Google Pay Team Reportedly in Major Upheaval After Botched App Revamp (arstechnica.com) 43
Google Pay is apparently just as much a disaster internally as the app transition has been externally. From a report: That's the big takeaway from a recent Business Insider article detailing an exodus of executives from Google's payment division, lower-than-expected app adoption, and employees frustrated with the slow movement of the division. Business Insider spoke with ex-employees and learned that "dozens of employees and executives have left" the Google Payments team in recent months, including "at least seven leaders on the team with roles of director or vice president." The most prominent departure, of payments chief Caesar Sengupta, kicked off the exodus in April, and now employees are worried about another reorganization and even slower progress. Many rank-and-file team members have reportedly departed, too, with the story saying, "One former employee estimated that half the people working on the business-development team for Google Pay -- a group of about 40 people -- have left the company in recent months."
How is this possible? (Score:2, Insightful)
Google hires only the best and brightest, with lots of university degrees! And they can answer puzzles in interviews!
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I await your apology.
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I await your apology.
We're sorry you're an idiot.
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Is that a parody?
No. It is not. It is impossible to parody California any more, because they use The Onion as an instruction manual.
Re:How is this possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't answer for OP, but I certainly see some objectionable bits.
According to that document, focusing on getting the right answer (with right cheekily in quotes) is a manifestation of white supremacy (no, I'm NOT kidding!). Sorry, but math problems DO have a right answer and it is highly useful to be able to arrive at it. In their future careers, lives may ACTUALLY depend on it. Emphasizing that over understanding the concepts (why it's the right answer) may result in students being poorly prepared for the next concept, but I don't see how it's white supremacy. White kids subject to that will do no better.
Apparently independent practice is also white supremacy. As is showing the class how a concept works, then working a problem with the class, then having the students try one on their own. Yes, the paper claims that may be a manifestation of white supremacy!
Also, tracking individual student's progress.
So basically, if I expect students to actually solve math problems, show them how, then have them try one, and actually give a damn how each student is doing (presumably so I can offer additional instruction where required), I must have a white hood and a bedsheet in my closet?
There were also a number of practices that I will readily agree are bad, but they were examples of poor instruction, not white supremacy.
All that from the first page after the letter to the reader. I can well understand why people might not take it at all seriously after that. If you walk in to an interview wearing big floppy shoes and do a pratfall and the squirting flower routine, you can't really expect to be taken seriously unless you're interviewing with the circus.
White supremacy math (Score:2)
Re:How is this possible? [A feel good story on /.] (Score:2)
more like hire shitty managers, see your employees leave in droves.
the "woke" bullshit you're talking about is a figment of the imagination of trumpist psychos
If you feel you must feed the trolls, you could at least change the Subject. Requoting you against the trollist censor mods from fans of "the former guy".
But I do somewhat disagree with you on the substance. I think the problem is more likely that this kind of project attracts abnormally greedy people. The google didn't "hire shitty managers", but rather the kind of greedy people the project attracted are just natural-born bad managers. Plus such greedy people (both the managers and the managees) can be eas
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more like hire shitty managers, see your employees leave in droves.
Too many managers.
"dozens of employees and executives have left the Google Payments team in recent months, including at least seven leaders on the team with roles of director or vice president."
Which implies that the total number of directors and vice presidents is considerably more than seven. Why do you need that many directors and vice presidents? This is massively top-heavy management.
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I know that's true, because Fox News told me. You're not claiming Tucker Carlson is a liar are you?
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Google hires only the best and brightest, with lots of university degrees! And they can answer puzzles in interviews!
Hubris.
Re:How is this possible? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google hires only the best and brightest, with lots of university degrees! And they can answer puzzles in interviews!
Hubris.
Not only that, but I'm not sure they're getting the intellectual diversity they think they're getting with their methods. Thinking Outside the Bun sometimes means having that commensurate experience, which means that sometimes the "best and brightest" aren't for a particular task.
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How? Seems obvious...
"a group of about 40 people" with "at least seven leaders on the team with roles of director or vice president."
That is a massively top-heavy group. Too many leaders to possibly implement a coherent vision.
No wonder it was a clusterfuck.
Business Insider (Score:3)
We're quoting Business Insider as a credible source now??
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We're quoting Business Insider as a credible source now??
Well... more so than Hobbyist Outsider anyway.
The new app is a mess (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The new app is a mess (Score:5, Interesting)
Did it always use Plaid? Maybe that was the point - leveraging their market share to get everyone's banking information aggregated into a third-party partner. Suddenly every twist and turn of the app seemed obsessed with getting you to (1) share all your contacts and (2) make sure "all your bank are belong to Plaid".
I abandoned Google Pay this summer after it took way too many bizarre steps and utterly unclear UI flows just to do some simple regular transfers I'd been doing for a long time with the exact same account. Wrestled with it for a while, then had to help the other payers/payees walk through the same idiocy. Decided to iron out that set of transactions, then emptied the funds and changed all banking account info that had been tied to it.
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Re: The new app is a mess (Score:3)
Replace 'Pay' with almost any Google product these past few years and your statement remains true.
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For me, Google Pay has always just been an NFC-based replacement for my NFC-based credit card. I didn't even realise until now that it was anything other than an NFC-card-replacement. By extension, I don't actually know what I'd do with it other than NFC payment, it doesn't meet any need I have for payment.
Which sorta goes to show how (in)effective their market research and marketing of it has been, they've made a product for India, where it fills a real need, and forced it on everywhere else, where I ca
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For me, Google Pay has always just been an NFC-based replacement for my NFC-based credit card. I didn't even realise until now that it was anything other than an NFC-card-replacement. By extension, I don't actually know what I'd do with it other than NFC payment, it doesn't meet any need I have for payment.
Which sorta goes to show how (in)effective their market research and marketing of it has been, they've made a product for India, where it fills a real need, and forced it on everywhere else, where I can't for the life of me think of a use for it.
That's spot-on. I'm not sure what they're trying to turn it into, but it became very clear with the new version of the app that they are trying to do SOMEthing with it that not only isn't what we were using it for, but actively erects UI/taskflow barriers to previously simple tasks. Whatever the "something" they redesigned it around... must not be something I do, because the app stopped making sense. "A user interprets shitty app design as function-damage, and routes around it to another app".
Re: The new app is a mess (Score:3)
Yes there was a very good reason to change the app: one cannot get promoted at Google without launching something big and audacious. Just maintaining an existing app is a career suicide.
Can't solve with LeetCode (Score:3)
Topheavy Much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah. If you can lose that much management and your team still exists?
Agreed; that seems like 5 too many for one team. I mean, I get that some companies like to throw -- I mean bestow -- titles like Director and Vice President around to make employees feel important, but this seem like a bit too much.
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Mod parent insightfully funny.
But I think it still points at the root of the problem. Fancy and elevated titles are often used in lieu of cash, but the kind of people who joined this project want cash. (Per my longer comment on the story.)
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Sure! There were seven directors and vice presidents, five marketing execs, three HR people, four business development managers, two personnel mangers, eight user experience specialists, and two telephone handset sanitisers second class, so plenty of people left.
Oh, and Bob, the guy who does all the coding, but he only worked part-time so no big deal there.
Just another 20% project I guess (Score:3)
What is crazy to me from Google, is how many large and important projects come off feeling like 20% projects - vast swings in focus or how they work from year to year.
The only things that ever feel at all stable with Google are mail and ads.
How could they have OKed such a massive shift in how Google Pay worked, to where featured just dropped or it would take months for things like person to person payments to work properly for everyone?? It's like they had no regard at all for people using it.
*sigh* (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the kind of shit Apple fans make fun of Android for and they are right.
What was the point anyway? Looks? (Score:1)
The old saying: If it is not broken, don't fix it!
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Used to be a great app, now a piece of crap. (Score:4, Interesting)