I was hanging the other day with some ex-Google folks. There are more and more of these as the search company matures and the fact that I’m running across a few is, in itself, meaningless. But without giving away any trade secrets (which the ex-Googlers absolutely refused to do) these chance encounters have opened my eyes a bit to how things actually function inside the Googleplex. It’s different, really different.
Google isn’t organized like any tech company I’ve ever worked in, that’s for sure. Peer review seems to be at the heart of nearly everything. Yes, there are executives doing whatever it is that executives do up in the Eric/Larry/Sergeysphere, but down where the bits meet the bus most decisions seem to be reached through a combination of peer review-driven concensus and literal popularity polls.
The heart of Google is code and all code there is peer reviewed TO DEATH. The result is absolutely the cleanest code in the digital world, forced into that condition by what can be a torturous process of line-by-comment-by punctuation mark analysis sometimes over-driven by people who take their work WAY too seriously. You know the type. Peer review wars have apparently been known to break out at Google, though rarely. Usually the pedants are accommodated and, in fact, they for the most part win. The code is clean as a result, but the process is s-l-o-w, or so I’ve been told.
And the code had better be clean, because at Google developers outnumber testers by 50-to-1.
But peer review at Google goes way beyond looking at the code. Hiring requires peer review. Promotion requires peer review. Presumably even firing requires peer review, though I didn’t have anyone actually tell me that. All the technical workers at Google are involved in peer review activities a LOT of the time — up to 20 percent, in fact.
Which brings us to the vaunted 20 percent time Google engineers are supposed to get to work on anything they like. Most of them apparently use that time for corporate housekeeping — for doing all that peer reviewing. It makes sense: if you want to appear productive in your main job yet are still required to do all this work that would normally be handled by managers, when else can you do it but during time you don’t have to account for?
This may be part of the reason that the Google 20 percent time hasn’t spawned as many new products as I expected it would.
But wait, if all the developers are effectively making management decisions through a peer review process, what are the managers doing? They are going to meetings, I’m told. The typical Google manager has 50-60 direct reports and has time for nothing but meeting after meeting. In a typical nerds-versus-suits scenario, the ex-Google developers I spoke with had no idea exactly WHAT their managers actually did.
Someone at Google is buying companies, I’m sure, and those decisions have to take place at an upper management level where checks are written, even at Google. What I find really interesting is what happens after the products are acquired. Who works on them and what features get changed or modified? That, too, is apparently up to the engineers.
At Google I am told developers bid for what they want to do with their time. If there’s a big job to be done people commit to parts of it. And the parts nobody commits to do? They don’t get done. Really. So when we wonder exactly how a JotSpot, which I really liked, turns into a Google Sites, which I really don’t like, that morphology apparently comes from people changing what they want to change.
There is no marketing input.
Effectively, there is no marketing.
I am not making this up.
This approach isn’t without precedent. I saw much the same thing during the early days at Apple where new products were entirely driven by engineering. Engineers built whatever they wanted to build and it was up to the company then to sell it. Google apparently operates in much the same fashion.
All of this helps explain the Google tendency to have almost eternal betas, because there are no marketing-driven deadlines… ever. And why should there be? Given that most Google products aren’t intended to directly produce revenue, it may not matter.
This explains, too, how Google products — even those popular with their users — sometimes just fade away. Nobody wants to continue to support it, so the product dies.
Google is not your father’s software company, that’s for sure. The fact that it works so well (makes so much money) comes down to the realization I had that Google isn’t a software company at all. It’s an advertising company.
Ah, now THAT makes sense.
I, Cringely readers from the Boston area who want to see if I reflect light in person can run that controlled experiment next Thursday, September 17th, when I speak to the Society for Information Management’s Boston Chapter. Here’s the link. My topic is Consumerization of IT: Is Corporate IT about to Lose Control Again? The answer of course is “yes,” but the devil is in the details. Please attend if you can.
I think some peer review would be a good thing for a lot of companies. I’d imagine that if Microsoft let its engineers peer review some of its work they might produce some better products.
I also like the idea of engineers making what they want, as long as there is some form of review to prevent them from producing the engineers wet dream product that can’t be sold. Often what customers say they want and what they actually want are very different things.
This may not be believed, but this is how things were in the ‘good old days’
at EDS. We used to mainly code PL/1, IMS, DB2 online and batch programs
to run on the IBM mainframes (This was the GM account)
We had good standards ‘Vol5’, and programs specs were peer reviewed as was
program code. For large projects, lots of common, and useful, routines were
written by ‘top guns’ and used by everyone.
The code was clean, but it took too long by today’s standards to implement.
And not only at EDS. In my previous life (mid ’80-ties til mid ’90-ties) I was a software developer for a Dutch shop and while working at ESA (those europeans who send satellites in space) every page of design and every line of code was peer reviewed. Code peer reviews were only skipped when dead-lines were at stake, but not after proving that you had consistent performance on sticking with the coding standards. Result: clean and predictable code. Makes sense when flying satellites costing half a billion dollars. And off course we didn’t start writing code 3 months before launch….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
Ouch! 😉
Google’s dirty little secret, sadly is that they ignore great talent if it’s “to old” in their eyes. Brian Reid has been around since, forever:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)
https://www.eff.org/files/nsa/reid.pdf
I met him when I interviewed at his facility at DEC’s Lyton offices in Palo Alto. I was sorta shocked by the news that Google didn’t really know what to do with him:
http://public.getlegal.com/articles/cultural-fit
As an aging techie, I’ve been flat out told I’m to old for the business any more. And I don’t have gray hair. I’ll bet Google gets it in the shorts on this one, if it even get into court at all.
At my last job no code was checked in which was not peer reviewed.
Not only did we find bugs before check in, not only was the code cleaner overall,
not only did we do better re-use (hey, why are you re-inventing the list? We have it already),
but, and I think this is probably relevant to all the peer-review happening at Google – the reviewers are part of the creative process, their input makes them co-authors of what is being reviewed and information is spread more evenly within the company.
The best engineers are the ones you don’t have to manage – they manage themselves. This might help explain the great disconnect. In an ideal company there are no managers – the people doing the actual production know what to do. This is the trend happening I think in the knowledge industry – the hierarchy keeps getting flatter the more that the people producing the product connect directly to each other and the consumers of their product. Another example of networks eliminating the middleman.
One caveat: I hate when this advice is taken literally: no check ins yet! Oh really? If you want to review work before it is merged or sent for testing, that is a good thing, and I heartily agree with this policy. If you are letting *days* go by without saving some progress-checkpoint in a backed up archive, that to me seems foolish (undo? backups??? no worries!). Not that I haven’t seen groups try to enforce exactly that policy…
And that’s why we now have SCMs like GIT – you can check in to a branched code line for review before it get’s merged up into the main line.
Automatic compile checkins (like Bazaar) are also interesting: at checkin, the repo server automatically compiles and runs unit tests, if any fail the checkin is rejected..
Bob, you have perfectly captured why Google will never make a truly great product which people get passionate about. Functional products, yes; “does what it says on the tin” products, yes; OK products, yes; but exceptional? No.
Ian, I think time has faded our memories of how appalling search was before Google burst onto the scene with PageRank. You remember Hotbot, Altavista, Yahoo was the wunderkid back then and even they to put it mildly, sucked. To begin with the search engines of the day weren’t particularly good, the home pages were cluttered nightmares of celebrity gossip and ‘today’s weather’ (for California), and on top of that paid for adverts were buried within the actual search results (what a quaint notion).
Google with it’s beautifully simple home page consisting of a search box and their company logo blew all that cruft away. How time fades our memories, because before Google enabled us to find what we were looking for the internet kinda sucked.
That’s exceptional, no matter how you slice it.
In all fairness, it was Altavista who pioneered the simple and clean search homepage. That was before they sold out and got that homepage turned into another Yahoo.
AltaVista may have pioneered simple, but Google was also fast and (importantly) accurate.
Remember when searching was an art form? It’s easy to forget.
I still cannot find another search engine even close to as good as Google.
I think Google Voice is poised to be (already is?) an exceptional product by anybody’s definition of the term. It has fundamentally changed how many people handle their phone calls, and it is just getting started.
Google Mail and Maps are not exceptional? Many would disagree.
Not really on topic but…
Google Maps is great if you know where you are going. If you are looking for a business in an unfamiliar place, GM might very well lead you astray. I find the info to often be very stale – it will list a business that has been gone for years.
Google Earth has changed many peoples view of the Earth in the same way that the Apollo “Blue Marble” did. Is that not exceptional. It is the one single piece of software I would like to have been associated.
Ian, you must be joking, right? Apart from the obvious counter-example of Google Search (maybe one of the greatest products in the history of… products) I know a lot of people who are enthusiastic advocates of Google Maps, Google Chrome or (specially) GMail.
Bob, Google has a lot of people working in marketing. Actually, in most countries most Google staff are marketing guys. Maybe they don’t interact with engineers much, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
This process strikes me as remarcably similar to the way FOSS code is produced. With FOSS there’s also a definite lack of marketing, and any product (can we even call them products?) lives and dies by the size and interest of the developer crowd they manage to pull in. And while it’s alive it will cater mainly to the interests of super-geeks.
I LOVE that analogy – you hit it right on the head! Google is a corporate FOSS environment. They leave it up to their users to promote the products. Another thing they do well, is take a type of peer-review in a way, in open-forum/voting for new features on some of their products (http://productideas.appspot.com/#16/e=cf&hl=en)
It may not be the best way for mavericks to operate…which means that Google will continue to have to buy many of their new ideas (youtube, grandcentral, etc). But that may not be a bad thing – it’s almost like a venture capital way of outsourcing your research lab. It may or may not be more profitable…
And I don’t think the existence of ex-googlers are a sign of google going down…but rather a spread of google philosophy into other markets.
[…] [From I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The People’s Republic of Google – Cringely on technology] […]
While working as a software consultant for the federal government here in DC, I noticed something very strange … consulting firms don’t have any idea what peer review is. Actually, they don’t even care, all they want to do is complete a project with as little money, and as fast as possible so they can move onto the next contract while billing the government millions.
After more than 30 years as an IT consultant to the Feds, you are wrong. The contractors know what peer review is. But they are not paid to deliver good code. They would love to deliver good code, but that is not what is in the RFP, and not what they bid.
Federal procurement is stuck in the Waterfall methodology that failed in the 80s.
Add in that the Feds expect contractors to accept $40 per hour for folks with a BS in CS, and you get clueless folks that barely graduate from the worst programs in the country.
This is the truth. The contractors know what peer review is, but the government doesn’t care. If given the option of
1) Something done in 3 months
2) Something reliable in 4 months
They pick #1 every time.
Having worked in a peer-review ethic, flat-rank company and then having that been bought up by a strict hierarchy company, I prefer the peer-review, flat-rank because it’s more conducive to innovation, and the hierarchy to stagnation. However, the hierarchical approach is much better at maintaining the systems and support. Since they can’t create anything new they have to keep up what they have.
Bob: Although I think Google’s setup has issues, especially in the area of product management, you’re missing some of the power of this peer-driven system.
A friend of mine who works there is a big fan of some particular technical practices that increase quality. What did he have to do to get them adopted? At other places, he’d have to become a manager. Or he’d have to put together PowerPoint documents and convince managers. Managers who were certainly not active coders any more, and at many places never were.
At Google? He had to convince his peers. Which he did. So he’s happy, the code is better, and the user experience is better.
I was just talking yesterday to a fellow who is also trying to hire engineers in the Bay Area. We agree: it’s very hard to get engineers to leave Google, even the ones who used to change jobs every couple of years. I think that’s partly because the peer-driven system gives engineers far more control over the things they care about than most other places ever will.
now the transition from the Grand Central interface to the Google voice interface is making a little more sense. I mostly like Google interfaces, but this time, the Grand Central UI was better, but they killed it so it would be more Googley, and in this case less usable.
I agree – Grand Central’s interface was great. Google’s is less usable.
Just makes me want to work for them all the more. I’d give my left *** to work in an environment where competence was considered such an important topic. Nerdvana! Unfortunately, they have no office in my city and I can’t move. 🙁
Peer reviews rock. They keep people more honest.
I am one of the “managers” at Google, and I have to say that I feel liberated in my job because of the peer reviews.. I dont have to do the job of being the only adult in the room, which was the case in previous companies.
And no, managers don’t just go to meetings… I would quit the day that happened 🙂
Fine, more than meetings. But what *productive* work do managers do at Google? Bob couldn’t find out what that might be. OTOH, management doesn’t do much of anything productive anywhere. 🙂
I didn’t do much productive work as an engineer either 😀
[…] Cringely reveals what we all know to be true. […]
Peer review is great for code, not so great for design. Here is what Doug Bowman, onetime top designer at Google, now Creative Director at Twitter, had to say about design-related peer review at Google:
Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
//
So, it would appear that while Google can engineer great code, it will be unable to leap the chasm to great design, because that does not happen by committee, and their left-brained institutional approach will be unable to comprehend the implications of this divide.
Exactly. Bob mentioned that Apple used to be engineer-driven, and if you look at the products and vaporware they were putting out in the early 90s that explains a lot. At some point you need a designer (an intelligent one, hopefully) to crack the whip.
intelligent design????????? corporations are Social Darwinists through and through. wellllllllllll…. until they want a bailout. then their very existence is The Only Thing That Matters to Life as We Know It. Ship the bucks, come on ship the bucks.
On the other hand, what about companies that have been ‘acquired’ by Google. Do they switch to this ‘peer review’ methodology?
Here’s an example: One of their acquisitions was SketchUp (now Google SketchUp). That company has taken the architecture (corporations as well as architecture colleges), movie stage, and designer worlds by storm. Don’t even mention the incorporation of that product’s output into their Google Earth product. As far as I can tell (from outside), Google has left that corporation distinct and the company’s approach to building, coding, and releasing new versions reasonably intact.
Google has been acquiring many companies, but it’s not clear that these acquisitions are forced to change their internal processes or corporate culture.
I was a software design manager at a software/hardware company that operated similar to Google–virtually no strategic marketing, and where product decisions were made by engineering. The hardware products were mostly generic signal data acquisition/generation tools, so the Google model worked OK there, but the software could not be so generic, so that model was horrible for software.
The Google model assumes that engineering has a good idea of the needs of the customer. That works great for products like Gmail, where engineers are good proxies for customers, since engineers use email largely the same way as anyone else. But at my company, our customer base was more engineer dominated. Unfortunately, the software engineers that developed our software products were not the kinds of engineers we were trying to serve.
Most of the software development went into adding new features to a single, flagship product, with an implied theory that if the product just had enough features, people would buy it. As a result, the product was a huge, bloated collection of random functions that were largely buried deep in the product. There was almost no way to tell how any particular new function affected sales.
Our sales performance with other, peripheral products was, predictably, abysmal. For example, we created one software product that sold exactly one copy in the release quarter.
Fortunately, we had a direct sales staff that was very good at selling hardware. Most users would use only the most rudimentary aspects of the software, and use third-party software for sophisticated needs.
Our marcom group was essentially clueless, too. They knew technical terms, but not what the terms meant, which had some rather humorous consequences. The customer surveys that they generated frequently were so badly done that they caused more confusion than clarity.
One issue that Cringely does not mention is customer feedback. How does Google know how customers perceive their free products? Is it just based on download count? For Gmail, you can count accounts, but how about for Google Maps? If Google does deduce customer interest in released products, doesn’t that information get fed back to engineering?
I think this is an excellent point. Google gets along with little or no product management because they are pushing commodity apps – ones that basically everyone has a use for. If you are a company making a very special product for a narrower market, you can’t count on the engineers to know what to build. I should know – I’m an engineer for a company making very special tools for the embedded market, and I have no idea what the product should do most of the time.
This post explains a lot why I’ve found Google APIs for the most part to be superior and more consistent than APIs from others to use in building applications. But this process does not guarantee that a great idea will be properly nurtured and turned into a great product. The only things that work are the ones that are absolutely necessary to bring in the cash, like the search and ad technology, or that the engineers use everyday among each other, like Gmail and Docs. Does this also explains why despite having lots of Mac users in house, they still couldn’t offer an official release of the Google Chrome for the Mac or Linux besides developer builds?
Yes google has some some good products. But only one is paying all the bills – Adwords and Adsense – something that was created at the beginning of Google’s early days. Heck, if Adwords weren’t created, Google search would be another Inktomi.
The jury is still out as to whether Google can create another service that will actually make money in the event that some other Ad platform service eats into Adwords. When that happens, you’ll see Goole slash people, cut projects, bring in marketing and sweat balls. Just like Yahoo, AOL, MS and all the others that eventually get the wake up call (even though they all continue to sleep).
The sun has to set and it doesn’t matter where you live or who you are.
While it’s true Google does have a lot of people in its Marketing department, here’s the difference Bob was (I think) getting at — 99% of marketing is spent on two things: AdWords, and the Google brand. They don’t do marketing for GMail, Google Maps, Picasa, SketchUp, etc. They have done a little marketing for Google Search, and more for Chrome, but for the most part, they’re selling their ad business (the 1 money-maker of it all), and the rest is just fun.
I used to work for Google. I would beg to differ when it comes to the part about the code having to be the cleanest code in the world. It may have perfect punctuation and flawless indentation, but very, very much of it isn’t great. Some of it is even shockingly crap. Rather than reviewing a significant body of work with an eye to thinking about proper design, it is reviewed in fragments. Changelist by changelist. This means that code that was perhaps once great will accumulate damage over time as numerous people fondle it. Perhaps new maintainers are somewhat inexperienced. Maybe they don’t care. Or they do not understand the overall design.
In my opinion, the codebase at Google is probably somewhat better than other places I have worked, but it is a far cry from the standards one should aspire to.
20% time is a joke. Senior management makes obligatory ceremonial noises about it now and then, but the bottom line is that you always have a performance review coming up, so you can either make your peers think you are a selfish jerk (and kiss that promotion goodbye) or you can do what most people do and spend 120% of your time on your primary project plus additional duties.
And yes, the performance reviews are a real pain in the ass. They start with the slotting process which gets completely de-railed if you do not conform to the company’s rather dogmatic idea of what you are supposed to do. And it goes down-hill from there. Before Google I only worried about getting my job done. I had no idea what my job title was most of the time and I can’t say I cared. At Google your job title, level, quarterly goals, visibility of your project, favor with embarrassingly vain and fickle senior management, adherence to sometimes comically bureaucratic procedure, career plan/path/progression was ALL more important than just doing what you were hired for.
But the most severe damage the perf process does is: people optimize for the short term. Before Google I would think 1-2-3 years down the road when making decisions. In Google there was only the next quarter and hitting those all-important quarterly OKRs. Anything beyond that … well, do you want a career or not?
>> Before Google I only worried about getting my job done. I had no idea what my job title was most of the time and I can’t say I cared. At Google your job title, level, quarterly goals, visibility of your project, favor with embarrassingly vain and fickle senior management, adherence to sometimes comically bureaucratic procedure, career plan/path/progression was ALL more important than just doing what you were hired for.
So, if I read this accurately, Google is just IBM with t-shirts?? Not surprising, really. IBM is all about image, and Google being all about advertising, makes a difference without much distinction. People, even those who proclaim they will not be evil, well, they are. Where’s that anthropomorphic ZAP when you need it?
Well, yes and no.
At Google you have a much more chaotic process and much more freedom to pursue the kinds of ideas and projects that you would not be able to pursue at other companies. This is good and I would imagine that this process is much more stifled by formality at companies like IBM.
What is not so good is that you are to a much higher degree held accountable for what you are doing, which means that while lip service is paid to the goodness of pursuing risky projects and wild ideas, if they fail the price you pay is high. At Google you cannot hide away and tinker. Which is necessary to develop ideas. A bright light is shone on you once every quarter, and if you cannot point to precisely quantifiable accomplishments, you have to face the consequences. At all times you MUST ask yourself “how does what I do right now benefit my quarterly goals” and if the answer is even unclear, you should stop what you are doing.
At least I find this extremely limiting since what I do best involves creativity and bursts of impulsive exploration. (There is a cartoon I find very descriptive of me at Google where the manager points to a cubicle and yells “now go back to your cubicle and think outside the box!”. Google is kinda like that).
The upshot of this is that if you care about your career (and Google makes sure you do), you will seek out low-hanging fruit and quick wins. I have observed numerous people who are very good at identifying projects that have high visibility, and a high chance of success and go for these rather than going for more substantial projects that in the long run would have brought the company far more value. This is a winning strategy at Google and will get you promotions, bonuses and management recognition.
At Google it is advisable to take risk only if you are certain you are not going to lose or if you are someone sufficiently famous (internally or externally). If you are a lowly engineer you get with the program and you dot your i’s and cross your t’s. And there are a lot of i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed.
Oh, and you should Know Thine Players and you make damn sure that you never show up on the radar of a few google executives who have been promoted far beyond where they belong. Even in the magic kingdom there are some really nasty, petty people who get away with pissing all over people below them.
As for the code review regimen: I think this is an artifact of Google growing up too fast. There is a lot of legacy practices that have not been given the proper attention as the company has grown from a few tens of developers to thousands. Trying to discuss this with people who could actually affect change is somewhat hopeless in that they are prone to look backwards rather than projecting into the future. How do you tell someone with a huge chunk of rather valuable Google stock that what they are doing is wrong? I mean: would they be stinking rich if they were wrong? Of course not, so what they do is so obviously right.
Google culture is about holding on to assumptions, to eliminate anyone who is not “like us” and to celebrate one’s “elders” as demigods and heroes.
Agree with your comment “code that was perhaps once great will accumulate damage over time as numerous people fondle it.” Peer review may be useful for some scenarios, but it is not “one size fits all,” taking it too far has its negatives. Also it is somewhat against human nature – naturally we tend to disagree, so a process that requires all peers agree on a topic esp. performance review (when different measurements come into play) can produce negative results.
Oh I still think peer review is important and a very good mechanism for improving quality. My point is that at Google there is a lot of focus on reviewing code at a micro-level (changelist by changelist), but very little attention is paid to the bigger picture. This means that you will have large chunks of code where each individual source file or method or function follows every best practice in the book, but where the overall design is either bad or worse: that there is no proper, coherent overall design.
It is like building a cathedral by only focusing on 1×1 foot parts at a time. Sure, the door-hinges are going to be great since they have been painstakingly inspected, discussed, altered and approved before being mounted. But you get oddities like three bell-towers (one of which floats in thin air) and a merry-go-round — without anyone really being able to tell you why.
[…] The People’s Republic of Google | I, Cringely 〈グーグル人民共和国〉 コメントを書く « 2009年9月11日(金) […]
Applied to piranha’s this is like picking the fish with the sharpest teeth and the best ability to avoid being bitten. This system can not be good for teamwork or trust between workers.
I never saw a performance review process I liked. The best system was a suggestion. Identify the 5% top performers and the 5% bottom performers. Give the top 95% the same pay increase. Give the top 5% a bonus. Give the bottom 5% cost of living only, and coaching to perform better, or lay them off.
A large part of one’s performance is the assignment, the management, and other factors. Not everyone can do the fun work on high profile projects. Someone has to fix things that pop up unexpectedly, and other unglamorous work. Many people have special skills that does not involve writing perfect code.
While Microsoft has made a lot of money and will continue to do so for a long time, it is their management and corporate culture that will limit their long term growth. Eventually Microsoft importance in the world will fade.
If this is representative of Google culture, then it too will limit their long term success.
I can think of a dozen or so ideas that could either Microsoft or Google can do that would make a real difference in the world. I am sure many of you have your own ideas. The biggest problem with cultures like Microsoft or Google is it cuts off the free spirit and ideas of their own people and the outside world.
Google likes to measure you against your job description. If you are not a 100% match then something must clearly be wrong. There are only N types of people and if you do not conform there is something wrong with you.
I’ve worked with people who were terrible programmers. But they were good at other things and thus very important to the project. But since their job description was “software engineer” the fact that they did not commit any code was seen as a problem and needed to be explained. Again and again and again.
>> It’s an advertising company.
It’s taken you all these years to figure this out??? It was obvious years ago. If I’d had a blog back then, I would paste in the link.
Bob, if you go back to the Boston RT128 area, you will find the remains of lots of companies that had no marketing. DEC aka Digital Equipment Corp was famously run by engineers. And they sold to engineers.
They failed when the industry moved to where engineers were not making the purchasing decisions.
Bob, I wonder if that’s the situation with Google’s core products. E.G. Search, adsense, server managment.
>> naturally we tend to disagree, so a process that requires all peers agree on a topic esp. performance review (when different measurements come into play) can produce negative results.
Isn’t that synonymous with “design by committee”??
[…] The People’s Republic of Google […]
Marketing’s job is to bring the customers to the product, while engineering brings the product to the customers.
It’s marketing’s close connection to the buyer base that gives it cred. Steve Jobs ain’t a designer or an engineer but he really is the First Consumer. That’s what keeps Apple marketing focused.
I always understood that marketing had many jobs. The first, and most important, job was to determine what customers want (or to determine what they will want, under the appropriate conditions).
So instead of trying to sell whatever makes it way out of product development… The better strategy would be to determine what customers want, or could want. Then to create that desired product (and any required conditions). And then, and only then, to sell that product to customers.
>> he first, and most important, job was to determine what customers want (or to determine what they will want, under the appropriate conditions).
Nope. Jobs/Apple have proved that what really gets the $$$ is figuring out what the customer wants BEFORE the customer does. That was true of the Apple/I and Mac and everything else they’ve built that was successful. Doing “customer research”, and basing product on same leads to products limited by the feeble minded (aka, customers).
Dear Robert,
Didn’t you read the part of my comment that discussed “… (or to determine what they will want, under the appropriate conditions)… Then to create that desired product (and any required conditions).”
I intended these short descriptions to expand the scope of marketing. That is, marketing isn’t just about flogging whatever products a company has available for sale.
Also, I wanted to cover the cases where customers wouldn’t necessarily know what they wanted until it was made available to them.
Maybe I should have mentioned that you might need a visionary, like Steve Jobs, to bring about the appropriate conditions for a breakthrough product. On second thought, being a visionary is too rare and esoteric to be part of the marketing method.
Hope I haven’t offended anyone. After all, it’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The People’s Republic of Google – Cringely on technology […]
[…] Shared The People’s Republic of Google […]
“The heart of Google is code and all code there is peer reviewed TO DEATH. The result is absolutely the cleanest code in the digital world, forced into that condition by what can be a torturous process of line-by-comment-by punctuation mark analysis sometimes over-driven by people who take their work WAY too seriously. ”
I have a somewhat similar level of inside knowledge and I’ll say that this comes at enormous, and I claim unnecessary, cost, whereas pairing (which you could look at as extreme peer review, if you wanted to) and TDD produce MUCH cleaner, higher-quality code in a way that’s light years more productive.
There are plenty of stories to tell about waste and engineering dysfunction inside Google. But they get it really right sometimes, which is much more than you can say for most big software organizations.
And they’ve been instrumental in pumping up the culture of the modern coddled engineer, which FB et al have continued, and which one day will be seen as an antipattern (oh please work for us, do whatever you want…you’re spending all your time building a toy that’s available as a nice stable api? Go ahead, you’re the genius – we can all just deal with your fragile ego and insecurity complex. You have an opinion about the business model? Let me furrow my brow and take in all your grand unified vision of product usability for the next hour, you ranty trailblazer you. Please don’t quit, please please!).
Each morning I need to go into my kids bedrooms and tell them how I want them to clean up. I have been doing this for years and I can’t seem to get them to grasp the finer details of a clean room.
After reading the article I thought: peer review. I had each of them tell the other what they had to do to finish cleaning their room. Talk about the finer details of a clean room!! It appears those years of explaining had sunk in after all.
I am going to do try this at work. I am a manager and do have meetings all day. I don’t have time to review code and work. Let them do it!
jr
[…] lectura sobre la organización interna y la toma de decisiones en Google que he leído en I, Cringely. Entre otras cosas, me ha dejado muy sorprendido la proporción de entre desarrolladores y […]
Google should look into Halogen Software (https://www.halogensoftware.com) for their performance reviews. Reviews shouldn’t eat up 20% of your workforce time! Organization reviews are very important, but doing too many is counterproductive.
The lack of direction from Managers at Google isn’t surprising – engineers are running the show. Managers are just there to take notes and *guide their teams along with little to no real understanding of what goes on behind the scenes. This is typical behavior in most companies, so it’s no surprise Google is suffering through the same growing pains.
Google never was a Software company.. really. Every effort put into Google was to create profit through advertising. Build a search index that is better than everyone elses’, gain popularity/mind share, capitalize by providing advertising space.
90billion searches a month = 180billion eyes seeing potential advertising = advertisers paying Google lots of $$ (billions $$ every Quarter)
They’ve made it work and that’s why Google is succeeding. Nothing wrong with that.
With access to so much search trend data Google can pretty much predict the future of human interest. I’m hearing Yoda’s voice saying “With great power comes great responsibility”
Will Google eventually succumb to absolute greed?
The future of Search is unclear, but one thing is certain, Google engineered it’s way to the top and pioneered the Internet for all of us.
…not all engineers are visionaries!
Uh, yeah, Google is very much a software company. Perhaps more so than most stereotypical software companies I have worked for. Just because they do not make money directly from their software (by licensing or selling it) doesn’t mean that the billion or so they spend on R&D isn’t mainly spent on designing and building software.
You’ve never really worked for Google, huh? Or any large internet company that solves problems at that scale?
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I don’t work for Google but I work in software company. I just want to point out two things: 1. Google does not have any killer app except Google Search. 2. Peer code review does not work for every company. Especially for code review, peer review will not work if peer’s quality has issue.
If Google is an advertising agency perhaps they should buy NASA. See
Pohl & Kornbluth ‘The Space Merchants’, 1953
[…] The People’s Republic of Google. [I,Cringely] […]
“But without giving away any trade secrets (which the ex-Googlers absolutely refused to do)”
What’s the deal with the secretiveness? Ex-employees of every other tech company I have talked to are perfectly glad to blab on about whatever you want to know. Is there something about Google that makes the secrets more sacred? Would the rest of the world benefit if these secrets were public? If so, does that make Google Evil for withholding that knowledge?
[…] The people’s republic of Google (I, Cringely) […]
[…] Source: Robert Cringely, “The People’s Republic of Google,” I, Cringely, September 10, 2009 […]
Evangelists, in any shape or form, become boring. If they believe themselves, they die away, as the world moves away from their current obsession.
This blog is turning into evangelism, and by definition is losing any sense of debate. Ergo ….
With all its money and all its engineers, Google’s achievements are rather a deception (webmail, calendars, HTML indexing -wow show me more exciting stuff…).
Plus, one has to admit that Google is inclined to extracting its actual revenues from sources that are uncorrelated to its (supposedly) coding genius (GWS, Gmail, Google Charts, etc. -are all closed source so you can’t even tell if they are decently written or if they just work thanks to Google’s 1 million servers) because Google SELLS content MADE BY OTHERS.
Google does not sell software, it sells “information”.
This includes your Web surfing habits, your shopping patterns, your sexual orientation, the news written by others, etc.
Why Google’s revenues have nothing to do with coding (if coding is the core value of the company)?
“Plus, one has to admit that Google is inclined to extracting its actual revenues from sources that are uncorrelated to its (supposedly) coding genius (GWS, Gmail, Google Charts, etc. -are all closed source so you can’t even tell if they are decently written or if they just work thanks to “Google’s 1 million servers) because Google SELLS content MADE BY OTHERS.”
Pierre: that makes me wonder if you have ever written code that even works on 5 computers simultaneously. Things dont just work when you have code running across millions of servers .. have you ever heard of failing harddisks? Databases that required millions of transactions per second? I wont even go into more complicated things since you obviously dont understand.
Google doesnt need certification from FOSS community to get an understanding of how good the internal code is. No one has seen MS server code, but even then it is uniformly trashed, because IT DOESNT WORK. Google products work reliably (with the exception of Gmail, which has been less reliable), and people continue using them .. Google does well, because users spend less time looking for more high quality information, and not to forget, its products are free!
altavista was pretty good. but about when google busted them, was when the seos began !@!@ing over the search engines. i think that’s why within a year, altavista seemed to have mysteriously turned to sh1t. they hadn’t changed, but their search had been mal-manipulated.
as for passion over google ware. hmm, i don’t think i’m passionate about any ware. but lots of ppl like ge, skp, gmail, etc.
passionate vs world-weary is more of an age thing.
Judging from the slipstreamed screwups in google groups, I don’t believe any peer review is done at all.
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Although peer review is good, and most likely helps improve most functions, it’s surprising to see how much peer review goes on at Google. Every good writer or developer will say that it’s nice having an editor or someone review the content before it goes out, but when the review process makes the content delivery slower than it can be efficient, it makes one wonder when enough is enough.
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I’m surprised it took you so long to come to your “realisation”, or maybe you’ve always known this but failed to disclose it.
The peer-review process sounds much like open-sourced development projects.
And the reliance on “popularity polls” seems very much in line with the founders’ early decision to go forward with the idea that a webpage’s “importance” can be estimated by its “popularity”, as described in the PageRank patent, which, incidentally, will soon expire.
Whether they realised this at the time (early 90’s) I’m not sure – people should know there was a Google before AdWords – the advertising idea came later – and not from the founders themsleves, but this focus on assessing “importance”, as described in the patent, is most relevant to *advertising*. The idea of popularity as being indicative of importance, per se, is dubious, in my opinion. Common sense should remind us of this fact.
PR is not a truly original idea. It draws on, among other things, the “most cited” concept in academic databases, e.g., ISI’s.
However there are some key differences:-
Transparency
Using ISI’s databases, the origins of the citations are made very transparent (in Google terms this would amount to the “links:site.com” operand). If a paper has been cited many times, then the next logical step when using the ISI database is to view who has cited it. The user receieves a *complete*, and reasonably traceable list.
Accountability and credibility
Secondly, there is no anonymity with db’s such as ISI’s. Each author must stand accountable for their work. That work must of course be supported by data and the results must be reproducible. Imagine applying these standards to the web at large.
You may recall GOOG tried to pursue something similar to an academic database where articles were authored by “established experts”. This project never took off. I am having trouble even recalling the name (“____ol”?). Wikipedia, with it’s anonymous authorship, has proven to be the most popular source of “authority” on the web. There is an alternative: Google Scholar. I feel Google Scholar does get enough credit. They surpassed ISI and the others in academic publishing many years ago with Scholar, in my opinion. It is in most cases the most efficient way to locate and retrieve any paper in almost any discipline.
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