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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#81

Post by Brian_K_White »

UncleMeat wrote: post #57
renegade-otter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google culture in general seems to be "this is not fun or a very profitable, so we are just going to, like, not do it anymore". Fundamentally it comes from the fact that they don't have to do any of it anyway . Anyone using AdWords knows that it's a money-printing machine. Google is thousands of fresh CS graduates who want to do "cool green-field stuff" but not really the day-to-day grind we are all part of and what…

I think that there are competing cultures, and ultimately only one of them has the power to fire people. I'm currently losing a multi-year long siege to kill a project with significant external visibility almost entirely because of organizational structure. A series of reorgs and new VPs have ended up such that our VP doesn't give a crap about our project and the VP that does doesn't have a great relationship with ou…

"My experience is that people really do become proud of the systems that they build and that deleting them is something they avoid."

Who is still in the same position or team 10, or even 2 years, or even 6 months later, especially in any faang?

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#82

Post by anytime5704 »

It’s disheartening to read all the comments agreeing with this post.

I actually worked on GCP for several years and we always made sure our customer facing API changes were backwards compatible.

The decision to deprecate or “sunset” a feature was not taken lightly and needed to be announced O(years) ahead of time.

Apparently, my team was an exception rather than the norm.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#83

Post by kridsdale3 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #62
renegade-otter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google culture in general seems to be "this is not fun or a very profitable, so we are just going to, like, not do it anymore". Fundamentally it comes from the fact that they don't have to do any of it anyway . Anyone using AdWords knows that it's a money-printing machine. Google is thousands of fresh CS graduates who want to do "cool green-field stuff" but not really the day-to-day grind we are all part of and what…

I'm doing boring enterprise maintenance for a lot less than Google money, maybe I should just apply. "No, I'm not Ivy league or MIT, but I'm great at taking abuse and grinding away thanklessly". Any chance that buys me a pass on not being great at memorizing algorithims?

"I'm not Ivy league or MIT, but I'm great at taking abuse and grinding away thanklessly"

This describes me, and they hired me.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#84

Post by Joker_vD »

dielll wrote: post #53

recently Youtube shows you a pop up that says they banned adblockers and even suggest that you pay for Youtube Premium. However, in my country if you click the Youtube Premium link, it says YouTube Premium is not available in your country" I don't think Google takes their non ad products seriously. They only launch their products in few countries, the teams use them for promotion then abandon the products

Well, you better watch those ads then — or else.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#85

Post by gtirloni »

busterarm wrote: post #43
gtirloni wrote: post #5

Just a rant about having to react to things that the author didn't want to react to. But these are facts of life. I find GCP policies pretty reasonable. I was never caught off guard by them.

When you have 30 engineering teams all using different parts of the platform and your Product team is crushing your whole org with their aggressive roadmap, you will no longer feel like GCP policies are reasonable. When everything takes 20% longer to ship than you planned because every other week some random team(s) is forced to do unplanned, immediate rewrites by a vendor, that vendor starts to look like a dick and…

> When everything takes 20% longer to ship than you planned because every other week some random team(s) is forced to do unplanned, immediate rewrites by a vendor

This vendor is certainly not GCP in this case.

Every other week? Immediate rewrites? Is this even based on reality?

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#86

Post by D13Fd »

morkalork wrote: post #44
f33d5173 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major critique of the python transition is that they forced you to port your code instead of supporting python 2 code alongside python 3.

As someone who only started using python in earnest after 3 got its legs, I appreciate that decision.

Yeah that's the boat I'm in. I started using Python for production projects after the switch. It sucks for those who came before, but it's just fine for those who came after, and I'm not sure it hurt the platform as much as this article suggests.

Plus, they clearly learned their lesson after that switch, which is still talked about in 2023.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#87

Post by AwaAwa »

grumple wrote: post #66
jvolkman wrote: post #48

I had this experience with AWS earlier this week. ======== Hello, This is a reminder to update your policies to avoid changes to your access to AWS Billing, Cost Management and Account consoles. Our records indicate that you are still using retired actions to access these consoles. If your policies are not updated with new actions by December 11, 2023, your users’ access to the AWS billing, Cost Management, and Accou…

I run things at a mid sized company and I get AWS emails like this daily. There's always something that needs attention. Except sometimes it doesn't really need attention. Other times it's something absolutely critical. Sometimes can't tell unless I read 50 pages of documentation and talk to their support. Meanwhile at my old job, we had actual servers and vms in house. We had a machine running some obscure service s…

Cloud opex is high. And I don't mean the bill. Though the former does add to the latter.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#88

Post by noirscape »

scarface_74 wrote: post #74
noirscape wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the (broad) architecture of my local government yes (due to keeping tabs on government spending on IT as a personal curiosity). I'm aware of the morass you speak off. The reality though is that most tech stacks aren't that complicated. Not every company is a venture capital "go big or go bust, we change the entire industry" darling (nor are they necessarily looking to grow that way, especially outside the S…

When I say “enterprise”, I’m talking about large F500 companies with lots of moving pieces.

Yes, in those cases the tradeoffs of lock-in are worth it. With that in mind though - F500 are the absolute peak of the economic market (since you know, that's how Fortune makes that list). They represent less than 1% of the total market in terms of actual needs.

In those cases, the vendor lock-in from using a bespoke AWS or Azure solution are absolutely worth it because if AWS or Azure are an active problem they also will have the manpower to migrate off of AWS/Azure. My suggestion/advice is for the other 99%. You still want AWS/Azure for CYA, the managed part (not having to deal with ops) and backups but you don't need all the extra solutions they offer.

It's why "you are not Google" is an advice that exists. Newbies often tend to assume that because [big company/VC startup] is willing to eat the potential risk of a lock-in gone awry that the [smaller company] they work for/founded is able to eat it as well. There's definitely a usecase for all the specific services that GCP/Azure/AWS offer. Chances are though that you're not working for a company where that's the case and the more conventional tools will do just fine.

(VC Startups tend to ignore that advice mostly because they have a lot of financial resources to spend upfront, so they think it's worthwhile/that they will hit that point where GCP/Azure/AWS services become a necessity compared to a traditional tech stack.)

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#89

Post by fenesiistvan »

I don't agreee with the Android related tougths. Altrough they don't deprecate API's, permission related things are changed too often. If you have any non-trivial app, you have to make changes every year to remain in Google Play and the rules are awkard. My latest pain: I have a voip phone app in the store and last time I had to add a big popup before touching the contact list, informing the users the purpose (which is obvious with a phone app). Also the app description now contains that "this app might upload your phone numbers", altrough it only list it for the user, so they can select a contact and call it. There are many more idiot thing, but I stop here because I already start to become angry, thinkig about the many wasted hours at their stupidity.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)

#90

Post by busterarm »

kuchenbecker wrote: post #67
busterarm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have 30 engineering teams all using different parts of the platform and your Product team is crushing your whole org with their aggressive roadmap, you will no longer feel like GCP policies are reasonable. When everything takes 20% longer to ship than you planned because every other week some random team(s) is forced to do unplanned, immediate rewrites by a vendor, that vendor starts to look like a dick and…

That backwards compatibility strategy to update defaults on new versions while leaving existing the same is to avoid the scenario you're complaining about by not changing behavior for existing customers.

But then they don't have versioned documentation, so you only know how to properly operate the newest version of things and for the existing stuff you have to figure it out on your own.
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