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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position.

Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school.

It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.

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This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible.

The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated.

And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false.

New grads aren't making any big decisions about products.

And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.

So to some extent this info is outdated

The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship.

Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.

My point is that the promo process being the root cause of this comes up often but doesn't really have any evidence to back it up except a long chain of repetitions.

Put in concrete terms, do you want to be one of the two engineers exiled to maintaining Reader because you pissed someone off to keep the geeks off Google’s back?

For $400k a year I’d be okay with it yeah

I'd do it for $300K!

Anyone from Google want to check my post history and reach out to someone able and willing to do boring maintenance?

Part of the problem is when you are in that position it’s also easy to move to other interesting projects internally.

Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.

Not everyone wants to chase the new shiny. There are many folks out there who enjoy the challenge of working in a legacy database. Blue sky folks see a rats nest of wires, maintenance engineers see cable porn in potentia.

Maintenance doesn’t need to be boring, and I also don’t see how you wouldn’t add interesting new features and improvements to existing products.

The basic issue, it seems, is that the higher-ups simply don’t care about the products themselves, other than for them to serve as a profit center.

Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion.

The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.

From what I've heard even their performance reviews heavily focus on bringing new products to market or working on exciting projects, so even if Google needs it there's a chance you're at the top of the list for layoffs anyway.

They need to create a subsidiary of Alphabet called Google Maintenance or something and explicitly it only does boring maintenance and promotes on a mechanized schedule.

The traditional way of doing that was through outsourcing to a low-cost country where they paid pennies on the dollar relative to US wages.

For the kind of money that's on offer? I would imagine it would suit a lot of people. Fix a few bugs, add some diagnostics, see what the customers think should be changed? Why wouldn't you, it seems like the sort of thing you could get someone to do.

Because at most companies it’s probably a recipe to not get bonuses, RSUs, promotions, good reviews, and other teams may not want to touch you—out of sight out of mind.

And guess who is high on the list if cuts are to be made?

Plenty of people would take a steady non-exciting maintenance job, especially if it paid remotely close to what Google pays. Many would even prefer it to a more exciting job.

There are thousands of companies that manage to maintain much more boring apps with salaries much lower than Google's.

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