

Waving goodbye to Google - on the exodus of Wave engineers - michaelneale
http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye

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plinkplonk
Some interesting observations there

e.g:

"Here is something you've may have heard but never quite believed before:
Google's vaunted scalable software infrastructure is obsolete. Don't get me
wrong, their hardware and datacenters are the best in the world, and as far as
I know, nobody is close to matching it. But the software stack on top of it is
10 years old, aging and designed for building search engines and crawlers. And
it is well and truly obsolete.

Protocol Buffers, BigTable and MapReduce are ancient, creaking dinosaurs
compared to MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop. And new projects like GWT, Closure
and MegaStore are sluggish, overengineered Leviathans compared to fast,
elegant tools like jQuery and mongoDB. Designed by engineers in a vacuum,
rather than by developers who have need of tools."

 _if_ true, this is a strong indicator that Google is well and truly a BigCo
now. Everyone expects a company of Google's size to have its share of politics
and crappy middle managers and so on, but this is the first time that I've
heard a Google engineer (ok an ex Google engineer) say that its _software_ is
bloated and ugly (and more importantly, not getting fixed - see the bits on
the rewards structure encouraging territoriality leading to rejection of
patches.)

Mind blowing.

~~~
chuhnk
Yea so the infrastructure comments really shocked me but it makes complete
sense. They had to do massive scaling early on and a lot of what they use now
is from that era. I can imagine even at google they have some sort of "if its
not broken dont fix it" mentality. There is a reason why megastore is sluggish
right? Its tries to uphold CAP theorem across datacenters and because of that
write performance suffers.

