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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any knowledge of this, but it sounds to me a lot like a typical everyday re-org or "defragmentation" that happen frequently.

Defragmentation example: they have a team with 12 people in California, 5 in New York, 2 in Seattle and 3 in Zurich. They decide to move all roles into one location instead of having the team split all over. If you don't want to move with the role, then you need to find something new.

Alternatively perhaps they just merged some teams and there were surplus folk. In my experience (unrelated to any of this) in rapidly growing orgs, teams/functions often get duplicated/semi-duplicated as different parts independently spin up teams to deal with some need. Ultimately these end up getting rationalised as time progresses.

If they were doing big layoffs of engineers etc, I think we'd have heard about it o we Twitter/blogs/comments/etc by now

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I hope you’re right. My team have chosen Google Cloud. With every news like this one, the risk that Google will shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen.

> shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen

That seems extremely unlikely, the products that Google shuts down from time to time are usually not products that make money. GCP is a whole different beast with SLAs, paying customers, huge corporations using it. It also wouldn't make sense to give up the position as one of the few big cloud hosters.

It will start making sense when Google stops shelling out a comparatively-high level of free credits for every new deal. They’re subsidizing their own users to game market share numbers, and at some point the funding to do this will have slow (unless they find out that it actually converts evals to year over year clients).

Our start up got a 6 figure AWS credit with 3 year expiration date... I'd say AWS does the same

They say that's set to be decided in or around 2023 one way or another.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

For that reason alone it seems so silly to me that Google would make this change and cause this headline to occur. Hell like the poor folks rest and vest as the worse case.

>My team have chosen Google Cloud

Why though? AWS, Azure etc all look much more competent and friendlier to customers, and without Google's history of killing services they don't care for anymore...

Azure is not competent or customer friendly at all. I've been using Azure on and off since its very first days and despite me telling every client that they're better off by using AWS or GCP because it will cause their dev teams less headache, and cost them overall a lot less in engineering cost (time spent by their engineers fighting with Azure instead of building a product) there's still every so often a non technical idiot who got sucked off by some Microsoft Partner manager and trapped in this shitshow of inconsistent, slow, buggy and constantly broken cloud services which Microsoft offers.

Not discounting your experience, but we have clients in all three, and our own experience is that Azure support and service is _significantly_ better than AWS and GCP, to the degree that we primarily recommend Azure for that reason.

> look much more competent and friendlier to customers

How exactly are you measuring "more competent"? Once you pay for support levels you also don't have the problem that Google is a black hole where you don't get any answers like if you are just a free user on Gmail, YouTube,...

It also depends on which services you use, if you are just running everything in Kubernetes and are not locked into proprietary services of any cloud provider it's not that hard to move between clouds. I find it a bit odd to make blanket statements about a company based on some consumer products or Google Reader being killed off years ago.

My team has also chosen Google Cloud.

Here's two reasons: 1. They have I think the most mature manged kubernetes service. 2. They have a managed Airflow offering called Cloud Composer.

If you are just using the basics (VMs, managed SQL, storage), then it probably makes sense to pick primarily based on factors such as price and customer service.

Once you get into more complicated use cases like say big data, distributed systems, or ML, there are important differences between what the cloud providers are offering.

No. I don't work for Google but that earlier unfortunate piece from the inaptly named "The Information" represents a complete misinterpretation of management-speak and a fundamental misunderstanding of cloud market dynamics.

Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe, but what "cloud" means and where the respective monsters go looking for their next meal and how much capital they put into what kind of hunting is going to continue to change and evolve.

For many businesses that are eg large market-like B2B plays I would be more worried about greedy AWS looking up at me and deciding they would like my position and a larger share of my sweet, sweet revenue stream. Those mofos are apex predators and understand there is no problem that cannot be solved with another API.

These are interesting times, but for commodity cloud consumers there is no future in which Google suddenly decides that with the hundreds of billions of capitalized data center investment it makes sense to "shutdown" its cloud business. This is not Reader.

>> Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe

Maybe consumer space, in enterprise I would not bet on it.

Yeah, I'm not sure how/why this is even in the news...reorgs are a regular occurrence.

So the people working on GCP are easily replaceable? Why not hire outstanding talent instead?

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