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Interesting that this was enabled with apparently no outreach. Maybe Google needed some of those employees that it recently laid off

by a2tech 4y ago

londons_explore 4y ago
And it would have been pretty simple to run a query for users with over 4 million objects, and fire off an email to them all saying "We are about to implement a limit, and you will be impacted. Here are potential workarounds/mitigations". I suspect though that the simple process of dropping a few hundred customers who will be directly impacted an email requires approval from 27 middle managers, and it's easiest to just ignore them.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  More often, this kind of error out of Google comes from the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Joe or Jane Noogler has just been brought into the team, and their starting project was to improve indexing. They succeeded in doing so by attaching the Drive data to an indexing service created after Drive existed. It's working great and has a 10-20X speedup. But oops... That new indexing system has a 5-million-element hard limit built in, and nobody caught it until they went to production. J. Noogler is too new to have realized this could have been an issue so they never started the escalation / customer messaging processs.
hirako2000 4y ago
Precisely what I felt skimming through the comments on the issue. A lot of high scale businesses have taken a huge risk. A company like Google had over 10y long tenure engineers who were swept by the layoffs. The argument that the year prior was a hiring spree only makes it worse: now you have hands to throw at the problem but unlikely the right pairs, which, given the climate of job loss fear, aren't likely to admit they are incompetent. Off topic, but this isn't an isolated case of mega size top tier companies seemingly dropping the ball more far often and/or with greater blast radius impacts. See github leaking secrets publicly on their own git repo. Call me paranoid, but to me one of these things is going on: 1/ tipping point of too many under qualified for the job engineers running things, due to C-suites looking at keyboard monkeys the way they see factory workers, naively applying "cost cutting" measures, plucking through spreadsheets who "are the biggest seemingly disposable weights" and fire those as part of waves of x% layoffs 2/ Overworked remaining know-how crews - added the weight of dealing with inspiring politicians turned enginners for the juicy 200k + rsu package who, demand better articulated instructions, knowledge transfers and more comprehensive formal documentation materials, so that they too can shine too - on top. Competent folks having less and less time but more more tears and blue bags below their eyes finally realising that ain't worth it as it keeps getting worse anyway. 3/ sabotage Or all those, since there could be some smowball effects there. Call me paranoid, that it isn't what's going on, we clearly aren't seeing the slow fall of major infrastructures the few who were there to build them now having mostly packed their bag and long gone, replaced by swaths of bootcamp trophy coders hoarding cloud certificates like North korean generals like to collect shiny pins. Maybe it isn't, the future is still in the making anyway, but I felt glimpses of that several years ago, then about each passing year, now every few months. like an seeing accelerating meteroite seemingly going away but which keeps looking bigger and bigger. More so related to the topic: just drop drive as a centralized storage, there are e2e solutions out there and open source scripts to entirely migrate out of these wall gardens. You won't miss google sheets: you can still use it!

Interesting that this was enabled with apparently no outreach. Maybe Google needed some of those employees that it recently laid off

by a2tech 4y ago

Interesting that this was enabled with apparently no outreach. Maybe Google needed some of those employees that it recently laid off

londons_explore 4y ago

And it would have been pretty simple to run a query for users with over 4 million objects, and fire off an email to them all saying "We are about to implement a limit, and you will be impacted. Here are potential workarounds/mitigations". I suspect though that the simple process of dropping a few hundred customers who will be directly impacted an email requires approval from 27 middle managers, and it's easiest to just ignore them.

shadowgovt 4y ago
More often, this kind of error out of Google comes from the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Joe or Jane Noogler has just been brought into the team, and their starting project was to improve indexing. They succeeded in doing so by attaching the Drive data to an indexing service created after Drive existed. It's working great and has a 10-20X speedup. But oops... That new indexing system has a 5-million-element hard limit built in, and nobody caught it until they went to production. J. Noogler is too new to have realized this could have been an issue so they never started the escalation / customer messaging processs.

hirako2000 4y ago

Precisely what I felt skimming through the comments on the issue. A lot of high scale businesses have taken a huge risk. A company like Google had over 10y long tenure engineers who were swept by the layoffs. The argument that the year prior was a hiring spree only makes it worse: now you have hands to throw at the problem but unlikely the right pairs, which, given the climate of job loss fear, aren't likely to admit they are incompetent. Off topic, but this isn't an isolated case of mega size top tier companies seemingly dropping the ball more far often and/or with greater blast radius impacts. See github leaking secrets publicly on their own git repo. Call me paranoid, but to me one of these things is going on: 1/ tipping point of too many under qualified for the job engineers running things, due to C-suites looking at keyboard monkeys the way they see factory workers, naively applying "cost cutting" measures, plucking through spreadsheets who "are the biggest seemingly disposable weights" and fire those as part of waves of x% layoffs 2/ Overworked remaining know-how crews - added the weight of dealing with inspiring politicians turned enginners for the juicy 200k + rsu package who, demand better articulated instructions, knowledge transfers and more comprehensive formal documentation materials, so that they too can shine too - on top. Competent folks having less and less time but more more tears and blue bags below their eyes finally realising that ain't worth it as it keeps getting worse anyway. 3/ sabotage Or all those, since there could be some smowball effects there. Call me paranoid, that it isn't what's going on, we clearly aren't seeing the slow fall of major infrastructures the few who were there to build them now having mostly packed their bag and long gone, replaced by swaths of bootcamp trophy coders hoarding cloud certificates like North korean generals like to collect shiny pins. Maybe it isn't, the future is still in the making anyway, but I felt glimpses of that several years ago, then about each passing year, now every few months. like an seeing accelerating meteroite seemingly going away but which keeps looking bigger and bigger. More so related to the topic: just drop drive as a centralized storage, there are e2e solutions out there and open source scripts to entirely migrate out of these wall gardens. You won't miss google sheets: you can still use it!