[lsseckman]

"He [Lewandowski] also said it was common practice to share work files via Dropbox"

Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's products. Shows that what some view as a monolith is a bunch of smaller bands of people.

[dward]

This is not common practice. Google has had a strict no iCloud, no Dropbox policy for a while. We can't even have code from the core codebase stored locally on our company issued laptops.

[lsseckman]

That's more of what I would expect!

Does that make it feel more like he was intentionally storing company files in a personal account?

[dward]

In my opinion, yes.

[rtpg]

Is everything done on networked drives then?

[jacobmarble]

SWEs are issued a desktop machine, and a laptop. The laptop (Mac, Linux or Windows; employee's choice) is essentially a very expensive remote desktop client. All development work (except some OSS stuff) is performed on the desktop machine.

(Or that's how it was when I worked there until 2016.)

[pythonaut_16]

Are Chromebook Pixels a common SWE laptop then? That seems like almost the exact case that they're designed for

[dward]

Yes chromebooks are very common developer laptops, up there in numbers with (still most popular) macbooks and linux laptops. They are more than sufficient for the lion's share of engineering roles. Corp engineering is pushing them hard because they are cheap and secure.

[dirtyaura]

Builds are run on servers, using Blaze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000

[dantiberian]

What about editing? Do you mount a network drive to edit files on your computer?

[KerrickStaley]

Roughly that, although it uses a Google-developed internal tool. Source code files can be transferred to one's workstation (which lives in a Google building), but not to one's laptop—all work on a laptop must be done through a remote session, either SSH, VNC, or via a (again Google-internal/proprietary) cloud-based editor.

[nostrademons]

Google uses FUSE extensively. Basically there are a bunch of daemons that make the various cloud source repositories look like a local disk.

[dward]

But even those aren't allowed to be mounted to your corp laptop. Those clients can only be mounted on a workstation unless you are doing iOS development.

[nevir]

There's also several options for purely online editing (devving on a Chromebook isn't bad)

[jon_richards]

Given the bugs/missing features in the google docs lineup, I've never believed they are dogfeeding. It's been out for 10 years and it still has formatting issues. Change the zoom level of your browser and tab-aligned things will suddenly unalign. Made a report with pictures/figures? Good luck printing that, everything will move around as soon as you go to print it.

The only thing I know google uses google docs for is coding interviews. Which is just sad.

[ucaetano]

AFAIK from dozens of Googlers, it's used for everything from PRDs to financial models and contracts. So maybe you just don't know enough.

[PhasmaFelis]

Isn't that even more damning, if they use it for everything and it's still riddled with issues?

At the very least it implies that they're naively unaware of a lot of their user stories.

[nostrademons]

Like with a lot of projects Google dogfoods, it's well-adapted to their values and has a lot of blind spots on things that are unimportant to Google.

Google executives don't care about formatting; the vast majority of them are technical, and culturally Google basically has a "don't care about superficial stuff, you have bigger problems to worry about" attitude. And the idea that you might want to print something out is a terrible anachronism; the whole reason we have multi-exabyte datacenters is so you never have to deal with paper again.

It's not naivete, it's arrogance. Basically Google wants to see you move into the 21st century, and if you don't, that's your problem, you'll eventually be forced to because the rest of Google's feature set is so good. Same reason IE support is pretty shitty on a lot of their products.

The only two real gaffes I can think of that really were naivete were the sound on the PacMan doodle, and the lack of privacy controls on Google Buzz. It basically never occurred to Googlers that you might get in trouble for having sound blaring out of your work computer (this, BTW, is my fault, I did the code review for the sound on the Pacman doodle), or that you might get in trouble because your boss knows about stuff you do on your personal time.

[maaark]

Forgotten last year's Gmail Minion Mic Drop incident already? People lost their jobs.

[nostrademons]

I haven't worked at Google for 3 years now, so anything recent I probably haven't heard about.

...but yeah, it would never have occurred to me that people would get in trouble for the mic drop April Fools joke. It's a different culture in tech, in Silicon Valley, and particularly at Google. I remember being told by a senior engineer that as long as I continued to do my work, there was basically nothing I could say to a senior executive that would get me fired.

[wutbrodo]

Fwiw, i was there for several years and every team i was on used it pretty much exclusively. I never came across the issues you describe, but have heard similar things from others: if you're not in a position where it matters how pretty your docs are, then I would imagine the issues you're talking about don't really matter. IME it was hard to find anything to complain about.

For example, I don't think I've printed a document in a decade, except when dealing with dinosaurs like govt or banks, which my team didn't deal with.

[warent]

Yes we exclusively dogfood our GSuite products at every corporate level from entry to executive. All of our internal presentations are Google Slides, our docs are Docs, our sheets are Sheets.

[philsnow]

google docs is not for typesetting; if you care what things will look like on a printed page it's not the right tool.

re tab-aligned things, are you using explicit tab stops or not?

[jon_richards]

Maybe I'm just bitter that there doesn't seem to be a good typesetter.

I used LaTeX for a while, but that randomly has tiny little issues that are seemingly impossible to solve. Try coloring the background of a table cell. It will cut off 1 pixel of the cell border on the top and left of the cell, regardless of the zoom level. If you zoom out enough, the border disappears. If you zoom in enough, its almost impossible to notice. It's infuriating. And the most commonly accepted answer online? Get rid of your cell borders, your table will look better.

Word is Word. Haven't used it seriously in so long I can't properly critique it.

Unfortunately there are some things you still have to print for (or at least convert to pdf). Most of the time, you can't turn in a google doc. For most companies, they don't want you emailing them a google doc. I don't need a ton of features, I just need consistent presentation of content.

The issue with the tabs is that the length of non-tab content changes a tiny bit when you change zoom levels. If that change goes past the start of a tab, suddenly a tiny change turns into an entire tab. Explicit tabs would probably fix that, but there's no point in trying, considering many tiny little issues like that there are.

It seems I'm wrong about them dogfooding. Apparently they just don't give a shit about these issues.

[eropple]

A competitor to Microsoft Word isn't "if you care what things will look like on a printed page"?

That seems fishy to me.

[ggg9990]

Google Docs is not marketed as a complete replacement for Microsoft Word. It's marketed as "the 50% of Word's feature set that 99% of people need."

[jon_richards]

I would have guessed more than 1% of people need to print and/or turn a document into a pdf without having it change the page a picture is on.