6 ms·

I interned at Google once. And the first thing they told us at the orientation is that they put the users first. Is that a lie then? Because what you said seem

by nialv7 9y ago

I interned at Google once. And the first thing they told us at the orientation is that they put the users first. Is that a lie then? Because what you said seems to imply Google puts the convenience of the developers first.

mining 9y ago
Depends how you look at it. Dev time is a finite resource, and spending it on supporting a weird combo of user agent and browser seems likely to lead to less user utility.
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  Weird combo being Firefox with its default user agent..
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    Well, mobile Firefox which is much less common.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Or Desktop Firefox (~43% of German desktop market) in Google Inbox (during the launch), the new YouTube redesign, Hangouts, Allo, Earth... Half of Google products either don’t work at all, or far worse, on one of the largest browsers out there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rasz 9y ago
Adword/Doubleclick clients are their users, not you and me.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  I'm not so sure. I've witnessed their adwords team plunder a startup marketing team's budget with false promises and bad advice.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    Some extra detail (what's easy to share) could be very interesting.
    - WalterSear 9y ago
      Sorry, I've really tried to come up with anything it seems reasonable to share more than: 'Google's ostensible adword assistance team were no more than glorified inside sales and, over the protests of the rank and file, bamboozled management into throwing over a $1 million dollars of good money after bad which helped sink the company'
- reilly3000 9y ago
  Ive been on both sides and used most google ad products. For a solid 1.5 years we had to use Opera to function in DBM due to Angular memory leaks. I live in DFP now and have to reboot my machine after 3-4 hours in their interface using Chrome and Safari. Maybe they are just a really, really unfathomably big company that always see as users do across every team.
askafriend 9y ago
You have to look at opportunity cost. There is significant dev time that is spent supporting those configuration mixes that relatively few people will use. If that dev time could be spent on other features that will be appreciated by more people, then that is a decision you can make while still adhering to the principle of "users-first".
- andosa 9y ago
  So a multihundred billion dollar web company doesn't have the dev resources to support Firefox? Even though it already works when you spoof the agent string?
  - askafriend 9y ago
    Even with all the resources in the world, opportunity cost plays into every decision. To remove that context would be missing my point. And as always, resources dedicated to a project are finite. The “X billion dollar company can’t do trivial Y thing” isn’t as straightforward as it seems and the argument rarely holds up to scrutiny in my opinion. We’re missing a ton of internal context here, and to have a real discussion we’d need that context. Otherwise there are tons of valid reasons why the opportunity cost calculation might not have worked out.
    - andosa 9y ago
      At some point you have to stop giving the benefit of the doubt. I draw the line where Google is unable to make a search page (that is making them the "x billion dollar" company in the first place) work with Firefox due to "lack of dev resources". Even though the only thing stopping the page from working in FF is a user agent check. You are making exactly the same argument that Microsoft proponents were making when IE was bundled into Windows trying to push off other browsers. We don't have all the context, it must be too difficult to separate browser and OS code, etc
      - xerophyte12932 9y ago
cbhl 9y ago
Unfortunately, the part they didn't tell you was that you should put more users first before putting fewer users first. (This is what "impact" means on the job ladder.) Given two otherwise equal tasks, if one helps 60M users and another helps 12M users, you are usually expected to work on the one that helps more users. And if a product develops too many bugs of the latter type (affects too few users to ever be prioritized above other work), it will usually get shut down. Fixing bugs for one or two or even a hundred users doesn't scale, and Google wants to scale so it can live up to its "potential to improve the lives of millions of people". (If you ever work at or start an early-stage start-up, you want to be the opposite of this because Google can't; see Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" essay.) If you come back (for another internship or full-time), the Intern Host, Product Manager, Director, and/or VP Engineering in your management chain can provide more context on how to apply "put the users first" in your specific context. There are times where I was expected to put IE 9/Win XP above Firefox because that would help more users. And yes, that sucks, both for me, and for Firefox users.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The issue with this, that you have to focus on the largest group of users so you can "improve the lives of millions of people" is that it doesn't make sense: Google has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they literally can't decide how to spend. Clearly, they have enough money to "improve the lives" of more people, so that answer doesn't satisfy. However, the idea that Google is first and foremost a business which makes money at any expense, and it isn't profitable to support a competitor's browser, does.
  - cbhl 9y ago
    In my opinion, the engineers that work on Chrome are the saddest about Alphabet products that are Chrome-only, because it makes it harder to cooperate with Firefox, Edge, and Safari engineers on open web standards. I disagree with the idea that it is unprofitable to not support competing browsers. Just look at United States v. Microsoft Corp. But, as you say, Google is first and foremost a business. As a business, it has a process where, if you don't have impact, you get fired. There are lots of people who, if forced to choose between "deferring work on Firefox bugs" and "getting fired", would choose the former. I would rather that they didn't have to make that choice in the first place.
OneMoreGoogle 9y ago
Xoogler here, worked there for 18 months circa 2015. > And the first thing they told us at the orientation is that they put the users first. This is the company line, but the truth is that Google no longer knows itself. The orientation was designed in an era where Google was growing rapidly. The fear was that the early company culture of mutual trust and so on was likely to be diluted by the influx of new hires, so let's administer a proactive cultural injection. But the reality today (err, 2015) is that the Google culture is no longer monolithic. Even basic day-to-day processes are different between Chrome and Android and Google and X and probably other teams I wasn't exposed to. The orientation has now become counter-productive for a large subset of the engineers, because it sets expectations wrong. Examples: "Every engineer has access to all the source code." Or "no company code may be stored locally on a laptop." Or "every change must be code reviewed." These were company policies that were routinely violated by individual teams, which I only learned after daring to ask "how the heck are you getting your JOB done?" Does Google "put the users first?" Depends on the org. In my admittedly brief tenure there, the most important consideration was internal politics, followed by "partner" and "ecosystem" concerns. Users registered but only distantly, mainly because we didn't expect many of them. I think Modern Google can be best summarized with a company-wide goal of "be the most." Google Search as the most-used search, Android as the most-used OS, Chrome as the most-used browser, etc. If your revenue is based on page-views, and page-views are based on click counts... "Most" is different from "best." Edit: I feel obligated to clarify how the "we didn't expect many users" comment meshed with the "be the most" principle. I was a software engineer in a hardware org (think Pixel). The point of high-end hardware like Pixel was not to dominate the market, but instead be a prestige product that moves expectations. By building a MBP-level laptop, Google could demonstrate that ChromeOS is not just for throwaway laptops, and thereby make ChromeOS viable on its partners high-end hardware. Being too successful was an anti-goal, because it risks scaring off Samsung and the like. The hope was not to single-handedly dominate a la Apple, but rather to foster the "ecosystem." As to users, well...they'd be better served indirectly by a robust ecosystem. Or at least that was the hope. You'll notice that Google does not build low-end hardware, with the notable exception of Chromecast, which is another story.

by nialv7 9y ago

mining 9y ago

Depends how you look at it. Dev time is a finite resource, and spending it on supporting a weird combo of user agent and browser seems likely to lead to less user utility.

ricardobeat 9y ago
Weird combo being Firefox with its default user agent..
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  Well, mobile Firefox which is much less common.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Or Desktop Firefox (~43% of German desktop market) in Google Inbox (during the launch), the new YouTube redesign, Hangouts, Allo, Earth... Half of Google products either don’t work at all, or far worse, on one of the largest browsers out there.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rasz 9y ago

Adword/Doubleclick clients are their users, not you and me.

WalterSear 9y ago
I'm not so sure. I've witnessed their adwords team plunder a startup marketing team's budget with false promises and bad advice.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Some extra detail (what's easy to share) could be very interesting.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    Sorry, I've really tried to come up with anything it seems reasonable to share more than: 'Google's ostensible adword assistance team were no more than glorified inside sales and, over the protests of the rank and file, bamboozled management into throwing over a $1 million dollars of good money after bad which helped sink the company'
reilly3000 9y ago
Ive been on both sides and used most google ad products. For a solid 1.5 years we had to use Opera to function in DBM due to Angular memory leaks. I live in DFP now and have to reboot my machine after 3-4 hours in their interface using Chrome and Safari. Maybe they are just a really, really unfathomably big company that always see as users do across every team.

askafriend 9y ago

You have to look at opportunity cost. There is significant dev time that is spent supporting those configuration mixes that relatively few people will use. If that dev time could be spent on other features that will be appreciated by more people, then that is a decision you can make while still adhering to the principle of "users-first".

andosa 9y ago
So a multihundred billion dollar web company doesn't have the dev resources to support Firefox? Even though it already works when you spoof the agent string?
- askafriend 9y ago
  Even with all the resources in the world, opportunity cost plays into every decision. To remove that context would be missing my point. And as always, resources dedicated to a project are finite. The “X billion dollar company can’t do trivial Y thing” isn’t as straightforward as it seems and the argument rarely holds up to scrutiny in my opinion. We’re missing a ton of internal context here, and to have a real discussion we’d need that context. Otherwise there are tons of valid reasons why the opportunity cost calculation might not have worked out.
  - andosa 9y ago
    At some point you have to stop giving the benefit of the doubt. I draw the line where Google is unable to make a search page (that is making them the "x billion dollar" company in the first place) work with Firefox due to "lack of dev resources". Even though the only thing stopping the page from working in FF is a user agent check. You are making exactly the same argument that Microsoft proponents were making when IE was bundled into Windows trying to push off other browsers. We don't have all the context, it must be too difficult to separate browser and OS code, etc
    - xerophyte12932 9y ago

cbhl 9y ago

Unfortunately, the part they didn't tell you was that you should put more users first before putting fewer users first. (This is what "impact" means on the job ladder.) Given two otherwise equal tasks, if one helps 60M users and another helps 12M users, you are usually expected to work on the one that helps more users. And if a product develops too many bugs of the latter type (affects too few users to ever be prioritized above other work), it will usually get shut down. Fixing bugs for one or two or even a hundred users doesn't scale, and Google wants to scale so it can live up to its "potential to improve the lives of millions of people". (If you ever work at or start an early-stage start-up, you want to be the opposite of this because Google can't; see Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" essay.) If you come back (for another internship or full-time), the Intern Host, Product Manager, Director, and/or VP Engineering in your management chain can provide more context on how to apply "put the users first" in your specific context. There are times where I was expected to put IE 9/Win XP above Firefox because that would help more users. And yes, that sucks, both for me, and for Firefox users.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The issue with this, that you have to focus on the largest group of users so you can "improve the lives of millions of people" is that it doesn't make sense: Google has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they literally can't decide how to spend. Clearly, they have enough money to "improve the lives" of more people, so that answer doesn't satisfy. However, the idea that Google is first and foremost a business which makes money at any expense, and it isn't profitable to support a competitor's browser, does.
- cbhl 9y ago
  In my opinion, the engineers that work on Chrome are the saddest about Alphabet products that are Chrome-only, because it makes it harder to cooperate with Firefox, Edge, and Safari engineers on open web standards. I disagree with the idea that it is unprofitable to not support competing browsers. Just look at United States v. Microsoft Corp. But, as you say, Google is first and foremost a business. As a business, it has a process where, if you don't have impact, you get fired. There are lots of people who, if forced to choose between "deferring work on Firefox bugs" and "getting fired", would choose the former. I would rather that they didn't have to make that choice in the first place.

OneMoreGoogle 9y ago

Xoogler here, worked there for 18 months circa 2015. > And the first thing they told us at the orientation is that they put the users first. This is the company line, but the truth is that Google no longer knows itself. The orientation was designed in an era where Google was growing rapidly. The fear was that the early company culture of mutual trust and so on was likely to be diluted by the influx of new hires, so let's administer a proactive cultural injection. But the reality today (err, 2015) is that the Google culture is no longer monolithic. Even basic day-to-day processes are different between Chrome and Android and Google and X and probably other teams I wasn't exposed to. The orientation has now become counter-productive for a large subset of the engineers, because it sets expectations wrong. Examples: "Every engineer has access to all the source code." Or "no company code may be stored locally on a laptop." Or "every change must be code reviewed." These were company policies that were routinely violated by individual teams, which I only learned after daring to ask "how the heck are you getting your JOB done?" Does Google "put the users first?" Depends on the org. In my admittedly brief tenure there, the most important consideration was internal politics, followed by "partner" and "ecosystem" concerns. Users registered but only distantly, mainly because we didn't expect many of them. I think Modern Google can be best summarized with a company-wide goal of "be the most." Google Search as the most-used search, Android as the most-used OS, Chrome as the most-used browser, etc. If your revenue is based on page-views, and page-views are based on click counts... "Most" is different from "best." Edit: I feel obligated to clarify how the "we didn't expect many users" comment meshed with the "be the most" principle. I was a software engineer in a hardware org (think Pixel). The point of high-end hardware like Pixel was not to dominate the market, but instead be a prestige product that moves expectations. By building a MBP-level laptop, Google could demonstrate that ChromeOS is not just for throwaway laptops, and thereby make ChromeOS viable on its partners high-end hardware. Being too successful was an anti-goal, because it risks scaring off Samsung and the like. The hope was not to single-handedly dominate a la Apple, but rather to foster the "ecosystem." As to users, well...they'd be better served indirectly by a robust ecosystem. Or at least that was the hope. You'll notice that Google does not build low-end hardware, with the notable exception of Chromecast, which is another story.