Post by Grant Taylor2023-11-22 04:29 UTC
Reflecting on 18 years at Google
I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later.
Last week was my last week at Google.
I feel very lucky to have experienced the early post-IPO Google; unlike most
companies, and contrary to the popular narrative, Googlers, from the junior
engineer all the way to the C-suite, were genuinely good people who cared very
much about doing the right thing. The oft-mocked "don't be evil" truly was the
guiding principle of the company at the time (largely a reaction to
contemporaries like Microsoft whose operating procedures put profits far above
the best interests of customers and humanity as a whole).
Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to
be good for society. Google Books, for example. Much of the criticism Google
received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of
interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and
mistakes can appear malicious). I often saw privacy advocates argue against
Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights
have had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most annoying is the
prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found
it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas
that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google
interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
[Photograph] Charlie's patio at Google, 2011. Image has been manipulated to
remove individuals.
Early Google was also an excellent place to work. Executives gave frank answers
on a weekly basis, or were candid about their inability to do so (e.g. for
legal reasons or because some topic was too sensitive to discuss broadly). Eric
Schmidt regularly walked the whole company through the discussions of the board.
The successes and failures of various products were presented more or less
objectively, with successes celebrated and failures examined critically with an
eye to learning lessons rather than assigning blame. The company had a vision,
and deviations from that vision were explained. Having experienced Dilbert-level
management during my internship at Netscape five years earlier, the uniform
competence of people at Google was very refreshing.
For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards. My
mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web
would be good for Google (I was explicitly told to ignore Google's interests).
This was a continuation of the work I started while at Opera Software. Google
was an excellent host for this effort. My team was nominally the open source
team at Google, but I was entirely autonomous (for which I owe thanks to Chris
DiBona). Most of my work was done on a laptop from random buildings on Google's
campus; entire years went by where I didn't use my assigned desk.
In time, exceptions to Google's cultural strengths developed. For example, as
much as I enjoyed Vic Gundotra's enthusiasm (and his initial vision for Google+,
which again was quite well defined and, if not necessarily uniformly appreciated,
at least unambiguous), I felt less confident in his ability to give clear answers
when things were not going as well as hoped. He also started introducing silos to
Google (e.g. locking down certain buildings to just the Google+ team), a distinct
departure from the complete internal transparency of early Google. Another
example is the Android team (originally an acquisition), who never really fully
acclimated to Google's culture. Android's work/life balance was unhealthy, the
team was not as transparent as older parts of Google, and the team focused on
chasing the competition more than solving real problems for users.
My last nine years were spent on Flutter. Some of my fondest memories of my time
at Google are of the early days of this effort. Flutter was one of the last
projects to come out of the old Google, part of a stable of ambitious experiments
started by Larry Page shortly before the creation of Alphabet. We essentially
operated like a startup, discovering what we were building more than designing
it. The Flutter team was very much built out of the culture of young Google; for
example we prioritised internal transparency, work/life balance, and data-driven
decision making (greatly helped by Tao Dong and his UXR team). We were radically
open from the beginning, which made it easy for us to build a healthy open source
project around the effort as well. Flutter was also very lucky to have excellent
leadership throughout the years, such as Adam Barth as founding tech lead, Tim
Sneath as PM, and Todd Volkert as engineering manager.
[Photograph] We also didn't follow engineering best practices for the first few
years. For example we wrote no tests and had precious little documentation. This
whiteboard is what passed for a design doc for the core Widget, RenderObject, and
dart:ui layers. This allowed us to move fast at first, but we paid for it later.
Flutter grew in a bubble, largely insulated from the changes Google was
experiencing at the same time. Google's culture eroded. Decisions went from being
made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever
was making the decision. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would eagerly
attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was happening, I found myself now
able to predict the answers executives would give word for word. Today, I don't
know anyone at Google who could explain what Google's vision is. Morale is at an
all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all
their Google clients are unhappy with Google.
Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-
sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter,
instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success
even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The
effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user,
or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be
rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff
people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they
dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously.
Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one
has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The
lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in
the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google's
founders famously told Wall Street "Google is not a conventional company. We do
not intend to become one." but that Google is no more.
Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership
from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural
norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept
middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department
that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and
Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I
wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even
after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are
doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely
incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that
is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no
relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive
feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams
(who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her
to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right
time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
There are still great people at Google. I've had the privilege to work with
amazing people on the Flutter team such as JaYoung Lee, Kate Lovett, Kevin
Chisholm, Zoey Fan, Dan Field, and dozens more (sorry folks, I know I should just
name all of you but there's too many!). In recent years I started offering career
advice to anyone at Google and through that met many great folks from around the
company. It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some
shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO's
office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google's
extensive resources to deliver value to users. I still believe there's lots of
mileage to be had from Google's mission statement ("to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful"). Someone who wanted
to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and
disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the
skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements.
I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google's culture
will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need
to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an
organisation without a moral compass.
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