
I’m Leaving Google — Here’s the Real Deal Behind Google Cloud - dsr12
https://medium.com/@amirh1/im-leaving-google-and-here-s-the-real-deal-behind-google-cloud-1b86513be01b
======
psankar
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.

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

~~~
Latteland
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.

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StefanKarpinski
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.

~~~
t0astbread
It's a "to be continued"

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Latteland
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.

~~~
elp
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.

~~~
Latteland
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.

------
gralx
> 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...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared-
repercussions-of-disclosing-to-public-1539017194)

------
ankka
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?

~~~
jdlyga
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.

~~~
partiallypro
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.

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

~~~
shemnon42
He only spent one paragraph complaining about perf and promo. I'm not
convinced he worked there.

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

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

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

~~~
arountheworld
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.

~~~
dagw
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.

~~~
arountheworld
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.

~~~
dagw
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.

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

