[VCFundedGenYer]

There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?

[fullstop]

I got Bard to execute a fork bomb, I think, when it was first launched. I noticed that it was evaluating the flow of a shell script incorrectly and it allowed execution, then refused to respond for 20 or 30 minutes.

Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why isn't it opt-in?

It's hard to take Google seriously these days.

[inigyou]

Always delete the si= or is= parameter from a shared YouTube link. This will work until they copy Reddit's idea of encoding both the video ID and sharing indicator together as one big opaque encrypted string.

[threatripper]

Do you get promoted for not launching a product? The interests of the individual and the institution do not always perfectly align.

[cyanregiment]

People who want to destroy you at work (which I imagine is rampant at Google) will sometimes prevent you from doing something, but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

Some of my favorites from my career:

1. PM enticing me to "volunteer" to build a PoC over the weekend, to have it ready by Monday morning – come Monday, PoC is shipped live to all international customers. It was nowhere near prod ready, it was just to demo 1 thing.

Naturally, endless tickets open asking about missing functionality, and changes to the dashboard, "Nothing works!".

I'm in Slack talking to customer support like "Sorry I don't know why they launched it, it's not even close to being done". I've had nightmares about this kinda thing before, and then it happened lol. Anyway it was easy to paint the image that I'm just trash, biting off more than I can chew, can't let me near anything, and I got fired for it. They want back to maintenance mode.

It was a simple dashboard that looked great (for investors) and solved problems for customers, but there was no way the other guys on the team were going to let me launch that thing. Rather than stop it, they just "helped" get it out early. Project dead, they never built that.

2. And on the other end where I was stopped from launching something, I've had 2 devs go in league to say that code I was writing was a huge security risk (front-end React) and kept saying in meetings "Yeah I saw some things" without pointing out exactly what.

At some point one of them just irreversibly deletes all the branches related to it, live in standup, and puffs his chest "Yeah sorry guys we're not releasing this stuff, I'm worried about code quality" basically got him promoted to CTO.

So yeah I imagine politics and mind games happen all the time at Google, and it's probably very confusing what is or is not a good idea, what will work and will not work, because of the massive distraction of everyone backstabbing and preparing to backstab.

[steveBK123]

> but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

A skill one must develop is identifying no-win-scenario tasks that can be avoided. POCs are often such tasks.

A teammate and I got roped into some POC where everyone in the room seemed to silently agree the product was not fit for purpose. The meetings went in circles of seemingly trying to find anything they could do to use the product, rather than assessing it objectively on the use case the vendor pitched.

Behind the scenes it turned out the product was being pushed by someone seniors brother. So the thing was getting bought no matter what. What they were really looking for was the patsy to own finding any sort of use case for the stupid thing, integrating it and owning it.

Obviously a "the product cannot fail, it can only be failed" scenario. Run run run away.

[cyanregiment]

These guys with their brothers and uncles!!!

If anyone in tech wants to adopt a grown man hmu I need a network

[steveBK123]

The longer I work and the higher I go, the less I believe that we have a meritocracy. Directionally, yes.. but the higher you go the more nepotistic the world really is. And that's putting aside starting conditions which are already not meritocratic.

Even if it's not the compliance/legal definition of "nepotism".. its all "networks" and "relationships".

[threatripper]

Yeah, it's way easier to argue that the product is a bad idea if they give you all the resources to build, release and grow it but there's just not enough customers showing up.

The alternative might be internal battles to kill it that take up time and energy and everybody can continue their argument forever.

[phoghed]

The reverse of this is also bad. Numerous arduous processes that exist mostly because the people who ship nothing far outnumber those who do. I imagine striking a perfect balance is difficult.

[breppp]

The issue here is probably because you need to show how your work relates to AI to get promoted

[obscurette]

It's a pattern much wider than Google or event technology sector. It's very apparent in AI craze trough society, public governance sector, journalism etc. For people like me (growing up in seventies) it seems that there is teenagers everywhere and nobody is responsible for anything any more.

[projectileboy]

Google has always been a technology company, never a product company. It’s very deep in their DNA.

[baxtr]

Google’s culture seems so different from Apple’s which sometimes comes across as overly mature… which I personally prefer though!

[steveBK123]

Steve Job's mantra was that what you say No to is even more important than what you say Yes to.

Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.

There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.

[jstummbillig]

Making bad mistakes is childish? Or correcting them?

[BugsJustFindMe]

Exercising zero political awareness or foresight or understanding of people. The problem isn't that this was a mistake. The problem is that this mistake was obvious from a mile away to anyone who pays any attention to the world.

Also, the given justification for the feature was absolutely silly.

[profsummergig]

What red flags would the name "Bard" have raised for you if you were on that team?

[pjio]

Maybe I missed the reference like with Claude for Claude Shannon, but Bard always sounded like "Bart (Simpson)" to me.

[profsummergig]

I thought Bard was an acceptable name. But I think Gemini is better. The "G" associates better with Google.

[JV00]

They are good products, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing them

[the_snooze]

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

[AaronAPU]

“Communism is a good political theory, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Letting everyone out of prison is a good social strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Making all shops operate on the honor system is a good business strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

[binary132]

what’s wrong with the name Bard?

[taocoyote]

It's frustrating when a product has a generic name that returns pages of unrelated search results. It's also frustrating when the name gives no real hint about what it does.

[card_zero]

It's not very goord.

[apercu]

I imagine because Bards never let the truth get in the way of a good story?

[mikeweiss]

I preferred it to Gemini

[toilet]

I would have preferred "Bort"

[QuantumNomad_]

What kind of a name is Bort?

[mingus88]

My son is also named Bort

[hbcdbff]

Google is no longer a technology company, it’s a vehicle for engineers to acquire wealth via promotions

[hollow-moe]

Didn't the saying go something like "go fast, break law" ?