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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

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Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#101

Post by merb »

walki wrote: post #78

I have personally used a large number of cloud compute services: AWS, packet, Alibaba, Digital Ocean, nimbix, Azure, Oracle, ... I still use all of these services from time to time. If you carefully look at my list of cloud vendors you realize that there is only one of the big cloud vendors missing: GCP. Why? When GCP came out I wanted to switch from AWS to GCP because AWS was costing me a lot of money and GCP was ma…

that was sily because they only asked for a company name but you could've entered "Individual" inside the box and they would not care!

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#102

Post by Traster »

mamurphy wrote: post #82
fh973 wrote: post #75

I think Google couldn't do better, even if they wanted to. The reason is the engineering culture and the promotion system. People expect to switch to new projects, and work towards to a promotion within 2-3 years. This shows in all products, and presumalby also the reason for the deprecation. New people come on the project, want and need to do a major overhaul, and do not have resource or incentives to support the ol…

My armchair thought: what if the CEO said "wow, Yegge is right, we've gotten really off trail here. you need to show leadership in maintaining a 3+ year old system at Google for promotions?" Could that happen and would it work?

The promotion system isn't the issue, the promotion system was the issue 10 years ago. For the last 10 years Google has been hiring and promoting and keeping people who prioritize shiny new things more than maintaining old things.

If you start rewarding maintaining old things you aren't going to suddenly get what you want, you're just going to lose a tonne of people because they don't want to do what you're telling them and you won't be able to hire good people with your priorities because no one is going to believe they can have a good career at Google by prioritizing stability and long term support. It's all downstream of culture, and culture change is very difficult.

Of course if you do buy into this idea that this is the issue, then GCP has already lost. It would be years before they could make a dent in that culture, and more years after that for external customers to know and trust Google's new culture. By that time there's going to be a dominant player anyway. So maybe actually it's best to stick with the current culture - try and win on your strengths than try to fix your defficiencies.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#103

Post by justincormack »

I do hope the intermediate solution he mentions, tooling that upgrades your code for you, starts to be used more. Go did this in the early days before 1.0, but it is fairly rare still outside the internal Google tools. It is a big chunk of work obviously but it saves a huge amount of downstream work, and lets everyone move forward.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#104

Post by blickentwapft »

A perfect, spot on analysis.

The only thing that’s weird about this is that it’s about 3 years late.

If this had been written 3 years ago it would have been topical.

But really it’s old news that google deprecates everything and leaves it’s developers in the lurch and that as a result no one wants to use their stuff.

It’s not surprising to hear this from Steve Yegge cause he’s a super switched on guy, but it’s surprising to hear this from him NOW.

Google’s cloud ship sailed years ago, they just haven’t yet got to shutting the whole thing down, but the writing is on the wall.

Google seems totally oblivious to how much developers distrust them, which is probably because dump trucks turn up every hour or so and dump cash onto everything which probably makes everyone feel that everything they do is awesome, even if it isn’t.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#105

Post by thereare5lights »

blickentwapft wrote: post #104

A perfect, spot on analysis. The only thing that’s weird about this is that it’s about 3 years late. If this had been written 3 years ago it would have been topical. But really it’s old news that google deprecates everything and leaves it’s developers in the lurch and that as a result no one wants to use their stuff. It’s not surprising to hear this from Steve Yegge cause he’s a super switched on guy, but it’s surpri…

You think Google Cloud is gonna shut down?

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#106

Post by michaelt »

joshuamorton wrote: post #70
CJefferson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been hired or approached by Google. However, as a University lecturer I know a lot of people Google have employed. In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught, and accepted some idiots who know how to speak well. While they have employed some good people, I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better…

> In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught There's no question that Google is happy to have false-negatives in interviews. > I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else why would they do this? And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? (this is also an amusi…

> And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful?

When a company has a lot of money coming in, they can be successful despite decision X, rather than because of decision X.

Microsoft can interview people asking about filling airliners with golf balls. Valve can just not bother with Half-Life 3. Google can have zero support and a self-driving car division that keeps avoiding chances to release anything.

That the companies are successful doesn't mean all their actions are smart - sometimes it's that their successes are big enough the occasional bad decision doesn't hurt them.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#109

Post by blickentwapft »

thereare5lights wrote: post #105
blickentwapft wrote: post #104

A perfect, spot on analysis. The only thing that’s weird about this is that it’s about 3 years late. If this had been written 3 years ago it would have been topical. But really it’s old news that google deprecates everything and leaves it’s developers in the lurch and that as a result no one wants to use their stuff. It’s not surprising to hear this from Steve Yegge cause he’s a super switched on guy, but it’s surpri…

You think Google Cloud is gonna shut down?

Well that’s what they said if they don’t get to #2

Just search google for the topic of google cloud shutdown, many speculate it.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#110

Post by dragonwriter »

waheoo wrote: post #88

I recently migrated off of digital ocean into aws. I was originally planning to go to go for the native k8s experience. Then I read somewhere online that was doesn't sunset services where as gcp does. I was half way through the migration process to gcp and bailed on a dime.

What I really want is a cloud provider that has AWS’s “we don't kill anything anyone is still using” and Google's probability of the documentation being both where you expect, having what you need, and being current and accurate (and, yes, I know Google is far from perfect on that, but dear God is AWS utterly horrible and that's just for the services that they are actively pushing.)
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