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points by repeekad 1 day ago | 0 comments
At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.

Eric Schmidt even predicted the issue in How Google Works, there are "whales" who have no business staying in their role but have become so senior that they basically control entire small towns worth of people.

[–] reissbaker 1 day ago
> At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.

I wonder: is this still true? The impossible projects being possible part, I mean. What projects has Google done recently that would be impossible for other large tech companies like Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc to do?

My sense is this used to be sort of true, but hasn't been true for a while. And the "easy projects feel impossible" part unfortunately does seem like it's still true, at least, looking in from the outside.

[–] solyin 1 day ago
It's not 2003 anymore. The one we'll never know is how would GitHub be doing if Google had bought them instead of Microsoft.

There's a difference between impossible projects are possible at Google, and no one else can do the impossible. If you really want to get into it, why didn't Google do Starlink? Project Loom was the shittier, cheaper version of Starlink.

What Google's done lately though is Waymo. Other companies are doing it too, but holy shit, computers can drive cars now?

The easy things are impossible just makes me want to link broccoli man though.

https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI

[–] newswasboring 1 day ago
I have the most naive question, why not change this if they know this? American companies regularly do restructuring and layoffs. Why can't these whales be dealt with that way?

Edit: I want to add I'm not naive enough to think they can just fire senior people willy nilly. I could have worded the question better but I hope people understand the spirit of it. I understand there must be reasons why this is hard to solve, I am looking to understand why it's hard.

[–] booty 1 day ago
It's difficult, if not impossible, to measure the impact of individual SWEs. The challenge of measuring the impact of managers in charge of large quantities of SWEs is surely an order of magnitude more difficult.

I imagine this is compounded by the fact that anybody who has risen to control of a fiefdom at a prestigious place at Google is surely highly intelligent, driven, and is either highly competent or at least highly adept at projecting competence. I can't imagine spectacularly obvious dunces rise to such heights at Google.

To be clear... I'm a million miles from Google and have zero inside knowledge, just speculating

[–] plaguuuuuu 1 day ago
It's not hard, it's just that silicon valley is obsessed with quantitative metrics, which are fucking stupid.

Just make a judgement call. It might be completely wrong a small % of the time, which is better than being mostly wrong all of the time.

[–] jack_pp 1 day ago
What's so tough about this though? Someone is responsible for this shit show, make them accountable. In the abstract you may be right but this isn't abstract