5 ms·

Am I odd in seeing a Google engineer discrediting Google's own product?

• throw2048 13y ago
  How do you know he's telling the truth? Disclaimer: I too work for Google. 2nd Disclaimer: No I don't.
  • gnufied 13y ago
    Sorry, you misunderstand me. I am as skeptical as you. I did not assume the statement as truth. I was just bit bewildered.
• bronson 13y ago
  The thread where we question the activities of employees outside their workplace was yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7459529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7459529
  • fennecfoxen 13y ago
    Ah, yes. Don't you love that we live in a day and age where you make a donation to a political movement and people who disagree with it call for your job? (A mainstream political movement, for that matter. Mainstream enough that they won.) Next step, I expect, will be the Spanish Inquisition. :P ... Sorry, everybody. I'd missed that one yesterday. :( We now return you to your regularly scheduled Google-skepticism
• RyanZAG 13y ago
  Probably not - Google is a big company and there are bound to be a number of employees not pleased with current direction at any time. It could be entirely personal reasons such as wanting to move to the GCE team but being denied because of a push towards mobile - maybe now he's forced to develop for Android and he likes iOS (if what he says is true, who knows?).
  • massev 13y ago
    No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself. Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.
    • toomuchtodo 13y ago
      > Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android. Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.
      • untog 13y ago
        So the only somewhat decent things that come to mind are some of Google's biggest consumer-facing products? Also, user experience is not the be all and end all. Profitability on the other hand...
        • toomuchtodo 13y ago
          Google makes substantial revenue from Calendar, Gmail, and Android? Yes, yes, I know. Adwords. They better hope licensing for self-driving cars takes off.
      • niketdesai 13y ago
        It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set of groups, technologies, and directions. Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well. I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  No, I think everyone sees someone claiming to be a Google employee (not specifically an engineer, though) trashing Google's product.