GCP vs Google

Amazon / Eng
lc_hater

Go to company page Amazon Eng

lc_hater
Aug 18, 2021 55 Comments

Got reached out by a recruiter from google. Wanted to work more towards distributed systems, so told him I want to work infra and core tech such as spanner et which may have implied
Gcp. I didn’t do my research, apparently gcp doesn’t have the best rep.

1. Why is gcp getting a bad rep? What’s the complaint about work culture there

2. Doesn’t the rest of google use gcp infra under the hood or initiative to move to it? Eg at Amazon there’s a whole initiative to migrate all internal teams to aws.

3. Essentially I want to work on core tech whatever the fuck that means. Not to be grandios but want to work on the base of a distributed system (eg consensus algorithms) rather than build APIs around it. I assumed that I’m more likely to get that inside gcp. Is my assumption wrong?

#tech #google #gcp #swe

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TOP 55 Comments
  • Google doesn’t even use GCP that’s how bad it is
    Aug 18, 2021 9
  • Oracle
    MBfN54

    Go to company page Oracle

    MBfN54
    “I want to work on core tech whatever the fuck that means” 😂
    Aug 18, 2021 1
    • Amazon / Eng
      lc_hater

      Go to company page Amazon Eng

      lc_hater
      OP
      For example, we’re working a cool new journal with so and so features. There’re multiple teams around it. Some will provide a data model. Some will maintain APIs. Some will work on the consensus protocols to make the journal distributed or maintain consistency with redundant nodes etc. I want to work on that last team. Do you get the idea?
      Aug 18, 2021
  • Google
    kaws35

    Go to company page Google

    kaws35
    For what it’s worth, I work in GCP and love it. I have brilliant coworkers, great leaders (Amin Vahdat), and get to do both research work and production work. I think I would be unhappy in most other SWE departments at Google.
    Aug 18, 2021 7
  • Apple
    atomic_ice

    Go to company page Apple

    PRE
    Amazon
    atomic_ice
    Amazon doesn’t use AWS completely either despite being a much older cloud service provider. It doesn’t mean shit
    Aug 18, 2021 5
    • Amazon
      NIea29

      Go to company page Amazon

      NIea29
      Alexa has good wlb but they don't work on anything and lot of politics and teams with overlapping charters. Retail is much better. I don't know about the politics in AWS but the WLB over there is worst in the industry. Some people who thrive in such an environment and don't have a life outside of work will definitely enjoy it.
      Sep 1, 2021
    • Amazon / Eng
      focused-af

      Go to company page Amazon Eng

      focused-af
      Dude had a box in front of his toilet to put his laptop on. I don’t know who the fuck he was working with in Alexa
      Sep 1, 2021
  • Google
    bruuhh

    Go to company page Google

    bruuhh
    You do realize consensus has been solved for many years, right? Even if you joined a Spanner subteam working on that, then you would maybe work on optimizations which would be very difficult to ramp up on and slow to show impact.
    Aug 18, 2021 3
    • Oracle
      samxbz

      Go to company page Oracle

      samxbz
      yo bruh what would be a good infra team to join for learning and technical growth
      Aug 18, 2021
    • @Google, Consensus has been "solved" since the 80s, but most implementations are still shit. tho u are right, Spanner is so ancient now youll proly end up slaving away patching bugs.

      OP, look into open source teams, that's where cutting edge is happening these days bc academics seek attention. Popular topics are serverless, ML schedulers/param managers, containerization/microservice frameworks, IoT, SDN, disaggregated storage.

      If you just want pure distributed systems problems, ur better off working at Snowflake or Databricks or Hashicorp
      Aug 18, 2021