it's sad that startups become corps and decay. this article is the perfect illustration, from the bio, to the llm slop content of the article. Just sad it has to be this way
Lessons from 14 years at Google
231–240 of 732 posts
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team This revelation is utterly shocking to me. That's like anti-abuse 101. You infiltrate their networks and then track their behavior using your own monitoring to find the holes in your observability. Even in 2010 that was anti-abuse 101. Or at least I think it was, maybe my team at eBay/PayPal…
Well, the 101 idiom comes from US education, it's a reference to the introductory course. Part of the problem with anti-abuse work is that there's no course you can take and precious little inter-firm job hopping. Anti-abuse is a cost of business so you don't see companies competing over employees with experience like you do in some other areas like AI research. So it's all learning-by-doing and when people leave, th…
I seem to recall sitting in weekly abuse team meetings where one of the metrics was the price of a google account on the black market. So at least some of these things were tracked and not just by one individual.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users It's worth noting that Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users. It might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company.
>Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer Oh
That's not a fair reading, he's as much of a developer as anyone else. But he wasn't (AFAIK) working on user-facing products specifically.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#234Not 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…
To be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google.
“Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users It's worth noting that Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users. It might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company.
Fair point. "User" as developer rather than "user" as person clicking buttons in Gmail, Google Maps, etc, etc
I think that's more "this sounds great" than "our users are developers". Google's services also aren't aimed at developers, the APIs are often very bureaucratic and not very well done (there's no way to list the available google sheets documents in the sheets api, I need the drive API and a different set of permissions? please.)
It reads exactly like what you'd expect from a "I want to be considered a thought leader" person: nothing you haven't read a hundred times but it sounds nice so you can nod along.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#236Not 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'd like YouTube to add a button to stop showing scam ads from people outside my country.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support.
But even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot.
It was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#238[deleted]
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is good only if the whole team believes it. If the team mates have a different mindset, they see it as half baked or hacky. And if there is ever some bad feedback, they just use it as a "I told you so" and throw you under the bus.
Bad feedback can be more helpful than good and is often the only type of feedback a product gets. And you may not have received that feedback if you didn’t ship. It’s better to get that information early.
I personally agree with the premise to ship early, with some rough edges, etc. But teammates may not be supportive. You need the whole team to have that mindset/culture.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 hate Microsoft with the passion of a thousand burning stars, yet even I still think Google products have worse UX than their Microsoft counterparts. MS Teams is definitely terrible. But I’d take that over Google Meets. Google Docs isn’t even remotely as good as Office 365. And Azure, for all its many faults, is still less confusing than GCP. Thankfully I seldom have to touch either other these companies half-baked…
> I’d take [teams] over Google Meets
What? Why?
Honestly your entire comment is almost exact polar opposite to how I feel.
GCP Makes total sense if you know anything about systems administration, Google docs is limited for things like custom fonts (IE; not gonna happen) but it's simple at least and I can give people a link to click and it's gonna look the same for them.
But, honestly, the Teams one is baffling. I can't think of a single thing Meet does worse than Teams.