Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

Bard is a horrible name though. Poet? Horse ornament? It's close to Bardo which is the stage after death and before rebirth.

Gemini is much more neutral and easy to work with. Like Alexa or Siri.

The reason the word "inept" keeps coming up is just how opaque and senseless to the rank and file the January 2023 layoffs were. High performers, low performers, newest hires, most tenure: we saw all kinds of heads roll. I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. A growing deployment team was actively hiring before and after it got a 6% haircut.

The simplest explanation would be that every cost center/P&L had to offer up 6% of its people, regardless of that cost center's overall trajectory, place in company strategy or open headcount. And that every cost center's VP or general manager or whatever just got collared by HR, was given a list on a piece of paper and couldn't leave until they chose 6% by ...whatever metric they came up with on the spot.

Whatever actually happened I'll never know, but what I've seen was 100% compatible with that theory. Which in turn looks pretty inept.

Markdown in Google docs: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en

Of course, if you want non wysiwyg, then don't use Google docs just use markdown in a text editor or install mediawiki or something.

> It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.

I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.

The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.

Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.

Let’s not even get started on permissions.

I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.

And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.

I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!

My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.

> whatever algorithm is being used to remove people

Different functions/teams/departments seemed to use very different algorithms, suggesting there was just no leadership at all. I posted a separate top level comment, but seeing one function do last-in/first-out and another jettison its most-tenured (most expensive? non-pristine HR record? who knows!) folks makes it hard for employees to understand what the new rules of engagement are.