10 ms·

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in th

by tedivm 3y ago

People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google. * I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error, * I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and suddenly stop getting their ads shown, * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen, * I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview. One of my more recent startups was actually funded by a Google based venture firm, and they wanted to know why we refused to use GCP. My answer is that I wanted the startup to actually succeed, and it wasn't worth the risk of dealing with Google's horrible support.

DeathArrow 3y ago
>People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've heard horror stories with GCP from paying customers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
matwood 3y ago
Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.
- frognumber 3y ago
  What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time. If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer. Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google. The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over. I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is: - Free tier, quick one-off hack - Legacy - Literally no other options Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.
- tedivm 3y ago
  Not only that but they actually provide real support. I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day. In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start). It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    It's not support if you have to complain on a public forum though.
    - tedivm 3y ago
      That was due to my own whining and impatience. Going through the normal support channels tends to be pretty solid through. I will say though that companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        > companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well. Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.
    - nijave 3y ago
- oefrha 3y ago
  Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC. Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.) - Former ACD customer who got burned.
  - hedora 3y ago
    They also banned encrypted files, effectively kicking off everyone using it for backup. I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.
    - jeremyjh 3y ago
      Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.
      - MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
        Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
        NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        >Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed. If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.
        DiskoHexyl 3y ago
        Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1. So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much
- moralestapia 3y ago
  To add to that, and related to, >I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error I once just stopped paying an AWS bill on a small website I abandoned (few USD/month), came back to check after a long while and I was surprised to find out how long does it take for AWS to actually shut you down. Also on AWS, on two different occasions I screwed up and got a high ticket bill: * Got a lot of data out of Glacier and bill spiked to a couple thousand $$$ (this one'e explicitly mentioned several times in their docs but my mind just didn't register it). * Forgot to turn off some expensive spot instances and left them running for ~2 days (where it should've been minutes). Again, some thousand $$$. Both times I opened tickets, told them it was an honest mistake and they just wrote them off, :O.
  - tedivm 3y ago
    During covid the company I worked at had their Series A fall through- we had a signed term sheet and everything, but the venture company lost their shit and pulled out of the deal. We only had a few months runway left at this point. I reached out to our account rep at AWS and asked if we could delay our bills for three months. They laughed and said that if we didn't pay our bill for three months their system would just send us a bunch of emails, but that they wouldn't even start the process of closing the account until at least three months had passed- and even then they'd delay it further for us. We got a new funding round and paid all of our bills, but we would not have been able to make payroll if AWS wasn't so lenient about it. That was 2020, so almost three years ago, and that company is still regularly featured at AWS talks and product announcements.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Same applies to Azure, they also have their issues, but not Google bad.
whatamidoingyo 3y ago
> * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen, I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running". I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my sites and annoying users to eventually get to $100 to see if I'll be able to cash it out. It's getting close to $100, so it's hard to deactivate.
- winter_blue 3y ago
  > but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic Do you mean you get more traffic when Google Ads are active/present on your website? I.e. that the google search ranking algorithm prioritizes websites running Google ads?
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    Maybe I misread but GP seems to be saying the opposite.
  - whatamidoingyo 3y ago
    No, the opposite. When they're inactive, traffic reaches all time highs. When they're active, traffic is still decent, but nowhere near as high when they're off. Google ranks your site based on speed (as well as a few other factors), and their product (adsense) slows everything down, so that's potentially a reason. So, it's like... wow, I should have kept adsense on (although I probably wouldn't have the same traffic if it was).
    - dcow 3y ago
      The Google Catch-22
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- simonlc 3y ago
datadeft 3y ago
Google decided it is time to sell GA for enterprises with 3rd parties involved. One client of mine (1B+ revenue, Xth largest website in Europe where x < 10) did not sort out the 3rd party agreement on time. Google's answer: we are going delete all of your data. Have a nice day!
- barbazoo 3y ago
  this seems like there is something missing to the story though, no?
  - datadeft 3y ago
    Yes. The sanity from Google.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dna_polymerase 3y ago
Their abysmal user support is the number one complaint. How the f*ck didn't they wake up to this issue by now. I think they are in dire need of a leadership change. If they want to serve businesses, they need to adopt actual business practices.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Support doesn’t scale so Google doesn’t want to do it out of greed and immaturity.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    If any given user needs x support hours a week, and their business pays for > x support hours a week, then support scales. I guess as you scale up a business you want to get leaner and you accept lower margins, hoping to make it back by volume? Maybe that's what you mean?
    - x0x0 3y ago
      I assume he/she meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. Support can never scale; only fixing your software so that it doesn't trigger support needs scales. Otherwise, each support request linearly requires human time.
      - ska 3y ago
        > meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. This is a pernicious usage of "scale" that has crept into tech-speak, because it makes the term strictly less useful.
pdonis 3y ago
> People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data. However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.
- number6 3y ago
  > Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data. You are not paying the competition either; so you somewhat paying Google. It's not a direct payment but indirect support
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > You are not paying the competition either Competition for what? Here we're talking about data hosting. There are plenty of companies that will host huge amounts of data for reasonable prices. And unlike Google, they actually have reasonable terms of service and customer support.
    - number6 3y ago
      And you are not paying them, not even the reasonable price, because Google flips giving it away for "free" - so the competition doesn't get any money and Google doesn't have any liability whatsoever... Win-win for Google
- smhenderson 3y ago
  That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better. But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users. Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything, pulling an "oops, sorry, I guess you get what you pay for" is just ludicrous at this point. And sorry if it seems like I'm arguing directly with you, that's not my intention. But I see this a lot and have gone from saying it myself to vehemently disagreeing with it over the last decade or so.
codedokode 3y ago
> company that can't be relied on for anything Any cloud service can't be relied on for anything. There is no law for mandatory backing up cloud content and no guarantees your data will not be lost. Buy HDDs while they still are available and do the back up yourself.
- profunctor 3y ago
  Aren’t the guarantees the SLA that is agreed with Amazon, Google etc?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  The journalist had nearly 500 TB of data to store.. getting that much local storage could be prohibitively expensive. That's sort of the whole selling point of cloud services.
iamgopal 3y ago
It’s ~18 years since my blogpost blog caught click fraud, I still can’t do many things related to ads because of it. That credit card is still on their record and that address on which I lived total 2 months one and half decades back, is where I live in their record. Stupid stupid company.
ExoticPearTree 3y ago
Just to be put the record straight: Google is an advertising company with hobbies. And like for many of us hobbies change over time, so do Google's hobbies. There's somewhere a website with all the products killed by Google for various reasons, some even after a few months.
- danhodgins 3y ago
  @ExoticPearTree - "Google is an advertising company with hobbies." This should be Google's mission, purpose, values and tagline.
- justin_oaks 3y ago
  The website you're referring to: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gurchik 3y ago
  I've always wanted to ask, how do engineers who work at Google think about this? I want to work at a company where I feel like I'm making the lives of our users better. I'm sure this is true for lots of users of Google products, but there are also thousands or tens of thousands of people who have had serious real life impacts because of it. You can see many of them in this thread: AdSense businesses getting shut down, Youtube content creators getting banned for mysterious reasons. I try to work at companies that believe these problems to be unacceptable to even 1 person. While that goal may not always be possible, I would not be comfortable with anything less than an immediate resolution and a postmortem to prevent it from happening again. Is this also true at Google? I don't know anyone at Google to ask.
  - ExoticPearTree 3y ago
    I think it's the same for everyone company: as long as the pay is good with perks and benefits you don't really care what you code on. And if you drink the company kool-aid, you believe you're doing people a favor.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thiht 3y ago
Damn, I've had a great time using GCP at my last job, especially coming from AWS. This disappoints me a lot but I can't say I'm surprised, I've stopped using Google services almost everywhere (I'm slowly migrating away from Gmail, and I'm still stuck with YouTube) for this very reason. I'm very aware that cloud vendor lock-in should be avoided (or mitigated) at all cost, but PubSub was actually pretty nice.
neilv 3y ago
External to Google, I think we have little data, but we've heard that much internal behavior is based on individuals making data-backed cases for positive contributions to the company. Which prompts the idea: does Google have a data-backed adversarial operation, as a check on all that activity and biased analysis? For example, when someone says "I did X, which resulted in a Y% positive impact to Z, so pls gimme dat sweet promo yo"... there's another function of the company that can say, "It was actually only 0.2 that positive impact, in that isolated regard; but more importantly, it had costs to A and B, which our current strategy model suggests resulted in substantial net harm to the company. Please tell all your colleagues that disregarding A and B is not the way to get a promotion."
bbor 3y ago
I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview. If anyone’s ever been curious what working at Google is like, this sums it up perfectly…
dgellow 3y ago
Is it really better with other cloud providers? Genuine question. I personally never faced terrible issues like the one described, it’s always difficult to understand if it is really a GCP problem and not a general cloud problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kzrdude 3y ago
It seems safer to not have any financial ties with google at all. Not paying for services and not being paid for services. Not publishing apps, not using ads. -just a free user of gmail who hopes to be undisturbed.
- tedivm 3y ago
  I'd rather be a paid user of Fastmail than a free user of GMail.

by tedivm 3y ago

DeathArrow 3y ago

>People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've heard horror stories with GCP from paying customers.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

matwood 3y ago

Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.

frognumber 3y ago
What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time. If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer. Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google. The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over. I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is: - Free tier, quick one-off hack - Legacy - Literally no other options Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.
tedivm 3y ago
Not only that but they actually provide real support. I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day. In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start). It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.
- nottorp 3y ago
  It's not support if you have to complain on a public forum though.
  - tedivm 3y ago
    That was due to my own whining and impatience. Going through the normal support channels tends to be pretty solid through. I will say though that companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      > companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well. Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.
  - nijave 3y ago
oefrha 3y ago
Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC. Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.) - Former ACD customer who got burned.
- hedora 3y ago
  They also banned encrypted files, effectively kicking off everyone using it for backup. I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.
    - MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
      Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
      - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        >Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed. If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.
      - DiskoHexyl 3y ago
        Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1. So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much
moralestapia 3y ago
To add to that, and related to, >I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error I once just stopped paying an AWS bill on a small website I abandoned (few USD/month), came back to check after a long while and I was surprised to find out how long does it take for AWS to actually shut you down. Also on AWS, on two different occasions I screwed up and got a high ticket bill: * Got a lot of data out of Glacier and bill spiked to a couple thousand $$$ (this one'e explicitly mentioned several times in their docs but my mind just didn't register it). * Forgot to turn off some expensive spot instances and left them running for ~2 days (where it should've been minutes). Again, some thousand $$$. Both times I opened tickets, told them it was an honest mistake and they just wrote them off, :O.
- tedivm 3y ago
  During covid the company I worked at had their Series A fall through- we had a signed term sheet and everything, but the venture company lost their shit and pulled out of the deal. We only had a few months runway left at this point. I reached out to our account rep at AWS and asked if we could delay our bills for three months. They laughed and said that if we didn't pay our bill for three months their system would just send us a bunch of emails, but that they wouldn't even start the process of closing the account until at least three months had passed- and even then they'd delay it further for us. We got a new funding round and paid all of our bills, but we would not have been able to make payroll if AWS wasn't so lenient about it. That was 2020, so almost three years ago, and that company is still regularly featured at AWS talks and product announcements.
pjmlp 3y ago
Same applies to Azure, they also have their issues, but not Google bad.

whatamidoingyo 3y ago

> * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen, I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running". I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my sites and annoying users to eventually get to $100 to see if I'll be able to cash it out. It's getting close to $100, so it's hard to deactivate.

winter_blue 3y ago
> but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic Do you mean you get more traffic when Google Ads are active/present on your website? I.e. that the google search ranking algorithm prioritizes websites running Google ads?
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  Maybe I misread but GP seems to be saying the opposite.
- whatamidoingyo 3y ago
  No, the opposite. When they're inactive, traffic reaches all time highs. When they're active, traffic is still decent, but nowhere near as high when they're off. Google ranks your site based on speed (as well as a few other factors), and their product (adsense) slows everything down, so that's potentially a reason. So, it's like... wow, I should have kept adsense on (although I probably wouldn't have the same traffic if it was).
  - dcow 3y ago
    The Google Catch-22
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
simonlc 3y ago

datadeft 3y ago

Google decided it is time to sell GA for enterprises with 3rd parties involved. One client of mine (1B+ revenue, Xth largest website in Europe where x < 10) did not sort out the 3rd party agreement on time. Google's answer: we are going delete all of your data. Have a nice day!

barbazoo 3y ago
this seems like there is something missing to the story though, no?
- datadeft 3y ago
  Yes. The sanity from Google.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dna_polymerase 3y ago

Their abysmal user support is the number one complaint. How the f*ck didn't they wake up to this issue by now. I think they are in dire need of a leadership change. If they want to serve businesses, they need to adopt actual business practices.

faeriechangling 3y ago
Support doesn’t scale so Google doesn’t want to do it out of greed and immaturity.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  If any given user needs x support hours a week, and their business pays for > x support hours a week, then support scales. I guess as you scale up a business you want to get leaner and you accept lower margins, hoping to make it back by volume? Maybe that's what you mean?
  - x0x0 3y ago
    I assume he/she meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. Support can never scale; only fixing your software so that it doesn't trigger support needs scales. Otherwise, each support request linearly requires human time.
    - ska 3y ago
      > meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. This is a pernicious usage of "scale" that has crept into tech-speak, because it makes the term strictly less useful.

pdonis 3y ago

> People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data. However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.

number6 3y ago
> Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data. You are not paying the competition either; so you somewhat paying Google. It's not a direct payment but indirect support
- pdonis 3y ago
  > You are not paying the competition either Competition for what? Here we're talking about data hosting. There are plenty of companies that will host huge amounts of data for reasonable prices. And unlike Google, they actually have reasonable terms of service and customer support.
  - number6 3y ago
    And you are not paying them, not even the reasonable price, because Google flips giving it away for "free" - so the competition doesn't get any money and Google doesn't have any liability whatsoever... Win-win for Google
smhenderson 3y ago
That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better. But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users. Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything, pulling an "oops, sorry, I guess you get what you pay for" is just ludicrous at this point. And sorry if it seems like I'm arguing directly with you, that's not my intention. But I see this a lot and have gone from saying it myself to vehemently disagreeing with it over the last decade or so.

codedokode 3y ago

> company that can't be relied on for anything Any cloud service can't be relied on for anything. There is no law for mandatory backing up cloud content and no guarantees your data will not be lost. Buy HDDs while they still are available and do the back up yourself.

profunctor 3y ago
Aren’t the guarantees the SLA that is agreed with Amazon, Google etc?
JohnMakin 3y ago
The journalist had nearly 500 TB of data to store.. getting that much local storage could be prohibitively expensive. That's sort of the whole selling point of cloud services.

iamgopal 3y ago

It’s ~18 years since my blogpost blog caught click fraud, I still can’t do many things related to ads because of it. That credit card is still on their record and that address on which I lived total 2 months one and half decades back, is where I live in their record. Stupid stupid company.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

Just to be put the record straight: Google is an advertising company with hobbies. And like for many of us hobbies change over time, so do Google's hobbies. There's somewhere a website with all the products killed by Google for various reasons, some even after a few months.

danhodgins 3y ago
@ExoticPearTree - "Google is an advertising company with hobbies." This should be Google's mission, purpose, values and tagline.
justin_oaks 3y ago
The website you're referring to: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gurchik 3y ago
I've always wanted to ask, how do engineers who work at Google think about this? I want to work at a company where I feel like I'm making the lives of our users better. I'm sure this is true for lots of users of Google products, but there are also thousands or tens of thousands of people who have had serious real life impacts because of it. You can see many of them in this thread: AdSense businesses getting shut down, Youtube content creators getting banned for mysterious reasons. I try to work at companies that believe these problems to be unacceptable to even 1 person. While that goal may not always be possible, I would not be comfortable with anything less than an immediate resolution and a postmortem to prevent it from happening again. Is this also true at Google? I don't know anyone at Google to ask.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  I think it's the same for everyone company: as long as the pay is good with perks and benefits you don't really care what you code on. And if you drink the company kool-aid, you believe you're doing people a favor.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thiht 3y ago

Damn, I've had a great time using GCP at my last job, especially coming from AWS. This disappoints me a lot but I can't say I'm surprised, I've stopped using Google services almost everywhere (I'm slowly migrating away from Gmail, and I'm still stuck with YouTube) for this very reason. I'm very aware that cloud vendor lock-in should be avoided (or mitigated) at all cost, but PubSub was actually pretty nice.

neilv 3y ago

External to Google, I think we have little data, but we've heard that much internal behavior is based on individuals making data-backed cases for positive contributions to the company. Which prompts the idea: does Google have a data-backed adversarial operation, as a check on all that activity and biased analysis? For example, when someone says "I did X, which resulted in a Y% positive impact to Z, so pls gimme dat sweet promo yo"... there's another function of the company that can say, "It was actually only 0.2 that positive impact, in that isolated regard; but more importantly, it had costs to A and B, which our current strategy model suggests resulted in substantial net harm to the company. Please tell all your colleagues that disregarding A and B is not the way to get a promotion."

bbor 3y ago

I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview. If anyone’s ever been curious what working at Google is like, this sums it up perfectly…

dgellow 3y ago

Is it really better with other cloud providers? Genuine question. I personally never faced terrible issues like the one described, it’s always difficult to understand if it is really a GCP problem and not a general cloud problem.

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kzrdude 3y ago

It seems safer to not have any financial ties with google at all. Not paying for services and not being paid for services. Not publishing apps, not using ads. -just a free user of gmail who hopes to be undisturbed.

tedivm 3y ago
I'd rather be a paid user of Fastmail than a free user of GMail.