Former Google+ UI Designer Suggests Inept Management Played Role In Demise (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Morgan Knutson, a UI designer who seven years ago, spent eight months at Google working on its recently shuttered social networking product Google+ and who, in light of the shutdown, decided to share on Twitter his personal experience with how "awful the project and exec team was." It's a fairly long read, but among his most notable complaints is that former Google SVP Vic Gundotra, who oversaw Google+, ruled by fear and never bothered to talk with Knutson, whose desk was "directly next to Vic's glass-walled office. He would walk by my desk dozens of times during the day. He could see my screen from his desk. During the 8 months I was there, culminating in me leading the redesign of his product, Vic didn't say a word to me. No hello. No goodbye, or thanks for staying late. No handshake. No eye contact."

He also says Gundotra essentially bribed other teams within Google to incorporate Google+'s features into their products by promising them handsome financial rewards for doing so atop their yearly bonuses. "You read that correctly, "tweeted Knutson. "A f*ck ton of money to ruin the product you were building with bloated garbage that no one wanted." Gundotra is today the cofounder and CEO of AliveCor, maker of a device that captures a "medical grade" E.K.G. within 30 seconds; AliveCor has gone on to raise $30 million from investors, including the Mayo Clinic. Asked about Knutson's characterization of him, Gundotra suggested the rant was "absurd" but otherwise declined to comment. Knutson goes on to paint "a picture of a political, haphazard, wasteful and ultimately disappointing division where it was never quite clear who should be working on what or why," reports TechCrunch.

Comments

Re:"A Role"

[Anonymous Coward]

former Google SVP Vic Gundotra, who oversaw Google+

While running Goog+, Mr. Gundrota implemented a policy of requiring everyone to use their "real name". Funny thing about that. Mr. Gundrota's real name is not Vic. Like many Indians who come to the U.S., he adopted a more "American" first name. So, the guy demanding that you you must use your real name, is using a fake name.

But wait, the lulz are just getting started.

Goog+ AUTOMATICALLY got linked to your G-Mail, YouTube, Goog Docs, everything.

So if, for some reason, Goog thought you were using a fake name (all hail the Mighty Algorithm) -- because of your Youtube name, or because you have an "obviously fake" name like Jake Butt-- your Goog+ account got permanently suspended. With the standard Google appeal / recourse of "fuck you, no humans here".

This also took out your G-Mail account (and all your mail), and your YouTube account, and your Goog Docs...

Anyone who was even mildly curious about Goog+ dropped it like a toxic hotshit and never looked back.

Where he went wrong

[SuperKendall]

I hate to second guess people in bad situations, but from my reading through his few hundred tweets earlier today I would say a few points jumped out to me as him doing the wrong thing at the time:

1) Should not have agreed to design review meeting the next morning. If a deadline is totally unrealistic, don't agree to it man. Tell them you need to delay It by whatever makes sense. If they hate you already they will not hate you any more or less because you push back.

2) When report of grandmother dying comes in, drop everything and send a message out noting you need a reschedule and why. If they say no, well wouldn't it be great to go to HR with a complaint that a manager would not let you attend to a dying nana? Regardless urgent family matters ALWAYS come first for anyone you care about.

3) When meeting was called off the next morning do not whine about that to whoever. Just roll with it. It would have been irrelevant anyway if the first two points I made had been followed. As it was it led to an HR complaint and since it made you look weak the people that hated him tried to take advantage and treated him even worse after.

4) If you are put under a manager you know "will not end well", GET OUT ASAP. Maybe finish up some important task you have but start figuring out your exit immediately, because you will be exiting anyway and better to do it while you have endured minimal stress.

Again, I know I was not in the situation at the time, but there is no situation I've ever been in where point 1 or 2 could not be followed all the time without repercussion. You should always always push back on very unreasonable things and not just pretend you can meet them, even if sometimes you can. Anyone worth working for can understand reasonable pushback, so if they can't you needed a new job anyway.

Second Life

[ArhcAngel]

So you're telling me...a company with the resources of Alphabet/Google were unable to put together a viable social platform but Second Life is still a thing?

Meet the new Google, same as the old Microsoft

[MikeS2k]

tldr = Google are becoming the new Microsoft.

Ultimately, you hire people from Microsoft and other large companies (plus MBA's etc), and you act surprised when your company behaves like these large companies? What happened to the community of enthusiastic developers like "the old days"?
Remember when Microsoft were being praised for being a "little startup" that took down IBM? look what they became..
Someone should come up with a name for the cycle of - company produces good product and grows; "management" get brought in to improve profits; product suffers. users jump to a new product developed by a different company. this company grows and brings in "management" to improve profits.....

You can tell Google have been infiltrated by morons because a) They have hired ex-Microsoft employees; b) they listen to these idiotic UX "experts" and have gotten rid of vertical scrollbars; because everyone needs to know gestures now as gestures are so much more intuitive than something you can see on a screen...

A personal rant about Google here (tl;dr Google software is becoming as much as a pain as MS software) - I do the IT for a School and Google are getting just as user hostile as MS ever were. Their attitude is now "what we want matters more than what the users want" (Google got big by providing what users wanted, and Microsoft is getting smaller for ignoring this - e.g. MS browser share is now 3%. 3%! can you imagine that 15 years ago?).

I ended up recommending Bing to my users a few months ago because Google kept prompting users to fill in a Captcha every time they did a search - which sounds fair enough but a Captcha involving picking street signs, 10 - 15 times, for each page of search results? Is that the best they can come up with?

Our Proxy IP address was showing "Bot-like activity" - I have checked our logs for evidence of malware or other bogus searches (found none) - I can see how a thousand searches an hour for "Fortnite Skins" seems like bot activity, so I can't criticise them for this too much - but why isn't there any human support where I can inform them that we are a school and our search profile might be different? our IP address is even on an educational-only ISP.
Instead you just get to an FAQ telling you to run a virus scan because their algorithms are never wrong, never mismatch search patterns; basically they do not care.

Ultimately it is their software, their servers and they can do what they want. Such it is that I can also switch our default search provider over to Bing, and inform my users that Google software is basically just as bad as Microsoft software.