Google Employee Accidentally Shares Rant About Google+

First time accepted submitter quantumplacet writes "Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms of its products. He also shares some interesting little tidbits about his six year stint at Amazon working for the 'Dread Pirate Bezos'. The rant was intended to be shared only with his Google coworkers, but was accidentally made public. Steve has since removed it from his page, but it has been reposted elsewhere."

Comments

It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[HerculesMO]

I think that it's got a lot of good information, and this guy desperately wants Google to embrace different ideals than they've held in the past. That said, I think rant is an inappropriate word for this. It's very interesting.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[TechLA]

He's right with this:

Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

Apart from the core services, Google is doing everything in an half-assed way. They discontinue A LOT of their products too and since they're fully hosted on Google's servers, it means users just can't use them anymore. It's different from desktop software, as desktop software you can practically always still use. Using Google's services is pretty much like using DRM, except that there's no cracks, no way to make things work again after Google shuts down their half-assed services.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[DerekLyons]

That said, I think rant is an inappropriate word for this.

No, "rant" seems more appropriate to me... For all his complaints about how Amazon Invariably Does It Wrong and Nobody Can Use Amazon's Website - he fails to square those claims with some very publicly visible things; a) their nearly bulletproof infrastructure, and b) that millions of people do manage to use the site on a daily basis. Those failures undermine the balance of his 'argument'. (Worse yet, he seems to confuse and interchange user accessibility and developer accessibility.)
 
Just like the rants you see elsewhere on the net, his is a confused mish-mash of (seemingly) stream of consciousness writing. If he's gotten something right, it's more on the "stopped clock" principle than anything else as near as I can tell.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[styrotech]

I think you missed the entire point of it.

It doesn't matter how wrong you think he was about what Amazon supposedly does badly, that was just setting the scene for what he thought Amazon did and does right.

It was about how Google needed to follow Amazons example of creating a service oriented platforms rather than standalone products.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[lgw]

Senior engineers have to address cultural problems at companies. You don't do that by being nice, or respectful, and you certianly don't go through the management chain at a company like Google - as a senior engineer, this is his problem, nt management's.

And, yes, "do it this way or you're fired" is needed for cultural change. Heck, at the the startup I helped to sell, we mentioned to the acquiring CEO that we were making a cultural change and his only comment was "so how many people have you had to fire".

Everything everywhere as a service is a bit extreme, but beyond a certain scale in development you have to "platformize" in some way or the dependencies between teams will kill you.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[lgw]

As someone else has said, you do not badmouth your bosses or your company among coworkers.

That may have been true in the 50s. Today, not so much. If you can't handle the truth., you probably suck as an engineer. What's next, politely worded compiler errors? Broke is broke.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[ConceptJunkie]

You have obviously not worked at a typical company. At a typical medium to large company, stating things diplomatically and constructively will still get management pissed off at you and subject you to vindictive behavior. It's not the engineers you need to worry about, it's the spoiled-brat arrested adolescents that pass for middle to upper management. In my experience doing anything but parroting exactly what they say is a recipe for trouble. Needless to say, I get in trouble, because these same people are usually idiots.

Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change..

[cforciea]

Who says Google is a typical company? If the company culture is such that he reasonably expected to not get management's panties in a wad over this, I don't see the issue. And given Larry Page's purported directness, there is a reasonable possibility that he does encourage this sort of up front discussion in his company.

Funniest bit was on Sony

[SuperKendall]

But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

Also the most insightful section...

Re:Amazon & Google

[kbielefe]

What I like about Google is they aren't afraid to fail, and their failures often have beneficial side effects for the internet as a whole. Even if all that comes from google+ is facebook being a little less annoying to use, I think there are people at Google who consider it worth the investment.

...But they don't have any of our perks or extras

[Nom du Keyboard]

But they don't have any of our perks or extras

Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.

Re:Pay attention to Update #2

[iluvcapra]

Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform.

I suspect this post was "accidentally" leaked in the same sense that Apple's iPhone 4 prototype was "accidentally" lost in a bar.

Corporate messaging challenge: How do you acknowledge that your new product doesn't meet expectations, and that you're aware of the problems and serious about addressing them, while at no time admitting any error on the part of the corporate entity?

Favorite line(s)

[93 Escort Wagon]

There's a lot of good stuff there, and I hope the Big Boys are listening because the guy really gets it. But I must say I loved this:

head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Re:Amazon & Google

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Even if all that comes from google+ is facebook being a little less annoying to use, I think there are people at Google who consider it worth the investment.

Not Google stockholders I'm guessing.

Re:Amazon & Google

[SpiralSpirit]

a positive work environment that makes you proud to come to the office is a great 'feature' when you're hiring people to come work their little souls out at all hours of the day and night. Part of that is showing up to work and not seeing dirtiness, drabness, etc. Your environment gives you huge cues as to your behaviour.

Lucky he's not at Apple.

[uncqual]

If Steve Yegge were at Apple, he probably would have been walked out by security by now.

(Although, once they build the new Steve Job's Memorial Spacebase, I assume they will have some sort of traction beam to remove employees more efficiently at the push of a button - why wait for and pay for a security officer.)

Re:Lucky he's not at Apple.

[Nom du Keyboard]

why wait for and pay for a security officer.

The Apple security officers are all busy at the moment raiding houses in SF with SFPD. Please take a number and your request will be fulfilled as soon as they return.

No kidding

[DesScorp]

I interviewed at Amazon once, what he says is true about the offices, they didn't look very clean and impressive. That's a bad impression right there.

Well, duh. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies, and when they decided that spending a ton of money on a fancy office was better than spending the money on hardware and employees, that was always a pretty good sign that it was going downhill.

The writer goes to great lengths to discuss how Amazon does almost nothing right. He went on to state that Amazon's interface sucks (because of Bezos, natch), and how awful it was that the Apple human interface guy that was brought in was ignored.

Looking at the money Amazon is bringing in, looking at the way Amazon absolutely dominates their field... I don't think Jeff Bezos gives a rat's tail what one of his ex-coders thinks. Plus, Google's storybook offices are indeed the exception and not the rule. He paints this picture of Amazon's offices like they're something out of a Charles Dickens novel, and then goes on to savage Amazon and Bezos for not giving to charities (wonder what he thought of Apple?) and "political" matters (What political matters, Google guy? Did he not support your favored candidate or something?).

Methinks this fella has an axe to grind. He might have some points, but the Amazon rants come off as bitter, and frankly, just how bad are they doing things if they're that successful? Bezos may indeed be a tyrant, but... so what? So was Jobs and Larry Ellison and Ted Turner and most other driven business visionaries. Again, Google is the exception, not the rule here. And yet, for as great as he says they are, he sure seems to be unhappy about how they do things in the end.

Re:Amazon sells products, not ads.

[SoftwareArtist]

Google's priority is to return search results in under 100ms. That requires tight integration. It's all about cache management, not platform APIs. Some data has to be pushed to clients, rather than pulled through APIs, or performance will suffer badly.

The article isn't about search. He barely mentions it, and for good reason. Search is one of the few Google services that already is easy to access programmatically, even all you're doing is sending an HTTP GET that mocks the Google search page. But he's talking about Gmail, Docs, Google+, Maps... All those other products that you could do really neat things with if they had real APIs.

Re:Full text in case the link gets taken down

[dgatwood]

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out.

I've never heard of a company that didn't leave the decision of who to hire up to the teams. Is this person saying that Google hiring is done by HR? That's just a horrible way to do things. Hiring standards vary according to the team because the needs of the team vary according to the team and according to what that person is going to be doing.

More importantly, I've found that above a certain baseline level of technical competence, it's far more important to hire someone who gets along with the team than to hire someone with any particular set of skills. In effect, job postings are just recommendations for what you'd like, not requirements. Unfortunately, people (both on the hiring side and the applying side) tend to read them as a laundry list instead of as a roadmap, and tend to assume that if a person isn't a perfect fit for every little point, then they aren't a good fit for the position. The reality often couldn't be further from the truth. Being a good match for a job on paper is rarely a good indication of whether someone is a good match for the job.

Where I work, our team does a dozen different things, and all of us do several of those things in various proportions. A new hire who can do the things listed in the job description might be able to be a drop-in replacement for somebody who retired, which is certainly the easiest hiring case to make. However, more often than not, we would be just as happy with someone who can take over some tasks currently owned by three other people within the team who already know how to do the things listed in the job description.

Put simply, you don't hire for a position. You hire a person who works well on the team, then you figure out how best to integrate them. That can't be done by anyone other than the project team, because only the project team has a sufficient grasp of all the things that the team does.

Google has SERIOUS interop problem

[SuperKendall]

I have a Google Apps account, for email addresses for my business.

Naturally when Google+ came out, like others I was somewhat curious what it was about so I tried to sign up.

Nope. You see, if you are stupid enough to pay Google for email accounts, you cannot sign up for Google+. Even though they are very big on verifying identity and what better way than through a paid account?

This holds true even today, if you pay for Google Apps you cannot use that email address for Google+.

Frankly at this point I think I'll scrub both, and let Google+ follow Wave into the inky depths. But it points to a huge problem at Google if one kind of account holder cannot work the same way across anyone they provide email for.... that is the business killer right there, when you want to create new products but your own internal complexity prevents them from succeeding.