What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

No one asked for a "block device"? Um, that's table stakes because every single OS in the world needs to be able to boot their system, and that requires a block device. Every single cloud system provides a block device because if it wasn't there, customers wouldn't be able to use their VM, and you can sure they would be asking for it. Every single cloud system has also provided from day one something like AWS S3 or GCE's GCS so users can store files. So I'm pretty sure you don't know what you are talking about.

As far as "proper stack refactoring" is concerned, again, the key is to make a business case for why that work is necessary. Tech debt can be a good reason, but doing massive refactoring just because it _could_ help other teams requires much more justification than "it could be beneficial". Google has plenty of storage solutions which work across multiple datacenters / GCE zones, including Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable. These solutions or their equivalent were available and used internally by teams long befoe they were available as public offerings for Cloud customers. So "we could have done it a different way because it mgiht benefit other teams" is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. Speaking as someone who has worked in storage infrastructure for over a decade, I don't see the calcification you refer to, and there are good reasons why things are done the way that are which go far beyond the current org chart. There have been a huge amount of innovative work done in the storage infrastructure teams.

I will say that the posix/nfs/smb way of doing things is not necessarily the best way to provide lowest possible storage TCO. It may be the most convenient way if you need to lift and shift enterprise workloads into the cloud, sure. But if you are writing software from scratch, or if you are internal Google product team which is using internal storage solutions such as Colossus, BigTable, Spanner, etc., it is much cheaper, especially if you are writing software that must be highly scalable, to use these technologies as opposed to posix/nfs/smb. All cloud providers, Google Cloud included, will provide multiple storage solutions to meet the customer where they are at. But would I recommend that a greenfield application start by relying on NFS or SMB today? Hell, no! There are much better 21st century technologies that are available today. Why start a new project by tying yourself to such legacy systems with all of their attendant limitations and costs?

You run into all sorts of bugs you'd never even conceive of when things scale up, even basic frontend code

Some problem that would hit one customer every few years and go away on refresh for a local mom & pop website will irritate thousands of people a day on Google.com, and those people will band together on Facebook into a support group, and that support group will get media coverage

You try to look into the issue and you can't reproduce it at all, you just have to figure it out from tiny wisps of clues

"decline in economic activity" is a decline in GDP. You're proving my point, not countering it.

Nobody defines a recession as a decline in employment. It's correlated, sure, but not the same thing.

> "decline in economic activity" is a decline in GDP.

No, GDP is one of many measures of activity in the economy.

Also, “significant, widespread, and prolonged” are important qualifiers, and quarterly GDP is relevant to at most two (significant and prolonged) of them.

> Nobody defines a recession as a decline in employment

Not employment alone, no. But income has long been recognized as part of the multidimensional set of indicators that determines recession.

The Congressional Research Service in a 2008 report wrote:

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades.

This is the generally accepted view among economists of what constitutes an economic recession. There is also a commonly cited "rule of thumb" that is referred to in the press. That rule is that a recession is two consecutive quarterly declines in real gross domestic product (GDP). But this rule does not always apply.

https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20081215_R40052_72d3368...

In 1974, the BLS Commissioner provided this set of rules of thumb for the depth (“significant”), duration (“prolonged”), and diffusion (“widespread”) elements of recession; note that employment is a factor in two of the three elements, just like output (at the time, GDP had not yet replaced GNP as the preferred output measure):

In terms of duration—declines in real G.N.P. for 2 consecutive quarters; a decline in industrial production over a six‐month period.

In terms of depth—A 1.5 per cent decline in real G.N.P.; a 15 per cent decline nonagricultural employment; a two point rise in unemployment to a level of at least 6 per cent.

In terms of diffusion—A decline in nonagricultural employment in more than 75 per cent of industries, as measured over six‐month spans, for 6 months or longer.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200325140941/https://www.nytim...

Google in Poland doesn't pay in USD. Why would you think they want simpler solutions?