I ran into this a few days ago and figured I had done something wrong. Fortunately Duck Duck Go has an acceptable timer: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer
It loads an mp3 and js file when the timer completes. If the internet is not reliable at that moment, the timer will silently fail.
Positive: at least it will still ring if the timer skips over the exact second, such as with a date change or momentary stutter. Many online timers have this problem.
Prefer the Brave timer linked in a down-tree comment.
Not having the timer feels a little sad, but if Google had done this 6 months ago, someone could have raised a 5M seed round for a blockchain based distributed timer app...
I'm sure they did a careful, sophisticated A/B test and discovered that the timer was measurably decreasing revenue. After all, if you're clicking a timer widget, that means you're not clicking a Youtube video titled "6 minute countdown" and watching a 30-second ad first.
Then I went on to actually google "6 minute countdown" to check the view counters of the youtube videos (which are right at the top of the search results).
Yup. I didn't say that just to get in a dig at Google; I said it because after glancing at the search results, and having worked at a similarly "data-driven" company for a long time, it seems like the most likely and obvious explanation.
And nobody is chiming in that Google being the best place to get instant answers without watching a 30-second ad is a very important part of their strategy that they should be careful about squandering to squeeze out a bit more ad revenue? At least make a dozen of these embedded tools a free perk for Google One subscribers if you need to make it all about money.
I quite like it that some simple unit conversions (Celsius <-> Farenheit is the one I use most often), rough currency conversions and the likes are displayed right on the search results page.
FWIW, some of these can be done in your OS search bar. Cmd Space on the Mac, and Win key on the pc. Not sure about the various flavors of Linux though.
Krunner is super finicky about it though, especially since it won't handle even the simplest of mixed units (eg. neither 6ft 2in or 6'2" works, where 6ft, 6', 2", and 2in all give conversions on their own).
...and then after it fails, if you hit enter or click at the top of the results like you would to copy the value, it launches whatever random program burbled to the top when it gave up.
GNOME supports unit conversion too, by pressing Super and typing in the queries. And iOS too. Not sure about Android though, because IIRC the search bar just directs you to Google search.
Just be careful with unit conversions and cooking/baking measurements. They are often wildly wrong. Search for "1 cup flour in grams" and you'll find suggested answers ranging from 100g to 300g -- while it _does_ vary by brand and type of flour, it certainly doesn't vary that much!
Hahaha glorious, the dice roller is still there! That MUST mean that Teraflop is right: removing the timer drives people to "x minute timer" youtube video's
I'm sure they did a careful, sophisticated A/B test and discovered that the dice roller was measurably decreasing revenue. After all, if you're clicking a widget, that means you're not clicking a Youtube video titled "roll dice" and watching a 30-second ad first.
some Product Manager at Google will now get promoted for "removing legacy infrastructure, cutting costs and increasing ad revenue by directing traffic for popular search queries to partner sites"
That is a nice design! It’s cool that one can download the app for desktops.
I made a shared timer (not nearly as pretty) a few years back, with live URLs and admin login codes for controls. Intended for LARP leaders or fitness coaches.
I kinda like Google not doing everything. When google starts to do all the little services like timers, conversions, speed tests there isn't any room for anyone else. I just wish the alternatives weren't so scummy.
Setting something like this up encrusted in enough process to ensure that it won't disappear a few million commits later would certainly cost a lot. It can only be cheap of it's allowed to disappear.
> Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google. Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!
> Google software engineer here. These gripes are legitimate. We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down.
Still a legitimate gripe nine years later, it seems...
Google are well known for the amount of services they deprecate [0], but what gets less attention is functionality they remove from their core search product. It seems like quite a few "advanced features" have been removed, including `link:` which I found extremely useful for finding web pages that link to a given URL, and for which I haven't found a decent alternative.
What kind of game are Google playing at? They’re like evolution at play and routinely prune and trim away anything not working for them. They’re so Darwinian.
That's not true. Evolution happens under certain conditions. Rampant bio-engineering, of certain kinds, would remove us from the conditions under which evolution has any effect.
it's perhaps interesting to speculate in the possibility of a post-evolution (at least at organism level) regime in future, but mLuby said "started" so I think the correction was fine, if a bit at risk of falling into semantics.
When I was there (2007-2008), there was a popular phrase among the management class along the lines of "We like to measure things in the billions here." Meaning that if whatever project you're working on is going to last (e.g. get more funding, get more headcount, not get killed, etc...) it better have some extremely large and impressive internal metric (or have a credible growth plan to get there). Billions of users, billions of downloads, billions of dollars in revenue, etc. If something doesn't have that kind of metric, start the countdown timer...
When joined in they were on the tail end of sunsetting Google Code, which they explained was the smart thing to do because Google doesn’t want to waste its time on opportunities that aren’t measured in billions.
Google then sat on the sidelines as GitHub grew to a tens of billions dollar business, and now Google spends billions trying to get more developers on GCP which they could have gotten for free if they still owned the portal to the code all the developers use.
A lot of Google wisdom sounded a lot wiser before we saw how it fully played out.
Google Code was great but the reason it sunset was because GitHub ate its lunch (just like Google Code ate Sourceforge before that). It would have distracted their resources to focus on that and the billions their spending to get developers on GCP are not influenced by the presence or lack of Google Code (which you can tell because Microsoft owns GitHub and that doesn’t meaningfully impact Azure)
Just this morning I was trying to show a friend a video of a man being cut out of a python (to prove the point they quite easily can eat a full grown human if big enough).
Having seen the video many times it should have been easy.
Nope.
8 pages with cutoutd for videos and gifs all of the exact same 'fail video' of apparently a person who attempted to be swallowed by one purposefully and chickened out.
200 hits on that one stupid video. Articles. Videos. Listicles.
Changed to duck duck go and it was the first freaking hit.
Old tech needs to die. All of faang especially are just dust, let them blow away.
Also from that thread, a Google engineer saying (out of context:) "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
How long before Google realizes that these casual shut-downs of side projects are harming their image tremendously?
When they have lost revenue enough quarters in a row that they have to shuffle and start doing business differently.
Until something big changes they reap record profits off our data and people continue to be the product while their customers continue to be the advertisers.
Even if that happens, it's not going to change the core problem.
They'll just what microsoft did, and say "look, we are good people now". The world will forgive and forget, and use their product hapilly. But because the underlying cause hasn't change, only the context, as soon as the context will change again, we will be back to square one.
This is a very astute observation, and one that I've seen in practice all too often. Thank you for this remarkable insight, I will definitely put it to use.
They don't care because they're not incentivized to care. It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
> It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
But then there's equally a danger of becoming IBM, which would be worse. (In this case, if Google creates something that people need then pull it, then other open-source people can replicate it).
I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance. Even Yahoo did this.
> I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance.
That might not work well for Google specifically, thinking about how long GMail was branded as "beta". Also, much of their consumer-facing things need network effects (think their piles of messengers)…
I think the people making this sort of decision ("Should we kill X minor feature of Y product?") are quite a long way down from the top, and probably were engineers themselves in the past. This isn't a "pointy haired boss" level decision. It's a trivial feature in a core product. It's much more likely it just needs someone to own it and no one wants to.
How long until people get it through their think skull? You are not the customer. Google's customers are corporations advertising and spying on you for the US government.
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
There's no incentive for people to do that: things like maps, search, and gmail are fantastic products, and on the other side of the equation it doesn't negatively impact my life in the slightest to have google profiting from having access to private information about my life. That's the case for the vast majority of people; their private lives aren't interesting enough for there to be any reason to avoid selling them to tech companies in exchange for excellent products. So it's quite deliberate; it's not a stupid mistake that people are making due to lack of thought processes in their thick skulls. On the contrary, it's the population of people voicing your opinion that is making the mistake in their risk analysis: you are both wildly overestimating the probability that something genuinely bad will happen and also overestimating the extent to which your private life is interesting to anyone else.
That's pretty much how I've always seen it.
Though I suspect a very large % of Google product users don't even give it a second thought that if they're getting something for "free" they must be paying in some sort of hidden/indirect manner.
I'm actually a fan of targeting advertising too - when it's done well it can genuinely be a useful sort of information that can assist in deciding what products to buy. What I don't get is why it's so often not very smart (e.g. getting tonnes of ads for a product that I literally just bought and couldn't even have received yet given shipping times).
Some would argue that these "failures" due to "market forces" are simply an excuse, a ruse to cover up their monoplies elsewhere (i.e., search and ads).
Give how often they sunset things it often feels like a solid argument.
The Google i18n font repo (https://github.com/googlei18n) went private all of a sudden in the last few weeks and it broke my Yocto build (and hey boot2Qt team, if you're listening, you're broken too).
I've been steadfast in not adopting any of the Google toy side-projects (e.g. Brillo, Weave, Things, etc etc) but now I'm expanding that rule to anything and everything from them at all, including AOSP. It's all quicksand.
Talking to Googlers nowadays, I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time. Googlers are just people and now that their hiring standards have shifted we can expect to see even Google making junior-level mistakes.
That’s not it. Googlers were good when Google was a startup with a high bar of entry trying to change things. Nowadays Google is a prestigious company. They are attractive to people who are first and foremost looking for a prestige job and don’t get me wrong they can be quite good but generally that’s not very interesting people.
"You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." —jwz
More likely that Google engineers are in a bubble because of all the available internal tools. Also the interview process nowadays select people that have time to train for the interviews rather than good engineers. The Google interview is still hard, but not for the same reasons than in early 2010.
This. Their interview process selects people who have hundreds of hours to blow to practice on stupid competitive coding, aka LeetCode. These aren't people who are innovative, they're ones that know how to grind.
Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.
Googles strategy is to find innovative people who can code well, but it's way easier and faster to determine the latter. So they hire a TON of people with these interviews and then wait for the sharp and innovative ones to float up while the not so innovative ones stay at L4.
Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience
> I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time.
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.
I think the problem is Google is significantly less productive with their thousands of incompetents than they used to be their their dozens of professionals.
Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.
Google's organization is often described as "thousands of startups under the same roof". So each team has ownership over their product(s) and each team has the room for advocacy for their product. But if their product is deemed unprofitable or whatever by higher-ups, I assume they start experiencing pressure about that. Ultimately though I'm sure budget concerns is king, and if a SVP needs to hit some quota for revenue or whatever and your product is relatively niche then they may be able to make the argument that your time is better spent working on something more "productive".
Aha, I see, the original URL in the HN comment was the org URL, which didn't redirect. https://github.com/googlei18n
I don't know why original poster was linking to that!
I misunderstood, indeed. Kind of funny that a bunch of other HN discussion then took off about how it was evidence that Google as an entire giant company was now terrible! Ah, HN.
CJK. Like a sibling comment said, a redirect would have worked but it looks like there are other issues.
Right there in the About panel: Noto fonts, except for CJK and emoji
If there's some technical/licensing/political issue about the font sure, whatever, I get it. I'm just saying it's all brittle and obviously a lesson that I need to internally fork every. single. thing. when working with Yocto.
It sucks that Google did that, but if you're relying on a third party lib for something important/in production, why wouldn't you have your own mirror?
In Yocto development I typically rely on external OSS repos to achieve the first builds but, yes, in production one can lock down the source in a local mirror.
Google fonts were already ruled a GDPR violation by a court (at least when loaded remotely), at this point it's probably a good idea to avoid those too. And probably anything else from Google with a reasonable alternative.
Brave search still works as well. Honestly, non search engine alternatives really are not equivalent. A timer is not important enouhgt for a bookmark or desktop icon.
The DDG one works okay but does not update in the page title like the Online Stopwatch one does, so it's a bit less convenient to quickly check how much time is left (or if it's expired and you didn't hear the sound) when the tab is somewhere in the background.
It does have a better UI and it's nice that it supports running multiple concurrent timers though.
Ideally it would support sending a browser push notification so you know the timer is done even if your volume happens to be on mute.
There's an iOS and macOS app called Due [1] that has all the bells and whistles if anyone else uses a lot of timers regularly.
One one hand, sucking the life out of the web ecosystem and then killing their vampire implementation is really bad.
On the other hand, the alternative to shipping a DOOMED implementation is Google not shipping these in the first place, which people also don't want.
The least the company could do to not destroy the ecosystem would be to open source or at least write up these implementations for someone to rebuild black-box.
Realistically, any developer could write a blog with black-box reimplementations.
An alternative is to keep a team explicitly for life support of these projects.
I’ve already stopped relying on Google. It’s too hard to tell the difference between a product they are going to support and a product they aren't. I don't want to have to pull up some financial statements just to understand if google is going to cancel some product I'm interested in within 2 years, I'm going to save my time and just go with somebody else.
I honestly wonder if they might be able to solve the issue with branding.
> "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
That kind of ethos used to exist at Google circa 2004 and was the way the majority of engineer and the few product manager behaved.
Very few of these folks are left and are a very tiny minority.
Most folks at Google these days don't give a rat's ass about that kind of thinking nor about the company itself, they're just here for the GSUs and the free food.
Given how many other useful similar tools remain, it would seem extremely odd this was removed intentionally.
But on the other hand, given all of Google's infra/tests/quality/etc., it would also be extremely odd for this to be removed by accident.
Maybe some component being deprecated internally meant this was easier to shut down than upgrade, but for a feature this simple that wouldn't make a lot of sense either.
Search is a very old codebase comprised of several large monoliths that are mostly tested by end-to-end diffs.
There is no central repository of all search features and if the timer is tested, it is likely forced to trigger with debug flags.
For timer to disappear like this would most likely be caused by a ranking change which prevents it from appearing as the top result (the only position it can render itself in).
I'm less interested in what a feature is, and more curious if there's some exhaustive list internally - or if there's even awareness of all of them spread throughout the corporation.
That is, in a large org like google (or msft, or...), how much stuff is there that no current employees are aware of?
I work at a relatively small company for a number of years, and it's definitely been a challenge to maintain knowledge of feature creep that has occurred, let alone anything more in depth like what the features were _supposed_ to do.
Does that mean if you play with results per page P, and get it to land on the P+1 position, you might be able to coax it back into being? ^^ Or maybe you can pick "results from custom range" to a couple weeks ago when it was still active? ;p ;) xx ;p
Is it possible Google removed the timer because of the EU DMA? If the widget was a search result, it seems like that would be a violation of the new legislation, along with other things people have mentioned disappearing in this thread.
It also would explain why the DDG one remains, as they don't meet the definition of a gatekeeper.
I think in such a legislation it has to be clearly defined what a "search result" is I'd be surprised if the legislation would count the timer widget as such.
It's basically their goto strategy though. For instance, responding to third party payment provider laws by saying "okay, but you still have to pay us 27% anyways" is pretty much purposely intended to respond by following the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, forcing lawmakers to go back and be even more clear on the demand.
They know the law was intended to address their abusive pricing arrangements, but they decided, of course, to thumb their nose at it and add a new "platform fee" instead.
But they're already known to do exactly that. Here's how a lobbying group representing Google, among other companies, went full scaremongering in reaction to a proposed anti-trust law:
I’m not sure of that, tit for tat does well as a strategy. Also lawmakers change every so often and usually love to pick over the negatives from their predecessor’s time and do things differently.
> For timer to disappear like this would most likely be caused by a ranking change which prevents it from appearing as the top result (the only position it can render itself in).
Does Google really not have some sort of "Always rank this result first" flag?
No one gets promoted for maintaining the timer widget on Google search.
One of the most successful engineers I know in big tech told me this once -
“thewarrior you need to understand. In these companies everything happens mainly for one reason - does it get someone promoted or not ?”
I’ll wait to see if this was an accident or not. But I suspect there are systems in place to prevent changes like these from being shipped by accident.
This is one of those tragedy of the commons situations that has bedeviled the industry.
Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit.
What this does to the companies in the long term remains to be seen.
The way you get promoted for maintaining the timer widget is to create some platform which drastically minimizes search features maintenance costs and tooling that largely automigrates legacy features onto it. Easy path to Google fellow if you can do it.
The best platforms are those that build a single product. Then we can argue for days about whether it's the platform teams responsibility to do X or the product engineering teams responsibility.
In close second are the platforms that are used for a fraction of a product and will never be wholely migrated onto because they are not fit for purpose.
Third place goes to the platforms that never actually have any product built on top of them - a theme so exciting people love recreating it at there own workplace.
We're all just temporarily embarrassed Linus Torvalds that want the world to build on our apis.
"Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit."
I guess so. I can relate to this 100%. So I guess so. Hate that it is like this, but it is 100% correct.
Why don't just work on current position? I'm working as a programmer for 15 years and I'm trying my best to evade any kinds of promotions because my salary suits me and additional responsibilities will detract me from writing code.
“ This particular example was about older folks in tech.
As I remember it, the story goes like this: you're supposed to get into this business, get your money, and get out, meaning retire. You sell all your stuff and travel the world and write posts on Medium. You know, the whole pyramid thing, right?
Therefore, if you are still here, and are visibly old, something must be going on. They seem to boil it down to two things.
The first possibility is that the person is a badass. They are one of those people who already made their fortune and only hangs around at the job because they feel like it. They don't have to be there.
The other possibility is that the person is the exact opposite of a badass, and has managed to not cash out despite being in the biz for a very long time. They've made no money, may be living paycheck to paycheck, and really need the job. Basically, the fact they're not "at the top" despite their age means they are crap.”
I think this must be a relatively “new-ish” thing. When I got into this industry, in the middle 2000s, there was still the image of the “old beard” inside the company that was getting things actually done, and that was fine, one needn’t be a “director of” or a VP, just “programmer” was enough.
I now realize that worldview was on its last days, soon enough (I’d say 2007-2008) we started talking about “ninja” and “rockstar” programmers, first in the context of RoR but then it extended, gradually but surely, to almost all of the industry. And then lots and lots of money started becoming available via FAANG-like companies (I’d say starting around 2013-2014, something like that) and all this worldview was dialed up to one thousand.
There is still an “old beard”, it’s just expectation that if you are an old beard getting stuff done you’re an L6+ instead of just senior. No one would look down on a wisen old senior principle.
It is possible to do that past a certain level, and some people do. But I think the reason this isn't the predominant strategy is that there's a selection bias at play. The kinds of people who are ambitious enough to get a job at Google are also likely to always want the next job up, or if that isn't going smoothly, to move up by moving out.
A lot of large companies have an Up or Out policy. If you haven't reached a 'terminal level', your position has an expiration date, if it expires before you've been promoted, you get put on a path to being fired. If you've reached a terminal level, then you're ok, but it's hard to be stable in a position in a company of chaos and churn.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadhttps://search.brave.com/search?q=timer
It loads an mp3 and js file when the timer completes. If the internet is not reliable at that moment, the timer will silently fail.
Positive: at least it will still ring if the timer skips over the exact second, such as with a date change or momentary stutter. Many online timers have this problem.
Prefer the Brave timer linked in a down-tree comment.
Not having the timer feels a little sad, but if Google had done this 6 months ago, someone could have raised a 5M seed round for a blockchain based distributed timer app...
Then I went on to actually google "6 minute countdown" to check the view counters of the youtube videos (which are right at the top of the search results).
My jaw dropped.
2,505,001 views
95,726 views
66,394 views
44,479 views
...and then after it fails, if you hit enter or click at the top of the results like you would to copy the value, it launches whatever random program burbled to the top when it gave up.
It is already questionable why a search engine needs these features, but why remove one and not the other?
(With apologies to teraflop)
“Chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random.”
I mean, Google rolls over in bed and crushes $1mm products and does not even realize it.
I made a shared timer (not nearly as pretty) a few years back, with live URLs and admin login codes for controls. Intended for LARP leaders or fitness coaches.
Unfortunately never deployed, but works using Elixir, LiveView, and ETS in-memory DB. https://github.com/mvellandi/easy_timer
https://www.google.com/search?q=tip+calculator
Maybe someone in the EU anti-trust area discovered Google had a timer and threatened to fine them?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429564
Edit: Another blog post from someone that noticed it: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/08/google-timer.html
> Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google. Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!
> Google software engineer here. These gripes are legitimate. We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down.
Still a legitimate gripe nine years later, it seems...
[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/
Nope, evolution is the only game in town. We can not replace it, we can only play it.
Google then sat on the sidelines as GitHub grew to a tens of billions dollar business, and now Google spends billions trying to get more developers on GCP which they could have gotten for free if they still owned the portal to the code all the developers use.
A lot of Google wisdom sounded a lot wiser before we saw how it fully played out.
I can’t. They killed that feature.
Darwin was a balanced, caring and conscientiousness, highly complex figure who placed immense value in emotion, family, and ethics.
Google is cold, callous calculating machine that chews up its users and other businesses to sacrifice them on the alter of money.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...
Having seen the video many times it should have been easy.
Nope.
8 pages with cutoutd for videos and gifs all of the exact same 'fail video' of apparently a person who attempted to be swallowed by one purposefully and chickened out.
200 hits on that one stupid video. Articles. Videos. Listicles.
Changed to duck duck go and it was the first freaking hit.
Old tech needs to die. All of faang especially are just dust, let them blow away.
https://www.online-stopwatch.com/timer/1hour/
Also from that thread, a Google engineer saying (out of context:) "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
How long before Google realizes that these casual shut-downs of side projects are harming their image tremendously?
One I like better, no ads, no stopwatch function though: https://e.ggtimer.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack
Until something big changes they reap record profits off our data and people continue to be the product while their customers continue to be the advertisers.
They'll just what microsoft did, and say "look, we are good people now". The world will forgive and forget, and use their product hapilly. But because the underlying cause hasn't change, only the context, as soon as the context will change again, we will be back to square one.
Actually, never mind that. They know. They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).
You cannot rely on the managers that you want to let go to implement the change that you need.
I also cannot generate the change I need by myself. It’s a losing proposition to expect too much.
They don't care because they're not incentivized to care. It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
But then there's equally a danger of becoming IBM, which would be worse. (In this case, if Google creates something that people need then pull it, then other open-source people can replicate it).
I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance. Even Yahoo did this.
That might not work well for Google specifically, thinking about how long GMail was branded as "beta". Also, much of their consumer-facing things need network effects (think their piles of messengers)…
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
It will. You will see some day.
Give how often they sunset things it often feels like a solid argument.
The Google i18n font repo (https://github.com/googlei18n) went private all of a sudden in the last few weeks and it broke my Yocto build (and hey boot2Qt team, if you're listening, you're broken too).
I've been steadfast in not adopting any of the Google toy side-projects (e.g. Brillo, Weave, Things, etc etc) but now I'm expanding that rule to anything and everything from them at all, including AOSP. It's all quicksand.
Unless you're referring to a different font repo they had?
Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.
Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.
Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.
https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts → https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts
I don't know why original poster was linking to that!
I misunderstood, indeed. Kind of funny that a bunch of other HN discussion then took off about how it was evidence that Google as an entire giant company was now terrible! Ah, HN.
Right there in the About panel: Noto fonts, except for CJK and emoji
If there's some technical/licensing/political issue about the font sure, whatever, I get it. I'm just saying it's all brittle and obviously a lesson that I need to internally fork every. single. thing. when working with Yocto.
> This repository is in the process of being migrated.
...oh
If it doesn't involve ads, Google will kill it off at some point.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=6%20minute%20timer
It does have a better UI and it's nice that it supports running multiple concurrent timers though.
Ideally it would support sending a browser push notification so you know the timer is done even if your volume happens to be on mute.
There's an iOS and macOS app called Due [1] that has all the bells and whistles if anyone else uses a lot of timers regularly.
[1]: https://www.dueapp.com/
One one hand, sucking the life out of the web ecosystem and then killing their vampire implementation is really bad.
On the other hand, the alternative to shipping a DOOMED implementation is Google not shipping these in the first place, which people also don't want.
The least the company could do to not destroy the ecosystem would be to open source or at least write up these implementations for someone to rebuild black-box.
Realistically, any developer could write a blog with black-box reimplementations.
An alternative is to keep a team explicitly for life support of these projects.
I honestly wonder if they might be able to solve the issue with branding.
That kind of ethos used to exist at Google circa 2004 and was the way the majority of engineer and the few product manager behaved.
Very few of these folks are left and are a very tiny minority.
Most folks at Google these days don't give a rat's ass about that kind of thinking nor about the company itself, they're just here for the GSUs and the free food.
To be fair though, the entries on killedbygoogle seem to average ~5 years before death. By that metric 9 years is a respectable run.
It performs its job perfectly.
http://maddin.io/gestimer/
Given how many other useful similar tools remain, it would seem extremely odd this was removed intentionally.
But on the other hand, given all of Google's infra/tests/quality/etc., it would also be extremely odd for this to be removed by accident.
Maybe some component being deprecated internally meant this was easier to shut down than upgrade, but for a feature this simple that wouldn't make a lot of sense either.
This is... kinda baffling, to be honest.
There is no central repository of all search features and if the timer is tested, it is likely forced to trigger with debug flags.
For timer to disappear like this would most likely be caused by a ranking change which prevents it from appearing as the top result (the only position it can render itself in).
huh so I suppose it’s possible there are ghost features no one maintains but might still work?
That said we could argue for days about what a feature is.
That is, in a large org like google (or msft, or...), how much stuff is there that no current employees are aware of?
I work at a relatively small company for a number of years, and it's definitely been a challenge to maintain knowledge of feature creep that has occurred, let alone anything more in depth like what the features were _supposed_ to do.
It also would explain why the DDG one remains, as they don't meet the definition of a gatekeeper.
To what end? Needlessly pissing off lawmakers isn’t a smart strategy.
They know the law was intended to address their abusive pricing arrangements, but they decided, of course, to thumb their nose at it and add a new "platform fee" instead.
https://inv.riverside.rocks/jXf04bhcjbg?t=1297
Does Google really not have some sort of "Always rank this result first" flag?
One of the most successful engineers I know in big tech told me this once -
“thewarrior you need to understand. In these companies everything happens mainly for one reason - does it get someone promoted or not ?”
I’ll wait to see if this was an accident or not. But I suspect there are systems in place to prevent changes like these from being shipped by accident.
This is one of those tragedy of the commons situations that has bedeviled the industry.
Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit.
What this does to the companies in the long term remains to be seen.
In close second are the platforms that are used for a fraction of a product and will never be wholely migrated onto because they are not fit for purpose.
Third place goes to the platforms that never actually have any product built on top of them - a theme so exciting people love recreating it at there own workplace.
We're all just temporarily embarrassed Linus Torvalds that want the world to build on our apis.
I guess so. I can relate to this 100%. So I guess so. Hate that it is like this, but it is 100% correct.
Those people who don't get promoted are fired?
“Why are you still here ?”
Rachel Kroll explains it well here https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/29/age/
“ This particular example was about older folks in tech.
As I remember it, the story goes like this: you're supposed to get into this business, get your money, and get out, meaning retire. You sell all your stuff and travel the world and write posts on Medium. You know, the whole pyramid thing, right?
Therefore, if you are still here, and are visibly old, something must be going on. They seem to boil it down to two things.
The first possibility is that the person is a badass. They are one of those people who already made their fortune and only hangs around at the job because they feel like it. They don't have to be there.
The other possibility is that the person is the exact opposite of a badass, and has managed to not cash out despite being in the biz for a very long time. They've made no money, may be living paycheck to paycheck, and really need the job. Basically, the fact they're not "at the top" despite their age means they are crap.”
I now realize that worldview was on its last days, soon enough (I’d say 2007-2008) we started talking about “ninja” and “rockstar” programmers, first in the context of RoR but then it extended, gradually but surely, to almost all of the industry. And then lots and lots of money started becoming available via FAANG-like companies (I’d say starting around 2013-2014, something like that) and all this worldview was dialed up to one thousand.
If you're at a higher level, even if you're content with your position, your manager is rated on how many people earn promotions.