The bug that almost killed Google's Pac-Man doodle
medium.com
medium.com
One of the factors we'd identified in the post-mortem was actually the difference in Google culture vs. the rest of the world culture. When we heard strange whirring noises coming from nearby computers in the office, our first impulse was "Woah, that's really cool! We're seriously going to launch this on the home page? Can I help?" While at many other offices, if you hear strange whirring noises from an employee's computer, the reaction is "You're fired!"
Similar cultural mismatches have been responsible for a few other gaffes, eg. Google Buzz was a huge hit internally because pretty much everything inside Google is (was?) public anyway and people are very tolerant of different opinions, and it never occurred to us that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.
This explains so much.
EDIT: A year ago I wrote this, and it seems I was right:
> Google is self-selecting to employ those people who are fine with the idea of Google recording everything they do. This does not bode well for the rest of us.
I'd say that peak "all your data are belong to us" was back in 2010, before the launch of Google Buzz and various location/wifi privacy flaps in Europe.
I would be more worried now about the same dynamic existing in every other startup that takes off. When a startup is on a break-out trajectory, it has its pick of applicants from a wide number of elite institutions. Most of them will never have experienced powerlessness or marginalization, because that's what it takes to get into a hot startup. And so they generally won't be able to empathize with what it's like to have arbitrary fact X in your background taken and used against you in devastating ways, even if they do genuinely sympathize.
Google glass might have caught on as a 50$ toy, but at 1,500$ it's firmly into the realm of things people working at Google would buy, and that's about it. What's really interesting IMO is they could have made a 50$ version of the basic concept, but it was simply not on anyone's radar.
In theory, these blinders are why startups can show up and eat incumbents lunches. But, when starts are drawing from the same talent pool there making the same kind of mistakes.
Net result, way to many food delivery services.
In a few years a cheap version of the idea may start making the rounds like the mini Segway's. But, again when it was obviously going to fail at that price point why continue?
That's not "what it takes to get into a hot startup"; it's a self-selecting property that people reinforce, consciously or otherwise. You can and should make a conscious effort to counter that bias, and leaving aside all the other reasons you might want to do so, you'll counter the monoculture that can lead to "let's build things people like us want" (which fails if it becomes "and almost nobody else does").
Recommended viewing: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
Is it really that bad? I'm not personally familiar with US office culture, but it seems like an exaggeration. Why would a boss throw away an otherwise functioning employee over something so minor? Why would someone choose to work under such a punitive regime?
I've been lucky enough to never have such a boss, but then, I work in tech, where the supply & demand equation has been on the worker's side since I started my career.
Not in most US states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_will_employment
Firing is difficult here and is only done for the most severe offenses. You could be "laid off," but you'll never know exactly why, (as you could then sue for improper termination), but even then, that involves a lot of paperwork and he won't sign up for that instantly after hearing a noise.
I have had my supervisor give me talks about proper workplace conduct for these kinds of things though.
This is really disturbing. Imagine a major Google product launch failing because no one on the dev team had thought of testing it on hardware, OSes, or browsers outside of their than their own laptops. I can't imagine that would ever happen; no one would allow such a comprehensive gathering of idiots to putter along unsupervised on a major product.
So how is it possible that Google existed for over a decade before it even occurred to anyone to consider the users' safety and privacy? It doesn't make sense to me; I don't understand.
People are horrible at coming up with social failure cases because we're often blind to such issues that others face.
I routinely open a bunch of tabs with interesting things, then read them. Youtube included - I'd like to be able to open a bunch of videos, then watch then one at a time in the tabs.
I don't want all of them to start playing at once.
Every time the concept of a "Web Bill of Rights" comes up, I want Article I to be: no use of audio without express user consent. That consent might be stored for a time on a per domain basis, but only for 1st party content.
The visual equivalent was the much despised popup. Autoplay shouldn't be used for the same reason.
There are plenty of ways to trigger it accidentally, like loading Google, then walking away from your desk, or doing a google search in a presentation and pausing to talk about something.
I might expect an autoplaying video with sound at a news or social media site, but I certainly wouldn't expect it from Google.com
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=567398%... [2] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ainput.moz... [3] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amozillazi...
- A web browser plug-in loads Google's homepage in the background.
- There's a weird standard to writing Polish characters with diacritics.
- Some Windows systems carry around this decades-old bitmapped font.
I think it's similar to why I love those lists titled "X myths that programmers believe about Y". It's insane how varied the world is and how that comes out when we deal with as many domains as we do when programming.
I mean, yeah, personal responsibility, but google already has a preflight checklist with code reviews and tests and such. Treating it as a systemic feature protects a lot of stuff you want.
1.) post-mortems at Google don't blame people, they blame processes, and then they suggest ways those processes could be fixed.
2.) I know Marcin personally and I've never known him to blame anyone either. And indeed, he didn't: the takeaway from the article was that the complexity of the web was at fault.
My best guess is that he included that because many other organizations who do post-mortems, who he might want to reach with his writing, do think in terms of "Who is to blame?", and addressing it explicitly may be better than leaving it unanswered.
With that said, I clicked the click-bait title, and I enjoyed the article. (shrug.)
tldr; google homepage pacman game auto played sound, and a browser extension in firefox was silently loading google.com.
Telling a story in an entertaining way isn't just listing the facts.
> I don’t remember how exactly we figured it all out
The rest of the article was an interesting read, but not fully taking the blame seems wrong to me.
Was expecting some explaining of this bit, but it's the only time he mentions it. That is indeed a crazy day!
http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f10/strange-mysteriou...
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/windows-xp-computer-...
Yep, that sounds like Google support alright.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72157629963516...
When I read this blog post, I thought the name was familiar and was very pleased to be reminded of his good work in this area as well.
Any idea what the bug was?
Explanation of the bug at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossie..., in the section "Just Passing Through".