
The Google+ project and exec team - seapunk
https://threader.app/thread/1049523067506966529
======
whack
Controversial opinion here. I know that exaggerating and complaining is a
surefire way to get clicks, but it's hard to take the author's criticisms
seriously when he complains about so many different things. Some as minor as
the noogler orientation. Others as petty as putting down colleagues who
haven't worked as designers before.

Regarding the main event in question: I like that Google allows people to
party in the evenings with whoever they want to party with. I like that Google
allows people to reschedule meetings if they aren't feeling well, for whatever
reason. It sucks that the author's grandmother died and that he felt the need
to work through the night while that happened, but it's unfair to take that
out on your colleagues. Nobody would have blamed him if he asked to reschedule
the meeting because of his grandmother's health. Heck, they probably wouldn't
even have minded if he asked for a different day/time, just so he wouldn't
have to work through the night.

I have no idea who the author is. He might be a fantastic person, and Jim/Greg
might be total dicks, for all I know. But just from the volume of different
complaints mentioned, and his reaction to a meeting reschedule, I get the
impression that he isn't the easiest person to work with, and that there are
other sides to this story.

~~~
Meekro
It was a hard lesson for me to learn in the past: if you care wildly more than
the people around you -- so much that you work late into the night while your
grandmother is dying and your coworkers are pounding drinks with their
counterparts at a competitor -- you'll just end up really hurt and frustrated
and they'll all think that _you_ are the problem.

The author seems like the kind of person that I'd love to do a 3-person
startup with. We'd be in an environment where working late into the night is
valuable sometimes, and because all of us would be doing that he'd have no
reason to be resentful. Hopefully he gets into a group like that before the
corporate life trains him to preserve his sanity by not caring so much.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_and they 'll all think that you are the problem._

Agreed.

~~~
tdb7893
The thing is that often they are right. It's almost literally crazy to me that
he wouldn't just try to reschedule the meeting and that he would work when his
grandma was dying. It's not working long hours that's a problem but in my
experience it often correlates with people who don't work well in a team
(which this guy seems like a perfect example of).

~~~
ryanmarsh
I love working with people who “don’t work well in a team”. There’s something
beautiful about these crazies. They make amazing stuff if you just have the
wits to lead them.

------
ordinaryperson
To summarize some of his major complaints:

1) He accepted a salary (115K) lowered than what he thought was fair

2) Design occurred in silos, there was no unity or cohesion

3) His 2nd manager was "political" and "in love with bureaucracy"

4) An exec on a rival team tried to quash his idea

5) Managers often just wanted to slap their name on his work

6) He worked all night to satisfy an angry coworker the night his grandmother
died, while coworker partied then rescheduled mtg

For No 1: if you don't think a salary is fair, don't accept it.

Nos 2-5: these happen at almost every medium-large sized company I've ever
worked at. If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and
filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my
resume.

For No. 6, if you feel a deadline or meeting time is unfair, say so. If you
have a sick family member, say so.

He sent this email to his boss:

> "Greg, I had to work most of the night because of Jim, and he canceled our
> meeting because he was partying with our competitors. In my book, this is
> totally unacceptable. What am I supposed to do?"

It's never a good idea to send this. It's not going to help you, even if
you're in the right. Canceling a meeting is not a gross injustice and if an
employee parties afterhours that's his or her business.

I sympathize with the author. Sounds like a good dude. But you have to try to
roll with the punches, no workplace will be perfect, I promise you.

~~~
kamaal
>>Nos 2-5: these happen at almost every medium-large sized company I've ever
worked at. If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and
filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my
resume.

This is one of the problems with the way their hiring is marketed. They are
depicted to be asking hard CS and algorithm based questions, and a culture of
a workplace is being sold which is based on a merit process along the lines of
_' programming abilities'_.

The reality in every people structure one will every work at, politics is how
the world works. People optimize what's best for themselves. The bosses are
often stupid, because bosses that exist never want smart people to grow up and
become a competition to them. Money is always attached to hot projects, so
bulk of the career growth, bonuses and other juice comes when you work there.
Regardless of whatever the merits of that project are.

The same applies to projects too. Once a company has 2 - 3 cash cow projects,
the executives won't let new set of rivaling products emerge and become a
competition to their fiefdom. Most of the times the competition is killed in
plain sight, but other times its back room political sabotage. Only a few days
back some one mentioned how Google is a place where $100M revenue
opportunities pop up and die all the time.

The same case with that 20% extra time projects. Who is going to let this
happen? I'm pretty sure anybody who dares to do these projects will be marked
to be a trouble maker by the very managers they report too.

In short once you have more than 2 layers of management at your company,
politics is how thing will work. And its perfectly, OK. Because that's how
world is.

What is problematic is if the people at the top, Larry Page and Sergey Brin
don't know are too naive to understand that its happening in their company
since years. Inability to deal with everyday politics can kill companies.

~~~
1ae8-4846-8e9c
People have gotten promoted off their 20% projects.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but to say you understand the internal
dynamics of Google and the decisions that Larry and Sergey make is certainly
some kind of delusional.

------
pi-squared
The Googleyness is weak with this one. Inferiority complex. Work-life balance
problems (work over xmas break, late night after work). Not being able to
stand for oneself (salary, reschedule meeting). Wanting everyone to like him
(literally said it). Seems to dismiss other people's jobs and even names as
being less important than his.

Nobody's perfect, we all have some bad things in our personalities. But it's
impossible to read this and extract the value that he tries to convey that
Google as a company didn't accommodate him (dismissing the design of buildings
or noogler's orientation) rather than he tried too hard to be liked and
perceived as valuable member.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
Unfortunately in big companies no one is valuable. If someone is, the company
has a problem.

~~~
tschwimmer
In 2014 Google paid a guy named Neal Mohan $100 to refuse the head of product
job at Twitter.[0]

[0][https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/neal-
mo...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/neal-mohan-
googles-100-million-man-2013-4)

~~~
pgodzin
$100m not $100

------
rocky1138
This is one of the most unprofessional things I've ever read. Giving callouts
to people who passed you up for a hire is just... unacceptable.

~~~
kylnew
Yes, very odd. I suppose it’s an attempt to suggest the employer made a
mistake passing on them, but the act of calling out itself demonstrates they
might have made a good call.

~~~
randycupertino
So true! The whole post is just completely offputting and strange. What
strikes me as the most odd is that the author thinks this makes him look good.
imo it just discloses that he's a nightmare coworker.

------
Waterluvian
The big tech companies are really really good at making you feel like you're
exceptional and special and destined for greatness because you're good enough
to work for them. But then there's the risk that they just say that then dump
you in with thousands of others to churn out product.

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a ton of life experience and wisdom to
be gained by working for big tech in your early 20s when you have a lot of
flexibility. But when you've figured out what kind of life you want to lead,
they're probably not the right fit for you.

I think it boils down to: money is easily quantifiable, happiness and freedom
aren't. So people make bad life decisions based on an incomplete assessment of
what will really suit them best.

~~~
mc32
Yeah that’s the biggest take from this. Lots of nice smart people mostly doing
routine boring things made a little more palatable because it comes with a big
name company and decent perks.

And we may have some inkling as to why Vic left (if the anecdotes are
representative of behavior).

------
pavlov
It’s just a side note, but this mention of his brief tenure at a “failing
startup” rubs me the wrong way:

 _”In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in
a year with their eng team.”_

No startup deserves a designer with this kind of attitude. Your job isn’t to
produce pie-in-the-sky concepts for your portfolio but to work on the product
_together_ with the engineers.

------
hibikir
Some have written about the problems of the piece. I agree with most of the
criticisms, but what is useful for the rest of us is not the problems, but
figuring out what useful things we can get out of the piece.

The author's biggest work-related mistake was to sit tight when given a
managed he had a bad relationship with. In most large organizations (500+
employees), your success and your failure will have a lot to do with a good
relationship with your manager. It's not just performance reviews, but your
technical influence that will be influenced by this. This matters with sibling
teams too, as a political manager (and most bad managers are very political)
will not want a report they don't like to have more influence than they do. I
have seen people go from being seen as extremely productive to being called
very low performers, and vice versa, in 2 months and a manager change. This
kind of match, and caring about making teams cohesive, is something that most
large valley companies do not really care about, and hurts them greatly, as a
lot of talent is underused or downright shoved out the door.

We can learn the some things as managers too: A report we really dislike could
really help the company a whole lot if they were in an environment that
matches them better, and ultimately that's what we should be caring about, not
making people we don't like leave, and helping people we like get promoted.
Whether it is by knowing them better, or helping them move somewhere else, is
far more work than just undermining them, but its ultimately the right thing
to do. What we should foster instead is teamwork, and the minimization of
political behavior among reports. The sly report that is always telling me
what I like to hear, but playing politics all day is the bad manager of
tomorrow. Companies work better when people are aligned with building the best
product the company can, not maximizing the credit they get. The more energy
is spent on political fights, the worse the product gets.

------
jVinc
This isn't a story about Google+, it's a story about a disgruntled employees
failing at a job as told through his own glasses filled with illusions of
grandjour and sense of superiority.

That said it's still an incredibly interesting story, and I have the feeling
that many managers could gain some insight into what's going on in some of
those "I am gods gift to development"-type individuals who can be both a huge
benefit to a project yet at the same time be toxic to work with.

------
mynegation
Wow, on one hand - pretty interesting read in a sense that tabloids are
interesting, but boy, you should never do that. It’s not just burning the
bridges, it is not a very good signal to your potential employers, partners,
acquirers, employees... Imagine public outcry if it went the other way: if
managers hung out dirty laundry on employees who were not up to snuff.

Also, about contractors in pivotal roles. The author was relatively new to
for-profit industry and it happens way more often than one may think. People
who go the contractor route are usually senior and experienced enough to be
confident in getting and keeping the gigs, as the barrier to getting rid of a
contractor is very low.

------
ggm
Never write in anger. writing in sadness is ok, but writing in anger generally
clouds the message. Some of this stuff is about how you work, and how others
work. Its not about google, you could "feel" this way in almost any enterprise
with more than 1 tier of management.

~~~
rightbyte
The writer seems unbalanced and I can't tell if he or the workplace is the
problem, or both.

The thing that cought my eye is that he was telling his boss his coworker was
home hung over, becouse he worked while his grandma died instead of visiting
her. Like, who is being inconsiderate here really?

~~~
Novashi
>The writer seems unbalanced

That doesn't mean anything, and if you're trying to give it meaning, you're
probably not qualified to diagnose someone over a twitter thread.

Everything, all-caps profanities and all, would be part of a normal
conversation where a friend is ranting to you.

~~~
mcbits
Ranting makes people seem unbalanced. Especially ranting on Twitter.

~~~
paganel
For me it looks that he is a human being with genuine emotions, that he’s
passionate about his work and not yet a complete corporate drone.

~~~
Apocryphon
Twitter has become our society's Rorschach test of character. This rant will
earn him both detractors and admirers.

------
wdr1
I'm sure Google+ is a dumpster fire, but reading this my only takeaway was...
fuck, I hope I _never_ work with anyone this toxic.

The hate, the vitorial, the attacks, the arrogance, the lack of
accountability, paranoid, passive aggressive, complaining intensely about
event trivial things...

This is the type of person I would leave a project over, no matter how
exciting the work.

~~~
randycupertino
Yes. Probably why they forced him out of Google... because he was horrible to
work with and the entire team was complaining about his lack of social
awareness and poor interpersonal skills.

------
tjoff
_If your team, say on Gmail or Android, was to integrate Google+’s features
then your team would be awarded a 1.5-3x multiplier on top of your yearly
bonus. Your bonus was already something like 15% of your salary._

Suddenly it makes sense why we can't use + to force a word in google searches
anymore.

~~~
brianberns
Is that why they got rid of it? I liked using + more than putting the word in
quotes, which is what you have to do now.

~~~
bambax
> _Is that why they got rid of it?_

Yes.

"Plus" is a dumb and lame product name.

When Jean-Marie Messier was trying to make Vivendi an important Internet
company, he decided he wanted to make some kind of portal (copying Yahoo) that
would be named "Vivendi Plus". He announced it at a press conference before
having even secured the vivendiplus.com domain. That was in Sept. '99\. It
failed miserably (didn't even launch).

Ten years later when Google wanted to copy Facebook they came up with the
exact same name. It failed.

I think just naming a product myBigCompany--Plus is a symptom you don't know
what you're doing or where you're going. It's bad form and then it's bad luck.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
It also implies that regular Google is Google-, some kind of inferior good.
Never a good thing to do to your principle revenue stream.

------
asveikau
People are being too hard on this guy here. It's true that big companies are
full of politicians and jerks, and that this can be frustrating if you just
want to get good work done.

There are some things you can say about the style of writing but... There is
stuff here that resonates and accurately describes downsides of SV life. Just
because "it's like that everywhere" doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to
better. Just because we don't like some aspect of this guy's communication
style doesn't mean we should dismiss him.

If you're reading, Morgan, don't despair at all the people displaying needless
aggression in this thread.

------
allenu
I tried reading this, but it is just stream of consciousness writing and
littered with unnecessary details. It comes across as petty and the author
doesn't seem to be good at communicating what he wants. For instance, he's
whining about a 9am meeting with a coworker. If it's such a big deal, why
didn't you ask for a later meeting?

~~~
raydev
The "coworker" seemed more like a superior. I'd also be wary of cancelling
meetings with a hostile superior.

~~~
throwaway080383
To me, it sounded like they all reported to Greg.

~~~
lern_too_spel
At places like Google, where peer reviews determine your bonuses and your
career advancement, senior people on your team have to be handled politically.
For a person coming in at a level 2, this means nearly everyone.

~~~
allenu
I've worked at a large software company with a similar review system in place
and I think this attitude makes it sound like everyone is walking on egg
shells and can't state what they really think for fear of offending someone in
power. That's hardly the case.

If someone "below" me had a problem with my scheduling or some things I was
doing, I'd like them to tell me and not just act angry later on.

People work together and generally try to be accommodating in large companies.
But it does require people _communicating_ their needs to each other and being
fair. The poster sounded like he was holding a grudge against people and
trying to power through things instead of having a frank discussion with other
people. It sounds like they have talent, but they need work in working with
others.

I get that sometimes you know your ideas are much better than other people's,
but at the end of the day you need to work with others and give and take a
bit.

~~~
lern_too_spel
> I think this attitude makes it sound like everyone is walking on egg shells
> and can't state what they really think for fear of offending someone in
> power. That's hardly the case.

The company has to explicitly foster an egoless culture to make fair peer
reviews work, but egoless employees aren't going to present themselves well
enough to get promotions. The system incentivizes politics. If you didn't see
it in your team, your teammates hadn't learned to play the game yet.

------
CoolGuySteve
There’s a special kind of rottenness in big orgs when the only thing they can
produce is “like X but by us”.

I understand why it happens, I’ve been on a few projects like that. The
problem is that it’s hard to come up with a genuine new idea that a stack of
middle managers will agree on and execute.

But if you say: “Let’s make Twitter/facebook/App Store”, then the middle
managers can’t really disagree with you since there’s already a successful
example of that thing on the market.

There’s also no room for miscommunication, everyone already knows what
Facebook looks like, we just have to copy it.

The problem is that this work is dull, uninspired, and likely to be
unsuccessful. What’s the point? Why not just kill this shit before spending
millions of dollars on it?

~~~
BareNakedCoder
Like VisiCalc but by us. Hmmmm, sometimes it works out okay.

------
brown9-2
_He’s a timid and generally kind person (running theme). But also not sure of
himself. Not confident in his work. Also understandable considering it wasn’t
the best. Often times he seemed anxiety stricken._

This is the point at which you begin to realize the author is a bit of a jerk.

~~~
graysonk
Really? My turning point was when he called out companies for not hiring him
and then said he did more work than the engineering team in 3 months

------
brettaaron
Interesting insight, but I can't help but wonder if this guy is going to
regret some of the shots he took in this article.

I also stumbled upon his Twitter at the end of the article and it does more to
show really how much this experience has affected him
([https://twitter.com/morganknutson](https://twitter.com/morganknutson)). Very
sad.

------
jlengrand
I'm s bit sad at the end of the article. Sounds to me like a great designer,
with good ideas and some genuine leadership skills. But the article itself is
so full of anger and resentment that I really wonder what it would be like to
work with the author. Looks like nobody has taken the time or given him the
opportunity to learn how to navigate trough BS and handle it.

Saying NO, being political, negotiating. . . Not very surprising if he indeed
had such bad managers.

Still, feels like wasted time and resources for everybody. I hope he is doing
OK now.

------
otabdeveloper2
Megacorps don't work to make products. They work to keep their top-dog status
perpetual. One way to do this is to hire smart people and keep them locked
away wasting time.

Two benefits: them not working productively at a competitor's place is one,
and them losing the skills and drive to make real-world useful things after a
few years is another.

~~~
goliatone
Ive read other post basically making the same claim, Google is happy to
create, fund, and hire for projects just to capture/retain talent and remove
it from the hiring pool. Is that HN folks reading too much between lines or is
it a thing?

~~~
otabdeveloper2
It's not a Google thing. Every single large, successful company does this.

It is a no-brainer decision from a game theoretic point of view: these
companies already have a top-of-the-line, best in the world product. Working
on more products requires lots of inspiration, time and luck, and even in the
_best_ case all you get is just another amazing product. (I.e., just more of
the stuff you already got.)

Using your money and fame to neutralize talent that could be used against you
requires no effort or thinking at all, only money. These companies don't know
what to do with their profits anyways.

------
thelastidiot
Your story is exactly why I see many capable people leaving the Valley putting
all that BS behind. FAANG, those are where you find a bunch of incompetent
managers, who never got to learn leadership, stealing your ideas to look good
in front of their boss, draining your energy with stupid decisions a donkey
wouldn't take, and unable to understand how to work with smart people.

Move on and get a new life. And before you get your next gig, go spend 10 days
in a vipasanna center.

------
acconrad
It's one thing to not be happy at Google+, which is the center of this rant.
But to put targets on all of the companies you interviewed at along the way
with their founders Twitter names? Incredibly bitter and salty. It's no way to
strengthen your argument or to live.

------
jesusthatsgreat
Publicly criticizing people & companies you've worked with because you haven't
seen eye to eye with them...

Is this the sort of person you'd want to work with or hire to work for you? If
it were a company that didn't pay you or were doing something unethical etc
then fair enough - blow that whistle... but as far as I can see this is just
someone with a chip on their shoulder and a bruised ego who can't move on.

~~~
shanusmagnus
I would never, ever hire someone who went on a giant public character
assassination of his colleagues and dumped all the day-to-day insider baseball
to the world. Call-outs to people who didn't hire him. Jesus, wtf?

I don't care how dysfunctional his experience was, I don't care how much of a
star he might be, I don't need that kind of worry in my life, and it's hard to
imagine someone who would. Be interested to know how his career goes after
this.

~~~
cwyers
The run-down of companies that didn't hire him and name-checking the people
involved put me off the whole damn thing before I even got to the stuff at
Google. Who does that?

------
codingdave
> ... I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team
> was.

No, this is never true. Airing dirty laundry almost never produces a real
change in the world. It just burns bridges and often makes you look petty.

~~~
joe_momma
Possibly, but sometimes things do need to be said and he changed the names of
the actual people he did not like so much, so maybe consider this "dry
cleaned"? It definitely is useful to other people in similar circumstances and
pretty much raises a point about all the pettiness that occurs in all
industries. This is a human condition that needs to be addressed or this world
will continue to be built by people who shouldn't be in charge.

------
natecavanaugh
The one thing he did, which is admirable, is that he didn't call out most
people by their real names, but some of the remarks do seem a little petty.
But this hopefully was a learning experience for him to not sacrifice what he
wants in order to make people like him (it's a struggle I fight with).

This does sound like a failure of leadership WRT the product and internal
management, but, I think we should all try to read past the memory coloring,
because I'm sure other members might have a different experience. But I think
the main point still holds. Google+ was created as a reaction to FB, and while
there were a couple of half decent features, but I can't remember anything
they created that was enough to overcome FB's network advantage and draw
people away.

Either way, this article is fascinating to hear internals and understand the
dynamics behind the scenes.

------
1ae8-4846-8e9c
Engineer here. I wasn't around for G+, but it seems to be an open secret
internally that G+ was one of the most poorly managed projects _ever_. This
isn't the first time I've heard about the poorly designed incentive structures
or terrible senior management described here.

I'm not going to say anything about all the other obvious caveats here, I
think the other comments cover that pretty well. But because this one actually
pisses me off: who cares about "partying with our competitors"? Does working
at Google mean I shouldn't have friends at other companies? And above all, why
the shit is your manager supposed to care about that?

For what it's worth, I've also seen people transfer in less than 3-6 months on
the team they were hired into. But if you don't do anything to make it happen,
it's not going to happen.

------
NelsonMinar
Just wanted to highlight this bit of the article about Vic Gundotra: "I
remember him frequently flirting with the women on the team."

Don't be that guy.

~~~
tyingq
The shot he took on Twitter is even harsher.
[https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744](https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744)

------
cromwellian
Reading this I got the immediate impresssion that his temperament isn’t very
Googley and was a cultural mismatch from the beginning. His ego is really big
and doesn’t seem be able to deal with being a small fish in a big sea.

------
ganeshkrishnan
This is really ungrateful. The author is not happy because he got to work on
Google+ not chrome?

Google+ for all it's short comings were business failures not tech or ux or
design failure. I worked on far stupider projects at big companies and I am
utterly grateful for the opportunities given to me.

Absurd blog and no matter how muchi hate Google posts like these makes me
realize how ungrateful some people can be.

~~~
didibus
If you read through the end, you see he is not happy because his Manager
backstabed him and fired him (slow release as they say) because he felt
threatened by him.

~~~
janoc
Frankly, if you are running around the office, making everyone feel like
useless piece of crap because you are the obvious rock star, no wonder that
folks get defensive.

My bet is that he wasn't fired/let go because the manager was afraid for his
job (that's what the author claims and it is a pretty cheap shot to make) but
because the guy's behavior was being toxic for the team. Unfortunately he
couldn't see that over his ego ...

------
phyller
I feel like I understand the author's experience, and his bitterness, I had a
very similar situation myself when I was a new engineer, creating an amazing
project that was really useful for everyone that got completely shot down for
political reasons. For a while after, the more I stuck out with better work
the more I was punished.

I learned a lot from this. It was very demotivating, painful, even
humiliating, and it took me a long time to get over it (mostly). What I _didn
't_ learn is that all the people who were to blame for this were the bad guys.
Here's what I did learn:

    
    
      - People are people and will do the things that people do, despite your high expectations.
      - You can often not change other people. But you can change yourself. Think of what *you* can do to improve relationships.
      - You'll rarely change someone's thinking by using logic. This, sadly, is not human nature in a political environment.
      - Work is a political environment. Even engineering.
      - You must learn what motivates, frustrates, encourages, shames and honors the people you work with.
      - Protect the people you work with, do not cause them to raise their defenses.
      - If you want something to move forward in a team you must win people over.
      - You don't win people over by making them feel threatened that you will take power from them or make them look bad.
      - If you truly care about something, having another person claim that idea as their own isn't bad, it's a great victory.
    

If you don't really care what gets done in your organization and are just
interested in being the most well respected and successful person, and want to
get there in the quickest and not deal with everyone's crap, then do what a
lot of others do and just flatter and lie and job-hop around before things
catch up to you and you'll be C-level in no time. You can also get there (but
not for sure) through long difficult years of doing everything right. Make
your choices.

------
peatfreak
Yeah..... I'm not buying into this 100%...... it sounds like typical corporate
BS that he is complaining about, and it was his choice to work instead of
being with his family during a serious time of ill health.

Like others have mentioned, I get the impression there are many sides to this
this story, just like any other story. And yes, it does come across as
extremely whiny. And also somewhat naive.

Yaaaawwwwwwn.... I'm not exactly sitting on the edge of my seat for part II.

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didibus
That's what people say when they say the team and product you're on matters
most. In big tech companies, your experiences can vary greatly from one team
to another.

This is where the companies could do a better job with HR of making sure each
employee fits well in their team and enjoys themselves, and if not, to
relocate them to another team.

This is also a great lesson to learn for yourself: Don't stay on a shitty
team, don't work for a failing product. Get out as soon as you can, transfer
to another team, or even quit and leave the company if that's not possible.

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Grue3
This sounds so much like how things are done at Yandex. I guess we really copy
Google at everything. I also disagree with people attacking the author, these
sorts of things need to be aired out, in fact names should be named as well.
Public callouts is the only way we can defeat toxic workplace culture.

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RichardCA
It's a real shame, because I can definitely see a way for Google to do social
networking in a way that would pull me away from Facebook. Basically I could
connect with people and put their feeds into channels sort of like Slack (one
for family, one for work, one for recruiters so I could get rid of Linkedin).
But I'd have control over each channel and (this is important) people could
message me in a way that worked like Gmail, but I wouldn't have to fork over
my Gmail address.

For me that was the critical omission, the idea that we can be "friends" on
Google+ but you have no way to message me. It never made any sense. And I'm
not even that smart.

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sizzle
His criticisms come off as seriously naive and green if he was expecting to
upend the design practice of a behemoth tech company with many competing
business units and products, each with their own leaders, legacy code
dependencies, and teams of designers who would poke holes in his design
decisions from a UX perspective (e.g. didn't test designs with users, just
made it up) and see him as a 'graphic designer' who is a glorified pixel
pusher and lacks a fundamental understanding of the field of HCI and user
centered design.

This is clearly evident from when he mentioned his outrage that he:

 _" Never would’ve imagined that I was joining a team of 50+ designers where a
bunch of them had never designed before.

And I was “evaluated” at about their level? These weren’t interns, these were
designers in their very first roles ever...at Google."_

From any UX design professional's perspective, he comes into their world,
lacking any background in UX or basic understanding of user centered design
methods, and just does the visual design portion of the work, not the actual
hard work that goes into understanding human behavior, being curious and
testing hypotheses and validating designs with quantitative and qualitative
data via UX research methods.

Dude needs to check his ego in my opinion, design is a team sport and anyone
can mock up random _dribbble_ worthy interfaces in an afternoon and think they
deserve the title of designer then diss others who have a 4 year degree in
fields related to understanding human behavior, not just art or graphic design
(although art degrees are good if you solely focus on visual design due to
color theory, typography, understanding design aesthetics, design critiquing
etc.)

tl;dr

UI designer ≠ UX designer

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rdiddly
The best bit was his take on the famed Google "adult daycare" workplace theme
- essentially saying it's a clutter problem. But this guy is a dumpster fire.

------
jstewartmobile
I have never read a corporate butthurt story with this kind of flow--not on
Medium anyway.

@morganknutson, your writing style is on point.

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joe_momma
"They just wanted THEIR work to be used, or to be able to take credit for it.
I hate that weak ass shit." My favorite part, it sucks he lost someone in the
whole process...

------
jiveturkey
auto-bio: a very serious person doing very serious and important things

that’s all you need to know. can stop reading right there

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wizdumb
For anyone interested, "Emerald Sea" was the project code name for G+.

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chris_wot
Hmmm this is interesting, but too much anger. I’m taking it with a grain of
salt. This is definitely no rachelbythebay.

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dvfjsdhgfv
It's a sad story. His tweets provide the background for why he decided to
write all this.

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the-dude
Unhinged guy does not like Google, his boss or his collegues. Why is this at
the top?

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jiveturkey
i especially like how he has nothing but disdain for jack dorsey but is
perfectly happy to tweet the day away

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yuhong
I was complaining about some of the problems in a few HN posts back then.

