Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?
I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.
I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.
Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).
My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.
What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.
Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.
(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).
A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…
…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?
I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.
Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.