Has Google Lost Its Mojo? 560
CWmike writes "Google looks as if it's on top of the world right now, holding an ever-increasing lion's share of the search market. So why do I think it's lost its mojo? Let's start with the way it treats its employees, writes Preston Gralla. Another example: Google employees, such as Sergey Solyanik, have started deserting the company. And its share price is down double that of the Dow or Nasdaq since November 2007. Even if Google has lost its mojo, why should you care? It won't make your searches any less effective, will it? Nope. But Google has its eyes on bigger things than search, notably your IT department. It's looking to displace Microsoft with hosted services like Google Apps, Gmail and Google Docs. Solyanik warns that Google's engineers care more about the 'coolness' of a service than about the service's effectiveness." Of course Google employees version of being mistreated is often laughable, and quite a shock when they look for their massage therapist at wherever they end up next.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
Parents lose big when a company downsizes or restructures their benefits. This is an indirect form of age discrimination because older folks are more likely to have families.
A company I worked for in the past restructured their benefits by changing employees more for their health and dental insurance and "offset" the losses by giving every employee a flat pay raise but after some calculation I found that employees with no dependents benefited from a good raise and only slightly higher insurance payments while those with families(who insured their families, at least) suffered net losses.
Food (Score:5, Informative)
It's always all downhill once startups start cutting back on the food perks [valleywag.com].
From the linked Valleywag article:
"
Google's food perks on the chopping block
There's no such thing as a free dinner. A worker at Google tells us the company is taking evening meals off the menu: "Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program. How is it affecting campus? No more dinner. No more tea trolley. No more snack attack in the afternoon." The changes will be announced to Googlers on Monday. Workers at the Googleplex will remain amply fed, with free breakfast and lunch -- dinner will be reserved for geeks only -- but it's still a shocking cutback.
Last year, when we aired the mildest speculation about Google cutting back on free food, commenters were outraged. Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company's resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they'd add perks, rather than cut them.
In 2004, they wrote:
We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge ... We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.
What went wrong? ...
"
--Q
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't like the system, I understand why it has to be, but I will NOT stand and let someone try to make it look like people with no dependents are getting away with something. Even in your situation, the only difference is that the single people have been grossly overpaying for years and years, and now they are getting a slight reprieve from being over charged.
Re:Vacation... (Score:3, Informative)
I wondered if the equivalent days in the UK (there are 8) were in addition to the 24 days (28 from next year) or included -- it turns out that they can be included in the mandatory 24 days. I don't know what standard practise is, but the last company I worked for gave 24 days + the 8 days anyway.
Re:Media Darling (Score:3, Informative)
One wonders how Google helping China to field underage gymnasts by making sure their caches were all purged of copies of the real documents is going to play in the media.
Anyone can request to have information removed from the google cache: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61062 [google.com]
I'm not saying this is how it was removed, but it is possible that there was no explicit action taken by google.
Re:infant care (Score:3, Informative)
In Mountain View, a 2 br, 1 ba would cost:
$400k for a condo in a crappy area
$650k for a townhouse
$800k for a standalone home.
Re:infant care (Score:3, Informative)
In Mountain View, a 2 br, 1 ba would cost:
funny ... I'm now doing an apartment/home search and we're starting out from mtn view and slowly moving 10, 20, 30mi away in our daily searches.
I saw this:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3192/2796221986_d76ae43a95.jpg [flickr.com]
I believe that was a $2000/month place, or very close to that range. 2 or 3 br, 2flr, 2car garage, middle unit. but, well, I *guess* you could get all the 'internets' and free cable/phone service you wanted. not hard at all. maybe this was a hidden benefit?
THIS is what I'm seeing, or stuff close to this, in my apt search. the bay area is *tough* right now on rent prices since everyone is afraid to buy and the housing market is on the downward spiral. the fact that places with 'junky exposed wiring' (the house, inside, was close to the outside condition) are going for about $2k/mo in the bay area.
Re:Food (Score:3, Informative)
They've already posted a correction. Google is still feeding their employees.
http://valleywag.com/5041464/dinner-saved-for-googles-geeks [valleywag.com]
Not even close (Score:3, Informative)
I just sold my 1500 square foot, 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath house (on a spacious 5500 square foot lot) in Silicon Valley for $875,000. I bought it for $750,000, and had to spend close to $100,000 in repairs and updates over the last 4 years. I priced it to sell, and it was only on the market for 6 days. I probably could have held out for more, but I was done and wanted out of CA for family reasons in my home state.
When I forst got to California and told people what I bought, and for what, they had one of two reactions:
1. You got a good deal!
2. How much repair does it need?
You could tell who had live in the Bay Area by which they had.
-B
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Informative)
Having company sponsored childcare doesn't mean other employees are getting paid less, is just means the stockholders are not seeing as big of a profit as they could have.
Maybe in a vacuum. In reality, if a company is making less profit:
- They pay less dividends to shareholders (as you mentioned)
- They cut wages (perhaps not across the board, which is the only thing you seem to have considered)
- They cut the number of jobs they have available (so maybe the wages don't go down, but the openings do)
- They increase the cost of goods or services they sell
- They decrease the non-wage benefits to employees
- Their stock price takes a hit and the company loses the ability to make business deals, their employees that hold options tend not to make out well, it hurts morale, etc.
Re:What's wrong with charging for day care? (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps one of us has missed the point. The article says that Google had started out with good daycare that people could afford. Then they changed that to the very best daycare that money could buy, at prices that only the very rich could afford. The good daycare was no longer an option, but probably most people still wanted that option.
When a company stops considering what the common employee wants and only considers what the richest executives want, then you might also wonder how long they will remain in touch with what their common customer wants.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Informative)
That is indeed correct. The birth rate for a geographic area tends to move inversely to the rate of development, wealth accumulation and life expectancy increases.
Meaning that nations like India which pretty much requires parents to have many offspring to support them in old age will grow rapidly. Nations like Japan and Germany, which are much more affluent and are not needing children specifically to support them tend to not reproduce enough.
Re:Higher salary? Not bloody likely (Score:3, Informative)
We were allowed to bring a guest twice a month. I did that more often than not. And I ate breakfast and lunch virtually every day, plus snacks and drinks throughout the day. The SmartWaters they had are like a buck each. The Naked Juice in the lobby fridges are $3-$4. I ate dinner there a couple/three times a week. They brought in food on weekends as well.
Sometimes it actually was lobster (though more likely crab and/or shrimp on Seafood Friday's at Charlie's). Sometimes a weird meat cut I'd never heard of. I had squab one time. Sometimes it was a celebrity guest chef. Bought elsewhere, it'd probably work out to more than $8K. They served very good food. I ate at home toward the end of my stay there, but it's a conscious choice you have to make: Go home and cook, or stay a little late and eat there. Traffic was better past 8pm anyway, so the lazy choice was usually taken.
And I only weigh 190, same as when I started work there. :-)
-B
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
Every day at work I'm given the opportunity to work with some of the most brilliant, passionate people in my industry solving problems no one has solved, at scales most can only dream of.
All of the managers that I've worked closely with (on up the chain*) are experts in their field, and are very protective of Google's egalitarian culture. If I wasn't prepared for promotion in one cycle, my manager was dedicated to giving me the resources I needed to be ready when the next one came around. Furthermore, a negative review from a manager is hardly damning since promotion is driven primarily by reviews from peers your own choosing. We're very fortunate to have nearly complete control over the promotion case we present. If your peers and manager don't support you for promotion, you're probably doing something wrong.
If you think executive management is overlooking some systemic rot within the company, your stock options (and mine) would thank you for bringing up such problems at the multitude of confidential forums provided to you in lieu public ones. I've found senior VPs within engineering (such as Alan) to be extremely responsive and down to earth. If that doesn't work, it's hard to be ignored when you take a mic at TGIF. If you really work at Google, you should know that the greatest fulcrum for change is the effort you're willing to expend. If you see a problem, fix it. After all, you have a vested interest in the success of the company.
I don't know that the few people leaving for "greener pastures" are a significant cause for alarm. The people that define Google's culture and are responsible for its success aren't here for the fringe benefits; they're here because they love doing what they do alongside smart people they can learn from, who fancy a cold beer and engaging conversation on the balcony (and maybe flying finger darts, or a game of pool) to break up a particularly challenging day of work.
[1] Did you know Eric co-wrote Lex?
~G
Re:Yes. (Score:1, Informative)
Speaking as a Googler, "some" is about right and this poster is clearly just bitter for some unknown reason. The majority of the people I work with are incredibly talented coders, who aren't afraid to do the "grunt" work like writing readable well tested code.
In fact, the Google performance review process is expressly designed to identify the talented engineers instead of political climbers, and in my experience does a great job of it. I am not the biggest Google fanboy and I agree it doesn't have the mojo it had as a startup, but I think for a company of its size its doing a better job than everybody else.
And as somebody who complains a lot internally when I see things I disagree with (often with good results), I find it funny you choose to rant anonymously on Slashdot than bring it up internally where people can do something about it.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking as a Googler, "some" is an understatement. The best and brightest have been exiting Google at the earliest for months, leaving behind the political climbers, backbiters and the just plain incompetent.
If Jeff or Sanjay left, you might have a point. Otherwise it really comes across like you're either not in engineering or you don't know what you're talking about. It's true that the people who only wanted money or publicity have now left, along with some genuinely good engineers, but I can't say I really worry that much. Mostly, the "famous" ones next projects have demonstated just how awesome they were (Cuil anyone?). It's true that we have also lost some good people hired in recent years (~the last two), since stock compensation and the "startup feel" isn't what it used to be. There's only so much you can do about that though. That said, I have never worked with a better group of people, and I even have several coworkers who could retire tomorrow if they wanted to -- yet they choose to keep working. That says a lot to me.
That isn't to say things might not change. However the only exodus I've seen is the "startup people" who would leave any company after it is no longer a startup. Anyone who has ever worked in the SF Bay Area knows the type of person I'm talking about. A company does have to grow up, so you can't keep everyone.
Now Google mainly runs on interns, everybody else is too "smart" to do the grunt work like coding, debugging, or much at all beyond getting face time.
I don't think you work at Google, unless you are on some sort of crazy-ass side project that is going to die. We've never had more than 10% interns in our group, and it's the ye-olde-developers who debug most problems. The idea of interns debugging other's code is almost laughable given the company's devotion to TDD.
The reason for this is simple: narcissistic managers whose main talent is claiming credit for the work of their subordinates while punishing anyone who shows initiative, and thus possibly could get promoted. These days at Google, showing skill and dedication is a great way to get a bad review from your manager.
How does your manager cause you to get bad peer reviews (which is the #1 thing promotion committees will look at)? Maybe if you're getting a bad review from your manager *and* your co-workers, you might want to take a look in the mirror and read some of that feedback.
But you knew how promotions work, right?
Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck.
I feel sorry for your group/project/office or whatever, but your experience doesn't reflect any of the groups I've worked with any time recently. Maybe you should request a transfer or a change in managers.
But you know you could do that, right? Or maybe you didn't since you're making shit up.