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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+(?).
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
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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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."
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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
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.
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
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