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It's not much better if you end up being a GCP customer. My company has gone through 4 reps in 3 years. Every time we get a new GCP rep they just want to talk

It's not much better if you end up being a GCP customer. My company has gone through 4 reps in 3 years. Every time we get a new GCP rep they just want to talk to us about "expanding our use of GCP offerings". The only thing they want to talk about is starting to use BigQuery - not my business at all. I signed up for a Google Cloud Security summit, and afterwards a sales rep reached out me. It was obvious from the start they had no idea I was a gsuite or GCP customer. They then directed me to a NEW account manager (#4) even though I had been working with a different one. I had worked with the prior account rep going over our architecture to make sure everything was kosher (sustained use discounts etc). I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at their request. Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence. It's really insulting, and to me obvious they don't care about my company at all. We're looking at other options. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this post leads to me getting an email from another rep "Wanting to start over and doing things right", which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I use BigQuery.

bpodgursky 6y ago
Honestly given how good BigQuery is, I don't blame the sales rep for keeping their eye on their wallet. I know a lot of companies who are primarily AWS but use Google Cloud exclusively for BigQuery analysis. (no, I'm not and have never been a Google employee)
- dominotw 6y ago
  why not just use snowflake though if they aren't on gcp already?
  - mr_toad 6y ago
    Why use Snowflake over BigQuery?
    - dominotw 6y ago
      don't have to move data to another cloud?
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I've used both GCP and AWS at multiple companies and personally, and my take is that a handful of important GCP products are significantly better than their AWS counterparts (Bigquery, Bigtable, Spanner, GKE), and a lot are just OK, usually slightly behind AWS in terms of features. If one of those products that's significantly better could be a differentiator for you, GCP is the better choice.
nautilus12 6y ago
I'd say your experience isn't unique to google. I think at some point we are going to hit a place where people realize the convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost of having a mostly predatory business partner.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  the convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost of having a mostly predatory business partner Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing.
  - mcny 6y ago
    > Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing. I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent? You always can drive cost concessions from sales, especially for base workloads where you have time flexibility. For a big company, cloud rarely saves money for many categories of expense. In a normal market, it is almost always faster time to market to rent, and always cheaper TCO to own.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        > When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent? This is a different market and one which is ultimately constrained by the availability of land. Notably, cloud prices do fall especially relative to the compute power. Specifically I remember when Fargate moved to firecracker and prices fell by like 40% or something similarly considerable. Maybe managing your own internal cloud is indeed cheaper (especially if you don't account for support or maintenance!), but arguing that cloud prices don't decrease or making some housing analogy seems like poor reasoning.
manigandham 6y ago
Same terrible experience here with GCP sales and support, but the other options aren't much better. The reality is that unless you are in the 7 figure range, you don't get serious attention. I'm still surprised why sales is so dysfunctional but billions of quarterly profit means there's little need to change.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I dunno, I spend $3 monthly with AWS, but when I click the support button I’m talking to a real person pretty much immediately.
  - PaywallBuster 6y ago
    you only get billing/account support unless you have subscription, starting at 150 US$ month
    - Androider 6y ago
      That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some really general and technical questions of AWS support and always received a helpful reply without a paid support plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is better. In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases, they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly. Our other experience is with paid Azure support, which did little else than direct us to the (not related to the question) docs. They also had a really hard time understanding our technical questions about specific APIs. To their credit, they did eventually escalate to the PM of the service in question. In general, the team responsible for the service really must be able to help out with support requests. In AWS this is definitely the case, in Azure as well but there's a bit of gatekeeping. Does developers and PMs in GCP participate in support?
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        Microsoft support is always useless in that way and the TAMs are pretty powerless. I hired an intern just to contest the hours to effectively cut our (large) premier bill 70-80%. Their model was fault-based, and a “bug” gets billed to the support group. So the game was always for MS to avoid assignment for non Sev-A cases, and our game was to find a product defect for anything.
jtdev 6y ago
This seems to summarize my experience with software sales processes and interactions in general. I’m hopeful that software sales culture is beginning to evolve into something other than the pack of hyenas on a carcass that it is today. I personally have resorted to rejecting any and all conversations with software sales people unless I can dictate the direction of the conversation.
D-Nice 6y ago
Sigh, I remember a similar experience. It was a third-party rep they pushed us to, but we would be asking for ways to re-architect one thing we already had setup on AWS, and all they would do is just try and upsell us on random offerings that clearly did not resolve our specific needs. Some European-based customer apparently had a requirement if we engaged with them, that our service be offered via an acceptable vendor such as GCP, for some reason AWS apparently wasn't, but it was such a nightmare to even prod about an architecture that would have feature-parity with AWS, it wasn't even worth it. Also as an fyi, I'm no AWS fanboy, I don't use it in any of my own projects to avoid vendor lock-in this company suffered from.
cyral 6y ago
I've had the same experience with GCP account reps. They always go missing and someone new emails us about how they are taking over 6 months later. Every call we have had with them has not resulted in anything meaningful. Our biggest issue is how their "highly available" Cloud SQL goes down every couple months for maintenance, not how we can use BigQuery.
- byteofbits 6y ago
  We’re currently migrating to Spanner for a variety of reasons - but the mandatory downtime on their Postgres CloudSQL offering will be the part I miss the least. It’s insane that even with all of their HA and failover turned on they take the whole cluster down for as long as they like every few months!
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    One thing that customer obsession at an entire-organization-depth level does is encourage broad customer use awareness. To an engineer, things are things, because of how they architect and build them. To an engineer who understands a customer, things are things and all the things people actually use them for. Big difference. It also makes "Well, that customer is using it wrong" less of an exceptable engineering dodge.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency?
      - majormajor 6y ago
        > Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency? I haven't worked inside AWS or GCP, but I've never seen product get everything they want, especially around maintenance/downtime. If "less downtime" is on the roadmap but engineering is constantly pushing back "that'll be really really hard and take a long time and they're just using it wrong anyway," I can't imagine it getting done as quickly as at a place where the engineering team was also focused on customer satisfaction.
numbsafari 6y ago
This has also been my experience. When we first launched on GCP, there was no question that it was the way to go (frankly, because of BigQuery). Working with AWS, when we launched, was going to cost us significantly more up-front, before we had even brought on our first customer. Fast forward 5 years... AWS has closed the gap in every way that matters. I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's, but I don't encourage folks to use GCP the way that I used to. Just the opposite. In 2021, no questions asked, it's either AWS for general compute, or something more targeted if your business doesn't need it. Until you get to the point where your bill is larger than a dozen engineering salaries, you won't get any respect from these people.
- dastbe 6y ago
  (I work at AWS) > I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's If you have the time, could you expand on this? While I'm not directly involved in security at AWS, I'd be down to forward your thoughts to people who do.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    One thing that GCP is far better at is account setup. Having everything nested under a single gsuite organization with folders and projects and IAM flowing through is incredibly easy to work with and makes permissions simpler to understand. AWS has a long ways to go in this regard.
    - f430 6y ago
      I disagree. Once you learn IAM and able to segregate users into groups each with its own layer of security, then it is good enough. Often the UI, and docs make it seem like everything is all over the place but AWS feels like lego with some pieces tucked away. That is where I think AWS can be improved upon with a better documentation UI and discoverability. I do have to commend Google on Flutter + Firebase + Firebase Functions. I think if Amplify focused on serving Flutter users more it could pull me away from Google altogether. Unfortunately, Google has done a fantastic job with making Flutter integrate with Firebase through Android Studio and there really is no product from AWS that matches its developer friendliness and low learning curve. This makes it very easy to switch. I guess it is somewhat of a threat because the Firebase Cloud Functions also offer something of a counter to AWS Lambda as much as I love using it with API Gateway.
ransom1538 6y ago
"I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at their request." >> Hahah. They did that to me too. I doubt they even looked at it. It was a fun homework assignment though. "Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence." >> Hahaha. Same here. "which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I use BigQuery" >> This is a trap. Once you are on BQ there is no sane way off.
- milesward 6y ago
  As the guy who designed the architecture diagramming system, mostly to help folks keep straight what they're trying to help folks build, I hate that it's being used as a qualification/filter/etc. Sorry yo.
avipars 6y ago
These guys must be commission based
- dialogbox 6y ago
  Aren’t the all sales reps commission based? I would be very surprised if AWS reps are not.
milesward 6y ago
I'm not a rep, and I don't know anything about your use, but I'm 100% ready to learn about it and see if any of the stuff I know can be helpful to you and your team. Sorry this has been your ride to-date :( miles@sada.com
rodgerd 6y ago
It's interesting that you've had that experience - it mirrors mine in dealing with Oracle reps: no engagement, no interest, very high turnover, always under pressure to sell, sell, sell. I wonder if appointing someone ex-Oracle to head GCP has carried that culture over.
franczesko 6y ago
I mentioned this a couple of times, but Google's CS is non-existent. That's #1 issue holding me back from trying any of GCP offerings.
- verst 6y ago
  You need to see GCP as its own brand with its own support team and policies (though they are impacted by some shared technical infrastructure and associated policies). I cannot say whether these are good or bad, only that they are distinct for GCP. Experiences with support or lack of support concerning other Google product areas and divisions, especially those not designed for businesses really don't apply if you know how Google operates. I don't use GCP in a personal capacity at this time and I work for a competitor (though am certainly not speaking on behalf of the competitor).
  - numbsafari 6y ago
    I use a lot of Google products. All of them I pay for, except search. It is true there are individuals that shine, but across the board, Google sucks at support. It starts at the top with what kind of company they want to be, and goes from there. They do not like humans.
    - verst 6y ago
      Once upon a time I was one of 3 people globally that was the entirety of the GCP support team :) You should have seen the extent to which the rest of the team and I tried to resolve customer issues. Random App Engine app getting 500s calling an Open ID endpoint (the service wasn't strictly speaking managed by GCP). I absolutely could not reproduce this and had no other reports, but I knew it was happening for the customer. I examined everything that could be different... After 2 weeks I finally got it: The customer app was running in a different data center compared to where I was testing. Calls to the API endpoint were timing out internally (pretty aggressive timeout interval). It turns out the Open ID service wasn't running in the same data center region. That should not have been the case but occurred because the internal BigTable service had to be upgraded in a particular region and hence all App Engine apps in that region were moved to another one - a fairly seamless process. The Open ID service unfortunately wasn't provisioned in that region (it's not a dependency of App Engine). Once I identified the issue it was a matter of telling the on call SRE about it who then spun up Open ID in that region and thereby resolved the issues in a matter of 5 minutes. Often a new support case meant discovering platform limitations - for example running into BigTable anti patterns because App Engine Datastore allocated IDs sequentially by default. That could cause poor read / write performance, in part due to automatic sharding behavior of BigTable. We later switched to snowflake IDs. And then there were lots of Java folks used to Classpath scanning (default behavior of Spring Framework?) which for larger projects caused App Engine container startup to exceed the allowed time limit. That became a user education issue for which we then had to write an in depth article. Good times :) I absolutely hated dealing with billing inquiries though... so difficult to map someone's code to billable operations. Some SDK methods were of course utilizing multiple billable operations. Determining SLA violation refunds was much easier.
0df8dkdf 6y ago
Google Cloud, AWS, MS Auzra are made to lock you into their system. I guess if fine if you are ok with it and you don't have an experienced systemadmin/dev op on hand. There are plenty of cloud agnostic platform out there that does VPS, load balancers. digital ocean, linode, etc. If you want to be green there is also the Advania they use geothermal energy. And since it is in iceland better data protection policy than US companies. I'm not affiliated with any one of them, it is just from year of cloud provider hopping.
- antb123 6y ago
  same and ended up with hetzner.. great inexpensive service. Only thing I miss is firewalls for cloud (they have it for dedicated).
- cocochanel 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I am on both DO and Linode for many years and I have had an amazing experience. Not affiliated with any of them, just a happy customer.
  - tomjuggler 6y ago
    Yeah, Digital Ocean $5 per month is where I started. Do it yourself, the tools are out there!
- tilolebo 6y ago
  How does AWS lock you more than DO? Because they have a more comprehensive offering?
  - 0df8dkdf 6y ago
    Route 53, S3 storage, load balancer, everything is encouraged to work other AWS services! Smells much like what MS was doing. Don't get me wrong, it is more open than Google Cloud and Azura.
  - emptysongglass 6y ago
    Have you tried deleting an S3 bucket? Go ahead, I'll wait. How about egressing any amount of data? I hope you have a Diamond Platinum AmEx attached to your account because you're about to lose your house with that bill.
pjmlp 6y ago
Somehow your comment reminded me how Google talks go at GDC and similar game development conferences. While everyone else is talking about game engines, design and programming techniques, Google's talks are mostly around their cloud offerings, and customer telemetry.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> they don't care about my company at all So why is Google this way? They already have a terrible reputation for their non-existent support. Never thought they'd treat actual companies this way though. It makes no sense...
- dev_tty01 6y ago
  Inevitable. The entire company is built on a scalable business that required no direct contact with customers. Direct person to person interaction is the antithesis of their successful business model. Of course, now when they enter a business that needs direct customer interaction, it shouldn't be surprising that they aren't good at it. No supportive processes and probably no internal appreciation for what reps do. Thus the turnover. They will have to build out a sub-org that nurtures and develops this part of the business. I personally find customer interactions problems to be epidemic with fast-scaling internet businesses. It does however create a space for others to come in and do it better. We can hope...
  - lanstin 6y ago
    Even their customer facing engineers who aren’t total a holes act like they are from a superior type of existence and we should be honored to be graced with their specialness without meaning to, but it is ground into them.
valleyjo 6y ago
Sounds like my experience with their recruiting. Nov 2019 - interviews Dec 2019 - passed hiring committee Dec to June 2020 - emailed recruiter every two weeks never heard back June 2020 - cold email from recruiter “here is your offer letter to join Google! Let's talk team match.” Needless to say I did not accept that job. This was for a software engineer role. (edited to add line breaks)
- gallego2007 6y ago
  Wow. Not even a call from the Recruiter to walk you through the offer letter?
  - valleyjo 6y ago
    They called me eventually were kind on the call. But the whole communication issues leading up to that really ruined it for me. I was initially quite excited too. I have no idea if this is common or if my recruiter was especially bad. Reading the parent comment made me think of the similarity.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- noname2021 6y ago
  I had a similar experience with their recruiting. Some interviews were cancelled and had to be rescheduled only after I inquired. Many weeks to generate offer and paper work and then 24 hrs to accept with a "take or leave it" ultimatum. Just a very poor taste and I know some fine people who work at Google. Its unfortunate they don't seem to value warmth and humaneness when communicating externally
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Got an offer from a dream company. But it was lowball take it or leave it quickly thing. Noped out of that as quick as I could.
- nostromo 6y ago
logicchains 6y ago
To be fair, BigQuery is probably their best product since Search so I can see why they try to milk it. It capitalises on what Google's best at, distributed systems engineering, while avoiding what Google's worst at, API design (by instead using SQL, which wasn't invented by Google). I say that as a customer who otherwise has little positive to say about Google.
cosmodisk 6y ago
The reason why the account managers change this way is because of so called territory or account realignment. These are sales terms but ultimately it means don't sit on one client for too long. Salesforce does this every single year, last week I received an email from 6th or 7th account manager since I started using them. The story is always the same: they get in touch,try to understand your business,ask questions,and see if they can spot something that previous guy missed. I hate it. However, this seems to be working on their end,as the sales keep growing...go figure.

bpodgursky 6y ago

Honestly given how good BigQuery is, I don't blame the sales rep for keeping their eye on their wallet. I know a lot of companies who are primarily AWS but use Google Cloud exclusively for BigQuery analysis. (no, I'm not and have never been a Google employee)

dominotw 6y ago
why not just use snowflake though if they aren't on gcp already?
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Why use Snowflake over BigQuery?
  - dominotw 6y ago
    don't have to move data to another cloud?
dehrmann 6y ago
I've used both GCP and AWS at multiple companies and personally, and my take is that a handful of important GCP products are significantly better than their AWS counterparts (Bigquery, Bigtable, Spanner, GKE), and a lot are just OK, usually slightly behind AWS in terms of features. If one of those products that's significantly better could be a differentiator for you, GCP is the better choice.

nautilus12 6y ago

I'd say your experience isn't unique to google. I think at some point we are going to hit a place where people realize the convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost of having a mostly predatory business partner.

goatinaboat 6y ago
the convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost of having a mostly predatory business partner Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing.
- mcny 6y ago
  > Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing. I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent? You always can drive cost concessions from sales, especially for base workloads where you have time flexibility. For a big company, cloud rarely saves money for many categories of expense. In a normal market, it is almost always faster time to market to rent, and always cheaper TCO to own.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      > When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent? This is a different market and one which is ultimately constrained by the availability of land. Notably, cloud prices do fall especially relative to the compute power. Specifically I remember when Fargate moved to firecracker and prices fell by like 40% or something similarly considerable. Maybe managing your own internal cloud is indeed cheaper (especially if you don't account for support or maintenance!), but arguing that cloud prices don't decrease or making some housing analogy seems like poor reasoning.

manigandham 6y ago

Same terrible experience here with GCP sales and support, but the other options aren't much better. The reality is that unless you are in the 7 figure range, you don't get serious attention. I'm still surprised why sales is so dysfunctional but billions of quarterly profit means there's little need to change.

Aeolun 6y ago
I dunno, I spend $3 monthly with AWS, but when I click the support button I’m talking to a real person pretty much immediately.
- PaywallBuster 6y ago
  you only get billing/account support unless you have subscription, starting at 150 US$ month
  - Androider 6y ago
    That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some really general and technical questions of AWS support and always received a helpful reply without a paid support plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is better. In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases, they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly. Our other experience is with paid Azure support, which did little else than direct us to the (not related to the question) docs. They also had a really hard time understanding our technical questions about specific APIs. To their credit, they did eventually escalate to the PM of the service in question. In general, the team responsible for the service really must be able to help out with support requests. In AWS this is definitely the case, in Azure as well but there's a bit of gatekeeping. Does developers and PMs in GCP participate in support?
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      Microsoft support is always useless in that way and the TAMs are pretty powerless. I hired an intern just to contest the hours to effectively cut our (large) premier bill 70-80%. Their model was fault-based, and a “bug” gets billed to the support group. So the game was always for MS to avoid assignment for non Sev-A cases, and our game was to find a product defect for anything.

jtdev 6y ago

This seems to summarize my experience with software sales processes and interactions in general. I’m hopeful that software sales culture is beginning to evolve into something other than the pack of hyenas on a carcass that it is today. I personally have resorted to rejecting any and all conversations with software sales people unless I can dictate the direction of the conversation.

D-Nice 6y ago

Sigh, I remember a similar experience. It was a third-party rep they pushed us to, but we would be asking for ways to re-architect one thing we already had setup on AWS, and all they would do is just try and upsell us on random offerings that clearly did not resolve our specific needs. Some European-based customer apparently had a requirement if we engaged with them, that our service be offered via an acceptable vendor such as GCP, for some reason AWS apparently wasn't, but it was such a nightmare to even prod about an architecture that would have feature-parity with AWS, it wasn't even worth it. Also as an fyi, I'm no AWS fanboy, I don't use it in any of my own projects to avoid vendor lock-in this company suffered from.

cyral 6y ago

I've had the same experience with GCP account reps. They always go missing and someone new emails us about how they are taking over 6 months later. Every call we have had with them has not resulted in anything meaningful. Our biggest issue is how their "highly available" Cloud SQL goes down every couple months for maintenance, not how we can use BigQuery.

byteofbits 6y ago
We’re currently migrating to Spanner for a variety of reasons - but the mandatory downtime on their Postgres CloudSQL offering will be the part I miss the least. It’s insane that even with all of their HA and failover turned on they take the whole cluster down for as long as they like every few months!
- ethbr0 6y ago
  One thing that customer obsession at an entire-organization-depth level does is encourage broad customer use awareness. To an engineer, things are things, because of how they architect and build them. To an engineer who understands a customer, things are things and all the things people actually use them for. Big difference. It also makes "Well, that customer is using it wrong" less of an exceptable engineering dodge.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency?
    - majormajor 6y ago
      > Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency? I haven't worked inside AWS or GCP, but I've never seen product get everything they want, especially around maintenance/downtime. If "less downtime" is on the roadmap but engineering is constantly pushing back "that'll be really really hard and take a long time and they're just using it wrong anyway," I can't imagine it getting done as quickly as at a place where the engineering team was also focused on customer satisfaction.

numbsafari 6y ago

This has also been my experience. When we first launched on GCP, there was no question that it was the way to go (frankly, because of BigQuery). Working with AWS, when we launched, was going to cost us significantly more up-front, before we had even brought on our first customer. Fast forward 5 years... AWS has closed the gap in every way that matters. I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's, but I don't encourage folks to use GCP the way that I used to. Just the opposite. In 2021, no questions asked, it's either AWS for general compute, or something more targeted if your business doesn't need it. Until you get to the point where your bill is larger than a dozen engineering salaries, you won't get any respect from these people.

dastbe 6y ago
(I work at AWS) > I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's If you have the time, could you expand on this? While I'm not directly involved in security at AWS, I'd be down to forward your thoughts to people who do.
- manigandham 6y ago
  One thing that GCP is far better at is account setup. Having everything nested under a single gsuite organization with folders and projects and IAM flowing through is incredibly easy to work with and makes permissions simpler to understand. AWS has a long ways to go in this regard.
  - f430 6y ago
    I disagree. Once you learn IAM and able to segregate users into groups each with its own layer of security, then it is good enough. Often the UI, and docs make it seem like everything is all over the place but AWS feels like lego with some pieces tucked away. That is where I think AWS can be improved upon with a better documentation UI and discoverability. I do have to commend Google on Flutter + Firebase + Firebase Functions. I think if Amplify focused on serving Flutter users more it could pull me away from Google altogether. Unfortunately, Google has done a fantastic job with making Flutter integrate with Firebase through Android Studio and there really is no product from AWS that matches its developer friendliness and low learning curve. This makes it very easy to switch. I guess it is somewhat of a threat because the Firebase Cloud Functions also offer something of a counter to AWS Lambda as much as I love using it with API Gateway.

ransom1538 6y ago

"I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at their request." >> Hahah. They did that to me too. I doubt they even looked at it. It was a fun homework assignment though. "Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence." >> Hahaha. Same here. "which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I use BigQuery" >> This is a trap. Once you are on BQ there is no sane way off.

milesward 6y ago
As the guy who designed the architecture diagramming system, mostly to help folks keep straight what they're trying to help folks build, I hate that it's being used as a qualification/filter/etc. Sorry yo.

avipars 6y ago

These guys must be commission based

dialogbox 6y ago
Aren’t the all sales reps commission based? I would be very surprised if AWS reps are not.

milesward 6y ago

I'm not a rep, and I don't know anything about your use, but I'm 100% ready to learn about it and see if any of the stuff I know can be helpful to you and your team. Sorry this has been your ride to-date :( miles@sada.com

rodgerd 6y ago

It's interesting that you've had that experience - it mirrors mine in dealing with Oracle reps: no engagement, no interest, very high turnover, always under pressure to sell, sell, sell. I wonder if appointing someone ex-Oracle to head GCP has carried that culture over.

franczesko 6y ago

I mentioned this a couple of times, but Google's CS is non-existent. That's #1 issue holding me back from trying any of GCP offerings.

verst 6y ago
You need to see GCP as its own brand with its own support team and policies (though they are impacted by some shared technical infrastructure and associated policies). I cannot say whether these are good or bad, only that they are distinct for GCP. Experiences with support or lack of support concerning other Google product areas and divisions, especially those not designed for businesses really don't apply if you know how Google operates. I don't use GCP in a personal capacity at this time and I work for a competitor (though am certainly not speaking on behalf of the competitor).
- numbsafari 6y ago
  I use a lot of Google products. All of them I pay for, except search. It is true there are individuals that shine, but across the board, Google sucks at support. It starts at the top with what kind of company they want to be, and goes from there. They do not like humans.
  - verst 6y ago
    Once upon a time I was one of 3 people globally that was the entirety of the GCP support team :) You should have seen the extent to which the rest of the team and I tried to resolve customer issues. Random App Engine app getting 500s calling an Open ID endpoint (the service wasn't strictly speaking managed by GCP). I absolutely could not reproduce this and had no other reports, but I knew it was happening for the customer. I examined everything that could be different... After 2 weeks I finally got it: The customer app was running in a different data center compared to where I was testing. Calls to the API endpoint were timing out internally (pretty aggressive timeout interval). It turns out the Open ID service wasn't running in the same data center region. That should not have been the case but occurred because the internal BigTable service had to be upgraded in a particular region and hence all App Engine apps in that region were moved to another one - a fairly seamless process. The Open ID service unfortunately wasn't provisioned in that region (it's not a dependency of App Engine). Once I identified the issue it was a matter of telling the on call SRE about it who then spun up Open ID in that region and thereby resolved the issues in a matter of 5 minutes. Often a new support case meant discovering platform limitations - for example running into BigTable anti patterns because App Engine Datastore allocated IDs sequentially by default. That could cause poor read / write performance, in part due to automatic sharding behavior of BigTable. We later switched to snowflake IDs. And then there were lots of Java folks used to Classpath scanning (default behavior of Spring Framework?) which for larger projects caused App Engine container startup to exceed the allowed time limit. That became a user education issue for which we then had to write an in depth article. Good times :) I absolutely hated dealing with billing inquiries though... so difficult to map someone's code to billable operations. Some SDK methods were of course utilizing multiple billable operations. Determining SLA violation refunds was much easier.

0df8dkdf 6y ago

Google Cloud, AWS, MS Auzra are made to lock you into their system. I guess if fine if you are ok with it and you don't have an experienced systemadmin/dev op on hand. There are plenty of cloud agnostic platform out there that does VPS, load balancers. digital ocean, linode, etc. If you want to be green there is also the Advania they use geothermal energy. And since it is in iceland better data protection policy than US companies. I'm not affiliated with any one of them, it is just from year of cloud provider hopping.

antb123 6y ago
same and ended up with hetzner.. great inexpensive service. Only thing I miss is firewalls for cloud (they have it for dedicated).
cocochanel 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. I am on both DO and Linode for many years and I have had an amazing experience. Not affiliated with any of them, just a happy customer.
- tomjuggler 6y ago
  Yeah, Digital Ocean $5 per month is where I started. Do it yourself, the tools are out there!
tilolebo 6y ago
How does AWS lock you more than DO? Because they have a more comprehensive offering?
- 0df8dkdf 6y ago
  Route 53, S3 storage, load balancer, everything is encouraged to work other AWS services! Smells much like what MS was doing. Don't get me wrong, it is more open than Google Cloud and Azura.
- emptysongglass 6y ago
  Have you tried deleting an S3 bucket? Go ahead, I'll wait. How about egressing any amount of data? I hope you have a Diamond Platinum AmEx attached to your account because you're about to lose your house with that bill.

pjmlp 6y ago

Somehow your comment reminded me how Google talks go at GDC and similar game development conferences. While everyone else is talking about game engines, design and programming techniques, Google's talks are mostly around their cloud offerings, and customer telemetry.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> they don't care about my company at all So why is Google this way? They already have a terrible reputation for their non-existent support. Never thought they'd treat actual companies this way though. It makes no sense...

dev_tty01 6y ago
Inevitable. The entire company is built on a scalable business that required no direct contact with customers. Direct person to person interaction is the antithesis of their successful business model. Of course, now when they enter a business that needs direct customer interaction, it shouldn't be surprising that they aren't good at it. No supportive processes and probably no internal appreciation for what reps do. Thus the turnover. They will have to build out a sub-org that nurtures and develops this part of the business. I personally find customer interactions problems to be epidemic with fast-scaling internet businesses. It does however create a space for others to come in and do it better. We can hope...
- lanstin 6y ago
  Even their customer facing engineers who aren’t total a holes act like they are from a superior type of existence and we should be honored to be graced with their specialness without meaning to, but it is ground into them.

valleyjo 6y ago

Sounds like my experience with their recruiting. Nov 2019 - interviews Dec 2019 - passed hiring committee Dec to June 2020 - emailed recruiter every two weeks never heard back June 2020 - cold email from recruiter “here is your offer letter to join Google! Let's talk team match.” Needless to say I did not accept that job. This was for a software engineer role. (edited to add line breaks)

gallego2007 6y ago
Wow. Not even a call from the Recruiter to walk you through the offer letter?
- valleyjo 6y ago
  They called me eventually were kind on the call. But the whole communication issues leading up to that really ruined it for me. I was initially quite excited too. I have no idea if this is common or if my recruiter was especially bad. Reading the parent comment made me think of the similarity.
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noname2021 6y ago
I had a similar experience with their recruiting. Some interviews were cancelled and had to be rescheduled only after I inquired. Many weeks to generate offer and paper work and then 24 hrs to accept with a "take or leave it" ultimatum. Just a very poor taste and I know some fine people who work at Google. Its unfortunate they don't seem to value warmth and humaneness when communicating externally
- treeman79 6y ago
  Got an offer from a dream company. But it was lowball take it or leave it quickly thing. Noped out of that as quick as I could.
nostromo 6y ago

logicchains 6y ago

To be fair, BigQuery is probably their best product since Search so I can see why they try to milk it. It capitalises on what Google's best at, distributed systems engineering, while avoiding what Google's worst at, API design (by instead using SQL, which wasn't invented by Google). I say that as a customer who otherwise has little positive to say about Google.

cosmodisk 6y ago

The reason why the account managers change this way is because of so called territory or account realignment. These are sales terms but ultimately it means don't sit on one client for too long. Salesforce does this every single year, last week I received an email from 6th or 7th account manager since I started using them. The story is always the same: they get in touch,try to understand your business,ask questions,and see if they can spot something that previous guy missed. I hate it. However, this seems to be working on their end,as the sales keep growing...go figure.