There are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that …

"Bad engineering" in adhoc ways tends to mean new ideas are being explored. Sophisticated deployments, logistics, procedures, tends to mean you're optimizing or extending existing system. That's not to disparage the latter. making things work at scale is hard engineering. But when people praise the glory days, it may be a preference for working on new ideas in small projects.

Although there were some rough areas, Google has been considered to have pretty advanced software engineering for 20 years or more. There was plenty for a new engineer to boggle at even then. On the other hand, someone who started in 2015 missed out on the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt. That’s about when the culture started turning against “big tech” in general (rather than specific companies like Microsoft).

From my experience crossing eras; the tools have improved, and there are still some amazingly brilliant people, but the amount of overhead and the ratio of top level, passionate builders has dropped meaningfully. I have had a priority project stuck in legal hell for six months because it’s just a morass of logistics. The project is benign but it doesn’t matter. We are ossified. I look at it as somewhat inevitable considering the path the company has taken, but it is certainly different. We are cranking out money and that’s fine, but it is a change.

Oof. I knew it was going to happen, but people thinking boq/pod are good rather than actually killing the company makes me pretty sad.

> Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID Could you elaborate on what these are for a non-googler? Ironically enough, Google isn't very helpful.

On the flip side, clueless execs are killing tools like Code Search because they don't understand the value. They're willing to layoff off a team to save money even if it reduces the productivity of 20,000 employees by 1%

I left over ten years ago and it's hard to understand that perspective. Back when I was an SRE (~2006 to 2009) there were only one or two monitoring systems (which didn't overlap, so you could argue there was one) and a handful of config languages. Compared to anywhere else Google had military levels of discipline and order. > Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine. Deployments were weekly and done from a dev machine because that way someone was watching it and could intervene in case of unexpected problems. Some teams didn't do that and tried to automate rollouts completely. I could always tell which products weren't doing enough manual work because I'd encounter obviously broken features live in production, do a bit of digging and discover end user complaints had been piling up in the support forums for months. But nobody was reading the…

So sure they can very reliably and safely deploy... It just doesn't feel like they've actually deployed anything interesting in 5+ years (except maybe some AI stuff). From the outside it looks like the company is perpetually refactoring history's biggest yakshave...? not surprising for a programmer-run company I'm sure it still matters to bring down the power and server bills. But one can't help feel like they could be doing much more