Google GCP vs non-GCP
I have seen too much hate and too much love for GCP within Google. I needed to get some inputs purely in terms of TC and career growth as relates to the GCP vs non-GCP debate. This is not a discussion about culture between the two groups. Purely a TC and career growth discussion. From what I have learned so far: GCP: - more growth opportunities. Might be faster to get promotions - more fast paced - products might get scraped and higher chances of PIP - not as much value when looked from outside as search/ads/maps etc Non-GCP: - better quality of work - more WLB - lesser growth and promotions are a little slow - The value of the Engg is supreme because they work on the best products in the world. So amazing market value if and when you leave G. If you agree with the gist then please vote yes. If you disagree then please vote no and give the reasoning.
I heard GCP culture is not traditional Google culture because most are recent external hires. I hear it’s more cut throat than rest of Google but easier to get into. Think Amazon/AWS.
No one interesting gives a shit about search unless that’s all they know (20+ years career in that field). Gmail hasn’t changed in decades, all other initiative are killed one by one. All legacy google are stagnant products with marginal improvements and mostly just trying to keep not regressing on quality with the dataset growth. The rest is ad targeting that pays for it all and I’d rather work on accounting software for a bank. So, overall mildly interesting engineering challenges with a single money printing machine but it hasn’t had an impact since 2005, just growth with same old and many failed attempts to branch out. You couldn’t pay me enough to work on search or ads. Actually you could before I retire. It’s a rest and vest party. GCP is the only innovation in the boring behemoth google has become.
Great, inaccurate paraphrasing. Gmail hasn’t changed in decades, wtf? Entirely new chat like slack, integrating meet and workspaces, smart complete features. I am not even on the team and I can lost 4-5 more features that I’ve seen in the past 2 years so I don’t know what you’re going on about. The rest is ad targeting - umm, What about infra, ML and the other 9 business units that have a billion users?
lol a billion users. Nah. Two users. Google search and ads. Or if you mean products like google reader or whatever else google is deprecating this month? Android is a good “me too” play at least. Too bad they lost control of the ecosystem and their flagship phones last all of three months before becoming bargain bin deals. New “features” in gmail like mixing ads with my email cause people got too good at ignoring promoted content? Or “chat” and “hangout” getting owned by 20 people at Zoom while they are salvaging the billions of dollars dumped into 5 failed attempt at being a social network back where a team of 8 could have done it in the same amount of time? Orkut anyone? If “smart” complete is the best they got, these five L4/L5 needed to make it happen should just take a two weeks vacay in Hawaï, they clearly deserve it after such a great feature! Please. It’s weak and one of the worst ROI in tech by far. Sure is cozy for employees though. It just doesn’t matter because as long as search pays everyone’s lunch it’ll keep getting fatter and more inefficient until the next wave of reorg and product canceling... PS: I worked there. It’s a wasteful engineer’s playground in too many places.
Who pays more
Mostly true. (I’ve worked in both) However, wlb in GCP is much better than non. We don’t do shhhhhht!!
Pls tell us how it is better than non GCP., I heard from reliable sources that it’s bad work politics n bad work culture in GCP as people r well connected these days with ex boyfriend, divorced spouse, former colleagues etc in other companies but would like to know current situation !!
I would be interested in hearing the experience of more engineers who have worked both in and outside of cloud. I haven’t, but I’ll expand a bit more on my previous response based on what I’ve heard from colleagues: I don’t believe that GCP is necessarily faster to get promotions. Our promo process is set up to reward the type of work that makes search and ads successful, but is less applicable for cloud work. GCP wlb is very good for every team that I’ve seen. Hard deadlines are rare and on call load is light. I don’t see a difference between GCP and non-GCP here. Agreed products get scrapped easier. Not sure PIP chance is higher, that’s pretty rare across the board in google. I disagree that non-GCP work is valued more externally. In fact I expect that cloud products are generally much easier to explain to external audiences than if you’re on a team working on backend technology for ads/search.
I disagree on that last point. Most people don't know what the cloud is because they don't use it directly. People understand things like search or maps because they use it all the time, and because of that it tends to lead to more interesting conversations because they might have legitimate questions about x or y. With cloud, your at best in a one way Q&A until they lose interest or get bored, which is usually right after the point where they realise they still don't understand what the cloud is.
How is the interview bar for GCP? I have an on-site coming up and I was already told that I'm being interviewed for a role in GCP.
How is search/ads/maps more valued outside of Google than GCP Cloud? It’s only valuable there if you are working on search/ads/maps, news alert most companies aren’t building search/maps/ads. GCP would have more value externally than search/maps/ads because people actually build solutions on GCP.
They are the market leading products in their respective spaces. GCP is... not, at least not yet.
Better growth opportunities? Google Cloud is losing money like crazy. Googlers don’t do work. Good luck getting promoted beyond L5/L6.
This is totally opposite of my experience.
Cloud market is growing exponentially. Google already late to the game but can still catch up. The other products are pretty much top so not much more room to grow.
I came here to say Cloud is improving significantly
I don’t think this is accurate but I’ve only worked in one of them so hard to be sure