Not sure what Marissa Mayer has to do with this. But please don't blame an entire company for the decisions of a single person: Vic Gundotra.
There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.
The remark pointed to the impression that when Mayer left the floodgates opened and lots of UX changes happened.
She had been holding things back -- for good and bad. It was very hard to get new things done while she was the gatekeeper for UX. There were a lot of things that didn't work too well when it came to the process of developing the user experience. A big part of which, as far as I could tell, was Mayer's inability to conduct UI reviews in a meaningful manner. I was present at a few of them. It was like attending a meeting being presided over by the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Sadly you wouldn't find many people willing to speak up about it, because that could potentially be Very Bad For Your Career within Google. So people would just tolerate her childish, spoilt behavior.
The good thing was that very little frivolous nonsense was shipped. The bad thing was very few positive changes were made as well.
So when Mayer was "reallocated" (and eventually resigned) there was all this pent up frustration and pressure to get work done on UX. And I think the pendulum swung a bit too far in the other direction because of it.
In the beginning most of the changes that came out were incredibly positive. For instance I think the overall look of Gmail and the move to a flatter overall design was a good thing.
But eventually things started to go a bit pear-shaped. For instance I have no idea what made the Google+ people think that the mad scrolling animations was a good idea. I can't imagine how it enhances the experience, and if you are on a smart phone, it is a really slow way of flicking through your feed. Slow is not a Google value. Google products should never be slow.
In Google+ I wish they would have focused on usability rather than embellishments. For instance: why the hell is it so awkward to start a hangout on Google+? Why is the UI for this so fucked that it takes people a dozen uses to learn how to do it without mousing around for ages? Seriously, if I were the PM for that product I'd nail down fixing that problem as the top OKR for the next two quarters and focus on getting just that done. Hangouts is the single most useful feature Google+ offers, and the key thing that differentiates it from Facebook; yet the user experience for getting a hangout going between a group of people is fiddly.
People use Pro Tools because PT has been the industry standard for years. For tracking and mixing PT11 is pretty good. Some people master using PT, others prefer something like Sequoia.
For MIDI work PT is several years behind Cubase, Logic and Ableton. Everybody has their own favorite. I've found Logic to fit my workflow very well and is not any less of a professional tool than the other DAWs I mentioned.
Being professional means you leave emotions at the door (like in poker) and back your argument with data.
The algorithm might be stupid, that doesn't make the person stupid. Ad hominem attacks are a very poor way to defend your point and will result in people not wanting to work with you.
Saying "grow a thicker skin" won't make it better either.
Linus is a brilliant engineer, his people skills not so brilliant. But we all knew that already.
Yeah, it didn't make any sense to me either. I'm all for running your own mail server but that alone will not make it any more secure unless you only communicate with people using said server.
If I care that much about the content of an e-mail it will be encrypted or I will tell the person via other means. I assume everything I send via e-mail to be available to 3 letter agencies all over the world, regardless of what server I use.
Surely the NSA has a pretty thorough screening process that you have to go through before you're allowed to work there.
Also, when you think of the consequences of leaking ( basically giving up your life in the USA) I'd guess most people would think twice about it and go with the pragmatic option, the same way that most of the population is ok with the NSA's actions as long they protect us from the terrorists.
You are right, and it is demoralizing for any future leaker.
Something can be done about the whole mess, its not all lost, but not unless a majority is on board, and it doesnt seem to be, majority seems to be fine with it and seem to be fine with living in fear or threats of fear.
Its like, if a few officers or groups of soldiers in Whermacht or SS begin to question and disobey their orders to run the Einsatz-gruppe or concetratipn camps... some few tried, they got killed or their lives destroyed.
What we can learn from Snowden is that he is one of the few heroes among us, and that we are already too deep in the shit to do anything about it, as is obvious to the lengths the USA would go just to catch him, a sysadmin who showed a few powerpoints to a a few journalists.
I fail to see what this has to do with the protest or the 4th Amendment for that matter. Seems to me like you're treating the symptoms but not the cause.
Au contraire. This is exactly the Google of today vs back then's Google.
The Google of today focuses only on social and mobile and, GoogleX aside, will not green-light anything that will not benefit those two. You can ask anybody who works there how the 20% project time policy has changed or how certain teams have all the resources and cool stuff while others struggle.
Android under Sundar Pichai is not much better than it was under Andy, although I'm glad the latter is gone. And Vic Gundotra, well, he's one big hypocrite.
Google is still a great place to work, but the politics and trying to create the next Facebook have pretty much ruined its culture.
There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.