Leaving Google

https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/670

by todsacerdoti • 1 year ago

565 362 1 year ago

90s_dev12• 1 year ago

That is far beyond what any of us expected in the early days, when our best hope was that Go might serve as an example for useful ideas that other languages and programming environments could adopt.

Am I understanding you correctly? The Go authors basically expected Go to be just a good starting point or source of ideas for real languages to stand on?

chubot2• 1 year ago

No, you editorialized it by adding the word “real”

You’re probably reading what you want to read

lowmagnet• 1 year ago

no, they expected to have good ideas others can follow.

nine_k5• 1 year ago

Google has a bunch of internal languages that are only used within it, don't enjoy a wider adoption, and get deprecated.

Facebook created Hack, a version of PHP with a quite nice static type system, which is virtually not used outside it. They also had an early statically typed version of JavaScript, called Flow, which enjoyed a limited success, but was supplanted by Typescript.

Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, etc all enjoyed some success in specific narrow domains, while influencing heavily such mainstream languages as Python, Java, Typescript, Rust, and, well, Go.

Compared to this, Go is unreasonably, blindingly successful; it's now all over the place, but that was hard to predict back in the early days of the project.

nick__m• 1 year ago

hack was created at meta for meta...

scripturial3• 1 year ago

Early on it was risky to choose go, as it really wasn’t clear if go could achieve mainstream adoption. That said, in hindsight, it really should have been obvious. If I myself saw its benefits over the incumbents, I should have realized I wasn’t the only one. That said, go is old enough that google still had a lot of its older more positive “high skilled elite cool programmer” image, so perhaps that really helped the language along. I’m not sure. Today I’d be much more hesitant to pick up a google language.

xiphias2• 1 year ago

Sure, as they say in Google, for technologies you always have two options: the new which is experimental and not yet supported and the old that is depreciated because there will be a new coming anyways.

uaas2• 1 year ago

Facebook created Hack, a version of PHP with a quite nice static type system, which is virtually not used outside it.

Well there’s at least Slack, and another huge project (which has eventually migrated away from it once PHP has improved) with tens of millions of users. There has to be others, too.

cdogl• 1 year ago

I read it as simple humbleness, which is not too surprising given the careful management of the project and the tone of the piece.

cratermoon2• 1 year ago

Hugged to death, so https://archive.is/RbkzW

chubot2• 1 year ago

I wonder what people use GCC Go for, in production? I tried it and it seems pretty cool, although the binaries start slower for some reason (I think it was more than a second even?)

vips7L• 1 year ago

Probably boutique architectures or operating systems the official compiler doesn't support.

RainyDayTmrw5• 1 year ago

If you're targeting a system (hardware architecture and operating system combination) that GCC already supports, but the native Go toolchain doesn't, this may be an easier bootstrap path.

pjmlp15• 1 year ago

It used to be for better performance, however it was never updated after Go got generics, so I suspect eventually it will join gjc at the compilers retirement pub.

r0nan• 1 year ago

I’m curious what he means by Google changing and the Go project changing

LVB• 1 year ago

re: Go, I did wonder if there was any connection to Russ leaving (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132669)

nikolayasdf1238• 1 year ago

yes, looks like related

atombender3• 1 year ago

Russ Cox has not left. He's still on the Go team at Google, but he's stepped down from his position as tech lead.

DannyBee• 1 year ago

Russ didn't leave. But this is also different, AFAIK.

In this case I expect it's more related to how the engineering ladder has changed at Google over time, and the effects of cost cutting placing pressure to conform to the ladder, even when the ladder doesn't reward what it necessarily should be rewarding.

That's about as unobtuse as i can be about it, for various reasons.

RainyDayTmrw5• 1 year ago

But Gooogle [sic] has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.

That's kinda surprising to hear. I wonder what happened. It would have been easy to leave out these 3 sentences or replace them with fluff. The author choosing to write this out suggests that there is some weight here.

hiddencost• 1 year ago

I think management started turning the screws. They're doing that everywhere. Management isn't technical anymore.

RainyDayTmrw5• 1 year ago

One would think that someone prominent like Ian Lance Taylor or Russ Cox (who also left within this past year, as noted by another commenter) would be relatively insulated from that.

rtpg• 1 year ago

Or management is cynically thinking they could get more bang for their buck with multiple people (I gotta imagine at 19 years at google gets you a healthy multiple compared to new hires)

throwaway519• 1 year ago

Management is more technical fallacied than it's ever been: HR believe they are fine tunng for good.

kortilla4• 1 year ago

This theme has been repeated a bunch over the last 10 years or so. Google has been in a constant state of decline since the employment surge in the back half of 2010s culminating with a hiring fervor in 2020 that diluted out all of the extremely talented employees.

This severe decline of the median engineer means comp gets cut back, perks get cut back, and most importantly, autonomy gets cut back. Oppressive process and political gamesmanship reign supreme.

Even when I left nearly a decade ago, the idea that something like Gmail could be made in 20% time was a joke. 20% time itself was being snuffed out and dipshit PMs in turf wars would kill anything that did manage to emerge because it wasn’t “polished enough”.

At this point Google is far beyond recovery because it is inundated with B, C and now D players. It’s following the same trajectory of Intel, Cisco, and IBM.

Pockets of brilliance drowning in mediocrity

qyph• 1 year ago

Gmail wasn't created with 20% time.

https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...

happyopossum• 1 year ago

comp gets cut back, perks get cut back

That hasn’t really been happening - perks and comp have been pretty stable for the past 3+ years at least, so…

nophunphil• 1 year ago

Aren’t we talking about what appears to be a management decision/performance review?

What do the other engineers have to do with this? Why are they mediocre?

nvarsj• 1 year ago

Exact same thing happened to M$ in the late 90s/00s. At some point the MBAs and money chasers come in and it's just downhill from there.

babyent6• 1 year ago

What if I told you..

Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers.

Today big tech is just a place people go to make money, and they don’t necessarily care about long term vision.

Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types who have little “passion” for engineering or computers. Zero imagination and outside the box thinking. Just rote memorization to get in and then getting PIP’d or laid off to go do the same at the other big corps. TC or GTFO types.

Better luck at startups that are the Google’s of yesteryear.

blitzar3• 1 year ago

20-30 years ago when you graduated if you wanted to get paid you targeted banks, accountancies or consultancies.

Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.

WWLink• 1 year ago

I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock!

But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.

In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.

But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.

PaulDavisThe1st• 1 year ago

What if I told you that ...

in 1992?

ok_dad• 1 year ago

Because that’s what tech companies want today. They don’t want hackers and shit, they want corporate automatons who will code for scraps.

laidoffamazon4• 1 year ago

Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types

What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.

UncleMeat3• 1 year ago

I've seen a lot of high level engineers at Google leave over the past couple of years. There's vastly more pressure from management and much less trust. And a bunch of L7+ folks have been expected to shift to working on AI stuff to have "enough impact." The increased pressure has created a lot of turf wars among these folks, as it isn't enough to be a trusted steward but now you need your name at the top of the relevant docs (and not the names of your peers).

Prior to 2023 I pretty much only ever saw the L7s and L8s that I work with leave Google because there was an exciting new opportunity or because they were retiring. Now most of the people I see leave at this level are leaving because they are fed up with Google. It's a mess.

jnwatson• 1 year ago

I think there's a simpler answer. Google has drastically slowed hiring. Less hiring means fewer natural opportunities for growth.

I joined in 2021. I feel like I caught the tail end of old Google. Any decent idea was greenlit.

Now, it is a lot harder to find resources to do things. (This is of course relative. It is still far easier than any other place I've worked at).

The company has transitioned into something a little more traditional.

Balinares• 1 year ago

I don't know what it's like right now, but around the time I left last year, it was a proper exodus. What a sorry waste.

coliveira• 1 year ago

When they put Sundar Pichai, a person of little brilliance, to lead Google, it was clear that they want to transform the place into just another money maker and destroy the original culture of the company.

ocdtrekkie• 1 year ago

Sundar is brilliant, just not in the ways you want. He went from developing an IE browser extension to a web browser to running the world's most powerful company. He understood that what Google needed to keep the numbers going up was not better search, but better market capture.

rixed• 1 year ago

I would date this turnpoint decision back to when L. Page said in a meeting that, from now on, Google had to have as many engineers than Microsoft.

geodel3• 1 year ago

Huh, who is stopping person of great brilliance to launch their own companies and preserve culture forever?

If there are no large companies with original culture after few decades of their founding it would just imply it is nature of things instead of being a particular person as chief executive.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

The appreciation for engineering and phd research is missing. All focus stems from the CEO on profitability and revenue and commerce.

Edit: seems like he wrote about this before:

Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google

mdwrigh2• 1 year ago

Wrong Ian -- Ian Hickson wrote about that in a blogpost, this post is about Ian Lance Taylor

geodel3• 1 year ago

This mostly sounds like "Look I have made my money but don't let that stop me from shitting on leadership (which kinda enabled making money) on my way out.

It kind of make sense also since people blasting management while leaving are mostly not looking to launch their own companies so they will not be proven wrong about their "incisive critique" of management.

NotAnOtter3• 1 year ago

Whenever I read these "I was at <faang> for 20 years and am now leaving" it always translates to "I have become unreasonably wealthy, mostly due to the company itself N-tuppling in value. And now after 20 years I don't need or care to have a day job that requires me to show up when I don't feel like it."

kardianos• 1 year ago

That's not what Ian said, and he always says what he means.

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

I'm sure people who have worked at FAANG for 20 years aren't starving in the streets, but you don't know enough about their financial situation to predict whether they are "unreasonably wealthy." How much of their salary went straight in to their landlord's pockets? Towards student loan interest? Towards health issues, childcare, or taking care of extended family members? Maybe they tried investing and lost money. Heck, maybe they just prioritized travel over saving money, or something. You can't just assume someone has F-you money just because they worked for 20 years.

ikiris• 1 year ago

Dude you have no clue what you’re talking about. I used to love when I’d see him as my reviewer because somehow he had the code reviews back in minutes and was always great to work with.

neilv• 1 year ago

There's the fact that they almost certainly don't need to work another day in their life.

But they probably haven't for many years.

So their reasons for choosing now to leave are probably a bit more interesting not wanting to show up if they don't need the money.

laidoffamazon4• 1 year ago

You’re forgetting that they also want the adulation that comes with leaving and everyone singing their praises.

My dad and before him my uncle “retired” from tech at ~61 too, neither didn’t wrote a blog post

Cthulhu_4• 1 year ago

I'm reading something else; I think they would have been financially secure, if not rich, for the biggest part of those 20 years already - if they weren't, during the boom times they could've jumped ship a dozen times over already.

Very, very few people actually work for that long for a tech company these days, at least in the IT sector in Europe.

jhatemyjob• 1 year ago

I'm surprised you find it surprising. It's well established among ex-Googlers that it jumped the shark with Emerald Sea. There will always be pockets of sanity within such a large corp but it's been decadent for over a decade.

RainyDayTmrw5• 1 year ago

On a second reading, the extra "o" might not have been a typo, but instead a reference to the early days of the Google search results page, where extra letters "o" were used for pagination.

7bit3• 1 year ago

And yet, he chooses to say nothing at all. You say there's no fluff. I say that's nothing more than fluff. I wish people would find the courage to actually talk about issues instead of keeping quiet.

neves• 1 year ago

What are the good use cases for Go today? It looks like the hype has gone.

packetlost• 1 year ago

I put it in the same category as Clojure and where I hope Rust eventually ends up: stable, boring, and capable with healthy ecosystems

dboreham• 1 year ago

Where you want to just cut code without drama (and dramatic people).

root_axis2• 1 year ago

Go shines for network services. The standard library has everything you need for networking and the web with very accessible concurrency primitives. It's also a pretty lightweight language that's easy for people to pick up.

90s_dev12• 1 year ago

Are these not also true for Node.js? Add the familiarity of JavaScript, the ecosystem of NPM, and the good-enough speed of V8, and I'm not sure why choose Go.

echelon• 1 year ago

I've used Go and Rust for network services, and they honestly feel completely on par with one another from a DX and ergonomics perspective. I wouldn't be surprised if Rust starts eating into Go marketshare for microservices.

There are some Googlers angling for this.

Animats• 1 year ago

Go shines for network services.

Right. Go is a great language for the server side of web client/server things. It's more reliable than C++, easier than Rust, and is hard-compiled to a read-only executable, which is good for security. Goroutines, which are cheap but can block, get rid of the async/sync distinction. The important libraries are maintained by Google people and used internally, so even the unusual cases are well-exercised.

What more do you want?

tayo42• 1 year ago

It's like a more robust python. Compiled so you don't deal with the annoyances of using a scripting language to build, deploy and run applications. But also way simpler then something like c++ or rust. Though I do wish it had some more nice syntax and features.

90s_dev12• 1 year ago

Theoretically, it's basically a faster Node.js. Case in point, TypeScript is moving from Node.js to Go for a 10x speed increase.

But in reality, TypeScript is probably its only legitimate use-case, and only because it already had very stringent requirements.

Most projects either stick to Node.js, or if they need more efficiency, they get rewritten in C++ or Rust, instead of ported to Go.

zaphirplane• 1 year ago

With all due respect, I am fairly confident that the view you have is formed in a bubble .

nikolayasdf1238• 1 year ago

Theoretically, it's basically a faster XYZ

well, that's the point. it is excellent language for server programming. and not just faster, it is more stable, scales complexity better, stronger security

bqmjjx0kac• 1 year ago

Go has surprisingly good "UX", which I don't hear people talk about much. It compiles very quickly and gets out of your way. I've found it useful for a few reasons:

1. The standard library has a real HTTP/2 implementation (unlike Python).

2. The Go compiler creates statically-linked binaries and cross-compiling is painless.

3. Channels and goroutines make it relatively easy to write parallel code. There are certainly sharp edges, like every language.

kevindamm• 1 year ago

It is also conveniently easy to compile everything into a single file, using embed, and this helps with deployment in a few ways.

prisenco2• 1 year ago

I love how readable it is, even by people who don't know Go.

devjab• 1 year ago

We've moved from .NET and C# to Go, and I'd argue that it's very competetive with general purpose languages like C#, Java and similar for a different philosophical approach to enterprise tech. It's been a great technical fit for us in both finance and energy, but the main purpose for our adoption is because it's opnionated approachs are a much better fit for us than traditional OOP languages. There is no "magic", everything is explicit, the standard library is incredible and it's a relatively easy langauge to write and read.

In a world where 4chan can serve 4 million visitors on some dated apache server version running a 10k line PHP script which hasn't been updated since 2015 it's important to remember, that for 95% of all software (if not more), any, general purpose language will be just fine technically speaking and it's in the development processes (the people) the actualy differences are found. Go is productive and maintainable (cost-efficient and rapid changes) for teams that work better without implicit magic and third party depedencies.

The hype may be gone, but the Jobs aren't. In my area of the world Go is the only noticeably growing programming language in regards to job offerings.

haiku20773• 1 year ago

- Fast compiler with easy cross compilation (super handy e.g. for developing Linux network services on a Mac)

- Pretty decent concurrency built in

- Small language spec that is very easy to read and learn

- A very good and well thought out toolchain and tool ecosystem. This is hard to list as a selling point or quickly summarize but it makes Go code pleasant to work on. Things that other languages have ti have complex third party tooling for are simple and boring in Go.

- If you are writing code that interfaces with Kubernetes or a popular container runtime like Docker or Podman, it is a natural choice.

- Pretty good performance as far as garbage collected runtimes go. Not the best, but really good.

eikenberry3• 1 year ago

The hype has gone as it is now just another programming language in common use. The use cases are the same as they've always been. Networked and distributed systems.

melodyogonna• 1 year ago

Almost every tool in the cloud ecosystem is written in Go. I did not know Go is so massively used until I started working with Kubernetes

mlrtime• 1 year ago

service to service communication. GRPC + Protobufs + Go allow ease of development and resuse.

neonsunset• 1 year ago

Using gRPC in Go is really inconvenient in comparison to some other languages.

whobre• 1 year ago

Kubernetes custom operators

pjmlp15• 1 year ago

When you want to have native code in clouds like Vercel and Netlify, unless you rather go via nodejs native modules.

They build on top of AWS Lambda, but do not expose the full capabilities, so Go it is.

Working on DevOps space, most tools related to Docker and Kubernetes are written in Go, as this is its reason to fame. Although Rust is starting to show up as well.

philosophty• 1 year ago

Google should spin Go out into a non-profit foundation and give it $1 billion and send it on its way. They should beg Russ Cox run it as benevolent dictator for life, and hope he can hire Ian Lance Taylor back.

benesch• 1 year ago

It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community, and the programming community at large. In addition to gccgo, Ian wrote the gold linker, has blogged prolifically about compiler toolchains, and maintains huge swaths of the gcc codebase [0]. And probably much, much more that I’m not aware of.

I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.

I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.

Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.

[0] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS

sidkshatriya• 1 year ago

It's very important for both the compiler tools chains of go to continue working well for redundancy and feature design validation purposes. However, I'm generally curious -- do people / organizations use gcc-go for some use cases ?

fweimer• 1 year ago

GCC Go does not support generics, so it's currently not very useful.

cletus2• 1 year ago

Google has over the years tried to get several new languages off the ground. Go is by far the most successful.

What I find fascinating is that all of them that come to mind were conceived by people who didn't really understand the space they were operating in and/or had no clear idea of what problem the language solved.

There was Dart, which was originally intended to be shipped as a VM in Chrome until the Chrome team said no.

But Go was originally designed as a systems programming language. There's a lot of historical revisionism around this now but I guarantee you it was. And what's surprising about that is that having GC makes that an immediate non-starter. Yet it happened anyway.

The other big surprise for me was that Go launched without external dependencies as a first-class citizen of the Go ecosystem. For the longest time there were two methods of declaring them: either with URLs (usually Github) in the import statements or with badly supported manifests. Like just copy what Maven did for Java. Not the bloated XML of course.

But Go has done many things right like having a fairly simple (and thus fast to compile) syntax, shipping with gofmt from the start and favoring error return types over exceptions, even though it's kind of verbose (and Rust's matching is IMHO superior).

Channels were a nice idea but I've become convinced that cooperative async-await is a superior programming model.

Anyway, Go never became the C replacement the team set out to make. If anything, it's a better Python in many ways.

Good luck to Ian in whatever comes next. I certainly understand the issues he faced, which is essentially managing political infighting and fiefdoms.

Disclaimer: Xoogler.

eikenberry3• 1 year ago

Channels were a nice idea but I've become convinced that cooperative async-await is a superior programming model.

Curious as to your reasoning around this? I've never heard this opinion before from someone not biased by their programming language preferences.

cletus2• 1 year ago

Sure. First you need to separate buffered and unbuffered channels.

Unbuffered channels basically operate like cooperate async/await but without the explictness. In cooperative multitasking, putting something on an unbuffered channel is essentially a yield().

An awful lot of day-to-day programming is servicing requests. That could be HTTP, an RPC (eg gRPC, Thrift) or otherwise. For this kind of model IMHO you almost never want to be dealing with thread primitives in application code. It's a recipe for disaster. It's so easy to make mistakes. Plus, you often need to make expensive calls of your own (eg reading from or writing to a data store of some kind) so there's no really a performance benefit.

That's what makes cooperative async/await so good for application code. The system should provide compatible APIs for doing network requests (etc). You never have to worry about out-of-order processing, mutexes, thread pool starvation or a million other issues.

Which brings me to the more complicated case of buffered channels. IME buffered channels are almost always a premature optimization that is often hiding concurrency issues. As in if that buffered channels fills up you may deadlock where you otherwise wouldn't if the buffer wasn't full. That can be hard to test for or find until it happens in production.

But let's revisit why you're optimizing this with a buffered channel. It's rare that you're CPU-bound. If the channel consumer talks to the network any perceived benefit of concurrency is automatically gone.

So async/await doesn't allow you to buffer and create bugs for little benefit and otherwise acts like unbuffered channels. That's why I think it's a superior programming model for most applications.

skybrian2• 1 year ago

“Systems programming language” is an ambiguous term and for some definitions (like, a server process that handles lots of network requests) garbage collection can be ok, if latency is acceptable.

Google has lots of processes handling protobuf requests written in both Java and C++. (Or at least, it did at the time I was there. I don’t think Go ever got out of third place?)

kmeisthax2• 1 year ago

My working definition of "systems programming" is "programming software that controls the workings of other software". So kernels, hypervisors, emulators, interpreters, and compilers. "Meta" stuff. Any other software that "lives inside" a systems program will take on the performance characteristics of its host, so you need to provide predictable and low overhead.

GC[0] works for servers because network latency will dominate allocation latency; so you might as well use a heap scanner. But I wouldn't ever want to use GC in, say, audio workloads; where allocation latency is such a threat that even malloc/free has to be isolated into a separate thread so that it can't block sample generation. And that also means anything that audio code lives in has to not use GC. So your audio code needs to be written in a systems language, too; and nobody is going to want an OS kernel that locks up during near-OOM to go scrub many GBs of RAM.

[0] Specifically, heap-scanning deallocators, automatic refcount is a different animal.

frollogaston5• 1 year ago

It's non-application software meant to support something else at run time. Like a cache, DBMS, webserver, runtime, OS, etc.

pjmlp15• 1 year ago

Some of us believe GC[0] isn't an impediment for systems programming languages.

They haven't taken off as Xerox PARC, ETHZ, Dec Olivetti, Compaq, Microsoft desired more due to politics, external or internal (in MS's case), than technical impediments.

Hence why I like the way Swift and Java/Kotlin[1] are pushed on mobile OSes, to the point "my way or get out".

I might discuss about many of Go's decisions regarding minimalism language design, however I will gladly advocate for its suitability as systems language.

The kind of systems we used to program for a few decades ago, compilers, linkers, runtimes, drivers, OS services, bare metal deployments (see TamaGo),...

[0] - Any form of GC, as per computer science definition, not street knowledge.

[1] - The NDK is relatively constrained, and nowadays there is Kotlin Native as well.

nmz• 1 year ago

From what I remember, Go started out because a C++ application took 30 minutes compiling even though they were using google infrastructure, you could say that they set out to create a systems programming language (they certainly thought so), but mostly I think the real goal was recreating C++ features without the compile time, and in that, they were successful.

zelphirkalt• 1 year ago

I mean, they claimed that one didn't need generics in the language for some 12 years or so ...

pluto_modadic• 1 year ago

is there a language that implements cooperative async-await patterns nicely?

frollogaston5• 1 year ago

JS, Rust

nikolayasdf1238• 1 year ago

so what is the reason why he is leaving? layoffs? burnout? up-or-out without up? internal politics pushed him out? seems like he wants to work. so what happened?

philosopher12342• 1 year ago

This is so sad! It seems Go is fast becoming rudderless, i worry the wualities that have made it great wont survive the tides at google this way. But i hope to be wrong.

nikolayasdf1238• 1 year ago

same. Go is so powerful because of its core. without core, ecosystem will fall apart

surajrmal• 1 year ago

Go still has strong leadership. They are just not as prominently known externally.

justguesser• 1 year ago

Not trying to create a conspiracy theory, but I wonder whether this has any relation to Ian Hickson's departure from Google/Flutter team [1], where he specifically called out some names:

Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.

[1] https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

glimshe2• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing. One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. The company should have changed names when Pichai took the reins because it metamorphised into something unrecognizable. Most people you'll meet who worked for Google worked under his regime.

armitron• 1 year ago

Let's not pretend that Google pre Pichai was anything special, the rot was already instilled long before he came along. Other than very early days, Google has mostly been a force that corrupts, commoditizes and destroys. Sundar Pichai just made it explicit, a bagman-beancounter far removed from any engineering ethos.

ralferoo• 1 year ago

The company was restructured and become a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet Inc. just after this, so the company did, in fact, change names at that point!

tbrownaw2• 1 year ago

One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again.

That was mostly an artifact of the free money that gets thrown off as tech advancements are integrated into society.

nine_k5• 1 year ago

As they say, people join companies, but people but people leave (because of) their managers.

osigurdson2• 1 year ago

> people leave (because of) their managers

I've often wondered, when people say this, do they mean their direct managers or the management hierarchy in general? If direct manager only, this only makes sense if they have a lot of leeway to run things how they want. For instance, if a company decides to cut 30% of the workforce and more people (naturally) leave afterward, is it really the direct manager that caused them to leave?

I think people leave "the situation" for all kinds of reasons. If you have a really horrible direct manager, that might be why you leave but it certainly isn't universal.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

I don’t understand why this aphorism appeals to people.

I’ve most definitely left bad companies where I’ve had good managers and I know my experience is not unique.

When it gets to the point where people are pointing at executives as the “managers” that they’re leaving, do people just not realize that companies are run by high-level managers?

It’s a vacuous statement that holds some strange appeal for some people, but it’s not particularly insightful nor accurate.

klabb3• 1 year ago

Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.

This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review.

One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.

pphysch• 1 year ago

My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers.

Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it.

Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.

akudha• 1 year ago

I don’t know about Google but many places I have worked had people who say a lot of things but those words don’t actually mean anything. You listen to them for half hour but you can’t summarize why they said in those 30 minutes, no matter how hard you try. Lots of buzzwords and word salads. It isn’t unique to Google. Reminds me of politicians

grg0• 1 year ago

Ah, yes, assigning "resources".

bsimpson2• 1 year ago

She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set

She's not alone.

Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.

slantedview• 1 year ago

This is shocking.

zipy124• 1 year ago

The lower salaried locale for the python team is Germany no? Which isn't exactly like your tradional outsourcing. I find it hard to believe we won't see more of it in the coming years with how much cheaper engineers are in Europe especially when they are english speaking and go to good universities like Cambridge/Oxford/EPFL/ETH etc...

RainyDayTmrw5• 1 year ago

I heard about this, too. Sadly, we were not in the right place at the right time, so to speak, to be able to grab some of these candidates.

AdrianB14• 1 year ago

Not at Google, but in a different American company of similar size (not capitalization): the quote about the strategy applies exactly the same, the criticism of middle management is the same. Internally we have an official name for the politics that brought us to that situation, but I cannot write it here because it would be immediately downvoted and flagged; in any case, it is an official policy not to have a strategy, not even to measure results of the projects and, lately, to eliminate the idea of roles and responsibilities and replacing it with "we all need to contribute and jump in as needed".

kridsdale110• 1 year ago

If you’re talking about a 100,000 person company that sounds like a complete nightmare.

egl2020• 1 year ago

When I worked at Google, Ian Lance Taylor was in the pool of randomly assigned code reviewers. He was polite, firm, and informative. It speaks well of Taylor and the project that he was doing this kind of review--- it's a version of the YC advice about founders doing customer support.

And maybe I'm shallow, but it was a thrill to see his initials show up on my code reviews. Thanks for all your work on golang.

notepad0x902• 1 year ago

What a nice praise. It is refreshing to see someone being remembered as 'polite'. It is a critical life-lesson I've learned myself, it is better to be considered things like polite, kind and nice instead of smart, 10x <whatever>, capable.

caprock• 1 year ago

I've found a lot of value in the habits of politeness, especially in written communication. It's disappointing when it's not a first class citizen in a company culture for things like code review. There are plenty of rationalizations for how it might not be needed, but that just feels like laziness.

jrockway2• 1 year ago

I also really enjoyed the Go readability process. It made me a much better programmer.

I did Python readability at Google and "take this one massive CL and if they make it good by the end of the process they're done" never felt quite as useful as Go's process. I'm glad they made their own rules; it benefited me. (Even if during the process I was thinking "I JUST NEED TO CHECK IN THIS CODE SO I CAN GO BACK TO BED" when getting paged in the middle of the night ;)

danpalmer• 1 year ago

I'm glad you had that experience with Go readability, because mine was far from that. Java readability taught me loads. Go readability taught me almost nothing and took far longer. In the end I was given it when I emailed the admins to say "either give me some feedback or give me readability". I'm fully behind the readability concept, but it's hard to scale and keep the quality high.

ncruces• 1 year ago

As an “insignificant” outside contributor to Go (I think I worked on half a dozen proposals and PRs), I can say just the same, even for things that in the end got dropped or rejected: polite, firm, informative; I'd add curious.

Had a great experience contributing to the project, and Ian was a big part of that. Which for a big project like Go says a lot.

henvic• 1 year ago

Same!

aleksiy123• 1 year ago

I have something similar except it was Titus Winters on my final c++ readability change.

I tried to push back on one of his comments as well.

Imo it just feels kinda cool that someone who really really knows what they are doing gave you a stamp of approval on something.

malkia• 1 year ago

I was at Google 2014-2017, and I think Ian shared how he did his promo package in order to help others (if I'm not mistaken I think it was him). This was just wow!

firesteelrain• 1 year ago

I don’t have much insight into internal Google politics but there seems to be a rash of articles and blog posts over the years about prominent folks seemingly and abruptly announcing their exit. What is behind this trend?

praptak• 1 year ago

Google switched from exploration to exploitation.

At least this is what I found at the root of every particular inconvenience that used to wear me down at Google until I finally left in August.

AdrianB14• 1 year ago

Corporation rot. If you are successful when you are relatively small and hire the best and brightest, then you scale out in numbers, you go down as this model is not scalable. When you have tens of thousands of people, you bring "professional management" that are bozos (this is a quote from an interview with Steve Jobs), the organization first starts to decline as an average (cannot find tens of thousands of really bright people, there are not enough in the world) and second it starts to rot as the bozos have a huge negative impact. When the bozos change the culture for the worse, top people leave, average employee is declining even more. It is a race to the bottom, not in pricing but in employee quality.

mosura• 1 year ago

The meta question here is what is the Google of 2005 today? Is it really OpenAI? Does it exist at all?

The meta meta question is how long was Google ever really in the state that so many engineers remember as a golden age?

conqrr• 1 year ago

There isn't one yet / We can't see it. You're trying to predict an Industry (like the Tech Industry) that will grow beyond $1 Trillion and a company that provides a fundamental and ubiquitous tool (like Search).

NotAnOtter3• 1 year ago

My take is the 2005 google does not and cannot exist again because it was born in an era where the underlying tech became so much more powerful. Any company that happened to invest creatively in tech during that era became unfathomably wealthy.

I joined google in 2022 (and have since left), even as a newcomer it was obvious that not only was the golden era over, but the era after the golden era was winding down too. The atmosphere wasn't "The reckless innovation is over but lets make the product as great as we can" - it was "Just don't break anything and squeeze out 1 or 2% improvements where possible"

monkeyelite2• 1 year ago

Any company that happened to invest creatively in tech during that era became unfathomably wealthy.

Except countless companies did - many went out of business, and few became Googles.

The historical context is essential but there are so many factors that set them apart.

gman83• 1 year ago

Isn't that a good thing? When millions of people are relying on those products day in and day out, I think we don't want them to be reckless. Leave that to others.

gdiamos• 1 year ago

It doesn’t exist.

There is an opportunity to build it.

I think the problem with this gen of companies isn’t tech, it’s culture.

Philip-J-Fry• 1 year ago

As a spectator, the golden age has to have ended around 2013/2014.

Tech culture is so rampant with ruthless capitalism that it'll never happen again. You used to at least have the sense that there was a will to innovate and experiment. Now it's just oiling the machine.

dehrmann2• 1 year ago

2014 is interesting for tech because...

- College students just in it for the money hadn't taken over yet

- Low interest rates led to lots of investment

- Most people had broadband in developed countries

- Most people had cell LTE smart phones in developed countries

- Compute tech (CPUs, memory) was mature, adequate, and stable

pjmlp15• 1 year ago

In most countries there are hardly glamour tech culture jobs, capitalism has always been there.

Developers are seen as yet another office job, and unless you make it into manager, you will be always looked down has not having made a name for yourself.

Written as someone approaching 50y, that has been trying to avoid the management trap forever.

ramoz• 1 year ago

It's still Google.

__turbobrew__• 1 year ago

I don’t believe it exists, google was a unique product of its time — much like Bell Labs which also does not have a contemporary.

xnx2• 1 year ago

Waymo. Important work that's on the verge of changing the world.

sbochins• 1 year ago

Back in 2016 when I was at google, I started on a team that was all golang. I was working on my first project, building out a new service and got many readability approvals from Ian. One time I got an an approval with some follow up requests, which I somehow didn’t notice and landed the change. He got back to me asking me to follow up. I didn’t realize he was one of the core Golang developers! He was super gracious, even though he didn’t need to be and I’ll always remember that. It’s really something that he invested so much time into seeing how the language was actually used and identifying core problems. Very admirable.

iwontberude2• 1 year ago

19 years! Congratulations for making it out!!

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

You only ever serve two days: the day you sign your new hire paperwork and the day you complete the exit interview.

iwontberude2• 1 year ago

I just assumed it took a while to find a way out (figuratively) through all of the obligation and social entanglement.

taf2• 1 year ago

When you have core people from Google leaving the chrome and now golang project - it’s pretty evident the management is not doing so good

uaas2• 1 year ago

While there can be other signs of management not doing so good, let’s not forget that this person is leaving after 19 years.

mountainriver• 1 year ago

They are putting all their cards in AI, they see it as an existential battle. They are probably right

djha-skin• 1 year ago

... Gooogle has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.

I wish I had more elaboration on this paragraph. It seems like a real change happened of which Ian took notice.

mattlondon• 1 year ago

Probably asked to make it more AI or something.

"Please add Gemini to the go compiler errors, or take a hike."

skirmish• 1 year ago

Almost exactly what I heard, he was told (paraphrased) "for people at this level and pay, we expect them to be working full on time on AI".

sashank_1509• 1 year ago

Wow talk about ridiculous. Hopefully this is not the case, I’m in Google and I don’t want to see it deteriorate to this point.

xyst• 1 year ago

What’s there to elaborate? It’s well documented in public.

Anti-trust trouble.

Poor leadership selling out the company for short term gains.

Palpable shift from a technology company that was unrivaled for a long time to yet another Microsoft/IBM clone.

No longer a leader in the industry and simply following trends and riding the waves (the AI trend…)

Bending the knee to governments with questionable history and supporting projects with implication of death of citizens.

"Do no evil", my ass.

Bro was fed up with the constant smoke that was blown up his ass. And lies pushed down his throat. Probably timed this exit with vesting/options maturity.

cma2• 1 year ago

No longer a leader in the industry and simply following trends and riding the waves (the AI trend…)

While they missed out on the first major commercialization of LLMs, they invented transformers and now have the leading LLM for coding and second best or potentially best training hardware in the world, designed in house, which they started working on before the current boom and kept improving.

7bit3• 1 year ago

What’s there to elaborate? It’s well documented in public.

What is there to elaborate is what the author really thinks. "Well documented in public" is such nonsense. First of all, what you mean by that is purely subjective. Second, you still don't know what the author really thinks.

486sx33• 1 year ago

Posts like this really show how resilient C has been over the past few *decades•. Who will invest in Go now that Google doesn’t care about anything ?

yusina3• 1 year ago

I'd have liked to see more actual reasons for the departure beyond "not a good fit anymore". What does that mean? How have things changed?

Honest question, I'm not after dirty laundry. Just want to know more than "I'm leaving because reasons" which is kinda the tl;dr of that post.

laidoffamazon4• 1 year ago

Why do people think they are so important to announce their departures instead of stating plainly that they hit their retirement number? Or just not state anything at all?

frollogaston5• 1 year ago

Cause he didn't hit his retirement number

leelou2• 1 year ago

As a fellow Go developer, I want to express my deep gratitude for your immense contributions to the language and its community. Your work has not only shaped Go into the productive and enjoyable language it is today, but has also inspired countless engineers—including myself—to build better software. Thank you for your dedication and for paving the way for the next generation of Go developers. Wishing you all the best in your future endeavors!

sheepscreek• 1 year ago

Interestingly, the blog has very few posts. What I would really like to read is a follow up to https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/552 (“The 2016 Election”)

ergocoder• 1 year ago

I wonder what an average net worth of a person who works at Google for 20 years.

This guy must have been pretty high up maybe at senior staff / principal for several years at least. A principal can probably draw >$1M per year.

Would it be in $50M-$100M range?

kridsdale110• 1 year ago

That depends on if they had a mortgage or rent payment in the Bay Area that whole time.

georgehm• 1 year ago

Having two compilers helped ensure that the language was clearly defined.
When the two compilers differed, we knew that we had to clarify the spec and figure out what the right behavior should be.

This idea of having two implementations for spec stood out for me.

frollogaston5• 1 year ago

Golang has always struck me as having a great user experience, including documentation. I feel like some of Google's other dev-facing products needed this. Like, Tensorflow lost to PyTorch despite its initial lead, and the PyTorch on Google Cloud reputation isn't great.

7bit3• 1 year ago

Overall I think my approach was a good one in helping to build a successful project. But Google has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.

I wish people would have the courage to explain what led to their decision to leave big projects, instead of trying to be overly polite. This statement virtually says nothing and the whole post boils down to nothing but: I left Google.

kragen2• 1 year ago

To keep working at Google for more than a few months, you must internalize their relatively extreme internal culture of secrecy. Also, potentially Google could sue him for NDA violations.

Leaving Google

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