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.
Mistreated? You want mistreated? (Score:4, Interesting)
Vacation... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting. Looks like it starts at 15 days, and moves up to 25 days after 6 years. Their 6 year level has reached the mandatory minimum number of paid vacation days in many EU countries.
Is that mistreatment? If you've come from Eurpoe, then it may feel that way.
Re:Media Darling (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Of course, the way the media fawned over the Chinese during the Olympics (Tibet?!?! Huh?), I doubt Google's going to take any heat about that.
short answer: no (Score:3, Interesting)
As for how it treats it's employees, maybe it's escaped your notice but we're in a recession. Expect to get *****ed on from a great height - you'll get your revenge when the next boom happens.
Re:Mistreated? You want mistreated? (Score:3, Interesting)
all about money (Score:2, Interesting)
From Sergey Solyanik:
"I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.
Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!"
"All of them are free, and it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it."
bottomline is...
Rule 1: I should earn $$$ for a project to be interesting. And I don't know the semantic difference between "open source" and "free".
Rule 2: I should earn $$$ when I'm earning even more $$$...
Re:Wait a minute (Score:1, Interesting)
As someone with no children, I think it is awesome.
One thing I hate is people who use their children as an excuse to leave work early or stay back late when everyone else is. It completely undermines team dynamics. I had a coworker who used to use his wife as a proxy-child to do the same thing, that was at least comical.
That said, one thing I hate more is people bringing their screaming spawn into the office. So an on-site daycare (significantly isolated from the work areas) sounds like a freakin' great idea and I'll happily chip in.
I can pinpoint the exact day (Score:2, Interesting)
When they bought that stupid 767 jet.
Do no evil? Is it only polluting when someone from the middle class does it or do all these environmental gripes apply to rich people too?
How about donating 10% of what B. Gates does to charity Goog? Do no evil?
What I'd like Google to do (Score:5, Interesting)
While I understand that Google must increase shareholder value at all cost, I would like to see Google do the following:
Respond to Yahoo Mail's new web mail's interface. I find Yahoo Mail's scrolling calender events found at the bottom while composing email really sweet. The whole [new] interface is quite impressive.
Google should put more efforts into getting KDE 4.1 up to "standards". Right now, KDE 4.1 really needs lots of work. The Summer of Code efforts leave the situation still wanting.
Get GMail out of beta. Heck, it's been over 2 years!
Google should walk the walk...that is make ODF documents, .ogg streams searcheable from www.google.com.
What do you think?
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
You've hit the nail on the head. If Google's employees are typical of those at non-unionized tech companies, when interviewing for a job they are prepared to have to negotiate for pay and benefits, and even if their job offer comes with few benefits, if they accept the job, they will be prepared to accept benefits other than vacation time at that same level for the entire time they work at the company. But what they won't do is smile and nod if their employer wants to change the rules after the game has already started.
With that said, business needs are what they are. However, Google should at least consider offering a lower quality child care option at a lower price if parents would settle for that (as I assume the lion's share of the value of on-site child care is convenience.)
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Only if there is not a compensating benefit that rewards non-parents but is of no use to parents. It really depends a lot on how the benefit package is constructed.
The interesting metric is whether a business has policies that allow its employees to "grow up". If they do not, then eventually as people get older, they will be forced at some point to say that in order to merely accommodate the ordinary and anticipatable life events, they must go to a different company or face a pay cut because the benefits they used to like are now no longer benefits.
For example, why should an employee who has a family at home shopping and fixing food be penalized because of the availability of free food at work that surely must be paid for somehow. Google has an open cafeteria, and tons of free junk food in the hallways, which people who have a life do not need. But it has been said of Google (and I am trying to be neutral about expressing an opinion myself, only observing that it's a topic worthy of discussion) that it prefers employees who are willing to work long hours and sleep under their desks to employees who want to have families and lives outside of work. Now if this were true, you might not see it as age discrimination. And it might really not be. But it's a reasonable observation to make or question to ask, given that the set of people who don't mind this kind of lifestyle is probably unevenly distributed agewise.
So if Google is offering both the daycare and the cafeteria, then maybe it's balanced. But if it's giving up the daycare expenses to focus on cafeteria expenses, then maybe there are questions to ask. Just as one example for conversation--if I knew their benefit policy, maybe something else better would present itself.
In fact, I bet whether you think this is an age issue varies by age, suggesting at least the possibility that some people who thought it wasn't an age issue changed their mind with experience, as well as the possibility that some who are quite sure it's not will eventually come to decide they were wrong.
Google offers itself as an ethical company. Here's my definition of ethical: Ethical means you continue to ask yourself hard questions and to not quite be sure you're ethical. So people will evaluate the answer to these questions differently, but the day Google thinks the questions are inappropriate to ask is the day it's lost its ethics. Ethics are an exercise in continuous choice, and everything about intent. Once choice is sacrificed, you're at best coincidentally aligned with those whose outcomes are the same, but as the result of an actual thoughtful choice. If outcome without choice can be deemed ethical, then there are rocks that may be more ethical than some people...
Re:Media Darling (Score:3, Interesting)
Google enterprise products aren't stopped by the "dominance" of Windows (in the enterprise?) as much as simply missing the mark. Enterprise products are expected to plug into existing mangement frameworks, API styles, etc. Doing some new cool thing isn't useful if it doesn't cleanly interoperate with the rest of the enterprise. Google doesn't seem to get this yet.
Re:I can pinpoint the exact day (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has lost some of it's Mojo
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. 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. 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. Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
A well thought-out comment.
Here's an example from the other side. My husband's work offers free alcoholic drinks (they have an entire fridge full) on Friday afternoons. The single workers often hang around on Friday night for games of table tennis and go through a heap of wine and beer. My husband has a wife and kids who need him at home, so he misses out. Do I say this is unfair, that $20 worth of alcohol is going to his workmates every week but not him? No! Because on the other hand, he has a boss who understands that when he has to leave to pick our kids up at daycare it's not negotiable, and he LEAVES. It balances out at the end. People who haven't had kids may say "but he has the OPTION of drinking" but I say that no, he doesn't. Or rather, he does in the same way that they have the OPTION of breeding, but choose not to.
Re:Food (Score:3, Interesting)
Dinner for Geeks only? For once it pays to be in that population.
The real problem is Click Fraud. One of these days their advertising program is going to have to cut out click fraud, and their profits will drop by 75%.
Higher salary? Not bloody likely (Score:5, Interesting)
You think Google would offer a higher salary? Not if your just a normal engineer guy. They'll give you what they want to give you, and you better be grateful you're getting the offer in the first place, buddy.
I made probably about 20-25% less than my similarly-employed friends. Google likes to say that it compensates in other ways. I calculated that the free food alone was worth about $8000 per year to me. The yearly bonuses were beyond generous. I negotiated a good stock grant when I was hired. But the actual pay pretty much sucks, and they're cutting back in all sorts of ways. I saw it happening starting in late 2006, and it kept on rolling. They'll cut back on perks and then try to convince everyone they have the best thing going regardless, especially with regards to recruiting (keep pushing that 20% project myth, guys...). A certain TGIF is a good example (TGIF is a big gathering in Charlie's Cafe every Friday at 4:30, where Larry and/or Sergey and/or Eric talk about company issues and take questions).
During the QA portion, a guy got up and asked about our health care plan. Apparently, it wasn't as good as Microsoft's, yet in a then-recent magazine article, Eric said that we had the best benefits in the world and was really talking up the perks - even as they were routinely being scaled back. So this guy was comparing notes with his MS buddy and our health plan wasn't all that great (the dental in particular was worse than some government jobs I've had). Eric said he'd look at it and get back to us. (One of the things I really liked about working there was that sort of transparency and openness.)
Couple weeks later, same guy gets up to ask about what they found out. Eric says they did the numbers, and it was going to cost a few 10s of millions more per year to implement a comparable health plan. So, no dice. The crowd generally grumbled, and Eric was quick to pipe up with "But just think, by working here, you get to change the world!"
Was shortly after that I gave serious thought about examining my options. I'm not sure if/how that influenced my decision to leave, but some kool-aid you should never drink.
No, the only way to get more money at Google is to work 80 hours a week or sleep with someone important. Leaving and coming back won't do it, unless you're a high-flier and they're trying to headhunt you back for some particular reason.
-B
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm.. I work for a company where everyone is salaried and "at will". My employer can require us to do anything they like because they can let us go without notice and without reason. In the real world (which is where I work) people get whatever conditions they are willing to put up with, and people who don't "play the game" get shown the door.
Out of interest, is there any reason why you're staying with them? That sounds like utterly horrible working conditions to me, and the implications from your previous posts is that having a family/partner/life is frowned upon and discouraged.
At the very least, I hope you're being paid a sh*t load of money to compensate ...
Google is already old news just ask the users. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Interesting)
"Employers aren't responsible for an employee's children."
They can be selfish assholes, but then people chose another place to work and they close. Assuming you are skilled labor - if you are without education you are fucked.
On company-supplied child care (Score:5, Interesting)
Why in blazes should people who don't have kids, or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for (such as *gasp* having Mom stay home and actually raise them), have to pay in the form of a lower salary for yours?
And a reduction in this silly benefit that you shouldn't have in the first place is age discrimination against you?
My wife is a stay at home mom. We made the decision to forgo a second income for the benefits of actually raising our kids at home, at least at very young ages. We never wanted to be one of those couples that had a child, and then had it in some form of third-party care two months later for career's sake. I very much sympathize with what you're arguing.
However, this is the Bay Area we're talking about, a place that's become notorious for being both child-unfriendly, and a mecca for young, single, childless workers with high skill. In that kind of atmosphere, a top company wanting top talent should consider on-site childcare as a perk if they want to keep these studs past age 30 or so. Sooner or later, nature calls, and most of them marry and start families. Google, for all its fame in supplying wild perks, is actually wise in supplying this one. They don't have to, but they have been smart in doing so. Top companies supply top perks if they want to stay top companies. You'll never see Goldman Sachs, Mercedes Benz, or Harvard cheaping out on their benefits.
That said, if there's any truth to the quote the NY Times attributes to Sergey Brin ("no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of Googlers who felt entitled to perks like bottled water and M&Ms), then it sounds like something is indeed turning sour at Google. It seems like every hot company that skyrockets eventually has to come back to Earth hard. If this is indeed happening at Google, perks will soon be the least of their problems.
Re:Yes, I do know what it really means. Thanks. (Score:2, Interesting)
As a googler (Score:1, Interesting)
As a googler who doesn't work in Mountain View, (there are a lot of us) this whole childcare benefit isn't even offered to us. It makes me laugh how upset folks are in MTV - they scream bloody murder and swear this will hurt recruiting - yet distributed offices are growing just fine without the benefit.
Plus, I figure that mostly senior folks, aka pre-ipo folks, benefit the most from child care since they signed up early - and they surely can afford to pay for their full share.
Despite not getting this benefit I'm perfectly content at Google - maybe a little annoyed that folks in MTV want more while our office cuts back - but all in all, I still work on interesting stuff so you won't see me bailing to a competitor anytime soon.
Of course it has (Score:3, Interesting)
It is now huge (read, you have to play political games to get ahead), its share price is not going anywhere (read, there's no potential to get rich quick) and it is "blessed" with a workforce in which they have cultivated a sense of entitlement (read, once you take anything away, no matter how small the perk, the response will be swift, merciless and disproportionate).
Frankly, based on what I hear from ex-Googlers, if I wanted to work for a big company, I'd rather go to Microsoft instead. There's more structure there, wider variety of projects, and rules for promotion although not set in stone and not always followed, are better defined.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
"The term is corporate responsibility."
The Founding Fathers (of the US) discoursed endlessly on the meaning of "republicanism." John Adams in 1787 defined it as "a government, in which all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws."
Problem is corporate money buys laws and finances government. To people who are rich, the law doesn't mean much since they have the most powerful insiders anyway. It is impotent because they can afford to buy lawyers and politicians. So they can simply make the law and reorganize the economies in their favor, so the law doesn't really sting because they can block it, anull it or buy new ones.
I'm not sure if there can ever be corporate responsibility. The profit motive is too corrupting I think. I'm reminded of John adams...
"Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that "the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic." But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, "even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce." As a result, there was "a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there."
Re:Vacation... (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, even very low paid retail jobs don't generally do that. Large retail outfits like Marks and Spencers even have significantly more generous vacations than the norm. Not long ago their vacation days topped out at 35 days a year for long serving employees, but even after a year or two you'd be at 27. Don't know if that's changed recently.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
JWZ identified the turning point for Netscape, where the decline started, as the point at which they started hiring people who wanted to work there because it was a great place to work, rather than people who wanted to work there to make it a great place. I interviewed at Google about a year ago[1] and I made a point of asking my interviewers why they wanted to work at Google. All five told me that they were there because it was such a great place to work. Looking around, it was hard to disagree with this (it really did seem like a great place to work), but it was sad to see that this was the main reason people went there. I only got to talk to half a dozen people, so maybe I got a skewed perspective (although, I believe, the interview process is meant to select a good cross section of the workplace for each interviewee).
[1] I'd really recommend this to anyone, by the way. I didn't get in, but the mental work-out from the interview was incredible, and I spent much of the next two months implementing ideas I came up with during the interview (and got a journal paper out of one of them).
Reality bites (Score:2, Interesting)
Even a child should know that everything has a beginning and an end. Empire like Google starts to eat its own self with time, and collapses under its own weight. This is part of life, and Rome and a lot of other attempts to be larger than life went this way. And the more one is trying to fight this tendency the more weight it carries, and the harder is the fall. What do you expect, Google to stay on top forever? This only happens in fairy tales. The reality has something to do with particle physics, I am sure :-)
Re:Little boys in a mans world (Score:3, Interesting)
"So much juvenile idiocy in this thread."
So you jump right in with some other kind of your own. Look your family is no one else responsibility. No employer really cares about your priorities. Wearing them on your sleeve like some kind of badge of honor does not make you a hero. It make you a manipulable target. Life is full of choices and they come with consequences. It is not incumbent on anyone to deal with or be sympathetic with the consequences of your actions. To insist that anyone care is "idiotic". I agree that work is rendering service for pay. Pay is associated with the value of service rendered. Nothing more than that. As for forgetting about your kids for 8-12 hours a day who in their right mind would pay you to sit around and think about them.
From a Googler (Score:1, Interesting)
Until recently I used to be a Google engineering manager. Not anymore, I've moved back to being an "individual contributor". This is a pattern I see quite often among the old timers who don't want to fight it out in the new political world that Google management has become. Management is now the playground of the politically savvy and ruthless. I've worked in consulting, and it was easy to separate the hard nosed career-minded individual from the normal. So at least the rules of engagement were clear. At Google it's different, because the performance system penalizes anyone who is not "popular" all the career-minded ones are "well-liked" and "great party companions" until you meet the sharp end of their knife in your back.
Google is still full of smart people, but a different kind of smart. Looking at the psychometric assessments (MBTI or other) of employees at company trainings over the years is illuminating. About 6 years ago the bulk of leadership used to possess geek-like traits, and over the recent years (even in engineering) the population has become more balanced like the rest of the real world. Politics and ruthlessness comes in for free.
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
Subsidized child care and similar benefits reward parents at the expense of other employees.
I'm sorry to have to point this out to you, but people with children are worth more to society than people without children. Perhaps you should read or watch Children of Men to get a grasp on how important having children really is. The greatest advancements in the arts and sciences will mean very little if there is no one around to appreciate them.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:4, Interesting)
I might be cynical here, but... is that a bad thing ? "Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut", as one demotivator put it. If everyone bases their lives around trying to accomplish things, in the financial sense, then most people will lose constantly - after all, there can only be so many winners, and someone has to flip the burgers too. The temptation to cheat - arrange your competitors to have "accidents" in extreme cases - is quite high in such an environment. I see the constant unethical or outright illegal behavior of various companies and can't help but wonder if the (impossible to fulfil) requirement that they increase their profits constantly is mostly to blame.
This of course doesn't mean that all people couldn't accomplish something, only that only a few of them can be financial successes. Most people are mediocre, by definition; and some fall beneath that. If they all have burning ambition and refuse to settle for their position, "cutthroat competition" gets a whole new meaning.
Remember, "bread and circuses" was meant to keep the masses complicit - to make them lazy, to put it bluntly.
It is, here on Slashdot at least. I think that the libertarians in general would enjoy a far greater success if they'd keep the people who refer to people as "crotchfruit" and go on about the evil of taxes and the government on leash, and concentrated on talking about liberty. This is especially true when said rant is posted on a discussion forum in a government-built tax-funded Internet :).
In a way, it's a pity. Libertarians actually have a lot of good ideas (or at least ideas I agree with ;), they simply tend to take them to the point where the reduction positive freedom starts negating the increase of negative freedom. Not to mention the return to feudalism, which will happen if the central government is weakened too much, since there's no longer anything to stop the local land/factory/whatever owners from throwing their weight around.
One way to avoid this is to ensure that you can improve yourself regardless of your parent's financial situation. For example, here in Finland, not only is education up to and including university level (up to Doctorate, I think) free (paid by the government), but it actually subsidizes the students - just barely enough to live by, but still enough that anyone who honestly wants to better his position in life can go study. Of course keeping on getting this subsidy is dependent on showing continued progress in one's studies.
Government can and does place requirements on receiving the benefits. As I see it, the problems with relying on private charities are: