The Pragmatic Engineer - The man behind the Big Tech comics – with Manu Cornet

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Supported by Our Partners• WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.• Graphite — The AI developer productivity platform. • Formation — Level up your career and compensation with Formation.—In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by a senior software engineer and cartoonist, Manu Cornet. Manu spent over a decade at Google, doing both backend and frontend development. He also spent a year and a half at Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it and rebranded it to X. But what Manu is most known for are his hilarious internet comics about the tech world, including his famous org chart comic from 2011 about Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.In today’s conversation, we explore many of his comics, discuss the meaning behind them, and talk about the following topics: • The viral org chart comic that captured the structure of Big Tech companies• Why Google is notorious for confusing product names• The comic that ended up on every door at Google• How Google’s 20% time fostered innovation—and what projects came from it• How one of Manu’s comics predicted Google Stadia’s failure—and the reasons behind it• The value of connecting to users directly • Twitter’s climate before and after Elon Musk’s acquisition and the mass layoffs that followed• And more!—Timestamps(00:00) Intro(02:01) Manu’s org structure comic (07:10) Manu’s “Who Sues Who” comic(09:15) Google vs. Amazon comic(14:10) Confusing names at Google(20:00) Different approaches to sharing information within companies(22:20) The two ways of doing things at Google(25:15) Manu’s code reviews comic(27:45) The comic that was printed on every single door of Google(30:55) An explanation of 20% at Google(36:00) Gmail Labs and Google Stadia(41:36) Manu’s time at Twitter and the threat of Elon Musk buying(47:07) How Manu helped Gergely with a bug on Twitter(49:05) Musk’s acquirement of Twitter and the resulting layoffs(59:00) Manu’s comic about his disillusionment with Twitter and Google(1:02:37) Rapid fire round—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• How Manu creates comics• Consolidating technologies• Is Big Tech becoming more cutthroat?—See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail]. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe

Why do you think Google has such a problem naming things? This is the bad consequence of a good company culture, because if you are very bottom-up and employees, engineers, are really the powerful figures in the company, people are going to start things, and sometimes they'll start efforts that will end up being competing. When I first interviewed for Google, I asked my interviewer,

what criticism would you say about Google or your job? What are some of the drawbacks? And one of the guys that interviewed me and I asked him this question, he said, because it's so bottom-up-driven, there ends up being some duplication. People work on similar things or competing efforts. And even that was in 2007, so it was even worse later on. Have you ever seen this comic making fun of the orcructure of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft? This comic was created more than 10 years ago, and yet most of these are still spot on even today. But who created these and how are they so accurate?

and funny. Today, we reveal the cartoon as behind this comic and many other similar ones. He is Manu Cornei, who was a Google software injury for 14 years. He worked on Gmail, Android, Chrome, and Google Search. Today, we talk about the story behind the Orchchart comic and how Manu almost did not publish it. Lots and lots of cartoons about Google, but we also dig behind the meaning of them, like why Google is so bad at naming products. We look at our cartoon where Manu correctly predicted Google's cloud gaming console, Stadio, would eventually be killed, and he did this on the day that Google launched his console. It's safe to say that Manu is the highest profile cartoonist in tech world,

and I hope you enjoy him sharing the story behind some of his most famous comics. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe to the podcast on any podcast platform on YouTube. So let's jump in. Manu, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So one of your most referenced comics is the orc structure one, which I just sent over. Can we talk about when and how he created this?

why and it's it's been a very heavily reference one i've spent the last 10 years trying to prove that i'm not just a one trick pony with this one one cartoon that was successful um so just for anyone listening this is the uh this is in six panels of orchards of big tech companies and it was published in 2011 so i almost didn't publish this because um the um the um the I didn't really find it funny. It's always a big problem when you have an idea, you find it funny on the moment, and then you draw it, and then you've spent time on it.

This one isn't too elaborate, so it didn't take too much time to draw. Sometimes it takes a lot longer, and by the time you're done drawing, you have no idea whether it's funny or not. You've been staring at it for too long. And for this one, I didn't really find it very funny by the time it was done.

So I almost didn't publish it. And the punchline, which is the last company, was supposed to be Oracle that has a large legal department and a tiny engineering department. And initially I had written engineering improperly. I had an E, what I should be somewhere. I fixed that later. I think it was at the time when Oracle and Google were battling on Java. So that was really... This was in 2011, 2010th of the one.

Yeah, yeah. So the drawing is from 2011. I'm pretty sure there were some losses going on at that time. So, but then, so Amazon was like the base case, like a very standard tree-like structure, very hierarchical. The other ones were kind of easy to think about. Apple would be very centralized. And initially, I didn't have much.

Microsoft, but I couldn't really have only five companies because that would not have an even number of panels. So I thought about a sixth one, which was Microsoft. And I looked online on some forums on what the Microsoft culture was. And I heard people mention these battles between departments. And that ended up being the more the panel that caught people's attention. more than the others. This is old Microsoft,

but this comic was so talked about and I still see it reference. I wonder if there's a, are you finding to do any updated version? Would you have inspiration? I guess I could. I'm trying to look forward and not try to live off,

like surf off previous waves. But I know that it was mentioned by the CEO in his book. without really mentioning it by name or anything, but he described his drawing pretty clearly on the first page of his book, which was a nice hat tip even without attribution.

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There's this comic that you also created, also around probably like 2011, which is titled a much clear insight into who's who's who. And there's this big diagram of like Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, HTC, Microsoft. off with like arrows one between the other and then on the on the bottom right corner uh there's Nokia by itself not sued by anyone not suing anyone just burning yes yeah this was almost um yeah i guess it's not any better right now um but it felt like it was a big mess of who was suing whom

um i don't really follow it uh closely any longer um but i don't even remember this one so closely. Oh, I remember I drew Starbucks on the side because I thought Oracle might be suing Starbucks because of Java and Java beams. And then Nokia was. This was the height where Oracle was suing everyone because of Java. Yes, exactly. So I don't think they ever really sued Starbucks, but I thought I would make that a thing.

And then, yeah, you're right. Nokia was, I think it made a bit of a comeback since then. I mean, it's not any, it's not one of the most popular smartphone makers, but it used to be really popular with like feature phones. And then it was really, yeah, as you said, like it's in the drawing, just by itself in this corner, almost sad that it's not being sued by anyone. It's like, yeah, I want to play too. Well, plus I don't know if you created this around.

that time, but there was a famous Nokia's old CEO made this famous speech of Nokia being a burning platform. So I don't know if it was because of that, but you can associate it with that as well. It is burning by itself. I don't remember the details, but it might be very well be one of the inspirations for that, yes. And then, you know, we talked about like, is there a follow-up for, you know, the tech structure, what companies are. But recently, I think a, a, I think a, only a few years ago, you did this called Google versus Amazon, which is not about all big tech companies, but Google on Amazon. And it's with guns and roses. There's a circle with Google where, like, there's guns held to outside to customers and, like, roses to employees.

And Amazon is the opposite way where they hold roses to customers and guns towards employees. Yes. this one didn't get quite, it didn't get shared quite so much as the initial org charts one. I think it was a little bit more complex, as in harder to parse. Like the org charts one, you take a glance and it immediately is obvious what's happening. For this one, you have to read. You have to notice that the customers and employees are in different places. but yeah, I do think it was, it obviously oversimplifies,

which comics always often do. But it does feel like Google has always, or maybe not right now, I'm not sure, but at least when I was there, treating its employees insanely well, and not really caring that much about the customers, because, you know, they're not the one that's paying. Most people used back then Google,

products for free. Now there's a little bit more of an enterprise business and cloud business, but most people are still just users of things like Gmail or search, which are free products. So Google has really no immediate incentive to be really nice to its customers. I mean, it does, and it still, and it did and it still does focus on the user, as in trying to build features that are useful to the user and to make things nice and pretty and fast. But if as a user you are unhappy and you're looking for customer service, good luck ever reaching out and reaching people from Google to help you out. Yeah.

I mean, in my experience, I kept kind of joking to, you know, people that like, you know, as a business owner or like as a startup, if I'm buying from a company, like the company that I trust the most is Amazon because if I have a problem like they've bent over they've been backwards they like there's been so many stories an example of Steve Yeggie did an interview with the pragmatic engineer and he was saying that he used to work at Amazon and then he went later to well he worked at Google for a long time then so Amazon and then Google for a very long time and then he went to grab and when he worked at grab he they were on Amazon a day they were on Amazon on AWS, they used services.

You know, they were not the biggest customer by far, but they were like, you know, mid-sized or something like that. And the Amazon team meeting wanted to meet them. And he had the PMs, the PMs for several products that they were using in the room, like in person meeting with them. And he was just like blinking. Like, you know, why did they come here? And they just wanted to talk to customers.

And again, they were not the biggest customer. And that's like very specific to Amazon. Whereas on the other hand for Google, when I was researching, for example, on-call practices, you know, Amazon on-call is like good luck. Like everyone's on-call, like you're, you need to make sure your systems are there. It's very tough. If you have a small team, yeah, you still have an on-call. And Google, Google On-Call is probably as chill as it gives. They have a dedicated team that takes the majority of the on-call load.

No other company does this because all the teams have it. I assume these are the SRIs, right? the SREs actually step in and take that, which is unheard of. So as an employee, if you're looking for like, what is the company that pays the most and I have the most chill place to work until last year, this was definitely like Google or so. Yeah. It might, as you said, it might be changing a little bit. But I think this comic is still kind of.

It's interesting that the approach of really bending over backwards to be nice to customers. also translates to company customers like B2B for AWS and not just people who buy stuff on Amazon.com. I was surprised to learn. And this was, you know, Steve Yeggy, he used to work at Amazon. He was surprised. He was like, what? They're still doing it?

I made another comic later on where showing the how confusing it is to do anything with Google products with all the different names. and it shows a woman showing up in front of a Google employee, or it's this one, and she wants to buy something, and then the Google guy keeps correcting her because then it's not the right code name. And then someone commented on this thing, saying, wait, this shows a customer directly talking to a Google employee. That can't be right.

Yeah, there is this thing about, I think still to this date, like, people, you know, make fun of Google's naming and for some part for rightfully so so I'll give you my example of you know Google when I worked at Uber and we were rolling out Apple Pay and an Android pay. So so what I joined we had in like 2016 or so there was Apple Pay and then there was Android pay. And and then Google came back and said okay we're retiring Android pay and there's going to be a new thing called Google Wallet. I think it was supposed to be called Google Wallet or something like that. And we're like, fine, or maybe Google Pay.

I'm all confused, but it was interesting because it, so in 2010 or 11, when Uber started, the first payment method was called Google Wallet, then it became Android Pay. Then I think they said it's going to be Google Pay. Yes, so it was Google Pay. And then we, you know, we agreed we were partners and we needed to upgrade to this new thing and be part of the launch. And about two weeks before the launch, they changed the logo. Like they send a brand new or a different logo to us.

And we're just kind of thinking like what's going on. And then of course later, I'm not sure. I think Google Pay means something else. There's Google wallet. So now there's a comic about this. Even right now, yeah, I have a comic about most things at Google. Even right now, there are two apps on Android that I have on my phone. One is called G-Pay.

And the other one is called Google. pay, maybe not anymore now. At some point there was these two. And one of them was functional, and the other one was retired. So we were showing the deprecation process to users even then. But then there's also Google Wallets. And as you said, Google Pay, Android Pay. And yeah, this is another comic that I'm showing now, which

shows a double entry, like just a spreadsheet with rows being Google, Chrome, Android, Nexus, Pixel, play and across the columns are books. Yeah. This sounds very spot on now. You know, jokes aside, you've actually been inside Google. Why do you think Google has such a problem naming things? When I look at other companies, you know, they just seem to stick with it, right?

Like, look at Apple. Like, they don't really change their naming. I don't feel like I kind of point to any other large company that is so confusing. Obviously, we can always have funny stories about why. product here or there. But at this level, it seems like a world record, honestly. So I think this is, I mean, my interpretation, and I don't have enough of a bird's eye view of things. This is above my pay grade. But my interpretation is that this is the bad consequence of a good company culture, because if you have, if you are very bottom up and employees,

engineers of really the powerful figures in the company, people are going to start things, and sometimes they'll start efforts that will end up being competing. And this is actually, funnily enough, when I first interviewed for Google, for my job at Google in 2000, end of 2007, early 2007, sometimes I like to be a bit sneaky, and I ask my interviewer, when they, you know, usually at the end of the interview, they say, do you have any questions for me? And I said, yeah, what, what is, what criticism would you say about Google or your job? Or, you know, what are some of the drawbacks? And the, one of the guys interviewed me and I asked him this question, he said, because it's so bottom up driven,

there ends up being some duplication. People work on similar things or competing efforts. And even that was in 2007, so it was even worse later on. Wow. Yeah. So that means that means that if you have, you know, different teams working on the same thing or similar things, there isn't that much top down pressure. And this goes back to really being nice to employees and not so great about customers. Like if you want to be really nice from employees and let people work on stuff that matters to them, you end up being a little bit, you end up shipping the or chart to the. public and making consumers being a bit confused.

And I don't think it's much better now, even though the company is very top-down, but maybe because the CEO isn't, he's not like the Steve Jobs who would consolidate things. He's more of an appeaser trying to arbitrate all the different efforts and make people happy all that once. this is interesting though if we think about it i know you know we're looking at this the whole thing through the lens of humor but if you if you had to draw something about apple it will be probably a black box or just teams not talking about each other because again one thing that we do know about apple it's pretty well known i mean i'm one day i'm going to do a deep dive on on how apple works but apple is so damn secretive yeah to the point of teams like you work at a tech company

like 99% of tech companies are 99.9.9%. You know, you work in a team, you go have lunch. You meet someone and you ask them, hey, what are you working on? And then to tell you, you know, you talk about it. You might get some ideas. You might help each other or. And obviously, everything you talk about stays in the company, right? This is without saying at Apple, you go and have lunch.

You ask someone, what are you working on? And the first thing they're going to ask is like, do you have like clearance? They have a special word for, and they're not going to talk to you because even though you're sitting next to each other. It's just a very different design. So my phone is just interesting how these tradeoffs between, you know, like how much freedom do employees have, how kind of is a company prioritizing their, you know, their needs versus the like how centralized things are, how much information flows, how, how much are we demanding

from on calls so that we please our customers? They might be connected. You might not be able to have it all, right? Yeah, yeah, it's a difficult trade-off. And I do think Google has been moving in the direction of where Apple is, which is being more silo than people not having access to other pieces of the company or the codebase. I think if I was to, I could update the Apple org chart. I think it would look like a fog of war, you know, like in games where you're studying somewhere

and you're seeing what's around you, but you don't really, everything else in the world in the map is blurred or just obscured. I made fun of that movement of Google to move towards being more and more siloed, but that also doesn't come free. It's like, okay, this one is probably too long to read.

But it's especially ironical when Google's mission is supposed to organize the word information, and when you're on the team, you don't have access to the information of another team that could have helped you, but you need to prove that you need to know it in order to do your job. And if you don't know it exists, then you don't even know that you need to prove it. So anyway, I do think Google is moving towards that siloing as well. Yeah, well, it might be a necessity.

One other thing that is kind of, I guess, internally known, about Google's engineering culture, but externally might be a bit surprising with migrations. And you did a comic about migrations. Can you explain what this is? I didn't really mean it specifically about migrations, but in general about competing efforts. And it is the same thing that we were describing earlier. We were paying GPPA. So what you see in the comic here is it's like a first person view of car that is encountering a choice between two roads and then the top sign says, welcome to Google, and the right-hand side road says main road, and that's crossed out, that says deprecated, and then don't even think about it, and the road looks kind of dirty

and old. And the right-hand side says new road under construction, and then there's a danger, and then there's a construction cone. this was initially I think this was initially a comment by the Zen CEO Eric Schmidt I don't know if he's the one who said that

or maybe Johnson Rosenberg I forgot one of the Google execs at that time who said there's two ways to do things at Google there's the deprecated way and there's the way that doesn't work yet so this was like an illustration of that line. And I do think that's actually quite relevant to lots of other companies. People, when I was at Twitter, people asked me to rebrand the welcome to Google to make it welcome

to Twitter because it was the same thing. So I do think there's a tendency for, specifically for engineers, software engineers, but I think that might be even more general to try. to make a new improved way and try to get people to use it even before it is ready to replace the other way. Yeah. And to be fair, I think you're right. This is not specific to Google. This is like any like mid-size or larger tech company.

It just keeps happening. And after a while, you go into the, there's even the sketch about microservices, which is, you know, like the punchline is similar to this where the one of the assistants is not yet ready to handle something. And again, from the outside, people working at startups or small teams, they're kind of rolling their eyes. Like, how is this possible? And it is. Like, you put together smart people and stuff like this happens.

And obviously, everyone's surprised. You know, this is one of reasons why projects often, not always, but one of the reasons projects get delayed is, oh, yeah. Like, we thought this service will be ready and we could just use it. But the existing one is being deprecated and the new one is not yet ready. Right. Another engineering culture-related thing, of course, is if you're at a mid-sized or large it's code reviews. And of course you have a comic about code reviews as well.

Yeah, I have several. I have another comic where I can describe it where there's two people in two different panels. There's the author of the change who says, oh, I don't need to be too cautious about my code. If there's some problem, the reviewer will catch it. And the other panel is the reviewer who said, oh, I don't need to review this too carefully if the author must know what he's doing or what she's doing. And yeah, same thing here. It's like the scene is basically a table with two people standing up on the table replacing a light bulb. So this was a pun on the how many people does it take to screw in the light bulb,

which was of maybe not quite as popular as the knock-knock jokes, but similar you can have a different version of it. So there's a software engineer who is trying to replace a light bulb, and there's another software engineer also standing on the table because the lamp is really high up. That says, Code Review, who is commenting on how to screw in the light bulb, that must be another way. And then there's a PM who is holding the light bulb as a, you know, like Shakespeare to be or not to be holding a skull kind of thing.

And then there's the TLM, the manager who is looking at his wristwatch because this is all taking too long and we need to ship now. And then there's the SRE, the site reliability engineer who is adding little pieces of wood to make the table more. stable and then there's a ux person who is bringing a light bulb with a hat and decorations around it making is prettier when you worked at a team that warrants a tpm and also like sri i guess most companies will not have that but yeah that that sounds about right it's it's more complex than it looks yeah of course of course these these comics are always um simplifying and uh and obviously the s re has a beard and long hair which was a good stereotype at that time.

So some of your comics, they weren't just limited to, you know, like making fun or pulling some jokes. There was a comic that ended up being printed on every single door at Google, as I understand. Yeah, that's right. So at some point, people noticed that things were being stolen from offices. And that was because Google employees were letting people in behind them. and I guess this being Disneyland or Wonderland because all the campuses are colorful and everything is free and nice and people are nice to each other

you don't really question who is coming after you and you just hold the door for them and they ended up calling this tailgating even though I understand this is more of a driving thing initially so this first comic was a pun on this initial thing. So it shows a crocodile or an alligator

who is slithering its way into the office through a half-closed door that has Google written on it. And it says, beware the tailgator with an OR at the end. And that, so that was the first one. And then that people liked it.

And because Google was trying to spread the word on increasing security and having people be aware that they should not let whoever is coming after them into the building without making sure that they're actually an employee. They used this drawing initially and then because they wanted to keep people's attention and they asked me for a refresh or readitions. Yeah. So they printed this and it was whenever I was visiting a Google office,

elsewhere in the world, there was the same, my same drawing on all doors, which was really cool to see. But I ended up making, yeah, every year I would make two or three versions. And it was like trying to say the same thing in different ways. This episode is brought to you by Formation, a personalized interview prep program for experience software engineers. Formation is built by X-Fang engineers who've conducted thousands of interviews collectively, so they know what it takes. In 2024, they helped engineers increase a comp by $110,000 on average. They help you understand exactly how you stack up

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Apply today at fm.dev slash pragmatic. That is fm.com.com. So 20% time. This is something when you join Google, it existed, right? Can you tell us about what it was, how you saw people use it? What did you do in your 20% time? And how did it change over time? And obviously, you have a comic about the change as well.

Yes. So, yes. So 20% was, I think one of those things when you were back in maybe when I joined, maybe in 2010 or so or a bit before, when you were at Google, these were among the parks that you would tell about, maybe you would say things about the free food and about you being able to walk up to the microphone. and ask questions to the CEO, stuff like this.

And one of them was being allowed to dedicate 20% of your time to a project of your choosing. Within reason, you're not going to, you know, tell your boss that you're going to learn guitar one day per week. That's not relevant to your job. But something that would be, you know, a reasonable project for you to work on, something new. And Google itself used to private self on

having so many of their innovative projects that were started as 20% projects. So as projects that were started that way, I think Gmail was one. I think Google News was probably one, and there's a bunch of other projects that were started that way. But this is the part where I don't really understand where exactly the pressure to become a more traditional company with more siloed people, where that comes into clash with that 20% project thing. I never really quite understood how that manifests itself. So the drawing shows a big tree with one big branch labeled 20% projects, and then there's a woman sitting on this branch,

and the woman has a T-shirt labeled Innovation. Then there's a guy with a tuxedo and a necktie and smoking a cigar and sunglasses who is climbing on the ladder and starting to saw off that branch. So my point was that really that was a source of innovation and if you cut those off, if you don't encourage people to have those projects, which was the case more and more, even though I don't remember. remember it being called out explicitly that 20% projects are no longer a thing because that would be too obviously admitting that you're becoming a traditional or conventional or company. But they were less and less encouraged and maybe more and more frowned upon. So, yeah, I didn't really quite understand. Maybe they didn't care about innovation that much.

They just were happy with. I mean, just bringing up a different angle. I'm not sure you have a comic that made fun of how many products Google shut down. But one of the things outside, you know, again, Google has a lot of perceptions, but one of the perception is like, oh, if Google ships something, they're going to shut it down. And I do wonder, just, you know, putting a little bit of devil's advocate in the sense that could it be? Like, obviously 20% time we know brought a lot of really cool innovation with Google famously. Gmail apparently started as a 20% project,

then there's going to be examples of other products that started off. But having too many of those products might just mean that some of them eventually will have no investment. They'll have to be shut down. So I wonder if it is connected that Google has more products retired than any other tech company. And they're also the only company that allow 20% innovation time for many, many years. I don't know. This is a question, too. Do you think there's a connection?

I do think there's a connection. That's a fair point. I would say then it should happen internally. You should be throwing things at the wall and you should be experimenting without necessarily launching stuff publicly. I think you should, I mean, if I knew how to run a company, I would be a lot richer. I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be drawing comics. But I do think it's good for companies to encourage innovation,

and I think 20% projects were a good way of doing this, but you could let the projects select themselves more organically by either having employees test them internally without necessarily launching them. Gmail did something that was interesting at some point that I also worked on. which was Gmail Labs. So you had a special section in your settings with these things called Labs.

And it was by the name, but also the labeling, it was pretty obvious that these were not going to be officially supported. And they may go out at any point. But that allowed people working on Gmail to launch with quotes, launch something that was, you know, with more scrutiny. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you knew, I remember, it was very clear that this is experimental. It can go away like this, you know, use it at your own wrist, but we love your feedback. Yes. And I actually, I remember as a user, like I thought that was fair because it was just super clear.

Like, you know, this is alpha, alpha. You get the latest cutting edge. And I think they also made it clear that if it gets enough usage, it might make it, right? No promises. So I think I have a point there that this probably could have been done differently. Yeah. Yeah, also maybe Google could have some sort of Google Labs, which they probably do, but it probably need something else to launch things that were not actual products yet and to make the branding clear enough that people wouldn't complain if they went away. And this comic that you created, we talked about that you must have a comic about the Google Graveyard, which is also a website, which has almost 300 products listed there now or so.

And this seems oddly prophetic because you created this when Stadio was launched, right? Google Stadia, the games console where you could play remotely. It was a pretty cool concept. And then this comic shows a Google graveyard and a man. And a man, so there's a sign saying welcome Stadia developers because Google had to encourage people to actually develop for this platform, make games for Stadia developers. because Google had to encourage people to actually develop for this platform, make games for Stadia. So this guy was waving towards a nice roads with rainbows and stars and a unicorn. So, you know, look this way, please.

But ignoring that on the side there's a huge graveyard of tombstones of all the dead Google products. So developers had to focus on the nice things for Stadia and ignore all the risk involved with all the dead products. And yeah, Stadia eventually was also discontinued. I forgot exactly when. It came a little bit out of no. It's hard to tell. I do know there's different analysis, whether it actually had market fit or wasn't growing fast enough. There's a lot of, but it did take people by surprise.

Of Google did do one thing, which they provided a full refund to anyone who asked, as I understand, so they ate the loss, which was, I guess, a bit. But still, it just reinforces that it's hard to trust Google outside of ads products, especially, like, on areas that are not known for, like, gaming. This was my interpretation of why Stadio failed. So this comic is a guy with a T-shirt branded Stadio. trying to launch something by firing a big cannon. And then just in front of a cannon, there's a big wall-labeled network effect with a bunch of previously failed cannonballs

labeled Google Wave and Google Plus and Allo, which was one of Google's instant messaging things. That was my interpretation that you need critical mass. You need some kind of network effect. It's your Google Plus, even if your problem, is superior. If everyone is already on Facebook, then it's a lot harder. And I believe Stadia has a similar issue. If everyone is on Steam and Steam isn't compatible with Stadia, then developers have to develop for your platform specifically. That's interesting because even if you think outside of

Google, if you think about what are products that have become wildly successful that are related to large companies. If I think of meta, you know, they bought them, right? Like Instagram. They bought a platform

that was getting that network. WhatsApp. They also bought them. Yes. And the only platform that you could argue has some level of like social network or like used by hundreds

of millions of consumers, maybe threads. But that one, you know, there's existing distribution that Facebook can use. And there's arguments of like how successful it actually is compared to some of the other ones.

But it just shows how really difficult it is even for companies with billions of dollars to spend, just crazy amounts. And Matt, I heard that that's a comment that I want to make pretty soon if I have time. I heard that Mark Zuckerberg was criticizing Apple saying that Apple hasn't really innovated since they launched the iPhone. They kind of made that innovation and then sat on it for 20 years. So I want to show him saying that and then saying we, on the other hand, have been acquiring innovating company every few years since then. So not that they're being very innovative themselves, but as you said, they just buy them. So after 14 years at Google and creating all these comics, some lighthearted, some more critical,

you decided to leave the company and join this other social media company called Twitter at the time. Yes. And obviously things happened afterwards there, but when you joined, can you share what did it feel, what did the culture feel like? This was before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Yes. How did it compare, especially for such a long time at Google? Yeah. It was, yeah, I ended up for various reasons leaving Google, even though it was a very nice, stable job. The company was just becoming less and less what it was in my naive dreams initially. And Twitter was, at the time, it felt a lot like a young version of Google. So it was very similar to what Google was when I joined.

Smaller company, less rec tape, friendly culture. Google is always friendly, but less stilering. The problem was that in a capitalist society, if you're trying to be a nice guy, like I think it's where it was, but you don't have a huge amount of revenue, then you are at a threat. You're going to be threatened by all the sharks around, including Elon Musk. And that happened. Google had that nice, endless cash cow of the ad revenue, which meant that it could pursue a whole bunch of really interesting projects even before they could be profitable, which Twitter never really had that luxury.

But culturally, it felt similar. And then you had this very interesting time where almost as soon as you joined or a few months after rumors started to happen that Elon Musk might buy Twitter. And you started to make some comics about what I assume must have felt inside the company. What did it feel on how much did these comics actually convey in what it was really like? Right. Yeah. So I thought I had made a pretty smart move to Twitter.

But yeah, six months after that. So just to confirm, like, did I interact with like, you're, you. you went to Twitter thinking, okay, this is going to be, you can rewind time a little bit, go back to an earlier version of Google, like focus, build, nice people, chill, not chill, but like focus and less corporate stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chill in terms of a nice atmosphere, but, you know, not in terms of slacking off. Everyone was working pretty hard.

Well, you actually were one of the, just speaking of the, the, the, the, the, the, work that you did, just a brief mention. What kind of, so you worked on different web products. One thing I heard from people who I talk with is that you were a very productive developer in terms of building stuff, fixing code, those kind of things. Can you talk a little bit about your work? Yeah, so I worked mostly on the web clients as opposed to the iPhone app or Android app, so like the website.

I like the product. I like the team that makes it a lot easier to be working hard and to be productive. The developer experience was pretty good, I would say. I was, when I left Google, I was working on Google Search, which was obviously the oldest part of the Google Codebase and pretty hard to work on. This is something that I also made fun of. but it's it felt like this is what it felt like this is like trying to drive trying to ride a boat that looks like a house moving castle which lots of

so that's what google search code base felt like and it's i mean not to blame anyone it's uh it's something yeah it's just what happens that that all would become like this i think um but moving from this uh and the coming on this one was really more about the legal trying to blame it on people, to pull people rowing for not moving fast enough. But moving from this to Twitter, it felt, yeah, the experience was a lot easier. You could make changes and iterate faster.

The teams were awesome. Yeah, I felt, and it was also becoming kind of a more senior person at that time. So people also looked up to me in a way that increased my, imposter syndrome but I tried to be yeah try to be hardworking and productive and and a good co-worker and mentor I like yeah so someone told me who I talk with Twitter that you were the you were one on the most kind of highest output web developers at web developers in terms of front end at Twitter this just came after you're firing someone who's your focus like oh well I guess you know they're

they're also getting rid of people who are we're actually pushing a lot of of code and fixing a lot of things. And also the one way we connected, which we didn't even know each other is I complained on the web, on Twitter web, about a bug on the web client. And you just messaged me saying, oh, can you, you know, help me reproduce it? I'll try to fix it, which I was really surprised about because Twitter at this time was already pretty big. And I never had anyone reach out to me about anything. And then you actually, you went in, debugged it. And if I remember you might have fixed it,

I'm not sure about that part, but you know, like you actually somehow had time to, you know, monitor social media for, you know, people's problems. And just go ahead and try to fix it. This is something I had tried doing. Even at the Gmail time,

there was, there were Gmail user forums where GBL engineers were, would never, never, ever hang out, unless they already were forced to by some social program between engineers. But this is something that I had always been a little bit frustrated at Google. And big companies in general, you don't really get to meet your users,

which is, for me, it makes, you know, if you have a feedback loop, that's just not close at that time. It's not a loop anymore. If you're being told what to do by your team or management, who have done a bunch of studies and market research and they have metrics. And I'm sure they know better on what people want. But still, it feels like when you're not connecting directly to users, it feels off to me. So I did a little bit of that on Gmail, trying to ask for what people's problems and feature requests were.

And that led to a bunch of improvements. And yeah, same thing with Twitter. trying to see what the users were actually saying and trying to fix their issues. So it was back to, you know, the news of like Musk making an offer for Twitter. And at that point, no one knew if it would buy or not because it was not a binding offer. It was all sorts of noise. What was it like to work through those months of like proper uncertainty? Right.

So this is what this, what this comment is about. There's a bunch of other ones. I'll show them. This one is really, and when you work on Twitter, you are by, because of your job, you kind of stare at the news all day. Because even though you might be testing on synthetic data or testing data, usually you, you know, testings with actual feeds. So you see new stories coming in. So when Musk started trying to acquire Twitter, then this was all over Twitter. So even though as an employee you don't really know what's going to happen to you,

and Musk not having a great reputation for how he treated workers at Keshele, for example, you would have good reasons to be concerned. But the management, understandingly, was trying to. to say, hey, don't worry about it. We'll worry about when we get there and just tune out the noise and try to do your job, which is completely understandable, but hard in this specific situation. So the comic is really a, it's like a sports field with a huge arena around it, and apparently tens of thousands of people around it, but there's no sport.

just a bunch of workers, people sitting at their computer working. And the maestro, whoever is the boss saying, just tune out the noise. And everyone is around cheering. And there's banners. And there's even helicopter and airplanes and fireworks. So, yeah, it was, oh, and I made a sign with the stock price at that time, which was apparently $46.37. sense. So it gets a bit hard to ignore the news when it's in your face and you are not only

watching the news, but you're the object of that news. Yeah. And then what Elon Musk did end up buying Twitter, there was really, really massive firing. So I'm not sure there's any anything comparable unless a company is shutting down or like just, you know, properly going out of business. what are some comics that you, you know, like, drew to represent, you know, like how, how you felt about this, how people felt about it? So, let's see, there's a bunch of those. Because at least 50% of people were let go within a matter of weeks, right? And then even more after. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was 80%.

Yeah. So that, initially it was a rumor that we had heard. before he actually finalized the deal, that said something about 75%. And then that prompted me to draw a bunch of references with these sort of Damocles hanging on top of people's head, saying 75%, while you're trying to work and make your plans for next year. We all thought, that can't be right, can't be that high. eventually it ended up being more, more like 80%. Oh, this is one about him visiting the office,

actually trying to find his best location. But yeah, we were, it was pretty brutal. So I do think that it was a time, just to be a bit cynical and not to be too dramatic, It was a time when Silicon Valley in general had a whole bunch of layoffs. Metra had some pretty big ones also. And I do think Twitter had over-hired for a little while. And it was, I do think firing some people or downsizing, if you want to call it nicely,

was due, was overdue at some point. It may have been not possible because of the deal that was ongoing with Musk, so it sort of froze everything and people couldn't get fired during that time. So some layoffs were necessary, but the way they were done was really not very nicely people at all. So this comic here, yeah, it's a big dartboard with the Twitter logo at the center of the circular. dartboard and a big orch charts of all people working at Twitter. And then you see dozens of darts with the label fired red darts hitting all those. And let's see the bubbles say, shall we stop now? And another guy says, now this is fun.

And then another guy says, your turn, Elon. So yeah, it felt, it felt random. The reason I drew this is because, well, first everyone was getting fired. But also, it felt really random. I don't want to mention my own case. I mean someone else who is on my team, who was clearly the most productive guy I've ever met in my career in terms of not just commits and pushing code, but also quality. He was really, really hardworking, and he was fired. So that felt really random to me.

really felt like, okay, I understand they need to fire a whole bunch of people, but they're not doing it very nicely at all. And they're maybe not firing the right people. And he ended up being rehired and he accepted because he had a visa issue. And so he really had a good reason to go back, even though most people wouldn't go back being treated. Yeah, well, visa is powerful enough. Yeah. So, I mean, it was a very clearly a very hard time, both for Twitter, obviously, but also for the industry. You did create a comic that I felt kind of looked at it from a different angle. And I heard that. You mentioned that this was pretty well received by people. Yeah. So this was, this was, let me see, what the date on this one? Seventh of November.

So, yeah, this shows playing on the sink idea of Elon Musk showing up with a big sink, just for the sake of making a pun. He is basically, in the comic, he is emptying a large can containing a bunch of small bluebirds into the sink. And that's the metaphor for firing people. and the bluebirds, all the employees. And then there's a hole in the pipe below the sink, and then all the little birds, they escape through that hole, and they all fly away, and they all look pretty happy. So, yeah, it was trying to inject a bit of happiness,

or just trying to say maybe we vouch the bullet because maybe we wouldn't have been treated really well anyway. I also spoke from a bit of a privileged position because I was, yeah, I had a bunch of years under my belt. I had some more financial stability, more seniority. I didn't really have any health insurance issues or visa issues. So I was really very lucky compared to other people. So I felt like it was also my role to try and. And have some lighthearted comments as well.

Yeah. So I asked you earlier, what's a comic that will kind of, you know, like be personal and like maybe reflect on your professional career? And you pointed to this one. What is this comic? And how would you reflect now on your professional career of like coming up closer to 20 years? Yeah. I would say I've been insanely lucky in joining this industry at the right time.

I hope it will get better again. I'm pretty sure it will. It seems it's a lot more rough right now that it was a few years ago. So initially I came from academia. I was really, I was meant, I was trained to be a teacher or researcher. So it wasn't an obvious move for me to go into big tech companies. Initially, I was going to study physics or research, physics, or computer science, or bioinformatics. And I left my PhD program before I finished it because there was this company called Google that looked pretty awesome.

It looked like it wasn't really just only after-profit. It was trying to be a good neighbor, trying to be a good player in the world and making things to really for the betterment of society, which was a bit of a naive view. But that was my view at the time. And to be fair, I think Google was quite close to that ideal view of such a company at the time. And then it took a long time for Google to slowly move down into being more and more of a traditional company, even though the founder's letter initially said, we are not a, what was the word? We are not a traditional company or something like that. It's probably another adjective.

We are not a traditional company. And we don't intend to become one. I'll look for the lot later. So I do think there are a pretty traditional company now, even though if you compare Google to most of the companies, it's still most better on average. But it is not quite the naive ideal that I had. But I still got away with working more than a decade for that company.

That was really a dream job. And I was trying to find some of that. in Twitter also. So the comic shows two drunk characters on the bench sitting on a bench at nighttime in a park. One of them is a human with a Google t-shirt and the other one is the Twitter blue bird. And Google says, the Google guy says it only took me 10 years before capitalism killed my ideals. And there's a bunch of... empty bottles of wine on the side. And Twitter says, good for you.

It took me three months. So it felt like a dissent from the ideal company, which I don't know if capitalism even makes this possible in general for such a company to be nice with its employees. And also, I mean, it feels almost like an anomaly for it to have so much of a cash inflow and being able to do all those awesome things. things. And I tried to find some of that also in Twitter, but that the travel downwards was a lot faster. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it's been an interesting ride for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I was, even though people were not treated really well at Twitter, I was, I was, I I was insanely lucky compared to others. And the cartoonist side of myself was having a great time witnessing that.

And you did. I got this book of yours called Twitunes, where you actually summarize the story of what happened to Twitter via comics. It's actually very entertaining to read because the story, I mean, the story as we know, it played out. It is something that sounds like it could be fiction, right? But it's actually based on real events. Yeah. It does sound like it would be, I almost want Netflix to make something out of this. We'll see if they do. So to wrap up, I'll just have a few rapid questions. So I'll just shoot them out and then you answer whatever is on your mind. What is your favorite programming language and why? I don't have one. I feel like it is a means to an end. It depends on what I'm

building. Whenever I have interviews and people have this online coding platform before they paste in their templates of the interview question, they say, oh, which language are you going to do? And then I always say, I think the only smart answer to this is it depends on your question. So people are always a little bit confused. But yeah, I don't have a favorite language. I just use whatever is best to use for the job. Which languages have you used a lot in the past? I would say all the major ones. So Java, JavaScript, Python, C++, Objective C for Apple.

That would be more like Swift. I'm trying to learn Rust. I did a bunch of C also when I worked on lower-level system stuff. And then I don't know if you would call these programming languages, but things that look like programming, like HTML or CSS or even latex. You, it's some kind of code. Well, I like the right tool for the right job. Yeah. What's a book and a comic book that you liked and would recommend?

I always have this issue of reverse indexing. It's like when, if I'm looking at a. a bookshelf or a library, I say, oh, I love this one, oh, I love this one, oh, I love this one. And then if you ask me, oh, what are your favorite ones? I miss the reverse index to have, oh, what are my three favorites? So actually I have a webpage that helps me remembering. So it is ma.n.u, which is my website slash faves, as in favorites. Wonderful.

So, yeah, you could get some ideas from them. I would recommend for English speakers, I would recommend, There's a comic book that is a series of books that is really famous in Europe, but not that much in the U.S., but is currently being translated, I think, pretty well. And the English title is Gomer Gouf. So it is the name of a guy. His last name is Gouf. So he goose all the time. And he is the anti-hero.

And it's really funny. That would be my choice. What is your favorite comic that you've created of all the ones or a favorite comic? That's always difficult. It's like asking for the favorite child. You know, I have one child, so that's an easy question. She's my favorite one. This one is what I answered earlier.

Yeah, I think this one, And yeah, I could stand by this choice. My answer will probably depend on when you ask me. So this one isn't more about engineering. Do you want to describe it? Yeah. So this one has two panels, and I think it's something software engineers can relate to. The first panel is labeled the life of a software engineer,

and it shows a guy in front of a building that only has foundations. and looks nice and neat and clean. And he says, and he has a hammer and a hand saw, and there's a bunch of wood on the side. He says, clean slate, solid foundations. This time, I will build things the right way. And then the next panel says much later. And then there's a big mess of buildings that all look completely different,

connected by a bunch of weird ladders and staircases. And he says, oh, my, I've done it again. haven't I? So this relates to at least my experience of trying to make things work and then, you know, you try to start from scratch or start afresh. I'll do things differently. It's going to be a lot cleaner. And then six months later, it's even worse than it was before. As engineers, I think we can all relate to it. If not, you've just been not doing it for long enough. That's a good. That's a good point. Or you're a genius software architect and you must be hired immediately by all those companies. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, man, thank you for

helping go with all these stories behind the comics and just talking about them. This, this was very interesting and pretty rare. There's not many software cartoonists. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I hope this was interesting or at least entertaining. Thank you to Manu for going through some of his favorites, and the stories behind them. To see more comics from Manu, head over to his website at ma.n.u. That's a pretty clever name.

For more stories that Manu shared on creating comics, check out deep dives in the pragmatic engineer. Link below in the show notes. If you enjoy this podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. Thank you and see you in the next one.