Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 417 posts

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

#161

Post by lowiqengineer »

offbyone wrote: post #45
lowiqengineer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Huh. At this point I'm quite curious if I know you.

Haha, you don’t but I do know you from the Pythonista list.

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

#162

Post by aaanotherhnfolk »

It is a total hassle to keep up with Googlers changing everything constantly. It's not just GCP it's every platform they control. Try keeping a website on the right side of Chrome policies, a G Suite app up, a Chrome extension running.

Thousands of engineers chasing promotions by dropping support for live code. If it was their code they wouldn't do it. The org is broken. If you want to see what mature software support looks like, check out Microsoft. Win32 binaries I wrote in college still run on Win 10. Google looks unimpressive by comparison. But they all got promoted!

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

#163

Post by Illniyar »

gravypod wrote: post #42

> I have been inexorably pushed away from GCP, towards cloud agnosticism. On a side note I think this is what all of us should be aiming for. Every time someone on a team I'm working for starts trying to use some very complex tool that a SaaS/cloud has built for us I always urged them to look for a simpler solution. Do you really need AWS Lambda/kinesis/etc or can you write your code and deploy it onto our cluster as…

On the contrary, every time someone comes to me with a suggestion to build something in-house or use an open source solution when a aws service exists I say the hell with that. I don't want to maintain it, build features into it or operate it.

I want full in vendor lock-in, it saves an immense amount of time.

You just need to pick a vendor that gives a shit about it's customers to be locked in to - and that's simply not google.

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

#164

Post by typest »

albacur wrote: post #97
lowiqengineer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. I'm well aware that I'm considered mentally defective (or maybe just garden variety low IQ) by the hiring committee. That doesn't really change my observation here.

You pop up in every post about Google or Facebook and make the conversation about yourself, wallowing in self pity because you didn't land a job there straight out of college. This might sound harsh, but you need to get over it and move on.

^^ what this guy said. You named yourself lowiqengineer because your SAT score was “only” 2200. That’s in the 98th percentile —- if it were an IQ test, it would get you into Mensa, the organization for high IQ people!

You talk as if people from FANG (your invented acronym to exclude Amazon) look down on all others, but it seems that you are the one looking down on all others, everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to get into G/FB straight out of college while also building up not just 1, but 2 or 300k or net worth.

These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them.

Take a step back. You won’t “fail” life because you “only” got a job at one FAANG and not another, or because your net worth is only 100k straight out of college....even the sentence I just wrote sounds completely ridiculous.

Your problems are stemming from how you view yourself and the world, which is full of false assumptions. A lot of smart people on HN have told you this —- you should listen to them.

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

#165

Post by rikroots »

Illniyar wrote: post #150

> 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…

EC2 vs EC2-classic. I got badly burned (mentally) because I had to learn about creating EC2 instances using the company AWS account created before 2014, but then needed to create instances on a client account created in 2014.

Also: classic vs application load balancers - especially the health checks. That one drove me nuts for weeks!

AWS never seems to "deprecate" anything, but they do enjoy adding services which are very similar to other services but guaranteed to trip people (ie: me) up when it comes to the buried-in-the-documentation details.

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

#166

Post by corin_ »

zimbatm wrote: post #135
Traster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It might be even deeper than that. I don't know if it's representative, the few Googlers I talked to were there only for the money. Their view of the company was actually quite negative. Keeping backward-compatibility requires people that care. That have enough pride in their work to counter-balance the grind.

Obviously having people that care about the work they do is a positive thing, but there are plenty of people in plenty of industries managing to do a good job despite only being in it for the money.

It might not be a good business decision for Google, but surely if they create enough positions that are solely focussed on the boring stuff but are paid better to make up for it, there is a price point at which they'd get enough interested people.

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

#167

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

zimbatm wrote: post #135
Traster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It might be even deeper than that. I don't know if it's representative, the few Googlers I talked to were there only for the money. Their view of the company was actually quite negative. Keeping backward-compatibility requires people that care. That have enough pride in their work to counter-balance the grind.

the few Googlers I talked to were there only for the money. Their view of the company was actually quite negative.

This is true for most people working for large multinational corporations. Good things can still be developed without passion.

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

#168

Post by lclarkmichalek »

habosa wrote: post #95
larrymcp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that he mentioned a few of them in the article. He writes: I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to... I dunno, _everything_, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years.

I work on Firebase. His characterization of Firestore is incorrect and lazy. It did not replace Realtime Database (which is the product he’s calling Firebase) they are two products which live side by side and both are being actively improved. People assumed that because we made a new database we were killing the older one, but that was never true.

Well, that’s a novel take on the customer is always right

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

#169

Post by skohan »

I've been hiring dev ops engineers lately, and the consensus seems to be in the candidates I've talked to that all of the cloud providers are somewhat painful to work with.

I've worked the most with AWS so I'll use it as an example, but it seems like they sell on "new services", so they are incentivized to release quickly, which leads to services with a lot of holes and poor documentation, making it almost essential to get paid support to work around these issues.

It makes me wonder what it would look like to build a minimal cloud product which focused on a few core services with an emphasis on reliability, performance and developer ergonomics.

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

#170

Post by tsimionescu »

nl wrote: post #157
joepie91_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not even knowing if a upgrade of a dependency breaks your system is just hard. This is true for any language/platform.

Strong typing does partially help in this situation though.

Only for the most trivial bugs, though (as non-dependent type systems can't express anything but trivial properties). Still, it's better than nothing.
Post reply on HN