Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore. A couple weeks ago there was an AMP article related to using real, source URLs, and a bunch of engineers from Google posted in defense.

This is absolutely Google trying to dictate what the web should be. If the US had functional antitrust authorities they would kill this.

View on HN

“I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore”

Got to justify that google pay check. Mostly to themselves, helps to do it out loud.

Upton Sinclair, circa 1900:

>It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

True 100 years ago, true today.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

If anything got me to stop using google it would be amp, it’s such a trash experience. It makes me click multiple times and load the content multiple times before I can get to what I want.

When you're working day to day you tend to lose sight of the bigger picture and only focus on the problem you're trying to solve and either let your managers mostly decide what problems you will solve, or just work to get "features" implemented for promotional reasons.

I don't accept this excuse. Google engineers are smart people. It's not like they are not aware of what they are building.

with the exception of the very few people who know how to manage upwards, when you are the bottom rung of the totem pole org chart (and i'm not talking about developer or engineer levels), you have zero say over what comes down from 2 or 3 levels above you.

I'm not suggesting they have 'say' over it. I'm saying they are aware of what they're building, and they're choosing to be complicit in it. I don't know if you can easily move to a different project within Google, but they certainly don't have to work at Google if they disagreed with it.

> I for the life of me don't understand how any Google AMP engineers can bother defending this anymore.

The narrative is “we develop an open standard that is widely adopted, and we’re not responsible for what people do with it”.

The team lead, @cramforce will also tell you tgat AMP is good for tge web.

I understand Google engineers saying the thing which gives them a healthy paycheck is good. What surprises me are the number of non-Google people who repeat the marketing spin — this is all about advertising, don’t give up your credibility uncompensated!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com