Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google
51 comments
·May 13, 2025braza
kubb
I’d wager 90% time spent at Google is fighting incidental organizational complexity, which is virtually unlimited.
repeekad
The phrase thrown around was “collaboration headwind”, the idea was if project success depends on 1 person with a 95% chance of success, project success also had a 95% chance. But if 10 people each need to succeed at a 95% chance, suddenly the project success likelihood becomes 60%…
In reality, lazy domain owners layered on processes, meetings, documents, and multiple approvals until it took 6 months to change the text on a button, ugh
simianwords
Equally important is the amount of time they save because of available abstractions to use like infra, tooling etc
tuyiown
I think this is addressed with the complex vs complicated intro. Most problems with uncontrolled / uncontrollable variables will be approached with an incremental solution, e.g. you'll restrict those variables voluntarily or involuntarily and let issues being solved organically / manually, or automatisation will be plain and simple being abandoned.
This qualify as complicated. Delving in complicated problems is mostly driven by business opportunity, always has limited scaling, and tend to be discarded by big players.
braza
I don't think this is adequately addressed by the "complicated vs. complex" framing—especially not when the distinction is made using reductive examples like taxes (structured, bureaucratic, highly formalized) versus climate change (broad, urgent, signaling-heavy).
That doesn’t feel right.
Let me bring a non-trivial, concrete example—something mundane: “ePOD,” which refers to Electronic Proof of Delivery.
ePOD, in terms of technical implementation, can be complex to design for all logistics companies out there like Flexport, Amazon, DHL, UPS, and so on.
The implementation itself—e.g., the box with a signature open-drawing field and a "confirm" button—can be as complex as they want from a pure technical perspective.
Now comes, for me at least, the complex part: in some logistics companies, the ePOD adoption rate is circa 46%. In other words, in 54% of all deliveries, you do not have a real-time (not before 36–48 hours) way to know and track whether the person received the goods or not. Unsurprisingly, most of those are still done on paper. And we have:
- Truck drivers are often independent contractors.
- Rural or low-tech regions lack infrastructure.
- Incentive structures don’t align.
- Digitization workflows involve physical paper handoffs, WhatsApp messages, or third-party scans.
So the real complexity isn't only "technical implementation of ePOD" but; "having the ePOD, how to maximize it's adoption/coverage with a lot uncertainty, fragmentation, and human unpredictability on the ground?".
That’s not just complicated, it’s complex 'cause we have: - Socio-technical constraints,
- Behavioral incentives,
- Operational logistics,
- Fragmented accountability,
- And incomplete or delayed data.
We went off the highly controlled scenario (arbitrarily bounded technical implementation) that could be considered complicated (if we want to be reductionist, as the OP has done), and now we’re navigating uncertainty and N amount of issues that can go wrong.
null
dmoy
> My immediate reaction in my head was: "This is impossible". But then, a teammate said: "But we're Google, we should be able to manage it!".
Google, where the impossible stuff is reduced to merely hard, and the easy stuff is raised to hard.
dijit
This is probably the most accurate statement possible.
“I just want to store 5TiB somewhere”
“Ha! Did you book multiple bigtable cells”
Phelinofist
What are peer-bonuses?
dijit
The idea is if someone helps you in a really big way that you’re able to reward that. So you can ask the company to give the person either credits for an internal store, or a direct addition to their salary for one month.
Obviously, there are limits to how many pay bonuses you can give out and if it’s direct money or store credits.
Directly asking for a peer bonus’ is not very “googly” (and yes, this is a term they use- in case you needed evidence of Google being a bit cultish).
There are companies who help do this “as a service”; https://bonusly.com/
decimalenough
Basically a way to "tip" people for going out of their way to help you, except that the "tip" comes out of the company's pocket, not yours.
To prevent obvious abuse, you need to provide a rationale, the receiver's manager must approve and there's a limit to how many you can dish out per quarter.
socalgal2
Something designed to remove all intrinsic motivation from employees
cmrdporcupine
Or "How many MDB groups do I need to get approved to join over multiple days/weeks, before I can do the 30 second thing I need to do?"
Do not miss
RenThraysk
There is a certain amount of irony when the cookie policy agreement is buggy on a story about complicated & complex systems.
Clicking on "Only Necessary" causes the cookie policy agreement to reappear.
jajko
Not for me, on Chrome now
Pavilion2095
The cookie banner reappears indefinitely on this website when I click 'only necessary' lol.
teivah
Sorry about that, I'm my newsletter provider (Substack) which is very buggy sometimes.
ggm
I think there are two myths applicable here. Probably more.
One myth is that complex systems are inherently bad. Armed forces are incredibly complex. That's why it can take 10 or more rear echelon staff to support one fighting soldier. Supply chain logistics and materiel is complex. Middle ages wars stopped when gunpowder supplies ran out.
Another myth is that simple systems are always better and remain simple. They can be, yes. After all, DNA exists. But some beautiful things demand complexity built up from simple things. We still don't entirely understand how DNA and environment combine. Much is hidden in this simple system.
I do believe one programming language might be a rational simplification. If you exclude all the DSL which people implement to tune it.
zmb_
Following the definition from the article, armed forces seems like a complicated system, not a complex one. There is a structured, repeatable solution for armed forces. It does not exhibit the hallmark characteristics of complex systems listed in the article like emergent behaviors.
p_v_doom
Agreed. The problem is not complexity. Every system must process a certain amount of information. And the systems complexity must be able to match that amount. The fundamental problem is about designing systems that can manage complexity, especially runaway complexity.
jajko
> Middle ages wars stopped when gunpowder supplies ran out
Ukraine would be conquered by russia rather quickly if russians weren't so hilariously incompetent in these complex tasks, and war logistics being the king of them. Remember that 64km queue of heavy machinery [1] just sitting still? This was 2022, and we talk about fuel and food, the basics of logistics support.
gilleain
Mostly overlapping definition of what a 'complex system' is with :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
although I understood the key part of a system being complex (as opposed to complicated) is having a large number of types of interaction. So a system with a large number of parts is not enough, those parts have to interact in a number of different ways for the system to exhibit emergent effects.
Something like that. I remember reading a lot of books about this kind of thing a while ago :)
CommenterPerson
Interesting, Thanks to the writer.
However, all this amazing stuff in the service of .. posting ads ?
polotics
I think you are using hysteresis when actually meaning more general path-dependency.
nottorp
Let's add a post scriptum:
Whatever you're working on, your project is not likely to be at Google's scale and very unlikely to be a "complex system".
pentaphobe
Let's add a post post scriptum :)
Just because your project might not be at Google's scale doesn't mean it is therefore also not complex [^1]
Example: I'd say plenty of games fit the author's definition of "complex systems". Even the well-engineered ones (and even some which could fit on a floppy disc)
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
globalnode
Speaking of games, why hasn't google made a game. They could create a gaming division and well... make one. Amazon did. I wonder why they haven't.
fidotron
Google has a really hard time grokking the games industry, to the point they can hire people from it and just almost totally ignore them. Their ideas on how Android game development should be done were utterly hilarious, and it's only because of a couple of their dev relations people going to ludicrous lengths that it is actually viable at all.
Fundamentally, and ironically, Google likes to offload complexity on to everyone else in their ecosystems, and they got so used to people being willing to jump through hoops to do this for search ads/SEO they are very confused when faced with a more competitive environment.
One reason Google can't make games is they can't conceive of a simple enough platform on which to design and develop one. It would be a far too adventurous constantly moving target of wildly different specifications, and they would insist you support all possible permutations of everything from the start. There are reasons people like targeting games consoles, as it lets you focus on the important bits first.
Arelius
As someone who has firsthand experience:
A. The same reason Amazon had/has such a hard time.
B. Google lacking the same persistence of Amazon (Consider all the products that are killed)
C. Google's hiring process. (They organizationlly do not know how to hire specialists)
galkk
Google made Ingress and Pokémon go (Niantic was part of google before it was spun off).
sdenton4
/me pours one out for Stadia
nasretdinov
IMO even a more interesting observation is that even Google itself doesn't necessarily work on large scale, e.g. many regionalised services in Google Cloud don't have _that_ many requests in each region, allowing for a much simpler architecture compared to behemoths like GMail or Maps
p_v_doom
IMO what we term "complex" tends to be that which the current setup/system struggles to deal with or manage. Relatively speaking google has much much higher complexity, but it doesnt matter as much, because even in simpler cases we are dealing with huge amount of variety and possible states, and the principles of managing that remain the same regardless of scale.
octo888
Don't underestimate my colleagues' abilities to turn the simple into the complex!
vendiddy
Managing complexity pays off sooner than one would think.
Even a project that's like 15k lines of code would benefit from a conscious effort to fight against complexity.
0xKelsey
100%
citrin_ru
For small scale one can build a simple system but I see many are trying to copy FAANG architecture anyway. IMHO it’s a fallacy - people think that if they’ll would copy architecture used by google their company will be successful like google. I think it other was around - google has to build complex systems because it has many users.
nottorp
Yes, it's called "cargo cult" and it applies to a lot of architecture and processes decisions in IT :)
kossTKR
"This is one possible characteristic of complex systems: they behave in ways that can hardly be predicted just by looking at their parts, making them harder to debug and manage."
Zoethink
[dead]
One of my pet peeves with the usage of complex(ity) out of the traditional time/space in computer science is that most of the time the OPs of several articles over the internet do not make the distinction between boundaried/arbitrary complexity, where most of the time the person has most of the control of what is being implemented, and domain/accidental/environmental complexity, which is wide open and carries a lot of intrinsic and most of the time unsolvable constraints.
Yes, they are Google; yes, they have a great pool of talent around; yes, they do a lot of hard stuff; but most of the time when I read those articles, I miss those kinds of distinctions.
Not lowballing the guys at Google, they do amazing stuff, but in some domains of domain/accidental/environmental complexity (e.g. sea logistics, manufacturing, industry, etc.) where most of the time you do not have the data, I believe that they are way more complex/harder than most of the problems that the ones that they deal with.