People always find a reason to complain, no matter how polished the product is. Especially the manager on one of my previous teams at Google.

Every few days, my manager and I would sit down together and open our iPhone app. He would describe all the problems that he saw on the main page. Then, I would furiously scribble notes and try to fix each bug before our next meeting.

One week, he had a complaint like “This page shows no content.” That was a severe problem! I started investigating ASAP.

Once the empty page bug was resolved, my manager said, “There’s not enough whitespace between this button and this label.” That meant there were no more big issues, and I was doing a good job. I set the margin from 2 pixels to 8 pixels and got back to my refactoring project.

The next day, our product manager came by and said, “There’s too much whitespace here!” So I reduced the margin from 8 pixels to 4 pixels.

Inevitably, my manager reported another bug saying the whitespace was incorrect at 4 pixels. (So what was it supposed to be?) At that point, I just said, “Let me check the UX spec.”

Of course, there was no UX spec for iOS. At Google, they only provided a spec for Android. So I quietly ignored the bug and got on with the rest of my work. Oddly, everyone forgot about their whitespace requests within a week.

What a strange team.