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..

[TechLA]

Oh and just want to point out this too - even Googlers think Google again failed with their social networking launch.

The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.

It's just much harder to back out of it now as it's integrated to Google search.. Google really shot itself to foot here.

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

[blair1q]

Facebook gets it.

(blink)

(blink blink)

Wow. If what Facebook gets is what he just said, then I don't want Google+ to get the same thing.

Sure, upgrade the API. Convince devs they will have a willing herd of eyeballs to cadge. But please, do not let it turn into a crashing avalanche of sorry crap in the process.

Take the Facebook openness, and apply a little Apple App Store QA.

Oh, and become your own Zynga. Because letting them take down the primary dollar stream is dopey.

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

[stevesliva]

The weakness of Facebook to me is their developer API... but only because it's far too much of a whore. It reminds me of trying to secure Windows 98 boxes for student use, except (to be as bad) Microsoft would have to log in remotely every other night and change the settings so there's another configurable security hole added with the default setting set to "open".

That may be a weakness in your eyes, but remember that Win95 was an incredibly huge success for Microsoft. Just like the developer API is for Facebook. Warts and all.

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..

[bigstrat2003]

What I found most striking about his post is that I am apparently a fucking genius, because I have never had any trouble at all using Amazon's web site.

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..

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I do most of my online shopping at Amazon, and when I use other shopping websites -- or especially the iTunes store -- I wonder how they get shit so wrong that Amazon's had running well for a decade. Both their search function and their personalized recommendations are way ahead of any other site I've tried. Their music recommendations have introduced me to some of my favorite bands, which is impressive considering my obscure and varied tastes, although their personalized Gold Box items seem to now mostly consist of shit they want to push that's completely unrelated to my prior purchases (whereas before they were highly correlated to recent purchases).

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.

Amazon & Google

[mystikkman]

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+(?).

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.

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.

Re:Amazon & Google

[CharlyFoxtrot]

They don't have any idea how to create a successful business

Does Google ? That's sort of the crux of the rant, that they can't build successful platforms and use those to expand their business into new areas. Google in some ways bears a resemblance to the Microsoft of the late 90's: one cash cow and a lot of money pits they throw money in to avoid competitors gaining a foothold anywhere where it can threaten their core business. What are Google making from products like Google+ and Android except the benefit of using them as a hedge against Facebook and Apple moving in on their business ? To me those look a lot like what MS did with the Xbox as a hedge against Playstation (and consoles in general) and products like Internet Explorer, created to prevent Netscape from becoming dominant. Ultimately this has been a losing strategy for Microsoft, which has stagnated, and for its stockholders because the stock has been flat. So I think Google stockholders might rightfully be worried about reports like the rant posted.

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...

Full text in case the link gets taken down

[AdamHaun]

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

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.

...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:I'm guessing...

[alostpacket]

Are you sure you're sure you want to cancel?

[OK] [Cancel]

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.

It's not about Plus specifically.

[yacoob]

It's about Google as a whole.

Amazon sells products, not ads.

[Animats]

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.

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.

Please start by platforming youtube.

[TheSunborn]

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..

Re:...But they don't have any of our perks or extr

[werepants]

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

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

I'm not your guy, buddy.

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.

/. Google

[Nom du Keyboard]

So have we /.'ed Google yet?

Re:I'm guessing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.