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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

#141

Post by megablast »

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…

Microsoft bend over backwards for app compatibility, but keep breaking UI compatibility every few releases for no good reason.

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

#142

Post by dutchmartin »

nicoburns wrote: post #126
BossingAround wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running into this problem more and more. It seems like Node is fundamentally unusable for anything but the nimblest teams that do not mind updating their dependencies automatically, every week, and when something breaks, they are capable of fixing it within hours. I really like Node as a language (especially with TS), but Node as an ecosystem feels like a very hard fit into 90%+ of corporations.

I think the culture of Node comes from the earlier culture of in-browser JavaScript. When running on the browser platform you have to make sure your libraries are up to date and maintained, otherwise you're at the mercy of browser updates breaking things from under your feet (this is less bad now, but it was awful in the days of IE Consequently, JavaScript developers got used to the burden of maintenance and rapidly…

I strongly feel that you must have end to end tests while using node because of the dependency hell. Not even knowing if a upgrade of a dependency breaks your system is just hard. Also testing it by hand is just not maintainable.

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

#143

Post by vmateixeira »

londons_explore wrote: post #86
mamurphy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My armchair thought: what if the CEO said "wow, Yegge is right, we've gotten really off trail here. you need to show leadership in maintaining a 3+ year old system at Google for promotions?" Could that happen and would it work?

Yes, but there might be other downsides... Suddenly every developer turns into 'maintenance man' just refactoring existing code to make it neater without adding much.

Increasing performance and cutting down infrastructure costs?

Looks like someone deserves a bonus

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

#144

Post by gberger »

1024core wrote: post #68

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?

That's one of the points of the essay. Steve also argues that it's not a GCP problem, but a Google-wide problem (excluding Android and Chrome).

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

#145

Post by benhurmarcel »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #17
mdrabla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not endemic. I think you've met a few people you didn't like, read some tweets, and extrapolated poorly. And I don't think people working on GCP are really treated that much better than their counterparts at AWS. The fact that you think the difference in product depreciation policy between them is caused by people getting "everything they could dream of" is funny though

Trips to Europe or to random conferences in first class? Trips to _any office_ for "face time"? Massages? Bonuses of any sort, including peer bonuses and holiday gifts? Refreshers? Society thinking that you're "smart" for passing the loop? You're rewarded just for being alive at Google, but I get nothing but scorn and condescension. Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make les…

> 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.

Yet you still make more than what the vast majority of engineers in western Europe will ever make in their whole career. And that's still only looking at the most developed countries.

The job market isn't fair. No use getting burnt over that.

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

#146

Post by spery »

BossingAround wrote: post #119
sitkack wrote: post #66

> 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 s…

> we all know someone that lost someone to the Python2/3 transition This feels like a very strange perspective. Why is it a problem to "lose" someone from a language? You're an engineer (a presumption on my side); casting yourself into a subsection of a "Python engineer" seems like a move with all the downsides and no upsides.

You don't lose, you're still an engineer. Platform loses a user. And that's bad for everyone as explained in the essay.

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

#147

Post by dhanna »

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…

As a counter argument, I don't hold much confidence in my former professor's ability to rank the real-world competence of their student's.

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

#148

Post by em-bee »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #133
em-bee wrote: post #53

i think this is the key point of the article: it actually winds up being less DevOps work, on average, to support open-source systems running on bare VMs, than to try to keep up with Google’s deprecation treadmill.

I honestly feel like this is a better idea in general, at least in data science stuff. For context, I tend to get dumped with undocumented poorly written untested DS code bases every time I move to a new job. The difference between setups where there's a bare VM/server and it runs using standard tools (command line scripts) or at least some open-source orchestration and any kind of proprietary technology tied to infr…

this is the classic advantage of Free Software and Open Source over non-free tools. you often get a mix of commercial services and inhouse custom development that is no better documented or supported than FOSS alternatives.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

Traster wrote: post #102
mamurphy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My armchair thought: what if the CEO said "wow, Yegge is right, we've gotten really off trail here. you need to show leadership in maintaining a 3+ year old system at Google for promotions?" Could that happen and would it work?

The promotion system isn't the issue, the promotion system was the issue 10 years ago. For the last 10 years Google has been hiring and promoting and keeping people who prioritize shiny new things more than maintaining old things. If you start rewarding maintaining old things you aren't going to suddenly get what you want, you're just going to lose a tonne of people because they don't want to do what you're telling t…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by Illniyar »

> I’m not actively developing on AWS, so I don’t have as much of a sense for how often they sunset APIs that they have previously dangled alluringly before unwitting developers.

SimpleDB still works, it's not even deprecated or grandfathered to not accept new users. There is really nothing else you need to know about how AWS treats deprecation than that single example.

Deprecation is practically unheard of in AWS. If it does happen you can be damn sure it takes years to actually remove obsolete functionality and there is a fairly easy migration path to something of equivalent functionality.

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