5 ms·
A lot of this is believable (i.e. can be taken for real, not satire) if you don't read into each point, because a lot of it is quite different from how Google d
by beering 14y ago
A lot of this is believable (i.e. can be taken for real, not satire) if you don't read into each point, because a lot of it is quite different from how Google does things:
1. At Google, code has to be designed, written, tested, and reviewed. You can't just start writing and shipping stuff, partly because there's so much infrastructure, and partly because you pay for shoddy code later. Google has long outgrown the kind of "start-up" velocity that you feel at Facebook.
2. Arguably, software does need to be talked about and debated. Google and many others hold meetings to make sure teams don't end up with 5 incompatible siloed components when what they really needed was a server and multiple clients. Teams have been bitten in the past by the "shit, let's rewrite all this except with a good design" problem. Certainly, they try to keep engineers out of meetings as much as possible.
3. Google doesn't have Larry and Sergey micromanaging things, and PR has been something that Google's struggled with. The role of a CEO is debatable.
4. Sure, although a low stock price isn't without consequences.
5. Several design changes have been made to food at Google: healthier snacks on the snack shelves, color-coding snacks, more plates of the smaller variety in cafes. Some people do get the Noogler 15.
6. Engineers can be pretty bad at making certain kinds of decisions, especially because they spend a lot of time heads down on a small components. (Have you seen the typical engineer-designed UI?) Google PMs that work between teams focus a lot on product decisions that affect the users and other products. Remember criticism that Google just makes a bunch of random, disconnected products?
7. Facebook has had some embarrassing "launches" of Hackathon products. One poorly thought-out launch can mean multiple criminal investigations and loss of user trust.
8. Social is important to Google, but it's hard getting people to agree that it's important.
9. Does it drive away candidates?
10. Trust is all fun and games until you give people in your PRC office extensive privileges to the internal network.
- jrockway 14y ago+1 I can kind of see the logic behind the author's first point. When I write code for fun, I don't write design docs or invite friends over for design reviews. I just do whatever I want, mostly typing in lines of code, until I can't stay awake anymore. And it is a lot of fun. The problem is, it's ignoring things like "making money" and "not annoying users" and things like that. When you need to engineer instead of play, then you need to think about things like: "how can I not write this code". And that's why you need design docs and design reviews and meetings: to learn, to share knowledge, and to ensure that your time spent programming is the best possible use of that time. If someone said, "your job is to write as much code as possible and push to production every eight seconds", that would be fun. I just don't think the company would last longer than ten years. At that point, that company would do nothing but extinguish fires, and a new upstart would be doing "more with less" and out-innovate them. Name the popular tech companies from twenty years ago that you interact with on a daily basis today. Yeah.
- btilly 14y agoThank you for demonstrating the truth of Steve Yegge's observation in https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSK... that Google's software culture tends towards risk-adverse conservatism.
- Resident_Geek 14y agoDon't worry, I don't think there's any controversy there. Google is quite conservative, engineering-wise.
- codeonfire 14y agoFirst, what are you trying to say? Are you being sarcastic like the original post? Or are you making genuine observations about Google and approve of them?
- ABS 14y ago> 1. At Google, code has to be designed, written, tested, and reviewed. You > can't just start writing and shipping stuff, partly because there's so much > infrastructure, and partly because you pay for shoddy code later. Google > has long outgrown the kind of "start-up" velocity that you feel at > Facebook. you are assuming it's impossible to design, write, test and review a small change or a small set of changes and get it into production quickly. The assumption is wrong, all you need is good people, the right processes (formal and informal, i.e. discipline) and the right tools. That's what continuous deployment is about
- brown9-2 14y ago1. At Google, code has to be designed, written, tested, and reviewed. You can't just start writing and shipping stuff, partly because there's so much infrastructure, and partly because you pay for shoddy code later. What makes you think Facebook doesn't design and test code, or that the other concerns don't apply to them as well?