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by brianolson
968 days ago
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I have heard many times: Google hires good engineers not to _do_ things, but to _not do things elsewhere_. (even if 80% of Google engineers are 'productively' working on products Google cares about, thats thousands of grade-A engineers spinning their wheels, and given the rate Google discontinues and replaces its own software, 80% is certainly high) |
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SREs at Google are generally an insanely good use of Google's resources in keeping actually profitable services (like ads, search, cloud, etc.) running and running at a standard that I think few non-Googlers on this forum really have a concept of.
But the bulk of SWEs are working on developing things which are not part of those Product Areas. I actually don't think the discontinuation thing is the main problem. The problem is that outside of Search, Ads & Cloud, pretty much nothing else at Google is really a profitable revenue generator. But you don't need >100k engineers to make the profitable stuff run. There's only so many ways to sling ads and report on them and build the infra for them.
But Google's conundrum is that if they just focused on those areas, someone would eventually come along with something that would eat their lunch. So in the past Google would prefer to a) hire those people and shower money on them to stop them from doing that and b) farm out a bazillion "bets" and projects to try their hand at that stuff in the hopes of striking a vein of gold again, like they did with AdWords 20+ years ago.
Cancelling projects is the byproduct of this continual search for new gold veins.
Also a lot is changing now. SV execs seem to have made a gentleman's agreement among each other to tighten the labour market.
Anyways, I think Meta is in more trouble than Google, long run. They're in a much riskier, shakier position.