I've worked in some pretty big global orgs. Everything was decided by committee which meant that everything had to work for everybody, which meant that everything was shit. I spent some of the best years of my life building and rebuilding the same bullshit. I think I shipped a handful of truly novel experiences in that time (probably about one novel feature every 2 years) but the rest was beating a dead horse to make the experiences we already had "better."

Eng was neutered at that large org. Product people had the "vision" and the say. A lot of product people just used our team's product as a stepping stone onto their next role and in the end it showed. I would hope Google has a better culture...but theres a good chance it doesn't.

No, it's exactly because of the copious resources.

Vertex AI existed as an ML platform before the GenAI era. DeepMind was doing it's thing in another silo. Then Gemini products came along. Then they acquired the Windsurf folks.

A smaller company would have no choice but to focus on one team and one product. Google has a Darwinian ecosystem and someone has to come along and smash teams together, clumsily refactoring the technology and user journeys.

Their employees read HN though and their VPs hear customers complain about onboarding. I hear there is an effort underway to create one unified agentic platform.

they are certainly aware of the complaints. but no one is forcing them to release half-baked garbage. they are choosing to. no one is forcing them to smash teams together. they are choosing to. no one is forcing anything; google is making its own decisions. this is not new, especially not from google. therefore, what we experience must be what they want. i just don't see how anyone can reasonably conclude anything otherwise.

Youtube does not order search results correctly, for which there are only two root cause explanations available: they are halfwits, or they are assholes. For many years I assumed the latter, but these days I’m equivocal, so maybe it’s both.

It's actually insane, I can't find anything with more than 5 views for some terms (as in it only shows videos with no views when searching topics which i know are popular). I mostly assume that their management is so awful that different departments somehow make things completely unusable every now and then.