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Comment by jmkd | Hacker News Reader

By maintaining >50% engineering staff for so long, Google has inadvertently created a fascinating study of the interplay between two spectrums: autistic and psychopathic.

More on the similarities and differences here, namely aspects related to empathy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826592/

It seems of no coincidence that so many of Google's social products have misfired - due in part to this interplay - influenced by the empathic dissonance found in managers from both sales and engineering departments.

I suppose it is another way of saying that Google (insert other SV giants here) employees are not only demographically dissimilar to the customers they serve, but that they cannot hope to represent them faithfully due to this empathic dissonance at senior decision-making levels.

Perhaps this is part of the fate that befalls most large and successful companies.

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By this theory, given the scale of Facebook’s success, Mark Zuckerberg should be a super-emptathetic person.

Ha, but that wasn't quite the theory I espoused...

1. Facebook was social at the core, and succeeded while still small. 2. Their efforts in this space were proactive 3. Google tried to add social much later, while already massive. 4. Their efforts were reactive.

I was referring to large companies initiating projects in response to perceived market conditions.

What I saw in 5 years at Google was engineers who didn't know what people wanted, and managers who didn't care what people wanted, hence my crude allusion to these comparable spectrums of behaviour.

Of course there were countless exceptions to this, however there were enough impactful examples of both for it to be noticeable and troublesome to me.

Buzz is the ultimate example.

I agree Buzz was probably the best example

https://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead (About the UI/UX nobody wanted)

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13goo... (Failure to respect users and imagine any blowback from violating trust and privacy)

Interesting theory! I can see some merit in it (even if most people are downvoting you, probably salty G employees haha).

That has nothing to do with why Google+ failed. Or Allo. It's because everyone was already using Facebook and WhatsApp and those have extreme network effects, and Google+/Allo were basically the same thing just owned by a different company. You don't need to invoke autism to explain it.

I found Google+ to be great, but not nearly as many people used it. I'm not on any social network anymore though.

FYI many of the people who were an Google+ are moving to MeWe.

I'm not suggesting it as a primary cause, I'm offering it as an explanatory factor that is not coincidental.

The network effects statement is both true and relatively unimportant, considering prior social and chat networks had periods of extreme dominance before Facebook and Whatsapp, and that others will in future.

All despite network effects.

Apologies if I came across somehow invoking autism as an explanation for business failure. I certainly applaud initiatives such as Dell's, and we can easily find examples of brilliantly successful products and services created by those on the spectrum.

I mean to suggest that psychographic profile differences between the large tech workforce and their potential customers may be enough to contribute to product failure. This is particularly so if the products require empathic understanding, a known problematic for both the autistic and psychopathic spectrums.

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