I don’t think those products failed due to poor engineering, google just hasn’t been great at social (if you don’t count YouTube). Other companies which use the same interview techniques are winning in those exact product spaces.
But, then what are they succeeding at? If engineering hasn't helped them not kill most of their products, what is it helping do?
And again, it is more than just social. ChomeOS? Even still a thing? How is android wear doing nowadays?
Again, I'm not claiming they are bad at engineering. I honestly don't feel qualified to judge. But I don't know that they are qualified to judge success of new hire, either. Their main success seems to be to simply suffocate the talent pipelines of the industry by hiring the top talent first. But not by actually using it.
> "If engineering hasn't helped them not kill most of their products, what is it helping do?"
Engineering does not set direction, they just build what they're told to. There are entire product management, market research, and similar teams that help senior management decide what to build. This is the case at most large software companies.
Yes, direction can be set independent of engineering. But a string of failures, at best, shows a string of misused engineering resources. Which just leads back to my challenge of why do they think they know what a successfull candidate is?
I'm questioning if they really know what good engineering is. I'm not saying they are bad at it. Those are two different claims
That they are the default entry to the web is their main asset. Agreed. Their search is good enough, and they are good at monetizing the top boxes of their search results. Really good.
That said, most of their engineering hires are not working on that. And they have a string of unfocused attempts at entering markets that smacks of not having a good sense of how to use engineering in a field. Basically, of they can't recreate the field, they give up. Rather quickly. That isn't engineering. That is just brash spending of money.
Why not both? It was a poor usage of engineering effort to try and recreate a field, instead of leveraging some assets and building on what they actually had.
It isn't like reader died alone. They had buzz going, which did a decent job of linking reader and Gmail. That is solid engineering. Instead, they have constantly tried to recreate Gmail to kill it. Wave? Plus? Inbox? I'm sure there are others.
