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Google developers are often so lost in the weeds of shipping fast and optimizing for rapid releases that they frustrate users with rapid UI changes, deprecation

Google developers are often so lost in the weeds of shipping fast and optimizing for rapid releases that they frustrate users with rapid UI changes, deprecation of major functionality, and not building the things that people often want in favor of just shipping fast. That's part of the reason why this post doesn't talk at all about user requirements, needs definitions, or user stories or anything like that. If this is what is "Software Engineering at Google" then maybe this shouldn't be seen as "best practice". I have found the Google experience, as a user, to be decaying steadily over the past 5-6 years.

mekane8 5y ago
I wholeheartedly agree that the experience of being a Google customer / user has degraded significantly. I'm not sure the omission of the topics you mentioned can be corelated exactly to that degradation, but it's an interesting idea. My assumption is that all the changes do go through proper UX and user testing, but the reason for them is questionable. I certainly haven't asked for hardly any of the changes. I also assume that the book focuses on the purely technical side intentionally.
ksec 5y ago
Yes. Despite the "Move fast and break things" or rapid releases cycle being attributed to Facebook, it was Google who did it first and amplified by Mark Zuckerberg which becomes de facto standard in Silicon Valley and Tech industry worldwide. The cult of move fast and break things meant doing it the old fashioned way were wrong. For nearly 20 years, Twenty Years. It is sin that is even worst than IE stagnation. ( Well I say that because IE is now irrelevant. If IE is still here my rage would have been even worst. )
- Silhouette 5y ago
  The cult of move fast and break things meant doing it the old fashioned way were wrong. The likes of Google and Facebook, as well as many startups inspired by them, have been an excellent demonstration of what commercial success looks like in a modern software business. In particular, they have (unfortunately, perhaps) demonstrated that quality really doesn't matter all that much in their target markets. In the early days, it turns out that users will forgive almost anything breaking if you have an attractive product. Later on, you can still break things often and almost completely ignore customer service as long as your lock-in effects are strong enough to keep most of your users anyway. Even if you do need higher quality standards in your market, the lean startup view is to build anything you can and ship your MVP as quickly as possible. If and when you find product-market fit then you can pay off your "debts", potentially including big changes like rewriting your whole application or firing groups of early customers, because by that time you have the money and resources and user base to do these things without it hurting your bottom line too much. Again, from a business point of view, this strategy makes a lot of sense if you're operating in markets where these rules apply. What I don't understand though is why so many people who are operating in markets where quality does matter seem to idolise big names like Facebook and Google and the people who work there. They have a high profile and they pay high salaries and their hiring processes are well known for being challenging, but I see little evidence that they effectively translate any of those apparent advantages into producing either better quality or more innovation than anyone else in the industry. If anything, given the enormous resources they have at their disposal, the opposite seems to be true.

mekane8 5y ago

I wholeheartedly agree that the experience of being a Google customer / user has degraded significantly. I'm not sure the omission of the topics you mentioned can be corelated exactly to that degradation, but it's an interesting idea. My assumption is that all the changes do go through proper UX and user testing, but the reason for them is questionable. I certainly haven't asked for hardly any of the changes. I also assume that the book focuses on the purely technical side intentionally.

ksec 5y ago

Yes. Despite the "Move fast and break things" or rapid releases cycle being attributed to Facebook, it was Google who did it first and amplified by Mark Zuckerberg which becomes de facto standard in Silicon Valley and Tech industry worldwide. The cult of move fast and break things meant doing it the old fashioned way were wrong. For nearly 20 years, Twenty Years. It is sin that is even worst than IE stagnation. ( Well I say that because IE is now irrelevant. If IE is still here my rage would have been even worst. )

Silhouette 5y ago
The cult of move fast and break things meant doing it the old fashioned way were wrong. The likes of Google and Facebook, as well as many startups inspired by them, have been an excellent demonstration of what commercial success looks like in a modern software business. In particular, they have (unfortunately, perhaps) demonstrated that quality really doesn't matter all that much in their target markets. In the early days, it turns out that users will forgive almost anything breaking if you have an attractive product. Later on, you can still break things often and almost completely ignore customer service as long as your lock-in effects are strong enough to keep most of your users anyway. Even if you do need higher quality standards in your market, the lean startup view is to build anything you can and ship your MVP as quickly as possible. If and when you find product-market fit then you can pay off your "debts", potentially including big changes like rewriting your whole application or firing groups of early customers, because by that time you have the money and resources and user base to do these things without it hurting your bottom line too much. Again, from a business point of view, this strategy makes a lot of sense if you're operating in markets where these rules apply. What I don't understand though is why so many people who are operating in markets where quality does matter seem to idolise big names like Facebook and Google and the people who work there. They have a high profile and they pay high salaries and their hiring processes are well known for being challenging, but I see little evidence that they effectively translate any of those apparent advantages into producing either better quality or more innovation than anyone else in the industry. If anything, given the enormous resources they have at their disposal, the opposite seems to be true.