> They just don't seem to employ them to actually make user-facing products. it's fine if the high-level public-speaking folks aren't doing this, but the probl

> They just don't seem to employ them to actually make user-facing products. it's fine if the high-level public-speaking folks aren't doing this, but the problem is that no one seems to be doing it. anyone can open up the DevTools network panel during a Gmail load, then look at the timings, payloads and generated DOM to see that it's almost entirely absolute shit by Google's own standards, even in Chrome on a fast desktop; they still use MochiKit ffs. there are at least several hundred engineers here on HN that can rewrite the Gmail UI to be "blazing fast" without gutting features and would still work great even on old phones still running Android 4.4.4 (with latest Chrome). obviously Google knows all of this, they just don't care because there's no measurable ROI in a faster free Gmail compared to getting people to host their juicy AMP content on Google's servers. "It's what the users want" is a half-truth optimized for maximum PR value; a bit like "Don't be evil".