As I approach a transitional period in my career, I'm reflecting on the managerial effort of places like google. How on earth do they keep an engineering org on the 'right track'? I work on products that are not as complex: fewer moving parts, fewer egos, no where near as novel. It feels like nobody does anything and nobody has any expertise

is it just 'Hire the right people'?

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serioussecurity a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's a quarter million people (including temps/vendors/contractors) over almost 28 years. There's no "just" here.

It's extremely inconsistent internally as well.

Look up the slime mold analogy for Google.

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boelboel a day ago | parent [-]

Makes me wonder if more growth/innovation could've happened (outside of google) if they didn't employ this many people. Some sort of dutch disease within the higher echelons of the tech sector.

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Eridrus a day ago | parent [-]

Yes and no.

Google did a very good job on things that required longer research times and compute scale, note that Transformers, BERT & Scaling Laws came out of Google (though the latter were also worked on at OpenAI).

Conversely, Google is horrible at product, and without OpenAI, it probably would have taken many years longer to take off. I know this because Google had demos of this internally, but absolutely no stomach to release it, and they didn't believe in the API use case at all.

Which is to say, I think if Google was smaller, we probably would have gotten more SaaS, not more breakthrough research.

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no_carrier 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Pre this whole LLM era, Googled would've been roasted if they created a chatbot that hallucinated to users. I feel like this was the main reason they never turned it into a product and then ended up on the back foot.

	▲	Eridrus 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely, Google lived in fear of that and so we basically needed someone with nothing to lose to break us out of that fear of the media.

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Eridrus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They haven't solved management and definitely don't keep things "on track" globally. However, they definitely don't have the problem that nobody does anything and nobody has any expertise.

It's also worth noting, Gemini 3.5 Pro never came out.

Having worked there (but only in a small part of it that eventually got absorbed into Gemini), it's some combination of:

* The eye of Sauron (management) can make specific spots (e.g. Gemini) push harder (and attract the motivated people at the company and be selective)

* They hire a lot better than average (Generally from the top 10%, hotter places in Google are more selective)

* They have a promo process that gives career motivated people a way to prove themselves (not always aligned with things being on the right track ofc, and not always non-political, but they definitely do something)

* Redundancy in teams causes them to compete (not necessarily productively)

Of course, there are other downsides not listed here (insane bureaucracy for launches, GDPR/BCID compliance, etc, etc), but a lot of what makes Google possible is the insane amounts of cash Search throws off.

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arjie a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s like the USA. How do they keep people on track? They don’t. You delegate and hope things work. When they have Google Ads and Search they can experiment a lot and “waste” a lot in search.

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estearum a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bottomless buckets of money produced by their web monopoly so they can continue on at pace, virtually regardless of how inefficiently they do it.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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jacquesm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the google graveyard is a partial answer to that question.

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IncreasePosts a day ago | parent [-]

Google has tried a lot of ideas and then abandoned them, but has it fumbled any already successful product?

Perhaps one of their more successful chat clients, but that's all I can think of

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jacquesm a day ago | parent [-]

Success for google is defined in a different way than it would be for an ordinary company and many of those would have been successful if they had started outside of google.

The really annoying ones are the ones they buy, and then shutter because they can't make enough money on them fast enough.

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braj0 5 hours ago | parent [-]

RIP Google Nest CO2 and Smoke Detectors T.T

I thought the nightlight that goes on when you walked under it was really neat...

	▲	jacquesm 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The real problem is that they put a lot of parties making similar devices out of business because they could not compete with google on volume, pricing (subsidized, of course) and marketing.

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ceejayoz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How on earth do they keep an engineering org on the 'right track'?

What if the answer is "they don't"?

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ur-whale 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> How on earth do they keep an engineering org on the 'right track'?

They don't.

If they did, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic would even exist, as the core of what they're all doing was invented by Google engineers and researchers.