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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
211–220 of 576 posts
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#212Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#213There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one. I am having that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn’t expect to get pass an assessment c…
> Then, people would just focus on making stuff better
And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#214I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck as hard as they do. They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could react when challenged. Both…
You tell a nice story with the data, but I cannot dismiss the potential selection bias: perhaps these PMs were not up to Google's standards and were invited to leave?
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#215Google hasn't had any major new products for 10 years.
Stadia?
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest.
Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good.
Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near the pre-2010 Google products.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#216I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article. An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article…
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive. * It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily. * Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. * Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find th…
> Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.
To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search for it, because now there are 1000s of identically named documents.
It also happens when legal tries to share a generically named file with you and you lose the link, so you search for it and find a file that looks like it, only to realise that is HR's own special copy.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#217It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know t…
I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS.
But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#218It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know t…
All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always ha…
Yet Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continuously diversify. Google still gets most of its profit from ads.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always ha…
This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are plac…
That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error. Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or exp…
> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all. Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating syst…
> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product"
So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?