Comment by swores
1 day ago
> "AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet."
I find it hard to believe there aren't worse ones out there. But off the top of my head I actually can't think of any...
Quite incredible that you can say a sentence like that, while talking about something within Google(/Alphabet) that's actually an important area for them (not just some random little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic, it's sincere!
Everyone there overseeing it (from direct management all the way up to C-suite) should truly feel embarrassed.
At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.
Eric Schmidt even predicted the issue in How Google Works, there are "whales" who have no business staying in their role but have become so senior that they basically control entire small towns worth of people.
> At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.
I wonder: is this still true? The impossible projects being possible part, I mean. What projects has Google done recently that would be impossible for other large tech companies like Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc to do?
My sense is this used to be sort of true, but hasn't been true for a while. And the "easy projects feel impossible" part unfortunately does seem like it's still true, at least, looking in from the outside.
It's not 2003 anymore. The one we'll never know is how would GitHub be doing if Google had bought them instead of Microsoft.
There's a difference between impossible projects are possible at Google, and no one else can do the impossible. If you really want to get into it, why didn't Google do Starlink? Project Loom was the shittier, cheaper version of Starlink.
What Google's done lately though is Waymo. Other companies are doing it too, but holy shit, computers can drive cars now?
The easy things are impossible just makes me want to link broccoli man though.
https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI
I have the most naive question, why not change this if they know this? American companies regularly do restructuring and layoffs. Why can't these whales be dealt with that way?
Edit: I want to add I'm not naive enough to think they can just fire senior people willy nilly. I could have worded the question better but I hope people understand the spirit of it. I understand there must be reasons why this is hard to solve, I am looking to understand why it's hard.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to measure the impact of individual SWEs. The challenge of measuring the impact of managers in charge of large quantities of SWEs is surely an order of magnitude more difficult.
I imagine this is compounded by the fact that anybody who has risen to control of a fiefdom at a prestigious place at Google is surely highly intelligent, driven, and is either highly competent or at least highly adept at projecting competence. I can't imagine spectacularly obvious dunces rise to such heights at Google.
To be clear... I'm a million miles from Google and have zero inside knowledge, just speculating
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they should be fired immediately (and never be recruited to touch any real product)
Concurs is terrible.
The average SAP internal app is probably worse.
Off the top of my head: workaday
Workday looks horrible but at least it's functional. AI Studio is neither and I get a headache even thinking about using it
ADP: looks like shit and doesn't work. Also, there are apparently no alternatives.
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Literally every internal IBM tool interface.
Years ago I tried navigating the IBM website to download CPLEX (I think it was freely available for academic use, can't remember). I've forgotten the details now, but I still remember how bloated, slow and just plain bad that site was -- it felt like there were layers of unusability.