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How Google measures and manages tech debt

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Re: How Google measures and manages tech debt

#11

Post by jokoon »

I experienced awful tech debt combined with an hostage taker, meaning a guy who seemingly refrains from giving knowledge about the software or being able to make the project progress, which gives him eternal employment, while hardly helping his colleagues to get out of the situation.

I wonder at what point a refactoring becomes just a waste of time and money compared to a slow rewrite. It becomes difficult to have an adult discussion about the subject, but obviously it's about money and how clients don't have a choice.

https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...

There are softwares out there that are just waiting to be put out of their misery, until another savior company finally builds a viable replacement.

At some point it becomes a true crisis of faith, "is it realistically possible to get work done at this job, and should I be okay earning money by mopping the rain".

Of course those softwares are out there, but I can imagine young engineers are not always aware of what is out there.

Re: How Google measures and manages tech debt

#14

Post by godelski »

ryoshu wrote: post #8
godelski wrote: post #6

Google may not be the best example. They seem to be poor at measuring and have high tech debt. As is evident by: - the decrease in quality of search - Poor response to SEO techniques (seems they embraced it...) - Decrease in spam filtering - I frequently get spam now. A fair number have crazy original messages that are pages long but display a single image in the main interface - Constant drops on projects that someo…

The first three sound like political decisions. Measurement and understanding doesn't mean action if the company's goals aren't aligned.

I wouldn't call that political, though the politics sure can cause it.

Measurements are never perfect and we need to stress this a lot. A measurement is meaningless without good interpretation. People want to ignore the latter and often politics is the means of resolution. But what matters more? Who sounds right or who is right. It's usually easy to identify experts because they can't ignore nuance. But they're long winded, boring, and present more complicated solutions. That's misinterpreted as dismissal (and sometimes they are too quick to dismiss).

It's always about alignment. The whole tech debt thing is alignment. A big issue is many of our big companies have sacrificed future earnings but short term ones. These are good decisions if you only care about shareholders and if by shareholders you mean short term investors who have no interest in the long term stability of the organization. But if you want a company to last and you want long term profits to be high then these usually aren't the best decisions. The bigger question is why everyone has become so myopic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873275

Re: How Google measures and manages tech debt

#15

Post by gjm11 »

In case it isn't obvious to everyone: the actual article title is "How Google measures and manages tech debt".

I am not sure I have seen a single case in which the HN delete-initial-"how" transformation improves an article title. (I concede that it's possible that I just haven't noticed the ones where it's an improvement.)

Re: How Google measures and manages tech debt

#16

Post by compiler-guy »

godelski wrote: post #6

Google may not be the best example. They seem to be poor at measuring and have high tech debt. As is evident by: - the decrease in quality of search - Poor response to SEO techniques (seems they embraced it...) - Decrease in spam filtering - I frequently get spam now. A fair number have crazy original messages that are pages long but display a single image in the main interface - Constant drops on projects that someo…

All of those things are real problems with Google, and its decisions, but they don't seem to be signs of technical debt. I suppose they _could_ be, but they could all have plenty of other causes, many of which seem more plausible to me.

1. Decreasing quality of search and poor SEO technique responses may be caused by technical debt, but they also might be the results of strategic product decisions to make more money. That isn't technical debt, that's enshittification for money.

2. Similarly. If Google chooses to do worse spam filtering in order to get more advertising in front of its customers (for example), that's a bad product decision, not technical debt.

3. Constant drops on projects are simply resource allocation decisions, unless of course, they are dropped because they are too expensive to maintain. But there are a myriad of other reasons a product might be dropped.

4. A million more things.

There are numerous valid reasons to dislike Google these days (and I say that as an employee!), but tracing them all back to technical debt is finding the wrong reason for real problems. Similarly with worse spam filtering.

Re: How Google measures and manages tech debt

#18

Post by jldugger »

hiddencost wrote: post #7

Lol false. Google killed their internal culture which prioritized supporting and trusting engineers to do the right thing. They replaced them with grifters who would lie to management claiming they could measure technical debt.

> Google killed their internal culture which prioritized supporting and trusting engineers to do the right thing. They replaced them with grifters

Please, tell us more.

Re: How Google measures and manages tech debt

#20

Post by cadamsdotcom »

jokoon wrote: post #11

I experienced awful tech debt combined with an hostage taker, meaning a guy who seemingly refrains from giving knowledge about the software or being able to make the project progress, which gives him eternal employment, while hardly helping his colleagues to get out of the situation. I wonder at what point a refactoring becomes just a waste of time and money compared to a slow rewrite. It becomes difficult to have an…

That hostage taker needs a new plan because now LLMs can generate code docs.
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