The reasons for this are actually kinda fascinating (at least in a “root cause analysis of an engineering disaster” way).
The way performance evaluation works at Google very heavily takes into account what things your (and if you are a manager, your team) have delivered recently. Maintenance doesn’t really count, so if you want to get a good performance review (and promotions, not be first to go when it’s redundancy time etc) you have to be doing “new”. You can get away with ongoing evolutionary development of a thing if it’s a product or if it’s visible and important, but the unsexy, unglamorous things like looking after small corners of the developer ecosystem that (until very recently) weren’t strategic priorities is a very good way to kill your career.
Yep, sadly this is the case and it’s not even just Google, it’s the whole of Silicon Valley. You’d think that given the size of Google, they’d be so big that they could avoid this, but nope, they have to always deliver for their shareholders, so they need a culture that creates new products constantly. Still though, I would love a small team that got to focus on the old unglamorous stuff and didn’t have to worry.
