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These days I wonder if Google is really the example to follow. There was a time 10 or 15 years ago where Google seemed to be leading the industry in everything,
by rzz3 2y ago
These days I wonder if Google is really the example to follow. There was a time 10 or 15 years ago where Google seemed to be leading the industry in everything, and I feel like a lot of people still think they do when it comes to engineering culture. These days I tend to see Google as a bit of a red flag on a resume, and I have a set of questions I ask to make sure they didn’t drink too much of the koolaid. Perhaps more importantly, when I look at Google from the outside these days, I see that their products have really gone downhill in terms of quality. I see Google Search riddled with spam, I see Gemini struggling to keep up with OpenAI, Google Chat trying to keep up with Slack but missing the mark, Nest being stagnant, I could go on and on. All this to say that I don’t think Google is the North Star that it used to be in terms of guiding engineering culture throughout the industry.
- dehrmann 2y agoI agree on the product and customer service front, but Google's reliability is top-notch.
- mirashii 2y agoAs a Google Cloud customer, I’d say it might be best to split Google into some divisions or something, as Google Cloud’s reliability is a relative shitshow compared to Google.com.
- pphysch 2y agoWho is then?
- scarface_74 2y agoFrom a product standpoint every BigTech company has done better at releasing new products than Google.
- pphysch 2y agoHow did we get from SRE culture to (paraphrasing) "I personally think Google makes worse products than IBM, Oracle, Apple, Netflix, Broadcom, et al."
- scarface_74 2y agoHaving good technology and good products are orthogonal. People are conflating the two
- hollowsunsets 2y agoWhat defines a good product? Something that many customers use? Something that makes shareholders happy?
- scarface_74 2y agoA product that either moves the needle as far as revenue and/or makes the ecosystem better. It also needs to be a product that gets continuously better as long as there is a market for it and not abandoned quickly. - “a connected TV device”. How many cancelled lines of products have they abandoned? How many market failures have they had in their own line of phones? The Pixel’s aren’t taking the world by storm and they spent billions on Motorola and then sold it off for scraps They have been releasing a cancelling their own tablet initiatives for years. At one point they had 5 separate messaging initiatives going on simultaneously. Even today they have three operating system initiatives that are not on the same codebase - Fuscia, Android and ChromeOS. They have basically abandoned Flutter and don’t use it for any of their high profile apps. What have they actually done besides ads? And the obvious evidence is their money losing “other bets” Also Google Fiber https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/how-google-fiber-dug-itself-into-a-very-shallow-hole-in-louisville-ky-49889194 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
- jofla_net 2y agothis came to mind https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/data-management/news/google-drive-loses-user-data/ https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/data-management/news/google-...
- taeric 2y agoI'm curious what you have in mind for evidence of "koolaid" there? Hard not to disagree with the general trend you are outlining. Most of that feels driven by product choices, moreso than execution. I think a lot of the previous glorification of their work was likely misguided, as well. But I would be hard pressed to be quantitative on that.
- scarface_74 2y agoIt was 5 years after Android was introduced that the CEO stopped using BlackBerry…
- taeric 2y agoAn amusingly good quantification of some evidence. Well done! :D Still, I don't have much to say that I think the engineering was overly good or bad. I typically think that what they captured for a short while, at least, was enthusiasm. In particular, developers were enthusiastic to be near Google technology in a way that I don't think I've seen for other companies, since. I don't think they identified it as such, though. Which could be why they seem slow to see that a lot of that has evaporated. Not to say that they have no enthusiasm, now. I'd wager they still have a lot. But as a percentage share of all developers, it feels very different.
- scarface_74 2y agoI would never hire a product person from Google or someone I needed to be visionary. For the most part, their products suck, they have no vision and no follow through. But their technology is top notch. I hire mostly for startups and green field initiatives though and I wouldn’t hire anyone from any BigTech company unless I had “hard” technical problems to solve. Yes I’ve done a stint at BigTech.
- ninkendo 2y agoThey have top notch tech, yes, but it’s massively overkill for literally every company that’s not at google’s scale. If you’re not careful you may hire someone who will try to replicate everything google does, when you may need only 1% of the complexity. This is the experience I’ve generally had with xooglers… they lament that they don’t have the same tools/tech stack they had at google, and so their first act is to try to move everything to the closest open source equivalents, even if they’re not a good fit. There’s good things and bad things to take away from experience at google… you have to be careful to ignore things that won’t actually help you.
- scarface_74 2y agoI agree. I haven’t run into a “hard problem” in my career By hard problem I mean technically at the top 5% of a problems in the industry that can’t be solved by throwing money at a SaaS or using a cloud provider.
- everfrustrated 2y agoMost companies are really just crud apps. Very few are doing anything technically innovative. And that's just fine. I wonder how much of the early Google technical innovation was more a product of open source tech/distributed systems being a lot more immature (I'm particularly thinking databases) 25 years ago. Ultimately all companies get bloated and loose their way. It shouldn't be a suprise this has happened to Google - 25 years on they are mega corp and idling. Probably for the best as it allows innovators a chance to compete.
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- brudgers 2y agoUnless you have Google sized problems and resources, Google probably is not the best example because the things Google does are done to address Google size problems with Google sized resources. It's tooling and methods are not commercial products. For example, Google can get away with the flaws of it's AI search results because it is Google.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 2y agoThe fact that some people prefer ChatGPT over Gemini is not something that SRE can help you with. The fact that ChatGPT is rarely available is something that SRE could help Microsoft avoid.
- yodsanklai 2y ago> There was a time 10 or 15 years ago where Google seemed to be leading the industry in everything They used to write interesting books and articles about software engineering. It felt that they were maintaining high quality standards and were an industry reference. Nowadays, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a red flag to have Google on one's resume, but definitely not the same appeal as before.
- nimish 2y agoGoodhart's Law for employment