The original founders are gone.
The only reason they're alive is their ad/search moat. It's a walking IBM/Oracle, otherwise.
Don't forget when it leaked a year or so ago that even Google Cloud Platform is on their chopping block if they don't meet targets.
I wouldn't trust this company with anything. Photos, music, youtube videos, mail. They do not care.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
They show time and time again that they're willing to pull the rug out from under people that depend on their platforms.
Google is in the midst of an epic struggle to transform itself. I think it's succeeding in turning into a sustainable post-ads company, and I think Google will be around for many years to come. However the transformation is not pleasant for many of the SWEs, particularly those in GCP.
I can say with some confidence that GCP is not in peril. TK is turning the ship around, and a fresh infusion of "conventional company" executives are doing what it takes to make the changes happen. A lot of Google SWEs are suddenly being directly exposed to revenue targets that they have to meet by clawing enterprise sales from Amazon and Microsoft. Not all of them are up to the task, and many are fleeing to... well, I bet many of them are getting a "rude awakening" about how the tech industry outside of their popping Google bubble has to operate.
All of the sudden they can't sit back in their castle and wave their "A/B test" wands to figure out which experiments draw in 20,000 daily users vs. 17,000 daily users. Instead they have to take orders from sales and PM as they scream at them to hurry up and build features to get 5 or 6 more enterprise contracts signed by such-and-such a date. Google SWEs have never needed to pay any heed to sales or PM; they just used to do whatever they felt like doing, launching it, creatively selecting metrics that demonstrate "success," collecting their promos, and dancing along to the next shiny thing.
That fantasy world is gone.
As ads revenue falters, the real world is slamming into Google full-force. I actually expect the opposite of "not caring" about photos, music, etc. to happen. Google is quickly moving into a phase where a reputation for shipping and supporting stable, durable, and compatible solutions is what it desperately needs in order to win and keep enterprise customers. We're going to see it happen, and the Google SWEs who survive are the ones who are willing to humble themselves, roll up their sleeves, and compete head-to-head with AWS and Azure SWEs on a level playing field. It will mean harder work for less pay, fewer promos, and less autonomy.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone working at Google today. It's still a very privileged place to work, especially in the midst of the global turmoil going on around us right now. I do, however, have little patience for any Google SWEs who still expect the "ship shiny, collect promo" career path to work out for them there.
Salespeople will gladly hound engineering teams to pound out an MVP for whatever their particular prospects want this quarter, and a shiny MVP is often enough to close a deal so long as it holds up in a demo with managers whomever has purchasing power. Once that's done, sales is happy to forget about that product, or at least convince themselves that it working in a demo means it will work well in production (they lack the technical competence to see the inevitable holes that will appear down the road if the MVP isn't developed past minimum viability).
If next quarter's customers want a different set of features, well, sales will push for those, often to the detriment of fleshing out existing functionality or ensuring they're stable and maintainable. They're insulated from any pain that results from half-baked products if the people tasked with actually using products aren't those with purchasing power, and in the enterprise context, they usually aren't, and are themselves insulated from line workers who could tell them they've essentially bought a lemon, or more the promise of functionality instead of actual functionality.
My gf works for a Microsoft cloud re-seller (among other things) and I've recently asked her if GCP has ever come into the conversation when it came to their clients (clients among which are a few government entities), her answer was "never", followed by a quick laugh, as in "who would even ask such a thing?" Google and its cloud offering is missing in action around here big time, and I have a feeling the same situation happens in other European countries. They still have this mistaken belief that people will come to them hat in hand just because they're Google, but when it comes to the cloud market that has never been the case.
I'd argue an organization needs to reward these things properly to happen. People won't give up promo to do right by the business, the business needs to give promo for the right things. If nothing changes then it's far more likely the company is in deep trouble long-term.
If you tightly lock down your GV account, it should be much more difficult to compromise than a random cell carrier. I don't know if there's a comparable service, but I'm dying to pay for one, if only to not have a single point of failure.
I've looked around at a few possibilities and narrowed it down to two I intend to try:
* https://jmp.chat/ plus maybe http://getkaiwa.com/ -- on the fiddly side, but with great fiddliness comes great flexibility, maybe?
* https://www.openphone.co/ -- seems more turnkey
There's also https://wiki.soprani.ca/VonageSetup if you want to host the alternative yourself (though it doesn't support group texting).
The service isn't free but the call quality is far better than Google voice and you can text from your number with an app on your phone or computer.
I guess the guys who created grandstation (what turned into Google voice) started this company.
All my friends churned away from google’s IM solutions and I doubt we’re ever coming back. Who’s got time for all that?
I'm seriously asking myself these days if this is how Google dies, and we're just seeing the early signs of it.
Can you please explain more?
Since I left, I understand that they've revamped the promotions up to Senior such that managers that are familiar with your work consider your promotion instead of a random committee. I'm curious to hear whether that has affected the "launch launch launch" push for promotions under staff engineer. I know through my network that staff+ promotions can still be held up for this reason.
The idea is to reduce gamesmanship in promotion decisions (my whole team is senior engineers, etc.), and to provide some uniformity across the organization. They usually also have some budgetary discretion as well, as they have to balance whatever pool of money is available for promotions, COL adjustments, and merit based raises.
I guess my last several orgs just kept that away from me then, for whatever reasons they had. It's honestly surprisingly new to me that "committees" for such a thing are "normal" at large orgs.
In those cases, I had a lot of autonomy over promotions-as a leader, other than the usual "get approval from the CFO for funding if there is a raise involved"; beyond that, coordinating promotions with my director what the promotion would entail was all there was to it.
But it seems to me like there was a big push a couple years ago to integrate everything with G+. Someone collected the political capital inside the company to get this to be a mandate for the company, a direction for everyone to head.
Well, it really wasn't that bad, but no the gangbusters success Google hoped for (not sure how anything with the flimsiest tiniest Read-Only api like that would ever get anywhere?).
Since then it seems like there's a corporation, but mostly a lot of different teams marching to different drummers. It's pretty common in corporate world that managers & mini-executives & executives push for huge home run hits, within their fief, then leverage that smashing success to push for even bigger agendas. There's little incentive to maintain & care for a product well: everything is about metrics, & the existing user base's retention is usually not all that influenced by the love & care of a carefully thoughtfully evolved product. Trying to work across teams, to create something that works consistently across products, is even harder, as the organizational complexity of bringing more & more teams in keeps increasing.
Organizational complexity grows. Teams seek autonomy & wins. Products get focus. Ecosystems & long-burning initiatives are much much much much harder to sheppard forward. Little of this is unique to Google.
There's an argument from an anti-monopoly / competition point of view. But perhaps organisational as well?
Perhaps smaller companies which favour local (product focused) concerns would actually benefit all of us?