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Steve's Google Platform rant

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Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#241

Post by anigbrowl »

pitdesi wrote: post #120

It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…

Thanks for reposting. It's a testament to Google's flat-seeming corporate culture that team members are encouraged to speak their mind so frankly.

The key paragraph for me is this one: Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.

This is my perennial Google grumble in a more elegantly stated nutshell: Google is a magical playground of wonderful things, few of which are finished. It's magical because the parts that work do so at great speed and with almost spookily good results. It's maddening because some things are automagically interoperable and others are head-deskingly separate or incomplete. The main thing I use Google Docs for is word processing, and though it's great to have stuff in the cloud it's just absurd - absurd - that when I move to an Android device the UI is unavailable, or that the full UI lacks support for things like user-defined text styles.

Thing is, Docs owuld be fine if I was just using it for a personal journal or some glorified notepad. But now that I'm a student again, I'm writing letters and model legal briefs and things like that, and it's just a pain in the ass for that, so every day I flirt with reinstalling MS Office...2003. The stuff I need to do was all in Office >10 years ago, and I would even put up with Clippy again just to have things like outlining, styles and templates.

Steve Yegge should get a seat on the board, pronto.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#242

Post by anupj »

bnr wrote: post #169
aangjie wrote: post #135

Hmm.. Great level of detail in steve yegge's post for a rant....Infact one of my pain points with google+ is not being able aggregate(#tags) and publish feeds from my blog. slightly OT: does anyone else think there seems to be a trend of ranting recently, i mean Ryan Dahl,ted dziuba, and now steve yegge??

It is my understanding that Yegge basically invented ranting.

I think he made it "mainstream" :)

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#243

Post by rahoulb »

danssig wrote: post #186
pitdesi wrote: post #120

It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…

I only got down the first few paragraphs but it sounds like most of the complaints are "retail vs tech company" stuff. Retail has razor-thin margins so of course they will all be cheap as hell. If you think Amazon is bad, try working for Walmart HQ.

you should read the rest of it - it's not about amazon's working conditions, it's about a mistake that google is making.

(btw i didn't downvote you)

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#244

Post by nirvana »

zippy wrote: post #225
sethg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the theory is that the A players, secure in their own skills, want to be able to delegate work to people who are as competent as they are, whereas the B players want to surround themselves with people who make them look good by comparison.

A prospective hire who is an A (in whatever field) wants to work with their kind, and so is less likely to sign up at a company full of B-level people. Also, as mentioned above, it is harder for many B-level people to recognize and value an A level person in the hiring process. An A may come across as arrogant by describing things as good or bad to a B when they're simply knowledgeable and confident because of that.

And by that mechanism, C players use the "only hire A players" rule to claim that A players are "not good enough", though such objections don't get raised about other C players.

There were some A programmers at Amazon, and they were respected, but they weren't the ones who made the hiring decisions. Since any B or C can veto any hire, A people often didn't get hired in favor of B or C people. (and A people who already worked there, eventually, got excluded from hiring loops because they're "needed elsewhere.")

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#245

Post by ceejayoz »

nikcub wrote: post #159
nirvana wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, about 4 years after it was publicly claimed to be running on AWS.

yes but we all figured this out earlier because EC2 and S3 downtime would never correspond with Amazon.com downtime - which made it obvious that the 'use the infrastructure we use' line was complete bullshit.

Not necessarily. Netflix managed to survive EC2 and S3 downtimes by architecting around the (mostly known) pitfalls - multiple regions, S3 isn't HA, etc.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#246

Post by Steer »

nirvana wrote: post #46
SoupIce wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> of course, and I had to do it- RIGHT THAT MINUTE- in the middle of the night. There is your problem right there. Why in your sane mind would you even consider fixing it at that moment? You should have told them to FUCK OFF - right at that minute - and gone back to sleep. Right there and then a loud and sound go fuck a rake and fuck off.

You're absolutely right. It would have meant I lost my job. When Bezos is posting on a ticket, everyone knows it. All the pressure rolled downhill right onto me. This means that, even if I did tell them to fuck off, I wouldn't have been able to get back to sleep. On some level I would have felt I was shirking my duties, and after all, I'd lobbied hard to get it fixed, months before. I think, ultimately, it is kind of…

Nirvana, I'm very impressed by your latest answer which shows a lot of maturity and knowledge about yourself. It is so very easy to write "well, I would have told them to fuck off", but in my experience very few people do that in reality, regardless of what they say when not in that specific situation.

I agree that it is quite like an abusive relationship which is of course why you should get the hell out of there. Nothing you say or do will change the other part in the relationship (amazon in this case) and you should just learn your lessons and move on.

Although your employment at Amazon is not something that you look back on with fond feelings perhaps you can agree that it is something that has taught you a lot and in that regard was a good thing for you?

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#247

Post by lamnk »

nostrademons wrote: post #218
Jun8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that he gives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture. But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platf…

It's not that. The procedure for open-sourcing Google-owned code is very easy: you e-mail Chris DiBona and he almost always says yes. There've been a bunch of major pieces of the Google infrastructure open-sourced (eg. cTemplate, Closure, Protocol Buffers, Guice). The problem is really technical. Because of the open codebase and "edit anything" culture, basically every piece of infrastructure at Google, unless it was…

Ugh, I think you are mistaking between open source and being a platform here. A platform need not to be open source.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#248

Post by TruthPrevails »

TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Internship experience was quite good. But then it was just for 12 weeks. I enjoyed writing code. Since I have less time to decide now, I might just accept the offer and test the waters. I am inclined to choose one of the good AWS teams or the Kindle silk browser team (hoping they have plans to turn it into a browser OS in future)

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#249

Post by skyo »

TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

I did multiple internships at Amazon and now I work here full-time. I love it here. But, like other people have pointed out, your experience can be very dependent on which team you join. Personally, I wouldn't want to work full-time on the team that I did my first internship on. The work there just wasn't fun. But my internships put me in a good position to know which teams suck and which teams are great, and so I chose a great team to join. Hopefully you are in a similar place because of your internship. Did you enjoy your team? If not, did you see any teams that you would like to work on?

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#250

Post by TruthPrevails »

skyo wrote: post #249
TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

I did multiple internships at Amazon and now I work here full-time. I love it here. But, like other people have pointed out, your experience can be very dependent on which team you join. Personally, I wouldn't want to work full-time on the team that I did my first internship on. The work there just wasn't fun. But my internships put me in a good position to know which teams suck and which teams are great, and so I ch…

My AWS team was good. I enjoyed my work as an intern. However I was warned that work in the group is operations intensive. I could see that myself in those 12 weeks. As an intern I was not given any operations work. Obviously it will change when I join as a full timer. As noted below I am looking at other AWS teams, Kindle silk browser team. I need to find out about these teams.
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