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Google's hubris is believing engineering brilliance alone can solve everything. They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR,

Google's hubris is believing engineering brilliance alone can solve everything. They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service. There always seems to be a lack of well-roundedness at Google. It didn't really matter back when they just did search, but now that they're expanding into other fields, they're looking more and more like an expert hammerer than an master of many tools.

crunchlibrarian 8y ago
Trying to view every problem through the lens of a probability distribution seems to be Google's only way of looking at the world. Converging every answer to the same hivemind mean is not always the best solution, let's start thinking more about the edge cases and outliers which do actually still exist.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  what is selfishness?
- cube2222 8y ago
  I think you should add some examples. I for one think the opposite. They're the best at giving me exactly the ad which I may like. (I'm not saying I like the idea of an ad)
monksy 8y ago
I really get the feeling that they like they sell the idea of their engineers over the idea that they're helping their customers solve a problem in a better way. That's rather frustrating thing is: they've done some creative things, but it doesn't seem to be so that they've helped anyone. My guess [from their product launches and behavior] It looks like they reward people who make publicity waves and ignore the fact that nothing comes of it. Google wave? Duo/whatever the next chat app.. etc. (Now Google+)
- amelius 8y ago
  > It looks like they reward people who make publicity waves and ignore the fact that nothing comes of it. The world of advertising is all about eyeballs. That might explain it.
zapita 8y ago
I would say they are excellent at PR. Having seen behind the scenes the reality of various initiatives, and comparing it to the media narrative they manage to spin around it... Their reality distortion field is truly remarkable. It takes serious PR expertise for a company doing so much harm to enjoy such a consistently positive image with the media and general public. This is starting to change, but it’s a very recent development.
- kenhwang 8y ago
  Google has excellent marketing. They're very good at getting people to use their products and talk positively about it. PR on the other hand, I think to be more of a mixed bag. They've always used marketing to deflect away from poor PR. Historically in the early days their PR was better, but I think that can be attributed to the company just being better. These days, well, this whole G+ debacle can be seen as a failure in PR. They managed to turn a minor oversight of leaking common information that likely impacted nobody into a major data breach front page announcement on every major news publisher. Pretty big PR failure if you ask me.
nostrademons 8y ago
"They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service." I don't think that's actually true. In particular, I think that Google for most of its history was masterful at PR and communications - they managed to maintain a very positive public image all the way through 2011, despite being both far more powerful, more naughty, and more ruthless than the general public saw them as. I think management and UX are also quite strong at Google - they're known for sparse design and UX fails, but there's often a lot of subtlety to how Google products are designed that makes them very effective for their purposes. They did always suck at customer service, though. Rather, I think Google's hubris is...hubris. They feel the need to have their fingers in everything. It's not enough to be the world's best Search company or even organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, they also need to be the best social network, and best cloud provider, and best AI company, and best mobile-phone OS, and best web browser, and best daily deals site (remember their aborted Groupon purchase, soon followed by a competitor?), and do government contracts for the military, and get into China, and build self-driving cars and robotics, and be a major payment provider and operate half a dozen different chat services. Most of the PR, communication, management, and UX fails are forced errors. They happen because there's an inherent contradiction in Google's business model. You can't simultaneously market yourself to engineers with "Don't be evil" while devising ways to help the military kill people more accurately or censoring Chinese search results; hell, at some point the military is likely going to have an issue with China potentially hacking into Google's cloud infrastructure through their partnerships. A surprising number of the UX fails also come about because some executive is protecting their turf and won't let the obvious integration & UI simplification happen even though both engineers and customers want it.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  Getting bad commentary on geeky/nerdy HN is, almost by definition, bad communications/PR for a tech company. Getting into too many fields and ending up all over the place is bad management. Executives protecting their turfs may indeed be a recipe to getting bad UX, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's bad UX or that bad UX is all over Google. If anything the latter points towards more bad management. And as you wrote, customer service has always been bad.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Google is run by PMs, not engineers, data scientists, or economists. The problem is their PMs are universally bad, believing they know more than the user but knowing just as little at best.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Probably true, but gosh I sure hope not. I know three different PMs at Google in a non-work capacity, and these three people in particular are the most 'intellectually self-righteous' people I have ever met in my life. Basically they're total bullies. I really hope this isn't exemplary of the rest of them, but your statement leads me to think that is not the case.
  - fermienrico 8y ago
    Just curious - PM at Google stands for Product Managers?
    - jghn 8y ago
      Yes
- WisNorCan 8y ago
  Google is run by engineers. Amazon is run by PM.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    And Apple?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Apple doesn’t even have PMs (at least most of the sw and hw orgs). They are engineering driven. They have project managers who keep the trains running on time but have no product decision making power.
rajacombinator 8y ago
With the exception of the recent gmail redesign they’re usually great at UX.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  I like the new gmail. It got me to switch back from Inbox.
  - buxtehude 8y ago
    honest question: was there anything in particular that you liked about the new gmail that brought you back?
    - jonny_eh 8y ago
      Knowing that Inbox was going to die, may as well switch now.
  - xvector 8y ago
    I will use Inbox until it sputters and dies. The new Gmail contains none of the features that make Inbox useful.
    - jonny_eh 8y ago
      > none of the features that make Inbox useful Being able to read email is useful. Seriously though, Gmail added the snooze ability, which was the one feature from Inbox I used regularly.
bitxbit 8y ago
I agree and this is more or less how I have viewed them over the past few years. I would even go one step further and say they’ve almost tried to minimize human touch points from their products and overfocused on creating self-sufficient products. Exh A is how youtube has been (mis)managed.
yourbandsucks 8y ago
There's not even much engineering brilliance anymore. It's been replaced by engineering orthodoxy. Which is it's own kind of rot.
pasbesoin 8y ago
I think they were actually better when the engineers were really "running the place". They could be a bit blind about some things -- and blindsided. But once you actually made your point, they'd do something about it. They actually cared. (Or, enough of them did, to make a difference.) Now, we have a corporately curated behemoth. Although, it is interesting that internal pressure still occasionally produces an appearance of change, such as publicly stepping back from death robots and Wintermuth off its meds.
api 8y ago
There was a bit of a backlash in the Valley against the opposite hubris: that sales and marketing are where all the value is and everything else is a replaceable commodity. This remains the mentality in many places outside SV, and especially back East. The reality is that excellence in all areas is ideal, but very few company leaders or cultures can manage this. Most excel at one or two.
otabdeveloper2 8y ago
> engineering brilliance What engineering brilliance? Their only non-trivial product is search, and it sucks and keeps getting suckier every year. Their ad business is no better than the competitors.
- kamaal 8y ago
  >>What engineering brilliance? I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin when it came to in house engineering. Google in many ways was the first mega web scale company. The scale of their servers, data centers, in-house research, things like MapReduce, BigTable etc etc the list is endless. Google indeed was a hub for very smart people to work pre-2010's. Not sure what changed. I also hear their engineering driven culture has faded heavily if not totally dead. 20% time projects are no longer there, and even if they exist by a miracle they are largely hated by the internal cartels and power structures. Arguably the biggest slip in an engineering driven culture happens when your big products come through acquisitions not in-house work. That's the first indication that bureaucracy has taken over, and no real person worth their salt is running their show. The reason why start ups can disrupt the market and not big companies, is because 1 - 2 people with a good team are what do the disruption. Its a mistake to assume that companies or your average middle manager Joe can do much in that area.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I would consider Yahoo, Altavista, EBay and Amazon the first mega web scale companies, not Google.
- zzbzq 8y ago
  Product-wise, I agree. Tech-wise, most of the high-scalability infrastructure, along with many big data (and machine learning) tools and practices are copied from Google. None of the other tech giants come close to the level of innovation on the technology side. Actually, product-wise, there's some other high points as well. At any given moment, Chrome is usually the best browser, and it's certainly the one that pushed quality forward the most.

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

Trying to view every problem through the lens of a probability distribution seems to be Google's only way of looking at the world. Converging every answer to the same hivemind mean is not always the best solution, let's start thinking more about the edge cases and outliers which do actually still exist.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
what is selfishness?
cube2222 8y ago
I think you should add some examples. I for one think the opposite. They're the best at giving me exactly the ad which I may like. (I'm not saying I like the idea of an ad)

monksy 8y ago

I really get the feeling that they like they sell the idea of their engineers over the idea that they're helping their customers solve a problem in a better way. That's rather frustrating thing is: they've done some creative things, but it doesn't seem to be so that they've helped anyone. My guess [from their product launches and behavior] It looks like they reward people who make publicity waves and ignore the fact that nothing comes of it. Google wave? Duo/whatever the next chat app.. etc. (Now Google+)

amelius 8y ago
> It looks like they reward people who make publicity waves and ignore the fact that nothing comes of it. The world of advertising is all about eyeballs. That might explain it.

zapita 8y ago

I would say they are excellent at PR. Having seen behind the scenes the reality of various initiatives, and comparing it to the media narrative they manage to spin around it... Their reality distortion field is truly remarkable. It takes serious PR expertise for a company doing so much harm to enjoy such a consistently positive image with the media and general public. This is starting to change, but it’s a very recent development.

kenhwang 8y ago
Google has excellent marketing. They're very good at getting people to use their products and talk positively about it. PR on the other hand, I think to be more of a mixed bag. They've always used marketing to deflect away from poor PR. Historically in the early days their PR was better, but I think that can be attributed to the company just being better. These days, well, this whole G+ debacle can be seen as a failure in PR. They managed to turn a minor oversight of leaking common information that likely impacted nobody into a major data breach front page announcement on every major news publisher. Pretty big PR failure if you ask me.

nostrademons 8y ago

"They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service." I don't think that's actually true. In particular, I think that Google for most of its history was masterful at PR and communications - they managed to maintain a very positive public image all the way through 2011, despite being both far more powerful, more naughty, and more ruthless than the general public saw them as. I think management and UX are also quite strong at Google - they're known for sparse design and UX fails, but there's often a lot of subtlety to how Google products are designed that makes them very effective for their purposes. They did always suck at customer service, though. Rather, I think Google's hubris is...hubris. They feel the need to have their fingers in everything. It's not enough to be the world's best Search company or even organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, they also need to be the best social network, and best cloud provider, and best AI company, and best mobile-phone OS, and best web browser, and best daily deals site (remember their aborted Groupon purchase, soon followed by a competitor?), and do government contracts for the military, and get into China, and build self-driving cars and robotics, and be a major payment provider and operate half a dozen different chat services. Most of the PR, communication, management, and UX fails are forced errors. They happen because there's an inherent contradiction in Google's business model. You can't simultaneously market yourself to engineers with "Don't be evil" while devising ways to help the military kill people more accurately or censoring Chinese search results; hell, at some point the military is likely going to have an issue with China potentially hacking into Google's cloud infrastructure through their partnerships. A surprising number of the UX fails also come about because some executive is protecting their turf and won't let the obvious integration & UI simplification happen even though both engineers and customers want it.

ddebernardy 8y ago
Getting bad commentary on geeky/nerdy HN is, almost by definition, bad communications/PR for a tech company. Getting into too many fields and ending up all over the place is bad management. Executives protecting their turfs may indeed be a recipe to getting bad UX, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's bad UX or that bad UX is all over Google. If anything the latter points towards more bad management. And as you wrote, customer service has always been bad.

lern_too_spel 8y ago

Google is run by PMs, not engineers, data scientists, or economists. The problem is their PMs are universally bad, believing they know more than the user but knowing just as little at best.

busterarm 8y ago
Probably true, but gosh I sure hope not. I know three different PMs at Google in a non-work capacity, and these three people in particular are the most 'intellectually self-righteous' people I have ever met in my life. Basically they're total bullies. I really hope this isn't exemplary of the rest of them, but your statement leads me to think that is not the case.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Just curious - PM at Google stands for Product Managers?
  - jghn 8y ago
    Yes
WisNorCan 8y ago
Google is run by engineers. Amazon is run by PM.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  And Apple?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Apple doesn’t even have PMs (at least most of the sw and hw orgs). They are engineering driven. They have project managers who keep the trains running on time but have no product decision making power.

rajacombinator 8y ago

With the exception of the recent gmail redesign they’re usually great at UX.

jonny_eh 8y ago
I like the new gmail. It got me to switch back from Inbox.
- buxtehude 8y ago
  honest question: was there anything in particular that you liked about the new gmail that brought you back?
  - jonny_eh 8y ago
    Knowing that Inbox was going to die, may as well switch now.
- xvector 8y ago
  I will use Inbox until it sputters and dies. The new Gmail contains none of the features that make Inbox useful.
  - jonny_eh 8y ago
    > none of the features that make Inbox useful Being able to read email is useful. Seriously though, Gmail added the snooze ability, which was the one feature from Inbox I used regularly.

bitxbit 8y ago

I agree and this is more or less how I have viewed them over the past few years. I would even go one step further and say they’ve almost tried to minimize human touch points from their products and overfocused on creating self-sufficient products. Exh A is how youtube has been (mis)managed.

yourbandsucks 8y ago

There's not even much engineering brilliance anymore. It's been replaced by engineering orthodoxy. Which is it's own kind of rot.

pasbesoin 8y ago

I think they were actually better when the engineers were really "running the place". They could be a bit blind about some things -- and blindsided. But once you actually made your point, they'd do something about it. They actually cared. (Or, enough of them did, to make a difference.) Now, we have a corporately curated behemoth. Although, it is interesting that internal pressure still occasionally produces an appearance of change, such as publicly stepping back from death robots and Wintermuth off its meds.

api 8y ago

There was a bit of a backlash in the Valley against the opposite hubris: that sales and marketing are where all the value is and everything else is a replaceable commodity. This remains the mentality in many places outside SV, and especially back East. The reality is that excellence in all areas is ideal, but very few company leaders or cultures can manage this. Most excel at one or two.

otabdeveloper2 8y ago

> engineering brilliance What engineering brilliance? Their only non-trivial product is search, and it sucks and keeps getting suckier every year. Their ad business is no better than the competitors.

kamaal 8y ago
>>What engineering brilliance? I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin when it came to in house engineering. Google in many ways was the first mega web scale company. The scale of their servers, data centers, in-house research, things like MapReduce, BigTable etc etc the list is endless. Google indeed was a hub for very smart people to work pre-2010's. Not sure what changed. I also hear their engineering driven culture has faded heavily if not totally dead. 20% time projects are no longer there, and even if they exist by a miracle they are largely hated by the internal cartels and power structures. Arguably the biggest slip in an engineering driven culture happens when your big products come through acquisitions not in-house work. That's the first indication that bureaucracy has taken over, and no real person worth their salt is running their show. The reason why start ups can disrupt the market and not big companies, is because 1 - 2 people with a good team are what do the disruption. Its a mistake to assume that companies or your average middle manager Joe can do much in that area.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I would consider Yahoo, Altavista, EBay and Amazon the first mega web scale companies, not Google.
zzbzq 8y ago
Product-wise, I agree. Tech-wise, most of the high-scalability infrastructure, along with many big data (and machine learning) tools and practices are copied from Google. None of the other tech giants come close to the level of innovation on the technology side. Actually, product-wise, there's some other high points as well. At any given moment, Chrome is usually the best browser, and it's certainly the one that pushed quality forward the most.