It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.
I can’t think of any good measurable incentives that Google could use,
What's interesting is that even the most biased insider must see that Google really sucks in some domains - and recognising (and/or generating) user value seems to be one of them. Several times, they've either spent big on products which just missed the mark from day one (Plus/Currents, Stadia, multiple text/chat apps), or killed products which already had major engagement (Reader, Inbox, Orkut).
What's interesting is that if they made user engagement the only major metric that mattered and incentivised accordingly, it would likely drive interesting behaviour - a real focus on user needs, iteration to optimise engagement in the longer term, improvements in customer service, etc.
Would __your__ company ever do that?
99.9% of Google users are completely unaware of their reputation around closing down products. Closing Google reader a decade ago is a cause that nerds like us on HN care about, but virtually no one else. And the same nerds like us also care enough about our online presence to not use Google products for a hundred other reasons anyway
Does gmail make a profit? Does search make a profit? Neither of them are paid services, but they allow a huge advertising business to be built on top. Reader could have been the same
https://blogger.googleblog.com/
The last update is May 2020 after at least one a year for 15 years, so it may not be long for this world.
And their skills are too rusty to pass the DS&A section of the interview and they didn’t do anything significant to show off their system design skills.
I work at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department (cloud app dev/“application modernization”) and the equivalent of “doing tickets” is being put on a project where you aren’t actually doing “consulting”, you’re doing “staff augmentation”. I avoid those like the plague.
Even though I’m not chasing after a promotion, I want to have something to show for the time I spent here when it comes to my next job either inside the company or outside.
But, I’m not at the point where I can quit working. I’ve been around long enough to know that you always need to be interview ready when it’s time to look for your next job.
Being a “maintenance developer” is a sure fire way to get caught up in the “expert beginner” trap - “1 year of experience 10 times” and make yourself unemployable .