[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.