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Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk | Hacker News Reader

going through this now with my first L5 scope project.. not enjoying it. too many parties involved and i have to somehow convince them all to do work for me. meanwhile i keep getting bombarded with questions that mean nothing to my immediate scope of work, which is slowly pushing me behind schedule. good news is that my project is unlikely to get canned. we're in too deep already. learned early not to pick useless feature projects and cleanup work. if your manager isn't excited about what you're doing, its gonna get the ax.

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The first project I worked on at Google was a system for consumers to send money to each other. My team made a mobile app before I joined, but it "wasn't part of the product vision" for that to be in the Google Wallet app. (So I guess we'll flush hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of code down the toilet!) Our PM looked around for teams willing to use our service, and found the Gmail team very receptive. A few engineers integrated it in about a week and we launched that "send money" button on Gmail at Google I/O. Could never get over how Gmail had "send money" but Google Wallet didn't. (They eventually changed their mind, of course.)

I'll never forget the launch. I was sick, and sitting on the floor of a war room live-coding a script to give every attendee $1. Python, had tests, and it persisted its state to SQLite so that we could Control-C it if our service got too slow. It didn't get too slow; we did a lot of load testing and capacity problems and the launch was very smooth. Most fun I've ever had while sick. (10-year-older jrockway wouldn't go to work while sick, though.)

Haha, I'm still afraid to update GPay because I think they ruined it with their social or coupons or whatever the heck they did to it. All I want is to pay for stuff. When I moved to the US I foolishly tried telling people to pay me, or I tried to pay them with GPay or GWallet or whatever it was, and they were like no? Everyone just uses Venmo now. Missed opportunity.

This is weird - I use it here in the UK and don't recognise this description at all. Social? Coupons? I just tap my phone to pay for stuff. It's the equivalent of Apple Pay, except that everyone's heard of Apple Pay and shops just conflate the two.

Its two different products. Google pay especially in India is a mobile wallet with coupons and rewards. Ironically, the card payment app is now called Google Wallet.

Europe (incl. the UK) doesn't need these social payment apps because we have free instant bank transfers between personal accounts. In the US if you want to send your friend money electronically then you need a 3rd party app.

Brazil implemented Pix last year (free instant bank transfer). Today it's more popular than credit card.

>Our PM looked around for teams willing to use our service, and found the Gmail team very receptive. A few engineers integrated it in about a week and we launched that "send money" button on Gmail at Google I/O. Could never get over how Gmail had "send money" but Google Wallet didn't. (They eventually changed their mind, of course.)

Thanks for the insight on why Google makes so many braindead decisions. It's so frustrating I'm ready to abandon them entirely.

> learned early not to pick useless feature projects and cleanup work.

And that's why things slowly rot away. Cleanup should be a priority, otherwise it eventually slows down new feature work.

In fact, a project should not be declared finished until its inevitable follow-up cleanup tasks have been completed as well. Just like a party weekend is not finished until you have cleaned up the mess after. Somebody is going to have to do it, and if it's not you right after you're done with your deliverables, then somebody else will have to do it. Possibly yourself further down the road when you actually want to do something else more exciting. Just like doing the dishes. Nobody wants to start preparing a big meal by having to do the dishes from the week prior.

Nobody wants to do the dishes... but we do, because we're adults.

In business, we don't have to be adults.

Yep, technical debt and atrophy. If not paying-down that debt, it becomes like compound interest from a loan shark. If not applying maintenance, atrophy sets in and things get worse and worse.

Getting managers excited is one of the unwritten skills required at L5+ lol.

Ya.. I get it, but I don't have the energy to try to convince people to be excited for a project that I'm barely excited for. Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting, but all we ever do is steal features from other apps.

> all we ever do is steal features from other apps.

Strategically, this is called being a Fast Follower. One of GOOG's problems is that it acts in the market as a fast follower, but tells itself internally that its an groundbreaking innovator. Your reaction (which was also my reaction),

> Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting...

is a form of corporate-wide cognitive dissonance between GOOG's propaganda and reality.

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