“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

Unfortunately, the part they didn't tell you was that you should put more users first before putting fewer users first. (This is what "impact" means on the job ladder.)

Given two otherwise equal tasks, if one helps 60M users and another helps 12M users, you are usually expected to work on the one that helps more users. And if a product develops too many bugs of the latter type (affects too few users to ever be prioritized above other work), it will usually get shut down.

Fixing bugs for one or two or even a hundred users doesn't scale, and Google wants to scale so it can live up to its "potential to improve the lives of millions of people". (If you ever work at or start an early-stage start-up, you want to be the opposite of this because Google can't; see Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" essay.)

If you come back (for another internship or full-time), the Intern Host, Product Manager, Director, and/or VP Engineering in your management chain can provide more context on how to apply "put the users first" in your specific context.

There are times where I was expected to put IE 9/Win XP above Firefox because that would help more users. And yes, that sucks, both for me, and for Firefox users.

I didn't know that chrome could get that. I thought that the mobile site had limited functionality and requested the desktop site when I needed to set a time range. I checked it with Chrome and it works. Very unfair.

However Chrome spoils the user experience by asking too many questions (log in? change language?). Not a good experience, I'll keep asking for the desktop site on those rare occasions.

At some point you have to stop giving the benefit of the doubt. I draw the line where Google is unable to make a search page (that is making them the "x billion dollar" company in the first place) work with Firefox due to "lack of dev resources". Even though the only thing stopping the page from working in FF is a user agent check.

You are making exactly the same argument that Microsoft proponents were making when IE was bundled into Windows trying to push off other browsers. We don't have all the context, it must be too difficult to separate browser and OS code, etc

Xoogler here, worked there for 18 months circa 2015.

> And the first thing they told us at the orientation is that they put the users first.

This is the company line, but the truth is that Google no longer knows itself. The orientation was designed in an era where Google was growing rapidly. The fear was that the early company culture of mutual trust and so on was likely to be diluted by the influx of new hires, so let's administer a proactive cultural injection.

But the reality today (err, 2015) is that the Google culture is no longer monolithic. Even basic day-to-day processes are different between Chrome and Android and Google and X and probably other teams I wasn't exposed to. The orientation has now become counter-productive for a large subset of the engineers, because it sets expectations wrong.

Examples: "Every engineer has access to all the source code." Or "no company code may be stored locally on a laptop." Or "every change must be code reviewed." These were company policies that were routinely violated by individual teams, which I only learned after daring to ask "how the heck are you getting your JOB done?"

Does Google "put the users first?" Depends on the org. In my admittedly brief tenure there, the most important consideration was internal politics, followed by "partner" and "ecosystem" concerns. Users registered but only distantly, mainly because we didn't expect many of them.

I think Modern Google can be best summarized with a company-wide goal of "be the most." Google Search as the most-used search, Android as the most-used OS, Chrome as the most-used browser, etc. If your revenue is based on page-views, and page-views are based on click counts...

"Most" is different from "best."

Edit: I feel obligated to clarify how the "we didn't expect many users" comment meshed with the "be the most" principle. I was a software engineer in a hardware org (think Pixel). The point of high-end hardware like Pixel was not to dominate the market, but instead be a prestige product that moves expectations. By building a MBP-level laptop, Google could demonstrate that ChromeOS is not just for throwaway laptops, and thereby make ChromeOS viable on its partners high-end hardware. Being too successful was an anti-goal, because it risks scaring off Samsung and the like.

The hope was not to single-handedly dominate a la Apple, but rather to foster the "ecosystem." As to users, well...they'd be better served indirectly by a robust ecosystem. Or at least that was the hope.

You'll notice that Google does not build low-end hardware, with the notable exception of Chromecast, which is another story.

> a new and proprietary web engine that's not beholden to Apple, Google, Mozilla, or any of the major firms

I wouldn't necessarily go as far as proprietary, but I agree everywhere else. Now that we essentially have a bunch of Chrome flavors, I'm finding myself missing the browser wars of the mid 2000s. Real competition producing real results.