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The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Te

The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Teams who have been working on ports for months were blind-sided. Employees generally did not know. It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company with the absurd revenue that Google gets. It feels like a double warning: Google will withdraw suddenly, whenever they like, and they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions.

cududa 4y ago
Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  For a specific example of latency incompetency that immediately came to mind while reading this: Chrome. Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one. When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome only runs properly from second execution onwards after the underlying operating system has cached most of the stuff Chrome wants in RAM in anticipation of subsequent executions. I want to say this is optimization for ever more powerful hardware, but I'm inclined to say it's also sheer incompetency that Chrome literally can't fallback gracefully if it doesn't get data as quickly as it wants.
  - polio 4y ago
    In the first-boot-on-HDD scenario, why would latency make the program fail to start at all? I'd expect it to just start slowly.
    - cududa 4y ago
      JIT. It's using a "known state"/ cached blob to start then quickly falls apart as it does it's "SSD expected" memory management voodoo.
    - herendin 4y ago
      Unanticipated race condition perhaps? A process takes 2 minutes instead of 5 seconds, and then a later part of the startup fails because it has no way to handle the totally unexpected lack of data
    - rasz 4y ago
      For starters Chrome will not wait for extensions to load/initialize. Its possible in case of HDD there might be more things that simply time out/chrome disables because it doesnt want to wait.
  - cududa 4y ago
    Made some offhanded comment about Chrome perf on Twitter earlier this year and a Google friend replied something like "Well, pretty much the whole Chrome team just got upgraded to local test machines with at least 32gb of RAM. Godspeed everyone."
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
      Makes you wonder what would happen if companies occasionally did the exact opposite to their engineers. "Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."
      - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.
        cududa 4y ago
        You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. Windows Vista devs with 8GB of DDR2 when real world customers had 512mb of DDR learned this lesson hard. EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.
        Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        > You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware? If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    This seems weird to me, can you define "run properly"?
  - doubled112 4y ago
    I've seen this exact behaviour in a few Electron apps on a Raspberry Pi 400. Make sure nothing else is running, start the application, expect failure, start it again, works as expected.
  - password4321 4y ago
    I was just whining how when Chrome-based browsers first open up on my 5400rpm hdd, I paste in the URL and press Enter, then it loads the default home page and wipes out what I pasted... "you're goin' nowhere!"
    - copperx 4y ago
      That's far from being only a Chrome problem. That extremely irritating behavior is going to be with us until OS developers see the light and we get hard/soft realtime GUIs.
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      Opening Google maps, the text entry is editable far, far before when it should be. As soon as the page loads, I can start typing. Then the JavaScript starts running, and helpfully selects the text entry, placing the cursor at the beginning of the text field. Then some cached suggestion loads, inserting some suggested search for the area being viewed. The end result is that anything I type gets jumbled or overwritten multiple times before the page settles down and can actually be used.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        This is the general curse of async UI these days, and it's everywhere from the web to native desktop apps to the OS itself. Obviously, it can be done right, but it seems that most devs who are so eager to jump on the async bandwagon have no idea that they have to make that effort now.
  - MikusR 4y ago
    Chrome also runs a full built in antivirus scan of your whole PC on first launch after updating.
- herpderperator 4y ago
  How did they have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi AP in 2010, and how did you have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi client in 2010? Wi-Fi is barely 1Gbps over a decade later.
  - cududa 4y ago
    Dualband bonded 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi 4. No idea if it was effective speed or reported.
  - gsich 4y ago
    Wouldn't matter much for the usecase that was presented in parent. Latency can still be at ~1ms.
- bluedino 4y ago
  You'd think everyone working from home where they have real-world internet speeds would fix that.
  - cududa 4y ago
    Well people weren't working from home in 2010
- liquidgecka 4y ago
  Okay, something I can speak too! (Though I left in 2009 but it's close enough) I was a SRE on Gmail, and I can assure you that the experience for devs was not great intentionally. We had a pool of dedicated machines that ran various versions specifically used for development. I made sure those where always on our worst clusters (slowest CPUs and disks) so the dev experience was always the worst case scenario for performance. :-)
  - cududa 4y ago
    Would love to hear more about that! I feel like there was a very specific period between 2010 and 2012 when web app stuff just sucked but Google Docs etc was great fun ~2006-2009
skybrian 4y ago
The announcement seems sudden but actually it's with about three months notice. It does seem a little short, but how much would it help to drag it out further? How much time do you want to spend on a project that's shutting down?
- shakna 4y ago
  There were games preparing to launch on November 1st. Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Big companies are quite paranoid about leaking shutdowns even internally, because they don't want the press to know, customers to start asking questions, team members leaving, etc etc. I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
    - shakna 4y ago
      That's true... But when you act as a publisher, then you're required to take the risk of leaking something's final days. When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.
      - 4y ago
manicdee 4y ago
Reader, Wave, G+, Hangouts, Stadia and soon RCS. Never build a business on a Google project, only ever use Google as a side hustle.
- joshgachnang 4y ago
  What's happening with RCS?
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  why use it for a side hustle?
  - copperx 4y ago
    OP said "as a side hustle", not for. Perhaps OP resells Google services or Cloud offerings?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  RCS is a failed telco standard, not a Google invention, and Apple refusing to adopt it is probably the single biggest reason it never took off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
  - hedora 4y ago
    RCS is (was?) designed so telcos can charge per message, requires (and is tied to) a phone number, and end-to-end encryption is an afterthought. Is there even an RCS client for iOS? There is for signal…
vkou 4y ago
> Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming When you're making a decision like this, you have to go full steam ahead until you decide to stop. Because not going full steam ahead compromises you in the event that you choose not to cancel. It's like a negotiation. If you're thinking of completely folding to your counterparty, the last thing you ever want to do is tell them that they have you on the ropes.
- Pelam 4y ago
  And like in any game of minds, it goes into a guessing game: ”Are they thinking of X? They would never admit, but perhaps this and that can be interpreted as signal for X.” This is fine for some situations, like games, and can even be fun. It is not ”fun” if you are a paying customer and and X is ”Suddenly kill the service I’m using.” The only remedy to this is trust. (Which a simple short term zero sum game theoretic analysis does not account for.)
frozenport 4y ago
Everybody at Google knew it was doomed but they still collected their $200k a year.[1][2] [1] https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACkmiFEpw2moH/images-118.fill.size_2000x1397.v1626207452.png https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACk... [2] https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-comics-critique https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-com...
adrr 4y ago
You have to pretty naive to not realize that Google could flip directions any day. Look what happened to Nest? They went from being apart of Google, getting kicked out, and back to being apart of Google in a short time frame. Or the pixel that went from being a flagship phone to being a mid tier phone and then back to a flagship phone in a 3 year period. There’s more examples like Google fiber which stopped expanding in 2016 to adding a bunch of new cities this year. Leadership flips positions all the time. They don’t have a real vision for the company. All they know how to do is search and ads.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  They do have video streaming down. YouTube is still a great product IMO.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Youtube is not great by any objective measure, but they are the only worthwhile player in town.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      That seems like it is great, along the measure of “economically viable”.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Thorrez 4y ago
>they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions. Google's refunding all Stadia game and hardware purchases. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Stadia.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  IMO no need for a disclosure if you're just stating a single fact.
  - mediumiqsad 4y ago
    It’s intentional, it’s a way to brag. They don’t need to at all. There’s a reason why nobody at other companies does that - people at other companies are normal and don’t think they’re gods gift to the world.
    - DharmaPolice 4y ago
      If you search for "Disclosure I work at Microsoft" site:news.ycombinator.com you get 300+ results.
      - thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
        Though Xicrosofter returns none.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      It's required by company policy. Otherwise the comments could be seen as astroturfing. The policy is so strict that it specifically says you need to put a disclosure in every individual tweet, a disclosure in your Twitter bio isn't sufficient. I think that part of the rule is broken frequently though.
      - mach1ne 4y ago
        Interesting. Is it limited to Twitter? I can see the company fearing a backlash in social medias where you're operating under your own name (and thus can be traced back to Google) but what about anonymous and semi-anonymous forums like HN?
thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
If staff were told early it would be at the top of HN and Blind 10 minutes later. Same for if developers were told to wind down porting. In both cases, customers would be upset about being able to spend money on a service without being told it's circling the drain. There's no clean way of doing it without telling everyone at once and in that case, immediately shutting the store and giving a deadline in the future is the option that gives the most advance warning. I also guess there are legal complications about telling employees early. Google employees are Google investors.
ShamelessC 4y ago
This strains plausibility. Do you want to cite these reports you mention?

cududa 4y ago

Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"

Dalewyn 4y ago
For a specific example of latency incompetency that immediately came to mind while reading this: Chrome. Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one. When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome only runs properly from second execution onwards after the underlying operating system has cached most of the stuff Chrome wants in RAM in anticipation of subsequent executions. I want to say this is optimization for ever more powerful hardware, but I'm inclined to say it's also sheer incompetency that Chrome literally can't fallback gracefully if it doesn't get data as quickly as it wants.
- polio 4y ago
  In the first-boot-on-HDD scenario, why would latency make the program fail to start at all? I'd expect it to just start slowly.
  - cududa 4y ago
    JIT. It's using a "known state"/ cached blob to start then quickly falls apart as it does it's "SSD expected" memory management voodoo.
  - herendin 4y ago
    Unanticipated race condition perhaps? A process takes 2 minutes instead of 5 seconds, and then a later part of the startup fails because it has no way to handle the totally unexpected lack of data
  - rasz 4y ago
    For starters Chrome will not wait for extensions to load/initialize. Its possible in case of HDD there might be more things that simply time out/chrome disables because it doesnt want to wait.
- cududa 4y ago
  Made some offhanded comment about Chrome perf on Twitter earlier this year and a Google friend replied something like "Well, pretty much the whole Chrome team just got upgraded to local test machines with at least 32gb of RAM. Godspeed everyone."
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
    Makes you wonder what would happen if companies occasionally did the exact opposite to their engineers. "Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."
    - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
      What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.
      - cududa 4y ago
        You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. Windows Vista devs with 8GB of DDR2 when real world customers had 512mb of DDR learned this lesson hard. EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.
        Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        > You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware? If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  This seems weird to me, can you define "run properly"?
- doubled112 4y ago
  I've seen this exact behaviour in a few Electron apps on a Raspberry Pi 400. Make sure nothing else is running, start the application, expect failure, start it again, works as expected.
- password4321 4y ago
  I was just whining how when Chrome-based browsers first open up on my 5400rpm hdd, I paste in the URL and press Enter, then it loads the default home page and wipes out what I pasted... "you're goin' nowhere!"
  - copperx 4y ago
    That's far from being only a Chrome problem. That extremely irritating behavior is going to be with us until OS developers see the light and we get hard/soft realtime GUIs.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    Opening Google maps, the text entry is editable far, far before when it should be. As soon as the page loads, I can start typing. Then the JavaScript starts running, and helpfully selects the text entry, placing the cursor at the beginning of the text field. Then some cached suggestion loads, inserting some suggested search for the area being viewed. The end result is that anything I type gets jumbled or overwritten multiple times before the page settles down and can actually be used.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      This is the general curse of async UI these days, and it's everywhere from the web to native desktop apps to the OS itself. Obviously, it can be done right, but it seems that most devs who are so eager to jump on the async bandwagon have no idea that they have to make that effort now.
- MikusR 4y ago
  Chrome also runs a full built in antivirus scan of your whole PC on first launch after updating.
herpderperator 4y ago
How did they have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi AP in 2010, and how did you have a 1Gbps Wi-Fi client in 2010? Wi-Fi is barely 1Gbps over a decade later.
- cududa 4y ago
  Dualband bonded 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi 4. No idea if it was effective speed or reported.
- gsich 4y ago
  Wouldn't matter much for the usecase that was presented in parent. Latency can still be at ~1ms.
bluedino 4y ago
You'd think everyone working from home where they have real-world internet speeds would fix that.
- cududa 4y ago
  Well people weren't working from home in 2010
liquidgecka 4y ago
Okay, something I can speak too! (Though I left in 2009 but it's close enough) I was a SRE on Gmail, and I can assure you that the experience for devs was not great intentionally. We had a pool of dedicated machines that ran various versions specifically used for development. I made sure those where always on our worst clusters (slowest CPUs and disks) so the dev experience was always the worst case scenario for performance. :-)
- cududa 4y ago
  Would love to hear more about that! I feel like there was a very specific period between 2010 and 2012 when web app stuff just sucked but Google Docs etc was great fun ~2006-2009

skybrian 4y ago

The announcement seems sudden but actually it's with about three months notice. It does seem a little short, but how much would it help to drag it out further? How much time do you want to spend on a project that's shutting down?

shakna 4y ago
There were games preparing to launch on November 1st. Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Big companies are quite paranoid about leaking shutdowns even internally, because they don't want the press to know, customers to start asking questions, team members leaving, etc etc. I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
  - shakna 4y ago
    That's true... But when you act as a publisher, then you're required to take the risk of leaking something's final days. When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.
    - 4y ago

manicdee 4y ago

Reader, Wave, G+, Hangouts, Stadia and soon RCS. Never build a business on a Google project, only ever use Google as a side hustle.

joshgachnang 4y ago
What's happening with RCS?
chrisweekly 4y ago
why use it for a side hustle?
- copperx 4y ago
  OP said "as a side hustle", not for. Perhaps OP resells Google services or Cloud offerings?
rippercushions 4y ago
RCS is a failed telco standard, not a Google invention, and Apple refusing to adopt it is probably the single biggest reason it never took off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
- hedora 4y ago
  RCS is (was?) designed so telcos can charge per message, requires (and is tied to) a phone number, and end-to-end encryption is an afterthought. Is there even an RCS client for iOS? There is for signal…

vkou 4y ago

> Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming When you're making a decision like this, you have to go full steam ahead until you decide to stop. Because not going full steam ahead compromises you in the event that you choose not to cancel. It's like a negotiation. If you're thinking of completely folding to your counterparty, the last thing you ever want to do is tell them that they have you on the ropes.

Pelam 4y ago
And like in any game of minds, it goes into a guessing game: ”Are they thinking of X? They would never admit, but perhaps this and that can be interpreted as signal for X.” This is fine for some situations, like games, and can even be fun. It is not ”fun” if you are a paying customer and and X is ”Suddenly kill the service I’m using.” The only remedy to this is trust. (Which a simple short term zero sum game theoretic analysis does not account for.)

frozenport 4y ago

Everybody at Google knew it was doomed but they still collected their $200k a year.[1][2] [1] https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACkmiFEpw2moH/images-118.fill.size_2000x1397.v1626207452.png https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACk... [2] https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-comics-critique https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-com...

adrr 4y ago

You have to pretty naive to not realize that Google could flip directions any day. Look what happened to Nest? They went from being apart of Google, getting kicked out, and back to being apart of Google in a short time frame. Or the pixel that went from being a flagship phone to being a mid tier phone and then back to a flagship phone in a 3 year period. There’s more examples like Google fiber which stopped expanding in 2016 to adding a bunch of new cities this year. Leadership flips positions all the time. They don’t have a real vision for the company. All they know how to do is search and ads.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
They do have video streaming down. YouTube is still a great product IMO.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Youtube is not great by any objective measure, but they are the only worthwhile player in town.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    That seems like it is great, along the measure of “economically viable”.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Thorrez 4y ago

>they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions. Google's refunding all Stadia game and hardware purchases. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Stadia.

mach1ne 4y ago
IMO no need for a disclosure if you're just stating a single fact.
- mediumiqsad 4y ago
  It’s intentional, it’s a way to brag. They don’t need to at all. There’s a reason why nobody at other companies does that - people at other companies are normal and don’t think they’re gods gift to the world.
  - DharmaPolice 4y ago
    If you search for "Disclosure I work at Microsoft" site:news.ycombinator.com you get 300+ results.
    - thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
      Though Xicrosofter returns none.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    It's required by company policy. Otherwise the comments could be seen as astroturfing. The policy is so strict that it specifically says you need to put a disclosure in every individual tweet, a disclosure in your Twitter bio isn't sufficient. I think that part of the rule is broken frequently though.
    - mach1ne 4y ago
      Interesting. Is it limited to Twitter? I can see the company fearing a backlash in social medias where you're operating under your own name (and thus can be traced back to Google) but what about anonymous and semi-anonymous forums like HN?

thrwyoilarticle 4y ago

If staff were told early it would be at the top of HN and Blind 10 minutes later. Same for if developers were told to wind down porting. In both cases, customers would be upset about being able to spend money on a service without being told it's circling the drain. There's no clean way of doing it without telling everyone at once and in that case, immediately shutting the store and giving a deadline in the future is the option that gives the most advance warning. I also guess there are legal complications about telling employees early. Google employees are Google investors.

ShamelessC 4y ago

This strains plausibility. Do you want to cite these reports you mention?