4 ms·
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 disconn
by 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 agoI 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 agoAre 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 agoI 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 agoThey 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