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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."
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.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
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.
Getting back to the topic, Google does get the outside contributors thing. Look at their search engine (leverage webmasters content and make them do the work of optimizing their site for your search engine), Android (app developers) just like his examples of Facebook, MS and Amazon.
But yes, Google is getting into a troubling mess with Wave, Buzz and now Google+(?).
If a A-level geek can't grok the UI for Google+, do the masses have any chance?
There is a box that says public. I'm sorry, but how the hell is the not clear?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Quit making fun of quantumplacet, this is hi's or hers first story.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe he feels most alive when he's afraid of being fired. He did work at Amazon all those years...
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
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. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.
To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.
I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.
I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.
But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies wi
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The UI is pretty damn clear, but it won't stop users from making stupid mistakes.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Period inside the quote. "Grammar" capitalized, as it is a part of your proper noun. "Own" is arguably redundant, since you start with "your."
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"Grammar" capitalized, as it is a part of your proper noun.
Full sentences please.
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?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
#DeleteChrome
Too bad Facebook doesn't realize that 3rd party developers are important, because their API is probably the worst thing I've ever seen in computing. If Google could deliver a consistent and unchanging API (unlike facebook), they would have a winner.. but Steve was right, google just doesn't see the light where APIs are concerned. I've used a few google APIs, for google earth and google maps, and their documentation is piss poor compared to MSDN. Not just that, but there are many things that are ridiculously convoluted to attempt in those APIs. They don't even include mercator-to-cartesian in their API, which is a HUGE miss in that arena. It's a pitiful attempt at an API really. Wake up Google! You aren't too big to fail!
It's about Google as a whole.
-- we're here you're not
Amazon can use a platform-based service because Amazon sells things for money. Allowing programs to find out about things Amazon has for sale is profitable, t Amazon's marketing info gets redistributed. Amazon's "cloud" is a pay service, and making pay services available makes money. So Amazon's platform is a win for Amazon.
Google, on the other hand, is entirely ad-based. (Yes, they get about 3%-7% of their revenue from actual products they sell. So what?) So they don't want their data repurposed, especially if repurposing deletes the ads.
Facebook is quite platform-oriented internally, with internal services making heavy use of interprocess communication. But little of that is exposed to the outside world. What is exposed is heavily restricted. Facebook games have to accept payment only in Facebook's private money, with a 30% take.
Google used to be more platform oriented. There was a Google SOAP search interface and a Google Web Search API. Both have been discontinued. They didn't push ads.
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.
Given Google's business model, they don't seem to be doing their infrastructure wrong.
Dear Google, please start by making Youtube a platform.
If I want to embed a youtube video on a page optimized to mobile phones, I am fucked. There is for example no way to have youtube show a screenshot of the video, and when the user click it, have it play fullscreen.
But m.youtube.com does it, so it can be done, just as long as you don't want to do it on your own page. (So they have an internal api to do it, but there is no way for me to access it).
And just try to watch this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/youtube-api-gdata&showsearch=true&showpopout=true&parenturl=http%3A%2F%2Fcode.google.com%2Fapis%2Fyoutube%2Fforum%2Fdiscussion.html#!searchin/youtube-api-gdata/embed$20youtube/youtube-api-gdata/VSk5vQFULts/sddOXH4wXTAJ and look at the response from the youtube team. The best answer is something like: "Use the following hack, which may work. And I can't say if it break the platform agreement, so it might even be allowed..
Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.
I'm not your guy, buddy.
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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
So have we /.'ed Google yet?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Period inside the quote.
Minor quibble, but this is one of the many US-UK differences -- UK style tends to put final punctuation outside the quotation marks, unless that punctuation is part of the quote. US style tends to include the final punctuation inside the quotation marks all the time, which can cause confusion when quoting things like code, where a stray punctuation mark can cause all kinds of fun mayhem.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
He covers that:
His point is that Google is less competitive when they make products that are not backed by platforms, while their competitors offer both.
iGoogle for the eventual Apple acquisition of the hegemonic Google. Imagine a hedgemon consuming a hedgemon.
Cheers.
Yours In Marxism,
K. Trout,
Is hedgemon a pokemon who lives in a bush?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.
New stuff is fine; just let me have the old way (i.e. status bar, menu, View>Page Source) and don't send me to about:config
Sounds like you've never shopped at Newegg. Each product has details, reviews, and lots of photos. Nicely laid out. Once you've been to Newegg you wonder why Amazon, Wal-mart, Tiger, and other can't do as well.
Definitely. Look at George Carlin. He made a career out of insightful rants.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The thing that most of the sibling comments to the parent post don't seem to get is that the parent post is quoting NEARLY VERBATIM an ACTUAL prompt in the Google+ app.
This explains a great deal about why Google has always seemed like it has a massive case of ADHD, starting lots of projects, then dumping them a couple of years later. None of them got enough attention by any single person for a long enough period of time to evolve from being a pet project into being something that's actually good before it became somebody else's problem.
Keeping a single job only one or two years means that you can't build up any level of institutional knowledge. Admittedly, on the plus side, this means everything gets written down, but on the minus side, it almost invariably leads to an environment in which nobody knows what the h*** they're doing because nobody who is working on a project has any real memory of why critical design decisions were made (unless stuff is documented so thoroughly that those details are all written down, in which case the engineers might finish reading the design specs by the time they're expected to move on to the next project).
Fully learning the architecture of a complex piece of software sufficient to do any real design work (above the level of a basic code monkey) can easily take the better part of a year. If you change jobs every two years, I don't see how you could get anything done; you'd never have time to fully get comfortable with a product before you got yanked off to do something else. That's quite possibly the worst possible way to build quality products; it's like you're still getting your feet wet in the pool when you get unceremoniously yanked out of the pool and tossed onto the basketball court.
A good software company needs to mostly hire people with the expectation that they will be involved in all aspects of the design, not just in the day-to-day coding. Sure, there's sometimes a senior engineer on top who makes the final decisions, but everybody should be contributing at every design phase, redesign phase, etc., which means that everybody needs a fundamental grasp of the overall architecture. That's just not possible if you're changing jobs every couple of years.
More importantly, working on the same project over an extended period of time gives you a sense of ownership, which means you're more likely to take care of the code and improve it. And even if you jump into a project that has been around a while, after a time, you'll get used to it and will take ownership of it. By contrast, if the project gets handed off to somebody else after a year or two, they have no real desire to continue maintaining your code; they have different ideas about how it should be designed. The result is a series of non-stop rewrites, and nothing ever comes out of it except a lot of unfinished code.
Such a short work cycle is just plain bad engineering practice. If it works at all for even one project, it's almost purely luck. Like I said, it explains a lot.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The UI is pretty damn clear, but it won't stop users from making stupid mistakes.
The UI may be clear, clean and simple. But that doesn't mean it's not shit.
Yegge's point about a default font size is dear to my heart. While I had perfect vision a decade ago, I've been growing progressively farther-sighted over the last five years. Being unable to change the default font size in a browser is a deal-breaker to me. It angers me because someone had to decide to take the feature OUT. I mean, setting a default font size is one of the first things you configure into a browser, and exposing the value to make it user-changeable is trivially easy. But no, some eagle-eyed boy scout decided that it wasn't necessary.
The same goes for the G+ Android app. The number of things missing from it frustrate me virtually every single time I want to use it. I've been reduced to treating it as a glorified RSS feed for the half-dozen half-interesting Silicon Valley bloggingheads that still use it.
These same criticisms can be made about dozens of other products and companies. But I'm with Yegge - Google is one company that can and SHOULD do better.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Whatever "Facebook gets it" I don't want G+ to get it, and I don't even use G+.
This is a very stupid stance to adopt. A very stupid, fanboyish stance.
You may not like Facebook. I certainly don’t, and I have a nice list of reasons. I still use it, but I don’t have to like it much. Pretty much like Windows.
However, there is a reason Facebook is so successful. There is a reason Windows is successful (how ungrammatical this sounds). I may not like them, but I’d be a fscking idiot if I failed to note what makes them successful and learn from it. Google even more so.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.
The larger problem for Google is that Gears is gone, Wave is gone, what else will be gone tomorrow?
It's all very well for a company to fail at stuff. Successful companies do it all the time. But Google fails and abandons high-profile "next big thing" projects far too frequently. I'm writing a little application for my own use right now that pulls images from Google Maps (statically--for some reason wxWebView folds up on the .js version, although frustratingly it displays the map correctly before doing so). I'm ok doing that because a) it's for my own use only and b) Maps has been around for long enough that Google isn't going to abandon it.
But... I'd never use any Google service for any commercial offering unless it was at least five years old and so strongly supported and widely used that I had some confidence that it would still be around a year or three down the road. There were probably organizations out there that jumped on Google Wave, for example, and now they have two unpalettable choices: set up their own servers, or move to something else.
Google is building up a reputation as the 'Net's number one source of AbandonWare, and that accumulation of abandoned projects will hurt them a great deal. They are the Little Marketer Who Cried Hype: when they come out with something really great in five years time there will be no one willing to adopt it, and the failure and abandonment of Google's experimental and innovative offerings will become a self-sustaining cycle.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.