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A comment on Google's 2023 Shutdown Spree: 6 Products Pulled in Just 4 Months.

Re:Google's 2023 Shutdown Spree: 6 Products Pulled in Just 4... by jacknews on Thursday April 13, 2023 @11:11AM (#35556697)
I was going to comment on another post, about the validity of CS style leetcode puzzles in interviews, and that Goole seems to have been at the forefront of this trend: Not only do they not necessarily predict competence at solving real-world problems, they possibly select for people who treat complex real-world problems as a CS exercise, and just look at the result for Google - numerous projects that try to solve the wrong problem, others that solve it in a way that doesn't align with the audience, etc. The algorithms are probably efficient though.
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Re:Google's 2023 Shutdown Spree: 6 Products Pulled in Just 4... by never_inline on Thursday April 13, 2023 @11:21AM (#35556851)
Going by this logic, most of these shut-down projects should be coming from India (and possibly eastern European countries?), where the bar of DSA problems is much higher due to competition.

I too dislike the pervasiveness of the narrow type of DSA problems (because it comes at the cost of other computer science topics, scales linearly with practice after some point, and selects for people who have time to practice them). But DSA puzzles aren't what you should be blaming for closing down stadia.

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Re:Google's 2023 Shutdown Spree: 6 Products Pulled in Just 4... by jacknews on Friday April 14, 2023 @08:56AM (#35569027)
"where the bar of DSA problems is much higher due to competition."

I don't see any logic there. Companies in the rest of the world are less focused on DSA as a hiring metric, in my understanding.

Why are Google projects closed? Why are they started?

I believe Google are heavily focused on data and metrics and algorithms, and I think that is definitely a factor.

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Re:Google's 2023 Shutdown Spree: 6 Products Pulled in Just 4... by randgoog on Thursday April 13, 2023 @12:25PM (#35557956)
You're implying that engineers have a say in product decisions. They often don't. A lot of what we are told to build comes from upper management unfortunately.

I wouldn't blame eng interviewing practices on this particular issue.

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