Lessons from 14 years at Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#181

Post by dcminter » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

> In large organizations, decisions get made in meetings you’re not invited to, using summaries you didn’t write, by people who have five minutes and twelve priorities. If no one can articulate your impact when you’re not in the room, your impact is effectively optional.

Very true in large organisations. But... in a company whose stated mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" ... this feels like a failure.

When a truly data driven company manages to quantify impact by more than the volume of hot air emitted :) then it's going to eat the world.

Perhaps it's for the best that nobody does that?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#182

Post by richtersand » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

GREAT ARTICLE!

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#183

Post by joduplessis » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #161

joduplessis wrote: post #143

> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems. Complete bullshit. Sorry, but the reason why people use Google is because of the ecosystem + value proposition. Google Drive & Calendar are some of the most outdated pieces of SaaS software that only gets used because of the greater ecosystem they live in - and price. They (along with the other Google products) are also some of the poorest designed user…

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"?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#184

Post by rapidfl » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

sowbug wrote: post #62

rapidfl wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

If your self-esteem is sufficiently resilient, you can exploit the same human tendencies behind Cunningham's Law (the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer). Check your crappy end-to-end proof of concept into the team repository, and your teammates will be so horrified and outraged that they'll fix it faster than any sprint could have planned.

yeah there are ways, but is it good for your career lol

Also the one person who has to review it before checking in needs to be resilient too

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#185

Post by andsoitis » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #71

ramijames wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the users is the correct solution. Defining company culture through software loading is ridiculous.

What about the second order effects? Ignoring the customers becomes a habit, which doesn’t lead to success. But then, caving to each customer demand will make solution overfit. Somewhere in there one has to exercise judgement. But how does one make judgment a repeatable process? Feedback is rarely immediate in such tradeoffs, so promotions go to people who are capable of showing some metric going up, even if the metr…

> But how does one make judgment a repeatable process?

Principles can help scale decision-making.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#186

Post by aprilthird2021 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #63

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is partly LLM generated or edited, fairly certain

I think it's inevitable everyone will use LLMs to assist with writing, such as editing, if it hasn't happen already. It's like having a free editor, beyond grammar or spell-checking.

The AI slop voice is grating to me and many others. If you can avoid it or make it not feel like slop or make it feel unique, people will like it more. I don't care how you do that tbh

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#187

Post by songodongo » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

rapidfl wrote: post #26

firefoxd wrote: post #5

They are pretty insightful. Particularly this one: > 3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one. I have my own version of this where I tell people that no amount of good advice can help you make a blank page look better. You need to have some published work before you can benefit from any advice.

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.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#188

Post by dtech » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #116

hansmayer wrote: post #93

Not 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 qu…

I feel like you're giving too much credit here. I don't know if it was a leak or an urban legend, but I remember the awful win 8 "flat boxes UI" being that way because it could be designed by managers in PowerPoint that way

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#189

Post by spicyusername » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

bigcloud1299 wrote: post #133

15 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…

    So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.

Or to stay far away and do something useful with their lives.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#190

Post by mike_hearn » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #179

mike_hearn wrote: post #139

Earlier 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,…

> 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, the experience usually leaves with them.

After leaving Google the anti-abuse teams at a few other tech companies did reach out. There was absolutely no consistency at all. Companies varied hugely in how much effort and skill they applied to the problem, even within the same markets. For payment fraud there is a lot of money at stake so I'd expect eBay would have had a good team, but most products at Google didn't lose money directly if there was abuse. It just led to a general worsening of the UX in ways that were hard to summarize in metrics.