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Google engineering team is supreme but product team is subpar.

by peppertree 4y ago

melony 4y ago
I thought they are famous for their "APM program"? Is it simply overrated?
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  “Signs point to yes” But for real… it’s prestigious because it’s hard to get into, not because Google is great at product development. In practice Google’s product muscle has proven to be pretty weak
- s3r3nity 4y ago
  They've been riding off that "fame" for like 20 years, but it's a completely different situation today vs. when the program was at its peak.
zoltar 4y ago
The house that Marissa built.
smaug7 4y ago
While I don't necessarily disagree, my understanding is that engineering tends to drive more of the product decisions. I question how much power the product team actually has.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  That has ceased to be true in vast tracts of the company. Cloud, for example, is chasing feature parity with its competitors and engineers are told to implement things because AWS or Azure have them, not because they organically grew out of the architecture of the existing system. In fact, quite a few features annealed poorly onto the existing architecture (which users of Google Cloud may have memory of).
  - ayberk 4y ago
    Huh, citation? :) I'm not saying you're wrong, but as a GCP engineer I have never seen us (well, my org) implementing something because of "AWS or Azure has it".
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Memory's a little fuzzy, but I'd put IAM and workspaces in that category. IAM, in particular, was a huge undertaking in jamming fine-grained access rights onto existing resources where none such existed before, and it was pretty much marching orders from above: "Potential clients can't migrate off AWS because AWS has this and we don't." And it caused more than its fair share of "Why is this API suddenly throwing errors" tickets from existing users who were accustom to the pre-IAM permissions model. ETA: Re-reading my initial statement, it was over-broad. There is room in Cloud for bottom-up engineering and product design. However, especially relative to the rest of the company (where Google is an industry leader, not entering a market already heavily dominated by an elephant), Cloud spends a lot of its time chasing "table-stakes" features to enable new customers to be on-boarded who can't subscribe to Cloud because they can't migrate their existing flow off AWS without X Y or Z analogous feature available in GCP.
    - benlivengood 4y ago
      Online disk resizing was the one I tracked as it slowly trickled through alpha/beta. To be fair, pretty much every virtualization product had online resizing before GCE, so it could have been a matter of prioritization. Whatever the heck Vertex AI is compared against the Sagemaker+Ground Truth pile that AWS has. By no means is any of it groundbreaking from either company, just piling open source software and buckets behind UIs, but it seems GCP is doing catch-up there.
    - ak217 4y ago
      I have been interviewed multiple times by GCP product managers seeking to understand how my team used specific AWS services that Google lacked at the time to learn how to implement Google's competing service. I would be more concerned if your org wasn't doing this. AWS does it all the time too. The parent post is wrong to paint this as a negative. And GCP has some unquestionably industry leading products too (BigQuery, GKE, Spanner, AI/ML services)
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
But are engineering teams not focused on getting the best product out to customers supreme engineering teams? Hardly so imo.

Google engineering team is supreme but product team is subpar.

melony 4y ago

I thought they are famous for their "APM program"? Is it simply overrated?

adam_arthur 4y ago
“Signs point to yes” But for real… it’s prestigious because it’s hard to get into, not because Google is great at product development. In practice Google’s product muscle has proven to be pretty weak
s3r3nity 4y ago
They've been riding off that "fame" for like 20 years, but it's a completely different situation today vs. when the program was at its peak.

zoltar 4y ago

The house that Marissa built.

smaug7 4y ago

While I don't necessarily disagree, my understanding is that engineering tends to drive more of the product decisions. I question how much power the product team actually has.

shadowgovt 4y ago
That has ceased to be true in vast tracts of the company. Cloud, for example, is chasing feature parity with its competitors and engineers are told to implement things because AWS or Azure have them, not because they organically grew out of the architecture of the existing system. In fact, quite a few features annealed poorly onto the existing architecture (which users of Google Cloud may have memory of).
- ayberk 4y ago
  Huh, citation? :) I'm not saying you're wrong, but as a GCP engineer I have never seen us (well, my org) implementing something because of "AWS or Azure has it".
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Memory's a little fuzzy, but I'd put IAM and workspaces in that category. IAM, in particular, was a huge undertaking in jamming fine-grained access rights onto existing resources where none such existed before, and it was pretty much marching orders from above: "Potential clients can't migrate off AWS because AWS has this and we don't." And it caused more than its fair share of "Why is this API suddenly throwing errors" tickets from existing users who were accustom to the pre-IAM permissions model. ETA: Re-reading my initial statement, it was over-broad. There is room in Cloud for bottom-up engineering and product design. However, especially relative to the rest of the company (where Google is an industry leader, not entering a market already heavily dominated by an elephant), Cloud spends a lot of its time chasing "table-stakes" features to enable new customers to be on-boarded who can't subscribe to Cloud because they can't migrate their existing flow off AWS without X Y or Z analogous feature available in GCP.
  - benlivengood 4y ago
    Online disk resizing was the one I tracked as it slowly trickled through alpha/beta. To be fair, pretty much every virtualization product had online resizing before GCE, so it could have been a matter of prioritization. Whatever the heck Vertex AI is compared against the Sagemaker+Ground Truth pile that AWS has. By no means is any of it groundbreaking from either company, just piling open source software and buckets behind UIs, but it seems GCP is doing catch-up there.
  - ak217 4y ago
    I have been interviewed multiple times by GCP product managers seeking to understand how my team used specific AWS services that Google lacked at the time to learn how to implement Google's competing service. I would be more concerned if your org wasn't doing this. AWS does it all the time too. The parent post is wrong to paint this as a negative. And GCP has some unquestionably industry leading products too (BigQuery, GKE, Spanner, AI/ML services)

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

But are engineering teams not focused on getting the best product out to customers supreme engineering teams? Hardly so imo.