[lewisjoe]

Good is really good at engineering great software and really sucks at making them enterprise ready.

It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)

[valenterry]

Google isn't even good at engineering great software.

They have some good people working on some good projects. If you look at the relation between software-quality of their average product and number of developers they have... yeah I don't know. Maybe hiring tons of new-grads that are good at leetcode and then forcing them to use golang... is not what actually makes high quality software.

I could believe that they are good at doing research though.

[materielle]

Most of the core products at Google are still written in pre-C++11.

I wish these services would be rewritten in Go!

That’s where a lot of the development time goes: trying to make incredibly small changes that cause cascading bugs and regressions a massive 2000s C++ codebase that doesn’t even use smart pointers half the time.

Also, I think the outside world has a very skewed view on Go and how development happens at Google. It’s still a rather bottom up, or at least distributed company. It’s hard to make hundreds of teams to actually do something. Most teams just ignored those top-down “write new code in Go” directives and continued using C++, Python, and Java.

[surajrmal]

I wouldn't say most. Google is known for constantly iterating on its code internally to the point of not getting anything done other than code churn. While there is use of raw pointers, I'd argue it's idiomatic to still use raw pointers in c++ for non owning references that are well scoped. Using shared pointers everywhere can be overkill. That doesn't mean the codebase is pre c++11 in style.

Rewriting a codebase in another language that has no good interop is rarely a good idea. The need to replicate multiple versions of each internal library can become incredibly taxing. Migrations need to be low risk at Google scale and if you can't do it piecewise it's often not worth attempting either. Also worth noting that java is just as prevelant if not moreso in core products.

[thebytefairy]

Failing with GCP? GCP has had accelerating growth the past few years, larger than the other two, and widening profit. I've used all three major clouds and overall I would choose GCP, particularly these days for their data/AI stack

[AceJohnny2]

> Good is really good at engineering great software

was

While they sucked at bringing products to market and sustaining them, they indeed used to have a good reputation at software engineering. However they are burning that up in the AI pivot, though it's not yet very visible externally.

[xnx]

Do you work at Google?