Rationalizations

I have on several occasions observed that Google has a problem: they like to "fix" things which aren't broken. The latest victim of this malicious tinkering was Google Maps. They completely porked a very user-friendly and powerful app, turning it into a confusing mess of bad decision designs and arrogant disregard for end users.

In this article, a current Google employee addresses what causes that problem: they aren't held accountable to reality like the rest of us. Google employees are a lot of smart people living in an isolated and sterile world, a world into which realities rarely intrude, allowing them to rationalize any behavior or idea, no matter how bizarre and pointless.

Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. You can make decisions based on whatever input you choose. The success or failure of your project in the market is not really that important; what's important is whether it gets canceled or not, a decision which is at the whim of your boss's boss's boss's boss, who, as your only link to the unpleasantly unpredictable outside world, seems to choose projects quasi-randomly, and certainly without regard to the quality of your contribution.

It's a setup that makes it very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people's capriciousness. End users and profitability, for example, rarely enter into it. This project isn't supposed to be profitable; we benefit whenever people spend more time online. This project doesn't need to be profitable; we can use it to get more user data. Users are unhappy, but that's just because they're change averse. And so on.

He goes on to point out that people who work at Google who have a connection to reality and aren't willing to rationalize everything through the lens of their own beliefs are viewed by the majority of employees as having a problem. Confirmation bias, bubble existence, call it whatever you like, it's a very unhealthy sign in a company. If you own shares in Google, you might want to consider shedding them.