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> improvements, not maintenance, drive careers forward. Google puts a piece of software on death roll by declaring them “in maintenance mode”, that's the state
by justicezyx 6y ago
> improvements, not maintenance, drive careers forward.
Google puts a piece of software on death roll by declaring them “in maintenance mode”, that's the state where no matter how difficult it was to work with, and how valuable are the improvements made to the software, the results carries “negative” weight in perf review.
That is, one who devote considerable time on a software in maintenance mode is considered working in conflict with the norm, and should be taught to behave more correctly, and sometimes punished for consistent effort of not reverting that behavior.
- vagrantJin 6y agoWhy doesn't Google open-source the projects it has killed? Hubris.
- hazz99 6y agoBecause they’re largely dependent on internal, non-public infrastructure and libraries. Open sourcing things is nonzero effort.
- justicezyx 6y agoThey cannot be killed easily. They also cannot be easily open-sourced as answered below. They were put on death roll. In the sense, that people with authority deemed them rightly deserved to be killed. But any software that needs authority to be declared dead, certainly have a life of their own. One such case is when the practitioners see the software has great value and an inherent vitality to sustain itself, but were simply rejected by people with authority. Did you know that Borg itself were put on death roll once, by Google's most powerful technical authority? That history ruined my respect for many of the once-golden images. But in the end a great lesson that anything that is valuable, is also worth fighting for. Just an example of how ridiculous an authority could become, if allowed to be unchallenged. Even in technical sphere, where is thought to be more rationale.