[anigbrowl]

Google's focus, however, is on hiring SWEs that can solve uniquely complex and difficult technical problems.

I think that's kinda just marketing TBH. How else do you explain things like their habit of overhauling the graphics while removing functionality on many of their popular offerings? The last update of Google News looked a lot nicer but removed all user customization of the news feed - you can't even filter out sources any more.

I mean, maybe there are a lot of super-clever SWEs at google who are bored and frustrated with everyday consumer-centric product development and so do a terrible job at it until they're rotated onto something more interesting. I can't think of any other reason to inflict such a product on the public.

[koala_man]

>How else do you explain things like their habit of overhauling the graphics while removing functionality on many of their popular offerings?

I can't speak to any specific instances, but generally when this happens it's because the front-end needed replacing, and not because they had to give up on supporting the functionality on the backend.

For example, the front-end may have been mobile or offline hostile, while the new one works great with both but only reimplemented 80% of the massive feature set that the old UI accumulated.

It sucks if you primarily used the site on desktop and heavily leveraged the missing 20%, but I can see the value in such a trade-off.