<story><title>Pkg.go.dev is more concerned with Google&apos;s interests than good engineering</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/01/pkg-go-dev-sucks.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>warent</author><text>These are fair criticisms. Still though, there are some pretty sweeping generalizations about Google being made here. The company is as big as a city. Not all of their engineering culture is like this.&lt;p&gt;Take what I&amp;#x27;m saying with a grain of salt; slightly biased since I worked there for a bit in the past.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>googthrowaway42</author><text>As a counter-point, I worked at Google for two years and what the author is describing is completely consistent with my experience with the engineering culture and the systems it produces.&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally there is a hostility towards the philosophical aspect of software engineering which involves a careful consideration of the essential nature of the system as a whole as it relates to some ultimate end and the nature of logical components of the system and how they interact. Note that these considerations can occur prior to any code being written and also as part of an iterative process as the product and understanding of the product develops.&lt;p&gt;I believe this stems from three sources:&lt;p&gt;1. The criteria and process for getting promoted is very focused on shipping new and complex things which in practice is at the exclusion of all other considerations. This means that improving or maintaining existing systems or producing systems which are well architected at all is not as clearly valued. The promo committee is comprised of people who don&amp;#x27;t know the specifics of the systems you&amp;#x27;re working on so the easiest thing to convey is that feature X or product Y was shipped.&lt;p&gt;2. There is a hyper-rationalist, hyper-modernist, data-driven, anti-intuitionist view which pervades Google which completely discounts any sort of philosophical&amp;#x2F;qualitative thinking. People get really uncomfortable when you try to start even the most anodyne discussion about the product or service as it relates to some broader goal since those involve qualitative judgements that can&amp;#x27;t be reduced down a set of metrics. Some of this may be attributed to the CYA culture among management.&lt;p&gt;3. The interview process doesn&amp;#x27;t select for software engineering or software architecture skills (aka people who have developed an intuitive understanding of the art of software engineering) so there are many people within Google who lack the ability to effectively evaluate the architecture choices that are being made around them or that they themselves are making.&lt;p&gt;With all that said I did meet and work with many brilliant engineers and others who were very talented and did think deeply about things but those were relatively rare. And yes it is a big company with many different teams and subcultures but what the author and I have described are the patterns that one sees broadly across Google.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pkg.go.dev is more concerned with Google&apos;s interests than good engineering</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/01/pkg-go-dev-sucks.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>warent</author><text>These are fair criticisms. Still though, there are some pretty sweeping generalizations about Google being made here. The company is as big as a city. Not all of their engineering culture is like this.&lt;p&gt;Take what I&amp;#x27;m saying with a grain of salt; slightly biased since I worked there for a bit in the past.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>finnthehuman</author><text>&amp;gt;Not all of their engineering culture is like this.&lt;p&gt;Sure.  I&amp;#x27;ll grant you Junio; he seems like a cool guy.&lt;p&gt;The rest of google though?   Google&amp;#x27;s engineering culture is by and for google. They&amp;#x27;re not doing the rest of us any favors.&lt;p&gt;Googlers need to admit that.  Not to me, but to themselves.</text></comment>