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Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lea
by sianemo 3y ago
Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.
- blibble 3y agodesigning a new music app and/or chat app every 2 years sounds pretty fun
- standardUser 3y agoBut then you might have to watch it get killed right before your eyes. And the lack of new features and general support for a lot of their products makes me think there are a lot of employees wishing they could continue work on the products they've built, but can't.
- esafak 3y agoSeeing your work get canned is not fun.
- MikeTheRocker 3y agoI'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
- chaostheory 3y agoHopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.
- solardev 3y agoMeh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.
- MikeTheRocker 3y agoWith >150,000 employees, I think they can probably do both
- solardev 3y agoWell, so far, they haven't really improved either one in a long time...
- SllX 3y agoI’ll believe that when they stop destroying search. Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
- bdd8f1df777b 3y agoWoW, I thought my VPN failed (to properly traverse the GFW) when the date filter just didn’t show up on iOS.
- SllX 3y agoNope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.
- seoulmetro 3y agoYou seem to be under the impression that Google search got bad by accident? They killed it on purpose. They killed image search on purpose too. Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.
- vineyardmike 3y agoConsidering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.
- zmmmmm 3y agoSeems likely the team was gutted specifically because they are refocusing on a new strategy.
- zmmmmm 3y agoIt's an interesting test for them. Essentially, it's a free hit - low expectations, few constraints, lots of latitude to throw out prior work, open ended opportunity to be creative and innovate, a clear baseline provided by Apple for them to benchmark success against and little to no regulatory scrutiny. Basically, one of the few opportunities they will ever got for a zero baggage, green field project where, if they actually have the talent and the will power, they could hit something out of the park. Will they do it? Will they not?
- redleader55 3y agoIsn't Meta the one building the AR/VR operating system? Quest runs Android and they are upstreaming the 3D stuff, I think.
- pinewurst 3y agoThe regular employees are far more deluded than management in thinking that they're somehow changing the world for the better.
- utopcell 3y agoGoogle Web Search is (supposed to be) changing the world for the better.
- pinewurst 3y agoCertainly not in the last few years as it’s been increasingly enshitified.
- fsflover 3y agoThese are only from the last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35039360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35039360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36564042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36564042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329
- t_mann 3y agoHow do projects that get canned after a short time benefit the CVs of the managers who launched them? Serious question.
- sianemo 3y agoTo my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after. You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
- ikiris 3y agoIts hard to see through the charade you got promoted for yourself.
- resolutebat 3y agoUp and out: launch something, get promoted, move onto the next team, what happens afterwards is the next guy's problem. And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing. This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.
- solardev 3y agoI think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.
- gtirloni 3y agoAnd the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?
- zdragnar 3y agoI don't expect it to take over the world, but I really do hope Starline becomes a "thing" https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/ https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
- ShamelessC 3y agoYou should prepare to be disappointed. Project will be canceled shortly after it launches, if it ever launches.
- solardev 3y agoThey should've pitched it as a video add-on to a new chat app.
- wtracy 3y agoI know a lot of investors are excited about Waymo, so I assume the executives are as well. I don't have any insight into what the experience is like on the actual engineering team, though.
- aaomidi 3y agoI was working on Google Trust Services. My job was genuinely interesting. Bad upper management (immediate manager was absolutely 10/10) was the reason I ended up leaving.
- cageface 3y agoThe worst manager I ever had in 25 years of working in tech went to Google after she finally got fired at my company. Apparently there she fit right in.
- michaelt 3y ago> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work. Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it. The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
- wolverine876 3y ago> Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work. Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.
- julianlam 3y ago> Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style. Takes 5-10 seconds to load. Avoided fucking it up, huh.
- martin-t 3y agoExactly. I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.