Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve

cnbc.com

67 pointsaprdm101 comments

The headline doesn't exactly match the content. The "simplicity sprint" is best described by this paragraph:

> Pichai said the company is opening the floor for employees to share their ideas through August 15th through an internal survey that asks if management can reach out if they have follow-up questions.

I expect this will actually be a valuable exercise. A company the size of Google must have a HUGE amount of stop-energy and inertia. Making it a priority to identify and address things that are slowing them down seems like an obviously valuable exercise to me.

I'm reminded of this excellent recent essay on Reducing Friction - https://blog.ceejbot.com/posts/reduce-friction/

If you can spot things that even give you a 1% aggregate productivity improvement at a company with 174,000 employees it's naively equivalent to hiring 1,740 people!

I predict: Sundar will be replaced by Ruth Porat (the CFO) as the CEO of Google in a year (with sundar remaining CEO of Alphabet). The company will undergo a finance-driven adjustment of priorities which will involve large-scale downsizing touching every area of Google that doesn't bring revenue/profit, user traffic, or research credibility (leaving Ads, Search, Cloud, and Research). Many ambitious future products and existing duds will be shut down (with a promise this will allow them to focus on their core). It seems unlikely Google Cloud will catch up to AWS or Azure, but shutting down GCP would probably cause a lot of serious problems.

When I joined Google in '07 I thought they were already pretty late to the cloud game and faced uphill resistance from every Urs flunkie about cloud- "it will never match the profit margins of ads". When Urs finally did get serious about cloud, he eviscerated TI which has taken years to rebuild itself.

I still have a hard time understanding exactly why they've committed so much money to Verily with its focus on high-touch medical dx.

Thanks for sharing your prediction and insight.

> he eviscerated TI

What is TI? Texas Instruments?

Technical Infrastructure- the people who built the software foundations of the google compute environment.

Agree with most of the sentiment in the thread. I guess Pichai asking people for input is nice and all, but what mission you're supposed to be on usually comes from the people who lead, it's not the job of developers or middle-management to decide the direction of a company. If you're asking people for a 'simplicity sprint' you'll have to declare where you're sprinting to first.

Zucc gets a lot of crap for the whole 'Metaverse' thing and it may very well be a terrible idea, but at least it's an idea.

Alphabet is a conglomerate. The best ideas would not come from the top.

Then they have the wrong leaders.

Interesting. So you'd prefer all the "great ideas" to come from a select few in the C-suite?

I’d flip that statement. The c-suite should be world class product visionaries and executioners who lead with the great ideas.

I think this is a sign that the leadership is "just now" realizing good ideas come from the bottom and has been listening to the wrong voices.

But with freezing hiring, and constraining projects, expect more projects to get shut down and more will end up here: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Based on the promotion system and structure approved by executives Google engineers are working very hard. They often produce little of value to the company bottom line but that is not the incentive set for them by the company so that's hardly unexpected.

Reminds me of an 80’s anti-drug TV ad: “I learned it by watching you” where the kid reveals his drug problem comes stems from his parents.

> To that end, Pichai introduced a “Simplicity Sprint” initiative to crowdsource ideas for quicker product development.

The previous innovation of keeping three-word personal mission on moma must have reached its effectiveness limit then. Is this just me or corporate top brass who’s collecting hundreds of millions annually are supposed to provide insight like this, not solicit it?

Never thought of this before. As a former Googler, I probably burned out trying to come up with ideas for improvement.

When you're constantly asked to come up with ideas (take initiative!), but then can't find the right avenues to actually implement them, you feel a bit ignored and useless. (Maybe all my ideas were bad, perhaps I didn't fit in the corporate environment, or I was too emotional about my work environment. All I know is it didn't work out for me.)

When will these big companies be satisfied? They have astronomical market caps, share prices and pay structures for leadership but it’s always more more more. These companies need to pull off the gas pedal and provide for their employees more rather than continue to extract from them.

Google are meant to be working in the interests of shareholders. If you bought their stock today, would you be happy if it never went up in value?

If it continued to reliably generate a profit and distribute dividends, then yes.

Infinite growth is not possible and seeking it is not sustainable.

I’m not saying they should stop attempting to innovate, just that it shouldn’t come at the cost of giving up on reliable profit centers for the sake of “growth”.

We will continue to have growth until Humanity is living in dyson spheres with matter replicators, and humans are immortal Until then there will always be scarcity, and with scarcity you will always have new people doing more with less. If the trucks delivering your product go from human drivers to self driving trucks, there will be a lowered cost of getting your product into stores and increased productivity. If the local coal powered plant is shut down, and a new nuclear power plant takes its place and the cost of electricity for your business goes down by 8%, that is growth, that is an increase in productivity.

I believe that Googles problem, as with most other large aging organizations, is overflowing middle management.

It remains to see if they will admit and fix it or just screw over the lower layers.

Its extremely hard to identify bad middle management, as well as do anything about it. Unlike upper management, which is pretty mercenary and out for itself, and can be fired albeit with large golden parachutes, bad middle management is pretty opaque to top management. It is hard, by design, to figure out what outcome is a particular middle manager having on the company bottom or top line. There is vicious politics, and trying to trim it down can actually do more damage, at least in the short term, than leaving it in.

Utterly disgusting for the obscenely wealthy CEO of one of the most valuable and profitable companies on Earth to be telling employees they "Need to work harder" or they're going to get laid off, as let's not beat around the bush, that's exactly what's happening here even if Pichai was too cowardly to say it directly.

Or to put it another way:

Google CEO to employees - "Make the shareholders and I more money or I will dispose of you."

Simplicity sprint gives me flashbacks to other upper/top management exercises I've done in the past. We never got much out of it. Good ideas and innovations are something that grows over time not over flashy events. I have no idea why Google is doing it. Generally they seem to be doing smart things in smart ways and avoid corporate nonsense.

There's no magic stick effect to increasing productivity. I reckon this exercise is an excuse that will be used in near future to prune the workforce as it's unlikely to yield anything tangible.

I don’t think google has the capacity to become more efficient as an organization. Google is a strange mix of hyper capitalism and literal 5 year planning command economy communism. The thin interface of the company with rest of the universe, mainly made of legal policy, sales and vendor management is extremely efficient hyper capitalism. The huge gooey inside of this boundary layer, for basically all job roles, is a command economy where the inputs are determined by exec fiat, the results are interpreted through an extreme work politics lense devoid of nearly all market feedback, the consequences of failure are not firing but a 6 month delayed promo cycle, and everyone more or less is piggybacking on a more than a decade of monopoly profits. Google cannot become an efficient company again until market based success and failure mechanisms return to the inside of this massive company.

Productivity to build what? To do what? To make the world better how? Optimizing ads better?

The difference between an Elon and a Sundar is on full display here.

Seriously. Google has stagnated for so long it's hard to remember how they got big in the first place. I guess every big tech company eventually turns into Microsoft :( At least they're not Oracle.

Because getting big is only somewhat related to technical skill.

They have some amazing engineering, IMHO, but it seems to get piped in random (and often contradictory and/or redundant) directions. They end up with a bunch of excellent but half assed proofs of concept and no major initiatives. They've become so afraid of taking on new challenges and risks, it's kinda sad to see.

Now instead of trying to solve major problems, they just move buttons and shadows around with every Android release and rebrand their hardware with new names and logos every few years.

Googler opinions are my own.

I agree that it seems like we haven't had any huge launches in a long while, just lots of incremental improvements.

Google has lots of people with lots of ideas, but launching anything under the Google name is treacherous. If it fails to gather adoption and it dies (like many startups do) we get blamed for killing products.

It's a problem of an internet company. If we just released software like people mostly did 20 years ago, we could just stop providing updates. But keeping an internet service up takes compute and human resources.

As for what we work on, every active product has small changes going on. In payments (my team), we continue to launch support for new forms of payment. We continue to stay up on the latest regulations around the globe. (ex: Apple stopped accepting credit cards in India for their App Store, but Google Play still supports it.)

I feel like payments was a great example. Why is there wallet, pay, the new pay, the Android pay, the Google pay, the web payment service, the play store, none of which seem intercompatible? And yet in the meantime Stripe and Venmo took over?

It's got nothing to with desktop vs web software. All of Google's major past successes were online services too, as are your competitors. From the outside it just looks like you guys are resting on a giant warchest with feuding petty fiefdoms while the king is asleep at the throne. You know the problem spaces but come up with a bunch of half added solutions instead of some disciplined, visioned push. That just seems like a classic lack of competent leadership. Wish you guys could fire your execs and start over.

> From the outside it just looks like you guys are resting on a giant warchest with feuding petty fiefdoms while the king is asleep at the throne.

They're probably operating like a third world nation that finds a natural resource like Oil or diamonds or something.

That was google search / ads.

The company now is full of internal corruption which is just the petty fiefdoms all squabbling over the spoils, while the industry is being badly managed.

Lets see if I can find the economics book on that...

The Bottom Billion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion

Chapter 3 is on "the natural resources trap"

I haven't read it in over a decade and the analogy may fall apart, particularly when it comes to stuff like trade and currency -- but the problems of governance when a country is overflowing with natural resources is the narrow slice I'm talking about being analogous.

That's a great analogy!

Yeah I mean I haven't read that book in probably 15 years, so I may be making shit up about it at this point given how my memory is... but I definitely see corporations behave that way and internal governance goes completely to hell when they're flush with cash.

"If it fails to gather adoption and it dies (like many startups do) we get blamed for killing products."

That doesn't explain the mess of 8 different messaging apps each year. If Hangouts was still the de facto android messaging platform and google put some effort and marketing dollars, it would have billions of users, instead you have a mess and millions switching to iOS because android messaging is a joke. Same with payments. I get an email every 6 months for "the new google pay is now android pay and gPay is google pay". it's a joke. same with adnroid music play all access google play music plus.

Managing complexity is the job of an architect. Possibly the only job. Who is the architect of Google? The CEO. Thus, this is a really bad sign: shop-level complexity he is after commonly grows out of organizational complexity (the work of DeWeck at MIT) which is _his_ responsibility. Also, where is the complexity coming from? Fine, we do this sprint and make some things simpler. But if the graph is still trending up, we’ll be back where we started in no time. Finding and breaking mechanisms that breed complexity is the job of the CEO simply because nobody else has the authority. Of course, the CEO can delegate, but it’s still their job.

Wasn't there an article about situations like this? Something about "The Elves leave Middle Earth."?

It's going to be interesting to watch what happens over the next year or two.

Was curious about the article, so searched for it. Pretty sure this is it: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Yup, thats the one. Forgive the vague reference, but it was on HN fairly recently, and such statements from execs evoke the same feeling.

Baseless gut assumption: we're going to start seeing engineer layoffs at the big companies to push down salaries

Perhaps there focus and productivity will improve if they had a proper vision to work towards from upper management.

I don't think Google's problem comes from productivity losses, and I think leadership is to blame exclusively for this.

Google lost focus of what made it great under the CEO that's now demanding better productivity and focus, so I wonder what the problem here is.

Google also has(had?) great employees but somehow great products aren't coming out, the cure isn't more productivity imo but better vision and leadership.

A lot of companies, Google included, seem to lack focus and vision. Google is doing a million things and seems half committed to most of them. How many products and services have Google launched, neglected, and then killed in short time?

Look at Stadia. What was that? Why even try if you aren’t going to follow through.

Maybe Google should just start building cemeteries. They're really good at that.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Also failing to provide reasonable customer support for their successful projects worsens my trust in future projects.

Stadia has not been cancelled. It's a rumor. It has traction only because Google has cancelled too many products. Go read the HN thread on it, people there were calling it poorly sourced.

At this point I'll be shocked if Stadia isn't cancelled, that's just what Google does and their customers know it by now. It's become a self fulfilling prophecy.

There was a discussion about this just yesterday or so (sorry, on mobile, hard to find).

But I think a while ago they already pivoted to selling/renting the underlying tech to other businesses instead of trying to be a game marketplace. What's left of consumer Stadia is just dying day by day... not that it was ever particularly healthy.

Honestly, it's questionable whether Stadia was ever alive to begin with. It's been neglected ever since inception.

Friend of a friend story: one of the POs left days after launch, because they knew it would never replace consoles/desktops. It's really struggled to find footing since.

Personal theory: Stadia is a precursor to Rendering as a Service for AR/VR. It will be a long time before we can render a high-quality content for stereoscopic vision with a mobile device. But if you can solve the streaming problem, you can just offload it to the cloud. Issue is that any tracking lag that causes motionsickness now will just be magnified.

It's tempting to think there was some grand plan for Stadia, but more likely it was just another failed copycat like Google Plus. Game streaming tech was around before Stadia, and Nvidia is doing it much better now. I don't see how Google could ever compete directly with that unless they get into the GPU business themselves.

It has not been cancelled, but it is not being supported. It might as well be dead. My understanding is they are pivoting to white label services, but I am not sure if that is more than conjecture.

It feels like big tech companies enforce a vicious cycle on the software landscape.

Step 0: Someone has a good idea and builds a solid product around it.

Step 1: BigCo sees the new growth budding out of the software landscape.

Step 2a: BigCo buys the new property, refuses to take risks with their new acquisition, and eventually shutters it when it stops printing money.

Step 2b: BigCo sues the new entrant into the ground.

Step 2c: BigCo launches a competitor/fork, gains market share by operating it at a loss, then shutters it when it fails to turn a profit.

Step 3: Innovation is stifled, start over.

Seen it so many times as a customer of startups. “This is an awesome SaaS!”

Then they sell it to BigCo, and less than a year later it is at best loosely integrated or worse sunset. Innovation and this form of capitalism is not a good match if we value innovation as a society.

Probably that is also why we read so many comments saying “We did this 20 years ago with…” here when new tech is released. A long repeating cycle where only scraps of innovation is kept.

I wonder if the root of the issue is profit expectations. Their main business, Google search, makes mad cash. Why would Google keep something around that makes only a tiny fraction of what their main business does?

Why try new things at all? Because they realize that they need to diversify and try to find something that can bring in money to rival their main business in case their main business goes away.

I don't agree with this cycle, by the way. How can something make the same amount of money as google search if they don't put the same sort of resources into promotion and give it time to grow? But, I don't have an MBA.

I dunno about that. Once upon time, after search but before the modern era, they built (or bought and then integrated) very useful things like Android or Maps or Docs or Gmail. But they still took risks back then.

> very useful things like Android or Maps or Docs or Gmail

Which have become an overengineered mess with stagnating core features and a trickle of fresh, ad related nuisances.

True :( Especially Maps

I agree. Part of the conversation around Stadia before launch was, “how long until they kill it.” That is their reputation as a company.

> I wonder if the root of the issue is profit expectations.

When I was a youngster I was taught that capitalism promoted hard work and innovation, but it seems like that's only true during a growth phase. Once you've got a cash cow there is no reason to innovate, once you've sold or licensed a patent you can cruise on royalties, and if some upstart threatens you then sue, slander, or buy them. Beyond a certain tipping point the need for profit hampers if not outright suppresses innovation.

because there is only so much you can grow the main cash cow. would you rather have a company that makes 1 billion a year on 90% profit margin, or a company that makes 2 billion a year on 60% profit margin but is diversified?

You get promoted at Google not for improving and maintaining great products, but for building and releasing a product. This is why you see them building seemingly competing products for the exact same sector (Duo and Allo anyone?). Someone leads the project, they get dozens of engineers to work on it, it gets released and announced at Google I/O. The manager who got the project completed gets promoted, the product ends up languishing.

There's no incentive to maintain a product, or improve a product, so Google just puts out an endless series of half baked products and abandons them, while existing products are barely touched. If their only real goal is to produce new executives and higher level managers, the system works great.

But Google doesn't hire engineers to produce anything of value. They hire engineers to keep them from working at a potential competitor.

The meetings will continue until morale improves.

Perhaps let employees work remotely then.

You can. Most orgs have a very flexible approach to full time remote positions.

I ghosted the last Google recruiter I talked to because they wouldn't say "full-time remote" and spent a good amount of time qualifying it.

This is, in my experience, not true. "Most" is a very strong qualifier here.

Where I sit in Core, every single remote application was approved. There are a few orgs that banning it (GBO famously) and Cloud had to be pushed pretty hard but the process seems to be fairly easy in many places in the company.

Given that it is usually easy to transfer within the company, it isn’t hard to find a team that will support fully remote status.

I spoke to an acquaintance at Google last week and they said they have to report to office at least 3 days in a week.

Having said that - and I support working fully remote - I don't see how that's a solution to this problem. As others have said, if the company is lacking direction, it has to come from higher management. It can come from engineers or middle-management as well, but you'd be lucky if that happens.

That is the default status, but people can apply for a full time remote status and a large amount of the company supports this.

I have yet to see an employee that works harder from home. Employees get lazier at home.

I run a remote only team, I agree with this and think the trade off is worth it. I get the productivity I’ve always expected. We have deadlines and we meet them on average. That my engineers may spread 6 hours work over a 14 hour period isn’t really my concern.

Then again we do a ton of live share “office” coding and pair programming. So we still have a similar environment to an office. But I think my team is overall happier than if they had to come in 8 hours a day.

I do my damn best to ensure that I am no more productive in the office than I am at home :)

You can't use the stick to make people more productive/less lazy, unless you're watching them 8hrs a day 5 days a week.

Using at home productivity to leverage a remote work agreement was one of the main points of the 4 hour work week.

Speak for yourself. Anecdotally, as an employee who prefers the office and goes in most days a week even though I don't have to, I am waaaaaay more productive at home. Fewer distractions, no random noises and people talking all around you, deliveries being dropped off all the time, etc. And a more powerful machine, better monitor, etc.

The office loses money on me whenever I go in. Sure, the boss sees me more, but it's a lot less efficient when I'm constantly talking to people around me (which I enjoy, and is why I go in) but my actual work only gets done in the quiet moments in between, which are much rarer at the office than at home.

Shrug. People are different.

I have yet to meet an office-preferer who doesn't slack off a lot at the office.

In the office I can make appearances and sleepwalk through a bunch of meetings and I look productive.

At home, I actually have to produce something measurable and not just pleasant social interactions in meetings and on coffee breaks.

I think the issue is that managers want to "see" their employees "working". And by "working" I mean being seen at their desk, in meetings, or at the whiteboard. It's harder for them to judge by the quality of work because they don't have that expertise.

It's funny because I often wonder the same of CEOs. What exactly are we paying them for? How can we judge the quality of their work?

Well that's actually much easier. CEOs are paid, by shareholders, for the return on investment they generate for said shareholders. The quality of their work is judged by the return on investment generated every 3 months.

And why does the CEO get the credit for that?

1. because that's how we've decided businesses work.

2. because the buck stops with the CEO. They are (ostensibly) responsible for the output/productivity of the entire organisation. How they achieve that is mostly irrelevant, in the same way that our managers don't really understand what we do, so it goes for shareholders.

So maybe we can get rid of them and deliver even more value to shareholders?

Indeed. Might have been an alright a decade ago, but now we have all these services that you fill in every few weeks/months about performance, goals etc. so that managers can have an overview. There is nothing to hide behind anymore, managers have all the data, they need to learn what to do with. Butt-in-seat is not a satisfactory KPI.

How do you measure this?

Experience with 200+ employees.

That has nothing to do with measuring. That's like asking "how do you measure how much water you have" and you say "I have a lot of experience being in water"

Maybe it will help, but it means little.

You are the CEO of Google and you cant see what's wrong with Google.

Out of all the Big Tech, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, Google seems to be the one that will not stand the test of time.

Google needs to build a product people want to pay for

Lol, their problem isn't their employees, it's their leadership and management. They've been stagnant for a decade.

This has been the problem at almost every company I or my friends have worked at.

At one company, the CEO was saying, “my vision is X”, while the middle managers were implementing a whole different alphabet, but the middle managers were reporting up that engineering is the problem. It took numerous leadership shakeups to even acknowledge the issues, but by that time the company was effectively dead.

It sounds like a variation of “Gervais principle”.

The few times, in my experience, that competent top management has been directly involved in development has been very different. That’s when all the bullshit from middle managers evaporated completely.

Very shocking that encouraging employees' endless SJW crusades winds up being unproductive.

"Simplicity Sprinter" would make a great t-shirt.

Google’s challenge is that their core business is one where the future looks bleak, and just about everywhere else they try to compete they lose money. Lots of random efforts that seem to go nowhere. Even in widely adopted businesses like cloud, companies like AWS are highly profitable and GCP loses a ton of money.

But management doesn’t want to be accountable for any of that. In their eyes everyone just needs to work harder.

Shutdown YouTube.

Oh come on, I'd be so bummed to lose Shiey and Kurt Caz.

Their only good product?

'oh, it seems like the whole company isn't productive...I guess I'll ... work harder.'

Does this mean we won't be getting a new chat app next year ?

It means we'll be getting two.

"Productivity and focus" means focus on producing more chat apps. I predict 2 chat apps next year.

Productivity and focus must improve so Google generates more revenue selling ads on distracting, time-wasting, clickbait-y websites and smartphone apps?

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