11 ms·

Google seems terribly run, frankly. I wouldn't use them as an example of good process, organization, or really anything other than that being early to advertisi

Google seems terribly run, frankly. I wouldn't use them as an example of good process, organization, or really anything other than that being early to advertising and being the internet's front page for ~20 years is a great way to make money

packetlost 6y ago
This. Google seems to not have anyone with a cohesive vision or even anyone that knows how to build a platform or maintain a product. I personally would like to know what's going on with the product owners at Google, because it really seems like none of them talk to each other. Google is a fantastic engineering company, but terrible at building products.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  I don't know that they're a fantastic engineering company. I don't know what Google is great at - a few things, which feel like they're successful almost because they're treated as separate from the rest of the organization. OKRs are one of many parts of that, in my opinion.
  - mahmoudimus 6y ago
    Google engineering is fantastic and respectable. What gives the impression that it is anything else other than excellent?
    - staticassertion 6y ago
      My personal opinion is that Google has some really strong engineers, and some pockets of engineering are truly exceptional. That is it. The impression is based on lots of anecdotal experience. I know many people at Google, I use many Google products, I talk to other industry leaders about their impressions of Google.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - User23 6y ago
      Well here’s one example: https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/index.html https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/inde.... Another is the frat boy hazing code review culture. Heck there are plenty of noogler’s first code review memegens floating around. It’s totally not bullying it’s just joking right?
      - jdm2212 6y ago
        It is in fact just a joke. New grads write shitty code (I certainly did when I started at Google) and after a few months of attentive reviews they write good clean code. It feels like hazing a bit at first because all us arrogant ivy league types graduate thinking we're geniuses and then it turns out, no, we can't even do the equivalent of fetching coffee correctly and have to be handheld through it. But afterwards people joke about it the way they joke about any other shared experience.
      - summerlight 6y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873418 The author of that article completely confused about the goal of protobuf. Read this rebuttal comment, written by the previous owner.
        User23 6y ago
        Thanks for the link. It's quite a weak rebuttal however. For example "this inability to distinguish between unset and default values is a nightmare" is ignored. And, to me, "If it were possible to restrict protobuffer usage to network-boundaries I wouldn’t be nearly as hard on it as a technology" is the most damning criticism and that's also ignored. The so-called rebuttal basically amounts to "we're using it to make oodles of money in the ads pipeline so it must be good software engineering." The claim about success in the market is completely true, but it's also not a rebuttal to the claim that the designers of protobufs are apparently ignorant of current computing theory and just patched together an ad hoc mess. Nobody capable of observation disputes that the standard substandard quality of most professionally written software is no impediment to success in the marketplace, there are too many examples to claim otherwise.
    - quanticle 6y ago
      Their products, especially their mobile products. Take, for example, Google Tasks. It has, roughly the same number of features, with the same design as when it launched two years ago. Presumably there are engineers assigned to it. What on earth are they doing? Meanwhile, Microsoft Tasks has subsumed all the features of Wunderlist and has become a far better to-do list app. It's a small example, but it's emblematic. The same applies to Google Apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest haven't had any substantial new features or (more importantly) performance improvements in 10 years. Try loading a hundred-page Word document in Google Docs and it still lags out. And then there's chat. Oh, lord, Google's chat applications. How many do they have again? Five? Six? Which ones are they canceling this year? Every year, they promise that they're going to "unify" [1] chat, and every year they fail to deliver on that promise. The only product at Google that actually seems to get updated and maintained is search. Everything else is either a half-baked science experiment that is soon to be canceled or a stagnant leftover without a clear product roadmap. You can quibble that this is bad product management rather than bad engineering, but as far I'm concerned, bad product management is bad engineering. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/report-google-planning-tenth-messaging-app-this-ones-another-slack-clone/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/report-google-planni...
- osipov 6y ago
  >Google is a fantastic engineering company, but terrible at building products. not anymore
- badestrand 6y ago
  This is objectively false as they have developed many of the most successful products on this planet. There are hundred of web mail products but gmail is the best. Google Maps is the best in class, other great products are Google Earth, Analytics, YouTube, Cloud, Android and many more. Yes, you can find flaws in any of those but it's also hard to find better products in the same category. Google is not in any way "terrible at building products", they are one of the best companies in the whole world in building products.
  - hddherman 6y ago
    Youtube and Android were acquired by Google, and there are definitely other products that are also the result of an acquisition.
  - kerng 6y ago
    Gmail is by far not the best mail system - in enterprise settings it's possible the worst actually. Its cluttered, threads are unreadable, tiny window by default to write a message... maybe it was hip 16 years ago, but that's past. Because of all these things I'm not even using it in private setting either. YouTube is full with ads and fake comments including spam. I agree with the parent post that Google products benefited most from being first or being acquisitions - it's like Microsoft early 2000s or so.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    They haven't developed one for quite a while now.
  - asa4akj 6y ago
    youtube android and earth are acquisitions, Cloud is nothing compared to its competition, GMail is almost 2 decades old. In the last decade, I can't remember a single innovative google original product, or some copy-cat product that is better than the competition
    - dividedbyzero 6y ago
      > Cloud is nothing compared to its competition I've been working with GCP a lot during the last two years, and I think the experience is actually quite a bit better than people generally assume or adoption numbers suggest. It's probably not a great fit for large companies with really big engineering departments building really complex systems, but getting started on GCP as a small to medium org is a breeze, products at different levels of abstraction complement each other well (so it's easy to grow) and everything seems to be built to be minimum hassle and require a lot less fiddling by an engineer to get going than the corresponding AWS product. Much better web console than AWS, great K8S offering, BigQuery can do machine learning nowadays, which is actually usable for simple tasks. Everything has lots of sane defaults, it's usually only a couple of clicks to spin up pretty much any resource; in AWS this tends to be a huge pain. Although, if you're in the EU and bound to a strict interpretation of GDPR, then your experience is going to be absolutely miserable, because there's no way to actually restrict data to stay within the EU for the vast majority of products. A lot of the serverless products has something like "data may be processed in US West or global" hidden in their docs (which legal tells me is a big no-no), and while you can set allowed regions, even BigQuery violates that silently, so that's useless and dangerous as well. So if they were to get better at selling what they have (which they really, really suck at; we're using them not because, but in spite of, their sales efforts) and maybe discover Europe one day, then it'll be a very strong contender for AWS/Azure.
cortesoft 6y ago
Why didn't the other companies that were those things succeed then? (Yahoo, Altavista, etc)?
- staticassertion 6y ago
  I don't know. I don't feel that I have to know to make the statement I made.
  - reddothomme 6y ago
    Curious to know from your point of view; which company is well organised and well-run?
    - staticassertion 6y ago
      I don't think I know of a company that has really nailed being well run at scale, I can maybe think of a few that I don't want to name but they aren't in tech anyway. But I have a very limited view, having lived in SF for a few years and just having insight into the companies I've seen. I bet there are loads of them that I'm just ignorant to.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    Your statement was the google was successful because of their starting position only, and that their bad management doesn't matter because they can't screw it up being in such a great position. I think the existence of other companies that were in similar starting positions, and then subsequently failed, would prove that you need more than just that starting position to succeed.
    - staticassertion 6y ago
      My statement is that I do not believe that Google is well run today, or in the recent future, and that OKRs are part of that. I believe that their position is not earned through strong organizational structure in recent years, but that they simply have a strong foothold in an extremely powerful market. What allowed them to 'win' in that space decades ago? I don't know, nor do I feel the need to know in order to just much more recent history. It could have been organizational structures that either in a different time, or with a different group of people, or at a different scale, or whatever, were the key. Or something else. I have no comment on it.
jariel 6y ago
I beleive G is 'well run' if you think of them as a 'whole' - even if it means 'poorly run' in many ways. Search and AdWords are probably 'well run' by whatever measure. And they make money with radical surplus, kind of like pumping sweet Oil cheaply. And like such places that have cheap oil, a lot of other things are dysfunctional. We can look past some failures like 'Wave' as merely taking risk, which is fine. But strategic disasters like 'Google Plus' show an inability to do something coherently across business units. YouTube, in many ways, has a really, really poor interface and some really bad and slow-moving features. But hey, it makes money. I worked at a major handset maker that made money hand-over fist on devices, and it was laughable how dysfunctional some things were. This is normal. OKRs are probably a minor contribution to G's success, and maybe they help confirm G's unique 'culture' as much as anything, in that it's powerful to be able to say 'this is how we do things here', it's like a kind of 'internal branding'.

packetlost 6y ago

This. Google seems to not have anyone with a cohesive vision or even anyone that knows how to build a platform or maintain a product. I personally would like to know what's going on with the product owners at Google, because it really seems like none of them talk to each other. Google is a fantastic engineering company, but terrible at building products.

staticassertion 6y ago
I don't know that they're a fantastic engineering company. I don't know what Google is great at - a few things, which feel like they're successful almost because they're treated as separate from the rest of the organization. OKRs are one of many parts of that, in my opinion.
- mahmoudimus 6y ago
  Google engineering is fantastic and respectable. What gives the impression that it is anything else other than excellent?
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    My personal opinion is that Google has some really strong engineers, and some pockets of engineering are truly exceptional. That is it. The impression is based on lots of anecdotal experience. I know many people at Google, I use many Google products, I talk to other industry leaders about their impressions of Google.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - User23 6y ago
    Well here’s one example: https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/index.html https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/inde.... Another is the frat boy hazing code review culture. Heck there are plenty of noogler’s first code review memegens floating around. It’s totally not bullying it’s just joking right?
    - jdm2212 6y ago
      It is in fact just a joke. New grads write shitty code (I certainly did when I started at Google) and after a few months of attentive reviews they write good clean code. It feels like hazing a bit at first because all us arrogant ivy league types graduate thinking we're geniuses and then it turns out, no, we can't even do the equivalent of fetching coffee correctly and have to be handheld through it. But afterwards people joke about it the way they joke about any other shared experience.
    - summerlight 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873418 The author of that article completely confused about the goal of protobuf. Read this rebuttal comment, written by the previous owner.
      - User23 6y ago
        Thanks for the link. It's quite a weak rebuttal however. For example "this inability to distinguish between unset and default values is a nightmare" is ignored. And, to me, "If it were possible to restrict protobuffer usage to network-boundaries I wouldn’t be nearly as hard on it as a technology" is the most damning criticism and that's also ignored. The so-called rebuttal basically amounts to "we're using it to make oodles of money in the ads pipeline so it must be good software engineering." The claim about success in the market is completely true, but it's also not a rebuttal to the claim that the designers of protobufs are apparently ignorant of current computing theory and just patched together an ad hoc mess. Nobody capable of observation disputes that the standard substandard quality of most professionally written software is no impediment to success in the marketplace, there are too many examples to claim otherwise.
  - quanticle 6y ago
    Their products, especially their mobile products. Take, for example, Google Tasks. It has, roughly the same number of features, with the same design as when it launched two years ago. Presumably there are engineers assigned to it. What on earth are they doing? Meanwhile, Microsoft Tasks has subsumed all the features of Wunderlist and has become a far better to-do list app. It's a small example, but it's emblematic. The same applies to Google Apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest haven't had any substantial new features or (more importantly) performance improvements in 10 years. Try loading a hundred-page Word document in Google Docs and it still lags out. And then there's chat. Oh, lord, Google's chat applications. How many do they have again? Five? Six? Which ones are they canceling this year? Every year, they promise that they're going to "unify" [1] chat, and every year they fail to deliver on that promise. The only product at Google that actually seems to get updated and maintained is search. Everything else is either a half-baked science experiment that is soon to be canceled or a stagnant leftover without a clear product roadmap. You can quibble that this is bad product management rather than bad engineering, but as far I'm concerned, bad product management is bad engineering. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/report-google-planning-tenth-messaging-app-this-ones-another-slack-clone/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/report-google-planni...
osipov 6y ago
>Google is a fantastic engineering company, but terrible at building products. not anymore
badestrand 6y ago
This is objectively false as they have developed many of the most successful products on this planet. There are hundred of web mail products but gmail is the best. Google Maps is the best in class, other great products are Google Earth, Analytics, YouTube, Cloud, Android and many more. Yes, you can find flaws in any of those but it's also hard to find better products in the same category. Google is not in any way "terrible at building products", they are one of the best companies in the whole world in building products.
- hddherman 6y ago
  Youtube and Android were acquired by Google, and there are definitely other products that are also the result of an acquisition.
- kerng 6y ago
  Gmail is by far not the best mail system - in enterprise settings it's possible the worst actually. Its cluttered, threads are unreadable, tiny window by default to write a message... maybe it was hip 16 years ago, but that's past. Because of all these things I'm not even using it in private setting either. YouTube is full with ads and fake comments including spam. I agree with the parent post that Google products benefited most from being first or being acquisitions - it's like Microsoft early 2000s or so.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  They haven't developed one for quite a while now.
- asa4akj 6y ago
  youtube android and earth are acquisitions, Cloud is nothing compared to its competition, GMail is almost 2 decades old. In the last decade, I can't remember a single innovative google original product, or some copy-cat product that is better than the competition
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    > Cloud is nothing compared to its competition I've been working with GCP a lot during the last two years, and I think the experience is actually quite a bit better than people generally assume or adoption numbers suggest. It's probably not a great fit for large companies with really big engineering departments building really complex systems, but getting started on GCP as a small to medium org is a breeze, products at different levels of abstraction complement each other well (so it's easy to grow) and everything seems to be built to be minimum hassle and require a lot less fiddling by an engineer to get going than the corresponding AWS product. Much better web console than AWS, great K8S offering, BigQuery can do machine learning nowadays, which is actually usable for simple tasks. Everything has lots of sane defaults, it's usually only a couple of clicks to spin up pretty much any resource; in AWS this tends to be a huge pain. Although, if you're in the EU and bound to a strict interpretation of GDPR, then your experience is going to be absolutely miserable, because there's no way to actually restrict data to stay within the EU for the vast majority of products. A lot of the serverless products has something like "data may be processed in US West or global" hidden in their docs (which legal tells me is a big no-no), and while you can set allowed regions, even BigQuery violates that silently, so that's useless and dangerous as well. So if they were to get better at selling what they have (which they really, really suck at; we're using them not because, but in spite of, their sales efforts) and maybe discover Europe one day, then it'll be a very strong contender for AWS/Azure.

cortesoft 6y ago

Why didn't the other companies that were those things succeed then? (Yahoo, Altavista, etc)?

staticassertion 6y ago
I don't know. I don't feel that I have to know to make the statement I made.
- reddothomme 6y ago
  Curious to know from your point of view; which company is well organised and well-run?
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    I don't think I know of a company that has really nailed being well run at scale, I can maybe think of a few that I don't want to name but they aren't in tech anyway. But I have a very limited view, having lived in SF for a few years and just having insight into the companies I've seen. I bet there are loads of them that I'm just ignorant to.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Your statement was the google was successful because of their starting position only, and that their bad management doesn't matter because they can't screw it up being in such a great position. I think the existence of other companies that were in similar starting positions, and then subsequently failed, would prove that you need more than just that starting position to succeed.
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    My statement is that I do not believe that Google is well run today, or in the recent future, and that OKRs are part of that. I believe that their position is not earned through strong organizational structure in recent years, but that they simply have a strong foothold in an extremely powerful market. What allowed them to 'win' in that space decades ago? I don't know, nor do I feel the need to know in order to just much more recent history. It could have been organizational structures that either in a different time, or with a different group of people, or at a different scale, or whatever, were the key. Or something else. I have no comment on it.

jariel 6y ago

I beleive G is 'well run' if you think of them as a 'whole' - even if it means 'poorly run' in many ways. Search and AdWords are probably 'well run' by whatever measure. And they make money with radical surplus, kind of like pumping sweet Oil cheaply. And like such places that have cheap oil, a lot of other things are dysfunctional. We can look past some failures like 'Wave' as merely taking risk, which is fine. But strategic disasters like 'Google Plus' show an inability to do something coherently across business units. YouTube, in many ways, has a really, really poor interface and some really bad and slow-moving features. But hey, it makes money. I worked at a major handset maker that made money hand-over fist on devices, and it was laughable how dysfunctional some things were. This is normal. OKRs are probably a minor contribution to G's success, and maybe they help confirm G's unique 'culture' as much as anything, in that it's powerful to be able to say 'this is how we do things here', it's like a kind of 'internal branding'.