Is Google far too much in love with engineering?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20008253-71.html

by kadhinn • 16 years ago

30 40 16 years ago

news.cnet.com

stcredzero• 16 years ago

The question should be: Is cluelessness in "soft skills" worse than technical cluelessness? Really, both are bad. (Example: Cuil)

arethuza• 16 years ago

Google's success wasn't so much coming up with the best web search technology but finding a way of converting that to billions of dollars in revenues and profits.

To me Google have excelled at both the technology and the marketing - which is why they are so successful.

Having said that, if you can't manage to be good at both technology and marketing, I suspect that you are better off being weak at technology than marketing. Plenty companies thrive with average/poor technology but an excellent understanding of what the market wants. I've known plenty companies (some from the inside) where the technology was good but the marketing was weak - things generally don't turn out too well.

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

Agreed. Anyone that tries big things often enough will have both successes and failures.

And I do seem to recall an overwhelming success like Windows starting off as somewhat of a failure.

kiba• 16 years ago

What's wrong with the Nexus One launch?

rbranson• 16 years ago

Right. The Nexus One is a working, production, reference implementation of what an Android phone SHOULD be, not something Google expected to make them rich.

Maven9113• 16 years ago

Well that makes the point of focusing too much on the engineering side...corporations are for-profit entities and they are not there to make the "perfect" product but rather a marketable product that will generate them net positive cash flows...after all, if you are a shareholder of Google, you expect them to MAXIMIZE their earnings, not just make things for the fun of it, or cause its interesting (example: the free optical network they want to give to a select bunch of small to medium-size cities...)

sprout• 16 years ago

>However, I wonder whether such slight, but no doubt data-driven, infelicities, such as the launch of Google Buzz, the riotously misguided home page designs, or the launch of Nexus One, might have done with one or two fewer data-driven managers and one or two more people who offered suggestions about what real people like and how they might react?

It's very easy to look at a company like Google and find examples of significant failures.

Though actually, I think the 'failures' he brings up are not quite the failures he thinks they are. They're not actually data-driven decisions. They're data-collecting experiments. Google is in no way wedded to any given device or approach. It's pivot, pivot, pivot, often in eight directions at once. Releasing a polished product with top-notch marketing is a good way to make a lot of money in the short term, but your customers get very attached to what you've given them, and it makes it a lot harder to innovate in the long term.

kwantam• 16 years ago

The author of this article backs up his argument with little substance. No decision-making process is perfect; pointing out the warts in Google's isn't much of an indictment. Really, to my mind the whole thing comes across as a bit whiny.

nexneo• 16 years ago

  The author of this article backs up his argument with little substance.

Engineering mind need real facts :)

eitally• 16 years ago

Here's a personal beef describing how Google places too much emphasis on engineering and too little on the experience paying customers have with its services: Google Apps. Support is almost nonexistent for nearly anything that isn't already on their roadmap, the roadmap is set by engineering and not based on customer feedback, the deployment schedule is completely closed and updates frequently surprise domain admins & their users, billing for various services (GSAs, GAPE, Postini) is non consolidated, and various features break at regular intervals. It doesn't help that a lot of their engineering showcases in Gmail -- Labs features -- they pitch and great improvements to Gmail, but offer zero support for. This included Offline when it was in Labs.

Google is a great engineering company, but it still doesn't "get" the enterprise.

cglee2• 16 years ago

I paid for the Premium Google Apps for one of my domains. When it was about to expire, I got emails almost daily reminding me to renew. The day before it was to expire, someone from Google Apps actually called my cell about renewing.

For a different domain that I was using regular Google Apps on, I couldn't get an email response to a support question I sent several months prior.

Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.

danh3• 16 years ago

Sure, the author is a bit whiny, but I still think he has a point.

One example: design. I still haven't seen a single page from Google that looked stunning, or even good (to my eyes, obviously). Their entire design philosophy seems to be infinite-amount-of-monkeys-hacking-css and A/B-testing. They even manage to make their main landing page, with only a handful of items, look quite messy.

The method may be scientific and all, but it doesn't produce good looks.

gnaritas3• 16 years ago

Because good looks don't necessarily equate to good performance. They optimize for conversion, not beauty, and make an ass-load more money because of it. That's how it should be done.

jackfoxy2• 16 years ago

I submit to you as an example Chrome, which while technically sound has not exactly caught fire, despite Google's ability to promote it from the Google page.

falien2• 16 years ago

by what metric do you argue that it has not caught fire in ways that are remotely possible based on past experience with browser market share?

fliph• 16 years ago

Yeah, Google could be pretty successful if only they didn't focus so much on engineering.

frossie• 16 years ago

Are you arguing that anybody who is successful is by definition doing everything right?

Maybe they are successful because they do more rights than wrongs. Or they were in the right place at the right time. Or because they lacked a better competitor. The history of IT is littered with wildly successful yet sub-optimal companies.

shod• 16 years ago

> Do complex interview questions really test your educational achievement? ...

When interviewing prospective software engineer employees, a Google interviewer asks software engineering related questions, to test the interviewee's knowledge of software engineering. Questions like these:

http://jpaint.drizzlehosting.com/google.html

That's a nice illustration of the balance of creativity, lateral thinking, logical thinking, and technical competence Google expects from the engineers it interviews. Note that the interview questions aren't in the form of, "Where did you complete your expected MSc in Computer Science?" Instead, the interviewee is expected to demonstrate real achievement from their education; i.e., knowledge and thinking ability.

But Google hires non-engineer craftsmen, too. Catering staff, to steal the article author's example. Just a hunch: Google conducts more than one type of interview: catering staff are not expected to design class libraries or database tables as part of their interview process.

dusklight• 16 years ago

I think it's funny this article showed up on the front page at the same time as another article about the Dunning-Krueger effect.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

This is how Dodge explained it: "The engineering background brings a rigorous thought process that questions assumptions and requires accurate data in the decision process. That doesn't mean every decision will be perfect, but it will be based on data...not opinions."

I think that strategy is unimpeachable. I've worked at plenty of non-engineering companies, and the inability to question assumptions seems rampant. If Google manages to avoid that, then whatever it costs will likely be worth it.

Is Google far too much in love with engineering?

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