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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

#401

Post by manigandham »

thethethethe wrote: post #275
wh-uws wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(warning rambling rant) I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus. I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore. Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now. But for their ad revenue what would they be? Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff. It's cool but t…

> Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra. Hadoop and Bigtable are not the same thing. Bigtable is a noSQL database. Hadoop is a big data processing framework. Hadoop is actually an open source implementat…

Hadoop is a collection of things: HDFS (filesystem), Hbase (keyvalue database), MapReduce (data processing), and YARN (resource scheduling and job management).

Hbase was open-source implementation of Bigtable while HDFS was a copy of Google File System. The divergence appeared with other processing frameworks like Spark but now there's Apache Beam to unify it all.

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

#402

Post by manigandham »

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.

If they're in it for the money then better maintenance and support of projects should be easily solved with a few paychecks.

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

#403

Post by manigandham »

perl4ever wrote: post #282
glogla wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? They have almost complete monopoly on online search, web ads, online video, on phone OS, on browsers. And they are not afraid to abuse those to get more, and are getting away with this. You don't need to do anything right when you rent-seek most of the online world.

How is this rent seeking and not just profit seeking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Because they can raise the rents anytime and everyone else just has to pay. See Google Maps pricing fiasco for a rather public example.

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

#404

Post by manigandham »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #299
typest wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^ 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 i…

> These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them. Don't know why people say this. I'm usually pretty good at behavioral interviews. The problem is the algorithmic interviews (again, this is where my IQ fixation comes from). IDK man, compared to most everyone else I seem to have failed life at this point given that I have zero accomplishments and little financial security.

There are billions of people worse off then pretty much anyone posting on HN.

Let me repeat: that is thousands of millions of people who can barely even conceptualize the life you're able to live.

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

#406

Post by hyperdimension »

luord wrote: post #405

One thing I was left curious about after reading this is, what is that third cloud that Google could fall behind of? I know they're after AWS and Azure, but there are several candidates for that fourth place.

Alibaba, I think. Probably the 'natural' choice for Chinese-facing developers, but I think Azure has a region there as well.

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

#407

Post by fallenpegasus »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #255
Jabbles wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact opposite of the usual complaint: that if you don't pay for support you can expect Google to arbitrarily shut your account and scoop up all your data - however paying them actually allows you some control.

Many of the frequent horror stories on here about account suspensions and completely unresponsive support are coming from people or companies with paid accounts. I do believe that there is a level of spending where you can actually get a hold of someone competent who can look into things. But that level appears to be rather high.

About 5 years ago, Hewlett-Packard tried being a paid GSuite customer, paying for tens of thousands of seats, with a path to onboarding the entire company. We could not get support, or even a TAM who would answer their phone.

After a year, HP dumped GSuite, and went to O365 instead. We got a responsive TAM, full multi-tier support, and white glove handholding for migration. And, I think it was cheaper, too.

There is NO level of spending as a customer at which Google actually gives a shit.

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

#408

Post by fallenpegasus »

geranim0 wrote: post #287
jeffffff wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds kind of like this famous linus rant: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Is he always like that? That's toxic af

Complaints about "toxic" are a screen to hide the fact that you can't say "incorrect".

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

#409

Post by Grue3 »

_dps wrote: post #359
overgard wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably less to do with backwards compat then how it was handled. The first few versions of python 3 didn't really provide any compelling benefit, (indeed things like performance were worse, not better), and most people didn't _care_ about the cruft it removed. The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure. Did that weirdness have any consequences at all? Not really. Was it worth it to forc…

Agree with everything you said here, but let me riff on this > The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure. I am reminded of the Emerson quip "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". The Py2 print statement is special/weird because it is a very important and special behavior, especially for newcomers. It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that…

The funny thing is, if you type print with space it recognizes what you meant, and still wouldn't do it, raising an exception instead. It would've cost them literally nothing to support both ways to write print, since the parser has to detect statement print anyway.

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

#410

Post by d1zzy »

corin_ wrote: post #166
zimbatm wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

And that's assuming people cannot find satisfaction in maintaining things. Personally I do find it satisfying to be "polishing" the same software for a long time. Iron out bugs, make performance improvements here and there, update to newer frameworks/APIs. Code is like a living thing and keeping it alive can be very rewarding work.
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