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OWNERS files rarely get in the way - you can always send a code change to an OWNER. They are also good for finding points of contact quickly, for files where th

by pradn 2y ago

OWNERS files rarely get in the way - you can always send a code change to an OWNER. They are also good for finding points of contact quickly, for files where the history is in the far past and changes haven't been made recently. Readability really does help new engineers get up to speed on the style guide, and learn of common libraries they might not have known before. It can be annoying - hell, I'll have to get on the Go queue soon - but that's ok.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sawyna 2y ago
This isn't true at all for OWNERS files. If you try developing a small feature on google search, it will require plumbing data through at least four to five layers and there is a different set of OWNERS for each layer. You'll spend at least 3 days waiting for code reviews to go through for something as simple as adding a new field.
- okdood64 2y ago
  3 days for a new change on the biggest service on the planet? Not bad.
  - tallowen 2y ago
    I agree that it could be worse! Facebook has significant (if not more) time spent and I found adding features to news feed a heck of a lot easier than adding features that interacted with google search. Generally a lot of this had to do with the number of people needed to be involved to ensure that the change was safe which always felt higher at Google.
    - kridsdale3 2y ago
      I have the same background: I find the code quality at G to be quite a lot higher (and test pass-rate, and bug report-rate lower) than News Feed, which was a total shit-show of anything-goes. I still hold trauma from being oncall for Feed. 70 bugs added to my queue per day. The flip side is of course that I could complete 4 rounds of QuickExperiment and Deltoid to get Product Market Fit, in the time it takes to get to dogfooding for any feature in Google.
    - codethief 2y ago
      I'm only an outside observer in this conversation but could it be that the review process (or the lack thereof) and the ease with which you can add new features has had an impact on the quality of the software? The thing is, in my experience as a user Facebook (the product, not the former company) is absolutely riddled with bugs. I have largely stopped using it because I used to constantly run into severe UI/UX issues (text input no longer working, scrolling doing weird things, abysmal performance, …), loading errors (comments & posts disappearing and reappearing), etc. Looking at the overall application (and e.g. the quality of the news feed output), it's also quite clear that many people with many different ideas have worked on it over time. In contrast, Google search still works reasonably well overall 25 years later.
    - esprehn 2y ago
      There are pretty different uptime and stability requirements for a social product and web search (or other Google products like Gmail). When news feed is broken life moves on, when those products break many people can't get any work done at all. One of Google's major cultural challenges is imposing the move slow and carefully culture on everything though.
      - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
        It’s not considered ok for newsfeed to break. It would be a massive issue that would command the full attention of everyone.
        esprehn 2y ago
        And yet folks who are on call for it say things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826497
tallowen 2y ago
I think I have heard similar things from other googlers and I think there might be two factors on why I think this: - I worked on Google Assistant which was responsible for integrating many services. This meant I had to work with other peoples code way more regularly that many at google. - I moved from FB to google - I'm not really sure how many people have had this experience. I think many of my colleagues at google found it surprising how many of the things they thought were unique to google actually also existed at FB. At the end of the day, any of these processes have pros/cons but I think the cruft of having APIs that are a couple steps harder to evolve due to finding Readability/Owners for everything you touch just makes things slightly less cohesive and a trickier place to have a "good" codebase. When I worked at FB, I would frequently rebase my code on Monday and find that, for example, the React framework authors or another smaller infra team had improved the API and had changed *every* callsite in the codebase to be improved. This type of iteration was possible in certain situations but was just much less common at google than at fb.
- snotrockets 2y ago
  > I think many of my colleagues at google found it surprising how many of the things they thought were unique to google actually also existed at FB. Google workers are groomed to believe Google is the best, and hence they are too. A corollary of that, then, is that nobody else has it that good, when in fact, others sometimes have it better.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    I also made the move from FB to G and echo everything said above. Googlers have a massive superiority complex. In reality, it's naiveté. My 2 cents: OWNERS is fairly useful, if only as a form of automating code reviewer selection. Readabilty is a massive drag on org-wide productivity. I have had diffs/CLs take MONTHS to be approved by every Tom Dick and Harry whose claws were added to my code and made me re-design whole project approaches, and they were only there because they're supposed to check if my new-lines are in the right spot for that language. I thought about quitting.
    - 2y ago

by pradn 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sawyna 2y ago

This isn't true at all for OWNERS files. If you try developing a small feature on google search, it will require plumbing data through at least four to five layers and there is a different set of OWNERS for each layer. You'll spend at least 3 days waiting for code reviews to go through for something as simple as adding a new field.

okdood64 2y ago
3 days for a new change on the biggest service on the planet? Not bad.
- tallowen 2y ago
  I agree that it could be worse! Facebook has significant (if not more) time spent and I found adding features to news feed a heck of a lot easier than adding features that interacted with google search. Generally a lot of this had to do with the number of people needed to be involved to ensure that the change was safe which always felt higher at Google.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    I have the same background: I find the code quality at G to be quite a lot higher (and test pass-rate, and bug report-rate lower) than News Feed, which was a total shit-show of anything-goes. I still hold trauma from being oncall for Feed. 70 bugs added to my queue per day. The flip side is of course that I could complete 4 rounds of QuickExperiment and Deltoid to get Product Market Fit, in the time it takes to get to dogfooding for any feature in Google.
  - codethief 2y ago
    I'm only an outside observer in this conversation but could it be that the review process (or the lack thereof) and the ease with which you can add new features has had an impact on the quality of the software? The thing is, in my experience as a user Facebook (the product, not the former company) is absolutely riddled with bugs. I have largely stopped using it because I used to constantly run into severe UI/UX issues (text input no longer working, scrolling doing weird things, abysmal performance, …), loading errors (comments & posts disappearing and reappearing), etc. Looking at the overall application (and e.g. the quality of the news feed output), it's also quite clear that many people with many different ideas have worked on it over time. In contrast, Google search still works reasonably well overall 25 years later.
  - esprehn 2y ago
    There are pretty different uptime and stability requirements for a social product and web search (or other Google products like Gmail). When news feed is broken life moves on, when those products break many people can't get any work done at all. One of Google's major cultural challenges is imposing the move slow and carefully culture on everything though.
    - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
      It’s not considered ok for newsfeed to break. It would be a massive issue that would command the full attention of everyone.
      - esprehn 2y ago
        And yet folks who are on call for it say things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826497

tallowen 2y ago

I think I have heard similar things from other googlers and I think there might be two factors on why I think this: - I worked on Google Assistant which was responsible for integrating many services. This meant I had to work with other peoples code way more regularly that many at google. - I moved from FB to google - I'm not really sure how many people have had this experience. I think many of my colleagues at google found it surprising how many of the things they thought were unique to google actually also existed at FB. At the end of the day, any of these processes have pros/cons but I think the cruft of having APIs that are a couple steps harder to evolve due to finding Readability/Owners for everything you touch just makes things slightly less cohesive and a trickier place to have a "good" codebase. When I worked at FB, I would frequently rebase my code on Monday and find that, for example, the React framework authors or another smaller infra team had improved the API and had changed *every* callsite in the codebase to be improved. This type of iteration was possible in certain situations but was just much less common at google than at fb.

snotrockets 2y ago
> I think many of my colleagues at google found it surprising how many of the things they thought were unique to google actually also existed at FB. Google workers are groomed to believe Google is the best, and hence they are too. A corollary of that, then, is that nobody else has it that good, when in fact, others sometimes have it better.
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  I also made the move from FB to G and echo everything said above. Googlers have a massive superiority complex. In reality, it's naiveté. My 2 cents: OWNERS is fairly useful, if only as a form of automating code reviewer selection. Readabilty is a massive drag on org-wide productivity. I have had diffs/CLs take MONTHS to be approved by every Tom Dick and Harry whose claws were added to my code and made me re-design whole project approaches, and they were only there because they're supposed to check if my new-lines are in the right spot for that language. I thought about quitting.
  - 2y ago