Wave and Hello.com each had over 50 engineers, and Andy Rubin spent several hundred million (perhaps billions) on robotics acquisitions, all for projects that ended up getting canceled.
At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - historically, these included Google Toolbar (initially conceived as a defensive play against Microsoft, but ended up getting Google Search in front of hundreds of millions of new users - this, BTW, was Sundar Pichai's first big win on the way to CEO); Google Chrome (ditto, with the side effect of becoming the dominant browser); GMail (initially an internal tool to improve productivity, then became a major consumer product); and Google Fiber (worst case, force Internet speeds up through competition, best case, new ISP). It's likely that Sundar & Larry's thinking of Fuchsia is that worst-case, it keeps 100 talented engineers at the company, and best-case, it's a dominant new OS that drives computing forwards. Either one is worth the $50M or so, so they do it.
> So their manager asks them "Well, what is it you really want to work on? Maybe we can make it happen here and you don't have to leave all the perks of Google behind." The engineer says "I've always wanted to do OS development, and there's a bunch of neat research developments like capabilities that haven't yet been incorporated in a production OS." The manager says, "Hmm, I know of some guys over in this other department that have similar ideas. Why don't you connect with them and see if your interests align?"
What you describe is simply allowing a well-performing engineer to switch to new project, which of course happens all the time.
It's very different from "a bogus project for the sole purpose of retaining some engineers" that OP theorized.
> Google wins because it keeps these talented engineers off the market, and if the project succeeds they can win in a really big way.
So more or less like any ambitious new project? :)
> This is not unlimited, BTW.
Right, and again, goes against what OP was implying, that Google is going to run a huge project indefinitely just to retain a bunch of diva engineers who wouldn't work on anything else.
As I wrote above: "a rich employer may retain an unproductive employee for a limited amount of time if they expect it to ultimately pay off".
This is exactly what you are describing.
> if you were instrumental to the success of a project that made Google much more than you're ever likely to make in salary, you get one chance at a self-directed project.
Right, and Fuchsia is not a "self-directed project" of this kind. It's a big project with over 100 engineers, the vast majority of whom did not have the impact of Rob Pike or the others you mentioned.
Your comment is good and informative, but ultimately does not lend any support to the notion that Fuchsia really is some bogus project with no business case or future, solely for retention purposes, which is what OP was implying and what I am disputing.
Per the article, Google has over 100 engineers working on Fuchsia. If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year.
That's a lot of money to pay just for retention of people who are not producing anything of value, consuming many other resources (office space, network, hardware, perks), and deeply committed to a project that supposedly will never benefit their employer.
A rich employer may retain an unproductive employee for a limited amount of time if they expect it to ultimately pay off. It just doesn't make any sense to retain someone indefinitely if they're not going to produce anything of value, and (implicitly) will quit the moment you try to put them on any sort of real-world valuable work. Google is a public company with fiduciary responsibilities to its shareholders and a legally accountable board, it can't just throw tens of millions of dollars away without good reason or explanation.
> You see all these different projects competing against each other (multiple messaging apps are a good example) and you think: why is Google so unfocused?
There are many good reasons to have multiple teams competing against each other, building the same product. Often it will bring a strong drive and pace to all competing projects, as well as cross-pollination, and eventually they often merge to a single deliverable that is better than any of the projects could produce individually.
> what Google basically wants to do is hoard engineers
I'm not sure why all these improbable theories make more sense to you than the plain fact that Android was designed quite a few years ago, has many natural deficiencies, and - like all technologies - will eventually be replaced by a superior successor.
That's exactly what Fuchsia is about. Its existence does not require any elaborate conspiracy theory. On the contrary: given how strategically important the Android market niche is for Google, it would be very surprising if Google was not working on a viable successor. It's as if Sony didn't have a successor for the PS4 in the pipeline, and just expected it to sell forever, with minor patches here and there.
"One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project."
This has been my therory for a while. You see all these different projects competing against each other (multiple messaging apps are a good example) and you think: why is Google so unfocused? But what Google basically wants to do is hoard engineers so they don't leave and go work for competitors and make them stronger (or start their own companies that could compete against Google).
So Google's management figured out that if they give these enginners some cool stuff to work on, they'll stay at the company, even if the stuff they work on is a duplicate of something else the company has already done.
The number of engineers isn’t the limiting factor competing against google, it’s the innovation/talent. While most engineers even at google aren’t working on hard problems, there’s a few who’re solving distributed computing/gfs/page rank/etc and those individuals are definitely not being laid off. The others use their tools to solve business problems.
Internally in Google it was really, really hard to get in the Wave team. So many people felt the opportunity to show what they can and get a career boost. So, presumably, they had best Google engineers working on that product.
What I want to say is an obvious thing -- stellar team doesn't imply success.
Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven.
I guess Google at this point just keep churning through systems because Engineers are incentivized to show impact and rarely end up creating new good products.
Adding tons of new engineers is also probably hurting their overall quality and velocity.
Google isn’t an engine to create wealth out of nothing. Its a place that is/was structured to extract maximum value from its engineers specifically. It isn’t all that surprising that engineers got most of the perks.
Or more that they're likely useless from a shareholder perspective, but have a small chance of paying off in a large way, and worst-case keep the engineers occupied & employed at the company.
Google doesn't generally allow projects that everyone knows have zero chance of being useful in a bottom-line sense; you can't, for example, build a D&D campaign index on company time even if you're T9. (There was a big debate over this near the tail end of the Eric Schmidt years, when you actually could, and this was one reason for Larry's "More wood behind fewer arrows" campaign.)
But for something with a small chance of having a large impact, like a new OS or programming language or attempt to speed up scientific progress? Google can totally get behind that, because worst-case, you keep the engineers employed and available for future use, while best-case, you've got a computer science breakthrough. Fuchsia fits right into this case, as does Dart and Go and Unladen Swallow and several other projects.
That's interesting. Google certainly did pick up a number of world class engineers from Microsoft and Bell Labs (Ken Thompson!). I wonder though if it was a conscious strategy to get these top-level engineers in order to retain a vast pool of average-level engineers by inflating their egos with the positive association.
If you combine engineer mindset, business acumen, relentless drive and do so over decades, you can get outsized results.
It's a thing to admire, *even if you dislike the products*. Much the same as you can be awed by Ray Kroc's execution regardless of whether you like McDonald's or what you think of him personally.
It simply isn't that common to have that combination of talents at work on one thing at such scale for so long. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had the same combo of really being down in the details despite reaching such heights.
You can contrast to Google, a company whose founders had similar traits but who got tired of it. Totally understandable, but it makes a difference in terms of the focus of google today.
Again this is true regardless of what you think of Meta on, say, privacy vs. Google's original "Don't be Evil" idea.
Saying "wow they still have engineering leadership" is hardly worship. It's a statement of fact.
I can understand that when Google was on a technology growth curve in 2007 that a single engineer could hit a home run. I think that is much much harder today. So I would have to see it. I'm not saying it's impossible but I'd have to see it.
My favorite Google engineer idea was how much autocorrect improved search results and efficiency. Awesome idea but I doubt it contributed $100M in revenue. MapReduce, good idea but I doubt it contributed $100M in revenue.
One engineer, $100M is easy to say. It's really hard to do.
I always surmised that this was the only way to compete with Google and others. Even if you had 10k engineers, heck 1000 engineers who did it, it would be a formidable force. But actually doing it. That's the hard part.
> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently?
Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work.
Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-driving cars have a great reputation - arguably a much better design than Tesla have. BigQuery's pretty neat, even if it's missing things like unique constraints. GCP is the third largest cloud provider out there. Project Zero is pretty cool. Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Lots of interesting ML output, even if they've somehow failed to capitalise on it.
The problem is what to do with the other 170,000 employees.
Google does seem to have many solid engineers, as far as I can tell. Though the bar must definitely be lower than back when it was a smaller company. It seems their problems seem to lie in management (executives, line managers, product, etc.)
Google attracts the top engineers in the world because it can pay them the most money in the world through its profits. Take away profits, take away the engineers that made google valuable in the first place...
Google has solid to excellent engineering depending on where you are. The problem is and always has been that the leadership hires mid HR and business talent. It’s hard to watch smart people with 40 years of experience having to jump to the tune of some MBA bro with a massive ego whose only qualification was going to the right school and a massive ego.
Google’s problem was never a lack of ability to build and run impressive engineering artifacts. It was always that the business and product side of things was run very poorly.
At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - historically, these included Google Toolbar (initially conceived as a defensive play against Microsoft, but ended up getting Google Search in front of hundreds of millions of new users - this, BTW, was Sundar Pichai's first big win on the way to CEO); Google Chrome (ditto, with the side effect of becoming the dominant browser); GMail (initially an internal tool to improve productivity, then became a major consumer product); and Google Fiber (worst case, force Internet speeds up through competition, best case, new ISP). It's likely that Sundar & Larry's thinking of Fuchsia is that worst-case, it keeps 100 talented engineers at the company, and best-case, it's a dominant new OS that drives computing forwards. Either one is worth the $50M or so, so they do it.
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