Is there any other, more gracious, way to interpret this as Google retiring for on being Google, if so I’d like to know. I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal. The biggest impact was to have thousands perhaps millions of coders and researchers see Google as the place to be. As the place that gets it. The Mecca of coderdom, if you will.
Now they are just another corporation.
I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.
I hate how "normal" of a company google is becoming. Closing down services and products not because they aren't profitable, but because they aren't profitable enough. They've really lost their way the last few years.
In the late 2000's/early 2010's, google was pictured as the "fun" place to work. In part due to their coding competitions and the various other events they held for students throughout the year. Everyone I knew wanted to work for google. Now? everyone sees FAANG just the same as any other company.
Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere.
Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).
I'm not sure I'd give them that much credit in executing on any strategy.
Google sat on perhaps the biggest moat any recent company has known. They had cash to burn for decades and to their credit put a lot of that towards employee happiness.
But I'm not sure they ever really got anything off the ground for the "post" search era.
It's hard to be the scrappy and disruptive company when you've established the reputation that all of your new products efforts are a probably just months away from being showcased on https://killedbygoogle.com.
> Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere
Honest question (this is really not a challenge), care to share where? I always thought of the FAANGs (collectively) giving the best compensation in the business. Which companies are paying more than Google but with more stability?
I've been really happy at Zipline. My salary is comparable to when I was at Google, and my equity has way more potential. As far as stability goes, I can't imagine a company being more supportive of its employees.
I was talking about base salary. Zipline has been very proactive about making adjustments to stay fair and competitive, and I have only positive things to say. Regarding total compensation, yes Zipline equity is riskier than Google stock grants. I'm not going to share details, but so far it's trending favorably.
I've never worried about compensation details so much, and instead tried to find projects with interesting technical problems that bring intrinsic value to humanity, and a company of people worth spending my life with. My first job out of school, my salary was 40k below other offers I had. It just seemed like the best use of my time and energy. In time it brought me what I can only describe as an embarrassment of riches. My coworkers on the self driving car project at Google were perhaps the most brilliant people I've ever met. To paraphrase Zipline's CEO, they want employees doing the best work of their lives, and it's a marathon rather than a sprint. I have countless examples of the company, its employees, and its management going above and beyond. We're literally saving lives, too.
Google's equity is cash. Ziplines is not real. I would much rather work at Zipline but given the delta in cost I would rather not forgo $1-200K a year to work there given bay area housing costs.
Each person has their own risk tolerance. Not taking on any risk at all is certainly safe, but also limiting. I've always taken a probabilistic "expected value" approach when weighing financial decisions, and so far it's worked out favorably. I don't think it's fair to conflate liquidity with reality. My equity in Zipline is real enough, at least to the Internal Revenue Service!
A few yeas back several of them moved to netflix, and a few moved to airbnb and uber. I'm sure google still pays executives well above any other company, the people I knew at the time were fairly inexperienced and new to the field, and from what I heard google seemed to undervalue them relative to what other Bay Area companies were offering at the time.
Of course, this was a few years back, I'm not sure if the landscape has changed now for better or for worse.
This doesn't exactly answer your question but some FAANGS pay better than others, and its related to the "desirability" of the company. Eg. Amazon started beating out Google's pay, since people wanted to work at google, and had to be coheres to working at amazon.
I can't answer where pays better than FAANG, but companies in the bay (eg. Uber) are starting to approach the salary. Even smaller no-name bay companies are starting to match on base salary (equity+bonus is harder to match).
OK, thanks, that pretty much is how I saw it. E.g. I definitely knew some FAANGs pay better than others (have heard from an Amazon recruiter straight up "We never lose people due to compensation"), but haven't heard of other companies paying more (unsurprisingly given the profit margins of the FAANGs).
Thus, I'm going to be a little skeptical when I hear about people taking higher paying jobs with more stability elsewhere.
> Even smaller no-name bay companies are starting to match on base salary (equity+bonus is harder to match).
FWIW- I see a lot of places with matching or better base than FANG, but it's precisely because the equity at FAANG is so high.
The only places I see with meaningfully higher pay than FAANG + hot tech companies of the day (ex. Doordash, Datadog, ...) are hedge funds. Curious if there is anywhere else
One thing that complicates this is that Google (and probably the rest of FAANG but I don’t have experience there) is happy to severely downlevel people versus the positions they could get elsewhere. They also aggressively cut compensation if you live outside of SF/NYC. I’ve done a couple stints as an L4 SWE at Google and it is one of the worst paying places I’ve worked - but that’s because I’m comparing it to larger scope roles at smaller companies. Whereas yeah Staff or Director at Google is pretty hard to compete with.
> I’ve done a couple stints as an L4 SWE at Google
I’m curious. Does this mean you’ve left Google and returned multiple times at the same level while having better jobs elsewhere?
Not to be critical but why? (I ask because I’m considering returning to old places down/equileveled after being laid off somewhere and curious your reasons)
Yep, that’s exactly what I did. I came back during COVID (after leaving to move away from an office five years prior) and chose to return at the level I left at rather than deal with leetcode interviews. It was a rough personal time for me (two kids under five during COVID daycare shutdowns) and I wanted the stability/benefits of the big G, and didn’t want to take the risk of an interview that I didn’t have time/energy to prepare for.
I feel a little bit bad because I very much used their benefits and then left again to go to a more appropriately leveled job. But going back to L4 at a megacorp was kind of mind numbing, and the compensation got so bad after the stock drop and location based pay cuts that I couldn’t justify staying any longer.
L4 at Google is basically “mid level” aka you’ve proven yourself past a college hire but you’re not a senior engineer with lots of experience.
So doing a few jobs as an L4 is what’s unexpected because after experience at another role, and additional knowledge gained, etc ideally they’d be able to return as L5+.
Most of those aren't really the huge pulls. Sure Google was "fun" and offered good benefits, but it was also incredibly stable despite it's competitive edge and "fastmoving-ness".
After the massive layoffs that dwarfed any previous ones at Google (combined), that's no longer a pull to joining Google over other major techs.
Worked at Google in the early 2010s and it was still a bit quirky/different, not enterprise at all ... but they were hiring armies of project managers, agile coaches, multiple layers of HR specialists ...
> I hate how "normal" of a company google is becoming. Closing down services and products not because they aren't profitable, but because they aren't profitable enough.
What specific services and products are you thinking of there? How do you know they were profitable?
Just to be pedantic: not profitable enough doesn't necessarily imply profitable.
Consider, eg, shutting down their (Stadia's) game studio before the release of their first game. First release was scheduled a few months later, with no significant delays having occurred. Nevertheless, shutdown.
No one would expect it to have made a profit without a release. But apparently there was no way they could be profitable enough to warrant keeping.
As a nerdy kid growing up, Google always felt like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to me. There was somewhat of a feeling of mystery about the things they were working on, and when things like Gmail were unveiled it felt like such a wonder.
Now they just seem like a worse version of Microsoft to me, at least Microsoft knows how to deal with enterprises.
> at least Microsoft knows how to deal with enterprises.
For what it's worth, this was a big part of why I had a positive image of Google. Enterprises are boring, especially when it comes to technology. They make boring decisions about technology because they are almost always made based on bullet lists of half-truths, rather than by the people who actually have to use it.
Google seemed to make things for the users. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, none of these had feature parity with their competitors at the time, but they were just so much better to use that people abandoned those enterprise products, even if their company was the one paying for them, and Google's popularity skyrocketed.
Many years ago my university asked the students to decide between Google and Microsoft for the (student) email platform. The impression I got from IT folks I knew was that they were strongly in favor of Microsoft. But when both companies were asked to make presentations to the students, I remember leaving the Microsoft one thinking they weren't even trying.
Boring is good, sometimes. Especially when boring means "reliable" and "gets things done without being the center of attention".
Scott Hanselman's old analogy here is that enterprise software is something like the "dark matter" of the software universe. It's obviously boring, and mostly kind of hidden, but yet still so heavily influences the gravity all around it.
On the other side, if you live by the "exciting" technologies, you sometimes die by the "flash-in-the-pan" effect. It's unfortunate for Google that they seem determined to prove that in the ways that they support and maintain products.
Agreed on all points. Once I hit the real world (working for a large soulless enterprise like a lot of people end up in), and trying to deal with Google for G-suite was a terrible experience. So IMO, they’re not great at either thing anymore.
Nah, it's still like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You have people turning into blueberries with unknown fate, kids getting stuck in pipes with no way out and now 12,000 going down the garbage chute.
The Oompa Loompas are the sycophants that are still drinking the Kool-Aid.
Which Google are you referring to exactly? With its many successful products, I don’t see Google being overtaken anytime soon.
Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade.
“The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
>Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades.
(After going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, would they respond to a threat by jumping on a real emerging technology, or a buzzword technology? That's why you can't cut your researchers and simply bring them back when your competitors are getting close.)
Companies like Google don't really get "overtaken" per se.
Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.
Neither do the nerd complainers, apart from scoping their search to a few trusted information repositories (Reddit, StackOverflow, &c).
Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
Good news: kagi.com is mostly a shell over Google and Bings apis, but they do quality control and they are building their own index.
I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore.
It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report.
Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
I'm not a Kagi subscriber, but I'll be. Yesterday I was looking for a pdf reader app with a specific feature. Nor Google nor Bing helped me; result pages were almost 100% ads (most by Adobe). I was giving up. My first try with Kagi gave me exactly what I wanted.
Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
n=1 but the built-in Maps on iphone seems to be fine these days. Doesn't steer me wrong, integrates with a car. Not sure what the moat here is other than name recognition or current popularity. Perhaps app integration or API consumption?
Apple Maps, and the huge number of products based on OpenStreetMap are perfectly fine as maps. And actually, even better than Google Maps in many cases.
But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
Yea, I'm planning a vacation, and using a saved lists of places in Google maps to keep track of all the places I'm interested in seeing. Clicking on one of the saved places brings up all the information you mention.
Clicking the auto-link of my address on an iOS device will open a route in Apple Maps to an address with a different street name on the wrong U.S. state. Apple Maps has come a long way, but it still doesn’t cut it.
Honestly Apple Maps isn't even particularly good outside of the US and a few European countries. Roads are constantly out of date and can barely keep up and landmarks and businesses in tons of major cities aren't close to correct
It's not particularly good within the US outside of a few of the big cities.
Dallas has a lot of parallel highways/roads, and Apple Maps seems to get really confused and have to recalculate the route every few minutes when I'm down there. Google seems to understand it perfectly and simply doesn't do that.
Not to mention its complete inability to reroute sometimes if you take the wrong turn. It'll keep yelling to return to the route over and over instead of routing a turnaround somewhere.
This can happen if you've lost the data connection, perhaps? In my (UK) experience, Apple Maps is perfectly good at re-routing. Even if you haven't made a wrong turn, it'll sometimes suggest new routes anyway based on live traffic.
Accuracy of local business listings on Apple is still far behind Google. And Apple's new business admin interface is only slightly less trash than it's old one.
Google has been "just another company" for a while now, but I disagree with "prone to be overtaken". Yes, Google Search is a dead product. The moneymakers aren't, though: AdSense keeps on trucking, fuelled by billions of annual YouTube watch-minutes piling on top of each other.
For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.
Honestly I was searching for something the other day and between displaying an excessive number of YouTube links (was not in a position to watch a video) and the adverts it was less useful that Yahoo! Circa 2006.
I have long since switched to Kagi and I am a happy paying customer.
I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that.
What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out.
No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing).
Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
I would say the change towards “less exciting” is driven by risk-averse management. Even their latest “risk” (Bard) was driven by Microsoft’s Bing release. I would even argue that releasing Bard represents the lower-risk approach. The risk incurred by being silent is undoubtedly what moved Google executives to rush out a half-baked and even more poorly executed “demo”.
> I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal.
I can confidently say that this is not the case in India. I have a countless list of people (including myself) who received emails from Google recruiters for advancing to later rounds of Code Jam or securing a top rank in a Kick Start round. Even if people missed out on top ranks, they would put their results on their resume/LinkedIn and would get attention from recruiters anyway. Needless to say, these were strong signals for recruiters, especially for university students. Based on the skewed demand-supply here, they were closer to necessary than sufficient.
Now they are just another corporation.
I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.