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Because Google is playing catch up and needs to pay higher salaries to poach from MSFT and AMZN and also pay much more for infra than what Amazon paid for their

Because Google is playing catch up and needs to pay higher salaries to poach from MSFT and AMZN and also pay much more for infra than what Amazon paid for theirs initially.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Google has been "playing catch up" for a decade now. They also pay less than Amazon (source levels.fyi)
- scottyah 4y ago
  From what I hear they paw software engineers less, but find it harder to attract sales personnel, as it’s easier to sell the industry leader (IBM, Oracle vs ???). No sources, just some posts a few months ago.
- arebop 4y ago
  Google does not pay less than Amazon (source levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Salesforce&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Salesforce&tra...). I have heard people claim that Amazon pays more and by that they mean that if you hold your Amazon stock until vesting, it appreciates so much that it ends up being worth more than whatever the Google grant would have been worth. But then you have to ask if the relative performance of the stocks will remain stable over time despite having changed recently, and factor in differences in employee churn and so on.
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    They pay about 100,000 less. Its widely known, not sure why you are arguing this. Amazon also raised their paybands massively, so a blanket comparison doesnt reflect reality. Look at individual data over the last year or so. Google also downlevels, so comparing levels makes less sense, compare years of experience instead
    - jnwatson 4y ago
      Back last July, AWS couldn’t come close to what Meta or Google could offer when I was looking.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mandeepj 4y ago
      > Amazon also raised their paybands massively that $350k base limit is top of the band, not everyone walking inside the door is going to get that. A friend of mind got an offer from AWS about a month ago, his base was offered $180k
    - eclipxe 4y ago
      Very wrong.
ra7 4y ago
What does Google still need to catch up on in cloud? Building products/services? Sales? AFAIK, they have comparable cloud services to most AWS/Azure offerings.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Trust for one thing. They just cut off customers services with line of recourse. Also shut down products with little warning.
  - ra7 4y ago
    I don't think shutting down products applies to GCP services. Even if it did, it doesn't explain the $858M loss. They are spending big on something to "catch up", I'm just not sure what it is.
    - RandomBK 4y ago
      IIRC it's mostly incentives for large companies to jump ship
    - ushakov 4y ago
      > shutting down products applies to GCP services they regularly deprecate old API versions in favour of new ones, which are not backwards compatible and usually more expensive any time Google Cloud APIs change you have to update your code and they break stuff, introduce bugs more often that you'd expect and prioritize new features over fixes (see bugtracker for confirmation) this is why i'm never again touching GCP
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Mostly I think it’s just acquiring customers. The big cloud providers go to great lengths to lock their customers in, so convincing them to switch is hard. Requires a much better product which seems pretty much impossible against aws and azure or a much cheaper price.
- levi-turner 4y ago
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
IIUC, Google w/o cloud or YouTube handles more network requests, storage, and bandwidth than Amazon + AWS by a large margin. They don't need to "catch up" on infra. They need to catch up on their product offering.
Melatonic 4y ago
They also offer insanely cheap deals to nonprofits and education for both GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) and GCP. Totally makes sense why they do it but I have to imagine its a huge loss on paper. They also might be building more actual datacenters and doing so in a high end / environmentally friendly way whereas perhaps Amazon has already done a lot of those investments in previous years?
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  >… insanely cheap deals to nonprofits… Amazon and Microsoft both do that as well.

Because Google is playing catch up and needs to pay higher salaries to poach from MSFT and AMZN and also pay much more for infra than what Amazon paid for theirs initially.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

Google has been "playing catch up" for a decade now. They also pay less than Amazon (source levels.fyi)

scottyah 4y ago
From what I hear they paw software engineers less, but find it harder to attract sales personnel, as it’s easier to sell the industry leader (IBM, Oracle vs ???). No sources, just some posts a few months ago.
arebop 4y ago
Google does not pay less than Amazon (source levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Salesforce&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Salesforce&tra...). I have heard people claim that Amazon pays more and by that they mean that if you hold your Amazon stock until vesting, it appreciates so much that it ends up being worth more than whatever the Google grant would have been worth. But then you have to ask if the relative performance of the stocks will remain stable over time despite having changed recently, and factor in differences in employee churn and so on.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  They pay about 100,000 less. Its widely known, not sure why you are arguing this. Amazon also raised their paybands massively, so a blanket comparison doesnt reflect reality. Look at individual data over the last year or so. Google also downlevels, so comparing levels makes less sense, compare years of experience instead
  - jnwatson 4y ago
    Back last July, AWS couldn’t come close to what Meta or Google could offer when I was looking.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mandeepj 4y ago
    > Amazon also raised their paybands massively that $350k base limit is top of the band, not everyone walking inside the door is going to get that. A friend of mind got an offer from AWS about a month ago, his base was offered $180k
  - eclipxe 4y ago
    Very wrong.

ra7 4y ago

What does Google still need to catch up on in cloud? Building products/services? Sales? AFAIK, they have comparable cloud services to most AWS/Azure offerings.

bamboozled 4y ago
Trust for one thing. They just cut off customers services with line of recourse. Also shut down products with little warning.
- ra7 4y ago
  I don't think shutting down products applies to GCP services. Even if it did, it doesn't explain the $858M loss. They are spending big on something to "catch up", I'm just not sure what it is.
  - RandomBK 4y ago
    IIRC it's mostly incentives for large companies to jump ship
  - ushakov 4y ago
    > shutting down products applies to GCP services they regularly deprecate old API versions in favour of new ones, which are not backwards compatible and usually more expensive any time Google Cloud APIs change you have to update your code and they break stuff, introduce bugs more often that you'd expect and prioritize new features over fixes (see bugtracker for confirmation) this is why i'm never again touching GCP
colinmhayes 4y ago
Mostly I think it’s just acquiring customers. The big cloud providers go to great lengths to lock their customers in, so convincing them to switch is hard. Requires a much better product which seems pretty much impossible against aws and azure or a much cheaper price.
levi-turner 4y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

IIUC, Google w/o cloud or YouTube handles more network requests, storage, and bandwidth than Amazon + AWS by a large margin. They don't need to "catch up" on infra. They need to catch up on their product offering.

Melatonic 4y ago

They also offer insanely cheap deals to nonprofits and education for both GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) and GCP. Totally makes sense why they do it but I have to imagine its a huge loss on paper. They also might be building more actual datacenters and doing so in a high end / environmentally friendly way whereas perhaps Amazon has already done a lot of those investments in previous years?

Godel_unicode 4y ago
>… insanely cheap deals to nonprofits… Amazon and Microsoft both do that as well.