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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#611

Post by CrimsonRain »

lapcat wrote: post #256

> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritising short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion. > For my first nine years at Google I worked on HTML and related standards ( https://whatwg.org/ ). My mandate was to do the best thing for the web, as whatever was good for the web would…

W3C got what it deserved.

> The WHATWG began because the W3C told you, “HTML was dead. If you want to do something like HTML5, you should go elsewhere.” Now that the W3C has come to its senses, is it time for the WHATWG to hang up its spurs and for its participants to work inside W3C to continue the development of the web platform?

We tried (2007–2012). It didn’t work out. In fact, we ended up spinning more specs out of the W3C! The WHATWG has about 12 specs spread amongst eight or so editors now.

> Bruce The spec now known as HTML 5 began with a "guerilla" group called WHATWG. How and why did the WHATWG begin?

> Hixie The short answer is the W3C told us to. The long answer: Back in 2003, when XForms was going through its final stages (the "Proposed Recommendation" vote stage), the browser vendors were concerned that it wouldn’t take off on the Web without being made a part of HTML, and out of that big discussion (which unfortunately is mostly hidden behind the W3C‘s confidentiality walls) came a proof of concept showing that it was possible to take some of XForms’ ideas and put then into HTML 4. We originally called it "XForms Basic", and later renamed it "WebForms 2.0". This formed the basis of what is now HTML 5. In 2004, the W3C had a workshop, the "The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents", where we (the browser vendors) argued that it was imperative that HTML be extended in a backwards-compatible way. It was a turning point in the W3C‘s history—you could tell because at one point RedHat, Sun, and Microsoft, arch-rivals all, actually agreed on something, and that never happens. The outcome of that workshop was that the W3C concluded that HTML was still dead, as had been decided in a workshop in 1998, and that if we wanted to do something like HTML 5, we should go elsewhere. So we announced a mailing list, and did it there. At the time I was working for Opera Software, but "we" in this case was Opera and Mozilla acting together (with Apple cheering us from the sidelines).

W3C declared html dead and now you are mad on whatwg for html5?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#612

Post by cellu »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #356
Laremere wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today. A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom l…

Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.

I’m curious to understand your perspective:m as to why a business that focus on the user may expose to risk? Doesn’t meeting user needs equals to making users happy which in turn equals to making more money?

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#613

Post by sdenton4 »

starcraft2wol wrote: post #293
3seashells wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block.. One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.

This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil, corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.

Kids often bring out the worst level of 'fuck you, got mine' politicking in humans. All that school segregation stuff in the 60's? Parents 'protecting' their children. Same for the school segregation stuff in the 2010's.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#614

Post by Nimitz14 »

closeparen wrote: post #485
marklar423 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you're working with a different definition of "silo" than the parent. My understanding of a "silo" is "closed off teams that aren't allowed to work with outsiders" who have their own culture that may be at odds with the company. It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.

Building in silos is when you get something done by yourself or with your direct teammates. Cross team collaboration involves e.g. a weekly sync, coauthored design documents, code changes made in modules you’ve never seen before reviewed by people you don’t know, tasks that are critical blocking dependencies for you but totally irrelevant to the decision-makers of the teams that need to allocate time for them. The ex…

This is not at all what people mean when they talk about silos

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#615

Post by dekhn »

Osmose wrote: post #69

This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making i…

There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar.

But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#616

Post by ajross »

whstl wrote: post #525
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better

For me it's because ChatGPT ignores less of what I type than Google currently does, plus it doesn't return spammy SEO results. Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus. Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately,…

> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried

I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).

I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#617

Post by cavisne »

progbits wrote: post #547
serial_dev wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling her out by name felt a bit harsh within the context of the post. Sure, call out Sundar as he's a public figure, but this lady, never heard of her, never seen her. He could have made the point by writing "I had this terrible boss who had no idea about anything and...", her name is irrelevant to demonstrate the issue of decline at Google.

Maybe it was too much, but one counterpoint: if horrible managers never get called out how are you supposed to know to avoid them / how will they face consequences? I understand authors frustration, I've experienced the same in the past but could not voice this beyond just some close friends and coworkers (who knew it already anyway), for fear of repercussions. I've since left but of course this person remains, and f…

I think the right/ethical move is to identify your organization (ie Flutter) and not name anyone specifically.

I agree completely with the article, but naming someone publicly makes the author seem like they are living in a bubble. Ie in their world the head of their org is a public figure, but hardly anyone knows what Flutter is let alone the org structure.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#618

Post by deanCommie »

refulgentis wrote: post #481
swetland wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship. I came aboard during the…

I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material/Hardware.[2] Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any env…

> TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus."

This doesn't resonate. I've been a loyal Android user since Gingerbread (2010), and maybe for the first couple of years it was catching up to Apple, but i would say since pretty much KitKat, it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features. (And arguably putting them out with more stability and polish).

Throughout the main feature that Android was behind on and had to "copy" was performance. iPhones used to (and still) blow even top-tier Android phones away on basic things like scroll smoothness.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#619

Post by magarnicle »

chatmasta wrote: post #341
glimshe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the "Dream Team" of Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is. Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their ga…

> Google hasn't created a new major product in years Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway). But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products…

> throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way.

Street View is the perfect example of this. It still seems like an insane-in-a-good-way product to me after all these years.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#620

Post by marknutter »

deanCommie wrote: post #609
mpalmer wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't think mentioning her by name was necessary (she's just an example of the culture of bad middle management he's calling out), I do think highlighting her race as a meta-criticism does neither the OP nor Banks herself any favors. My rule of thumb: unless given an obvious reason not to, assume good faith on the part of individuals.

Throwaway didn't claim bad faith necessarily, but just pointed out an important variable. It's good to have good faith, but it's also good to understand that good faith individuals also suffer from blindspots and unconscious biases. Hypothetically if there is a set of leaders, directors, and VPs, that all seem equally incompetent, but you call out only one, what might be the reason for it? It could be random. It coul…

Nah, it’s race baiting bullshit, and more racist than the racism it claims to be calling out.
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