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.
They have no heart or soul, only brief flickers of “try” followed by “squirrel!”
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.