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I think that there are competing cultures, and ultimately only one of them has the power to fire people. I'm currently losing a multi-year long siege to kill a

I think that there are competing cultures, and ultimately only one of them has the power to fire people. I'm currently losing a multi-year long siege to kill a project with significant external visibility almost entirely because of organizational structure. A series of reorgs and new VPs have ended up such that our VP doesn't give a crap about our project and the VP that does doesn't have a great relationship with our VP. My experience is that people really do become proud of the systems that they build and that deleting them is something they avoid. This isn't coming from junior engineers wanting to do green field stuff. This is coming from VPs who swoop in and say "what I care about is this metric and if you aren't pushing on this metric then you are fired." There are aggravating factors. Regulation sometimes means that core infrastructure needs to change out from under you, so the "it is stable and just needs a small amount of ongoing maintenance" doesn't always persist. I think that Google's monorepo also contributes to this. It has a lot of huge benefits but it also means that "keep the old version of library X around" isn't really possible.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
"My experience is that people really do become proud of the systems that they build and that deleting them is something they avoid." Who is still in the same position or team 10, or even 2 years, or even 6 months later, especially in any faang?
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  I have been on the same team, maintaining the same system for 10 years here at Google. The median tenure on my team is six years.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    That is good to hear. I had gotten an impression of frequent moves required as the only way to advance.
DrScientist 3y ago
I think the other problem with reorgs is that the incoming VP often wants a success they can call their own. It's a bit like lion infanticide when a pride is taken over - the new leaders are not invested in existing projects - they want to give birth to a success of their own and your maintenance of an existing project is competing for resources.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

"My experience is that people really do become proud of the systems that they build and that deleting them is something they avoid." Who is still in the same position or team 10, or even 2 years, or even 6 months later, especially in any faang?

UncleMeat 3y ago
I have been on the same team, maintaining the same system for 10 years here at Google. The median tenure on my team is six years.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  That is good to hear. I had gotten an impression of frequent moves required as the only way to advance.

DrScientist 3y ago

I think the other problem with reorgs is that the incoming VP often wants a success they can call their own. It's a bit like lion infanticide when a pride is taken over - the new leaders are not invested in existing projects - they want to give birth to a success of their own and your maintenance of an existing project is competing for resources.