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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

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Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#61

Post by mvn9 »

physicles wrote: post #56

The mishandled Python 3 transition sure created a lot of pain (I experienced some of it, even though I only started with Python in 2016), but I never realized how much it hurt the language’s momentum. This must be one of the reasons why JavaScript is so popular today. JS benefits here from being run in browsers, which the author points out are fantastic at back compat, even as the dev culture surrounding the language…

Also: functional programming feels better in JS than in Python. On the other hand, it's nicer to write for-loops in Python.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#62

Post by chillfox »

rawgabbit wrote: post #5
lowiqengineer wrote: post #2

The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group . If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, l…

Sad. I want to like Google but the author is right.

Yep, Googles stuff looks nice, but I can’t afford to use their stuff. The time budget simply doesn’t allow for rewriting things more than once a decade, and even that’s a pain.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#63

Post by logicslave »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #2

The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group . If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, l…

I think this is really common. I've met quite a few Google engineers whose whole identity is defined by their employer. Its striking, and a testament to the malleability of the human mind, even if the individual is "smart".

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#64

Post by rewq4321 »

TLDR of the article:

> In the Emacs world [...], when they make an API obsolete, they are basically saying: “You really shouldn’t use this approach, because even though it works, it suffers from various deficiencies which we enumerate here. But in the end it’s your call.”

> Whereas in the Google world, deprecation means: “We are breaking our commitments to you.” [...] It means they are going to force you to do some work, possibly a large amount of rework, on a regular basis

It's fine if they want to go hunting for their Perfect API v10™, but just leave the old APIs alone - build abstractions under them if needed. Don't push that work onto your customers.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#65

Post by sharken »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #33
gundmc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make less than a new grad at Google. This doesn't appear to be close to true based on levels.fyi, unless you're severely underpaid for an Amazon L5.

Levels.fyi is good, but it's still polluted with TC's from multiple regions in the US (California + NYC have higher base and higher TC by 15% due to taxes). In addition, promos always happen at the low-band and aren't negotiated. There's very likely some intersection between high-band L4 and low-band L5, and I'd be there when/if I promo. The only way to get out of the band is to get a high raise during evaluation sea…

Dive and save is one option you have, as admittedly being a long time at a company does not usually end up in a great salary. Related: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-diving-save/

The other more popular approach is to "play the game" as I think of it, I.e. every 18-24 months you switch to a new job with a substantial increase in pay as result.

I wish this wasn't the case, but I guess it is what it is.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#66

Post by sitkack »

> Let’s say hypothetically that Apple was dumb enough to pull a Guido van Rossum, and declare that Swift 6.0 is backwards-incompatible with Swift 5.0, much in the way that Python 3 is incompatible with Python 2.

Damn, I was waiting for this. The whole essay was a setup for this paragraph. Reframes the argument using a shared traumatic experience for everyone. This humanizes the effect, we all know someone that lost someone to the Python2/3 transition. I can't count the number of Python friends that turned into Gophers, joining some cult of middle class bearded tech dad with a side business distilling pear brandy.

Best Yegge Essay Yet! Welcome back Steve.

edit, finished the essay. He smoked GCP in this one, damn damn hard. Hickory.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#67

Post by LoSboccacc »

jimmaswell wrote: post #60
userbinator wrote: post #27

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

The absolute worst in my small experience with it is anything touching the node ecosystem. Try to follow any guide or use any library not updated in the last week and there will be breaking API changes and deprecation warnings everywhere.

try using four libraries and chances are they require two different version of a build tool installed globally

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#68

Post by 1024core »

I have heard that at Google, you get promoted/rewarded for launches. To me, that seems like an obvious perverse incentive to continuously deprecate things, so new things can be "launched" to replace them. There are no "launches" if you're just maintaining backwards compatibility!

Maybe GCP should take a hard look at their internal incentives?

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#69

Post by bickeringyokel »

> One fun bit of trivia about Bigtable is that they had these internal control-plane entities (as part of the implementation) called tablet servers, which had large indexes, and at some point they became a scaling bottleneck.

Anyone understand the technical jargon here? I'm a bit lost.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#70

Post by joshuamorton »

CJefferson wrote: post #58
perl4ever wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, when someone expresses an opinion like this, you never know if they were contacted at some point by a Google recruiter and ended up with a case of sour grapes. I had a phone conversation with a hiring manager once, and obviously I was not the right type or class or caste or something, but it wasn't a technical screen at all, so it's a mystery to me forever what exactly determined the "in group" as…

I've never been hired or approached by Google. However, as a University lecturer I know a lot of people Google have employed. In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught, and accepted some idiots who know how to speak well. While they have employed some good people, I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better…

> In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught

There's no question that Google is happy to have false-negatives in interviews.

> I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else

why would they do this? And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? (this is also an amusing comment because the only group I find more critical of Google than HN is Googlers)

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