8 ms·

Why cut 16% of a thing? Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product. Or you can't afford the cash, but that doesn't

by yafbum 4y ago

Why cut 16% of a thing? Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product. Or you can't afford the cash, but that doesn't check out here. Or it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower. It's hard to understand how an OS project gets to 400 people and then to 336 people. It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success. Armchair CEO predicts Fuchsia will not be able to take on a big launch crunch and will join Stadia in the graveyard of doomed investments that ran for way too long.

throwaway23597 4y ago
To play devil's advocate, in the case of a company like Google, it's unclear whether or not execution actually gets much slower. From what I hear the amount of people coasting or even distracting teammates with negativity is pretty high, cutting such people might even speed up execution in the net. As for Fuchsia as a product I'm not really sure what exactly it is so if possible I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how.
- yafbum 4y ago
  From my contacts at Google, the cuts don't appear to be strongly correlated to poor performance, rest & vest attitude, negativity, etc. It has been messaged by company leaders as "role eliminations", not as "dropping underperformers", so it doesn't give anyone a reason to work harder.
- oblio 4y ago
  > I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how What's a 411?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-1-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-1-1 Commonly used as "information"
    - deaddodo 4y ago
      Eh, better translated as “a summary” or “abstract” here.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Parochial north american slang originating from local directory assistance phone number in Canada and the United States. Equiv. to give me the details, the lowdown, fill me in, etc.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    411 was a phone service that you could call and ask basic questions to and a human operator would look up answers for you. Kind of a primitive version of Google.
    - patwolf 4y ago
      Anyone remember GOOG-411? During the days before smart phones, you'd call a phone number and do a Google search via voice. My favorite part was that the sound it made while waiting for the results was a human making robotic beep-boop sounds.
deaddodo 4y ago
My understanding is that a large chunk of the Fuchsia team is dedicated to experimentation. It’s like asking why Microsoft laid off part of their Microsoft Research team: it’s likely many of those experimental projects weren’t paying off and now the project’s direction is being pared down to known needs. Additionally, probably only 50-75 of those engineers are considered “critical”, with the rest being used to alleviate load and accelerate velocity (if it’s like any other large incubation/startup team).
- yafbum 4y ago
  Maybe. Unless it's a separate area that is purely speculative (within a business that is already a long shot itself), losing >10% of an org with no notice, no knowledge transfer, is a hard thing to adjust to, even if it's some moderately useful support function.
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    Incubator teams like this rarely lack knowledge redundancy. I highly doubt a single one of the people laid off had silo’d knowledge or worked solo on any mainline components. Let’s say they were testing a new Camera subsystem. The results weren’t promising. So they choose to stick with porting the legacy subsystem; well, losing that team isn’t a loss and doesn’t have much effect on velocity or knowledge coverage. I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list. Is there a likelihood this would affect the velocity or direction of the project? Sure. But I don’t read losing 15% of an experimental team as deprioritizing it, but more mainlining it (based on my personal experience and knowledge of the subject).
    - yafbum 4y ago
      > I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list. From what I heard most managers were not consulted ahead of time.
vineyardmike 4y ago
> Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product. > It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success. Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. What if there is a bug in the kernel? Who's going to fix those devices, who's going to ensure a security update comes out? > Why cut 16% of a thing? Well, maybe you realize that 336 people is enough? Or you cut 16% of the scope. Or you want to kill the project over the next year, but you need people there to help kill it gracefully, without jeopardizing a bunch of in-prod devices. > it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower. > you can't afford the cash Fuchsia is in prod, but there is realistically not much google can do with it. Its in prod on a few devices, and based on leaks on HN/media, that may increase. But that doesn't mean its anywhere near a new alternative to linux/android. Maybe they realized that they can't afford to build a new full-feature operating system that they'll never use for anything more than a smart speaker, so they're cutting 16+% of the scope. Rumors I've heard from contacts in google is that more layoffs are coming across the year. 16% could be the biggest chunk they can take out at once without jeopardizing too much "bus factor". Fuchsia may get cut another 16% in 6mo. If they're de-prioritizing all non-smart-speaker utility, then they may be able to cut 50% over the long run, without "graveyard"ing it. Personally, I agree that it doesn't make sense to maintain a custom OS over a linux distro if it isn't going places. They used to want to grow in-house knowledge and research on operating systems, but I bet those days are over now. I hope more organizations started to invest in fuchsia before it dies inside google.
- yafbum 4y ago
  Ok maybe not 100% but 300 people aren't needed to do the occasional security patch for some kind of smart speaker. Sounds like the future of this project is towards the trashcan then.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  > Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. Those devices never used to run Fuchsia, they ran the Chromecast linux distrib. When I left that team half the devices (the small ones) were being re-flashed with Fuchsia, but the big ones were still running Chromecast. The UI layer was the same (Flutter-based) on both and a consumer can't tell the difference. There were no feature advantages to the Fuchsia transition. (In fact the opposite since a bunch of stuff [e.g. accessibility features] had to be rewritten from scratch) I'm sure some stuff has bitrotted, but last I looked Chromecast was still a thing, so the OS distrib is still there and shipping on devices. And it will still run on those devices in the field. Not actually suggesting this as a course of action, but I think you're wrong that they have no alternative to keeping Fuchsia. It would actually be very easy to kill it. It was super late rolling out on the Home Hub, added nothing consumers didn't have already, and would not be noticed when it was gone. Besides there was always a political turf war about those display devices in which certain product teams (with the ear of people higher up) really thought they should be running Android. Unfortunately Android was a pig and couldn't reasonably perform on the bargain-basement SoC that was used. If Fuchsia was gone, Android would take over.
ehnto 4y ago
400 to 336 could happen with a bit of housekeeping. It's more or less politics as to who gets budget in bg orgs. I think this is a project that can meander rather than sprint, it's not that important to race to a finish line here.
nashashmi 4y ago
> it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower. I think in this case, letting go of the most senior decision makers may actually speed things up. Even letting go of senior talent may cause the upcoming engineers to grow faster and better. New nimble team that much rather fail fast than ponder long over what succeeds. This might be a positive pruning. But yes letting go of staff is a short term loss. Hoping for the best in their future.
gjvc 4y ago
> Why cut 16% of a thing? 16% is approximately equal to one-sixth, expressed as a fraction.
pharmakom 4y ago
Maintenance mode.
maldev 4y ago
There was alot of rumours that they would eventually make this their mobile device OS. By cutting 16%, you're probably realigning goals of the project, and I wouldn't be surprised if those 16% cut are to shift away from making this to mobile.
advisedwang 4y ago
It's all politics. Top level leadership is triangulating between keeping investors happy and the business running. Product Area leads saying "we need to keep headcount to fend of competitor X" or "to stop customer Y from losing trust and abandoning us" (although that last one clearly doesn't work at Google). The actual headcount number a team has at is the integral of a hundred political decisions, not any kind analysis of what headcount actually makes sense.
- yafbum 4y ago
  It's always politics but the triangulation seems like poor decision making.
euroderf 4y ago
A small team can curate institutional memory and make roadmaps ? (Like, if the cut were not 16% but 84%.)
jjtheblunt 4y ago
maybe 16% was a group porting for a cancelled device.

by yafbum 4y ago

throwaway23597 4y ago

To play devil's advocate, in the case of a company like Google, it's unclear whether or not execution actually gets much slower. From what I hear the amount of people coasting or even distracting teammates with negativity is pretty high, cutting such people might even speed up execution in the net. As for Fuchsia as a product I'm not really sure what exactly it is so if possible I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how.

yafbum 4y ago
From my contacts at Google, the cuts don't appear to be strongly correlated to poor performance, rest & vest attitude, negativity, etc. It has been messaged by company leaders as "role eliminations", not as "dropping underperformers", so it doesn't give anyone a reason to work harder.
oblio 4y ago
> I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how What's a 411?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-1-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-1-1 Commonly used as "information"
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    Eh, better translated as “a summary” or “abstract” here.
- defrost 4y ago
  Parochial north american slang originating from local directory assistance phone number in Canada and the United States. Equiv. to give me the details, the lowdown, fill me in, etc.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  411 was a phone service that you could call and ask basic questions to and a human operator would look up answers for you. Kind of a primitive version of Google.
  - patwolf 4y ago
    Anyone remember GOOG-411? During the days before smart phones, you'd call a phone number and do a Google search via voice. My favorite part was that the sound it made while waiting for the results was a human making robotic beep-boop sounds.

deaddodo 4y ago

My understanding is that a large chunk of the Fuchsia team is dedicated to experimentation. It’s like asking why Microsoft laid off part of their Microsoft Research team: it’s likely many of those experimental projects weren’t paying off and now the project’s direction is being pared down to known needs. Additionally, probably only 50-75 of those engineers are considered “critical”, with the rest being used to alleviate load and accelerate velocity (if it’s like any other large incubation/startup team).

yafbum 4y ago
Maybe. Unless it's a separate area that is purely speculative (within a business that is already a long shot itself), losing >10% of an org with no notice, no knowledge transfer, is a hard thing to adjust to, even if it's some moderately useful support function.
- deaddodo 4y ago
  Incubator teams like this rarely lack knowledge redundancy. I highly doubt a single one of the people laid off had silo’d knowledge or worked solo on any mainline components. Let’s say they were testing a new Camera subsystem. The results weren’t promising. So they choose to stick with porting the legacy subsystem; well, losing that team isn’t a loss and doesn’t have much effect on velocity or knowledge coverage. I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list. Is there a likelihood this would affect the velocity or direction of the project? Sure. But I don’t read losing 15% of an experimental team as deprioritizing it, but more mainlining it (based on my personal experience and knowledge of the subject).
  - yafbum 4y ago
    > I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list. From what I heard most managers were not consulted ahead of time.

vineyardmike 4y ago

> Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product. > It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success. Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. What if there is a bug in the kernel? Who's going to fix those devices, who's going to ensure a security update comes out? > Why cut 16% of a thing? Well, maybe you realize that 336 people is enough? Or you cut 16% of the scope. Or you want to kill the project over the next year, but you need people there to help kill it gracefully, without jeopardizing a bunch of in-prod devices. > it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower. > you can't afford the cash Fuchsia is in prod, but there is realistically not much google can do with it. Its in prod on a few devices, and based on leaks on HN/media, that may increase. But that doesn't mean its anywhere near a new alternative to linux/android. Maybe they realized that they can't afford to build a new full-feature operating system that they'll never use for anything more than a smart speaker, so they're cutting 16+% of the scope. Rumors I've heard from contacts in google is that more layoffs are coming across the year. 16% could be the biggest chunk they can take out at once without jeopardizing too much "bus factor". Fuchsia may get cut another 16% in 6mo. If they're de-prioritizing all non-smart-speaker utility, then they may be able to cut 50% over the long run, without "graveyard"ing it. Personally, I agree that it doesn't make sense to maintain a custom OS over a linux distro if it isn't going places. They used to want to grow in-house knowledge and research on operating systems, but I bet those days are over now. I hope more organizations started to invest in fuchsia before it dies inside google.

yafbum 4y ago
Ok maybe not 100% but 300 people aren't needed to do the occasional security patch for some kind of smart speaker. Sounds like the future of this project is towards the trashcan then.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
> Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. Those devices never used to run Fuchsia, they ran the Chromecast linux distrib. When I left that team half the devices (the small ones) were being re-flashed with Fuchsia, but the big ones were still running Chromecast. The UI layer was the same (Flutter-based) on both and a consumer can't tell the difference. There were no feature advantages to the Fuchsia transition. (In fact the opposite since a bunch of stuff [e.g. accessibility features] had to be rewritten from scratch) I'm sure some stuff has bitrotted, but last I looked Chromecast was still a thing, so the OS distrib is still there and shipping on devices. And it will still run on those devices in the field. Not actually suggesting this as a course of action, but I think you're wrong that they have no alternative to keeping Fuchsia. It would actually be very easy to kill it. It was super late rolling out on the Home Hub, added nothing consumers didn't have already, and would not be noticed when it was gone. Besides there was always a political turf war about those display devices in which certain product teams (with the ear of people higher up) really thought they should be running Android. Unfortunately Android was a pig and couldn't reasonably perform on the bargain-basement SoC that was used. If Fuchsia was gone, Android would take over.

ehnto 4y ago

400 to 336 could happen with a bit of housekeeping. It's more or less politics as to who gets budget in bg orgs. I think this is a project that can meander rather than sprint, it's not that important to race to a finish line here.

nashashmi 4y ago

> it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower. I think in this case, letting go of the most senior decision makers may actually speed things up. Even letting go of senior talent may cause the upcoming engineers to grow faster and better. New nimble team that much rather fail fast than ponder long over what succeeds. This might be a positive pruning. But yes letting go of staff is a short term loss. Hoping for the best in their future.

gjvc 4y ago

> Why cut 16% of a thing? 16% is approximately equal to one-sixth, expressed as a fraction.

pharmakom 4y ago

Maintenance mode.

maldev 4y ago

There was alot of rumours that they would eventually make this their mobile device OS. By cutting 16%, you're probably realigning goals of the project, and I wouldn't be surprised if those 16% cut are to shift away from making this to mobile.

advisedwang 4y ago

It's all politics. Top level leadership is triangulating between keeping investors happy and the business running. Product Area leads saying "we need to keep headcount to fend of competitor X" or "to stop customer Y from losing trust and abandoning us" (although that last one clearly doesn't work at Google). The actual headcount number a team has at is the integral of a hundred political decisions, not any kind analysis of what headcount actually makes sense.

yafbum 4y ago
It's always politics but the triangulation seems like poor decision making.

euroderf 4y ago

A small team can curate institutional memory and make roadmaps ? (Like, if the cut were not 16% but 84%.)

jjtheblunt 4y ago

maybe 16% was a group porting for a cancelled device.