Is Google far too much in love with engineering? | Hacker News Reader

Is Google far too much in love with engineering?

news.cnet.com

30 pointskadhinn40 comments

>However, I wonder whether such slight, but no doubt data-driven, infelicities, such as the launch of Google Buzz, the riotously misguided home page designs, or the launch of Nexus One, might have done with one or two fewer data-driven managers and one or two more people who offered suggestions about what real people like and how they might react?

It's very easy to look at a company like Google and find examples of significant failures.

Though actually, I think the 'failures' he brings up are not quite the failures he thinks they are. They're not actually data-driven decisions. They're data-collecting experiments. Google is in no way wedded to any given device or approach. It's pivot, pivot, pivot, often in eight directions at once. Releasing a polished product with top-notch marketing is a good way to make a lot of money in the short term, but your customers get very attached to what you've given them, and it makes it a lot harder to innovate in the long term.

The author of this article backs up his argument with little substance. No decision-making process is perfect; pointing out the warts in Google's isn't much of an indictment. Really, to my mind the whole thing comes across as a bit whiny.

  The author of this article backs up his argument with little substance.

Engineering mind need real facts :)

Here's a personal beef describing how Google places too much emphasis on engineering and too little on the experience paying customers have with its services: Google Apps. Support is almost nonexistent for nearly anything that isn't already on their roadmap, the roadmap is set by engineering and not based on customer feedback, the deployment schedule is completely closed and updates frequently surprise domain admins & their users, billing for various services (GSAs, GAPE, Postini) is non consolidated, and various features break at regular intervals. It doesn't help that a lot of their engineering showcases in Gmail -- Labs features -- they pitch and great improvements to Gmail, but offer zero support for. This included Offline when it was in Labs.

Google is a great engineering company, but it still doesn't "get" the enterprise.

I paid for the Premium Google Apps for one of my domains. When it was about to expire, I got emails almost daily reminding me to renew. The day before it was to expire, someone from Google Apps actually called my cell about renewing.

For a different domain that I was using regular Google Apps on, I couldn't get an email response to a support question I sent several months prior.

Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.

> Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.

No, that's exactly their focus. You got a lot of attention regarding the product that you were a customer of, the premium paid apps.

In the other instance, you were the product: a pair of eyeballs they could sell to advertisers. And the advertisers are the customers in that instance.

I should add that they were never so helpful when I inquired from my premium domain in the past. I only received a lot of attention when it was time to renew.

For example, I couldn't figure out how to cancel the premium account, and I sent an email asking. No response ever came.

Sure, the author is a bit whiny, but I still think he has a point.

One example: design. I still haven't seen a single page from Google that looked stunning, or even good (to my eyes, obviously). Their entire design philosophy seems to be infinite-amount-of-monkeys-hacking-css and A/B-testing. They even manage to make their main landing page, with only a handful of items, look quite messy.

The method may be scientific and all, but it doesn't produce good looks.

Because good looks don't necessarily equate to good performance. They optimize for conversion, not beauty, and make an ass-load more money because of it. That's how it should be done.

I agree with you, but it is still possible the they are only optimizing within a local minimum (ala Jason Cohen's latest blog post - http://blog.asmartbear.com/local-minimum.html).

I think you're ignoring the fact that a product as familiar as the Google search page alters the search space you're trying to optimize. No matter how bad of an idea it was to add background images, the fuss that it caused was way out of proportion.

Any change that deviates too much from the current state of things has a huge amount of friction working against it. Whatever you think of the current design, I defy anyone to come up with a major overhaul that makes up for the loss of warm fuzzies the average user associates with the current home page.

You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. You can just tweak the details, in the turd-polishing sense.

That being said, being ugly can of course be profitable. If you want to signal that you are cheap, for example, the ugliness helps. Just look at the difference between, say, Walmart and an Apple store. So maybe Google wants to look cheap - but I for one wish they didn't.

> You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design.

That's just crap. You can test anything, including entirely different versions of an app. The idea that you can't test good design is what designers tell themselves to justify their operating on gut feeling and pulling opinions out of their asses.

There isn't anything a user does that you can't come up with a way to test, designers are just afraid of actual data showing them they're full of shit. They don't want their ideas challenged democratically by users, they want their own ideas used instead because of some misplaced sense of taste. Engineers do it right, test, iterate, improve, follow the data wherever it leads regardless of your own ego.

It may be crap, undemocratic, pulled out of behinds, and egotistic. It's still true though.

You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.

And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps. It is just as in language: you can test two different novels, for example, but pretty much all the "intermediate novels" you can think of just don't make any sense.

> You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.

Yet it's still testable. There isn't anything you can't test somehow and there isn't any design any designer could come up with that can't benefit from incremental improvement as a result of testing.

> And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps.

That's your own strawman, no one says you have to. Test radically different designs against each other, testing will still declare a winner and that winner can be incrementally improved by further testing.

I submit to you as an example Chrome, which while technically sound has not exactly caught fire, despite Google's ability to promote it from the Google page.

by what metric do you argue that it has not caught fire in ways that are remotely possible based on past experience with browser market share?

By the metric of Chrome zooming up to about 4% share and then staying there, despite Google's frequently promoting it from the most popular page on the web, promotion no other browser could ever have.

On our web sites Chrome has gained no share in the last six months, while Safari (due to iPhone's increased share) has surpassed FireFox.

This recent report, http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20001546-264.html, actually gives Chrome 6.1%.

I'm just saying given the engineering resources dedicated to it, and the unparalleled promotion resource available, it could do much better.

Personally, I use Chrome, but I object to the product management decision not to offer a dedicated multi search box like FF and IE. I think this was an engineering driven decision because the omnibox is so [fill in your favorite positive adjective].

Yeah, Google could be pretty successful if only they didn't focus so much on engineering.

Are you arguing that anybody who is successful is by definition doing everything right?

Maybe they are successful because they do more rights than wrongs. Or they were in the right place at the right time. Or because they lacked a better competitor. The history of IT is littered with wildly successful yet sub-optimal companies.

> Do complex interview questions really test your educational achievement? ...

When interviewing prospective software engineer employees, a Google interviewer asks software engineering related questions, to test the interviewee's knowledge of software engineering. Questions like these:

http://jpaint.drizzlehosting.com/google.html

That's a nice illustration of the balance of creativity, lateral thinking, logical thinking, and technical competence Google expects from the engineers it interviews. Note that the interview questions aren't in the form of, "Where did you complete your expected MSc in Computer Science?" Instead, the interviewee is expected to demonstrate real achievement from their education; i.e., knowledge and thinking ability.

But Google hires non-engineer craftsmen, too. Catering staff, to steal the article author's example. Just a hunch: Google conducts more than one type of interview: catering staff are not expected to design class libraries or database tables as part of their interview process.

This is how Dodge explained it: "The engineering background brings a rigorous thought process that questions assumptions and requires accurate data in the decision process. That doesn't mean every decision will be perfect, but it will be based on data...not opinions."

I think that strategy is unimpeachable. I've worked at plenty of non-engineering companies, and the inability to question assumptions seems rampant. If Google manages to avoid that, then whatever it costs will likely be worth it.

What's wrong with the Nexus One launch?

Right. The Nexus One is a working, production, reference implementation of what an Android phone SHOULD be, not something Google expected to make them rich.

Well that makes the point of focusing too much on the engineering side...corporations are for-profit entities and they are not there to make the "perfect" product but rather a marketable product that will generate them net positive cash flows...after all, if you are a shareholder of Google, you expect them to MAXIMIZE their earnings, not just make things for the fun of it, or cause its interesting (example: the free optical network they want to give to a select bunch of small to medium-size cities...)

Honestly, why is it such a bad thing when a company with absurdly high profit margins delegates some of the income back into improving the general standard of living for everyone.

Call it what you like. Write it off as them improving their image with the public, or as getting more users into the ecosystem, or becoming more vertically integrated.

But fundamentally, why is doing something that is good for people looked at as such a bad thing. From what I understand the public don't even have the majority stake in the company, and don't really have to get a say in how it is run. If they don't like that they can buy other companies stock.

If ones goal is to maximize happiness (or some other equivalent metric), there will be times at which the decision to maximize profit will diverge from this goal, and the ethical decision will be to spend money (which you have from profits in other sectors) to develop something at a net loss because you think its right.

(I'm not affiliated with google, this is just a broader point that irritates me).

Most companies try to show they are ethical by donating or being a corporate sponsor for a charity or event. I like Google's concept of just giving things out for free since I am a great benefactor of that.

Google can make some of the money back through increased ads, but its not always clear how they do it for some products where there isn't any visible ads at all.

I think you mean beneficiary, not benefactor.

yup you are right, sorry

With Android, they're preventing someone else from locking down smartphones and getting in the way of Google's advertising business.

Why companies even care about what their shareholders think?

It's not like they gonna show up with their shares and ask for their money back.

Only things that I can think of is that members of the board might care because they can be sacked by shareholders, also company might want to pat shareholders on their heads because it is planning to sell more of its stock to gather some more free cash and wants it to be as much as possible.

I don't think you can sack google founders and I don't think google cares about money from selling shares anymore, so why anyone at google should care about what shareholders think?

The Nexus One was intended to drive the improvement of Android, which is intended to increase ad revenue.

My understanding is that the free optical network they'll be giving out is intended to showcase the effect of high-quality internet service on a community.

Google seems to be committed to the idea that what's good for the internet is good for Google.

Perhaps they are maximizing earnings with an outlook of fifty to one hundred years. Allow their engineers a free hand so that product offerings are as diverse as possible and can later be integrated for advanced usages. Build interesting things and simply give away those not immediately profitable to gain and maintain constant mindshare in consumers. Rather than product ideas starting at the top and trickling down through layers of bureaucracy, anecdotes seem to tell of a flattened structure wherein thousands of independent projects churn in a chaotic maelstrom of ideas, with internal popularity and management approval selecting how projects will be made public, monetized upon or released through marketing machinery.

As to your example, free optical opens consumers to try new technology since their costs are minimal. This creates general consumer knowledge that the technology exists, which creates demand, which can be fulfilled by monetizing the persons already geared for running and maintaining it. And if the experiment fails, it was decent marketing and proved the market doesn't exist without having to gear up and release product specific sales, marketing and other auxiliary offices needed for a paid product launch.

One presumes that shareholders of google buy in with the knowledge and approval that the company works differently than many others. Whether this direction will be advantageous or disadvantageous is what the stockholders are wagering upon.

If you buy GOOG stock because you expect them to maximize short term profit, you haven't really been paying attention. It's not like they haven't been telling people what they're up to:

http://investor.google.com/corporate/ceo-message.html

http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-lette...

They're not a product company. They're an advertising company. This may change, but that does not mean all their efforts should be put towards changing it. They're expanding and creating their existing market, while putting feelers into others.

I think it's funny this article showed up on the front page at the same time as another article about the Dunning-Krueger effect.

The question should be: Is cluelessness in "soft skills" worse than technical cluelessness? Really, both are bad. (Example: Cuil)

Google's success wasn't so much coming up with the best web search technology but finding a way of converting that to billions of dollars in revenues and profits.

To me Google have excelled at both the technology and the marketing - which is why they are so successful.

Having said that, if you can't manage to be good at both technology and marketing, I suspect that you are better off being weak at technology than marketing. Plenty companies thrive with average/poor technology but an excellent understanding of what the market wants. I've known plenty companies (some from the inside) where the technology was good but the marketing was weak - things generally don't turn out too well.

Agreed. Anyone that tries big things often enough will have both successes and failures.

And I do seem to recall an overwhelming success like Windows starting off as somewhat of a failure.

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