Google stopping coding competitions
developers.googleblog.comWe could lament them shutting it down, but why not thank them for doing this for 20 years? That's a LONG time to do anything, and despite what Google has become, it absolutely defined tech culture.
Now it's obvious and commonplace, but an employee-centric company was revolutionary at the time. Things like this changed the lives of every single person here, either directly or indirectly.
And best yet, it's a chance for other companies to take up the mantle. Rather than wishing Google kept playing their same old hits over and over for 2 decades, there's more oxygen for new companies to take the lead.
> That's a LONG time to do anything
I can't help but think that in a meeting somewhere someone mentioned that the coding competitions have run forever in response to people complaining how quickly everything dies -- and someone decided to fix the glitch.
> despite what Google has become, it absolutely defined tech culture.
Real talk: What companies are filling this role now?
I work at a FAANG, and it just does something to the soul. I can't describe what that thing is... but I routinely look at early-retirement calculators to cope with it.
Google is still loads better than eg Amazon but its days are numbered. I’ve heard msft wlb is improving a lot.
I think the next gen of employee- first companies will be wfh centric (or something new and flexible) and 4 day work weeks. People realized slides and food wasn’t as good as free time and flexibility. I expect maxing their employees 401ks and generous cultural WLB.
Companies that are advancing technology and gaining a rep as tech first? Look at blog posts that gain lots of traction here: Fly.io, Cloudflare, and many others. etc. Avoid anything too trendy ( AI, blockchain) because they might not last the hype cycles.
Fifteen years ago at Microsoft, most people worked ~40 hour weeks, there were shuttles between Seattle and Redmond, a good gym on campus, and (mostly) private offices.
You'd come into work at 9, wander off campus to a nearby restaurant with coworkers for a relaxing lunch at noon (granted, because the food in the cafeterias sucked and cost money), and after a bit of exercise or a nice game of racquetball at the gym, you'd go home at 6. Or if you were single and it was a weeknight, you might stay late in the office watching movies in a conference room and doing a bit of coding.
Of course, fifteen years ago, Google paid more and had a reputation as a place where the really smart people came to grow their careers, whereas Microsoft was sleepier and more middle-aged.
But it had "WLB" in spades.
Gym after lunch? :)
They clearly didn't follow the Hulk Hogan program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKkHQtmS01s&t=260s
We were young, and stupid. ;)
I agree - to me it’s “let’s pretend to be a startup, and KIND OF all buy into it”
But it’s not a startup, and you have very little ownership, and so little actually gets done
The rah rah rah fake cheerleading and silly hats
When you’re a consultant looking back at a FAANG everyone FAANG kinda comes off as an NPC it’s weird
I can’t speak for Netflix, don’t know anyone there
I don’t think any companies are. The industry is in a very stable, mature state right now and the culture is kind of defined. The last big disruption was probably the smartphone and App Store and that was what, 15 years ago now? Google managed to last that one out.
We were told Web3 would be the next disruption. Now we’re told it’s AI. The mere suggestion of Google messing that up tanked its stock price, maybe it’ll be real this time and OpenAI will define tech culture? I’m sceptical but hey, maybe.
Once AI succeeds there won't be a tech culture, because tech companies will no longer employ humans.
Wow! What a joy to click on the comments and find a positive comment at the top. Thanks for writing this and thanks HN upvoters for expressing your gratitude.
> We could lament them shutting it down, but why not thank them for doing this for 20 years?
We did? Everyone talking about how shitty and staid they've become is comparing to how great they were.
> an employee-centric company was revolutionary at the time
In the world of major software corporations, perhaps, but it's not like it was unknown elsewhere.
They were never the poster child for "employee centric" companies; they were just young, successful, made an awful lot of money and spent it. From this timeframe Fog Creek was the defacto "developer first" company.
Disagree. What is even "Fog creek"?
Joel's blog was extremely influential so it put Fogcreek in the spotlight.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
There had to be early Google employees who read that.
One could even argue that Joel and Jeff both having popular dev blogs drove the early adoption for Stack Overflow.
I dont know of any good reason to have gratitude for a corporation for anything. Having gratitude of the workers and academics that made it happen on the other hand? Sure, that's fair. But gratitude for a corporation, especially one that is dystopian and anti-consumer in everything they do? No can do.
You’re getting grayed out, probably for not jumping on the praise the corp bandwagon, but yeah you have a solid point.
We mustn’t confuse the people who make a corp great for the corp itself. The people are (or can be) awesome, while the corp which is a profit-driven institution that won’t hesitate turning against the people that make it great if it has to increase profitability a couple of quarters down the line.
Wake up, folks, they’re in it for themselves, they don’t (want to) care about you either as employees or as consumers if they don’t have to.
> them for doing this for 20 years?
"them" likely were layed off, hence they shut down service now.
Haven't we already been thanking them for 20 years?
Know what's even worse than Google on autopilot? Microsoft.
A Tesla?
Let me say it: HN would be a better place without the obligatory downvotes for MS-critical posts. The other large companies' employees somehow avoid doing this, why can't you? Are you really that insecure?
('you' here not meaning the poster I just commented, but, well, you know who.)
I also generally distrust and dislike Microsoft and have no affiliation with them but I just don't see how you made the leap to introducing Microsoft to the conversation in the first place. It just sounds like you have an axe to grind and are wedging it into the conversation. How is Microsoft connected to Google and/or coding competitions or the contents of the top level comment you replied under?
How is Microsoft connected to Google
When Google falters, Microsoft will be there to scavenge. I'm worried that Microsoft again will become the dominant software company.
Your comment hardly counts as "criticism." Drive by, low effort swipes at anything get downvoted a lot on HN.
Microsoft (as another giant monster of a company) at least has the decency to contain terrible parts (Windows, parts of Azure & and consumer goods) and amazing parts (Programming, parts of Azure and developer tools). Google is just uniformly bad.
Even though I deslike the way they screwed Sun, at very least they had the guts to push with Android, a relatively good managed OS, no matter what.
Something that WinDev killed with politics (Longhorn, Singularity, Midori,...).
> and despite what Google has become, it absolutely defined tech culture.
I don't think that was a good thing.
Some things were good, some things were bad. It's nuanced.
I think I'd prefer Google to care about their users more than their employees.
(And every time there's a story about Google employees rebelling, it's to make things even better for the employees and continue ignoring the users.)
This doesn't benefit users. Quite the opposite. This is all about Google placating the activist hedge fund investors. I think employees typically want users to have better user experiences.
I think employees generally want to get good performance reviews, which comes from demonstrating impact and good numbers on charts. Satisfying users doesn't do that because it doesn't scale.
Why not champion for both?
Is there any other, more gracious, way to interpret this as Google retiring for on being Google, if so I’d like to know. I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal. The biggest impact was to have thousands perhaps millions of coders and researchers see Google as the place to be. As the place that gets it. The Mecca of coderdom, if you will.
Now they are just another corporation.
I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.
I hate how "normal" of a company google is becoming. Closing down services and products not because they aren't profitable, but because they aren't profitable enough. They've really lost their way the last few years.
In the late 2000's/early 2010's, google was pictured as the "fun" place to work. In part due to their coding competitions and the various other events they held for students throughout the year. Everyone I knew wanted to work for google. Now? everyone sees FAANG just the same as any other company.
Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere.
It's been a long time coming.
Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).
> For a long time, they succeeded.
I'm not sure I'd give them that much credit in executing on any strategy.
Google sat on perhaps the biggest moat any recent company has known. They had cash to burn for decades and to their credit put a lot of that towards employee happiness.
But I'm not sure they ever really got anything off the ground for the "post" search era.
youtube, android, chrome, maps, google doc, drive to name a few.
It's hard to be the scrappy and disruptive company when you've established the reputation that all of your new products efforts are a probably just months away from being showcased on https://killedbygoogle.com.
I wonder what would happen if they spun stuff off instead of killing stuff. Keep 20% ownership, it's an alternative to layoffs.
>We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms.
Cue Amazon's efforts to stay away from 'Day 2'...
The more profits a company makes, the more they stand to lose, so they avoid risks.
> Most of the people I know who wanted to work at google, and a few that worked at google, now have higher paying, more enjoyable, and more stable jobs elsewhere
Honest question (this is really not a challenge), care to share where? I always thought of the FAANGs (collectively) giving the best compensation in the business. Which companies are paying more than Google but with more stability?
I've been really happy at Zipline. My salary is comparable to when I was at Google, and my equity has way more potential. As far as stability goes, I can't imagine a company being more supportive of its employees.
It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that this triggers my fight or flight response https://getzipline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/rainbow-zo...
Lol, we're flyzipline.com
Oh that's way cooler!
There is absolutely no way your salary is comparable. Are you only counting base and not tcomp?
edit: Ah, he's counting start-up equity as not worthless. That's definitely one way to value it.
I was talking about base salary. Zipline has been very proactive about making adjustments to stay fair and competitive, and I have only positive things to say. Regarding total compensation, yes Zipline equity is riskier than Google stock grants. I'm not going to share details, but so far it's trending favorably.
I've never worried about compensation details so much, and instead tried to find projects with interesting technical problems that bring intrinsic value to humanity, and a company of people worth spending my life with. My first job out of school, my salary was 40k below other offers I had. It just seemed like the best use of my time and energy. In time it brought me what I can only describe as an embarrassment of riches. My coworkers on the self driving car project at Google were perhaps the most brilliant people I've ever met. To paraphrase Zipline's CEO, they want employees doing the best work of their lives, and it's a marathon rather than a sprint. I have countless examples of the company, its employees, and its management going above and beyond. We're literally saving lives, too.
Google's equity is cash. Ziplines is not real. I would much rather work at Zipline but given the delta in cost I would rather not forgo $1-200K a year to work there given bay area housing costs.
Each person has their own risk tolerance. Not taking on any risk at all is certainly safe, but also limiting. I've always taken a probabilistic "expected value" approach when weighing financial decisions, and so far it's worked out favorably. I don't think it's fair to conflate liquidity with reality. My equity in Zipline is real enough, at least to the Internal Revenue Service!
A few yeas back several of them moved to netflix, and a few moved to airbnb and uber. I'm sure google still pays executives well above any other company, the people I knew at the time were fairly inexperienced and new to the field, and from what I heard google seemed to undervalue them relative to what other Bay Area companies were offering at the time.
Of course, this was a few years back, I'm not sure if the landscape has changed now for better or for worse.
This doesn't exactly answer your question but some FAANGS pay better than others, and its related to the "desirability" of the company. Eg. Amazon started beating out Google's pay, since people wanted to work at google, and had to be coheres to working at amazon.
I can't answer where pays better than FAANG, but companies in the bay (eg. Uber) are starting to approach the salary. Even smaller no-name bay companies are starting to match on base salary (equity+bonus is harder to match).
OK, thanks, that pretty much is how I saw it. E.g. I definitely knew some FAANGs pay better than others (have heard from an Amazon recruiter straight up "We never lose people due to compensation"), but haven't heard of other companies paying more (unsurprisingly given the profit margins of the FAANGs).
Thus, I'm going to be a little skeptical when I hear about people taking higher paying jobs with more stability elsewhere.
> Even smaller no-name bay companies are starting to match on base salary (equity+bonus is harder to match).
FWIW- I see a lot of places with matching or better base than FANG, but it's precisely because the equity at FAANG is so high.
The only places I see with meaningfully higher pay than FAANG + hot tech companies of the day (ex. Doordash, Datadog, ...) are hedge funds. Curious if there is anywhere else
One thing that complicates this is that Google (and probably the rest of FAANG but I don’t have experience there) is happy to severely downlevel people versus the positions they could get elsewhere. They also aggressively cut compensation if you live outside of SF/NYC. I’ve done a couple stints as an L4 SWE at Google and it is one of the worst paying places I’ve worked - but that’s because I’m comparing it to larger scope roles at smaller companies. Whereas yeah Staff or Director at Google is pretty hard to compete with.
> I’ve done a couple stints as an L4 SWE at Google
I’m curious. Does this mean you’ve left Google and returned multiple times at the same level while having better jobs elsewhere?
Not to be critical but why? (I ask because I’m considering returning to old places down/equileveled after being laid off somewhere and curious your reasons)
Yep, that’s exactly what I did. I came back during COVID (after leaving to move away from an office five years prior) and chose to return at the level I left at rather than deal with leetcode interviews. It was a rough personal time for me (two kids under five during COVID daycare shutdowns) and I wanted the stability/benefits of the big G, and didn’t want to take the risk of an interview that I didn’t have time/energy to prepare for.
I feel a little bit bad because I very much used their benefits and then left again to go to a more appropriately leveled job. But going back to L4 at a megacorp was kind of mind numbing, and the compensation got so bad after the stock drop and location based pay cuts that I couldn’t justify staying any longer.
Internships? There are some people who spent every summer in college as Google interns
L4 at Google is basically “mid level” aka you’ve proven yourself past a college hire but you’re not a senior engineer with lots of experience.
So doing a few jobs as an L4 is what’s unexpected because after experience at another role, and additional knowledge gained, etc ideally they’d be able to return as L5+.
Most of those aren't really the huge pulls. Sure Google was "fun" and offered good benefits, but it was also incredibly stable despite it's competitive edge and "fastmoving-ness".
After the massive layoffs that dwarfed any previous ones at Google (combined), that's no longer a pull to joining Google over other major techs.
Worked at Google in the early 2010s and it was still a bit quirky/different, not enterprise at all ... but they were hiring armies of project managers, agile coaches, multiple layers of HR specialists ...
> I hate how "normal" of a company google is becoming. Closing down services and products not because they aren't profitable, but because they aren't profitable enough.
What specific services and products are you thinking of there? How do you know they were profitable?
Just to be pedantic: not profitable enough doesn't necessarily imply profitable.
Consider, eg, shutting down their (Stadia's) game studio before the release of their first game. First release was scheduled a few months later, with no significant delays having occurred. Nevertheless, shutdown.
No one would expect it to have made a profit without a release. But apparently there was no way they could be profitable enough to warrant keeping.
As a nerdy kid growing up, Google always felt like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to me. There was somewhat of a feeling of mystery about the things they were working on, and when things like Gmail were unveiled it felt like such a wonder. Now they just seem like a worse version of Microsoft to me, at least Microsoft knows how to deal with enterprises.
> at least Microsoft knows how to deal with enterprises.
For what it's worth, this was a big part of why I had a positive image of Google. Enterprises are boring, especially when it comes to technology. They make boring decisions about technology because they are almost always made based on bullet lists of half-truths, rather than by the people who actually have to use it.
Google seemed to make things for the users. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, none of these had feature parity with their competitors at the time, but they were just so much better to use that people abandoned those enterprise products, even if their company was the one paying for them, and Google's popularity skyrocketed.
Many years ago my university asked the students to decide between Google and Microsoft for the (student) email platform. The impression I got from IT folks I knew was that they were strongly in favor of Microsoft. But when both companies were asked to make presentations to the students, I remember leaving the Microsoft one thinking they weren't even trying.
> Enterprises are boring
Boring is good, sometimes. Especially when boring means "reliable" and "gets things done without being the center of attention".
Scott Hanselman's old analogy here is that enterprise software is something like the "dark matter" of the software universe. It's obviously boring, and mostly kind of hidden, but yet still so heavily influences the gravity all around it.
On the other side, if you live by the "exciting" technologies, you sometimes die by the "flash-in-the-pan" effect. It's unfortunate for Google that they seem determined to prove that in the ways that they support and maintain products.
Agreed on all points. Once I hit the real world (working for a large soulless enterprise like a lot of people end up in), and trying to deal with Google for G-suite was a terrible experience. So IMO, they’re not great at either thing anymore.
Nah, it's still like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You have people turning into blueberries with unknown fate, kids getting stuck in pipes with no way out and now 12,000 going down the garbage chute.
The Oompa Loompas are the sycophants that are still drinking the Kool-Aid.
This is exactly how it felt for me. I always wanted to work there as a kid/teen. I no longer feel much desire to.
Google has never looked more tired and more prone to be overtaken.
Which Google are you referring to exactly? With its many successful products, I don’t see Google being overtaken anytime soon.
Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade.
“The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
>Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades.
(After going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, would they respond to a threat by jumping on a real emerging technology, or a buzzword technology? That's why you can't cut your researchers and simply bring them back when your competitors are getting close.)
Companies like Google don't really get "overtaken" per se.
Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.
>nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I know many non nerd complainers, but they don't know any alternatives.
Neither do the nerd complainers, apart from scoping their search to a few trusted information repositories (Reddit, StackOverflow, &c).
Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
Good news: kagi.com is mostly a shell over Google and Bings apis, but they do quality control and they are building their own index.
I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore.
It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report.
Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
I'm not a Kagi subscriber, but I'll be. Yesterday I was looking for a pdf reader app with a specific feature. Nor Google nor Bing helped me; result pages were almost 100% ads (most by Adobe). I was giving up. My first try with Kagi gave me exactly what I wanted.
Exactly.
Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
Yup. Nailed it.
The founder of kagi.com - " I was grateful to be the VP of Product at GoDaddy (2016 - 2018)." Thanks, but no thanks.
And YouTube - although TikTok is winning in some segments: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/tiktok-is-crushing-youtube...
n=1 but the built-in Maps on iphone seems to be fine these days. Doesn't steer me wrong, integrates with a car. Not sure what the moat here is other than name recognition or current popularity. Perhaps app integration or API consumption?
Apple Maps, and the huge number of products based on OpenStreetMap are perfectly fine as maps. And actually, even better than Google Maps in many cases.
But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
Yea, I'm planning a vacation, and using a saved lists of places in Google maps to keep track of all the places I'm interested in seeing. Clicking on one of the saved places brings up all the information you mention.
Clicking the auto-link of my address on an iOS device will open a route in Apple Maps to an address with a different street name on the wrong U.S. state. Apple Maps has come a long way, but it still doesn’t cut it.
Honestly Apple Maps isn't even particularly good outside of the US and a few European countries. Roads are constantly out of date and can barely keep up and landmarks and businesses in tons of major cities aren't close to correct
It's not particularly good within the US outside of a few of the big cities.
Dallas has a lot of parallel highways/roads, and Apple Maps seems to get really confused and have to recalculate the route every few minutes when I'm down there. Google seems to understand it perfectly and simply doesn't do that.
Not to mention its complete inability to reroute sometimes if you take the wrong turn. It'll keep yelling to return to the route over and over instead of routing a turnaround somewhere.
This can happen if you've lost the data connection, perhaps? In my (UK) experience, Apple Maps is perfectly good at re-routing. Even if you haven't made a wrong turn, it'll sometimes suggest new routes anyway based on live traffic.
Accuracy of local business listings on Apple is still far behind Google. And Apple's new business admin interface is only slightly less trash than it's old one.
Depends on the location. Driving directions are not available at all for Georgia and Armenia, for example, though as simple maps they work ok.
As others have said: POI data. If you don't have (the cancer that is) Yelp installed, you don't even get reviews.
Google has been "just another company" for a while now, but I disagree with "prone to be overtaken". Yes, Google Search is a dead product. The moneymakers aren't, though: AdSense keeps on trucking, fuelled by billions of annual YouTube watch-minutes piling on top of each other.
For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.
Apple (and later Spotify) demonstrated that a better quality product can beat the free offering.
Honestly I was searching for something the other day and between displaying an excessive number of YouTube links (was not in a position to watch a video) and the adverts it was less useful that Yahoo! Circa 2006.
I have long since switched to Kagi and I am a happy paying customer.
I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that.
What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out.
No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing).
Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
It is the he/him culture who has corroded the giant from the inside.
Any source for this?
I would say the change towards “less exciting” is driven by risk-averse management. Even their latest “risk” (Bard) was driven by Microsoft’s Bing release. I would even argue that releasing Bard represents the lower-risk approach. The risk incurred by being silent is undoubtedly what moved Google executives to rush out a half-baked and even more poorly executed “demo”.
What does this even mean?
Are you capable of guessing the gender of any given Chinese/Indian/African person by their name without being told?
> I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal.
I can confidently say that this is not the case in India. I have a countless list of people (including myself) who received emails from Google recruiters for advancing to later rounds of Code Jam or securing a top rank in a Kick Start round. Even if people missed out on top ranks, they would put their results on their resume/LinkedIn and would get attention from recruiters anyway. Needless to say, these were strong signals for recruiters, especially for university students. Based on the skewed demand-supply here, they were closer to necessary than sufficient.
> Now they are just another corporation.
the Google Summer of Code still exists (and that other program for high school kids I think).
I think those were the nicest things they did back in the day, and I don't know of any other corp doing it.
Looks like Summer of Code is still happening in 2023: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/02/mentor-organizatio...
I wonder if AlphaCoder was the writing on the wall? Go out on top rather than tainted with scandal and unhappiness polluting memories?
They have been just another corporation for a while.
The great layoff and such things just made it official.
Google is winding down and that's ok! There many exciting things to work on, and those things should be owned by the engineers working on them.
as Google retiring for on being Google
Can you learn to construct a grammatically sentence before you decide click the submit button?
There is a much more civil way to word that.
> as Google retiring for on being Google
I can't tell what this phrase is supposed to mean. Can you explain/edit your comment?
It seems like they meant "as Google retiring from being Google"
It's been an interesting experience watching the primo crop of Silicon Valley sweethearts coming out of age and turning into this generation's IBMs, Oracles, and Ciscos. "He who slays the dragon shall become one".
The trick is to slay the dragon and then go home. If you stick around the gold and treasure for too long, that’s when it starts to get dangerous.
There's a roguelike cyberpunk game I like to play called Neon Chrome. You play a hacker who can take over the body of an "asset" in a cyberpunk arcology, with the goal of overthrowing the Overseer who rules the arcology.
The plot twist being that with the Overseer disposed of, your character takes his place, and the second playthrough features a NEW "hacker" player character who etc. And so the cycle continues.
Parallels to the history of Google are left as an exercise.
This was also the final plot device in the original Diablo game.
Atlassian nailed this. So has Vercel - do one thing perfectly.
What does Atlassian do perfectly? And please don't use the J word.
JIRA.
You gone and done it. Also JIRA is wack.
But can you actually name a competing product that does a better job?
I'll admit I've not looked particularly hard, but as far as I can tell nobody has a competing product, so Atlassian basically owns the whole field at this time.
ClickUp, Monday.com, Linear, Wrike, Asana, Smartsheet, Teamwork.
There are lots of good modern alternatives to Jira. The reason people still use them is the same as why Oracle DBs are still so popular – they have a large sales team and corporate contacts, and so their products are pushed down your throat.
My whiteboard and the sticky notes it holds outperform JIRA all the time - 100% uptime, clear and obvious process flows, haven't needed a service ticket ever.
Jira is by far one of the worst pieces of software that i have used. It has no business being this slow… and don’t get me started on the DB and accessing raw data.
>Atlassian
>One thing perfectly
I don't think putting all your eggs in one basket is a smart long term strategy.
Interesting that just a few days ago they posted about opening basically the same thing but focused on ML https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/02/MLOlympiad2023.htm... Interesting contrast and I guess a sign of the changing tides.
Am I missing something or are these just regular Kaggle competitions, but with no prizes? What is google offering, other than the branding? Why are competitors motivated to take part?
Because people like competing. Because people like solving problems.
There is often beauty in good competition problems. And you can even learn something along the way.
Sure but regular kaggle competitions have all those qualities, usually with a $50K+ prize to boot.
Google seems to have skipped out on the prize and substituted branding
I think there is a difference between the pro-like competitions with high emphasis on the top competitors where high prizes make sense to attract and reward the best.
At the same time at least Google Code Jam which I participated in, is an event for the masses where while there are winners in the end the focus is on great experience of thousands students and recreationals who participate.
When they started the Google code jams, around 20 years ago, for the initial few years they used TopCoder as the platform. So it may play out that way.
line in resume?
Bingo! It just means that developer as a job is on the way out and in 20 years everyone is going to be a prompt engineer. Hence getting rid of coding competitions and sponsoring ML competitions instead.
20 years from now prompt engineering wont be required. We might still call it prompt engineering tho.
That's a good point, they probably couldn't think of a good way to prevent cheating with ML assist. They even have their own AlphaCode that'd beat most competitors.
Today - everyone googling on SO to solve problems. Future - everyone will be prompting AI to solve problems. As long as we all get basically the same tools, the difference comes from the developer.
Electricity is also a huge productivity booster, but it doesn't advantage any one person, all have access to the same energy infrastructure. Youtube has educational and artistic content for everyone, but we need to actually use it to get the benefits - it depends on us.
I bet strong money against that.
Before jumping on the "Google is now Oracle" bandwagon, curious with anyone with even a little inside baseball knowledge can comment on the reasoning behind this. Because if it's for penny-pinching, "we need to be more efficient" reasons, then yeah, I'm ready to jump on the bandwagon too. But someone else posited it may be more that they want to focus on new skills needed for AI, for example (i.e. "Software 2.0" vs. "Software 1.0" skills, to borrow a term from a recent HN post) - in that case, would make sense.
All that said, by shutting down without announcing a reason, Google must've known people would speculate and likely assume it's because of the "Google = Oracle" reasoning. So I'm certainly leaning towards the "this is pretty sad" side of things.
They've found Code Jam to be a pain for a long time now, because the results never align with their ideology. Men (mostly eastern European and Asian) dominate these competitions to such an extent that Google created another Code Jam that excludes them, so women had a chance to win prizes. Also, Code Jam is often won by the same people year on year, look at the leader boards for the previous years.
I mean, things like chess have had women-only tournaments for years, that seems acceptable to me.
Still, I think it's pretty sad that "results don't conform to our ideological results" equates to "it must be a bad metric, let's shut it down!" Hope it's not the same kind of thinking that led to ElectronConf being cancelled a couple years ago for "not having a diverse slate of speakers", despite the fact that all proposals where chosen in a blinded process explicitly set up in a way to eliminate bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
Yeah I’ve always been a bit leery of code competitions. I saw a lot of undergrads spend a lot of effort on these contests, and I was never convinced it was the best use of their time (especially because the university I did my graduate studies at had a professor who put a lot of effort into running the competitive programming club).
I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!
There are some good things about coding competitions, if done well:
* Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms
* Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite)
* Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it
At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.
These are all, of course, things one should learn in an algorithms class.
CodeJam is practically just an extended version of algorithm/data struct class.
Such contests seem to be just a fun way to get students interested in algorithmics. Many of those who become passionate about Computer Science due to competitive programming go on to get PhD in CS and contribute with their research. Some highlights among Code Jam winners: Tiancheng Lou (won Code Jam in 2008 and 2009, went on to earn his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Marek Cygan (won Code Jam in 2005, earned his PhD from University of Warsaw in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Gennady Korotkevich (won Code Jam 8 times between 2014-2022, as of 2019 was a PhD student at ITMO University) (sources: Wikipedia and Linkedin)
The first two have published some influential works during their academic careers:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=df8TSy4AAAAJ
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Vjo4Tg4AAAAJ
I wonder what the total number of research papers and citations of all Code Jam winners would be. Sadly, it's hard to find reliable info on most of them.
There is no correlation between a person's ability to solve such problems and his ability to do research.
Maybe they thought everyone would just plug it in to chatGPT
Some earlier possibly-informed speculation from SJvN at The Register a month back:
<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>
Steven's been around the community a long time and is pretty well connected, so may know more than he'd stated explicitly in that piece.
As someone who participated in their competitions for years, this feels really sad.
The decision to shut down everything at once also looks hasty. Why not at least leave the website running for the times things will get better? Many competitions skipped some difficult years but returned.
Thanks for all these years, Google, still hoping that this decision could be revised.
Google, Apple, and perhaps 2-3 other companies, have the weird characteristic that they are unimaginably enormous, AND the vast majority of their value is actually goodwill.
It's true that Apple makes good devices and Google does good search, but their competitors are good enough.
What distinguishes Apple and Google from their competitors is that we like them more.
Not "we" the technical literati, but "we" billions of users.
As a result, they are SO careful about maintaining that goodwill. But is this careful as in afraid, or careful as in focused?
Google spent time building it, but now seems to want only not to screw up.
Apple is still building. It's always trying to build it, probably because it spent its 1990's adolescence as an outcast.
Twitter and Facebook are similarly large and had similar initial stories, but of late have induced massive distrust. People are there only because they have to be, and they're struggling.
Apple and Google see Twitter and Facebook as examples of what NOT to do with your goodwill.
Apple's growth and technical chops keeps investors at bay. But Alphabet's sprawling failures have heightened criticism, as Google-X and other nice-to-have's haven't turned out any measurable benefit (and measurement is how Sundar justifies his strategies).
So fingers-crossed that Google's quiet retrenchment doesn't result in a Twitter explosion. I'm not confident that switching out Sundar would help more than it hurts (which is the FUD that he lives by).
More importantly, the industry-wide refocusing on AI produces lots of demo-ware, but no business on a scale that could grow Google or Microsoft. That coming implosion worries me.
What's lost in the rush to AI is the question of bureaucracy: how to keep these massive organizations from being self-serving, particularly to the extent they engage with the outsourcing and consultancy that drive financialization.
WFH likely increases bureaucracy by privileging process and work-product over brainstorming and risk-taking, so my bet is still on Apple weathering the storm better than the others.
Apple sells several devices that are absolutely unique on the market. Not saying they are better, but if that's what users want (and many users do want that), they are not replaceable by something else.
What a weird premise. You really think anyone is buying iPhones because of the personal goodwill they feel about Apple or Tim or whatever?
Yes. Apple is built different. No other major tech company has the intense user focus that Apple does, and Apple users repay Apple's regard for them with good will -- buying and evangelizing their products, etc. Many of us know at least one "Apple person" who stays within the Apple ecosystem to the extent possible -- and loves it. I know several.
People don't really have the same good will for Google though. It's an ad company. They simply tolerate it.
> No other major tech company has the intense user focus that Apple does
That sounds like something that might actually improve the products.
Absolutely. It might not be so difficult to migrate to Android. I don't though.
Yes.
I have won a couple of t-shirts in Google code Jam and got to the third round once.
One year I was competing from my honey moon.
I was never really good but it was one of the competitions I have greatly enjoyed. Especially when one could still run the code locally and submit solutions in any language possible.
There were pepole who made an effort to solve every problem is different language.
I haven't competed last 5 or so years, but I will shed a tear for Google Code Jam.
It seems like large companies are like government: Just like there's a power vacuum that causes governments to exist, there's an economic vacuum that causes large companies to exist. The question is not if these things will exist, but how and why -- and especially with what limits.
It's sad to see Google -- the once very promising small company with big ideas -- getting sucked into the vacuum.
> there's an economic vacuum that causes large companies to exist
The size of these vacuums is a direct result of policy. Tax policy, liability policy, antitrust policy -- there are a dozen levers we could pull to create a corporate landscape that looks very different. But yes, with the levers in their current positions, what we see here is inevitable.
That's because large companies are good. They're easier to regulate and more productive. If you're a small company, that means you're not good enough to get big, and if you've met SMB owners they're often the most reactionary class of people.
Ha, a genuine pro-monopoly tool, in the flesh! Amazing.
Small companies require more overhead (per size) for compliance, yes, but they also have to compete with each other and they can't fight back nearly as effectively with lawyers and lobbyists.
> If you're a small company, that means you're not good enough
...at the game of monopoly, which is not a game any of us should be particularly invested in.
This is a forum run by a VC company, you know. Turning small companies into large ones is the whole point!
Though it's not the full Thiel monopolies are good philosophy. I merely think that large companies are not all monopolies, and that they can be monopsonies too, which can be good for consumers. (And they can also pay better and treat employees better than small companies because of the reasons I said above.)
If YCombinator / VC discussions about high level corporate strategy have not convinced you that megacorps are bad for humanity, I suspect nothing will. Moats, two-sided markets, network effects, blitzscaling -- the victory conditions are very clearly based on avoiding the competitive pressure that is supposed to keep companies in check. Cheating, in other words. It's easy to understand why one would be eager to obtain such a victory, but it's less clear why one would be eager to enable this misbehavior in general. Are you a "temporarily embarrassed Zuckerberg" or merely a simp who has found that the fattest coattails make for the best riding? Either way, yuck.
> they can also pay better and treat employees better than small companies because of the reasons I said above
On the other side of every "easy dollar" is someone getting squeezed hard. Google employees and shareholders love the easy ad dollars, but everyone else pays through the nose for marketing. Apple employees and shareholders love the easy app store dollars, but independent devs and end customers get taken to the cleaners. Your ability to only see one side of this equation represents an extreme failure of imagination. We all pay a heavy price to keep things this way.
Small businesses are a very good thing for local communities, if only because they engage people in productive work, enable them to feed their families, enrich local communities with more available goods and services, and promote community building and engagement. All business (in the classical sense, meaning productive work) is a good thing.
Large businesses are the ones that tend to abuse their power, gather data inappropriately, promote monopolies, squash competitors using underhanded tactics, make inappropriate financial deals, lie to investors, and rent-seek at a grand scale -- in other words, all the anti-patterns of badly regulated capitalism.
Monopolies being bad is an axiom of some kinds of political theory that doesn't seem always true. Like I said, they're easier to regulate because there's less of them - that's how utility companies work. And often they're also monopsonies, which means most "monopoly" analysis doesn't work on them.
And mom-and-pop businesses are totally capable of bad behavior and especially are worse to their employees! If they're too small to have HR departments they are perfectly capable of doing business based on personal grudges, wage theft, and accidentally doing things up to and including hiring slave labor.
> lie to investors
This one's funny because startup investors actually demand you lie to them (because they think it shows the right personality traits for a CEO, psychotic optimism), whereas large companies are public and the SEC will sue you if you lie in your investor reports.
I often think of markets in pseudo-evolutionary terms. The types and sizes of companies that survive are those that fit the environmental pressures.
One common trend in evolution is toward gigantism in places of intense competition. Whales, for example, may be as large as they are to avoid having to compete or be eaten by smaller animals. Being bigger means they eat more, leaving fewer resources for competitors.
It can be quite the winning strategy.
At least so long as the environment can provide enough stability to feed such large organisms in the manner in which they are evolved to exploit.
For companies, being large means you can always buy the competition or make sure the barrier to entry is too high for competition (thinner profit margins, "free" services, regulatory capture, etc.).
It works, and quite well. These large corporations can withstand enormous financial shocks, and if they can't, they get purchased by those that can.
For most mature markets this generally seems to shake out to most of the product area being divided between two or three big players and a host of smaller companies at the edges.
Oddly enough, when things are stable being large may be a winning strategy, but it is also very fragile and if the whole system gets disrupted, can be the first to fail when things change too much.
is this a sign that finding developers is not that hard anymore, and they don't need to organize these competitions with the hiring budget?
Or maybe they've laid off the group that was in charge of organizing these competitions? Or will soon?
They did, indeed, lay off the group in charge of organizing these competitions (or at least the Google Code Jam Program Manager).
https://twitter.com/jonathanirvings/status/16220755214872084...
Probably more a sign that these competitions don't help with hiring in any substantial way.
I believe they do help, but certainly hiring doesn't seem to be a priority for them at the moment.
It's strange that they decided to discontinue the entire competition instead of just cancelling this year's one, though.
nah, it's google shutting down a random thing like always
Google Graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Looks like Cat Allman was let go in the big layoffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Allman
I'm guessing that's the reason for this. I wonder what this means for Summer of Code.
From my perspective as a maintainer in a project that's been in GSoC last 5 years, I'd be way more concerned if Stephanie Taylor was laid off (and she hasn't yet) as she's been the absolute face of it on the mailing lists and point of contact into Google.
It's weird that there is no reason given here. It's not that I expected a real reason, but there isn't even a fake PR buzzword-filled explanation, there's just... nothing.
This usually means that the real reasons are not particularly flattering.
So after 20 years - who won? Who is the Best Coder?
Holy shit I didn't expect an answer but yup... There he is.
Won nearly every single coding jam (8/9) he was in, highest code force rating of all time, 6x consecutive IOI gold, yea he’s the cut and dry winner.
Also known as 'tourist'. He is the best in the world on several platforms, including codeforces[1] which has the cultural leadership now for algo coding competitions.
Wow. This guy looks good.
The real Best Coder was the friends we made along the way.
The real Best Coder was inside us all along.
Speak for yourself
Competitions like this one are good at finding people who are the best at winning coding competitions. "Best coder" on the other hand is impossible to define yet alone solve for.
Jeff Dean of course: https://www.informatika.bg/jeffdean
The Elves are leaving Middle-Earth.
(for those who might miss this reference)
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
We now have to do a formal expense report for friday drinks in the office.
They've also taken away the company credit card so that all employees must go through the dreaded Finance hurdle to have any fun.
I was wondering what was happening with Google's open source team notably Chris DiBona.
Riffed, as noted by SJvN at The Register (<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>) and discussed here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576>) about a month ago .
Chris made a brief comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563641>.
Code Jam/Summer of Code was a great indicator from a hiring perspective ... When I see a junior candidate who participated in those, it was always a good sign. I wonder if they are trying to reduce "training" of talent that could be potentially made into competition.
It seems all of the things that made Google an attractive company to work for have been slowly fading away through the recent years. Many of these big tech companies started off being scrappy and fun, which arguably is what made them so innovative.
I can't imagine this costs much to keep running.
Quite sad to see. It seems like they're still doing Summer of Code and CTF events, at least?
Was just going to ask about Summer of Code
In other words..
“We have enough coders, thank you!”
( pssst … actually we have too many )
I attended a Google "coding day" event years ago in Boulder, CO, while in college. It wasn't "Code Jam," but I can't remember the name for the life of me. It was a sort of lab-format hackathon where I was placed on a team and we had to build something (after being given some vague prompt). Google employees would roam around and answer questions, give direction, etc,; and prizes were given at the end. I believe the year I attended was the last before this particular event was cancelled. I can't really argue for it to continue, I don't feel like I got much out of it besides a day off-campus and a free lunch; but it was kind of fun.
I really liked Hashcode, even if I've only participated in 3-4 different events, this was my favourite. One of my favourite Google things actually.
Sad to see it go, but hey, it's their thing, they can do whatever they want with it.
Have they announced a reason behind this. I was new to the competitions, just started last year and was looking forward to another year of them. They were a great break from my college course work on the days they happened
Thank you Sundar for getting rid of the frivolous, Silicon-Valley-esque things like coding competitions for kids, extricating all of the humanity and decency that made Google so inefficient with money, and for doubling down on your focus to turn Google into the next iteration of Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It's exactly what this world needs, so you are the perfect leader for this.
That's hardly fair.
Cisco, Oracle and IBM actually have some customer service.
Cisco does -- if you pay for it.
As for Oracle -- never dealing with them again if I can help it.
If you spend a million dollars on Oracle hardware they at least give you a human being who is authorized to fix things for you and diagnose your problems.
Meanwhile in google land, you can literally be bring in millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue on your channel and asking for help from your dedicated Youtube contact/representative can get your entire channel retroactively demonitized
That creator seems to have found some help eventually, because their channel isn't age-restricted now and they're still posting videos on YT.
It looks like it took social media shaming and backchannels, similar to the occasional desperate post on HN for support for locked accounts and such.
If you watch the video, they explain how 1) none of the videos that they pulled clips from to make the highlight reel were age restricted, 2) this exact situation occurred last year, and the youtube rep assured them this was a mistake and it wouldn't happen this time, 3) the Youtube rep once again reassured them that this was absurd, 4) after reaching out to the rep and being told their complaint was being reviewed, videos that were years old suddenly became age restricted, 5) the rep apologized and explained that the new age restrictions were as intended.
This means that even if you have 2 million subscribers and a youtube rep for support, asking google for help is just as likely to ruin you as actually fix anything.
He says "My entire channel is being age-restricted and demonetized." That's not the case now, but I don't know if he was exaggerating, he misunderstood, or YT reversed course.
In any case it didn't ruin him. He's still making videos for YT.
Sundar is the Steve Ballmer of Google. And that's fine! Ballmer was a competent if uninspiring CEO: Microsoft under his leadership missed many new opportunities, but still made lots of money.
Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was not going to be the next Facebook, but Microsoft had to try and fail in order to learn those lessons.
The real question is who- if anyone- will be the Satya Nadella of Google, bringing the company back for a third act in the post-AI world. And maybe, in this new world, the limiting factor of human progress is not the number of CS grads who can solve coding puzzles.
Fully disagree with windows phone. It never reached enough maturity to be a true competitor to ios, but it absolutely could have won over android. the gui was truely innovative (with the « tiles » system), and the general feeling and smoothness was absolutely better than android. Microsoft missed a huge opportunity there. It never was a technical problem, MS knows how to make operating system. It was only a strategical one. Ballmer is 100% to blame for that.
The windows phone would never win over android.
Google is the web monopolist, and would never build apps like YouTube or Maps for a Windows phone product, since it would compete with Android, and not have the market share of the iphone.
Microsoft tried making their own YouTube app, which Google had taken down. Without access to the Google web products, a new phone ecosystem is going to be dead on arrival
Microsoft added back the YouTube app a few months later.
In terms of UI, Windows Phone was so far ahead of Android and iOS at the time (and in many areas still beats both of them. Android is still a mess). The Nokia Lumia series of phones also were solid with great cameras in an era of plastic Android phones.
I agree Microsoft flubbed the strategy, same with Zune where they had a technically superior product but no commitment.
Platform reboots killed any developer momentum they built - Windows Phone 8 apps were not backwards compatible with Windows Phone 7 which itself was a clean break with Windows Mobile. A lot of trending apps like Instagram and Snapchat never released apps on the platform, so you had to use third party knock-offs that chased private APIs. Microsoft did build some great social media integrations that tied your contacts into a single local profile across platforms (Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook).
They also kept rebranding and shuffling services on the phones - for example Zune became Xbox Music became Groove.
Windows phone was kneecapped by Sinofsky who abandoned .net for windows 8 app development for windows 8.
There were 200K apps in the windows phone store, that would have run on day one when windows 8 released. Instead Sinofsky wanted to kneecap devdiv, and created windows rt API, which was a C++ mess that led to developers completely abandoning the windows platform.
All app development on windows phone stopped when windows rt for windows 8 was announced. Windows phone was miles ahead of Android at that point. In terms of apps they had 200K in comparison to Androids 500-800K apps.
Overall, I don't understand this "that's fine."
No. It's not. Which is to say, why do we value "CEO makes money?" That's NOT valuable to me. Microsoft doesn't pay me, therefore the pure question of whether or not they make money is literally meaningless to me, and should be meaningless to you if you are not in their employ. I'm not saying it's bad either, but it's such a weird gut reaction.
Which is to say -- if you find out the CEO is making the company more money, you still do not yet have enough information as to whether they're good...
The CEO is answerable to the shareholders, who do get paid when the company makes money.
Right. A few more people that I also don't care about because I'm not one of them.
Well, millions of Americans are one of them, either directly or through their index funds, retirement funds, etc. When you said "I don't care", I assume you meant "I" as a representative of some larger public class.
Surely you understand that jrm4's interests, specifically, don't factor much into corporate/national decision-making?
1. The windows phone was actually well put (and I liked metro UI, as an apple person!), but suffered horribly from low population + tons of shit in their "app store" - iE: it was actually hard to find a non-scam facebook app!
2. Microsoft has an actual enterprise business that is stable and not prone to disruption, they can swallow huge projects that fail easily without endangering their cashflows. This is NOT true for google, search (their core channel for ads) is getting grilled in the new future by ChatBots + SocialCommerce + non-existing customer support + known to launch stuff only to kill it shortly after + many people hate/ignore google alltogether. It doesn't matter if they can build a better Bot on their own, these huge margins are gone now, innovators dilemma.
3. "post-AI world" for me means achieving technical singularity, and what comes afterwards is strictly not predictable, including the fact if humans continue to exist at all, let alone the concept of "programming jobs"
Demis Hassabis has my vote.
Microsoft had a diverse set of revenue sources through that period. Google makes 90% of their revenue through ads.
Microsoft could have very easily found another Ballmer instead and ended up very different today. Main takeaway is they aren't really comparable and we still don't know where the winds are blowing for Google.
All these companies are built on exploitation of cheap labour
> to pivot Microsoft into what it is today
You mean marginally less obnoxious than it used to be?
Hello, I am Cortana, would you like to play Bejeweled?
Sorry, that isn't fair, but still I think they were less obnoxious back in the Windows 3.1 days.
I think it depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at those sorts of things, Microsoft is far more obnoxious than they used to be.
If you're looking at business practices, they're a little less obnoxious than they used to be.
Make an attempt to say something you believe, instead of inventing beliefs for others.
I was stating my personal opinion in an (attempted) humorous way. I doubt anyone seriously thought I was summarizing anyone else. I truly apologize for being unfunny here.
There are two possible outcomes for a publicly traded company that has figured out how to make a lot of money over a long period
1. Continue to accrete new revenue sources and pivot slightly forever until you eventually do a bit of everything, "diversifying" to the point where you become in effect a small nation
2. Stick to your plan and go out of business
These are the two possible outcomes as a public company
3 - Split up and create value.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc are offensive companies in that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Microsoft in particular is held back by having to support the platforms. Office as a standalone company would be worth more than Microsoft.
Have you tried Office lately? Feels like all coding is done by 14yo olds that just discovered programming.
Also feature wise, why do I need a LinkedIn option on Excel.
But that’s what you get when there is 0 competition.
What we need in competition and anti-monopolistic policies. Not splitting up companies.
For starts let’s get rid of the fucking patents for all software.
They should merge IBM and Oracle and make Sundar the CEO. Apart from plastering ads in every nook and cranny and a stupid attempt to enter China, he has achieved nothing.
If Kurian promotes into the Global CEO role then it would immediately be complete
Sundar is a scapegoat.
I'm offering to play the scapegoat for him and only asking for half of his compensation.
I'll be his scapegoat for a mere 10th of what he makes! You can blame me for anything you dislike that Google does.
As a matter of fact, I think we could crowdfund this. Watch this space for a link to my Patreon, where you can pay a mere $10 per month to blame me for things that upset you.
If you'd like to sign up for my special High Flyers VIP pricing, you can even call me and rant at me for the decisions of companies and governments that bother you.
I can take it! The buck stops here!
Great idea! Reach out to Google board. They'd be thrilled to see double the talent at half the price.
He's CEO.
Responsibility falls on him at the end of the day to get this stuff right.
If internal politics are in the way of achieving high level goals it's the CEO's job to address those internal power games.
Corporate Executive Officers exist to take responsibility. That's the point.
Aside from the fact that most of Google's upper levels want this to happen, isn't it true that Sundar wants it to happen too?
Sundar is Leslie Nielsen when the pilots (Larry, Sergey, Eric) decide to get sick on dirigibles, parties, trying to become government tech czar, etc.
Nobody's flying the plane. It's on search ad autopilot and slowly crashing into the ground. Could make for one of the most catastrophic value destruction stories of our time.
He's such a bad CEO that I can't believe he's still in the seat. Just the way he let the employees revolt and embarrass him. If he had any dignity or pride he would have resigned then. He may know all the facts on how businesses should be run and is a good guy, but he has 0 leadership skills. Just an awful, terrible leader. The ChatGPT fiasco is further evidence the place has been mismanaged the last 8 years.
If a person is in a $200m per year job, they're primarily incentivized to keep the job for as long as possible. This one objective dwarfs any other consideration in every decision that the person makes.
And sure, 99% of his compensation is Google stock, but at those magnitudes the marginal utility of the dollar is zero. What's the difference between $100m and $200m anyway?
Agree 100%. This is what stifles innovation and kills companies, people moving into positions where they make more than they ever have before and their goal is look good to financial stakeholders and maintain their position as long as possible. Although difficult for other reasons, I think I prefer working with true visionaries.
How does the money factor in here?
Presumably sundar is motivated to remain CEO for as long as possible regardless of the specific motivations, right?
Whether he is motivated by earning a billion dollars over a decade or he’s achieved pure altruism and simply wants to make Google the greatest company in history doesn’t really matter. He can only achieve his goals if he remains CEO. And as a public company, that means keeping shareholders happy. No?
Every decision that we make factors in many variables that are weighed according to how important we perceive them to be. If one coefficient in that "equation" outclasses all others, to a rational person that would become the primary motivator.
>Whether he is motivated by earning a billion dollars over a decade or he’s achieved pure altruism and simply wants to make Google the greatest company in history doesn’t really matter. He can only achieve his goals if he remains CEO.
I don't buy this argument at all. For one, his goals are unknowable and might be what he plans to do with $200m/year, and he could justify anything to attain that $200m up to and including total destruction of the organization. Secondly, many people abdicate power if it's false power i.e. someone forces their hand in critical decisions. He hasn't done that presumably because $200m is more important to him than his pride or (Google) legacy.
$100,000,000
OK, so you can buy 10 mega yachts instead of only 5. You've got 30 vacation homes instead of just 10. How does this actually impact your life?
Because they don’t buy 30 vacation homes, they buy companies. Where the extra 100m goes a long way. I’m sure he is quite comfortable on 100m though.
Again - what difference does it make to your life, aside from empire-building, to have an extra $100m? Nothing. It's just greed.
To someone in the bottom 10%, I'm sure they think there's no appreciable difference between a $100k/y annual income and $1M annual income. How much rent and food can one person consume, after all?
As others in the thread are trying to explain, there is a huge stratification at those levels. A $1B net-worther has a very different ability to project his will onto the world than a $.1B net-worther, or a $10B net-worther. That matters to them.
It's ability to do things and have an impact on the world. You can afford to try out crazy projects that require enormous amounts of capital. Obviously no one needs this, but there are plenty of things to spend your money on that isn't buying 30 of the same thing.
How much does that motivate a person though?
Observably, quite a lot, considering these CEOs are dedicating so much of their life towards this when they could easily stop working now and be rich forever if they only cared about holiday homes and boats.
I think certain people a lot. As your wealth grows so do your ambitions for sone people. Self actualization is a pyramid onto its own. Power, influence, and legacy are attractive. Of course so is living a quiet life.
Is there a backup for all the problems and solutions?
I'm working on tools to backup problems and analyses, including images and sample inputs: https://github.com/ghuysmans/ccwg-archive. Their API is open.
Do you know any other projects working on something like this? I imagine most commenters here would be very grateful for a google competition archive. The reason I'm asking is that I'm very surprised to see your repo/project with so little attention (in this thread and on GitHub).
But why
ChatGPT
The program who can't answer anything that is not the stackoverflow answer you get when you Google your prompt? I don't follow.
ChatGPT solved many of the AoC 2022 problems with no assistance, and those are written in an even more obfuscated style than GCJ. I imagine the LLMs of this summer and next summer would blow through most of the early rounds of GCJ with ease.
AoC tasks are much easier than usual Competitive Programming tasks. AoC is pretty much undergraduate class level (whereas some Competitive Programming problems ended up being turned into actual papers) and the main difficulty in tasks is in implementing the solution rather than coming up with a tricky idea. Also, in AoC time complexity doesn't matter at all - all you need is any solution. Classic Competitive Programming problems have both a memory and a time limit. Most of them have a simple brute force solution but the trick is finding an efficient algorithm.
However, I can see Google execs thinking the same and using this explanation as the reason to close the competition.
is this because people will just use chatGPT to cheat?
I know a competitive programmer who actually has been to Code Jam finals. He says ChatGPT wouldn't be able to solve the majority of tasks that are used in algorithmic competitions like Code Jam. ChatGPT might be able to do some of the simplest tasks, but Code Jam had a few rounds of increasing difficulty and at some point it wouldn't help much. The last round is actually in-person so there would be no influence of ChatGPT there at all (Edit: correction, the final round used to be in person, but it has moved online since Covid)
Also, even if people do use ChatGPT, that shouldn't be a problem - it's a tool like any other. Programmers use tools all the time. Is it cheating if someone uses Wolfram Alpha or Stack Overflow to solve a programming task at hand?
Maybe Google's Bard does better at this type of task.
They still hold coding competitions, they just call them job interviews and take all the fun/fun parts out of it and cause you to hate programming puzzles instead of loving them
Maybe Google is trying to shake up their diversity of thinking, and next on the chopping block are the Leetcode hazing filter, and the misaligned promotion system?
One can dream.
I can't imagine this cost very much to keep running.
Google is still a company where (especially for projects like this) the work is done by engineers volunteering time outside of their core job description.
It may be as simple as "Morale dropped too low for the folks there to feel like it was worth it to continue," or "They let go of the people who were volunteering their 20% time to make this happen."
And spending time even if it's ostensibly "your" time outside of your core job on something that no one up your management chain cares about, or worse actively disapproves of you working on, isn't the best place to be in.
I read that as Google ‘Stopping Coding’ Competitions, which would hint at the process by which they kill all those projects.
I wonder if Google Summer of Code is next.
Coding competitions were always a recruiting tool. Now that Google basically isn't hiring, it makes sense that they're winding down the coding competitions.
If we ever get back to having a Google that's competing for the best engineering talent, they'll probably reinstate them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Yo
Another product of the near-zero interest rate phenomenon that needed to go.