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Comment by desdiv | Hacker News Reader

Google is developing SoundScript

Aren't they doing Dart as well? That has optional typing. Plus they have GWT, which is Java to JS.

Don't get me wrong, I'm super grateful to receive their fruits of labor for free, but this looks like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

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You've hit the nail on the head with left-hand-right-handedness at Google. Every interaction I've had with that company reveals behavior reflective of this condition. You've gotta scratch the surface to find it, but lately it's not very deep. When I interview places, and the interviewer gives me a single question, I hit them with something almost no one expects ("If you could change one thing without veto, what would it be?"). When I interviewed there at Google some time ago (I turned down their offer because of the answers I got to this question), six out of the seven interviewers I asked replied with some variation on "All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and most people aren't in a position to solve the gnarly problems, so I wish I could do work that challenges me." This immediately sent up red flags with me, along with the weird sense of hivemind I got at the Googleplex. It wasn't exactly like wandering around a Borg cube, but it was close. Then recently the company I work for has had visitors from Google, and while I'm not involved in the interactions personally, there's a huge sense of this left-hand-right-hand problem even among teams working on the same product, just different groups. This is probably the case with all large corporations after a certain critical mass, but I'm personally experiencing a selection bias for Google in particular.

When I interview places, and the interviewer gives me a single question, I hit them with something almost no one expects ("If you could change one thing without veto, what would it be?")

I will remember this one. That's a great question for interviews.

Even from the POV of the interviewer it's a great question. I'd give my answer then brainstorm with the interviewee about how they would propose solving that problem.

Would you feel comfortable asking an interviewee the same question about their last job? It could give a sense of how they think / why they are looking for a new spot but might be a little invasive.

Also AtScript, for the upcoming Angular 2.0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11YUzC-1d0V1-Q3V0fQ7KSit9...

"Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything" http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...

Not a bad thing to let two or more projects compete to encourage innovation, than granting each team exclusive privilege to represent the whole company in the area.

I think this is fairly typical of large companies. For example, Facebook also has a framework called Javelin that predates React by a few years and had it's own take on functional reactive programming. It's best to think of a large company as several small companies pursuing their own agendas.

> Don't get me wrong, I'm super grateful to receive their fruits of labor for free, but this looks like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Its more a case of not all the eggs being put in one basket. Google exploring many avenues to the same broad goal in parallel has been a widely observed phenomenon for a long time.

It's more that the left hand doesn't need permission from the right hand's boss to develop a competing tool.

Don't forget the Google Closure compiler in advance mode.

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