Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Having talked about similar questions with friends who work/worked at Google, you need to first ask "How do people get promoted at Google?" The answer to that (by launching new things that get abandoned soon after rather than improving/fixing existing things) answers your question and many others like it.

View on HN

Everyone at Google says this. It’s not true. Of course it contributes to the problem, but trust me a broken messaging strategy doesn’t naturally arise from Software Engineers trying to get incremental promotions.

It comes from two parts of google that are totally broken and don’t know it:

1) Product Management 2) Legal

The PMs are running from meeting to meeting trying to please execs and not doing anything that looks like sophisticated product development. Each team has their own broken process and crappy dashboards. I can’t even describe how irrational and broken the process for making product decisions is.

Then there are the lawyers. If you even think about doing something interesting or original they will say No and that’s the end of that. They’re shockingly risk averse. Even if every single competitor is doing a thing, you almost definitely can’t do that thing at Google. My team was BARELY allowed to know how many users we had! And we certainly couldn’t know anything about them. Because Legal.

this >> " trying to please execs"

This is interesting. As a non-Google PM, whenever I face legal or compliance-related pushback on what I think are fair uses of data and reasonable risks, I think to myself, There is no way I’d be facing this constraint at <big company>! But perhaps that’s been a bad assumption.

If the big company has a cash cow, legal does everything to protect the cow.

If the big company is hurting, legal works to find ways to justify everything and anything.

Bad assumption. I worked for Snap and anything that goes out has to be reviewed and signed off by legal. Don’t even get me started on looking at data. For some data requests, Directors had to be involved and I had to justify to them to give me access for couple hours to some piece of data.

I also worked for FB and it’s not as strict as Snap but similar.

Here are comments from a former Google VP about legal concerns during Hangouts engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mD7_nGPA4&t=652s

There is a Village Global podcast episode where Eric Schmidt is asked this question [1]. He basically says that leadership did not "get" messaging platforms. I think of this as similar to how RIM/blackberry did not "get" the iphone. Nor did Steve Ballmer. It's equivalent in screwup magnitude to Microsoft not getting mobile. This requires massive leadership oversight.

Now, having worked at Google during these times (including the Allo launch where the team went around Google trying to rally the troops on why it was going to work), I can say that the PM structure at Google meant that a ground up led effort to build a competitive messaging platform just wouldn't happen. PMs basically rotate products every few years and nobody really has passion for the thing they are working on it. Its a very mechanical role oriented around features, roadmaps, growth bookkeeping etc. None of these things would yield a competitive messaging platform without a mandate from the top.

Now why was there no mandate from the top? Well, I think that leadership was confident that Google already had what it needed to build messaging into their dominant platforms. Between youtube and Android it felt like that if the competition in messaging were to grow in feature set, it would become more like these platforms (facebook turning into youtube with video, etc). Google could then add messaging and meet them at some point in the future. Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the podcast episode.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-globals-ventur...

> Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the podcast episode.

I've heard that from other people at Google as well. But the fact that YouTube isn't a messaging/social app in any significant way is part of why I stick with it. I wonder if I'm not the only one.

It's true but not because they haven't tried. I remember they had some feature to share a video with your direct contacts/friends and open up a chat to talk about it.

I think this just goes to show it isn't as easy as they thought it was. I am sure Microsoft leadership thought it would be easy to turn a dominant consumer computing platform (windows) into a dominant mobile platform. I mean it is true that we are seeing a convergence to some degree with ios/ipad/macos. The thing is it doesn't happen as fast as needed for the competition to captialize on it. Facebook might eventually look like youtube. However, by the time it happens there will nothing left for youtube to gain. The market will be cooked.

i am conflating social network and messaging platform here which are too distinct things. Just trying to make a point about how easy it is to have irrational confidence in using the thing your successful in to gain success somewhere adjacent.

If youtube did start growing the messaging/social features you like, how would you remove yourself from it? thats where the videos are.

If they were intrusive, I'd just stop using it. The internet is full to the brim of videos from other platforms. YouTube isn't the only game in town. I use it mostly because it's convenient. If it became much less convenient (and, honestly, they've made a number of "enhancements" lately that have made it a bit less convenient), the cost/benefit ratio would no longer be favorable.

Isn’t it? Vaguely I hear of Vimeo being used for art videos but I kind of got the sense that the network effect and technology at Youtube was very strong. Where else do people go to watch videos? Where else can you host a live stream?

You can host videos on demand or live streams at Mux.com as well.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a community engineer at Mux.)

A lot of the respectable creators are transitioning to other platforms like Nebula or Curiosity Channel. Or at least that's my impression, I'm seriously considering joining, as the only thing that is on youtube that I consume now is the equivalent of trash TV (livestream VODs, which can be consumed much more efficiently in their home platform).

Which current (or recently released) things have a mandate from the top at Google at the moment ?

Cloud. GCP must compete on the same level as AWS and Azure. You can reverse engineer this by looking at the knobs "the top" has to make something happen. Staffing, money, acquisitions, etc.

So, it's B2b? No B2C or things like Gmail anymore? All I can think of rn is stadia.

Google has won consumer. Adding another consumer app doesn't really change the equation. Google Cloud as a product needs to compete in the market and not die or get sold off. This is a massive growth vector for the company. The main reason it is a different class of product. Paying for usage vs. ads.

Isn’t the second point an argument against fragmentation? Google had an integrated messaging platform, they’ve now abandoned it for multiple platforms. Where was Legal saying no to these new endeavors?

I wish we could rewind most of the web at least ten years. Everything was better then — I enjoyed Gmail, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, etc.

This is a meme. Yes, you need to change something about the state of the world but that change absolutely does not need to be launching a product. I work in the Core organization, which builds tooling for the rest of the company. My org within that has among the highest promotion rates (even to high levels) in the company and the primary thing we focus on is the sort of grungy "keep everything functioning" work that everybody says is anathema to promotions.

It is no secret that Google's product strategy is a mess. But I'm not convinced this is caused by the promo process. For communications strategy I think it is instead the following:

1. Messy code stacks make surviving tool deprecation a problem.

2. Google seems to be bad at staffing for proactive protection against maintenance work. If a product is working, staffing dwindles to match the maintenance load. But if suddenly a huge mandate comes along like a stack switch, it is not easy to get the heads you need to handle that spike in maintenance. Instead, the product gets triaged or dies.

3. It is really hard to push past 1B users of anything, and growing populations outside of the US and Europe are not desktop focuses, encouraging a "mobile first" solution that leaves desktop integration in the dust.

How many PMs does Core have compared to other PAs?

The problem isn’t really with SWEs but with the entire incentive structure of PMs and the product management chain.

They in turn are able to get more SWE headcount for these unfruitful ventures and end up failing upwards.

Core seems to have fewer PMs but we have similar problems with triaged products due to lack of heads. The PMs we do have also struggle with getting heads just as much as the SWEs do.

At the very least, I think it is clear that Google’s product failings are not just a result of the promo system.

I'd suggest a 4th reason: Google has so much money and so many high-traffic properties that it can keep a poorly designed or unpolished product going for years, more than long enough for the original people who designed and built it to move on/up inside the company. Google will just push the product on the front page of some existing property to bump traffic, or get creators/developers to use it in hopes of boosting their existing search rankings, or give away the product for free. Every company would try to do these things but Google has a big advantage.

This allows Google to be lazy about product-market fit and avoid asking the hard questions like "is this thing really better than the alternative" and "what's the ROI for people who adopt this".

I worked on what I'd consider a failed product, and there was no explicit acknowledgement of that fact ever, we just waited 3 years and quietly turned it off. A more drawn-out version of the same thing happened with Google Plus. There was never anything like a "product postmortem".

And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?

As per my comment below, it's not just stagnation - I was ok with where they were 5 years ago - it's that they've made an active effort to degrade the experience. Instead of clicking once in Gmail to start a video call, there is now some janky system where it starts a 'meet' and sends my mom an email asking her to join it. An email! When both of us are sitting there with Gmail open.

Which seems to be a reasonable human decision -- do you want to be the person that blocked your colleague from getting a promotion?

That would require you to pretend that Google listens to devs more than the MBAs they work for. Nothing says "market expertise" like having a sheet of paper that proves you once completed a class project to write a business plan.

If many managers are onboard with an idea, one engineer saying "no" doesn't have much weight. Also, if you keep saying "no" to things, you might be perceived as "negative" and it might come up in performance reviews. And it's often difficult to predict if an idea will work or not - a lot of it comes down to execution and future politics.

So, as an engineer, it's probably better to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, and try to get a promotion from it. It's stupid, but it's how it works. You will not progress within a company by saying "no", even if you are right and it stops a bad project.

(I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation)

> (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation)

I wouldn't work for Google, but have worked at a couple of very large software companies and this echoes my experiences with them.

It's one of the reasons that I prefer not working for large software companies -- people there tend to be more concerned with their own career than the products they work on.

> "And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?"

In any engineering organization, one can find people saying "wait a second, that's not a good idea" to pretty much anything.

And in many of them, it would be a good idea for someone to listen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com