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Google Fuchsia OS team affected by layoffs
- rektide 4y agoGiven that Google's whole IoT world is seemingly moving to Fuchsia this is a bit of a surprise. That said, Nest Hub type product is I think the only one with user facing UI, and an extremely limited one; really more an appliance. With a couple fixed hooks/extension points 3rd parties can tap into (versus being a general OS). I still have an ebay search I havent cancelled to show me results for one of the old 2-in-1 machines that had been a dev target, the Acer Switch Alpha 12 (https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/hardware https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/hardware). But that was sooo long ago now. And I dont really know what user-facing intents have really emerged or grown since. Seems hard to kickstart a new consumer os, turning a viable platform into something emd userable. Yeah, having your own niche appliance os is fine, but less interesting. It'll be interestint to see what happens with 3rd party Chromecast/Google Cast products over time. Will Fuchsia ever have inroads on 3rd party products? Do many of them already run & will they continue to run CastOS? Are there other off the shelf Chromecast implememtations? I was surprised when Android Things got dropped, when the ecosystem fractured, given how much infrastructure/packaging/services they had been able to use. Interesting times.
- rcme 4y agoWere Google's IoT products affected by layoffs as well?
- saagarjha 4y agoI know Nest lost headcount.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoI don't think there was a single PA at Google that didn't lose people. From the stuff I've seen on LinkedIn via ex-colleagues, etc. I have a hard time believing that they d didn't just run a random # generator over the set of US employees, just drawing people out of a hat until they hit 12k.
- saagarjha 4y agoCertain teams were impacted more than others. The actual distribution for like comp/seniority/whatever seemed random but some were entirely unscathed and some saw massive cuts.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago> Nest Hub type product is I think the only one with user facing UI, and an extremely limited one; really more an appliance And that took them probably 5x longer than they told mgmt it would and missed multiple deadlines. (I worked on the product for its original launch, and before it was all rewritten for Fuchsia) The whole world of shipping multiple OSes and home software stacks at Google was a minefield of politics, turf wars, and "shipping the org chart" that was just painful to watch and be a close spectator to. Much dysfunction. BTW, I don't think any third party devices run Chromecast Linux; that was always only first party devices when I was there. The third party stuff was running Android generally. We shipped the first round of the Home Hub stuff running on a Chromecast stack with a UI written in HTML/TypeScript, and it worked pretty good. Then a few months later they decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in Dart/Flutter and replace the whole OS with Fuchsia for some reason. So a whole elaborate transitional shim layer was built to get Dart/Flutter UI to host on the Chromecast distrib, while the Fuchsia people did their own thing that would also run the same UI. Every little had to be re-built from scratch, on an already shipping and successful product. It was insanity.
- bushbaba 4y agoYou had that due to poor C-Suite leadership. A good C-Suite would have noticed the in-fighting, and re-organized the group into a single threaded leader who is a benevolent dictator. Google's disfunction is due to the lack of clear organizational decision making leading towards a 'democracy' with no movement.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoAt the C level is hardly the only place where there is/was bad rot. And in this case, it wasn't just one group. It was multiple product areas. Each trying to make the other one execute their vision for them, it seemed. It wasn't "democracy", it was more... feudalism. Anyways, the parts of Google that were just shipping boring old unsexy $$ making core/search/ads stuff were managed much better.
- netheril96 4y agoIf the group is well organized, you seldom need to have cross organization collaboration to achieve your goals. Then you cannot claim to have leadership or complexity because stuff accomplishable by a single team is considered simple to do. Bad for perf.
- solarkraft 4y ago> Seems hard to kickstart a new consumer os, turning a viable platform into something emd userable. Actually ... the Android runtime is pretty portable and works VERY well on Chrome OS (you can even connect to VPNs and use custom keyboards through it). That's kind of 80% of what you need. I mean of course it's still hard, but it seems to me like they have all the parts they'd need. Which makes it all the sillier that they still haven't managed to fix Android updates.
- saagarjha 4y agoYou do understand that the Android runtime on Chrome OS didn't just pop out of the ground fully-formed, right? Years of effort went into it.
- rektide 4y agoIndeed!! Making Android vaguely somewhat compatible with the rest of the Linux universe has been an incredible long & difficult struggle. There have been so many heroic works, to tackle the vastly radically different conpletely NIH-ed Android universe & make it deal-with-able.
- solarkraft 4y agoI do, but it proves to me that it's possible. Google can do it and so (kind of) can Microsoft and the Linux community. Of course it's still hard, but a lot of what you need is already there; most importantly Google's moat, the proprietary Play Services.
- pjmlp 4y agoGiven that Google already killed two IoT OS projects, Brillo and Android Things, they can as well kill Fuchsia, it wouldn't be their first.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoBefore anyone kills me and yells that “OS development is hard!”, remember that Fuchsia was running on a Pixelbook, with a basic GUI, 4 years ago, with the first source code being posted 6 1/2 years ago. Now look at what Andreas Kling has accomplished in 4 years… One can reasonably wonder if Fuschia is in development hell…
- readthenotes1 4y agoone good way to slow things down is to add more people
- karamanolev 4y agoEspecially Perf(now GRAD)-evaluated people who care about promotions and performance reviews. Which is of course completely normal, not blaming the individual engineer here. Engineering directions just start taking weird turns that don't make that much sense globally, but locally they're the best course of action.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted for this. It's true. From what I could see, the Fuchsia team had basically unlimited headcount and blew up into an absolutely massive thing in a short period of time. They still missed deadline after deadline. Overall my experience at Google, esp in consumer hardware and things touching it, can be summarized as: Has a single person here read (or heard about) The Mythical Man Month?
- zbowling 4y agoThere is no part of this statement that is true. Fuchsia never had "unlimited headcount" (early on there was a buffer more than needed but our VP told use we couldn't hire too quickly as to not to overwhelm things and then later that buffer was taken away in reorgs when it was actually needed later which meant we had to do more with less). Fuchsia also never missed deadlines we made outside of the team. Any delays to market were not the fault of Fuchsia team itself but delays our internal partners needed.
- _8j50 4y agoI hope you all are taking noted of employers for whom you won't work for. This isn't fat trimming apparently just an attempt at trying to get near-zero interest rates.
- readthenotes1 4y agoAre you saying that all the tech companies are conspiring to lay off workers to cause the employment rate to drop from its near record levels so that the Fed will panic and reduce interest rates? They're going to have to lay off a lot more people to move the needle aren't they?
- thatguy0900 4y agoHmm, I wonder, would that be treason? It would basically be a organized attempt at crashing the US economy. Though I suppose banks have gotten away with it before.
- wmf 4y agoIf the government's official policy is to crash the economy then helping them isn't treason.
- thatguy0900 4y agoBut here it would crashing it in the opposite direction, trying to influence the fed through threatening the job market
- notatoad 4y agoi'm not saying i buy this conspiracy theory, but laying off ~100k high-paid tech workers in the noisiest way possible will definitely move the needle. maybe not directly, but there's a lot of uncertainty and knock-on effect caused by all these big layoffs getting a lot of press coverage
- roncesvalles 4y agoNot GP but yes I'm saying exactly that. If you concede the following axioms: 1. All tech companies' management and investors are primarily incentivized to increase the stock price total return. 2. High interest rates are kryptonite for growth tech company stock prices and will always be the biggest dampener on stock price recovery and growth. It makes sense that company management and investors are incentivized to get rid of high interest rates. You can't manage your way out of a problem that wasn't caused by poor management. These companies were darlings of the market one week and shunned as uninvestable the next. The only thing that changed was the macro environment. You don't need actual synchronization to observe a synchronous response. If disjoint parties have the same incentives and are equally rational, they will move in a direction that appears synchronized. Of course, these companies aren't even actually disjoint - the same management consultants may well be advising multiple tech companies and coordinating a response. Big tech growth companies are an extremely rich and powerful segment of the economy. I wouldn't put it above them or beneath them (depending on how you view it morally) to not take givens as givens and manipulate their environment itself.
- ldargin 4y agoIt sounds like Google is rushing their resources into AI. They might see this project as one that they can stop and start cold when needed.
- bushbaba 4y agoChatGPT has a real chance of disrupting Google Search. Heck I'd say OpenAI's generative art models could even disrupt google images search.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoGoogle has its own ChatGPT-like/LLM thing that is at least competitive. There's almost for sure a bunch of very legitimate reasons they haven't tried to mate search with that. #1 from my perspective is that those systems... lie.
- solomatov 4y agoI suspect that the main problem with these systems is that Google doesn't know how it will affect Google revenue, i.e. if there's a possibility of destroying a lot of revenue without replacing it with larger revenue. I.e. it's what's known as an innovator's dilemma.
- impulser_ 4y agoI don't think that's the main problem. They wouldn't invested money into Google Assistant, which directly hurts Google revenue. They also already give direct answers to questions on Google without ads. Realistically, the main problem is scaling and costs/benefits. You have to remember Google is accessed by billions of people a day. Now imagine they serve a product like ChatGPT. You would be pissing off a lot of users with a product that is laggy, often crashes, requires a hourly rate limit just to protect your business from going bankrupt on computing costs. It's not really beneficial to Google to rush a model into their golden product that isn't ready for the scale it operates at.
- helf 4y agoAnd who is surprised?
- landswipe 4y agoTime to change industries, it looks like it will be downhill from here (at least for a while). My gut tells me we have hit a saturation point in IT, a lot of very busy people getting very little done. What happened at twitter was eye opening. I agree with earlier posters about the impact of inflation and interest rates, seems we have hit a tipping point.
- pphysch 4y agoThere is certainly not a surplus of capable software developers/engineers in USA. Maybe some corners of SV.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoIt's strange that the Fuchsia homepage says that it is written in 'C', when wikipedia says it's written in 'C, C++, Dart, Go, Rust, Python'. I've counted the number of lines in the fuchsia codebase myself using `cloc .` and the results are below. It is not written in solely C or even mostly C. In fact there are more lines of code written in Rust. The fuchsia team should rectify this incorrect information on their homepage. Why is the implementation language even listed as the first thing on the homepage? It's really odd. $ cloc . 69394 text files. 66754 unique files. 22781 files ignored. 14 errors: Line count, exceeded timeout: ./scripts/third_party/d3_v3/d3.js Line count, exceeded timeout: ./src/diagnostics/archivist/src/inspect/mod.rs Line count, exceeded timeout: ./src/lib/diagnostics/selectors/src/parser.rs Line count, exceeded timeout: ./src/proc/tests/android/gvisor/expectations/default.json5 Line count, exceeded timeout: ./src/settings/service/src/light/light_controller.rs Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/golibs/vendor/golang.org/x/net/idna/tables10.0.0.go Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/golibs/vendor/golang.org/x/net/idna/tables11.0.0.go Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/golibs/vendor/golang.org/x/net/idna/tables12.0.0.go Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/golibs/vendor/golang.org/x/net/idna/tables13.0.0.go Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/golibs/vendor/golang.org/x/net/idna/tables9.0.0.go Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/gvisor_syscall_tests/expects/netstack3/loopback_expectations.cc Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/gvisor_syscall_tests/expects/netstack3/tcp.json5 Line count, exceeded timeout: ./third_party/rust_crates/vendor/tuf-0.3.0-beta11/src/metadata.rs Line count, exceeded timeout: ./tools/auto_owners/src/main.rs github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.90 T=142.47 s (328.0 files/s, 107722.2 lines/s) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JSON 2186 50 0 4674452 Rust 13783 404572 625522 3339090 C++ 10232 402599 236729 1937881 Go 3227 91268 152628 671742 C/C++ Header 8236 174436 243376 619602 Markdown 3717 108561 72 318674 Assembly 447 35435 18812 293467 C 1591 47081 64048 271343 CSV 17 0 0 140374 Dart 637 10788 11546 61906 Python 424 11559 13427 47039 Perl 41 5210 4997 38375 diff 4 960 33038 36364 TOML 734 3762 5518 21375 YAML 326 976 1555 19767 JavaScript 68 3340 10315 19305 Bourne Shell 286 3536 5394 16504 Bourne Again Shell 230 2882 4408 14259 SVG 72 66 362 11872 GLSL 57 2551 5322 7493 HTML 29 614 39 7344 JSON5 109 303 2199 6100 XML 42 468 172 5258 Protocol Buffers 35 1214 1746 3007 Bazel 37 325 299 2367 reStructuredText 9 538 152 1034 Starlark 20 192 418 856 Handlebars 38 123 8 838 Mako 8 70 0 537 make 16 100 34 371 JSX 2 13 31 250 vim script 10 72 124 232 CMake 4 44 123 227 Lisp 6 81 99 217 Dockerfile 18 42 30 211 Pascal 3 50 68 209 CSS 8 26 16 190 Jinja Template 3 16 0 175 Qt 1 0 0 156 Meson 5 27 18 98 Fish Shell 2 18 43 92 awk 1 14 3 80 Windows Module Definition 1 7 0 46 HLSL 2 6 0 38 Qt Project 1 11 3 31 DOS Batch 1 3 0 20 INI 2 2 0 16 Nix 1 1 0 6 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 46729 1314012 1442694 12590890 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- tommiegannert 4y agoIt will be interesting to look at commit history in a while to see how this week compares to preceding and succeeding ones.