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Classic: You get what you measure.

But years ago the same thing happened to me at Apple. I was fixing bugs in every part of a major framework to help SnowLeopard ship only to get passed over for a minor promotion because I wasn't "critical on any one project".

I thought it was especially ironic since SnowLeopard was supposed to be a stability/performance release only to get massively delayed by people "shipping" things like the Objective-C garbage collection that made XCode unusable for months. The same stability/performance release that had a day-1 point release.

Maintenance is thankless work - it's that way in just about every industry around, short of total disaster no one is going to congratulate you for making something work the way it was supposed to work.

Personally I've had good reception of performance and security bug fixes at my current job. Even got a private bonus from CTO for one. (Small-Medium company)

But I can see how that'd be the exception.

Thanks for contributing that to Snow Leopard. It is my all time favorite OS X release precisely because it felt solid and fast, and didn’t add a bunch of useless new cruft to the interface or mess up anything I relied on. I haven’t felt that with any release since. It’s a depressingly rare feeling with something as fundamental as an OS.

Your bosses may be clueless, but at least folks at HN - that is actual Apple customers - really appreciate your hard work. It is thanks to people like you many of us still use Apple hardware.

> Actual Apple customers I mean, I get what you're attempting to say, but this is so delusional when looking at the most successful business in the world that it's almost farcical.

Xoogler here.

The most fun thing was the time when the lazy-ass billionaires who manage the place and are completely out of touch with the realities of the world (and randomly boast things like "don't be promo focused"--just slave out for us at our mercy while we collect our hundreds of millions[1] and give some as severance pay[2] to sexually-harassing buddies) decided to "fix" the problem by issuing a memo promoting "landings" and not "launches".

Guess what? Tada! Nothing, of course--with the exception that everyone now simply does 's/launch/landing/g' in their performance reviews.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/google-ce...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...

Reminds me of this account: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

OMG! This!! Why have I not seen this before? So depressingly true.

thanks

As someone who works at a company similar to Google (not FAANG, but just below), this is hilariously accurate.

> You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you...

YES! It's soooo not about smarts/(true) impact/anything truly relevant - it's about racing to the bottom via launches, and crazy ways to generate revenue. I find is so funny looking back, that pre-undergrad-graduation, I thought promotions came via actually doing great things.

> people internally usually warn about this shit, complain about it, file bugs about shitty performance, etc. It is ALL ignored

It's hilarious how L2s and L3s truly just don't give a damn about the opinions of those working at the company (first-level employees and those just above that)

After this job, I AM DONE with this big company ish. I'll leave that to the new-grads who still believe you get promoted by being smart ;)

rant over

Which big company starts with "N"? I can only think of Nintendo..

Nvidia? Netflix?

Netflix?

The N in FAANG stands for Netflix, because people needed an N and FAAG would be awkward.

Thanks for the answer and the jokey comment. :)

I've always wondered, why isn't Microsoft included in this? FAMANG maybe?

Because the term has been coined by Jim Cramer to denote the best performing tech stocks at that point in time. It does not take into account anything other than stock growth.

French uses GAFAM: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM (and leaves out Netflix). Funnily enough it used to be GAFA, but people eventually added Microsoft.

Also because Netflix is a world class engineering company - they led in cloud, popularised chaos engineering, and are in the process of destroying the cable industry.

I love your theory about how “N” got in there. Thanks for sharing.

Ah! I often wonder, how and why does Google decide to change the UI to well established products like Gmail? It's certain to annoy veteran users, so I'm particularly puzzled when the decide to shake things up, UX wise, for no apparent usability or feature gain.

I suppose your post is at least partly an explanation.

In this particular case, Gmail surely needed to be brought in line with Material Design (as has been happening to all Google apps, like Keep last week)... and the fact it now works offline (in its native interface, not the old kludge) is the biggest usability/feature gain (pretty huge, really).

They've actually been adding a ton of new features over the past year, especially with Inbox functionality being merged in.

In split view, clicking a message to view it also adds 'archive' buttons under the mouse. So viewing a message immediately archives it.

Even if you could type text and have it appear on screen in a reasonable time, the current state of gmail is /insane/.

Oh, I'm sure it's not random. I bet there's a rationale for almost every change in every piece of software UI. These are not bullies making changes just to annoy me; I know that. I can even understand why they stopped supporting the old look & feel after a grace period. I'm a software dev too, after all.

But from the point of view of a random user (me), it seems bizarre. The Gmail team changed things for no apparent gain. I don't care about Material Design -- I don't even know what that is! All I know is that the immediately previous incarnation of Gmail looked less cluttered and felt snappier. I know it's not accurate, but sometimes it feels they make UI changes just to show the app is not abandoned, whether this changes make sense or not.

There are some nice things about the new UI: e.g., it's possible to take actions (such as delete) on a email in the inbox in 1-click. It's also that gmail now has lot of new things. e.g., snooze, integration with tasks which probably meant that they had to update the UI regardless.

I just want to say, this is my favorite HN comment edit ever. :)

Exact same situation at Amazon. Launches (doesn't matter how useless and broken) >> Fixes

>>others just begin optimizing for promotion as opposed to optimizing for what is good for the user or the company.

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy": In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

Sounds like Google has become just another big company.

Google Fit is a good example of this. It was a simple app that worked extremely well in showing how many steps you took today. But they had to do a major redesign and emphasize newly invented, meaningless stats like 'Heart Points'.

Sounds like a novel Joseph Heller wrote I read in high school featuring Major Major Major Major and a guy named Oar rowing to Sweden.

Looks like my job at the IT service company has a similarity with Google. We cared a lot about our clients when we were small.

I can understand these reasons, but come on, at least some of the execs must have noticed that the new Gmail is a total mess, I simply can't believe they're all clueless. This actually made me and people like me to migrate away from Gmail. Do they really want to loose the competitive advantage they used to have?

The execs probably know but are also victims of the same perverse incentives.

It's not their fault it's worse, they did an excellent job of launching the update!

This means people at the very top should look back and see where they fucked up as it looks like this machine got a life on its own and starts to act against the best interests of the company.

Any chance we can get inbox “relaunched” instead of shut down? It’s miles better than gmail and my favorite google product by far. That they are killing it is absolutely insane.

I went back to Gmail to get used to it before Inbox was officially shut down. It was so unbearable to use I went back to Inbox in hopes that Gmail is uncrippled by the time I'm forced to use it.

We'll see but I'm not holding my breath.

I just got my first non-gmail email account a few weeks ago, been slowly switching over. Zero, performance issues with ProtonMail.

Comment deleted since the parent was updated.

Was not sure if that was allowed here. Updated now.

That answers my question : why do these guys keep redesigning a perfectly fine UI, making it actually worse than it was, not solving any real UX issues?

Allo is canned?

Unfortunately a lot of product manager roles are hired based on how many new products/features that person launched, and not the actual impact to the company or customers (that information is usually confidential or impossible to tease out from one product anyway).

In reality the Product Manager roles should often be to nurture products to perfection over the long-term, and to be an absolute expert on the category.

Often though those people who want to nurture great products over the long-term just go on to start their own businesses! So the field is left with flashy people who launch flashy products very often, but who don't really understand the business, the industry, or their customers.

This is absolutely true.

The problem is, it's easy to measure launches and their effects. It's almost impossible to measure "nurturing" or separate out its effects. So that isn't rewarded.

So you're right -- if you know you're going to do an amazing ongoing job with a product, it makes far more sense to do it as an owner (reap the rewards) than as a salaried PM.