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This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. Sure you can get promoted for launching a new

This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. Sure you can get promoted for launching a new thing, but you can also get promoted for fixing a first pass implementation, for scaling something from a small user base to a large user base, and so on, as long as you can show the "impact" of the change – whether that's revenue, savings, productivity, improved UX, etc. It's possible that up at the top there's more of a focus on shipping new things, but I don't think that's something that 99% of Googlers need to obsess over, and it doesn't reflect the bulk of the work actually being done.

avereveard 4y ago
> as long as you can show the "impact" of the change Which is far easier if the thing is brand new and didn't exist yesterday, then attribution is straightforward, and we're to square one.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. Again I'm not thinking so much about the very top of the company as almost everyone is not in that position and never will be. For me, it's not necessarily true that showing impact on a completely new feature is easier than showing impact in improving an existing one. It's a lot more work to measure new things as we don't have the tools to measure them yet, or as you have to introduce new measurements to colleagues and get buy-in that they are the right thing to be measuring. On the other hand, saying that I reduced an existing error rate by half is very easy to communicate, understand, prioritise, and even reward.
largepeepee 4y ago
Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I think you've missed my point. As you break down "the grind", it breaks down into projects like "fix this bug" or "speed up that API", and those are impactful and can lead to promotion. Sure, no director is going to be promoted to VP for fixing a bug, but it's useful stuff for a new grad to have completed and would feed into their promotion. If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? I'm not talking about for promotion, I mean why would anyone make changes that have no impact?
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    Because, especially now, we can see lack of it drastically impacting new Google products like Stadia. No one can trust Google to maintain their products at all.
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I can see elements of it at a very high level, as I said I'm not really commenting on the top leadership, but for most people at Google, new products do not appear to be necessary for progression.
      - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
        >> Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things. Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not reward long-term maintenance of products. >> I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. It started with Google Reader and has become ever more obvious since then. When Google launches a new product, observers in tech make bets about how long the product will be around before Google kills it. It has become a meme: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
>> This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. In many cases perception is reality, regardless of what the facts actually are.
tmoertel 4y ago
The problem is that "impact" is easy to establish for shiny new things, whereas for preventing problems – you know, maintaining things – the impact is how much better you have made the universe compared to what the universe would have been without your work. Of course, you have done your work, so we never get to observe that other, "counterfactual" universe that establishes your actual impact. To estimate the impact, we need to run controlled experiments. And we have lots of A/B testing infrastructure to help us run those experiments when it comes to launching shiny new things. But when it comes to maintaining things, not so much. So if there are two possible projects of equal difficulty and impact that you could take on, and one is to launch a shiny new thing and the other is to maintain an existing thing, you're always better off launching the shiny new thing because the cost of quantifying your impact will be low, whereas had you chosen the maintenance project, quantifying your impact would be prohibitively expensive. And that's why building shiny new things dominates maintaining existing things: you get full credit for your work, not a small fraction.
eitally 4y ago
The problem honestly has nothing to do with SWE/PM incentives. The problem here, as noted, isn't going from 0->1. The problem is business strategy and leadership, and the ability for multiple stakeholders to rally around a xfn initiative to ensure it receives dedicated care & feeding to take it from 1->100. When you step outside the eng bubble, the incentives problems absolutely apply when discussing issues Google has creating mature products.
- rvnx 4y ago
  Another issue is about the clients. In the AR-space, "Enterprise customers" is the secret code to say "military clients". If Google has the policy to not work with the DoD, then it makes its options very limited (Magic Leap doesn't have such restrictions as far as I know). The same way they likely didn't appreciate when they were associated with Boston Dynamics. So, if you can't sell your product for its main useful usage, then it's a bit difficult :/
  - stonogo 4y ago
    Google has no such policy. Google Workspaces has active DOD contracts (and DOD is featured as a case study on their site) and active pursuits in other spaces, employee concerns very much notwithstanding.

avereveard 4y ago

> as long as you can show the "impact" of the change Which is far easier if the thing is brand new and didn't exist yesterday, then attribution is straightforward, and we're to square one.

danpalmer 4y ago
Maybe, maybe not. Again I'm not thinking so much about the very top of the company as almost everyone is not in that position and never will be. For me, it's not necessarily true that showing impact on a completely new feature is easier than showing impact in improving an existing one. It's a lot more work to measure new things as we don't have the tools to measure them yet, or as you have to introduce new measurements to colleagues and get buy-in that they are the right thing to be measuring. On the other hand, saying that I reduced an existing error rate by half is very easy to communicate, understand, prioritise, and even reward.

largepeepee 4y ago

Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.

danpalmer 4y ago
I think you've missed my point. As you break down "the grind", it breaks down into projects like "fix this bug" or "speed up that API", and those are impactful and can lead to promotion. Sure, no director is going to be promoted to VP for fixing a bug, but it's useful stuff for a new grad to have completed and would feed into their promotion. If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? I'm not talking about for promotion, I mean why would anyone make changes that have no impact?
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Because, especially now, we can see lack of it drastically impacting new Google products like Stadia. No one can trust Google to maintain their products at all.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I can see elements of it at a very high level, as I said I'm not really commenting on the top leadership, but for most people at Google, new products do not appear to be necessary for progression.
    - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
      >> Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things. Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not reward long-term maintenance of products. >> I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. It started with Google Reader and has become ever more obvious since then. When Google launches a new product, observers in tech make bets about how long the product will be around before Google kills it. It has become a meme: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

thesuperbigfrog 4y ago

>> This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. In many cases perception is reality, regardless of what the facts actually are.

tmoertel 4y ago

The problem is that "impact" is easy to establish for shiny new things, whereas for preventing problems – you know, maintaining things – the impact is how much better you have made the universe compared to what the universe would have been without your work. Of course, you have done your work, so we never get to observe that other, "counterfactual" universe that establishes your actual impact. To estimate the impact, we need to run controlled experiments. And we have lots of A/B testing infrastructure to help us run those experiments when it comes to launching shiny new things. But when it comes to maintaining things, not so much. So if there are two possible projects of equal difficulty and impact that you could take on, and one is to launch a shiny new thing and the other is to maintain an existing thing, you're always better off launching the shiny new thing because the cost of quantifying your impact will be low, whereas had you chosen the maintenance project, quantifying your impact would be prohibitively expensive. And that's why building shiny new things dominates maintaining existing things: you get full credit for your work, not a small fraction.

eitally 4y ago

The problem honestly has nothing to do with SWE/PM incentives. The problem here, as noted, isn't going from 0->1. The problem is business strategy and leadership, and the ability for multiple stakeholders to rally around a xfn initiative to ensure it receives dedicated care & feeding to take it from 1->100. When you step outside the eng bubble, the incentives problems absolutely apply when discussing issues Google has creating mature products.

rvnx 4y ago
Another issue is about the clients. In the AR-space, "Enterprise customers" is the secret code to say "military clients". If Google has the policy to not work with the DoD, then it makes its options very limited (Magic Leap doesn't have such restrictions as far as I know). The same way they likely didn't appreciate when they were associated with Boston Dynamics. So, if you can't sell your product for its main useful usage, then it's a bit difficult :/
- stonogo 4y ago
  Google has no such policy. Google Workspaces has active DOD contracts (and DOD is featured as a case study on their site) and active pursuits in other spaces, employee concerns very much notwithstanding.