My armchair thought: what if the CEO said "wow, Yegge is right, we've gotten really off trail here. you need to show leadership in maintaining a 3+ year old system at Google for promotions?" Could that happen and would it work?
If you start rewarding maintaining old things you aren't going to suddenly get what you want, you're just going to lose a tonne of people because they don't want to do what you're telling them and you won't be able to hire good people with your priorities because no one is going to believe they can have a good career at Google by prioritizing stability and long term support. It's all downstream of culture, and culture change is very difficult.
Of course if you do buy into this idea that this is the issue, then GCP has already lost. It would be years before they could make a dent in that culture, and more years after that for external customers to know and trust Google's new culture. By that time there's going to be a dominant player anyway. So maybe actually it's best to stick with the current culture - try and win on your strengths than try to fix your defficiencies.
Keeping backward-compatibility requires people that care. That have enough pride in their work to counter-balance the grind.
It might not be a good business decision for Google, but surely if they create enough positions that are solely focussed on the boring stuff but are paid better to make up for it, there is a price point at which they'd get enough interested people.
MS pay is actually competitive for external hires, although internal raises aren't usually very high.
This is true for most people working for large multinational corporations. Good things can still be developed without passion.
There's nothing wrong with that, and when I'm at work, I do my best to do a good job and make reliable, maintainable systems. Those two things aren't in conflict.
Isn't that inherent to their interview process?
I don't follow. Wouldn't ridding Google of its reputation for inadequate maintenance, make it a more prestigious employer? Its reputation for paying well wouldn't change. How would this lead to an exodus?
Obviously generalizing here, but most engineers (especially fresh graduates) would rather work on a new thing than do maintenance, if given the choice. Google offers a pretty good value proposition: Lots of money and you get to work at new exiting projects and if you don‘t like it you can change to something you like. There‘s obviously more nuance to this, but that seems like a pretty good deal for many people.
I think that's only part of it though. I think that the only way a company can let products wither for years without a single new feature or improvement is if they don't have a product manager to represent the users, and bring a vision to the engineering team.
This is the same reason why it is near impossible to reform a police department. It would take firing everyone and starting over.
Looks like someone deserves a bonus
You need the people evaluating performance to really understand the work, and make informed, discretionary decisions about who to promote to maximize real value creation.
I agree but for everyone working at / running a company without a money printing machine it is worth noting that this is really expensive. You need to take someone that’s a good engineer—-one with judgment and a modicum of people skills—-and give them mostly thankless, stressful work.