KilledByGoogle is a website listing the filicides of Google. It lists the lifespan of products Google started and shut down. When looking at this erratic behavior, it feels like looking at the handiwork of a deranged mind. I remember clearly reading an engineer’s account of how people start products in a bid to land promotions.
I find it disturbing that a senior staff engineer (the top of the top brass in the engineering track) describes this practice akin to BogoSort, where you randomly sort and expect it to land correctly.
“Google has not launched one single successful executive-driven thing in years. Sometimes, VPs try to decree “we need a new chat app or AI-first demo for I/O!” There’s a huge death march, and in the end, the thing is half-baked and roundly derided. If it doesn’t get 100 million users in six months, they give up and shut it down. It’s like that joke algorithm I learned about in college – BogoSort. In each iteration of the algorithm, you reorder everything randomly and if the elements happen to land in order, you are done.”
The saddest part of it is that it has been gobbled up by … itself.
KilledByGoogle: https://lnkd.in/d3ZRHy_n
Senior staff engineer’s account of Google: https://lnkd.in/dcC2qnvt