6 ms·

The incidence makes me wonder what percentage of people at Google spend their time in counterproductive ways. If this is rooted too deeply in Google's culture

The incidence makes me wonder what percentage of people at Google spend their time in counterproductive ways. If this is rooted too deeply in Google's culture by now, they might take very long to recover. Like decades long. Has anybody else here seen how the UIs of Google Adsense and Google Ads have evolved during recent years? They are a mess. Another indicator that something is wrong. I witnessed firsthand, how SMBs tried to put ads on Google Ads in the latest version and simply gave up. Because they couldn't figure out the interface. Did Google lose their ability to bang out useful software?

Veuxdo 3y ago
Other than search, what would you consider Google's best software?
- ralphist 3y ago
  Maps is still good. GMail still works. Most of their big products aren't awful. It's funny that Search seems to be going down faster than the others, given that this one actually makes most of their money. I'd have thought they would put the best people on it and been very conservative about changing it.
  - Xirgil 3y ago
    Search is going downhill at least in part because they're dealing with an entire industry that's adversarial to them. SEO companies are spending billions of dollars and countless man-hours with the explicit goal of making search worse. The fact that they've gotten even better tools in the form of GenAI for manipulating search hasn't helped.
    - nwienert 3y ago
      I'd argue a much bigger part is their various nerfs. Reddit and SO are barely recommended. Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites. During Trump they decided allowing anything except for MSNBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/etc on the first five pages of anything remotely news related were the only allowable results. This mirrors exactly the Gemini/OpenAI nerfs for PC. Given 90% of my searches are for questions about what people think about things, code/food/drugs/health/medicine/etc, and topical events, it's become completely useless without adding "reddit" or something after.
      - Xirgil 3y ago
        I won't deny that there's nerfs, but do you not see how "Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites." and "People trying to sell you things are spending billions of dollars on SEO to junk up your results" are related
        nwienert 3y ago
        I strongly don't think it's caused by SEO, it's caused by them not liking that having too much reliance on certain sources. There was an update a while back where Wikipedia/Reddit were turned way down suddenly, this is a knob they are using specifically.
      - kaliqt 3y ago
        This propaganda issue also applies in full to YouTube.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Kubernetes, or do you mean software that Google sells?
  - manishsharan 3y ago
    > Kubernetes, or do you mean software that Google sells? I am presuming you are referring to Anthos. Anthos is very well suited for the needs of large enterprise. It makes Kubernetes less painful for our development teams. It has reduced the learning curve for our teams.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- ardit33 3y ago
  Youtube, Maps (mobile, the web version has been getting worse), Gmail are pretty good. So, their core services are fine; for anything that is not in the 'hot money making' path, good luck, some are great some are bad.
- yesplorer 3y ago
  Gmail
crowcroft 3y ago
Yes, not even just that the UIs are worse, but just they're not really even that different? At least the last Google Ads UI change was because the existing interface was very clearly dated... GA4 is even worse as well. I often find it just straight up doesn't load correctly.
steveBK123 3y ago
East coaster tech guy here, but I've met a handful of GOOG employees over here over my career and this fits the bill. Every single one seemed to hold two contradictory ideas in their head - they were changing the world & their work was nowhere near any actual product or something that produced revenue. It's like GOOG screened for this kind of person for over a decade, and now they are the majority of their staff.
- mancerayder 3y ago
  Last I interviewed there over a decade ago, I got filtered out due to my lack of math skills. And this was not for software development, but infrastructure. If you want math 'from first principle' theory types because that's your proxy for competence in unrelated area or perhaps even IQ...
- lumost 3y ago
  The funny thing about being tied to a product/revenue at a megacorp, is that people can hold you accountable - in fact because hundreds of teams depend on your team's revenue to survive, you may be forced to work ungodly hours. On the other hand, you could go work on a team which is ... not tied to revenue, or even a product. Then your value is whatever you can convince others of, or you can simply be forgotten about as there is no way to tell whether you are doing your job. I've seen people spend 4+ years delivering not a thing in this manner while product focused teams work 80 hours a week. Which group would you choose to be in?
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    The fact that GOOG has so many of the latter tells you something about the monopoly profit they get from the former.
  - 121789 3y ago
    The latter are often first in the chopping block and you’ll spend quite a bit of time trying to validate your own team’s existence. The aggressive product teams will probably have better career opportunities. Both paths are fine, it’s a trade off
neya 3y ago
I used to work as a Google Cloud consultant in my past life. I had to frequently visit Google’s offices and talk to engineers there to advise on our clients for project specific requirements. Once we had a large news publication client who had a requirement of optimizing their backend for costs as they were spending something like north of $4000 per month in server costs. This was with Cloudflare on top since the homepage and some sections could never be cached as it had to be real time. To address this issue, we consulted an engineer who had no idea about even the database offerings Google had. He recommended something like a NoSQL solution. The more we grilled him for info on implementation and why he suggested it the more empty talk he gave us. And he wasn’t the only one. Google is really large, so we talked to a handful of them and almost all of them seemed very incompetent. Frustrated, I walked past one of the areas where people were supposed to be working. And there were a lot of empty seats. And the few that were there were watching some Korean drama on YouTube, etc. The rest were either sleeping off in couches and/playing snookers downstairs. For an outsider, it felt like a great culture thing to me. But later, after a dozen more visits and same working style observations, it occured to me that this no accountability cozy environment actually didn’t allow them to weed out the bad ones who didn’t even know the product they were supposed to specialize in and nothing good comes out of a company that is built on such levels of incompetence. Soon after, I quit consulting for Google Cloud products as they also managed to increase prices without justifying the value proposition. I am not alone, many consultants who worked with Google would tell you the same. Their work culture or lack thereof is their worst enemy.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I worked there and had to quit after 15 months due to the broken systems. So many people are there purely because of the pay (and I don't blame someone for wanting an easy job that pays $300,000+). But personally I do not want to work among people that are optimizing that hard for income. When I joined my team the first question I got was "Are you trying to get a promotion?". My manager was trying to be helpful so that he could assign promote-able projects. But the system is broken if that's how things work. I should instead be doing my best work on a project that needs to exist and by doing so get promoted. There were so many broken systems there. Once I made it clear to my boss I wanted to quit Google entirely he told me to just stick around for a year as he didn't want to do the paperwork to fire me. Thankfully I'm back at a startup. These days if I see a lot of YOE at Google on a resume it is a red flag.
tmaly 3y ago
People want to keep changing things to make it look like progress. This includes app icons. I would rather have consistency. Think of all the users that figured out how to buy ads the first time that might have stopped buying ads when the UI changed. It is really hard to get users to change. The old MS Excel interface to many people a long time to adjust to the ribbon. I know people who have still not figured out the new pivot table UI.
schnable 3y ago
GSuite/Google Docs is just a bad product at this point. Very marginal changes and feature additions while day-to-day limitations never get fixed.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  Still no syntax highlighting for their own language.
theolivenbaum 3y ago
Google ads is indeed a mess - I was surprised to see this is their cash cow, as the experience is just horrible. Got access the other day to their latest AI models, and while everyone in the market will let you a) create an API token and b) use it, for Google you've a mess of service accounts, badly named permissions, services that change name all the time, 'just works' authorization that's basically a lock in to their own cloud. After spending a few hours with their docs, I just gave up - not worth the effort for now. We're now also being asked to revalidate our integrations with them in the name of security (no change on our end, thousands of users using it every day). Another absolutely useless, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque process, with rules changing all the time, and not properly applied. Google has long lost its way on software...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zzz999 3y ago
Google just has too many employees ... So they change things that don't need to be changed just to have something to do?

Veuxdo 3y ago

Other than search, what would you consider Google's best software?

ralphist 3y ago
Maps is still good. GMail still works. Most of their big products aren't awful. It's funny that Search seems to be going down faster than the others, given that this one actually makes most of their money. I'd have thought they would put the best people on it and been very conservative about changing it.
- Xirgil 3y ago
  Search is going downhill at least in part because they're dealing with an entire industry that's adversarial to them. SEO companies are spending billions of dollars and countless man-hours with the explicit goal of making search worse. The fact that they've gotten even better tools in the form of GenAI for manipulating search hasn't helped.
  - nwienert 3y ago
    I'd argue a much bigger part is their various nerfs. Reddit and SO are barely recommended. Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites. During Trump they decided allowing anything except for MSNBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/etc on the first five pages of anything remotely news related were the only allowable results. This mirrors exactly the Gemini/OpenAI nerfs for PC. Given 90% of my searches are for questions about what people think about things, code/food/drugs/health/medicine/etc, and topical events, it's become completely useless without adding "reddit" or something after.
    - Xirgil 3y ago
      I won't deny that there's nerfs, but do you not see how "Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites." and "People trying to sell you things are spending billions of dollars on SEO to junk up your results" are related
      - nwienert 3y ago
        I strongly don't think it's caused by SEO, it's caused by them not liking that having too much reliance on certain sources. There was an update a while back where Wikipedia/Reddit were turned way down suddenly, this is a knob they are using specifically.
    - kaliqt 3y ago
      This propaganda issue also applies in full to YouTube.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Kubernetes, or do you mean software that Google sells?
- manishsharan 3y ago
  > Kubernetes, or do you mean software that Google sells? I am presuming you are referring to Anthos. Anthos is very well suited for the needs of large enterprise. It makes Kubernetes less painful for our development teams. It has reduced the learning curve for our teams.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ardit33 3y ago
Youtube, Maps (mobile, the web version has been getting worse), Gmail are pretty good. So, their core services are fine; for anything that is not in the 'hot money making' path, good luck, some are great some are bad.
yesplorer 3y ago
Gmail

crowcroft 3y ago

Yes, not even just that the UIs are worse, but just they're not really even that different? At least the last Google Ads UI change was because the existing interface was very clearly dated... GA4 is even worse as well. I often find it just straight up doesn't load correctly.

steveBK123 3y ago

East coaster tech guy here, but I've met a handful of GOOG employees over here over my career and this fits the bill. Every single one seemed to hold two contradictory ideas in their head - they were changing the world & their work was nowhere near any actual product or something that produced revenue. It's like GOOG screened for this kind of person for over a decade, and now they are the majority of their staff.

mancerayder 3y ago
Last I interviewed there over a decade ago, I got filtered out due to my lack of math skills. And this was not for software development, but infrastructure. If you want math 'from first principle' theory types because that's your proxy for competence in unrelated area or perhaps even IQ...
lumost 3y ago
The funny thing about being tied to a product/revenue at a megacorp, is that people can hold you accountable - in fact because hundreds of teams depend on your team's revenue to survive, you may be forced to work ungodly hours. On the other hand, you could go work on a team which is ... not tied to revenue, or even a product. Then your value is whatever you can convince others of, or you can simply be forgotten about as there is no way to tell whether you are doing your job. I've seen people spend 4+ years delivering not a thing in this manner while product focused teams work 80 hours a week. Which group would you choose to be in?
- steveBK123 3y ago
  The fact that GOOG has so many of the latter tells you something about the monopoly profit they get from the former.
- 121789 3y ago
  The latter are often first in the chopping block and you’ll spend quite a bit of time trying to validate your own team’s existence. The aggressive product teams will probably have better career opportunities. Both paths are fine, it’s a trade off

neya 3y ago

I used to work as a Google Cloud consultant in my past life. I had to frequently visit Google’s offices and talk to engineers there to advise on our clients for project specific requirements. Once we had a large news publication client who had a requirement of optimizing their backend for costs as they were spending something like north of $4000 per month in server costs. This was with Cloudflare on top since the homepage and some sections could never be cached as it had to be real time. To address this issue, we consulted an engineer who had no idea about even the database offerings Google had. He recommended something like a NoSQL solution. The more we grilled him for info on implementation and why he suggested it the more empty talk he gave us. And he wasn’t the only one. Google is really large, so we talked to a handful of them and almost all of them seemed very incompetent. Frustrated, I walked past one of the areas where people were supposed to be working. And there were a lot of empty seats. And the few that were there were watching some Korean drama on YouTube, etc. The rest were either sleeping off in couches and/playing snookers downstairs. For an outsider, it felt like a great culture thing to me. But later, after a dozen more visits and same working style observations, it occured to me that this no accountability cozy environment actually didn’t allow them to weed out the bad ones who didn’t even know the product they were supposed to specialize in and nothing good comes out of a company that is built on such levels of incompetence. Soon after, I quit consulting for Google Cloud products as they also managed to increase prices without justifying the value proposition. I am not alone, many consultants who worked with Google would tell you the same. Their work culture or lack thereof is their worst enemy.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I worked there and had to quit after 15 months due to the broken systems. So many people are there purely because of the pay (and I don't blame someone for wanting an easy job that pays $300,000+). But personally I do not want to work among people that are optimizing that hard for income. When I joined my team the first question I got was "Are you trying to get a promotion?". My manager was trying to be helpful so that he could assign promote-able projects. But the system is broken if that's how things work. I should instead be doing my best work on a project that needs to exist and by doing so get promoted. There were so many broken systems there. Once I made it clear to my boss I wanted to quit Google entirely he told me to just stick around for a year as he didn't want to do the paperwork to fire me. Thankfully I'm back at a startup. These days if I see a lot of YOE at Google on a resume it is a red flag.

tmaly 3y ago

People want to keep changing things to make it look like progress. This includes app icons. I would rather have consistency. Think of all the users that figured out how to buy ads the first time that might have stopped buying ads when the UI changed. It is really hard to get users to change. The old MS Excel interface to many people a long time to adjust to the ribbon. I know people who have still not figured out the new pivot table UI.

schnable 3y ago

GSuite/Google Docs is just a bad product at this point. Very marginal changes and feature additions while day-to-day limitations never get fixed.

aaomidi 3y ago
Still no syntax highlighting for their own language.

theolivenbaum 3y ago

Google ads is indeed a mess - I was surprised to see this is their cash cow, as the experience is just horrible. Got access the other day to their latest AI models, and while everyone in the market will let you a) create an API token and b) use it, for Google you've a mess of service accounts, badly named permissions, services that change name all the time, 'just works' authorization that's basically a lock in to their own cloud. After spending a few hours with their docs, I just gave up - not worth the effort for now. We're now also being asked to revalidate our integrations with them in the name of security (no change on our end, thousands of users using it every day). Another absolutely useless, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque process, with rules changing all the time, and not properly applied. Google has long lost its way on software...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zzz999 3y ago

Google just has too many employees ... So they change things that don't need to be changed just to have something to do?