6 ms·

These are fair criticisms. Still though, there are some pretty sweeping generalizations about Google being made here. The company is as big as a city. Not all o

by warent 6y ago

These are fair criticisms. Still though, there are some pretty sweeping generalizations about Google being made here. The company is as big as a city. Not all of their engineering culture is like this. Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt; slightly biased since I worked there for a bit in the past.

_-___________-_ 6y ago
All of the parts of the engineering culture that are publicly visible seem like this.
finnthehuman 6y ago
>Not all of their engineering culture is like this. Sure. I'll grant you Junio; he seems like a cool guy. The rest of google though? Google's engineering culture is by and for google. They're not doing the rest of us any favors. Googlers need to admit that. Not to me, but to themselves.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I'm seriously astonished by the depth of these Freudian analyses of the dark underbelly that is Google's "engineering culture", and how everything bad with the world can be linked to ... ... a meaningless decision to have a transparent proxy in some network path some free code takes on its way to you?
  - finnthehuman 6y ago
    >a meaningless decision If it's so meaningless, now that Drew has complained they can just make the alterative the default for their software right? Right? It is MEANINGLESS afterall. When faced with a decision, someone chose the option that took extra operational expenses to keep services online. If you're going to call that a meaningless, then you've either a huckster or have got quite a lot to learn my friend.
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
      Exactly! It's so meaningless they shrugged and flipped a switch when asked to do so in a single blog post. Try that feat with any policy decision google actually does care about!
- juped 6y ago
  I feel like Junio gets to be exempt from Google engineering culture because of his unique position.
izacus 6y ago
This is the same author who wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966778 and also had some very one-sided things to say about Google. I forecast a lot of HN upvotes :) Personally I don't find the fact, that a corporation built something out of their own interest surprising at all.
- ddevault 6y ago
  >Personally I don't find the fact, that a corporation built something out of their own interest surprising at all. It's not surprising, but it is concerning given that Google is the steward of the joint interests of all Go users.
- eat_veggies 6y ago
  I don't understand what this comment is saying about Hacker News or Drew DeVault. Are the points any less valid just because they do not praise Google? And just because something is unsurprising does not mean that it is good or acceptable, or that we should not urge them to do better.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
googthrowaway42 6y ago
As a counter-point, I worked at Google for two years and what the author is describing is completely consistent with my experience with the engineering culture and the systems it produces. Fundamentally there is a hostility towards the philosophical aspect of software engineering which involves a careful consideration of the essential nature of the system as a whole as it relates to some ultimate end and the nature of logical components of the system and how they interact. Note that these considerations can occur prior to any code being written and also as part of an iterative process as the product and understanding of the product develops. I believe this stems from three sources: 1. The criteria and process for getting promoted is very focused on shipping new and complex things which in practice is at the exclusion of all other considerations. This means that improving or maintaining existing systems or producing systems which are well architected at all is not as clearly valued. The promo committee is comprised of people who don't know the specifics of the systems you're working on so the easiest thing to convey is that feature X or product Y was shipped. 2. There is a hyper-rationalist, hyper-modernist, data-driven, anti-intuitionist view which pervades Google which completely discounts any sort of philosophical/qualitative thinking. People get really uncomfortable when you try to start even the most anodyne discussion about the product or service as it relates to some broader goal since those involve qualitative judgements that can't be reduced down a set of metrics. Some of this may be attributed to the CYA culture among management. 3. The interview process doesn't select for software engineering or software architecture skills (aka people who have developed an intuitive understanding of the art of software engineering) so there are many people within Google who lack the ability to effectively evaluate the architecture choices that are being made around them or that they themselves are making. With all that said I did meet and work with many brilliant engineers and others who were very talented and did think deeply about things but those were relatively rare. And yes it is a big company with many different teams and subcultures but what the author and I have described are the patterns that one sees broadly across Google.
- amscanne 6y ago
  It’s pretty uncool to use just two years of experience at a place as a credential to shit on the culture of that place (and through implication, the engineers there). I’ve been at Google for six years, and I’ve never encountered a “hostility towards the philosophical aspect of software engineering”. What a bunch of hooey. There are certainly problems with the promotion system (and incentives it creates), but it’s laughable to say that it rewards shipping “at the exclusion of all other considerations”. In two years, I imagine that you didn’t yet serve on promo committees (or see many successful and failed promotions of colleagues), so I’m not sure your criticisms are coming from a deep understanding of how they work. I’m sorry that you had a bad experience, or that you felt your specific working group had some kind of CYA culture or anti-engineering vibe. But it upsets me to see people indirectly shitting on or commenting about tens of thousands of engineers that they had never worked with or even interacted with. I don’t know why it’s fashionable to do this with Google right now, but it just shouldn’t happen with any company. If you want to describe your specific, concrete experience, I’m sure that would be much more helpful and constructive than saying “the culture is X”, “Google engineers are Y” without any connection to specifics. My 2c.
arp242 6y ago
They might be if they were true, but they're not: the only thing that was broken about sr.ht was that the links to the source code didn't work, but other than that it worked fine. The other sites mentioned like codeberg.org work just fine today, just without those links (a minor feature I almost never use). The whole "it needs meta tags" thing is also not true, I don't know where he got that from. Quite a few points in this article are highly misleading.
- yencabulator 6y ago
  codeberg.org only works with `go get` etc because they do have the meta tags set up. The only way for a non-hardcoded host to work would be for the import path to contain ".git", ".hg", etc -- which is so ugly pretty much nobody does that.
  - arp242 6y ago
    Ah sorry, you're correct. I checked but forgot about the "?go-get=1" parameter it adds. The entire thing is a bit hacky, but as mentioned in other comments godoc.org started as an independent project outside of Google and pkg.go.dev built on what was already in place. Was that the right decision? I don't know, I haven't looked at the matter and possible problems in-depth; all I do know it's far more nuanced than "Google being bad at engineering".

by warent 6y ago

_-___________-_ 6y ago

All of the parts of the engineering culture that are publicly visible seem like this.

finnthehuman 6y ago

>Not all of their engineering culture is like this. Sure. I'll grant you Junio; he seems like a cool guy. The rest of google though? Google's engineering culture is by and for google. They're not doing the rest of us any favors. Googlers need to admit that. Not to me, but to themselves.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I'm seriously astonished by the depth of these Freudian analyses of the dark underbelly that is Google's "engineering culture", and how everything bad with the world can be linked to ... ... a meaningless decision to have a transparent proxy in some network path some free code takes on its way to you?
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  >a meaningless decision If it's so meaningless, now that Drew has complained they can just make the alterative the default for their software right? Right? It is MEANINGLESS afterall. When faced with a decision, someone chose the option that took extra operational expenses to keep services online. If you're going to call that a meaningless, then you've either a huckster or have got quite a lot to learn my friend.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    Exactly! It's so meaningless they shrugged and flipped a switch when asked to do so in a single blog post. Try that feat with any policy decision google actually does care about!
juped 6y ago
I feel like Junio gets to be exempt from Google engineering culture because of his unique position.

izacus 6y ago

This is the same author who wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966778 and also had some very one-sided things to say about Google. I forecast a lot of HN upvotes :) Personally I don't find the fact, that a corporation built something out of their own interest surprising at all.

ddevault 6y ago
>Personally I don't find the fact, that a corporation built something out of their own interest surprising at all. It's not surprising, but it is concerning given that Google is the steward of the joint interests of all Go users.
eat_veggies 6y ago
I don't understand what this comment is saying about Hacker News or Drew DeVault. Are the points any less valid just because they do not praise Google? And just because something is unsurprising does not mean that it is good or acceptable, or that we should not urge them to do better.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

googthrowaway42 6y ago

As a counter-point, I worked at Google for two years and what the author is describing is completely consistent with my experience with the engineering culture and the systems it produces. Fundamentally there is a hostility towards the philosophical aspect of software engineering which involves a careful consideration of the essential nature of the system as a whole as it relates to some ultimate end and the nature of logical components of the system and how they interact. Note that these considerations can occur prior to any code being written and also as part of an iterative process as the product and understanding of the product develops. I believe this stems from three sources: 1. The criteria and process for getting promoted is very focused on shipping new and complex things which in practice is at the exclusion of all other considerations. This means that improving or maintaining existing systems or producing systems which are well architected at all is not as clearly valued. The promo committee is comprised of people who don't know the specifics of the systems you're working on so the easiest thing to convey is that feature X or product Y was shipped. 2. There is a hyper-rationalist, hyper-modernist, data-driven, anti-intuitionist view which pervades Google which completely discounts any sort of philosophical/qualitative thinking. People get really uncomfortable when you try to start even the most anodyne discussion about the product or service as it relates to some broader goal since those involve qualitative judgements that can't be reduced down a set of metrics. Some of this may be attributed to the CYA culture among management. 3. The interview process doesn't select for software engineering or software architecture skills (aka people who have developed an intuitive understanding of the art of software engineering) so there are many people within Google who lack the ability to effectively evaluate the architecture choices that are being made around them or that they themselves are making. With all that said I did meet and work with many brilliant engineers and others who were very talented and did think deeply about things but those were relatively rare. And yes it is a big company with many different teams and subcultures but what the author and I have described are the patterns that one sees broadly across Google.

amscanne 6y ago
It’s pretty uncool to use just two years of experience at a place as a credential to shit on the culture of that place (and through implication, the engineers there). I’ve been at Google for six years, and I’ve never encountered a “hostility towards the philosophical aspect of software engineering”. What a bunch of hooey. There are certainly problems with the promotion system (and incentives it creates), but it’s laughable to say that it rewards shipping “at the exclusion of all other considerations”. In two years, I imagine that you didn’t yet serve on promo committees (or see many successful and failed promotions of colleagues), so I’m not sure your criticisms are coming from a deep understanding of how they work. I’m sorry that you had a bad experience, or that you felt your specific working group had some kind of CYA culture or anti-engineering vibe. But it upsets me to see people indirectly shitting on or commenting about tens of thousands of engineers that they had never worked with or even interacted with. I don’t know why it’s fashionable to do this with Google right now, but it just shouldn’t happen with any company. If you want to describe your specific, concrete experience, I’m sure that would be much more helpful and constructive than saying “the culture is X”, “Google engineers are Y” without any connection to specifics. My 2c.

arp242 6y ago

They might be if they were true, but they're not: the only thing that was broken about sr.ht was that the links to the source code didn't work, but other than that it worked fine. The other sites mentioned like codeberg.org work just fine today, just without those links (a minor feature I almost never use). The whole "it needs meta tags" thing is also not true, I don't know where he got that from. Quite a few points in this article are highly misleading.

yencabulator 6y ago
codeberg.org only works with `go get` etc because they do have the meta tags set up. The only way for a non-hardcoded host to work would be for the import path to contain ".git", ".hg", etc -- which is so ugly pretty much nobody does that.
- arp242 6y ago
  Ah sorry, you're correct. I checked but forgot about the "?go-get=1" parameter it adds. The entire thing is a bit hacky, but as mentioned in other comments godoc.org started as an independent project outside of Google and pkg.go.dev built on what was already in place. Was that the right decision? I don't know, I haven't looked at the matter and possible problems in-depth; all I do know it's far more nuanced than "Google being bad at engineering".