171–180 of 201 posts
At this point, why is anyone relying on Google APIs (or even GCP!) for serious work? It feels like Google is contempt with Search, Ads and Android.
> or even GCP At least you're paying for GCP.
Every time Google is shutting down a product there are the same kind of reactions like “I will not trust google running anything more than a year”, “killedbygoogle.com”. I’m wondering, have you ever heard about this product? I for one have no clue what this is. How many more products does google have that you never heard about and that are not shut down?
Every time Google is shutting down a product there are the same kind of reactions like “I will not trust google running anything more than a year”, “killedbygoogle.com”. I’m wondering, have you ever heard about this product? I for one have no clue what this is. How many more products does google have that you never heard about and that are not shut down?
Like with Covid, like with SLAs, it's not enough to think of ratios of success or failure. You have to also look at frequency and duration.
A flaky test might fail a build 1 time in 200, but as your team gets bigger, build frequency rises, your tests grow, and eventually you're getting failed builds frequently enough that people start to see them as a regular occurrence, and that negatively affects their opinions about the whole experience. I've seen people bash the system when failures happen weekly, I've seen others 'turn' after a couple of statistical clusters and then fall to confirmation bias long afterward.
Google has so many irons in the fire that I think we've reached that same threshold for a lot of people. Shutting down the worst 1% of your projects a year sounds like a completely reasonable business plan. Until you have 1000 projects, and now you're shutting one down every five weeks on average. People will talk.
And if there's no transparency in that process, how do I know that my favorite tool isn't next, or on the list for next year? Odds are low, but not zero.
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They have a real problem finding developers that will want to work on it. You don't get promoted at Google for maintaining a product that isn't growing.
This is an HR problem. Two HR problems really, as exemplified by both your sentences. > They have a real problem finding developers that will want to work on it. At most companies, you don't get to choose projects you want to work on. You get assigned a project whether you like it or not. Almost every other company functions like this, Google's insistence on being different is shooting them in the foot. > You don't g…
If Google really wanted to solve this problem they could by making the promotion criteria different. Their actions say they don't really see it as a problem, though.
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It's definitely a funny one. I hadn't heard of it but it appears to be an Instagram alike for 3D models and VR. If Google was trying to establish themselves as a first mover platform in the VR space, it's odd that they would can such a product before VR itself has finished taking off. It signals that they actually have no interests in VR going forward but it's Google so you never know, they will probably have 4 of th…
Google has already shown that they're willing to try: they've made Tango (AR, discontinued), Google Glass (AR, enterprise-only), ARCore (AR, active), Cardboard (VR, discontinued), and Daydream (VR, discontinued).
I could understand putting in less effort, or more effort, but failing the way they did was mind boggling and just seems like lack of a strategy on the management level.
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If you were running Google, what would your strategy be regarding products that can’t support themselves?
Keep them running and eat the cost. Even if they can’t do that every time, it should at least be one of the options under consideration. I feel like there’s often an argument that “keeping it running costs more than you think, because it would need updating” (or “it depends on legacy infrastructure that’s going away”), but I’m skeptical of that in the general case. Other than possibly security issues, there’s often l…
Do you know whether it was considered?
> Other than possibly security issues, there’s often little to get in the way of servers running happily with little or no maintenance for years.
Security costs alone can be substantial. Whose department should take the budget hit for maintaining a no longer viable project?
Whose reputation should be dinged for running a non viable product?
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Do you consider it bad that they experiment with new products?
Depends on where you stand... If you're one of the people who comes to rely on the product, then your answer would probably be "yes". The cost of the experimentation is people wondering what product they'll discontinue next and whether it'll be one that _they_ rely on. If you find yourself asking this often enough, you'll probably start moving out of the Google ecosystem. How is this good for Google? Yes, I understan…
However, Google share price and market saturation tell me the whatever damage has been done is worth no follow up from them.
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If they’re going to kill them at the same rate? Yes.
Why? Seems to it’s like running a VC fund. One hit could justify all those experiments in perpetuity.