I agree. My personal example: google contacts. I updated all my contacts to have a photo. However in Gmail-Chat some of those photos do not appear. If I click on the empty photo in the chat I'm taken to the contact details and there is the photo I uploaded. Not world class!
I don't fully agree with the article's point, and I certainly don't like the tone: to me, it sounds like a useless rant and it seems as if the poster is using symptoms of a sloppy QA as proof of a lack of expertise of the Google engineers. These are two different things.
Having "the world's best engineers" should mean that you are able to solve problems that no one else can. That your engineers recognize possibilities and see solutions where no one else can. I can actually argue that because they (supposedly) hire engineers with such great expertise, the QA department suffers. A common symptom of smart people is that they don't want to be bothered with dumb, repetitive tasks (read: testing, QA, etc) but rather want to solve interesting problems.
Besides, it would be a bit weird to expect smart people to not make any mistakes. People always make mistakes, no matter how smart they are. If mistakes are noticeable to the end user, in the end it's due to an error in the business processes, not a human error.
The article picks a few atomic issues and uses them to suggest that Google aren't hiring the best people.
I'm sure Google have people who can fix these issues, I'd be surprised if Google have any engineers incapable of fixing them, the only thing this shows is that they aren't prioritizing those fixes.
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[ 18.2 ms ] story [ 953 ms ] threadIn other news:
Nobody is perfect.
There are no silver bullets.
Fix it yourself if it's open source.
Why don't you use something better then.
It's free so you can't complain.
Some Google engineers don't get this clear
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/hands-on-goo...
And most of the Google products are not open source either.
Having "the world's best engineers" should mean that you are able to solve problems that no one else can. That your engineers recognize possibilities and see solutions where no one else can. I can actually argue that because they (supposedly) hire engineers with such great expertise, the QA department suffers. A common symptom of smart people is that they don't want to be bothered with dumb, repetitive tasks (read: testing, QA, etc) but rather want to solve interesting problems.
Besides, it would be a bit weird to expect smart people to not make any mistakes. People always make mistakes, no matter how smart they are. If mistakes are noticeable to the end user, in the end it's due to an error in the business processes, not a human error.
I'm sure Google have people who can fix these issues, I'd be surprised if Google have any engineers incapable of fixing them, the only thing this shows is that they aren't prioritizing those fixes.