I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving the previous service to slowly die and eventually get abandoned?
I'm starting to believe that it might be simply because low quality software is hard to maintain. They have some very complex software, but nothing of great quality. They might hire a lot of smart people, but not very many that are actually good at developing quality software. It appears that being smart doesn't make you diligent in your work, or give you an eye for detail.
Examples of this bad quality are simply everywhere; cursor left and right too fast in Google Image Search and that functionality breaks until you use the mouse to select the next image. Want to reply in Gmail, you have to click the reply button twice for the reply pane to appear. This is really basic stuff, and suggests a lack of competency in developing quality software, and a lack of care.
They are huge, but they are actually not very good.
This doesn't happen to me, and a quick Google (ha) isn't turning up complaint posts about it. This might just be a you thing.
Have you used Google maps? Or Google {search,photos}?
I get the feeling that they have two very different grades of software they write, and the stuff written by the varsity is so good that it's invisible to it's users.
This. They seem to hire people who are excellent Computer Scientists, but that DOESN'T make you an excellent software engineer!
The result is what we often see from Google: A product with an impressive/complex algorithm (whether it be AI or efficiency) wrapped in terrible software prone to tons of bugs and breakage.
but i see where you're coming from, it's "konkurencja" in Polish :)
The problem is that maintaining existing projects generally isn't considered to be a demonstration of impact (or at least, it's a MUCH harder case to make). It's much easier to make the case that greenfield projects demonstrate impact.
Additionally, engineers have a good amount of power over what they get to work on: managers generally have to convince them to join a team. It's nice in concept, but lacks a steady influx of unwitting new engineers to help support all the not-so-sexy projects (like many other companies).
…so, you tend to see a pattern of engineers building a new thing, launching it, and then moving on to the next project. Leaving a trail of poorly supported projects in their wake.
The promotion process is how you described though, PMs don't get promoted for maintaining projects, or even improvement on some metrics (that engineers are very good at), they always want new shiny stuff to brag about.
In a deeply fundamental way, every service or software product that isn't part of the revenue stream doesn't really matter to the business and there is no incentive to maintain it.
Then again, if its just a matter of cutting any project that won't make billions, the point is moot.
