It's just the cultural difference between the two companies. I have been told that GCP oncalls are a lot busier than rest of the Google, but it's still nowhere close to the suffering I had at AWS. It's an organizational pain and comes from the mindset AWS has towards software development and their engineers.
AWS's mindset is software is useless without customers. Google doesn't seem to have the same care - it's a charity for academic software engineers to spend AdSense revenue on abstract high level computer science problems not caring about practical applications.
It's why most Google X ideas flame out. It's why there's a new chat app every year.
But - it's a net positive for humanity. Google publishes a lot of papers, and I think genuinely has moved humanity forward in the last few decades.
I don't have a PhD and I don't do L33tcode, so I don't think I'm smart enough to be at Google, but honestly I don't know if I would want to be.
I'm sure you're more than enough smart to be at Google :) It's just practice and luck.
I completely agree that people who prefer to ship fast would be happier at AWS. I've heard all the horror stories about how slow Google is, but I think GCP has a great balance between speed and quality. I'm definitely happier here, but I understand why some people would be happier at AWS.
It's just the cultural difference between the two companies. I have been told that GCP oncalls are a lot busier than rest of the Google, but it's still nowhere close to the suffering I had at AWS. It's an organizational pain and comes from the mindset AWS has towards software development and their engineers.