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Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.

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We actually spent the entire day at the Giants game today. ¯\(ツ)/¯

There's no incentive for high ranking HN posts, or any HN posts, actually. If there were, you wouldn't see others continually submit our news here before we do. This was a nice and unprompted post for everyone in GCP to read, as well.

(Disclosure: I work on GCP as a product marketer.)

A GCP product marketer responding to negative commentary on HN within ~20 minutes of it being posted strikes me as automated.

EDIT: It is a double standard though, HN readers want access and responses from people on the GCP team but at the same time tinfoil hat subliminal marketing etc.

> A GCP product marketer responding to negative commentary on HN within ~20 minutes of it being posted strikes me as automated.

Nonsense, there are many Googlers on HN and all it would take is a colleague poking another with a relevant thread.

I would be reading this every 10 minutes for new comments if it was my product up for discussion.

Ten minutes even seems like a lot. If I saw my website on HN, I'd have alerts set up for new comments.

Hey I was at the giants game today with my company as well! ¯\(ツ)/¯

</noise>

I’m now realizing this might have come off as sarcasm. It wasn’t! I was buzzed from the game when I wrote this lol!

since you are disclosing your affiliation: do GCP actually have any account managers or similar business devs in EMEA?

The first statement is partially true (it's certainly nice) but that's true of any marketing team. To be clear, I don't think the NYT people were pushed to do this. Engineering blogs commonly say what they did to take pride in their work. I'm not in marketing, so I don't know if we we're involved. Maybe they sent it over for review, but I kind of doubt it. (To the comment below, we don't pay people for content, and it's demeaning to the engineers at NYT to suggest that).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (as an engineer, not in marketing, despite how I like HN).

> Engineering blogs commonly say what they did to take pride in their work

Yep, engineering blogs are also marketing, aimed right at HN readers. Attracting good engineering talent isn't easy, so companies have to do marketing on that front as well.

But, as usual, people being marketed to (in this case, HN readers) don't realize they are being marketed to.

I sometimes ask Google Cloud clients who post this type of stuff, what's your motivation? The one consistent theme is that telling the world that you're doing cool stuff with cool tech raises your organization's profile and helps in recruitment.

From my experience working with NY Times they are certainly a top-notch engineering organization. They should be free to advertise that.

I don't know if these engineers are being forced to release these types of blogs, but the far more likely (and respectful to said engineers) scenario is that they just want to talk about their work. This isn't the first time NY Times has done this [0][1].

(Work at Google Cloud on same team as boulos and worked with NY Times on some of their migration pieces like BigQuery)

[0] https://thenewstack.io/caching-hadoop-new-york-times-embrace...

[1] https://open.nytimes.com/faster-simpler-workflow-analytical-...

I imagine the resulting discussion may also open the team's eyes to alternatives that others have succeeded and failed with, which in turn helps the team in further refining their process.

Heaven forbid a software engineer post about a major technical change their team just accomplished. It couldn't be because they want to raise their team's profile for hiring, or discuss the pros and cons of their experience, or raise their own profile as an engineer.

That's the nature of conspiracy theories: sneakily insinuating a well-organised plot to harm, while masquerading as someone who thinks Occam's razor is a hairdresser.

PS: I don't work Google

<#org.google.subversion#ref-hn5!impact-8!factor-5!aID636TZ>

Really why would they care? HN is a tiny, tiny slice of the programming world.

It is over-saturated with people who either make spend decisions or seriously affect spend decisions

Google likely offers significant discounts to companies which write these sorts of pieces for them. And obviously a lot of Googlers participate actively here, so getting upvotes naturally is likely not a challenge.

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