Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last week’s layoffs

Re:Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last we... by deaddodo on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @04:29AM (#34516294)

My understanding is that a large chunk of the Fuchsia team is dedicated to experimentation. It’s like asking why Microsoft laid off part of their Microsoft Research team: it’s likely many of those experimental projects weren’t paying off and now the project’s direction is being pared down to known needs. Additionally, probably only 50-75 of those engineers are considered “critical”, with the rest being used to alleviate load and accelerate velocity (if it’s like any other large incubation/startup team).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last we... by yafbum on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @04:37AM (#34516353)

Maybe. Unless it's a separate area that is purely speculative (within a business that is already a long shot itself), losing >10% of an org with no notice, no knowledge transfer, is a hard thing to adjust to, even if it's some moderately useful support function.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last we... by deaddodo on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @04:48AM (#34516432)

Incubator teams like this rarely lack knowledge redundancy. I highly doubt a single one of the people laid off had silo’d knowledge or worked solo on any mainline components.

Let’s say they were testing a new Camera subsystem. The results weren’t promising. So they choose to stick with porting the legacy subsystem; well, losing that team isn’t a loss and doesn’t have much effect on velocity or knowledge coverage.

I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list. Is there a likelihood this would affect the velocity or direction of the project? Sure. But I don’t read losing 15% of an experimental team as deprioritizing it, but more mainlining it (based on my personal experience and knowledge of the subject).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last we... by yafbum on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @04:53AM (#34516468)

> I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list.

From what I heard most managers were not consulted ahead of time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last we... by fidgewidge on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @09:25AM (#34518571)

But what experiments did they do? Microsoft's Fuschia-like OS research project generated some interesting blog posts and research papers, it had a genuinely very different take on what an OS should look like. Fuschia seems like an ordinary microkernel written in C++.

[ Parent | on HN ]