One thing people don't get about Google is how it motivates its employees. You get promoted for _taking credit_ for _launching new stuff_. I deliberately mention "taking credit", because if you can't take credit for the work you've done, you're better off not doing anything at all; a prime example of this is launching a project someone else started but abandoned. Note that you also don't need to do much work to be able to "take credit" - it's easier to just "lead" a project which is already on its way to getting launched by sitting in meetings with people more senior than you.

You get _nothing_ for improving things that already exist. As a result you get four different messaging apps, and not a single one that doesn't suck, and a bunch of stagnating, seemingly abandoned products. The reason is simple: people who are smart enough to understand the rules of the game move on immediately after launch to the next big thing.

Having said that, I still prefer GSuite to Office. Microsoft has set the bar very low indeed.

> Having said that, I still prefer GSuite to Office. Microsoft has set the bar very low indeed.

Depends upon which pieces. You can pry Excel from my cold, dead hands; OneNote is still an amazing piece of software that is getting pretty sweet updates; Outlook by itself is pretty solid for 80% of use cases, with fast iOS/Android apps; everything can be tweaked to your liking with some VBA scripting.

Onedrive also gives you more free space vs. Google Drive when signing up, I believe, though creating Google Docs / Sheets / Slides don't contribute to GDrive storage space - which was the deciding factor for us.

iOS and Android Outlook aren't actually Outlook. They are Accompli. Desktop Outlook leaves much to be desired nowadays.

And yes, my wife is an accountant, so Excel is mandatory for her. She _can_ do most of what she does in Sheets, but Sheets lack integration with the various backends that grew over the years.

That's a popular perception but it's not totally true. You need to be able to measure improvements you make, which might make a large category of possible improvements untenable from a perf point of view. But if you can show satisfaction scores or latency numbers or action-conpletion metrics or even just customer comments saying it solved their issue, that's plenty reason to attempt the change. The system encourages you not to work on things that "feel good" but instead things that are measurable. There's pros and cons to this as you can imagine.

That all said, I think the bigger problem is a willingness to put out things that don't meet a high standard. Ex: the new web GMail launched while slower than the older one. This was done to get new features out to users faster, but it doesn't feel that great from a product excellence POV. There's no Steve Jobs figure telling us the Pixel 4 doesn't look great and as a consequence we should go back to the drawing board. It's more like there's a set of market survey results and the phone was made to check those boxes.

The perception m0zg outlined still seems correct. The system encourages deceptive reporting of metrics. If you can take credit for improving things with metrics, while causing far more damage in the process or making no real contributions, you will still get promoted.

It's literally 10x more effective to release a half-baked but "new" piece of crap for promotion purposes. You'd have to move heaven and earth to get the same amount of career velocity out of incremental improvements.

That seems to agree with what a friend of mine who worked there, and how he was rewarded (or not).

I can't help but think they are rewarding the right thing -- new shiny things may have the best ability to bring stragglers onto google the platform.

Unfortunately, it leads to the feeling that google just dabbles in things.

> Note that you also don't need to do much work to be able to "take credit" - it's easier to just "lead" a project which is already on its way to getting launched by sitting in meetings with people more senior than you.

This is the standard way of getting promoted that I've seen. How do these people not feel disgusting?

This is true. I was at Google 5 years. Some Googlers will take credit for your work. Get away from such people as quickly as possible.