> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios.
That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.
My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spend as much time looking to "align with stakeholders", I just go ahead and do things my decades of experience have taught me are the right paths (while also using my experience to know when I can't just push things through).
What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly.
Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up.
Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to maintenance mode, and start new orgs within the company that are as insulated from legacy as possible. This will not be an easy transition, and will probably fail. The alternative however is to definitely fail.
For example Google is in the amazing position that it's search can become a commodity that prints a modest amount of money forever as the default search engine for LLM queries, while at the same time their flagship product can be a search AI that uses those queries as citations for answers people look for.
They are completely stuck in the 90s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone clicks buttons on their grossly outdated tools.
Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they weren't constantly in meetings, I honestly don't know what leadership would do all day.
You have to go through a change committee to do basic maintenance. Director levels gatekeep core tools and tech. Lower levels are blamed when projects faceplant because of decades of technical debt. No one will admit it because it (rightly) shows all of leadership is completely out of touch and is just trying their damnedest to coast to retirement.
The younger people that come into the org all leave within 1-2 years because no one will believe them when they (rightly) sound the whistle saying "what the fuck are we doing here?" "Oh, you're just young and don't know what working in a large org is like."
Meanwhile, infra continues to rot. There are systems in place that are complete mysteries. Servers whose functions are unknown. You want to try to figure it out? Ok, we can discuss 3 months from now and we'll railroad you in our planning meetings.
When it finally falls over, it's going to be breathtaking. All because the fixtures of the org won't admit that they haven't kept up on tech at all and have no desire to actually do their fucking job and lead change.
Hah, at a previous employer (and we were only ~300 people), we went through three or four rounds of layoffs in the space of a year (and two were fairly sizeable), ending up with ~200. But the "leadership team" of about 12-15 always somehow found it necessary to have an offsite after each round to ... tell themselves that they'd made the right choice, and we were better positioned for success and whatever other BS. And there was never really any official posting about this on company Slack, etc. (I wonder why?) but some of the C-suite liked to post about them on their LI, and a lot of very nice locations, even international.
Just burning those VC bucks.
> You have to go through a change committee to do basic maintenance. Director levels gatekeep core tools and tech. Lower levels are blamed when projects faceplant because of decades of technical debt.
I had a "post-final round" "quick chat" with a CEO at another company. His first question (literally), as he multitasked coordinating some wine deliveries for Christmas, was "Your engineers come to you wanting to do a rewrite, mentioning tech debt. How do you respond?" Huh, that's an eye-opening question. Especially since I'm being hired as a PM...