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I don't think there needs to be a conspiracy. From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship

by Hasu 4y ago

I don't think there needs to be a conspiracy. From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. It's not at all hard for me to believe that a company that has built, shipped, and killed multiple chat apps has also built and killed multiple subscription and micropayments systems. Then, the employees who are pushing adtech can use those failures as evidence that adtech is the only way.

joshuamorton 4y ago
But it isn't the adtech people, it's the contributor people, who are willing to say it's an unviable consumer model.
- Hasu 4y ago
  The same incentive system explains that too, though. The incentive is to ship. Once you've shipped the system, improving it isn't rewarded, so if it isn't immediately viable, who cares, you got your promotion and you can say, "Well we tried".
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    That uhhh... Won't get you promo.
UncleMeat 4y ago
> From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. I work at Google. What you say here is not true. Yes, Google is indeed often very bad at long term product strategy and has rebooted its chat offerings an embarrassing number of times. But "it shipped, fuck it if it works" is not actually a sufficient justification for promotions.
- Hasu 4y ago
  Interesting, this is not what I've heard, but my sources are obviously secondhand. I'll update my priors in that direction, although it makes whatever Google is doing make even less sense to me.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    I think a big problem is that "Google bad" is a very engaging blog post and that, by virtue of being enormous, there are plenty of people who leave the company with bad feelings who are willing to write about it. This leads to a lot of highly visible writing about flaws within Google but largely from the perspective of people who were unhappy. There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization. I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.

by Hasu 4y ago

joshuamorton 4y ago

But it isn't the adtech people, it's the contributor people, who are willing to say it's an unviable consumer model.

Hasu 4y ago
The same incentive system explains that too, though. The incentive is to ship. Once you've shipped the system, improving it isn't rewarded, so if it isn't immediately viable, who cares, you got your promotion and you can say, "Well we tried".
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  That uhhh... Won't get you promo.

UncleMeat 4y ago

> From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. I work at Google. What you say here is not true. Yes, Google is indeed often very bad at long term product strategy and has rebooted its chat offerings an embarrassing number of times. But "it shipped, fuck it if it works" is not actually a sufficient justification for promotions.

Hasu 4y ago
Interesting, this is not what I've heard, but my sources are obviously secondhand. I'll update my priors in that direction, although it makes whatever Google is doing make even less sense to me.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I think a big problem is that "Google bad" is a very engaging blog post and that, by virtue of being enormous, there are plenty of people who leave the company with bad feelings who are willing to write about it. This leads to a lot of highly visible writing about flaws within Google but largely from the perspective of people who were unhappy. There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization. I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.