[sianemo]

Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.

[michaelt]

> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently?

Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.

Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.

The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.

[wolverine876]

> Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.

Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.

That requires a lot more than 5,000. Also, much of that is old and not interesting, at least in the sense of innovative, exciting, ground-breaking, disrupting, world-changing.

[astrange]

> Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.

> The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.

This is actually the problem and solution in one go - they're all doing data annotation.

[julianlam]

> Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up.

Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style.

Takes 5-10 seconds to load.

Avoided fucking it up, huh.

[martin-t]

Exactly.

I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.

[wyclif]

Looks like they're going to kill it later this month. Today when I tried to use the HTML version, a splash screen loaded that said this:

Starting from February 2024, this version of Gmail (Basic HTML Gmail) will no longer be supported, and you'll automatically start using Standard Gmail. Switch to the latest Gmail version now.

[MikeTheRocker]

I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.

[vineyardmike]

Considering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.

[zmmmmm]

Seems likely the team was gutted specifically because they are refocusing on a new strategy.

[zmmmmm]

It's an interesting test for them. Essentially, it's a free hit - low expectations, few constraints, lots of latitude to throw out prior work, open ended opportunity to be creative and innovate, a clear baseline provided by Apple for them to benchmark success against and little to no regulatory scrutiny. Basically, one of the few opportunities they will ever got for a zero baggage, green field project where, if they actually have the talent and the will power, they could hit something out of the park. Will they do it? Will they not?

[chaostheory]

Hopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.

[redleader55]

Isn't Meta the one building the AR/VR operating system? Quest runs Android and they are upstreaming the 3D stuff, I think.

[solardev]

Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.

[seoulmetro]

You seem to be under the impression that Google search got bad by accident? They killed it on purpose. They killed image search on purpose too.

Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.

[MikeTheRocker]

With >150,000 employees, I think they can probably do both

[SllX]

I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search.

Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.

[bdd8f1df777b]

WoW, I thought my VPN failed (to properly traverse the GFW) when the date filter just didn’t show up on iOS.

[SllX]

Nope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.

[solardev]

Well, so far, they haven't really improved either one in a long time...

[t_mann]

How do projects that get canned after a short time benefit the CVs of the managers who launched them? Serious question.

[resolutebat]

Up and out: launch something, get promoted, move onto the next team, what happens afterwards is the next guy's problem.

And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.

This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.

[solardev]

I think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.

[gtirloni]

And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?

[csande17]

Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.

Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".

[eddythompson80]

Plenty of projects don't get launched to begin with. The ability to "launch" a project is looked at favorably in general. Maybe too favorable, but that's another discussion. If you are someone who is known to be able to deliver a "launch" that's big on your CV in most companies. Believe it or not, in big companies many project never quite reach a minimal viable product status to begin with.

Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.

[sianemo]

To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.

You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.

[ikiris]

Its hard to see through the charade you got promoted for yourself.

[aaomidi]

I was working on Google Trust Services. My job was genuinely interesting.

Bad upper management (immediate manager was absolutely 10/10) was the reason I ended up leaving.

[cageface]

The worst manager I ever had in 25 years of working in tech went to Google after she finally got fired at my company. Apparently there she fit right in.

[zdragnar]

I don't expect it to take over the world, but I really do hope Starline becomes a "thing"

https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/

[ShamelessC]

You should prepare to be disappointed. Project will be canceled shortly after it launches, if it ever launches.

[solardev]

They should've pitched it as a video add-on to a new chat app.

[wtracy]

I know a lot of investors are excited about Waymo, so I assume the executives are as well. I don't have any insight into what the experience is like on the actual engineering team, though.

[dekhn]

waymo isn't part of google

[pb7]

Sundar is CEO and it's part of $GOOG.

[blibble]

designing a new music app and/or chat app every 2 years sounds pretty fun

[standardUser]

But then you might have to watch it get killed right before your eyes. And the lack of new features and general support for a lot of their products makes me think there are a lot of employees wishing they could continue work on the products they've built, but can't.

[esafak]

Seeing your work get canned is not fun.

[pinewurst]

The regular employees are far more deluded than management in thinking that they're somehow changing the world for the better.

[utopcell]

Google Web Search is (supposed to be) changing the world for the better.

[fsflover]

These are only from the last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920760

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35039360

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36564042

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329

[pinewurst]

Certainly not in the last few years as it’s been increasingly enshitified.