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

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 339 posts

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#151

Post by djur »

sumeno wrote: post #128
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that in particular will freak everyone else in the company out, and .. most importantly... Google is no longer scared about those people going to their competition, because their competition is also flushing talent away. In the past, Google was willing to dump all sorts of cash into talent as long as it kept people from creating a truly competitive landscape. Now, they don't have to worry as much. The layoffs…

Random layoffs that affect high performers and low performers equally doesn't encourage performing higher. If anything it encourages performing lower because why bother if it's not going to even save your job?

It might not be so much about encouraging performance as encouraging compliance.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#152

Post by jeffbee »

vineyardmike wrote: post #117
jeffbee wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.

It does if Google can double their footprint. They announced reduced profitability recently in part due to capex for data centers. Last year google started warning some internal teams that they had to limit usage. It’s possible they’re running out of compute.

Google has been internally chopping budgets since decades. Is how they keep utilization up. Look up “steamroller” or “ucp” if you don’t know those.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#153

Post by scarface74 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #146
scarface74 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure. What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity? Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.

AWS was re-built from the ground up. Based on systems Amazon knew it already had and how to do better. S3 was built from the old image hosting designs, but better. StepFunctions and SWF before it are re-designed based on the 5 internal workflow engines that existed (and still do exist). SQS is a re-do of AMP. DynamoDB is a re-do of Sable. Redshift is a re-do of their internal partitioning and querying of Oracle datab…

I am aware of the history.

The people responsible for writing and maintaining AWS Services are my coworkers…

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#154

Post by yawnxyz »

With Firebase and the rest of GCP, there's absolutely no reason why those products are as hard to use as they are.

Supabase, Vercel, etc. all stepped in to fill that massive void that Google could have taken care of so long ago. IMO that's a massive miss and failure on Google's part.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#155

Post by bachmeier »

lmeyerov wrote: post #131
adra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

Internally at Microsoft, the flops were obvious. Employees made fun of the zune, there was a lot of embarrassment that staff were preferring iphones to free company-provided alternatives, etc. Leadership was putting $ in (remember the Nokia acquisition disaster?) and individual teams were doing neato things, but leadership was feudal & by-the-numbers with many tiny product owners, and not led by a good overall produc…

My introduction to Microsoft's problems came about 20 years ago. I was talking to a developer that worked there who kept emphasizing that Microsoft was such a boring place to work compared to companies like Google. Open source was the enemy, and they were supposed to give their all to further the Windows and Office monopolies - proprietary, corporate software. Meanwhile he was watching what was happening in the Linux world and elsewhere. There was a plan, it's just that it was to maximize next quarter's revenue.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#156

Post by mardifoufs »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #136
spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label. The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negativ…

Waze has been consistently better, especially for traffic rerouting. It's also way better at letting you know about road events, like accidents, than Google Maps. Maps is better to search stuff on a map, but for navigation, it is so barebones (and not even in a good minimalist way). I'm not sure how GMaps can still lag so far behind when Waze is also owned by Google.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#157

Post by Rebelgecko »

buildbot wrote: post #20

TCI / Chris Hon are only doing this because his fund is mainly invested in Microsoft and Alphabet[1]. Guess what, his fund recently lost a bit of money for the first time: TCI[2] Its ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING that MS and Alphabet are being pushed into laying off collectively over 20K people so this billionaire can recover a bit. Like, could this not be a national security issue? This man is able to have Google trash thei…

There are definitely billionaires profiting from the layoffs, but if you look at who owns shares of Google stock it isn't people who own a paltry <1% of shares

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#158

Post by cmckn »

malinoal wrote: post #149
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label. The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negativ…

maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back

I’m no expert, but the “eco” routes don’t usually pass the smell test with me. I’ll be routed away from a thoroughfare that’s mostly flat/downhill to take a slightly-shorter side street that’s a steep incline. It just seems like half-baked greenwashing.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#159

Post by yazaddaruvala »

scarface74 wrote: post #153
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS was re-built from the ground up. Based on systems Amazon knew it already had and how to do better. S3 was built from the old image hosting designs, but better. StepFunctions and SWF before it are re-designed based on the 5 internal workflow engines that existed (and still do exist). SQS is a re-do of AMP. DynamoDB is a re-do of Sable. Redshift is a re-do of their internal partitioning and querying of Oracle datab…

I am aware of the history. The people responsible for writing and maintaining AWS Services are my coworkers…

> This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure.

Your comment above doesn’t seem to reflect that history, so I just wanted to make sure it was stated.

AWS is also entirely built on Amazons builder tools like Apollo and Pipelines. So it’s really unfair to say “AWS was built from the ground up”

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#160

Post by sytelus »

spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

Search has particularly gone south last 3-4 months. Quotes and exact phrasing is now a necessity and I find myself rather use ChatGPT.

What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.

Post reply on HN