I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be. With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings. Having met countless arrogant but mediocre engineers that leave Google after four years, I will bring up the old algorithms only hiring nets bad employees with good memories.
I do think their engineers have likely slipped in quality over the years, but that's not the problem. The problem is their culture of product managers being rewarded for launching projects and nobody being rewarded for maintaining projects. They financially incentivize people to launch and kill projects.
It sounds like a leadership problem, because only leadership can change the culture like that.
Probably a lot to do with this. Incentives are probably the strongest driver of behavior in a company, much stronger than any stated strategy.
If people are richly rewarded for launching new products, they'll optimize their work for launching new products, even when that product doesn't make sense, or when more business value could be created by supporting/enhancing an existing product.
For another example, Microsoft's dysfunction and infighting in the Ballmer era can be tied to stack ranking. If your success depends on your peers doing worse than you, you're incentivized to not cooperate at best, snipe and sabotage at worst.
Google absolutely has to change their internal incentives if they want to sustain success into the future. In the case of GCP they're gonna have to start figuring out how they can shift their culture to wooing and keeping enterprise customers. This leak, their culture, and their history is gonna make that a tall order.
That, and the absolute 100% lack of customer support or engagement.
Unless you are a Fortune 100, they don't do support.
Want to move an SMB with 50+ employees to Chromebooks with Chrome Enterprise? You literally cannot pay Google to support you. You have to work with one of their third-party vendors, who all suck.
Perhaps with Brin and Page finally leaving, this is something that can change. But, I doubt it will, since they hired the leadership that's implemented their vision. The next chapter of Google is likely to be how Sundar Pichai leads them to the brink.
This is also true, but Google is a very engineering centric company, who they hire with regards to software end up running other parts of their business. Lots of really powerful people there came in and worked as engineers.
> I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be.
Obviously I am biased. I don't think I'm particularly great or anything, but I find my colleagues to be by far the most capable I've ever worked with, and I did previously work at AWS, where engineers were also very smart.
> With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings.
Personally I think it's an issue with management structure rather than individuals. Frankly I don't think smart people matter all that much.. for the most part you only need sufficiently smart people to do their job, and good culture/management will make the team shine. I'd argue that engineers are individually significantly less important than product managers and managers.
That being said, I think the issue is that Google is just too engineering focused. This makes it a wonderful place to work, but I don't think it leads to great products most of the time. It's fine for products like search and ads, where you can literally measure if you are making improvements, but not so good for most products.
Engineers are more or less allowed to pick what they want to work on. Again, I enjoy this flexibility, but I think it also leads to a lack of focus, especially when product managers probably have a much better understanding of what customers want or need.
Of course, Google is a massive company so I don't know how reflective my own experience is of the larger picture! This is just my personal feeling.
It's a little strange to me that otherwise experienced people feel the need to "study" for Google interviews.
To me, this seems less like they're selecting for good engineers and more like they're just selecting for people who really want Google on their resume.
