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> Google pioneered many now standard tech practices: on-site cafés, A/B tests, and “dogfooding,” or first releasing new products internally where they can be im
by n8cpdx 2y ago
> Google pioneered many now standard tech practices: on-site cafés, A/B tests, and “dogfooding,” or first releasing new products internally where they can be improved before launching to the public.
Famously, Microsoft and others pioneered dogfooding decades before the events described in this article and approximately a decade (at least) before Google came into existence.
And I’m 99% certain company cafes existed at least a half century before Google invented the concept.
- kevindamm 2y agoI worked at a few tech companies before 2000 that had a company cafe but they all required payment. It was cheaper and closer but not free, and not nearly the same level of quality. Charlie's et al. were all free, and I remember even seeing a TV news spot about the free food at Google specifically, in the months before I started there. I think I'd be okay crediting Google with the free lunch (and the nod towards TANSTAAFL that I suspect it was). But dogfooding, yeah that had been around for a while. Originally from Alpo, iirc. The first tech company to adopt the term as well as the practice was Microsoft in 1988. A/B existed before Google but 2000s era A/B testing and user research were unparalleled until Facebook also started putting serious capital into it. Nowadays it's considered table stakes but it was revolutionized in the beginning of the millennium. Maybe not entirely by Google but substantially so, and driven heavily by their product launch review process.
- lupire 2y agoA/B testing was Amazon Weblab. Google pioneered information retrieval and ranking innovations, not behavior optimization.
- rootusrootus 2y agoDefinitely. I remember a class trip to Intel's Jones Farm campus back in the early 90s and they definitely had company cafes. Everything was free.
- medler 2y agoWhen I worked at Intel, they only free items in the cafe were coffee and fountain drinks. But maybe they were more generous before the dot-com bust.
- wbl 2y agoOnly half? I'd be willing to say that there should be some 19th century examples and we can argue if the food arrangements in the Valley of the Kings count.
- gandalfian 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_lady https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_lady
- twic 2y agoI had a job about twenty years ago where at some point a sort of freelance tea lady started coming round. Basically had a van full of bacon rolls and a tea urn, and would drive up to office buildings and offer to come in and sell tea and rolls to the employees. The boss agreed, because it made his employees happier and cost him nothing. She made a killing. We got bacon rolls at our desks. It was entrepreneurship at its finest. Silicon Valley could never.
- walthamstow 2y agoA position that still exists at most football clubs, even the ones worth billions
- red-iron-pine 2y agothey have the money to spend, and aren't a political football like with the NHS
- walthamstow 2y agoThere are over 100 professional clubs in England and most of them don't have money to spend, but they all have a tea lady.
- ddp26 2y ago(Author here) Yeah, good feedback, I think I overstated this in the article. It would have better to say Google popularized these practices rather than pioneered them. Or at least, that these practices became much more widespread among tech companies after Google's IPO in 2004 than beforehand. I think it's also safe to say that Google's culture was strikingly different from other tech companies of its era, as has been well documented in a few books.
- luu 2y ago> It would have better to say Google popularized these practices rather than pioneered them This also seems incorrect. Before Google, it was common to have company-provided before Google. IBM and Motorola had cafeterias. I don't know when AMD installed their cafeterias, but if it was post-Google, it would've been inspired by IBM and Moto's cafeteria and not Google's. In Austin, the Moto cafeteria was known for having very good food and IBM was moderately subsidized and pretty good until the 2010s, which doesn't line up with Google being influential at all. And Centaur had great, free, food. This is an old idea that predates tech companies that a lot of tech companies have picked up that Google also happened to pick up. As a term, dogfooding spread through Microsoft after Paul Maritz wrote an emailed titled "Eating our own Dogfood" in 1988. If the term was popularized by anyone, it was probably Joel Spolsky who took the practice from Microsoft and blogged about it when he was the most widely read programming blogger. But there are a lot of examples of people doing this before Martiz's email (they just called it something else) and before tech companies even existed; this is another practice that predates tech companies that tech companies picked up. I don't know about the history of A/B testing in tech, but Capital One was doing A/B tests at scale before they would've been influenced by Google and that's another idea that was used outside of tech.
- flakiness 2y agoOthers are taken. Let's give it a credit for popularizing the A/B test ;-) https://www.google.com/search?q=Google%27s+41+shades+of+blue https://www.google.com/search?q=Google%27s+41+shades+of+blue
- 2y ago
- jsemrau 2y agoWhen I worked at Electronic Arts in 2003 we had a lovely restaurant on the premises.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LittleTimothy 2y agoDidn't you hear, every silicon valley company personally invented everything they ever did. Chamath invented Data Science at Facebook!
- andrewxdiamond 2y agoIronically the _lack_ of dogfooding GCP products at google is often quoted as one of the reasons AWS beat GCP to defining the Cloud market. Amazon builds AWS on AWS as much as possible, Google has only somewhat recently pushed for this
- antonvs 2y agoProbably more importantly, doesn't the Amazon store system use AWS? Google has nothing comparable to use for that purpose.
- hmottestad 2y agoThere is search, Adsense, gmail, google docs and Gemini. Do they at least train Gemini on GPUs on GCP?
- bobthepanda 2y agomaps is another big one.
- pie420 2y agoone of the craziest comments i've read on HN. google does a lot of internet things these days, idk if you've been out of the loop for a while
- antonvs 2y agoI didn't express it well. Google's consumer-facing systems all tend to be very focused. Things like search, maps, gmail etc. are not the same kind of system as Amazon's store. While these systems do presumably give Google something to exercise their cloud systems on, the sense I have (as a longtime user of both GCP and AWS) is that it doesn't give them a realistic sense of what other companies, that don't just sell advertising and consumer data via focused products, do. Amazon's store is more representative of typical businesses in that sense. Basically, it seems to me that Google Cloud has continually learned lessons the hard way about what customers need, rather than getting that information from its own internal usage.
- righthand 2y agoFood cafeterias at the office go back to Henry Ford. Creating a distinction based on how fancy it is, is just the modern day “I invented it!”.
- ACow_Adonis 2y agoI did work experience at tidbinbilla radio telescope facility in...1999 or 2000. It had an on-site cafeteria, which aside from being "out in the middle of no where", we all wondered "why?". Why didn't everyone just bring their lunch? Even at the time, we just explained it as a "just a thing that Americans did" and wrote it off as because of the presence and involvement of NASA. So it's good to hear that Google invented it sometime later... /Never listen to tech people commenting on history or economics, lol
- beachy 2y agoRe dogfooding. I worked at Oracle back in the 90s, first in the team building the company's HR systems (specifically their payroll product), and then in the team building the company's CASE (computer-aided software engineering) products. The CASE products were intended to automate away coding, and Oracle's HR products, with their gazillions of lines of code, and with the developers located in the same building and with a common senior management team, were the best possible opportunity for dogfooding. However while I was in the HR product team we never tried in earnest to use CASE (except for the ER modelling tools). There was no real enthusiasm from the CASE team to support us and the tools as they were then fell far short of what was required. Later, when I joined the CASE team, I learned that their narrative was that the company's ERP products (like HR) were so complex that they were not realistic targets for CASE (* cough cough bullshit * - and perhaps the sort of attitude that doomed the CASE products in the long term). My learning was that dogfooding is an awesome strategy, but sometimes much harder to embed in a development team than one might think.
- chii 2y ago> they were not realistic targets for CASE that's a very interesting tidbit. It looks to me that the management structure and incentive at this department is too conservative, because failure is seen as bad and is probably punished (somehow - might not be overt). Therefore, leadership is incentivized to target realistic use cases, which means simple use cases. This basically "guarantees" success as described by the objective. This is the same as revenue forecasts being overly conservative, and the market sees through the lies.
- beachy 2y agoYes. Both teams followed a course that was less ambitious and politically safer for themselves, to the detriment of the company overall.
- jefflinwood 2y agoI worked out of the SGI campus before it got sold to Google, and I remember the on-site cafe there was amazing. I don't know how much Google changed about it, I've never been. As a vendor, I (well, my company) had to pay for meals at SGI, I have no idea if the employees got free meals.
- dekhn 2y agoI used to hang out with Jeff Dean and he told me that Google and SGI both occupied the googleplex at the same time and the SGI employees looked sad because they had to pay for their meals. I believe Charlie's (the main onsite cafe) has been renovated a few times although the basic layout was constant throughout my tenure (2007-2019) and in fact if you looked behind the curtains (literally), there was basically the equivalent of an archeological trash heap with generations of Google and SGI documents. Over time Charlie's got worse and worse; the food quality dropped significantly and became quite monotonous (true for the other cafes as well), and Noname (eventually named Yoshka's) did too. In fact, every great cafe I remember attending was eventually replaced with a worse version of itself.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoYou should know that people at google are the smartest people on the planet. Several of them assured me so.