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Google Outage in Europe

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Re: Google Outage in Europe

#71

Post by jankeymeulen »

de6u99er wrote: post #64
kroolik wrote: post #9

There were outages around the same time last year. Somebody in the HN thread commented back then that the employees evaluation and promotion window ends around december/eoy, thus more releases are made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages

Some people are definitely not gatting a raise.

More likely someone actually will. A blameless postmortem will be written, and the people that will fix the bug or systems issue will have something to work on with high visibility and high impact, which tends to translate in good performance ratings.

(Googler, opinions are my own)

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#75

Post by oblio »

yunohn wrote: post #59
oblio wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are various whitepapers that reformulate this exact truth you've highlighted: issues tend to happen more when changes are made. Regarding the technical details doc, Google will never state that outright in individual postmortems. And they will definitely not draw this to the logical conclusion regarding the spiky yearly activity.

> logical conclusion regarding the spiky yearly activity Why is it logical? There’s tons of changes being deployed at all times, at all large companies. Across products, verticals, everything - hundreds of changes at any given point. Some of these changes can introduce hard-to-predict bugs in globally distributed systems. Most of the time, external users don’t even notice before they’re fixed. Like another commenter…

> Like another commenter said, performance reviews do not coincide with with the year-end at Google and other companies.

When are they? My bet is that they're roughly around the same time period, even if they don't start or close on December 31st.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#76

Post by trhway »

kroolik wrote: post #9

There were outages around the same time last year. Somebody in the HN thread commented back then that the employees evaluation and promotion window ends around december/eoy, thus more releases are made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages

November 11 is a public holiday in US. And it seems it has in recent years became a company holiday in many companies too. May be that break in established over many years cadence of workday and holidays plays a role here, like say affecting smoothness of support transition between US-EMEA-APJ.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#77

Post by UncleMeat »

oblio wrote: post #43
kroolik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with it. People make errors, distributed systems aren't easy. More frequent changes - more likely a bug was introduced. My post is just a speculation, let's wait for the actual technical details doc from Google.

Well, there are various whitepapers that reformulate this exact truth you've highlighted: issues tend to happen more when changes are made. Regarding the technical details doc, Google will never state that outright in individual postmortems. And they will definitely not draw this to the logical conclusion regarding the spiky yearly activity.

It can’t be logical because it is based on bad facts.

We wrote evals in August. Anybody racing to get things launched before perf did so months ago. The timing described in the top post is just false.

We write the next one in February. We are almost exactly half way between perf cycles. Your hunch that this lines up with the end of the year is false.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#78

Post by skinkestek »

mucle6 wrote: post #65
samhw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it not be knock-on effects of earlier changes? Or indeed post-review changes from scared/precarious engineers?

I think we are exactly mid way between the end year 2021 perf and mid year 2022 perf, so its not clear to me that this could be to blame

That explains:

The people who did the stuff have either gotten their promotions and moved on or didn't get a promotion and have given up.

:-)

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#80

Post by [deleted] »

kroolik wrote: post #9

There were outages around the same time last year. Somebody in the HN thread commented back then that the employees evaluation and promotion window ends around december/eoy, thus more releases are made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages

[deleted]
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