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Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-betwe

Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.

danpalmer 4y ago
I think you've missed my point. As you break down "the grind", it breaks down into projects like "fix this bug" or "speed up that API", and those are impactful and can lead to promotion. Sure, no director is going to be promoted to VP for fixing a bug, but it's useful stuff for a new grad to have completed and would feed into their promotion. If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? I'm not talking about for promotion, I mean why would anyone make changes that have no impact?
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Because, especially now, we can see lack of it drastically impacting new Google products like Stadia. No one can trust Google to maintain their products at all.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I can see elements of it at a very high level, as I said I'm not really commenting on the top leadership, but for most people at Google, new products do not appear to be necessary for progression.
    - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
      >> Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things. Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not reward long-term maintenance of products. >> I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. It started with Google Reader and has become ever more obvious since then. When Google launches a new product, observers in tech make bets about how long the product will be around before Google kills it. It has become a meme: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
      - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
        Holy Cow. I don’t even know about most of those products!
      - danpalmer 4y ago
        I completely understand the "google kills products" meme. I just think that "google doesn't reward maintenance" doesn't lead to "google kills products" except in very general examples. For the most part Google is maintaining products, that's most of what most people do. The reasons for the killing of products are I think much more nuanced and numerous.
      - sofixa 4y ago
        > Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. Nonsense. It failed to attract developers because it was an unsure new platform so of course most of them wouldn't spend hours to develop for it. They were always going to need convincing (with money of course), which took Google too long, but around a year or so in there were multiple heavy hitters in the form of Red Dead Redemption 2, Hitman, Ubisoft's entire catalogue (and an Ubisoft+ integration), EA Games' most new games, Destiny 2, alongside a ton of indie games. By the time Stadia shut down, it didn't really have a catalogue problem. Problem is, Google bungled the rollout and took too long to start doing this - they banked on the initial release being highly successful, but didn't start massively investing in games until later on. For gamers, fear of Google shutting it down played a part, of course. But so did all the extremely negative coverage, from everywhere, that Stadia is dead on arrival which only reinforced that fear. Had Google actually told everyone their shutdown plan (reimburse everyone for all games), a lot of gamers would have overcome those fears (what was there to lose, really?). Technically, the platform was amazing. To this day the best UX by far of out cloud gaming platforms. Quality upgrades were lacking though. To sum up, Google failed in their strategy and marketing. Had they 1) promised to reimburse everyone in case the platform was shut down before X years 2) given away Stadia Premiere packs to anyone they can (like YouTube Premium subscribers, etc.) 3) enticed big studios to port games, all things they eventually ended up doing, Stadia would have been a roaring success and would be undergoing a hardware refresh at the moment. Instead, it just reinforces that Google sucks at b2c and shouldn't be trusted.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? Because it's hard to measure and even harder to predict. E.g. Something that fixes Youtube's scam comment problem where scammers impersonate creators and lure viewers into telegram and whatsapp to scam them. It won't be working immediately, so someone will have to work on it for a while and iterate against the scammers' countermeasures until it gets too costly for them and most of them give up. Should someone pick it up? It's not immediately impactful as it won't increase engagement and ads, but it's probably going to prevent a big PR issue when some media company picks up the topic and highlights Google's inaction and their decision to tolerate the scammers and their crimes on their platform. Fixing it has no direct impact on income, and the problem it mitigates hasn't happened yet, why would anyone work on it? And in the real world we see: they're not working on it (or it's taking them longer than a year, who knows).
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I think you might underestimate the number of people working on this stuff. There are rarely trade-offs between, as you suggested, working on ad engagement and YouTube scam comments. Both will have teams working on them. At a very high level you could argue that the number of people being allocated to each may not be right, but it's not that one or the other doesn't have any resources. From what I've seen, people at Google are very cognizant of these issues, and the only real reason that the public may see progress come and go is that these are hard problems and the work against malicious content is sadly never-ending.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Thank you for your perspective. It's frustrating from the outside with the lack of progress (or even acknowledgement, really), and it feels like nobody is working on it (or cares). I'm sure they're hard problems, but on the other hand I'm sure Google has lots of smart people, and they have sheer endless resources and own pretty much every part of the user journey and the stack, and the attacks aren't even sophisticated. Amazon had a similar issue a while back where well-rated seller accounts got hacked (or sold?) and started offering vastly underpriced premium items with text added somewhere to get in contact with the seller, trying to get people off of the platform. But to their credit, they dealt with it pretty swiftly, and I'd consider it a solved problem, I haven't seen it since.
- Retric 4y ago
  The problem exists at the managerial level. If no VP is going to be promoted for Google glass improvements then they sure as fuck don’t want to be involved. When managers are better off shifting budget to projects that can help them progress, these projects stagnate and ultimately get cancelled.
- kajecounterhack 4y ago
  That’s problem: there is impact, but it is not recognized well. For promos higher than L4 you need bigger projects. Stringing together a bunch of medium impact bug fixes won’t get it done even if the net effect is very high impact. You only get credit for something you measure and if the quantity is big enough.

danpalmer 4y ago

I think you've missed my point. As you break down "the grind", it breaks down into projects like "fix this bug" or "speed up that API", and those are impactful and can lead to promotion. Sure, no director is going to be promoted to VP for fixing a bug, but it's useful stuff for a new grad to have completed and would feed into their promotion. If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? I'm not talking about for promotion, I mean why would anyone make changes that have no impact?

KptMarchewa 4y ago
Because, especially now, we can see lack of it drastically impacting new Google products like Stadia. No one can trust Google to maintain their products at all.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I can see elements of it at a very high level, as I said I'm not really commenting on the top leadership, but for most people at Google, new products do not appear to be necessary for progression.
  - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
    >> Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things. Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not reward long-term maintenance of products. >> I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. It started with Google Reader and has become ever more obvious since then. When Google launches a new product, observers in tech make bets about how long the product will be around before Google kills it. It has become a meme: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
    - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      Holy Cow. I don’t even know about most of those products!
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      I completely understand the "google kills products" meme. I just think that "google doesn't reward maintenance" doesn't lead to "google kills products" except in very general examples. For the most part Google is maintaining products, that's most of what most people do. The reasons for the killing of products are I think much more nuanced and numerous.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. Nonsense. It failed to attract developers because it was an unsure new platform so of course most of them wouldn't spend hours to develop for it. They were always going to need convincing (with money of course), which took Google too long, but around a year or so in there were multiple heavy hitters in the form of Red Dead Redemption 2, Hitman, Ubisoft's entire catalogue (and an Ubisoft+ integration), EA Games' most new games, Destiny 2, alongside a ton of indie games. By the time Stadia shut down, it didn't really have a catalogue problem. Problem is, Google bungled the rollout and took too long to start doing this - they banked on the initial release being highly successful, but didn't start massively investing in games until later on. For gamers, fear of Google shutting it down played a part, of course. But so did all the extremely negative coverage, from everywhere, that Stadia is dead on arrival which only reinforced that fear. Had Google actually told everyone their shutdown plan (reimburse everyone for all games), a lot of gamers would have overcome those fears (what was there to lose, really?). Technically, the platform was amazing. To this day the best UX by far of out cloud gaming platforms. Quality upgrades were lacking though. To sum up, Google failed in their strategy and marketing. Had they 1) promised to reimburse everyone in case the platform was shut down before X years 2) given away Stadia Premiere packs to anyone they can (like YouTube Premium subscribers, etc.) 3) enticed big studios to port games, all things they eventually ended up doing, Stadia would have been a roaring success and would be undergoing a hardware refresh at the moment. Instead, it just reinforces that Google sucks at b2c and shouldn't be trusted.
luckylion 4y ago
> If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? Because it's hard to measure and even harder to predict. E.g. Something that fixes Youtube's scam comment problem where scammers impersonate creators and lure viewers into telegram and whatsapp to scam them. It won't be working immediately, so someone will have to work on it for a while and iterate against the scammers' countermeasures until it gets too costly for them and most of them give up. Should someone pick it up? It's not immediately impactful as it won't increase engagement and ads, but it's probably going to prevent a big PR issue when some media company picks up the topic and highlights Google's inaction and their decision to tolerate the scammers and their crimes on their platform. Fixing it has no direct impact on income, and the problem it mitigates hasn't happened yet, why would anyone work on it? And in the real world we see: they're not working on it (or it's taking them longer than a year, who knows).
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I think you might underestimate the number of people working on this stuff. There are rarely trade-offs between, as you suggested, working on ad engagement and YouTube scam comments. Both will have teams working on them. At a very high level you could argue that the number of people being allocated to each may not be right, but it's not that one or the other doesn't have any resources. From what I've seen, people at Google are very cognizant of these issues, and the only real reason that the public may see progress come and go is that these are hard problems and the work against malicious content is sadly never-ending.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Thank you for your perspective. It's frustrating from the outside with the lack of progress (or even acknowledgement, really), and it feels like nobody is working on it (or cares). I'm sure they're hard problems, but on the other hand I'm sure Google has lots of smart people, and they have sheer endless resources and own pretty much every part of the user journey and the stack, and the attacks aren't even sophisticated. Amazon had a similar issue a while back where well-rated seller accounts got hacked (or sold?) and started offering vastly underpriced premium items with text added somewhere to get in contact with the seller, trying to get people off of the platform. But to their credit, they dealt with it pretty swiftly, and I'd consider it a solved problem, I haven't seen it since.
Retric 4y ago
The problem exists at the managerial level. If no VP is going to be promoted for Google glass improvements then they sure as fuck don’t want to be involved. When managers are better off shifting budget to projects that can help them progress, these projects stagnate and ultimately get cancelled.
kajecounterhack 4y ago
That’s problem: there is impact, but it is not recognized well. For promos higher than L4 you need bigger projects. Stringing together a bunch of medium impact bug fixes won’t get it done even if the net effect is very high impact. You only get credit for something you measure and if the quantity is big enough.