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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

How do we reconcile Google Only Hires Geniuses with their executional incompetence across multiple (dozens of?) products?

Is it a pride of ego fallacy? They think they are the best and they can do no wrong, so they just keep doing things without thinking results through?

Too many logical programmers trying to have input on end users/UI/UX decisions where visuals and emotions are more important?

Too many 24 year old bro managers running around trying to make a name for themselves by manipulating people in flashy ways instead of quietly making the world a better place?

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I agree with the sentiments, but most Google products worked better when they were done by logical programmers. They've all got much less usable since the fancy UI designers came in and screwed them up.

Good point. There's the genius of the original Google Search experience versus the new horrendous "three to five floating javascript toolbars taking up 50% of the screen" Google+ pages with unreadable URLs.

"Which post? Oh, post 43278947329849783223? Yeah, I liked that one too."

> They've all got much less usable since the fancy UI designers came in and screwed them up.

See also, the decline of GNOME. This isn't a problem unique to Google.

True. See also: The New Yahoo...

And apperantly Win8 too.

They were great when they were merely engineering products. Implementation of killer search. Implementation of smtp and a great improvement on imap. Etc.

Now that they're trying to program humans ... not so great.

This is one thing michaelochurch got right: Google imported a bunch of MS execs (Gundotra, etc) and didn't beat the MS out of them. The engineers lost political power to control the product.

An article that had more details was submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6420546

Original link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/20/sex_a...

I don't think you can blame the "genius" engineers. These seem rather more like business decisions. As soon as Google started talking about the total number of Google+ accounts as though they were in competition with Facebook, it became clear that the goal was to increase that number at any cost, including intrusive and downright anti-user tactics.

The only explanation as to why they are continuing to push forward on this front even in the face of increasing criticism is that it must be working, at least in the sense that the number keeps going up. However, these UX nightmares are eventually going to catch up with them and drive people away. In short, they are going to win the battle but lose the war.

I don't know but I have a feeling that the hippies are leaving Google, thus the quality goes down. That is why I never comment on youtube - I cannot do it anonymously, if its cat video. But the problems started on other products too. And my sample size of people that start to dislike google services have increased recently by fair share of average Joe type users that now find them much harder to use than before

probably they hire only one hemisphere of the brain

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