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I used to work as a Google Cloud consultant in my past life. I had to frequently visit Google’s offices and talk to engineers there to advise on our clients for
by neya 3y ago
I used to work as a Google Cloud consultant in my past life. I had to frequently visit Google’s offices and talk to engineers there to advise on our clients for project specific requirements.
Once we had a large news publication client who had a requirement of optimizing their backend for costs as they were spending something like north of $4000 per month in server costs. This was with Cloudflare on top since the homepage and some sections could never be cached as it had to be real time.
To address this issue, we consulted an engineer who had no idea about even the database offerings Google had. He recommended something like a NoSQL solution. The more we grilled him for info on implementation and why he suggested it the more empty talk he gave us. And he wasn’t the only one. Google is really large, so we talked to a handful of them and almost all of them seemed very incompetent.
Frustrated, I walked past one of the areas where people were supposed to be working. And there were a lot of empty seats. And the few that were there were watching some Korean drama on YouTube, etc.
The rest were either sleeping off in couches and/playing snookers downstairs. For an outsider, it felt like a great culture thing to me. But later, after a dozen more visits and same working style observations, it occured to me that this no accountability cozy environment actually didn’t allow them to weed out the bad ones who didn’t even know the product they were supposed to specialize in and nothing good comes out of a company that is built on such levels of incompetence.
Soon after, I quit consulting for Google Cloud products as they also managed to increase prices without justifying the value proposition. I am not alone, many consultants who worked with Google would tell you the same. Their work culture or lack thereof is their worst enemy.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoI worked there and had to quit after 15 months due to the broken systems. So many people are there purely because of the pay (and I don't blame someone for wanting an easy job that pays $300,000+). But personally I do not want to work among people that are optimizing that hard for income. When I joined my team the first question I got was "Are you trying to get a promotion?". My manager was trying to be helpful so that he could assign promote-able projects. But the system is broken if that's how things work. I should instead be doing my best work on a project that needs to exist and by doing so get promoted. There were so many broken systems there. Once I made it clear to my boss I wanted to quit Google entirely he told me to just stick around for a year as he didn't want to do the paperwork to fire me. Thankfully I'm back at a startup. These days if I see a lot of YOE at Google on a resume it is a red flag.
- moralestapia 3y ago>And the few that were there were watching some Korean drama on YouTube, etc. Ugh, plus 1 to that. As much as people love hating "the new orange guy", there's a lesson behind the fact that he got rid of 80% of staff in a big company in an afternoon and pretty much nothing adverse happened.
- vigilans 3y agoNothing adverse besides widespread outages and revenue collapse. To be clear the revenue collapse might be unrelated to the full but I'd call it adverse.
- kaliqt 3y agoIncorrect. It is completely unrelated. Revenue collapsed due to the powers that be getting angry at him for ending the censorship regime. As for outages, the issues were little to none.
- Daishiman 3y agoYou mean advertisers don't like to see their ads next to bigoted content? Truly terrible.
- felixgallo 3y agoremember when he published the actual algorithm for twitter and everyone could look at the code that was reportedly boosting the woke and canceling maga, and it turned out not to have any kind of censorship regime or boosting, except it boosted his account? That was a great time.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAnd also it wasn't "the algorithm" at all but just some boilerplate python you use to feed stuff into the actual model, literally "let's put an ML model here" 101 kinda stuff. It was such a dumb stunt.
- 3y ago
- hkkwritesgmail 3y agoThis just shows that you don't really need 50K employees to make what Google does. You just need a few hundred brilliant ones who churn out something that makes super normal profits and carries the rest of the thousands of employees through. The rest of the staff will surely do something useful, but it could be just like finding the best screws to secure the covering of the already functioning nuclear reactor.