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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Also, Google's internal politics are kind of broken. It's my understanding that a lot of the product launches and cancellations are a consequence of an internal culture that rewards launching new products, but not maintaining or improving them.

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As I understand it, higher level promotions require a portfolio be compiled and submitted to an anonymous review board. A successful product launch is one of the most valuable additions to these packets.

This has two logistical consequences: 1 - it's more valuable to launch a new product that it is to successfully maintain/grow a current one. 2 - the person running these new projects tends to get promoted away, leaving it rudderless.

Google could change all this overnight by restructuring what these review boards prioritize.

If a solution is that simple, why hasn't it been done? Also, the head of Android has become the CEO, and Android is still not rudderless.

Because the system works? Why fix what isn't broken?

It works for some things but they've kind of painted themselves into a corner with cloud services, many companies do not trust that GCP will not just disappear without a trace someday.

Identifying a good change and actually implementing it in a massive organization are two wildly different things.

> product launches and cancellations are a consequence of an internal culture that rewards launching new products, but not maintaining or improving them

This is very stale information at this point. Product launches are now pretty heavily gated, and promotion criteria are far less based on launches than on overall impact, including but not limited to improving/maintaining products.

(Googler but interpretation is my own)

I think that depends where you are. There's a lot of lip-service being paid, but from what I've seen, it's mostly translated to talking about _landings_ rather than _launchings_, which isn't much of a change.

(Also a Googler.)

I think landings allows for a much broader scope of accomplishments. For example, if refactor an entire system for demonstrably better maintainability and efficiency, that's a landing, but not a launch.

I suspect that this is a consequence of the above problem. Something that's pretty successful and growing at a pretty good clip is not a giant spigot of money, and therefore it's effectively useless to Google. Maintaining it requires programmers that could be better put to searching for the next spigot.

People always say this on HN, and while it’s definitely a viable explanation for why Google so often cans projects that are well-loved, I’m finding it harder to believe the more I think about it. If all of us on the outside are so aware of this fact about Google’s culture, surely someone with sway has heard about it, and taken steps to fix it. I’m sure Google are well aware of the perception that they’re always getting rid of products, and would like to fix that. So if the explanation was just that the culture doesn’t reward maintaining existing projects, I’m sure we would have heard something about a corporate incentive to maintain stuff.

I hate the word, but if there's one thing google has it's analytics - data. They can tell if something is growing or dying. I'm guessing they could even tell youtube was growing before they bought it. But seeing an upward trend seems easier than seeing a flat line and deciding it can't be turned into an upward trend.

> So if the explanation was just that the culture doesn’t reward maintaining existing projects, I’m sure we would have heard something about a corporate incentive to maintain stuff.

So, two things:

1) Changing culture is really hard, especially at a company the size of Google, and

2) Even if they could change the culture, it's possible they simply don't care or they believe the benefits outweigh the cost.

How about this explanation instead: Google doesn't actually have a habit of canceling projects that are well-loved?

If you don't believe it, try selecting 10 of their supposedly killed products at random. Had you honestly heard of them ever before? Do they look like something that would have had a significant user base? Hell, do they even look like they were actual products?

People say this all the time about every company. For many this is true, when seen from the narrow perspective of an individual. However for the only metric that people care about (stock price and profit) Google’s system is incredibly successful. Higher ups will not dictate changes like this if the company is successful. Culture change at the macro level only happens when the company is spiraling at the macro level.

This is also typical of mismanaged governments:

Always building new infrastructure, and not maintaining the existing one.

Neither OP or GP have it right - Fuchsia isn't a "3rd OS", it's a kernel, like Linux, except MIT. Maintenance is most certainly rewarded, at least in the 5 years I've been at Google

Eh. If you've been at Google for 5 years then you should recognize Fuchsia as another one of the "retention projects" where you get paid to twiddle away at something cool in the corner and your only real deliverable is not going to work for Facebook or Apple.

Sometimes they stumble upon something another PA needs, but often it just ends up as a patent or research paper.

Why would Google pay employees to not go to Apple?

The only competition for the giants are the other giants.

Who can divert from Google's massive ad income funnel?

Apple.

Facebook.

(Also maybe several foreign governments' antitrust cases.)

An engineer on your payroll is an engineer not on the competition's payroll.

Because Google has infinite money, the execs just hire people so they can admire the zoo of smart people they've built. Why do they need Vint Cerf, Guido, and Rob Pike? Why are they on the MIDI board? Because there's no real reason not to.

Guido hasn't been at Google since 2013

I don't have an opinion either way on your position here, other than a fact check.

Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Before that, he worked at Dropbox.

Before that, he was at Google. Failing to retain an employee doesn't invalidate that Google would rather they didn't leave.

I get the quarterly check-ins from the "alumni recruiting" team, and can assume Guido does too.

Facebook or Apple? Not Amazon or Microsoft?

Actually, it is a 3rd OS named Fuchsia, which uses a custom kernel called Zircon which is MIT.

"Zircon is the core platform that powers Fuchsia. Zircon is composed of a kernel (source in /zircon/kernel) as well as a small set of userspace services, drivers, and libraries (source in /zircon/system/) necessary for the system to boot, talk to hardware, load userspace processes and run them, etc. Fuchsia builds a much larger OS on top of this foundation."

- Fuchsia Docs, https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel

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