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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

> It must be a daunting chore to maintain all the legacy pages.

Clearly $350 billion revenue in 2024 is not enough...

Something that can be hard to appreciate if you haven't managed this sort of project is that it can be surprisingly hard to throw money at the problem.

If you try to hire at your regular "bar" for skill for boring work like this - people will often quit. This is one of the reasons many company's integrations are lacking despite it being a strategic interest - integration work is miserable and doesn't help your career.

Hiring below the skillbar at the same pay, is dangerous and often doesn't actually work out - if it was that easy someone more skilled probably would have fixed this a while ago.

So you try to pay more for the miserable work - but hold on, now you have to pay out of band salaries, and legal tells you that opens you to massive liabilities.

Ok - maybe you can just level them differently? No, HR will tell you that will mess with all your internal level processes - which are key to running the company. They're going to add a lot of additional overhead tracking these "fake" leveling bands and dealing with the consequences.

None of this means the problem is literally unsolvable, but it now requires a huge amount of time and effort from people near the top of the company who everyone would much rather spend their time on making the company better.

All of this to say - sure you could solve this problem, but it's actually much more complex than adding some line items to a budget.

Source: have watched many big companies try and fail for years to staff unsexy work like this.

isnt exactly this why most of it ends up outsorced to consultants or third parties generally?

You can give people time to go fix things that bug them. Two systems that you use don't work together and it bothers you? Have a day a week to fix it.

> pay out of band salaries, and legal tells you that opens you to massive liabilities

can you elaborate on this?

In my country, there is already a (little known and not really enforced) law, that says, that for similar work there has to be a similar pay (simplifying massively). There is possibly a bunch of workarounds for this (as usual), but a good HR will not like the idea of hiring another SWE, with the same title as other SWEs, but with 2x pay.

In addition to having the money, Google also needs the incentive to spend that money on such projects. If the perceived return on capital is low (or negative!), the incentive is simply not there.

In addition to having the money, Google also needs the incentive to spend that money on such projects. If the perceived return on capital is low (or negative!), the incentive is simply not there.

Perhaps Google should Google the concepts of "customer service," "standing behind your product," and "brand reputation."

Why? Nobody is abandoning their services.

"Sure, Google retrieved the 10,285 results from my obscure query in a few milliseconds, but did you see how they stored their 12-year-old company icon image? Phhht.... I'm going with Bing!"

> Google the concepts of "customer service," "standing behind your product," and "brand reputation."

They're probably satisfied with their reputation with their customers, who are advertisers. The corporate IT folks who buy their G Suite products are also their customers, but overall the majority of the users of Google's software are not their customers, and Google cares about them the same way I care about how the gasoline in my car feels.

Google's main search page is the slowest page & UI I have found on the internet today (not accounting for bandwidth limits). Even on modern devices it lags at text entry and even rearranges characters in the text box so you have to wait 10+ seconds for it to finish loading or it will go haywire. The shopping and other pages are actually worse. So it appears you're right, $350B isn't enough money to maintain a web page in 2025.

There is something wrong with your computer.

1) it happens on both an Android smartphone and a Linux computer 2) it only happens with Google 3) it is consistent and reproducible

don't forget how long the google.com redirect takes now if you dare to click a link on the SERP instead of just consuming their "AI Slop Overview" directly.

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