[zimbatm]

It might be even deeper than that. I don't know if it's representative, the few Googlers I talked to were there only for the money. Their view of the company was actually quite negative.

Keeping backward-compatibility requires people that care. That have enough pride in their work to counter-balance the grind.

[TheAdamAndChe]

the few Googlers I talked to were there only for the money. Their view of the company was actually quite negative.

This is true for most people working for large multinational corporations. Good things can still be developed without passion.

[jethro_tell]

Seems like this is probably true for the vast majority of people. I don't know why we circle jerk on passion and it's not very healthy. Sure I love to write code and most days I don't hate my job, but if I didn't need the money I'd rather write code for myself or open source projects, or do other things.

There's nothing wrong with that, and when I'm at work, I do my best to do a good job and make reliable, maintainable systems. Those two things aren't in conflict.

[corin_]

Obviously having people that care about the work they do is a positive thing, but there are plenty of people in plenty of industries managing to do a good job despite only being in it for the money.

It might not be a good business decision for Google, but surely if they create enough positions that are solely focussed on the boring stuff but are paid better to make up for it, there is a price point at which they'd get enough interested people.

[ghaff]

The fact that most people are there mostly for the money (which I'm pretty sure is the case) actually works in their favor if they wanted to prioritize maintenance more. Currently people don't do it because they're not rewarded for it, not because they don't care. It's actually far easier to steer people towards certain behaviors if you have lots of money and all you need to do is give more or fewer RSUs or bonus $$s.

[d1zzy]

And that's assuming people cannot find satisfaction in maintaining things. Personally I do find it satisfying to be "polishing" the same software for a long time. Iron out bugs, make performance improvements here and there, update to newer frameworks/APIs. Code is like a living thing and keeping it alive can be very rewarding work.

[hdfhu]

That would be a career suicide to become a support engineer like this. 4 years later, when his stocks dry out, he'd have to switch the company and he'd need to tell a convincing story why the new company should pay him the new market rate. And "I supported legacy code" is not such a story. There's always an option to go to Microsoft and support legacy stuff for life, but beware that MS pays peanuts (relatively speaking) and with the MS pay you'd be priced out of the housing market.

[amznthrowaway5]

If you have an understanding of the product, it is not difficult to come up with a convincing story.

MS pay is actually competitive for external hires, although internal raises aren't usually very high.

[d1zzy]

To show that you deserve whatever pay you need to show impact and complexity. I don't think you would have a problem showing either when talking about maintaining Google scale products...

[hdfhu]

Now we are talking. The thing is, only few work on those big projects. The rest are doing god knows what and have to jump ships often. If your resume says you spent 5 years maintaining a smallish noname project, your career is at risk. I don't believe that Google keeps all its 100k employees busy with complex and high impact projects.

[doonesbury]

Periodically I'm jealous of googlers who try new stuff. Our company started ~1975 and comes with a good bit of crappy legacy code that as good business and customer driven people we maintain while we deprecate and replace components. At times it's boring, an operational pain in the butt, and frustrating. I'm working on my second major deprecate and replace project now. But when I'm done I'm gonna move to green fields. We sometimes are too conservative.

[manigandham]

If they're in it for the money then better maintenance and support of projects should be easily solved with a few paychecks.