With his blog post, Prasanna was equally critical of Google's coding culture. But, he says, this was a function of the company's size. "The nature of a large company like Google is such that they reward consistent, focused performance in one area. This sounds good on the surface, but if you're a hacker at heart like me, it's really the death knell for your career.
"It means that staking out a territory and defending it is far more important than doing what it takes to get a project to its goal," he said. "Engineers who simply staked out one component in the codebase, and rejected patches so they could maintain complete control over design and implementation details had much greater rewards."
Prasanna says that he voices these opinions without bitterness. And his post does have a rather even-handed tone. In the past month or two, he says, eight of his colleagues who worked on Google Wave have left the company. Which is hardly surprising. A year after unveiling Google Wave, Google killed development on the project.
Lars Rasmussen – who designed the original Google Maps with his brother Jens before running the Google Wave project – has now defected to Facebook.
"It means that staking out a territory and defending it is far more important than doing what it takes to get a project to its goal," he said. "Engineers who simply staked out one component in the codebase, and rejected patches so they could maintain complete control over design and implementation details had much greater rewards."
Prasanna says that he voices these opinions without bitterness. And his post does have a rather even-handed tone. In the past month or two, he says, eight of his colleagues who worked on Google Wave have left the company. Which is hardly surprising. A year after unveiling Google Wave, Google killed development on the project.
Lars Rasmussen – who designed the original Google Maps with his brother Jens before running the Google Wave project – has now defected to Facebook.
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