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I don't think the hiring process is the reason for Google's inability to gain market share in the cloud market. Google's hiring process has ensured that the qua

I don't think the hiring process is the reason for Google's inability to gain market share in the cloud market. Google's hiring process has ensured that the quality bar has been very high. They have unique offerings like spanner, which other clouds are simply not anywhere near of. Their failure in cloud is mostly because the inability to sell primarily, and secondly maybe because of their support being not as good as other clouds. But both are specific classes of directions taken by their leadership.

fwip 7y ago
The argument isn't that the quality bar is too low, but rather that they're measuring "quality" in the wrong way. If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  But megacorps hire in such volumes that it's simply not possible to ensure any quality at all by any measure. It's all just random people that even perform worse when put in a corporate environment. So overall it's below average quality.
  - pm90 7y ago
    So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all? If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it. That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.
      - pm90 7y ago
        Making money is one metric. How about diversified revenue stream? Do you think they should be concerned about that?
        coldtea 7y ago
        They probably should. But it's not the concern of their developers.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Blackberry’s highest revenue quarters were around 2010. Three years after the iPhone was introduced. Profits are a trailing indicator. But even if you don’t buy that, Google’s net income was down last quarter. Revenue was up but traffic acquisition costs were up even more. What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced. What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?
        coldtea 7y ago
        >What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2008 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced. Sure, but how are those things relevant? Those are strategic decisions, not decisions made by developers -- and don't concern what we're discussing, if the devs they hire are good for the company. If somebody at Google C-level decided "let's close down Search and Ads, and just make kitchen juicers" their profits would also tank. But that's not related to if the devs they hire are good for them. Unless their profit is hampered by dev output (and not one of the other reasons it can go down), their devs are fine for them.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Who do you think gets promoted within Google what are their incentives? If engineers slowly move up the ranks based on the same culture and incentives - creating products that are soon abandoned. The entire culture of Google is not conducive to the diversification they need as ad sales become less profitable.
    - enitihas 7y ago
      What different metric do you think would work better? Github? I have seen people get job offers by taking someone else's project, editing commit history to make themselves the author, and then push it to GitHub and talk about that project in their interview. Sure, sometimes on drilling deep enough you would know people are faking it, but a lot of time people would pass through. I just mean to say that all hiring criterion have tradeoffs, and none is strictly better than the others.
      - pm90 7y ago
        Nope, don’t give me the “oh there is no better way so let’s continue using our shitty way” excuse. Citing another poor way of hiring does not make the existing one better. And I don’t know what a new process should be. Google has the data from literally millions of applications and has decided to just ignore them or not to try different ways of hiring? Give me a break.
        enitihas 7y ago
        Or maybe "the data from literally millions of applications" has made Google realize that their current way is the best among all the others possible? Who knows.
        pishpash 7y ago
        Or one day when Google isn't doing well there is a sudden phase transition to say the current way is the worst among all the possible. We assume somebody competent is looking at this, but for all we know they are using the same dumb myopic evaluation as they use for promotions. I mean the same people came up with both.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        How have Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon managed to diversify?
        enitihas 7y ago
johan_larson 7y ago
That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.
- scarface74 7y ago
  What good is “building software systems” if you can’t produce products that people and businesses want? After all of these years and all of the initiatives, still almost all of their profits come from ad sales.
  - johan_larson 7y ago
    It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      As long as the trend of blocking ads doesn’t increase and as long ad buyers don’t see Facebook as being better at targeting. Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.
- usrusr 7y ago
  I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons. edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.
scarface74 7y ago
And this is attitude is the issue. You have a lot of geeks who know nothing about what businesses need to succeed because the hiring process is optimized for those who can memorize leetCode.
- enitihas 7y ago
  Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money. And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.
    - pm90 7y ago
      Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).
    - enitihas 7y ago
      Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else. Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.
pm90 7y ago
You’re oversimplifying why they’re failing in the cloud. * _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up) * _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent. * _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really). There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.
adventured 7y ago
There is another very large factor in what has set Azure apart from Google. Google is more of a pure play competitor to AWS. Azure got a big jumpstart due to the Windows enterprise market adopting them as a natural home. From there Azure has gradually leveraged itself into taking some share of the Linux market. The Windows business segment provides a lucrative, lower competition base for Azure. Realistically, Google poses zero potential threat to the large Windows cloud business that Azure will yield billions in annual profit off of in time.
wisty 7y ago
Also, here's a list of reasons why investment in Google's cloud might be hard for third parties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

fwip 7y ago

The argument isn't that the quality bar is too low, but rather that they're measuring "quality" in the wrong way. If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.

zzzcpan 7y ago
But megacorps hire in such volumes that it's simply not possible to ensure any quality at all by any measure. It's all just random people that even perform worse when put in a corporate environment. So overall it's below average quality.
- pm90 7y ago
  So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all? If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it. That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.
    - pm90 7y ago
      Making money is one metric. How about diversified revenue stream? Do you think they should be concerned about that?
      - coldtea 7y ago
        They probably should. But it's not the concern of their developers.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Blackberry’s highest revenue quarters were around 2010. Three years after the iPhone was introduced. Profits are a trailing indicator. But even if you don’t buy that, Google’s net income was down last quarter. Revenue was up but traffic acquisition costs were up even more. What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced. What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?
      - coldtea 7y ago
        >What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2008 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced. Sure, but how are those things relevant? Those are strategic decisions, not decisions made by developers -- and don't concern what we're discussing, if the devs they hire are good for the company. If somebody at Google C-level decided "let's close down Search and Ads, and just make kitchen juicers" their profits would also tank. But that's not related to if the devs they hire are good for them. Unless their profit is hampered by dev output (and not one of the other reasons it can go down), their devs are fine for them.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Who do you think gets promoted within Google what are their incentives? If engineers slowly move up the ranks based on the same culture and incentives - creating products that are soon abandoned. The entire culture of Google is not conducive to the diversification they need as ad sales become less profitable.
  - enitihas 7y ago
    What different metric do you think would work better? Github? I have seen people get job offers by taking someone else's project, editing commit history to make themselves the author, and then push it to GitHub and talk about that project in their interview. Sure, sometimes on drilling deep enough you would know people are faking it, but a lot of time people would pass through. I just mean to say that all hiring criterion have tradeoffs, and none is strictly better than the others.
    - pm90 7y ago
      Nope, don’t give me the “oh there is no better way so let’s continue using our shitty way” excuse. Citing another poor way of hiring does not make the existing one better. And I don’t know what a new process should be. Google has the data from literally millions of applications and has decided to just ignore them or not to try different ways of hiring? Give me a break.
      - enitihas 7y ago
        Or maybe "the data from literally millions of applications" has made Google realize that their current way is the best among all the others possible? Who knows.
        pishpash 7y ago
        Or one day when Google isn't doing well there is a sudden phase transition to say the current way is the worst among all the possible. We assume somebody competent is looking at this, but for all we know they are using the same dumb myopic evaluation as they use for promotions. I mean the same people came up with both.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      How have Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon managed to diversify?
      - enitihas 7y ago

johan_larson 7y ago

That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.

scarface74 7y ago
What good is “building software systems” if you can’t produce products that people and businesses want? After all of these years and all of the initiatives, still almost all of their profits come from ad sales.
- johan_larson 7y ago
  It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    As long as the trend of blocking ads doesn’t increase and as long ad buyers don’t see Facebook as being better at targeting. Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.
usrusr 7y ago
I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons. edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.

scarface74 7y ago

And this is attitude is the issue. You have a lot of geeks who know nothing about what businesses need to succeed because the hiring process is optimized for those who can memorize leetCode.

enitihas 7y ago
Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money. And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.
  - pm90 7y ago
    Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).
  - enitihas 7y ago
    Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else. Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.

pm90 7y ago

You’re oversimplifying why they’re failing in the cloud. * _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up) * _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent. * _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really). There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.

adventured 7y ago

There is another very large factor in what has set Azure apart from Google. Google is more of a pure play competitor to AWS. Azure got a big jumpstart due to the Windows enterprise market adopting them as a natural home. From there Azure has gradually leveraged itself into taking some share of the Linux market. The Windows business segment provides a lucrative, lower competition base for Azure. Realistically, Google poses zero potential threat to the large Windows cloud business that Azure will yield billions in annual profit off of in time.

wisty 7y ago

Also, here's a list of reasons why investment in Google's cloud might be hard for third parties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...