The Key To Gmail: Sh*t Umbrellas | Hacker News Reader

The Key To Gmail: Sh*t Umbrellas

techcrunch.com

44 pointsmk16 comments

I think the more appropriate analogy is "shit filter."

I really appreciate project managers that know when the customer is full of shit and can filter that out from our discussions, keeping me and my colleagues focused on the things that actually matter.

On the other hand, when I did front-end work, I was really annoyed that the management would keep the secrets of customer feedback to themselves and only let through the things that aligned with their own "vision." Honest feedback and actual usability testing never seemed to be something that the higher-ups cared about; they simply wanted to go through the motions. I wished they could just let some of this information through.

I think the more appropriate analogy is "shit filter."

The article specifically mentions the difference between shit "funnels" (or filters) and shit umbrellas. Shit is shit, there's no good amount, other than zero, that it's good for engineers to have rain down on them. If there's anything of importance in the shit a good manager's job is to fish it out, wash it off, and pass that on to their engineers.

The revelation that Buzz was produced by a team of 30 engineers and one product person, who only ever meet to give product demos, explains much about that launch.

I'm not a mindless Google-basher. They have many brilliant products. But Buzz was a pointless product that looked terrible and broke user expectations, produced entirely on a "because the data would be fun to have" basis -- something you'd expect from engineers who aren't thinking about the customer.

Engineers can build great, customer-focussed products (heck, that's the idea behind most of YCombinator). But this group did not.

> Internally, the Google Buzz team was known as “Team Taco Town”

So apt: http://www.hulu.com/watch/1447/saturday-night-live-taco-town — It's 15 great tastes all rolled into one!

An unfortunate name, considering.

I love this article, I showed this to some of my associates at my last job and they fell on the floor. With one of them exclaiming "Dude you are a shit Umbrella" and I had such noble descriptions of the position like "Shielding the developers" and "The gate keeper". Well at lest I know what my job title is now, I guess I should see if Google is hiring for any Shit Umbrella positions, I am pretty good at it.

I found this line interesting: "There are several hundred thousands lines of javascript in Gmail – one of the biggest in the world".

I'd like to see what the engineers have to say on managing that much JavaScript.

This is what they'd say:

http://code.google.com/closure/

And how they do to keep a good load time for gmail, with the potential down download that much. (Though at my day job we probably rival that amount of JS, but it's an intranet app, so nobody in the wild gets to see it.)

Gmail uses the Google Web Toolkit, a lot of the javascript that runs on the site is actually produced via code that is originally in java.

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Gmail precedes GWT.

> Google uses Gmail internally (obviously), switched over from Microsoft Outlook at launch (about 6 years ago)

I was under the impression that pine was a popular client at Google.

100 engineers? What have they been up to for the last 5 years? (besides buzz)

Buzz, Wave, and Gmail Chat (including Video) aren't enough for you? How about Gmail Labs, which didn't exist 2 years ago, but now lets you skin Gmail, use keyboard shortcuts, embed youtube videos, etc. etc.? Calendar integration, a better text editor, embedded photos, multiple simultaneous attachment uploads w/ progress bars, better filters, incrementally better spam protection, plus the fact that I now have 7.5 gigs of space in my inbox, all while fending off attacks from Chinese hackers?

I think you grossly underestimate the amount of things they've accomplished in the past year, and the number of people it takes to run a service this popular. Facebook releases with grandiose redesigns, prompting temporary revolts among their users. Gmail improves incrementally, so much so that I can't imagine living without it as my primary e-mail client, but the sense of novelty that comes with a massive redesign is lost. Personally, I prefer Gmail's approach.

That sounds like a lot of work for 10 people, or a normal amount for 20.

Software as popular as Gmail is like an iceberg: most of the engineering effort doesn't go towards user-visible features but towards the -ilities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilities

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