Comment on Google lays off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams
stevecrox@kbin.run 5 months agoThe FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.
If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc.. there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.
The Google staff didn't think to look outside Google and so wrote something entirely from scratch.
Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great "Its by Google so it must be good!" Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.
The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren't owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc..).
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 5 months ago
Every big company suffers from “not invented here” syndrome. It’s not always just because of arrogance. For example, as an engineer at Google, it can be less hassle to use a first-party library than a third-party one.
Also your list of examples is pretty bad. Guava is one I remember filling a real need when I worked at a small Java shop, and as I recall there was no widely used alternative to Protobuf when it came out. Gradle isn’t even from Google at all!
stevecrox@kbin.run 5 months ago
I actually researched my list, most the technologies were used internally for years and either publically released after better public alternatives had been adopted or it seems buzz reached me years after Google's first release.
Between 2012-2015 I used to consult on Apache Ivy projects (ideally moving them to Maven and purging the insanity people had written). I got asked to help solve a lot of Guava/GSon issues, often their would be some annoying bug for the team and a patch release would have the fix but some other library they used pulled it in and even patch releases increases would break the other library. So most of the time you'd find out what they needed guava for and just point to the relevent commons library.
Fun story in 2016-2017 I got called to consult on a lot of Gradle projects to fix the same kind of stupid things people did with Apache Ivy. Ivy knew the Gradle 'feautres' were a massive headache in 2012 and told you not to use Maven for those reasons. Ce La vie.