Even more pertinent, when it gets time to go through the promo process and when I need to prove “impact” and make sure what I’m doing is aligned with the department wide OKRs, why would I want to be on a project supporting old legacy tech that I can’t spin to show how it helped the company’s revenue?
I’ve never worked for Google. But incentives based on the promo culture is endemic to all of BigTech.
And even worse, every company is focused on “AI” these days. If you aren’t part of an initiative that can be said to be AI adjacent, if you care about your career and comp, you shouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.
https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c...
Empathy and being a good human being in relation to society. Making devices that look good at first and cause pain later, when it's too late to do anything about it... is bad.
> I need to prove “impact” and make sure what I’m doing is aligned with the department wide OKRs
Fair, and that's a reason to _not_ put in the effort to make longer lasting devices.
> But incentives based on the promo culture is endemic to all of BigTech
And we should be calling them out for it. It's bad in the same way that forced ranking systems are bad; they promote the wrong things.
And no one works for a privacy invading ad tech company because they want to make the world a better place. It’s purely about making a shit ton of money.
> And we should be calling them out for it. It's bad in the same way that forced ranking systems are bad; they promote the wrong things.
Despite the newest LP about being the best employer, Amazon has been the shittiest of the BigTech employer as long as I can remember. Their reputation hasn’t changed anything about their profitability or stock price.
Before you ask if I knew that, why did I work there. I was 46 at the time, it was my 8th job out of 10 and it was purely remote and a “field by design role” that was remote until a year after I left. It was purely a money and resume play.
Engineers don’t make business decisions on when to end support, that’s a management decision; engineers ideally ought to be consulted on what it would take to continue support, but even that isn’t guaranteed. If planned obsolescence has been a business strategy, literally having an obsolescence switch and pulling the trigger on it has to be tempting to certain decision-makers even when support would be practical.
Let me turn it around. Imagine that you are a Google engineer who worked on Search, YouTube, or Nest. How would you feel reading your own post? You would probably vehemently disagree! I'm not sure your sentiment is relative in 2025. Everyone on HN knows that any "web scale" public product (with billions of users) 100s of engineers behind it. And, it takes very good ones to keep them running and continuously improve them.
Thus, in response to:
> It might be unfair