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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

It's what happens when companies get big. Same thing happened at Microsoft.

I thought that might be the reason, too, so I went to check the number of employees. According to Wikipedia, Baidu has "34,600 (As of March 31, 2014)", and Google "52,069 (Q2 2014)"

So Baidu is 2/3 of Google - it's not just the size.

My opinion is that "getting big" can either be an increase in the number of workers or the degree of maturity.

As a company becomes older, the need to run all kinds of crazy experiments suddenly doesn't matter anymore. They care more about stability and profit. Yes, there is Google X and I know Google still run all sorts of crazy data analysis. But the point is, they want to become more structural because of the number of projects needed to approve. If twenty researchers each request to run a project each takes 1M out of Google, those research better have some formal proposal or so so they can evaluate which gets priority. Also seniority? Two top talents can compete for the same resource but if one team makes more "promising" result than the other team does, the winner is obvious.

Now coming to BD. BD isn't exactly unlike Google. It's exactly China's Google. It has reached its own maturity, but when they want to expand westward and when they want to steal talents from Google, they will have to strike better deals, be it compensation, work freedom and resource support.

I will not be surprised a few years down the road Ng will find similar hurtles within BD once he's all "used up" (sorry for the lack of better word). But of course, what matters is what he can do now.

Ya, but one can hope they'd think in terms of quotas [e.g. You have XXXX of machine time and/or a $$$ budget of XXXXX to test ideas] rather than require committee meetings.

They require the committee meetings to set the quotas.

Quotas suffer from the standard budgeting problem: everybody inflates their needs and hoards resources so that if they need extra in the future, they don't have to go through the budgeting process again. As a result, when a new project comes along that's not just an off-shoot of an existing high-priority project, they find that they're starved out of quota. They don't have an existing quota because the project previously didn't exist, and then when they go to get some, they find that all machines are currently allocated because everybody else overbid to secure room for expansion.

Google was rolling out a fix for this process when I left them, but I'm not sure if I can share the details on it.

I know some bigger companies like HP make sure every department bills every other department in order to make sure that you don't get problems like you would in any centrally planned economy without a price mechanism.

Microsoft works in a similar way, so it's easy to hire vendors.

But if you don't have enough internal customers, you might have budget shortfalls, so guess what happens for vendors.

  > Google was rolling out a fix for this process

This sounds fascinating. Off the top of my head, the only fix I can imagine is to punish people for overestimates, but that sounds harmful in other ways.

Fair enough, I don't work for Google so I have no clue how it works there. :)

I work at a place small enough where the budgeting process is for IT as a whole and we each have our corner to play in of fixed size.

Guess it happens when the company hires a certain level of managers/MBAs.

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