This sounds like an accumulation and reiteration of other peoples ideas and blogs, barely changing or adding anything. Fair, but I was interested in the author’s own ideas or how those ideas they’re reiterating matter within the context of Google.
Lessons from 14 years at Google
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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#112lgtm
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#113Not 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
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish Google would be biased a little more towards quality and performance. Their user-facing products tend to be full of jank, although Gmail is quite good to be fair. In general I think the "ship fast and break things" mentality assumes a false dilemma, as if the alternative to shipping broken software is to not ship at all. If thats the mentality no wonder software sucks today. I'd rather teams shipped working, c…
I wish people who ship crappy software didn't ship it and would let someone else ship something better instead. It really sucks when the first mover / incumbent is some crappy half assed solution. But unfortunately we live in a world where quality is largely irrelevant and other USPs are more important. For example these little weekend projects that become successful despite their distinct lack of quality Linux kerne…
how does the Linux kernel lack quality?
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#115This 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…
Yeah but what do you want to do about it? The engineers I see making these mistakes day-to-day are not going to connect the dots if I just point them to the seminal writings. Heck, half of their complaints are of the same form as yours: if only the majority of [engineers, colleagues, stakeholders] were aware of [A, B, C principles] then we could avoid repeating [X, Y, Z failures]. Yeah it's exhausting, life is exhausting, and it doesn't inherently get better with knowledge and experience as the gap to the lowest common denominator only increases; the only balm I've found is focusing on what I can control.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#116Not 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…
The short answer is that the UI isn’t optimized for users like you.
I haven’t worked for Google specifically, but at this scale everything gets tested and optimized. I would guess they know power users like you are frustrated, but they know you’ll figure it out anyway. So the UX is optimized for a simpler target audience and possibly even for simpler help documents, not to ensure power users can get things done as quickly as possible.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#117Not 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…
> wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse
UX? Google doesn't even bother helping folks locked out of their Gmail accounts. For people who use Android (some 3bn), that's like a digital death sentence, with real-world consequences.
It is almost comical that anyone would think Google is customer-focused, but might if they were being paid handsomely to think otherwise, all the while drinking a lot of kool-aid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024754 The top comment there is from a Xoogler which sums it up nicely:
The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people. Companies love the benefits that come from scale, like having a billion people use their service, but they never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it :(
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#118It's funny that I agree with most or all of these principles but don't feel like my 10 years at Google accord with most of this. I wouldn't say I learned these things at Google, but learned them before (and a bit after) and was continually frustrated about how many of them were not paid attention to at Google at all? Incentive structure inside Google is impaired. I do think Google engineering culture does bias agains…
Maybe OP learned these things precisely because he saw the consequences of them not being done
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#119Not 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 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.
Ah, I see. I did notice it looked a bit too long-winded and fluffy for a developer-written text.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish Google would be biased a little more towards quality and performance. Their user-facing products tend to be full of jank, although Gmail is quite good to be fair. In general I think the "ship fast and break things" mentality assumes a false dilemma, as if the alternative to shipping broken software is to not ship at all. If thats the mentality no wonder software sucks today. I'd rather teams shipped working, c…
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.