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> You would expect a big software company like Google to know better, but you'd be mistaken. I don't think it qualifies as speculation anymore to assert that G

> You would expect a big software company like Google to know better, but you'd be mistaken. I don't think it qualifies as speculation anymore to assert that Google has something really broken about it, organizationally, that keeps it from producing truly good software—and often not even decent software—in most of its projects, for some reason. Even very high-profile ones. There's not really any other explanation for how they consistently behave.

arke_125 6y ago
Pure speculation on my part, but it sounds like an organizational case of ADHD or Magpie driven development. A new project is started and everyone jumps ship before it is ready, leaving some other team to come in and continue before jumping. Repeat this over a few times in a product and you end up with an unusable mess. This might explain it.
- alkibiades 6y ago
  yeah the culture is all based on promotions.. and you get them by launching something new, not by maintaining or improving existing systems. hence what you said
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Friend of mine that worked as a manager for a few years at google. Said he found it extremely difficult to get people to work on stuff that wasn't shiny and to stop refactoring stuff that was good enough.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
On the tooling side, I think Steve Yegge's infamous and very entertaining platform rant from 2011 nails it: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 tl;dr Google doesn't have the platform mentality in its culture, unlike Amazon and MS.
nojvek 6y ago
Google is a large company. I have respect for its core product that is google search. It’s insanely fast and reliable. I can’t remember the last time it was down. Mostly gets the answers I need at the top (I use adblockers so ads aren’t a problem) The rest of Google has other priorities though. Even gmail’s iOS app had pretty glaring bug that it couldn’t mark a message read. Google docs fails to save at times. YouTube Kids is just an awful mess. Don’t let your kids even near it. Google Cloud isn’t as reliable as the other clouds. Google can’t do proper human support. They don’t believe in it. If you’re a small shop, going with Google for anything critical is just going to be a disappointment. Google Search though. I have an insane amount of respect for their engineers who work on performance and reliability.

arke_125 6y ago

Pure speculation on my part, but it sounds like an organizational case of ADHD or Magpie driven development. A new project is started and everyone jumps ship before it is ready, leaving some other team to come in and continue before jumping. Repeat this over a few times in a product and you end up with an unusable mess. This might explain it.

alkibiades 6y ago
yeah the culture is all based on promotions.. and you get them by launching something new, not by maintaining or improving existing systems. hence what you said
Gibbon1 6y ago
Friend of mine that worked as a manager for a few years at google. Said he found it extremely difficult to get people to work on stuff that wasn't shiny and to stop refactoring stuff that was good enough.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

On the tooling side, I think Steve Yegge's infamous and very entertaining platform rant from 2011 nails it: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 tl;dr Google doesn't have the platform mentality in its culture, unlike Amazon and MS.

nojvek 6y ago

Google is a large company. I have respect for its core product that is google search. It’s insanely fast and reliable. I can’t remember the last time it was down. Mostly gets the answers I need at the top (I use adblockers so ads aren’t a problem) The rest of Google has other priorities though. Even gmail’s iOS app had pretty glaring bug that it couldn’t mark a message read. Google docs fails to save at times. YouTube Kids is just an awful mess. Don’t let your kids even near it. Google Cloud isn’t as reliable as the other clouds. Google can’t do proper human support. They don’t believe in it. If you’re a small shop, going with Google for anything critical is just going to be a disappointment. Google Search though. I have an insane amount of respect for their engineers who work on performance and reliability.