The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren't combative.
The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.
That obelisk (we call it the monolith) effect is what led to the approval in my org to take a small team and start work on replacing our nearly 25 year old pile of enterprise Java with a new codebase. I agonized over doing this, tried to fix and refactor and guide effort to just having better code, but in the end the code base has become an inscrutable, angry monolith and it's impossible to know what code improvement appeases it or triggers a series of critical production bugs.
Joel Spolsky is a smarter man than I, but his examples here are table stakes stuff compared to two decades of poorly implemented Java enterprise MVC patterns. And we don't sell software, we sell a service, and that service will continue even if our rewrite team never delivers, so the rewrite can't be more than just an expensive financial boondoggle if I'm wrong.
What an aggressively myopic, narrow view of the situation. The reason "this VMware stuff" is a huge issue is because Broadcom are just absolutely fucking up relationships between every part of the VMWare ecosystem: the vendor relationship, the support relationship, the licensing system, the trust in a product reliability roadmap, just everything. This creates chaos in any org relying on them, at any size and efficiency. Chaos costs a fortune. The reasons that any org has for keeping their server operations on-prem and reliant on VMware are not as blithely dismissible as you are indicating. In fact, the reasons are frankly irrelevant anyway, as even the most impeccably managed migration plans to whichever big 3 cloud vendor you'd like are going to be thrown at least somewhat askew by the recent actions from Broadcom. The volume of clear, unambiguous discussion and media coverage that this is getting goes a long way to smooth over the pain of mitigation strategies with nontechnical leadership.
Broadcom hasn’t screwed up anything with the big contracts, only SMEs. That’s the entire business plan. Did you even read the article? This has been going on for a while.
Nothing I’ve said is wrong, either. It’s almost entirely affecting the small shops who don’t have resources. Big buys are renewing contracts and calling it a day because VMware caters to them.
Oh boy, are you mistaken. Big contracts with upcoming renewals have already been approached and are being hit with 3x-5x increases on hypervisor licensing alone (source: I used to be in the ISP/hosting business and have recently consulted on an infra provider acquisition that is hung on this).
I know plenty of people in the sales pipeline handling VMWare renewals, they are getting 0 pushback from these massive increases because of my above comment of teams not knowing how to use anything else.
That's just because those customers have already decided to move but will take the renewal for 1 year until they re-skill. Many admins are looking to learn other tech.
Pichai doesn't need to sincerely believe what he's relaying here to benefit from it, he needs only believe that by saying these things he can steer employee discontent to back within a manageable margin. Therein lies the ineptitude.
Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, 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 been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
Considering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.
It's an interesting test for them. Essentially, it's a free hit - low expectations, few constraints, lots of latitude to throw out prior work, open ended opportunity to be creative and innovate, a clear baseline provided by Apple for them to benchmark success against and little to no regulatory scrutiny. Basically, one of the few opportunities they will ever got for a zero baggage, green field project where, if they actually have the talent and the will power, they could hit something out of the park. Will they do it? Will they not?
Hopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.
Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.
I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search.
Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
Nope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.
I think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.
And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?
Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.
Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".
Plenty of projects don't get launched to begin with. The ability to "launch" a project is looked at favorably in general. Maybe too favorable, but that's another discussion. If you are someone who is known to be able to deliver a "launch" that's big on your CV in most companies. Believe it or not, in big companies many project never quite reach a minimal viable product status to begin with.
Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.
To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.
You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
The worst manager I ever had in 25 years of working in tech went to Google after she finally got fired at my company. Apparently there she fit right in.
I know a lot of investors are excited about Waymo, so I assume the executives are as well. I don't have any insight into what the experience is like on the actual engineering team, though.
But then you might have to watch it get killed right before your eyes. And the lack of new features and general support for a lot of their products makes me think there are a lot of employees wishing they could continue work on the products they've built, but can't.
The don't-bother-unless-it-hyperscales majority attitude of tech company funding and growth heavily limits the variety of new things that the tech world at large can offer. There are simply not that many types of tech business models that are capable of scaling fast and quickly without massive infusions of cash, but it turns out that data brokering, large dataset analysis, and profile building are a few of those things, and so the market success of these business looms large in the technology space.
I had hoped that rising interest rates and a tighter consumer market would change that dynamic somewhat but unfortunately for now it seems to be an incredibly well entrenched status quo that doesn't appear to have a clear path away from
Dynamics is Microsoft (somewhat poorly) making a Salesforce for people who are all-in on the Microsoft ecosystem. In terms of collective human suffering caused per year of existence I would say it's on par with the rest of the stuff you've mentioned.
It doesn't until there are negative externalities, you know, like labor retention rates, that cause those transport costs to go back up.
Tesla might be able to sell some of these to some companies for a while, because brand recognition and Elon stans in purchasing positions. That's not really a good strategy for long term growth, and Tesla can't just will an automotive niche into existence.
This guy genuinely has no clue what labor retention rates are. He thinks an unsafe truck that saves a tiny percentage of money will actually save large corporations cash on their bottom line
Do you honestly believe that a malicious actor who can access data storage can also necessarily access a silent mechanism to affect the security internals of a given iPhone? And also the theoretical hacker wouldn't be able to just push said theoretical silent update to your device to just exfil the data anyway?
Really having a hard time understanding the detailed security implications of your scenario beyond this vague notion you're presenting that a theoretical hacker can use theoretical tools to silently pwn any Apple device collected to the internet at any time.
> that a malicious actor who can access data storage can also necessarily access a silent mechanism to affect the security internals of a given iPhone?
A malicious actor who can access _already encrypted_ data storage where you cannot even associate files with a given account ID _without_ having already put a backdoor in the corresponding code may be able to actually put such backdoor in the software that is distributed to iPhones? Yes, I believe that.
You're correct about the testing not being a concern. Testing for psilocybin is very expensive and unreliable. Really only one major drug testing lab in the country will even try to test for psilocybin, and that's because you can, for the right price, try to get them to test for just about anything in a mass spec sample. I won't go so far as to say that nobody can ever successfully test you for psilocybin, but it's about as close to never as you can get.
The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.