
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant (2011) - vinnyglennon
https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
======
theDoug
This post, and posts about this post, have been reshared plenty since 2011.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=yegge&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=yegge&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Title should probably have a [2011] at the end too.

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mattlondon
This is from 2011. 7 years ago.

It would be nice to see if there was a change at Google since then to
orientate itself towards more of a SOA thing like Amazon? I don't know what
state Google Cloud Platform was back in 2011 - I am guessing it is
significantly more now than it was then, so would be curious to know if that
has stemmed from a "transformation" internally, or if they just started from
scratch for GCP?

~~~
jchw
I'm a newer employee, so I can't add color to the past several years of work,
but my immediate reaction is Yes. Given the "We <3 APIs" slogan you can see
around the MP campus (from public view of course) it's pretty apparent that
there was a top down push towards improving the state of SOA and building
platforms.

Whether that applies to non-Cloud Google I don't know. But I don't even think
GCE existed in 2011. A lot has changed.

~~~
berdario
"I/We love APIs" has actually been Apigee's slogan since before the
acquisition into Google Cloud

Example: [https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital-business/tweet-your--
i...](https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital-business/tweet-your--i--apis-
sticker-contest)

Apparently hackernews tampers with unicode in urls, so additional link:

[https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-i-love-
apis](https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-i-love-apis)

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akhilcacharya
>>You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler, so
I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're not arrogant, by and
large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post -- if you'll
reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doing everything
right". We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant
it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or
something along those lines. They're inferring arrogance because it makes them
feel better.

Given how Steve moved to Grab it's funny how his "they hate us cuz they ain't
us" bit in itself comes off as arrogant.

~~~
al_chemist
> I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're
> not arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free.

And the post starts with "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does
everything right".

~~~
akhilcacharya
Yeah, this irked me when I first read this a few years ago, but reading this
as a current Amazonian it really riles me up.

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kenhwang
The thing about API and platforms is, stability matters, and it matters a lot.
Google can't stop fiddling with things, their products and their APIs and
legal terms; they just keep changing things constantly. It makes it incredibly
annoying to build anything on Google tech.

Things built on Microsoft tech still work decades later without any change. I
have things built on AWS that's still running on 6 year old APIs and they
still work. With Google, I'm lucky if it lasts 6 months.

~~~
Jyaif
My google app engine website is still running after nearly 10 years. I only
had to update a .yaml file once.

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rch
> head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. ... It's like what
> your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to
> demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all
> they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Amazingly, this is now _more_ true than when it was written.

Look at the top categories under the 'products' menu, compared with the same
menu on aws.

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loosetypes
I recently interviewed with Google and their recruiter's, presumably copy-and-
pasted, spiel included the following footnote:

"Steve Yegge (former Googler) talks about his interview experience and "How to
Get that Job at Google" in his blog post here[0]."

Which I found strange given that (A) Steve wrote it 10 years ago and (B) he's
more recently written[1] that "The main reason [for leaving] Google is that
they can no longer innovate."

[0] [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-
goog...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

[1] [https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-
gr...](https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-
grab-86dfffc0be84)

~~~
casual_slacker
I was sent that same post when I interviewed 5 years ago. I wonder if they
have data indicating success of interviewees who were sent that link.

If nothing else, the recommended book "Steven Skiena's The Algorithm Design
Manual" is very good to prepare for the Google interview.

~~~
loosetypes
Right, I was commenting less on its utility as a prep. resource than how it
seems, to me, either stale or incongruent on Google's marketing front.

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dbmikus
It's funny how much he talked up Facebook's "platform", but all of their
platform work has contributed very little to Facebook's bottom line, and has
even caused them issues in the case of Cambridge Analytica.

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pfarnsworth
My admiration for Steve Yegge plummeted after his article on why he moved from
Google to Grab.

He was talking about how Grab had some sort of moral highground above Uber,
but if he spent even 10 mins researching he would see that objectively they
are worse in Southeast Asia. And their behavior after Grab bought Uber in
Southeast Asia was nothing short of ruthless. I have family in the area so I
have first hand accounts as to what happened, so him talking about how proud
he is working at Grab because they are somehow moral really made my lose my
respect for him.

~~~
an_account_name
I haven’t heard anything about what Grab is doing beyond Yegge’s post about
it; what’s going on there?

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kiwifellows
Wow I remember when this was published and such a good rant. Had to read again
for laughs. SOA is sort of the older term... a subset which is a better
description of where platforms should be heading is microservices. Issues like
rate limiting still exist but need to get away from things like api gateways
as well as they are becoming a sort of antipattern for scaling massively.
They're useful for certain problems but not necessarily as useful as lower
level message queuing engines that need to handle high volumes of
transactional throughput.

~~~
philwelch
The biggest difference I’ve seen between SOA and microservives is that people
have been able to explain to me what SOA means.

Aside from that, the term “microservices” implies a bunch of anti patterns in
itself, and brings to mind horror stories of startups with three times as many
microservices as engineers that invested multiple man-years in setting up
Kubernetes to do something that could have been accomplished with a fraction
of the cost in 2005 with ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server.

Service boundaries are significantly more expensive than people assume. A
monolithic web application, or even a “macroservice”, can still be scaled
horizontally with network dependencies on a shared database and can call any
code or access any local data with the same basic guarantees of any other
computer program. Your procedure calls are normal procedure calls, whose
contracts and interfaces are as efficient and safe as your language’s type
system allows. You can have unit and functional test coverage that exercises
virtually all of your feature or application without needing to deploy and
integrate multiple services. You can achieve better focus and deeper
investments in infrastructure when there are fewer services to deploy and
support. The only issues with concurrency and distribution you have to worry
about are whether you are writing threadsafe code in the first place, your
connection to your database, and perhaps cache invalidation.

The minute you introduce a service boundary, you throw all of that away. API
calls have to be documented, versioned, and validated on both sides. Tooling
exists for this (Swagger, gRPC, GraphQL), but the complexity is much higher.
Testing requires deploying interdependent services in a shared test
environment. Your service interfaces have to be built with some well-
considered strategy around resiliency and consistency because you might (and,
with enough services, statistically _will_ ) have to keep running with some
unavailable dependencies. Even dependency management, which is already a hell
in itself, becomes combinatorially harder when you have to design around the
requirement that your service dependencies (and the services that depend on
yours) can change at runtime with you being none the wiser.

Now, at times, you don’t have to incur all these costs. Some services are
inherently independent. Some behaviors can and should happen e.g. on a message
queue or on a schedule rather than in response to live traffic. And, at a
certain scale, you need to separate your data stores, decouple your feature
deployments from each other, or reap many of the other benefits of SOA. But
those benefits aren’t free; they’re extremely expensive, and companies on the
scale of Amazon or Google reap those benefits not because they are inherently
wonderful, but because despite the costs, they are the only way certain things
are possible in the first place.

If monoliths are the communist planned economy of web applications, SOA are
the market economies. They can scale a lot, lot more, but at the added
overhead of everyone having to squint at each other suspiciously and
distrustfully.

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narag
I remember reading something like this, not sure if the same piece, but I
missed this bit:

 _monitoring and QA are the same thing_

Makes me want to read more from this guy.

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perpetualcrayon
I actually wrote an email similar to this recently (re: interfaces) to folks
on a project I'm working on, though of course I didn't nor could I threaten to
fire anyone :)

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notatoad
is this being reposted in relation to some recent event that i missed, or is
it just that time again?

~~~
brian-armstrong
Might be because g+ is being turned off soon. Enjoy the spoils while you still
can.

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dominotw
> accidentally made public.

Sure

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whydoineedthis
What's funny is I checked out
[https://developers.google.com/](https://developers.google.com/) and compared
it to the others.....and 7 years later it is still accurate to describe it has
"having been designed by a 5 year old". I'm a big fan of Google, it's too bad
no one listened to this. Google Wave was amazing, I still to this day do not
understand why it was shuttered before it even had a chance to get off the
ground.

Speaking of eating their own dog food, still not sure why they are writing
their own OS for Pixel. They have now shoved linux on top of it to make it
useful to devs and I think that is akin to sprinkling people food around the
bowl of dog food. The dog food was so bad your devs & community literally
built around it.

And again, I'm a fan of Google. There are just some things they could do so
much better.

~~~
amphibian87
[https://developers.google.com/products/](https://developers.google.com/products/)

Would be the equivalent to the links this person blogged. And they offer a ton
now, including Turing GPU cloud computing for AI, which I have seen host chess
AI and destroy the world's best chess engine (Stockfish).

~~~
whydoineedthis
fair enough! thanks for the reply/info/link.

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throwawaygcloud
The thing about dogfooding is so accurate in Google. They don't like
dogfooding here.

I work in Google cloud. And I want to host my personal website on the platform
I'm working on.

People look at me funny when I bring up about free gcloud credit. My teammates
don't seem enthusiastic about this idea. My manager don't seem to agree that
it's important. So, I've never got the credit, and my personal site is still
hosted on heroku for free.

And nobody on my team uses our own platform.

The culture is strange. Dogfooding our own product should be one of the top
priorities.

~~~
CreepGin
Well there is the Free Usage tier just like AWS's. Though Google's egress
limit is 1GB compared to AWS's 15GB.

