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:
