https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)
From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average.
I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat.
>To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist?
They already exist.
I think Google is pretty good at hiring "qualified" engineers who are very good at maintaining and scaling existing systems, but the process definitely selects against entrepreneurial product-focused engineers. Maybe Google thinks that's fine though: they can always pick them up through an acquisition later, albeit at 100x the price.
That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.