I’m Leaving Google — Here’s the Real Deal Behind Google Cloud | Hacker News Reader

I’m Leaving Google — Here’s the Real Deal Behind Google Cloud

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46 pointsdsr1225 comments

Google has terrible support. I used AWS and Google clouds in parallel for a while and the difference was day and night. GCE support issues take anywhere from 2 days to 3 days for the first response (depending on timezone differences), while with AWS someone usually contacts within hours, if I just crib on the twitter account. There are only positive surprises with AWS, while negative surprises only with GCE (like their recent maps pricing debacle, retiring Datastore APIs, etc).

AppEngine was ahead of the competitors a few years back. But it was/is neither as easy as heroku, nor as kept updated as the competitive PaaS solutions. We have beanstalk, lightsail etc. in AWS. Appengine flexenv takes about 10 minutes whenever we change the container sources, and the GCE team believes that it is acceptable :(

Golang was invented at Google but AWS Lambda added support for serverless golang a looooooong time ago, while CloudFunctions from Google is still in a private closed beta which probably none outside Google use.

Also, I have been burnt by Google obsoleting their Datastore APIs and expecting the whole world to move as fast as them, while my apps written for dynamodb continue to run without requiring changes for years.

Also, firebase, stackdriver (opentracing vs observability) etc. seem to go on various directions, with different documentation formats, tutorial styles, dashboard styles, etc. in contrast to AWS services, which offer a more cohesive, uniform experience.

Some of us at $DAYJOB are big fans of google technologies but always end up choosing AWS due to the much superior support of the latter. It often feels to me like Google is in the public cloud business only as an afterthought and not even fully interested in it.

Might the Google cloud be just an internal product they happen to try sell externally?

The internal stuff had many hard exposed edges that made it more difficult to use. The public exposed apis were easier to understand. It would be hard to document all the warts of internal systems where you have to deal with more failover scenarios.

I’m sure Google is lovely and all but there was so much Google worship in this post that I never made it to whatever the actual subject was supposed to be.

It's a "to be continued"

You never came up with any negatives about working on google cloud or really gave any useful information. You must have some relevant things to talk about.

Something I've always wondered is if Google is such an awesome company then why are there so many ex Googlers?

It always feels strange to me that it seems like every second person on HN used to work at Google, but all of them say how great Google was.

I left google because I was working on v. 8 or 9 of things, and it just got boring adding new features to giant systems that weren't that interesting. I wanted to work on core software again, write a new system, or have freedom to make improvements and change. I didn't want to work on a multi-million line java program with relatively fixed architecture and slow evolution over time. There were tons of great things about google, good pay, the best people, awesome benefits, the gym, food. Really the quality of devs when I was there for almost 10 years were excellent. I only came across one asshole manager in my time there (unfortunately he was my manager, but he's left since).

The technology of test, development, source code editing was the best. But, there weren't that many fun projects.

If the New England Patriots/LA Lakers/New York Yankees/Manchester are such a great team why are there so many former players?

Sometimes what the team needs and what you need don't align. Wrong sport, wrong coach, not enough play time, not good enough, hate the fans, etc.

He was a PM, so he doesn't understand the real problems inside Google. Talking about agility: you have to provision TPUs years ahead. Developer jobs are taken over by higher priority production tasks all the time. Datacenters are always turned down, and job dependencies on datacenters are still managed manually, as the internal tools don't support automatic migration. Forgetting to provision necessery network quota means that even when you get a lot of GCUs, you have to wait months again to get network quota. If you find the right SRE though they try to be helpful, but their tools are limited as well.

I'm not saying things are bad though. There are lots of great tgings at Google, but agility is not one of them.

> If I asked you which company had the fewest breaches, or where you feel your information is safest — what would your answer be? And so, it’s no wonder that Google Cloud leads and will continue to lead in this area.

Meanwhile, in other news today, The Wall Street Journal reports that "Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public".[1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared...

The post mentions cloud security.

We were actually discussing this one day at the office - have there been any serious security breaches at Google? Are they really just that good?

Google is a black hole that sucks in the best talent. I'm sure once you're there it's a singularity of extremely talented engineers. So if anyone were to have good security practices, it would be Google.

That's fine and all, but so is every major tech company in the public cloud space. And humans make mistakes regardless of how talented or brilliant they may be.

Android security is top notch /s

I think the post is just a resume with work history “I worked at google”.

He only spent one paragraph complaining about perf and promo. I'm not convinced he worked there.

For someone leaving Google he sure did spend a lot of words telling everyone how awesome Google is.

Shouldn't company pay adequately instead of giving out "free" food? This is something I can't understand.

Honestly I imagine that the "free" part is really secondary to actually having a selection of good quality food readily available in the office.

But that removes choice, which diminishes your freedom as a person. I'd rather have a canteen where you can pay for food or go outside and be paid so I can afford that.

How does it remove choice, other than perhaps by discouraging local restaurants from opening too close to the Google campus?

or go outside and be paid so I can afford that.

I can afford it, the problem is that most halfway decent and interesting places are a good 30 minutes walk away. If I want a nice lunch it effectively means taking a 90 minute lunch break. I'd love nothing more than to have good food available in my office building, free vs paid is really a secondary concern.

Right, but you want to impose it on the others. That is pretty selfish. If company paid for food in you salary you could have a choice. You don't want choice? Fine. Just don't force it on others because it works for you.

I'm not sure I get the point you're trying to make. What exactly am I trying to impose on others? And how does having an office canting (either paid or free) limit choice? No one is forcing anyone to eat there. Obviously I would love nothing more than to have an amazing choice of awesome lunches within walking distance of my office, but given that the realities of urban planning and economics preclude that from happening I'd much rather have my company offer decent food in office as opposed to the current situation of no decent food.

What a kiss-ass. He didn’t even say why he was leaving.

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