Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="blackwater"]Google does have software engineers in test and testers in software or whatever they call it. Basically it's developers of automated QA (the aristocracy of the QA world) and manual QA (the shit-chucking apes who click on buttons to simulate what grandma will do). It's really hard to get automated QA people-- you basically have to find a software engineer who is willing to help debug other people's software, which is tough. GOOG has always been good at attracting top talent, though, and I know a few really good automated QA folks who ended up there... The thing you have to realize about Google is that it's not really "a web company," it's more of an infrastructure company. They have traditionally been bad at "web company" things like user interfaces. Google barely notices or cares about individual users and has little concern for what they think. For 99.9999% of people who interact with Google, there is no phone number they can call or person they can talk to if they don't like something. Google's answer to everything is to build more infrastructure-- starting with a web crawler and MapReduce, but now extending into distributed SQL engines, distributed schedulers, and now Google Brain... Android and Chrome don't really count as "web company" stuff in my mind. They're written in Java and C++, which are two "dinosaur" languages from the old days of waterfall development. Android's model is very much a waterfall model with "big design up front" and code drops every year or so. If they brick a bunch of devices with an update, there will be hell to pay... and that's where you really need QA. Chrome can be a bit more fast and loose (and has been, from what I hear), but as with any desktop software, there's a limit to how "agile" you can be. Microsoft has always been a "me-too" company. They called their windowing system Windows, for God's sake. They called their word processor "word" (presumably calling it "word processor" was too long?). They had a flight simulator called "Microsoft Flight Simulator." They were not creative people. They succeeded because Bill Gates knew how to build and extend a monopoly through Stanard-Oil like tactics, not because they were ever great software engineers. Don't get me wrong-- they were competent, but they would never have won the success they did without anti-competitive tactics. I remember the bad old days of Windows 98. Daily reboots were a reality of life back then. The criticism of Windows' stability by Linux zealots sometimes seems overblown, but it absolutely wouldn't if you were comparing Linux to Win95 or Win98. I'd like to think that those days will return and Microsoft will get their richly-deserved comeuppance. But it's more likely that people will just think that "computers sure are unreliable" and just accept the shit sandwich they've been handed, like in the days of old.[/quote]