Ian 'Hixie' Hickson has departed Google. He was a big name in the Flutter community. Although I never really saw him much. He wasn't as public as some of its other contributors. In fact I can't find much about him. He has a photo on Wikipedia that appears to be quite old.

He did appear in a Flutter Boring show more recently though.

Now normally when people leave Google that's that. But when Hixie left he wrote a blog post about it and it is a very interesting read.

Here are some highlights that I found interesting:

Many times I saw Google criticised for actions that were sincerely intended to be good for society. Google Books, for example. Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base (it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious). I often saw privacy advocates argue against Google proposals in ways that were net harmful to users. Some of these fights have had lasting effects on the world at large; one of the most annoying is the prevalence of pointless cookie warnings we have to wade through today. I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.

I really resonated with this paragraph because it reminds me of something that happened recently. The Web Environment Integrity (WEI) API which is basically attestation for the internet. Attestation is verifying that you are an actual person and not a bot. I thought it was a good idea because we already have attestation in the form of Captchas, the WEI API would just streamline that and make it less error prone and privacy invasive.

But people were furious resulting in Google withdrawing the proposal. And I was pretty mad about it:

You know I never really understood why people were so up in arms around this proposal. They were saying how it's DRM for the web. Yeah, have you used Netflix lately? Or YouTube? Or any bank? Or any number of online sites? The internet is loaded with DRM. They want to know that you are not using any sneaky tricks to get around. Otherwise they would just make a normal app and not allow web access.

Oh, and by the way normal apps have had attestation like this for a long time. It is available for both Android (through Play Protect) and iOS (through DeviceCheck/AppAttest). So the fact that most web browsers do not have any attestation methods yet is a bit of an outlier. And by killing web environment integrity you're just making the internet worse.

Now I'm not sure if Hixie would have seen things my way. But it is quite interesting that things like this have happened before.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about today. What I want to talk about is how incompetent management killed Google. Hixie pretty directly says this in his post:

A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.

In this section he directly mentions Jeanine Banks. Way to burn your bridges man. Or maybe not. Looks like this Jeanine Banks was not particularly liked in the organization. Maybe some might appreciate Hixie's honesty here. Anyways I've wanted to talk about middle management for a while because I recently watched this video.

This video is about a company called McKinsey and before watching this I did not even know companies like this existed. Basically McKinsey is what I'd describe as 'middle management from hell', or at least that's what the video seems to suggest. They appear to be unaccountable, unethical, and usually end up making the company worse.

Similarly there is something called 'Private Equity'. These are companies that buy up a company, make changes, and flip it for a profit.

Now I'm not going to say these companies are as bad as consulting companies because they actually have an incentive to make companies better. Although they don't always succeed and when they do they usually end up jacking up prices.

Incompetent middle management is a scourge on society. Ideally you'd want to have people that have already done well become a manager. So a programmer managing other programmers. Of course this is a bit more complicated because not everyone who's good at their job would make a good manager, this is the 'Peter Principle'. And if you make someone that's really good at their job a manager it means they can't do their normal job anymore.

But even with these problems I do think choosing people who have experience in the industry is the right move, even if the person you choose ends up being a bad manager. Because what's the alternative? You hire someone that knows absolutely nothing? That can end up destroying the company. And in the case of Google it looks like it has. As Hixie described it:

Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google's erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of "don't be evil"). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it's not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs. I see all of this at Google now. The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane corporate policies. In 2004, Google's founders famously told Wall Street "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." but that Google is no more.

I never really thought about it this way. People always talk about layoffs as reducing redundancy and if you think about it like that it might not be so bad. But it looks like the way these layoffs were done at Google was mostly random and that can be really damaging to a company.

I think when Google started out it started as a small group of programmers that talked to each other like peers. But as the company grew and grew there was a growing desire to be a real company, to bring in middle management and other consultants. But over time the management ended up corroding Google's fundamental values. And this is what ultimately contributed to some of the complaints that Hixie has.

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