Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

Good riddance. 7 years too late. I worked as a Google Cloud consultant for a major part of my career. We had this really large client, we were bleeding money because one of our ex-employees promised the client a cost reduction strategy that was impossible and I took over his role - literally a hot seat. We walked into Google's office, it was fantastic, they had something like 12 cuisines in the dining area, multiple game rooms with Table tennis and all. Sleeping rooms, you name it. It was more of a 5 star luxury resort experience than anything.

We walk into the meeting room, past the employee desks, over 50% of it was empty. I asked one of the colleagues showing us around where they all were - "they just work when they like!". Wow, what a dream! Google has/had? this rule where you can take some 20% of your time in a given day for yourself. But, mostly people used something like 40% of it in reality. I thought this was the perfect working culture with great work-life balance. I had very high expectations for the employee quality until I met the TLM and his team we were supposed to meet.

What a bunch of clowns. They suggested we use Cloud Spanner - one of the most expensive offerings at the time and our bottleneck (and bleeding) came from legacy MySql. He didn't even know that Spanner was more expensive than their Cloud SQL offerings, not to mention completely different offerings (it's No-SQL). None of them even knew when to use Spanner for and when to stick with SQL for. It was their own product line-up and we had more knowledge than them! I didn't pass any GCP exams even, at the time. That was the funniest part. We just needed help with some re-architecting of the client's application on a legacy PHP-MySQL combo. They didn't even have suggestions on what stack to migrate to! No idea whatsoever and they tried to talk their way out of it. In the middle of the meeting, my boss leaned over to me and told me "Neya, I think you probably know more than these guys, let's leave" and we wasted no time. To Google's credit, they did offer us some credits to use, but it was far too less than what were bleeding.

I went back to office and out of curiosity searched for how much these guys make - It was easily 120k - 250k (back then) depending on their experience. That's when I literally stopped trusting Google with anything at all. I could never be that laxed when I take that much money from anyone. Later, I learned a lot of these people were just there because depending on the country, you had to maintain a quota (ratio) of certain demographics within Google, most of the TLMs and their teams just conveniently fit into that. Why fix something that's not broke, right?

The Google we knew with the original startup culture was long dead and this story is atleast 7 years old now. For over 5 years since then, they did nothing but make money by simply increasing prices for GCP offerings. I remember our costs rising up suddenly after they just pulled the rug on us with Cloud storage price increase at random. No innovation, nothing. The AI mode they launched now after ChatGPT took the market by storm was what should've been 5 years ago. They are following the pattern exactly as described in the book we learned in our Masters' - "How the mighty fall" (really good book) and well deserved. You reap what you sow.

/endrant (thanks for reading!)

I have a similar story, many years ago I worked in Brazil as an "IBM consulting partner". Meaning my company implemented IBM solutions on clients, but as a separate company from IBM. Usually as a more of a budget option to IBM internal consulting work.

(I didn't actually work with IBM stuff, I did development of our internal product that we sold in conjunction to IBM solutions to our clients)

I went to their office in São Paulo once and it was the most surreal office experience I ever had. The lobby was all promo stuff and self-aggrandizing marketing. Then after some walking came auditoriums full of people on laptops, not rooms, auditoriums. 200 people-big rooms (although they seem only 70% full) with maybe 30cm between each seat on all sides. I thought at the time that I would rather die than have to work in one of those rooms every day. The building is actually quite cool looking (from the outside):

https://arquivo.arq.br/projetos/edificio-sede-da-ibm

Then they took us upstairs where it looked like a concrete maze full of meeting rooms without windows. The discussions were not very fruitful.

My manager told me once that IBM consulting was considerably worse than most of their certified partners (even though they were implementing IBM own products) because they rely on the brand name. They pay slightly more than the partner does for their employees but they treat them like crap.

From that experience I understood how this world of consulting/client-interaction works. Unlike software, consulting scales linearly. So the companies want to squeeze as much as they can from these labor-linear income flows. So it is usually not the best people doing that kind of work.

These companies much rather you buy their solutions and do it yourself, the consulting is just a growth strategy for the product. That is why the external partners were better with the tools than the people inside the company.

Damn, that was just sad to read. Thank you for sharing.