Without knowing much about the team I really doubt this has much to do with remote work. It seems like a smart move to take pressure off team deliverables in general right now for a host of reasons.
It's a mix of many things. Our teams all working remote for the first time and dealing with the same issues all people are dealing with. And then also at the same time if we put pressure on external developers with breaking changes or new bugs then it doesn't seem the right thing to do for users and developers at this time.
Local schools are leaning heavily on chromebooks. They have checked them out to students without computers. Adding an os update to this would contribute to the chaos.
Except when they move the launch bar from here to there or hide scrollbars or make any of a million other changes that cause your screen to no longer resemble the screenshot you're trying to learn from.
I updated a couple weeks ago and every tab was discarded when I tabbed away, reloaded when I tabbed back. It's better now. I can only imagine the problems that would cause for a school with a couple hundred of these checked out.
install session buddy from the chrome web store. it saves your tabs automatically, & even restores sessions containing a mix of tabs & web "apps" accordingly.
Provided they go right. If the entire team is adapting to a new way of working it makes sense to hold off on new releases while you make sure you've got everything working right.
IIRC my school district (in WA state) pinned Chrome OS versions for a long time because the state standardized testing software required a specific Chrome version. Not sure off hand if that's still a problem.
Stress can impact the human immune system and reduce our ability to fight off an infection, on that note alone it's worth adding some more slack to these important but not truly essential releases.
I joked with my friend a few weeks ago that B.C. would stand for before Corona/Covid. Unfortunately, it looks like it's not as much of a joke and the impacts of it are only starting to become clear, I hope we can learn from it so if there's another pandemic we can react much faster.
Google Play Store app publishing is delayed as well. Currently the message says:
"Due to adjusted work schedules at this time, we are currently experiencing longer than usual review times.
Please expect review times of 7 days or longer."
I wonder how this will impact educational apps that are trying to get last minute features for use in environments with a teacher. I know drops is trying to roll out an update at the moment.
> Guess the "decades run from 1 to 10, not 0 to 9" people won that argument.
Like: the twenties run from 2021 to 2030, not from 2020 to 2029.
Because the year after 1 BC is 1 AD. There is no year zero. This is one of the weird things of our calendar. More about that see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero.
So, the first millennium is from 1 to 1000, the second from 1001 to 2000 and the third from 2001 to 3000. And the twenties being the third decade start with the year 2021, and so on.
The comment is just snarky, because people have a mess with dates. Usually people start counting with one, even if mathematically starting with zero would make more sense. But hey, they make an exception for millennia, centuries and decades. They start with zero. Bravo!
In a sense this is funny. People don't usually start counting with zero. Of all things they do this for decades, however for once this is not ... applicable? useful? right?
Not snarky at all - an attempt at an humorous aside. I thought about trying to tie it to Lua / Erlang / Julia coders vs. C / .NET / Java etc., but thought that a bit of a stretch. :)
I hope that Google and other companies will encourage remote teams and divisions after this event. Having the ability for some teams to primarily work from home might provide some hermetic guarantee of continued development and liveness during a time of crisis.
I don't think this is similar to normal remote work though. Schools are closed, so people can't work on home in isolation. On top of that people must be anxious. When people are worried about lots of other stuff their output may not be the same.
Even basecamp, which is highly remote, postponed their email service launch.
If everything works right now, then slowing feature-work down makes sense for products critical in the current situation (which is the case with ChromeOS for students doing school remotely, as you have described). Because imo the goal should be to keep things as stable as possible to avoid interruptions for people during critical periods and only issue hotfixes for bugs that break functionality and for security vulnerabilities. Feature-work could still be done in some capacity, but pushing it to customers in prod is too risky.
This makes sense and sounds like an empathetic approach. Even if it wouldn't be an adjustment to remote-first teams, it should be assumed this is an adjustment to many others, and that new problems will be uncovered especially for critical services. It's also nice to have a constant in a sea of change.
> Even basecamp, which is highly remote, postponed their email service launch.
I’m sure the added stress didn’t help, but I would imagine it’s more related to marketing. Do you really want to launch a new product at this time of uncertainty?
Considering that it was an email service, focused on making async communication better, one would think right now might be a pretty good time when a large number of people are working from home.
It's not about being profitable. They could even maybe launch it below cost and that might help people even if it costs them. The parent talked about marketing. And people using something and benefitting from it, and then recommending to others is probably one of the best forms of it.
The optics are bad if you try to profit unreasonably. Launching something to help people become more productive, and making reasonable money out of it doesn't have bad optics.
There are plenty of firms not terribly worried about the optics right now.
I don't mind naming one particularly gross one - Knightscope is busy spamming about how "Security robots are immune from disease and work 24/7". I'm sure they practiced defensive patter about resilience until they could say it without smirking.
Bingo. I've been full-time remote for a few years. I have little kids who are in the house a lot, and I've adjusted to the disruptions that can entail. But the stress and anxiety of the current situation are more difficult to adjust to. Hard to shake anxiety over something like this if you're prone to it.
I've seen forecasts that this may last a few months, or until a vaccine is created. We need to expand our options beyond death or economic collapse. Not only that, but this almost certainly isn't the last pandemic we'll see, I think we should expect another one of similar magnitude within 10 years (like we expected another major terrorist attack within 10 years of 9/11) and plan accordingly.
We techies are some of the ones best positioned to keep the economy going. No need to physically travel, can remote access resources, and the ability to value generation engines. In the information economy, we absolutely need to do our part. That should be what we take away from this tragedy.
> There are a lot of obstacles for temps/contractors to gain remote access at google.
I thought that Google were all-in on BeyondCorp, which doesn't require a secure perimetre. Did they not actually convert everything, or is it still in progress?
I find it harder to believe that google is not equipped for remote work than somewhere like Ubisoft (where I work) which is having serious pain as testing games over RDP is bandwidth heavy and horribly laggy.
And we’re not pushing any releases as far as I’m aware.
Remote work is one thing, working with kids at home because daycare is closed, not being able to lead a normal life, people getting sick... that's a completely different matter.
Chrome runs with user privileges on billions of computers. The impact of someone hacking the software delivery chain and inserting malware is enourmous, let alone the risk for the brand/user trust. And don't forget that Chrome is not a charity project, but meant to secure Google's search and adtech monopoly. They actually pay a lot of money for Firefox to ship their search engine as default, and that's for a tiny market share.
The blog post is pretty accurate. I know it seems pretty general, but nearly the entire team is working remote and at the same time it's not prudent to push change on the ecosystem when everyone is trying to keep their site running.
Remote work now is likely lower in productivity than normal-times WFH.
If a software company cannot adjust to remote delivery, albeit at lower than normal productivity, the rest of the economy has no hope.
I don't understand Google's decision here - I wish they simply predicted a longer than normal release cadence, versus none at all
I don't know what Google use, but a friend worked on a system some years ago that used a robotic "finger" to press on a phone touchscreen, for testing. This was for a mobile phone company (pre-Android/iPhone) to check their OS worked.
I wouldn't be surprised if even the best of those systems requires some human supervision.
> I don't understand Google's decision here - I wish they simply predicted a longer than normal release cadence, versus none at all
It's reasonable to not understand their decision, but it's also reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what's best for their team and product (and in that order).
Googlers (like myself) are probably the least materially affected by COVID-19. We are well compensated and most aren't living paycheck to paycheck. We have great medical benefits. Our schedules are flexible and working from home is fairly feasible for most teams. Many are young enough to not have kids, or compensated well-enough to have a stay-at-home partner.
And technically, for many of us, working from home is fairly straightforward. Google already has much of that infrastructure in place. Many teams are already distributed across sites and used to working over email and VC. We all have laptops, etc. Some of us work on open source where it's trivial to have full access to source code when not on the corporate network.
Even so, my rough estimate is that my team is about 30% less effective right now. Like you say, it's not because working from home is hard. It's because staying focused on code during a global pandemic that will kill unknown people, is causing massive suffering for people who aren't as fortunate as we Googlers, and may lead to a depression the likes of which haven't been seen in a hundred years is really hard.
We're all trying to survive a monumentally catastrophic event with our health and wits intact the best way we know how. The history books are going to write about how millions low-risk young people self-quarantined to protect the older generation. They will remember the states and countries that suspended evictions and mortgages.
No one's going to give a damn that Chrome skipped a release or two. At the scale of shit the world is dealing with right now, it just doesn't matter.
> At the scale of shit the world is dealing with right now, it just doesn't matter.
There are different ways to cope with adversity. The "Keep calm and carry on" method is a contrasting formula, which applied to Chrome, would see maybe one release versus three or four, even in the midst of an adversity.
As much ubiquitous suffering as there is currently, the comfort of at least a (slower than usual) browser release can be a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak horizon. Heck, if my browser won't even update, forget fixing a massively multivariate system/problem like public health, or the economy.
Your/Google's self awareness of privilege is much appreciated. But if you really want to make a difference, a slower release cadence is much more uplifting than resigning to the virus.
They're also considering the impact on developers targeting Chrome and Chrome OS platforms[1], which is a welcome consideration.
Edit to add: this also has a follow-on effect of reducing the possibility that end users experience problems due to breaking changes or bugs, which is also important considering nearly everyone is depending on the internet at this time.
I don't understand. Regardless of COVID, they always need to consider the impact on developers.
Like I said in my previous comment, the newly remote Chrome team may be facing many unseen roadblocks, but I expect that to be a temporal window of delay, after which the team should resume shipping, albeit at a slower cadence due to reduced productivity compared to normal-times WFH.
We always consider the needs of developers, but we also tend to ask a lot of them (new perf, security, capabilities etc etc) in more normal situations, but I'd add this is a highented situation for all users and develers where everyone is requiring information and access to services like never before it makes sense to be very prudent in all of our rollouts.
Whilst I love NFC API, it's not critical at this moment where as ensure there are no (or as rew as possible) regressions is.
Wrapping up, it's a massive mix of needs right now from our own teams and users alike.
I want to say that I appreciate your team's decision and I especially appreciate your personal effort to answer questions here in public. I'm sure it's frustrating when people second guess important decisions during a stressful time. Just want you to know I (and I'm sure many others) see your effort and appreciate it.
> I don't understand. Regardless of COVID, they always need to consider the impact on developers.
Sure, but that impact might be somewhat more... impactful right now. This isn't that difficult. If you're a FB user, you probably saw last night nearly all of your friends reporting that their posts were being flagged as spam yesterday. That's because a bunch of people were sent home and the automated system took over. Staffs are being sent home and their ability to work effectively is reduced. The prospect of breaking changes and new bugs in the world's most popular web browser could put more strain on already strained teams that are struggling to keep up with both their current working environment and new challenges as they respond to the public health crisis. Removing that as a factor is a net benefit for those teams and for all of their users.
My ideal mix is either 80/20 or 60/40 remote/in-office. I have been 20/80 my entire career up to the CV outbreak (1 day WFH minimum every week).
I prefer 100% WFH to that, but I dislike not going to the office at all. This is my first time being 100% WFH for this long -- my previous max was a full week.
