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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#551

Post by marcusjt »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #25

No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. I used…

Strange, works fine for me, you can pick as many calendars as you want in Assistant Settings > Services > Calendar

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#552

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #535
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't moved beyond Google yet (I want to, though, who is hiring... :-) ), but yes, to be honest, better code cleanliness, testing, style conformity, and good code review ability are the major things I've learned in the 8 years I've been there. Most other skills one picks up at Google are not transferrable outside of Google.

My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!

Your engineers sound very impressive. Too bad about the management.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#553

Post by armandhammer »

dleslie wrote: post #95
thoraway1010 wrote: post #25

No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. I used…

> 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…

Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#554

Post by mav3rick »

duncanawoods wrote: post #341
throwawaygler wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interna…

Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness. The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.

I love the arm chair analysis of every external person here. Code quality is extremely important at Google. That doesn't mean people don't write any features.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#555

Post by VRay »

inakarmacoma wrote: post #439
hodgesrm wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I wish I had thought of your example first. We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.…

Docs has revision history. For several of the concerns listed, I'm surprised to see how people are using the app. Similar for asking every employee of a company to track their time in same name documents? Perhaps poor processes and poor tool-to-solution matches contribute?

So they're using it wrong?

/s

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#556

Post by three_seagrass »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #385
three_seagrass wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because those are not really monopolies. People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.

> exclusive control of supply Is not the only, nor even the most useful, definition of a monopoly. And there's also not a magic moment where one second you're not a monopoly, and the next second you are when user X+1 signs up. It's a gradual process and that's why it is such a huge area of law.

Monopoly is semantically not very complicated. It's a fairly simple economic principle:

- Monopoly = Exclusive control of supply

- Monopsony = Exclusive control of demand

If you want to redefine it to popular things, you should reflect on your motivation to do so.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#557

Post by wutbrodo »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #535
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't moved beyond Google yet (I want to, though, who is hiring... :-) ), but yes, to be honest, better code cleanliness, testing, style conformity, and good code review ability are the major things I've learned in the 8 years I've been there. Most other skills one picks up at Google are not transferrable outside of Google.

My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!

Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#558

Post by cmrdporcupine »

wutbrodo wrote: post #557
lowiqengineer wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!

Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.

Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least.

What I also hear about Amazon is that the experience varies wildly from group to group. That's not a gamble I'd be willing to take. Google is not nearly so balkanized; there are fairly consistent expectations across the company in terms of what is acceptable manager behaviour.

I am not happy at Google. But if I were to jump ship it would be to a small or medium sized company that is more agile and internally cohesive and where things move quickly, not to another BigCo with all the excessive bureaucracy and politics that goes with that.

I miss the teams I worked on where there were less than 30 or so engineers in the company.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#559

Post by lowiqengineer »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #558
wutbrodo wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.

Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least. What I also hear about Amazon is that the experience varies wildly from group to group. That's not a gamble I'd be willing to take. Google is not nearly so balkanized; there are fairly consistent expectations across the company in terms of what is acceptable manager behaviour. I am not hap…

You’re really just implying that if the experience is worse and we are treated badly (aka no company paid off sites to Hawaii or seasons working remotely in Tahoe) the only people at Amazon are there because they aren’t capable of getting better offers.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#560

Post by lowiqengineer »

wutbrodo wrote: post #557
lowiqengineer wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!

Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.

Of course. It’s the same code words people use when they describe neighborhood schools while avoiding race.

“Wouldn’t consider Amazon when planning a move” seems to have the same tenor as “Wouldn’t consider moving to a less white neighborhood”

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