Steve's Google Platform rant • Hacker News Board

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#341

Post by crizCraig » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 4:39 AM UTC

I think this is a bunch of BS. Google didn't have to create a platform, it took control of the world's biggest platform. Google benefits from most things built on the web sans Facebook. Now it's leading the way in the most promising platform of the next few years with Android. Chrome is a platform. Google+ is a platform for content creation that solves the problem of the Facebook crawl wall. It also sets the stage for a more complete solution to your problems (aka searches) via increasing its knowledge on individuals.

I don't think Google will accomplish its goal with plus however, because it's not being aggressive enough in collecting user data and integrating it with search. I think the Universities are in the best position to do this as they did with email and the web. The killer app will be a light bulb that makes extremely useful suggestions based on context.

This rant expounded here: http://www.wepolls.com/p/3740179

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#342

Post by mcantor » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 4:47 AM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #131

mbyrne wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Disgruntled" is a straight up ad hominem attack that doesn't address whether or not what the person says is true or not.

"grouchy, testy, sullen, grumpy, dissatisfied." All of the above, and I really don't see the ad hominem in there. It's just a description of a state of mind with respect to another entity.

Ad hominem doesn't mean "calling them a name or label that isn't true"--it means "implying that their argument is less valid because of their state of mind or perspective".

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#343

Post by eljorgito » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:12 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #270

TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

Like others have said, decide on the merits of your internship. I left recently (a few months ago) and much of Yegge's rant rings true - but like all big companies, it is not universal. My main caveat when others ask me about working for Amazon is - know exactly which team you'll be on . That will be the difference between a hell on earth scenario vs. a pretty sweet job. From your internship, you have much more infor…

any advice for people considering a move to Amazon but haven't had the benefit of internship or view from the inside. it's clear that group to group variance is enormous - hell on earth vs pretty sweet - but getting clarity on the particular group is key to decision. it's possible to get some of that through the recruiting process but not the same as spending time there.

also curious as to whether the hellishness everyone talks about applies cross-org (eg for PMs, TPMs, etc.) as well as engineers.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#344

Post by simplekoala » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:13 AM UTC

haldean wrote: post #327

simplekoala wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-Amazonian, I have to second your opinion. It was by far the worst employment experience I had at a tech company. In my 10 year tenure, I fortunately didn't come across any company as bad as Amazon, when it comes to how it treats its employees. The management doesn't have any value for the lives of their developers, and use them as tissues. Use and throw seems to their policy. If you can take their abuse, and…

Advice taken. I have an offer from them right now, as well as an offer from elsewhere -- after seeing this whole thread, I think I'll go for the elsewhere. Thanks for the advice!

Amazon is still a great place to learn, if you are willing to take the brunt of operations and don't mind having no life. Dismal working conditions, over-working, heavy operations load (group specific), having no-life, working over holidays, poor line managers, cover-your-ass politics aside - It is one of the few places where you truly get to see how large scale web-based/distributed systems are conceived, built, and operated. It could be a great career launch pad, if you are just out of school. It will be like drinking from a fire-hose. If you are single, and in a good group with the right set of peers then it could work out well for you. If elsewhere is a super hot startup (Quora/Palantir/Dropbox and ilk or good tech companies like Google, FB, Twitter, Linkedin or even Zynga (pre-IPO makes it hot in my opinion) then I would seriously consider the down-sides of working for Amazon, and living in Seattle.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#345

Post by simplekoala » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:29 AM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #56

revorad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really shocked to read that (and the OP's rant about Amazon). Of course, I've never had a corporate job. It amazes me that Amazon managed to be so successful, despite treating their employees so badly.

I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything bad about Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made my post because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went into more detail.) Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS powered Amazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortu…

I have been a victim of this down-voting in the past :) Even till end of 2007, majority of Amazon.com was not powered by AWS. If I remember correctly, website team tested out serving traffic on EC2 machines during 06-07 timeframe, and categorically declared that Amazon can't run on cloud without crossing major technology hurdles.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#346

Post by aangjie » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:36 AM UTC

anupj wrote: post #242

bnr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is my understanding that Yegge basically invented ranting.

I think he made it "mainstream" :)

Well, i haven't been following him long enough to comment on that. But i do know i prefer his rant compared to the other two. It seems to have more facts/details than the others.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#347

Post by simplekoala » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:38 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #268

nirvana wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in a healthy, functioning, company there is some politics. The thing about amazon is, it doesn't matter to anyone that I had pointed this out months ago. From my boss up to the person who reported to Bezos, every one of them would be embarrassed by it, but what could I do? Threaten to tell Jeff Bezos? He doesn't care. He was in the ticket and they were all pointing the finger at me. Me coming back and say "Bu…

> ""But, I pointed it out months ago"... would result in "therefore its your fault because you weren't persuasive enough!"" And then this would get noted in your performance review. Weakness: bias for action.

LOL at bias of action :) Reminds me of ex-manager's parrotry of Amazon's values

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#348

Post by buu700 » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:40 AM UTC

speedracr wrote: post #65

buu700 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another mirror: http://buu700.com/steverant

Thanks! Out of curiousity: Were you expecting this to go offline? Somehow there's always at least one HN member caching a good article :)

Haha, actually I just happened to have it open in a separate tab when I read people saying it 404'd, though I do have a habit of saving loads of random things to my ~/Public/ NFS share when browsing HN and reddit.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#349

Post by msg » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:43 AM UTC

limist wrote: post #321

msg wrote: post #276

Amazon engineer here, just a couple of observations after a few years at the company. As many people said, there's a wide variability in experience at Amazon depending on the team. And I would say even more, depending on where you sit in the graph. The bottlenecks at the center have more clients, higher TPS, more stringent latency requirements. And their support burden is worse and the engineer's life is worse. It's…

Very informative and well-written post, thank you. Nice evolution of the MLK quote. What I'm wondering next is, What is the practical take-away for startups and relatively small efforts that are looking to scale? Regardless of tools-stack, what should a forward-thinking developer do? Is the answer to design around a RESTful API specification right from the beginning, then building layers of server-side and client-sid…

It's a little hard to talk about this broad topic without bloviating. Here goes.

So first, take that stuff Steve said about extensibility to heart. He has another blog somewhere, oh here it is

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht...

about software that is alive because it's extensible. That is true of your startup too. You don't want to be a "site", you want to be a "service". And that means you want to be an authority for a unique kind of data, that you want your users to create and use.

I think the Google+ data is pretty unique and cool. I like the user experience. But you can't call it a service, which is bad news until they get their crap together.

I'm a strong believer that flowing data puts pressure on software to work correctly. You want a public API because you don't assume that you and your team are world class geniuses who have exhausted the search space of valid use cases for your data... but your customers can, close enough. (A very Amazon virtue: start with the customer.)

You want to have a well-designed interface for yourself and your users because it's so painful to scale, migrate, control security, etc. without it. So sure, I would say start with it as early as you can stand. Make it public as soon as you can. Allow your users to contribute and build on your data and service.

You'll probably treat your public-facing interfaces with different levels of scrutiny than internal-only ones. This is convenient, but it might be a mistake. You don't want to put off security or user data integrity until it's too late.

Having multiple services means that you can scale them independently. This costs some overhead but you'll be able to right-size your hardware, say with appropriate fleets in EC2.

Sorry that's all kind of generic, but that's about as deep as I would go without a real-world example to talk about.

The High Scalability blog is one I would recommend at the leading edge of this thing. I see posts on the front page alone that cover all I've been talking about and more.

http://highscalability.com/

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#350

Post by koko775 » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 5:51 AM UTC

nextparadigms wrote: post #172

This post reminds of me of why I couldn't believe Google would launch Honeycomb with almost no apps optimized for it, when Microsoft managed to have 2000 apps at the launch of WP7. Also, why they didn't try to bring the content owners on board for Google TV, and why I think they will be missing a huge opportunity to turn Google TV into a "console platform" . But I feared they won't "get" this, and this post is settin…

So this is somewhat related, somewhat off topic from the subject at hand, but... ----

As for bringing content owners on board - as far as I can tell, they did. Their developer support was also very responsive. A+ on forming a dialogue with developers.

Their problem IMO is that they don't appear to feel it in their bones how important product differentiation is. Maybe they get it, but I don't think it's sunk in.

Allow me to elaborate. What's the difference between an embedded device, a phone, a mini-tablet, a tablet, and GoogleTV? Well...

* Embedded devices might have a pre-2.x Android that never got updated. But that's okay, nobody develops apps for them anyways.

* Phones probably have 2.1, maybe 2.2.

* A mini-tablet could be 2.1 or 2.2, and has the mobile device UI.

* A tablet might have 3.0 or 3.1 on it.

* GoogleTV has 3.0 on it, but its market app might filter like it's 3.1. How do you differentiate this in code? Version specifiers, specifying notouch (which will break if googletv ever supports any kind of touchscreen, on a large screen size (which is smaller than a tablet, which has a extra large screen), etc.

Want to develop for iOS? Great. Would you like iPhone or iPad? Or both? Need to make sure it works on 99.9% of the devices that can download it? No problem. And hopefully, sometime in the future, maybe Apple will see fit to enable the AppleTV for developers.

Circling back to address your statements, if Google's aim, or one of them, is to make GoogleTV into a gaming platform, I don't have much confidence in Google's ability to deliver on that goal, because GoogleTV is little more than a revision of Android plus some optional APIs, and Android is architected as a multi-device platform. It's not a single device with multiple revisions, as is the case with the iPhone 3G/3GS/4/4S sequence, or even the Nintendo DS and its subsequent revisions. There are reasons that Android isn't as compelling a game platform as iOS is, and that is a big one.

With respect to building a multimedia application platform, GoogleTV has potential if for no other reason than it's one of the few set-top boxes with an app store, period, and a programming interface that isn't thoroughly obtuse, but the GTV's design and usability are very weak, almost pre-alpha, even, as if it were scarcely more than a straight-up port of Android's touch-optimized interface with an inadequate amount of polish. It's nothing your average TV-watching user is going to grok, if the keyboard+mouse remote didn't clue you in.

Really, what it comes down to is that, even for hardware, Google just doesn't seem to want to release something "perfect". They just want "shippable" -- or I daresay "just barely shippable" - if you can call it that. Even if they have critical bugs, so long as developers can work around them, even if they haven't nailed down the UI, and make a sweeping change right before public release, that's still "good enough". And "good enough" is the enemy of "great".

Until Google puts design thinking into their products from the ground up, as you put it, they aren't going to be able to lead the marketplace.

/rant