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Comment by tuananh | Hacker News Reader

"Former member of the Android team here. Honestly, Hugo leaving isn't a very big deal at all as he never really contributed much to Android (or Google in general). He started as middle management under Vic, based in London, when the Android and Mobile teams were two separate entities.

No one really wanted Hugo, and it was weird that he ended up on the Android team to begin with. He was pretty much a figurehead as Andy was the one really running the show.

The Android team is big enough these days with solid leadership (Dave Burke, etc.) that a single person leaving (other than Andy of course), isn't going to change much in the day to day operation of Android."

-- former member of Android team.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1laqjr/androids_hug...

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Sounds a bit revisionist. Obviously a single employee won't make or break a project, but he clearly contributed a lot to android given his position. If he held that position and really didn't contribute anything, then I have to wonder what the hell is going on at Google.

>>I have to wonder what the hell is going on at Google.

The same thing that goes on in nearly any big company?

Its not like these people are Steve Jobs like product managers giving everything they have to the product/project. Most of the time there is some UI designer which does all the design work and these people just come in as some kind of reviewers to give some general improvement comments.

Apart from that its just usual decision making, book keeping, employee appraisal management and your general bureaucracy work is what they do 99.99% of the times. Add your usual corporate politics to keep their position in the hierarchy maintained.

Thankfully for them Apple showed/shows them much of the UI direction. So they don't to really work on any paradigm changing innovation. If they can get out some thing similar looking, without big obvious mistakes they can simply come in and push their 9-5 jobs maintaining the status quo without any real problem.

He most likely moved on as he did not find it possible to climb the corporate ladder any further at Google as the current set of execs are well entrenched into their jobs and may not quit until they naturally retire.

> Thankfully for them Apple showed/shows them much of the UI direction. So they don't to really work on any paradigm changing innovation.

Yeah, Mattias Duarte, the man behind WebOS cards that pretty much everyone including Apple is ripping off - I am sure he likes to sit all day letting things happen on their own - like all the post Gingerbread UI changes for example. Sure.

>> Thankfully for them Apple showed/shows them much of the UI direction.

Huh!? If anything, I think Apple's the one taking a few pages out of the Holo playbook with their new found love for flat UI design in iOS 7.

And notifications.

I wonder if he knew a lot of valuable corporate secrets which would be worth a lot go Xiaomi or China in general...

Maybe he'll give Xiaomi source code...

I seriously doubt it. He was not on the engineering side of the Android project.

Are there some engineering secrets? I thought Android was kind of Open Source...

Play, Maps, +, etc. are not open source.

Oh come on. Both Dave Burke and Hugo Barra are hugely talented people and great to work with.

Sorry, sounding more suspicious these days... But, could that message be posted by Andy or his PR?

If no one really wanted Hugo that could be the reason he left...

Didn't Andy leave long ago to work on robots at Google X? They put the Chrome guy in charge now, which is unfortunate.

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