But their technology is top notch. I hire mostly for startups and green field initiatives though and I wouldn’t hire anyone from any BigTech company unless I had “hard” technical problems to solve.
Yes I’ve done a stint at BigTech.
There’s good things and bad things to take away from experience at google… you have to be careful to ignore things that won’t actually help you.
By hard problem I mean technically at the top 5% of a problems in the industry that can’t be solved by throwing money at a SaaS or using a cloud provider.
I wonder how much of the early Google technical innovation was more a product of open source tech/distributed systems being a lot more immature (I'm particularly thinking databases) 25 years ago.
Ultimately all companies get bloated and loose their way. It shouldn't be a suprise this has happened to Google - 25 years on they are mega corp and idling. Probably for the best as it allows innovators a chance to compete.
The thing is -- it depends. Sometimes when everyone knows some complex system well -- it becomes easy.
One example comes to mind -- Kubernetes. 90% of teams don't need all its complexity. And I've been "you don't need it" person for some time. But now I see that when everyone knows it -- it's actually much easier to deploy even simple websites on it, because it's a common lingo and you don't spend time explaining how it's deployed.
It's not like civic engineers, when an over-engineered bridge would cost a lot more in materials.
Kubernetes is rarely the right answer for simple things even if Docker is.
And yes, I use the Cloud Run myself, but only for my one-person projects. For the team projects consistency is much more important (same way to access/monitor/version etc).
PS: I would say even AWS/GCP is already a huge overkill for most projects. But for some reason you didn't see exactly the same problem starting with clouds right away.
And “using AWS” can be as simple as starting off with Lightsail - a VPS service with fixed pricing
And the Kubernetes was just one example of my "you're not google" point. There is many more technologies that are definitely overkill, but is a good common denominator, even when it's 1000x more complex than needed for the task at hand.
PS: Btw, I dunno why people downvoted your comment. It's fits the HN "Guidelines" at the bottom, so upvoted.
Like what, Lambda? I've seen so much horrible hacks and shit done with it (and other AWS services cough API gateway cough), these days I rather prefer a set of Kubernetes descriptors and Dockerfiles.
At least that combination all but enforces people doing Infrastructure-as-a-code and there's (almost) no possibility at all for "had to do live hack XYZ in the console and forgot to document it or apply it back in Terraform" .
Also, I've witnessed people editing Lambda code through the console instead of doing a real deploy. what a mess...
As far as flexibility, while there have been third party libraries that let you deploy your standard Node/Express, .Net/ASP, Python/Flask app to Lambda, now there is an official first party solution
https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter
And as far as ECS, it is stupid simple
I’ve used this for years
https://github.com/1Strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example/...
Yeah, exactly that's what I am talking about. Utter nightmare to recover from, especially if whoever set it up thought they needed to follow some uber-complex AWS blog post with >10 involved AWS services and didn't document any of it.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-aws-app-...
Google has something similar.
Before I worked at Google I was at a small telecom company that was running into limits of what some of the Dataflow/Apache Beam product could do, so we had to rewrite it (and commit it back to Beam).
There are companies that have massive scaling issues even if they're not planet scale cloud providers or something.
You can replicate a lot of Google tech now by....just using the OSS they release and/or jumping on a modern cloud provider (GCP or AWS). It's not 2012. You can use a good database and not have to reinvent it.
For example, Google can get away with the flaws of it's AI search results because it is Google.
Hard not to disagree with the general trend you are outlining. Most of that feels driven by product choices, moreso than execution. I think a lot of the previous glorification of their work was likely misguided, as well. But I would be hard pressed to be quantitative on that.
Still, I don't have much to say that I think the engineering was overly good or bad. I typically think that what they captured for a short while, at least, was enthusiasm. In particular, developers were enthusiastic to be near Google technology in a way that I don't think I've seen for other companies, since.
I don't think they identified it as such, though. Which could be why they seem slow to see that a lot of that has evaporated.
Not to say that they have no enthusiasm, now. I'd wager they still have a lot. But as a percentage share of all developers, it feels very different.
https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/data-management/news/google-...
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245861992/drive-for-...
- “a connected TV device”. How many cancelled lines of products have they abandoned? How many market failures have they had in their own line of phones? The Pixel’s aren’t taking the world by storm and they spent billions on Motorola and then sold it off for scraps
They have been releasing a cancelling their own tablet initiatives for years.
At one point they had 5 separate messaging initiatives going on simultaneously.
Even today they have three operating system initiatives that are not on the same codebase - Fuscia, Android and ChromeOS.
They have basically abandoned Flutter and don’t use it for any of their high profile apps.
What have they actually done besides ads?
And the obvious evidence is their money losing “other bets”
Also Google Fiber
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
They used to write interesting books and articles about software engineering. It felt that they were maintaining high quality standards and were an industry reference. Nowadays, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a red flag to have Google on one's resume, but definitely not the same appeal as before.