5 ms·

In general, if someone wants to beef up the tooling in my project that I know is fine to begin with, I still say "I don't mind, go ahead, but I will continue us

In general, if someone wants to beef up the tooling in my project that I know is fine to begin with, I still say "I don't mind, go ahead, but I will continue using my old tooling until yours works with no regression." Half the time, they abandon it. I don't even know how Bazel works cause I've never felt enough pain with makefiles etc to research an alternative. Also, Google tooling knowledge doesn't transfer very well to outside projects. Everything is special on the inside there. They use an internal version of Bazel called Blaze that's totally integrated with everything, with entire teams dedicated to the tooling, and only a few officially supported programming languages, so of course it works smoothly.

dessant 4y ago
> Google tooling knowledge doesn't transfer very well to outside projects. A good number of their open source projects fall apart in real-world use. If you visit their repositories you'll often get the sense that beyond working on interesting problems, their engineers have no desire to properly maintain these projects for the next few years. The gamble of relying on a Google product unfortunately also applies to their open source projects.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  Maybe that's because the average tenure at google is so short?
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Average tenure at Google is so short because they have grown ridiculously. The actual attrition rates are slower than industry norms.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      This is correct. People were always shocked how many SWEs were newer than them after working for half a year or so.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    "ex-google" is a really valuable notch to have on your CV
- tmpz22 4y ago
  I roast Google at every opportunity but this does not seem fair to me. What about Golang? Angular? Dart? Even the bigger stuff like Chrome and Android while a bear to deal with are integrated with every day by a lot of companies. What is some Google OSS that has failed in the way you mention?
  - TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
    Angular, famous for betraying their devoted developer community with a complete breaking change when going from 1.x to 2.0. No migration plan whatsoever. It was a totally new framework which happened to share the same name. After a few years they relented and put in some work to help migrate existing users, but by that point most people has already put in the work to migrate towards a framework that wouldn't just leave you behind.
    - tmpz22 4y ago
      Angular 1.x was (is?) still viable. Its not a breaking change because its an entirely optional shift. I was working in Angular 1.x at the time and while there was a lot of hype for 2 we all knew Angular 1.x wasn't going anywhere.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      The migration plan is to use React instead.
    - rawoke083600 4y ago
      >No migration plan whatsoever. Not 100% true, there were a lot of workarounds and documentation how to upgrade. Sure it wasn't great, but the few projects I did with Angular 6,7,8 was kinda nice. I still have an AngularJS project in production which is also nice :) Of course any new JS project is now done in Svelte (nothing simpler) or as nice PS. It's nice to be nice :D
moosedev 4y ago
I used it for several years inside Google, and TBH it was often painful in the ways external users have described in this thread. When I was doing something very "normal" from the point of view of Google's monolithic codebase, i.e. targeting a C++ binary intended to run on Google's distributed computing platform, I found it smooth enough, if awfully verbose. When I was doing something less vanilla, but not necessarily uncommon, e.g. targeting Android, iOS, Windows, it was painful, and I spent a lot of time working around it or understanding the chains/mountains of clever things others had built to work around it. I understood some of the design decisions and tradeoffs for why it works the way it does, but I didn't like it. I certainly wouldn't reach for it for a personal project. Possibly I still just didn't "get it". I've used dozens* of build systems at this point, but hey. * possibly exaggerating
- vlovich123 4y ago
  When was this? I recall they were just getting around to cross-platform builds around 2015 or so (as I had helped in porting some QUIC stuff in my 20% time). I would image 7 years later the picture looks very different over there.
riku_iki 4y ago
> until yours works with no regression and there still no guarantee of no such regressions one month later.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I give it a trial period still. But yes, one time a guy switched our NodeJS project to Typescript. It worked for a little, then stuff started breaking (mainly involving imports/modules). He left for unrelated reasons, so I immediately took us back.
  - Thiez 4y ago
    A shame, TS really is nicer when you get used to it.

dessant 4y ago

> Google tooling knowledge doesn't transfer very well to outside projects. A good number of their open source projects fall apart in real-world use. If you visit their repositories you'll often get the sense that beyond working on interesting problems, their engineers have no desire to properly maintain these projects for the next few years. The gamble of relying on a Google product unfortunately also applies to their open source projects.

phist_mcgee 4y ago
Maybe that's because the average tenure at google is so short?
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Average tenure at Google is so short because they have grown ridiculously. The actual attrition rates are slower than industry norms.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    This is correct. People were always shocked how many SWEs were newer than them after working for half a year or so.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  "ex-google" is a really valuable notch to have on your CV
tmpz22 4y ago
I roast Google at every opportunity but this does not seem fair to me. What about Golang? Angular? Dart? Even the bigger stuff like Chrome and Android while a bear to deal with are integrated with every day by a lot of companies. What is some Google OSS that has failed in the way you mention?
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  Angular, famous for betraying their devoted developer community with a complete breaking change when going from 1.x to 2.0. No migration plan whatsoever. It was a totally new framework which happened to share the same name. After a few years they relented and put in some work to help migrate existing users, but by that point most people has already put in the work to migrate towards a framework that wouldn't just leave you behind.
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    Angular 1.x was (is?) still viable. Its not a breaking change because its an entirely optional shift. I was working in Angular 1.x at the time and while there was a lot of hype for 2 we all knew Angular 1.x wasn't going anywhere.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    The migration plan is to use React instead.
  - rawoke083600 4y ago
    >No migration plan whatsoever. Not 100% true, there were a lot of workarounds and documentation how to upgrade. Sure it wasn't great, but the few projects I did with Angular 6,7,8 was kinda nice. I still have an AngularJS project in production which is also nice :) Of course any new JS project is now done in Svelte (nothing simpler) or as nice PS. It's nice to be nice :D

moosedev 4y ago

I used it for several years inside Google, and TBH it was often painful in the ways external users have described in this thread. When I was doing something very "normal" from the point of view of Google's monolithic codebase, i.e. targeting a C++ binary intended to run on Google's distributed computing platform, I found it smooth enough, if awfully verbose. When I was doing something less vanilla, but not necessarily uncommon, e.g. targeting Android, iOS, Windows, it was painful, and I spent a lot of time working around it or understanding the chains/mountains of clever things others had built to work around it. I understood some of the design decisions and tradeoffs for why it works the way it does, but I didn't like it. I certainly wouldn't reach for it for a personal project. Possibly I still just didn't "get it". I've used dozens* of build systems at this point, but hey. * possibly exaggerating

vlovich123 4y ago
When was this? I recall they were just getting around to cross-platform builds around 2015 or so (as I had helped in porting some QUIC stuff in my 20% time). I would image 7 years later the picture looks very different over there.

riku_iki 4y ago

> until yours works with no regression and there still no guarantee of no such regressions one month later.

hot_gril 4y ago
I give it a trial period still. But yes, one time a guy switched our NodeJS project to Typescript. It worked for a little, then stuff started breaking (mainly involving imports/modules). He left for unrelated reasons, so I immediately took us back.
- Thiez 4y ago
  A shame, TS really is nicer when you get used to it.