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This makes me wonder if Google developers ever get feedback from outside the company, it feels like some feature is released and developers move the the nsxt sh

This makes me wonder if Google developers ever get feedback from outside the company, it feels like some feature is released and developers move the the nsxt shiny thing and most feedback (the one that does not reach on a news paper) is ignored. Probably this is expected when you have many users and most of them are not paying.

kristopolous 6y ago
I wonder this about a lot of "tier 1" software, whenever I get easy to access critical business logic breaking bugs in Amazon, eBay, etc... I just find it utterly unacceptable. I'd drag my developers over hot coal if they somehow released what I see from these trillion dollars companies. I wasn't able to "add to cart" with my Amazon app for instance and things like YouTube and Instagram constantly crash when I'm adding new content. And many banking apps totally freak out when I use a password manager. This is pretty core operation. It's really amazing. I really don't know how the valley operates sometime. I'd imagine they supposedly have entire departments and dozens of people who are supposed to make sure this stuff works. Sometimes I find it so unbelievable that I try multiple devices to take the possibility that it's just me out and it's invariably reproducible on all. Maybe nobody at the company uses Android or maybe nobody uses their own product? (Maybe people who work at, say, Facebook don't actually like using it...thats understandable, but also unacceptable) I really don't know how it happens. Maybe their tests are 100% automated and no human checks it? I don't know.
- aflag 6y ago
  Maybe their quality control can be improved, but you give no insight in QA practices they are obviously skipping. Unless you're counting "dragging developers over hot coal" as your advice. In which case, I have serious doubts the system you're comparing them with is actually of better quality.
  - RandoHolmes 6y ago
    It's a problem with many developers. They think that because there can be a root cause analysis, they didn't fuck up. But there are times when something simply shouldn't be, definitionally. As in, if X happens, it doesn't matter what the root cause analysis is, something is wrong. To give a real life example, if you're driving drunk, the events and reasons leading up to the act don't really matter. They're not without value, but they're not important for determining that someone fucked up. This is what the poster you're responding to is saying. That the problems are so goddamned egregious that they simply shouldn't be. It's not up to the aforementioned poster to fix the problems, it's up to the companies in question wanting to be better.
    - aflag 6y ago
      Fair point, but that's obviously not true. All evidence we have points to both amazon and google following excelent software development practices. They are even drivers of good practices in certain parts. So, we'd need stronger evidence to show that they are not doing their due diligence before releasing new versions. I'd say that releasing software without tests, code review and incremental rollout would be akin to drunk driving. However, I believe they do all of that and more. Moreover, I don't know about the many developers you have experience with, but if the developer considers the behaviour to be a bug, I have a hard time believing they don't consider the behaviour to be a failure (ie. someone made a mistake somewhere). Though, I can definitely see people shifting the responsability to someone else, specially if there's a blame culture in place. Obviously, that's easier to do once you know the root cause. However, a company will be better off by putting solid QA practices in place and measuring "fuck ups" as a decrease in productivity instead of measuring it as the number of times each developer break production.
      - simion314 6y ago
        Maybe the issue they are doing too much dev and less contact with real users. You can unit test all your code but you can't cover all possible real data, so you need to accept user feedback. Sometime ago in one of our products there was an issue with RTL languages, as a developer it was first time I hit this concept, I got the report, I informed myself, I fixed the issue,the ticket was closed,the user was happy. In this case it is clear the developer assumed that they can always find someone picture, the assumption is wrong but probably all the TDD and good dev practices won't catch this issue until someone listens to the user reports.
- Fatalist_ma 6y ago
  I think the main reason is that they can afford to not care. There is no pressure. They can afford to be inefficient because they know that as long as the core features work, customers will not leave.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Maybe the reason they are trillion dollars companies because they care about more important things than obscure or unprofitable bugs and berating their staff.
    - smaryjerry 6y ago
      True. Apple has bugs that have been posted on their forums for like 10 years that haven’t gone away and rack up hundreds and sometimes thousands of comments. They don’t care. In some cases they block further comments without ever fixing the bug. They figure something that only affects 1 percent of people Of whom only half of them will actually get annoyed, they don’t need to fix at all. It really adds up though when you have hundreds of bugs.
    - sildur 6y ago
      Because they care about filling their pockets and mostly nothing else, that’s the reason.
  - reportgunner 6y ago
    Seconded, I think they don't want an internet where there is 0 pictures available of some known figure and that's why they don't take such a case into consideration.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nottorp 6y ago
In large organizations like this you tend to do what advances your own career, not what's useful. Mainly because it's not going to affect Google's bottom line in the short term. See how many chat/social networking offerings they have done.
- simion314 6y ago
  In small companies feedback from customers reaches support or the CEO(sometimes) and tickets are opened for all(most) issues. So are this companies have no support people or what are those people doing? Their job is to collect this feedback and put in tickets and advocate for the user witht he developers. Many times I had some feature implemented in a clean.logical way from coding point of view but it had to be changed so custoemers are satisfied and not me the developer.
  - aflag 6y ago
    They have billions of users, it's not scalable to treat each of them individually. So, they take more scalable approaches to identify problems and assess user satisfaction. That means that an individual should expect not to have much influence over the direction the product takes and which bugs are prioritized.
    - simion314 6y ago
      The question is if they dont' collect feedback they don't know how many users are affected. If you break feature X and all users are affected but you send them to read some FAQ and not record the reports then the only way you get informed about this is from Hacker News or a news paper, maybe this is the Google and Apple strategy, if it causes an issue that reaches a news paper then we investigate it, otherwise we fix only the bugs that upset our developers or bosses
      - aflag 6y ago
        Most of their feedback probably comes from their metrics. Things like sudden drop in the number of purchases, an unexpected increase in refinenment of certain queries, increased number of 500s, etc. In order to respond in scale you have to try to detect unusual patterns showing up in your data. That said, they do have some avenues to contacting them. There are feedback buttons in the knowledge panel and in the translations. There's an actual support in youtube (albeit it will take a while until you get to a real person) and so on. As it is, they are likely already getting more feedback than they can process on a daily basis. Bear in mind that not all feedback is useful. A big chunk of the work in any support hotline is wading through the mountain of useless feedback. I can only imagine how that'd be like at google's scale. Note: by useless feedback I don't mean that the user is wrong because they don't understand the interface, when it's actually the interface that's not intuitive. I'm saying that people are often calling in trying to solve something completely out of your control. Just talk to anyone in support and they will tell you the craziest things that pop up. One example I've heard was a user who could not wrap around the idea that an app on the phone needs internet access to order food delivery. Something like that can easily take 30 minutes for a supporter to handle, for instance.
lrem 6y ago
Let's try a thought experiment. There is a `Feedback` button on the bottom right, imagine that Google developers actually look at them. Let's assume some numbers: - Once every ten searches there is that "smart" box. - Once every thousand "smart" boxes a user spots an error and clicks the `Feedback`. - There are a hundred developers behind this feature, working 8h/day. So, according to [the result in a smart box](https://kenshoo.com/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on-google-and-other-google-facts/ https://kenshoo.com/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on...) there are 228 million searches per hour. So, to go through all the feedbacks, your developers need to average well over 600 per hour. An alternative approach to get this estimation: imagine every tenth user reports one error per year. There are [2 billion gSuite users](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billion-users/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billi...), so intuitively there should be at least as many Google search users. By simple division, your developers would need to go through almost 700 feedbacks per hour. Having these numbers: how do you think Google engineers should actually react to the feedback? Disclaimer: I work at Google, but on something not exposed to the outside world. However, we do hit similar scale issues with our users being only Google engineers.
- VRay 6y ago
  Very slippery slope, since you can use that argument to justify anything you want. The bottom line is this: You guys are actively spreading misinformation and profiting from it. That's a bad thing.
  - lrem 6y ago
    Do you have any alternative ideas on how to make this better?
- eutropia 6y ago
  Solution: Hire 10,000 people to vet the feedback and funnel it into the org. Those people vet 6-7 feedback per hour, or 18-21 if you keep the operation running 24/7. But that would cut into the Profit from the Money Printing Machine. Saying "We're doing business on a scale that's too big for us to be (profitably) accountable" isn't an acceptable answer.
MisterTea 6y ago
> Probably this is expected when you have many users and most of them are not paying. Everyone pays one way or another otherwise google wouldn't exist. I leave feedback on Google results and apps all the time. Either no one reads them, a computer reads them and based on keywords pushes them to a queue that reaches a human or /dev/null, or no one in the company wants to accept responsibility for mistakes otherwise they may not be promoted.

kristopolous 6y ago

I wonder this about a lot of "tier 1" software, whenever I get easy to access critical business logic breaking bugs in Amazon, eBay, etc... I just find it utterly unacceptable. I'd drag my developers over hot coal if they somehow released what I see from these trillion dollars companies. I wasn't able to "add to cart" with my Amazon app for instance and things like YouTube and Instagram constantly crash when I'm adding new content. And many banking apps totally freak out when I use a password manager. This is pretty core operation. It's really amazing. I really don't know how the valley operates sometime. I'd imagine they supposedly have entire departments and dozens of people who are supposed to make sure this stuff works. Sometimes I find it so unbelievable that I try multiple devices to take the possibility that it's just me out and it's invariably reproducible on all. Maybe nobody at the company uses Android or maybe nobody uses their own product? (Maybe people who work at, say, Facebook don't actually like using it...thats understandable, but also unacceptable) I really don't know how it happens. Maybe their tests are 100% automated and no human checks it? I don't know.

aflag 6y ago
Maybe their quality control can be improved, but you give no insight in QA practices they are obviously skipping. Unless you're counting "dragging developers over hot coal" as your advice. In which case, I have serious doubts the system you're comparing them with is actually of better quality.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  It's a problem with many developers. They think that because there can be a root cause analysis, they didn't fuck up. But there are times when something simply shouldn't be, definitionally. As in, if X happens, it doesn't matter what the root cause analysis is, something is wrong. To give a real life example, if you're driving drunk, the events and reasons leading up to the act don't really matter. They're not without value, but they're not important for determining that someone fucked up. This is what the poster you're responding to is saying. That the problems are so goddamned egregious that they simply shouldn't be. It's not up to the aforementioned poster to fix the problems, it's up to the companies in question wanting to be better.
  - aflag 6y ago
    Fair point, but that's obviously not true. All evidence we have points to both amazon and google following excelent software development practices. They are even drivers of good practices in certain parts. So, we'd need stronger evidence to show that they are not doing their due diligence before releasing new versions. I'd say that releasing software without tests, code review and incremental rollout would be akin to drunk driving. However, I believe they do all of that and more. Moreover, I don't know about the many developers you have experience with, but if the developer considers the behaviour to be a bug, I have a hard time believing they don't consider the behaviour to be a failure (ie. someone made a mistake somewhere). Though, I can definitely see people shifting the responsability to someone else, specially if there's a blame culture in place. Obviously, that's easier to do once you know the root cause. However, a company will be better off by putting solid QA practices in place and measuring "fuck ups" as a decrease in productivity instead of measuring it as the number of times each developer break production.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Maybe the issue they are doing too much dev and less contact with real users. You can unit test all your code but you can't cover all possible real data, so you need to accept user feedback. Sometime ago in one of our products there was an issue with RTL languages, as a developer it was first time I hit this concept, I got the report, I informed myself, I fixed the issue,the ticket was closed,the user was happy. In this case it is clear the developer assumed that they can always find someone picture, the assumption is wrong but probably all the TDD and good dev practices won't catch this issue until someone listens to the user reports.
Fatalist_ma 6y ago
I think the main reason is that they can afford to not care. There is no pressure. They can afford to be inefficient because they know that as long as the core features work, customers will not leave.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Maybe the reason they are trillion dollars companies because they care about more important things than obscure or unprofitable bugs and berating their staff.
  - smaryjerry 6y ago
    True. Apple has bugs that have been posted on their forums for like 10 years that haven’t gone away and rack up hundreds and sometimes thousands of comments. They don’t care. In some cases they block further comments without ever fixing the bug. They figure something that only affects 1 percent of people Of whom only half of them will actually get annoyed, they don’t need to fix at all. It really adds up though when you have hundreds of bugs.
  - sildur 6y ago
    Because they care about filling their pockets and mostly nothing else, that’s the reason.
- reportgunner 6y ago
  Seconded, I think they don't want an internet where there is 0 pictures available of some known figure and that's why they don't take such a case into consideration.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nottorp 6y ago

In large organizations like this you tend to do what advances your own career, not what's useful. Mainly because it's not going to affect Google's bottom line in the short term. See how many chat/social networking offerings they have done.

simion314 6y ago
In small companies feedback from customers reaches support or the CEO(sometimes) and tickets are opened for all(most) issues. So are this companies have no support people or what are those people doing? Their job is to collect this feedback and put in tickets and advocate for the user witht he developers. Many times I had some feature implemented in a clean.logical way from coding point of view but it had to be changed so custoemers are satisfied and not me the developer.
- aflag 6y ago
  They have billions of users, it's not scalable to treat each of them individually. So, they take more scalable approaches to identify problems and assess user satisfaction. That means that an individual should expect not to have much influence over the direction the product takes and which bugs are prioritized.
  - simion314 6y ago
    The question is if they dont' collect feedback they don't know how many users are affected. If you break feature X and all users are affected but you send them to read some FAQ and not record the reports then the only way you get informed about this is from Hacker News or a news paper, maybe this is the Google and Apple strategy, if it causes an issue that reaches a news paper then we investigate it, otherwise we fix only the bugs that upset our developers or bosses
    - aflag 6y ago
      Most of their feedback probably comes from their metrics. Things like sudden drop in the number of purchases, an unexpected increase in refinenment of certain queries, increased number of 500s, etc. In order to respond in scale you have to try to detect unusual patterns showing up in your data. That said, they do have some avenues to contacting them. There are feedback buttons in the knowledge panel and in the translations. There's an actual support in youtube (albeit it will take a while until you get to a real person) and so on. As it is, they are likely already getting more feedback than they can process on a daily basis. Bear in mind that not all feedback is useful. A big chunk of the work in any support hotline is wading through the mountain of useless feedback. I can only imagine how that'd be like at google's scale. Note: by useless feedback I don't mean that the user is wrong because they don't understand the interface, when it's actually the interface that's not intuitive. I'm saying that people are often calling in trying to solve something completely out of your control. Just talk to anyone in support and they will tell you the craziest things that pop up. One example I've heard was a user who could not wrap around the idea that an app on the phone needs internet access to order food delivery. Something like that can easily take 30 minutes for a supporter to handle, for instance.

lrem 6y ago

Let's try a thought experiment. There is a `Feedback` button on the bottom right, imagine that Google developers actually look at them. Let's assume some numbers: - Once every ten searches there is that "smart" box. - Once every thousand "smart" boxes a user spots an error and clicks the `Feedback`. - There are a hundred developers behind this feature, working 8h/day. So, according to [the result in a smart box](https://kenshoo.com/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on-google-and-other-google-facts/ https://kenshoo.com/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on...) there are 228 million searches per hour. So, to go through all the feedbacks, your developers need to average well over 600 per hour. An alternative approach to get this estimation: imagine every tenth user reports one error per year. There are [2 billion gSuite users](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billion-users/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billi...), so intuitively there should be at least as many Google search users. By simple division, your developers would need to go through almost 700 feedbacks per hour. Having these numbers: how do you think Google engineers should actually react to the feedback? Disclaimer: I work at Google, but on something not exposed to the outside world. However, we do hit similar scale issues with our users being only Google engineers.

VRay 6y ago
Very slippery slope, since you can use that argument to justify anything you want. The bottom line is this: You guys are actively spreading misinformation and profiting from it. That's a bad thing.
- lrem 6y ago
  Do you have any alternative ideas on how to make this better?
eutropia 6y ago
Solution: Hire 10,000 people to vet the feedback and funnel it into the org. Those people vet 6-7 feedback per hour, or 18-21 if you keep the operation running 24/7. But that would cut into the Profit from the Money Printing Machine. Saying "We're doing business on a scale that's too big for us to be (profitably) accountable" isn't an acceptable answer.

MisterTea 6y ago

> Probably this is expected when you have many users and most of them are not paying. Everyone pays one way or another otherwise google wouldn't exist. I leave feedback on Google results and apps all the time. Either no one reads them, a computer reads them and based on keywords pushes them to a queue that reaches a human or /dev/null, or no one in the company wants to accept responsibility for mistakes otherwise they may not be promoted.