On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 1:08 AM Matt Farina <matt.far...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Three things I've considered: > > 1) when a company runs a project without much publicly documented process > but does as they choose, isn't that a sign of a company run project? > Ian mentioned that "Google" as a company doesn't actually choose to do a lot. The Go team is largely autonomous in their decision making and isn't being influenced by executives. So, to put it another way: If the only role the company plays is to provide paychecks to some Go developers, does it actually exercise or have any significant level of ownership? > 2) The go team at Google has had processes that are not public. One > example is the proposal review process. There has long been a group at > Google that decides these. For a long time this wasn't documented publicly > but happened. The public documentation on it came after the decision on go > modules. > Note that the documentation still says "some members of the Go team". Not "the Google-employed members of the Go team" (i.e. not everyone at Google has access to those meetings) and not "a Google-internal set of people" (i.e. people outside Google aren't categorically excluded from them). A charitable interpretation of this might be that some members of the Go team started, at some point, to semi-regularly meet informally to churn through the proposals. As it was informal and as everyone involved was working at the same company and was paid for this work, it made sense to do so during business hours in a meeting room at the office. When a project came up that was driven by people outside of Google, the need arose to specify better how proposals are reviewed and decided on, so the previously informal or semi-formal meeting was codified. Personally, I don't see how this charitable interpretation would contradict claims that any process can be opened to people outside of Google when the need arises. On the contrary, it seems to confirm that; after all, the meeting was formalized and publicized based on the need of including outsiders in the process. > 3) how has no one outside of Google qualified for the core team > I don't think this is true at all. There are several people who got hired into the Go team from outside of Google directly. See above hypothetical (and Ian's point): Google tends to try to hire people they think are qualified to work on Go. And it tends to succeed. Seems a pretty reasonable answer to that question. > and why aren't more companies who are heavy users in on owning it? > As a concrete example: Cloudflare pretty heavily uses Go. When a cloudflare-employee started stepping up to work more and more on the Go crypto stack, they got hired by Google to do it fulltime. At least from the outside, that seems to what happened with Filippo Valsorda. So, again, the explanation Ian gave seems pretty reasonable: Doing core work on Go is a fulltime job, Google seems willing to foot the bill for that fulltime job and people seem willing to let them. > I've heard stories (not mine to share) of more outside engagement not > happening for Go. > > > I'm not nocking on Google for doing what they do. It's a business > decision. I get it and I can understand a climate where it might change. > I'm just trying to be aware of what's happening. > > I do sometimes wonder what the small decision making core team would look > like with people from multiple companies with differing concerns on it. > But, that's just wondering. > > I use Go. Gonna start something new in go soon, too. > > -- > Matt Farina > mattfarina.com > > Go in Practice <http://goinpracticebook.com/> - A book of Recipes for the > Go programming language. > > Code Engineered <https://codeengineered.com/> - A blog on cloud, web, and > software development. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAEkBMfEVzrqYPoDDRgVtJFL9mL9gSLLv6usC0guPB-RJLDdTSA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
