How is Google not going to suck more? The internet has changed. Nobody's writing webpages anymore. Who's still blogging? People use the internet by logging on to Instagram or using a phone app, which can't be accessed by a Google search.

That is a very angry bit of editorializing, and it's entirely misplaced.

It's a generalization but it's all over the internet and in the most disparate fields: India management means problems...they need to update their way of teaching and their overall approach to society if they want to be appreciated and welcomed on the world stage.

> Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies

People who don't play office politics lose to people who do. Having "toadies" helps you win the game of Survivor. It works because the CEO doesn't recognize actual skill.

The problem with tech is that the people leading it, don't understand tech. If you ever see a manager open “Power BI”, you're not dealing with a professional, you're dealing with someone who wants to see pretty pictures and charts, without having insight, or, intelligence about the data or their field of work.

I've lost count of the number of times someone has been upset over a chart, in a report. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told the analytics don't make sense, when the issue is the person doesn't understand what they're looking at. Hell, I've been in meetings where the solution to the report not looking perfect, was to start using Sprints. When I objected and pointed out that fixing the documentation, planning, and project management needed to be done first, I was scuffed and laughed at.

Management has turned from leading the troops into battle, to sitting at a desk, playing risk, with the monopoly rules, and crying about not getting nap time, then blaming the engineers because the product is yellow, not red. The funny thing about management, is that if you do it well, people don't know you're a manager. Good managers lead, and pull everyone up by setting an example. Typical managers, use buzz words, broken tools, bad reports and meeting to hide udder incompetence.

Here's what happened in tech. I can speak with authority because I was there.

During the 1990s, when corporate America was caught in last place technology-wise, they had no trouble hiring and fairly paying people to help them build what they needed. I was one of those people, and because of my hard work, knowledge and skill I multiplied my salary 500% in seven years.

This was all funded by hard investments in technology infrastructure, and it is when all the key platforms were invented or perfected: browser, TCP/IP, streaming video, high-speed graphics libraries, multiplayer gaming, ecommerce, Flash, LAMP, etc.

By early 2001 I was unemployable. I haven't had a job since.

What happened? Simple. Plowing money into derivative shit became more profitable than tech stocks. (See Commodities Futures Modernization Act) All the capital and jobs were taken away so mortgage bonds could be monetized. That led directly to the housing crash, which led to bailout culture which led to mailbox money and then to rampaging inflation and finally to here.

They took our jobs, houses, women and money. Now they want our vote. We went from the greatest economic expansion in human history to the verge of ruin in one generation.

I couldn't rent a job now. Among the reasons nobody would ever hire me (despite the fact my experience and skill catalog runs close to 20,000 words and the fact I've built four successful businesses single-handed without one dime of outside investment) are: too old, too opinionated, too experienced, too expensive and so on. The situation is the same for everyone in my generation. We took the leading edge of the post-employment economy right in the teeth. We were educated and trained (by lifetimes of hard work on our parents' part) for an America that no longer exists. The world we grew up in doesn't even remotely resemble the one we live in now.

We're the ones who will never have homes, families or legacies because we were thrown off the train and we landed next to the very tracks we built.

All this bullshit about worker shortages and skill shortages is just that: bullshit. Stories like this are proof. Getting hired is pointless now anyway. You'll just get fired no matter how good a job you do.

P.S. For those of you who think you beat the system, just keep this in mind: your kids will never own a home, have a family or have a real job. They'll also never elect anyone to office. Have a nice day.

To a techie mailing list I'm on.

Here's evidence it worse than sucks: I'm working on some revisions to what was a short story, and may turn into a novelette. I need some information about the Russian city of Kursk around the year 1200. Five or six years ago, I found, among other things, a pic of a drawing? painting" of the city no later than 1600.

Now? Even after I exclude from the search battle, ussr, soviet, nuclear and a few more items, I can't find any real history of the city, when its walls were built, *zippo*.

This is just what happens when a once-innovative company gets big enough. It's inevitable. The business weenies move in, and try to adapt the company to maximize its efficiency. It's their job! The only way they know to do this is through taking formerly less-structured workflows and imposing process upon them, so as to reduce their unpredictability and redundancy. Then they point at the numbers for this quarter, and there, these ones are bigger, and these ones are smaller. (Hopefully. If not, do it again next quarter, even harder.) They've done their jobs.

Except that innovation is a form of unpredictability, of course. Just as reliability, and therefore quality, is a form of redundancy.

And so great companies ossify, and stop doing the thing they originally did, the one that customers liked, the one that took all the work and thinking and effort and investment, you know, art and/or engineering, and instead they put all their eggs in the shiniest basket they can fill with the eggs at hand. And if they can't really fill it, they can arrange the eggs carefully to look like it's filled. It's their fiduciary duty!

Eventually, to extend the egg metaphor, they start boiling their layers and selling them to the dog-food company. It really pumps up the numbers for this quarter! And never mind next quarter; fiduciary duty doesn't reach that far.

To do the reverse of the situation described in this article, and inappropriately cast a business scenario in terms of computer science, it's as if every algorithm written, now matter how intricate or brilliant it started out, slowly devolved into a greedy search algorithm.

This same quote could apply to Boeing more or less. The CEO and C-suite changed Boeing into a profit-maximizing, cost-minimizing fiasco, eliminating decades worth of trust and respect the Boeing brand name used to have.

If only there were a way to mod the whole submission "flamebait". Are there any "news" in the article apart from the posters's impression that "Google search now sucks" and a decision to pin it on a single person...?

Google is a business that is making lots of money for its managers and owners. Those are the purpose and values that ultimately drive it and every financially successful company. If they do anything good it either serves that purpose or is a welcome side effect. It reflects our values. Imagine a describing a company that is losing money as "successful" because it provided some other value. Netscape?

Failing upward happens in every organization known to man. It's because most of us are social creatures and we weight personal relationships more than measurable results.

"fake it 'til you make it" is really "fake it and get promoted before anyone figures it out" (and repeat)

In the corporate world, there seems to be a level that once you reach, you'll never fall below. Somewhere around "director" makes you hireable no matter why you got fired.

... the average tech manager, then? what would be special is that (apparently, can't be bothered to rtfa) this one had a really influential position, but that isn't really that rare either. ok.

I'm actually curious as to why we don't just build our own search engine - PageRank is out of patent, it's a pretty simple algorithm. Yes, of course. Scale... *but* I've not seen anyone *attempt* to do this even at small scale, just as a proof of concept. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

This is problem that spans the many corporate empires that exist. Did I say many? Sorry, I meant few.

Look to the companies you admire and look to the ones you don't. Why do you admire the companies you do? Why do you loathe the companies you do?

To me the key difference is, "am I getting a good product or service for what I am paying for it" verses "Is this company profiting good this quarter?" If you are looking to the stock market, you want the latter company. If you are a customer, you are looking to the former company.

While I am getting closer to retirement every day, if I invest, I want to look to a solid, product or service centered company which is going to be around for a bit. If I want to make a quick buck, profit extraction is king baby!.

Boeing is a great example of a company that was focused on delivering a great plane to customers but shifted a couple decades ago to making as much money as possible and not caring whether the plane flies or not.

Seems like our society has focused on who they can fleece for the most instead of building something to be proud of. Unfortunately we as a nation are going to continue to decline until the C suite class of people decide they want to focus on making something to be proud of instead of focusing on how big of a yacht they own.

What is it exactly about the structure of hi-tech companies that selects for ignorant assholes in management positions?

It's kind of astonishing that the reaction to revenue dropping and a rash of articles about the the product has gone downhill is a, "new operating model" with less resources and more time pressure.

All this started when short term shareholder value became the only thing executives cared about. For a while, I think it was more that leadership just didn't give a shit about product quality or long term viability.

But now I think the management culture has changed so much that they legitimately don't know how to

This reads as someone crying about having their traffic go down after a recent update. This has been happening for 20+ years. He's basically mad because the results now show someone else's SEO driven content over his SEO driven content.

I moved away some years ago, when it started to just be annoying. Short-term thinking moron in control, obviously. Although all of Google is advancing in Enshittification, search is clearly the worst.

Could we perhaps encourage him to go work for Microsoft or Amazon/AWS? On the one hand, nobody would likely notice; on the other hand, he might improve things; on another hand yet (a foot?), he might strike a mortal blow and we'd all be better off...