But you left out the largest retention side project: Jeff Dean and Brain.
What you describe is simply allowing a well-performing engineer to switch to new project, which of course happens all the time.
It's very different from "a bogus project for the sole purpose of retaining some engineers" that OP theorized.
> Google wins because it keeps these talented engineers off the market, and if the project succeeds they can win in a really big way.
So more or less like any ambitious new project? :)
> This is not unlimited, BTW.
Right, and again, goes against what OP was implying, that Google is going to run a huge project indefinitely just to retain a bunch of diva engineers who wouldn't work on anything else.
As I wrote above: "a rich employer may retain an unproductive employee for a limited amount of time if they expect it to ultimately pay off".
This is exactly what you are describing.
> if you were instrumental to the success of a project that made Google much more than you're ever likely to make in salary, you get one chance at a self-directed project.
Right, and Fuchsia is not a "self-directed project" of this kind. It's a big project with over 100 engineers, the vast majority of whom did not have the impact of Rob Pike or the others you mentioned.
Your comment is good and informative, but ultimately does not lend any support to the notion that Fuchsia really is some bogus project with no business case or future, solely for retention purposes, which is what OP was implying and what I am disputing.
At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - historically, these included Google Toolbar (initially conceived as a defensive play against Microsoft, but ended up getting Google Search in front of hundreds of millions of new users - this, BTW, was Sundar Pichai's first big win on the way to CEO); Google Chrome (ditto, with the side effect of becoming the dominant browser); GMail (initially an internal tool to improve productivity, then became a major consumer product); and Google Fiber (worst case, force Internet speeds up through competition, best case, new ISP). It's likely that Sundar & Larry's thinking of Fuchsia is that worst-case, it keeps 100 talented engineers at the company, and best-case, it's a dominant new OS that drives computing forwards. Either one is worth the $50M or so, so they do it.
And they all got canceled once their business case became void.
None of these were bogus projects. They all initially had a business case, and were run by engineers who proved themselves before. When that business case fail to pan out - they were canceled.
> At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter.
Maybe to you as an employee. Not to Google as a business, nor its shareholders.
If I'm a Google shareholder, and you're wasting hundreds of millions of dollars of my money with nothing to show for it but some vague fears that "my engineers will go to competitors", then I'm going to be unhappy. Beyond a certain point, you're opening yourself up to lawsuits and even criminal charges (Google is a public company).
All of your examples are projects that were interesting and had some passionate senior engineers pushing them forward, but also had a business case. When the business case went bust, so did the project.
To support OP's assertion that Fuchsia is just a retention project with no future, you'd have to show a project of its size (or any size, really) run for the sole purpose of retention with no plausible business case.
I don't think such a thing exists, and it's not in any of your examples.
I have some personal experience with Wave. It had a plausible business case and Google was promoting it heavily. It wasn't bogus. I'm sure the same is true for the others.
"We rely on highly skilled personnel and, if we are unable to retain or motivate key personnel, hire qualified personnel, or maintain our corporate culture, we may not be able to grow effectively."
Acquiring and retaining key people is in the interests of shareholders, and Google invests significantly in this activity. I started this subthread with a comment about $50M acquihires where they shut down the product immediately afterwards. That's just one example - others include funding STEM education for children, the Google Summer of Code, multi-million-$ retention bonuses, and constant recruiting efforts.
This is all disclosed on the prospectus and annual reports. If you don't understand why this is important for a tech company, you should probably not be investing in tech, but I will be happy to buy your shares from you.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000165204416...
Are you a voting shareholder (class A or B)? If you have class C (no vote), they don't have to care. If you have class A (voting public) shares, which get 1/10 the vote of the class B (management) shares, your influence is incidental at best.
I think Fiber was a bit of a miscalculation in that they misjudged where the bottleneck would be. In the early days of Fiber (I worked on it, briefly), the assumption was that key risk factors would be that incumbent ISPs would raise their speeds to match, or that marketing would fail to sign up enough customers to make the build-out economical. These turned out to not be major problems, but the incumbent ISPs blocked expansion to new municipalities through permitting & right-of-way restrictions. The assumption when I was working on it was that if Kansas City could demonstrate a successful deployment, other cities would be lining up to clear roadblocks and bring Google Fiber to their citizens; this didn't happen.
Sure, it took a while after Google Fiber launched, but there was a lot of infrastructure to deploy. I'd argue Google had a hand in this.
I mean, it's not like Google is inventing bogus projects in a top-down sense, with some middle-manager somewhere coming up with "private works projects" and staffing them with engineers Google wants to keep. Nobody is claiming that.
No, what the GP was proposing is that the projects are bogus in a bottom-up sense: they're projects that are entirely useless to Google's shareholders in both a short-term and long-term sense, but which the engineers really want to work on, and which at least aren't actively harming Google (or perhaps they are, but not as much as Google would be harmed if the same project were developed in the wild.) This is very different from "basic research" (Google X et al), which is useless in a short-term sense, but may yield large positive returns later on. These projects are bogus because the best-case scenario for them is no net effect on Google as a business. (They might have quite an effect on the the world, but if there's no way for Google to convert that effect into shareholder value: bogus.)
Fuchsia is a perfect case: at best, it replaces Android, for no net benefit to Google (since they already dominate the mobile ecosystem with Android.) But if the engineers working on Fuchsia couldn't work on it at Google, they'd have started a similar project outside Google... and then Google would be in the position of a non-Google-owned OS displacing Android's share of the mobile-OS market.
Much better that these engineers do something useless [from a business perspective] that merely keeps stable Google's share of a market, than that they do something that actively lowers Google's share of a market.
Google doesn't generally allow projects that everyone knows have zero chance of being useful in a bottom-line sense; you can't, for example, build a D&D campaign index on company time even if you're T9. (There was a big debate over this near the tail end of the Eric Schmidt years, when you actually could, and this was one reason for Larry's "More wood behind fewer arrows" campaign.)
But for something with a small chance of having a large impact, like a new OS or programming language or attempt to speed up scientific progress? Google can totally get behind that, because worst-case, you keep the engineers employed and available for future use, while best-case, you've got a computer science breakthrough. Fuchsia fits right into this case, as does Dart and Go and Unladen Swallow and several other projects.
I’m thinking of things like the build system, mono repo & the borg etc
I was at Google for 5.5 years and was the beneficiary of an engineer-retention project for a year of that. I'm now working on a startup.
Think of it from the company's perspective: they have an engineer who has already been "paid off" in the sense of having generated more revenue for the company than they are likely to get in salary during a lifetime, and is likely independently wealthy through stock options. That engineer comes to them and says "I'm unhappy here and thinking of leaving so I can work on personal projects." The company does not want to see them on the open market, where they can potentially compete with Google or work for a competitor. So their manager asks them "Well, what is it you really want to work on? Maybe we can make it happen here and you don't have to leave all the perks of Google behind." The engineer says "I've always wanted to do OS development, and there's a bunch of neat research developments like capabilities that haven't yet been incorporated in a production OS." The manager says, "Hmm, I know of some guys over in this other department that have similar ideas. Why don't you connect with them and see if your interests align?"
Google wins because it keeps these talented engineers off the market, and if the project succeeds they can win in a really big way. The employee wins because they don't have to deal with all the risk and bullshit of being unemployed or starting their own thing. Competitors lose but screw them. Consumers probably lose, but it's not a sure thing because if their project succeeds, consumers can win in a big way, so Google doesn't get into antitrust or anticompetitive trouble for it.
This is not unlimited, BTW. The unofficial rule-of-thumb when I was at Google is that "you get one freebie" - if you were instrumental to the success of a project that made Google much more than you're ever likely to make in salary, you get one chance at a self-directed project. If that fails, you either go back to being an ordinary rank-and-file engineer and have to prove yourself, or you get marginalized and usually leave. Public examples of such projects include Google Scholar (Anurag basically ran the crawl single-handedly for many years, and so he gets to indulge his passion project because Google wouldn't exist without him), Golang (Ken Thompson is Ken Thompson and Rob Pike basically built the log handling infrastructure for Google), Google Wave (the Rasmussen brothers basically founded Google Maps), Hello.com (Orkut Buyokokkten's passion project, eventually spun out), and Andy Rubin's robot collection.