I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.

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stephenhuey 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Throughout my career, I've almost always been close enough to the user that I hear about it quickly when something is wrong. It's a tough problem that so many Google engineers are typically so far removed from end users. Or maybe it's just that a small part of the company has long subsidized the rest of the employees to the point that it doesn't matter how good their work is because they'll get paid anyway.

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lanyard-textile 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Ex-Googler.

The engineers are pressured to significantly reduce "dependencies" for projects. Anything that could become risk or create friction is dramatically less appetizing.

Simply because of how many people that *must* agree with your proposal. Getting all the relevant tech leads, some you have never heard of or ever spoken with, to agree on a proposal for your team's project is a nightmare.

So you keep it as simple and agreeable as possible. Given the circumstances, it makes sense as one of the engineers. It's fairly fine advice in general wherever you work, but it just haunts all the work you do at Google in particular. Nothing gets done otherwise.

If you have a dependency that can be dropped from an engineering perspective, that's the route the 9 leads reviewing your design doc will take:

"Let's iterate and start with just the basics (no user testing)", "let's get this working and user test in a later phase", "I think this problem is obvious enough we don't need to consult with users about it."

I worked in Ads Integrity at the time, and for one of my projects I was concerned how it would impact the manual reviewers. Then I learned I couldn't talk with them, only by proxy through another person if we really had to. And that proxy takes time, so...

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stephenhuey 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Very insightful. I've worked in only one company of Google's size, but it was a vastly different industry. I personally never got to speak with a user on a massive internal application my team worked on for years. :)

	▲	lanyard-textile 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that kind of model can work well if there's some other mechanism for ensuring a great user experience. But without it... :)