Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker?
If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".
Exactly. My experience at Google over the past two years has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so the net effect of all of this is that people move slower.
Google is still, IMO, a good place to work. But it has degraded considerably over the last several years and I've lost pretty much all faith in leadership above the Director level.
> ...has been that "we need to be nimble and move faster" has led to increased scrutiny on ongoing projects but few actual changes in ongoing projects. So there's more docs and slides presented to VPs justifying work (taking up time) but VPs aren't willing to say "this isn't a priority - go help with this key project over here." There's minimal vision from above, so the net effect of all of this is that people move slower...
Wow, its like you were reading my mind for almost exactly how i was going to describe my current employer. The difference is that i do NOT work for a startup nor a big tech company, etc...I'm just a cog on a digital team at a consumer packaged goods mfg company; sort of a typical corporate America type job...and all that you noted is happening at my job too...so odd that many seem to be experiencing similar tactics from "Above"! Did all the top management companies whisper the same set of tactics to all corporations recently!?!
> so odd that many seem to be experiencing similar tactics from "Above"! Did all the top management companies whisper the same set of tactics to all corporations recently!?!
They all read the same HBR articles, they all take advice from the same management consulting companies, they all study the same business school curriculum, etc.
It's quite rare that executives have innovative ways to do business, as in any job if you try to step too much out of the line of the status quo you will have to deliver much more value to empirically prove yourself right or you will be fired.
So many of those folks are just going through the same motions because it's safer. A very good example is Google itself under Sundar Pichai, there's no real vision or business innovation, he's been trying to just not rock the boat and keep milking the cow but now the cow is running dry and he doesn't know what to do. It's pretty clear that Google could have any other professional CEO and go through the same issues because most of them are just there to follow the business schools Zeitgeist.
> ...They all read the same HBR articles, they all take advice from the same management consulting companies, they all study the same business school curriculum, etc...
Yep, sadly, the evidence is clear that they're all lemmings and staying that way! Also, your 100% correct on your other points as well...And said truth is quite frankly sad; sad for both Google, but also for all other corporate-type companies, at least that I know about in the U.S. :-(
Look at how aligned they all are on Returning To Office work. Nearly every major company is saying the exact same things, to the point where you can probably find exact wording matches between internal memos. They're obviously getting all their ideas from the same place.
I absolutely believe it, and this is one of the reasons I am staying at Google. I'm not convinced that going anywhere else would be massively better. I mostly just miss what it was like working there in 2016.
This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right.
When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our current projects, but do it more innovatively. When pressed about what this actually meant, he just showed us the graph again.
We don't know what will succeed next so you all better move faster throwing things against the wall so we can find what sticks. Oh, and this is all so that we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday.
>we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday
Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday?
Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google so they can rest and vest, which is what Google is famous for and makes it a very desirable place to work.
There was even a Googler's guide on Reddit a few years ago how to pretend to work from home while you play videogames all day and cash in 400k/year, with all the details on the theatrics needed to pass your peer performance review for years while working less than 20h/month, since nobody really checks in detail what your working on and why how long it should take, so you have a lot of avenues to pretend to look busy while relaxing.
Doesn't sounds like the place where you'd need to miss your kid's birthday to me, unless maybe you hate your family.
In the story, he calls out a team working 120 hours a week, after first ramping to 100 hours/week for a while...in what seems like a example he's wanting people to follow.
Oh for sure, there are always some, like the original Android team who was working like crazy to catch up to Apple after they unveiled their first iPhone, but Google is such a big and diverse company now with several monopolist positions, I doubt all teams at Google are in wartime mode crunching like crazy like their Gemini team is.
In fairness, he seems to effectively have CNBC reporters sitting in with the crowd at the company all-hands. He would probably come off the worse if he started saying things of substance. In his position I'd cancel the all-hands.
He’s deservedly being criticized for not saying anything of substance. If he had something to say worthy of his paycheck, it’d be less newsworthy than the “Google has no idea what they’re doing” stories which come out of consultant babble like “faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution”. Google had the reputation they’ve been working so hard to shed because they used to actually innovate and build things which the average person could immediately see as better; telling people to do more with less becomes the story because it announces that the old Google is gone.
I asked Gemini for some advice and it gave a better answer suggesting things like “break down silos and empower teams to make decisions without excessive bureaucracy” and “refocus on what made us great – building products that solve real user problems”, not working 120 hour weeks.
We got the same pep talk at the beginning of the year. They wanted to give us developers more autonomy, the ability to move faster, etc. Sounds great on paper as there were a lot of useless meetings and chat channels we wasted a lot of time in.
But the solution was to eliminate the release manager role and move QA away from testing individual tickets and instead toward developing/managing automated testing. And then the devs had to pick up the QA and release responsibilities without any change in our original responsibilities.
Which means that I now waste a massive chunk of my work week doing things other than write code. All the while they're making a big stink about "coding days". Which has pretty much never ended well for developers. I'm sure next they'll be counting total lines of code, too.
I launched what was ostensibly a web analytics platform that was just an Google Sheet we shared with partners attached to a JavaScript snippet for webpages. Very lean and unusual for Google. But we had to use internal tools and libraries to ensure this tiny tool was “Google Scale” and were subject to company-wide deployment restrictions as well as PR-sensitive launch dates that took what was mocked up internally as a JavaScript MVP by one of our engineers in 1 week almost 10 months to launch formally and with the exact same shit MVP Google Sheets interface. This was a “no red tape” project where execs cleared a path as best they could.
the C-level equivalent of poking the business with a stick and mumbling, "c'mon, do something..." when youve clearly run off all the talented, sidelined all the most dedicated, and turned your once thriving tech company into an ambling rudderless dumpster fire that occasionally immolates its best products for no reason and runs down pointless features because you spend more time reading Gartner than reading O'Reilly.
> If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resource
If you're a huge corporation like Google, you're not even playing the same game as any startup in the first place, and trying to compete with them as if you were is likely to end in tears.
The same is true the other way around. If you're a small company, you're unlikely to beat a major corporation by playing the game that major corporations play.
Being a small company gives strengths and weaknesses that large companies don't have -- and vice versa. Smart companies of any size play to their own strengths rather than trying to play to the competition's strengths.
If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the problem here. Yet no corporate executive is ever going to go up on stage and admit that their strategy and execution were the cause of the mess. It's always those lazy employees. "Just let me crack the whip a few times to light a fire under them. That'll fix the problem".