I don't think it is necessarily a "problem" that it can't be perf-farmed anymore though. Google groups isn't perfect but it does a lot of things well (the bugs mentioned in TFA not withstanding), is used extensively internally at Google, and doesn't necessarily need a lot of new features. There are a ton of internal products at Google that are also staffed by one or two people in maintenance mode and it's not a problem.
As an example, I recently checked the internal symbolization service at Google (that handles symbolization for C++ executables, which is in turn used for generating performance profiles and symbolizing things like stack traces generated by core dumps) and the team maintaining it was two people. And those people aren't solely maintaining the symbolization service, they're compiler engineers who spend most of their time working on other projects and spend a small amount of their time maintaining the symbolization service as issues come up or bugs are reported. But this isn't a problem. The symbolization service works and is basically feature complete. There's no reason to have a team of ten people actively working on it.
> the team maintaining it was two people. [...] But this isn't a problem. The symbolization service works and is basically feature complete.
As long as it works, it is no problem. But given any larger change somewhere in the stack and management not being aware that these two folks have that side project, maybe they even left, and there will be problems.
Either a project has dedicated staff or it doesn't exist and just survives.
I don't know how critical groups internally are, but I assume with the general decline of e-mail compared to chat, video calls, etc. (insert joke about googles chat tools if you like ...) I would assume that this will be home less of relevance. Over time as well and drop more and more off.
Correct, and a good chunk of layoffs were people who never got promoted because they were tending the garden. So it’s actually worse than that, anybody who tried to maintain something is marked for deletion by Ruth’s fire-a-tron
That’s an interesting note, given that the Tie/X-wing fights were heavily inspired by WW2 dogfights, right? Can you imagine something that draws on the Gulf War similarly? It just seems wrong, too proximate to pull out purely aesthetic themes.
WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.
Which of the gulfwars are you even talking about? - Even Korea and Vietnam, which were big and had quite some cultural impact, are more and more forgotten.
Although during the 80s and until Desert Storm, the same term was applied to the Iran/Iraq war - which is another mostly forgotten thing despite the huge human cost.
(I realised after I typed the above that the wikipedia disambiguation page also links to the Iran/Iraq war anyway)
Not the person who used the term, but I kind of wish I had been. It's excellent. At FAANG-ish companies where "impact" is the key to promotion, there's an inevitable tendency for engineers to prefer working on things that are highly visible like starting new projects or adding new features, vs. things that are highly useful like stability, testing, or code quality. Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others when they've served their perf-review-enhancing purpose. "Perf farming" is as good a term as I've seen for it.
When you get promoted, they tend to move you to different projects (that need different resources at founding time than the operations folks that have experience scaling up)
I assume it's gaming the Google performance review system in order for promotion. That's why you see new Google products/features launched, then left to wither in the sun - ongoing maintenance/support doesn't do anything for your career.
The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google...
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