Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
Speaker 1: your host ed zig Tron. Well, and in the next
Speaker 1: two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names some
Speaker 1: of the people responsible for destroying the Internet. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to start on February fifth, twenty nineteen, when Ben Gomes,
Speaker 1: Google's former head of Search, well, he had a problem.
Speaker 1: Jerry Dishler, then the VP and GM of Ads at Google,
Speaker 1: and Shiv Van Carterman, then the VP of Engineering Search
Speaker 1: and Ads on Google Properties, had called something called a
Speaker 1: code yellow for search revenue due to and I quote
Speaker 1: emails that came out as part of Google's anti trust
Speaker 1: hearing steady weakness in the daily numbers and a likeliness
Speaker 1: that it would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics
Speaker 1: that kind of unclear for those unfamiliar with Google's, in turn,
Speaker 1: a kind of scientology esque jargon which means most people,
Speaker 1: let me explain, a code yellow isn't a terrible need
Speaker 1: to piss or some sort of crisis of moderate severity.
Speaker 1: The yellow, according to Stephen Levy's Tell All book about Google,
Speaker 1: refers to and I promise this is not a joke,
Speaker 1: the color of a tank top that a former VP
Speaker 1: of Engineering called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his
Speaker 1: time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of deafcom
Speaker 1: one and activates, as Levy explained, a war room like
Speaker 1: situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into
Speaker 1: a conference room where they tackle the problem as a
Speaker 1: top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined and independently.
Speaker 1: I've heard there are other colors like purple. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to get into that, though, it's quite boring and
Speaker 1: irrelevant to this situation. In emails released as part of
Speaker 1: the Department of Justices antitrust case against Google, as a
Speaker 1: previously mentioned Dishler laid out several contributing factors. Search query
Speaker 1: growth was significantly behind forecast, the timing of revenue launches
Speaker 1: was significantly behind, and he had this vague worry that
Speaker 1: several advertiser specific in sector weaknesses existed in search. Now
Speaker 1: I want to cover something because I've messed up, and
Speaker 1: I really want to be clear about this. I've previously
Speaker 1: and erroneously referred to the code yellow as something that
Speaker 1: Gomes raised as a means of calling attention to the
Speaker 1: proximity of Google's ad side getting a little too close
Speaker 1: to search. I'm afraid the truth is extremely depressing and
Speaker 1: so much grimmar. The code yellow was actually the rumble
Speaker 1: of the goddamn rot economy, with Google's revenue arms sounding
Speaker 1: the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes,
Speaker 1: a Googler of nineteen years that basically built the foundation
Speaker 1: of modern search engines, should go down as one of
Speaker 1: the few people in tech that actually fought for an
Speaker 1: actual principle, and he was destroyed by a guy called
Speaker 1: Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist class traitor that sided with
Speaker 1: the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of their problems
Speaker 1: was that there was insufficient growth in queries, as in
Speaker 1: the amount of things that people were asking Google. It's
Speaker 1: a bit like if Ford decided that things were going
Speaker 1: poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles on
Speaker 1: their trucks. This whole story has personally upset me, and
Speaker 1: I think you're going to hear that in this but
Speaker 1: going through these emails is just very depressing.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: A few days beforehand, on February first, twenty nineteen, Kristen Gill,
Speaker 1: then Google's VP business finance officer had emailed Shashi Thakker,
Speaker 1: then Google's VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that
Speaker 1: the ADS team had been considering a code yellow to
Speaker 1: close the search gap it was seeing, vaguely referring to
Speaker 1: how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan.
Speaker 1: To be clear, this email was in response to Thaker
Speaker 1: stating that there is nothing that the search team could
Speaker 1: do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the
Speaker 1: ADS department had demanded. Shashy Forward did the email to
Speaker 1: Gomes asking if there's any way to discuss this with
Speaker 1: Sandar Pashai, Google CEO, and declared that there was no
Speaker 1: way he would sign up for a high fidelity business
Speaker 1: metric for daily active users on search. Saker also said
Speaker 1: something that I've been thinking about constantly since I read
Speaker 1: these emails, that there was a good reason that Google's
Speaker 1: founders separated search from ads. I want you to remember
Speaker 1: that line for later. A day later, on February second,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox,
Speaker 1: a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a
Speaker 1: multiple day long debate about Google's sun lust for growth.
Speaker 1: This thread is a dark window into the world of
Speaker 1: growth focus Tech, where the Kherr listed the multiple points
Speaker 1: of disconnection between ads and Search, discussing how the search
Speaker 1: team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without
Speaker 1: hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into
Speaker 1: spending more time on a site, and that doing so
Speaker 1: would lead them to and I quote, abandoned work on
Speaker 1: efficient journeys. In one email, Fox adds that there was
Speaker 1: a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants
Speaker 1: and what Search was doing. Every part of this story
Speaker 1: pisses me off so much. When Gomes pushed back on
Speaker 1: the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three
Speaker 1: of them were responsible for Search and that Search was
Speaker 1: and again I quote, the revenue engine of the company,
Speaker 1: and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was
Speaker 1: now potentially the new reality of their jobs. On February sixth,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Gomes said that he believed that Search was
Speaker 1: getting too close to the money and ended his email
Speaker 1: by saying that he was concerned that growth is all
Speaker 1: that Google was thinking about. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: Google VP of Product Management Darshan Cantac would declare the
Speaker 1: end of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of
Speaker 1: congratulatory emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
Speaker 1: saying that the plans architected as part of the Code
Speaker 1: Yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter Probarka Ragavan,
Speaker 1: then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
Speaker 1: the Code Yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the
Speaker 1: current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and
Speaker 1: that the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very
Speaker 1: clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth
Speaker 1: was not happening at the rate he needed it to.
Speaker 1: A day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he
Speaker 1: intended to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he
Speaker 1: was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
Speaker 1: In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
Speaker 1: how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically
Speaker 1: added that they could increase queries quite easily in the
Speaker 1: short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning
Speaker 1: off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively
Speaker 1: labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
Speaker 1: that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
Speaker 1: of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, that he was deeply,
Speaker 1: deeply uncomfortable with this. He also added that this was
Speaker 1: the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in the
Speaker 1: amount of the things with people searching on Google, were
Speaker 1: a good metric to measure search, and that the best
Speaker 1: defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling
Speaker 1: user experiences that make users want to come back.
Speaker 2: Crazy idea there, what if the product was good not
Speaker 2: good enough?
Speaker 1: Of prabaka, so little bit of history about Google here.
Speaker 1: They regularly throughout the year do core updates to search.
Speaker 1: These are updates that change the algorithm. Let's say, okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can
Speaker 1: elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the
Speaker 1: reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear
Speaker 1: or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic,
Speaker 1: some don't get any, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2: But they do a lot of them. The one that's really.
Speaker 1: Interesting and a little bastard and I went and looked
Speaker 1: through pretty much the last decade of these, the one
Speaker 1: that stood out to me it was the March twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen core update to Search, which happened about a week
Speaker 1: before the end of the code yellow, meaning that it's
Speaker 1: very likely that this was a result of Prabaka's bullshit.
Speaker 1: So this was expected to be one of the largest
Speaker 1: updates to Search in a very long time, and I'm
Speaker 1: quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many
Speaker 1: found that the update mostly rolled back changes and traffic
Speaker 1: was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates,
Speaker 1: like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve that specifically
Speaker 1: targeted spami search results.
Speaker 2: There were others that were.
Speaker 1: Seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on
Speaker 1: the first of August twenty eighteen that was a few
Speaker 1: months after Gomes became head of Search.
Speaker 2: While I'm guessing here, I really don't know. I do
Speaker 2: not work for Google.
Speaker 1: I do not have friends there. I think the timing
Speaker 1: of the March twenty nineteen core update, along with the
Speaker 1: traffic increases the previously suppressed sites that one hundred percent
Speaker 1: were spamy seo nonsense. I think these suggest that Google's
Speaker 1: response to the co jello was to roll back changes
Speaker 1: that were made to maintain the quality of search. A
Speaker 1: few months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll
Speaker 1: out a redesign of how ads were shown on Google Search,
Speaker 1: specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green AD label and
Speaker 1: URL color on ads with a tiny, little, bolded black
Speaker 1: note that said ad in the smallest font you could
Speaker 1: possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise identical to
Speaker 1: a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed
Speaker 1: to start hitting their numbers, hah. And then in January
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Google would bring this change to desktop, and
Speaker 1: the vergins John Porter would suggest that it made Google's
Speaker 1: ads look just like search results now awesome. Five months later,
Speaker 1: a little over a year after the code yellow situation,
Speaker 1: Google would make Probakar Ragavan the head of Google Search,
Speaker 1: with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of Ads.
Speaker 1: After nearly twenty years of building Google Search, Gomes would
Speaker 1: be relegated to the spe VP of Education at Google. Domes,
Speaker 1: who was a critical part of the original team that
Speaker 1: made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing
Speaker 1: the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine,
Speaker 1: was chased out by a growth hungry managerial type, several
Speaker 1: of them actually led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant
Speaker 1: wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the way,
Speaker 1: I use the term management consultant there as a pejorative
Speaker 1: while he exhibits all the same being counting morally young
Speaker 1: guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell,
Speaker 1: Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of
Speaker 1: the economy.
Speaker 2: But you know who has.
Speaker 1: San Dhar Pishai, the CEO of Google, who previously worked
Speaker 1: at McKinsey, arguably the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed,
Speaker 1: having played roles both in the two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: financial crisis, where it encouraged banks to load up on
Speaker 1: debt and floored mortgage backed securities, and the ongoing opioord crisis,
Speaker 1: where it effectively advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth
Speaker 1: hack sales of oxy content and extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey
Speaker 1: has paid nearly one billion dollars over several settlements due
Speaker 1: to its work with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but
Speaker 1: one last point. McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a
Speaker 1: company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to
Speaker 1: advise on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs
Speaker 1: and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class. What fleshy
Speaker 1: in bacteria is the skin. But back to the emails,
Speaker 1: which are a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy,
Speaker 1: the growth that all costs mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And if you take one thing away from this episode,
Speaker 1: I want it to be the name Prabakar Ragavan and
Speaker 1: an understanding that there are people responsible for the current
Speaker 1: state of the Internet. These emails, which I really encourage
Speaker 1: you to look, and if you go to where's youreed
Speaker 1: dot at, you'll be able to see a newsletter that
Speaker 1: has links to them. Well, these emails tell a dramatic
Speaker 1: story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Ragavan,
Speaker 1: with the blessing of CEO Sandhar Pashai, the McKinsey guy,
Speaker 1: actively worked to make Google worse to make the company
Speaker 1: more money. This is exactly what I mean when I
Speaker 1: talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying mindset that
Speaker 1: turns products you love into torturous frustrating quasi tools that
Speaker 1: require you to fight the company to get the thing
Speaker 1: you want. Ben Gomes was instrumental in making Search work
Speaker 1: both as a product and a business. He joined the
Speaker 1: company in nineteen ninety nine, a time long before Google
Speaker 1: established dominance in the field, and the same year when
Speaker 1: Larry Page and Sergey Britain tried to sell the company
Speaker 1: to Excite for one million dollars, only to walk away
Speaker 1: after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor and co founder of
Speaker 1: some Microsystems that's now a VC who tried to stop
Speaker 1: people going to a beach in Halfman Bay, Well, he
Speaker 1: tried a low ball and with a seven hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars offer also known as a one hundred
Speaker 1: square foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with
Speaker 1: Fast Companies Harry McCracken from twenty eighteen, Gomes freyed Google's
Speaker 1: challenge as taking the page rank algorithm from one machine
Speaker 1: to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren't very
Speaker 1: good machines at the time. Despite his impact and tenure,
Speaker 1: Gomes had only been made head of Search in the
Speaker 1: middle of twenty eighteen after John Gillanderia moved to Apple
Speaker 1: to work on its machine learning and AR strategy. Domes
Speaker 1: had been described as Google's searches are beloved for his
Speaker 1: ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized apartments. Every
Speaker 1: single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at
Speaker 1: Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation
Speaker 1: of one of the most important technologies ever made. A
Speaker 1: man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with
Speaker 1: a and I quote Gomes here guiding light of serving
Speaker 1: the user and using technology to do that.
Speaker 2: And when finally given the keys.
Speaker 1: To the kingdom the ability to elevate Google Search even further,
Speaker 1: he was rap fucked by a series of rotten careerists
Speaker 1: trying to please Wall Street, led by Provakar Ragavan. Do
Speaker 1: you want to know what Provacar Ragavan's old job was?
Speaker 1: What Probacar Ragavan the new head of Google Search, the
Speaker 1: guy that ran Google Search, that runs Google Search right now,
Speaker 1: that is running Google Search into the goddamn ground.
Speaker 2: Do you want to know what his job was?
Speaker 1: His job before Google, He was the head of search
Speaker 1: for god damn Yahoo from two thousand and five through
Speaker 1: two thy and twelve when he joined the company. When
Speaker 1: Probakar Ragavan took over Yahoo Search, they held a thirty
Speaker 1: point four percent market share, not far from Google's own
Speaker 1: thirty six point nine percent and miles ahead of the
Speaker 1: fifteen point seven percent that Microsoft's MSN Search had. By
Speaker 1: May twenty twelve, Yahoo was down to just thirteen point
Speaker 1: four percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months,
Speaker 1: and was being beaten by Eva, the newly released BING.
Speaker 1: That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its
Speaker 1: corporate history, shedding two thousand employees, or fourteen percent of
Speaker 1: its overall workforce. The man who deposed, Ben Gomes, someone
Speaker 1: who worked on Google Search from its very beginnings, was
Speaker 1: so shit at his job that in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search tech,
Speaker 1: instead choosing to license Bing's engine in a ten year deal.
Speaker 1: If we take a long view of things, this likely
Speaker 1: precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from
Speaker 1: being worth one hundred and twenty five billion dollars at
Speaker 1: the peak of the dot com boom to being sold
Speaker 1: to Verizon for four point eight billion dollars in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: which is roughly a three thousand square foot apartment in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. With Search no longer a priority in making
Speaker 1: less money for the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into
Speaker 1: Web two point zero and original content, making sum bats
Speaker 1: that paid off, but far far too many that did not.
Speaker 1: It spent one point one billion dollars on Tumblr in
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, only for Verizon to sell it for just
Speaker 1: three million dollars in twenty nineteen. It put Zimbra in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven ostensibly to complete with the new
Speaker 1: Google Apps productivity suite, only to sell it for a
Speaker 1: reported fraction of the original purchase price to VMware a
Speaker 1: few years later. That's not his fault, but nevertheless, Yahoo
Speaker 1: was a company without a mission, a purpose, or an objective. Nobody,
Speaker 1: and I'll speculate even though his leading the company really
Speaker 1: knew what it was and what it did. Anyway, just
Speaker 1: a big shout out right now to Kura Swisher, who
Speaker 1: referred to Pradaka as well respected. When he moved from
Speaker 1: Yahoo to Google. He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job.
Speaker 1: In an interview with zd and ets Dan Farber from
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, Ragavan spoke of his intent to
Speaker 1: align the commercial incentives of a billion content providers with
Speaker 1: social good intent while at Yahoo, and his eagerness to
Speaker 1: inspire the audience to give more data.
Speaker 2: What anyway before that, It's it's actually hard.
Speaker 1: To find out exactly what Ragava and did, though according
Speaker 1: to ZDNA, he spent fourteen years doing search and data
Speaker 1: mining research ibm MM. In April twenty eleven, The Guardian
Speaker 1: ran an interview with Ragavan that called him Yahoo's secret weapon,
Speaker 1: describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research and practice
Speaker 1: to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising, and how
Speaker 1: under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had shifted to
Speaker 1: the direct development of new products. It speaks of Ragavan's
Speaker 1: scientific approach and his steady process based logic to innovation
Speaker 1: that is very different to the common perception the ideas
Speaker 1: and development are more about luck and spontaneity. A sentence
Speaker 1: that I'm only reading to you because I really need
Speaker 1: you to hear how stupid it sounds and how specious
Speaker 1: some of the tech press.
Speaker 2: Used to be.
Speaker 1: Frankly, this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous, that
Speaker 1: I'm actually astonished I don't want to name the reporter.
Speaker 2: I feel bad.
Speaker 1: What about Ragavan's career made this feel right? How has
Speaker 1: nobody connected these thoughts before? I have a day job,
Speaker 1: I run a PR firm, I am a blogger with
Speaker 1: a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: drag Uller is now the CEO of the Blood Bank.
Speaker 1: Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I
Speaker 1: just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.
Speaker 1: But to be clear, this was something written several years
Speaker 1: after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
Speaker 1: a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who
Speaker 1: replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign
Speaker 1: as what zd Neat referred to as the search Master
Speaker 1: was one so successful that it ended up being replaced
Speaker 1: by a search engine that not a single person in
Speaker 1: the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
Speaker 1: exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved
Speaker 1: firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before
Speaker 1: Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman
Speaker 1: Roy bost. Her replacement Scott Thompson, who previously served as
Speaker 1: president of PayPal. Would last a whole five months in
Speaker 1: the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
Speaker 1: Marissa Mayer, in part because it emerged he lied on
Speaker 1: his resume about having a computer science degree.
Speaker 2: Hey, Brobaka, did you not notice that anyway? Whatever?
Speaker 1: Barts joined Yahoo in two thousand and nine, so about
Speaker 1: four years into Broba Kha's reign of terror, I guess,
Speaker 1: and she joined in the aftermath of its previous CEO,
Speaker 1: Jerry Yang, refusing to sell the company to Microsoft for
Speaker 1: forty five billion dollars. In her first year, she laid
Speaker 1: off hundreds of people and struck a deal that I've
Speaker 1: mentioned before to power Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search
Speaker 1: engine Tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of
Speaker 1: the revenue a game from searches. A deal made Yahoo
Speaker 1: a couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys
Speaker 1: and the take to its most high traffic platform. As
Speaker 1: I previously stated, when Brabakhar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was
Speaker 1: doing his work, Yahoo Search was so valuable that it
Speaker 1: was replaced by Bing its sole value. In fact, I
Speaker 1: mean maybe I'm being a little unfair. There's a way
Speaker 1: of looking at this that you could say that Yahoo's
Speaker 1: entire value at the end of his career was driven
Speaker 1: by nostalgia and association with days before he worked there. Anyway,
Speaker 1: thanks to the state of modern search, it's actually very,
Speaker 1: very difficult to find much about Ragavan's history. It took
Speaker 1: me hours of digging through Google and at one point
Speaker 1: being embarrassingly to find three or four articles that went
Speaker 1: into any depth about him. But from what I've gleaned,
Speaker 1: his expertise lies primarily in failing upwards ascending through the
Speaker 1: ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he's coursed.
Speaker 1: In a wide interview from twenty twenty one, GLAD handler
Speaker 1: Stephen Levy said Ragavan isn't the CEO of Google, he
Speaker 1: just run the place, and described his addition to the
Speaker 1: company as a move from research to management. While Levy
Speaker 1: calls him a world class computer scientist who has authored
Speaker 1: definitive text in the field, which is true, he also
Speaker 1: describes Ragavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks
Speaker 1: with everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares
Speaker 1: that Google's third party ad tech plays a critical role
Speaker 1: in keeping journalism alive, and a really shitty answer to
Speaker 1: a question that was also made at a time when
Speaker 1: he was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content, and
Speaker 1: a year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a
Speaker 1: shit about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable
Speaker 1: and it is dominated by search engine optimization and just
Speaker 1: outright spam. And I've said this before, but look, we
Speaker 1: complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk and
Speaker 1: justifiably he's a vile, anti, semi racist bigger. We all
Speaker 1: know this. It's fully true. We can say a million times. However,
Speaker 1: I'd argue that Ragavan, by extension some Ar Pashai deserve
Speaker 1: one hundred times more criticism. They've done unfathomable damage to society.
Speaker 1: You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and
Speaker 1: the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go
Speaker 1: into an election. Ragavan and his cronies worked to oust
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of
Speaker 1: his life to making the world's information more accessible, in
Speaker 1: the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the goddamn
Speaker 1: ground so that Sundar Pashai could make more than two
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan a Manager High
Speaker 1: by Sundar Pashai, a former McKinzie man. The King of
Speaker 1: Managers is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry.
Speaker 1: Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual
Speaker 1: academic credentials, Ragavan chose to bulldoze actual workers, people who
Speaker 1: did things, and people that care about technology and replace
Speaker 1: them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable
Speaker 1: and less useful. Since Prabakar took the reins of Google
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, Google search has dramatically declined with these
Speaker 1: core search updates I mentioned, allegedly made to improve the
Speaker 1: quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence
Speaker 1: of spammy shitty search optimized content.
Speaker 2: It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice.
Speaker 1: The emotion is because I've read all of these antitrust emails.
Speaker 1: I have gone through this guy's history, and I've read
Speaker 1: all the things about Ben Gomes too. Every article about
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes where they interviewed, is this guy just having
Speaker 1: these dreamy thoughts about the future of information and the
Speaker 1: complexity of delivering it at high speed.
Speaker 2: Every interview with Ragavan.
Speaker 1: Is some vague bullshit about how important data is it's
Speaker 1: so goddamn offensive to me. And all of this stuff
Speaker 1: happening is just one example of what I think are
Speaker 1: probably hundreds of things happening across startups or that have
Speaker 1: happened across startups in the last ten or fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and big tech two and it's because the people running
Speaker 1: the tech industry are no longer those who build Tim
Speaker 1: Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the same year, by the way as the Code Yellow thing,
Speaker 1: and while they remained as co controlling shareholders, they clearly
Speaker 1: don't give a shit about what Google means anymore. Propakar
Speaker 1: Ragavan is a manager, and his career, from what I
Speaker 1: can tell, is mostly made up of did some stuff
Speaker 1: at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and
Speaker 1: fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has
Speaker 1: run a story about how.
Speaker 2: Bad it is.
Speaker 1: This this is the result of taking technology out of
Speaker 1: the hands of real builders and handing it to managers
Speaker 1: at a time when management is synonymous with staying as
Speaker 1: far away from actual work as possible. When you're a
Speaker 1: do nothing looking to profit as much as possible, who
Speaker 1: doesn't use tech, who doesn't care about tech and you
Speaker 1: only care about growth.
Speaker 2: Well, you're not a.
Speaker 1: User, You're a parasite. And it's these parasites that have
Speaker 1: dominated and are now draining the tech industry of its value.
Speaker 1: They're driving it into a goddamn ditch. Ragavan's story is
Speaker 1: unique in so far as the damage he's managed to inflict,
Speaker 1: or if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in
Speaker 1: the case of Yahoo, on two industry defining companies, and
Speaker 1: the fact that he did it without being a CEO
Speaker 1: or founder is remarkable. Yeah, he's far from the only
Speaker 1: example of a manager falling upwards. I'm going to editorialize
Speaker 1: a bit here. I want to think about your job history.
Speaker 1: I want you to think about the managers you've had.
Speaker 1: I've written a lot about management, and specifically to do
Speaker 1: with remote work and the whole thing around guys who
Speaker 1: don't do work, who are barely in the office, telling
Speaker 1: you you need to be in the office. This problem
Speaker 1: is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and managers aren't doing work.
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone will email me now and say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm a manager and off I'll do work all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, make sure you do.
Speaker 1: That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you
Speaker 1: are at your job. People who actually do work don't
Speaker 1: feel defensive about it. People who do things then are
Speaker 1: part of the actual profit center. They don't need a
Speaker 1: podcast to tell them they're good at their job. What
Speaker 1: I think the problem is in modern American corporate society
Speaker 1: is that management is no longer synonymous with actually managing people.
Speaker 1: It's not about getting the people what they need. It's
Speaker 1: not about organizing things and making things efficient and good.
Speaker 1: It's not about execution. It's about handing work off to
Speaker 1: other people and getting paid handsomely. And if you disagree
Speaker 1: easy at better offline dot com, I will read your email,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll even respond. But the thing is management has
Speaker 1: become a poison in America. Managers have become poisonous because
Speaker 1: managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No,
Speaker 1: only the workers who do the work are. What happened
Speaker 1: to Ben Gomes is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful
Speaker 1: things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke.
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need
Speaker 1: you to read the news there and read these emails.
Speaker 1: I need you to see how many times him and
Speaker 1: Thakka Great Guy as well were saying, hey, growth is
Speaker 1: bad for search. The thing that Ben Gomes was being
Speaker 1: asked to do was increase queries on Google, the literal
Speaker 1: amount that people's search. There are many ways of looking
Speaker 1: at that and thinking, oh shit, that's not what you want.
Speaker 1: Surely you don't want no queries. You don't want people
Speaker 1: not using it at all, but queries going upwards. Lennearly
Speaker 1: suggests that if you're not magic, get to use the growth.
Speaker 1: At least the people are not getting what they want
Speaker 1: on the first try, which, by the way, kind of
Speaker 1: feels like how Google is nowadays when you go to
Speaker 1: Google and the first result and the second result, and
Speaker 1: the fifth result and the tenth result just don't get
Speaker 1: what you need because it's all that SEO crap. Now,
Speaker 1: this is all theorizing. But what I think prabagar Ragavan
Speaker 1: did was I think he took off all the fucking
Speaker 1: guidelines on Google Search. I think he rolled back changes
Speaker 1: specifically to make search, to increase queries, to give Google
Speaker 1: more chance to show you adverts. I am guessing don't
Speaker 1: have a source telling me this, but the pattern around
Speaker 1: the core search updates. The fact that Google Search started
Speaker 1: getting worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: and unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well, that's when Prabakar
Speaker 1: took over, That's when the big man took the reins.
Speaker 1: That's when Drac Killer got his job at the blood bank.
Speaker 1: And this is the thing. There's very little that you
Speaker 1: and I can actually do about this. But what we
Speaker 1: can do is say names like Probagar Ragavan a great
Speaker 1: deal of times so that people like this can be known,
Speaker 1: so that the actions of these scurrilous assholes can be
Speaker 1: seen and heard and pointed at and spat upon. I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting spitting on anyone, no violent acts. No can
Speaker 1: be pissy on the internet like the.
Speaker 2: Rest of us. Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting,
Speaker 2: but this subject, really, it really got to me. But
Speaker 2: it's not the only one.
Speaker 1: In the next episode, I'm going to conclude this sordid
Speaker 1: three part fiasco with a few more examples. And how
Speaker 1: many of these managers, these bean counters, devoid of imagination
Speaker 1: or ability or anything of note save for that utter
Speaker 1: slug likability. To protect oneself, I want to talk about
Speaker 1: how these people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by
Speaker 1: pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists, and pretending.
Speaker 2: To be innovators.
Speaker 1: I want to tell you all about how Adam Masseri
Speaker 1: destroyed Instagram, and I want to tell you how little
Speaker 1: Sam Altman has achieved other than making him and his
Speaker 1: friends rich. See you next time. Thank you for listening
Speaker 1: to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better
Speaker 1: Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more
Speaker 1: of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com,
Speaker 1: M A T T O S O W s ki
Speaker 1: dot com. You can email me at easy at better
Speaker 1: offline dot com, or check out better Offline dot com
Speaker 1: to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 2: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.