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Comment by staplung | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Google for 4 years. One thing that has always surprised me about documentation at Google is that they use Google Docs (just like everyone else) but have never seemed interested in making it less of a terrible tool for the task. It's relentlessly print oriented, which makes almost no sense these days (when was the last time you printed out a Google doc?), has no affordances for dealing with pre-formatted text (e.g. code), has basically no support for mathematical formulas, etc. In fact its actually evolved to be less suited to the task of technical documentation since it began given that earlier versions at least allowed you to define your own paragraph styles. I was hoping that Google Colab might evolve into a better/more general tool for writing tech specs but it doesn't seem to be moving in that direction really.

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I feel like Google has given up. The iOS Gmail app is terrible and buggy. The web app literally has a loading screen now. The GSuite set of products hasn't advanced much since it was acquired from outside Google. Google Cloud is getting curb stomped by Amazon and Microsoft. I guess they have Search still, but it's getting ad filled and tired. Not that I'm going to short GOOG anytime soon, but come on folks!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

Comment discovery is also horribly broken. So often, conversations _about_ a document contain information that don't necessarily _belong in_ the document, but still have value for future readers. Resolving comments makes it much harder to find them.

Exactly correct about the print-oriented interface. Writely, and earlier versions of Google Docs didn't force you to pretend you were writing on a piece of paper. I would love a "Google Docs for text files"!

On the other hand I love the simplicity of Google Docs and we use it for everything at my (very large) employer and it's particularly suited to collaboration between technical people and business people. The familiar document interface works for the business folk whilst the ability to add and assign tasks as comments makes the whole experience seamless.

Yeah it's in this really weird niche between the more simple text/note oriented markdown and the more print oriented word/pages. Like if it needs to look good when printed word is way superior but for simple things that don't, markdown is almost always better unless you want to solicit feedback or do live collab. And that's great, collab was definitely the killer feature a decade ago but who really still needs to print? It seems most Schools don't even take paper assignments anymore and nearly everyone has access to a phone/printer + internet so what's even the point of putting so much emphasis on print? I wish it would evolve to focus be more digital first experience with some reader-mode esque simplification or print hints like page breaks and the like if someone really wants to print.

Have you tried Dropbox Paper? Unlike what the name implies, it's the most non-print-focused editing experience I've used. Anecdotally, it's much more popular for design docs than Google Docs at my current employer.

At my workplace, we've started using Confluence for some projects and it's been incredibly productive. I still loathe JIRA but Confluence has been incredibly good for technical collaboration and documentation.

My experience as well - We are all in on Atlassian.

Confluence is brillient, bitbucket is meh but OK and JIRA is an utter tire fire both in how it's built and what it does but PHB's and PHB-shaped objects love it.

At my company we use the internal Wikis or Quip for this. Versioned and effectively markdown formatted with builtin live charts or spreadsheets, respectively.

Amazon had both wiki and Quip, and both were bad, but differently.

Wiki was painfully slow to edit (and render, ~2 sec page render was typical, and I'm not counting some graphs that were asynchronously rendered).

Quip is good for fast editing, but anything that needed code formatting there is bad. It's even more "print oriented" than Google docs. Fixed page width, very fixed formatting, tables are awful.

> One thing that has always surprised me about documentation at Google is that they use Google Docs

When did you work at Google? There are markdown supported wiki tools now for internal documentation. It supports pre-formatted code, graphs, etc.

I think the target audience is mostly non-programmers AKA normal people. It's a general-purpose tool hence the feature set.

Yep. Add to the list: no Markdown support.

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