8 ms·

It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural ou

It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know this from personal experience working on projects left behind by people who ended at Google

EthanHeilman 6y ago
All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.
- felixgallo 6y ago
  I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    What does "Alexander" refer to here?
    - necheffa 6y ago
      Probably Alexander the Great.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - robotresearcher 6y ago
      'And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.' Attributed to Alexander the Great. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander-wept/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        "It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?"
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Alex's Alexander the Great, who was great at conquering but not at administrating.
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
  - recursivecaveat 6y ago
    It's not about capturing marketshare for the company, it's about capturing bullet points for your resume. Working on new stuff is valued much more highly than fixing old stuff, and you naturally move much faster with more impressive sounding accomplishments in the early days of a product.
  - bsmith89 6y ago
    I think the premise is that the culture/behaviors/tactics that allowed Google to capture new territory early on are hanging on past their usefulness, not the actual capturing of territory itself. Growing existing products wasn't the important thing before, so _now_ the incentive structure at Google is mis-aligned with capturing territory in that way.
- abc_lisper 6y ago
  This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.
  - throwawaygler 6y ago
    That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.
    - duncanawoods 6y ago
      Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness. The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.
      - mav3rick 6y ago
        I love the arm chair analysis of every external person here. Code quality is extremely important at Google. That doesn't mean people don't write any features.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.
- hinkley 6y ago
  One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves. They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested. I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them. The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.
  - throwawaygler 6y ago
    https://area120.google.com/ https://area120.google.com/
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Does “sign up for early access” just mean get sneak previews, or that this is a new thing? If the latter, then good for them but another thing they should have done ten years ago.
  - munificent 6y ago
    > I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Is that not what Alphabet is?
    - hinkley 6y ago
      That's what I was hoping Alphabet would be, but it seems like this bit is still a sticking point: > or not high volume enough Kind of a let-down
- scarface74 6y ago
  Yet Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continuously diversify. Google still gets most of its profit from ads.
monksy 6y ago
HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT THESE LEET DEVS DO SUPPORT! They have that outsourced to non-employees/non-paid individuals via forums.
scarface74 6y ago
I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS. But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.
- celim307 6y ago
  I figure they thought they weren’t going to be always cheaper than AWS
  - milesward 6y ago
    Nope, we will.
- milesward 6y ago
  Me!
- jariel 6y ago
  So there are at least a few things here: 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product. 2) Just because some people like it doesn't mean it's worth maintaining. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Paradoxically, because it was such a marketing/sales focused product, it's possible the Eng. driven culture didn't really understand it's value and thought it was maybe to simple of a product. Arguably, it's hardly a product, more of a marketing feature. I suspect if sales was pushing hard for it it would have happened.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    > 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product. I can't tell what you're alluding to with "hugely sensitive", and "many sales issues around it". Could you clarify a concrete example these fuzzy expressions describe?
mapgrep 6y ago
>It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy I'm not so sure that's the case. It seems like historically certain products are starved of feautures and resources while other products are made a priority, and it also seems like these priorities can shift pretty rapidly. In the Google+ era for example there was the concept of "more wood behind fewer arrows" and a ton of money and resources went into plus to the detriment of other products (some of which were outright cancelled) and now obviously plus is no longer a priority. Hangouts was developed (iirc) for plus to attract users for a social network then eventually became Meets which seems to be attached to Google Apps as a business offering to attract paying subscribers. Which on some level makes sense but from the vantage of the actual product leads to some wasted effort and changes that seem arbitrary to users. There doesn't seem to have been a clear incentive to put features into Hangouts/Meet; instead the incentive seems to have been to grow the distinct platforms the product was attached to as a feature of those platforms. (Hence Duo as a separate product, it is attached to yet another platform, Android). Meanwhile Zoom, by staying focused on just the actual product of videoconferencing software, left Google's offering in the dust. Are there as many people working on features at say Blogger as there were 10 years ago? I doubt it. I'm not even saying that's wrong just that it contradicts the idea that Google can be said to incentivize features in the arbitrary case. I think it's clearly only for blessed products and that set of products that are blessed will change over time.
jogjayr 6y ago
I don't understand this "leetcoders produce bad code" meme. Is there something about being good at whiteboard interviews that makes you bad at writing clean code? Outside Google, I've seen plenty of terrible code by people who would fail FizzBuzz. Within Google, I've seen way more attention paid to code quality and system design than at any other place I've worked at.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  I think it just comes from the fact that solutions that come up in leetcode/HackerRank discussions are often unreadable gibberish.
wutbrodo 6y ago
For an anecdotal counter-example, the habits of code maintenance I picked up at Google are 10x better than anywhere else I've worked at. I've worked at small and medium-sized companies (and my current company is research-focused enough that a lot of people don't have a strong engineering background), but this is also what I hear from my Xoogler friends at (eg) Uber and Airbnb. I'd be surprised if this tendency had anything to do with Google exporting its culture.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  I haven't moved beyond Google yet (I want to, though, who is hiring... :-) ), but yes, to be honest, better code cleanliness, testing, style conformity, and good code review ability are the major things I've learned in the 8 years I've been there. Most other skills one picks up at Google are not transferrable outside of Google.
  - lowiqengineer 6y ago
    My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      Your engineers sound very impressive. Too bad about the management.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.
      - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
hodgesrm 6y ago
The "new features" ethos is really harmful in business apps. Business users want focused things like accurate budget vs. actuals reports where you can flag and fix deviations quickly. There's an overall design--of course--but great enterprise software is the result of attention to very granular features related to specific work practices. In this case the devil really is in the details.

EthanHeilman 6y ago

All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.

felixgallo 6y ago
I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?
- cpeterso 6y ago
  What does "Alexander" refer to here?
  - necheffa 6y ago
    Probably Alexander the Great.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    'And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.' Attributed to Alexander the Great. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander-wept/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      "It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?"
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Alex's Alexander the Great, who was great at conquering but not at administrating.
jethro_tell 6y ago
How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
- recursivecaveat 6y ago
  It's not about capturing marketshare for the company, it's about capturing bullet points for your resume. Working on new stuff is valued much more highly than fixing old stuff, and you naturally move much faster with more impressive sounding accomplishments in the early days of a product.
- bsmith89 6y ago
  I think the premise is that the culture/behaviors/tactics that allowed Google to capture new territory early on are hanging on past their usefulness, not the actual capturing of territory itself. Growing existing products wasn't the important thing before, so _now_ the incentive structure at Google is mis-aligned with capturing territory in that way.
abc_lisper 6y ago
This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.
- throwawaygler 6y ago
  That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.
  - duncanawoods 6y ago
    Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness. The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.
    - mav3rick 6y ago
      I love the arm chair analysis of every external person here. Code quality is extremely important at Google. That doesn't mean people don't write any features.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.
hinkley 6y ago
One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves. They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested. I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them. The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.
- throwawaygler 6y ago
  https://area120.google.com/ https://area120.google.com/
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Does “sign up for early access” just mean get sneak previews, or that this is a new thing? If the latter, then good for them but another thing they should have done ten years ago.
- munificent 6y ago
  > I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Is that not what Alphabet is?
  - hinkley 6y ago
    That's what I was hoping Alphabet would be, but it seems like this bit is still a sticking point: > or not high volume enough Kind of a let-down
scarface74 6y ago
Yet Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continuously diversify. Google still gets most of its profit from ads.

monksy 6y ago

HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT THESE LEET DEVS DO SUPPORT! They have that outsourced to non-employees/non-paid individuals via forums.

scarface74 6y ago

I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS. But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.

celim307 6y ago
I figure they thought they weren’t going to be always cheaper than AWS
- milesward 6y ago
  Nope, we will.
milesward 6y ago
Me!
jariel 6y ago
So there are at least a few things here: 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product. 2) Just because some people like it doesn't mean it's worth maintaining. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Paradoxically, because it was such a marketing/sales focused product, it's possible the Eng. driven culture didn't really understand it's value and thought it was maybe to simple of a product. Arguably, it's hardly a product, more of a marketing feature. I suspect if sales was pushing hard for it it would have happened.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  > 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product. I can't tell what you're alluding to with "hugely sensitive", and "many sales issues around it". Could you clarify a concrete example these fuzzy expressions describe?

mapgrep 6y ago

>It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy I'm not so sure that's the case. It seems like historically certain products are starved of feautures and resources while other products are made a priority, and it also seems like these priorities can shift pretty rapidly. In the Google+ era for example there was the concept of "more wood behind fewer arrows" and a ton of money and resources went into plus to the detriment of other products (some of which were outright cancelled) and now obviously plus is no longer a priority. Hangouts was developed (iirc) for plus to attract users for a social network then eventually became Meets which seems to be attached to Google Apps as a business offering to attract paying subscribers. Which on some level makes sense but from the vantage of the actual product leads to some wasted effort and changes that seem arbitrary to users. There doesn't seem to have been a clear incentive to put features into Hangouts/Meet; instead the incentive seems to have been to grow the distinct platforms the product was attached to as a feature of those platforms. (Hence Duo as a separate product, it is attached to yet another platform, Android). Meanwhile Zoom, by staying focused on just the actual product of videoconferencing software, left Google's offering in the dust. Are there as many people working on features at say Blogger as there were 10 years ago? I doubt it. I'm not even saying that's wrong just that it contradicts the idea that Google can be said to incentivize features in the arbitrary case. I think it's clearly only for blessed products and that set of products that are blessed will change over time.

jogjayr 6y ago

I don't understand this "leetcoders produce bad code" meme. Is there something about being good at whiteboard interviews that makes you bad at writing clean code? Outside Google, I've seen plenty of terrible code by people who would fail FizzBuzz. Within Google, I've seen way more attention paid to code quality and system design than at any other place I've worked at.

Drew_ 6y ago
I think it just comes from the fact that solutions that come up in leetcode/HackerRank discussions are often unreadable gibberish.

wutbrodo 6y ago

For an anecdotal counter-example, the habits of code maintenance I picked up at Google are 10x better than anywhere else I've worked at. I've worked at small and medium-sized companies (and my current company is research-focused enough that a lot of people don't have a strong engineering background), but this is also what I hear from my Xoogler friends at (eg) Uber and Airbnb. I'd be surprised if this tendency had anything to do with Google exporting its culture.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I haven't moved beyond Google yet (I want to, though, who is hiring... :-) ), but yes, to be honest, better code cleanliness, testing, style conformity, and good code review ability are the major things I've learned in the 8 years I've been there. Most other skills one picks up at Google are not transferrable outside of Google.
- lowiqengineer 6y ago
  My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Your engineers sound very impressive. Too bad about the management.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago

hodgesrm 6y ago

The "new features" ethos is really harmful in business apps. Business users want focused things like accurate budget vs. actuals reports where you can flag and fix deviations quickly. There's an overall design--of course--but great enterprise software is the result of attention to very granular features related to specific work practices. In this case the devil really is in the details.