The insularity isn't behind that, in my opinion.

It's more that almost all of Google's features are ad-funded, and the company has chosen to make lots of (apparently) free, but poorly supported and uncertain products, rather than a smaller set of well supported products. It's a tradeoff, and Google has made a good tradeoff for both themselves (who collect more data and have more ad supply) and the majority of their users (who get a wide variety of "free" services), but it has downsides, of course.

I think the insularity is caused by that, they literally don’t build for normal humans. They think the rest of us that don’t work at Google aren’t smart enough to understand what they do.

This is something I’ve noticed among dozens and dozens of Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into the water supply.

Maybe it /was/ a good tradeoff for users but the past few years I think people have become very disillusioned with Google. If anyone still gets excited about a new Google service being announced it's either because they're new to the Google ecosystem and haven't yet experienced year-after-year of having products and services you rely on repeatedly cancelled out from under you and replaced with something noticeably worse, or they're a masochist.

But other big companies are the same. Engineers just don't communicate with users; that's reserved for product managers. The most you will get is a bug report.

I walked away from an otherwise pretty great offer over this once. At some point I decided I won't do NPD efforts unless I can get engineers/developers and end users together in some meaningful way, and not all organizations can even conceive of how that might work once they are big enough.

Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev and customers.

I have a different experience in Microsoft where engineers would communicate with their customers if there are issues. There is always a first line of support but otherwise it will be escalated by the support staff and the engineer will jump in. Google is a bit weird because they do not target enterprises that much, their revenue is from ads sold to ordinary people.

They're just the user, not the customer. For the real customers (big ad spenders) they do provide support, account managers and SLA agreements. In their world a couple of dollars for your cloud storage isn't enough to pay for support and reading your email, browsing history and your site usage is a way to earn back the money they've put into creating and sustaining the "free" service.

I used to think about this when I was a kid. If 5 billion people pray to God at the same time and ask for mutually exclusive things, how can he possibly answer or even listen to them all? And it's now up to 8 billion and the problem isn't getting any easier.

I guess the answer is God's perfect omniscience is massively concurrent on a scale unfathomable to human computational models and, by existing outside of time, he also avoids the possibility of race conditions. But Google can't do that, so they need to face this problem like the rest of us. I think they have really, by admitting it's impossible at that scale to provide service to all customers, so they simply don't, but their users have not yet accepted that.

Or maybe there just shouldn't exist a company so large if it's clear that it won't be able to listen to its users?

Im pretty sure that if there were only one single human in the world the success ratio of the communication with God would be just as bleak, and the situation there is more like a company that after digging a tiny bit you discover only exists on paper.

> after digging a tiny bit

What makes you so sure that "the company" doesn't exist? Sounds like you've discovered something almost axiomatic to have that level of certainty since there isn't a state-of-Deleware for the perfect being.