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Reading the comments here a persistent theme seems to be that the documentation is lacking. Something that might help is creating a "dog-fooding" team mostly fi

Reading the comments here a persistent theme seems to be that the documentation is lacking. Something that might help is creating a "dog-fooding" team mostly filled with interns. This team will be responsible for creating samples with the public APIs. Why Interns? Because they will move on to better things around the time when their brains learn the patterns required to navigate the Google cloud API efficiently.

wikibob 8y ago
Yes! The documentation problem is NOT complex to solve. I would love to use GCP on more projects but the docs are embarrassing. Are they trying to get engineers to write the docs rather than hiring professional technical writers? Truly baffling.
- oblio 8y ago
  Isn’t Google using engineers for everything? They’re famous for piss poor support, for example, because they want engineers to build AIs to do support for them.
- bus_error 8y ago
  [I'm a technical writer at Google working on Cloud documentation] Thank you for the constructive comments regarding GCP and in particular documentation; we are working on addressing the points raised. GCP has a dedicated tech writing team which is growing (we're hiring!) and the documentation is written by tech writers. We work with our colleagues in developer relations (developer advocates, developer programs engineers), UX and the software engineers who created the product. All that said, we know our documentation is not perfect and are constantly working to improve. To that end if you see something that is broken/incorrect, please file a bug (the "SEND FEEDBACK" link in the top right of the documentation page is a bug submission form). We love to hear from users and I can assure you docs bugs do not get routed to /dev/null (we have a bug SLO, just like our SWE colleagues). As a more general tech writing comment, documenting large, fast growing distributed systems such as public clouds is tricky. There's a lot more to documentation than just writing up instructions, such as thoughtful information architecture. It's a challenge that we, and I'm sure our counterparts at AWS et al., are grappling with. As tech writers, we wince when we see errors in our work and feel pain when users are not able to enjoy the product/service as intended due to issues in documentation. The whole developer relations team (DAs, DPEs and tech writers) proactively try and catch these mistakes but of course, we miss some. It is nice to see users feel so passionately about documentation, so please let us know where we have made mistakes and we will fix them and try harder next time.
towepluswater 8y ago
Both Azure and AWS have fantastic documentation. The bare-bones documentation and sparse tutorials of GCP are big reasons (other than market awareness) that larger enterprise customers are hesitant to adopt.

wikibob 8y ago

Yes! The documentation problem is NOT complex to solve. I would love to use GCP on more projects but the docs are embarrassing. Are they trying to get engineers to write the docs rather than hiring professional technical writers? Truly baffling.

oblio 8y ago
Isn’t Google using engineers for everything? They’re famous for piss poor support, for example, because they want engineers to build AIs to do support for them.
bus_error 8y ago
[I'm a technical writer at Google working on Cloud documentation] Thank you for the constructive comments regarding GCP and in particular documentation; we are working on addressing the points raised. GCP has a dedicated tech writing team which is growing (we're hiring!) and the documentation is written by tech writers. We work with our colleagues in developer relations (developer advocates, developer programs engineers), UX and the software engineers who created the product. All that said, we know our documentation is not perfect and are constantly working to improve. To that end if you see something that is broken/incorrect, please file a bug (the "SEND FEEDBACK" link in the top right of the documentation page is a bug submission form). We love to hear from users and I can assure you docs bugs do not get routed to /dev/null (we have a bug SLO, just like our SWE colleagues). As a more general tech writing comment, documenting large, fast growing distributed systems such as public clouds is tricky. There's a lot more to documentation than just writing up instructions, such as thoughtful information architecture. It's a challenge that we, and I'm sure our counterparts at AWS et al., are grappling with. As tech writers, we wince when we see errors in our work and feel pain when users are not able to enjoy the product/service as intended due to issues in documentation. The whole developer relations team (DAs, DPEs and tech writers) proactively try and catch these mistakes but of course, we miss some. It is nice to see users feel so passionately about documentation, so please let us know where we have made mistakes and we will fix them and try harder next time.

towepluswater 8y ago

Both Azure and AWS have fantastic documentation. The bare-bones documentation and sparse tutorials of GCP are big reasons (other than market awareness) that larger enterprise customers are hesitant to adopt.