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More than anything, it’s surprising how well this company has maintained an illusion of competence and prestige. The general population really believes in the e

More than anything, it’s surprising how well this company has maintained an illusion of competence and prestige. The general population really believes in the eliteness of their engineers. But when the rubber hits the road, the products leave much to be desired Edit: A hypothesis I have: Part of the success of search is in the belief of the elite ness of their engineers. “They are the smartest so why ever try another search product”. The aura of the company is part of the brand/product. It’s brilliant marketing

0xcafefood 4y ago
Google does seem to have many solid engineers, as far as I can tell. (Though the bar must definitely be lower than back when it was a smaller company.) Their problems lie in management: executives, line managers, product, etc.
bushbaba 4y ago
Google builds well polished products that work well. The issue is that their product strategy is bad due to the company’s culture. For example stadia as a technology and product usage wise was great. However the product placement, market growth strategy, and pricing strategy was crap.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > Google builds well polished products that work well. The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works. But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did". Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling? I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.
  - ablatt89 4y ago
    A lot of these issues are quality issues but Google outsources QA and testing. Apple hires people from retail to do manual QA and testing. Automation is often not good enough since coverage is slow and triaging of results is long and tedious and very few engineers want to triage test results all day.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Are they? I mean, it's not like they have a million features and some of them haven't been tested thoroughly. Search, Comments and Shorts are central, and they suck. It's like when apple had that reception issue in their iphones, only that this is like ... "oh and you also can't read the display properly, and the speakers cut out every 30 seconds". I can't imagine them being totally ignorant and believing that their product is working great.
      - ablatt89 4y ago
        There's definitely testing but it's not at the level that it should be. That is, there's presubmit and postsubmit testing, but who is triaging the results? In addition, how often do we see people design tests to pass instead of design tests to fail and catch issues? I can't speak for Youtube, but some regression can be perhaps attributed to what management claims is lower productivity for new grads and mid levels, who are often assigned things like writing tests and automation (everyone in every company just wants to work on features). I think manual QA is highly underrated in general in the industry and catches so many bugs that automation just can't, and my guess is the manual QA efforts has decreased, and the discrepancy in output from seniors and juniors/mid-levels might be causing some quality issues (just my guess).
        56friends 4y ago
        What do you mean by who is triaging the results? Pre-submit failure will block your PR from landing, post-submit (e.g. integration test suite) failure will result in an incident and a likely deploy pause/rollback.
- influx 4y ago
  YouTube Kids is awful It locks up regularly, such that I have to kill the app and restart it. They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video. Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?
  - taeric 4y ago
    This seems endemic to all parental things in tech. I swear most of them seem to be done with no user acceptance testing at all. Worse, I think most of them are built by people that don't use them. The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?
    - irrational 4y ago
      I do wonder if they are being built by developers who have never had kids of their own.
      - taeric 4y ago
        Had this complaint with kindle's time limits. They have it by "weekend" and "weeknight." But... as a parent, I want "school night" versus "non-school night." And those aren't the same thing at all.
    - jchw 4y ago
      After that whole debacle with YouTube and the COPPA, I sort-of wonder if YouTube Kids has to do with anything anyone actually wants, or if it's pretty much just there to serve some kind of purpose for their optics.
      - taeric 4y ago
        My take is that it is what they want. That is, they want parents to put in a fair bit of effort to get their kids engaged. This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Google builds well polished products that work well. lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ. In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses. Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Most google products are crap. Google docs in particular can't handle documents the size of things I'd routinely edit on an 8088. Some are outstanding. Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    Google Docs is great for what it is, the problem is Google's insistence on building everything as a web app regardless of that decision's technical merit. Until the point where the web app architecture wets itself and gives up Docs has a reasonably good UI and the collaborative editing was/still is best in class. That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Google builds well polished products that work well No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.
altaltson 4y ago
Google has solid to excellent engineering depending on where you are. The problem is and always has been that the leadership hires mid HR and business talent. It’s hard to watch smart people with 40 years of experience having to jump to the tune of some MBA bro with a massive ego whose only qualification was going to the right school and a massive ego. Google’s problem was never a lack of ability to build and run impressive engineering artifacts. It was always that the business and product side of things was run very poorly.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  This just makes Google average. Execution isn't a problem at most tech companies, the problem is knowing what to build and stopping engineering teams from doing "new shiny"/resume-oriented-development. I've been working professionally for 25+ years depending on when "professionally" starts and almost _never_ has been "the team can't build it" even in the context of companies that are basically mountains of mediocrity. The problem has _always_ been that the team didn't know what to build, and very occasionally, the best way to build it for the long term.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    Execution absolutely is a problem. Being able to build something is 10% of the battle. Being able to build it well and reliably is the other 90%. A culture around building the proper tests, monitoring, and tooling to handle launches safely and plan rollouts goes a long way and most companies don't have any of that. The difference is stark even at large companies. Oncall shifts for friends at places like Amazon and Meta are nightmares of constant pages and stress. Oncall shifts for my friends at Google have tended to be far lower key, with dramatically fewer pages and more straightforward resolutions when issues appear.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      Most mature companies have _all_ of that. From the position of a large vendor, Google ships software with woeful quality practices on a regular basis. That Amazon and Meta are worse than google, well, I will grant that. Meta's internal culture is crazy.
adam_arthur 4y ago
The situation speaks moreso to Google's total lack of competent product muscle. Which is a bit ironic, given that a Google PM role is purportedly quite coveted. Apple and Microsoft appear far more intentional and successful with the products they choose to launch. Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind
- pjmlp 4y ago
  I used to think so regarding Microsoft, but since the WinRT reboot, deprecation of the tooling and rebooting again back to Win32/COM, while at the same time rebooting Xamarin.Forms into MAUI, and parallel to those two efforts, trying to push Blazor everywhere there is some form of Web Widget, I am no longer sure.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    That's not even scratching the surface. They're spread far and wide and the ice is cracking. WPF -> UWP -> WinUI 2 -> WinUI 3 is an even bigger mess that's creating a system of frameworks that completely overlaps in functionality with MAUI, except it's Windows only - but not really. The entire pipeline there doesn't even make any sort of coherent sense. WPF was clean, had extensive interest and support, and could have been trivially extended with more refined and "modern" styling/functionality. That's fundamentally all that UWP/WinUI are anyhow. But with each branching off, they splintered and annoyed developers in the XAML domain, to say nothing of the fact that I'm just pretending MAUI/Xamarin doesn't exist here. I feel that the constant desire to push onto new things is, somewhat ironically, really holding back major progress. Because you put out some new awesome and really exciting tech, but things take time to mature. C# is absolutely awesome now, but was a mediocre java clone when it first emerged. It took decades of incremental and focused progress to get there.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      What has pissed me most was the way they managed the C++/CX to C++/WinRT transition, because not only does WinDev expect .NET devs to keep their C++ skills up to date for specific APIs, now they want us to author components like in the ATL glory days. Then we finally have Native AOT, but still fails short from .NET Native capabilities.
pjmlp 4y ago
My time playing with Android NDK showed me that they surely weren't there, I ended up wishing to have my Symbian C++ dev experience back, and many know how not straightforward it used to be like.
bilsbie 4y ago
True but also the search used to be amazing in the early 2000s.
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Right but that was a different time with an almost different company
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
theGnuMe 4y ago
This is known as "The Lake Wobegon Effect".
hulitu 4y ago
Among the general public, maybe. From my point of view Google products are at the lower end of quality and usability. The user interface of Google products is designed by people who never saw a GUI in their life. No titlebar, highjacking right click, big logos without functions, no menus, no scrollbars, error messages obstructing GUI elements without any button to close, status mesages obstricting text input fields. "You are in power saving mode. This function might be affectd." Is it or it is not affected ? What is the result ? On a 1.8 GHz proceesor with 4 GB of RAM this is left as an exercise for the reader.
xwolfi 4y ago
No, I tried them all, I always come back to Google. It guesses what I want and if not drives me towards guessing what it wants. It's the best software I use daily, it doesnt feel like an illusion. I hate that I love Google.
dymk 4y ago
Contender for most insecure hacker news comment of the year right here
- greatpostman 4y ago
  I’ve worked at two FAANGS.
  - dymk 4y ago
    So have I

0xcafefood 4y ago

Google does seem to have many solid engineers, as far as I can tell. (Though the bar must definitely be lower than back when it was a smaller company.) Their problems lie in management: executives, line managers, product, etc.

bushbaba 4y ago

Google builds well polished products that work well. The issue is that their product strategy is bad due to the company’s culture. For example stadia as a technology and product usage wise was great. However the product placement, market growth strategy, and pricing strategy was crap.

luckylion 4y ago
> Google builds well polished products that work well. The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works. But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did". Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling? I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.
- ablatt89 4y ago
  A lot of these issues are quality issues but Google outsources QA and testing. Apple hires people from retail to do manual QA and testing. Automation is often not good enough since coverage is slow and triaging of results is long and tedious and very few engineers want to triage test results all day.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Are they? I mean, it's not like they have a million features and some of them haven't been tested thoroughly. Search, Comments and Shorts are central, and they suck. It's like when apple had that reception issue in their iphones, only that this is like ... "oh and you also can't read the display properly, and the speakers cut out every 30 seconds". I can't imagine them being totally ignorant and believing that their product is working great.
    - ablatt89 4y ago
      There's definitely testing but it's not at the level that it should be. That is, there's presubmit and postsubmit testing, but who is triaging the results? In addition, how often do we see people design tests to pass instead of design tests to fail and catch issues? I can't speak for Youtube, but some regression can be perhaps attributed to what management claims is lower productivity for new grads and mid levels, who are often assigned things like writing tests and automation (everyone in every company just wants to work on features). I think manual QA is highly underrated in general in the industry and catches so many bugs that automation just can't, and my guess is the manual QA efforts has decreased, and the discrepancy in output from seniors and juniors/mid-levels might be causing some quality issues (just my guess).
      - 56friends 4y ago
        What do you mean by who is triaging the results? Pre-submit failure will block your PR from landing, post-submit (e.g. integration test suite) failure will result in an incident and a likely deploy pause/rollback.
influx 4y ago
YouTube Kids is awful It locks up regularly, such that I have to kill the app and restart it. They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video. Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?
- taeric 4y ago
  This seems endemic to all parental things in tech. I swear most of them seem to be done with no user acceptance testing at all. Worse, I think most of them are built by people that don't use them. The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?
  - irrational 4y ago
    I do wonder if they are being built by developers who have never had kids of their own.
    - taeric 4y ago
      Had this complaint with kindle's time limits. They have it by "weekend" and "weeknight." But... as a parent, I want "school night" versus "non-school night." And those aren't the same thing at all.
  - jchw 4y ago
    After that whole debacle with YouTube and the COPPA, I sort-of wonder if YouTube Kids has to do with anything anyone actually wants, or if it's pretty much just there to serve some kind of purpose for their optics.
    - taeric 4y ago
      My take is that it is what they want. That is, they want parents to put in a fair bit of effort to get their kids engaged. This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Google builds well polished products that work well. lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ. In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses. Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.
foobiekr 4y ago
Most google products are crap. Google docs in particular can't handle documents the size of things I'd routinely edit on an 8088. Some are outstanding. Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Google Docs is great for what it is, the problem is Google's insistence on building everything as a web app regardless of that decision's technical merit. Until the point where the web app architecture wets itself and gives up Docs has a reasonably good UI and the collaborative editing was/still is best in class. That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.
hulitu 4y ago
> Google builds well polished products that work well No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.

altaltson 4y ago

Google has solid to excellent engineering depending on where you are. The problem is and always has been that the leadership hires mid HR and business talent. It’s hard to watch smart people with 40 years of experience having to jump to the tune of some MBA bro with a massive ego whose only qualification was going to the right school and a massive ego. Google’s problem was never a lack of ability to build and run impressive engineering artifacts. It was always that the business and product side of things was run very poorly.

foobiekr 4y ago
This just makes Google average. Execution isn't a problem at most tech companies, the problem is knowing what to build and stopping engineering teams from doing "new shiny"/resume-oriented-development. I've been working professionally for 25+ years depending on when "professionally" starts and almost _never_ has been "the team can't build it" even in the context of companies that are basically mountains of mediocrity. The problem has _always_ been that the team didn't know what to build, and very occasionally, the best way to build it for the long term.
- Arainach 4y ago
  Execution absolutely is a problem. Being able to build something is 10% of the battle. Being able to build it well and reliably is the other 90%. A culture around building the proper tests, monitoring, and tooling to handle launches safely and plan rollouts goes a long way and most companies don't have any of that. The difference is stark even at large companies. Oncall shifts for friends at places like Amazon and Meta are nightmares of constant pages and stress. Oncall shifts for my friends at Google have tended to be far lower key, with dramatically fewer pages and more straightforward resolutions when issues appear.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    Most mature companies have _all_ of that. From the position of a large vendor, Google ships software with woeful quality practices on a regular basis. That Amazon and Meta are worse than google, well, I will grant that. Meta's internal culture is crazy.

adam_arthur 4y ago

The situation speaks moreso to Google's total lack of competent product muscle. Which is a bit ironic, given that a Google PM role is purportedly quite coveted. Apple and Microsoft appear far more intentional and successful with the products they choose to launch. Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind

pjmlp 4y ago
I used to think so regarding Microsoft, but since the WinRT reboot, deprecation of the tooling and rebooting again back to Win32/COM, while at the same time rebooting Xamarin.Forms into MAUI, and parallel to those two efforts, trying to push Blazor everywhere there is some form of Web Widget, I am no longer sure.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  That's not even scratching the surface. They're spread far and wide and the ice is cracking. WPF -> UWP -> WinUI 2 -> WinUI 3 is an even bigger mess that's creating a system of frameworks that completely overlaps in functionality with MAUI, except it's Windows only - but not really. The entire pipeline there doesn't even make any sort of coherent sense. WPF was clean, had extensive interest and support, and could have been trivially extended with more refined and "modern" styling/functionality. That's fundamentally all that UWP/WinUI are anyhow. But with each branching off, they splintered and annoyed developers in the XAML domain, to say nothing of the fact that I'm just pretending MAUI/Xamarin doesn't exist here. I feel that the constant desire to push onto new things is, somewhat ironically, really holding back major progress. Because you put out some new awesome and really exciting tech, but things take time to mature. C# is absolutely awesome now, but was a mediocre java clone when it first emerged. It took decades of incremental and focused progress to get there.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    What has pissed me most was the way they managed the C++/CX to C++/WinRT transition, because not only does WinDev expect .NET devs to keep their C++ skills up to date for specific APIs, now they want us to author components like in the ATL glory days. Then we finally have Native AOT, but still fails short from .NET Native capabilities.

pjmlp 4y ago

My time playing with Android NDK showed me that they surely weren't there, I ended up wishing to have my Symbian C++ dev experience back, and many know how not straightforward it used to be like.

bilsbie 4y ago

True but also the search used to be amazing in the early 2000s.

greatpostman 4y ago
Right but that was a different time with an almost different company

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

theGnuMe 4y ago

This is known as "The Lake Wobegon Effect".

hulitu 4y ago

Among the general public, maybe. From my point of view Google products are at the lower end of quality and usability. The user interface of Google products is designed by people who never saw a GUI in their life. No titlebar, highjacking right click, big logos without functions, no menus, no scrollbars, error messages obstructing GUI elements without any button to close, status mesages obstricting text input fields. "You are in power saving mode. This function might be affectd." Is it or it is not affected ? What is the result ? On a 1.8 GHz proceesor with 4 GB of RAM this is left as an exercise for the reader.

xwolfi 4y ago

No, I tried them all, I always come back to Google. It guesses what I want and if not drives me towards guessing what it wants. It's the best software I use daily, it doesnt feel like an illusion. I hate that I love Google.

dymk 4y ago

Contender for most insecure hacker news comment of the year right here

greatpostman 4y ago
I’ve worked at two FAANGS.
- dymk 4y ago
  So have I