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by fragmede 316 days ago
> If you were an engineer would you want to be assigned this project?

If you're high flying, trying to be the next Urs or Jeff Dean or Ian Goodfellow, you wouldn't, but I'm sure there's are many thousands of people who are able to do the job that would just love to work for Google and collect a paycheck on a $150k/yr job and do that for the rest of their lives.
1 comments
YouWhy 316 days ago
I'd like to encourage you consider the following two perspectives --

1. A senior Google leader telling the shareholders "we've asked 1% of our engineers, that's 270 people, costing $80M/year, to work on services that produce no revenue whatsoever." I don't think it would pass that well.

2. A Google middle manager trying to figure out if an engineer working exclusively on non-revenue projects is actually being useful or otherwise; this is made more complex by about 30% of the workforce trying to go for the rest and vest option provided by these projects.

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disgruntledphd2 316 days ago
> A senior Google leader telling the shareholders "we've asked 1% of our engineers, that's 270 people, costing $80M/year, to work on services that produce no revenue whatsoever." I don't think it would pass that well.

The business case for this is that Google lose a bunch of money in b2b (cloud mostly, potentially AI in future) because professional users (developers etc) don't believe that products will be supported. Every time Google shut down a service like this, this perception is re-inforced. We're investing this money into these services to change our brand perception and help us make more money in future.

As a bonus, this kind of cultural change would also force them to rebuild their engineering systems (and promotional systems) to make this easier. This may not have mattered for Search/Ads but it will matter if they actually care about winning in cloud and AI.

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fragmede 315 days ago
A Google shareholder that shortsighted might as well ask why they have an HR department or have custodians to maintain the offices, after all, they don't generate income either.

The manager in the trenches can tell if there's actual work happening, to move goo.gl from the internal legacy system to the new supported one doesn't magically happen, code needs to change for it to work after the old system gets shut off.

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