Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.
The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.
That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.
Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style.
Takes 5-10 seconds to load.
Avoided fucking it up, huh.
I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.
Starting from February 2024, this version of Gmail (Basic HTML Gmail) will no longer be supported, and you'll automatically start using Standard Gmail. Switch to the latest Gmail version now.
> The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
This is actually the problem and solution in one go - they're all doing data annotation.
Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.
And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.
This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.
Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".
You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.
Bad upper management (immediate manager was absolutely 10/10) was the reason I ended up leaving.