DX to me is reduced cognitive load. We are all operating at the limits of abilities, better DX expands the scope of what we can accomplish in our weeks and months.
Often things sold as DX are absolute garbage dead end schlock, like a Flash to iphone app builder or something. So I get some of the indifference (google's not yours). But I don't think we should think of it that way.
Just on your last paragraph, I think it started that way. That Firebase would be the competent general problem solver that you might need to break out of. Firebase and App Engine have tended to weaken over time, so that you needed to move to GCP more often. Ideally Firebase would get more powerful, cover more cases, and have higher quota limits. Instead it feels like they are being degraded or abandoned rather than embraced.
I've never gotten the impression that at google DX was lionized. Examples of doing this well culturally are pre-Salesforce Heroku, Github, vscode, and Stripe.
A github/heroku style culture doing GCP would crush all competitors. Instead if anything GCP is a little worse than AWS.
> Just on your last paragraph, I think it started that way. That Firebase would be the competent general problem solver that you might need to break out of. Firebase and App Engine have tended to weaken over time, so that you needed to move to GCP more often. Ideally Firebase would get more powerful, cover more cases, and have higher quota limits. Instead it feels like they are being degraded or abandoned rather than embraced.
I think I mentioned this on another thread, but the "weakening" you mention is "strengthening integrations with other parts of the platform." I think the general thought here is that an App Engine or a Firebase is a local maximum, and in exchange for trading off deeper integration, there is a platform wide global maximum that is achievable.
Pre-acquisition Heroku, GitHub, Firebase, etc. all were able to achieve local maxima, which led to acquisition, and subsequent attempts to globally optimize.
Dev tools is a brutal business: if you're lucky, 80% of your customers cost you money, 15% break even, and 5% are where 80-90% of your revenue comes from. A better DX typically only gets you more customers in the bottom 95% bracket, because it's easier to onboard people who can get from 0 to 1 than from 10 to 100 (or 100 to 1000). Deeper integrations into the features on the far side of the curve tend to get prioritized and look a lot like what folks here are discussing as negatives.
> I've never gotten the impression that at google DX was lionized. Examples of doing this well culturally are pre-Salesforce Heroku, Github, vscode, and Stripe.
It's not, for the reasons others have pointed out about people being smart enough to figure out the solution regardless of the DX, etc.
I'm curious if you think it must be the case DX should be so cloud-specific. Could someone (maybe like my company, withcoherence.com) create a broadly "good" engineering workflow for different kinds of cloud apps, and map that onto different cloud substrates? I don't have your degree of experience with the internal culture at GCP but I would have to agree it seems to be less customer-obsessed than the examples you provide.
It's clear that AWS is more popular, especially with startups, but my experience is that GCP is better, if viewed through a user experience and product quality lens, outside of a few notable exceptions such as SSL certs (ACM) and some NoSQL DB products.
DX to me is reduced cognitive load. We are all operating at the limits of abilities, better DX expands the scope of what we can accomplish in our weeks and months.
Often things sold as DX are absolute garbage dead end schlock, like a Flash to iphone app builder or something. So I get some of the indifference (google's not yours). But I don't think we should think of it that way.
Just on your last paragraph, I think it started that way. That Firebase would be the competent general problem solver that you might need to break out of. Firebase and App Engine have tended to weaken over time, so that you needed to move to GCP more often. Ideally Firebase would get more powerful, cover more cases, and have higher quota limits. Instead it feels like they are being degraded or abandoned rather than embraced.
I've never gotten the impression that at google DX was lionized. Examples of doing this well culturally are pre-Salesforce Heroku, Github, vscode, and Stripe.
A github/heroku style culture doing GCP would crush all competitors. Instead if anything GCP is a little worse than AWS.