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No group of thousands of humans will be politics-free. But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do gre

No group of thousands of humans will be politics-free. But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on something for a year and then it gets canceled before launching, you won't get rewarded for that.

woooooo 4y ago
Google rewards engineering work in a vacuum, divorced from customer impact. This can lead to bad engineering incentives like valuing system complexity over the actual problem you're trying to solve.
- potatolicious 4y ago
  Agreed, having been on the inside at Google - they are not good at producing customer impact. The orgs are so large, so diffuse, and upper management so disconnected from on-the-ground execution that it's really all about gaming metrics. Even people who still want to produce customer impact have to play the game of stuffing their feature into a metrics-shaped-box so their projects don't get shut down. Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is a good example of why that shouldn't be the core principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that doesn't do anything useful for the business and is a net drag on the company. re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to succeed. I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of the user experience and does not account for hard-to-measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that conversation is coming from an executive.
  - sebhook 4y ago
    I listened to Kara Swisher interview some top Apple execs who used to work closely with Steve Jobs recently. Unfortunately I think we're now in an era where design and user experience is a lower priority when shipping new products. I'm not sure what the path to fixing this is, or if it even needs to be fixed, but I do think that Steve Jobs created a cult of innovation and a beacon to aspire towards creativity-wise, even if he wasn't the most pleasant person to interact with. This aspirational figure forced individuals and companies to be better.
    - mousetree 4y ago
      Are there hard facts to support this view? I've heard such an opinion so many times that I'm always skeptical on whether this is just the popular thing to say.
      - drc500free 4y ago
        I don't know about hard facts, but iOS has turned into a usability nightmare. Sedimentary layers of settings on layers of settings, unintuitive gestures that require perfect precision, and unstable behavior. Try tapping the play button and guess what's going to happen. Try getting the passcode screen to actually appear when you want to get into your phone and your face/finger aren't working. You can feel the competing teams shoehorning their thing into a platform that's already overstuffed, with no top-down editor removing the bloat.
    - hnaccount_rng 4y ago
      They just delivered on the biggest customer facing improvement of any single piece of technology in the last 5 years with their switch to Apple Silicon. In an environment where it really wasn’t absolutely necessary. Yes people were crumbling. But nobody was switching away when they started the transition. This was a _completely_ proactive move. Yes I’m also worried of them getting cocky and lazy. But so far they have done good
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  How would they go about associating engineering effort with customer impact when they have a bunch of sales people, product managers, project managers, UX designers, and so on, in between them? Heck, any large company where there is a division of labor will begin running into the problem of relating individual performance to overall customer impact, and if you begin measuring everyone by that singular metric, you will lose all of your good engineers very quickly (they will switch companies or move to non-engineering roles that have direct customer impact).
  - woooooo 4y ago
    Customer impact, business impact, some other subjective or objective measure. The point is that there's a thing you're trying to accomplish with a project and the engineering techniques should be a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.

woooooo 4y ago

Google rewards engineering work in a vacuum, divorced from customer impact. This can lead to bad engineering incentives like valuing system complexity over the actual problem you're trying to solve.

potatolicious 4y ago
Agreed, having been on the inside at Google - they are not good at producing customer impact. The orgs are so large, so diffuse, and upper management so disconnected from on-the-ground execution that it's really all about gaming metrics. Even people who still want to produce customer impact have to play the game of stuffing their feature into a metrics-shaped-box so their projects don't get shut down. Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is a good example of why that shouldn't be the core principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that doesn't do anything useful for the business and is a net drag on the company. re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to succeed. I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of the user experience and does not account for hard-to-measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that conversation is coming from an executive.
- sebhook 4y ago
  I listened to Kara Swisher interview some top Apple execs who used to work closely with Steve Jobs recently. Unfortunately I think we're now in an era where design and user experience is a lower priority when shipping new products. I'm not sure what the path to fixing this is, or if it even needs to be fixed, but I do think that Steve Jobs created a cult of innovation and a beacon to aspire towards creativity-wise, even if he wasn't the most pleasant person to interact with. This aspirational figure forced individuals and companies to be better.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    Are there hard facts to support this view? I've heard such an opinion so many times that I'm always skeptical on whether this is just the popular thing to say.
    - drc500free 4y ago
      I don't know about hard facts, but iOS has turned into a usability nightmare. Sedimentary layers of settings on layers of settings, unintuitive gestures that require perfect precision, and unstable behavior. Try tapping the play button and guess what's going to happen. Try getting the passcode screen to actually appear when you want to get into your phone and your face/finger aren't working. You can feel the competing teams shoehorning their thing into a platform that's already overstuffed, with no top-down editor removing the bloat.
  - hnaccount_rng 4y ago
    They just delivered on the biggest customer facing improvement of any single piece of technology in the last 5 years with their switch to Apple Silicon. In an environment where it really wasn’t absolutely necessary. Yes people were crumbling. But nobody was switching away when they started the transition. This was a _completely_ proactive move. Yes I’m also worried of them getting cocky and lazy. But so far they have done good
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
How would they go about associating engineering effort with customer impact when they have a bunch of sales people, product managers, project managers, UX designers, and so on, in between them? Heck, any large company where there is a division of labor will begin running into the problem of relating individual performance to overall customer impact, and if you begin measuring everyone by that singular metric, you will lose all of your good engineers very quickly (they will switch companies or move to non-engineering roles that have direct customer impact).
- woooooo 4y ago
  Customer impact, business impact, some other subjective or objective measure. The point is that there's a thing you're trying to accomplish with a project and the engineering techniques should be a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.