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

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 417 posts

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

#121

Post by BossingAround »

mvn9 wrote: post #61
physicles wrote: post #56

The mishandled Python 3 transition sure created a lot of pain (I experienced some of it, even though I only started with Python in 2016), but I never realized how much it hurt the language’s momentum. This must be one of the reasons why JavaScript is so popular today. JS benefits here from being run in browsers, which the author points out are fantastic at back compat, even as the dev culture surrounding the language…

Also: functional programming feels better in JS than in Python. On the other hand, it's nicer to write for-loops in Python.

I really love the array.map( e -> e.doStuff() ) syntax. You can do similar in Java and other JVM languages of course. Not sure whether you can do that in Python.

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

#123

Post by mcqueenjordan »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #17
mdrabla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not endemic. I think you've met a few people you didn't like, read some tweets, and extrapolated poorly. And I don't think people working on GCP are really treated that much better than their counterparts at AWS. The fact that you think the difference in product depreciation policy between them is caused by people getting "everything they could dream of" is funny though

Trips to Europe or to random conferences in first class? Trips to _any office_ for "face time"? Massages? Bonuses of any sort, including peer bonuses and holiday gifts? Refreshers? Society thinking that you're "smart" for passing the loop? You're rewarded just for being alive at Google, but I get nothing but scorn and condescension. Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make les…

Stop comparing yourself to others and work on yourself. Look inward, not outward.

You make six figures at a top tech company and you’re bitterly complaining because you think you’re entitled to more, and in the same breath you’re chastising Google’s pretentious culture? There’s a lot of irony there.

Focus on improving yourself and don’t get caught up in comparing yourself to others.

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

#124

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

logicslave wrote: post #63
lowiqengineer wrote: post #2

The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group . If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, l…

I think this is really common. I've met quite a few Google engineers whose whole identity is defined by their employer. Its striking, and a testament to the malleability of the human mind, even if the individual is "smart".

The joke that I always used to have when I worked near their Dublin office was How do you know someone is a Googler? Don't worry, they'll tell you :)

This was prompted by me noticing that most of the people who still had their badges visible after work appeared to have Google badges.

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

#125

Post by Mandatum »

remus wrote: post #35

I'd be interested in some concrete examples of things GCP have depreciated. I'm an (admittedly fairly light) user of GCP and haven't come across any myself.

Search each product in docs for the "Deprecate", "Deprecated" or "Deprecations" page (it's not common across product lines), they list every single functionality and date they deprecated stuff.. And yeah, they've done a fair bit.

Example: https://cloud.google.com/stackdriver/docs/deprecations

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

#126

Post by nicoburns »

BossingAround wrote: post #120
jimmaswell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute worst in my small experience with it is anything touching the node ecosystem. Try to follow any guide or use any library not updated in the last week and there will be breaking API changes and deprecation warnings everywhere.

I'm running into this problem more and more. It seems like Node is fundamentally unusable for anything but the nimblest teams that do not mind updating their dependencies automatically, every week, and when something breaks, they are capable of fixing it within hours. I really like Node as a language (especially with TS), but Node as an ecosystem feels like a very hard fit into 90%+ of corporations.

I think the culture of Node comes from the earlier culture of in-browser JavaScript. When running on the browser platform you have to make sure your libraries are up to date and maintained, otherwise you're at the mercy of browser updates breaking things from under your feet (this is less bad now, but it was awful in the days of IEConsequently, JavaScript developers got used to the burden of maintenance and rapidly updating to the latest versions of libraries, and this culture carried through to Node (partly because a lot of libraries are shared between node and the web).

Having said that, if you pick your libraries well, it's not too bad these days. When I upgraded from Node 12 to Node 14 earlier this year, I had to upgrade the `pg` package to a newer version that supported Node 14 (there was one available), but I didn't have to make any code changes. And other than that I've had no forced version upgrades in a long time.

I guess if you're lookig at 5-10 year timescales with literaly no maintenance then this would be a different matter though.

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

#127

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

TwoBit wrote: post #59
lowiqengineer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've studied hundreds of hours, failed HC for full time once and I've concluded that I'm mentally incapable of doing so (I blame my parents due to the slight heritability of IQ). "Just move" is something someone without any empathy for other people's circumstances would say - most people aren't capable of "just moving" as if the only concern is choosing an employer.

I worked at Facebook for years and did a lot of interviews and the hiring process has inconsistent results for all but the best and worst candidates. The amount of times a candidate was rejected because one iterviewer who had questionable rationale was surprising.

I once had a really good candidate rejected for wearing a T-shirt to a VC interview.

Mind you, he would probably have turned us down anyway to go do a PhD, so he probably dodged a bullet.

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

#128

Post by nicoburns »

kungato wrote: post #94
jimmaswell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute worst in my small experience with it is anything touching the node ecosystem. Try to follow any guide or use any library not updated in the last week and there will be breaking API changes and deprecation warnings everywhere.

The sad part about the js ecosystem is that even the biggest corps like Google can't keep their own js ecosystem stable on the last version. I have a small Angular app with Firebase backend and every time I come back to it to update, the libs are out of sync

Google aren't very good at this, but Facebook are. Maybe give React a try.

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

#129

Post by discordance »

One thing that I don't understand about all this deprecation talk, as pointed out here:

> So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, you need to pay for it. Not us.

Surely if there are shoppers/customers affected by a deprecated service on GCP (or any cloud provider), then that would indicate a paying customer behind it. That payment should at least cover costs of running that service (infra, development, software and maintenance). In that case, why deprecate at all? - version the API and continue running it as long as it economically makes sense?

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

#130

Post by murgindrag »

mdrabla wrote: post #12
lowiqengineer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "couple dicks"? It's endemic, dude. You can't be given everything you could ever dream of and _not_ end up like this. By comparison, I have nothing. zilch , for my hard work. Neither do most people working on core tech at AWS. That's why they empathize with their customers (I'm guessing).

It is not endemic. I think you've met a few people you didn't like, read some tweets, and extrapolated poorly. And I don't think people working on GCP are really treated that much better than their counterparts at AWS. The fact that you think the difference in product depreciation policy between them is caused by people getting "everything they could dream of" is funny though

It's totally endemic. If you work at Google, and can't recognize the smug, superior, yet incompetent culture, odds are you've be incultured.

It's not unique to Google. Lots of organizations intentionally build a culture of elitism. However, it means I would never, ever rely on Google for anything. Free products like search are a-okay. My email is on gmail because legacy.

Build a business on Google platforms? Nope.

Post reply on HN