Lessons From 14 Years at Google
Addy Osmani (via Hacker News):
User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock.
I wonder how much this happens at Google and Apple these days.
The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone - it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.
[…]
Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance.
[…]
With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.
This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.
Previously:
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I love this sentiment and it is absolutely true.
I think there's a couple reasons it's so rare.
At big companies like Apple and Google, I think it feels pointless because even if someone is able to work with a user to really determine a root cause, they don't have the power to fix it. Because the people that fix it don't talk to users, they are three layers away at absolute best, probably far more than that. And even then, they can't just fix it, they have to have management approval. And that manager has to have approval from corporate strategy / marketing / accounting / legal / etc etc etc.
And on a smaller scale, finding a full sprectrum support person is extremely rare because most companies are not set up that way either. And even if you do find that, those people have to depend on...software made by corporations like Apple and Microsoft. Or open source and just do absolutely everything oneself.
This whole thing used to be fun...
Having read the rest of it now I realize there's a lot more to it than that and it's all great advice from the trenches indeed.
But that user obsession bit really hit home. The rest is general career and tech advice and it's all good, but I really don't know what anyone is supposed to do about user obsession. It seems deader than Latin.
