> Prove it. Provide evidence. In my experience...
That's amusing, that you want solid evidence, yet you're willing to use your own anecdotes.
> Mandatory design documents for "communication" invariably morph into checklists of required signoffs from people who have little incentive to say "yes".
Or they make you think about things that are not obvious on first glance, especially at Google scale. For any customer facing feature, you have to make sure that PII is taken care of, that security is implemented properly (SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities for example), that internationalization is taken care of (especially right to left languages), and that UI fit and finish plays well with design guidelines, in both web and mobile, and that cross browser compatibility is at least thought about, as well as other issues.
> One developer's "unmotivated feature" is another developer's essential use case.
One developer's essential use case is another three dozen developers' backwards compatibility breaking change.
> Through numerous small steps, each apparently reasonable, a nimble organization becomes an ossified nightmare in which it takes six months to add a checkbox.
When you're serving up traffic at those volumes, with datacenters all over the world, accumulating revenue that quickly, yes, it's worth taking six months adding a checkbox to take every possible step possible to ensure that doesn't leak a security vulnerability somewhere.
Just because your individual progress is slow, doesn't mean that the progress of the team is slow. One breaking change in say Google adwords can undo literally man years of work.
That's amusing, that you want solid evidence, yet you're willing to use your own anecdotes.
> Mandatory design documents for "communication" invariably morph into checklists of required signoffs from people who have little incentive to say "yes".
Or they make you think about things that are not obvious on first glance, especially at Google scale. For any customer facing feature, you have to make sure that PII is taken care of, that security is implemented properly (SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities for example), that internationalization is taken care of (especially right to left languages), and that UI fit and finish plays well with design guidelines, in both web and mobile, and that cross browser compatibility is at least thought about, as well as other issues.
> One developer's "unmotivated feature" is another developer's essential use case.
One developer's essential use case is another three dozen developers' backwards compatibility breaking change.
> Through numerous small steps, each apparently reasonable, a nimble organization becomes an ossified nightmare in which it takes six months to add a checkbox.
When you're serving up traffic at those volumes, with datacenters all over the world, accumulating revenue that quickly, yes, it's worth taking six months adding a checkbox to take every possible step possible to ensure that doesn't leak a security vulnerability somewhere.
Just because your individual progress is slow, doesn't mean that the progress of the team is slow. One breaking change in say Google adwords can undo literally man years of work.