There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and the first Google Maps release it would be hard to overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they did so as properly interactive applications where the HTTP connection got out of your way and you could dynamically interact.
Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months.
From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you.
That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc.
... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't this neat check this out" vibe...
> Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build
As a webdev a few years ago, the Chromium team was oodles better than anyone else at delivering a reliable browser, and wayyyy better at fixing bugs than any other software team I have ever dealt with in my career (I just submitted bug reports to them, no direct or formal interaction). No idea what they are like now, but hotdamn that team was superlative. I hope it is enjoyable to work there, because the work output was phenomenal.
I never worked directly on Chromium, but I worked in its code base (for chromecast and google home products) and met many of the Waterloo folks who worked on Chrome. They were all top notch super smart people.
The codebase is huge. The code quality is on the whole excellent, but learning its ins and outs takes time.
Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months.
From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you.
That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc.
... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't this neat check this out" vibe...
[1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/