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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if some of the developers are feeling a bit uneasy "What happens if senior management realises that we've not realised anything on iOS for a month and no one cares?" What exactly are Google paying the people writing these apps for? What happens if you fire half of Google's app dev staff and it has no effect on revenue.

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One month is NOTHING. Companies do not care about a month. Users do not care about a month. Nothing changes within a month of development anyways.

Now go 2 years without an update, and it would start to show. 5 years, and the general consensus would be "the app is outdated"

This is what happened to IE, btw. They stopped updating it for 5 years. We all know what happened afterwards once the momentum was lost.

They didn't only lose release momentum, but they moved almost everyone away from working on it.

Big tech prefers overpaying programmers to stay in their job than be their potential competitors in the future.

Exactly. It might for example make (business) sense for Google and Facebook to round up every single ML PHD and just keep them busy so they don‘t work for anyone else. That way other companies are dependent on them and they keep resources from competitors. I actually love the Silicon Valley (HBO Show) analogy of engineers hanging out on the roof being „unassigned“.

The rooftop thing was a "rest and vest" situation. Different from keeping talent busy. Something Microsoft did by letting their top engineers build a brand new OS that was never meant for market. Forgot its name, Singularity OS?

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