And they did innovate in those days, eg, Gmail and purchase and integrate very innovative things like Writely (Docs), Grand Central (Voice).
At some point they got the idea that because they made so much money, new innovations could not be valuable if the profits would likely be insignificant compared to the existing oil gusher.... which is stupid, because nothing is ever gonna look that good early on, so they took on the persona of a flaky ADD schemer -- like Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld -- always scheming with some new idea, but never with the perseverance to stick with it for more than 25 minutes before moving on to something else -- because what can possibly ever compete with ads?
Google actually tried to be a "fuck you investors, we're gonna do research" company with the supershares, but they screwed up:
A big mistake they made, which then got replicated throughout the industry, was issuing stock to employees. It meant that even though Larry and Sergey had supershares and no shareholders could countermand their beliefs, the employees (especially middle managers) could, by changing their work decisions to try to boost the stock, thus inoculating the company indelibly with the wall street short term thinking disease that the supershares were supposed to have prevented.
It was pathetic how interested in the share price the average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the mid-teens, at least around the quarterly vest date.
Whoops. Should have listened to Buffet-- never give out stock. Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You cannot depend on a large mass of people like that to stick to a higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.
We individual employees had little control over stock and I don't remember anybody being particularly delighted when Patrick left and Ruth took over, despite the stock going up up up. I don't think our GSUs were influencing work decisions on aggregate.
What was influencing decisions was just the same as always: ad revenue. I think people who worked outside of ads at Google probably didn't get the sense of it. I came into Google as part of a competition crushing, monopoly focused acquisition, so I started off cynical. I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that it all lacked purpose or real motivation.
And into that void just crept more and more careerism and empire building.
Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a product of Perf economy than stock price.
I lasted there 10 years for lack of anything else worthwhile to go to in my geo-region, and because the money was too good to pass up. But what a weird, weird, weird place. Wandering around the MTV campus was like being in a real life Elysium (movie) or something. I could never figure out what all those people were doing between free meals. I felt guilty taking the money, the whole time.
> I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that it all lacked purpose or real motivation.
This is precisely how I would summarize it too. Very well stated.
> Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a product of Perf economy than stock price.
That I agree with, and I already regret implying stock was a bigger part of it than Perf/Promo-- I just wasn't thinking about them when I wrote that.
Perf was a bigger factor for sure from our ground level (L3/L4/L5 presumably) and was the main reason I left, as all I saw around my on my team was people doing things that added zero value or even subtracted it, but at least they created a new project that would sound good for Promo committee. Managers helpfully shepherded their team in that direction, which was kind and all for growing our careers and helping us get more slop from the trough, but it still felt gross. I couldn't bear seeing that as my future.
Sometimes, when I look at the housing market, or think about colleges for my daughter though, I regret not playing a long a little longer. I don't know.
THAT SAID: I don't think the stock incentives affected decision making at your or my level, but at higher middle management levels, where GSUs started to become huger both in absolute value and percentage of compensation. At the levels of the people actually deciding what products to close down or pursue. I wasn't up at that level so this is just a theory I admit.
Yeah, fair enough -- I still don't know if I've done a good job of successfully explaining to myself what the fuck it was I experienced working there and why, but it sounds like you and I had very very similar experiences.
Everything about the internal incentive structure was fucked up and incentivized very low value producing behavior.
And yet, I did learn some really valuable things there
- napa cabbage is delicious
- celery root is a thing
- fresh made pasta is better
- quiche and arugula pair great together
- oh my god legit ramen is amazing
Oh wait, outside of the food:
- monorepos, with the right tooling, are unbeatable. all the monorepo haters just don't have the right tooling. google did
- doing meetings right, with agendas and minutes, is also unbeatable, strictly better and more effecient than the alternative
- doing planning right, by circulating proposed design plans for comments, is strictly more effecient than the alternative
- doing cloud deployment right -- this is irrelevant now, most everyone knows how to do this now while google is stuck with legacy borg configs, but for a while, google actually was far ahead of the industry on this
Despite having some fundamentals like that that made certain things way way more effective, it was squandered pursuing cockeyed goals.
Yep. Monorepos and fully vendored third-party deps, the two things I wish other people were doing... because the way the bulk of the industry is doing it is a stupid productivity killing, security, and reliability nightmare.
I was always a square peg in the round hole there, and I have no idea how I lasted 10 years. I was at L4 the whole time and never made the move to even try for L5 because the perf process seemed like such stressful garbage to me and I was perfectly fine with my already generous compensation.
I miss that kind of $$, but oh well. It got to the point I couldn't stand it anymore, and after watching the insane growth in hiring... I knew layoffs would be coming.
Oddly, I agree-- that section was just kind of an obvious hurried joke about the great food. I really did learn a lot of culinary ideas due to eating a lot of food I could have afforded in Manhattan, but normally would never have bought due to my frugality.
> Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You cannot depend on a large mass of people like that to stick to a higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.
Well, if you gathered this big mass of people by dangling a nice pay and stock options in front of them then yeah, it does seem a bit odd to lament they are tempted by money.
> It was pathetic how interested in the share price the average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the mid-teens, at least around the quarterly vest date.
How dare someone look out for their own financial well-being!
(1) I was earning over triple what I had been earning just a couple years earlier, so it was hard to sympathize with people who felt that still wasn't enough.
(2) It is very unpleasant to know that what you are doing day in and day out adds no value to anyone else's life and is just busywork to trick the system into giving you a paycheck. It's not that different from being on unemployment and having to do the busywork of proving you applied to N jobs per week.
At some point they got the idea that because they made so much money, new innovations could not be valuable if the profits would likely be insignificant compared to the existing oil gusher.... which is stupid, because nothing is ever gonna look that good early on, so they took on the persona of a flaky ADD schemer -- like Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld -- always scheming with some new idea, but never with the perseverance to stick with it for more than 25 minutes before moving on to something else -- because what can possibly ever compete with ads?
Google actually tried to be a "fuck you investors, we're gonna do research" company with the supershares, but they screwed up:
A big mistake they made, which then got replicated throughout the industry, was issuing stock to employees. It meant that even though Larry and Sergey had supershares and no shareholders could countermand their beliefs, the employees (especially middle managers) could, by changing their work decisions to try to boost the stock, thus inoculating the company indelibly with the wall street short term thinking disease that the supershares were supposed to have prevented.
It was pathetic how interested in the share price the average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the mid-teens, at least around the quarterly vest date.
Whoops. Should have listened to Buffet-- never give out stock. Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You cannot depend on a large mass of people like that to stick to a higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.