Are developers working at Google really this incompetent?
Seriously, during the years I've been working deeply and for long time with many software products developed by Google, like the Android SDK or TensorFlow for instance, I can't find a single feature in them that isn't foundamentally wrong and badly designed starting form the basis, clearly due to an evident lack of the most basic programming knowledges... Am I missing something? Are they secretly making anyone out there think they are dumb on purpose for some occult reason? Or is it truly a dumbness matter? I don't understand.. :(

I'll try to answer seriously! Google engineers definitely are not dumb, but when giant swathes of humans form groups very strange things can and will happen. Smart people are actually even more susceptible to this

When you form a team of more than ~100 people, irrational stories are necessary for them to work together. Religions, politics, bitcoins, fashion, celebrities, money, justice, spaces vs tabs, human mass delusions are the norm, not the exception.

Programmers and managers are people too, and it's all but guaranteed that google has developed a unique arsenal of crippling delusions that keep their productivity in check. The amazing thing is that they sometimes manage to produce stuff

I think the ideal team size in tech is like 5 people

@ArtOfBBQ Awesome and concise analisys Bro!

It's called being normal, Things of those magnitude will never be perfect.

I can't shine any perspective on this, cause I never worked at google nor met a google engineer. But I hate the Android SDK with a passion so I feel like my opinion is relevant!

They are probably just normal people in an over-hyped work environment. It's still just humans running the show

As an end-user of many google products, I always get amazed by them(what a noobie I am :| ). It feels like "magic" while using their 'teachable machine' or 'quick draw' like experimental products.
But this rant made me realise that they are also humans, and their products aren't near to perfection. Wow! What an eye-opener...

@ArtOfBBQ Wow! I thought, more the human resource, better the team and the product... Seems like it's NOT true...

IsUserAGoat.

Also, terry pratchett wrote:
The Inteligence of a mob is the dumbest member IQ, divided by the mumber of bodies in the mob.

Group think (stink)? I saw videos of the higher ups at Google having meetings about manipulating elections. So the thinking at the top just stinks. I get the feeling a lot of these companies think they can create socialism through software.

@ArtOfBBQ Yup! That’s the magic number

I think Tensorflow is terrible, but I also think that no developer would have come up with a decent product, using python on a so large project.

Could you imagine being a Tensorflow developer? You change a line and you've to test the whole framework, because of the lack of types

Google used to be about hiring loads of small teams consisting of the top devs around, and paying them great money to just do the best things they could. Most projects sunk, but those that won *really* won big - they were the first to have satellite view, Street view, Google code when the only alternative was sourceforge, real time collaboration in Google docs, etc.

These days they've fallen down the ridiculous trap of targets, hiring people based on pointless interview puzzle questions that have no bearing on reality, miles of red tape before you can do anything, etc. - everything they were trying to avoid. And it painfully shows - their innovation has tailed off to barely anything, and those once close knit teams are the worst kind of "design by committee" going.

So yeah, don't expect anything much.

@AlmondSauce this

As others said it's the sad aspect of too many people working on a very complex project.

I think a good example are videogames.
The fact a single modder can fix a broken feature, on a project that a team of 1000 people developed in several years, in a few days or weeks is not caused by the fact their dumb, but it's just impossible to organize the project perfectly and still release it someday.
I'm pretty sure a lot of them had the will to improve something but they just haven't received the time from the supervisors to do that, at some point you have to give up and accept that it won't never be perfect, you have to release it.

Google devs are nirmal devs that happen to have a job at google.
Stop worshipping people, not a single person in the world deserves that much attention.