[Apreche]

It’s bad by design. Not because there is a conspiracy and they twirled their mustaches and made it bad on purpose. It’s bad by design, because what incentive is there for any Google employees to make it better?

It won’t get them promotions, raises, or even kudos if they make takeout really awesome. It doesn’t generate revenue. It only costs Google to have it. As long as it meets the minimum to satisfy regulators, it won’t be touched.

[GauntletWizard]

It was good and good by design. I knew several of the people in the Data liberation front commercial, and they were serious about making it a worthwhile experience. https://youtu.be/QP4NI5o-WUw

Software tends to rot, though, and software at Google double so.

[rty32]

Linked YouTube video was from 12 years ago.

These guys who initiated the effort could mean well and put all their efforts into it. That doesn't invalidate the parent's point a tiny bit -- nobody is incentivized to make it good today.

Yes software rots, but some much more than others. Look at Gmail, Search and Android. See the difference? Some generate revenue, others don't.

[asvitkine]

People can absolutely get promoted for improving products, even if those products don't make the company money.

The problem is more likely a lack of prioritization at the leadership level.

[JAM1971]

> The problem is more likely a lack of prioritization at the leadership level.

Great. If you're in leadership why would you prioritize a feature making it easier for people to leave your platform when you could instead prioritize a new feature that might generate value for the company?

There's no incentive to make Takeout any better than it is today.

[vitiral]

False. If there's an army of people saying it's impossible to leave Google then fewer will use it.

[SR2Z]

> People can absolutely get promoted for improving products, even if those products don't make the company money.

Yeah, but there better be a high-up patron for these products because Google is notoriously stingy with promo.

Source: quit Google right after L3->L4 because another company was willing to offer me an extra $200k/yr and L5. I've since been promoted at THAT job, and am now looking again because they gave me a raise to the bottom of the next band and that's dumb.

[Aeolun]

> gave me a raise to the bottom of the next band and that's dumb

Why is that dumb? By your own account they’re already paying you at least 200k/year.

There’s a limit to how many large raises you can give if you intend to give x% for the rest of time.

[ZephyrBlu]

Not sure why that was your takeaway. Much more likely that he feels that it's dumb he was promoted and put at the bottom of the band by default, regardless of his performance. How large the raise is shouldn't have any impact on this.

[SR2Z]

> There’s a limit to how many large raises you can give if you intend to give x% for the rest of time.

The tl;dr for this is that if the company makes getting paid a market rate and promoted internally more difficult than just interviewing, they should expect people to just leave.

I'm really not sure how the economics of this work out. Obviously Google has a much easier time swapping engineers in and out (it's responsible for basically everything that people hate about the company both internally and externally) but there are still specific teams where engineers leaving represents significant knowledge loss.

Hell, companies that DON'T follow the same engineering practices that let Google hotswap engineers still do this and there's no way it doesn't have significant hidden costs for them.

[Aeolun]

Yeah, I didn’t mean to say it’s actually impossible, but if you are at 200k+ and more likely towards 300k/year given the information, you are already at the top of the market for most positions (that I’m aware of).

If you still expect 200k raises in such a position you are likely in for a bad time (nothing is guaranteed though, you might get lucky).

[SR2Z]

> are already at the top of the market for most positions (that I’m aware of).

This is not even remotely close to true for high-paying SWE jobs in the Bay, and the part of me that grew up in the middle of nowhere still has a hard time believing it.

Staff engineers make between $500k to $1M a year. My first year at Google I was sat in a row of absurdly high-level engineers, many of whom made even more.