Google Engineer’s Frustrations over Google+ Accidentally Posted for Public View
On the heels of news that Google+ traffic has been consistently dropping, a Google engineer has inadvertently published a 5,000-word rant on his frustrations at work for all his +/- 2,000 followers to see. He said the post was supposed to be for internal discussion among his colleagues.
In his latest Google+ post, Engineer Steve Yegge explained how his "long opinionated" rant on how Google could be doing a "much better job" on Google+ was put up for public access.
"Sadly, it was intended to be an internal post, visible to everybody at Google, but not externally. But as it was midnight and I am not what you might call an experienced Google+ user, by the time I figured out how to actually post something I had somehow switched accounts," Yegge posted on his Google+ page, adding he has taken the page down "at my own discretion."
The Google engineer's admission that he is not an "experienced Google+ user" fuels previous news items that said Google's top management are not keen users of its own social network.
In a Mashable report, Todd Wasserman wrote Yegge started with rants on his previous employer, Amazon, which according to him had inconsistent hiring practices. Then Yegge moved on to talk about Google, his employer for about six and a half years now.
"That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't 'get' platforms... Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo)."
The G+ platform, Yegge wrote, is a "pathetic afterthought" and Google lacked an API at launch.
Google's biggest mistake, he stressed, is that it didn't emulate Facebook's plan of building "an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work."
"The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them," Yegge ranted.
"I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late," he furthered, a line meant to address his colleagues.
Follow this link for Yegge's entire "rant" post.