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Google Cloud lays off US based support engineers

54 points by ab_testing 5y ago

lazyeye 5y ago
There was a time when it was a point of pride for a company to provide employment for its own citizens. Nowadays they take huge pride in things like diversity targets which coincidentally aligns exactly with business objectives (hire whoever they want, wherever they want, at the cheapest possible price).
mhoad 5y ago
Misleading headline. It was support staff for a single product https://www.looker.com/ https://www.looker.com/
- paddez 5y ago
  This is incorrect. The layoffs also affect staff employed within the Workspace and GCP Support organisations.
throwaway_4ever 5y ago
Shifting positions to Bangalore, Mexico City, and other low cost centers.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Google’s support is horrible across the board. It is the biggest reason places I’ve worked at continue to pay all the premiums of operating in AWS - despite being offered a treasure chest of free credits and the generally lower pricing of Google Cloud. AWS answers the phone (and chat, and email) and you get very high quality answers. Google support asked us to write a business case justifying how answering our support question benefited Google. It’s a world of difference. I wonder if Google thinks fresh faces might improve their support offering, or if it’s just the typical “offshore people are cheaper” move.
- mathverse 5y ago
  It's offshore people are cheaper move.
- theevilsharpie 5y ago
  > Google support asked us to write a business case justifying how answering our support question benefited Google. I have never had this experience with Google Cloud support (or support for any Google product -- free or paid), and couldn't even fathom what that kind of response would look like. The only time I've ever seen anything remotely along these lines was when requesting a new feature for an enterprise product that we sold at the time (we were a channel partner), and even then, it was an online form that was asking about competitive information (e.g., "does anyone else on the market have this feature?").
  - idunno2468 5y ago
    they ask us a bunch. usually its to justify the severity level: if you put it p1 and they are about to page an engineer, they want to make sure its not a test project. i think its fair to justify even if the interface is a little annoying. my main issue with it is since its all web forms each interaction is like fifteen minutes delay
    - dekhn 5y ago
      oh, yeah, this is the same for aws- one of my team filed a p1 bug and paged an AWS engineer in the middle of the night. It was for something nontrivial in a test environment. After that we had a discussion about what consitutes "production", with me explaining that I'd only ever cause an eng to be paged if i was fully prepared to deal with the fallout of an incident.
- singron 5y ago
  I've never used Google's support, but AWS support isn't good either. They lack reading comprehension, give braindead answers to questions, and have less access than you do, so even a competent support person couldn't diagnose or fix anything that you couldn't yourself. I'm convinced that unless support is stellar, it's a complete waste of time and money.
stevenicr 5y ago
If this is a true thing, I would think it should be clearly stated on the coursera courses. Just last week I got someone started on that google learning path. This would be a strange kind of fraud if the course sucked your time and money but you were not aware that you could not work google cloud unless you moved to [insert cheap country here] - imho, maybe it's not but it should be.
Havoc 5y ago
Can anyone actually confirm this? Seems like a fairly big move backed by rather sparse Reddit evidence I’d have thought there would be way more noise about it

54 points by ab_testing 5y ago

There was a time when it was a point of pride for a company to provide employment for its own citizens. Nowadays they take huge pride in things like diversity targets which coincidentally aligns exactly with business objectives (hire whoever they want, wherever they want, at the cheapest possible price).

mhoad 5y ago

Misleading headline. It was support staff for a single product https://www.looker.com/ https://www.looker.com/

paddez 5y ago
This is incorrect. The layoffs also affect staff employed within the Workspace and GCP Support organisations.

throwaway_4ever 5y ago

Shifting positions to Bangalore, Mexico City, and other low cost centers.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

Google’s support is horrible across the board. It is the biggest reason places I’ve worked at continue to pay all the premiums of operating in AWS - despite being offered a treasure chest of free credits and the generally lower pricing of Google Cloud. AWS answers the phone (and chat, and email) and you get very high quality answers. Google support asked us to write a business case justifying how answering our support question benefited Google. It’s a world of difference. I wonder if Google thinks fresh faces might improve their support offering, or if it’s just the typical “offshore people are cheaper” move.

mathverse 5y ago
It's offshore people are cheaper move.
theevilsharpie 5y ago
> Google support asked us to write a business case justifying how answering our support question benefited Google. I have never had this experience with Google Cloud support (or support for any Google product -- free or paid), and couldn't even fathom what that kind of response would look like. The only time I've ever seen anything remotely along these lines was when requesting a new feature for an enterprise product that we sold at the time (we were a channel partner), and even then, it was an online form that was asking about competitive information (e.g., "does anyone else on the market have this feature?").
- idunno2468 5y ago
  they ask us a bunch. usually its to justify the severity level: if you put it p1 and they are about to page an engineer, they want to make sure its not a test project. i think its fair to justify even if the interface is a little annoying. my main issue with it is since its all web forms each interaction is like fifteen minutes delay
  - dekhn 5y ago
    oh, yeah, this is the same for aws- one of my team filed a p1 bug and paged an AWS engineer in the middle of the night. It was for something nontrivial in a test environment. After that we had a discussion about what consitutes "production", with me explaining that I'd only ever cause an eng to be paged if i was fully prepared to deal with the fallout of an incident.
singron 5y ago
I've never used Google's support, but AWS support isn't good either. They lack reading comprehension, give braindead answers to questions, and have less access than you do, so even a competent support person couldn't diagnose or fix anything that you couldn't yourself. I'm convinced that unless support is stellar, it's a complete waste of time and money.

stevenicr 5y ago

If this is a true thing, I would think it should be clearly stated on the coursera courses. Just last week I got someone started on that google learning path. This would be a strange kind of fraud if the course sucked your time and money but you were not aware that you could not work google cloud unless you moved to [insert cheap country here] - imho, maybe it's not but it should be.

Havoc 5y ago

Can anyone actually confirm this? Seems like a fairly big move backed by rather sparse Reddit evidence I’d have thought there would be way more noise about it