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Comment by spinchange | Hacker News Reader

My comment there seems to have been immediately flagged as spam, so I'll say it here.

I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google.

We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.

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Much easier to write the article, yes (of course) but why make the point? It's utterly irrelevant to whether the author has a valid criticism or not.

I think it's implied the article author has to deal with a much simpler analysis than whatever is needed to manage Google. It's therefore implied the article is based on faulty/incomplete information.

Agree vix.

My point is that there is little empirical basis for these criticisms. In the absence of this, what basis do I have to trust this author's intuition? His experience running enterprises like Google? His experience managing some of the brightest engineers in the world? Or his experience chasing an ephemeral position on Techmeme?

"I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google."

Based on comments like this getting so many votes, I'm starting to wonder how many Google fanboys use this site. This is true for any critic in any industry. If you have to be the de-facto source of information on something before you can comment on it, then nobody would ever be able to comment on anything. "It's much easier to eat food from a restaurant and pick it apart, then actually go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." True, the critic doesn't risk much.

Motivation is when you give someone an incentive to work hard. As mentioned in the article, if I work on search algorithms, how is a bonus contingent on social networking going to motivate me? I think it's a valid question, and if that's really what's happening at Google, then I would agree, it's a blunder.

Where you see fanboyism in my comment, I see an echo-chamber narrative being advanced in posts like these that give little context to numerous unique business and management complexities that must be faced running a company like Google at time like this in its existence.

Last week writers like this were saying Google was dying because of stagnation and because 'social just isn't in its DNA'. This week they're saying Google is dying because it's trying not to stagnate and 'get social.'

I think this comment would have been equally true, and better-received if you hadn't made the fanboyism jab.

No, we're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that Larry Page believes is crucial to the success of the company. That distinction is the basis of several of the criticisms made in the article.

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