Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

I'm a former Google engineer of 11 years, and while I certainly remember pile-ons, I don't recall many "unfair" ones. It's more of a difference of opinion.

For example, I mentioned the other day that it's sad that the lawsuits around Google Books left the Web deprived of important content, but I don't view that as unfair. I think the publishing industry/authors had a reason to want to maintain control. Reasonable people can disagree on that one.

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I also think there are many issues that Google hasn't gotten ENOUGH flack for.

The privacy stance of the company has been terrible from the beginning. I remember TGIF questions going back to 2005 about privacy, and they were more or less brushed off by Larry Page.

Google has REPEATEDLY paid out huge settlements in violation of the law. There was the one about circumventing a Safari change to deliver ads, the early one about the "war driving" and the SSISD database.

A hilarious thing is I just searched for "list of settlements paid out by Google", and there was a pretty big one in 2022, which I had no idea about. Apparently Android would still track your location irrespective of user settings? Didn't know that, but it's unsurprising.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w...

Would people argue that there was some misunderstanding there, or the company was unfairly prosecuted?

I don't know the details of that case, but I've seen a VERY consistent pattern from Google. The line in terms of "dark patterns" has been pushed for 15+ years, to the point where current employees don't even understand what a dark pattern is. It's just cultural now.

There are so many of these lawsuits and settlements that people don't even pay attention anymore. They just assume Google has bad intentions, and I think that's approximately correct.

If you were there in the early days, you remember when Google Toolbar collected an unprecedented amount of data (IIRC, Windows hooks for what you typed, plus what you clicked on), but it was NEITHER opt-in or opt-out. The user had to choose explicitly.

That culture is completely gone. It's not even close to that. IMO the company deserves its erosion of trust, and the public hasn't been unfair.

(There was also the product manager who coined "default opt-in" -- I repeatedly encountered such fuzzy and "interested" thinking in my time at Google. Some people weren't even aware they were doing it. They were just doing what was in the culture -- what's rewarded.)

Another early one was when Google had a "Windows deskbar", and it would ignore your setting to turn it off. It will continually appear on reboot, even when you asked it not to. There was an additional "dark pattern" checkbox -- you had to find 2 places to turn it off, not 1. I filed an internal bug on that one, and got a response from the product manager. They didn't change anything.

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When I compare early Google to say OpenAI, I think Google was at least 10x better. The products were better, it made way more money, and the working environment was better. (And I made that comparison 3 months ago, before last weekend's OpenAI drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399239 )

But I don't think the public has been unfair to Google overall.

Google created amazing things, and got credit for them plus even more. But it also had both bad outcomes and bad intentions on many products. You can say that's one Vic Gundotra in the company, but there were multiple Vic Gundotras. And Vic had a mandate from the top.

Products that were poorly executed, violated the law, dishonestly marketed, predictably shut down despite early promises, etc.

There's a very clear pattern, going back more than 10 years at this point, but you can see it from 15 years ago too. The company simply isn't user-centric, full stop. I can't see anyone argue otherwise.

What's the most user-centric improvement from Google in the last 5 years? (honest question) As a user, I honestly stopped paying attention to any new product launches over 10 years ago. My favorite product is probably YouTube, with a lot of great content, and I pay for it. Other than that, I just kinda get by with GMail, Maps, and search. The latter has deteriorated rapidly.

In general, I do not look forward to new Google products.

This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.

I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.

It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and making and stuff (like Hixie, all thanks to Chris Dibona) as well as a number of state of the art machine learning systems. There really was an amazing feeling being surrounded by so many highly competent people (many of whom I see in this post's comments) who had similar vision to mine. But ultimately, so many things started to chip away at my enjoyment that I had to leave. Middle management was a big part of that.

Once you're on the outside, so many things that seem obvious (borg, beyondcorp, flume, google3, etc) aren't. It's almost like the future is here, it's not evenly distributed.