[HN Gopher] Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the I...
___________________________________________________________________
Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Matrix
flight search app
Author : hnburnsy
Score : 340 points
Date : 2021-12-03 01:47 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.flyertalk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.flyertalk.com)
| andrethegiant wrote:
| > using newer web technologies like Angular
|
| surprised that they're only replacing the frontend, and with a
| framework that many wouldn't consider new
| ricardobayes wrote:
| This is probably a hard challenge, because I assume the data is
| semi-scraped.
| tincholio wrote:
| Why? Google owns ITA...
| danielam wrote:
| "The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and
| seat availability, provided electronically over private
| networks by the 800 or so airlines of the world. The data is
| not directly available to the general public and access often
| must be negotiated with individual airlines. Flight data is
| updated daily or occasionally more frequently in the case of
| unexpected cancellations. Prices are updated about ten times a
| day, and seat availability continuously. A large portion of the
| flight, price and seat availability data, called published
| data, is used by all the major search engines, but a
| significant amount of private data is restricted." [0]
|
| [0] http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
| com...
| itamarst wrote:
| I used to work at ITA, and no, it's not semi-scraped, it's
| doing same calculations airline reservation system does to
| approve a fare.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| What is the history of ITA Matrix? I thought it was bought by
| Kayak.com. Was that just a license to some data or something?
| discordance wrote:
| Google bought ITA Software:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Kayak licensed/used QPX from ITA back when they were an
| independent company. Google acquired ITA and as part of the
| regulatory approval had to operate the APIs for at least the
| next few years. Kayak continued with QPX, but slowly shifted
| over to using Amadeus whenever they could. I imagine they've
| completely switched by now, given how bad the Google <-> kayak
| relationship is.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| >how bad the Google <-> kayak relationship is
|
| How come? Is it related to SEO?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| ITA and kayak were organizationally close in a lot of ways.
| Kayak brought lots of useful data relationships to the
| table and ITA brought their technological wizardry. Google
| was a direct (and hostile) competitor to kayak, who led the
| anti-trust charge to stop the acquisition. The post-
| acquisition hostility is just the standard SV playbook
| stuff like prioritizing Google products in search results
| and offering amazing incentives to build market share.
|
| I have no particular insight here beyond a general interest
| in the industry though.
| gertrunde wrote:
| That's slightly frustrating to hear that Kayak are getting
| messed about by Google, as Kayak is about the only flight
| search tool that I've used that suits the airport situation
| in the UK.
|
| (e.g. 4-5 international airports reachable within 1 hour
| drive, another 2-3 reachable within 2 hours drive,
| flexibility to search across all of them).
|
| The other flight search tools that I've used might, at most,
| allow one alternative airport.
| m-s wrote:
| Google Flights allows multiple alternative airports as well
| F30 wrote:
| It seems that (at least the new) ITA Matrix Search can do
| that as well: Once you select an airport (or city) as
| origin or destination, it gets added to a list of possible
| locations.
|
| Being used to Kayak's comma syntax, I did not find this
| intuitive at first. But in fact, it is pretty convenient
| and powerful.
| esprehn wrote:
| The deprecated frontend stack they reference would seem to be
| GWT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit
|
| So they're rebuilding the app in TypeScript with Angular instead
| of with Java+GWT.
| echelon wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the current Matrix website implementation
| relies on an internally deprecated web platform slated for
| retirement.
|
| GWT, as you suggest, is definitely a dinosaur.
|
| > rewrite Matrix using newer web technologies like Angular,
|
| How long until Angular goes the way of GWT, though? It's not
| exactly a beloved technology. Not quite the same level of pain
| as GWT, but Angular codebases aren't something I'd like to
| maintain either.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| It is a beloved technology. Just not by you. It's ok.
| amzn-throw wrote:
| In 2014 most of the AWS console was written in GWT, and I
| worked on one of the services. Honestly? I kind of loved it.
| As a backend Java dev, it made a lot of sense to me, and I
| almost never had to touch any Javascript.
|
| Every service team at that time chose their own tech stack,
| and so sometimes I would hunt for ideas of how to implement
| something in other team's codebases, so I got to see the
| different tech stacks.
|
| For a brief moment Angular was really popular, and then
| fizzled out just as fast. For me, it was the worst of all the
| options by far.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Kotlinjs is a real successor to gwt - it even has mostly
| working ide debugging. Use kvision if you're going to
| experiment with it.
| jvolkman wrote:
| The entire GCP console is written in Angular, so it's
| probably got a bit of staying power.
| iaml wrote:
| Is it? I've been interviewing with them recently and they
| told me they're using their own internal framework.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Well, we had rumours of Google shutting down GCP not that
| long ago.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Were these rumors based on anything other than "Google
| will shut it down"? It is always the top comment no
| matter which product or service we are talking about, so
| it doesn't mean anything
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The exact framing was a statement that Google execs had
| given Cloud a deadline to reach a certain portion of the
| market, or it might lose funding.
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-
| set-202...
| lozenge wrote:
| "Lose funding" means "coast in maintenance mode" not shut
| down. One doesn't just shut down B2B services.
| sedachv wrote:
| Google acquired ITA in 2010. Cape Air switched their
| entire flight reservation/departure control system to
| ITA/Google in 2012. Google discontinued the system in
| 2013.
| speedgoose wrote:
| No it was based as ocdtrekkie said on supposedly internal
| leaks about Google wanting to be a leader soon or to give
| up the cloud market.
| baby wrote:
| They're making so much money out of it that your comment
| makes no sense.
| arnvald wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. They don't reveal separate
| numbers for GCP, but they put it under "Google Cloud"
| umbrella with Google Docs and other products. The
| revenues are growing, but they're still losing money:
| https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/alphabet-earnings-google-
| clou...
| speedgoose wrote:
| It was a joke. The rumours were real though.
| hsod wrote:
| What??
| jaywalk wrote:
| I've never understood all of the Angular hate on HN. I do
| understand the fact that it's very much the "corporate"
| option like .NET is, but that doesn't make it bad. I actually
| really like it and find it very intuitive.
| curryst wrote:
| In my short time working with it, I found it frustrating to
| debug. Using an incorrect tag meant it would simply be
| ignored with no indication of why my thing doesn't work,
| and I found tracing issues back to their HTML tag to be
| annoying.
|
| The equivalent React/Vue/etc would throw a Javascript
| exception. Stacktraces aren't the best debugging
| experience, but they're functional.
|
| I also think Angular inherits from a more traditional UI
| lineage of composing styling on an element, which I find
| less clear than something like React that has a more
| backend-y development flow. That's just personal
| preference, but I started on the backend so Angular's
| "build an element and then wire it up" makes less sense to
| me than React's "figure out the data flow and then build
| elements on that" style.
|
| I don't find it showstopping. I wouldn't turn down a job
| because they use Angular. If someone asked me what
| framework to use, I just probably wouldn't suggest Angular.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| > Using an incorrect tag meant it would simply be ignored
| with no indication of why my thing doesn't work
|
| No. It will not even compile.
| unionpivo wrote:
| We wrote Application (medical) with GWT in 2010, and we still
| maintain it, occasionally adding new features.
|
| Once you figure out build step and magic incitation to make
| debugger work (and docment it), It's really not bad,
|
| and maintaining is easier then most other "older" codebases I
| come across. Old rubby/php/javascrip(jQuery/whatever) project
| is usually pain because they all use tons of external
| packages/libs that you have to update find new ones etc every
| time you take project off the shelf. With GWT and Java it
| just works, because we didn't use that many other libraries
| and Java libraries generally put a lot more effort in
| backwards compatibility.
|
| So no I would not start new projects in GWT anymore, but I
| think that current react projects will be a lot harder to
| maintain in 10 years, than GWT is.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is not beloved on HN, on Java and .NET shops is the
| usually the SPA everyone goes for, given the similarities
| with MVC frameworks, and it was build from scratch for
| TypeScript, not something that some comunity person is
| writing type libraries for.
| xeromal wrote:
| This here. Big corporate enterprises use Angular in their
| rewrites in my experience as a .NET dev.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I have no idea why would anyone choose Angular (or Vue) as a
| JS framework in 2021. React has clearly won this ballgame
| (for now).
| flipperto wrote:
| That is absolutely not true. While React has a big piece of
| the market right now, it has not "clearly won this
| ballgame". Both Vue and Svelte are very much active in the
| industry and gaining terrain fast.
|
| Frontend development is an extremely fast moving field and
| claiming a "clear winner" makes no sense.
|
| Having said that, I agree that Angular may not be the best
| option in the general sense, but given that it is a Google-
| backed framework, they probably have the best talent
| available to build tools efficiently.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Look at how many jobs being offered in angular, vue or
| svelte vs react, in any given freelance job portal. It's
| 1 to 5 at best. If you want to punish your project and
| have issues hiring from a limited pool, sure go ahead.
| flipperto wrote:
| Yes, most current job offerings may be for React, but
| Angular had that spot a couple of years ago and ruby on
| rails was the cool new thing to work with before that. My
| point is that this is not a permanent thing. Technologies
| change, preferences change. React will be replaced with
| better tools for the job (IMO Vue and Svelte are better
| designed than React), I am sure of that. Besides, if you
| are going to hire by limiting your pool by frameworks,
| you are doing things wrong. Any decent developer that can
| work in an Angular codebase should have no problem with
| React, Svelte or Vue.
| jeremycarter wrote:
| Angular not going anywhere. Just because you don't use it
| doesn't mean it has no value
| vegetish wrote:
| You still can't do a search with origin from multiple countries,
| which annoys me. If I want to find the cheapest ticket for a
| cross-atlantic trip, it would be very helpful to have such a
| feature.
| qeternity wrote:
| You used to be able to. It was brilliant, you could do a quick
| relocation flight, even make it a nice little first stop, and
| then get a nice long haul somewhere else.
|
| Ah the good old days.
| glup wrote:
| Kiwi used to have this in their map view -- you could select a
| very large circular region regardless of country as the origin
| -- but it seems like they got rid of it.
|
| This was by far the most useful tool to identify cheap segments
| and cut down the space of options.
| dainiusse wrote:
| IMO one thing they failed (and looking over this thread looks so)
| is that it is not immediately clear what that "Matrix" is here.
| synthc wrote:
| Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.
| OAlexander wrote:
| You have to see it for yourself?
| trollied wrote:
| It's right there in the article!
| https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?
| tallanvor wrote:
| How did they fail? They were posting to the flyertalk forums, a
| site where Matrix is still understood to be the Matrix search
| engine provided by ITA - a company Google purchased years ago.
|
| It's fine if you don't have the same expectation when referring
| to Matrix here on HN, but you can't expect them to cater to
| your understanding on every site.
| baby wrote:
| Ahh, so not the chat protocol
| robobro wrote:
| I was misled too, baby.
| walls wrote:
| This is about something people will actually use.
| fulafel wrote:
| I wonder what's the co2 impact of contributing to a thing like
| this. You're helping sell more flights in the end.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Was this that semifamous Google common lisp project?
| caslon wrote:
| ITA Common Lisp project, but yeah. Google let it rapidly
| deteriorate after they purchased it.
| e40 wrote:
| > Google let it rapidly deteriorate after they purchased it.
|
| Is that true? They have a team of people working on SBCL and
| at ELS a few years after the purchase by Google they were
| talking about SBCL work to support the app.
| auvi wrote:
| For a while ITA was (probably is) a showcase of Common Lisp
| in production. But I think these days Grammarly is the one.
| danielam wrote:
| The choice of Common Lisp is less flattering than one might
| hope because it was largely the result of familiarity (Carl
| de Marcken's doctoral thesis was in computational
| linguistics and he was most comfortable using Lisp). When I
| asked him (c. 2007) whether he would have chosen Common
| Lisp again, he said that he wouldn't have and that he would
| have chosen Java instead. I don't recall any mention of
| technical reasons during that exchange (maybe static
| analysis?), but I do vaguely recall hiring considerations.
|
| (Also, while much of the "business logic" was written in
| Lisp, a good chunk of low-level stuff was written in C++.)
| thesausageking wrote:
| ITA Matrix is still my go-to for booking flights:
|
| https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
|
| Playing with this version, it's a little easier to use, but I
| don't see any functionality not in the regular version. Still, if
| it means Google is investing in Matrix, that's a good thing. I
| always worry at some point it will be killed.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| The speed and usability of this website is so refreshing
| compared to all the other flight search sites. All the input
| boxes are normal and shown on screen at once, the calendar and
| airport selection autocompleter dropdowns work instantly with
| zero lag or animations, and then it shows the results after 2
| seconds of processing time.
|
| The new design in the OP is still decent compared to the
| alternative websites, but slower and harder to use compared to
| this original design (to me, who had never heard of Matrix
| before).
|
| It's a shame that this is going to be gone soon.
| notyourwork wrote:
| > https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
|
| Error: Service Unavailable for me.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Try it again; it loads for me. I'm guessing it got hugged to
| death by everyone checking it out.
| traek wrote:
| > Still, if it means Google is investing in Matrix, that's a
| good thing. I always worry at some point it will be killed.
|
| This isn't Google investing in Matrix, this is a group of
| people who work at Google using their spare time to rewrite the
| product so it doesn't get taken offline.
|
| If anything, the lack of a dedicated team or resources is a
| strong indicator that Matrix will be on the chopping block at
| some point in the future.
| ragall wrote:
| There isn't a dedicated team because it's not a business
| product, but internally it's considered very important
| because it essentially allows power users to beta test our
| backend. For that reason alone it will be kept around and
| supported indefinitely.
| qeternity wrote:
| As someone who has done some of the most extreme/risky forms of
| travel hacking (serious FD's with 1X + sX for those familiar with
| lingo), Matrix lost a huge amount of its value when it disallowed
| searches that start from multiple countries. It's tedious to have
| to break up a search. Of course, this is not necessarily what
| they intended it for, so I can't really complain too much.
|
| And covid uncertainty these days has made proper flight hacking a
| bit of a pastime.
| vianneychevalie wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the lingo, or point in a direction for
| learning?
| splonk wrote:
| Normally I'd try Flyertalk for finding out what abbreviations
| mean, but this article probably explains well enough what OP
| is talking about.
|
| https://princeoftravel.com/blog/airline-secrets-what-is-
| fuel...
| [deleted]
| supernova87a wrote:
| Thanks for that example!
|
| Can I ask where is good to trade info and stories about this
| stuff? I have been on FT for a long time, but never came across
| this level of fare exploration. The extent of my enthusiasm is
| years ago jumping on things like the Icelandair or BA WT fare
| mistakes. Never actually searching / generating fare loopholes.
|
| Maybe I'm reading the wrong forums. Even just to hear about it
| interests me (to know what I'm missing out on)...
| deanCommie wrote:
| Something I never understood about Google's 20% time concept...do
| people at Google not have deadlnes?
|
| Like it's just assumed that every project estimate will be added
| 20% to account for 20% time?
|
| Like it's great when you're a market gorilla dominating the
| competition in search, but how does it work when you're #3 in the
| cloud and trying desperately to compete with Azure and AWS from
| behind. Do those people get 20% time too? Seems like a recipe for
| always staying #3...
| jointpdf wrote:
| Maybe there is a Pareto principle (80/20 rule) effect with
| these side projects: for these, you get 80% of the benefit (vs.
| working on it full-time) with only 20% of the hours. And for
| the main gig, maybe it's 90% of the benefit for 80% of the
| hours. So, 1.7 for the price of 1? Sounds like free utils to
| me.
|
| Plus: positive effects on employee morale/retention, skill and
| network building, (pseudo?) R+D / asset development, etc.
|
| Disclosure: I'm far too dumb to work at Google. Discount
| accordingly.
| tester34 wrote:
| I believe it's form investing into your employees
|
| People will mess with fancy tech, crazy projects and not only
| learn from it, but also feel less burnout
| uf00lme wrote:
| Also stops the urge for devs to push for fancy tech in
| production, or at least until it is demo from a 'learning
| project'.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Former Googler. I can't recall ever being told when or what to
| do. Management is more backwards-looking and individually-
| directed, at least where I was sitting. I had to write about
| what I did every year, and then people would say whether that
| was good or not. Organizational goals were objective and
| coarse, such as cut build times by half by end of year, or
| whatever.
| curryst wrote:
| Google owns the stuff you make during 20% time, iirc, so they
| use it as a feeder for new products.
|
| Allegedly (I can't verify, but can't see why they'd lie) GMail,
| Google Maps and AdSense were all born out of people's 20% time
| and Google just swooped in and turned them into full on
| products.
|
| It might be worth staying #3 in cloud if they could pull off
| products like that again. I can't help but notice that those
| products are all old, though.
| pflanze wrote:
| From all I can tell, Google Maps was not started from within
| Google, but started in early 2003 as Where 2 Technologies [1]
| and was purchased by Google in October 2004 [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_de
| vel..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Eilstrup_Rasmussen
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_maps#History
| gusmd wrote:
| Maybe they are assuming that their engineers can output 25%
| more than Azure's and AWS'? :)
| deanCommie wrote:
| Even if they're right, that means that they'd only be
| catching up at 5% faster than them, rather than 25...
| wmf wrote:
| 20% of a 10X engineer is two whole normal engineers!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Why? That just means you need ~20% more people - a bit more
| because people don't scale like that, but Google has to scale
| regardless so it's not much difference. And this is an org that
| allegedly creates projects that will never go anywhere just to
| keep talent in house and busy, so I'd say they certainly can
| afford 20% overhead.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You also have to consider that not everyone takes advantage
| of it.
|
| And that furthermore the 20% projects can have value to the
| company. Wasn't Gmail someone's 20% project?
| deanCommie wrote:
| You're still taking a 20% penalty hit to your productivity.
| And if you're 3rd in the market and actually care about
| getting to #1 (Maybe GCP doesn't), that's a massive
| impediment.
| visarga wrote:
| The 20% time rule might be useful in attracting good
| developers and keeping them from leaving too soon. So in the
| end it might be more profitable for the company to pay people
| to play around.
| tmerr wrote:
| I've never worked anywhere that deadlines were set with enough
| precision that +/- 20% would be distinguishable from noise. I
| think it would be lost to more significant factors like
| differences in employee productivity and unexpected roadblocks
| dmitriid wrote:
| > do people at Google not have deadlnes
|
| I've yet to see anyone work 100% of their work time.
|
| So yeah, it's better to codify "procrastination time" as 20%
| and motivate people to not feel guilty when working on
| something different.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I would imagine that a lot of the 20% projects end up being
| incorporated in, or part of something profitable. Adsense, for
| example, was a side project.
|
| From what I understand the rule is that you get to choose what
| you work on, but it has to align with the company.
|
| So what you end up with is that your most talented/intelligent
| staff end up working on, and learning about things that they
| think are interesting and will help the company.
| wmf wrote:
| I've heard that in the last ten years or so 20% time is on top
| of the 100% time for normal work. So no, deadlines aren't
| padded to account for it.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Full disclosure: I'm a former Googler.
|
| 20% time varies widely across the company, and the ability for
| an engineer to take their 20% time isn't as sacrosanct as it
| once was. On many teams it's discretionary depending on current
| team load (though on the teams I was on, generally granted if
| only as a matter of maintaining morale). Not everyone has a 20%
| project all of the time.
|
| People still have deadlines, but the amount of work you commit
| to doing for a particular deadline is scaled by people's
| availability - and that includes any 20% work.
|
| It's generally not useful to think about project estimates as
| padding 20% extra time - because deadlines tend to be exogenous
| (holiday seasons, launch events, etc.) and less negotiable, and
| more as scope of work that can be committed to in a particular
| period, which is something you actually have control over.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I'm on a similar plan with 10% (not at Google!). It's not
| really deadline sensitive. The 10% projects tend to be long-
| term so I can easily move them off my schedule for a while and
| spend more time on them after.
|
| The whole thing is optional for us anyway and in fact needs to
| be approved every 3 years.
|
| And I'm not really 100% occupied at work anyway. If I were, how
| would I fit in learning, networking etc?
| dakial1 wrote:
| In my early years I worked at a airline commerce redesign with
| people from Amadeus (migrating from their e-retail to WDS, great
| team). It was an awesome experience, as the channel had still a
| low penetration (2% of sales) on the airline overall sales and
| the team left lot of the product ownership on my hands (an
| external consultant). I remember playing a lot with the search
| features including allowing pax to:
|
| - Search for a date and no destination to get the best deals for
| that range
|
| - Search for a destination but no date and get a month matrix
| with the best rates to travel to that destination.
|
| Of course they were barely used by paxs, but I liked very much to
| leave these kind of easter eggs for more advanced users.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Does this statement
|
| "dedicated Google "20% time" volunteers"
|
| strike anyone as a bit "army intelligence" like?
|
| Maybe I don't understand, these are Google employees, right? Why
| are they volunteers too? Google gives employees a day long
| sabbatical once a week, thus 20%. Aren't they paid to work then?
| What's so dedicated about their offsets?
|
| Wouldn't it be better to say something like
|
| "A subset of Google employees chose to use their weekly
| sabbatical time to retire technical debt for Matrix"?
| marcan_42 wrote:
| By "volunteering" I assume they mean the fact that you can
| choose what to do with that time, assuming you actually have
| it, within the context of the company. So it is an actual
| _choice_ you have as to what to work on, which isn 't usually
| the case with your normal job duties.
|
| Whether those hours end up being unpaid overtime ("120% time")
| or not varies wildly from time to time and team to team, in my
| experience there. I had a real 20% project while I was there ~8
| years ago (porting modern Linux to a vendor device Google used
| internally), but I also stayed late quite often too; I can't
| say I know for sure how it added up in the end.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| When you get evaluated during performance reviews, do your
| 20% time projects count? If not, it seems like you are just
| doing a side project in your free time but giving any IP that
| results to Google. If it does count toward perf, then cool,
| it's nice to have complete autonomy for that 20% of your
| workload.
| overeater wrote:
| Sounds like this is a term used to make them happy about
| working additional paid time on a Google-owned product. I
| mean, if they spent this volunteer time (even if paid) on a
| public good, I could appreciate that, but choosing to do paid
| work on your own company's money-making products is not
| volunteering, it's just regular work but you choose what to
| work on during 20% of your time.
| danans wrote:
| > but choosing to do paid work on your own company's money-
| making products is not volunteering, it's just regular work
| but you choose what to work on during 20% of your time.
|
| Disclosure: Google employee, opinion my own.
|
| You are right, but that blog post is using volunteer in the
| weaker (but nonetheless common) meaning of "someone who
| raises their hand to do something". 20% time, when done
| properly, is more of an employee wellness and career/skill
| building perk. It is like your employer giving you paid
| time to take a class or training that is related to your
| job.
| onion2k wrote:
| What other companies never seem to understand about "Google's
| 20% time" is that, allegedly, as I don't work there, it wasn't
| really 8 hours out of your contracted 40 hours, but more like
| 16 hours out of the 80 hours you chose to work this week for
| most Googlers. People working on things in 20% time are
| volunteers in the sense that they're doing extra work
| voluntarily, rather than going home. It's not like they're
| doing this stuff during "work hours."
| ivalm wrote:
| No, Googlers I know def don't work 80 hours...
| xvector wrote:
| Some Googlers I know barely work 20 hours!
|
| Anyone have tips for finding a chill team at Google? Passed
| all interview rounds last time but decided to join another
| company. Might give it another go if I can get one of those
| <20hr gigs...
| zdkl wrote:
| Step 1: don't post on HN about how you want to minimise
| your work-time I guess?
| zerr wrote:
| The whole HN is dedicated to minimizing work-times
| actually.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Bighetti's team is chill :)
| JaggerJo wrote:
| can confirm. We built a potato canon last month.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Not payments.
| zerr wrote:
| Golang team? I've heard the plan is to slack off next 10
| years to add pattern matching in Go 3.
| onion2k wrote:
| I've only heard about it from ex-Googlers so perhaps it's
| different now. 20% time was introduced a long time ago
| (before Google went public?) and 80 hour weeks were _a lot_
| more common back then...
| pram wrote:
| They had something like this when I worked at Atlassian,
| which was copied from Google (like most everything there)
|
| You could pick a thing to work on outside your normal job and
| they'd "give" you time. However you had to basically justify
| it to your manager. This also hilariously ended up in having
| to plan OKR style achievements for your spare time project.
| So it was another, voluntary layer of micromanaging crap
| added over your real job.
| mateuszf wrote:
| > This also hilariously ended up in having to plan OKR
| style achievements for your spare time project.
|
| Indeed that's really funny in an absurd way.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| Haha most Googlers I know work closer to 30 hours a week.
| deadmutex wrote:
| Two questions: How long have they been in that position?
| Have they advanced recently?
|
| Genuinely curious.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| Once you get to senior you can coast forever and no one
| will bother you as long as you're meeting expectations,
| which gets easier and easier once you know the company
| culture. Anyone with 5+ years of industry experience or
| 2+ years at Google can figure out how to coast on 30
| hours a week if they want. There's 100,000 employees, no
| one notices. Ads is a seemingly endless firehose of
| revenue so the bottom line is never threatened by your
| laziness.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| You know some hard working ones then.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Hence the way I've heard it referred to as "120% time."
| skybrian wrote:
| It's hard to say for such a large company with people in so
| many countries, but I doubt all that many Googlers work much
| more than full time. Many have families.
| skybrian wrote:
| This is salaried work so pay is unchanged. Whether or not you
| work more than you would otherwise depends on how disciplined
| you are about it.
| jonp888 wrote:
| It looks powerful, however since it doesn't seem to include any
| results for Ryanair or Easyjet it's pretty much useless for
| short/medium haul trips in Europe.
|
| I use azair.com for that, although it seems to be quite
| technologically primitive behind the scenes(complex searches take
| a _long_ time).
| Calchas_ wrote:
| Yes, Ryanair and EasyJet do not participate in global
| reservation systems, so ITA doesn't have access to them.
| ragall wrote:
| The QPX infra can source data from the airlines themselves so
| that's not the issue. Ryanair and Easyjet don't want to give
| their data to Google.
| jhncls wrote:
| With Trabber you can choose "nearby" airports for either
| departure and/or destination airport. It includes Ryanair,
| Easyjet and many smaller European airlines.
|
| [0]: https://www.trabber.es/en
| m-s wrote:
| If you search for flights to "QPX", you get a flappy bird clone
| flipperto wrote:
| There's other nice easter egg in the url for that query
| https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/||||----BA
| tata71 wrote:
| So not the federated/decentralized comms protocol, then.
|
| Shucks.
| lovelearning wrote:
| I had the opposite reaction. The idea of Google employees
| rewriting a decentralized comms system scared me. Relieved to
| find out this is some other Matrix.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes same here.. No good could come of that. Perhaps at the
| start they'll contribute some valuable code, but then they
| will gain influence and steer the project away from this
| pesky decentralisation.
|
| Though I doubt it's on Google's radar so far as a serious
| competitor.
| wmf wrote:
| There's already Conduit.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| ITA for a long time was the "poster boy" exemplar case whenever
| anyone asked whether Lisp was being used for anything big in the
| real world.
|
| I worked for Orbitz during the era when ITA was still
| independent, and we used their flight search software in our
| backend. ("QPX" might have been its product name, that used Lisp,
| but been a while.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| ITA should instead be the poster child of clueless computer
| science stunts that actually are not that helpful. The fact
| that ITA can find and suggest that you could do this trip at a
| higher price but with a 24-hour layover in Charlotte, or with a
| 48-hour layover in Charlotte, or with a 96-hour layover in
| Charlotte, ... Someone with good taste should have stopped
| these crazed graph theorists before they reached the keyboard.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| Thought it meant the browser addon
| TowerTall wrote:
| I thought it was the movie
| andreyf wrote:
| Too good to be true!
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I thought it was the protocol.
| sigg3 wrote:
| The new Wave?
| robobro wrote:
| How is Matrix[0] like Apache Wave?
|
| [0] - http://matrix.org/
| tomhoward wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the
| go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers,
| points hackers, etc.
|
| It was built by ITA Software [1][2] in the early-mid 2000s (the
| earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 [3]) to test and
| showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. I once
| heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies
| had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that
| not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to
| justify making it a mainstream interface.
|
| Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010,
| was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder
| Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to
| find flights when travelling around the world for college
| debating competitions. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being
| more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly
| they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone
| company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down
| last year.
|
| It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product
| design concept being far superior to what's available in the
| mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough
| mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-
| supported service for those who love it. And far more than most
| other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure
| costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche
| products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team
| trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves).
|
| In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure
| and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some
| extent.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
|
| [2] https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-
| trave...
|
| [3] https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-
| sea...
| swalsh wrote:
| Hipmunk was the absolute best, I miss it everytime I have to
| search for a flight.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Hipmunk was the absolute best
|
| Not sure I would put it as strongly as that.
|
| Hipmunk was OK, one of "the better" free tools out there.
|
| But I'm afraid it never had anything on ITA Matrix. ITA
| always had copious amounts of extra special sauce.
|
| I extensively tried all competitors I could find (including
| Hipmunk) on a variety of real-world scenarios. Nothing ever
| came close to ITA and I was very worried indeed for its
| future when Google bought it.
| MAGZine wrote:
| Yeah, but you couldn't buy tickets on ITA which made its
| special sauce only go so far. What's the point of building
| the best schedule if its unpurchaseable, or unpurchaseable
| without a travel agent?
|
| Hipmunk actually let you use ITA syntax to search for very
| specific route constructions, which you could then buy.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Google is sometimes the same - presents an option for
| either calling an agent (never worked for me) or buying
| same flight for $20k. Then you go to SkyScanner and get
| same ticket for maybe 10% more but via dodgy-ish website.
|
| p.s. Google seems to be the worst at bait and switch, but
| that's different story.
| 1024core wrote:
| IIRC, ITA gave you the flight details in the special
| syntax (code) that travel agents use, and you could just
| give that code to a travel agent and they'd be able to
| buy that exact flight for you.
| radicality wrote:
| There's some sites that let you paste an itamatrix
| itinerary and show you places where you could potentially
| purchase it (eg https://bookwithmatrix.com/).
|
| If that doesn't work and you really want a specific
| itinerary, I've had good luck with amex travel concierge,
| where I provided them with copy-paste of ITA matrix and
| they made the booking.
| lars512 wrote:
| Looks like this tool also includes a "time bar" view that's
| in fact what Hipmunk was based off.
|
| Also looks like they're building a successor to Hipmunk
| called Flight Penguin: https://flightpenguin.com/
| telesilla wrote:
| Seems they will charge a subscription to access this - at
| first thought I wondered if this is the best option, and
| not just charge a per-leg fee like https://flightfox.com
| (who do concierge travel services and I love them) but I
| suppose, if you get the flight schedule you want, many
| people will instead jump and book direct with the airline.
| This can be good, if the flight aggregator is a behemoth
| and will not help you in case of problems, or bad if the
| airline is a behemoth.
| nefitty wrote:
| Airbnb's customer experience team used Hipmunk as a fallback
| for a long time. The last resort before just hanging up and
| promising a check was HotelTonight, until Airbnb acquired that.
|
| How did Hipmunk mess it up so bad? It was seriously one of the
| most pleasing web apps to use, even under time pressure.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Did Hipmunk 'mess it up'?
|
| The comment you replied to seems to have a fair assesment of
| why it failed
|
| >It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a
| product design concept being far superior to what's available
| in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot
| gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or
| even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far
| more than most other product categories, flight search has
| huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to
| economically sustain niche products (from grim personal
| experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel
| flight search product ourselves).
| nefitty wrote:
| If a business fails then that business messed it up.
| Ducki wrote:
| "flight search has huge infrastructure costs"
|
| Could you please elaborate? What makes a flight search so
| expensive?
| tomhoward wrote:
| Others have replied well but I'll add my own answer...
|
| In order for your flight search product to be useful, you
| need a database containing effectively every flight in the
| world - all the airlines, all the destinations - and you need
| to update it every time a fare or seat availability changes.
| Then you need optimized routing algorithms to find routes
| that accommodate a vast array of consumer preferences. So,
| there are giant costs just to get access to all the data in
| the first place, then write the code and run all the servers.
|
| ITA Software offered this as a service via an API, but since
| a couple of years after Google acquired them they stopped
| offering access to outsiders.
|
| Now the GDS companies (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) offer API
| products, but they are still very costly, so big transaction
| volumes are needed to justify it.
|
| There is now one way small/niche businesses can offer flight
| search and transactions fulfillment; a YC company called
| Duffel. They still only offer a narrow selection of airlines,
| but it's growing.
|
| Some other companies like Skyscanner offer access to their
| API, but only if it's in their interests (ie, if you generate
| sales for them; you can't make much revenue for yourself that
| way).
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Basically they are an AI travel agent.
|
| But travel agents died with the internet.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Business model changed, but travel agents are still
| active and in demand. (Source, spouse is a travel agent)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| My understanding is that the travel agency business has
| shifted more towards business and luxury customers rather
| than middle class people?
| mrkstu wrote:
| Sure, but plenty of those jobs still around. In fact
| they've been struggling with the rest of the market in
| filling positions. AmEx travel is constantly recruiting.
| sedachv wrote:
| The reason Google continued to offer API access after the
| acquisition was because a 5 year stipulation was in the
| contract to get it approved by the Department of Justice.
| Of course once the 5 years were up that was it. ITA had
| also built a reservation system for Air Canada. Air Canada
| never used it, but Cape Air switched in 2012. In 2013,
| Google discontinued it.
|
| The whole acquisition was a huge failure on the part the
| DoJ Antitrust Division.
| Marazan wrote:
| Flights are a big graph reachability problem with a mass of
| filters (cabin class, plane type, number of passengers etc)
|
| Directs are a trivial problem.
|
| 1-stop indirects is a simplish batch processing problem to
| produce an easily indexable data set.
|
| 2-stop indirects is a huge quantity of computing power.
| [deleted]
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Here's a excellent presentation by a co-founder of ITA
| Software to an MIT compsci course, entitled Computational
| Complexity of Air Travel Planning
|
| http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf
| [deleted]
| splonk wrote:
| The graph problem is huge (NP-complete in the full case). You
| can't reasonably cache things because segment availability
| changes a lot. Latencies on searches through the GDS may be
| much higher than you're used to in other domains. Due to all
| these factors and more, cost per query is quite high. And
| then on top of all that, conversions for flight searches are
| quite low and the reward for converting a search is on the
| order of single digit cents.
| dzdt wrote:
| Basically the problem is the airlines don't want good flight
| search so they erect barriers, right? Airlines prefer to have
| pricing and route info be opaque so they can keep people
| using higher price options. So the infrastructure costs are
| about fighting to get the information from people who don't
| want you to have it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| On the counter-side, if there are 300 seats on a plane, worth
| $100 each, and everyone does 10 flight searches before
| booking a flight, that means that your database needs to hold
| a few hundred bytes about prices, the plane, and departure
| time, and handle 3000 queries, and for that you get a chance
| to make a commission on $30k in revenue.
|
| There aren't many computing platforms that could offer a
| higher profit margin per byte stored or queried!
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Every single one of your numbers can be orders of magnitude
| off. Many people search without buying, there can be
| hundreds or thousands of fares for a single flight, and
| industry margins are razor thin. If you're lucky enough to
| actually get a commission (unlikely), your percentage will
| still be junk. Skyscanner (much bigger than you) is earning
| in the single digit percents and I have no doubt there's a
| cap in many of their agreements.
|
| Pretty much any other computing service has a better ROI.
| [deleted]
| rurban wrote:
| Results not viewable in Android Firefox. Cut off at the left
| side. Such is modern angular
| iakh wrote:
| Wanted to self plug a community project I maintain that continues
| to enhance ITA Matrix, Powertools[1] and see if anybody wanted to
| help port it over to this new front end. PRs accepted!
|
| 1. https://github.com/adamhwang/ita-matrix-powertools
| qeternity wrote:
| Whoa - crazy seeing you here. Hello from an old member of our
| old little Slack group.
|
| <end of line>
|
| @iakh is a legend!
| aneutron wrote:
| It's far from mobile compatible. But I'll try it once I'm on
| desktop.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Awesome. I hope this sticks around for a while. Matrix has long
| been the best way to find flexible date, multi-leg, and multi-
| carrier trips.
| supahfly_remix wrote:
| Is there anything similar for hotels?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I want to search for a flight with as many multi-day stops as
| possible, while keeping the price low. Whenever there is a
| stopover, I'd like it to be 24 hours plus, so I can explore that
| city.
|
| Ie. give me the most circuitous route, so I can explore the
| world.
|
| Yet nobody seems to have done this.
| krrrh wrote:
| You can do this sort of thing in ITA Matrix, it still takes a
| lot of work to craft the itinerary and learn the syntax, but I
| have used it to do exactly what you suggest, and found cheap 36
| hour bonus stayovers.
| evacchi wrote:
| I don't know how good is but you may want to look at
| airwander.com
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Ooof I was worried for a moment that this was about the Matrix
| chat network.
|
| I definitely don't want google messing around with that. It
| should stay unbiased and decentralised.
| xvector wrote:
| All volunteers will have biases. I _guarantee_ you that you
| have people from corporations you despise working on free
| software you love.
| slimsag wrote:
| Yes, much better if instead they keep in their own lane and use
| their own chat networks / protocols.
|
| ..right?
| ptman wrote:
| as long as it would follow the spec instead of EEE
| mikehotel wrote:
| To clarify, do you mean embrace, extend, extinguish?
| zaik wrote:
| Google used to provide an XMPP (IETF Internet Standard for
| IM) service to all its users once.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Once, when they still thought that competition is a good
| thing.
|
| Now that they are dominating several areas they think
| monopoly is great and open interfaces bad.
| robobro wrote:
| Facebook messenger is also XMPP!
|
| It's just not federated, just like Gab 2.0 :-)
| rapnie wrote:
| Ha yes, reminds me of this quote from "100 years of whatever
| this will be" (recommended read) that trended on HN [1]
| yesterday:
|
| > Software intercompatibility is trending toward zero. Text
| chat apps are literally the easiest thing in the world to
| imagine making compatible - they just send very short
| strings, very rarely, to very small networks of people! But I
| use at least 7 separate ones because every vendor wants their
| own stupid castle and won't share. Don't even get me started
| about books or video.
|
| [0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211201
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29416606
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if they federated with Matrix. In fact that
| would be great. I would mind if they try to control it. Which
| inevitably happens when a major player invests into a FOSS
| project on a big scale. They'll start to worm themselves into
| steering groups and then use that influence to get some
| return on investment and start steering things towards their
| goals. In Google's case that would mean lock-in and
| datamining (and ads but I doubt that would ever fly on
| Matrix)
|
| And indeed like zaik said below, they used to do XMPP and
| stopped it. XMPP is pretty good too these days by the way.
| But I prefer Matrix because of its bridges.
| edhelas wrote:
| XMPP has many bridges. I'm using my XMPP account to talk
| without issues with my Telegram, Discord and IRC contacts
| :)
| turminal wrote:
| The matrix chat software desperately needs an alternative
| implementation, I don't think it matters too much who will do
| it first.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| We have already seen a successful EEE scenario executed by
| Google when it comes to open IM networks, so - it does
| matter; and no, thanks.
| ptman wrote:
| And there are several server implementations:
| https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now#servers
| INTPenis wrote:
| Yeah but none is production ready. I used to host a matrix
| node with synapse but it's a waste of time because it
| doesn't scale well and once you realize that there is no
| way to convert your users over to a better server software.
|
| So now I'm just waiting until Dendrite or Conduit become
| fully featured to deploy one of them instead. I'm looking
| at matrix hosting long term, and synapse is not long term.
| feanaro wrote:
| What kind of workload do you need to scale Synapse too? I
| mean, matrix.org is running on Synapse...
| d33 wrote:
| I'd argue that matrix.org is not the best advertisement
| for Synapse then, judging by its performance.
| nannal wrote:
| I imagine he was using the sqlite backend rather than
| something bigger. I've had issues with it when connected
| to larger groups.
| INTPenis wrote:
| No postgres actually.
|
| Matrix.org has terrible performance, it's really a proof
| that synapse doesn't scale well.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm not saying I'd reach matrix.org levels, but I am
| kinda anal about having something that could reach those
| levels. So that my users won't experience issues. Because
| once you pick a matrix server implementation you are
| pretty much stuck with it. Migration would require a lot
| of hours of converting users, and might not even be
| possible depending on how the passwords are encrypted.
|
| I know people who've been hosting the same XMPP server
| for decades. So this really shows the immaturity of
| Matrix. I still believe in it but it needs some more
| time.
| zaik wrote:
| I'd say just stick with XMPP and extend the protocol to
| fit modern needs. If we want an universal chat protocol
| that's going to last, reinventing the wheel is not going
| to get us there.
| justaj wrote:
| Unfortunately none of them have feature parity with
| Synapse. In fact, many of them are missing critical
| features.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Synapse (the original python matrix server implementation)
| gets a bad reputation because it used to be particularly bad
| - we've done loads of work to improve it though, and these
| days it's pretty reasonable.
| https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-
| sca... and
| https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1434912387933560837
| gives some info.
|
| On the other hand, both Dendrite (Go) and Conduit (Rust)
| _are_ usable on the public network, despite being beta. There
| are some missing features, but people can and do run them for
| real, and both projects are super promising - and with more
| contributors, they 'll land even sooner.
|
| Needless to say, this has absolutely zero to do with ITA's
| Matrix flight search system :P
| IceWreck wrote:
| There is the main python implementation Synapse, there are
| two Go implementations (Dendrite and the other chinese
| finance chat implementation) , one very active and one nearly
| dead Rust implementation, a half baked c++ implementation and
| some others.
| feanaro wrote:
| Why do you think Conduit is nearly dead?
|
| Also, what's the other Chinese implementation you're
| talking about?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Why do you think Conduit was the "nearly dead" one and
| not the "very active" one? ;)
| broodbucket wrote:
| On first read I just saw "...nearly dead Rust
| implementation" and didn't notice the previous fragment
| saying there was another very active one. Just a reading
| comprehension fail but maybe the sentence structure
| tripped up others like it did to me.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Like the other comment pointed out, Conduit is the "very
| active" implementation.
|
| https://github.com/finogeeks/Ligase
|
| This is the Chinese implementation. From the README and
| website it seems its being heavily used in production but
| the website is Chinese so I dont know for sure.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Same, would be better to specify in title what Matrix they're
| referring to
| nanna wrote:
| Matrix _Airfare Search_. Title of thread should clarify.
| someblueman wrote:
| It should not. ITA Matrix is a well-known tool in the industry,
| and anyone even closely associated with the airline industry is
| aware of it.
| chriswwweb wrote:
| I like it, worked well for the few tests I did, however the main
| form needs some small UX improvements, I chose a start airport
| and destination airport but then the search button was disabled,
| leaving me clueless about what field was not filled out
| correctly, I quickly noticed it must be the date field, but still
| to me disabling a submit button of a form seems like a bad idea
| because if disable it you also remove the display of potential
| error messages related to the form failing validation, which to
| me is a UX no go (take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm not a
| UX guy). The second thing that bothers me is that none of the
| form fields actually tells you which ones are mandatory and which
| ones are not
| moontear wrote:
| Take that to the Feedback form, I'm sure the product team would
| appreciate such detailed feedback.
| Arubis wrote:
| Any chance they're doing the backend in a lisp this time around?
| e40 wrote:
| I can't tell if it is a rewrite of the frontend or both. Seems
| more like it might just be frontend work?
| shmerl wrote:
| This is confusing since I first thought it refers to the Matrix
| protocol.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| New ITA Matrix can be found here...
|
| https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search
| yosito wrote:
| Well that was thouroughly disappointing.
| ntumlin wrote:
| As a 20%er who worked on this it's a bit discouraging to see
| such a shallow dismissal. A lot of people put in a lot of
| work as a passion project to keep matrix from just
| disappearing.
|
| Can't win em all I guess.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| I think he thought it was a different Matrix as the initial
| title of this HN article was not precise (my bad!).
|
| As a frequent traveler thank you so much to all for the
| work on this.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fibbberMEN wrote:
| It's a very cool list! skyscanner still seems to be better.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| I always loved the creative solutions ITA could find, like
| transferring to a ferry to shuttle to another airport. To the
| cost sensitive adventurers, ITA was invaluable.
|
| The reboot is much snappier than the old ITA, and it now
| supports mobile properly! Looking forward to using. Glad Google
| engineers are applying their decades of experience honing
| Traveling Salesman type interview questions to the real life
| problem.
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(page generated 2021-12-03 23:01 UTC)