Huge versus smaller .. systems

[temporal1]

History reflects: Huge versus smaller .. systems:

From another thread, these quoted words speak volumes, for tech, for business, for churches, for gov:
The “Efficiency god” we so adore, has built-in problems, we prefer to deny/ignore.

The article names Google. My interest is general. What happens with “too much” success and comfort?

GEEKWIRE / Seattle founder who sold company to Google says tech giant has ‘slowly ceased to function’
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-f ... -function/

A former Google employee who just left the tech giant after three years says he witnessed a “gradual decay of a dominant empire” and said the company “has slowly ceased to function.”

Praveen Seshadri, who sold his Seattle startup AppSheet to Google Cloud in 2020, published a blog post Tuesday suggesting that Google needs an “intervention.”

“Google’s fundamental problems are along the culture axis and everything else is a reflection of it,” he wrote.

Seshadri called the current moment “fragile” for Google as it faces pressure from Open AI and Microsoft, which made headlines last week for its new Bing search engine. Alphabet recently saw its market capitalization drop by $100 billion amid fears that it is losing ground to Microsoft.

He pointed out four cultural problems within Google:
No mission;
no urgency;
delusions of exceptionalism;
and mismanagement.

“Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about ‘organizing the world’s information’?
They have lost track of who they serve and why,” he wrote, adding, “overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for.”

Seshadri previously spent more than a decade at Microsoft and said he noticed a similar downfall of a tech behemoth.

“Yet, Google has a few strengths that Microsoft didn’t have as it tried to recover — it isn’t a culture of ego and fiefdoms, the environment values introspection, the stated core values of the company are rock solid, and there is still immense respect for Google in the external world,” he wrote.

“There is hope for Google and for my friends who work there, but it will require an intervention.”

Seshadri said Google should take inspiration from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, suggesting that the company recommit to its mission, set aside “peacetime generals,” and decrease “the depth of the organizational hierarchy.”

Founded in 2014, AppSheet helped businesses develop their own data-based apps without requiring a team of developers. Seshadri launched AppSheet with Brian Sabino, a former student in his database systems class at Cornell University.

Read his full blog post here. ..

Interesting how “efficiently” scriptures warn about: vigilance versus sleeping. 2000+ years later, Truth.

i believe caution is needed as the world emphasizes tech to students, pointing to tech as almost their exclusive choice for life.
Life on earth is not efficient. Humans aren’t designed to be able to handle efficiency! For humans, efficiency leads directly to
the 4 stated cultural problems listed above.^^

Efficiency comes in, morality, Christianity goes out.

The actual formula for innovation, creativity, resourcefulness, etc., is: discomfort, inconvenience, poverty.
Humans don’t deal with comfort and abundance well. (Not our design!!!)

“There is hope” .. for divine intervention.

What say you?

[steve-in-kville]

What say you?

I have quite a bit to say. The bigger an organization gets, the more "fluff" jobs there are. It comes down to people start to make work for themselves. And after while the people in the middle are either supervising others, or answering to others... or both. And the people at then bottom are the ones actually doing the real work.

I've seen this happen in both for profit and non-profit organizations.

[Ken]

What say you?

I have quite a bit to say. The bigger an organization gets, the more "fluff" jobs there are. It comes down to people start to make work for themselves. And after while the people in the middle are either supervising others, or answering to others... or both. And the people at then bottom are the ones actually doing the real work.

I've seen this happen in both for profit and non-profit organizations.

Now do the Catholic Church!

[Ken]

Regarding Google though, they are definitely no longer innovating in one of the main areas where I interact with with which is education.

About 10 years ago Google came out with a very excellent education app called Google Classroom which was a classroom management app that let schools and teachers manage classes electronically. Essentially you create Google Classes for each of your regular classes and subscribe all of your students to their respective classes and then you can push out content to them (worksheets, readings, etc.) and they can turn stuff in electronically. All very nice and a great tool to save on paper and deal with kids who might be absent, sick, trying to make up old work, etc. Because you can put all your class assignments there along with all the reference material and such.

But after making Google Classroom, Google basically just sat on it and did very few updates or new innovations. They basically just used it as a way to push all kids into getting school gmail addresses and google accounts. Now there are newer, smaller, and hungrier apps that are just killing Google Classroom because they include all kinds of new modern features that Google never bothered to add. The one that all the schools around here are switching to is called Canvas. It does things like allow secure testing and test monitoring, and they interface with textbook publishers which Google Classroom never bothered to do. Most universities are also switching over to Canvas.

It is entirely Google's fault. The could have easily taken a poll of teachers 10 years ago and known these are all the things they should have been working on but apparently they never bothered or didn't care.

On the flip side, Apple did the same thing with their iPads. Ten years ago Apple was really promoting iPads for education and the school I was teaching at in TX bought iPads for all students. It was better than the old Dell laptops that they had, but there were major flaws with using iPads for education. Apple never really bothered to address any of then and failed to do any of the simple and easy things to improve iPads as a teaching tool. A few years later schools were abandoning iPads in mass and switching over to Chromebooks which are a far superior teaching and learning platform. And now most schools nearly universally use Chromebooks. Which is one good thing that Google has done. Chromebooks are hugely superior to either PC laptops or iPads in an education setting.

[steve-in-kville]

It is entirely Google's fault. The could have easily taken a poll of teachers 10 years ago and known these are all the things they should have been working on but apparently they never bothered or didn't care.

Most likley they thought they were on top of the world and they were untouchable, therefore didn't bother to innovate.

[Josh]

What say you?

I have quite a bit to say. The bigger an organization gets, the more "fluff" jobs there are. It comes down to people start to make work for themselves. And after while the people in the middle are either supervising others, or answering to others... or both. And the people at then bottom are the ones actually doing the real work.

I've seen this happen in both for profit and non-profit organizations.

Now do the Catholic Church!

A great deal of its highly paid bishops and so on actively try to subvert its values and goals, such as the current shenanigans from the German bishops.

[Ken]

I have quite a bit to say. The bigger an organization gets, the more "fluff" jobs there are. It comes down to people start to make work for themselves. And after while the people in the middle are either supervising others, or answering to others... or both. And the people at then bottom are the ones actually doing the real work.

I've seen this happen in both for profit and non-profit organizations.

Now do the Catholic Church!

A great deal of its highly paid bishops and so on actively try to subvert its values and goals, such as the current shenanigans from the German bishops.

The Vatican also has a bureaucracy that rivals or exceeds the Pentagon in its size and complexity.

[Franklin]

Sorry but I disagree with this thread.

It is true that big systems are harder to manage than small system. But systems of all sizes are currently decaying. So the issue isn't size. The issue is that the culture is in terminal decline and the people have become horrible, both stupid and evil. And things will continue to decay until God finally exterminates these people as He did to Sodom and Gomorrah.

It is true that comfort leads to degeneracy. But the ideal solution is not to reduce efficiency, but rather to raise children with challenges and without spoiling them so that they grow up into decent adults.