> The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.

The PixelBook isn't going to stop getting security updates any time soon, so if it was a good machine before the division was closed, why is it a less good machine now?

You're basing that on pure speculation so be careful what conclusions you're drawing from it. Chromebooks have historically gotten very good support, even though they tended to be relatively underpowered - the pixelbook isn't so I wouldn't expect support to stop anytime soon.

> The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.

FWIW Chrome OS is a separate PA (product area) than Hardware so Hardware closing whatever division likely has very little impact on the support for your Pixelbook.

I am also sad about that though as I really like the Pixelbook =[

Google reader is the one that kills me. Not only do they not monetize it / promote it, but it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives. Then Google+ and their failed social efforts killed Reader and RSS feeds have now disappeared from the landscape leaving us with only proprietary options.

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 a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, with no alignment with any stategic effort, that could be reimplemented by a particularly talented and hardworking high school senior, staffed by about a dozen engineers. That product will be the first on the chopping block, if only to encourage those engineering resources to find more profitable employment.

Google is in a unique position there: I often will avoid adding a new small service that I might like because I don't want to add another small payment I have to manage. With Google, I'm already paying them for storage and Youtube. I wouldn't think nearly as hard about adding a new Google service as I do others.

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

Google is unlikely to discontinue GCP

Game servers typically don't last more than a few years, even for an AAA game. They pretty much never last a whole decade outside of major MMORPG.

It's a bit surprising that the game industry would be scared of GCP going bust, given the short release cycle of the industry.

Didn't know SpatialOS was attached specifically to Google Cloud. This seems like a risky business move, people should've learned from the fine example of companies built exclusively on the Facebook platform by now.

https://www.hadean.com/ is presumably a direct competitor to SpatialOS then, I take it? And it's tied to Azure, I believe.

I'm pretty sure the hope is that this will lead to the development of a parallel track of game developers who make games that would otherwise be too difficult or expensive to make on old platforms.

It makes sense on paper: latency isn't an issue because Google's network is excellent. The browser is a widespread and powerful distribution network which gives you access to both desktop and mobile. The cost of development should be lower because you don't need to buy expensive development kits and licenses/certifications.

My personal view is that this isn't a technical problem but rather a bizdev problem, and Google's approach to solving things tends to be "throw out some tech and hope people use it," which is straight up not going to work with investment-heavy industries like games.

We are in the same boat. My boss came to me last week saying he had lunch with a friend that just moved their services all to GCP and got big savings. But we just recently were impacted by the sudden, unexpected Maps 14x price increase.

I can’t share with you how much GCP is making in revenue, but I can assure you it’s enough that it won’t get dropped, ever. I’ll put my money where my mouth is: I’m now preparing to expand my own team’s operations into GCP and away from AWS because of how good their ML offerings are.

FYI, GCP can't be dropped tomorrow because of legal/toc. Even dropping/changing non-beta features requires a looooong notification period (think 1+ year). Enterprise customers really like to secure their bases.

Source: Xoogler

I increasingly see this as the next level of alienation from work-product.

Carpenter makes and sells chairs to people who need chairs, farmer grows and sells apples to people who want apples.

Then there's the line worker making just chair legs for people they'll never meet, and the farmer selling their entire apple crop to a big company that'll do who-knows-what with them—sell them, turn them into apple sauce, use them as input to some process that turns out a "natural ingredient" that's some pure, extracted chemical contained in the apples.

Then there's the sort of crap we're talking about here. Projects that obviously never should have existed in the first place, and/or that would have been better if done in a simpler, faster, cheaper way, but a ton of make-work was thrown in due to agency problems and perverse incentives.

How much of the benefit of computers is being eaten by this kind of thing? The most effective things we do with them may provide 1000x the economic output of that apple farmer, or more, but then we spend a bunch of time doing useless or negative-value stuff, without even getting into a lot of the actually-lucrative work having large negative externalities—spyware-enabled advertising, say, or even just advertising, full stop. What does it do to someone's psyche to spend 90+% of their time doing harmful or useless stuff? Hell some people end up doing nothing of actual value for years on end. What are we doing?

Advertising is not evil, but I prefer business models that involve me giving companies my money and them giving me stuff.

To be perfectly honest I don’t know the answer to the chat app case in particular. That’s possible, and if one were to investigate and find each app was made by a team rolling up into a different director then I’d say that’s what happened. However it’s entirely possible that it was caused by an overly complex market segmentation strategy.

WhatsApp had the advantage of growing slowly and segmenting their users with time to experiment and tweak things. The Google chat apps came out at once, and it’s possible there were so many because they tried to come up with a working segmentation for all addressable users from day one instead of growing organically and grabbing each segment one at a time.

IMO yes: the promotion culture (technical complexity, impact) push people to come up with Big Ideas.

The thing with Big Ideas, is that they're often iterations of existing ideas, but just different enough that you can make a case for a fresh start. (And who doesn't want a greenfield project) Plus, the cost of experimentation is far less while you're not supporting a massive userbase.

That's consistent with my own experience at Google. It's not that working on improving a thing isn't rewarded, but it's just much easier to demonstrate impact when you can use the word "launched" in your self-assessment Launching is in itself an accomplishment, while optimizing requires you to also collect data, do analysis on the data, and show a positive impact. "Impact" here is one of the buzzword categories that goes into an assessment of your performance as an employee.

Ehh, I disagree with your assessment, and to illustrate why I think you need to focus on asblockers.

AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. Google is terrified of adblockers going mainstream, to the point where they’re willing to risk anticompetitive suits by creating their own. AMP is a part of the effort to prevent that from happening.

This is not the only example. I never ceases to amaze me that Google dropped XMPP because of non-mobile-friendliness and it was proven wrong by a single developer (see: Conversations.im).

It seems in a lot of cases Google just want to go on an easy route of creating fake "standards" (AMP) instead of long way of working with broader community for common good.

Maybe that's just me but the Google I remember back when Android was announced and the company it has become now it's like two totally different entities.

I am willing to bet on GCP's life-span - it will be around for 10 more years at least. What would you like to bet for?

Not necessarily common, but the ambitious engineers are the ones who get promoted and they're the ones who get to set the technical direction. So the incentives on offer to (over-)ambitious people are very important.

I was super pleased the other day when I needed to fall back on a personal device to join a meeting via GSuite and realized that because it was a meetup my hangouts app didn't work for it.

I also enjoy that calendar is also a separate and distinct thing so it's possible for me to get three notifications for a single meeting.

Now that's what I call usability and a solid product! If only they could improve this experience by raising the price of their business suite by 20% then I'd be really tickled!

I have Google Assistant app but to change settings I must use Google app but some settings like volume, room etc. could be controlled via Google Home app.

Oh just go ahead an name Facebook.

The irony, is that this pattern at FB and and Big G isn’t indicative of a good engineering culture. It’s pathological engineering.

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.

I work at Amazon and I don't believe that applies here. There certainly is an expectation that you can coordinate increasingly broad efforts as you rise through the ranks, but the focus isn't on launching new products (in my experience). Impact can be anything that is positive and measurable. At the end of the day if you make the company $1million then it doesn't really matter where you do it.

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"

I think that's a bit of an unfair way to characterize what's going on here. In fact, it's Google's values (as expressed through internal incentives) that govern this process. If the company wanted people to, say, make X better rather than killing it and launching a completely new X, all it would have to do is reward that rather than setting up a system that punishes it through reduced career growth.

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.

That’s gonna be an interesting one to watch.

Hosting the worlds photos costs many billions of dollars each year!

That said it’s a key driver to sell android phones (“infinite storage”)...so for the time being you will be good.

I’m not sure I understand this perspective. If I’m making 100k, and I could be making 150k by being promoted, while working on interesting new things at the same time (regardless of success), then that is what I would be doing.

Little point in sticking at 100k my whole career for some misplaced sense of honor.

You could go from making $200k/yr to $400k/yr with one to two promotions.

It's a big jump and for people who live in an area where homes are regularly $2-4m (they're not even nice homes), you have to make big money in order to afford one.

To play devil's advocate, we don't know how sucessful they would be if they followed a more orderly model.

Not saying they wouldn't be, but it's entirely possible that they are successfull in spite of, not because of how they operate in much of the business. Given that the vast majority of their revenue comes from just one place, advertising, which seems to be run in a much more cautious manner, there is an argument that this might be the case.

They keep showing more and more (or bigger and bigger) ads. At some point, they'll hit the law of diminishing returns.

I'm disappointed I had to go this far down into the comments to read an actual sensible rebuttal. I stand by my calling it a disorganized mess, but you'll notice I never actually say this strategy isn't paying off for the company...

Agree that "disorganized mess" is a stretch. But pointing to a company's success doesn't make them immune to criticism either. My project often gets compared to a competing offering from Amazon. When discussing this with coworkers, I will point out the drawbacks and trade-offs of their design and why that's a WAY bigger deal for my company's customers than it is for the typical AWS user. "But they made $X last year". Yes. And we're less vulnerable to data loss. Thank you. Next.

Following OPs argument (I have no idea either way)

Someone got promoted for introducing playlist shuffle

Nobody gets promoted for fixing it

Google employees in an individual-contributor role have limited power to change this if they want to remain Google employees. They're subject to performance reviews on this system, and the expected value of any individual advocating for a change is so tiny, compared to the expected value of playing along with the system and getting their salary and bonus check. If you want this culture to change, you need the people signing the checks to feel compelled to change it.

The practical effect is likely to be people leaving Google because they can get rewarded for maintaining existing products elsewhere.

Google as a company is worth almost $1T. It's hard to argue that's the wrong approach when they are so ridiculously successful.

>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)

Xoogler here. Individual contributors are aware of it, but have very little to no power to change it. I left when I realized I would never make career progress due in large part to this incredibly restrictive advancement model. My partner, also an Xoogler, left for the same reason.

Google is big enough, and appealing enough as an employer, that it appears to be comfortable accepting this turnover as part of how it does business. Anyone who wants to change things leaves, or is "encouraged" to leave, and only those who buy wholly into the model stick around to get promoted. Then, since that method of promotion worked for them, they entrench and encourage it, and the cycle continues.

While this issue is not unique to Google, IMHO their hiring process exacerbates it further. From day -1 you're primed to game the interview racket; once you're in, why would your mentality suddenly change wrt to climbing the promotion ladder? Your incentives haven't changed.

Oh everyone is aware of it. They have been making some changes to the promotion process to try to address it. But it's still a huge issue.

I'm not so sure about what the alternative is, though. The promotion process at other places I've worked was pretty much "does your boss like you? If so, they'll promote you." Which has a whole host of other issues. For instance you can get promoted for doing a mediocre job at maintenance work but being very friendly and likable.

Complete outsider to that, but it's easy enough to figure - you would have to be promoted like 3-7 times under the current system before anyone would start to care about your opinion on things like that. Good luck ever finding someone who can be enough of a creature of the current system to be promoted that many times within it, yet still maintain the firm idea that it needs to be changed.

Promotion means you get promoted to a higher level within Google[1]. This typically means you get more money[2], better opportunities, and more visibility.

People often do change jobs within Google/Alphabet after getting promoted. It's a signal that you're doing a good job, as verified by a promotion committee, and hiring managers will often look at a recent promotion as a signal that someone is a high-performer. But there are lots of folks who don't change jobs after a promotion (especially if you're happy with what you're doing) - it's an opportunity to keep doing what you're doing, just more of the same, with official recognition that you've been doing a good job.

1. Level 3 = SWE I - New Grad (Bachelors/Masters). Level 4 = SWE II (Newly minted PhDs start here). Level 5 = Senior SWE. Level 6 = Staff SWE. Level 7 = Senior Staff SWE. Level 8 = Principal SWE / Director.

2. This is not strictly true; a high-performer at Level N may make just as much as a low- or average-performer at Level N+1. But in practice you start to hit salary caps, and sustaining very high performance at Level N may be more difficult than sustaining average performance at Level N+1.