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Comment by ginger2016 | Hacker News Reader

ginger2016

I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.

Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.

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This is a false dichotomy. I think most would prefer a third path where Google invests in projects it actually believes in and commits to for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.

Projects contantly being half-assed and rug pulled aren't good for users or the developers being bounced around between them.

Yeah, it must be soul destroying to constantly build stuff that gets discarded without even giving it a serious chance.

Yeah, exactly. If you care about keeping people employed, what better way than to keep alive products and services that aren't the top in their field, but rather #3, #4, or #5? Even if the Google offering isn't super popular, as long as it's good enough, it'll have users, and it'll help keep users interested in other Google offerings and the Google ecosystem as a whole.

The way it is now, I have to be very cautious investing my time or money (even just time really) in any Google service because I'm worried it might be canceled at any time if it isn't Search, Gmail, or Maps. Will my Google Photos albums suddenly disappear one day because they decided it's not the #1 in its field? (Luckily, I don't use Photos as my main photo storage, only a way to share with others.)

Stadia was a bad idea, it had very little adoption, and Google was right to kill it.

I know for me I'd be very demoralized and not stay at a company very long if everything I built kept getting shut down.

Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.

I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.

I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.

"scale and backing?"

The just ended it because it didn't scale.

I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?

Not the same sort of scale. The technology part of it scaled fine, probably because Google invested the money and dev hours into making sure it did. The product itself didn't scale for a host of other reasons, but none of them had to do with the reasons it might be interesting to develop around it.

There's certain problem spaces that are just different if you have different amounts of money and dedication behind them. Working for AWS is likely much different than working for Linode, even aside from the culture of each company. Longer runways, better access to cutting-edge tech, a pre-existing global-scale infrastructure pattern... Even working on a failed project can be an interesting experience sometimes.

And I know somebody who had been a 15 year Google employee who could choose to work any team decided to make it his new priority. This is somebody who could have worked on any platforms project they wanted. They left Google a couple years after it launched, I imagine probably at seeing their hard work go nowhere.

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