
Steve Yegge Quits, Saying Google Is 100% Competitor Focused - mattmcknight
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/24/google-engineer-steve-yege-calls-company-100-percent-competitor-focused.html
======
ocdtrekkie
Previous discussion is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220666)

~~~
otp124
I've been reading through those comments, and all the top comments are about
Grab, not about Google. So while the previous discussion is relevant, I
wouldn't call this a dupe per se.

------
andrewstuart
The question is, where IS the innovation? Which big companies are doing an
impressive job of innovating?

Remember when Tim Cook was criticised for not constantly bringing out new
product lines? Yo don't hear that any more - people seem to have forgotten
about the idea that Apple might be a company that actually comes up with
entirely new product categories. Indeed Apple hardly even releases updates to
its computers any more, and was savaged for that a year or two back, promised
solemnly that it really does know how to release new computers, but for
example the Mac Mini was last updated 4 years ago in 2014.

Amazon is certainly innovating in the cloud space. Sony is having a go with
VR. What other examples are there of companies that remain innovative, not
just reactionary?

Out in the startup world innovation seems to have declined - reviewing the
next batch of startups from any incubator/early stage VC you're bound to see
the same types of companies that are fixing insurance, delivering food to
people and basically doing the same things over and over.

I feel like the real innovation happens on github but most of the projects
don't bother trying to become businesses.

~~~
ken
I think the Google Maps analysis ("Google Maps's Moat"), a month ago, showed
some pretty innovative work happening at Google! But more generally, I think
this highlights a fundamental problem with how systems are built and sold.

JWZ once described a "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model of
software development, where you get bored with the old codebase and just throw
it out, only to make just as many mistakes with the new one.

Lots of open-source projects do that, but it also happens with business.
Version 1, written in your garage (or Starbucks, these days), is the best
thing ever. Version 2 fixes bugs, improves performance, integrates with 23
popular services, has complete documentation, etc., and then the press roasts
you for no longer being "innovative".

(As a budding indie developer, I feel the heat: people buy version 1.0 and
expect it to be perfect. Sorry, I don't know how to deliver an Apple-like
experience on day 1. I do my best to fix any issues you find, as soon as I
reasonably can, though.)

Everything is perennially semi-broken, and everybody is constantly telling me
that their idea is going to be the Next Big Thing, and I know that it's just
going to be semi-broken forever, too. We complain about micropayments and
subscriptions and advertising, but the truth is that no end-user would ever
pay what software costs, if they knew how expensive it was to get right.

I spent a week and I couldn't get OAuth2 to work with Google Sheets, at all.
There's some cargo-cult guesses on StackOverflow, but nobody even has a good
idea for how to debug it. Google's own documentation doesn't even match what
their webpage shows, and many of the options don't appear to do anything at
all.

I'd be very happy, as a user and as a developer, if everybody stopped trying
to "innovate" and just fixed their crap. I love Yegge's writing, but it's a
little funny to hear the media complain about lack of innovation while we're
still arguing about how best to patch up Meltdown/Spectre. We're so friggin'
innovative I can't even trust a CPU built in the past 20 years.

~~~
acdha
I can’t think of anything which would improve the user experience more than
Google, Apple, or Amazon doubling the size of their QA staff and giving them
veto power over releases.

A couple weeks ago, I tried to report a problem to Amazon about Prime Photos.
It took a couple dozen emails to get their customer service person to read for
comprehension and as soon as they did they opened 6 internal bug reports for
basic UX problems – 1 that I’d started with and 5 that I found while
litigating that the first was a bug not covered in the online help.

Today, I noticed that Google is trying to push iOS users into using a “Smart
Lock” app as a new wrinkle on their two-factor support, which seems reasonable
until you install it and learn that the only thing it can do is pair with
wireless tokens rather than the USB devices most people actually have. I would
be shocked if a single person really tested that before they pushed it to
production.

------
sushisource
I do find the irony of him jumping ship to a company that's copying other ride
sharing companies pretty hysterical given his complaint.

Not to say that invalidates what he's saying or anything but it's a little
humorous.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
I only knew about him from his posts about interviewing and technical
interviews and in addition to the irony you point out I wonder whether there's
more irony around the possibility it could be the hiring practices he seems ok
with that may also be shutting the potential innovators out. I've worked at
tech companies and I feel there's a bit of a mono culture among many
programmers.

------
acover
Blog post the article is about:

[https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-
gr...](https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-
grab-86dfffc0be84)

------
stuffedBelly
> becoming "100% competitor-focused" and said the company "can no longer
> innovate."

I understand that from a nowadays developer perspective, innovation is held in
high regard and rightfully so. However, NO ONE can innovate constantly and
forever. A competition race such as the cloud pricing Google vs. Amazon he
mentioned is actually a good thing for customers from a economic standpoint.
At some point, all companies have to slow down innovation and focus more on
competitions and it's not necessarily a bad thing. That usually means refining
existing products, rethinking strategies, retiring things that do not work and
expanding to a new market space with a "me too" product (a "me too" product is
a common strategy to tread new territory with relatively low risk).

~~~
stcredzero
_However, NO ONE can innovate constantly and forever. A competition race such
as the cloud pricing Google vs. Amazon he mentioned is actually a good thing
for customers from a economic standpoint._

There was recently an article on HN that claimed that the cost of starting a
new business group at Amazon was amazingly low, and that the process was
amazingly fast. Basically, you get the people together/get people hired, and
you just start doing stuff. If that's true, then why couldn't Amazon manage to
innovate forever? What's to prevent Jeff Bezos from getting together a pool of
expertise comparable to that of YCombinator, and replicating the kind of
ecosystem YCombinator managed to develop?

I question your assertion that, _At some point, all companies have to slow
down innovation and focus more on competitions_

~~~
cromwellian
If your company has multiple business lines that grow at 15% YOY, and you keep
hiring say, 10,000 employees every year, eventually, the majority of your
revenue will be from existing, not new, product lines and most of your
employees will be working on products that either fail, copy, or are not
innovative.

If and when, a product group becomes a major hit and rockets to a billion
users, you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the
employees got to work on it. Everyone else will feel like there's no
innovation going on in the group they work in.

You cannot have a company continually hitting iPhones every year. Even Steve
Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2,
the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long
periods.

You can't grow a company to billions in revenue and tens of thousands of
employees and have all of them working on new stuff, and no significant
overlap with existing product categories of competitors.

~~~
stcredzero
_you 'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees
got to work on it._

This is irrelevant. So long as the new innovative product succeeds and is
allowed to cannibalize the existing products, the company stays on top, riding
the new wave.

 _Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products:
The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by
very long periods._

It's not relevant that there were only 3 products spaced out by a lot of time.
The significant point is that someone was allowed to do the disruptive
innovation, and that the new products were allowed to cannibalize the existing
products to some extent.

~~~
cromwellian
And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive
innovation, not even 0.1% of employees?

The point is, Apple, Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, et al are all trying to
find the next big disruptive thing. They all invest billions in R&D, but they
also have to run their main cash cow businesses.

In every company, there's going to be politics, risk aversion, and symbiotic
copying with competitors. This is no different at Google, Amazon, or Apple.
And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-
secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian.

Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast
exaggeration.

~~~
stcredzero
_And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive
innovation, not even 0.1% of employees?_

No. But I'm not so sure that Google knows how to get the new thing to
successfully cannibalize the current product line.

 _And for the rank and file employees who aren 't working in R&D or on super-
secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian._

You are telling me this as if I disagreed with it? Why?

 _Yegge 's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast
exaggeration._

From what you've written, it would seem that you think it's 99.9% true, so
missing that 0.1% is a huge exaggeration.

~~~
cromwellian
I don't think it's true, but in every company that is growing it's existing
product lines YoY without burning them to the ground, it will asymptotically
approach this.

Do I believe it? No. There are large numbers of people working on completely
new, crazy ideas, and just like the startup community, 97% of them will fail
utterly. The number of new machine learning oriented things has grown
exponentially. But how much innovation do you need in order to prove you're
company is innovating? Justin the last 2 years:

Google Photos, clearly innovative, bringing ConvNet's to everyone to reduce
the pain of photo management.

Tensorflow, now the dominant platform for ML

Kubernetes, now the dominant platform for container management, and from
experience of systems invented internally

SmartReply system (first launched on Inbox, now ending up in many Google
products)

Tango, eventually rolled into ARCore

Neural Machine Translation launched on Google Translate

Loads of Google Maps stuff, mostly invisible to people, except for the keen
eye ([https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-
moat/](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/))

GCam in Pixel2. A _ton_ of research and innovation is behind the low light and
portrait segmentation in this

Waymo

Cloud TPUs

AutoML

WaveNet/Tacotron2

Instant Apps

Spanner

Those are just the small list of public ones. Yegge worked on internal dev
infrastructure, I work on Gmail. Both are maintaining important needs. Someone
has to do it. I'd say Google has the opposite problem than what Yegge posed,
and that's not enough focus on excellence in maintaining what people are
already using.

The thing is, if you want to work on disruptive stuff, with maximum risk
taking, and no politics, you go found a small startup and get seed capital.
And even then, a huge number of startups are merely clones of existing
businesses. "Uber for X", "Slack for Y", "Blockchain for Z".

Innovation, disruption, and copying are a continuum, and all too often rants
take an extremist position and try categorize things in one of the other.

~~~
stcredzero
_I 'd say Google has the opposite problem than what Yegge posed, and that's
not enough focus on excellence in maintaining what people are already using._

Given the history of YouTube UI and algorithm bugs, I think that's got some
evidence.

 _The thing is, if you want to work on disruptive stuff, with maximum risk
taking, and no politics, you go found a small startup and get seed capital._

Amazon should make it so that another option is, "start a new business group
at Amazon." That would give Amazon another qualitative advantage Google
couldn't easily match.

------
jmadler
I'm not sure I agree with Steve that Google is 100% competitor focused. Yes,
there are lots of fast-follows, but the fast-follows are innovative (such as
Google Home), and the PM teams definitely focus more on user research than on
competitive research. I mean, Google didn't exactly invent the Search
Engine...

I do however believe that it is increasingly difficult at Google to enter new
markets as an individual contributor. Nearly all new products require
executive support before they can be meaningfully commenced. There are
definitely increasingly strict controls on any public releases (even silent
ones) centered around protecting the Google brand.

It kinda seems like Yegge was ready to move on and created post-hoc
rationalization for it that was too broadly sweeping.

I also don't think the fetishization around innovation is really that useful.
It's an ill-defined and abused buzzword.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
What's innovative about Google Home? Every component of it, Home itself
(Echo), the Home mini (Echo Tap), etc. are all clones of products that already
existed. It doesn't do anything particularly better than it's competitors, and
in many cases performs worse, including issues like embarrassingly incorrect
answers, killing Wi-Fi networks, accidentally recording all voice even when
it's not supposed to...

Google Home is the exact embodiment of a "me too" product. And it's not even a
good one.

------
redleggedfrog
Holy crap, that has got to be some tasty Kool-Aid.

Reading the blog post, it seems curious to me that much of what his startup is
predicted on is lack of any kind of governmental oversight, standards, and
enforcement. It actually seems to be more taking advantage of an undesirable
3rd world situation than improving it.

~~~
ztjio
So ... exactly like Uber in the beginning. Seems reasonable from a business
standpoint given the historical precedent there then.

~~~
falcolas
But not a very ethical one, or one with great long-term stability.

As much as I respect some of Steve Yegge's writing, there's some serious
delusion/justification that seems to be going on. "[...] people are generally
pretty clever about optimizing their income" is flat out wrong, and to base
your view of the morality of an industry on such shaky foundations is a recipe
for a rude awakening.

People work for Uber because it's a job. Not necessarily because it's a well
paying job or a job with anything resembling a future, but it's an easy-to-
obtain job.

------
chris_wot
I’m afraid his comments on not because my customer focussed enough jibe with
my experience of Google.

Google has done great UX, but two examples of dreadful customer apps are
Google Groups and the Google Admin interface. I have to daily make routine
changes to accounts and Google Admin is so unbelievably slow that I curse it
every time I have to login to it (which is incredibly frequently). The UI is
slow, non-intuitive and confusing. And for a search company, it’s ability to
search for Group addresses is appalling. And don’t get me started on
Collaborative Inboxes...

Google has innovated in the past, but it seems there is no polish and no
attempt at fully developing products. They aren’t terribly great for
enterprise management, which is sad for me because they have so much
potential.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Google Groups has been on life support for 15+ years. If they knew what they
were doing it could have been a Reddit killer integrated into a functioning
G+.

~~~
cromwellian
Google groups is not a Reddit Killer, it is basically an evolved DejaNews,
essentially the Archive.org of USENET.

Perhaps the real flaw was abandoning the federated architecture of USENET for
the centralized architecture of say Reddit or Facebook.

Maybe we should bring back UUCP. :)

------
bogomipz
>"He wrote this new blog post after deciding to join the Southeast Asian ride-
hailing company Grab"

Grab is a ride-haling app that is identical to Uber and Lyft. Where is their
innovation exactly? And Grab is obsessed with their competitors Go-Jek and
Uber.

------
RandyRanderson
It's hard to understand his criticism of g+ as his post of quite a ramble. If
g+ had APIs it would have been successful how? He makes several conjectures
but either doesn't provide an argument or just a passing one.

Also being a developer, he is qualified to comment on the business directions
of some of the large companies in the world because ...

Even in all my hubris, I would feel compelled to add several "just my opinion"
caveats.

Does anyone have a link to the google lunch lady's blog? I heard she has some
great tax advice that a lot of CFOs should hear.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Communities like social networks heavily depend on their celebrities/engagers
to get people regularly participating. Google+'s own UI was easily overwhelmed
by the dreaded "99+ notifications", and the lack of competent content
management features. With APIs, these "big" users would have an easier time
working with the network. Similarly, third party apps and tools are key in
bringing multi-network entities into engaging on your network.

Note that Facebook massively profited from people integrating with their
platform both internally and externally, bringing games in (Google did try
this... poorly) and bringing Facebook right into their own websites.

------
mattmcknight
Surprised that a programmer quitting is covered by the financial press.

~~~
busterarm
Steve Yegge is a widely respected programmer who is also a bit known for
making big predictions about the future of tech and generally being
(directionally) correct about them.

~~~
stcredzero
Is there a list of his predictions somewhere?

~~~
Techonomicon
google?
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Steve+Yegge+predictions&oq=S...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Steve+Yegge+predictions&oq=Steve+Yegge+predictions&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.1441j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

------
eligundry
This is a perfect time to re-read his rant about Google vs Amazon and
dogfooding.

[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

------
gstar
Grab must have absolutely incredible internal comms and leadership.

------
rconti
Why was he still there, after 13 years? He should have been able to retire
ages ago, or if he wants to keep working, should have gone somewhere
innovative half a decade ago.

~~~
oh_sigh
Perhaps because he thought he was working on something interesting, and they
kept giving him stock grant refreshes to keep him there?

~~~
stevenwoo
From his blog post there's one sentence where it sounds like he was already
gone the past few years, looking for greener pastures.

------
voicedYoda
Easily my favorite quote: "I’m getting myself involved in a land war in Asia."

------
shawn
Hello. I noticed Steve is writing a book about his time at Google:

 _I have a lot of good stories saved up that I’d love to share. Google
corporate didn’t much care for my blogging, and even though they never
outright forbade it, I received a lot of indirect pressure from various VPs.
So eventually I stopped. Sad.

But that’s not where my mind’s at today. Those stories will have to wait for
my book._

I can completely relate with this. I used to work at S2 games on Dota 2, and
at Matasano as a pentester. Both cases led to a lot of interesting stories,
and I have often thought of writing a book collecting these into a single work
from the perspective of a programmer, simply putting thoughts to paper.

There is a book, _With the Old Breed_ [https://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-
Peleliu-Okinawa/dp/08914...](https://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-Peleliu-
Okinawa/dp/0891419195)

It's the perspective of a WW2 solider, and simply chronicles events one after
another with very little personal flair. Simply a linear sequence of events.
The end result is fascinating, and works like this seem rarely published.

My question is, how can I do this without ruining my career prospects? Is that
a valid concern?

All of my stories are generally positive, and I don't think any of them would
cause drama. I just want to reminisce about the good times, and collate the
perspective of fellow devs and pentesters.

Obviously, sharing specific details that were covered under NDA is out. That's
not what this is about. But I do want to be careful not to gain a reputation
as someone who will reveal company secrets if you hire me.

Any tips? It's a scary prospect, but it seems worth doing.

~~~
luckydata
That's what anonymous blogs are for. Pick a pseudonym and get going.

~~~
hkmurakami
People figure out who's behind the blogs pretty quickly though, of it gains
any traction.

------
yuhong
My favorite is Eric Schmidt leaving after
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-
schmidt-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-
google-new-america.html)

~~~
kyrra
Eric did not leave Google or alphabet, it was just a change in roles. He is
still on the board of directors, and he is still employed as a consultant. He
just no longer holds the title of executive chairman.

------
foxfired
What I find funny is how mild his opinion about google was. I read his post on
medium and it's true that he showed some of the problems google have but it
wasn't as poignant. He mostly focused on his new venture

Now CNBC takes it and puts it on steroids.

> GOOGLE CAN NO LONGER INNOVATE!!! says former big shot employee

I won't be surprised if this also affects their stock price.

