I had the misfortune of working on this garbage of a project. One of the most pathetic software projects with some of the worse people I have ever worked in my life.

Google Pay India is very successful. Not because it is actually good but rather the fact that it does not face the pressure to be very profitable unlike its competitors like PayTM (which now is pretty much dead). It is a good product with basic feature that work (despite being somewhat slow app) most of the times. Google is not aggressive in trying to sell their users crappy fintech products or peddling gambling apps and other scammy offers. The fact that Google is slow turned out to be good for them.

At some point Google VP Ceasar Sengupta decided to shut down some unit and create Gpay Us app. His weird slogan for this was "Time of technology in finance is now" as if this guy was living under some rock for last 10 years. Then all engineers under the shut down unit were moved to this Gpay Us app project. For many of us this was an opportunity to get promoted by claiming "launch impact" so no one complained.

The problems here were engineering. Google decided that they will share the codebase and practices with Google India app which was built in flutter. The people who built it were pretty third rate snobs and treated this codebase as their own little empire. They saw this as an opportunity to get promoted again. These morons then created needless processes to harass gpay us team. Things like if you want to add a new page in the app create a doc first with the same code in the Google doc so it can be reviewed in Google doc first. Then write real code. As a new person in Google I thought may be this is how the company rolls.

Weeks passed and absolutely no code was submitted because the Singapore team would not approve any CL. Also most CL comments were about shaving the yak e.g. "Create a feature flag" for this page which does not even have an entry point yet. You create a feature flag and another engineer comments that feature flag is not needed since page does not have an entry point yet. For some weird unknown reason (I think DEI points for promo) the app has crazy focus on accessibility (not with intention to make product better for others but for the sake of engineering complexity) which means everytime you changed something it would create like 100 screenshots that needed to be reviewed manually which led to wild goose chases. For example you change a button color and someone else comments that the top bar does not look good (though not related the CL).

At that point it was clear to me that everyone is focused on promotions and no one gives shit about the product or users. The app was launched and soon the VP and most of the leadership left (or may be asked to quit) along with most of the senior engineers who then created "https://artafinance.com/". I suspect these people were denied promo and went sour and quit.

After that I left the team pretty quickly and heard the same horror stories of how rolling out one feature like say changing a button color would require around 15 primary approvals. There were concepts like "small council" meeting and "large council" meetings to review stuff and even after some shitty small feature was launched there were like 2 separate teams reviewing "analytics". The numbers were so tiny that some of my personal apps have more users and more activity than this Gpay US app.

Luckily I learned the game of how to get promoted at Google by cynical, launching stuff no one needs and by helping others with their own promotion goals.