221–230 of 253 posts
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when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?
I've been at Google 14 years and 2014 was around the time I noticed more and more people internally lamenting that old Google was dead.
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> Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions? They were my decisions based on all the data I had, including launching with what we had. re: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" this was posted on the old infrastructure and should have been in your RSS feeds up until late last week when our migration happened - so for just under a month... I…
According to my backups, https://developer.chrome.com/feeds had XML with 2023-10-17T00:00:00Z until December 7, then HTML after December 8. So it wasn't entirely broken until December 8 but seems to have been frozen for some time before that.
Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul
This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team? In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone t…
Not sure how old 'old Google' was. There was a bug in the Contacts web app where the states were out of order. They were ordered by 2 digit state ID but shown as state name. A simple order by mixup in SQL. This meant users in New York couldn't tab to the state and start typing the state name to get the state. It was a filed bug. Known by people within Google who wanted it fixed. It was finally fixed this year after n…
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Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the fir…
Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here. I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied…
This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team? In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone t…
when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?
And the culture changed at the same time. Lots of seemingly needless rules to protect rising fiefdoms that started the sclerosis that only got worse over time. Gamergate internally felt like a Civil War waged over Google+.
Google+ itself was the height of Google’s hubris, thinking they could kill a beloved product (Google Reader) to kill a different company’s beloved (at the time) product, Facebook. I remember being deeply disappointed with the release of Google+ like I was when the Segway was released. All this hype and promise for a secret product built with an enormous group of highly-talented people, kept away from the teeming masses of similarly talented people that could’ve told them that it was a dumb idea and here are the reasons why.
Really, if I had to blame one thing, it would be Google+ because of the corrosive effects of social media. Before Google+, my colleagues were just my colleagues who brought their whole selves to the office but we still mostly talked about work. Folks had mailing lists I wasn’t subscribed to where they would talk about their abhorrent political beliefs so I wouldn’t find out about them.
And then, all of a sudden, after Google+ came out, some guy I thought was cool revealed that he didn’t want women to be able have abortions. And some other guy was a randroid, hellbent on not understanding that taxes pay for roads. And on and on…seemingly everyone just spent a lot of time being mad at each other.
Obviously it’s hard for me to point to a specific thing or time period, but the writing was on the wall in the early 2010s (to me, anyways) and I bounced by the middle of the decade.
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Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here. I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied…
But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.
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But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.
Yes definitely, if the top says "we're doing it this way" then the smallest parts will have to do it that way. But in a company like Google (and IME most large companies) the top doesn't get that specific. They give broad strategic objectives and let the departments figure out the best way to achieve them. It's possible of course, but seems unlikely to me that the top would say something like, "remove RSS feed suppor…
The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.