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Comment by Zelphyr | Hacker News Reader

I feel like he's touching on a fact that we in software development and UI/UX design need to take heed; know when to stop.

Case in point: Google Maps. The old version used to not be as pretty but it worked really well. The new one looks fantastic. It's also slow, buggy, and not nearly as feature rich. Someone, somewhere inside the Google Maps team said, "We need to put out an update!" and nobody asked, "But, why?"

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Someone on all the Google design teams needs to stop hiding functionality behind ambiguous hamburger menus. Often they don’t even save any space or declutter the interface in any meaningful way. It’s extremely annoying and makes any useful setting or power-user function completely undiscoverable.

Like many google products, there's one or two basic features that I'd love to (re)enable to make the thing infinitely more usable for me, but which they simply refuse to.

With google maps it's the ability to enable scale all the time, not just showing scale briefly during zoom in/out changes.

I'm sure people asked. But you don't get promoted by not doing things. You get promoted by doing. So they do.

The median Googler works there for about a year, too, so I guess they have little interest or ability to understand existing code.

There's a brief commentary at the bottom of the OP in case anyone missed it.

My catchphrase with my kids: "just because you can doesn't mean you should".

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