> 15. When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring.
This is Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1].
Lessons from 14 years at Google
241–250 of 732 posts
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#242Not 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…
> Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX. Clicking the email address brings up a menu…
> I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX
Luckily for both you and me, we dont have to rely on our feelings of what is good UX or not. There are concrete UX metholodogies such as Hierarchical Task Analysis or Heuristic Evaluation. These allow us to evaluate concrete KPIs, such as number of steps and levels of navigation required for an action, in order to evaluate just how good or bad (or better said, complicated a UX design is).
Lets say we apply the HTA. Starting from the top of your navigation level when you want to execute the task, count the number of operations and various levels of navigation you have to go through with the new design, compared to just clicking and correcting the e-mail address in-place? How much time does it take you to write your e-mail in the both cases? How many times do you have to switch back and forth between the main interface and the context menu google kindly placed for us? Now, phase out of your e-mail writing window and evaluate how many various actions you can execute in the Google Workspace. Most of them are likely to have a few quirks like this. Now multiply the estimated number of actions with the number of quirks and you will slowly start to see the immense cognitive load the average user has to face in using, or shall I rather say "combating" the google products' UX.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats a poor characterization to choose 2 of the least talked about apps from that company. Also your response to the claim "the best engineers do X" is logically flawed. Maybe google doesn't use their "best engineers" to build out those cherry-picked examples? maybe they used them for Search or infrastructure or something else?
I'm commenting on the article, and the first point in the article doesn't sound like search or infra. Maybe read that before assuming things. And why would it be "logically flawed"?
google has a lot more products besides the 2 you picked. Some of them are wildly successful, even. Maybe they use their "best engineers" on the more successful products?
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer. I think there are multiple reasons for this, but they are mostly overlapping with preserving internal power structures. PM's don't want anecdotal user evidence that their vision of the product is incomplete. Engineering managers don't want user feedback to undermine perception of quality and derail "i…
Engineers have a perception that most other roles are lesser and if only they were allowed to be in charge things would go better. I certainly used to be this way. When I was an engineer I used to regularly engage directly with customers, and it was great to be able to talk with them one to one, address their specific issues and feel I was making a difference, particularly on a large product with many customers where you do not normally get to hear from customers much. Of course once these customers had my ear, the feature requests started to flow thick and fast, and I ended up spending way too much time on their specific issues. Which is just to say that I've changed my views over time.
In retrospect, the customers I helped were ones that had the most interesting problems to me, that I knew I could solve, but they were usually not the changes that would have the biggest impact across the whole customer base. By fixing a couple of customers' specific issues, I was making their lives better for sure, and that felt good, but that time could have been used more effectively for the overall customer base. PMs, managers etc should have a wider view of product needs, and it is their job to prioritize the work having that fuller context. Much as I felt at the time that those roles added little value, that was really not true.
Of course agreed that all the points made above for PMs, managers, support having their reasons to obstruct are true in some cases, but for a well run company where those roles really do their job (and contrary to popular opinion those companies do exist), things work better if engineers do not get too involved with individual customers. I guess Google might be a good example - if you have a billion customers you probably don't want the engineers to be talking to them 1:1.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#245Not 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…
There is a lot of nuance to their point. They are saying, in the long run, career wise, focusing on the actual user matters and makes your projects better. Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. More that, if you follow the user what you are doing can be grounded and it makes your project way more likely to succeed. I would even argue that in many cases it bucks the t…
> Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google.
Interesting, so he was not, contrary to the blog title, writing on the basis of his 14 years of experience at Google?
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#246> 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…
> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…
> The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.
The faster the LLM spits out garbage code, the more time I get to spend reviewing slop and dealing with it gaslighting me, and the less time I get to spend on doing the parts of the job I actually enjoy.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer. I think there are multiple reasons for this, but they are mostly overlapping with preserving internal power structures. PM's don't want anecdotal user evidence that their vision of the product is incomplete. Engineering managers don't want user feedback to undermine perception of quality and derail "i…
Engineers have a perception that most other roles are lesser and if only they were allowed to be in charge things would go better. I certainly used to be this way. When I was an engineer I used to regularly engage directly with customers, and it was great to be able to talk with them one to one, address their specific issues and feel I was making a difference, particularly on a large product with many customers where…
It’s oblique but this puts me in mind of an old adage I recently heard about war: Of 100 men, one should be a warrior, nine should be soldiers, and 90 shouldn't be there at all.
I think this is true of software developers too: only in companies, the 90% don’t really know they shouldn’t be there and they build a whole world of systems and projects that is parallel to what the company actually needs.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary
For the all the necessary complexity and race-to-the-bottom features, I am a fan of Jetbrains. I like using Uber, Twitch (wrote a plugin for it one weekend to integrate with chrome), Netflix, Discord. There are plenty of companies that manage to be enjoyable to end users and expose apis without the inscrutable abstractions and terminology I encounter using google products. It feels the same as working with Oracle.
> Netflix
Netflix? The barely functional video player accessed via excessively bloated thumbnail gallery? About the only good thing to say about this is that all the other movie streaming platforms somehow are even worse.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware. For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.
How's that? VLC, GIMP, Ubuntu search and settings. Terrible. Great products, awedul UX.
VLC is great I think.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#25015 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 i…
>b/c they didn’t know how to play politics
Or they refuse to play that bs game