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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

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Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#271

Post by arebop »

bad_user wrote: post #232
jfasi wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers. Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only…

I disagree. Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more. Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix. And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social netwo…

FANG interns aren't coffee-runners; you can't give them work you wouldn't give to a real junior engineer. First: doing so undermines your efforts to recruit the intern. Second: doing so undermines your efforts to evaluate the intern. Third: doing so wastes a valuable eng resource you could deploy on something worth launching!

The real problem for Reader was that it wasn't worth any engineering effort (because it only had a couple of million daily active users).

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#272

Post by jimmy1 »

president wrote: post #251
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

This mindset is commonplace in most of the jobs I've held in the last 10 years. Personal gain trumps morals, company values, and even company performance. It's what happens when you put a bunch of high-performers in a box and let them play the corporate ladder game.

It's better than the situation at most companies I have been at: It's basically the personal gain trumps all, but without the actual results. You just have a bunch of populists that talk up a good game, but when it comes time to execute or actually launch something, they are the last person you really want at the helm, but because they have built up a reputation with the higher ups, they are impossible to displace.

From my perspective, this appears to be the situation of most "Health IT" corps and VP of Engineering and above. I've since "sold out" and moved to a digital marketing firm, but in many ways the work here is much more honest than what happened at places I worked at in the name of "health"

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#273

Post by JoshTriplett »

compiler-guy wrote: post #240
akhilcacharya wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES > Are you not internally aware of this? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [exceptionally generous] salary [and RSUs, bonuses] depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair (approximately)

Strangely, I would say many if not most Googlers understand this situation, and that it is bad. The rank and file are mostly unhappy with it. But the rank and file can't change it.

It's bad for the company. It's bad for the industry. And it's a much more straightforward advancement model for the individual if they know how to exploit it. That's a very particular kind of "unhappy".

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#274

Post by nostrademons »

dlubarov wrote: post #245
bad_user wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more. Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix. And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social netwo…

> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.

It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#275

Post by dageshi »

stcredzero wrote: post #265
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others...deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising... Streaming game services, not so much. Streaming games has tremendous potential synergy with advertising. Games are yet another form of media, after all. There is obvious tremendous potential synergy with YouTube. Also, if one can stream games, then why not stream other kinds of applications? There's tremendous…

Basically identical to youtube. Forget putting AAA games on it, imagine a massively improved version of the flash games that were popular a decade ago.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#276

Post by ernopp »

Animats wrote: post #255
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

Streaming game services, not so much. Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product. (Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopef…

> then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product.

Google is unlikely to discontinue GCP

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#277

Post by josteink »

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

> why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion.

For people outside the San Francisco and Silicon Valley bubble which are confused by this, it may be worth noting that promotion here does not need mean getting a new job. Everyone are not constantly getting new jobs.

“Promotion” here means internal, magic Google-points and seem to work much like Chinese social credit.

Source: answer by Googler here on HN when I was confused about this very same thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18575875

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#278

Post by jedberg »

_ptgt wrote: post #167
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

In my experience at a different FANG, the same culture exists here. If I had to guess, I would say it probably applies to the others as well.

It definitely doesn't apply to Netflix. You can get good raises and promotions by optimizing an existing process. If you can show improvement in internal metrics, such as improving latency or lowering cost, that's a huge win. Even if you increase costs you can get a raise and promotion if you show that it increased code quality, such as creating the Chaos Monkey/Gorilla/Kong.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#279

Post by rifung »

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

Indeed that is also what I thought when reading the very relevant article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541475

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#280

Post by compiler-guy »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #273
compiler-guy wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, I would say many if not most Googlers understand this situation, and that it is bad. The rank and file are mostly unhappy with it. But the rank and file can't change it.

It's bad for the company. It's bad for the industry. And it's a much more straightforward advancement model for the individual if they know how to exploit it. That's a very particular kind of "unhappy".

Getting promoted at Google requires serious gaming of the system, especially once you go for L5. Very few people in the system at L5 or below think it is easy to exploit, even if it is supposedly "straightforward".

Decision making is opaque, even if the process is technically well-documented. One committee isn't bound by what the previous committee decided and on and on.

And yes, I think quite a few of the rank and file are unhappy about it.

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