[solaarphunk]

As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google. It's common knowledge how bureaucratic and political the company has become; these stories are everywhere.

If I were a large pension fund or asset manager, I would be asking questions to the board like, "Given nothing gets done on many teams, what would happen if Google reduced its headcount by 50%?" and "Why is increasing headcount currently an incentive for managers within organizations, especially without any apparent penalty function?"

[tmoertel]

> As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google.

Probably because most people understand that horror stories reported on the web are likely to be outliers and not representative of the typical experience, or of a massive company as a whole.

It takes motivation to write a horror story. If you worked at a company that you expected to be a good place to work, and it turned out that it was a good place to work, what's your motivation to write about it? And if you do write about it, what's the motivation for someone to submit your non-horror story to a site like Hacker News, or of a reader to upvote it?

So the distribution of stories you'll see on the web and HN is going to be biased toward horror stories and other extremes.

[izacus]

> As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google.

Because the way things are run at Google now are all FOR SHAREHOLDERS and for maximum value extraction with maximum stock buybacks.

Hacker culture and non-standard corporate leadership is always undesireable and PUNISHED by the shareholding class. Oracle/IBM type business leadership is familiar and rewarded.

This state of matters is the default for corporate America and Google was special because it managed to not be that for so long - until shareholders finally managed to bring it under control into the operating mode they understand.

There's a reason why modern corporate america is eating its own economic future and is becomming brittle to attacks from China.

[dsr_]

If the Goog reduced headcount by 50%:

They could not accurately judge productivity, talent or motivation, so some groups would lose their key players. This would demotivate everyone left. They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets.

It would be good for everyone except those who lost health insurance and income at the wrong time, and the Goog itself.

[meepmorp]

> They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets.

So, cut headcount, juice the stock, then have a bunch of possible acquisition targets that have developed viable products in new markets by not being saddled with the intractable corporate inefficiencies you suffer? Sounds like breaking some eggs for a tasty omelette.

I'm only mostly kidding.

[solaarphunk]

Wouldn't it mean that their entire organization is broken, if they can't effectively identify productive and talented people? This seems like a huge problem!

I agree that Google benefits from monopolizing headcount, even if the employees waste their lives doing nothing, because it reduces competition. I would even Google poisons people's work ethic/priorities permanently when they try to leave and go to other startups (this is my personal experience working with former non-technical google employees who only play politics).

[roenxi]

Yes it is a huge problem. No nobody knows how to fix it. This has been the largest and most glaring problem in software for decades now and is not at all a point of confusion for managers.

It is the same question as "how do we measure programmer productivity?" which is similarly a huge problem and, so far, unsolvable.

[_heimdall]

Once a public company gets large enough the stock itself is their product.

It really doesn't matter much what the company produces PR how well it manages its org, they just need to keep producing numbers in a quarterly earning report that few even read so a few clips can make a headline and bolster the stock.

[eru]

You can short Google.

[_heimdall]

Sure, though my point was only that the stock is the product when large enough. Nothing stops you from betting for or against the stock

[eru]

The stock isn't anymore the product than bonds are the product.

[muzani]

Most of these giant tech companies grow to be such sizes because of a huge market and highly profitable product.

They can pretty much do whatever they want and still make money. Most shareholders don't really care about what happens in there. Money in, money out.

I think a lot of people also falsely hold on to the belief that money validates process. FB had some terrible processes going on and yet people kept cheering them on. Then when stock prices plummeted, they blamed it on the most recent event, rather than asking why FB rebranded to Meta.

It's similar here. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Many shareholders are happy to blindly trust the leadership and paying them huge containers of money as long as stonks go up.

[coffeebeqn]

Besides what tools do investors have to affect change at a 100k people company? They can replace the CEO maybe but that hardly ever magically fixes things.

Are the other fortune 100 companies better or worse managed than Google?

[compiler-guy]

Err:

"Major investor calls on Google owner to ‘aggressively’ cut staff and pay"

A couple of months after this article appeared, google laid off 12,000 employees and didn't renew quite a few contracts. There were a few others too.

And this after a fairly hard hiring freeze that left a bunch of people in limbo.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...

[pid-1]

Google is so big not even large investors have stakes relevant enough for this sort of activism.

[chris_wot]

One day Google will collapse under its own crapululence.

[arb-spreads]

Cynical take is that Google is a monopoly. They could probably easily double net income margins from ~25% to ~50% while still growing at a similar rate. Instead, they waste hundreds of billions to satisfy employees and placate regulators.

[rtontic]

I'd assume shareholders value is still increasing, so it wouldn't be a problem for them.