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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

It's not even side projects!

The Google i18n font repo (https://github.com/googlei18n) went private all of a sudden in the last few weeks and it broke my Yocto build (and hey boot2Qt team, if you're listening, you're broken too).

I've been steadfast in not adopting any of the Google toy side-projects (e.g. Brillo, Weave, Things, etc etc) but now I'm expanding that rule to anything and everything from them at all, including AOSP. It's all quicksand.

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It doesn't look like it went private, just moved: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts

Unless you're referring to a different font repo they had?

Odd not to use the github feature to move a repo, such that github will redirect from old urls (for web UI as well as git https).

Talking to Googlers nowadays, I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time. Googlers are just people and now that their hiring standards have shifted we can expect to see even Google making junior-level mistakes.

That’s not it. Googlers were good when Google was a startup with a high bar of entry trying to change things. Nowadays Google is a prestigious company. They are attractive to people who are first and foremost looking for a prestige job and don’t get me wrong they can be quite good but generally that’s not very interesting people.

"You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." —jwz

More likely that Google engineers are in a bubble because of all the available internal tools. Also the interview process nowadays select people that have time to train for the interviews rather than good engineers. The Google interview is still hard, but not for the same reasons than in early 2010.

This. Their interview process selects people who have hundreds of hours to blow to practice on stupid competitive coding, aka LeetCode. These aren't people who are innovative, they're ones that know how to grind.

Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.

Googles strategy is to find innovative people who can code well, but it's way easier and faster to determine the latter. So they hire a TON of people with these interviews and then wait for the sharp and innovative ones to float up while the not so innovative ones stay at L4.

Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience

Unfortunately they also have the problem that the very innovative higher level Googlers leave from boredom and/or glass ceilings at the company.

> I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time.

The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.

The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.

I think the problem is Google is significantly less productive with their thousands of incompetents than they used to be their their dozens of professionals.

Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.

Does the average Googler have much input on product lifecylce decisions?

Google's organization is often described as "thousands of startups under the same roof". So each team has ownership over their product(s) and each team has the room for advocacy for their product. But if their product is deemed unprofitable or whatever by higher-ups, I assume they start experiencing pressure about that. Ultimately though I'm sure budget concerns is king, and if a SVP needs to hit some quota for revenue or whatever and your product is relatively niche then they may be able to make the argument that your time is better spent working on something more "productive".

It redirects just fine for me (?), if this is what you'r referring to:

https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts → https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts

Indeed. I actually linked the redirect to demonstrate it does indeed redirect correctly.

Aha, I see, the original URL in the HN comment was the org URL, which didn't redirect. https://github.com/googlei18n

I don't know why original poster was linking to that!

I misunderstood, indeed. Kind of funny that a bunch of other HN discussion then took off about how it was evidence that Google as an entire giant company was now terrible! Ah, HN.

CJK. Like a sibling comment said, a redirect would have worked but it looks like there are other issues.

Right there in the About panel: Noto fonts, except for CJK and emoji

If there's some technical/licensing/political issue about the font sure, whatever, I get it. I'm just saying it's all brittle and obviously a lesson that I need to internally fork every. single. thing. when working with Yocto.

Well, at least that repo should be stable for a while

> This repository is in the process of being migrated.

...oh

It sucks that Google did that, but if you're relying on a third party lib for something important/in production, why wouldn't you have your own mirror?

In Yocto development I typically rely on external OSS repos to achieve the first builds but, yes, in production one can lock down the source in a local mirror.

Did Google Fonts get killed off yet?

If it doesn't involve ads, Google will kill it off at some point.

Fonts and tag manger is their shiv for when third party cookies and analytics are regulated.

Google fonts were already ruled a GDPR violation by a court (at least when loaded remotely), at this point it's probably a good idea to avoid those too. And probably anything else from Google with a reasonable alternative.

Just wait until they abandon flutter

They won't abandon Flutter just yet but it'll suddenly all work in Carbon (new! shiny!) and they'll kill Dart.

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