llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/batch-6-139544e6-9749-495e-9336-4ba7f4898cd8-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Bugs Having Users at Scale
2. Automation Impact on Workers
3. Workplace Politics vs Technical Skills
4. Google's UX Quality Criticism
5. LLM-Assisted Writing Detection
6. Career Advancement and Networking
7. Clarity vs Cleverness in Code
8. User-Focused Engineering Culture
9. Innovation Tokens and Boring Technology
10. Abstraction and Complexity Management
11. Silent Resistance in Debates
12. Glue Work Recognition
13. Performance Optimization Strategies
14. Engineer-Customer Communication Barriers
15. Time vs Money Tradeoffs
16. Psychological Safety in Teams
17. Process and Bureaucracy Critique
18. Code Plagiarism Ethics
19. Big Tech Organizational Dysfunction
20. Goodhart's Law and Metrics Gaming
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46492929",
"text": "The beancounter takeover was after you left.\n\n2014 Google and 2019 Google were completely different companies."
}
,
{
"id": "46492659",
"text": "If an engineer talking to users is considered problematic, then it is safe to assume, that Google is about as fast away from any actually agile culture as possible. Does Google ever describe itself as such?"
}
,
{
"id": "46493498",
"text": "\"data-driven agile\"™"
}
,
{
"id": "46494721",
"text": ">What I learned was:\n\n>• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.\n\n>• I was considered weird for doing it.\n\n>• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.\n\n>• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.\n\n>• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring\n\nSincerely, thank you for confirming my anecdotal but long-standing observations. My go-to joke about this is that Google employees are officially banned from even visiting user forums. Because otherwise, there is no other logical explanation why there are 10+ year old threads where users are reporting the same issue over and over again, etc.\n\nGood engineering in big tech companies (I work for one, too) has evaporated and turned into Promotion Driven Development.\n\nIn my case: write shitty code, cut corners, accumulate tech debt, ship fast, get promo, move on."
}
,
{
"id": "46492763",
"text": "Having only ever worked for startups or consulting agencies, this is really weird to me. Across 6 different companies I almost always interfaced directly with the users of the apps I built to understand their pain points, bugs, etc. And I've always ever been an IC. I think it's a great way to build empathy for the users of your apps.\n\nOf course, if you're a multi billion dollar conglomerate, empathy for users only exists as far as it benefits the bottom line."
}
,
{
"id": "46491275",
"text": "> User obsession means spending time in support tickets\n\nThat's really funny when Google's level of customer support is known to be non-existent unless you're popular on Twitter or HN and you can scream loudly enough to reach someone in a position to do something."
}
,
{
"id": "46491471",
"text": "Thanks for sharing your valuable insights. I am quite surprised to learn that talking to customers was frowned upon at Google (or your wider team at least). I find that the single most valuable addition to any project - complementary to actually building the product. I have a feeling a lot of the overall degradation of software quality has to do with a gradual creep in of non-technical people into development teams."
}
,
{
"id": "46490994",
"text": "Almost nobody else in engineering did this.\n\nWhat you described is the job of a product manager. Are there no PMs at Google?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491067",
"text": "There are, and often times they're stuck in a loop of presenting decks and status, writing proposals rather than doing this kind of research.\n\nThat said, interpreting user feedback is a multi-role job. PMs, UX, and Eng should be doing so. Everyone has their strengths.\n\nOne of the most interesting things I've had a chance to be a part of is watching UX studies. They take a mock (or an alpha version) and put it in front of an external volunteer and let them work through it. Usually PM, UX, and Eng are watching the stream and taking notes."
}
,
{
"id": "46491930",
"text": "Xoogler here.\n\nWhen you get to a company that's that big, the roles are much more finely specialized.\n\nI forget the title now, but we had someone who interfaced with our team and did the whole \"talk to customers\" thing. Her feedback was then incorporated into our day-to-day roadmap through a complex series of people that ended with our team's product manager.\n\nSo people at Google do indeed do this, they just aren't engineers, usually aren't product managers, frequently are several layers removed from engineers, and as a consequence usually have all the problems GP described."
}
,
{
"id": "46491280",
"text": "PM is a fake job where the majority have long learned that they can simply (1) appease leadership and (2) push down on engineering to advance their career. You will notice this does not actually involve understanding or learning about products.\n\nIt's why the GP got that confused reaction about reading user reports. Talk to someone outside big company who has no power? Why?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491510",
"text": "I've had the pleasant experience of having worked for PMs at several companies (not at Google) who were great at their jobs, and advocated for the devs. They also had no problem with devs talking directly with clients, and in fact they encouraged it since it was usually the fastest way to understand and solve a problem."
}
,
{
"id": "46492071",
"text": "Sounds like you just got stuck with a shit PM to be honest."
}
,
{
"id": "46492990",
"text": "Almost every job in the US is primarily about pleasing leadership at the end of the day.\n\nIf companies didn’t want that sort of incentive structure to play out then they would insulate employees from the whims of their bosses with things like contracts or golden parachutes that come out of their leaderships budget.\n\nThey pretty much don’t though, so you need to please your leadership first to get through the threat of at will employment, before considering anything else.\n\nIf you’re lucky what pleases your leadership is productive and if your super lucky what pleases them even pleases you.\n\nGotta suck it up and eat shit or quit if it doesn’t though"
}
,
{
"id": "46490519",
"text": "> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users\n\nIt's worth noting that Osmani worked as a \"developer evangelist\" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users.\n\nIt might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company."
}
,
{
"id": "46493499",
"text": "I was Addy's manager when he was on Developer Relations.\n\nHe moved to an engineering manager role on Chrome DevTools many years ago and has recently just moved on to a different team. I don't think it's fair at all to say he's not a developer working on a product shipped to users when he led one of our most used developer tools, as well as worked on many of our developer libraries prior to moving to the Engineering manager role."
}
,
{
"id": "46490725",
"text": "Ah, I see. I did notice it looked a bit too long-winded and fluffy for a developer-written text."
}
,
{
"id": "46491114",
"text": "Fair point. \"User\" as developer rather than \"user\" as person clicking buttons in Gmail, Google Maps, etc, etc"
}
,
{
"id": "46491668",
"text": "I think that's more \"this sounds great\" than \"our users are developers\". Google's services also aren't aimed at developers, the APIs are often very bureaucratic and not very well done (there's no way to list the available google sheets documents in the sheets api, I need the drive API and a different set of permissions? please.)\n\nIt reads exactly like what you'd expect from a \"I want to be considered a thought leader\" person: nothing you haven't read a hundred times but it sounds nice so you can nod along."
}
,
{
"id": "46491569",
"text": ">Osmani worked as a \"developer evangelist\" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer\n\nOh"
}
,
{
"id": "46491662",
"text": "That's not a fair reading, he's as much of a developer as anyone else. But he wasn't (AFAIK) working on user-facing products specifically."
}
,
{
"id": "46491870",
"text": "I think it is more the point that the users for his job were external developers. The role is inherently user facing and user focused. I don’t think anyone was trying to say he wasn’t a developer just that his job wasn’t to directly develop products"
}
,
{
"id": "46492641",
"text": "Yeah, I guess I just wanted to add that because of the way that quote was cut at the end, made me believe that the person quoting me thought Osmani \"isn't a developer\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46490732",
"text": "> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much\n\nOk, I mean this sincerely.\n\nYou must never have used Microsoft tools.\n\nThey managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX.\n\nAzure? Teams? PowerBI? It's a total joke compared to even the most gnarly of google services (or FOSS tools, like Gerrit)."
}
,
{
"id": "46490811",
"text": "I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that."
}
,
{
"id": "46491368",
"text": "With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software...\n\nAnd the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it."
}
,
{
"id": "46490957",
"text": "There was also MSDN. But it was also a different world at the time."
}
,
{
"id": "46491678",
"text": "> If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support.\n\nBut even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot.\n\nIt was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them."
}
,
{
"id": "46491874",
"text": "Fair enough, everyone delivered software in boxes and with 500 page manuals. I still maintain MS did invest a lot in the quality of their documentation and they cared about developers - otherwise the Petzold series would have never happened (or the MS Press for that matter)."
}
,
{
"id": "46491991",
"text": "Ah yeah, fair, the Microsoft Press had some absolute bangers."
}
,
{
"id": "46491524",
"text": "I hate Microsoft with the passion of a thousand burning stars, yet even I still think Google products have worse UX than their Microsoft counterparts.\n\nMS Teams is definitely terrible. But I’d take that over Google Meets.\n\nGoogle Docs isn’t even remotely as good as Office 365.\n\nAnd Azure, for all its many faults, is still less confusing than GCP.\n\nThankfully I seldom have to touch either other these companies half-baked UIs."
}
,
{
"id": "46491695",
"text": "> I’d take [teams] over Google Meets\n\nWhat? Why?\n\nHonestly your entire comment is almost exact polar opposite to how I feel.\n\nGCP Makes total sense if you know anything about systems administration, Google docs is limited for things like custom fonts (IE; not gonna happen) but it's simple at least and I can give people a link to click and it's gonna look the same for them.\n\nBut, honestly, the Teams one is baffling. I can't think of a single thing Meet does worse than Teams."
}
,
{
"id": "46491933",
"text": "Yeah that seriously whiplashed me too, I'm genuinely confused. Google Meets has always worked completely fine for me, good performance, works well on mobile, Firefox, etc. Nothing special but it works. Probably my favorite of all the meeting apps.\n\nTeams meanwhile is absolutely my least favorite, takes forever to load, won't work in Firefox, nags me to download the app, confusing UI. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like teams."
}
,
{
"id": "46491998",
"text": "I've used Meet a few times for video calls and I was amazed at how poorly it worked given the amount of resources Google has at their disposal. I've never had a good video call on Meets. I've had a few Meet calls where over time the resolution and bitrate would be reduced to such a low point I couldn't even see the other person at all (just a large blocky mess). Whereas Teams (for all its flaws) normally has no major issues with the video quality. Teams isn't without its flaws and I do occassionally fall back to ZOom for larger group video calls but at the end of the day Teams video calling sort of just works fine. Not great but not terrible either. YMMV of course."
}
,
{
"id": "46492079",
"text": "I've had the complete opposite experience. Meet has been rock solid for me whilst Teams has been an absolute nightmare.\n\nThe thing is though both Meet and Teams use centralised server architectures (SFUs: Selective Forwarding Units for Google, \"Transport Routers\" for Teams), so your quality issues likely come down to network routing rather than the platforms themselves. The progressive quality degradation you're describing on Meet sounds like adaptive bitrate doing its job when your connection to Google's servers is struggling.\n\nThe reason Teams might work better for you is probably just dumb luck with how your ISP routes to Microsoft's network versus Google's. For me in Sweden, it's the opposite ... Teams routes my media through relays in France, which adds enough latency that people constantly interrupt each other accidentally. It's maddening. Meanwhile, Meet's routing has been flawless.\n\nBut even if Teams works for your particular network setup, let's not pretend it's a good piece o"
}
,
{
"id": "46497781",
"text": "As someone who worked on Meet at Google, it seems that it could have been networking to the datacenters where the call is routed from, some issues with UDP comms on your network which triggered a bad fallback to WebRTC over TCP. Could also have been issues with the browser version you used.\n\nSince Teams is using the very old H264 codec and Meet is using VP8 or VP9 depending on the context, it's possible you also had some other issues with bad decoding (usually done in software, but occasionally by the hardware).\n\nOverall, it shouldn't be representative of the experience on Meet that I've seen, even from all the bug reports I've read."
}
,
{
"id": "46490913",
"text": "It's not just Google, the UX is degrading in... Well everything. I think it's because companies are in a duopole, monopole etc position.\n\nThey only do what the numbers tell them. Nothing else and UX just does not matter anymore.\n\nIt's like those gacha which make billions. Terrible games, almost zero depth, but people spend thousands in them. Not because they are good, but because they don't have much choice ( similar game without gacha) and part the game loop is made for addiction and build around numbers."
}
,
{
"id": "46491309",
"text": "To offer some additional causes for the degradation of UX:\n\n1. An increasing part of industry profits started coming from entertainment (or worse, psychological exploitation) instead of selling the customer a useful tool . For example, good budgeting-software has to help the user understand and model and achieve a goal, while a \"good\" slot-machine may benefit from confusion and distraction and a giant pull-handle.\n\n2. \"Must work on a touchscreen that fits in a pocket\" support drags certain things to a lowest common denominator.\n\n3. UX as a switching-cost for customers has started happening more on a per-product rather than a per-OS basis. Instead of learning the Windows or Mac \"way\" of screens and shortcuts, individual programs--especially those dang Electron apps--make their own reinventions of the wheel."
}
,
{
"id": "46491612",
"text": "> Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for \"edit e-mail\" option.\n\nI just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX. Clicking the email address brings up a menu with options for other actions, which presumably get used more often. If, instead, you right-click the email address, the option to edit it is right there (last item on the bottom, \"Change email address\"). I don't see this as a huge penalty given that, as you said, it's rarely used.\n\nThere's also the \"X\" to the right of the email address, which you can use to delete it entirely, no extra clicks required."
}
,
{
"id": "46491713",
"text": "> I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX\n\nLuckily for both you and me, we dont have to rely on our feelings of what is good UX or not. There are concrete UX metholodogies such as Hierarchical Task Analysis or Heuristic Evaluation. These allow us to evaluate concrete KPIs, such as number of steps and levels of navigation required for an action, in order to evaluate just how good or bad (or better said, complicated a UX design is).\n\nLets say we apply the HTA. Starting from the top of your navigation level when you want to execute the task, count the number of operations and various levels of navigation you have to go through with the new design, compared to just clicking and correcting the e-mail address in-place? How much time does it take you to write your e-mail in the both cases? How many times do you have to switch back and forth between the main interface and the context menu google kindly placed for us?\nNow, phase out of your e-mai"
}
,
{
"id": "46491667",
"text": "To be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google.\n\n“Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble."
}
,
{
"id": "46492558",
"text": "I was going post exactly this! He was talking about those engineers that really exemplified, from his point of view, good engineers.\n\nAnd dealing with engineering managers that didn't see much use in such activity might be part of \"figur[ing] out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46492014",
"text": "Addy's users have been developers and Google has been very responsive in the past. I was usually able to get a hold of someone from teams I needed from Chrome DevTools and they've assisted open source projects like Node.js where Google doesn't have a stake. He also has a blog, books and often attended conferences to speak to users directly when it aligned with his role. I agree about the general Google criticism but I believe it's unjustified in this particular (admittedly rare) case."
}
,
{
"id": "46495306",
"text": "I think your particular Gmail issue exists because they want mobile web and touch screen web users (there are dozens of us!) to be able to tap the recipient to show the user card, like hover does for mouse users. To support your usecase (click to directly edit recipient), touch, click, and hover need to have different actions, which may upset some other users. Unless you mean double click to edit, which I would support.\n\nI save my energy for more heinous UX changes. For example, the YouTube comment chyron has spoiled so many videos for me and is just so generally obnoxious."
}
,
{
"id": "46490670",
"text": "And material UI is still the worst of all UIs. Had the pleasure of rolling out a production oauth client ... jesus christ. Only worse is microsoft in UX. You don't want me to use your services, do you?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490741",
"text": "> And material UI is still the worst of all UIs\n\nI'm not sure how that got approved either, but at least we now know what would happen if a massive corporation created a UI/UX toolkit, driven only by quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight. Really is the peak of the \"data-driven decisions above all\" era."
}
,
{
"id": "46497804",
"text": "What makes me wonder even more: why is this still in place? Someone must've noticed themselves when using it"
}
,
{
"id": "46493931",
"text": "> quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight\n\nthe root of all evil right there..."
}
,
{
"id": "46490800",
"text": "I have an issue with the first point as well, but differently. Having worked on a user-facing product with millions of users, the challenge was not finding user problems, but finding frequent user problems. In a sufficiently complex product there are thousands of different issues that users encounter. But it's non-trivial to know what to prioritize."
}
,
{
"id": "46490743",
"text": "I was also surprised to read this. I have terrible problems with all Google UIs. I can never find anything and it's an exercise in frustration to get anywhere."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50