> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?
I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.
This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing.
Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven.
Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
I was there early on (not in the first 1000 though), and some people did try to point it out, but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish. So such sentiments tended to be voiced in private. Also it's just so vague. What is the right size for a company like Google? How many people should you hire for projects like AI or self driving cars? And finally, it was totally against the founder's and top executives self image. They felt that the potential of the company was nearly unlimited, that they would never run out of ideas. So they just kept hiring, over and over again, without any connection between headcount and need.
> but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish.'
Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources)
The straightforward logic of:
linear increase in organization size = exponential increase in organization complexity = exponential frictional losses
Is that clear? How did you arrive at that number? Just because people exist and have some skills doesn't mean a company can find them and hire them. There are lots of reasons why that might not be the case. Even when I first joined the company very early on, they were struggling to recruit in the USA despite spending vast resources on the effort, and this was what pushed them into international expansion.
> Just because people exist and have some skills doesn't mean a company can find them and hire them.
I claimed it's technically possible with 'exponentially more resources', not that any private organization could feasibly possess the resources or cachet to, in practice, hire a million top notch people.
Maintaining the literal same average quality with Googler #1001 to #10000 would probably have required spending 10x more per hire, compared to hiring #1 to #1000.
how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? especially something worth millions and millions of dollars?
this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.
> have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"?
Yes I have actually, several times.
It's not easy, and of course it gets exponentially harder as the group grow, but these folks also have access to exponentially greater resources and exponentially greater motivation to do so. (Assuming their desire is to remain loyal shareholders of the company for the long term)
I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.