> Googlers are like toddlers with all the toys in the world: they quickly get bored and move on.
Wrong. Googlers are just like other normal humans and they respond to incentives presented to them. I worked at Google and observed their promo / bonus / compensation practices closely. The safest way to get big bucks was to launch something, invest some metric to measure something and make sure there is a lot of movement on that metric, repeat that N times in your promo packet and get your peers to do the same in their peer reviews, get promoted and immediately jump to the next sexy project.
Maintaining an existing service wasn't considered important early on. Then it started getting lip service. After a few years, it started getting some token awards every quarter or so. Finally, some smart VPs even started promoting 1-2 maintainers just to make a statement and have those counter-examples in their arsenal in case someone brought up the incentives for maintaining existing products. But the vast majority of promotions still went to launches.
Wrong. Googlers are just like other normal humans and they respond to incentives presented to them. I worked at Google and observed their promo / bonus / compensation practices closely. The safest way to get big bucks was to launch something, invest some metric to measure something and make sure there is a lot of movement on that metric, repeat that N times in your promo packet and get your peers to do the same in their peer reviews, get promoted and immediately jump to the next sexy project.
Maintaining an existing service wasn't considered important early on. Then it started getting lip service. After a few years, it started getting some token awards every quarter or so. Finally, some smart VPs even started promoting 1-2 maintainers just to make a statement and have those counter-examples in their arsenal in case someone brought up the incentives for maintaining existing products. But the vast majority of promotions still went to launches.