4 ms·

If building, running and evolving very large and complex systems over many years is not a measure of software engineering quality, I don't know how else to comp

If building, running and evolving very large and complex systems over many years is not a measure of software engineering quality, I don't know how else to compare companies.

rizzaxc 4y ago
Google has not pushed anything relevant to the user space for many, many years. It's not without reason people meme about Google Graveyard. Here in Hackernews, people constantly whine about their ads, their irrelevant google search, and what have you. Their latest "flagship" phone is littered with bugs. I wouldn't call them "evolving" anything software as of late. Their hard science departments seem good though, but these aren't software engineering
- lrem 4y ago
  Is product definition a part of software engineering?
- zaphirplane 4y ago
  TrueTime and spanner definitely fall in the wow category at least for me Microsoft one of the worlds top software companies couldn’t keep up with chrome. There are a lot of projects that look easy at a POC stage and are very different at million of users, millions of tps, millions of TB or full featured
  - rizzaxc 4y ago
    Chrome was released in 2008. Microsoft is doing fine with Edge, though it's a moot point because Microsoft is even older and more sluggish than Google. Spanner seems a prototypical Google dev product though; it's only invented to serve Google. I don't think any of their solutions is the de facto choice in any tech stack.
    - meowtimemania 4y ago
      Edge is just reskinned chrome browser. They discontinued their previous browser
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Spanner is definitely the system I would want to use if I had $$$, ran on GCP, and needed to do large-scale distributed database processing. It was invented to serve Google (really: the people who had outgrown bigtable's limited featureset) but is widely applicable.
- sdevonoes 4y ago
  > Google has not pushed anything relevant to the user space for many, many years. 80% of software engineering is not about pushing but maintaining. I'm not the one who praises Google (far from that), but using "pushing anything relevant" as a metric is not correct imho.
  - rizzaxc 4y ago
    I touched on that. Their search is highly gameable now, they don't care about correctness anymore. Youtube has incessant ads and their recommendation system sucks - I have to turn it off
somenameforme 4y ago
Their flagship product is Google search. But compared to 10-15 years ago, the results are hyper-monetized, full of spam, and frequently just not especially great. I understand there are many reasons for this (though some of those originate with Google itself), but that's rather the point. The whole reason Google became a thing is because most search engines 20 years ago were full of results that were "hyper-monetized, full of spam, and frequently just not especially great." Then Google came and offered a product that effectively solved this, and quickly became a giant because of it. Maintaining, let alone evolving, means continuing to work at least as well in the face of changing conditions.

If building, running and evolving very large and complex systems over many years is not a measure of software engineering quality, I don't know how else to compare companies.

rizzaxc 4y ago

Google has not pushed anything relevant to the user space for many, many years. It's not without reason people meme about Google Graveyard. Here in Hackernews, people constantly whine about their ads, their irrelevant google search, and what have you. Their latest "flagship" phone is littered with bugs. I wouldn't call them "evolving" anything software as of late. Their hard science departments seem good though, but these aren't software engineering

lrem 4y ago
Is product definition a part of software engineering?
zaphirplane 4y ago
TrueTime and spanner definitely fall in the wow category at least for me Microsoft one of the worlds top software companies couldn’t keep up with chrome. There are a lot of projects that look easy at a POC stage and are very different at million of users, millions of tps, millions of TB or full featured
- rizzaxc 4y ago
  Chrome was released in 2008. Microsoft is doing fine with Edge, though it's a moot point because Microsoft is even older and more sluggish than Google. Spanner seems a prototypical Google dev product though; it's only invented to serve Google. I don't think any of their solutions is the de facto choice in any tech stack.
  - meowtimemania 4y ago
    Edge is just reskinned chrome browser. They discontinued their previous browser
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Spanner is definitely the system I would want to use if I had $$$, ran on GCP, and needed to do large-scale distributed database processing. It was invented to serve Google (really: the people who had outgrown bigtable's limited featureset) but is widely applicable.
sdevonoes 4y ago
> Google has not pushed anything relevant to the user space for many, many years. 80% of software engineering is not about pushing but maintaining. I'm not the one who praises Google (far from that), but using "pushing anything relevant" as a metric is not correct imho.
- rizzaxc 4y ago
  I touched on that. Their search is highly gameable now, they don't care about correctness anymore. Youtube has incessant ads and their recommendation system sucks - I have to turn it off

somenameforme 4y ago

Their flagship product is Google search. But compared to 10-15 years ago, the results are hyper-monetized, full of spam, and frequently just not especially great. I understand there are many reasons for this (though some of those originate with Google itself), but that's rather the point. The whole reason Google became a thing is because most search engines 20 years ago were full of results that were "hyper-monetized, full of spam, and frequently just not especially great." Then Google came and offered a product that effectively solved this, and quickly became a giant because of it. Maintaining, let alone evolving, means continuing to work at least as well in the face of changing conditions.