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What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderfu

What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderful. Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company. Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of product manager. What the hell have they been doing?
- rvnx 3y ago
  Messengers.
- time_to_smile 3y ago
  Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet the user needs. Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills). Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
  - jack_riminton 3y ago
    This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer) The PMs job has become so much about process, that any 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it can't be measured objectively. Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      The original iPhone did very clearly and famously have a product manager. It was the same person that was also responsible to paper of CEO.
      - jack_riminton 3y ago
        Ken Kocienda one of the first engineers working on the iPhone disagrees with you on that https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Did any innovative product, at its inception, come from a 'product manager'? (especially at google) They have their place in the org, but I don't see much creativity from them.
- adrr 3y ago
  Trying to figure out what to rename Google Workspaces too. It's been two years, time for a new name. Also working on the next version of instant messenger to replace google meet since it is also a few years old. Maybe we'll see Google Hangouts 2.0.
ravenstine 3y ago
Perhaps it's overly reductionist, but I think a lot of The Google's issues come down to their self-image. To this day they're stuck in the year 2006 when everybody and their grandma saw them as "cool", "innovative", "not Micro$oft", and "not evil." Most average joes don't believe those things anymore and just see The Google as the default thingamahoozie for looking up stuff on their phone. The Google believed they could grow rapidly and structure themselves with ordered-chaos because they were the chosen ones. Their road has yet to have become bumpy enough that they get knocked down a peg and forced to look at themselves in the mirror. Their hubris has allowed them to believe that they have no serious competition; just because your competition isn't actively competing now doesn't mean they won't be down the road when you're weak. In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  I have generally found that people don’t take project managers very seriously, sort of like a human interface to a spreadsheet. Where are you that they are actually creating projects?
- eldavido 3y ago
  I think there's something to this. Another perspective might be Apple vs Intel, where one of my friends worked (at both) in fairly senior roles 5+ years. The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years. The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter anymore-the basis of competition has shifted. I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it, "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these things need to shift over time, but most companies can't. This is why companies rise and fall. I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term. Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific things Google has anchored on for the past years.
bena 3y ago
Eh. Yes and no. Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough to ship working software. That's not nothing. And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You can't really select for "the ability to create things that people want to use". No one's track record is flawless. It's very nearly a crapshoot. Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google employees. I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault isn't in pure engineering. And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of skill and/or talent.
- jsnell 3y ago
  > I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? [...] They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year revenue. That seems like quite a lot! To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees). It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.
  - bena 3y ago
sebzim4500 3y ago
From the outside, Alphabet seems to do a very good job when it comes to engineering. They have very little downtime, fewer embarrassing security moments than most, youtube is far better technically than the competition, etc. It's just that they aren't building things that people want to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.
- traveler01 3y ago
  Thing is, they actually are building things people might want to use, they just don't focus enough on it. Stadia for example, was way ahead of Microsoft in image quality, fluidity, etc. After a year or two of trying to push it to customers they killed it for no reason whatsoever. I even recall watching some comments of sad people who would need another gaming streaming service because they used Stadia for their gaming needs. It was a ridiculous decision that nobody understood why. They also screwed up game devs who were porting their games to Stadia, which will for sure have repercusions in future services.
JustLurking2022 3y ago
Just to clarify on the Go point - that was all made up BS from Rob Pike.
TingPing 3y ago
Moving from C++ is the most reasonable choice ever. It is very complex and 20 developers who use it could come up with 20 solutions given freedom. Standardizing on a simple language is just good for collaboration.
tester756 3y ago
>Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That tree reverse meme? he made it up
snotrockets 3y ago
Go isn't replacement for C++, and no one can handle C++.
- berniedurfee 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree with this. Odd comment about Go being C++ with training wheels. I don’t think that’s the case. Go is a great first-class language on its own merits.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago

Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of product manager. What the hell have they been doing?

rvnx 3y ago
Messengers.
time_to_smile 3y ago
Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet the user needs. Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills). Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer) The PMs job has become so much about process, that any 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it can't be measured objectively. Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    The original iPhone did very clearly and famously have a product manager. It was the same person that was also responsible to paper of CEO.
    - jack_riminton 3y ago
      Ken Kocienda one of the first engineers working on the iPhone disagrees with you on that https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20
raverbashing 3y ago
Did any innovative product, at its inception, come from a 'product manager'? (especially at google) They have their place in the org, but I don't see much creativity from them.
adrr 3y ago
Trying to figure out what to rename Google Workspaces too. It's been two years, time for a new name. Also working on the next version of instant messenger to replace google meet since it is also a few years old. Maybe we'll see Google Hangouts 2.0.

ravenstine 3y ago

Perhaps it's overly reductionist, but I think a lot of The Google's issues come down to their self-image. To this day they're stuck in the year 2006 when everybody and their grandma saw them as "cool", "innovative", "not Micro$oft", and "not evil." Most average joes don't believe those things anymore and just see The Google as the default thingamahoozie for looking up stuff on their phone. The Google believed they could grow rapidly and structure themselves with ordered-chaos because they were the chosen ones. Their road has yet to have become bumpy enough that they get knocked down a peg and forced to look at themselves in the mirror. Their hubris has allowed them to believe that they have no serious competition; just because your competition isn't actively competing now doesn't mean they won't be down the road when you're weak. In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.

pfannkuchen 3y ago
I have generally found that people don’t take project managers very seriously, sort of like a human interface to a spreadsheet. Where are you that they are actually creating projects?
eldavido 3y ago
I think there's something to this. Another perspective might be Apple vs Intel, where one of my friends worked (at both) in fairly senior roles 5+ years. The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years. The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter anymore-the basis of competition has shifted. I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it, "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these things need to shift over time, but most companies can't. This is why companies rise and fall. I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term. Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific things Google has anchored on for the past years.

bena 3y ago

Eh. Yes and no. Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough to ship working software. That's not nothing. And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You can't really select for "the ability to create things that people want to use". No one's track record is flawless. It's very nearly a crapshoot. Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google employees. I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault isn't in pure engineering. And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of skill and/or talent.

jsnell 3y ago
> I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? [...] They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year revenue. That seems like quite a lot! To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees). It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.
- bena 3y ago

sebzim4500 3y ago

From the outside, Alphabet seems to do a very good job when it comes to engineering. They have very little downtime, fewer embarrassing security moments than most, youtube is far better technically than the competition, etc. It's just that they aren't building things that people want to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.

traveler01 3y ago
Thing is, they actually are building things people might want to use, they just don't focus enough on it. Stadia for example, was way ahead of Microsoft in image quality, fluidity, etc. After a year or two of trying to push it to customers they killed it for no reason whatsoever. I even recall watching some comments of sad people who would need another gaming streaming service because they used Stadia for their gaming needs. It was a ridiculous decision that nobody understood why. They also screwed up game devs who were porting their games to Stadia, which will for sure have repercusions in future services.

JustLurking2022 3y ago

Just to clarify on the Go point - that was all made up BS from Rob Pike.

TingPing 3y ago

Moving from C++ is the most reasonable choice ever. It is very complex and 20 developers who use it could come up with 20 solutions given freedom. Standardizing on a simple language is just good for collaboration.

tester756 3y ago

>Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That tree reverse meme? he made it up

snotrockets 3y ago

Go isn't replacement for C++, and no one can handle C++.

berniedurfee 3y ago
Yeah, I agree with this. Odd comment about Go being C++ with training wheels. I don’t think that’s the case. Go is a great first-class language on its own merits.