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.