view that doesn't even work very well at startups, and certainly doesn't make any sense at large companies.

[badloginagain]

Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.

A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.

[abakker]

this is kinda true, but only if you say, "In the short term". In the long term, things are recursive - poor employee morale loses productivity and product quality suffers and customers leave and shareholders lose. And that is only one of many loops.

A CEO may appear to be rewarded in the short term, and may make short term choices, but, rest assured that they must please all 3 constituencies or they will not have a long run timeframe to worry about. (of course, boards and ceos make mistakes and act poorly and suffer the consequences, too).

[twblalock]

"Deliver value to the shareholders" is an outcome, not an action.

How a CEO delivers value is generally by running the company well, making the right decisions, hiring the right people, making sure the company has the right product vision, etc.

If the customers aren't happy, they will buy fewer products and revenue will decline. Since a large portion of a company's stock price is connected to expectations about future earnings, that will put downward pressure on the stock and hurt the shareholders.

[aliswe]

Excellent point

[dheera]

This is an extremely flawed way to structure a society. In what messed up world does the CEO of a company have more responsibility to some armchair drugged suit-people eating Michelin food on high-rises in Manhattan than the actual billions of people who use the product on a day to day basis, and the tens of thousands of people who work half of their lives to deliver that?

[chimprich]

> Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.

Nonsense. Customer happiness, employee happiness and company performance are all related.

I used to be a Google shareholder. I got a good return for a while, but eventually I got annoyed enough as a Google customer that I decided that I didn't want to hold Google stock. This was partly emotional, and partly a prediction that their stock price was going to plateau or fall given that they were alienating their users. This seems to have been the correct decision.

> A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.

It literally does matter, because shareholders are not automatons. A lot of the economy runs on confidence. Investments aren't just made on short-term economic performance.