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Comment by gnufied | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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.

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