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

371–380 of 417 posts

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

#371

Post by sandeeps_ »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #340
scarface74 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically said that I was not shaming $150k. You graduated from college and are now making more than most developers in the US and you work at a big tech company. You have the opportunity to leverage that and either get promoted from within or change jobs. Are you really struggling making $150K straight out of college? You graduated from a state school (as did I) you probably don’t have that much debt. For conte…

>You have the opportunity to leverage that and either get promoted from within or change jobs. I think the real problem is I'm not capable of doing so, at least according to the fair labor market. > Are you really struggling making $150K straight out of college? You graduated from a state school (as did I) you probably don’t have that much debt. I don't have any debt, I just have a really pathetic savings rate and a…

>> I don't have any debt, I just have a really pathetic savings rate and a really low net worth compared to nearly everyone I know, including folks that didn't do "the grind" that I did. I'll probably not be able to retire or own a car, much less own a house someday.

Dude, please seek mental help. You have so many working years ahead of you. Stop worrying about owning a house. Start budgeting using something like YNAB and get your savings rate under control. Also get all the basic investment vehicles going: 401k, after tax Roth, backdoor Roth etc. You’ll do just fine.

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

#372

Post by physicles »

Animats wrote: post #81
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…

I never realized how much it hurt the language’s momentum. Yes. The combination of a botched transition with a high arrogance level was hell. Here's something I wrote in 2015 after porting a medium-sized system from Python 2 to Python 3.[1] I listed a number of package problems encountered during the conversion. Ones that indicated those libraries weren't being used much in production. I discovered that the SQL conne…

Yeah I have the same thoughts about go, which I've been using every day for the last four years. It's super rare for an upgrade to break anything (has happened though). When it comes to running stuff in prod, boring is good.

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

#373

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

rgblambda wrote: post #139
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From a brief look at job openings at Google Dublin, this mentality would be particularly mind boggling as it looks like the Dublin office houses the support staff (not that there's anything wrong with working support).

So, in general, Dublin Big Tech jobs are in: - customer support

- sales

- finance (explains itself really)

- SRE (mostly because of favourable time zones)

Most of the core engineering is in London/Zurich. Dunno what's gonna happen post Brexit, but anecdotally, the FAANG which I am most familiar with has had real problems hiring in London post-2016.

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

#374

Post by dragonwriter »

perl4ever wrote: post #365
dragonwriter wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit-seeking with market power is rent-seeking.

I think it's very destructive of meaningful discussion to redefine a term of jargon in order to exploit the stigma of the original definition while talking about something else.

No, if you have market/pricing (empirical monopoly) power, profit-maximizing behavior is inherently rent-seeking by the standard definition.

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

#375

Post by Craighead »

efreak wrote: post #360
toast0 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed this: > I’ll also give a shout-out to our friends in the Operating Systems business: Windows, Linux, NOT APPLE FUCK YOU APPLE, FreeBSD, and so on, for doing such a great job of backwards compatibility on their successful platforms. I share your desire for stability. I don't necessarily mind frequent updates for security reasons, but I'm getting to the point where if things are changing in big ways often, I…

Linux code might be backwards compatible, but nothing like windows. I can run pbrush.exe taken from Windows 95 on windows 10, and it works fine. Want to run a 10yo binary on Linux? It's easier to set up a VM with a 10yo Linux release on it. You've hot the source code and you can compile it? Well, tough, the build tools have changed, and some autoconf script has been removed, even from autoconf-archive.

This is a bad take, there are immeasurable numbers of binaries from even Windows 98 or Windows 7 that dont run on Windows 10.

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

#376

Post by notgpt »

ryanobjc wrote: post #14

I used to work with Steve. He’s a good story teller. But a story teller tells good stories by having a fairly casual relationship with facts and the truth. For example, emacs lisp suffers from bitrot. Some core things haven’t changed in forever but also you can’t pick up elisp config from 15 years ago and it’s fine today. All live systems evolve and change. In this case emacs is just so slow that Steve thinks that it…

I don't know why people are downvoting you. I think you're right. I agree with his general point (I expanded a bit on that here [1]), and I also agree that people often overlook that general point since it is so convenient to do so. But otherwise, the specific examples he wrote (and the other assertions he made) seem to me to be incorrect.

But, as you said, he is a good story teller. Like Taleb. Getting the moral across is more important, even if sometimes the wolf eats little red riding hood in malformed renderings.

[1]: https://notgpt.com/2020/08/16/long-lived-systems/

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

#377

Post by dangoor »

mtlynch wrote: post #225
crazygringo wrote: post #202

This very long article doesn't describe even a single instance of anything GCP has deprecated. It's a long rant with a bunch of f-words, and the claim that he gets deprecation e-mails "about once a month". Can someone who is informed point to actual GCP services that have been, or are being, deprecated? From the article, I have no idea whatsoever if this is some huge actual problem with core services... or pulling su…

Python2 on AppEngine is a huge, painful Google GCP deprecation. I have a friend who built an AppEngine app within the first year of the platform's release, and he's spent the better part of the past 9 months doing almost nothing but managing his company's migration to Python3 AppEngine. It wasn't just migrating from Python2 to Python3 syntax. Google used it as an opportunity to also turn down tons of APIs and service…

We're in that boat as well and are rewriting in Go: https://blog.khanacademy.org/go-services-one-goliath-project...

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

#378

Post by dangoor »

While I agree that GCP's deprecation policy is painful, I don't think he's painting a compelling picture that the deprecation policy, specifically, is the reason GCP isn't ranked higher.

Taking two of the examples of "bad platform moves": Python 3 and Apple.

Where I work, we are simultaneously dealing with Python 3 and GCP deprecations[1], and it sucks. But Python is more popular than ever![2] Yes, some people (including us, at least for our website code) left Python, but lots and lots of people have moved to Python 3.

I've seen lots of people say "oh, the move from 2 to 3 wasn't that bad because of the tooling." That's probably true, and we probably wouldn't be moving to Go were it not for the fact that we had API changes _and_ Python's changes to deal with (and Go gives us other benefits).

And then there's Apple. Apple has a long history of maintaining compatibility for a time, and then getting rid of the bits that are holding them back. There are tradeoffs.

Maybe Android doesn't break things for developers, but Apple makes it so that iPhone users can keep updating their phones to the latest OS (and apps) for much longer than the typical Android phone. Because of deprecations and a general desire to make apps that fit the platform, developers of popular apps on iOS put the time into updating them, and these apps are really nice to use as a result.

I think fit and finish on non-first-party native Mac apps tends to be better than those on average on Windows, though that's just my opinion.

Carrying backwards compatibility comes with tradeoffs, and it's possible to be successful by making different tradeoffs than maximizing backward compatibility.

[1]: https://blog.khanacademy.org/go-services-one-goliath-project... [2]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/07/27/language-rankings-6-2...

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

#380

Post by bobbydreamer »

asgard1024 wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #27

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

> I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat No way! IBM mainframe (zSeries) is the gold standard for backward compatibility in IT.

When IBM starts to say they are going to deprecate something in mainframe, they will deprecate it in probably 10-12 years time. There will be 3 versions in between and each version will have a much better migration path. If a corporate don't want to take risk, they will be mostly the last ones to migrate, after confirming &consulting all the IBM tech champions, they would start the migration process which would last a year, before they install the new version.
Post reply on HN