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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> Google builds well polished products that work well.

The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works.

But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did".

Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling?

I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.

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A lot of these issues are quality issues but Google outsources QA and testing. Apple hires people from retail to do manual QA and testing. Automation is often not good enough since coverage is slow and triaging of results is long and tedious and very few engineers want to triage test results all day.

Are they? I mean, it's not like they have a million features and some of them haven't been tested thoroughly. Search, Comments and Shorts are central, and they suck. It's like when apple had that reception issue in their iphones, only that this is like ... "oh and you also can't read the display properly, and the speakers cut out every 30 seconds". I can't imagine them being totally ignorant and believing that their product is working great.

There's definitely testing but it's not at the level that it should be. That is, there's presubmit and postsubmit testing, but who is triaging the results? In addition, how often do we see people design tests to pass instead of design tests to fail and catch issues? I can't speak for Youtube, but some regression can be perhaps attributed to what management claims is lower productivity for new grads and mid levels, who are often assigned things like writing tests and automation (everyone in every company just wants to work on features). I think manual QA is highly underrated in general in the industry and catches so many bugs that automation just can't, and my guess is the manual QA efforts has decreased, and the discrepancy in output from seniors and juniors/mid-levels might be causing some quality issues (just my guess).

Yeah totally. They never had much manual QA. I once worked at Google and part of my job was in a rotation doing server pushes. As part of the push process I'd quickly check out the one paragraph of release notes from the releng guy which would note any new user visible features, and go and play with them on a canary server.

The frequency with which new features point blank did not work at all just blew me away. The problem 100% of the time was that some dev had written a feature given a bug ticket, written some unit tests that covered the code, but never actually brought the serving stack up and played with it themselves. They thought QA meant some test with lots of mocks, not, ya know, actually testing the feature as a user would see it. It was painful to run the servers locally so they just didn't bother a lot of the time.

What do you mean by who is triaging the results? Pre-submit failure will block your PR from landing, post-submit (e.g. integration test suite) failure will result in an incident and a likely deploy pause/rollback.

> A lot of these issues are quality issues

Can’t separate that from the product - as a user I care about the whole thing

> But polished? The search is atrociously bad

Funny. I don't disagree, but I find Youtube's search much better than Google Search itself lately.

Apart from the "barely related" videos interspersed with real results, it actually shows results related to the keywords I typed.

It's hit and miss, I guess. I find Google's search also worse than a few years ago, but it'll often find Youtube videos better than YT's search will. To me, YT search looks like the most naive search implementation using some synonyms and then ranking by channel popularity and upload date range, and it's getting flooded by Spam Channels (that you cannot flag and hide, because that would be an obviously good idea, and Google can't have those).

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