One conspicuous omission in the ex-google is reflection on killed products like Google Wave, Plus, Glass etc etc etc .. for many of the [whatever] was the gross imbalance between Eng owning the product but ignoring the userbase.
What ex-googlers often fail to grapple with is the product lifecycle (how short it may be) and the value of having diversity in the loop of product testing. Google is designed to be a safe place to focus, and that’s not what the real world is like outside the plex.
Actually I think it is never-Googlers who have the wrong perspective here. The fact that Google constantly produces and destroys products demonstrates that it is extremely easy for that company to churn out code, and validates their software development methodology. It's incredibly easy to just dash off a product building on their gigantic foundation of source code, infrastructure, and launch process.
The fact that Plus and Glass got canceled and Wallet has been canceled sixteen different times is merely a consequence of the fact that leadership and product is often led by imbeciles. That's an organizational problem and I hope nobody is out there cargo-culting Google's org (even though I know they are, with OKRs and Perf being widely copied).
Exactly, Google engineers deflect user issues and product failures to the leadership and non-engineers. That happens in any large team, but Google has sweetened the situation for engineers to keep them focused on engineering rather than the larger consequences. E.g. credit cards are just fine, nobody actually wants to see ads, etc. It’s the user’s fault for failing to see the esoteric details behind the thing.
Google's penchant for killing promising products is 100% the result of poor incentives. People are incentivized for launching challenging projects, but they are generally not responsible for the bottom line (which is going to be dwarfed by Search Ads revenue anyway) or for user happiness & brand loyalty (which is challenging to measure). As a result, lots of promising and exciting products are brought to market and then killed, as the easiest way to bring new products to market is to cannibalize the stuff your predecessors did and show how great your alternative is instead.
I'm not sure why your comment was previously downvoted. I've often heard, and it's not hard to find these comments from ex-Googlers on HN, that Google's "promotion-oriented development" is one of their biggest factors in some of their cultural shortcomings. That is, launching a big new product is seen as one of the best ways to get promoted, while working on the little nits (which in my experience, especially with some of Google's enterprise products, can languish for years, even though they can be really important but "boring" issues to fix) is not seen as high-value work.
What ex-googlers often fail to grapple with is the product lifecycle (how short it may be) and the value of having diversity in the loop of product testing. Google is designed to be a safe place to focus, and that’s not what the real world is like outside the plex.