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I'm secretly wondering if Google actually pays for these articles. I spent almost 8 years at Google and decided it was time to go after a rather inconsequential

I'm secretly wondering if Google actually pays for these articles. I spent almost 8 years at Google and decided it was time to go after a rather inconsequential change of four lines of code (excluding tests) took a design document, a few rounds of formal reviews and a number of more or less official meetings with the team manager and two tech leads - more than two weeks overall without any conclusion in sight.

Someone1234 12y ago
"Four lines of code" tells us nothing. How many users did that change impact? And was it likely to be noticed by end users and in need of justification? Is it likely to lose Google revenue if it went south? For example, it might take just "four lines of code" to change the Chrome's SSL padlock into a smiley face, but that would be a significant change, that would require hundreds of training docs' to be updated, and potentially re-training of end users.
- yid 12y ago
  I'm sure OP understands that four lines of code can be important. I think it was just different from what they were used to at the early stages of the company, where there was perhaps less oversight of engineers. Oversight is necessary at a company the size of today's Google, but it's also possible to be over-encumbered by bureaucracy.
  - magicalist 12y ago
    Just based on human-hours per line of code alone, that level of oversight isn't possible to maintain over that large of a codebase, so it seems impossible for that to be the regular case. More likely it's highly dependent on where that code is, your exact manager chain, etc. It could just as easily be that you picked the week a new manager started or a new process was put in place that turned out to be terrible and was so rolled back.
    - yid 12y ago
      > More likely it's highly dependent on where that code is, your exact manager chain, etc. It could just as easily be that you picked the week a new manager started or a new process was put in place that turned out to be terrible and was so rolled back. Absolutely. There are many good and valid reasons. The net result though is the same in terms of the impact to GP's personal productivity. People tolerate bureaucracy to different degrees, and it's a personal balance for everyone.
- technofiend 12y ago
  One line of code, six months of process. But it was code in the module that computed stress on the space shuttle's interconnects between the orbiter and its tanks during launch. The six months of process was the minimum and all I wanted to change was a goto, eliminating a dead code branch. I can't even imagine if I had tried to make deeper changes. Having said that, there have been times when I wished Google had a process that would keep some of their odder mistakes from happening. Most recently the android calendar client changes. No month view, really? The amount of review you mentioned could be excessive or just the minimum because the entire product was sensitive or high risk. With no context it's hard for us to judge.
brlewis 12y ago
What product area did you work in? Google is certainly a big company and different people might have different experiences, but when I worked there (on image search) I didn't see that sort of culture anywhere around me. It sounds like other people didn't think those lines were inconsequential.
- fishnchips 12y ago
  I worked in one of the infrastructure SRE teams. These four lines exposed via an RPC a certain state of the system that its internal customers often needed to know but were unable to find out on their own without specialist knowledge so they ended up filing tickets. Those four lines of code simply embedded that knowledge. I'd imagine a good analogy would be marking a private method public in an API. So in that sense those four lines were not cosmetic and they may warrant some discussion and a mgmt-level decision. But I was completely unprepared for what followed.
  - fishnchips 12y ago
    I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the problem was obvious, the solution was obvious and whether that was the right solution to the problem could be discussed but did not require that level of decorum and could have been handled without engineers' constant involvement.

Someone1234 12y ago

"Four lines of code" tells us nothing. How many users did that change impact? And was it likely to be noticed by end users and in need of justification? Is it likely to lose Google revenue if it went south? For example, it might take just "four lines of code" to change the Chrome's SSL padlock into a smiley face, but that would be a significant change, that would require hundreds of training docs' to be updated, and potentially re-training of end users.

yid 12y ago
I'm sure OP understands that four lines of code can be important. I think it was just different from what they were used to at the early stages of the company, where there was perhaps less oversight of engineers. Oversight is necessary at a company the size of today's Google, but it's also possible to be over-encumbered by bureaucracy.
- magicalist 12y ago
  Just based on human-hours per line of code alone, that level of oversight isn't possible to maintain over that large of a codebase, so it seems impossible for that to be the regular case. More likely it's highly dependent on where that code is, your exact manager chain, etc. It could just as easily be that you picked the week a new manager started or a new process was put in place that turned out to be terrible and was so rolled back.
  - yid 12y ago
    > More likely it's highly dependent on where that code is, your exact manager chain, etc. It could just as easily be that you picked the week a new manager started or a new process was put in place that turned out to be terrible and was so rolled back. Absolutely. There are many good and valid reasons. The net result though is the same in terms of the impact to GP's personal productivity. People tolerate bureaucracy to different degrees, and it's a personal balance for everyone.
technofiend 12y ago
One line of code, six months of process. But it was code in the module that computed stress on the space shuttle's interconnects between the orbiter and its tanks during launch. The six months of process was the minimum and all I wanted to change was a goto, eliminating a dead code branch. I can't even imagine if I had tried to make deeper changes. Having said that, there have been times when I wished Google had a process that would keep some of their odder mistakes from happening. Most recently the android calendar client changes. No month view, really? The amount of review you mentioned could be excessive or just the minimum because the entire product was sensitive or high risk. With no context it's hard for us to judge.

brlewis 12y ago

What product area did you work in? Google is certainly a big company and different people might have different experiences, but when I worked there (on image search) I didn't see that sort of culture anywhere around me. It sounds like other people didn't think those lines were inconsequential.

fishnchips 12y ago
I worked in one of the infrastructure SRE teams. These four lines exposed via an RPC a certain state of the system that its internal customers often needed to know but were unable to find out on their own without specialist knowledge so they ended up filing tickets. Those four lines of code simply embedded that knowledge. I'd imagine a good analogy would be marking a private method public in an API. So in that sense those four lines were not cosmetic and they may warrant some discussion and a mgmt-level decision. But I was completely unprepared for what followed.
- fishnchips 12y ago
  I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the problem was obvious, the solution was obvious and whether that was the right solution to the problem could be discussed but did not require that level of decorum and could have been handled without engineers' constant involvement.