71–80 of 145 posts
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The half an engineer was just the last team member around, only doing essential maintenance to keep it working.
So why allocate more engineers to the project when it was doing fine with half a head?
Very interesting story! The title (Google being able to kill facebook) seems a bit exagerated though. If this app was so important (25 to 50% of all facebook revenues), and so important to customers (most powerful editor to manage ads), I'm sure if Google had disabled websql, they would have forked some older chrome / electron with websql support and bundle it with the app.
A hit of 25-50% of revenue would certainly have hurt, but probably not killed Facebook. That people will find a workaround is absolutely true. I once worked on a system to order mobile phone subscription from a website that only worked on IE6. So we had a website that accepted orders from customers, created jobs that would be sent to one of 10 VMs that ran IE6, where a watir script would steer IE6 to enter the order…
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The half an engineer was just the last team member around, only doing essential maintenance to keep it working.
So why allocate more engineers to the project when it was doing fine with half a head?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen this sort of thing happen many times. What usually happens is the original team that built it leave the company or move on to other teams, and the one engineer left actually has a different job as well now but is stuck supporting it part time as a favour. It's not that you couldn't assign other engineers to help support it, but they wouldn't have any idea how to do so because there's probably no documentati…
It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for engineers at the time. Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would need to convince the engineer to work on the project. At the time, ads was not a high status part of FB engineering, and as such, it was very difficult to get people to work on ads products.
Today it's called Business Manager and it remains a user hostile pile of JavaScript with dubious design and riddled with bugs. The only reason anybody puts up with it is because there's no other way to access powerful targeting tools, and we are forced to depend on Facebook. More to the point of the original story, no, Google couldn't have killed Facebook by flipping that switch. The Power Editor users would have don…
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One time I saw a fascinating article about how scientists were working to grow skin complete with natural looking hair from stem cells for burn victims and such. I thought the article was really neat and I was in a hurry so I emailed a the link to myself. The next time I logged into my gmail to read it I happened to be at a machine without adblock and I saw that google was serving me ads for garbage treatments for ma…
Why are burn survivors unacceptably ugly to you, but baldness survivors are acceptable looking?
That's a new one for me on the victimhood trivialization scale.
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It may be "many" but it does not mean that the defining nature of advertising is ethically neutral. I think I just quote Banksy/Tejaratchi: "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is h…
One time I saw a fascinating article about how scientists were working to grow skin complete with natural looking hair from stem cells for burn victims and such. I thought the article was really neat and I was in a hurry so I emailed a the link to myself. The next time I logged into my gmail to read it I happened to be at a machine without adblock and I saw that google was serving me ads for garbage treatments for ma…
I really don't get this response.
Since very soon after Gmail launched, Google has been very open and public about mining user's emails to serve ads to them. This isn't some kind of dark pattern. There was a lot of fuss, to the point of politicians threatening to hold hearings about it.
And then people sign up for Gmail and complain about the ads.
I can understand complaining about cookies tracking you all over the Internet, and how hard it can be for the average Joe to avoid them. But Gmail and their ilk? It's trivial to use something else.
Today it's called Business Manager and it remains a user hostile pile of JavaScript with dubious design and riddled with bugs. The only reason anybody puts up with it is because there's no other way to access powerful targeting tools, and we are forced to depend on Facebook. More to the point of the original story, no, Google couldn't have killed Facebook by flipping that switch. The Power Editor users would have don…
I find business manager has a more sensible design than AdWords, having used both a lot. TikTok is funny because they basically copied the FB ads dashboard pixel by pixel.
But it seems less powerful than the old one for some reason might just be in my head though. It has a pretty low ad limit per ad group I think 100. Though some of the 'combo' ads where you can put 5 headlines, 5 copy etc help up that number.
BUT I do not like the business manager which houses all the pages, users, audience assets. I find the 'line of business' really confusing and hard to see how they want it organized. Like what's the model supposed to be? Agency line of business -> client subs. But then you need a specific line of business for certain offline attribution etc so having it agency parent doesn't make sense to me?!
Google actually had a successful social network project, Orkut, they just continuously marginalised it for it to be too NIH for US headquarters.
I don't know how they are doing it but Google manage to fail at anything social. By that I mean communication platforms, social networks and instant messengers. They have promising starts but they fuck it up later. Their only successes I'd say are GMail and YouTube. I'd say for GMail, it is just an email client they started out excellent, thanks in part to its huge storage space and good search features. And they did…
"People who understand human beings" and the have the ability to synthesize those insights into compelling technology products are exceedingly in demand in 2021. Rest assured, we hire as many as we possibly can and offer them a lot of money/benefits. However, they can pretty much get jobs anywhere and many choose to start their own venture.
You seem to think it's quite easy though. Do you think you can do a better job at Gmail than the Gmail team currently? Or a better job with Youtube than the Youtube team?
Maybe it's not as simple as 'understanding human beings'
If the product was responsible for 25% of the company revenue, why was only half of one engineer assigned to it? And after the vulnerability was discovered, they still only had 5 people assigned to it while it increased in importance to 50% of revenue?