It's frustrating to read this advice, which to me can be summarized as "don't think too hard, dumb it down, keep it simple, be a people-person" and then look at their hiring process full of advanced data structures and algorithms. Why hire top tech talent if you just need to keep a simple vibe and not over-think clever solutions?
Lessons from 14 years at Google
201–210 of 732 posts
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#202> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.
A little bit of sarcasm here: “well there probably isn’t a lot of great engineers at google then”
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#203Not 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…
It's not just Google, the UX is degrading in... Well everything. I think it's because companies are in a duopole, monopole etc position. They only do what the numbers tell them. Nothing else and UX just does not matter anymore. It's like those gacha which make billions. Terrible games, almost zero depth, but people spend thousands in them. Not because they are good, but because they don't have much choice ( similar g…
To offer some additional causes for the degradation of UX:
1. An increasing part of industry profits started coming from entertainment (or worse, psychological exploitation) instead of selling the customer a useful tool. For example, good budgeting-software has to help the user understand and model and achieve a goal, while a "good" slot-machine may benefit from confusion and distraction and a giant pull-handle.
2. "Must work on a touchscreen that fits in a pocket" support drags certain things to a lowest common denominator.
3. UX as a switching-cost for customers has started happening more on a per-product rather than a per-OS basis. Instead of learning the Windows or Mac "way" of screens and shortcuts, individual programs--especially those dang Electron apps--make their own reinventions of the wheel.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#204Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true. The two that stand out are > Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead. and > Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call. as a warning against about being too, too clever.
Eh, sure. But at the same time lessons aren't learned by reading what someone else has to say. They're learned by experience, and everyone's is different. An engineer with "14 years at Google" hardly makes them an expert at giving career advice, but they sure like to write like it does. This type of article reads more like a promotion piece from self-involved people, than heartfelt advice from someone knowledgeable.…
And google wasn't founded by people who just kept their heads down and employed the simplest, most direct solution to the problem. If they had done that, google search would have been done on a super-fast server or mainframe using an RDBMS.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#205Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true. The two that stand out are > Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead. and > Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call. as a warning against about being too, too clever.
Google still suffers the most from not understanding those two. Probably more than other companies.
Have they ever had an outage in recent years though? Pinging 8.8.8.8 is the gold standard of making sure there's internet in my book.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#20615 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.
This is what I really don’t get about these types of folks. Do they really want to remember their life’s work as “kissing ass and playing politics”? I get the “work to live” and all that, but you’re basically tossing away half your life…for what, money? How much money do you need!?
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.
Ideally, yes, but the final result of LLM assisted textual output by many users shows that they often have neglected the editing part just as much as they have neglected the writing part.
My father-in-law did a fair amount of editing back in the day (on paper, with red pencil/pen). He said that, when you saw something that had "blood" (red) all over it, that meant it was good. When things are bad enough, it becomes hard even to edit it.
It may not be just that people don't edit LLM output. It may be that the stylistic blandness is so pervasive, it's just too much work to remove. (Yeah, maybe you could do it. But if you were willing to spend that kind of effort, you probably wouldn't have an LLM write it in the first place.)
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well for starters I literally organized our company and all engineering around Conway‘s law and it’s working great That’s like the absolute bare minimum you can do, it’s trivially easy and solves a good half of these “problems.”
How big is your company?
A better question is how quickly are we growing…
We’re currently around 30 in engineering full time and 40 if you include ops, logistics etc…with new funding and coming out of stealth etc we expect to hit the dunbar number (~150 this year)
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Figuring out what is useful for people is not some difficult problem that requires shipping half baked slop. That's just an excuse.
ridiculous. > Figuring out what is useful for people is not some difficult problem that requires shipping half baked slop what have you shipped? paying sees literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to ship out fledged out software that no one wants is exactly why Stadia lasted both way too long and got cancelled anyway. figuring out what is useful is the hardest problem. if anything that's Google's biggest p…
Yeah if only Google shipped more crap software that they then go onto cancel, their software would be so much better!!!!!
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#210Earlier 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.
With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software...
And the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it.