The first paragraph reads like LinkedIn slop, so I scanned the rest of the titles - they indicate that the rest of the article reads the same.
Lessons from 14 years at Google
131–140 of 732 posts
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#132This has to be the 50th or 100th version of this article that repeats the same thing Every single point in this article was already explicitly described between roughly 1968 and 1987: Brooks formalized coordination cost and the fallacy of adding manpower in The Mythical Man-Month Conway showed that system architecture inevitably mirrors organizational communication structure in 1968 Parnas defined information hiding…
The fact that people don’t learn from the older books is somewhat annoying, but rewriting them makes sense precisely because people will likely trust it more. Software engineers are prone to novelty bias. Thats in contrast to some other demographic groups who very much prefer ancient texts.
Well both of them are wrong because they can’t walk the middle path
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#13315 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you in those positions - but once you are in those positions - only that mattered is politics and asskissing. I know so many people smarter than me, always stayed lower b/c they didn’t know how to play politics. Only reason i never got higher was I didn’t know how to play politics and kiss ass any more or any better.
The top people are all who kissed each others ass and looked out only for their cohort (e.g. people who were in same positions as them in early 2013). So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#134> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…
> Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.
The main benefit of understanding the purpose and real world usage of your software is that you can ask the right questions while planning and implementing the software/feature/bug-fix and that you don't make any wrong assumptions.
In a situation where you have conflicting requirements or concerns regarding the change, you'll eventually be hit with "PM knows the product & customer better" or the explicit "your job is to deliver what is asked".
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#135Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…
I have an issue with the first point as well, but differently. Having worked on a user-facing product with millions of users, the challenge was not finding user problems, but finding frequent user problems. In a sufficiently complex product there are thousands of different issues that users encounter. But it's non-trivial to know what to prioritize.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#136Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…
which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary
Omni Group. Wolfram. Parts of Apple. Rhino3D. Parts of Breville. Prusa (on device, not on desktop). Speed Queen (dial-based). Just from applications I currently have open and devices I can see from where I'm sitting.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#137Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much Ok, I mean this sincerely. You must never have used Microsoft tools. They managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX. Azure? Teams?…
I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you're not shipping, you're not learning from users. As a result, it's easy to build working, correct, performant code which doesn't fit what anyone actually needs.
Figuring out what is useful for people is not some difficult problem that requires shipping half baked slop. That's just an excuse.
ridiculous.
> Figuring out what is useful for people is not some difficult problem that requires shipping half baked slop
what have you shipped? paying sees literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to ship out fledged out software that no one wants is exactly why Stadia lasted both way too long and got cancelled anyway.
figuring out what is useful is the hardest problem. if anything that's Google's biggest problem, not shipping fast enough, not iterating fast enough.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#139Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse.
There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock"
When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was:
• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
• I was considered weird for doing it.
• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.
• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.
• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring.
In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly.
This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very heavily filled with LLM-isms. The writing is bland AI output.
how do you know? in the first item, LLMs don't use incomplete sentence fragments? > It’s seductive to fall in love with a technology and go looking for places to apply it. I’ve done it. Everyone has. But the engineers who create the most value work backwards: they become obsessed with understanding user problems deeply, and let solutions emerge from that understanding. I suppose it can be prompted to take on one's wr…
And have a look at the bio: https://addyosmani.com/bio/
> His story isn’t just about writing code, but about inspiring a community to strive for a better web. And perhaps the most exciting chapter is still being written, as he helps shape how AI and the web will intersect in the coming decade. Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come.