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Comment by joebar | Hacker News Reader

I would not touch this with a 10-foot pole. A few weeks ago Larry Page was asked about "putting the user first" at TGIF. His solution to this problem is to go mobile only and dedicate 80% of the company's resources to mobile (at the expense of everything else)

Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor and go with AWS, you'll end up in a much better position then if you went with Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

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"joebar" -- I don't know who the fuck you are, but you're not joebar@google.com, I am. Who are you really?

Like he's going to admit that after violating his nondisclosure agreement discussing Q&A at TGIF and disparaging GCE in public. Of all the things to discuss outside of work, the meeting that starts with a "everything you see, hear, and taste here is confidential as shit, man," slide...

Speaking from (direct personal) experience, someone that malicious needs to be identified quickly and removed, because that's without question not the only thing he's doing due to his disgruntled attitude. Nothing against him, just clearly Google has wronged him in some way and the responsibilities of his legal agreements are no longer important. That means it's time to move on before he harms the company.

Whenever I've spoken about my employment at Google -- even though I was fired inappropriately -- I'm careful not to divulge information that I promised to protect as it's important for my own integrity. And that's even when I have a pretty legitimate gripe with Google. Now that I'm with Apple, a company that ostensibly takes secrecy to an entirely different level than Google, I don't even discuss Apple in public. Ever. I know better.

I'd talk to Global Security about this if I were you since a case could be made that he tried to throw your LDAP under the bus.

Or... he's just lying.

Anyone can append a disclaimer to an anonymous comment claiming all sort of stuff.

Also one would expect Google employees to be smart his/her comment conveys the opposite: there is no inherent conflict between being mostly about mobile while providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares which are also becoming increasingly mobile.

There is a large amount of malice targeted at Google and much of it manifests in HN comments, as this threat would suggest.

I give it a little bit of stock because if someone came on HN and claimed "Larry and Sergey lit a pile of Bibles on fire and professed their love for Satan in front of the company," I'd be comfortable within the confines of my nondisclosure agreement saying that never happened even though TGIF is a confidential meeting. It'd have to be that ridiculous for me, but I'm sure the threshold for others is lower.

If "joebar" here completely made up the question and answer I bet one of the numerous lurking Googlers would have called him on it by now, even though it's a confidential meeting because (a) not everybody cares about nondisclosure to the same extent you and I do and (b) it's not like you're divulging corporate secrets, you're just saying that's a made up story. Pretty simple. "That story isn't true." Done. Legal gray area, but Google is pretty lax on social media until you fuck up.

I should clarify that it's probably a safe bet that the Q&A happened (and, honestly, sounds like Larry) but I disagree with the commenter's analysis.

> A few weeks ago Larry Page was asked about "putting the user first" at TGIF. His solution to this problem is to go mobile only and dedicate 80% of the company's resources to mobile (at the expense of everything else)

> Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy?

Granting, for the sake of argument, that the story you relate is true, um, yes? One of the big things in Google's cloud platform push has been to build infrastructure that on which applications can be built for Google end-user platforms -- Android and Chrome. If Google was adopting a mobile-as-central-end-user-focus strategy, then backend services that support mobile development like Cloud Platform (and tools that rely on it like Cloud Endpoints) would seem to be rather important.

> there new strategy

> you're business depends

> better position then if

How did you get a job at google?

Scoff.

Am I odd in seeing a Google engineer discrediting Google's own product?

How do you know he's telling the truth?

Disclaimer: I too work for Google.

2nd Disclaimer: No I don't.

Sorry, you misunderstand me. I am as skeptical as you. I did not assume the statement as truth. I was just bit bewildered.

The thread where we question the activities of employees outside their workplace was yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7459529

Ah, yes. Don't you love that we live in a day and age where you make a donation to a political movement and people who disagree with it call for your job? (A mainstream political movement, for that matter. Mainstream enough that they won.) Next step, I expect, will be the Spanish Inquisition. :P

... Sorry, everybody. I'd missed that one yesterday. :( We now return you to your regularly scheduled Google-skepticism

Probably not - Google is a big company and there are bound to be a number of employees not pleased with current direction at any time. It could be entirely personal reasons such as wanting to move to the GCE team but being denied because of a push towards mobile - maybe now he's forced to develop for Android and he likes iOS (if what he says is true, who knows?).

No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself.

Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.

> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't.

I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android.

Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.

So the only somewhat decent things that come to mind are some of Google's biggest consumer-facing products?

Also, user experience is not the be all and end all. Profitability on the other hand...

Google makes substantial revenue from Calendar, Gmail, and Android?

Yes, yes, I know. Adwords. They better hope licensing for self-driving cars takes off.

It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set of groups, technologies, and directions.

Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well.

I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.

Okay, so turn into an incubator. Divest all of your groups except Adwords, and create a holding company for your cash for investing in startups.

The only way for Google to innovate now is through acquisitions and acquihires.

I think that's a viable option.

Also, it's perfectly acceptable to enter new markets through acquisitions and apply Google's innovations there. That is a form of innovation in my opinion.

Oh come now, surely you can't be this ignorant of the way any company (of almost ANY size) works? Take Microsoft as an example: For the last decade, they've been the prototypical example of a dysfunctional company flailing around, and yet you'd have to be a complete fool to think that that suggests anything about how talented their engineers are (all the ones I've met have been exceedingly so). Ignoring all the layers between the intelligence of rank-and-file employee and the output of a corporation with ~50,000 employees and tying the two together is honestly just stupid. You even alluded to this with "(as an org)".

You're also hopping the goalposts around a bunch between revenue, success, and some subjective measure of "quality", but Android has over a billion activations, Chrome has three-quarters of a billion active users, GMail has 600+ million active users...again, one would have to be a complete fool (or a recent immigrant from Mars) to think that "only GoogleX and AdWords have had success".

By the way, in case you're planning to move the goalposts again to focus on only revenue, if you can't understand the concept of a product having monetary value without directly being a source of revenue, then I'm honestly just in awe of how little you understand how any of the industry works.

No, I think everyone sees someone claiming to be a Google employee (not specifically an engineer, though) trashing Google's product.

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