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Google's payments team is seeing an exodus of executives and employees
- whymauri 5y agoare they shuttering this one too
- bpodgursky 5y agoNah. I know the memes, but payments is far too core to throw out.
- MrStonedOne 5y agoSaving this for later.
- philtar 5y agoIt's definitely going to get thrown out eventually. 100%. It can't hold a candle to Apple Pay and some exec is gonna convince the higher ups that they need to rebuild it from scratch. I wouldn't put anything past the company that risked everything on Google+ and then basically abandoned it a few months later when they didn't see the mass exodus they were so delusional in expecting.
- CydeWeys 5y agoIf this org includes user payments for consumer-facing paid premium products, then the org is definitely way too important to ever be shut down.
- scrollaway 5y ago> It can't hold a candle to Apple Pay Am i missing something? To me google pay does contactless payments so i don't have to carry my card. Hugely useful. What does Apple Pay do that is better?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MattGaiser 5y agoGiven the market, is there anywhere that isn't seeing an exodus? If you don't like your employer for whatever reason, now is the time to go.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoTempting, but I personally worry about a glut of talent. Truth be told though, I would probably have anxieties no matter what the market looks like.
- MattGaiser 5y agoNo reason you can't quietly explore your options.
- noodlenotes 5y agoIt might be a nice boost to your confidence to apply at a time when everyone is looking for talent and you'll get more callbacks.
- mizzao 5y agoCan you share more about how the current job market is different than usual?
- crazysim 5y agoThere's a messaging app inside G Pay too. I don't think anyone would be actually surprised at that fact.
- ng12 5y agoI wonder if building a messaging app is the secret to promotion at Google. I cant think of any other reason they would have so many.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agoBuilding new useless shit is the secret to succeeding as a developer. You either build some shit or end up not getting a promotion / new job.
- omnicognate 5y agoYou mean the secret to being a developer is... developing?
- ForHackernews 5y agoCertainly it's not a career that rewards maintaining legacy systems or cleaning up technical debt.
- still_grokking 5y agoThat's for the new hires. The experts who created those things move on.
- Kye 5y agoIt sounds like the problem at Google is no one's maintaining things once the person responsible for it moves on.
- granshaw 5y agoNon paywall link?
- KLVTZ 5y agohttps://archive.is/cYrEf https://archive.is/cYrEf
- KLVTZ 5y agohttps://archive.is/cYrEf https://archive.is/cYrEf
- not_exactly__ 5y agoI’ve been pondering for a while why Google never tried to acquire PayPal, and/or perhaps most importantly Venmo (which is part of it). With Android & Chrome being the platforms that they are, the ultra tight integration of payment of PayPal/Venmo should be interesting to unlock more payment growth. Yes Google has the technical ability to build competitors to those, but the market of consumers/SMB’s don’t appear to understand the Google payment offering. Whereas with PayPal/Venmo as the frontend brand, it’d be hard to argue that the market would be confused given the already existing uses and brand appeal. Of course this sort of merger may raise all sorts of antitrust flags so maybe it’s just a thought experiment and nothing else for now.
- nicoburns 5y agoGoogl Pay is pretty popular here in the UK. The value proposition is simple: it's like a debit card, but it uses your phone, and thus can be more convenient in certain circumstances. From my european perspective, where sending money between bank accounts is free and easy using their first party apps, the last thing I'd want involved is paypal who have a reputation for stealing people's money and generally being difficult to deal with.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI don't know why they don't advertise more? They own the internet's biggest advertising platforms, but I don't know 1/2 if their products. I just said to myself I need to look into Google pay. Then I realized I use it on their domain registration app. And by advertising---not the typical hip flashy "Street" horrid ads they are notorious for, but just a developer taking about a useful product.
- bbarnett 5y agoThe real problem is, who wants to integrate/use something Google may shut down tomorrow, and, google is famous for no customer support. Paypal is known for support issues, but Google?! That's a whole other level of support pain .. I can just imagine my account blocked, thousands there, and... what? A wall of canned support answers, no recourse, misery. This is Google.
- oenetan 5y agothanks
- jsnell 5y ago> Dozens of employees and executives have left the group [...] > more than 3,700 full-time employees, according to recent internal data viewed by Insider. Roughly half of those were previously overseen by Sengupta. Do I read correctly that "dozens" out of about 1800 people have left since April? Is that an abnormally high number, especially right after things started opening up again after the pandemic?
- villasv 5y agoA 10% turnover rate in 4 months is pretty high, though I don’t know their baseline.
- jsnell 5y ago10% is 180. That seems pretty far outside of the expected range of "dozens".
- villasv 5y agoTrue lol I misread. So it’s close to 1% in 4 months or 3-4% a year, which should be pretty normal
- Ekaros 5y agoYeah, let's say average tenure is 5 years. Wouldn't that indicate that each year 20% of workforce would leave?
- itsdrewmiller 5y agoIt depends if you're including the tenure of all the people who have departed or not - AFAIK most places don't, which skews the numbers tremendously.
- munk-a 5y agoGoogle has been rolling out an astoundingly aggressive anti-remote policy from what we've heard - and it's probably even more aggressive internally. I wouldn't be surprised if they're just losing a lot of the folks that realized quality of life matters to them.
- encryptluks2 5y agoSo they take a working Payments app with browser access, and then replace it with a mobile-only payment app apparently geared towards the Indian market. Now, they want to gamify my finances and have me share my bank records with them so they can "reward" me. I'd leave too if I previously worked on developing something that was based off the "don't be evil" philosophy only to be replaced with something resembling evil.
- gerash 5y agoApart from the "evil" cliche you're right. It seems like all these executives are trying to do some growth hacking when a product hasn't gone viral. This guy probably promised significant user growth to his manager by adding all these coupon and using "AI". I have installed the app and none of the new features appeal to me and I don't see why it would appeal to anyone else. Probably none of these executives even use this product themselves and just chase trends they've heard about. None of them seem to have any intuition on what makes for a good product. All they are chasing is growth numbers to boast about in a presentation and get promoted/rewarded for. Can't understand why these executives are paid so much given their track record.
- ElijahLynn 5y agoPaywall splash modal is blocking content. Needs an Archive.org link.
- ElijahLynn 5y agoThanks, please upvote this to the top folks since I assume most don't have a subscription and can't read the article and will only comment on the headline title.
- downandout 5y agoYeah, I don’t know how these hard-paywalled articles keep making it to the front page. My understanding has always been that if there is no workaround, it isn’t allowed here.
- greenyoda 5y agoIt's not a "hard" paywall - their paywall is very easy to get around. I use the uMatrix browser extension, which disables JavaScript and cookies from third-party domains, and the full text of the article is displayed to me. This also works for many other sites, like the NY Times and Washington Post.
- jefftk 5y ago"hard" as opposed to the "softer" ones that give you some number of free views first
- squarefoot 5y agoAnother workaround: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome Also for Firefox despite the URL name, which is the one I use.
- dang 5y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28251905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28251905.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoI think anyone from the outside can see that Google has no central vision for is auxiliary products and as such, all of these products “boil” out of the company and evaporate into nothing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- buitreVirtual 5y agoAll these half-hearted products Google develops and often cancels makes me think it's a great place for developers and executives to train themselves and gain street cred, kind of like getting an ivy-league degree, and then move on elsewhere to real jobs having a real impact. In other words, it's the best way to get a masters degree with the added benefit of being highly paid while doing it, as opposed to paying highly for it.
- TedShiller 5y agoThat's like saying the best way to learn how to develop good products is to develop products nobody uses.
- istorical 5y agoThat's essentially what university is. Learning and research for its own sake or for the sake of self-improvement without worrying about applications or real world value.
- nostrademons 5y agoBest way to learn how to develop good products is to develop products everybody uses. This option is not open to most people, though, and developing products nobody uses is a significantly better way to learn than not developing products.
- TedShiller 5y agoSo doing exercises that are ineffectual is better than not exercising at all. Got it.
- Texaner 5y agoCome on. You can have someone do a great job creating a tool that nobody uses. The experience acquired building that tool is independent of the subsequent market demand.
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- kyrra 5y agoGoogler, opinions are my own. I work in payments. Caesar leaving was interesting for sure, and he just announced a new fintech startup yesterday. https://www.arbo.works/ https://www.arbo.works/ I can't speak to why he left or what he's doing now, but I wish I did know. :) Also, it's important to remember how big Google payments is. As the article says, Bill Ready has 3700 people reporting to him that do a lot more than the Google Pay app (which lots of people are talking about here). We do a lot of things.
- buitreVirtual 5y agoIs there anything being built there that could dominate fintech? I haven't heard of anything. 3,700 highly paid individuals is a lot.
- Clewza313 5y agoGoogle Pay is the most popular payment system in India, a country of 1,400,000,000 people.
- achow 5y agoPhonePe another payment app is bigger than Google Pay in India, and they are around 2000 employees but their feature set is order of magnitude more. Not that more feature is better, but to build those one needs more employees.
- yadaeno 5y agoYour vp for payments is named "Bill Ready"? Ive seen this phenomenon enough times to believe it's not a coincidence, but some sort of echo of label theory. See also: Doug Bowser, head of Nintendo america.
- trishmapow2 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
- morpheos137 5y agoGoogle hasn't fielded a commercially sucessful product since search, right? Youtube was an acquisition and lost money for years.
- spicyramen 5y agoStripe, Robinhood, Square are offering larger TC. An experience is relevant
- freyr 5y agoThis doesn’t seem to be the case for Square, at least.
- habosa 5y agoThe whole payments team at Google has had a reputation as a terrible place to work for many years. Due to the leadership, culture, and the product.
- symlinkk 5y agoWhat is “Google Payments”? Is this just where they save your credit card info and let you pay at various places? Why does that need thousands of employees?
- CydeWeys 5y agoBecause it's an entire org that does many more things than that one app.
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