alt Hacker News> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse.
There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock"
When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was:
• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
• I was considered weird for doing it.
• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.
• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.
• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring.
In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly.
This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.
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> User obsession means spending time in support tickets
That's really funny when Google's level of customer support is known to be non-existent unless you're popular on Twitter or HN and you can scream loudly enough to reach someone in a position to do something.
"10. In a large company, countless variables are outside your control - organizational changes, management decisions, market shifts, product pivots. Dwelling on these creates anxiety without agency.
The engineers who stay sane and effective zero in on their sphere of influence. You can’t control whether a reorg happens. You can control the quality of your work, how you respond, and what you learn. When faced with uncertainty, break problems into pieces and identify the specific actions available to you.
This isn’t passive acceptance but it is strategic focus. Energy spent on what you can’t change is energy stolen from what you can."
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Point 10 makes it sound like the culture at Google is to stay within your own bailiwick and not step on other people's toes. If management sets a course that is hostile to users and their interests, the "sane and effective" engineers stay in their own lane. In terms of a company providing services to users, is that really being effective?
User interests frequently cross multiple bailiwicks and bash heads with management direction. If the Google mindset is that engineers who listen to users are "weird" or not "sane"/"effective", that certainly explains a lot.
It is an almost universal fact that dealing with retail customers is something that is left to the lowest paid, lowest status workers and often outsourced and now increasingly left to LLM chatbots.
While you obviously can't have highly paid engineers tied up dealing with user support tickets, there is a lot to be said for at least some exposure to the coal face.
I love reading this insights in a corp structure. Especially the sociological aspect of it (like "• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees."). Thanks a lot.
> only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team
This revelation is utterly shocking to me. That's like anti-abuse 101. You infiltrate their networks and then track their behavior using your own monitoring to find the holes in your observability. Even in 2010 that was anti-abuse 101. Or at least I think it was, maybe my team at eBay/PayPal was just way ahead of the curve.
Hey Mike! Alex from GR here. Good to see you around :)
>What I learned was:
>• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
>• I was considered weird for doing it.
>• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.
>• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.
>• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring
Sincerely, thank you for confirming my anecdotal but long-standing observations. My go-to joke about this is that Google employees are officially banned from even visiting user forums. Because otherwise, there is no other logical explanation why there are 10+ year old threads where users are reporting the same issue over and over again, etc.
Good engineering in big tech companies (I work for one, too) has evaporated and turned into Promotion Driven Development.
In my case: write shitty code, cut corners, accumulate tech debt, ship fast, get promo, move on.
The beancounter takeover was after you left.
2014 Google and 2019 Google were completely different companies.
If an engineer talking to users is considered problematic, then it is safe to assume, that Google is about as fast away from any actually agile culture as possible. Does Google ever describe itself as such?
Having only ever worked for startups or consulting agencies, this is really weird to me. Across 6 different companies I almost always interfaced directly with the users of the apps I built to understand their pain points, bugs, etc. And I've always ever been an IC. I think it's a great way to build empathy for the users of your apps.
Of course, if you're a multi billion dollar conglomerate, empathy for users only exists as far as it benefits the bottom line.
Thanks for sharing your valuable insights. I am quite surprised to learn that talking to customers was frowned upon at Google (or your wider team at least). I find that the single most valuable addition to any project - complementary to actually building the product. I have a feeling a lot of the overall degradation of software quality has to do with a gradual creep in of non-technical people into development teams.
Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
What you described is the job of a product manager. Are there no PMs at Google?
Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer.
I think there are multiple reasons for this, but they are mostly overlapping with preserving internal power structures.
PM's don't want anecdotal user evidence that their vision of the product is incomplete.
Engineering managers don't want user feedback to undermine perception of quality and derail "impactful" work that's already planned.
Customer relations (or the support team, user study, whatever team actually should listen to the user directly) doesn't want you doing their job better than they can (with your intimate engineering and product knowledge). And they don't want you to undermine the "themes" or "sentiment" that they present to leadership.
Legal doesn't want you admitting publicly that there could be any flaw in the product.
Edit: I should add that this happens even internally for internal products. You, as a customer, are not allowed to talk to an engineer on the internal product. You have to fill a bug report or a form and wait for their PMs to review and prioritize. It does keep you from disturbing their engineers, but this kind of process only exists on products that have a history of high incoming bug rate.