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0 pointsraggi6mo ago0 comments

By forced I guess you’re referring to the room full of leads who all said yes, but then reported otherwise back down to their ics to avoid retribution. I caught early wind of this from folks being super rude in early on the ground discussions and tried to raise it with Linus. One of the directors got his kickers in a twist and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess clearly not, as the sentiment and division still stands.

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cmrdporcupine6mo ago

I don't care who agreed to what, it's bad engineering practice to take a working successfully launched product and throw out its entire working software stack no matter how inelegant it seems. To what end? What did Fuchsia offer? When it finally shipped -- what, 2, 3 years late? --- custmers couldn't even tell it happened.

And in order to make it happen it also required writing the already-launched HTML-based UI in Flutter/Dart. Again ... why? What for? There wasn't even a working "native" Flutter at the time, despite promises, and there certainly wasn't a working accessibility stack -- no screen reader, no magnification, nothing -- so that all had to be kludged in. It was everything wrong with the "rewrites considered harmful" distilled.

Not to mention terrible for morale, execution, planning, budget, customer satisfaction.

I was just a lowly SWE 3 "IC" just in the trenches, not nearly as "important" as all that, so my opinion mattered not at all. But to me it violated every sound engineering / project planning principle I'd learned in the 15 years of my career up to that point. Just another event that led to me becoming quite cynical about the ability of leadership at Google to actually manage anything of significant complexity that wasn't ads/search related.

Again, Fuchsia .. very neat. But it didn't belong there.

raggiOP6mo ago

Customers not being able to tell that it happened was a goal of that deployment.

It wasn’t anywhere near that late the numbers you’re saying was about the whole build cycle - board bringup for one of the two boards first commit in zircon was 3y before launch (that codes public, I just checked and Mike landed it in 2018) - and discussions weren’t done then, that was before any prototype/demos could be done. There were sluggish stages and project management was rough, and there were delays at the end related to quality but the quality bar was necessarily high, particularly on the core system - don’t brick all the devices in the field. And we didn’t, and that’s actually a feat replacing everything from firmware to gui in the field without users noticing.

What was the goal? Well two things: fuchsia needed a first, and realistic shipping target that wasn’t excessively lofty. Nest needed to get out of the OS game so it could focus resources on product. Chris talked about this in his 9to5google interview.

It’s a shame you feel so sour about it, everyone involved did good work. I have friends from nest and some of the ics also have similar pained history from that time - it’s sad, once upon a time it was maddening. It’d have been so easy for a leader to substantially improve that. Sure plenty of things could have been better, for sure we could have fixed these awful sentiment and relationship issues (I tried, got burned for it - that even showed up in my calibration), but we all shipped.

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