3 ms·
> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. And why i
by dmortin 6y ago
> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth.
And why is that? Google is not a poor company, can't they add a separate data support team for Maps which is a pretty important application? Is Google that cheap?
Why should feature engineers work on data support? I understand they implement automatic validation for data, but in addition to that there should be a separate data team which checks data manually.
- IggleSniggle 6y agoI can imagine. Google is a company of engineers that want to engineer things. The people that work there don't want to run a business, they want to make enough money to be able to engineer things and not worry about how to pay for that. The idea of needing to roll out, manage, moderate huge teams of people to manually review data and make judgment calls would mean needing to take responsibility for the listings and needing to care about micro-accuracy. Google doesn't want to be the "documentation team of the world," they want to be the "automated documentation generator for the world." Because that's an interesting engineering problem. As soon as it becomes primarily a people problem, Google individuals would just rather work on other things all things considered. Even if there is a business case for making this information more accurate, it's just a fundamentally different mindset. You can't hire your way into getting that work delegated very easily either when the mindset of "solve it once with code so that you don't need to solve it 5 billion times by hand" permeates the culture.