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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the hiring process is the reason for Google's inability to gain market share in the cloud market. Google's hiring process has ensured that the quality bar has been very high. They have unique offerings like spanner, which other clouds are simply not anywhere near of. Their failure in cloud is mostly because the inability to sell primarily, and secondly maybe because of their support being not as good as other clouds. But both are specific classes of directions taken by their leadership.

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The argument isn't that the quality bar is too low, but rather that they're measuring "quality" in the wrong way.

If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.

But megacorps hire in such volumes that it's simply not possible to ensure any quality at all by any measure. It's all just random people that even perform worse when put in a corporate environment. So overall it's below average quality.

So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?

>So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?

If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it.

That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.

Making money is one metric. How about diversified revenue stream? Do you think they should be concerned about that?

They probably should. But it's not the concern of their developers.

Blackberry’s highest revenue quarters were around 2010. Three years after the iPhone was introduced. Profits are a trailing indicator. But even if you don’t buy that, Google’s net income was down last quarter. Revenue was up but traffic acquisition costs were up even more.

What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced.

What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?

>What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2008 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced.

Sure, but how are those things relevant? Those are strategic decisions, not decisions made by developers -- and don't concern what we're discussing, if the devs they hire are good for the company.

If somebody at Google C-level decided "let's close down Search and Ads, and just make kitchen juicers" their profits would also tank.

But that's not related to if the devs they hire are good for them. Unless their profit is hampered by dev output (and not one of the other reasons it can go down), their devs are fine for them.

Who do you think gets promoted within Google what are their incentives? If engineers slowly move up the ranks based on the same culture and incentives - creating products that are soon abandoned. The entire culture of Google is not conducive to the diversification they need as ad sales become less profitable.

The culture is shaped from the leadership. There's no requirement a company needs to promote developers to strategic thinking positions.

There isn’t a requirement but from the outside it looks like that’s what’s happening.

What different metric do you think would work better? Github? I have seen people get job offers by taking someone else's project, editing commit history to make themselves the author, and then push it to GitHub and talk about that project in their interview. Sure, sometimes on drilling deep enough you would know people are faking it, but a lot of time people would pass through.

I just mean to say that all hiring criterion have tradeoffs, and none is strictly better than the others.

Nope, don’t give me the “oh there is no better way so let’s continue using our shitty way” excuse. Citing another poor way of hiring does not make the existing one better.

And I don’t know what a new process should be. Google has the data from literally millions of applications and has decided to just ignore them or not to try different ways of hiring? Give me a break.

Or maybe "the data from literally millions of applications" has made Google realize that their current way is the best among all the others possible? Who knows.

Or one day when Google isn't doing well there is a sudden phase transition to say the current way is the worst among all the possible.

We assume somebody competent is looking at this, but for all we know they are using the same dumb myopic evaluation as they use for promotions. I mean the same people came up with both.

How have Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon managed to diversify?

At least Microsoft and Amazon have the same interview style as google. The questions might not be as hard, but the interview style is same. All sorts of DS and algos. Infact, one of my friends once went to a microsoft interview, where even the interviewer had a leetcode like website open on his browser and asking questions from there directly.

Everybody follows the reputational leader. You can say Google ruined tech interviews.

Google didn't invent whiteboard interviews. Microsoft was doing it way back in the early nineties.

That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.

What good is “building software systems” if you can’t produce products that people and businesses want? After all of these years and all of the initiatives, still almost all of their profits come from ad sales.

It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.

As long as the trend of blocking ads doesn’t increase and as long ad buyers don’t see Facebook as being better at targeting.

Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.

I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons.

edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.

I think all companies would want to "have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it", since it ensures higher profits and frees you from monopoly accusations, but only few have managed to work it in a good way (e.g, Apple). In most markets where Google succeeded, they ended up being dominant.

Apple didn’t do that by reducing cost. They have hundreds of physical retail stores where they hire people directly (not contractors). They did it by offering a product that people were willing to pay a premium for.

Does anyone think that GCP is successful by any metric compared to Azure and AWS?

The real question is, does Google really need to dominate to be successful? We should be rating success by the quality of a product and market share is a relatively poor proxy for that.

The quality of the product especially for enterprise products has a lot to do with the quality of support. Google also lags there.

And this is attitude is the issue. You have a lot of geeks who know nothing about what businesses need to succeed because the hiring process is optimized for those who can memorize leetCode.

Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.

Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money.

And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.

Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).

Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else.

Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.

And in the end, Google still has to pay Apple a reported $9 billion a year to be the default search engine so they don’t lose the statistically more affluent iOS users.

What does it say about Android that even Eric Schmidt refused to use one years after it was introduced?

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-eric-schmidt-why-i-love-my...

Can you imagine the CEO of Apple telling reporters how much he loves his Android phone?

The problem is that the VPs were former engineers.

Yes google is still paying Apple for iOS. But if iOS was 50% of the market and other 50% dominated by let's say microsoft, Google would be paying Apple a lot more, along with possibly not being the default search engine on Windows Phone. The difference is gigantic. Paying Apple 9B$ should be fine for Google as long as they are making proportional money from iOS.

> $22 billion in profit

I mean, "only" is relative here.

Total after 8 years? Apple makes a larger profit than that on iPhones in one or two quarters. That’s probably less profitable than the Apple Watch will be after its first 7 years.

The majority of Android's value to Google is indirect - by having people view their ads through their platforms and the developer mindshare that comes with the platform. It's exactly the same strategy as Chrome. It is very telling how difficult it must be for developers on the Play Store though.

Back then they didn't sell hardware which is where most iPhone revenue comes from.

> I don't think they are hired via red black trees

No, they were hired long ago via red-black trees and got promoted for building google plus.

Exactly. People seem to be missing that these engineers that are memorizing red black trees to get hired are seeping into the rest of the organization.

You’re oversimplifying why they’re failing in the cloud.

* _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up)

* _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent.

* _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really).

There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.

There is another very large factor in what has set Azure apart from Google. Google is more of a pure play competitor to AWS. Azure got a big jumpstart due to the Windows enterprise market adopting them as a natural home. From there Azure has gradually leveraged itself into taking some share of the Linux market. The Windows business segment provides a lucrative, lower competition base for Azure. Realistically, Google poses zero potential threat to the large Windows cloud business that Azure will yield billions in annual profit off of in time.

Also, here's a list of reasons why investment in Google's cloud might be hard for third parties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

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