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Having talked about similar questions with friends who work/worked at Google, you need to first ask "How do people get promoted at Google?" The answer to that

Having talked about similar questions with friends who work/worked at Google, you need to first ask "How do people get promoted at Google?" The answer to that (by launching new things that get abandoned soon after rather than improving/fixing existing things) answers your question and many others like it.

amelius 5y ago
And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?
- davidw 5y ago
  As per my comment below, it's not just stagnation - I was ok with where they were 5 years ago - it's that they've made an active effort to degrade the experience. Instead of clicking once in Gmail to start a video call, there is now some janky system where it starts a 'meet' and sends my mom an email asking her to join it. An email! When both of us are sitting there with Gmail open.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Which seems to be a reasonable human decision -- do you want to be the person that blocked your colleague from getting a promotion?
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  That would require you to pretend that Google listens to devs more than the MBAs they work for. Nothing says "market expertise" like having a sheet of paper that proves you once completed a class project to write a business plan.
- FinanceAnon 5y ago
  If many managers are onboard with an idea, one engineer saying "no" doesn't have much weight. Also, if you keep saying "no" to things, you might be perceived as "negative" and it might come up in performance reviews. And it's often difficult to predict if an idea will work or not - a lot of it comes down to execution and future politics. So, as an engineer, it's probably better to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, and try to get a promotion from it. It's stupid, but it's how it works. You will not progress within a company by saying "no", even if you are right and it stops a bad project. (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation)
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation) I wouldn't work for Google, but have worked at a couple of very large software companies and this echoes my experiences with them. It's one of the reasons that I prefer not working for large software companies -- people there tend to be more concerned with their own career than the products they work on.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  > "And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?" In any engineering organization, one can find people saying "wait a second, that's not a good idea" to pretty much anything.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    And in many of them, it would be a good idea for someone to listen.
habosa 5y ago
Everyone at Google says this. It’s not true. Of course it contributes to the problem, but trust me a broken messaging strategy doesn’t naturally arise from Software Engineers trying to get incremental promotions. It comes from two parts of google that are totally broken and don’t know it: 1) Product Management 2) Legal The PMs are running from meeting to meeting trying to please execs and not doing anything that looks like sophisticated product development. Each team has their own broken process and crappy dashboards. I can’t even describe how irrational and broken the process for making product decisions is. Then there are the lawyers. If you even think about doing something interesting or original they will say No and that’s the end of that. They’re shockingly risk averse. Even if every single competitor is doing a thing, you almost definitely can’t do that thing at Google. My team was BARELY allowed to know how many users we had! And we certainly couldn’t know anything about them. Because Legal.
- rlewkov 5y ago
  this >> " trying to please execs"
- tylerrobinson 5y ago
  This is interesting. As a non-Google PM, whenever I face legal or compliance-related pushback on what I think are fair uses of data and reasonable risks, I think to myself, There is no way I’d be facing this constraint at <big company>! But perhaps that’s been a bad assumption.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    If the big company has a cash cow, legal does everything to protect the cow. If the big company is hurting, legal works to find ways to justify everything and anything.
  - e9 5y ago
    Bad assumption. I worked for Snap and anything that goes out has to be reviewed and signed off by legal. Don’t even get me started on looking at data. For some data requests, Directors had to be involved and I had to justify to them to give me access for couple hours to some piece of data. I also worked for FB and it’s not as strict as Snap but similar.
UncleMeat 5y ago
This is a meme. Yes, you need to change something about the state of the world but that change absolutely does not need to be launching a product. I work in the Core organization, which builds tooling for the rest of the company. My org within that has among the highest promotion rates (even to high levels) in the company and the primary thing we focus on is the sort of grungy "keep everything functioning" work that everybody says is anathema to promotions. It is no secret that Google's product strategy is a mess. But I'm not convinced this is caused by the promo process. For communications strategy I think it is instead the following: 1. Messy code stacks make surviving tool deprecation a problem. 2. Google seems to be bad at staffing for proactive protection against maintenance work. If a product is working, staffing dwindles to match the maintenance load. But if suddenly a huge mandate comes along like a stack switch, it is not easy to get the heads you need to handle that spike in maintenance. Instead, the product gets triaged or dies. 3. It is really hard to push past 1B users of anything, and growing populations outside of the US and Europe are not desktop focuses, encouraging a "mobile first" solution that leaves desktop integration in the dust.
- contravert 5y ago
  How many PMs does Core have compared to other PAs? The problem isn’t really with SWEs but with the entire incentive structure of PMs and the product management chain. They in turn are able to get more SWE headcount for these unfruitful ventures and end up failing upwards.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Core seems to have fewer PMs but we have similar problems with triaged products due to lack of heads. The PMs we do have also struggle with getting heads just as much as the SWEs do. At the very least, I think it is clear that Google’s product failings are not just a result of the promo system.
- tdeck 5y ago
  I'd suggest a 4th reason: Google has so much money and so many high-traffic properties that it can keep a poorly designed or unpolished product going for years, more than long enough for the original people who designed and built it to move on/up inside the company. Google will just push the product on the front page of some existing property to bump traffic, or get creators/developers to use it in hopes of boosting their existing search rankings, or give away the product for free. Every company would try to do these things but Google has a big advantage. This allows Google to be lazy about product-market fit and avoid asking the hard questions like "is this thing really better than the alternative" and "what's the ROI for people who adopt this". I worked on what I'd consider a failed product, and there was no explicit acknowledgement of that fact ever, we just waited 3 years and quietly turned it off. A more drawn-out version of the same thing happened with Google Plus. There was never anything like a "product postmortem".

amelius 5y ago

And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?

davidw 5y ago
As per my comment below, it's not just stagnation - I was ok with where they were 5 years ago - it's that they've made an active effort to degrade the experience. Instead of clicking once in Gmail to start a video call, there is now some janky system where it starts a 'meet' and sends my mom an email asking her to join it. An email! When both of us are sitting there with Gmail open.
infogulch 5y ago
Which seems to be a reasonable human decision -- do you want to be the person that blocked your colleague from getting a promotion?
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
That would require you to pretend that Google listens to devs more than the MBAs they work for. Nothing says "market expertise" like having a sheet of paper that proves you once completed a class project to write a business plan.
FinanceAnon 5y ago
If many managers are onboard with an idea, one engineer saying "no" doesn't have much weight. Also, if you keep saying "no" to things, you might be perceived as "negative" and it might come up in performance reviews. And it's often difficult to predict if an idea will work or not - a lot of it comes down to execution and future politics. So, as an engineer, it's probably better to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, and try to get a promotion from it. It's stupid, but it's how it works. You will not progress within a company by saying "no", even if you are right and it stops a bad project. (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation)
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation) I wouldn't work for Google, but have worked at a couple of very large software companies and this echoes my experiences with them. It's one of the reasons that I prefer not working for large software companies -- people there tend to be more concerned with their own career than the products they work on.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?" In any engineering organization, one can find people saying "wait a second, that's not a good idea" to pretty much anything.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  And in many of them, it would be a good idea for someone to listen.

habosa 5y ago

Everyone at Google says this. It’s not true. Of course it contributes to the problem, but trust me a broken messaging strategy doesn’t naturally arise from Software Engineers trying to get incremental promotions. It comes from two parts of google that are totally broken and don’t know it: 1) Product Management 2) Legal The PMs are running from meeting to meeting trying to please execs and not doing anything that looks like sophisticated product development. Each team has their own broken process and crappy dashboards. I can’t even describe how irrational and broken the process for making product decisions is. Then there are the lawyers. If you even think about doing something interesting or original they will say No and that’s the end of that. They’re shockingly risk averse. Even if every single competitor is doing a thing, you almost definitely can’t do that thing at Google. My team was BARELY allowed to know how many users we had! And we certainly couldn’t know anything about them. Because Legal.

rlewkov 5y ago
this >> " trying to please execs"
tylerrobinson 5y ago
This is interesting. As a non-Google PM, whenever I face legal or compliance-related pushback on what I think are fair uses of data and reasonable risks, I think to myself, There is no way I’d be facing this constraint at <big company>! But perhaps that’s been a bad assumption.
- bombcar 5y ago
  If the big company has a cash cow, legal does everything to protect the cow. If the big company is hurting, legal works to find ways to justify everything and anything.
- e9 5y ago
  Bad assumption. I worked for Snap and anything that goes out has to be reviewed and signed off by legal. Don’t even get me started on looking at data. For some data requests, Directors had to be involved and I had to justify to them to give me access for couple hours to some piece of data. I also worked for FB and it’s not as strict as Snap but similar.

UncleMeat 5y ago

This is a meme. Yes, you need to change something about the state of the world but that change absolutely does not need to be launching a product. I work in the Core organization, which builds tooling for the rest of the company. My org within that has among the highest promotion rates (even to high levels) in the company and the primary thing we focus on is the sort of grungy "keep everything functioning" work that everybody says is anathema to promotions. It is no secret that Google's product strategy is a mess. But I'm not convinced this is caused by the promo process. For communications strategy I think it is instead the following: 1. Messy code stacks make surviving tool deprecation a problem. 2. Google seems to be bad at staffing for proactive protection against maintenance work. If a product is working, staffing dwindles to match the maintenance load. But if suddenly a huge mandate comes along like a stack switch, it is not easy to get the heads you need to handle that spike in maintenance. Instead, the product gets triaged or dies. 3. It is really hard to push past 1B users of anything, and growing populations outside of the US and Europe are not desktop focuses, encouraging a "mobile first" solution that leaves desktop integration in the dust.

contravert 5y ago
How many PMs does Core have compared to other PAs? The problem isn’t really with SWEs but with the entire incentive structure of PMs and the product management chain. They in turn are able to get more SWE headcount for these unfruitful ventures and end up failing upwards.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Core seems to have fewer PMs but we have similar problems with triaged products due to lack of heads. The PMs we do have also struggle with getting heads just as much as the SWEs do. At the very least, I think it is clear that Google’s product failings are not just a result of the promo system.
tdeck 5y ago
I'd suggest a 4th reason: Google has so much money and so many high-traffic properties that it can keep a poorly designed or unpolished product going for years, more than long enough for the original people who designed and built it to move on/up inside the company. Google will just push the product on the front page of some existing property to bump traffic, or get creators/developers to use it in hopes of boosting their existing search rankings, or give away the product for free. Every company would try to do these things but Google has a big advantage. This allows Google to be lazy about product-market fit and avoid asking the hard questions like "is this thing really better than the alternative" and "what's the ROI for people who adopt this". I worked on what I'd consider a failed product, and there was no explicit acknowledgement of that fact ever, we just waited 3 years and quietly turned it off. A more drawn-out version of the same thing happened with Google Plus. There was never anything like a "product postmortem".