Joined Google relatively recently and have also worked in/with the payments infrastructure. Couldn’t agree more - absolute nightmare to work in and it’s a small miracle when anything gets delivered at all.

As far as I can tell, seems to be a lack of a cohesive vision from leadership and an absolute willing ignorance of existing challenges, as you’ve mentioned.

OK let me share more detail. My personal account has 2 payment profiles, one that is individual and one that is an Organization type with just my name which has a Public Merchant section. The second one clearly came from some kind of long retired way to accept payments via an older iteration of Google Pay or Google Wallet, that I didn't end up actually using, and which has long been removed from the platform or failed to migrate to the newer Merchant Center, and as a result I cannot remove it or manage it in any way except to edit the name, address, and credit card indicator in use. Merchant Center declares that I have no Merchant Center account.

90% of my personal Google services appear to be tied to the organization one for some reason, but a few recent ones from the Google Store are now tied to my personal one, meaning I need to use the profile switcher to access and manage them. There is no way to move subscriptions between payment profiles and the only option is to close one which will terminate the services immediately and remove the billing history. The one I should remove is the Organization one, as I'm not an organization...

-.-

Meanwhile, I have a single owner LLC that had GCP projects in play before the company was founded. I had tried to set up two separate GCP billing accounts, one owned by my GSuite admin and one owned by my personal account, to bifurcate the projects that fell under the new company.

Somehow that resulted in the one and only payment profile associated with my GSuite business GAIA identity being that same organization payment profile from my personal account! So I can see and manage personal subscriptions on payments.google.com. There's no way to change this that I'm aware of short of working with GSuite support.

You can in fact make a new payment profile, and Google says you should do this when you move to another country, but the help docs themselves note that your existing services will continue to charge on the old one. Which I guess means you are expected to cancel all your Google services, delete your old payment profile so that you can sign back up for all of them in the new payment profile manually, and lose all history of your previous payments.

So there's Billing Accounts which point to Payment Accounts, and Payment Accounts which point to Payment Profiles. In true Google fashion, there's a tooltip on the Payment profile ID which says it used to be called Billing ID. That's not confusing at all.

This is just a few of the utterly baffling things I found while trying to work this out. It reminds me of how PayPal has active subscriptions that it's UI literally cannot manage because they are too old and were incorrectly migrated from one of the zillions of older M&A subscription products that they merged in in their history.

As a non US person, I have a couple questions:

* What is P&A tech?

* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

>How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.

They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.

>* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.

$270k in the Bay Area is not retirement at 25 money unless you’re that Googler living in a van in the parking lot, or your retirement plan is living simply in a poor country. It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc. and the American healthcare system alone means you need to have millions saved as a buffer against illness over that kind of timeframe (kinda hard to re-enter the workforce at 40 with cancer when you realize your cost projections were optimistic).

>It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc.

You don't need to live in a high cost of living area, except if you're competing American Psycho style.

You could live where the other 95% of people working in the Bay Area live.

I'm pretty sure that the baristas serving those Googlers in cafes outside the Googleplex don't make $270K a year, and still get to work in the same area.

If that means more commuting, that's always an option. People commute 1-2 hours per direction too, to make $50K, I'm pretty sure a 20-something making $270K can handle it.

Heck, even a daily two-way Uber would be totally doable, and other expenses added, they'd still get to save over $150K per year still.

Oops, should've been M&A (mergers and acquisitions)