Google Translator Toolkit is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Google Translator Toolkit is shutting down

support.google.com

65 pointsamq24 comments

This is the natural progression of a culture that values the new toy over maintenance. It shows in the lack of support and inability to find any human support at all. If your entire success is the next thing or the big swing, there is really no incentive to maintain anything unless its absolutely necessary.

I love the fact that its so easy in computer work, compared to other professions that have to deal with actual physical things, to build whole new things. On the other hand, I hate the attitude it brings to maintenance and customer service. We are the profession of throw-away cities.

You know you would think they would at least slow down on sunsetting services as they're releasing Stadia to a chorus of "How long until they kill this?"

I think many people overestimate how large the teams who are behind most of Google's products. You have a few large ones like search, ads or cloud, but many of the smaller ones are just a few dozens who over the years dwindle down to just a handful as people realize it is a dead end project. At some point the team is not longer big enough to maintain the project and it gets shut down.

Sounds like a management/culture issue. That's not an excuse to not cycle in new staff and people move around.

Managers are just employees as well who also pick projects that will benefit their careers. Why work on a small thing with a few million users where you will never get promoted since you are already at the top, when you could just move to the next growth ship where lots of people are hired so moving up the ranks as a manager happens naturally? To me it seems like this culture seems to go all the way to the top. It is not like Sundar got promoted so quickly due to his work on an obscure product.

> Why work on a small thing with a few million users where you will never get promoted

That's the management problem right there. You should be able to get promotions for maintaining/improving a small product. The fact that you can't is what causes this endless shutdown mentality.

Yup. Can't get that promotion if you are on the wrong product/team, that's what I heard at least.

It's still a reason not to use their products, if you know the staff cares more about the promo than the product. Why would I want to use something (or build a business on something) that would disappear soon thereafter.

Why support a dying product? Pivoting is a key part of startup success. Why can't large companies recognize a shift in user needs (after a decade) and decide that something is no longer valuable?

Ultimately, you really are never going to see innovation if the cost of launching a product is "staff the product literally forever, no matter if it is losing money or no longer aligned with priorities".

If the project is a dead end, and nobody knows how to change that, it sounds like a good idea to let it die.

This seems like an argument in reverse.

Also, this makes me wonder: does every project have at least one security engineer until it gets shut down?

> Also, this makes me wonder: does every project have at least one security engineer until it gets shut down?

Usually a specific project doesn't have dedicated security engineers but instead the engineers have to get approval from security engineers for their relevant designs.

This is probably different for teams dedicated to security like those that write fuzzers and the such.

Well, the thing is that most products at Google were not started by upper management, so they have no real support from above. If the grassroots disappear the project dies since there is nobody planting new seeds.

Posted 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026456

This is sort of misleading since it's really just them deprecating things to organize and keep things tidy. You still have access to everything through Google Translate.

Does Translate offer the Toolkit functionality? Just checked, but couldn't find anything beyond the usual text or document translation box.

I believe google translate offers pretty much all of the toolkit functionality (and more), but packaged in a different way. Take a look at the google translate advanced docs:

https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/glossary

Not much of a news item. They are not shutting down google translate.

This horse has been beaten to death, repeatedly now.

Trust that Google's "don't be evil" was earnest has evaporated. *

Belief that product/services from Google are anything more then ephemeral has gone up in smoke.

Promises that hardware would be supported and provide a baseline for the future are nothing more then delusional and wispy.

This is what we get when we have faith in a cloud.

edited and updated. Thanks for the correction.

If you're gonna beat a dead horse at least get the motto right. It was "Don't be evil" not "Do no evil"

> It was

It is still there:

"And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Didn't anybody get it? ...evaporated.. ...ephemeral... ...up in smoke... ...wispy... And then the punchline:

This is what we get when we have faith in a cloud.

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