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> even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It depends on your perspective. This also means that you can spin for a year or more just getti
by neilk 15y ago
> even simple things become an interesting technical challenge.
It depends on your perspective. This also means that you can spin for a year or more just getting one feature out the door.
I think I had about 10 meetings over six months on whether addresses for Google Checkout would contain two or three address lines, and whether we needed a separate field for France's CEDEX postal codes. Some of this was justified as it involved complicated negotiations with external vendors too, and I had to negotiate with the guy who was hired to unify Google's internationalization libraries for Java.
But seriously, I'm not sure this was the best thing I could have been doing with my life.
If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day.
- nostrademons 15y agoYeah, some of the bikeshedding that goes on around UI gets ridiculous. I remember running into a quote board from very early (~2000) in Google's history. Marissa (who ended up in charge of the search UI anyways) said, "Maybe we should have a mailing list where anyone who's interested in UI can contribute" and then Amit (who came up with "Don't be evil", alongside Paul Buchheit) said "Bad idea. That's every engineer in the company." On the plus side, you learn from many, many different perspectives this way. It's like Peter Norvig's advice in "Teach yourself to be a programmer in 10 years": 1.) Get involved in a language standardization effort. 2.) Have the good sense to get yourself off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible. Great way to learn, perhaps not such a great way to get things done.
- neilk 15y agoThis wasn't UI as much as it was data model. Also, the guy they had doing the official i18n libraries had a default position of We Only Do The Right Thing. Admirable, but not fun to work with. So even if I proved to him that our downstream vendors, and indeed almost all French companies, handled these special French zip codes with a simple hack... that wasn't good enough for him.
- gregholmberg 15y ago> If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day. Your story could be read in a positive way by an MBA class: "After much careful company-wide introspection, the smart guy's instinctive solutions were allowed to prevail." Me? I would have given up on the process long before a year had passed.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]