Hacker News Reader

All of Google's documentations are awful.

I spent a few days on a pet project using the Google Sheets API and the official docs use a mix of 3 different versions of libraries, none of which are really up to date, and you have to guess which is the right one.

They don't care about developers.

View on HN

They put in quite some effort into writing the docs but then they often leave them to rot. Broken links and invalid code.

You'd have thought that a company the size of Google would have their public documentation problem totally solved by now.

It's more than just good stuff rotting. It's a fundamental lack of care, or maybe inability to ship anything that represents a big iteration. On the Google Analytics side, they are preparing to turn off data collection from the existing version of Analytics in 6 months and have been telling everyone to migrate to the new version for months now - but their "migration guides" are missing crucial technical detail, fall out of sync with the state of the new product a mere month or so after publishing, or contradict each other. It's like the whole effort of documentation has just been outsourced to the world of blogspam. Meanwhile, they started aggressively pushing for users to migrate their data collection when the new product itself didn't support some of the most basic use cases that needed to be migrated. Something is just off with Google's ability to ship these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com