Google now just a apparition of its former glorious self
how much has it fallen. from market leader in ml/ai to having desperately to play catch up. after investing significant š°in anthropic now itās the turn of character ai to get potentially hundreds of millions. despite having google brain/deepmind as part of its org. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/h1vdzfaqt found this wonderful blogšgiving us an insider view of how it is working at google. essentially the concept of private armies and pitched battles and the never ending red tape and stillborn brilliant ideas. oh and politics of course. https://shreyans.org/google and another interesting one comparing amazon culture to google. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 some gold nuggets below š ā¦ Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not. ā¦ ā¦. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies. ā¦. ā¦. Google used to have a set of internal values they called "The Three Respects": respect the user, respect each other, and respect the opportunity. The first two are somewhat easy to understand, but the third one confused most people. ā¦. now it seems google seems to care only about their invisible fourth internal value: respect š«” only and only the stakeholders and executives. f**k the first three internal values. maybe people who worked at either or both companies can lean in with their views and how much to read into the veracity of these blogs.
Gist
ctech
Eh. A lot of these "HCI experts" are full of shit and rely too much on (fallacious) experiment-driven design. Also there's too much importance on immediate understandability whereas great UIs take a few minutes to get used to. If Tesler was chief scientist at Apple, that explains a lot. Apple UI/UX is designed for goldfish even though people are going to use their computing device for thousands of hours.
well itās an anecdote of course. but the larger need-to-be-always-in-control is the theme.
also itās via a/b testing only can we reasonably confidently assert which ui design is better. pretty sure he is talking about this when the blog author talks about experimental design. itās how things get done in companies and how impact is measured.
I keep telling ppl itās the new Xerox or IBM. All large companies go though this cycleā¦ā¦
MSFT might look better than Google now from outside, but TC is crap and thatās what actually matters to employees.
i honestly donāt know whether microsoft should be ranked higher than amazon or lower in terms of what is a better place to be from employeesā standpoint.
MSFT insiderās perspective: go work for literally any other company and make more money and buy $msft stocks I am tired of this place. Honestly just waiting to vwmf but been lazy
The time is ripe for a disruptive startup(s).
Now? Or since 2017?
People have known G was all about rest and vest for about a decade now. It's just catching up to them
Don't care. Name me a company with a better combination of TC/wlb/perks? I'll consider it at my cliff.
Google is still far ahead in the AI space (except maybe openai). LLMs are the new crypto so everyone is hyping up LLM companies instead
no one is hyping up anything man. read the blog. even though google was the first to build transformers and other technologies it is the other companies who are leveraging and using it better.
what i also found interesting was the following Google used to have a set of internal values they called "The Three Respects": respect the user, respect each other, and respect the opportunity. The first two are somewhat easy to understand, but the third one confused most people. now google only seems to care about their invisible fourth internal value: respect š«” only and only the stakeholders and executives. f**k the first three internal values.
What is the root of the problem?