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Comment by julianlam | Hacker News Reader

My feeling is that at Google, building something novel (e.g. community contributions) is more important than maintaining something (e.g. dealing with spam/abuse in community contributions). Unless it brings in profit or collects valuable user data, anything that takes developer hours to maintain eventually gets canned.

There could be a code silo issue here as well. My understanding is Google dev teams are very mobile and hop from one project to the next, and so the knowledge and desire to maintain something goes away with it.

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I hear this explanation a lot. What I don't get is how Google, a company known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers, hasn't realized that their organizational structure causes this sort of build-and-abandon pattern. In any case, the rest of us at large shouldn't have to suffer just because Google can't figure out how to build meaningfully long-lasting services.

Build and abandon makes total sense for Google. They are participating in an IP land rush. Expect this to accelerate.

The engineers that Google hires to keep them from working for competitors are used to build as many new products and features as possible. Abandoned products are assets in Google's IP portfolio and continue to protect them against competing products and features long after Google has closed the door.

Are they though? ("Known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers?") I've actually never heard something in that direction, in many signs it is not the case (starting with broken recruiting).

It is however I believe good at keeping engineers happy, and good and good at managing their engineer infrastructure (though it is very Google-specific, and not necessarily a good fit for the rest of the world). But that doesn't say that engineers are being managed cleverly or efficiently.

I'm sure they are aware (or at least some people there are aware), especially since it is repeatedly pointed out on the internet. They just might not care.

I can't imagine they care.

Yeah, people are justifiably upset that they dropped this feature. But they are also, to my knowledge, the online video source that ever offered a feature like this in the first place. So nobody's upset is realistically going to translate into an exodus to a competitor, and the effect on their bottom line is negligible, and they have zero reason to care.

You know how the last 3 hours of any game of Monopoly is just this long, shitty, inhuman slog that isn't fun for anyone, except perhaps the person who lucked into owning all the properties? We've made it to that phase of the game.

We’ve been at that phase of the game for centuries if not longer. There is no easy fix

Google seems to want you to believe they are a Hanlon's Razor Schroedinger's Cat: the two most likely options are A) malice or B) incompetence. Their "well known" motto "Don't Be Evil" would have you believe it must entirely be incompetence, and so would Hanlon's Razor, normally. But with the number of smart people on staff how could they be so incompetent? Is it malice? Should we take Google on their "word" that they are simply incompetent on an amazing, heretofore undiscovered, scale, or maybe start to question if they are actively malevolent? Is the cat alive or dead? Who can observe it?

Did the cat meet its earnings target last quarter?

The constant product churn hasn't hurt ad revenue so why would they care? If they actually had to survive on some of these products they would change how they incentivized their employees.

Google has no incentive to improve this. Their revenue is unaffected by all of this.

In this specific case, I think it's more that they had numbers on use vs. abuse and decided it was too expensive to maintain.

There was no way to have those numbers until the feature existed, so of course it got built. But once it got deployed, oh well... The public didn't use it in a way that makes sense to maintain.

Some creators I follow have said they wanted to use community translations but didn't because the feature was underdeveloped. Particularly the fact that contributions are anonymous so there's no way to build trust in a particular translator, every translation for every video needs to be scrutinized and they just don't have time.

But from Googles beep boop robot analytics perspective they just see that nobody is using the feature and assume it's because nobody wants it.

It's almost like Google's product owners have no idea how to build and maintain comprehensive products. If people aren't using a feature, figure out why and can it if it's not being used because of a lack of interest instead of said feature being poorly implemented or maintained.

Does Google talk to anyone outside of their engineering bro culture?

Google Developers video [0] describing exactly how you should speak to users to get feedback: usability tests. This is pretty standard in the UX community. Here's Steve Krug, author of the Amazon top-selling book on web design "Don't Make Me Think," showing how to do it similarly [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YL0xoSmyZI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8

Edit: added Steve Krug video.

Yes, that would require them to actually talk to customers. This is anathema to their way of operating.

I don't know why you're assuming they didn't do this.

I don’t think this is a problem specific to google but the software industry in general. Showcasing your skills is a lot harder While you are maintaining something and it’s easier when you are building something new. And since the industry heavily penalises anyone who hasn’t “grown” over the years, the devs have a big incentive to keep building new things/Be involved in high visibility projects rather than be in a maintenance project.

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