[ramraj07]

As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very differently by different people, I am not sure how much weight we can give to this insiders representation- this sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers.

Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engineers die..

[leajkinUnk]

Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and some of the contributing technical factors, since these factors are a little different at Google than at other companies.

The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter.

For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes.

At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.