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I expect you weren't intending to but you captured the essence of Google and the authors lament so succinctly. When I read your comment what I see is this: "Go

I expect you weren't intending to but you captured the essence of Google and the authors lament so succinctly. When I read your comment what I see is this: "Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so." It captures the narcissism that is tech perfectly.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> the narcissism that is tech perfectly. Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I’d love to work on a maintenance project for a product I care about, though - and add small little incremental improvements over time and make my mark that way. If there’s a hiring manager at Google that wants someone to babysit products that shouldn’t die, but can’t attract career-oriented people to work on, ping me :)
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Me too. I would love my job to be "clean up tech debt all day"
- slg 6y ago
  Many of us would be perfectly happy spending our entire career making hundreds of thousands of dollars working on a niche product that we are passionate about.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  If it is only career you are interested in, you would probably use Google as a ladder for higher positions elsewhere.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The large majority of enterpise projects are maintenance, if you want to see a career die quickly focus on being an expert in technology fad X. The best way to keep going is to diversify, not only being a generalist, but also extending the soft skills, don't funnel too much in technology for technology's sake, and the career will be just fine, even with maintenance projects.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project. My org, which is more focused on maintenance than any other org at Google, has among the highest promotion rates. I personally lead a team whose primary job is related to code maintenance rather than product features. I've been promoted in the top 5% of promotion rates during my career. It is true that there are maintenance teams that stagnate. It may be a different story for product managers or vps, but for engineers I've seen tremendous career success focused entirely on maintenance.
prox 6y ago
This one of the reasons I never use more of Google than that I need out of job necessity. Every single product is up for termination or reduction in functionality whenever they feel like it. I really don’t like the monopoly position as a browser either, they’re are already close to being IE6, part 2. I would not be against breaking up Google.
- grishka 6y ago
  As someone who hasn't done web development for a long time and then tried it again recently — no, the one close to being IE6 is Safari. It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp. It's the reason why I still have to serve jpegs from my website. They take some nonsense amount of time to implement APIs that Chromium and Firefox had for years, too, like WAAPI. And you don't have the option to not support Safari either, because that's the only browser on iOS.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp Why should they? It was a thing pushed and created by Google. We might as well just have Chronium then it Google's whims become de facto/jure web standards implemented by all...
  - leadingthenet 6y ago
    And thank God for that. I hope Apple keeps web devs in check for many years to come. Btw, I’m a web dev myself.
  - least 6y ago
    ...Except, isn't that exactly the point of having competing browsers? WebP was pushed heavily by Google and because google has such a massive market share, it became a 'standard.' Google has been leveraging its position as the dominant market leader in the browser market to push its technologies and forcing competing browsers to support it or receive reduced functionality. It's the same story for 4k video on youtube.
    - 6y ago
derekdahmer 6y ago
I don’t think that’s accurate. Products get resources allocated to them based on how commercially important they are. That’s not narcissism it’s business. Google Music was a solution for a generation where streaming subscriptions didn’t exist yet. That’s fine - it’s ok for products to die as the market changes and employees to move on to more relevant stuff.
- c1p0 6y ago
  I used Google Music for streaming music ever since it became available in our country. I remember the first thing I did was to back up all my mp3s, but after that I used to stream many other songs and that worked just fine. I found everything that I was interested in on there. At least for me it was a good music streaming service, had all I ever needed. Now I switched to YT Music. Not sure how that's any different. It still plays most of the music I had bundled up in the playlists I created over the years and that's fine I guess. It seems a bit easier to find live sets from festivals with YT Music so that's a plus.
- hrktb 6y ago
  An issue with this approach is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Killing streaming subscriptions alternatives because they're on the decline definitely pushes that decline, even if it could have plateaued at some point where the service could have stayed viable.
amf12 6y ago
"Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so." That's a wrong take out of OPs comment. They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to. There is nothing wrong for a service to adapt to their new customer base. Why should they staff niche projects because some small % of users (and declining) want to keep using it and provide better alternatives?
- onion2k 6y ago
  Why should they staff niche projects because some small % of users (and declining) want to keep using it and provide better alternatives? Because killing off products has given Google a reputation that stops tens of millions of people using any of the fancy new products that Googlers build and launch. In the long term all the effort Googlers put in to new products is a waste of time.
  - Kostchei 6y ago
    THIS is exactly what happened when they (google) pushed "Google Chronicle" a security offering- which my employer might use (having some GCP and a lot of Gsuite)- I wouldn't even suggest it to the CISO, based on the nearly 99.9% chance Google will kill it and we would be left with a huge gap.
  - amf12 6y ago
    Because killing off products has given Google a reputation that stops tens of millions of people using any of the fancy new products that Googlers build and launch. In the long term all the effort Googlers put in to new products is a waste of time. This should be qualified. Killing off products without an alternative has given that reputation. As long as they provide a viable alternative with effective migration it should not count as "killing off". But I hear you, its the perception that matters too.
- kop316 6y ago
  > They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to. I mean in all fairness, For the price gouging I see for storage on phones, I can buy an mp3 player (with a nice DAC), a huge SD card, and then load it on there. That's why I don't store music on my phone.
Aunche 6y ago
Clearly, they do care about the majority of their users who are moving to streaming services.
- grishka 6y ago
  Of course they do, everyone wants to get on the recurring payments hype train. Besides, recurring payments make charts go up more reliably, and charts going up is the most important thing in the modern IT apparently, common sense be damned.
  - test1235 6y ago
    >charts going up is the most important thing in the modern IT apparently that's just business and economics, isn't it? Like how an economy (GDP) always has to grow, regardless.
darawk 6y ago
Is that narcissism..? Or is that just totally reasonable project and time management? Google has limited resources. Why is it their responsibility to continue staffing projects that people aren't using?
swyx 6y ago
"free stuff doesn't last" is narcissism?
sullyj3 6y ago
How is it narcissism? It's pragmatism! A company isn't going to work on something that a minority of people care about out of the goodness of their heart. Why would you expect that of them?
- majewsky 6y ago
  Only because of how you phrase it. If you strike out the latter half of the sentence and just have the company > work on something that a minority of people care about then that can be a very viable business plan. In fact, pg probably has an essay about that. Maybe the "do things that don't scale" one?
  - sullyj3 6y ago
    If in fact it is viable, then it's a good idea to work on it. Seems like a big "if". Regardless, it's a different argument to the nonsensical one gp was making.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    The problem is that Google’s infrastructure makes it damn near impossible to spin off products to people who would be more than happy to run a 10 million dollar company.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  2 Billion people describes "a minority" of Google users. I think that is the problem.
coldtea 6y ago
>"Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so." You left out the "if you don't constitute a viable market" part (expressed by the parent as "nobody but aging millenials still does X), which makes all the difference, though.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> Google doesn't care about you or what you think. I find the Google/Startup dichotomy here fascinating. We are on hackernews, a site focused on startups. Pivoting dramatically, including throwing away your entire customer base for a different population, is considered an essential part of running a startup. But if a big company has a product that is obviously stagnating at a small userbase then the community demands that it be supported in perpetuity. There is a pair of Cole Haan shoes I really like. I bought several of the same exact style over the years. It was eventually phased out. I can't buy it anymore. Is Cole Haan narcissistic for not offering me the shoe I want? Is it narcissism, or good business?
- ctrl-j 6y ago
  I'll admit, I don't work in the startup space. However, it seems to me that Google doesn't really run their products like a startup generally does. It seems like adapting your product to your existing client base is usually better than launching a similar but different product while your current one is live. Once you've fragmented your user base then shuttering one of your products and (hoping?) that the users who didn't migrate will finally migrate to your new product... that seems like a lot of unnecessary risk? Or maybe that's just the startup game? I feel like if startups ran their business like google runs their products, they'd fail pretty quickly. Am I off base here?
  - specialist 6y ago
    Talent retention. All the side projects are makework, amusement, seduction. So the top talent doesn't wander off to work some where else.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      Is this true or is it what Googlers who work on the low priority products that will inevitably be killed off after a few years tell themselves to feel better about working on what is essentially shovelware clones of the latest idea someone else is having some success with? Google are big enough and generate enough profit that they can afford to have entire divisions of developers who are kept around in case they're needed one day. That doesn't make those people good developers though. Obviously there are some very capable people on those teams, but if they're genuinely talented why aren't they working on Search or Ads? That's what makes Google money, so that's why the best people end up, not on little side projects.
res0nat0r 6y ago
If no one is using the service and it is dying, it should be shut down though?
- organsnyder 6y ago
  With the neglect of the product, it's no wonder it was "dying" (I haven't seen metrics to back up that claim, though I haven't looked, either). I used it quite extensively for the past five years, and hardly anything changed—even the curated "stations" of themed music seemed frozen in time. I don't see why it couldn't have been the next Spotify if they hadn't invested in it, and the new YouTube streaming platform seems like a shoddy attempt at synergizing disparate brands.
  - res0nat0r 6y ago
    I'm assuming Spotify ate their lunch, just like IMO why Apple Music sucks too. Better selection, discovery, ui etc so the userbase just isn't there for Google or Apple and is either dying or flat and humming along and possibly costing as much to operator or more than it is taking in. Ripe for getting the axe.
spaceflunky 6y ago
>It captures the narcissism that is tech perfectly. Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems. FAANGs should allocate their resources on big problems that others would not have the resources to tackle. Because if the FAANGs don't, no one else would be able to feasibly attack those problems. The upside is the big problems get solved and there's smaller problems left on the table for startups to flourish on.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  > Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems. That's a catch-22. You have to be pretty big to be able to license this stuff at all.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  One of the ways in which narcissism is expressed is in a lack of empathy for others. The economic priorities of "big problems" or "small problems" doesn't enter the picture once a product is shipped. I completely agree that a FAANG company would choose to prioritize big problems over small, but the essence of tech these days is how casually they might solve a problem, kill off any startups that might have also been pursuing that problem, and then discard their solution some time later with no regard for the users of that solution or acknowledging the dead startups that didn't have the resources (or will) to compete. Because a product they have shipped no longer serves the company's interests does not mean it no longer serves the user's interest. And yet these companies casually kill off these things without regard to the impact it has on those users. That lack of empathy, that focus on what is good for the company and company employee's who focus on what is good for them, is the narcissism here.
  - spaceflunky 6y ago
    I get your point about empathy, but it's far too utopian IMO. This isn't like life saving heart medication or something, its just music streaming. A company is not obligated to provide a service forever, even if they did kill off the competition. There also has to be a reasonable balance between: "users want this" and "it's cost effective to maintain." Having empathy does not obligate someone to charity. On that note, if there is truly a market for the service, rather than few angry niche customers, then someone else will come along to fill the void.
brundolf 6y ago
> It captures the narcissism that is [big business] perfectly.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

> the narcissism that is tech perfectly. Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I’d love to work on a maintenance project for a product I care about, though - and add small little incremental improvements over time and make my mark that way. If there’s a hiring manager at Google that wants someone to babysit products that shouldn’t die, but can’t attract career-oriented people to work on, ping me :)
- p1necone 6y ago
  Me too. I would love my job to be "clean up tech debt all day"
slg 6y ago
Many of us would be perfectly happy spending our entire career making hundreds of thousands of dollars working on a niche product that we are passionate about.
raxxorrax 6y ago
If it is only career you are interested in, you would probably use Google as a ladder for higher positions elsewhere.
pjmlp 6y ago
The large majority of enterpise projects are maintenance, if you want to see a career die quickly focus on being an expert in technology fad X. The best way to keep going is to diversify, not only being a generalist, but also extending the soft skills, don't funnel too much in technology for technology's sake, and the career will be just fine, even with maintenance projects.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project. My org, which is more focused on maintenance than any other org at Google, has among the highest promotion rates. I personally lead a team whose primary job is related to code maintenance rather than product features. I've been promoted in the top 5% of promotion rates during my career. It is true that there are maintenance teams that stagnate. It may be a different story for product managers or vps, but for engineers I've seen tremendous career success focused entirely on maintenance.

prox 6y ago

This one of the reasons I never use more of Google than that I need out of job necessity. Every single product is up for termination or reduction in functionality whenever they feel like it. I really don’t like the monopoly position as a browser either, they’re are already close to being IE6, part 2. I would not be against breaking up Google.

grishka 6y ago
As someone who hasn't done web development for a long time and then tried it again recently — no, the one close to being IE6 is Safari. It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp. It's the reason why I still have to serve jpegs from my website. They take some nonsense amount of time to implement APIs that Chromium and Firefox had for years, too, like WAAPI. And you don't have the option to not support Safari either, because that's the only browser on iOS.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp Why should they? It was a thing pushed and created by Google. We might as well just have Chronium then it Google's whims become de facto/jure web standards implemented by all...
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  And thank God for that. I hope Apple keeps web devs in check for many years to come. Btw, I’m a web dev myself.
- least 6y ago
  ...Except, isn't that exactly the point of having competing browsers? WebP was pushed heavily by Google and because google has such a massive market share, it became a 'standard.' Google has been leveraging its position as the dominant market leader in the browser market to push its technologies and forcing competing browsers to support it or receive reduced functionality. It's the same story for 4k video on youtube.
  - 6y ago

derekdahmer 6y ago

I don’t think that’s accurate. Products get resources allocated to them based on how commercially important they are. That’s not narcissism it’s business. Google Music was a solution for a generation where streaming subscriptions didn’t exist yet. That’s fine - it’s ok for products to die as the market changes and employees to move on to more relevant stuff.

c1p0 6y ago
I used Google Music for streaming music ever since it became available in our country. I remember the first thing I did was to back up all my mp3s, but after that I used to stream many other songs and that worked just fine. I found everything that I was interested in on there. At least for me it was a good music streaming service, had all I ever needed. Now I switched to YT Music. Not sure how that's any different. It still plays most of the music I had bundled up in the playlists I created over the years and that's fine I guess. It seems a bit easier to find live sets from festivals with YT Music so that's a plus.
hrktb 6y ago
An issue with this approach is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Killing streaming subscriptions alternatives because they're on the decline definitely pushes that decline, even if it could have plateaued at some point where the service could have stayed viable.

amf12 6y ago

"Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so." That's a wrong take out of OPs comment. They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to. There is nothing wrong for a service to adapt to their new customer base. Why should they staff niche projects because some small % of users (and declining) want to keep using it and provide better alternatives?

onion2k 6y ago
Why should they staff niche projects because some small % of users (and declining) want to keep using it and provide better alternatives? Because killing off products has given Google a reputation that stops tens of millions of people using any of the fancy new products that Googlers build and launch. In the long term all the effort Googlers put in to new products is a waste of time.
- Kostchei 6y ago
  THIS is exactly what happened when they (google) pushed "Google Chronicle" a security offering- which my employer might use (having some GCP and a lot of Gsuite)- I wouldn't even suggest it to the CISO, based on the nearly 99.9% chance Google will kill it and we would be left with a huge gap.
- amf12 6y ago
  Because killing off products has given Google a reputation that stops tens of millions of people using any of the fancy new products that Googlers build and launch. In the long term all the effort Googlers put in to new products is a waste of time. This should be qualified. Killing off products without an alternative has given that reputation. As long as they provide a viable alternative with effective migration it should not count as "killing off". But I hear you, its the perception that matters too.
kop316 6y ago
> They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to. I mean in all fairness, For the price gouging I see for storage on phones, I can buy an mp3 player (with a nice DAC), a huge SD card, and then load it on there. That's why I don't store music on my phone.

Aunche 6y ago

Clearly, they do care about the majority of their users who are moving to streaming services.

grishka 6y ago
Of course they do, everyone wants to get on the recurring payments hype train. Besides, recurring payments make charts go up more reliably, and charts going up is the most important thing in the modern IT apparently, common sense be damned.
- test1235 6y ago
  >charts going up is the most important thing in the modern IT apparently that's just business and economics, isn't it? Like how an economy (GDP) always has to grow, regardless.

darawk 6y ago

Is that narcissism..? Or is that just totally reasonable project and time management? Google has limited resources. Why is it their responsibility to continue staffing projects that people aren't using?

swyx 6y ago

"free stuff doesn't last" is narcissism?

sullyj3 6y ago

How is it narcissism? It's pragmatism! A company isn't going to work on something that a minority of people care about out of the goodness of their heart. Why would you expect that of them?

majewsky 6y ago
Only because of how you phrase it. If you strike out the latter half of the sentence and just have the company > work on something that a minority of people care about then that can be a very viable business plan. In fact, pg probably has an essay about that. Maybe the "do things that don't scale" one?
- sullyj3 6y ago
  If in fact it is viable, then it's a good idea to work on it. Seems like a big "if". Regardless, it's a different argument to the nonsensical one gp was making.
- Spivak 6y ago
  The problem is that Google’s infrastructure makes it damn near impossible to spin off products to people who would be more than happy to run a 10 million dollar company.
tengbretson 6y ago
2 Billion people describes "a minority" of Google users. I think that is the problem.

coldtea 6y ago

>"Google doesn't care about you or what you think. Further, employees of Google aren't going to spend any time on products you care about if they can't get promoted by doing so." You left out the "if you don't constitute a viable market" part (expressed by the parent as "nobody but aging millenials still does X), which makes all the difference, though.

UncleMeat 6y ago

> Google doesn't care about you or what you think. I find the Google/Startup dichotomy here fascinating. We are on hackernews, a site focused on startups. Pivoting dramatically, including throwing away your entire customer base for a different population, is considered an essential part of running a startup. But if a big company has a product that is obviously stagnating at a small userbase then the community demands that it be supported in perpetuity. There is a pair of Cole Haan shoes I really like. I bought several of the same exact style over the years. It was eventually phased out. I can't buy it anymore. Is Cole Haan narcissistic for not offering me the shoe I want? Is it narcissism, or good business?

ctrl-j 6y ago
I'll admit, I don't work in the startup space. However, it seems to me that Google doesn't really run their products like a startup generally does. It seems like adapting your product to your existing client base is usually better than launching a similar but different product while your current one is live. Once you've fragmented your user base then shuttering one of your products and (hoping?) that the users who didn't migrate will finally migrate to your new product... that seems like a lot of unnecessary risk? Or maybe that's just the startup game? I feel like if startups ran their business like google runs their products, they'd fail pretty quickly. Am I off base here?
- specialist 6y ago
  Talent retention. All the side projects are makework, amusement, seduction. So the top talent doesn't wander off to work some where else.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Is this true or is it what Googlers who work on the low priority products that will inevitably be killed off after a few years tell themselves to feel better about working on what is essentially shovelware clones of the latest idea someone else is having some success with? Google are big enough and generate enough profit that they can afford to have entire divisions of developers who are kept around in case they're needed one day. That doesn't make those people good developers though. Obviously there are some very capable people on those teams, but if they're genuinely talented why aren't they working on Search or Ads? That's what makes Google money, so that's why the best people end up, not on little side projects.

res0nat0r 6y ago

If no one is using the service and it is dying, it should be shut down though?

organsnyder 6y ago
With the neglect of the product, it's no wonder it was "dying" (I haven't seen metrics to back up that claim, though I haven't looked, either). I used it quite extensively for the past five years, and hardly anything changed—even the curated "stations" of themed music seemed frozen in time. I don't see why it couldn't have been the next Spotify if they hadn't invested in it, and the new YouTube streaming platform seems like a shoddy attempt at synergizing disparate brands.
- res0nat0r 6y ago
  I'm assuming Spotify ate their lunch, just like IMO why Apple Music sucks too. Better selection, discovery, ui etc so the userbase just isn't there for Google or Apple and is either dying or flat and humming along and possibly costing as much to operator or more than it is taking in. Ripe for getting the axe.

spaceflunky 6y ago

>It captures the narcissism that is tech perfectly. Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems. FAANGs should allocate their resources on big problems that others would not have the resources to tackle. Because if the FAANGs don't, no one else would be able to feasibly attack those problems. The upside is the big problems get solved and there's smaller problems left on the table for startups to flourish on.

Skunkleton 6y ago
> Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems. That's a catch-22. You have to be pretty big to be able to license this stuff at all.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
One of the ways in which narcissism is expressed is in a lack of empathy for others. The economic priorities of "big problems" or "small problems" doesn't enter the picture once a product is shipped. I completely agree that a FAANG company would choose to prioritize big problems over small, but the essence of tech these days is how casually they might solve a problem, kill off any startups that might have also been pursuing that problem, and then discard their solution some time later with no regard for the users of that solution or acknowledging the dead startups that didn't have the resources (or will) to compete. Because a product they have shipped no longer serves the company's interests does not mean it no longer serves the user's interest. And yet these companies casually kill off these things without regard to the impact it has on those users. That lack of empathy, that focus on what is good for the company and company employee's who focus on what is good for them, is the narcissism here.
- spaceflunky 6y ago
  I get your point about empathy, but it's far too utopian IMO. This isn't like life saving heart medication or something, its just music streaming. A company is not obligated to provide a service forever, even if they did kill off the competition. There also has to be a reasonable balance between: "users want this" and "it's cost effective to maintain." Having empathy does not obligate someone to charity. On that note, if there is truly a market for the service, rather than few angry niche customers, then someone else will come along to fill the void.

brundolf 6y ago

> It captures the narcissism that is [big business] perfectly.