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Google Plots Course to Overtake Cloud Rivals
- monksy 7y agoHow do they plan on doing that if they've downsized the group recently?
- vlovich123 7y agoEngineers are why things take so long to build. Without engineers things will build faster.
- rsashwin 7y agoMade me chuckle
- danudey 7y agoSomeone read the mythical man-month and realized that more engineers doesn't make things faster, and can actually make things slower. The next logical step is to hire fire people until you reach the optimal number, in some kind of binary search approach.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoTo some degree that’s true. Less engineers definitely can speed things up if they get autonomy. At my company there are a lot of people talking about work, doing planning, scheduling and whatever. They don’t contribute much but also hold the engineers up with constant information requests.
- xiphias2 7y agoThe days of autonomy for engineers at Google is over. At this point product managers fight for their ideas to be implemented so that they can get promoted, even if it's an inferiour solution.
- smt88 7y agoRight. Has Google ever produced a profitable product outside of ads and G Suite? YouTube likely isn't profitable, but even if it were, they bought it. This article is far too credulous and feels like it was planted by a Google marketing person worried about customers being scared off by the downsizing news and by Google's culture of whimsical product creation/destruction in general.
- jes5199 7y agoadding more engineers makes development go more slowly -- does that work in reverse??
- reaperducer 7y agoadding more engineers makes development go more slowly -- does that work in reverse?? Sure. That's why we see so many blog links on HN with titles like "I scaled my startup from $0 to $883 million with no employees in six days and only spent 49¢."
- jes5199 7y agoyou have missed the point of my question
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- David 7y agoCan you point to a source here? I work on Google Cloud and I don't think I've heard anything like that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paxys 7y agoMore employees doesn't automatically mean more productivity/launches/success. Downsizing can be an effective tool to get back on the right track (if done correctly, of course).
- cameronbrown 7y agoReorgs like this happen all the time at Google -- they didn't downsize Cloud, they found two parts of the business doing the same thing and merged them - so some people were redundant there. They could've just let those employees go, but they are giving them time to find a new role (and paying them the whole time they're not working). Disclaimer: Am a Google employee.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoIsn’t that how layoffs at all large companies go?
- CydeWeys 7y agoNo. It's very much the exception, not the norm.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoIve heard of this happening at Cisco and HP while being termed a lay-off. Is it different?
- kyrra 7y ago(googler, opinions are my own) Btw, the "finding a new role" is easily within Google. One of the "cloud" teams that was defragged was in my office, and some of those people were people I've worked with over the years. Local management are trying to make sure they have places to land on other teams in the office. Yes, they can look for new jobs externally, but this is how Google deals with cleaning up teams from time-to-time. Luckily Google is still hiring, and people moving to new teams tends to work out without much fuss. Outside Google, I've seen the same behavior. A friend that worked at waffle.io got a similar 3-6 month transition window (find a new job internally or externally). They ended up staying at Broadcom, so it's a good way for companies to retain talent in a tight labor market.
- mav3rick 7y agoThere is no such provision when Amazon lays off people
- outworlder 7y agoNot all reorgs are downsizes.
- orf 7y agoMicrosoft is pushing Azure hard. Not to disclose specifics but there are cases where deals with Microsoft for unrelated things are reliant on the company adopting/moving parts of their work to Azure, with huge amounts of free credits for the first year as a sweetener. It's not in writing on contracts but it's very much a requirement. I'm not sure how they can hope to become the number 2 cloud provider when pitted against that. Say what you want about Microsoft but they are in a really good position to take large chunks of the enterprise cloud market, and that's where the money is.
- shiftpgdn 7y agoI know a company that got a very, very, very sweetheart deal with GCP on a tens of million dollar contract. They have a huge sales team with a monsterous entertainment budget to land "traditional" companies.
- ttul 7y agoPlease lavish some of that on me, oh lords of cloud.
- shiftpgdn 7y agoIf you have a CIO/CTO title at a "traditional" fortune 500 there are a busload of cloud sales people waiting to take you out to the finest steak houses and gentlemen's clubs as often as you please. Along with all expenses paid trips to Jackson hole, Aspen or any other upper crust resort city for company trainings and seminars.
- ttul 7y agoI'll get right to work on obtaining that title now so that I can benefit from this largesse.
- ttul 7y agoMore seriously, I have heard that you need to be doing $300K+ a month in order to attract the attention of the Jackson Hole sales people.
- mrtksn 7y agoNot the Google Cloud but Firebase is by far the nicest experience I ever had with a "hosting" provider. It is a bit expensive but I think this proves that there are many low hanging fruits to gather out there. It's essentially an API to access a streamlined database, file hosting, access provider and so on. Everything integrated and can talk to each other. Not long ago I got fed up with endless tools and configuration in the LAMP/MEAN/MERN or whatever the latest trend is to put data somewhere and read it, so I got into native iOS development and I am loving it. On the client-side, I have only two UI frameworks to deal with(UIKit and SwiftUI). On the backend side, I only deal with Firebase. You can do everything with those. Honestly, I don't know why not all providers are essentially like Firebase. Surely for some scenarios, a custom solution would be needed but it strikes me as Firebase being the place that provides the structure and you plug your custom software to it. That's why I am under the impression that at the end the gold rush for the cloud, the result would be something like Firebase. What I would love though, if an open source self hostable Firebase alternative.
- scottfr 7y agoFirebase is fantastic. There is also a steady drumbeat of continual improvements going on in Firebase that keeps making it better and better. Even when Firebase is using other GCP products under the hood (e.g. Firebase Storage is Cloud Storage and Firebase Functions are Cloud Functions) they often provide a better developer experience that makes things flow smoother. For example, having a Firebase Function running on a schedule is a just an added line in your functions config whereas running a Cloud Function on a schedule requires setting up a Cloud Scheduler Job and linking everything together with PubSub.
- mrtksn 7y agoOh definitely. Also, I like their SDK. It's even easier to keep all the app data in Firebase than dealing with native solutions. All the stuff about imperfections of the world like slow connections and so no is taken care of. My only issue so far is that cloud functions respond very slowly if they are not used for a while. The first time takes 2-3 seconds, thereafter it's in the milliseconds. But other than that, it's such a nice experience.
- gamesbrainiac 7y agoI still don't understand why companies like Microsoft and Google hire folks from Oracle to run a cloud business. Oracle is the only player that can't do anything on the cloud; even IBM has a better game.
- reaperducer 7y agoBecause good people sometimes end up working for bad companies and want a way out?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoYup. Many of them didn't even choose to work for "bad" companies: eg. Oracle made tons of acquisitions, including Sun.
- wmf 7y agoThose Oracle people understand enterprise customers.
- thu2111 7y agoOracle Cloud is apparently not that bad, but it has no mindshare. They hire from Oracle because Oracle is really, really good at selling to the 'enterprise' i.e. the sorts of non-tech firms where non-tech executives make tech spending decisions. They often expect to be lavished with attention and sometimes perks (see Jackson Hole discussions above) in order to agree to a platform buy. Oracle's skill at selling into that environment is pretty legendary.
- yalogin 7y agoThis is something Google cannot abandon or be complacent about. Cloud is their turf and they ceded it to AWS and then Microsoft.
- more_corn 7y agoI hope part of their plan is fixing their documentation. Their documentation is crap and they can't win if they don't fix it. Apparently GCP technical writers have not been tasked with creating task/goal oriented documents. For grins, look up how to create a load balancer. You'll find 5 different articles. There won't be one containing the specific instructions you're looking for. The whole thing needs to be torn out by the roots and recreated around achieving specific results. They are unlikely to do this, so they are unlikely to catch up let alone win.
- tmpz22 7y agoIt’s so abundantly clear that most documentation writers at google have NEVER used their own products in production (nor do they ever intend to). This is how I imagine their meetings to discuss this goes: “Users leave our documentation pages in under 15 seconds! Our documentation is so clear and efficient! For some reason their hardware analytics show that the device falls 20 meters and shuts down afterwards, but that is surely an unrelated event!”
- hyperdimension 7y agoYet another A/B testing success story! And if they spend a lot of time poring over our documentation, well, that just means our user engagement is through the roof!
- obmelvin 7y agoGranted I've not used a ton of AWS services because all of this was in context of grad school research, but I've found this with a lot of the AWS documentation I've come across. Things like documentation for general API being inconsistent with language specific library docs, or function signature is different than what docs indicate. I had issues with others, but for reference this was largely with MTurk JS bindings to the api.
- tmpz22 7y agoFWIW I’ve also worked with mturk and find that to be an unfair comparison point because it basically a vestigial organ that nobody in academia actually even uses correctly.
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/mGtdw https://archive.md/mGtdw
- Aeolun 7y agoI think a good start would be building a reputation for decent support and longevity, but surprisingly they seem to be going in exactly the opposite direction.
- joncrane 7y agoBuilding a reputation takes a long time. They have already built a reputation for being capricious with support and sloppy with documentation. Re-doing a reputation is even harder than building one.
- unabridged 7y agoEasy. Cut bandwidth costs. Even just putting everyone at the lowest price and removing all tiers would change the market completely.
- adventured 7y agoThe bulk of the customers generating the $40 billion per year for AWS do not care enough about bandwidth (transfer) costs for it to change the market completely. While it may be in the top ten as a consideration on cost, it's nowhere near the top. All Google would do by slashing transfer pricing is lure a lot of low value customers - and worse - to their shores and harm their service in the process. It's a benefit to the cloud majors to keep transfer costs artificially high, which is why none of them have pulled the trigger on that competitive angle. It helps keep various types of low value + high abuse risk customers out and of course the transfer pricing is a profit center. Google isn't eager / desperate to saturate its services with terrible customers any more than the other large providers.
- justlexi93 7y agoDocumentation just needs some serious work. Though been a while since I last went digging, so maybe it's improved.
- hashbig 7y agoif a cloud provider out of the big 3 adds hard limit budget (taking down the service) so I don't have to worry about getting a 100k bill if I fuck up and not turn off some service before I go to a 2 month vacation, they can take all my money.
- Orcus90482 7y agoYou can do this on GCP programmatically. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
- hashbig 7y agoHow hard is it to turn this into a checkbox in their billing page?
- D2187645 7y agoLikely not feasable with our current technologies.
- Orcus90482 7y agoThis is clearly not a recommended process. GCP probably does not want a user to check the box and not understand the consequences given how severe they could be.