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We're five members of a sub-team of a sub-team of a large corporation whose recent products are used solely due to the critical mass of users built around the p
by forgotusername 15y ago
We're five members of a sub-team of a sub-team of a large corporation whose recent products are used solely due to the critical mass of users built around the previous generation of our company's developers' products.
Herein we will pay lip service to a barely innovative also-ran office product that happens to use a lot of complex JavaScript (which is fashionable), answering any questions posed with vague responses whose only substance is an alignment with our corporate goals. In truth we've probably spent the best years of our lives fixing bugs relating to the pixel-perfect positioning of the buttons in a particular form in the application.
Our motivation for writing this IAmA is most likely to convince ourselves that despite our cog-like position in a massive corporation wherein our only career path is sideways or into middle management, our jobs and lives have some semblance of meaning, and have created significant value for the planet. If upper level management approved our IAmA, they did so only for the goodwill and free PR that may result from it.
In truth, we are but 5 representatives of a company whose massive weight is being used to shape the future of the industry in ways favorable only to itself and its stockholders, and deeply unfavorable to small, independently controlled companies. Its recruitment drive has been turned so high in recent years that the mere name-dropping of "Google" is unlikely to mean much with regard to our individual skill-sets. We are mediocre developers with limited vision, working for a company that chooses our direction for us.
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I'm sorry for being so negative, but honestly there is almost nothing of value to be derived from these kinds of posts, it's not like these guys are authorized to tell us anything of substance with regard to future product plans. Guaranteed 90% of the comments are feature requests and self-congratulatory nonsense.
- intellection 15y agoWhat (information) could members provide without interfering with higher goals? Information is stuck in cog-like positions which teams revolve around, so how can we reprogram?
- jedc 15y agoBased on what I read from the thread, it's more the case that the Docs team is using it to get the pulse of what people want from Google Docs, than necessarily promoting anything. (Or even directly answering certain questions.) The top questions right now are on offline, security of Docs, outlook for mobile app, formatting problems, only some of which I'm personally concerned about. So I'm hopeful reddit feedback works its way into prioritization and product plans.
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoWow. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. If you bothered to actually look through some of the thread, it's actually a pretty nice read. A good chunk of upcoming features and design decisions were revealed, they took note of a number of feature requests, and some nice personal questions were answered as well, putting a nice human face on some of the invisible hands working on one of the world's largest online office suites.
- forgotusername 15y agoI'll admit to being in a slightly bad mood, but there are literally multitudes of blogs dedicated to news about Google and preaching its praises. I don't particularly consider this kind of endless, banal content centered around a handful of behemoth companies and trendy news topics interesting, especially with legitimately insightful articles buried in the new queue and receiving hardly a click (example: https://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/09/09climatewire-this-weeks-solar-flare-illuminates-the-grids-63979.html https://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/09/09climatewire-this-... ). If I tire day in, day out of reading the same rhetoric on Hacker News that I can find covered on the BBC (e.g. the ~5 articles they currently have dedicated to LulzSec on their technology home page, kids finding SQL injections really classifies as content for a boutique technical news site?), and can't respond with a little sarcasm, then perhaps HN isn't worth my time.
- jamesaguilar 15y agoYou will be deeply missed. It would be a shame if you spent the best years of your life making cynical comments on HN.
- jpeterson 15y agoSounds like someone had a bad interviewing experience with Google...