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I find it interesting that people blame the engineers when they're the bottom of the hierarchy. It's their bosses that prioritize their work, decide whether the

I find it interesting that people blame the engineers when they're the bottom of the hierarchy. It's their bosses that prioritize their work, decide whether their work is good enough, and decide whether to fix something that's broken. It's not the individual engineers who decide whether the company will have a culture of helping users and/or app developers, or treating them like resources to exploit. It's not the individual engineers who choose to have no humans involved in the app review process. Some engineers are incompetent, yes, but it's the bosses who keep the incompetent folks working at the company instead of finding better people.

notreallyserio 5y ago
Engineers at Google can get a job anywhere. They choose to work for Google despite building and maintaining a substandard product. Google engineers have a lot of leverage. I refuse to pretend that they can't influence product quality.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  Google and other trendy tech companies have a concept called Human Ops. Human ops is designed to improve and keep safe the mental health of its engineers. They do this by using machines to do all the dirty stuff as possible. Classic example is evil image flagging problems causing genuine psychological trauma, but it's extended now to everything engineers hate like drudge work, customer support etc. You'd need to convince the engineers that Human Ops is wrong first. Engineers like the shield and the corporation likes the cost cut.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    They're choosing to use machines to maintain their mental health by creating a product that impacts the mental health of their customers who get to deal with their revenue streams being cut off entirely, arbitrarily, often with no know reason or recourse. This argument makes the engineers look monstrous, not just mildly shitty.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Google engineers potentially can get a job anywhere but may not want to for multiple reasons: 1) The pay, plain and simple. 2) Google-scale problems are a very specific kind of problem that may not apply to other companies. I'm sure most of the engineers would be competent at dealing with smaller companies' problems, but maybe they don't want to? The interviewing process already selects for low-level LeetCode-style problems and I guess the ones who make it through must enjoy it. You're unlikely to have a need for those kinds of problems in smaller businesses where most of the work is CRUD and connecting APIs together. 3) At such a large company you could lay back, chill and most likely still fly under the radar while enjoying the money. This might be more difficult in smaller companies who are more demanding.
onion2k 5y ago
Google promotes engineers into leadership though. If you look through the board of Google, especially people who have titles like "Head of Customer Success"[1], you usually see they came up from engineering jobs. Google is not a company full of MBAs and pointy-haired bosses. These are decisions made by engineers (or at least former engineers I guess). Also, it's decidedly unreasonable to assume the leadership at Google are clueless idiots ordering helpless engineers around. There are many layers of management and engineering, and all of them have to come together to get stuff done. At any point people at every level of the org could influence the direction of things like customer success around simple things like an error page. We're not talking about the long term strategy of the whole business that's decided at a board level here. [1] Slightly unfair to link to someone, but here's an example: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markpidgeon https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markpidgeon

notreallyserio 5y ago

Engineers at Google can get a job anywhere. They choose to work for Google despite building and maintaining a substandard product. Google engineers have a lot of leverage. I refuse to pretend that they can't influence product quality.

thinkingemote 5y ago
Google and other trendy tech companies have a concept called Human Ops. Human ops is designed to improve and keep safe the mental health of its engineers. They do this by using machines to do all the dirty stuff as possible. Classic example is evil image flagging problems causing genuine psychological trauma, but it's extended now to everything engineers hate like drudge work, customer support etc. You'd need to convince the engineers that Human Ops is wrong first. Engineers like the shield and the corporation likes the cost cut.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  They're choosing to use machines to maintain their mental health by creating a product that impacts the mental health of their customers who get to deal with their revenue streams being cut off entirely, arbitrarily, often with no know reason or recourse. This argument makes the engineers look monstrous, not just mildly shitty.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Google engineers potentially can get a job anywhere but may not want to for multiple reasons: 1) The pay, plain and simple. 2) Google-scale problems are a very specific kind of problem that may not apply to other companies. I'm sure most of the engineers would be competent at dealing with smaller companies' problems, but maybe they don't want to? The interviewing process already selects for low-level LeetCode-style problems and I guess the ones who make it through must enjoy it. You're unlikely to have a need for those kinds of problems in smaller businesses where most of the work is CRUD and connecting APIs together. 3) At such a large company you could lay back, chill and most likely still fly under the radar while enjoying the money. This might be more difficult in smaller companies who are more demanding.

onion2k 5y ago

Google promotes engineers into leadership though. If you look through the board of Google, especially people who have titles like "Head of Customer Success"[1], you usually see they came up from engineering jobs. Google is not a company full of MBAs and pointy-haired bosses. These are decisions made by engineers (or at least former engineers I guess). Also, it's decidedly unreasonable to assume the leadership at Google are clueless idiots ordering helpless engineers around. There are many layers of management and engineering, and all of them have to come together to get stuff done. At any point people at every level of the org could influence the direction of things like customer success around simple things like an error page. We're not talking about the long term strategy of the whole business that's decided at a board level here. [1] Slightly unfair to link to someone, but here's an example: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markpidgeon https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markpidgeon