[HN Gopher] Google to reduce workforce by 12k
___________________________________________________________________
Google to reduce workforce by 12k
Author : colesantiago
Score : 1373 points
Date : 2023-01-20 10:21 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| bdavis__ wrote:
| 12K? What is that 5 to 7% of the total employment. Just don't
| hire for 120 days. Accomplish the same results and you don't even
| need to make a press release.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Layoffs make it easier to get rid of underperforming people
| without having to file too much paperwork, so it probably has a
| better effect on the median employee quality to do layoffs
| instead of a hiring freeze.
| bdavis__ wrote:
| Easier but not better. If you have a performance problem,
| there is a process in place to to deal with it. Not easy, but
| it gives the employee notice and the opportunity to improve.
| Vs. Gone.
| hbarka wrote:
| >> We've decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000
| roles.
|
| When I first read this I saw the word "role" and not "jobs" and
| therefore interpreted it as more than 12,000 jobs, because a role
| can be one or more people. By that definition however it's absurd
| to think that that many roles would be eliminated.
|
| Why didn't they just say "jobs"?
| rvz wrote:
| Not even Google.
|
| Looks like the era of free money for decades and over-hiring had
| to come to an end. The correction and then crash of the market
| had bring everyone back to reality since the covid bubble had
| burst in November 2021 as warned back at the time. [0]
|
| As I said before, no one is safe. Doesn't matter if your a FAAMNG
| company.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
| nextstep wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT to generate a layoff announcement email for
| comparison:
|
| Dear valued employees,
|
| It is with a heavy heart that I am writing to inform you that the
| company will be undergoing a restructuring process that will
| result in the layoffs of 12,000 employees. This decision was not
| made lightly, and we understand the impact it will have on our
| workforce and their families.
|
| We have been closely monitoring the economic climate and have
| determined that this action is necessary to ensure the long-term
| success and sustainability of the company. We are committed to
| treating all affected employees with fairness and respect during
| this difficult time.
|
| We will be providing severance packages, outplacement support,
| and other benefits to assist impacted employees in their
| transition. Additionally, we will be working closely with local
| authorities to provide job training and other resources to help
| affected employees find new opportunities.
|
| We understand that this news is difficult to hear, but we are
| committed to supporting our employees through this transition. We
| appreciate your contributions to the company and wish you all the
| best in your future endeavors.
|
| Sincerely, Sundar Pichai CEO, Google LLC
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| I'm not suprised, they have been scraping the bottom of the
| talent barrel pretty hard lately
| jstx1 wrote:
| One hypothesis is that the big tech companies are just better at
| sensing what the market is doing and reacting accordingly as
| quickly as they can, while companies from other industries are
| sleeping at the wheel. If that's true, we can expect those other
| companies to eventually follow with the layoffs.
| ra7 wrote:
| Larry and Sergey used to proudly boast that they are not a
| "conventional company". In fact, this quote is still in
| Alphabet's home page:
|
| > As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years
| ago, "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to
| become one."
|
| Google looks more and more like a conventional big company with
| moves like this. They've become really boring in the last 5-6
| years.
| KingFelix wrote:
| and visiting the house they built at CES, super boring! The
| mirror showcasing a very lame feature (when you get close to a
| speaker it notifies you and asks if you want to connect to it)
| was much more interesting. So boring, I know they have a google
| announcement day, but wow, so uninspiring.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| It's like a person who won the lottery more than a decade ago
| finally having their directionless identity crisis unravel in
| full force.
| dzonga wrote:
| I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not
| market dynamics.
|
| companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based
| on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies
| not the market, resulted in a war over talent.
|
| now it's a war on talent.
|
| and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at
| these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the
| benefits and can express your political opinions.
|
| but other big companies - say a tech company in the middle of
| nowhere e.g Epic - was paying good salary and not matching the
| faang / vc salaries. i'm sure those companies, if they didn't
| follow the herd ain't laying off people. their people are still
| employed, getting paid decent (enough). and work normal hours.
| thedougd wrote:
| I didn't realize the Raleigh, NC metro was in the middle of
| nowhere. ;)
| keyanp wrote:
| He was likely referring to HQ in Verona, Wisconsin. I've been
| there, can confirm it sure looks like the middle of nowhere
| :)
| thedougd wrote:
| Ah, the EMR company. I was referring to Epic Games.
| nextstep wrote:
| You should check out this guy called Marx, he wrote a couple
| books about how labor is always disadvantaged in such a system
| because their power ebbs and flows with the fluctuations of the
| market. The main check that labor has on this power is to
| bargain collectively. Seems tech missed that opportunity five
| years ago when it was top of mind but many people felt things
| are good why would we need a union.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The LVT is incoherent when applied to tech work.
|
| We don't exploit electrons.
|
| Boom bust cycles don't end up with contradictions that
| capitalism can't resolve, it just makes capitalism stronger.
|
| The absolute law of general accumulation doesn't exist
| either. As tech gets better, unemployment trends down.
|
| The tendency for the rate of profit to fall also doesn't
| exist. Economists have a name for the law that says the
| tendency for the rate of profit rises over time.
|
| So why should I trust Marxism when at least 4 of his giant
| predictions are empirically wrong after hundreds of years?
| Scientific socialism implies that we should have seen
| successful communist states by now. Zero of them are
| successful.
| edgyquant wrote:
| You're not wrong but at the same time I was hiring for a senior
| engineer a year ago and the market was ridiculous. Seniors only
| wanted to work if they could do part time for six figures and
| the consensus was they should be allowed to work 2-3 companies
| at once.
|
| This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater
| demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it
| may suck to be an engineer compared to the ones hiring them:
| that's just the nature of our mode of production.
| MrDresden wrote:
| To a European this kind of description always boggles the
| mind.
|
| Having been in the field for 12 years, with a degree in CS,
| worked as a senior IC and been personally responsible for
| critical projects at financial institutions and startups
| alike, the highest wage I have ever had was 75k. And this is
| in western Europe.
|
| In a way I hope that in the near future more US firms start
| looking outside their boarders when hiring.
|
| Because there is plenty of hungry talent here just waiting
| for a chance.
| riku_iki wrote:
| google has plenty of dev offices in western europe. Did you
| try to apply?..
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay -
| based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around
|
| But this concept of over-hiring and overpaying doesn't make
| sense.
|
| There is no way to predict whether a positive economy will last
| 10 years or 10 months, and if you don't follow the economic
| growth you will lose bigger than if you follow it and have to
| make cuts later.
|
| Everyone is quick to blame companies for "over-hiring", but
| they would also be quick to blame them for being too careful in
| a positive economy, and the market would punish them.
| dzonga wrote:
| overpaying makes sense, over-hiring makes sense.
|
| for two comparable companies, with comparable products look
| at Asana vs Basecamp.
|
| How much does Basecamp pay for a senior engineer ? they pay
| top end of SF salary regardless of location. However, you can
| best that Asana is paying at least 1.5x what Basecamp pays +
| RSU's etc.
|
| Yet Basecamp is printing money and yet Asana is bleeding
| money.
|
| How many engineers does Basecamp have ? How many does Asana
| have ?
|
| so yeah the concept of overpaying and over-hiring exists and
| not just a fallacy.
|
| if it was market driven, then the laws of the market would
| dictate Asana not to pay a premium over Basecamp for talent.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah, I also wonder how much of the current layoffs are "we
| need to fire people as to look good on paper for the market"
| kybernetyk wrote:
| More like: Oh shit, helicopter money has come to an end. The
| bottom line actually starts to matter. Let's get rid of the
| dead weight.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I think it's more "we want to increase company value" rather
| than "we want to increase the perception of company value,
| aka stock price".
|
| Which is good, that's what the management is supposed to do.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Its entirely that. A business method that relied on inflated
| valuations over the anticipated future market domination
| measured in current growth can only be possible in a market
| that has practically unlimited money entering the economy and
| it cannot survive in an environment where the money flow
| stops.
|
| The dollar losing its uncontested dominance as foreign
| exchange currency due to the results of the sanctions and
| economic war started over Ukraine with almost entire global
| south, Asia and most importantly, Arabia moving to trade in
| their own currencies has killed the zero interest economy.
| Which stopped the money that Federal reserve and private
| banks were feeding into the economy. (private banks were
| doing it through fractional reserve lending).
| vt85 wrote:
| [dead]
| rfoo wrote:
| What's "VC salary"? First time heard this and didn't find
| meaninging result from Google, nor does ChatGPT.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I believe they're referring to startups who use VC capital to
| attract people away from other tech firms at very high cost
| to themselves.
|
| Really it's what all the big companies are doing, but at
| least some of them can claim solvency.
| patchorang wrote:
| A large salary that is subsidized by VC funding.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Epic the games company??
| throwawayway99 wrote:
| The medical software company in Madison WI I think
| ROTMetro wrote:
| But people that know that industry segment don't want to work
| at Epic ;) So crappy employer/crappy industry based on
| government rent seeking not product quality/crappy pay/crappy
| location = no thanks brother.
| capitalsigma wrote:
| I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for
| higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher
| performing team. I don't want to work with people who are here
| to coast.
| bluedino wrote:
| The government and their policies aren't responsible at all
| (not just the USA but other countries as well)?
| ako wrote:
| Is overhiring really a problem, would the world be better if
| companies didn't overhire? Then many of the people now laid off
| wouldn't have had a job in the first place. If you accept a job
| for what it is, a temporary need for your help, and plan for
| what's next, a period of layoffs should become manageable.
| voytec wrote:
| Due to tech giants' overhiring and overpaying policies, a lot
| of people re-qualified in recent years. Now those Juniors
| can't find their easy-to-get-dream-jobs f or months and
| situation is getting worse for Seniors, too, as both bigger
| and smaller (and also both public and private) companies are
| doing hiring freezes, layoffs, invoke no-raises policies and
| all sorts of cost cuts.
|
| Sure - all those people could try to go back to what they
| were doing earlier but there are layoffs and freezes in not
| only tech and related industries.
|
| Those people are being punished for doing what the giants-led
| market demanded.
| ejb999 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Which is worse: never getting hired by google, or getting
| hired, working for a few years making a great or even
| outsized salary and then getting laid off after getting great
| experience? - or never having had the opportunity to in the
| first place?
|
| An awful lot of people would prefer the first scenario and
| will come out ahead.
| nullhash wrote:
| Consider my situation. I passed my Google interview in
| October for New Grad 2023 and was told that my starting date
| would be April.
|
| Now I'm most likely not going to be hired and need to restart
| my job search and this will have derailed my entire plans for
| the first few months of this year. I won't see a cent.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| OTOH, you've learned an important lesson early: You aren't
| hired until your first day of work. The job search never
| stops and never ends, until you're really ready to stop
| working.
|
| Next time when someone agrees to hire you in the
| hypothetical future, you will keep looking and
| interviewing, at least until you have accepted a formal
| offer from someone.
|
| (I'm assuming here that they didn't give you an actual,
| formal offer even if they did tell you about a starting
| date)
| nomel wrote:
| Your situation is one of extreme privilege, being able to
| have desirable plans, for many months, while unemployed.
|
| I've turned down job offers in the future, because they're
| empty promises. You're a hiring req in some drawer, until
| the first day, because everyone is aware it's an empty
| promise.
| cutenewt wrote:
| Yes, there's an opportunity cost to society.
|
| That overhired person who's not productive in Google could
| have done something better for society.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Healthcare is largely recession proof although hospitals had
| big layoffs just as COVID hit which was a huge mistake in
| retrospect.
|
| Epic is also a private company and yes pays less but they've
| taken up with Google now as well.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Hospitals chose to do that because everyone thought that
| bubonic plague was upon us and we no longer needed staff in
| elective surgeries.
|
| Obviously everyone was proven very wrong.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| As someone who threw away too many years writing medical
| systems for the American market stay away from this industry
| segment. Do you want lower pay, rent seeking companies, CFO
| centric not end user products, and the personal stress that
| you are kind of making the world a better place so too much
| guilt to leave, then medical software is the perfect fit for
| you (until you break).
| saos wrote:
| Concerned by knock on affect to other industries.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Buy the new shampoo ABC -- your hair will notice. CLICK HERE NOW.
|
| -- ai inserted ad through duplication of similar elements with
| custom text --
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Its all about greed. they could also keep those people and settle
| for a lower profit. How much do they need?
| pepF wrote:
| We're hiring full stack and devops engineers! (EU)
|
| https://career.anyfin.com/
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Your landing page is crazy. Full screen image of awkward
| looking people talking without audio working (tried a few
| things, can't get it to make a sound).
|
| Is the product a mobile phone application that you give access
| to your bank and it displays the same information your bank
| statement does but sorted into categories?
| activitypea wrote:
| On MacOS / Safari, the full-screen video loops the first few
| seconds while bufferring, so I was just looking at the awkward
| guy on repeat. I also have to agree that it was a "bold" choice
| to use black text with a dark green background on a website
| whose primary color is orange.
| [deleted]
| jonp888 wrote:
| I work for a company about twice as big as Google. Getting
| permission to hire anyone is very difficult, and everyone is
| always 100% busy just to meet customer deadlines(which we often
| don't).
|
| I guess Google and other FAANG-type companies must work in a
| different way that I can't comprehend if they can just randomly
| decide to fire 10% of their workforce.
|
| If 10% of the people on my project were fired, our customers
| would sue us for not delivering on the contracts we signed.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Google has been over-hiring for years. While there are
| definitely projects that felt understaffed, there are just as
| many where you'd join a team and look around and really have no
| idea what you should be doing with yourself because all the
| work seemed spoken for.
|
| Honestly, 90-ish% of Google's revenue comes from ads. Almost
| every other product area there is just a financial loss unless
| it's supporting search&ads. They keep making "bets" to try to
| diversify the revenue stream, but it never works. Hence why I
| don't think this will be the last round of layoffs.
|
| It will be interesting to see how this shakes out and what
| parts of the org and what roles this affected.
|
| (Worked there for 10 years, so find this all... sad and
| interesting)
| rsynnott wrote:
| A lot of these companies are building stuff now which might
| deliver revenue in X years, so by firing people now they're
| effectively borrowing money from the future; they cut costs now
| and revenue later. They're more sacrificing future growth than
| ability to deliver on current contracts, in general.
| michaelt wrote:
| Google struck oil 20 years ago and money has been flowing in
| faster than they can spend it ever since. Some of that money
| let them drill more holes, and about 15 years ago some struck
| oil again.
|
| Because it's worked in the past and they can afford it, they've
| continued drilling countless holes. For example, their many
| incompatible messaging systems [1].
|
| Some of the holes seem to have been drilled without any regard
| as to whether finding oil in that location is even possible.
|
| Presumably they hope to cut down on go-nowhere drilling, while
| still doing _some_ drilling, in the areas where an oil strike
| is most likely.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-
| half-...
| pyb wrote:
| I think what happens over time at FAANG, is that you get some
| divisions that are way overstaffed, and others that are way
| understaffed.
| bitL wrote:
| Is this the end of Google? Rarely a company recovers after
| massive layoffs. Are they in the SUN Microsystems negative
| feedback spiral now?
| Strom wrote:
| Massive? This is 6% of their workforce.
| bitL wrote:
| 6% isn't massive for a profitable company? 1 out of every 17
| people getting fired at the same time? That will have huge
| consequences to internal culture and employee optimism,
| leading to all kinds of weird people getting to the top.
| jollyllama wrote:
| >= .05 significant, >= .1 big, >= .15 huge, >= .2 massive,
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| The Google of 2005 wouldn't do this. The Google of 2005 would use
| this as opportunity to monopolize all the talent and move into
| some new space and eat everything with fantastic software.
|
| * I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and
| yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night.
| Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was
| buying geographic satellite companies and innovating with lazy
| loading javascript maps. It went from, websites can't provide
| anywhere near the functionality of desktop apps to why would ever
| use a desktop app for that.
|
| * I was building phone software and mobile search engines before,
| during, and after the launch of android so I got the inside
| perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a
| dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw
| signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google
| would build something 100X better than what they could ever build
| even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a
| cognitive improbability. The carriers began going through the
| stages of grief, while they were still on anger, like the sound
| of thunder[0] android launched, and reality shifted under their
| feet. After that it seemed like nothing else had ever been
| possible or true.
|
| Hungry Google was sight to behold.
|
| [0]: The Sound of Thunder -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder
| nvarsj wrote:
| It's funny to me because this has been happening in tech a long
| time and is happening to the current giants. The old giants
| like IBM, GE, Motorola, etc. all suffered similar fates. And
| it's been discussed ad nauseum by disgruntled engineers who
| then go and make new companies/start ups to get away from the
| "suits".
|
| It's called "Takeover by MBA". You know it's happened when you
| start hearing phrases like "Cut costs", "Make things more
| efficient", "LEAN process", etc. Basically the garbage
| pioneered by Jack Welch and taught at MBA schools everywhere to
| boost stock prices in the short to medium term.
| [deleted]
| cloutchaser wrote:
| It's an anecdote but it's also what I heard from my doctor
| dad working in the NHS. There was a time when the UK health
| system was actually run by doctors or people with medical
| knowledge. Now it's MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn't
| work, all it does is increase overhead, both in staff and
| bureaucracy.
|
| In his opinion that's what ruined the NHS not underfunding.
|
| Business and management courses are not necessarily good.
| vt85 wrote:
| [dead]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Business and management courses are not necessarily good.
|
| I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish"
| thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting,
| etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.
| ilikerashers wrote:
| I worked in a UK government office once where they had
| stopped giving teabags to staff as a cost-cutting
| measure. The project was PS50 million over budget. That's
| a lot of teabags.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That's tragically hilarious.
| VLM wrote:
| Much like social media in general, "sending a signal" is
| much more important than doing anything.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I interned at a large well-known tech company. When I
| started, in the break room, there was a Keurig machine
| and they would keep a large drawer stocked with plenty of
| k-cups.
|
| Then one day, they stopped refilling it, saying they're
| cutting costs. I was like, really? Each employee, at
| most, is drinking $2 worth of k-cups/day. Meanwhile,
| you're paying them at LEAST $400/day.
|
| The kicker is that the location had a cafeteria where
| they could get free coffee, but it was a much longer
| round trip to get there. It could easily be a 10+ minute
| ordeal. The productivity loss outdid any savings gains.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I suspect there was a big meeting with a bunch of
| managers about the need to make up a 7-figure budget
| deficit and 50 of the 60 minutes was spent bikeshedding
| about k-cups. :)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > Now it's MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn't work,
| all it does is increase overhead
|
| It's kind of interesting being in a small to mid-size
| organisation and leading a team where the need to introduce
| this kind of middle management is asserting itself. I'm
| instinctively resisting it but the downsides are clear. I
| have way too many direct reports. I am constantly bogged
| down in generic meetings - everything from desk
| arrangements, COVID safety, leave management, etc.
| Meanwhile most of my staff spend large amounts of their
| time blocked from their top priority task because they lack
| input or direction. My unique technical skills are being
| completely wasted. Yet it kills me that we might decide we
| have to blow $150k/year which could employ another coal-
| face engineer simply because we can't figure out how to
| organise ourselves better.
|
| So should I put in place a generic middle manager to deal
| with all this stuff? Or not? It may seem like it's obvious
| in happens to large megacorps that the end result of this
| is bad. But you can see completely how you end up there.
| Certainly the people who _are_ doing that are getting way
| more cred in the organisation and arguably actually getting
| more done in real terms.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Doctors abuse the system to their own benefit when given
| the chance. Putting them in charge produces terrible
| results as well.
| fooker wrote:
| The conjoined triangles of Success!!
| tarsinge wrote:
| What's fascinating is how long it took for this generation of
| giants for people to realise it's just the same big
| enterprise world again, just more shiny. Maybe it's because
| they revolutionised corporate marketing: Google was a symbol
| for my generation, a fun tech oriented company completely in
| rupture with what was before (i.e. wear a suit in a cubicle).
| The cycle is also complete with "modern" tech stacks starting
| to feel like enterprise framework at the time like
| JBoss/Hibernate/...
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| Jack Welch was a PhD chemical engineer, not an MBA.
| lazide wrote:
| It's easy to pick a group to 'other' and blame them for
| everything.
|
| Really, it's a general organizational scaling issue IMO.
| tuan wrote:
| In my orientation (2017) an executive was there giving a speech
| about how great the company is. I still remember he said
| something to the effect of we never layoff people because we're
| family. Oh well.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Executives lie left and right. Stay at a company long enough
| and you will see their stories shift. They are essentially
| politicians.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions.
| Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their
| wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their
| hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than
| what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their
| walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability
|
| This - and also the iPhone. The two of those were just _so much
| better_ for the user than Symbian, and also short-circuited all
| the egregious billing of mobile carriers. It once used to cost
| PS1 to send a message with a picture attached (MMS).
|
| But a lot of anticompetitive hurdles had to be overcome to let
| that happen. The worst possible outcome for users is where the
| old company has enough energy to squash competition, usually by
| cheating, but not enough to actually do so by improving its
| products - because "improving" to the user would mean cutting
| into their revenue stream.
| [deleted]
| suddenexample wrote:
| Poetic but misguided. The Google of 2005 didn't have so much
| fat to trim. When you have 150k employees, there's no escaping
| it. Not everyone is going to be hungry, and certainly not
| interested or in a position to build things 100x better. Many
| are happy to collect their paycheck while doing 20 hours of
| unambitious work per week.
| acituan wrote:
| Now the remainder will do 50 hours of "ambitious" work for
| projects that will eventually get axed, redone, reorganized
| etc.
|
| It was never a raw productivity per hour problem, it was an
| organizing productivity behind meaningful, useful _and_
| profitable projects problem.
|
| > certainly not interested or in a position to build things
| 100x better
|
| in an organizational complexity of 150k -> 138k workforce, no
| one is in a position to make things 10x better, let alone
| 100x. Shedding 12k is a scapegoating gesture as if there is
| such a possibility, merely to ease the anxiety of the market
| price of shares. It doesn't even directly move the needle for
| profit/asset ratio, but it will help depressing wages with
| the theatre of "look what we had to do".
| 7ewis wrote:
| I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent. It's more
| likely to be a fat trimming exercise.
|
| The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is
| currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to
| restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > fat trimming exercise
|
| The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively
| difficult interview process has "fat"? How?
| mathteddybear wrote:
| No hiring process prevents bad oncall rotations.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Hiring process is never perfect, you find after 6-12 months
| you made a mistake. I saw that many times, I did that
| myself 3 times (hired people that were later fired, even
| after being promoted, as they did not perform well even if
| they were really good on paper and in interviews).
| ipaddr wrote:
| Perhaps the interview process is not as good as they
| think.
| perfecthjrjth wrote:
| How did they get promoted, when they did not perform
| well?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent.
|
| If you just announce a layoff, you are already getting rid of
| talent.
|
| > It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise.
|
| Large companies can't lose fat in large strokes. There is
| simply no way to organize a mass layoff that results in "fat
| trimming".
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Whatever's happening is a prime example of how disruptions
| happen in tech industry. Previous giants become fossils and new
| incumbents take the spot. IBM -> GE -> Google etc will all
| follow the same trajectory towards irrelevance.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Previous giants become fossils and new incumbents take the
| spot._
|
| Or, alternatively, the giants focus on maintenance and
| "innovate" through acquiring the new incumbents.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think this is an old myth that is no longer relevant. Sure,
| it might happen, but many companies now fully understand "the
| disruption game" and know how to adjust, primarily through
| acquisitions. The only way to break this is with more
| muscular antitrust, which (at least for now) seems to be
| happening.
|
| For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well
| despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most
| important game in town. Furthermore, dominant companies
| actually rarely get disrupted in the sense that someone comes
| along to take their business, it's that new markets open up
| that make the old business obsolete. But IBM is still the
| leader in mainframes, Microsoft still has dominance for
| desktop operating systems, Google is still dominant in search
| despite what feels like weekly articles about how search
| quality has gone down.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I met a traveller from an antique land,
|
| Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
|
| Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
|
| Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
|
| And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
|
| Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
|
| Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
|
| The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
|
| And on the pedestal, these words appear:
|
| My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
|
| Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
|
| Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
|
| Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
|
| The lone and level sands stretch far away."
| typon wrote:
| This should be framed in the the office or every CEO.
| Although the point of the poem is the inevitability -
| maybe a good reminder nonetheless.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| _Memento mori_ but for businesses.
| dweekly wrote:
| I like that for years (and maybe it's still there) the
| back of the Facebook logo sign out front was a molding
| and decrepit Sun Microsystems logo. It was there on
| purpose as a reminder that regardless of how many
| brilliant engineers you hire, death awaits you when
| complacency arrives. And if you paid attention you could
| find little Sun logos still lingering around the MPK
| campus...
| shagie wrote:
| Elsethread I was reminded of one of my favorite
| collection of essays on software development. The last
| post in its collection is titled "Ozymandias"
| http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234 I
| chanced upon an ancient cache of code: a stack
| of printouts, tall as any man, that in decaying
| boxes had been stowed. Ten thousand crumbling
| pages long it ran. Abandoned in the blackness to
| erode, what steered a ship through blackness to
| the moon. The language is unused in this late
| year. The target hardware, likewise, lies in
| ruin. Entombed within one lone procedure's
| scope, a line of code and then these words
| appear: # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE
| The code beside persisting to the last-- as
| permanent as aught upon this sphere-- while
| overhead, a vacant moon flies past.
|
| https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Lumi
| nar...
| xwowsersx wrote:
| One of my favorite poems. In my language arts class in
| high school we could memorize poems and recite them to
| our teacher for up to 0.3 added to our GPA. This was one
| of them.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history
| of television [0], which will be studied in high schools
| 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
| dxbydt wrote:
| First time I watched Emperor's Club, I was like hey isn't
| this just Ozymandias ? It turned out that's a very common
| confusion, mined by English highschool teachers
|
| https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType
| =3&...
|
| Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to
| understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I
| still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial
| Hollywood feature film centered around that poem.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_Club
| htrp wrote:
| > For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well
| despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most
| important game in town.
|
| There was a period about 10-12 years ago when Microsoft was
| basically left for dead
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Azure launched 13 years ago in 2010. Before that,
| Microsoft had Windows and Office.
| int0x2e wrote:
| Microsoft is surprisingly hard to kill. They do a little
| of everything, and internally act much less like one
| company and more like a conglomerate. This means there is
| more politics than needed, but also that the company can
| survive some pretty massive changes. Microsoft isn't
| perfect, but it can probably survive even if they lost
| their top 3 revenue generators, which I'm not sure would
| be true for Google or Amazon...
| i_love_cookies wrote:
| for real, everyone was saying microsoft was the new ibm
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I think in a way, MSFT is only doing fine because all the
| alternatives are doing awful. Google, Apple, Amazon,
| they're all not exactly at the top of their game. Also
| MSFT is in a huge dev. marketing campaign phase, so we as
| dev probably are exposed a lot more to their charm
| offensive than the rest of the population. Our
| perspective might be biased.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > Microsoft is famously still doing quite well
|
| IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE
| isn't doing too bad either1.
|
| Every incumbent will be replaced eventually2. What really
| matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving
| innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place
| and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of
| it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo
| packet and kill products loved by users.
|
| 1: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GE:NYSE?window=MAX
|
| 2: https://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check,
| GE isn't doing too bad either1.
|
| Literally, what are you talking about? IBM and GE have
| both been shrinking for YEARS now. Even the graph you
| linked above shows GE's stock where it was in 1997. Just
| compare either GE or IBM to https://www.google.com/financ
| e/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=MAX
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Too many of us kid ourselves about 'irrelevance'
|
| The companies you list build a legal moat around their
| business (establishing some amount of monopoly) and then
| begin sucking taxpayer money
| meesles wrote:
| In general I agree that these companies retract from the
| forefront and maybe aren't the innovative powerhouses that
| they once were, however both IBM and GE do fine as businesses
| and will probably be around for a long time. And I think it's
| important we have a bit of both in the world.
|
| The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech,
| but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive
| projects. Google has been a driving force in laying sub-sea
| internet cables across Africa and South America for a good
| chunk of time now, enabling billions of people to come
| online. I don't think a small company could achieve that
| since it costs billions of dollars to do.
| gotorazor wrote:
| GE hasn't really been doing fine since the great Recession.
| The GE of the mid-2000's was a behemoth. If I have to guess
| and adjusted for inflation, GE hasn't been this poor since
| the mid-80's.
| avhception wrote:
| While I think you're right and GE is a fine example, I'm
| not so sure with IBM. They seem to really have lost any
| direction or vision of what they actually want to do.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there.
|
| The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-
| sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people
| who are trying to build things.
|
| Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to
| 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop
| maintaining the old system.
|
| Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't
| understand the problems they are facing day to day.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > Other tech people change the API for no reason and give
| work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system''
| and stop maintaining the old system.
|
| We're in the middle of rewriting our auth system because
| _Google Sign In_ is being replaced with _Sign In With
| Google_.
|
| Incredibly, I didn't just make that up:
| https://developers.googleblog.com/2021/08/gsi-jsweb-
| deprecat...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I tried Google APIs as well, and also gave up at
| authentication, even though I just wanted something super
| simple and small (push messages to mobile phone).
|
| Nowdays I'm just using nostr for storing simple data, as
| it's super simple with no vendor lockin (I can encrypt
| messages if needed).
| karmasimida wrote:
| Google is too big to be efficient
|
| Layoff would be inevitable. Reading its past history, the
| current Google is nothing like what is was. It used to be a
| pretty intense place where creators are eager to work (check
| the history of Android book, it is very informative on that)
|
| Now it is famous for getting paid without caring
| jbirer wrote:
| It's really unfair that the incompetent have so much power
| over the competent and block their potential.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, Google long ago passed the point where it was about
| making things, and has been at the point where 99.99% of
| its energy _has_ to go towards stopping itself from
| imploding.
|
| Which means processes, approvals, triple checks,
| departments/groups fighting each other (to protect
| themselves), etc.
|
| It's a natural part of the lifecycle and every organization
| gets there eventually.
|
| What you're talking about is frustration when you're part
| of the picture (and individual ability to get things done)
| is blocked by the overall organizations dysfunction/morass.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Only if the competent let them.
|
| You could argue that the whole point of something like Y
| Combinator is to back hungry competent founders over
| stagnant incompetent people working at behemoth companies.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You could also argue that the whole point of YC is to
| provide a passive(ish) income for Paul Graham by turning
| small hungry companies into behemoths via rapid forced
| growth and IPO. Like some kind of battery farming.
| whymauri wrote:
| The MBAification of Google.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| SOP for a McKinsey product.
| mcrad wrote:
| [dead]
| peanuty1 wrote:
| > Also the new CEO is not a software engineer
|
| I looked up Sundar's background before joining Google out of
| curiosity and it looks like his educational background is in
| "metallurgical engineering" (IIT Kharagpur), materials
| science (Stanford), and MBA (UPenn). And stints at Applied
| Materials and McKinsey.
| ttul wrote:
| It's safe to say he is intelligent and effective in all the
| ways that matter.
| dontblink wrote:
| Is it though? He hasn't really moved the needle for
| Google at all other than capitalizing on growth laid out
| by his predecessors. Satya is far more admired for his
| accomplishments comparitivly.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Satya is favorably compared to Balmer, whose
| effectiveness is constantly understated for reasons
| unknown to me. Anyone who takes over from an unpopular
| leader gets bimus points for not being unpopular.
| geodel wrote:
| Agreed. I have seen this similar scenario played in many
| context An organization is failing. Owners / Board of
| directors decides to put in new leader and outgoing
| leader will take all the blame, valid or not. I think all
| parties agree on this so that incoming leader can start
| afresh and also taking credit successes of past
| initiatives while failures attributed to past leaders.
| That way they can add to credibility of new leader.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech
| non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech
| people who are trying to build things.
|
| This seems to be inevitable anywhere. In the social games,
| biz types beat the nerds.
| marvin wrote:
| > The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech
| non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech
| people who are trying to build things.
|
| Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and
| innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant
| mistake?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Large organizations are pulled very strongly toward
| mediocrity.
|
| What's unique about Google is not that they ended up there.
| It's how they avoided it for so long.
| sah2ed wrote:
| That's because of something called the institutional
| imperative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287430
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| For companies of this size this is the norm, not the
| exception.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It was a response to real issues that had to be addressed.
| When 3 different teams ship 3 different chat apps over the
| course of just 5 years, that's the kind of thing that
| typically signals more leadership and better organization
| is needed.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Doesn't seem like they've addressed it yet based on the
| Meet/Hangout fiasco that is still unravelling. Mid-2010's
| Google was already showing signs of corporate lethargy.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Natural end stage of organization growth.
| neel8986 wrote:
| Google's sole purpose now is to increase profit by > 15%
| till eternity. No innovative tech can give >15% growth in
| profit every year like a clockwork. So they attracted bunch
| of number pushers who kept on putting more and more ads in
| youtube and search. They started chasing Amazon or Apple in
| Cloud or Phone hardware. They became 100% competition
| focussed and completely ignored their strength. They
| completely forgot that they are sitting on the next
| goldmine like LLM. It baffles me the the company which
| invented Transformer and has the worlds largest index can
| not build something like ChatGPT. But that is not going
| increase their profit in the next quarterly earning.
| zwily wrote:
| They say they have a better ChatGPT, but it's too
| dangerous to let into the hands of the genpop.
| Redoubts wrote:
| Growing past thousands of people is very hard to do
| "correctly". Maybe it's not even possible.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Around '08 or '09 is when IMO it became visible from the
| outside that Google's culture had shifted radically.
|
| I've read comments before claiming that when Google acquired
| DoubleClick, Google became more DoubleClick than the other
| way around. Basically, that the Google we liked was destroyed
| by that acquisition, and something new emerged. That
| certainly squares with the timeline.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Google buying Double Click is actually the most profitable
| acquisition in the history of business, nearly dwarfing the
| Robber Baron era and the Russians selling us Alaska.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Makes sense that they would become the dominant culture
| in Google then, no?
| mathteddybear wrote:
| No, Search Ads dwarfs it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > DoubleClick Inc. was an advertisement company that
| developed and provided Internet ad serving services from
| 1995 until its acquisition by Google
|
| Checks out alright.
| kderbyma wrote:
| Pinchai has been a Terrible pick. He made google just worse.
| Like a passive aggressive leader...
| cptskippy wrote:
| I always assumed his appointment was strategic, Pichai got
| his position shortly after Nadella took over Microsoft.
| This coincided with announcements like Android One and
| other products targeting or focusing on the Indian market
| which is emerging as a force on the global stage.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Who has the harder/worse job: CEO of Microsoft or CEO of
| Alphabet/Google?
| nova22033 wrote:
| Google market cap has more than doubled since he took over.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Maybe. But they should really keep the companies leaner
| than it currently is ...
|
| The self motivated bottom up Google way can't scale like
| this.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Do you attribute that to his lack of EECS background like
| the poster above you? Also, is Pinchai a typo or a play on
| words with "penny-pincher"?
| ptero wrote:
| Not to defend him, but I think by 2015 google has already
| lost its way, focusing not on developing groundbreaking
| technology, but on using it's dominance to squeeze any
| money even if it meant encouraging addictive behaviors.
| kccqzy wrote:
| 2015 sounds about right. _Three Years of Misery Inside
| Google_ is one of the best articles you can find about
| the seemingly sudden change of culture that made working
| at Google miserable.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-
| misery...
| user_7832 wrote:
| Wow, thanks for that article. It's quite a long read,
| though a bit sad/disappointing, as someone who once
| believed in Google.
| fooker wrote:
| I interned at Google around 2015 and again 2019 as a grad
| student. The culture was dramatically different, even in
| a very similar team.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Care to elaborate. In what way? I have always though
| their crazy hiring rate would erase their "culture" like
| every two years.
| fooker wrote:
| TGIF was not a thing people watched or went to anymore.
| The number of meetings doubled. Employees were actively
| discouraged to look through code in google3 and design
| documents that did not concern their work (search for
| 'need to know' in Memegen if it still exists).
|
| The main thing that weirded me out and ultimately caused
| me to decide not to work for Google was that everyone was
| talking about perf and promotions all the time. Everyone
| in the team structured their work accordingly, and tales
| of people who obtained promotions because of heroic
| effort for achieving something was a recurring topic in
| group conversations.
|
| There was cost cutting efforts everywhere. There was
| significantly more red tape involved in requisitioning a
| heavy duty computer needed for my work (compiler
| development). The food in the micro kitches were toned
| down in variety and quality. Food trucks disappeared. The
| food in the cafes was unchanged but dinner was no longer
| served at about half of the cafes.
| warning26 wrote:
| I've seen him speak in person, and this is completely
| correct. He just chases shiny things; there's no vision for
| the company at all, just "oh well this seems interesting".
| bushbaba wrote:
| He's thoughtful
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > just "oh well this seems interesting"
|
| To play devil's advocate (I'm no fan of Google in any
| way), but this is also how Elon Musk operates, and it
| seems to be going well for him.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Elon Musk is strongly outspoken, and has strong vision,
| communicates the vision, although it can change in a day.
| But at least everybody in the company (or rather
| everybody on Twitter) knows the plan to execute on.
|
| When Sundar speaks he speaks politically, so that he can
| never be wrong (at the same time if I just watched his
| talks, I couldn't even know that I'm at a search
| company).
| azinman2 wrote:
| Is that sarcasm? I can't tell
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Not at all. He did lose a lot of money recently, but most
| of that is "on paper" - he still has at least that much
| left over. I'd be more than happy to have his problems.
| He's in a valley right now, but his batting average is
| very high.
| seunosewa wrote:
| I often wonder why Larry and Sergey aren't more active.
| They seemed to have a pretty good vision.
| crdrost wrote:
| I made it my goal to get to Google several years back
| precisely because of stories like these about the Google of
| 2005 and whatever, Bock's "Work Rules!" and all that. And I
| made it! And now I have lost it, I am part of the unfortunate
| 6%.
|
| The old-timers I knew there must be shocked. They all said
| "that's just not what we do" when this was rumored months
| ago. "If those conversations are happening, I haven't heard
| about it, my managers haven't either."
|
| The culture that hired them told them both explicitly and
| implicitly "we did not hire you to do a job, we hired you
| because you are smart and effective, we trust that you will
| hate boredom and use your grit to make hard things happen and
| do the best work of your life."
|
| The reality from my little spot inside Google Cloud was much
| more sobering. In my first performance review I was making my
| bosses happy but not pleasing some faceless committee so the
| rating came as a shock to both of us. We worked our way out
| of that pit and then all our incoming headcount was cancelled
| because Sundar demanded we "sharpen focus," and so we had to
| cancel a bunch of planned growth tasks and work on tech debt
| cleanup and security features, which are less sexy but keep
| the lights running.
|
| The kicker is, just yesterday I was talking to the team about
| an experiment for a better way to improve our work, I was
| helping our new team lead onboard, AND I put out some new
| code for review that would solve a major pain point. So like
| I was "in the zone" today, I was legit ready to create a ton
| of business value. And like last night I woke up hearing the
| work laptop reboot in the other room and thought "that was
| weird" but did not give it much more thought, and then today
| I go to quickly skim HN, "all right let's kick some a... ...
| ... The affected have already gotten an email, I didn't get
| an email, I am safe right? ... I also didn't get the emails
| that we're over some quota, but maybe Kate or Martin fixed
| that ...? Okay work phone isn't helping, let's check the work
| laptop...."
|
| Amazingly bad. Just have my manager tell the group, let us
| all cry together... Not like this.
| anxman wrote:
| I worked on Sundars team at Google in 2006. He is highly
| technical and understands the nuance of software.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| CEO of Google _should_ be a software engineer. There are
| many execs at Google that can do a better job than
| uninspiring Sundar.
|
| If I were a shareholder of Google/Alphabet, I would be
| demanding a better CEO.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Sorry, but I haven't seen his code base, and I don't know
| any significant technical achievement of his other than
| spamming everybody with Chrome download links everywhere to
| make it the number 1 browser (it was a great strategy, but
| not enough to run a company).
|
| Google is paying Jeff Dean, the guy who even after was
| famous for a lot of things, after imagenet challenge result
| came out, stopped everything else, read research papers for
| a week, and implemented a system that separates dogs from
| cats with unprecedented precision.
|
| People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of
| people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen
| to them when they say that the company should go into a
| direction.
| ActionHank wrote:
| I doubt you can "understand the nuance of software" without
| having been in the trenches, even a little. Managing
| software roadmaps and projects or people is vastly
| different to dealing with systems and code.
| myko wrote:
| Could he have lost that in the intervening time?
| simonswords82 wrote:
| As somebody who started my software company in 2007 and
| stopped coding full time around 2012/2013 I'd say if you
| did it long enough you never lose the abstract concepts.
|
| I understand everything my head of engineering tells me
| and don't need it ELI5'd. However being told it, and
| being asked to do it are two different things. I would be
| a very useful or productive coder if I went back in to
| the trenches.
| myko wrote:
| > I would be a very useful or productive coder if I went
| back in to the trenches.
|
| Would or would not?
|
| After being in management for years I sometimes feel like
| I would not be, at least not without 6-12 months of doing
| it every day.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| > Other tech people change the API for no reason and give
| work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system''
| and stop maintaining the old system.
|
| This was a good 15% of what I used to do at Facebook.
| Adapting to the useless changes, that is, not making them.
|
| It felt like if your changes weren't backwards incompatible
| then they were less visible, and therefore less impactful for
| your performance reviews. If you made them backwards
| incompatible you could boast about coordinating hundreds of
| engineers to transition to the new system. If the transition
| is seamless, all you have to brag about are improvements from
| the old system, and frequently there were none.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| > Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there.
|
| I lost touch with Google's internal culture around 2011-ish.
| What is your take? When did you think Google changed and what
| drove the change? How gradual was?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| For me the two big changes were when Larry took over from
| Eric and when Amit was fired for harassment.
|
| Larry may have been good or bad leader, but he was just
| super serious and boring. Eric was amazing at trying to
| make us think in grand visions and be optimists, what is
| needed in tech.
|
| With Sundar TGIFs were not about organizing Google to a
| common goal, it was much more like watching advertisements.
|
| Big team meetings started to be anti-harassment training
| camps.
|
| I started to not participate in any team events and just
| code, as the leaders stopped giving us real honest
| guideance.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| During the deep dark days of Google+, at one TGIF a
| senior (very senior) search engineer stood up and asked
| Larry why they had to do everything Vic asked, like
| removing long-term search features and counting logins to
| Google as Google+ users, and Larry just sort of stood
| there, confused, and asked the crowd "can't you all just
| get along?"
|
| It was at that moment I saw the stark difference between
| Eric and Larry (and later, the difference between them
| and Sundary). Eric was a leader. He knew how to rally the
| troops (his speech at TGIF right after the US economy
| shut down was amazing). he saw economic downturns as
| times for Google to grow its strengths, not shed its
| weaknesses.
|
| What's amazing is how much the engineers at Google had to
| do to convince leadership that our pursuit of social
| (with the exception of youtube comments) was hurting our
| brand, and distracting us from the next profitable
| venture (cloud). I have eternal respect for the people
| who patiently convinced Yonatan Zunger (who wrote the
| infrastructure code implementing Real Names) that Real
| Names was a huge waste of time.
|
| At this point it's clear there's nobody at the top of
| Google who really has a clue how to move the company
| forward. They should just put Ruth in charge and complete
| their transition to being a post-innovator focused
| entirely on maintaining their monopoly positions.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| I'd honestly read a book about these anecdotes. Do you
| have more?
| dekhn wrote:
| Here's another. After working in Ads for a while somehow
| I convinced senior management to let me use all the idle
| cycles in prod. I spent the next three years building and
| running the equivalent of Folding@Home at scale (the
| largest number I'm allowed to share is that we used more
| than 700K Xeon cores 24/7 to run protein folding, drug
| design, and telescope simulations). We published a few
| high profile papers and then I shut down the project
| because it was using far too much energy and it made
| sense to free the resource up for more important
| projects.
| dekhn wrote:
| How about this one? When I was working on my idle cycle
| harvester I happened to sit near Jeff Dean and Sanjay
| Ghemawat. I got invited to have coffee with them many
| mornings. I told them how I thought Google could
| contribute to managing genome data, and a few weeks
| later, they opened up a chat window and said "We wrote a
| mapreduce to compress DNA. Can you tell us if this is
| helpful?" and that's how Google Cloud Genomics was born.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| What! That's crazy. Is your background in biology or
| genomics? How'd you grow an interest towards these
| topics?
| dekhn wrote:
| better to join google and go through all the internal
| history docs, memes (from the beginning) and ask the old
| timers.
|
| The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully
| representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The
| Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to
| Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have
| some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The
| Valley.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Time to apply! ;)
| gmoot wrote:
| There was a big change in 2015 when Ruth replaced Patrick
| as CEO.
|
| Most of the cost cutting dates to then. She has been
| undeniably good for the share price, but it's a two-edged
| sword. There is a lot you can't do when you're focused on
| the share price.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This sounds very Ginni Rometty at IBM.
|
| The share price did well, the company and its reputation
| much less so.
|
| It's not exactly news that if you want to goose a share
| price, a big round of layoffs will "reassure investors."
| Especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.
| bumby wrote:
| Are your examples also examples of survivorship bias?
|
| I was reading in the WSJ how all tech seems to be paring back
| their moonshot programs. I think the Google example was a
| program cut that had $1B in revenue but $6B in costs. (forgive
| me if the exact numbers are wrong). It seems like prioritizing
| and cutting back on programs that lose money (despite being
| innovative or inspiring) is a natural consequence of economic
| downturns.
| acdha wrote:
| There's definitely some risk of that but I'd put it more at
| 2008: that's when Google acquired DoubleClick, and the sea
| change away from building products which people wanted to use
| seemed to start a bit later when the ad focus had set in.
| It's hard to think of something they've done since then which
| has been a popular success.
| bumby wrote:
| > _when the ad focus had set in_
|
| Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue
| is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a
| lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do
| much for the "business" other than supporting the data for
| targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their
| main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns.
| (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me,
| has real insight)
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Yes it is. OP is pointing out that wasn't always the case
| - Google became an ads company, they didn't start as one.
| bumby wrote:
| You're right and thanks for the re-focus. I guess I don't
| know what else people would expect? All the incentives
| are for a publicly traded company to focus on what makes
| money. If you want to work on R&D solely for the sake of
| R&D, there are other options (notably in the public
| sphere). Expecting a company to continually funnel money
| into cool, but ultimately unsuccessful (by business
| metrics) ventures seems confused.
| acdha wrote:
| To be clear, my argument isn't that they should ignore
| profitability but that they could have multiple revenue
| models for different products, not to mention a better
| understanding of what it takes to succeed in different
| fields.
|
| I'd use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services
| but their sales guys showed up like "we're Google, of
| course we're the best" and put approximately as much
| effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton
| of people available, listens to what you need (and
| actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the
| sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked
| on it, ... and none of that matters if you give up after
| begging them to show up to sell it.
| acdha wrote:
| I think it's a little more subtle: the ad focus means
| they're unwilling to consider other revenue models or
| deeply appreciate how customers are different than high
| volume ad impressions.
|
| The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples
| but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back
| in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to
| make a profit on its own would not have been. Their
| executives just weren't sweating the way they would have
| if they knew their shares would go down when they didn't
| execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are
| running the service in a way which makes it clear they
| have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the
| parent company and thus aren't blowing off customer
| support, features, security, etc.
| lazide wrote:
| G-suite definitely was held back by that approach. I was
| there during the critical years. Very frustrating.
| acdha wrote:
| I can only imagine. It amazed me how many great people
| you'd talk to and the company just squandered their
| efforts.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The Chromecast was pretty market defining, and they've made
| huge inroads in education if you count that as "popular".
| Chrome was technically around in late 2008 but it took a
| while after that to reach its current dominance.
| sempron64 wrote:
| ChromeOS was a game-changer too.
| acdha wrote:
| Yeah, I don't want to say there's a line in the sand
| because nothing happens instantly or completely at a
| large organization but I'd say most of their successes
| were started before the ad culture became deeply
| entrained.
|
| Chromecast is definitely good but it was years after
| Apple and Roku, and feeds data to the ad impression
| system so I'm not sure how much it defined the market
| rather than very successfully competing in it.
|
| Google's educational efforts are actually super
| interesting to consider: they had some initial success
| but seem to have lost their way. My wife is a teacher so
| we hear people talking about this: most of the districts
| around us have switched to Office 365 and almost all of
| the people who've mentioned that have been happy because
| it's a better product without so many of the never-fixed
| warts they hit with G-Suite. That feels eerily similar to
| what I see with GCP where you really get the impression
| that incremental improvements aren't favored by whatever
| incentives their management sets.
| bumby wrote:
| Do you have any idea on what the Chromecast revenue
| stream was? I couldn't find it after a cursory look. I'm
| wondering if it's lumped into one of the "other"
| categories.
|
| I think part of the distinction is how "success" is being
| defined. A product may be innovative and market defining,
| yet still not contribute much to the bottom line. It's
| still cool to work on, but these companies are still
| trying to make money at the end of the day. I assume
| their moonshot ideas still have the explicit long-term
| goal of being profitable.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I dug up the original story* and read it for the first time
| just now, it was a great read. I particularly like the imagery
| of Apple and Google dealing the deathblow to that idiotic app-
| rental scam the carriers had been running
|
| It seems like we've pretty much come full circle in the 10-15
| years since then. I wonder who'll be the ones to put old Google
| to sleep..
|
| * A PDF of it popped right up in search results
| jcadam wrote:
| > I wonder who'll be the ones to put old Google to sleep..
|
| Hopefully soon, I make a concerted effort to avoid using
| Google services wherever possible. Even in cases where the
| alternatives are inferior.
| [deleted]
| kyrra wrote:
| It's worth stating that Google has been hiring like crazy for
| years. In their Q3 earnings[0], their year-over-year number of
| employees increased by 36,751.
|
| [0]
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422...
| Aperocky wrote:
| Back when I was in school Google was the company that had an
| aura where it's reserved for geniuses and next to impossible
| to get into.
|
| That was a number of years ago, I can't help but notice this
| perception changed among the people I know. I don't think it
| was entirely because I graduated and start having experience
| (disclaimer: did not work for Google).
| typon wrote:
| This perception changed 5-7 years ago. I actually can't
| think of a single software company that induces the same
| level of awe in university students anymore. Places like
| Jane Street do but they aren't really Silicon Valley tech
| companies.
| irrational wrote:
| I've never heard of Jane Street before. It's kind of hard
| to have awe of a place you've never heard of. How did you
| hear of Jane Street?
| ilikerashers wrote:
| Most recently due to FTX leadership being Jane Street
| alumni but they get mentioned a lot here due to OCaml.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| They used to be quite a niche trading company, known in
| the functional language community for their use of OCaml.
| But they grew to one of the highest paying company in the
| world.
| rongenre wrote:
| They've been on radar forever, but I used to work in
| finance and like Ocaml.
| algog wrote:
| Jane Street is huge in HFT space. SBF started at Jane
| Street.
| 22SAS wrote:
| I work in the HFT space. Jane Street in not an HFT, they
| are not trading in a very latency sensitive asset class.
| [deleted]
| neilv wrote:
| Jane Street did outreaches at MIT (dunno which other
| schools), wrote blog-like things, used an exotic
| language, paid a lot of money (word gets around), etc.
| [deleted]
| csmiller wrote:
| This profile in the times caught my interest
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-ne
| w-b...
| ironrabbit wrote:
| Openai is probably the highest status employer among my
| network, but I don't know any university students
| typon wrote:
| Deepmind is high status as well. However with both these
| companies - they are looking for experienced researchers
| usually rather than new grads. Google was famous for
| hiring bright eyed young geniuses and building their
| careers.
| donkeyd wrote:
| The Internship is now almost 10 years old. I almost
| wonder whether that had anything to do with it.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It's probably just size. People might believe a company
| of 20,000 is filled with geniuses, but it's hard to
| imagine a company of 200,000 filled the same way
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I'm sure there were tons of great engineers at Google, and
| they probably were incredibly picky with college grads. But
| I also saw them hire people I had worked with that were
| experienced but not amazing performers. There are people
| who have good resumes in that they went to a good school
| and somewhere along the line worked at a well regarded
| company. The funny thing is that people like that are
| typically well regarded their entire career even if they
| just bounce around. The pedigree doesn't go away. It's hard
| to evaluate people.
| scottyah wrote:
| "A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and
| C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to
| Z players."
| chihuahua wrote:
| I could tell their hiring standards are much lower when I
| finally passed the interview bar last year. But then,
| hiring freeze, and now layoffs.
| KMag wrote:
| Though, note that both Android and Google Maps were
| acquisitions. Someone needed the vision to acquire those
| companies, for sure, but their initial incarnations aren't
| great examples of Google innovation.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| YouTube as well...
| boplicity wrote:
| That also explains why carriers are obsessed with buying media
| companies; they just can't let go of their dreams of a walled
| garden.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Carriers are doing their best to avoid becoming a "dumb pipe"
| utility-style service where other people make all the money.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I call this "the plumbing law of the internet business."
| pjc50 wrote:
| The unspoken question: who does get to make all the money?
|
| At which point should the quasi-monopoly with the moat be?
| Hardware manufacturer? Retailer? Mobile carrier? ISP?
| Search engine? Social network? All of those companies have
| valuations which assume they'll work towards capturing most
| of the value, leaving the others competed away to nothing
| ..
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This sounds great, but obliterating tiny markets isn't going to
| move the needle anymore. Google Cloud is the size of bet
| required these days. And they are still investing heavily in
| it.
| paulsutter wrote:
| A timid half-step. If you've ever visited Google (even before the
| pandemic) the offices are empty (everyone is "working from the
| bus") and only a small minority of employees are involved in
| revenue products
|
| FANG have been stockpiling very skilled people and letting them
| atrophy, it's the biggest tragedy in Silicon Valley and for the
| US economy generally
| smugma wrote:
| Is Apple the last major tech company standing without layoffs?
|
| Yes, at least for FANG/MAGA. I wonder if they will avoid them or
| just be the last one to cut.
|
| Related, with employee growth charts:
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcou...
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to
| groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole
| industry.
|
| > Thanks to those early investments, Google's products are better
| than ever.
|
| Does he really believe this?
|
| Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I
| end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day.
|
| I worry about using google products for anything essential due to
| the risk of being locked out with no recourse, or the product
| being unceremoniously dumped after a year. Chat (whatever it's
| being called that month) is always changing, and not for any
| benefit that I can see.
|
| Their office suite is pretty impressive, but again I can't trust
| that it (or my files) will be there when I need them.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Does he really believe this?
|
| I believe it: the Google of 2008 would have been completely
| buried by the flood of ChatGPT-generated bullshit SEO spam.
| What they have today is the best version of Google to date, so
| it's still floating, not just as high as it once was in less
| adversarial times.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Really? Often, the top links are AI generated spam that,
| while somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, sounds
| like it was written by a high school student trying to pad
| the word count for a few pages.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| esp. for anything relatively technical. the pages look like
| they copied and pasted someone else's documentation
| together.
|
| at this point it's almost always ignore the first 3 hits
| and go straight to stackoverflow or reddit, or something
| that's plainly obviously related like python.org
| documentation.
| lancesells wrote:
| I've noticed so many domain names are spammy with
| associated subdomain spam. I'm impressed they manage to
| get to the front page of Google.
| sangnoir wrote:
| It doesn't sound like you're disagreeing.
| htag wrote:
| Yes, Google search results are worse than they were in it's
| height.
|
| Google front page is a whale of a target. At no point has
| there been more sophisticated attacks for people trying to
| hit front page with low-quality content. The position you
| parent comment took is that Google of today is better at
| resisting those attacks, and no one version of Google would
| provide as good results on today's internet.
|
| I believe Google is fundamentally failing at it's mission
| of "organize the world's information and make it
| universally accessible and useful" and it's earlier value
| of "Don't be evil". That's not to say that Google Search
| isn't better at searching today's internet than any other
| iteration of Google Search would have been.
| neuronic wrote:
| Maybe this is confirmation bias since I have seen a multitude
| of blogs and threads popping up around this topic but I have
| clicked the "Page 2" button on Google multiple times this
| month. I don't think I have to add anything to make that an
| argument.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > Does he really believe this?
|
| This is also a signal to the stock markets that Google is
| getting onto the AI bandwagon, to milk the current hype around
| AI.
| michaelgrosner2 wrote:
| I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one
| else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my
| gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad.
| In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information
| anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how
| much of a bubble HN exists in.
|
| OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban
| YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses
| Android, etc.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just
| because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably
| a top N listicle that search will happily present to you,
| even if it is auto generated nonsense.
|
| > Next to no one uses Android, etc.
|
| That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| US is mostly apple world
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Android has a 48.2% mobile OS market share in the US as
| of November 2022:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-
| held...
|
| Claiming "next to no one uses Android" is just plain
| wrong even in the US.
| metamet wrote:
| "Mostly" being a minor majority, only recently
| established (September, 2022)?
|
| > For the first time ever, there are more iPhones in use
| in the US than any other type of smartphone. Citing data
| from analytics firm Counterpoint Research, the Financial
| Times reports the iPhone overtook the entire Android
| ecosystem in June to claim 50 percent of US market share
|
| [...]
|
| > By 2010, two years after its debut, Android overtook
| iOS to claim the larger install base. Ever since then,
| Google's mobile operating system has been the dominant
| force in the global smartphone market, claiming more than
| 70 percent market share as of 2022, according to
| Statcounter.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-
| market-...
| gspetr wrote:
| >Next to no one uses Android
|
| Wait, what?
|
| Who's in the bubble now?
| college_physics wrote:
| The fact that somebody writing on HN doesnt know this shows
| you how low information the world really is.
|
| We generally assume too much about the shared knowledge
| basis. There would be much less friction if we could
| improve on that
| anifru wrote:
| I thought it was clear the poster was talking about their
| daily life, and not commenting on world statistics.
| scrollaway wrote:
| American bubble. US people don't realise the world runs on
| Android.
| simplotek wrote:
| > American bubble. US people don't realise the world runs
| on Android.
|
| It's not even an American bubble. Some sources show that
| the iPhine market share in the US is only slightly above
| 50%.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/north-
| amer...
| koube wrote:
| This could be a regional experience. Some states have 70%
| apple market share, with Rhode Island having 80%[0]. The
| difference could be even greater for smaller regions
| within a state.
|
| [0]: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-popularity-
| by-us-stat...
| Entinel wrote:
| This is the answer here. I believe iOS wins the US but
| world wide Android has a 72% market share.
| bobbyrullo wrote:
| Even in the US it's like 45% Android, so "no one uses
| android" is absurd in any context.
| chihuahua wrote:
| "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted
| for him." - famous quote from 1972
| rubatuga wrote:
| Maybe OP is saying nobody important uses android
| stocknoob wrote:
| You need to multiply the market share by the wealth of
| the participants.
|
| What fraction of the world's _wealth_ (easier to measure
| than influence) runs on Android? Elon using iOS has more
| influence than how many impoverished billions?
|
| This is why German and Japanese are often localized
| before other languages with more speakers.
|
| Not saying it's right, but just pointing out the reality.
| The world runs based on the decision makers, who use iOS.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Lol. If you want to talk wealth, then it doesn't matter
| again because people with enough money have multiple
| phones, iOS and Android.
| godelski wrote:
| If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the
| likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is
| quite small. We can think of this as roughly each of your
| friends tossing a coin and all of them landing heads. If
| they do, that's a pretty biased bubble (because it isn't
| a pure random process, but you also don't have a
| representative and random sample)
| mike_d wrote:
| > If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the
| likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is
| quite small.
|
| If you mostly associate with people who are on pre-paid
| cell phone plans they got at Walmart or a gas station,
| you'll see a high concentration of Android. Among people
| who are in technology or often purchase luxury goods,
| most your friends with have iPhones.
| lappet wrote:
| Most people I know use Android. I have noticed Android and
| IPhone users have their own bubbles.
| swarnie wrote:
| To expand on this how often do you have a conversation with
| someone where you evaluate or recommend search engines? I'm
| going to assume never because that would be both weird and
| boring.
| unsui wrote:
| > Next to no one uses Android, etc.
|
| Seems like a self-selection bias, possibly based on socio-
| economic factors that determine who you surround yourself
| with.
|
| In my personal circles, I only know 1 person who uses iPhone,
| everyone else uses android.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| In my daily life, all my tech coworkers and zoomer (and
| older) friends in VRC say it's horrible, myself included. The
| only people who don't have a problem are it are my very
| casual-use family members.
|
| TikTok search is apparently better. My version of that is
| "site:reddit.com", but even that's gotten worse as the
| culture there becomes more censorious, echo-chambery, and
| more insane.
| westernpopular wrote:
| Because non-tech people don't think about which search engine
| they're using. Doesn't mean it's not bad.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| People care when things are bad. They don't care when
| things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets
| normal folks the information they were looking for the vast
| majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is
| irrelevant when the results are still what people were
| looking for.
| bobinux wrote:
| Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed
| let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I
| used to get the best information, websites, media material
| that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even
| probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually
| get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest
| brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one
| specific forum in over 20 search pages, but then I had
| checked my bookmarks and the site was still running and
| functional and contained what I was exactly looking by the
| keywords and other possible search factors. These days I just
| feel I get the information sources that are the most
| advertised or well branded, but do not reflect the accuracy
| of what I'm looking for.
| pxoe wrote:
| it's starting to get really hard to believe that, as people
| repeat 'wow, search used to be better and now it's trash',
| remembering only the good parts, rewriting their memories
| of it, and just having it literally be 'well somebody said
| it, so it must be true'. 'i remember how it used to be a
| decade ago', well, sure you do. and yeah, somebody could
| dig out their search history takeouts and do some kind of
| opinionated pondering about it, but this ain't it.
|
| and if one wants to experience real search results
| difference, just switch back to, say, duckduckgo for a bit,
| and see how many times you just end up giving up and
| googling stuff instead.
| Jochim wrote:
| Google results are markedly worse than they used to be.
| SEO spam routinely pushes the site/content I'm searching
| for down/off the page. These sites are often just
| straight up copies of StackOverflow.
|
| My perception is that search queries need to be much more
| specific in order to avoid SEO trash as well. It used to
| be fairly common to find special interest forums when
| looking for product reviews. Now the first page is almost
| exclusively auto-generated spam sites referral linking to
| Amazon product pages. Adding "Reddit" sometimes provides
| helpful advice but there's often a lack of in depth
| insight that was present before.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| DDG just uses Bing though, it's bad but Bing was never
| particularly good.
| moultano wrote:
| Send me your queries to debug if you remember them.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| because the rarest sources of the web were relatively
| speaking much more popular back then when the internet had
| about 20 pages in total. The entire scale of the web has
| been growing x-fold every year.
|
| So what was relatively relevant back then is now irrelevant
| to a general audience and as a result has been pushed back.
| You could argue Google should bias search much more towards
| individual history but that has its own pitfalls, both in
| terms of results and privacy wise.
|
| Basically blame your fellow searchers for clicking and
| wanting big brand stuff, Google just gives you what the
| internet considers relevant.
| Jochim wrote:
| I blame Google and the third party ad model for profiting
| from and encouraging the creation of the lowest quality
| cash grabs. Search for any kind of product review and
| you're faced with a sea of auto-generated shit, the only
| purpose of which is to serve you an ad and hope you click
| an amazon affiliate link. It's a prime example that the
| "value" delivered isn't value to society or the
| individuals using the service.
| mda wrote:
| Your second paragraph points that you are living in a bubble
| as well.
| xwdv wrote:
| It's not a bubble. If you want to hear basic opinions from
| the everyday person then sure, go talk to your gym bros and
| grocery store Facebook moms about Google. That's if you're
| not met with blank stares. They don't know what they don't
| know.
|
| HN is a much more distinguished community possessing vast
| technical knowledge. We can approach products from beyond the
| level of the everyday person and can give deeper appraisal of
| their worth. Some here may have even built those products, or
| at least could build a distilled version of them in a weekend
| _for fun_.
| dcist wrote:
| After the way Google treated Stadia, I can't trust any Google
| product enough to fully rely on it.
| amf12 wrote:
| I think Stadia is something they handled well. Refunds to
| people. There are worse deprecation examples you can find.
| hourago wrote:
| > Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and
| I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every
| day.
|
| Google product is not the search, but the advertisements. I can
| believe that Google has gotten better at showing more ads to
| more people. The services like mail or search are just a way to
| get people to see that ads.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Sure, but as search circles the drain, they will lose
| eyeballs.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I'll believe it when Google Maps stops asking me if I want to
| get off the highway, drive around in a big square, then get
| back on at the same exit going the same way.
|
| No google. I don't care if it's 8 minutes slower. Still not
| tempted.
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| Many such cases. Every major company (FAANGM) talks big about
| being all-in on AI, but when you use their products in your
| daily life, stupid stuff like parent's map example is
| glaring.
| jsight wrote:
| Its weird because there was a time when I would have agreed
| with him. "Google Now" launched years ago and did an amazing
| job of predicting things. The little four icon thing in their
| launcher used to almost always have the app that I wanted at
| the top.
|
| Now, "Google Now" doesn't exist and the launcher rarely
| predicts an app that I'm wanting to use next.
|
| Search has regressed too. Google Finance and other web
| properties are maybe about the same, at best.
|
| And these are just a few of the less obvious problems.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| > but search seems worse every day.
|
| Search is a reflection of the internet.
|
| The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There
| are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy
| and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search
| can still be functional in such an adversarial environment
| filled with garbage.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| >Search is a reflection of the internet.
|
| Not sure I agree with that, as ChatGPT is pretty close to
| being a full-knowledge AI. I can ask it things Google fails
| to find and get a pretty damn good answer. Yesterday I asked
| it how Ethernet over Coax worked, what it was called, and
| specifically how it was able to get such high throughput
| while using only one conductor.
|
| The top results on Google are for Amazon, zdnet (linking to
| Amazon referrals), screenbeam.com (shallow article trying to
| get sales), Newegg, Hitron Tech (same as screenbeam), and
| only then Wikipedia. And the Wikipedia article doesn't even
| mention CSMA/CA (still relevant for MoCA apparently)
|
| Heaven help you if you have a specific problem with an
| emerging technology, like VR/SteamVR, specific 3D avatar
| issues in Blender or Unity, problems with a specific
| blueprint issue in Unreal Engine, etc.
|
| Knowledge AI is the future, likely with "fine-tuning as a
| service" based on the collective sum of everything you do
| online and on your phone.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| What you and other's replying here are suggesting then is a
| downward spiral for Google's search.
|
| Either Google needs to significantly shift gears or all of us
| need to look toward the next search paradigm that is not
| blighted by AI SEO crap.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| It's happening more and more often that the first result
| doesn't even include all the words in my fairly short
| queries.
|
| I'm thankful they have a warning on the result so that I
| don't waste my time.
|
| They're also extremely liberal with synonyms. For example,
| yesterday I searched for "linear cohort survival model." The
| first result has bolded "general linear transformation
| model." I can't even tell what "general" and
| "transformational" are mapping to in my query.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It is a reflection on how google views popularity over
| usefulness.
| lazide wrote:
| Huh?
| dekhn wrote:
| The biggest signal in Google's site ranking must be user
| clicks without returns (IE, user found something they
| wanted, clicked on it, and didn't come back to Google to
| search more). That would be good at filtering spammy
| pages, and shows things that are already known to be
| popular at the top. Rather than using link structure, use
| user clicks.
| mike_d wrote:
| That is not the metric used to determine result quality.
| But if it were, you'd be correct.
| clint wrote:
| I would say you are an extreme outlier. Most people use all
| these Google products with no problems nor do they seem to
| share your fears.
| wishfish wrote:
| At one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it
| suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there
| would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee
| on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly
| unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I
| didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name
| and services which will provide some customer support if
| there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small
| price vs. Google's free.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| While "extreme outlier" is probably true, here on HN many of
| us are extreme outliers. So while true, at least he's in good
| company.
|
| I am on the road to de-Google my life, or at least add some
| backups in case of Google locks me out of my account. On HN
| I've seen articles about people who have been locked out of
| their Google accounts based on 1) taking a picture of a boy's
| genitals intended medical purposes, 2) submitting a
| chargeback for a Pixel phone that never arrived, and 3)
| unknown reasons, likely Google's AI incorrectly flagging an
| account.
| pb7 wrote:
| Even on HN, you're in the minority. If you took HN as a
| representative sample, you'd think Linux was the #1 OS by a
| long shot even though it's a rounding error for personal
| usage. There's a big old bubble here.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Far and away, the most used OS for personal usage in the
| world is Android.
|
| If you squint, you can call that Linux.
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top
| few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page,
| based solely on the pages title. Compare:
|
| "how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work"
|
| bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+
| press...
|
| google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+
| sensors...
|
| I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles
| being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily
| found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic,
| where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.
| uvesten wrote:
| Wow. For me the difference is night and day. On my phone,
| google gives me first two screenfuls of ads, then about the
| same amount of homepages of companies apparently selling
| mems sensors, and then some kind of wiki that seems to
| answer the question, maybe... Bing, otoh, has an
| explanation of what a mems sensor is and how it works as
| the first thing on the page. I guess I'll try switching
| default search engine now. (For me, google results have
| definitely been getting way, way worse for a couple of
| years. At the moment, google search plainly _does not work_
| for me probably 5-10% of the time, i.e. I _only_ get ads
| and unrelated results.)
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| The results are slightly different but where they overlap
| the summary/preview/description doesn't seem radically
| different to me. But I'm not familiar with the subject so
| maybe I'm not seeing it the way you do. Bing has more
| images/thumbnails from some of the results so maybe that's
| it?
| nomel wrote:
| For this case, the biggest tell of quality is the
| existence of a block diagram, schematic, or equations.
|
| But, even without images, the "explore further"
| recommendations are _fantastic_ , with direct links to
| research papers. Google seems to not recommend research
| papers (zero on my results).
| hintymad wrote:
| > Their office suite is pretty impressive
|
| Speaking of usability, Quip is much better in my experience.
| Office 365 is more feature rich. If anything, I think GSuite is
| falling behind. A few killer features that GDocs should've had
| since years ago:
|
| - A link to any line. Quip has it, yet in gdoc I have to create
| a bookmark first.
|
| - Any table is a spreadsheet. I mean, isn't it obvious? Who
| says one never needs to calculate anything in a table, or never
| needs to format anything in a spreadsheet cell?
|
| - Embed formula anywhere and refer the result anywhere. Dah! So
| convenient for technical docs, yet gdocs has shit.
|
| - Latex support. I'm sorry, but gdoc's equation is both ugly
| and crippled.
|
| - Embed any file. I mean, really, this is year 3202 and I still
| have to upload a file to gdrive, find its link, and paste the
| link back to my doc?
|
| Google used to an avantgarde in product design. What happened?
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| Well Search is definitely better for Google's Shareholders.
| They've always made a killing but must be making substantially
| more with how degraded the product has felt recently.
| [deleted]
| brightball wrote:
| > Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always
| changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.
|
| I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google
| Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a
| great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close
| to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely
| useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside
| service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time.
|
| I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's
| currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all
| of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.
| bosch_mind wrote:
| Google chat is the worst software I've ever used
| dekhn wrote:
| original google chat in gmail was fine. since then it's
| evolved but compared to slack it feels like google isn't
| even trying.
| brightball wrote:
| When did you use it last?
| nomel wrote:
| Not grandparent, but I use it every day. It's definitely
| the buggiest message client I've ever used. Maybe it's
| because I'm using Safari, rather than Chrome, but
| problems within the last few months of use include:
|
| * long load times, sometimes I have to retry 15 minutes
| later. everything else works.
|
| * often shows week old conversations when I open it
| fresh, eventually updating when it feels like it
|
| * sometimes doesn't scroll to new messages, forcing me to
| manually scroll, even after page reload
|
| * absolutely massive memory usage (685 Mb for that tab,
| seriously wtf)
|
| * "open in a popup" used to be extremely buggy, but now
| it doesn't function at all, not being an actual detached
| window.
|
| I'm patiently waiting for beeper.
| brightball wrote:
| Interesting. One of the small offices I know who's using
| spaces with about 30-40 people hasn't had any complaints
| except the lack of scheduled do not disturb.
|
| The integration right next to email and calendar that are
| always open anyway have been very natural, but this isn't
| a software company where people are always on it.
| bosch_mind wrote:
| Every day
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself
| and more the web. It's now just a low quality generated content
| minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they
| could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it's a race
| to the bottom with that stuff. It'll only become worse as LLMs
| advance.
| kmarc wrote:
| That announcement was meant to be mostly for the shareholders
| when MS's ChatGPT and copilot is the next big thing which is
| actually usable IRL.
|
| This is a site for techies, so you and I search for IRL techs
| from Google that are products of the mentioned AI-first years
|
| We (he and you+me) have different understanding of stuff, and
| probably Different friend circles and audience. And that is
| fine.
|
| Hope the good ones out of the 12k find a good job afterwards
| where their work result in actual real life products.
| deadmutex wrote:
| > Does he really believe this?
|
| Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc.
| and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also
| sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but
| YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience.
| Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it
| seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most
| popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually
| watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels
| I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos
| in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch
| any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and
| videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor.
|
| No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested"
| or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless
| list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.
| amf12 wrote:
| Google Lens, AI algorithms for pixel cameras, voice
| recognition for Assistant, Translate, etc. We really just
| focus on Search being bad - a lot of which is because of SEO
| spam.
|
| When it comes to big companies, Google does have pretty good
| AI in products. I don't particularly find any mature product
| _bad_ per se.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| > I worry about using google products for anything essential
| due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse
|
| This is my big one as well. As Google refuses to segregate
| accounts, nebulously AI defined "bad" behavior on YouTube or
| GCP could lock me out of my digital life.
| college_physics wrote:
| Its terrifying for anybody ecking an existence in tech
| (without deep pockets). Those who built businesses around
| facebook and now twitter know all too well the risks of being
| a digital serf. But you argue it was their choice.
|
| You cannot do anything techy without exteme dependence on
| google. This is not how things should bem
| numbsafari wrote:
| > Does he really believe this?
|
| Does S.U.N.D.A.R. really believe anything?
|
| Do advanced holographic CEO chat bots dream of electric
| employees?
| siliconviking wrote:
| I'm surprised people aren't connecting all these layoffs with
| their root cause: the increasing cost of capital. Naturally,
| projects that were economically profitable only at a very low
| cost of capital could turn unprofitable at a higher cost of
| capital, destroying value instead of creating value. Shifting
| resources away from such projects is the logical thing to do, but
| if you end up with a surplus of resources, the only other
| possibility is to trim those resources. Discussions about how
| much cash Google has on hand are completely irrelevant in my
| view.
| lostmsu wrote:
| While this is a cause, it is definitely not the root cause.
| siliconviking wrote:
| What is the root cause in your view?
| ragnot wrote:
| It is the root cause. I think people just don't want to
| admit that the Fed has more control over our economy than
| they thought.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Well, the capital costs are not increasing on their own.
| You can argue what caused them to rise, and then that would
| be the reason.
| meltyness wrote:
| Apparently shrinking and firing people is inspired work! It's
| gonna be huge and cool! "Tough decisions" all around! Cheers!
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > As part of that, if you are just starting your work day, please
| feel free to work from home today.
|
| What a generous offer.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| My brain somehow skipped that sentence. I would be relatively
| certain all the affected people were already feeling quite free
| to do what needs to be done in their individual cases.
|
| This is such a weird Friday.
| saagarjha wrote:
| "Please don't show up on campus and make trouble for security"
| mk89 wrote:
| Ahahahaah
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Please feel free to voluntarily limit turmoil on the work floor
| today
| oars wrote:
| Let's see where this goes.
| kypro wrote:
| Are we about to enter a new era of ultra-profitable tech
| companies?
|
| While companies like GOOG and MSFT have had ridiculously healthy
| margins compared to traditional industries for some time now,
| it's also been clear in recent years that these companies have
| become very loose with spending. Take GOOG for example, they
| spend so much unnecessary money on fancy offices, free lunches,
| diversity programs, highly speculative investments, stock based
| comp, etc.
|
| But perhaps more importantly what happens when all the
| unprofitable tech companies with 80% gross margins decide to
| operate profitably? A lot of companies are so wasteful in tech
| today that they're actually choosing not to operate profitably so
| they can grow faster. We've seen Uber basically do a u-turn on
| this stance, but many other companies are following suite.
|
| The media seems to think these cuts are a sign that tech
| companies are struggling and other industries like energy will
| now take the lead, but surely being able to drop 10-50% of your
| workforce with almost no consequences is a sign of strength not
| weakness?
|
| I guess this whole time the most profitable companies in the
| world apparently weren't even trying that hard to be profitable.
| cutenewt wrote:
| I doubt it. It feels more like the end of an era.
|
| All the so called "cool" technologies from FAANG names in the
| last 15 years have lost its luster.
|
| There's a new set of companies that are ready to take over. The
| most obvious ones to fall to the wayside are the ones
| threatened by ChatGPT and TikTok.
|
| Who knew tech could be trendy?
| mathverse wrote:
| That's absolutely out of touch with reality. The owner of
| TikTok Bytedance was massively laying off people already. It
| is nowhere as profitable as any of the FAANGs.
|
| ChatGPT is nowhere a product that can pay for itself.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > diversity programs...
|
| Not even remotely comparable to the other things you listed.
| People such as yourself seemingly can't stop talking about it
| though, despite it having no effect on your life.
| type-r wrote:
| for a period of time, one of my previous employers had an
| unwritten policy that you couldn't send a job offer to a non
| diversity applicant at our headquarters. so yeah, these
| programs can actually have a pretty big impact on my life.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Yeah, google doesn't have that. So it doesn't affect your
| life.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Diversity programs have considerable side effects: there's
| both pressure to hire people who tick DEI boxes, and
| equivalent resistance to get rid of those who are
| underperforming. And neither of these does any favors to
| those who _are_ qualified, but get tarred with the suspicion
| of being the dreaded "diversity hire".
| kypro wrote:
| Well I don't know about GOOG specifically, but I know there
| has been relatively large diversity teams at every tech
| company I've worked for in recent years. Again, not GOOG
| specifically, but it's not uncommon for companies like this
| to have employees whose job it is to email people informing
| them to do things like rename their project's master branch
| to main. There have also been efforts within companies like
| GOOG to bring in employees who are less qualified simply
| because they're female or are of a certain racial group. My
| point about diversity programs is not that the team itself is
| expensive, but that when these companies push politically-
| motivative policies within an organisation they often cause
| larger inefficiencies and disruption. We've seen this in
| several companies in recent years such as Coinbase and
| Netflix.
|
| Whether you believe diversity and inclusion is important
| isn't really relevant to the profitability point my comment
| was focusing on.
|
| I also don't think it's necessarily comparable to the other
| things I listed and was actually considering not including it
| because I know there's always someone like yourself who will
| just focus solely on the politics and not my point. For
| example you didn't take issue with my point about their over
| hiring of kitchen staff? That's probably a much smaller
| expense and arguably doesn't have the larger productivity
| costs of diversity programs - it may in fact boost
| productivity.
| vervez wrote:
| I think many of the things you mentioned w.r.t. diversity
| is actually forward-thinking and potentially yields more
| returns later. If there's a brilliant swe that feels
| uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their
| branches, they won't work there. Same goes for hiring a
| "less-qualified" individual. How many decisions or projects
| can be improved because of a diversity of input? Again, a
| non-linear outcome that is harder to measure than immediate
| profitability. Those are some arguments for those programs
| focusing on your productivity point.
| kypro wrote:
| These are good points.
|
| I guess my issue is that unless done well it's very often
| just disruptive. At the place I work the exec team is
| currently pushing diversity as a major goal and have told
| us explicitly that there are too many old white men at
| the company - especially within senior positions.
|
| Since the push to replace white male leaders our
| corporate Jabber board has been filled with nothing but
| arguments about race with one side of the opinion that
| white male leaders need to immediately step down and make
| way for others, and the other arguing that this is a
| racist corporate policy which makes them feel unwelcome
| and without any path to career progression.
|
| I kinda get both sides of the argument, but the focus on
| diversity was a key catalyst to the problems we now have
| with diversity at the company. Had the execs just not
| taken a stance on the ideal racial demographics of the
| employees we'd probably not be fighting about it.
| [deleted]
| tristor wrote:
| The issue with your arguments in response is the issue
| with the entire way DEI is structured in industry. It's
| not that diversity is unimportant, diversity of
| /thoughts/ and /beliefs/ is critical to building products
| that appeal to the widest audience/target market. It's
| that the way programs are implemented focus on the wrong
| things, and worse are based on this type of wishy-washy
| thinking.
|
| Your argument amounts to a completely unsubstantiated
| what-if "[What] if there's a brilliant swe that feels
| uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their
| branches..."
|
| Here's a counter-argument: Productive driven people don't
| get distracted by irrelevant and petty things like what
| the repository branch is named in the private repo that
| no customer ever sees. This is the type of petty nonsense
| that bureaucracy loves though, and bureaucracy kills
| innovation, creativity, and productivity. The entire
| issue with DEI isn't that opponents think diversity is
| bad, or that we're against hiring people from diverse
| backgrounds, it's that the way DEI is implemented is a
| cancerous bureaucracy that kills companies and teams.
|
| It's just another form of the massive spread of
| administration/non-productive management across large
| organizations within the West. There's now close to (or
| in excess of) 1:1 administrators to faculty in most
| universities in the US, and the majority of the
| administrative hires are in DEI. These bureaucracies work
| to advance the bureaucracy, not to advance the mission of
| the organization they purport to represent. The massive
| waste of money on administration in hospitals, insurance
| companies, universities, and large corporations does not
| make these organizations improve patient outcomes,
| improve education of students, reduce medical costs to
| society, or improve products in the market that people
| rely on in their day to day lives. It's just a huge pile
| of burning money supporting the existence of roles that
| effectively detract from the overall productivity and
| quality of organizations.
|
| This isn't just DEI, by the way, it's all forms of
| unnecessary bureaucracy. It's one of the reasons why we
| need stronger anti-trust, because this is an inherent
| cancer to large organizations. The only solution for
| which is to have smaller organizations in the first
| place, so they can be razor focused on their actual core
| mission and not burning mountains of cash on
| administrative boondoggles.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Your complete mischaracterization of these programs and
| outright lies about "efforts within companies like GOOG"
| reveals that you are completely unqualified to assess their
| impact on profitability. And thus you are in fact the one
| mentioning it for political reasons.
|
| You also didn't say "over hiring kitchen staff", you said
| "free lunches", which are two different things.
| mbesto wrote:
| I think this sentiment comes from Universities (which do have
| cases of bloated diversity groups) and then that sentiment is
| passed on to the idea corporations, which to your point are a
| drop in the ocean in terms of overall costs.
| refused_cov_vax wrote:
| >I rank the odds of you getting hurt by these specific
| discrimination practices aimed at you low, so stop mentioning
| them!
|
| No. Humans are not equal in aptitude. Neither are human
| groups. Either account for it, or don't, but be consistent.
| elektrontamer wrote:
| It does have an effect on his life if the group he belongs to
| isn't a "diverse" one. I say this as someone who would
| probably be considered "diverse", I'd like to be judged based
| on my merits not by diversity quotas the blue haired gestapo
| has dictated.
| ineedasername wrote:
| >blue haired
|
| I don't understand this reference. What does blue hair
| (assuming metaphorical and not literal?) mean in this
| context?
| elektrontamer wrote:
| Maybe it's just another way for them to revolt against
| society, or they just really like the way it looks. I
| don't really know why but dying their hair in some
| outlandish color is pretty popular with that crowd. I'm
| not against it by the way, it looks nice when done well.
| MandieD wrote:
| Amusingly enough, "blue hairs" has long been slang for
| elderly women - a lot of old women used to put a bit of
| bluing in their yellowish grey hair to make it look
| whiter/more silvery, and some of them overdid it a bit at
| times.
|
| What's bluing? A non-permanent blue dye that used to be
| used when rinsing white shirts to make them look less
| yellowed. It's still sold, but I don't know anyone under
| 60 who still buys it.
|
| Amused by this shift in meaning, mostly because I'm now
| the female equivalent of a "grey beard" in tech, old
| enough to have experienced the Dotcom bust - there is a
| fair bit of silver in my hair, and I can't be bothered to
| cover it. "Grey bun"?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| People that care about these topics are often slandered
| as "women with dyed hair." It is a way of creating an
| outgroup.
| teh64 wrote:
| [dead]
| occamsrazorwit wrote:
| It's a literal meaning referring to the idea of a secret
| ruling class of leftist women in society. They're assumed
| to have all this societal influence and control ("blue-
| haired gestapo") despite no actual leaders resembling
| this. I feel like the burden of proof is pretty high for
| claims like this.
| netheril96 wrote:
| > despite it having no effect on your life.
|
| How could it have no effect on our lives? It has effect when
| you compete against a diversity hire, it has effect when you
| have to work with a diversity hire, it has effect when your
| manager has to decide who to lay off when your coworker is a
| diversity hire.
| John23832 wrote:
| Of all of the minorities in the world, even of the subset
| that may compete with you on for a position, you just CAN'T
| fathom that some of them may be better than you? That in
| even competition, this person, who just happens to be a
| (gender, racial, sexual orientation, ability, religous)
| minority is better than you at the position you're chose to
| apply for?
|
| Framing your competition as diversity hires (and
| contemplating the outsized concern that they have on your
| life) says more about than you think. You're the bottom of
| the barrel at what you do. "Diversity hires" don't compete
| at a high level.
|
| I for one know that if my competition wins, whether they
| are a minority or not, they do it on skill. I've elevated
| myself out of the concerns of competing with diversity
| hires, because I'm great at what I do. Level up.
| netheril96 wrote:
| Tell me more about how Asian Americans have to have
| better grades than Whites, Blacks and Latinos to get into
| the same school because they are somehow worse.
| 8note wrote:
| I'd guess that Asians with lower grades are less likely
| to apply. You'd get a distribution that looks like that
| even with completely random acceptance
| John23832 wrote:
| Because amongst similarly qualified candidates we are
| THEN allowed to differentiate. It's the same reason you
| may pursue extracurricular and then put them on your
| college resume. Differentiation.
|
| Where's your crocodile tears for Vietnamese kid from
| south central (where the Vietnamese in America are on the
| lower end of the economic scale) who is admitted to
| Harvard instead of a Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Indian
| kid from a well to do family? Lets segment Asian
| Americans and see how you feel.
|
| When opportunity is equally earned, we can then look to
| representation. Your argument is just an attempt to claim
| all spoils.
| netheril96 wrote:
| I don't understand your case about Vietnamese being
| admitted to Harvard at all, or how I would have tears let
| alone crocodile tears. Your words make no sense.
| John23832 wrote:
| I guess english is not your primary language, because
| it's plain english.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It is illegal to do what Harvard is doing in hiring
| decisions. It may even be illegal for Harvard to do what
| it is doing, given how the supreme court decides to rule.
| Affirmative Action doesn't exist in employment.
| netheril96 wrote:
| Affirmative action definitely exists in hiring. There are
| racial and gender quotas.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Such a quota would be very loudly illegal.
| netheril96 wrote:
| And I forgot to say this: all of your words here are ad
| hominem attacks. You have a condescending attitude
| implying that somehow if one fails to win, they don't
| have the right to complain about the unfair system. An
| absurd notion, given that they are impacted the most.
| John23832 wrote:
| There's a difference between failing to win, and
| asserting that others cheated. Calling others "diversity
| hires" implies that others have cheated. You don't get to
| claim the high ground there.
| [deleted]
| jensensbutton wrote:
| What is a "diversity hire"? Anyone that's a minority? Or
| perhaps someone that _you_ believe wouldn't have been hired
| if they weren't a minority? Let's give you the benefit of
| the doubt and say it's the latter.
|
| How would you know if a colleague of yours is a "diversity
| hire" without making assumptions? How do you know that
| you're just not as good? Because you don't think their work
| is high quality? Maybe you're a bad judge because your work
| isn't high quality. Or maybe you only see part of their
| work? Or maybe your pre-judgement has already doomed you to
| biased analysis of anything they do.
|
| Or maybe if you're worrying about this you're just not very
| good.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Companies don't write magical blank cheques to someone who
| ticks off the right boxes without having them do any actual
| work. They are hired with the expectation of delivering
| value to the company by performing real work adequate to
| their qualifications. The term "diversity hire" is
| meaningless and frankly derogatory without evaluating
| actual individual performance. Companies have pipelines to
| handle underperforming employees and there are no signs any
| of them are being spared due to ticking off the right boxes
| despite that right-wing conspiratory trolls allege.
| momodadragon wrote:
| if you're losing out to a "diversity hire", you weren't
| that good.
| netheril96 wrote:
| Your logic can rationalize any kind of unfair treatment
| in the world and therefore an invalid argument. After
| all, there alway are some people who are just so good
| that an unfair system cannot deny them.
| gcr wrote:
| This guy!
|
| Imagine thinking "diversity programs" are a significant cost
| center, as if their spend were comparable to real estate or
| employee compensation
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's not really about the cost though, is it? If they were
| donating to the KKK or literally setting cash on fire, I
| doubt you'd have the same outlook. Wasted or misspent money
| is never something to overlook, particularly when you could
| have justified keeping a few more employees on if you'd just
| stopped setting money on fire.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Watch out for the PACs. https://www.protocol.com/tech-
| company-pacs-2019-2020 (somewhere between donating to the
| KKK, setting it on fire, and using it for bribes). I wonder
| what a company that donates equally to both sides is trying
| to achieve, hmm?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I don't know if you're American or not but that's a
| common strategy to select higher quality candidates for
| your side whilst selecting the _lowest_ possible quality
| candidate for the opposing side via the primary process.
| That said, that 's not always the case and you could
| absolutely be right.
| babelfish wrote:
| How can you equate spending on diversity with spending on
| the KKK?
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic
| diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial
| returns above their respective national industry medians.
|
| Falsely equivocating spending on diversity programs to
| "donating to the KKK or literally setting cash on fire" is
| really telling.
|
| This monthly discussion comes up on HN and it's already
| turning into a dumpster fire.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Right but it is instead likely the case that companies
| with ridiculous profitability are likely to have
| diversity programs. That's the thing about statements
| like this, it's just one interpretation of the data.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic
| diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial
| returns above their respective national industry medians.
|
| Falsely equivocating correlation and causation is really
| telling.
| it_citizen wrote:
| > Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic
| diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial
| returns above their respective national industry medians.
|
| I hope this is right.
|
| But I keep seeing stats like that being thrown around and
| implying that the cause of those high financial returns
| are diversity when it is as likely that projections of
| high financial returns give you the money and time to
| focus more heavily on diversity. Both can also be
| symptoms of a common cause such as healthier management.
|
| Again, correlation is not causation.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is surely the case. It gets old watching
| progressives paint their interpretations as objective
| fact.
| threadweaver34 wrote:
| Diversity programs are best viewed as a relatively cheap
| marketing expense. They exist to make the company look better
| to certain people. When there are more pressing concerns, you
| pare them back because you have better things to worry about
| that what non-customers think of you.
| kypro wrote:
| Feel free to disagree with me on this, but I hold the view
| that diversity programs erode productivity generally
| speaking.
|
| And for the record here, I'm not even opposed to them as a
| worker. It bothers me about as much as companies providing me
| with free lunches (not at all). In my current place we spend
| around an hour each week either discussing diversity or in
| diversity & inclusion training, and it's always the easiest
| hour of my week.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Google is bragging about spending hundreds of millions of
| dollars on diversity programs every year.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Revenue: 256 billion dollars.
|
| So "hundreds of millions" is .1% of their spending.
|
| And it is a line item that can be effortly axed in hard
| times. As others said, it's basically marketing. If you
| have a company that actively consumes your personal
| information, but it's a rapacious creepy fascist company,
| people aren't going to hand over their data to it.
|
| Even if you hate the "woke", you probably still trust a
| company with a bunch of sensitive, moralistic raving SJWs
| that will scream if Google is abusing things too much.
| Which has happened!
|
| Likely, worth every penny.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| A few years ago, I built an exact replica of a Saas product I
| saw online and priced it 1/3 theirs. The actual founder went
| mad and started a smear campaign. Lucky for him, Workload at my
| regular job picked up and I abandoned the project, but this
| highlighted the weak moats of most of these products.
|
| and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's so
| that engineers are less inclined to go home and build their own
| competitor.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| For most of these companies sales and marketing is the moat.
|
| Edit: curious to know what was the SaaS that got rattled by
| your fun experiment.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| I'll dm u :)
| simonswords82 wrote:
| > and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's
| so that engineers are less inclined to go home and build
| their own competitor.
|
| This is most definitely not true.
| threadweaver34 wrote:
| If hosting is cheap, I'd be tempted to put it out for free
| just to up the ante with the other company.
| simmerup wrote:
| The other way to view is that even though you could undercut
| that business by two thirds, you didn't make enough profit to
| make it worth pursuing over your day job.
|
| So maybe you were selling it far too cheap after all.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| I would've made significant more than my day job just by
| subscriptions (not counting share value). I had just joined
| workforce and leaving it so early didn't seem right to me.
| maayank wrote:
| Anything we know about the makeup of this or other recent
| layoffs? Any professions overly represented in the layoffs
| compared to the firing org's distribution?
| shapefrog wrote:
| Google had 156,500 full-time employees in 2021, an increase of
| nearly 16% year-over-year as compared to the 135,301 full-time
| employees in 2020. Google's pace of hiring was also torrid in the
| second quarter of 2022 as the company added 10,000 new employees
| to its 163,906 workforce - that is only through to July 2022.
|
| These "Layoffs" are awful for individuals, but they are simply a
| sign that they went on a hiring spree in 2022 - plenty here were
| talking about the massive pay increases on offer all over the
| valley with demand off the charts.
|
| So really it isnt sign of pending apocalypse etc.
| komadori wrote:
| Wow! I worked at Google circa 2015 and there was an internal
| web page showing how many employees there were. My recollection
| is that there were about 50k full-time employees and 50k TVCs
| then. Even then, it felt crazy how large and incohesive the
| organisation was. I wonder what it's like now.
| shapefrog wrote:
| GOOG ; 2016, 72,053 ; 2015, 61,814 ; 2014, 53,600 ; 2013,
| 47,756.
|
| 2015 is really not that long ago either!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I joined end of 2011 and I think there were just north of
| 20,000 FTEs.
|
| When I left end of last year I had been there longer than
| 95%+ of the 100k+ (I forget) employees, which I found ...
| odd... since I still felt like a Noogler.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's best to split 2022 in two. The first half was quite
| different from the latter.
|
| I saw it in practice as I left Google at the end of 2021 and
| job hunted on and off through the year. The pace of hiring
| _everywhere_ significantly dropped mid-2022.
| jeegsy wrote:
| > To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different
| economic reality than the one we face today
|
| I will never tire of reading phrasing/euphemisms like these.
| Language can be so beautiful even when its something bad.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Are all of these layoffs essentially collusion to reduce wages?
|
| If they all end up with the same headcount but with a reduced
| wage in the next year, there should be a class action. Not that
| those help anyone but lawyers, but it's nice to have an official
| punishment on record.
| gbajson wrote:
| Reduce? They are hiring in Poland!
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The last recession - if you were a software developer, or in
| tech, you had a great deal of immunity. I remember having
| spending power when everyone else was unfortunately suffering and
| taking time to find jobs, etc.
|
| Now it feels like the same is true of machine learning. And to
| some degree other specialist roles within software engineering.
| If you're a generalist software developer, you're in a vulnerable
| position. If you have more specialized skills (AI, etc) you're
| going to be in a better, more robust position. Being a developer
| is more commoditized than it ever has been (of course good
| developers are still hard to find, but a lot of work doesn't
| really need good developers)
|
| It makes me think that specialization over time is telescoping.
| At one point computer engineering was a specialization of
| electrical engineering. Then computer science / software became a
| specialization out of computer engineering. Now other
| specializations are being born out of general software
| developers.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Specialisation is a risky long term bet though. The amount of
| companies a good generalist software engineer can work at is
| orders of magnitude more than an ML engineer and I imagine it
| will remain like that for a long while. Same thing for more
| extreme niches like compiler engineers - the number of
| opportunities is substantially less.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| spacemadness wrote:
| I'd be interested what the etc. is in "AI, etc." AI seems safe
| perhaps but so far that seems to be mostly gut feel.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| This has not been my experience. I have seen plenty of people
| with generic backend/full-stack keep their jobs, while my
| Linkedin is full of impacted infrastructure, security and data
| engineering specialists. Although I do agree that the developer
| world is becoming increasingly commoditized, I do not think
| that specialization is really the way to escape it.
| [deleted]
| durnygbur wrote:
| oh hello my brain teaser, and algorithm puzzle loving friends.
| Welcome to the job search market!
| sai_c wrote:
| Does anyone know what "Outside the US, we'll support employees in
| line with local practices." exactly means?
|
| In Germany I could imagine it to be "You're fired. Go to the
| Arbeitsagentur and find a new job". Of course within the legal
| forewarning period.
| dtech wrote:
| Usually EU countries have quite strict rules for layoffs, it's
| not like US at-will law. In NL mass layoffs like this have to
| be approved by the unemployment agency, you have to fire people
| LIFO and you get 1/3rd of your monthly salary for every year
| you've worked there. The approval is quite difficult to get so
| usually a higher severance is offered to leave voluntarily.
| oaiey wrote:
| In Germany any lawyer (or the work council) will block you from
| getting fired (because Google has no legal reason to fire you).
| What they do here in Germany is to negotiate to mutually void
| your contract by you accepting a financial package.
|
| So in theory you are right, in practice however, most companies
| (especially the ones like Google) have to buy you out of your
| contract.
| izacus wrote:
| Also, IIRC, when actual layoffs happen, in Germany they
| actually need to look at tenure and family status of fired
| people (e.g. fire people without families first).
| oaiey wrote:
| Correct. When it is a legal layoff (they rarely are) then
| the work council and the company have to develop a plan
| which includes factors like these.
| eggie5 wrote:
| in netherlands, for example, they (Goog) has to negotiate w/
| the local-employee-backed Works Council. If they didn't bother
| setting one up, like Meta NL failed to, it will take about 3
| months to do that. Then another 1-2 months for negotiations w/
| the council. Then if they come to an agreement (they don't have
| to) w/ the redundancies and severance the affected can _then_
| be notified.
|
| for example, technically the meta layoffs back in November have
| not even happened here in NL and the affected won't even know
| until at least March-April!!
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| Taking the UK as an example, there are strict laws and
| processes that need to be followed to implement redundancies:
| https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights
| vincnetas wrote:
| it means we will do what law requires. Which is quite a low bar
| to clear :)
| ggm wrote:
| C/F musk and his stupidity at twitter. Lawsuits in progress.
| mkl95 wrote:
| At some EU countries mass layoffs at large companies follow
| their own process, usually with some union involved, etc.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I guess it just means they will follow the law in each country.
|
| In the case of Germany I believe the minimum notice period is
| one month (unless on probation, 2 weeks), but it is common to
| get 3 months. So they will pay for 3 months.
| joshvm wrote:
| The notice period might be longer than 60 days, which is pretty
| generous for the US. In Switzerland, 3 months from either party
| is not uncommon.
| coredog64 wrote:
| 60 days is the US minimum for a large company doing a layoff
| (WARN Act). Some states have stricter standards, which is why
| Amazon had to pay a minimum of 90 days severance in NY state.
| parasight wrote:
| In Germany, local practices could include severance pay too. It
| is common for long-time employees to receive significant
| severance payments when they get fired.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Doesn't seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542681/how-many-jobs-...
| rr808 wrote:
| This is well over due. Lots of people resting and vesting.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Layoff very much due to investors' push. GOOGL, the stock, has
| been lagging the other big tech companies by a wide margin in the
| past year or so.
|
| Big picture though, you have to start wondering if WFH trends
| have largely exposed "unproductive" jobs in these big
| corporations. It was very hard to identify them in the past but
| now it's become so evident. You don't really need these gap-
| filling-there-for-the-optics people. Companies are going to be
| run that much more efficient.
| FpUser wrote:
| Earlier in 2022 Google introduced this GRAD performance review
| system. In my opinion said system turns employment into a rat's
| race but I digress. One of the goals of that system was to
| eliminate about 10000 people which falls just in line with this
| reduction.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...
| robocat wrote:
| "Hohn is not factoring in the counterintuitive reason why
| Google and other tech companies pay software engineers total
| compensation packages of $300k to $800k. They are hoarding
| talent from their rivals and paying workers handsomely so there
| isn't a motivation to quit and build a startup that will
| disrupt the status quo."
|
| Terrible reporting. I would like to see a proper financial
| analysis on whether hoarding or preventing competition makes
| financial sense. I think the hoarding idea is a crock of shit:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487744
| elektrontamer wrote:
| Judging by the comments I think it's safe to assume that the
| "taking responsibility" part is a meaningless statement at best.
| What I want to understand is does he even owe anyone an apology?
| Isn't employment just an agreement to provide services in
| exchange for money and benefits? Anywhere I work I expect my
| employer to fire me the moment they don't need my services or
| find a better/cheaper alternative, I wouldn't think twice if I
| found a better employer. So why would I be owed an apology or
| someone to "take responsibility"?
| lm28469 wrote:
| It really depends on how you see work and companies on an
| almost philosophical level. It hasn't always been as bleak as
| it is now
| eCa wrote:
| I guess someone has to write this comment:
|
| > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
|
| As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
|
| It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic
| cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will
| affect their longterm attraction as employers.
| havnagiggle wrote:
| > As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him
| are
|
| Ah, the heavy cost of a troubled mind /s.
| dwighttk wrote:
| > It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic
| cockups when it comes to hiring lately.
|
| Fwiw Cook took a pay cut and Apple seems to have only slowed
| hiring. (So far as I've heard)
| serial_dev wrote:
| He takes full _responsibility_ for the decisions.
|
| And the workers will face the _consequences_ of these
| decisions.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's a way to say you're not blaming anyone else, and the
| people getting laid off did nothing wrong.
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| These comments show up on every one of these layoff letters,
| but what do people actually want to see?
|
| The CEO resigning would only send the company further into
| turmoil and tank the stock (which is a significant portion of
| employee salary) even further down.
|
| Taking accountability doesn't mean someone needs to suffer
| drastic consequences.
| tootie wrote:
| I think it's there just so no one infers the opposite. It's
| not unheard for executives to blame everyone else. Pichai is
| just affirming that he's not blaming anyone else.
| bsaul wrote:
| I agree with others here pointing that firing people isn't
| necessary a sign of having mismanaged the company.
|
| However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging
| your company is going through rough times would be things like
| postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would
| be classy.
|
| Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You
| want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough
| reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits.
| Lead through example.
|
| Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Tim Cook did this explicitly, while Jassy's comp (99.999%
| RSU) had it managed for him by Wall Street.
| makomk wrote:
| That would still ultimately be spun as greed and proof they
| were getting pay increases when everyone else was suffering -
| at least, that's what happened in the UK when a bunch of CEOs
| didn't get their normal bonuses during Covid. This
| substantially decreased the total pay of the average FTSE 100
| CEO that year, and once it returned to normal every news
| outlet ran articles about how their pay had increased by a
| massive amount in the last year alone whilst ordinary
| workers' pay had decreased over the last decade. Of course,
| it was really only their pay returning to normal after
| dropping substantially over the last year or two in a way
| that normal workers' pay had not, and the actual numbers in
| the report this way all based on put their pay at lower than
| it was a decade ago.
|
| Still, the press managed to turn them taking a temporary cut
| in pay that ordinary workers didn't suffer from into them
| getting an increase in pay that ordinary workers didn't get.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Maybe because their pay should remain "low". At the very
| least according to their conception of "low".
| usrusr wrote:
| What if you could run an ad empire without employees? The
| human component of marginal cost in that business is zero.
| From capital's perspective, the final stage of perfection
| would be just a CEO serving the legal requirement of one
| existing. Surely that person wouldn't have to fret about
| their bonus...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him
| are.
|
| It's a company, and it is publicly traded. Thinkable
| consequences are plentiful and unspecific. Everything that can
| be imagined will be reflected in how well it is doing.
|
| What I imagine you are actually asking for are not
| "consequences" but "punishment". Which is understandable:
| People are hurt in this and where is the justice. But if we
| start to think it only be fair to personally hurt people who
| (to the best of our knowledge) inflict pain while acting
| legally and only as a side effect (while trying to do what is
| best in terms of their job description) we are on a somewhat
| weird path, where the more responsibility you have, the more
| okay it is to have you personally suffer.
|
| For that, I am not willing to "punish" a CEO who is exercising
| their legal power, because they did something other people
| dislike. The responsibility is theirs, which, apparently, as a
| general concept, we are also okay with as long as it goes
| smoothly.
|
| If we (as a society) think that what we have right now what we
| want, we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
|
| What a shame that "we" won't get a look in.
| taurath wrote:
| > It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic
| cockups when it comes to hiring lately.
|
| My understanding is it is simply firing season because markets
| will not punish companies for layoffs right now.
|
| Being in the job market right now myself it'll be interesting
| to see how competitive things get.
| bawolff wrote:
| I always find these comments a bit silly. Saying something is
| "my fault" is not the same as saying they intend to die on
| their own sword.
| mk89 wrote:
| I know but in general when you admit something like that,
| people also do expect like some preventive actions for the
| future.
|
| All I can say is that companies for so long despised people
| changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These
| major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing:
| companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to
| be in the wrong team or role or location.
|
| Look at that: https://careers.google.com/
|
| They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't
| they ask these laid off people to find anything in there?
| These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding,
| ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built
| relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people,
| etc. And the history repeats itself.
|
| Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller
| companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss,
| be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired.
| But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's
| sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be
| outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell,
| these are companies setting the high bar in terms of
| "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?
|
| It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But
| then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
| hardware2win wrote:
| >Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything
| in there?
|
| How do you know they didnt?
| mk89 wrote:
| Fair question. I know in my company they didn't and from
| what i have seen in other comapnies they didn't do it
| either (Ok I don't work at a FAANG.)
| hardware2win wrote:
| The corpo I work for did something like that - you have
| some time to find a new team, but I didnt have an
| opportunity to check that (yet? :))
| parasight wrote:
| He did not say, "It is my fault." He said, "I take full
| responsibility." The question stands: what does that mean?
| danielrpa wrote:
| Taking full responsibility here should have involved firing
| himself along the 12K. This is the norm in many cultures,
| resigning (or even killing yourself, sadly) when being
| responsible for a major failure.
| baloki wrote:
| Wasn't there a whole scene in Silicon Valley with Gavin
| Belson that basically mocks this kind of language?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Yeah, it was a great bit.
| jonkho wrote:
| It means he will pay severance, benefits for months even
| after the people are gone.
|
| It's just that people are so used to this entitlement that
| they overlook it by default.
| adam12 wrote:
| > It means he will pay severance
|
| Personally?
| jonkho wrote:
| The company made the hires to the presumed benefit for
| the company. The company will pay.
| tcptomato wrote:
| "He" won't. It's not like he'll bring money from home.
| bawolff wrote:
| He said "I take full responsibility for the decisions that
| led us here"
|
| You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility"
| means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my
| bad". Nothing more nothing less.
|
| If you look at the dictionary definition
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this
| way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or
| explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are
| other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes
| the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the
| other one.
| refurb wrote:
| I interpret it as "a decision was made, it was wrong and I
| take responsibility for that decision".
|
| The other option is he blames some external force or some
| other leader in the company.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| It means "I take the blame and some consequences thrown at
| me" .. that means yes _I will do nothing_ just absorb the
| hit which is probably nothing.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| The same, that it was a miatake on his part, even though he
| was getting signals from different people that Google is
| overhiring.
| fs111 wrote:
| Nothing. It means nothing. It is in the current CEO firing
| template, that is why it's there.
| rexreed wrote:
| The "FAANGs" or "MAFANGs" of today are the Standard Oil / US
| Steel / Westinghouse / etc of yesterday. Bezos, Musk, Pichai,
| and all would fit in really well with Rockefeller, Astor,
| Carnegie of yesterday. With one big exception: at least
| Carnegie and Astor and Rockefeller created enduring arts,
| sciences, and public spaces of good. The billionaires of today
| are primarily takers, with perhaps Gates as a notable
| exception.
| dimva wrote:
| He has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is
| down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly
| stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the
| layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so
| he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how
| the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders
| of capital.
| htrp wrote:
| It would be except he will get makeup grants in the next year
| or two to bring him back to where he needs to be.
| tasuki wrote:
| What do you mean? Where does he need to be and why does he
| need to be there?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Oh no. A billionaire's unimaginably massive compensation is
| now just somewhat less unimaginable.
| thanatropism wrote:
| [flagged]
| gcr wrote:
| I understood like maybe half of the words in this poem...
| Here's a summary, if anyone else needs one!
|
| https://www.shmoop.com/study-
| guides/poetry/canto-45/summary
| rco8786 wrote:
| He said responsibility, not consequences. I am still not sure
| what people expect CEOs to do in these situations to "punish"
| themselves. Google is not going bankrupt, they are still wildly
| profitable, they overhired and are adjusting headcount by a few
| percent.
|
| It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay
| that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to
| the leader in these situations.
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| He could resign. That would be "taking responsibility." Just
| saying you take responsibility isn't actually taking
| responsibility. Not in a way that matters to anyone anyway.
|
| If he wasn't planning on resigning, he should have just left
| that bit out of the statement. It comes off as empty and tone
| def.
| clintonb wrote:
| Forcing a leader to resign over a bad bet that is not
| permanently damaging to the company will only make things
| worse. That leader still has value to the company, and is
| probably one of the best persons to learn from and fix
| their mistakes. If you fire a CEO, you throw the stock
| market into chaos and all of your other leaders become
| focused on trying to get the CEO job instead of doing their
| own jobs. You went from one problem to multiple problems.
| rco8786 wrote:
| No it wouldn't. That would be resigning.
|
| When you break a window you don't give awway the house.
| LaGrange wrote:
| Donate 90% (or everything above $2M, whichever amount is
| higher) of their wealth to the people dismissed, and never
| take on a leadership position again.
|
| No, I'm not joking.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| If we applied this rule to each CEO that laid off people,
| there wouldn't be any CEOs going forward.
| pfooti wrote:
| Or maybe layoffs.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If there were ever a shortage of CEOs because they felt
| they were being treated unfairly, let me be the first to
| volunteer. I'd be happy to suffer as they do.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Nice!
| lurker616 wrote:
| Why not 99% or everything above $300k? Are you saying you
| couldn't live on less than $2M?
| LaGrange wrote:
| I'm being generous.
| rco8786 wrote:
| If you ever have to lay people off, you can no longer hold
| a leadership position? If you hire someone, it's permanent
| with the exception of their wrongdoing?
| GoToRO wrote:
| They could quit or... not get any income until everybody that
| leaves gets a new job.
| [deleted]
| larsrc wrote:
| What does it really mean to take responsibility, then?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What does it really mean to take responsibility, then?_
|
| To own the decision. Not pass the buck.
| tasuki wrote:
| > > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us
| here
|
| > As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him
| are.
|
| Taking responsibility is the opposite of assigning blame.
| Taking responsibility doesn't mean there are or should be
| consequences for him.
| bradhe wrote:
| The consequences are his bonus is paid out 5% higher :(
| londons_explore wrote:
| Over-hiring and then firing in big rounds once a decade can
| sometimes be better... It can be a good way to get the low
| performers out without fostering a culture of 'must make the
| metrics look good or I'll be fired'.
| l2silver wrote:
| Uh, if by get rid of the low performers you mean get rid of a
| lot of people, some of which happen to be low performers...
| eitally wrote:
| This wasn't that. This was a case of 1) over-hiring during
| covid, and 2) Google has expanded amoeba-like for the past
| decade (outside of Ads) and the result is that there are
| thousands of people, hundreds of projects and dozens of
| product areas that are staffed with people who A) were
| excellent hires at the time, but B) due to organizational
| drift over time, are no longer in roles that play to their
| strengths or allow them & Google to bring expansive new
| features & products to the market. I'm sure there are some
| low performers, but the vast majority of affected employees
| here (including a lot of the ones who are/were low
| performers) are that way _because_ of management decisions
| over time, not because they are individually "bad"
| employees. Fwiw, getting into this state is partly due to
| over-exuberant hiring and investment in new things over the
| past several years, where free money and huge profits made it
| relatively low risk to do so.
| fipar wrote:
| I guess it also means the often-copied interview process
| isn't that good at predicting worker performance.
| jrs235 wrote:
| >It can be a good way to get the low performers out
|
| It can if individual performance is considered in who gets
| the axe in mass layoffs. From my understanding, individual
| performance usually isn't a huge factor in who's laid off.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| In my experience it depends on how much of a general share
| price vs technical pivot is involved in the announcement.
|
| Typically some business functions will be shut down and
| merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let
| go.
|
| Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected
| lists that go up through various meetings where the exact
| numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists -
| at least in a well managed company - are based on
| operational need and regular, standardised, legally
| defensible, performance appraisals [0].
|
| [0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal
| systems.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic
| cockups
|
| cockups?
|
| > As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him
| are.
|
| ...and that's why I don't think those are cockups.
| [deleted]
| gswdh wrote:
| [dead]
| jaggirs wrote:
| If everyone's doing it then you might as well do it too.
| tempsy wrote:
| People really don't seem to understand that the fact employment
| is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech
| salaries are so high to begin with
|
| The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people
| expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than
| a few years at most.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| spicymaki wrote:
| > People really don't seem to understand that the fact
| employment is at will and people are not unionized is the
| reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
|
| What is your evidence for that?
|
| > The concept of being a lifer is very rare.
|
| This was the norm up until the neoliberal era. The trend of
| everyone becoming a gig worker only to be made obsolete by
| technology is a choice not destiny.
| tempsy wrote:
| what evidence do you need?
|
| unionization normalizes pay across workers. you trade
| upside for being a "superstar" for job security. it's not a
| controversial opinion.
|
| tech compensation is not normalized. there's pay bands but
| it's historically been wide and "superstar" candidates are
| enticed with highly variable equity comp.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I had a high performer fired today. Seems like the
| current system is also shitty for them.
| tempsy wrote:
| didn't say that being a high performer meant you were
| protected from layoffs...just that high variable pay is a
| consequence of at will employment system
| spicymaki wrote:
| Both my parents worked for unions and they would be paid
| based on seniority and established credentials all
| negotiated by the union. They had a pension, retirement
| medical benefits, things most people would kill for right
| now. They also had bargaining power which only the
| "superstar" employees have today. The majority are
| exploited all the way down to the gig worker.
|
| The union system seems more transparent than random hot
| shot new graduates making triple the salary of a
| productive senior worker that has dedicated many years to
| the firm. Nobody really knows how much these people are
| compensated or why. Every day there is a new "it" thing
| (microservices last month, crypto last week, generative
| predictive transformers this week). It is only okay,
| because the silicon valley entrepreneurs and venture
| capitalists tells us so.
|
| All I hear about on this forum is how there is a lack of
| transparency with hiring, firing, and promotion.
| Complaints about diversity hires, nepotism, old and young
| workers, interview requirements, credentials, mass
| layoffs, etc., etc. The system we have now is completely
| broken.
| concinds wrote:
| CEOs are fired for mismanagement. This is good management.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Then he should say something like, "this isn't personal - I
| am just doing my job."
| warkdarrior wrote:
| It's never personal, it's always business. Do you think
| Sundar personally picked each of the 12'000 laid off
| employees?
| sarabande wrote:
| This is good management now, but poor management before now.
| To paraphrase "Manager Tools": Layoffs are the consequence of
| management's failing to accurately judge market conditions.
| vkou wrote:
| >This is good management now, but poor management before
| now.
|
| If we weren't heading into a recession, it would have been
| good management before now.
|
| Hindsight is the only thing that's 20/20.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Isn't over-hiring an indication of mismanagement?
|
| Lots of salty people with poor reading comprehension... An
| "indication" is just that, a possible hint at an underlying
| issue, not an accusation.
|
| I did not claim it's entirely a C-suite fault either.
| "Management" goes beyond the C-suite.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| No, all companies underhire or overhire, sometimes both in
| different departments. There are companies where firing 20%
| would not result in any efficiency loss, and ones where
| hiring another 20% would result in 100% efficiency gain.
| cornel_io wrote:
| No. Hiring like crazy when interest rates are low and
| cutting back when they are not is proper management.
|
| The economy correctly drives company behavior, and that's
| not a CEO's fault.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I don't believe I blamed the CEO specifically. I hinted
| at upper management for bad estimations which includes
| more than the C-suite.
|
| Making promises you can't keep, or being wasteful or
| grossly overestimating your capacity to deliver is a sign
| of mismanagement.
| aarghh wrote:
| John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you
| care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean,
| why I earn the big bucks.
|
| Peter Sullivan : Yes.
|
| John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone.
| I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month,
| a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here
| tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just...
| silence.
| FpUser wrote:
| In the 90s I worked in software development company. We
| constantly struggled with not having enough people for all
| the work we were getting so there was overtime involved. On
| plus side it paid good bonuses to employees on minus side
| it resulted with people being overstressed. So at one point
| I asked the owner/CEO why the fuck are we doing this? He
| said something like "when the other companies fire people
| because of downturns we don't".
| agilob wrote:
| 1. Stocks go up
|
| 2. Company has more money to hire more developers and
| invest in itself
|
| 3. Code stays in the company and potentially produces
| profit all the time
|
| 4. Developers are fired, but the code stays and produces
| value
| daviddever23box wrote:
| ^ this.
| ksaxena wrote:
| Wow, that's salty! Mismanagement compared to what? An
| omniscient entity that understood exactly what global
| advertisement demand and capital costs would look like in
| advance? The real world is messy and runs on estimates for
| everything. If Google is 6% off on their estimate for human
| resources, it should not be labelled 'mismanagement'.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Management goes beyond C-suite. Upper management makes
| predictions of their needs, their productivity, what they
| achieve and don't all the time, it's literally a job req.
| My org has consistently less than 2 percent error in
| predictions while growing.
|
| Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance
| of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being
| wasteful and overambitious.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| While not relevant to google, it is very difficult for me
| to sympathise with C suite with articles like this one[1]
| showing up.
|
| [1] https://nypost.com/2023/01/19/microsoft-held-sting-
| concert-i...
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic
| cockups
|
| I'm becoming more and more convinced that they're preparing for
| a global recession.
|
| I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft
| layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there's no
| indication for a recession.
|
| However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant
| news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s
| per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once
| clearer and bleaker.
|
| We shall survive.
| rvz wrote:
| > I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft
| layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there's no
| indication for a recession.
|
| I don't how this 'indication of a recession' could not have
| been more clearer since November 2021 as predicted a year
| ago. [0] We were already in a recession [1] and it just took
| time for the indicators to take effect.
|
| I guess now the people denying about a looming recession are
| now _' preparing for a recession'_ which is a bit too late
| for that.
|
| Should have prepared as early in November 2021.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710
| xtracto wrote:
| People over here say there's no recession. But believing HN's
| assertions on global economy makes as much sense as believing
| it's opinions on Medical or Science threads.
|
| For financial information about the world economic situation
| I tend to prefer reading WorldBank, who's Global Economic
| Prospects for 2023 is not that positive: https://openknowledg
| e.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/3...
|
| ---
|
| Global growth is projected to decelerate sharply this year,
| to its third weakest pace in nearly three decades,
| overshadowed only by the 2009 and 2020 global recessions.
| This reflects synchronous policy tightening aimed at
| containing very high inflation, worsening financial
| conditions, and continued disruptions from the Russian
| Federation's invasion of Ukraine. Investment growth in
| emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is expected
| to remain below its average rate of the past two decades.
| Further adverse shocks could push the global economy into yet
| another recession. Small states are especially vulnerable to
| such shocks because of their reliance on external trade and
| financing, limited economic diversification, elevated debt,
| and susceptibility to natural disasters. Urgent global action
| is needed to mitigate the risks of global recession and debt
| distress in EMDEs. Given limited policy space, it is critical
| that national policy makers ensure that any fiscal support is
| focused on vulnerable groups, that inflation expectations
| remain well anchored, and that financial systems continue to
| be resilient
| CPLX wrote:
| The difference between the average random asshole on the
| street and the World Bank is there's at least a chance that
| the asshole on the street won't have a 20+ year history of
| being wrong about literally everything.
|
| The World Bank is and has always been a tool of the power
| structure to protect the interests of multinational
| capital. It's advice is always the same: don't spend too
| much money helping people so we can make sure you can
| always pay back first world banks and governments and don't
| seize any of our friends villas or mines.
|
| You realize that's literally what the last sentence of the
| quote you posted says right? The World Bank has exactly one
| job.
| ezconnect wrote:
| They are the thief of the world. Their first advice is to
| privatize public services so their buddies can profit off
| a working system.
| csa wrote:
| > I'm becoming more and more convinced that they're preparing
| for a global recession.
|
| I think it's more like "we are trimming some of the
| aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current
| revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was
| not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were
| prepared for)".
|
| Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing
| levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing
| levels at 2019 numbers or higher
|
| Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing
| levels at 2021/2022 numbers or higher.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I don't get the panic mode some folks here seem to fall
| into pretty quickly, probably young/junior ones. Numbers
| alone do seem scary, but then you 1) put it into global
| count perspective, we never so far go above few % which
| ie in banking is simply a no-story, usual yearly culls,
| every effin' year, sometimes more than once. And 2) all
| of these greedy companies over-hired massively during
| covid (and we talk about tens of thousands of hires per
| giant), so now are shockingly trimming that swing that
| ended up differently than they wrongly predicted (thank
| god for that).
|
| Once we will see trims going into 30% territory we can
| have a story. Now of course its pretty crappy if you are
| one of those affected, ie those 5%. If we are going to
| see serious employment issues in IT this is not _yet_ it
| (and I see few reasons for that personally, but what do I
| know...)
| mk89 wrote:
| Agreed 100% with this.
|
| Plus many took advantage of this "chaos" to get rid of
| products they don't want to do anymore - my company did the
| same. It had very little to do with the global recession
| etc.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and
| constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in
| the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at
| once clearer and bleaker.
|
| The major economies are posting record or near-record levels
| of employment; layoffs in one section of one sector are not a
| particularly good signal for recession one way or another.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>The major economies are posting record or near-record
| levels of employment;
|
| Where?
|
| Every chart I have seen shows total number of positions
| below pre pandemic levels, work force participation is down
|
| Sure unemployment U3 numbers are still low on a national
| aggregate in the US, but regionally (including Silicon
| Valley) they are spiking heavily, and that is after they
| heavily manipulate the U3 to make unemployment look good by
| not counting HUGE numbers of people that are unemployed.
|
| So I disagree that employment end of the economy looks good
| unless you cherry pick data
| rsynnott wrote:
| US employment for 2019 was 158M (then a record high),
| falling sharply to 148M in 2020, and recovering to 158M
| in 2022; it's currently 160M:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-
| the...
|
| (It is true that the _percentage employed_ hasn't
| recovered after covid; given the US's aging population
| it's possible that that figure will _never_ rise to where
| it was again. As they say, you can prove anything with
| statistics....)
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >work force participation is down
|
| This can't be used as an indicator for a variety of
| reasons. In short, a decline in the the labor force
| participation rate can be good or bad, depending on the
| reason people are dropping out of the workforce. If a
| dual-income family now has the option to earn enough to
| support the family on one income, then having one person
| drop out is a sign of economic health. Basically, we
| don't want the entire nation to be forced to look for
| work.
|
| Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out
| because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes
| that given our current unemployment numbers, then they
| are just plain gullible.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping
| out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly
| believes that given our current unemployment numbers,
| then they are just plain gullible.
|
| Or they cant find jobs that pay what they need/want or
| have working conditions they need/want while using
| government programs, gig economy, under the table
| employment, etc to cover their costs.
|
| I have been in more than one meeting where people are
| discussion why they can not find people... No Exec ever
| talks about not paying enough, or not providing the
| correct benefits, etc.
|
| They also look at superficial things, not "hey maybe we
| do not pay enough"
| paganel wrote:
| > he major economies are posting record or near-record
| levels of employment;
|
| When you're paid peanuts compared to the real cost of
| living those "near-record levels of employment" don't
| matter that much anymore.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| How many places that pay peanuts that you've been to in
| the last couple years don't have "help wanted" on their
| front door? Or a sign on the street? Or a billboard?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| So like, lay people off when there is actually a global
| recession then. Jesus Christ. Revenues and profit are still
| up, especially at Google.
| lm28469 wrote:
| What if most companies have no long term vision and just
| follow the trend, like when they all hired hundred/thousands
| of employees during covid for seemingly no reasons
| nkozyra wrote:
| I think this is likely, but more because it becomes a
| competitive gold rush once one agent makes moves like this.
|
| The idea that the pandemic would create some new world
| never really made any sense for a global rampup anyway.
| lukan wrote:
| "during covid for seemingly no reasons"
|
| During covid the demand for online services went way up,
| media consumption, remote work and study. They had to try
| to increase their share of it and now they scale back.
| stefan_ wrote:
| You say that like they _knew_ that. No, they were
| thinking it was going to be a recession. It 's all just
| cargo culting nonsense.
| netheril96 wrote:
| During the same time the Fed repeatedly suggested that
| the interest hike would come soon, yet none of these
| companies prepared for that at all.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you can find a quote for that, I'd be surprised.
|
| As I remember it, the Fed kept saying things were fine
| until faced with at a hard, cold 8.5% inflation rate.
| creakingstairs wrote:
| I do agree with you that those companies should have
| prepared for the hike but I also remember Powell saying
| "inflation is transitory" :p
| nkozyra wrote:
| Well, inflation _is_ demonstrably transitory.
|
| But the impact to these companies is, in general, less
| about inflation and more about free money.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > During covid the demand for online services went way
| up, media consumption, remote work and study.
|
| Has this been quantified? And on the downslope too?
| Aunche wrote:
| Companies are made of individuals whose interest isn't
| necessarily aligned with that of its shareholders. For
| example, Google and Microsoft are run by executives who
| only own a tiny percentage of their respective company's
| stock, so they have little to lose by gambling their
| company's money on over hiring. If these new hires are
| useful, they get even bigger bonuses, but if they don't
| they won't be punished too harshly because basically every
| other executive made the same "mistake".
|
| On the other hand, Zuckerberg would rather create the
| metaverse rather than cash out on Facebook, so he decided
| to throw unlimited money at it until he received severe
| pressure from shareholders.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > I'm becoming more and more convinced that they're preparing
| for a global recession.
|
| Large publicly traded companies don't really prepare for
| large recessions. They are fickle beasts. They mostly react
| to the market feelings and are in a lot of way quaterly
| focused. What we are seeing now is the combination of
| WallStreet feeling gloomy after the rate hikes and tech
| companies 2022 results being under target. They are taking
| actions to try to protect their stock price.
|
| From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing
| right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming
| recession than them having finally reached the point where
| their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of
| ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s.
| It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high
| might slowly come back down to the economy average. That
| would be a very significant share price drop.
|
| If you look at the economy as a whole, signs of a major
| recession are not there yet. SMEs are still the heart of the
| economy and the bankruptcies rate remains historically low.
| Unemployement is also really low. Manufacturing is doing
| great. Energy prices are far from bad in the USA. Inflation
| is high but rate hikes seem to be working.
|
| I'm not an oracle. I can't predict the future. I won't tell
| you there won't be a recession especially in a particularly
| volatile international context. What I can tell you is that
| currently the signs don't point to us being doomed.
| propogandist wrote:
| Manipulated numbers are keeping the illusion of healthy
| economy going.
|
| SPR reserve draining was key to manipulating gas prices to
| have taking points for US midterms and inflation
| calculations, for starters.
|
| Manufacturing numbers are also down
|
| https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/ism-manufacturing-
| contra...
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| The PMI is not a manufacturing indicator. It's a
| diffusion index on the value of stocks. What you are
| saying is that the stock market is contracting after
| seeing a rise at the beginning of the year (also
| _zerohedge_ , come on, I thought we were having a serious
| discussion here).
| htrp wrote:
| > From my point of view, the issue tech companies are
| facing right now is not so much the possibility of an
| upcoming recession than them having finally reached the
| point where their impressive growth is slowing down with
| little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the
| 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always
| been extremely high might slowly come back down to the
| economy average. That would be a very significant share
| price drop.
|
| I'd also add that all of the bets made to expand their
| TAM's haven't paid off.....
|
| Amazon - Brick and Mortar Retail Google - Everything other
| than search Tesla - Self Driving Facebook - VR/Metaverse
|
| At some point, investor expectations will tell you to stop
| investing in future ideas
| glenngillen wrote:
| I'm with you, though with a fraction less pessimism.
|
| I'm not buying into the collusion to compress wages or
| unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories. These a
| companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of
| the world every single day (I'd put Stripe in this bucket
| too). They've got much greater and earlier visibility into
| the state of the broader economy long before governments do.
| Why don't we assume they're a leading indicator of things to
| come? Why do these moves apparently only make sense when
| everyone else has finally come to the same conclusion?
|
| The silver linings for me so far has been that a) for many of
| the bigger companies the reduction is only bringing them back
| to their pre-pandemic levels of still very huge companies and
| b) the open lists of laid off people some of these companies
| have produced at first glance seem to skew very heavy towards
| recruiters/HR and marketing. Which makes sense if you're not
| expecting much growth over the next year.
| md_ wrote:
| > These a companies with globe spanning businesses the
| touch much of the world every single day (I'd put Stripe in
| this bucket too). They've got much greater and earlier
| visibility into the state of the broader economy long
| before governments do.
|
| If that were true, I'd expect them to have hugely
| profitable proprietary trading desks, which does not seem
| to be the case?
| hhlevnjak2 wrote:
| Even if you don't know the economy will slow down, the
| uncertainty alone will still make companies extra careful.
|
| Where a lot of IT budgets were only guidelines, they are
| becoming rules now. Layoffs send a message internally and
| externally about it. Any reasonably sized company will have
| people who aren't really contributing anything, this is
| just an opportune moment to cut some of them and avoid the
| backlash since "everyone else is doing it".
| tryagainynot wrote:
| > I'm not buying into the collusion to compress wages or
| unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories.
|
| Why not? Every FAANG company has been accused of colluding
| with each other to suppress (not compress) wages.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-
| others-...
|
| They have literally been tried, and admitted guilt, for
| doing exactly this.
| criley2 wrote:
| So, if the big companies hire 40-50k new employees each over
| the past 2 years, and then fire 10-20k, leaving a net 30-40k
| employee gain for the past 2 years... that means recession?
|
| People have no context for these layoffs. This is not a
| "recession layoff". This has nothing in common with 2009,
| which I suppose many of you are too young to remember.
|
| In 2009, we lost a million jobs to layoffs in one month.
| You'd turn on the news and see 200k jobs disappear in front
| of your face, so you'd turn it off.
|
| The big tech companies laying off 1/5 of the pandemic boom
| hires is not a recession to me.
|
| Alphabet staff:
|
| 2018 98771
|
| 2019 118899
|
| 2020 135301
|
| 2021 156500
|
| 2022 186779
|
| 2023 174000?*
| twistedpair wrote:
| "recession" talk provides cloud cover for many a company to
| pare back and prune products, processes, and people in a way
| that would normally cause more out cry. It's not that such
| changes aren't needed, but they can pile up until a forcing
| function triggers a hard look and it's acceptable to do them.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The Fed has been raising interest rates at historically fast
| rates all year in order to fight inflation by cooling down
| the economy.
|
| Which is another way of saying "inducing a recession", as any
| educated person should know.
| the_duke wrote:
| Recessions often are self-fulfilling prophecies.
|
| Everyone expects a recession, companies and individuals
| starts saving and being more frugal, which leads to an actual
| recession.
| [deleted]
| pissedgenes wrote:
| I'd still bet we avoid a recession in the US, even if certain
| industries (like tech) contract sharply.
|
| It's easy to forget tech is not the economy at large. What I
| think most people would classify as tech jobs -- working in
| "internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals"
| -- are less than 0.3% of total payrolls employment.
|
| But tech makes up ~26% of the S&P 500 market cap, so tech
| gets a lot more media attention because the companies are so
| valuable.
|
| Layoffs are terrible for anyone involved. But even with the
| roughly 200K layoffs at public and startup tech firms in 2022
| and 2023 so far, that's .001% of total US payroll employment.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| >I'm becoming more and more convinced that they're preparing
| for a global recession.
|
| Wait, are you telling me that I picked a wrong time to quick
| my job and work on side projects, again?
| needs wrote:
| There is no wrong time for that. You did the right choice.
| jumpkick wrote:
| /s?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The biggest companies have some very strong analysis
| departments which warn them about these kinds of possible
| scenarios (recession, etc.), and the companies act with this
| information.
|
| There were already signs of a global economic recession
| elsewhere (Asia, Europe to a lesser extent), with different
| signs (food and energy prices, even before the war). So the
| companies started to take defensive action before the
| downturn became visible on their side of the pond.
|
| Now it's looming at the horizon, not like the dotcom bubble
| or the previous recession(s). I guess it'll be slower, hence
| it'll be longer and will cut slow and deep.
| [deleted]
| remote_phone wrote:
| I was in the "global recession" camp all last year but I've
| started to doubt that.
|
| I don't see any real economic impact to companies except Meta
| but that was them losing market share. Otherwise all these
| layoffs feel like hangover recovery from over hiring the last
| 3 years.
|
| I think we will be fine. Hiring won't be like the last 3
| years but I also don't think we are going to go through the
| Bust 2.0.
| refurb wrote:
| I keep getting reminded of that scene from the movie Margin
| Call about the 2008 financial crisis (great movie by the
| way):
|
| _There are three ways to make a living in this business: be
| first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don 't cheat. And
| although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in
| this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be
| first._
|
| The recession might not be here yet, but it's a lot easier to
| reduce costs _before_ it hits.
| quonn wrote:
| Okay, but why would these companies secretly know something
| that the rest of us doesn't? Maybe they are preparing, but it
| doesn't tell us more about whether that's justified or not.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The fed chairman explicitly said he's going to raise
| interest rates until workers lose power in the market.
| larsrc wrote:
| [reference needed]
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-
| its...
|
| He's going to do whatever it takes to stop regular people
| from getting higher wages.
| propogandist wrote:
| he's setting up conditions for FEDcoin (CBDC), which will
| be how new economic stimulus will be delivered.
|
| Spending free fedcoin will require recipient to signup
| for FedCoin also. Then, the real fun begins.
| cpsns wrote:
| Which shouldn't come as a surprise. These people hate
| you, and they hate you getting any leverage. If it were
| up to them they'd own you.
| abm53 wrote:
| Agreed, I don't think it is productive to have
| conspiratorial mindset where there is a group of insiders
| who have access to a key piece of information and then
| engage in Kremlinology to decipher their macroeconomic
| views.
|
| To be sure, Google will have some interesting and
| proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still
| be tiny.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Not really. There's three factors:
|
| - Everyone overhired during the pandemic.
|
| - Interest rates are impacting the business at all levels.
|
| - Wall St demands sacrifice to the volcano gods. Microsoft
| and Amazon did layoffs, so must google.
| ncphil wrote:
| "The volcano gods". Best phrase of this thread.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I think this is all a smokescreen.
|
| Tech companies have seen compensation skyrocket with no
| end in sight. Everybody laying off a bunch of people at
| the same time to flood the market means they all need to
| compete far less for people. Suddenly "hey I've got
| another offer, can you beat it?" becomes less feasible.
|
| This is an industry-wide emergent strategy to limit
| compensation.
|
| Notice how these companies are still hiring after the
| layoffs.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm sure. All of these companies use the same criteria
| and went on a hiring binge, partially to deny employees
| to competitors. It's a like a gas station pump war.
|
| End of the day, when growth slows, it's hard to justify
| some of these salaries, becuase you can't raise prices
| forever. I lost an employee who is getting paid $450k by
| AWS to do customer engineer type work. It's just not
| worth that to me, and we hired a replacement recent
| graduate who went to a school that FANG companies will
| bin him for. The replacement makes $125k, is great, and
| will probably be with us for 3-4 years.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| >- Everyone overhired during the pandemic.
|
| why?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They were printing money and dealing with chaos. A friend
| of mine in sales booked multiple deals with a phone call
| (ie. Give me X widgets by Y date) for >$10M in April-June
| 2020. Exceeded his yearly goal before end of April.
|
| The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting
| a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools
| alone bought almost a million iPads.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| I'm convinced industry captains are given stronger indicators
| from the government that a recession is happening. Yes, they
| have amazing advisors that could feel this out naturally. I
| also think senators and representatives tell them directly to
| prepare before the average consumer gives this forethought.
|
| It's in the government's best interest to support those with
| capital. All the rest of us be damned.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Maybe. But it's important to bear in mind that when a CEO
| tells the public something, their goal is to manipulate the
| public in a way that is beneficial to their company. They
| might happen to be telling the truth, but that's
| incidental.
|
| So when Jeff Bezos says, "Batten down the hatches," he's
| not actually saying it to prepare us for recession.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > I'm becoming more and more convinced that they're preparing
| for a global recession.
|
| The tech industry famously over inflated once before in the
| original dotcom boom. This just seems like another
| correction.
|
| I don't think the tech industry is big enough to trigger a
| global recession on its own, but then again, the financial
| industry have a herd and panic mentality, so perhaps _it
| could_ trigger a sell-off for no real economic reason.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| The recession would be triggered by the end of cheap money
| we've had since around 2010. The absurd spike in the tech
| industry's P/E ratios would just be one of the first
| indicators that situation was getting wonky.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>I'm becoming more and more convinced that they're preparing
| for a global recession
|
| What if left to convince you, most of them have publically
| stated that is one of the reasons, and the economic
| indicators are all there.. I am not sure why people keep
| denying this reality, it is just faith in government that
| keeps denying it?
| [deleted]
| mrazomor wrote:
| He doesn't say it's going to be a punishment or a reward :).
| I'd bet on the latter. Lower operational cost! Increased stock
| value! Beefy bonus! Sundar takes all...
| dom96 wrote:
| Guess that means Apple layoffs are next
| spuz wrote:
| Probably not - Apple laid off internal recruiter contrators
| in August 2022 as part of a plan to reduce hiring which was
| already much lower than the other big tech companies. For
| example in 2020 and 2021, Alphabet increased their workforce
| by 13% and 15%. Meta increased their workforce by 30% and
| 22%. Apple on the other hand only increased by 7% and 4% in
| those same years.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-
| headcount-g...
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as
| employers.
|
| As long as they pay well, I don't think it will. And it's not
| like alternatives are safer.
| civilized wrote:
| "Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially,
| it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the
| need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street.
| "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make
| shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"
| unglaublich wrote:
| Yeah, like firing 12k folks isn't the full responsibility of
| the CEO in the first place?
|
| Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes
| "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will
| be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"
| Simran-B wrote:
| Hadn't looked at it this way. I usually interpret it as a
| meaningless phrase that everyone expects to be made. How
| often does "taking the full responsibility" have a real
| consequence for the top-level management? I would expect
| several of them to resign and the salaries to be used to pay
| 5x the number of employees that are way more productive than
| management anyway.
| jossclimb wrote:
| Taking full responsibility is resigning surely?
| antasvara wrote:
| I mean, they _are_ fully responsible for those decisions that
| led to the layoffs. Being responsible for something doesn 't
| imply that there are consequences.
|
| They overhired during the pandemic with the hopes that it was a
| permanent shift in the e-commerce space, and are now laying off
| employees when that didn't happen. Nobody else is responsible
| for that decision but the leadership.
|
| I was also under the impression that working for FAANGs was
| done because they paid best, had the best perks, had
| interesting work, and were the most prestigious. I don't think
| that "job security" was even in the top 5 reasons for taking a
| FAANG job for most employees.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Not defending him per se, but the phrase does have a meaning:
| "I'm not blaming anybody under me for this".
|
| As for what are the consequences for himself, that's definitely
| not for him to say or chose. It's up to those who hired him.
| wheels wrote:
| I think calling them cockups is a stretch. A few points:
|
| - Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that
| makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich
| countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up,
| and fire them when it goes down.
|
| - Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people
| miss doing things in real life.
|
| - It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making
| your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs
| taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone
| else is doing it.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> - Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since
| people miss doing things in real life._
|
| More like people have less disposable income for frivolities
| now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during
| the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at
| home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.
|
| How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond
| me.
| charles_f wrote:
| > calling them cockups is a stretch
|
| The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6
| months, I don't think it's a stretch.
|
| Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You
| gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational
| expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome
| outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been
| better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things
| but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for
| beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in
| the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton
| from your fridge a cockup.
|
| From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think
| cock up is probably a euphemism.
| cwingrav wrote:
| > It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people..
|
| Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they've
| probably wanted to cut for a while. They'll hire back in a
| year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider
| important.
| mring33621 wrote:
| "Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that
| makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich
| countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up,
| and fire them when it goes down."
|
| I believe that this is a huge competitive advantage for the
| USA over most of the world. It's not pleasant, but many of us
| benefit, on net.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| As rest of them besides Facebook, this looks like opportunistic
| firing rather than any world economy based action.
| nicolapede wrote:
| Is there any analysis explaining how the new interest rates
| regime is affecting the number of employees in tech?
|
| I think the impact on VC is probably more direct, but, given what
| is happening all over FAANGs, I would imagine there could be some
| causal relation there, too?
| dazuaz wrote:
| You can now Join an AI company and wait for Google to acquire the
| company and make Bank? Looks more like marketing Google
| investments in AI than anything else on that letter.
|
| Best of luck to anyone affected.
| joshruby123 wrote:
| Anyone who has experience with search interested in joining us?
|
| sirchit.com josh@sirchit.com
| activitypea wrote:
| FWIW, I went through sirchit.com top-to-bottom twice, and I
| have no idea what the product is. It looks like something out
| of HBO's Silicon Valley. "It's about people" is a weird pitch
| to make a highly technical utility like a search engine.
|
| "Google's mission is to organize information. Our mission is to
| help people get stuff done. In order for Google to accomplish
| its mission, it indexes the web. In order for Sirch to
| accomplish its mission, it connects users with people; people
| that offer goods, services, or [sic] infomation". I swear I
| uttered "those are certainly all words" to myself. Is Sirch a
| classifieds thing, or like a Craiglist?
| anonymouswacker wrote:
| It's a shame that Google is so good at hiring top talent, and
| even better at under utilizing them. The company had a hypomanic
| vision of greatness by throwing everything to see what stuck, and
| still can't get a new idea that is profitable besides marketing &
| advertising due to their virtual monopoly. I'm very curious what
| the breakdown of positions will be. This is a failure of
| leadership and Sundar should resign.
| franczesko wrote:
| While this is always bad news, this is also a cold shower - back-
| to-reality check for anyone who thinks that working for a company
| is anything beyond just a job.
|
| I hope, that for the ones affected, in the end this will turn up
| as an opportunity.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| > Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth.
| To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic
| reality than the one we face today.
|
| Translation: we fell for the economic mirage.
|
| I'm not buying it. Google sees something on the economic horizon
| and is now bracing for impact. And that something is not a mean
| reversion. It's an overcorrection.
|
| Google's main product, advertising, puts it in a unique position
| to see into the economic future. Google is a bellwether. If the
| coming recession were truly going to be "mild," then Google
| wouldn't care.
|
| It's time for everyone in tech to admit that the last two years
| were a mirage driven in part by corporate FOMO. Many do, but I
| don't think they're prepared for what comes next.
| [deleted]
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| People are natural born fools
| mkl95 wrote:
| > In the US:
|
| > We'll pay employees during the full notification period
| (minimum 60 days).
|
| Weird flex. Would it be legal not to?
| mcculley wrote:
| Yes. California is an at-will state. The employer can terminate
| at any time for any reason. Unless they have a contract, they
| can do anything they want.
| leoedin wrote:
| Do employees not have some sort of contract? Surely you'd
| want to have some level of notice - it's no good for
| employers for people to quit with no notice either.
| mcculley wrote:
| I agree that notice is preferable. The question was, "Would
| it be legal not to?"
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Employment in the US is largely at will. Only in large
| layoffs do workers have any rights to notification, and
| large layoffs are rare, so most US employees expect there's
| zero right to notification.
|
| This is a shock to folks in Europe, but when people quit
| here they generally give two weeks notice, and no one
| expects you to do any work in those two weeks.
|
| This equilibrium is bad for labor, but very good for
| capital. Not shockingly, the US is a magnet for capital!
| The macro term of art for this is "a dynamic labor market",
| and capitalists love it.
|
| If you're wealthy in the US, it leads to extremely generous
| compensation for in demand functions. But it's also
| correlated with a weak safety net.
| leoedin wrote:
| I guess I just naively assumed there'd still be some
| level of notice required. It seems that you can literally
| walk out of a job in an at-will state with no recourse.
|
| It's surprising to me because in the UK every employment
| relationship is governed by a contract that stipulates
| some level of notice. We don't have employment
| protections until 2 years of service - essentially after
| 2 years getting rid of an employee becomes quite onerous
| - but even from day 1 you have a notice period (which
| works both ways).
|
| I'm surprised companies in California don't get their
| employees to sign some sort of contracted notice - it can
| be incredibly disruptive to lose a key employee
| overnight! It feels like companies here want every longer
| notice periods - mine is currently 3 months and I'm not
| even sure why. It works both ways though - even if my
| employer wanted to get rid of me, they'd have to pay me
| for 3 months.
| eftychis wrote:
| No it wouldn't be legal. Edit: This is a layoff.
| pembrook wrote:
| A lot of people seem to be chalking this one up in the "memetic
| imitation among tech execs" column. However, in the case of
| Google, I'm not so sure.
|
| Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is
| extremely sensitive to changes in the economy (Companies cut ad
| spending when there isn't as much demand to soak up). In the last
| recession Google was still rapidly stealing ad share from old
| media, but now they've won the game and _are_ the market.
|
| So this one makes complete sense to me. I'm sure everyone still
| thinks Google only hires engineers, but they actually employ A
| TON of ad sales people.
| twelve40 wrote:
| I think throughout their existence they tried hard to be more
| than that. If they settled to be just an advertising business,
| then easy, you become an equivalent of Lamar Advertising, you
| post an equivalent of billboards for over a hundred years,
| perhaps run a few servers and settle for that. An advertising
| company doesn't need to try to break into cloud computing
| business and do all these things that Google is actually trying
| to do (whatever the degree of success).
| saos wrote:
| > Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is
| extremely sensitive to changes in the economy
|
| Very true
| notfromhere wrote:
| It's memetic because google is insanely profitable.
| 88 wrote:
| Just a theory but in a downturn I could see a lot of companies
| increasing their ad spend as they lose existing customers and
| find they need to work harder to acquire new ones.
|
| Obviously this doesn't apply to advertising which is just
| gratuitous brand building.
| somedude895 wrote:
| It applies to Google. Their main revenue still comes from
| Search Engine Advertising, which is a really good customer
| acquisition channel.
|
| But the reason ad spends decrease during downturns is that
| people consume less, so there's no point in advertising when
| nobody's buying.
| bigcloud1299 wrote:
| This is opposite. Marketing budget is second to be cut first
| being building (space expansion). The R&D budget however goes
| up mid recession. Here is how the cuts work R&D, space
| expansion, marketing, parties, raises, new product building,
| warehouses,
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Advertising revenue is sensitive but number of engineer Google
| needs is not proportional to amount of ads they show. It's not
| like Amazon where if people order less they need less workers
| at fulfillment centers and less track drivers. And Google still
| profitable and can afford to keep headcount as an investment
| into future. Or they have no plans which spans more than a
| quarter?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Google can afford to spend many billions on any unprofitable
| cause they wish, instead of maximising profit.
|
| I don't think they should. But if they did, I'd hope they'd
| focus on more worthy causes than paying US engineers
| $300k/year.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Why a project they invested in would suddenly become
| unprofitable for all foreseeable future? They expect
| recession to last decades? It more looks like public
| companies value short term profit (the next quarterly
| report) more than a long term development and Google is no
| longer immune to this.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| They've had all sorts of chances to expand that business, but
| have repeatedly shut down popular projects to the point where
| people hesitate before adopting new Google tools because they
| might get shut down with little warning.
| DrBazza wrote:
| This all happened in the dotcom crash - all the companies shed
| staff.
|
| It happened again during the credit-crunch.
|
| It (used to?) happens in reverse every year in the banks -
| everyone watched Goldmans pay out bonus before xmas and then
| adjust their bonuses accordingly.
|
| Business always watches what the other guy does.
| 3327 wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| For the past 10 years the common advice in HN is quit your
| startup and join bigtech. Now what?
| lwhi wrote:
| I find the 'work from home' final comment strange.
|
| Is he saying employees can work from work, because he's equating
| working from home as an easier ride?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Almost all articles on WFH posted on HN are followed by lots of
| comments on how WFH is better, less stressful, more productive,
| more enjoyable, etc. So yes, lots of people find working from
| home easier.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Big tech companies have a "Get out of jail free (in the press)"
| layoff card right now, and they're taking full advantage of that,
| despite not needing to at all.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Milquetoast Google CEO Sundar Pichai finally does _something_
| after 7 years at the helm
| gniv wrote:
| And the GOOG stock is 3.4% up before open. It seems this was a
| bit unexpected.
| Communitivity wrote:
| The current flood of layoff news from FAANG level companies is
| surprising, sad, and pathetic.
|
| As others have posted, they could keep the people on but they
| aren't, probably because it isn't financially optimal in the
| short term to do so. The two problems I see with that are (1) the
| loss of institutional knowledge, morale, and attractiveness as a
| place to work mean it is financially suboptimal in the long term,
| but companies right now are only thinking 1 quarter ahead (maybe
| 2); (2) it takes time to ramp up, get acclimated, and execute a
| vision - that clock resets for each position when someone is
| released and the a new hire is added back later.
|
| It used to be that when you worked for one of the new big corps
| (FAANG and those like them) it represented some security.
|
| Now I am saddened to see them adopting the big consulting corp
| model, where you can get released at will and staff is constantly
| being optimized for the current task set/direction/clients.
| dcj4 wrote:
| [flagged]
| tryagainynot wrote:
| "Up in the morning and out to school Mother says there be no work
| next year Qualifications once the Golden Rule Are now just pieces
| of paper
|
| Well the factories are closing and the army's full I don't know
| what I'm going to do I've come to see in the land of the free
| There's only room for a chosen few. " -- Lars Frederiksen
|
| I feel bad for everybody who spent the past 4 years going $200k
| into debt for a now worthless compsci degree. New grads, juniors
| and general employees who are not rock-stars, are in a miserable
| ride. As everybody casually writes it off to "over-hiring" you
| are forgetting the fact that there are 150k newly unemployed, a
| significant portion of whom will take many months, possibly a
| couple of years to find something. Meanwhile, all of those fresh
| graduates are now saying "Oh shit, I have to start making
| $2k/month student loan payments now, and don't have any income.
|
| As an oldster observing what I believe my 4th tech downturn, I am
| currently advising people to go into the trades instead of
| becoming a software "engineer". The money can often be far better
| than tech, and there are actually more opportunities to advance
| than in tech.
|
| If you consider inflation, offshoring, record profits for many
| companies who are still laying off, crypto crashing and _rapid_
| advances in AI-generated code, then you should be able to read
| the writing on the wall.
|
| Remember a significant portion of these layoffs are coming from
| companies whose revenues and profits are _increasing_ .. because
| they just don 't need as many people to keep the investors and
| c-levels rich.
|
| If you don't have at minimum 18 months worth of living expenses
| saved up when you get laid off, you could be in a world of hurt.
| steve_gh wrote:
| Anyone who quotes early Billy Bragg lyrics at me on HN
| definitely deserves an upvote.
| hankman86 wrote:
| I wonder what hidden benefits there are in these layoffs. Sure,
| companies lose skilled staff and nominally taken a hit in overall
| corporate output.
|
| On the flipside, people work twice as hard, eager to show their
| worth. That may be the cynic intent behind these industry-wide
| layoff. Scare the crap out of everyone and make them do the extra
| mile.
| pm90 wrote:
| Fear isn't a good long term strategy though. If your culture is
| fear driven, engineers will be less likely to join, or you will
| attract certain kinds of engineers. When operating on survival
| mode teams will switch from collaboration to competition. It
| can become really bad really quickly.
| ergonaught wrote:
| I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually
| punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed
| from their mouths.
|
| Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of
| September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K
| employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to
| keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around.
|
| Net income for that quarter was almost 14 billion dollars, and
| net income for "that year" was almost 67 billion dollars.
|
| Things are in decline, sure, but clearly this is a company that
| can actually afford to keep "great" people that they "love"
| working with employed, so "affecting Googlers lives" doesn't have
| to "weight heavily" on anyone.
|
| Sorry, but these antics require revolution. Not a friendly chat
| with the brand imagery wizards. Not a "well just use DuckDuckGo".
|
| It's rare to encounter a whole "class" of people more desperately
| deserving barbarians at the gates of their tower.
| Rezwoodly wrote:
| Elon musk set a precedent - you can treat your employees
| (serfs) like shit and get away with it. Layoffs, perks being
| removed, the tone has generally shifted to "look we have free
| coffee" to "we own you, be glad to have a job, oh and you might
| not actually have a job after all".
|
| This is a change of winds, instead of pandering to engineers
| companies are trying to debase us and remind us where we are in
| the totem pole.its not about revenues, its about power.
| prepend wrote:
| > Elon musk set a precedent
|
| No. This is giving him an absurd amount of credit.
| Organizations have treated their employees like this for
| decades (perhaps centuries). I remember the 90s were rife
| with profitable companies laying off employees to boost
| profit.
| ipython wrote:
| Oh, please. Elon has nothing to do with this. Workers have
| had the shaft for centuries. Tech workers have been treated
| with kid gloves compared to the "real" world.
| danieldk wrote:
| _Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to
| the "real" world._
|
| Depends on where you live. In many European countries you
| cannot just fire someone, e.g. you have to show that the
| company is in a financially difficult situation or a
| structural decline in revenue. If your revenue growth looks
| like this:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-
| revenue...
|
| You need other reasons (e.g. wrong behavior). Otherwise,
| you just find another position in the same company.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared
| to the "real" world._
|
| This is my reaction reading this thread. It's astonishing.
|
| This same crowd is typically anti-union, cheers on coal
| mine closures (learn to code!), want to throw finance
| people in jail, wants all car dealerships to disappear..the
| list goes on and on. They never seem to realize these
| business consist of normal people, most making salaries
| significantly lower than SV.
|
| But high paid software engineers lose their jobs and the
| same people want a revolution? I'm sorry to say, but the
| tech crowd doesn't have many labour allies in the "real"
| world anymore.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Careful, I appreciate your sentiment, but it's quite
| likely the set of people making the anti-Google comments
| are not the same set of people making the other comments
| you find distasteful. Or at least, the intersection of
| those two sets is small.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Elon musk set a precedent - you can treat your employees
| (serfs) like shit and get away with it._
|
| Really? That habit is older than Henry Ford.
| newshorts wrote:
| To some extent I agree with the sentiment.
|
| COVID seemed to create an awareness amongst employees that
| they could have better living conditions. There was a
| capitulation on the part of employers (especially in the tech
| industry).
|
| Now it seems employers are firing a warning shot across the
| bow, reminding employees where the power truly lies.
|
| Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function
| probably begs questions at other companies about how many
| folks are "essential".
|
| The macroeconomic situation is probably a factor but one
| could make the argument that it's only creating a window of
| convenience for a little house cleaning.
| arnvald wrote:
| > Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function
|
| It continues to function as an app, but does it really
| continue to function as a company?
|
| It lost enormous amount of trust on all sides: advertisers,
| users, developers. My Twitter feed is way more quiet than
| it was a few months ago. Advertisers are leaving[0]. Some
| developers just lost access to API (3rd party clients) with
| no warning.
|
| They also kill/abandon products - Twitter Spaces (their
| answer to Clubhouse) looks abandoned, and still doesn't
| work (or at least is not visible) on the web. Revue
| (Substack competitor) was killed in December. No idea what
| happened to communities, but I think they're abandoned as
| well. From creator's perspective, Twitter is very
| unreliable.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/18/twit
| ter-r...
| m00dy wrote:
| Fed wants to shed some blood and companies now play by the
| book. That's it.
| pyrrhotech wrote:
| You are not entitled to your multi-six figure job, and no one
| should feel bad for you if the company decides you are an
| excess. If you are not creating enough value to justify your
| presence, the company has every right and frankly society
| should demand that you be let go, otherwise you are wasting all
| of our finite resources. Sure, Google should have been a bit
| more cautious in their hiring during the unsustainable COVID
| bubble conditions, but at least they are correcting the mistake
| now.
|
| This sort of attitude is exactly what makes left coast
| limousine liberal tech workers so insufferable to the rest of
| the country. Thanks for living up to the stereotype
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "If you are not creating enough value to justify your
| presence, the company has every right and frankly society
| should demand that you be let go"
|
| That's not how it works for probably 99% of employees. You do
| the job management gives to you and have almost no influence
| on whether you create value or not.
| mrtksn wrote:
| A CEO taking responsibility for firing people always reminds me
| of Gavin Belson's speech:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ
|
| Did ever a journalist tried to ask how they took
| responsibility? Had they faced difficulties in their lives or
| careers or they couldn't concentrate on Succession's finale and
| had to rewind?
|
| Maybe taking responsibility actually means they did something
| very positive for the company within the rules of the game and
| expect a bonus? Are they referring to the events as a mistake
| they made or are they saying that they were able to grab the
| talent pool and didn't miss the opportunity?
|
| After all, CEOs and workers have different responsibilities.
| Hiring and firing for the opportunity and change in conditions
| is CEOs job and maybe he takes responsibility for properly
| executing it? Maybe this is the money shot of a CEO reminding
| the investors that the upside from these actions are solely on
| him and wants a proper compensation?
| nothrowaways wrote:
| It is so funny Gavin also started his speech with "I have a
| difficult announcement"
| mrtksn wrote:
| The Silicon Valley is an amazing documentary, gets so many
| things right :)
| Mezzie wrote:
| I want to see the SWOT analysis for this firing decision.
| brushfoot wrote:
| > I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people
| actually punished.
|
| "These people" don't deserve punishment any more than a
| developer who had to make a tough decision does. It's the same
| situation at a different level with more visibility. Management
| has its own set of challenges.
|
| > that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people
| that they "love" working
|
| It wouldn't be fair to them to keep them employed if doing so
| meant weighing down the company, which could eventually cost
| everyone else their job. Better to have strong companies that
| continue to adjust to fit people's needs and let workers move
| among them.
|
| > these antics require revolution
|
| Revolution to what economic system, exactly? I don't want to
| live in a world where companies are forced to keep workers in
| unproductive jobs out of a misplaced sense of goodwill. That
| sinks the ship for everybody.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Management has its own set of challenges
|
| True, and it comes with its own set of perks, too.
|
| However, the wording of "taking responsibility for the
| decisions that led us there" seems to imply that Sundar
| Pichai agrees that _he_ personally made some _bad_ decisions,
| and that the _logical_ conclusion is to pass the helm ?
|
| Fun fact: in France, a running gag for political jokes is
| that the sentence "I take full responsibility for xxxx" is
| almost mechanically expected to be followed by some form of
| "..., and therefore I resign", because of this spectacular
| historical precedent [1].
|
| > J'assume pleinement la responsabilite de cet echec, et j'en
| tire les conclusion, en me retirant de la vie politique.
|
| > I take full responsibility for this failure, and as a
| consequence, leave political life.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msObVR8EDYk
| jstx1 wrote:
| > I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people
| actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be
| removed from their mouths.
|
| There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every
| layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite
| way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's
| happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision"
| and it's partly ceremony for the sake of appearances - if
| you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company
| is using this language, that's a problem with you, not with
| them.
|
| It's like being indignant when a friend or a colleague replies
| with "I'm fine, thanks" when they aren't fine, or when they say
| "I can't complain" when they're in fact capable of complaining
| - it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's
| understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not
| taking every word literally.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| No, it's more like a soft version of the Monty Python line:
|
| "Some of you will die ... but that's a sacrifice I am
| prepared to make!"
|
| Saying you "take responsibility" is hollow if you don't
| suffer at all for your alleged failure.
| evan_ wrote:
| > the Monty Python line: "Some of you will die ... but
| that's a sacrifice I am prepared to make!"
|
| That's from Shrek
| prettyStandard wrote:
| I'm more inclined to agree with parent for the reasons stated
| by child.
|
| I would be more impressed if they did something like this: 1.
| internally decide we need to trim the fat 2. Announce the
| problem and what they need to target, and give the employees
| a deadline to hit that target 3. Encourage employees to look
| for new jobs on the job 4. or encourage people to take early
| retirement 4. or take the plunge on starting their own
| startup, 5. or let them switch to part time even. I'm sure
| many of these people are married and switch to their spouses
| insurance.
|
| They all have Google on their resume, it's not going to take
| long. These companies are the top of the food chain, they
| could at least act like it.
|
| This turns it back into every other business problem we solve
| day in and day out. The big dogs at the top are the deciders,
| and the ones at the bottom are the do'ers.
| speakfreely wrote:
| > it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill
| of not taking every word literally.
|
| HN is going to be a tough place for you. A mild, undiagnosed
| case of autism is not uncommon around here and a non-trivial
| amount of people seem to mistake that as some superpower for
| "seeing things how they really are".
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _undiagnosed case of autism_
|
| Autism is actually...
|
| (/s; couldn't resist; your points are absolutely true)
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Saying "I'm fine" when you aren't doesn't usually involve
| abruptly robbing thousands of people of their livelihoods.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar
| company is using this language, that's a problem with you,
| not with them
|
| Not so long ago, if you got raped, it was your problem, not
| the rapists.
|
| No saying the situations are identical, but the language used
| is equivalent and so is the logical rigour behind both
| statemets.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every
| layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a
| polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for
| what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this
| decision" and it's partly ceremony for the sake of
| appearances
|
| Yes, we know, on the left we have a word for doing that, it's
| called "lying."
|
| > if you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar
| company is using this language, that's a problem with you,
| not with them.
|
| The point of the comment is that we _should_ make it a _them_
| problem.
|
| > It's like being indignant when a friend or a colleague
| replies with "I'm fine, thanks" when they aren't fine, or
| when they say "I can't complain" when they're in fact capable
| of complaining - it's perfectly normal language for the
| situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed
| the skill of not taking every word literally.
|
| Yeah, sorry, but if someone does white lies and can't
| communicate, they ain't a friend.
| [deleted]
| smcl wrote:
| What's "infantile" about it?
| fullshark wrote:
| Thinking words mean things and aren't just tools of
| manipulation is childish.
| gmd63 wrote:
| The point being made is that there are no negative
| consequences to being responsible, so it's an empty
| statement. It doesn't even mean anything. They're making the
| decision because they're being rewarded for it by maintaining
| a certain level of profitability in the financial reporting
| game.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _The point being made is that there are no negative
| consequences to being responsible_
|
| What "negative consequences" would you like to see? You
| want to see executives fired over something like this? How
| do you think that would affect future hiring practices?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| So, if people lower in the totem pole mess up, they
| should never be fired? Because it might impact future
| hiring practices?
|
| The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it
| seems to matter how well you actually do your job.
| actualwitch wrote:
| It's so wild seeing people making claims like these on
| hn, considering people here also get treated similarly.
| Are you going to get fired from your job for minor
| mistake? Would you go work for a company that will fire
| devs over minor issues? Why should CEO be treated
| differently?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I'm not sure what's wild about it. As far as I've seen,
| what I said is entirely true.
|
| - If someone very low on the totem pole (ex. factory
| worker) is late a few times, they're far more likely to
| be fired than someone higher up.
|
| - If a low/mid level manager at a company screws up a
| project so bad that a bunch of people under them get
| layed off, they're far more likely to lose their job then
| a VP that does the same.
|
| The point isn't that everyone should get laid off for
| every mistake. The point is that, the higher up you are,
| the less likely you are to face _any_ consequences at all
| for any mistakes. And it's also not a certainly; just a
| probability.
| actualwitch wrote:
| It's wild because it's completely separated from
| realities of the business. If you fired CEO over any
| minor mistake (overhiring sucks, but for CEO it _is_ a
| minor mistake), the company would die much sooner,
| because people wouldn 't want to work there. You as a
| developer also are quite high on that pole, and you
| (probably) won't get fired if you bring down prod for a
| moment due to mistake in migrations, why should CEO be
| treated differently?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| me> The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it
| seems to matter how well you actually do your job.
|
| you> If you fired CEO over any minor mistake
|
| Do you see the disconnect here? At no point did I call
| for a CEO to be fired over a minor mistake. Rather, I
| pointed out that, no matter the size of the mistake, the
| higher up you are the smaller the repercussions. You are
| responding with what is a perfect example of a straw man
| argument.
|
| To be clear; no, I don't think a CEO that makes a small
| mistake should be fired. But I also don't think that a
| CEO that causes the downfall of a major company should
| walk away and into the arms of the next company, doing
| the same job, for just as much (or more) money. And, in
| between those two, there's a large area where
| repercussions are currently few and far between.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Considering that thousands of people just lost their jobs
| through _no_ fault of their own, one more who _did_ screw
| up massively doesn 't seem like it should change much,
| right?
| ilovetux wrote:
| Personally, I would like to see C-Level executives
| financially responsible for their decisions. Instead of
| firing a percentage of his staff, he should be sent a
| bill. With great reward should come great risk; at least
| thats how it works for the rest of us.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| A temporary C-level/VP/director/manager compensation cut
| (say, a couple quarters to a year) whenever "large"
| layoffs are executed seems fair.
|
| Sure, let 5-10% of the company go, but it should echo
| financially up the chain as well.
|
| In the sense that those people can't afford to do that
| thing that they'd been planning on doing, and might have
| to budget a bit harder.
|
| Seems minimally fair when others just lost their jobs.
| hgsgm wrote:
| C-level annual comp dropped 30% due to stock price
| decline.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That's "lost" money in the sense of compared-to-being-
| paid-in-gold.
|
| One could also say that dollar-based annual comp dropped
| 7% in 2022 due to inflation.
|
| And out of the three of those, stock has the best
| prospects for future appreciation, if one can afford to
| hold, which I imagine most C-levels can.
| hgsgm wrote:
| The exec made a calculated gamble, to generate profits
| and make gay while the sun shined. Why do you think it
| was a financial misake?
|
| If it turns out that the layoff were a mistake,
| punishment will come.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > at least thats how it works for the rest of us.
|
| Is that true? If you make your SF salary of >$200k and
| manage to down production, are you sent a bill for lost
| revenue?
|
| I don't think so. In fact, since CEOs are (usually)
| mostly compensated in stock and their job is to create
| shareholder value, their income is likely far more
| related to their performance than for your average
| engineer.
| ilovetux wrote:
| If you cost the company enough money, you will be let go.
| It is true that you probably will not be sent a bill
| (although that can happen depending on the
| circumstances).
|
| The C-Level executive suite, however, will see no
| repercussions, even though, in reality they are
| ultimately responsible for overseeing the hiring,
| training and compliance processes. Even when there are
| shareholders and a board of directors to answer to (which
| isn't always) consequences are rarely seen.
|
| In fact, I don't see how they could ever truly be held
| responsible for anything that goes wrong with the
| company, but they sure do win (with bonuses and related
| comp) when things go well while employees usually do not.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > What "negative consequences" would you like to see?
|
| None. But if taking responsibility for someone else's
| injury just involves saying that you're taking
| responsibility, it's nothing but playing with words.
|
| If your grandmother got sick, I don't think you should be
| punished. But if you _take responsibility_ for your
| grandmother getting sick, in English people will expect
| that you 're at her house taking care of her until she's
| well.
| lexapro wrote:
| It's like a murderer saying:
|
| "I don't regret what I did, I don't think it was wrong, I
| would do it again, I haven't been caught BUT I take full
| responsibility for the death of the victim."
| hgsgm wrote:
| No, it's not like that at all, because "murder"
| presupposes a crime.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they're making the decision_
|
| This is what being responsible for something means.
| hun3 wrote:
| Being responsible means two different things:
|
| 1. Causing something.
|
| 2. Being held accountable for something, and facing its
| consequences (e.g. compensating for damage)
|
| It's possible that _someone_ can cause _something_ while
| avoiding its consequences, deferring the responsibility
| of making up to _someone else_. This usually happens due
| to asymmetry of information or power.
|
| That said, we cannot say _definitely_ in this particular
| instance that Sundar could have foreseen the financial
| circumstances or economic crisis of any kind, and it 's
| also possible that Sundar might resign or get fired in
| the future as a consequence. Still, one can argue that
| the phrase "I'm taking full responsibility of [...]" is a
| bit overused in general, and used in a rhetorical manner
| without actually meaning it.
| lexapro wrote:
| The honest way to phrase this is "I'm the one who caused
| this."
|
| "Responsibility" is ambiguous as you said, and that's
| exactly why he chose that word.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Thats what 'Power' means.
|
| You've got your dictionaries mixed up
| TomSwirly wrote:
| "If someone lies, it's your problem, not theirs."
|
| What sort of argument is that?!
|
| They are not "taking responsibility" to the slightest degree.
| It's an empty, enraging statement like, "Thoughts and
| prayers."
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _are not "taking responsibility" to the slightest degree_
|
| They're not atoning to the internet's satisfaction. But
| they _are_ taking responsibility by saying as much.
|
| The infantilism charge is accurate. Taking responsibility
| doesn't require symbolic atonement like standing in a
| corner. Recognition is sufficient. If they deleted that
| line, would anyone be satisfied?
| mcv wrote:
| What does responsibility mean without consequences? The
| consequences here are all for people who bear none of the
| responsibility.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The problem is, you do not like their actions. And that's
| perfectly fine!
|
| However, no matter _what_ they say here, what platitudes,
| what attempts to comfort(or lack!), you will still find
| fault with the words.
|
| Stop complaining about the words, and people will stop
| arguing with you over them. The words are unimportant.
|
| Instead, complain solely about the act, leave the words out
| of it.
| darkerside wrote:
| Empty? Yes.
|
| Enraging? That's your personal choice.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's
| understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not
| taking every word literally.
|
| That's imposing US cultural norms on the rest of the world.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Given that we are talking about a US Citizen working as a
| CEO of US Company...
| jsiepkes wrote:
| So all of those 12K people are going to be in US offices?
| Noone outside of the US is going to get fired?
| SilverBirch wrote:
| It's because of an asymmetry in role. As a normal employee
| when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you
| fuck it up. You face consequences. Highlighting the fact that
| Sundar is responsible for this is saying two things- yes they
| were his decisions and it's his job to get them right, but
| secondly, he's going to face no consequences for getting that
| decision wrong. Instead, the employees- who clearly aren't
| responsible are going to face the consequences. So it points
| to a broken system, for the masses, you take responsibility
| and you take the consequences, for the elite you take the
| "responsibility" but the masses will still face the
| consequences.
| luxcem wrote:
| > So it points to a broken system, for the masses, you take
| responsibility and you take the consequences.
|
| What's should happen, but it won't is that the
| responsibility for hiring too many people and facing a
| change of perspective should be to have to keep these
| people event if it means a decline of profit, as long as
| they don't face bankruptcy they can take the loss and move
| on.
|
| That's why there are labor laws and worker unions, so the
| asymmetry can shift a bit to the employee side.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for
| something you are fired if you fuck it up. You face
| consequences.
|
| Is this really true? For software devs specifically I don't
| think it's common for someone to get fired when they ship
| code with a bug in it. Or when they make a production
| change which causes an outage, even if that outage costs
| millions of dollars in losses and an untold amount of
| reputational damage.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| I've seen it happen to engineers who were bad at their
| jobs and aren't socially savvy. If you make people like
| you, it's hard to get fired for performance from what
| I've seen. However, the company I work for is very
| intense and I don't think is normal in how often people
| are fired. It's a little scary, but i kinda like it. It's
| really frustrating working with people who don't know
| what they're doing.
| dnissley wrote:
| n = 1, but I've messed up a decent amount and never been
| fired or even laid off in over 15 years. Never seen
| anyone else mess up (in an accidental way) and end up
| getting fired for it, either.
| thiht wrote:
| > As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for
| something you are fired if you fuck it up
|
| I'd hate to work somewhere like this. When you fuck up, you
| take responsibility, you fix it and you ensure no one can
| fuck up the same way. You don't just fire people who fuck
| up, or people won't ever do anything for you.
| jen20 wrote:
| You can tell the places that do this immediately: every
| action is surrounded by 10x the effort of paper pushing
| to ensure that the "right person" is fired when the thing
| goes wrong (which it will, because such organizations are
| incapable of institutional learning).
| rwmj wrote:
| Wall St usually looks at cost reductions favourably, so his
| share options will likely go up making him many more
| millions. Those are the consequences for him.
|
| (Edit: Before the obvious replies of _" but but Google
| stock is already down 30%"_, the whole market is down over
| the last year.)
| roland35 wrote:
| This was a point that was brought up after the Meta
| layoffs. Yes the executives lost a lot of money before
| the layoffs - but they also benefited the most from the
| post layoff bounce! And none of them were laid off...
| wslack wrote:
| It seems like this model would say that Google should not
| hire without an ironclad assurance that they will never
| need to do layoffs. Is that fairer - to never employ people
| in the first place?
| luxcem wrote:
| "Some of you may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing
| to make"
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > it's his job to get them right
|
| But he didn't say he got it wrong.
| Olphs wrote:
| What is he taking responsibility for then?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The decision. He was responsible for making it.
| Olphs wrote:
| If it was the correct decision what responsibility is
| there to take?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| If that was the right decision, none. But it might have
| been the right decision, it also might not.
| lexapro wrote:
| >To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different
| economic reality than the one we face today.
|
| He kinda did.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| But he didn't. Kind of like how you might get an estimate
| wrong, it doesn't mean you made an error. Operational
| decision making are best-guess / heuristic by nature -
| and he never said he made a mistake in anticipating the
| economic reality that happened.
| hgsgm wrote:
| That's implying that he never intended these at-will
| employees to have tenure beyond the short term.
| argiopetech wrote:
| Of course he faces consequences for getting that wrong.
| He's losing the services of 12k (soon to be former)
| employees and the costs it takes to separate them. Those
| employees are now job searchers, but they were able to take
| advantage of months or years of Google's infamously
| adequate pay and benefits. They shouldn't have any trouble
| finding jobs with Google on their resume.
|
| I get the impression from your writing (and others in this
| thread) that you feel Google owes something to it's
| employees other than adequate compensation and a mutually
| acceptable working environment. That's not how (US)
| companies work. The CEO has obligations to the board of
| directors (to run the company in a way they approve) and to
| the shareholders (to be profitable). No obligation exists
| to employ as many people for as long as possible,
| particularly when to do so would impact the aforementioned
| actual obligations of CEOs. This is why layoffs happen.
|
| When labor is cheap and business is booming, you hire. When
| labor expenses increase or business declines, you fire.
| Sometimes that means layoffs to hit quarterly goals.
| Sometimes that means your five year strategy has a pandemic
| and economic downturn happen in year three and you have to
| downscale. The CEO has to take responsibility for that, as
| he does for everything the company does, but any apology
| relating is simply a socially graceful admission he lacks
| omniscience.
| tryagainynot wrote:
| You're right, what they should say is, "Mea culpa! You just
| lost your house, your family will have to uproot its life,
| your credit rating is about to be _ruined_ and we booted your
| ass out in the worst tech job market in a decade.
|
| The good news is I can still afford two buy a new private G40
| this year! Wahoo!"
| allarm wrote:
| > You just lost your house, your family will have to uproot
| its life, your credit rating is about to be ruined
|
| Except nothing of this happened to me when I was laid off
| in 2020. And I was not making 500k/y, not even close. I
| have full sympathy to those who are getting laid off now,
| but I assume googlers will be fine.
| pessimizer wrote:
| [flagged]
| allarm wrote:
| Being laid off and being shot is not even remotely
| comparable.
| tryagainynot wrote:
| Yes, this is called survivorship bias.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| allarm wrote:
| My point is that a person who earns 500k/y and have
| Google in their resume will most likely suffer much less
| than many many others. Too much drama about it honestly.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| If anything, it's actually a faulty generalization:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > perfectly normal language for the situation and it's
| understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not
| taking every word literally.
|
| I think that depends on how you view the situation. If you
| see it as twelve thousand people have just had their personal
| and financial circumstances very significantly disrupted,
| then this choice of language is very much _not_ normal. I
| suspect that most normal people would be of the view that
| taking personal responsibility for such a damaging act would
| normally be accompanied by actually _demonstrating_ some
| personal contrition, or accepting a sanction of some kind. I
| don 't think that this pov is infantile or indignant.
|
| If you see it as an exercise in cost reduction then I guess
| the way it is expressed is pretty normal - but only because
| abstracting-out the human consequences of such business
| decisions has been intentionally normalised by corporations.
|
| I suspect what Pichai is really saying here is that he
| accepts responsibility for the hiring decision because he is
| _taking credit_ for the firing decision. It 's as simple as
| that. For him, at least.
| nindalf wrote:
| The best part about people who take every word literally and
| demand punishment is that no punishment will ever satisfy all
| of them.
|
| It wouldn't matter if Sundar took a pay cut (like Tim Cook)
| because the same people would say he's still worth hundreds
| of millions. It wouldn't matter if he fired himself because
| there would be some other, equally fallible human being in
| the same role that he vacated. That person would be capable
| of making the same mistake Sundar did.
|
| Have these people never worked in a real organisation where
| people make mistakes? When an engineer causes an incident, we
| fixed it and then did a review to understand how we can
| improve the process to prevent such an incident in future. We
| didn't point fingers, we didn't demand punishment.
|
| Here's the thing - Sundar is still probably the best person
| to helm Google, despite this mistake. In fact, a person who
| has had to lay off thousands will definitely think twice
| before going on a hiring spree in future. Exactly the sort of
| person you want in charge.
| js8 wrote:
| Personally, I don't see taking a paycut or leaving a
| position of power to be "taking a responsibility". The
| baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position
| of power or not to have a high salary. If you just reduce
| to the baseline, it's not really a punishment. Incompetent
| people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first
| place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.
| ketzu wrote:
| Your argument seems to be that punishment only exists on
| an absolute scale (or relative to the overall population,
| not relative to the individual). Am I understanding it
| correctly?
|
| If so, I heavily disagree and hold the opposite opinion:
| Punishment (and reward for that matter) are heavily
| individual. E.g., Only playing with a playstation for 30
| mins a day might be a punishment for one kid, as they
| were playing 2~8h a day before, and a reward for another,
| as they haven't had access to that before. It is relativ
| to their life situation and independent of general
| playstation playtime.
|
| But there are cases where punishment is somewhat
| absolute, mostly for severe infractions like violent
| crime. Even then, the degree to what a sentence might
| feel as a punishment might heavily diverge based on the
| person receiving it. E.g., a homeless person without a
| job might feel very different about going to prison for 5
| years than a highly paid investment manager.
| js8 wrote:
| Of course the punishment should be considered on absolute
| scale, based on typical (or perhaps even lowest status)
| people in the society, because it is ultimately
| administered by the society! Otherwise justice would lose
| any semblance of fairness.
| ketzu wrote:
| Thank you for confirming I understood your argument
| correctly.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the
| position of power or not to have a high salary.
|
| This is quite funny, since the 'victims' we're talking
| about are some of the highest paid people in an already
| highly paying profession.
|
| > Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged
| position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as
| a punishment is absurd.
|
| Also, we should not have error handling because we only
| hire competent developers and therefore our app doesn't
| crash, ever. This is clearly absurd.
|
| Plus, the economic situation did change. Calling Satya
| incompetent for making mistakes while steering a trillion
| dollar company feels a bit like the management equivalent
| of "I could build StackOverflow in a weekend".
| js8 wrote:
| I am not sure you understood the argument I am making. At
| least I am confused what you're trying to argue.
|
| All I am saying is this: If I am giving you a handsome
| reward for a job, and it turns out you are doing it
| badly, then giving you just half the reward is not a
| punishment. Even giving you no reward is not a punishment
| (because you got a chance to do a well-rewarded job).
| Punishment, to mean something, would be losing more than
| you would get for doing the acceptable job.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > When an engineer causes an incident, we fixed it and then
| did a review to understand how we can improve the process
| to prevent such an incident in future
|
| Yes, sure most of the time its the process's fault. But not
| always. The big issue is that unlike an incident review
| where agreed, measurable fixes will be put in place, in
| business there is no such thing.
|
| Sure, Sundar admits that he made the wrong call. But, why?
| what information lead to that call, what changes are going
| to be made to how decisions are made in the future? how can
| the rest of the company be sure that this is a one time
| thing, and not a systemic information bias.
| nindalf wrote:
| I assume there's been a post-mortem for this incident,
| considering the cost to the company in terms of morale,
| pain for former employees, damage to hiring brand etc.
| They've probably learned lessons from this so they don't
| repeat them in future.
|
| It's hard to make the results of the post-mortem public
| because most of this would be decisions taken by specific
| people, instead of systems misfiring. They would not want
| to publicly throw the people under the bus.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > I assume there's been a post-mortem for this incident
|
| That requires trust. The sysadmin team where I work have
| a weekly incident review, its vaguely public and although
| I don't often go, trust is built because results are not
| private or hidden.
|
| > It's hard to make the results of the post-mortem public
| because most of this would be decisions taken by specific
| people,
|
| Public yes, but wider inside the company, less so (there
| are some caveats.) but as for throwing people under a
| bus, that's never the aim for an incident review. Sure if
| someone clearly acted with malice, then perhaps action
| might be taken.
|
| The point of incident reviews is to work out what
| happened, why, and if its likely to happen again. The
| general rule is that if you allow people to speak
| honestly in a review, and not punish them after, you get
| a better result.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Maybe we shouldn't have megacorporation CEOs in the first
| place. Maybe we shouldn't have billionaires.
|
| (And no, before the pedants come in, the absolute amount
| isn't what matters, the absurd level of inequality is.)
| discreteevent wrote:
| > In fact, a person who has had to lay off thousands will
| definitely think twice before going on a hiring spree in
| future. Exactly the sort of person you want in charge.
|
| How about someone who doesn't have to lay off thousands to
| before they figure this out? Someone with imagination and
| foresight? Maybe they would be more of an exact match.
| nindalf wrote:
| Yes, I'd love to find the person who has never made a
| mistake to be the CEO. Undoubtedly you must be speaking
| from personal experience of being infallible?
| achow wrote:
| Also to add to your point, this "I" is very specific as
| opposed to "we leadership", it is out there in public. Board
| and/or shareholder can use this to cut Sundar's salary/bonus
| or whatever that is _personal_ to him. Theoretically, this
| statement can also be used to fire or demote him, or sue
| _him_ and not Google.
|
| All hypothetical I know, but he easily could have used some
| other non-committal words.
| Ralfp wrote:
| It's because guy ,,taking full responsibility" will still be
| able to carry on whith his life like nothing happened, having
| financial security for him and everybody in his family to
| live off the interest of his bank for generations, and people
| he just laid off will now need to wonder how many weeks or
| months will their savings last them before they can find a
| next gig letting them maintain their living. Or maybe thats
| impossible and they'll have to relocate somewhere cheaper,
| potentially uprooting all their and their partnere and kids
| life and trying elsewhere?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It's because guy ,,taking full responsibility" will
| still be able to carry on whith his life like nothing
| happened_
|
| Why is it that some people believe that people reach some
| level of success and become inhuman, robotic automatons? He
| had to fire a bunch of people. Have you ever had to fire
| someone? It sucks. I'm sure he's not happy about it. What
| else do you expect him to say or do?
|
| > _having financial security for him and everybody in his
| family to live off the interest of his bank for
| generations_
|
| If we're going to play the game of relative wealth, I don't
| think you're going to find much sympathy for the laid-off
| Google engineers; these people aren't going to be at the
| food bank any time soon.
| Ralfp wrote:
| > He had to fire a bunch of people. Have you ever had to
| fire someone? It sucks.
|
| He didn't fire anybody. He reduced a number in a
| spreadsheet. This is Dunbar's number at work:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
| Nullabillity wrote:
| You don't accidentally become the CEO of a
| megacorporation by not being an inhuman robotic
| automaton.
| lexapro wrote:
| Happy no, but he didn't fire them because he had to. He
| fired them because that's what's expected of a CEO,
| maximizing shareholder value.
|
| You know, he could have fired 11k instead of 12k. I'm
| sure he sleeps just fine and would have also been okay
| with 15k.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'm sure he's not happy about it.
|
| Why is it that some people make up internal states for
| people that they've never met? He may have fought for
| months internally in order to lay off 12K people. He may
| be disappointed to the point of despair that it wasn't
| 20K, as he may have originally recommended.
|
| Being against making up callousness shouldn't be
| responded to by making up concern.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| >Sorry, but these antics require revolution.
|
| Maybe it just requires people not buying that rosy corporate
| lingo BS in the first place.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| It's not a charity you know. If they fire those many people,
| it's because they're confident they can go on without them.
| There are countries in which the law is more protective of
| employees, and you can't fire them unless you have serious
| economic reasons, which is a good thing. But in a country like
| the US where this isn't the case, I wouldn't shift the moral
| responsibility to the company itself. Its goal is to make
| money.
| qaq wrote:
| I have no beef with that as long as BS about values and one
| family and the like is dropped. I think the only company that
| handles this +/- honestly is Netflix.
| prepend wrote:
| I think it's the dishonesty that irks me. And the poor human
| capital management of not planning and allocating.
|
| I remember when GE and Microsoft did their ranking and
| culling the herd processes of perpetual annual layoffs. They
| got a lot of flak for that (and I think stopped) and I saw
| presentations from Google HR about how bad that was and they
| wouldn't do that because they are so much smarter.
|
| They are full of shit and would do it if they had better PR.
| And that's what they are doing now.
|
| Hiring and firing is expensive. Layoffs are short term
| corrections and long term inefficiencies.
|
| Google is for profit. And they are managed poorly to have
| such a layoff. If they were smarter they wouldn't have to do
| this. If they were smarter they would retrain and reassign to
| new projects.
|
| I don't work at Google. I applied years ago and didn't even
| get an interview. I wouldn't work there now.
|
| I suspect that they only need about 10% of their workforce to
| make 95% of their earnings. So everyone left is probably
| wondering if their imposter syndrome is real or not.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| A person whose only interest is money is a psychopath.
|
| If a company's only interest is money, it is effectively a
| psychopath too - a potentially immortal, tremendously
| powerful psychopath.
|
| We shouldn't say, "Oh, psychopaths are psychopathic, that's
| just the way it is." We need to fight back.
| bbarnett wrote:
| This may shock you, but a company is not a person.
|
| Further, there is zero wrong with a company's goal for
| profit. This is like water, or food, for a living organism,
| without profit the company will wither, and die.
|
| A company does not "owe you" a job. You do work, they pay,
| and at any time you or they may walk away.
|
| No one is owed a job.
|
| So what's the beef here? You want some sort of corporate
| socialism?
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| But that's the thing. So many highly skilled people, put
| to good use can multiply profits no? That's assuming that
| those 10k are not some part of their new stack ranking
| system.
|
| How would you interpret massive layoffs when a company is
| not making losses?
|
| To me, it looks like their existing projects aren't
| making the kind of money they want to make and they
| aren't interested in trying out more things that might
| give them a chance to make that kind of money.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _So many highly skilled people, put to good use can
| multiply profits no?_
|
| No. If true, merely having skilled people would
| immediately lead to a win for any startup.
|
| _How would you interpret massive layoffs when a company
| is not making losses?_
|
| I would only care to try, to spend the hundreds or
| thousands of hours to analyze google's actions (instead
| of guessing), if I cared to invest heavily it.
|
| To the above I will add, a well run company does not wait
| to lose money, but manages finances ahead of the game.
|
| Beyond that, share price is how google acquires, yes? So
| if share price plummets, acquisition capability
| plummets...
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Being put to good use is what multiplies profits imo.
| Don't get me wrong, i have seen with skilled/learned
| engineers, taking horrible technical decisions and
| causing their companies a lot of financial headaches. So
| I understand what you mean. Especially about "managing
| finances ahead of the game".
|
| But at Google's scale (and profits..) it was a little
| weird to see(/not see?) no efforts of reorganization
| before all those layoffs.
| bnegreve wrote:
| > This may shock you, but a company is not a person.
|
| Corporations are legally treated like people, that is the
| point actually [1]. Given that they have similar rights,
| it is not absurd to expect they also behave like people.
|
| [1] (from wikipedia) _A corporation is an organization
| authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a
| legal entity recognized by private and public law "born
| out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and
| recognized as such in law for certain purposes._
| prepend wrote:
| Legal people aren't people. This just means that rights
| given to people also apply to organizations and groups of
| people.
|
| Otherwise the state could say "yes prepend, you have
| freedom of speech, but the church you belong to can't say
| stuff." Etc etc.
| bbarnett wrote:
| No, corporations are not people, and legalities which
| apply in very specific circumstances and not relevant.
|
| Do you, as a person, have a CTO by law? Have your value
| listed on a stock exchange? Can you be sold? Dissolved at
| the whim of the state?
|
| A corporation is only a person in a very, very narrow set
| of conditions.
| bnegreve wrote:
| Corporations are granted the right to sue me. That enough
| for me to expect that they show some level of human
| decency.
|
| If they behave like psychopaths in a systematic way, I
| don't think they should be granted that right.
| smcl wrote:
| Imagine being the guy saying "No one is owed a job" in
| the comments of a story announcing 12,000 people are
| being fired.
| prepend wrote:
| Every algorithm is a psychopath. My savings account is a
| psychopath. My roomba is a psychopath. My dishwashing
| detergent is a psychopath.
|
| Etc etc.
|
| Don't anthropomorphize corporations. They aren't people.
| They are algorithms to maximize shareholder equity.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There are arguably bigger downsides to a system where you
| can't fire people such as extremely high unemployment for
| the youth.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Companies aren't really people. You wouldn't call a rock
| falling from a cliff a psychopath, you just don't stand
| near cliffs.
| Shish2k wrote:
| > you just don't stand near cliffs
|
| Actually we don't _just_ do that - we also put up fences,
| we reinforce parts of cliffs that need to stay up, we
| supply safety equipment to people who need to be there
| for some reason
|
| Similarly with companies, we don't just "avoid going near
| them" (is that actually your proposed solution - opting
| out of society?); we regulate, we unionise, we hold
| people accountable and make the most blatantly harmful
| behaviours illegal
| fathyb wrote:
| In this case, people do control the rock from the inside
| and can divert the rock, but falling from a cliff saves
| money.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Your argument is with gravity, not rocks. Either way
| seems like a waste of energy to me.
| sobkas wrote:
| > Companies aren't really people. You wouldn't call a
| rock falling from a cliff a psychopath, you just don't
| stand near cliffs.
|
| Decisions in companies are made by people, not rocks. And
| their decisions aren't a product of laws comparable to
| theory of gravity. And saying that CEO had no other
| choice but to fall on head of unsuspecting employee
| and/or client is a lie.
| Neil44 wrote:
| People who have responsibilities to a wide veriety of
| people including the remaining 138,000 employees, who
| have a very great interest in the continued health of the
| company.
| smcl wrote:
| I mean it's a nice metaphor on the surface, but it
| completely falls apart because in reality we do a lot of
| things to prevent rocks from falling and damaging us and
| our property. From signs that warn of falling rocks to
| netting/drapery and even elaborate electrical warning
| systems[0].
|
| We work together and mitigate it. What does this mean for
| companies? I dunno, but given they are man-made and that
| societies and attitudes shift over time I suspect it
| doesn't _at all_ mean that companies doing bad shit are
| an inevitable thing we should accept and that all we can
| do is to just try our best not to personally draw their
| ire.
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzAfich6mow
| Neil44 wrote:
| You assume that nothing was done to mitigate this but you
| do not have that knowledge you only assume it. You assume
| there's some alternate universe available to us where
| everything is good for everyone all the time.
|
| Let's look at the universe where Google becomes a social
| security service instead of a competitive entity. If only
| 12,000 people are on the bad side of that one we'd be
| improbably lucky.
| [deleted]
| smcl wrote:
| I've no idea what you're saying
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Except the companies are less like rocks, and more like
| quasi-sentient AIs that run this planet.
| Neil44 wrote:
| They're part of the universe in the same way as rocks
| trees and gravity. Rocks and trees are not iherently good
| or bad except in our minds. They just 'are'. Same with
| companies. If a rock is falling you get out of the way
| using the agency available to you, if you fail you die.
| So it has always been so it will always be. To project
| qualities onto things that they don't really have, to
| expect the rock to swerve around you because of your
| internal system of beliefs is a recipie for stress,
| confusion and ultimately unhappiness.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Gulags and the breast ripper are part of this universe in
| the same way as rocks and trees and gravity. Rocks and
| trees are not iherently good or bad except in our minds
|
| Firstly, rocks exist on mars, Companies and the gas
| chamber don't - because they are man-made.
|
| Secondly, concepts of good and bad only exist in your
| mind to begin with.
|
| Thirdly, if we followed this logic for the past 500
| years, you would probably be enjoying the breast ripper
| for treason or something.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Needing to find a new job in your lucrative industry
| after a nice golden goodbye from your previous one is not
| equivalent to a breast ripper.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You treat social constructs as immutable part of the
| universe like rocks and trees.
|
| If we lived in 1500's you'd replace the word 'company'
| with 'medieval lord'.
|
| Betraying you medieval lord for a competitor was treason,
| with equivalent of a breast ripper being employed.
| Neil44 wrote:
| > You treat social constructs as immutable part of the
| universe like rocks and trees.
|
| Fair point.
|
| > If we lived in 1500's you'd replace the word 'company'
| with 'medieval lord'.
|
| In some ways I see the equivalence because they both have
| power but luckily our justice system has evolved since
| then and there are more checks on power. We've also
| evolved from feudalism to whatever kind of capitalism
| we're in now. I think capitalism is a long way from
| perfect because it often doesn't align with our internal
| belief systems, partly because nobody has a complete view
| of the situation (even the CEO who cannot see the future)
| so our belief systems act on incomplete information and
| partly because there are perhaps not enough rules baked
| in to insert moralistic behaviour into it.
|
| I don't think that turning companies into social security
| is a good way forward. Just have social security. Don't
| loose sight that if your economy isn't competitive in the
| world then all this becomes moot because you all loose.
| tryagainynot wrote:
| Cash Rules Everything Around Me
|
| This is why I advise people to steal as much from their
| employers as possible. Last time I got laid off I stole 3
| laptops, two company phones, and leaked some very
| embarrassing e-mails.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| So basically, if a company has enough in the piggy bank, its
| main purpose is to become a mass supplier of make-work jobs?
| Sounds like communism to me.
| pnt12 wrote:
| We can criticize but this will never change. A CEO is the face
| of a company, everything they say publically is basically a PR
| stunt.
|
| - They won't say the company is falling apart until the
| insolvency, it's some new strategy or refocus. - They won't say
| they sold the company for money, it's a new chance to reach out
| to more people. - They won't say they laid off people to
| increase profits, it's all for some other reason.
|
| We cannot stop this without some draconian laws, but let's
| criticize it and increase awareness, so that other people
| aren't fooled by it.
| blastonico wrote:
| Gavin Belson feelings.
|
| Silicon Valley (the TV series) should be re-categorized as
| documentary.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Having just gone through this yesterday I can tell you that
| while some of this has to do with $$$, these layoffs/reductions
| are also used to quickly recalibrate the team by removing low
| performers and cultural misfits.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Due to how the US works, it is the prerogative of the company
| to let workers go _even if_ they are experiencing utmost
| prosperity. The CEO using language to take responsibility is an
| example of professional language. Contrast this to Elon who has
| the prerogative to let workers go while also shitting on their
| reputation.
| lwhi wrote:
| I'm not sure.
|
| As much as I like and admire the spirit of your comment; the
| game is capitalism.
|
| Just because you can afford something, surely you would
| sanction doing it unless there's need?
| em500 wrote:
| > _I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people
| actually punished._
|
| Sundar Pichai has an estimated net worth of 1.3bln.
|
| There is no lawful way to "punish" a billionaire unless they've
| done something very illegal.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Should companies keep paying people they don't need or want ?
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| No, but they also don't have to bullshit people by saying "I
| take full responsibility" when the responsiblity is shared
| between them and the employees that are now sacked. Nobody
| insists they say this, and it is just bullshit. I think it is
| fine that google fired them, but just own up.
|
| Instead of:
|
| > The fact that these changes will impact the lives of
| Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility
| for the decisions that led us here.
|
| Just say:
|
| > The fact that these changes will impact the lives of
| Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I admit that decisions I
| made have led us here.
|
| But even this is probably wrong, because while the CEO is the
| top executive, he does not make decisions in a vacuum or
| operate in a vacuum.
|
| To be fair though I think that his statement is fine in some
| specific sense of the word responsibility, i.e. sense 1.b.2
| from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible
|
| > being the cause or explanation
|
| It is just that in every other sense of the word it is not
| really accurate.
| [deleted]
| dbjijk wrote:
| I'm reading these comments and feel the need to speak some
| truths. Come on everyone, have we not stopped drinking that
| koolaid yet ? Are we still that naive ?
|
| The ONLY loyalty of a company is to its shareholders. The SOLE
| PURPOSE of a company is to increase profits for its
| shareholders. And you know it.
|
| Yes they sit on plenty of money. It's not your money, it's not
| the employees money, it's the shareholders money. And they want
| more of it.
|
| All the rest, the products, the messaging, whatever, is all
| just the means to reach that singular goal, increase profits
| for shareholders.
|
| The current news cycle warning for recenssions and though times
| allows large companies to push through this kind of workforce
| reductions with less pushback than they would get in order
| times, and it is the perfect way to increase profitability.
|
| Stock is up 2.3% already.
|
| PS: I feel bad for everyone suffering from this. Losing a job
| is a personal drama for everyone involved.
| bigcloud1299 wrote:
| Let's have different point of view. Google has probably cost
| shareholder billions of dollars through over comp, through
| employee benefits (pampering). Their profits have
| consistently shrunk. So does google really care about
| shareholders? Or has it been lucky decade for all tech giants
| due to low interest rates. This decade will tell.
| dbjijk wrote:
| I agree, it has definitely been a "lucky decade" in more
| than one way. Now that the cost of money is non-zero, I
| expect to see changes in multiple regards.
| __alexs wrote:
| I think the disconnect we feel with these people supposedly
| taking responsibility is actually that while the impact of
| these mistakes is real, their degree of control over this
| outcome was basically zero.
|
| The problem with the statement is not that there is no action
| to go with the words, it's that actually they are not
| responsible for this outcome in any meaningful way which in
| some ways is worse.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Those employees didn't fire themselves, nor was this the
| decision of their direct managers. The CEOs are absolutely
| responsible, and doing mass layoffs while a company is
| growing should be (and is, in much of the world) illegal.
| tempsy wrote:
| high salaries are only possible because no one is unionized
|
| what you're describing is what if employees were all unionized
| and had more protections
| fahadkhan wrote:
| "I take full responsibility"
|
| Translates to "I accept it's my fault but I am still going to
| sack you."
| matt_s wrote:
| The larger these tech companies get the more they behave like
| old tech, like IBM. When a company is publicly traded,
| shareholders are more important than employees. Silicon Valley
| and startups are too ingrained with the "IPO/acquisition or
| bust" mentality and post IPO employees want RSU's or stock
| grants as part of "total comp".
|
| You say you want a revolution? One where the people at the top
| are accountable? One where pay is more equitable from the
| bottom line employee up to CEO? Then people should be starting
| workers cooperatives[0] and not corporations with a goal of an
| IPO. Employees having democratic control of their own company,
| its projects, profits, pay scales, maybe voting in the c-suite
| executives, what countries they'll do business with, etc.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
| spacephysics wrote:
| This assumes democracy, giving everyone an equal vote, will
| have a net benefit outcome.
|
| I do not believe this is the case. Companies are closer to an
| autocracy or tribunal (board of trustees, etc)
|
| With everyone having a vote, either nothing will get done
| because it will be unorganized and the company will have no
| coherent vision or direction
|
| Or, there will be an autocracy that inevitably forms, with
| someone ending up at the top and directing what's to be voted
| on, to only give the illusion of power of the people.
|
| Furthermore, if you've started a company, I don't see why the
| people you've hired should take the company away from the
| original owner. That would be corporate "eminent domain"
|
| It would have disastrous effects of companies high tailing it
| out of the US, and we'd end up cratering our economy.
|
| A less extreme example of this is raising corporate taxes.
| The reality is, a company is going to try and reduce their
| tax liability as much as possible (like every person should
| do, really)
|
| If the cost of moving a company for a better tax rate
| outweighs the cost of the move, they'll do it. So raising
| corporate taxes will most likely have such an effect, taking
| jobs out of areas and moving them to a different state or
| country.
|
| One caveat is if the whole modern world agrees to raise
| corporate taxes, but then there exists other potential
| problems
| matt_s wrote:
| > Furthermore, if you've started a company, I don't see why
| the people you've hired should take the company away from
| the original owner.
|
| Did you read up on worker cooperatives at all? The concept
| is it is worker managed at its inception. I used the word
| democracy to convey that concept simply but it can be
| structured however the people that form it want it
| structured. It could be electing people onto committees
| that determine roadmaps, comp structure, etc. and they
| rotate out to other roles in the company per some rules the
| workers set up. It could be rules like total comp for
| highest paid must never exceed 8x of lowest paid and
| profits are shared, etc.
|
| The ego centric "I started the company so I say what goes
| (and I get richest)" pyramid/triangle structure will
| eventually (if successful) lead to a giant megacorp that
| does layoffs of 12k people. Or gets bought out by a
| billionaire that layoffs 75% of staff. People on HN
| complain about these layoffs but then come in hot about
| total comp comparisons, RSU's, or complain about these
| large companies doing business with countries with rap
| sheets of human rights violations. You can't have it both
| ways.
| spacephysics wrote:
| What do you define as inception? Is forming the LLC as a
| solo dev taking contract work inception? Or is it when it
| hits 100 employees?
|
| Committees and such already exist for companies. It seems
| like you're suggesting more of regulation for companies.
|
| Total comp for highest paid exec, that sounds closer to
| price ceilings which I don't think the government should
| enforce (which, with a worker cooperative, the gov needs
| to step in at some point for enforcement)
|
| This is the core of employee at will. Fight against that
| instead of changing the entire corporate structure. Other
| countries don't have employee at will, and have min
| severances and such that are enforced. That sounds like
| it would produce closer to what you're looking for (since
| it also incentivizes companies not to hire as wastefully)
| matt_s wrote:
| I'm not talking about government regulating anything. Or
| saying all company structures should change, just that
| there are other options. When the company structure is
| formed instead of a S-corp/LLC structure there is
| something called a workers cooperative where the
| workers/employees have say in the company and its
| direction. I've only read about it so I'm sure there are
| legal structures involved for that setup. This isn't
| discussed in any business schools from what I gather so
| maybe some examples would help:
| https://institute.coop/examples-worker-cooperatives
|
| A solo-dev starting contract work is a great example.
| They are the owner/operator of everything, profits,
| losses, direction. Say their work expands and they hire 3
| other people - do those people have a say in
| direction/projects/clients and share profits/losses or
| are they just assigned tasks and paid for them? Think of
| a workers cooperative as more like a farmers coop where
| everyone gets a share of the literal fruit/veggies coming
| from the farm because they all worked it and have equity
| and they collectively decided what the crops were for
| that season.
|
| Tech companies with stock options/RSU's for individual
| contributors are equity without any say in the company
| direction. If that company ends up laying off people
| because of bad management decisions (hiring too many, bad
| economic forecast, random projects, etc), the people hurt
| are the employees who had no say in the direction and
| usually the bad managers stay or have golden parachutes.
| Like I said earlier, I'm just suggesting an alternative
| structure perhaps one that doesn't answer to shareholders
| demand for infinite quarterly growth.
| RGamma wrote:
| Neoliberalism is a hell of a drug. Well put.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Punished for what? This is all going to plan. Big tech gambled
| that the pandemic would create huge opportunities and it hasn't
| totally panned out. They always planned to lay people off in
| that situation.
| rvnx wrote:
| This, punished for what ? In many big US companies, people
| are chilling as the revenue per employee is very high.
| Additionally, the low interest rates situation pushed tech
| valuations higher, and these employees benefited from the
| situation by getting a higher salary and relaxing job (see
| videos from Twitter or Meta employees). A lot profited from
| the scheme and are just sad that paradise is not forever with
| free wine, massages, sports and buffets at work and that
| downturns occasionally happens.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I guess it depends on what they were hired for. If they were on
| a team for a project that is no longer viable, should they be
| kept on and given busywork?
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| If they have cleared out Google's 6-7-8 rounds of
| interviews.. they can always be trained to move to/start into
| new projects no?
| Someone wrote:
| That requires there to be enough new projects.
| asvitkine wrote:
| Not necessarily entirely new projects, could be existing
| efforts that would just be new to those employees.
| Doubling down and investing in the areas that matter...
| crote wrote:
| Google hired 10.000 people in Q2 2022 alone. Despite
| claiming to have a hiring freeze, they hired _even more_
| people in Q3.
|
| It looks to me like they were hiring people without even
| considering whether there was work for them after
| accounting for the upcoming project culling, leading to
| the current need to fire 12k people. If they did their
| hiring freeze _properly_ , they could have probably
| avoided a significant fraction of these firings.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| The thing that bums me out about all this is that Google
| used to be a company where so many great
| products/projects came out of their 20% time. They used
| to hire "generalists" so they can be of use in wide
| segments of their company.
|
| Now they are laying people off while still being a
| profitable company.
|
| Something definitely changed in their company's DNA.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Layoffs are not about saving money. It's all theatre to appease
| the powers that be.
|
| "What explains why so many companies are laying large numbers
| of their workforce off? The answer is simple: copycat
| behavior."[1]
|
| [1] https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-
| la...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Thank you, this is a great link.
|
| > "The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of
| social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are
| doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs,
| the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are
| the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly
| evidence-based.
|
| I've had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful
| to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees,
| and don't accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and
| their board is asking why they aren't doing layoffs also."
|
| For most business people I come across, 80% of decisions of
| behaviour is imitating what other business people do. There
| is no rigourous fundamentals behind most of it
| kris_wayton wrote:
| I think there's also some amount of _" Other companies are
| laying off, and we secretly kind of like the idea of ranking
| and yanking, even if we don't need layoffs. So we'll use that
| already socialized economically driven layoff thing as
| cover."_
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Yes, exactly. I don't buy this "contagious" notion. It's
| simply a change in acceptable behavior. Everyone else is
| doing this objectionable thing, so suddenly it isn't as
| objectionable, relatively.
|
| It's like looting. If you take any one looter out of the
| environment, it's unlikely that he would act. But when the
| crowd of a thousand gets going, well, he doesn't want to be
| left with nothing while everyone else is gaining. Gotta
| strike while the iron's hot.
| Neil44 wrote:
| If Googe doesn't need these people any more who would it
| benefit to keep them around? Google isn't social security and
| in any case who wants to work in a job where it doesn't really
| matter what you do because you're not really needed and just
| given busywork. It's just not a good way forward.
|
| Getting all angry over a specific phrase which is clearly meant
| to take any responsibility or implication away from those being
| let go seems like a pointless wase of energy.
| 4764764 wrote:
| [flagged]
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Punished for what?
|
| This is about miscalculating business needs and failing to
| create a culture of work ethic, leading to a situation where
| people need to be let go.
|
| That is not a crime. It's just business.
| crote wrote:
| Well, management should be punished for miscalculating
| business needs and failing to create a culture of work ethic,
| leading to a situation where people need to be let go.
|
| It's their job to properly manage the business. They did not
| do their job properly, leading to the current mass firing. Of
| course it isn't a crime, but it _does_ mean they are doing
| their job poorly. In virtually every single role that will
| have repercussions, so why does management get off scot-free?
| pbalau wrote:
| > Well, management should be punished for miscalculating
| business needs and failing to create a culture of work
| ethic, leading to a situation where people need to be let
| go.
|
| So, management should be punished for giving 12k people
| jobs in the first place.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I agree they need to stop with the rhetoric... but I am sure we
| are not going to agree with why or what the end result of that
| change be
|
| The statement should read "We saw the "day in the life" video,
| we know you were not doing enough work so now we are reducing
| head count because clearly you have too much free time"
| quelltext wrote:
| Do you really think that?
|
| Also, if so, do you really think that reducing force means
| reducing force were it's appropriate (triming true fat)?
|
| All the companies are doing is to take the opportunity to
| save cost because everyone does, and because these companies
| can obviously survive.
|
| They hired to keep in line with trends and now they fire for
| the same reason.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Do you really think that?
|
| Yes, employers are not babysitters, nor charities. There
| seems to have been a large number of bloat position where
| people simply mess around all day, an maybe attend a few
| meetings were they talk about working.... then pass the
| results of that meeting to another group to actually do
| work...
|
| This is not a new concept, "middle management" style
| problems except in this case instead of have 5 people
| managers for every 1 worker, you end up with 5 "project
| managers" for ever 1 worker... same result too many people
| talking about work and not enough people actually doing
| work
|
| >>Also, if so, do you really think that reducing force
| means reducing force were it's appropriate (triming true
| fat)?
|
| Maybe, maybe not. Organizations are often prevented from
| simply trimming "true fat" due to regulations and other
| things that means layoffs have to occur in a more broad
| way. Overtime it will even out but the initial cut will
| probably not be that precise.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > There seems to have been a large number of bloat
| position where people simply mess around all day, an
| maybe attend a few meetings were they talk about
| working.... then pass the results of that meeting to
| another group to actually do work...
|
| And you ascertained that from...a video on TikTok?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| That was one example in a long line of data points
| smcl wrote:
| You could just admit you wanted to make a little joke for
| internet points
| mcv wrote:
| > I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people
| actually punished.
|
| Yeah, I think by "responsibility" he means "profit". He takes
| full profit of the decisions that took them there.
| prepend wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the "eat the rich" slogan because it's not a
| good solution.
|
| But I understand the sentiment of wanting to torture and
| destroy people who are directly responsible for these "we
| wanted $70B and only got $67B so we're firing you while smiling
| and offering hugs" events.
|
| I hope those laid off get new positions so it's not a life
| threatening situation.
|
| I think most of us are capable and lucky enough to choose where
| we work. People who choose to work for Google and other
| organizations like them need to do so with eyes open. Both as
| potential victims as well as supporting and bearing
| responsibility for Google actions.
|
| This is independent for working for an adtech company (or sugar
| company or bomb company or whatnot).
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Revolution is an extreme outcome in reaction to a system of
| determined abuse.
|
| A "good solution" would probably look like taking better care
| of people and reducing the polarisation of wealth
| particularly in a business community that is earning billions
| in profit.
|
| > "We'll be offering 6 months of healthcare"
|
| This tells us something of the desperation that workers face.
|
| > "The fact that these changes will impact the lives of
| Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility
| for the decisions that led us here."
|
| Hello, I'm your rhetorical assistant Clippy, it looks like
| you are laying off thousands of people from your profitable,
| influential business without any good economic reason.
| Personally, I think the top of your managment pyramid could
| take a pay cut if you really care.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| "I take full responsibility for punching you in the nether
| regions. I hope you have a lovely day."
|
| Taking full responsibility typically implies a negative impact
| on the person offering this. However, this has yet to be the
| case in tech layoffs.
|
| I would prefer they were honest. CEOs simply overhired to take
| maximum financial advantage of COVID, and now they no longer
| need the people who helped them achieve record profits.
| However, it doesn't read as well in a corporate PR announcement
| to claim you milked COVID as much as you could.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _CEOs simply overhired to take maximum financial advantage
| of COVID_
|
| What does this even mean? Are you implying these people would
| have been better off not being hired?
| oxfordmale wrote:
| During Covid, there was an increased demand for certain
| online services. As a result, companies hired additional
| permanent staff members to meet the extra demand. Instead,
| they could have chosen to hire these people on temporary
| contracts. Hiring staff on a temporary contract would have
| been more transparent.
|
| In the end, this is a business decision, and it is fair
| enough. However, claiming responsibility while knowing full
| well they would make the exact same decision again in the
| future is a different matter.
| bfeynman wrote:
| I think your view is very simplistic and reductionist on
| how tech companies work. They are not not factories, they
| did not over hire to get boots on ground for support.
| They were hiring and creating brand new things with glee
| as stock and revenue soared.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Tech companies are "factories" of software products and
| features. During COVID, there was an increased demand for
| such products, justifying additional investments in new
| products or features to remain competitive. This required
| a wide variety of staff members.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Presumably at least _some_ of them left a job to join
| Google. They now have no job, but might still have one had
| they not moved. It may very well be a tiny proportion of
| the total, of course.
| Mandatum wrote:
| This is what happens when you work for a public company.
|
| You're working for shareholders. You're working for MBA's.
| You're working for data analysts and economists.
|
| Your colleagues aren't these people, but the person who decides
| whether or not you have a job? That's not your colleagues.
| sumitkumar wrote:
| It is not about the saving from the 6B in salaries. It is about
| how much the leadership at Alphabet is hoping that the stock
| will rebound because of this decision in a month.
| shin_lao wrote:
| These companies are over bloated and it seems he can't write
| "well most of you aren't doing anything useful so we are using
| the downturn to fire you" so they BS their way through. Nothing
| to do with current revenue.
| efficax wrote:
| layoffs are herd behavior among tech execs right now. nobody
| really knows why they have to do it but everyone else is and
| wall street likes it. it's irrational, hurts morale, has little
| impact on the bottom line, it's just stupid.
| wp_efexx wrote:
| [flagged]
| przemelek wrote:
| But it sounds better than "Sorry for terminating your positions
| but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share
| values, and we are accountable for shareholders" (edited from
| "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our
| finances in check not to loose share values, and according to
| law it is only thing we are force to do")
| Rexxar wrote:
| Which law ?
| przemelek wrote:
| Public company is accountable to shareholders, in case if
| share prices will go down shareholders will want to know
| why, and some activist investor may go to the court
| complaining that company was able to have better financial
| results it should not work on some stuff and should fire
| people.
| 4764764 wrote:
| [flagged]
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| But they already have their (new?) stack ranking system to
| take care of dead weight no?
|
| If they themselves say they hire/pay "very talented people",
| and still layoff so many people while still being very
| profitable company, what would you infer from that?
| spacephysics wrote:
| I understand the frustration with the PR corporate speak, but
| that's to be expected of one of the largest companies in the
| world.
|
| Cash on hand isn't a reason to keep people. They probably
| recognize there's unhealthy parts of the organization, and this
| is a restructuring opportunity. It sucks from the employees
| side.
|
| employee at will goes two ways, and saying that this is bounds
| for a "revolution" seems a bit far stretched.
|
| Yeah it's shit, and sucks for anyone who looses a job
| regardless of severance. Typically at this scale, it's not on
| the individual as to why he/she got fired.
|
| But your rhetoric reminds me of a mid-century revolutionary
| calling to overthrow the Provisional government.
|
| Let history be a teacher as to the consequences of that.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| When pointing out anything that Sundar did wrong to get to this
| point, remember the 3 responses of the Management Class to an
| inconvenient fact:
|
| 1. It's not true.
|
| 2. It's true, but it's not important.
|
| 3. It's true, and it's important, but we already knew it.
| monkeydust wrote:
| This is a short-term downward adjustment to what is a long
| running trend of increasing demand for software professionals
| across every industry.
|
| I feel private companies who don't have the play the quarterly
| announcement game can come out stronger given conviction in what
| they are doing and a strong balance sheet.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I swear all these companies are just using the fact that everyone
| else is firing as an excuse to get rid of such a large part of
| their workforce.
| nness wrote:
| Yes, my suspicion is that most were forced into that position
| by macro economic trends, i.e. Facebook and smaller start-ups.
| Where as Google's delay in announcing this helped distance
| themselves from being lumped into the financial
| woes/overvaluation concerns of "the tech industry."
|
| That said, I thought they'd at least wait until Q2/Q3, but
| that's a whole quarter of money to save...
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The clock is ticking for Google.
|
| The quality of their products is consistently on a downward
| trajectory. Somehow, both search and maps have become worse. Spam
| that would have previously been easily filtered now gets through
| my Gmail.
|
| Meanwhile ChatGPT runs circles around Google for any serious
| query.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is market virtue signaling. Some ascribe it to "copycat"
| behavior but I don't think the accurately captures the intent.
|
| Sundar is telling the market "we're cutting costs". Even the most
| generous estimates of what these employees cost mean Google could
| have them do nothing and still make a healthy profit. Obviously
| they were doing something though so some value is being lost
| while costs are being cut.
|
| Remember that every time you hear "we're laying you off because
| of a recession" or "cheap labor in the developing world took your
| job" remember that it's all propaganda. In all cases, a
| capitalist simply decided to eliminate your job and possibly give
| it to someone else who is ostensibly cheaper.
|
| It's also worth noting that Sundar is financially incentivized to
| boost the share price [1]. There's not much semantic difference
| between "I take full responsibility" and "I want to maximize my
| own (already ridiculously large) pay packet".
|
| [1]:https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/google-ceo-
| sun...
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| tigerlily wrote:
| I wonder what they'll sunset next? Anyone got any hunches?
| rumblefrog wrote:
| In the dawn of rounds and rounds of layoffs in the tech sector.
| How would one advise a new CS BS graduate to tread?
|
| I've been told that young engineers are still in demand, and to
| look for opportunities in small startups, but seemingly out of
| the applications, merely no one has moved forward or replied
| back.
| nmca wrote:
| Do a PhD at ETH Zurich
| rumblefrog wrote:
| I'm sorry I'm not familiar with ETH Zurich, is that a
| Switzerland thing? I reside in the US.
| Moissanite wrote:
| I wonder how much major tech companies are taking into account
| "revenge" when doing their firing. For example, if I was a GCP
| Solutions Architect and got laid off, my skills would be well
| suited to jumping to a customer who is using GCP - but would I be
| inclined to support this activity, giving the employer who fired
| me more revenue? Depends on the availability of roles of course,
| but I would certainly be giving strong consideration to ways to
| screw them over in return, for example by advocating for another
| cloud and quietly, tactically airing some dirty laundry.
| pm90 wrote:
| Nobody behaves this way. A GCP solutions architect has spent
| years acquiring valuable skills and experience. They aren't
| gonna throw it away out of spite.
|
| The only thing laid off employees will generally do is never,
| ever work for the employer that laid them off ever again.
| Moissanite wrote:
| > A GCP solutions architect has spent years acquiring
| valuable skills and experience
|
| Citation needed :-)
|
| Joking aside, I think you're right for the vast majority of
| cases, but "nobody" feeling this way seems highly unlikely.
| Also, mid-level technical people having a grudge next year
| aren't a problem - but that might not be the case in 10
| years, when the laid-off person is CTO of a big potential
| customer - at that point, the technical skills are
| irrelevant, but the impact being laid off had on that person
| emotionally/financially won't be.
| eunos wrote:
| I think for most people 'revenge' either doesnt exist or
| dissipated quickly. If GCP skills bring money to the account
| then most people will leverage it regardless of their personal
| feeling to Google
| nullhash wrote:
| I got accepted at Google back in October for New Grad and my job
| was to start in May 2023. I am still in "Team Matching" and they
| told me that I should hear from them by January. I have yet to
| hear from them, so I take that this is not very ideal.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Is that 24 weeks plus two weeks per year of service? That sounds
| like an absolute dream. Now I regret not working at Google.
| That's a vacation of a lifetime plus lots of time to relax,
| practice and then interview.
| college_physics wrote:
| For those affected the tech layoffs may be crushing (though by
| many comments here on HN lots of people are fully comfortable
| with transactional relations with an employer).
|
| An interesting question is whether this round of layoffs signals
| some sort of paradigm shift in the broader tech world, a
| "disruption event" amidst a "bad economy" that would indeed be a
| motivation for alternative business models, startups etc to pull
| up their sleeves, hunker down, survive the dinosaur extinction
| and emerge standing on the other side?
|
| I don't think so. This is just "management-by-public-markets-
| stock-price", which is in turn management by collective madness
| [deleted]
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Every time I read stuff like:
|
| > "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth.
| To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic
| reality than the one we face today."
|
| I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2
| years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that
| free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't
| believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed
| that this was the new reality going forward. It was written in
| the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of
| understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and
| artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term.
|
| Really either the folks writing this crap take us for fools, or
| they're really shortsighted fools themselves.
| dustingetz wrote:
| we are measuring something about humanity here
| tephra wrote:
| In a similar vein, I would like to know what the "and I take
| full responsibility for this" line that CEOs always say in
| these emails actually looks like besides just saying it in the
| email.
| brookst wrote:
| That's it. It just means that they are making a point of not
| blaming their reports ("today is a tough day, especially
| because Bob over-hired in marketing and Kate talked me into
| that engineering expansion")
| TheCleric wrote:
| It's the corporate version of "It's not you, it's me."
| breakup line.
| htrp wrote:
| "It's not you, it's me, but I'm still deciding to breakup
| with you"
| saurik wrote:
| So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also
| simultaneously felt a bit like an economic _slowdown_ caused by
| the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some
| relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure:
| people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in
| a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a
| world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses
| shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to
| people all staying inside.
|
| I had not just hoped but kind of _expected_ that, if we ever
| again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at
| restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to
| theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly,
| advertisements on Google for all of those physical products,
| services, and entertainment options people might now want again
| --would kind of _explode_ from latent demand and pent up
| frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only
| THEN go into a _recession_!
|
| But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty
| that I don't know much about complicated global- or even
| national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about
| how--and very critically _when_ --the Federal Reserve functions
| (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I
| had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything
| looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation
| indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI
| wage increases :(.
| mabbo wrote:
| > Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not
| representative of the future.
|
| I disagree. There's charts showing the proportion of commerce
| online vs offline and it slowly rises over time over the last
| 20 years. It's following a pretty stable trend. Until the end
| of 2021 or so, the data really really looked like there had
| been a 5-6 year jump ahead on the curve thanks to COVID-19.
|
| The question was never "is this a temporary change", it was "
| _how much_ of this is temporary and how much is permanent? ".
| When the dust settled, would we see it go back to a 2-year
| jump-ahead? Stay at a 5-year? Go back to what was expected?
|
| Nobody knew the answer. You didn't. You had a guess. And _most_
| people forget what their guess was once they know the answer,
| and believe they always knew the answer.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Agree with you that all in all those companies are still
| mostly bigger than they were pre-pandemic, and their business
| indeed get ahead a notch by the effect of the pandemic. And
| clearly now the dust settles and they're ahead, overall, but
| need to trim down headcount, because they're not as ahead as
| they could have been in an alternate universe. That's all
| fine, although it's not great for those fired.
|
| I just can't stand the pretense "oh no we didn't know we over
| hired" like come on. We _all_ knew y'all were over hiring.
| Just cut the crap.
| Zvez wrote:
| the worst part is that even when economics growth stopped
| earlier this year, they didn't stop hiring. They didn't adapt
| fast enough to reduce the damage. They didn't try to optimize
| their workforce, they just went on with it till the moment they
| need to fire 12K
| kamaal wrote:
| >>Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not
| representative of the future.
|
| In hindsight, yes. But by that definition every decision is a
| coin flip, because no matter how good we get at predicting
| things, you are always and always making decisions based on
| past data, and that can't accomodate random 'act of god' sort
| of events COVID and Ukraine war was.
|
| >>Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons
| were a phase.
|
| There was no way to know COVID was a phase, we still can't say
| with confidence that COVID is over.
| bko wrote:
| Googles revenue grew 41% in 2021, which is higher than normal.
| But not crazy. It was not about future projections or anything
| real. It was about cheap money and asset inflation. I don't
| know the exact mechanisms but I'm not convinced that it was
| about projections and now a letdown. Revenue is falling sure
| but it's still growing incredibly fast for such a large company
|
| 2022 (TTM) $282.11 B 9.5%
|
| 2021 $257.63 B 41.15%
|
| 2020 $182.52 B 12.77%
|
| 2019 $161.85 B 18.3%
|
| 2018 $136.81 B 23.42%
|
| 2017 $110.85 B 22.8%
|
| 2016 $90.27 B 20.38%
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/revenue/
| avrionov wrote:
| "Revenue is falling sure"
|
| Your numbers show that the revenue is increasing, but the
| growth is slower, which is very different than the revenue is
| falling.
| maigret wrote:
| The classic error.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| They needed the increased labor at the time, they got it,
| utilized it, juiced profits and now don't need it so are
| getting rid of it. They used the increased labor to increase
| profits by 41% in 2021. If they did not have the increased
| labor in that period would their profits have increased by that
| much?
|
| I see this comment in much the same way I see a bear in a bull
| market. Stock X is $100 and Bob buys it. Carl tells Bob he is
| an idiot and the stock is going to go down. Stock X goes to
| $200. Bob sells. Stock X starts going down and Carl starts
| telling everyone he was right and he knew the stock would
| crash. In the mean time Bob is retired and has gotten
| everything he needed from that particular stock purchase.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Is this the "scalability of the cloud" I keep hearing about?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Pretty much. You don't want to know what happens at Amazon
| when you turn off your EC2 instance.
| kick_in_the_dor wrote:
| You must be rich from being able to predict the future so well.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I did in fact make good money from these broad predictable
| things. Like these big corps did. And probably a ton of
| people.
| matwood wrote:
| > Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not
| representative of the future.
|
| Are you making the same mistake they did and thinking in 0/1
| terms? The last 2 years _have_ shifted the future, but the
| shifts are gradients with few if any being absolute 0 /1.
| ctvo wrote:
| Give me a break. Everyone knew it wouldn't have lasted, sure,
| in the same way we all know China won't be the manufacturing
| hub of the world forever or the dollar may not be the primary
| currency.
|
| When will the transition happen? If you knew exactly, like you
| seem to be indicating, you should make some money off of it.
| Otherwise hindsight armchair CEO is dull.
| fhd2 wrote:
| These companies work not for their employees, but for their
| shareholders. I suppose shareholders would have revolted if
| they hadn't increased investment to potentially hit it big when
| they could. Turns out these investments didn't work out, so now
| they cut their losses. From a shareholder's perspective, I can
| understand this narrative as not foolish, rather courageous.
|
| From an outside (and employee) perspective, it can seem foolish
| though.
| throw123123123 wrote:
| Your clairvoyance must have made you extremely rich as you
| assess these events with accuracy and perfect timing, and thus
| made the right open-market financial bets to profit from them.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| What bets would those have been? It's not always
| straightforward to bet on economic trends, especially on the
| short side.
| throw123123123 wrote:
| Either it was predictable or it wasn't.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Companies don't need to be right, they need to maximise the
| chance of succeeding. Yes, it was obvious that the raining-
| money period wasn't going to last... but what if it had? What
| if Google had decided to ignore it, and then by some ridiculous
| twist of fate, it did continue and a competitor did leverage it
| to beat Google?
|
| Firing a bunch of people and killing some projects is a tiny
| price to pay for the potential upside. As humans, seeing people
| get fired is painful and we view the individuals responsible in
| a negative light -- which I agree with! -- but for Google the
| corporate entity, and Microsoft and Shopify etc etc it made
| complete rational sense _even in hindsight_.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| But that's not the intended message when they send out these
| memos.
|
| They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we
| hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for
| everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So,
| sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired."
|
| I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what
| they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the
| economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go."
|
| Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is
| often a rational thing to do.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Right, because they didn't _know_ it wouldn't last hence
| taking the risk. The message is being written after the
| fact, and the message isn't a lie per-se, rather, it's a
| human framing of the situation with the subtext of _we are
| a company and a company is not a job factory but a
| shareholder value factory_.
|
| Every message every company ever writes that leans on any
| amount of humanity is, in your characterisation, a lie...
| and while, sure, that's technically true, we all take part
| in this big theatre production where we expect companies to
| pretend to have humanity -- your problem is with all of us
| participating in this system pretending a company gives a
| single solitary fuck about any of us.
|
| These performative messages are just one small part of the
| performance, writing an "honest" message where they say
| "you're all fired and we don't care" wouldn't change
| anything. They'd still be doing a million other pieces of
| performative humanity.
| subradios wrote:
| I think we can give Google executives a little more
| credit.
|
| They care a bounded amount.
|
| A rough approximation of how much they care would be the
| rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in
| the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to
| employees that Google can afford due to their dominant
| market position.
|
| Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe
| benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but
| they aren't going to matter in the face of another
| $100,000 in salary.
|
| Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred
| bucks tho.
| phphphphp wrote:
| I don't think nice things can be characterised as caring,
| though. If their decisions were actively harming the
| company in order to benefit the humanity of their
| employees, that would be reasonable evidence that they
| care, but I don't think we can interpret every nice thing
| for a person as caring.
|
| For example, providing benefits above and beyond what
| other companies provide has a clear justification for the
| business: happier employees means better work from people
| that are better retained.
|
| A good question would be: if Google stood to benefit from
| making their employees lives miserable, would they do it?
| I'd argue, yes, absolutely, and there's much evidence of
| it. For example, Google (and many other big tech
| companies) pay human moderators low wages to do work that
| causes psychological damage.
|
| Caring about people as people and not employees isn't
| demonstrated by giving them nice benefits around the
| edge, it's demonstrate by putting their humanity above
| their employment.
| subradios wrote:
| Google does not have evidence that their outrageous
| salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line
| outside of the door.
|
| The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make
| people stay later.
|
| Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to
| increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people
| at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.
|
| This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same
| choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it
| every time.
|
| The exact lines change depending on local customs and
| competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can
| afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really
| cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin
| businesses have shittier working environments - there's
| more competition and less room for executives to care.
| brookst wrote:
| So if I buy a bunch of stock in $RAND because conditions
| favor their business, and then conditions change and I sell
| the stock, I'm _lying_ when I say I changed strategy
| because of changing conditions?
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| In this oddly specific example: Only if you had every
| reason to expect things would change, didn't warn anyone,
| and felt the need to blame the market for your actions.
| In that case, technically, yes, I would consider that
| dishonest.
|
| But: To whom did you owe honesty to when buying stock?
| I'm not sure you owed honesty to anyone there.
|
| When you hire people, you're making decisions that have
| impacts on their lives and those of their families. In
| the case of companies like Google, they're impacting
| entire communities.
|
| So I would say they have a moral (if not legal)
| obligation to be more transparent with their workers
| about their intentions. But you, in this stock situation,
| would not have any moral obligation whatsoever.
| hammock wrote:
| > we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation
| for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you
| today
|
| Did people not also take jobs at google in order to milk
| the situation for everything they could?
|
| Could those people not have foreseen an economic downturn,
| which happens at least every 8-10 years the last one being
| 14 years ago?
|
| What specific lie did google tell, or are you speculating?
| AYBABTME wrote:
| They did - the employees. The annoying part is the execs
| pretending like this is all unexpected. They could have
| skipped that line, just stay quiet. Don't pretend like
| you didn't know it was coming.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| The implied lie that this is just an unfortunate and
| unforeseeable circumstance. The unwillingness to be
| transparent about it. That's the lie, and it's not
| speculation if I'm observing their own words.
|
| I think your framing of this as a predictable cycle is
| deceptive. This isn't about regular crashes. This is
| about a temporary pandemic-driven situation. Yes,
| employees hired in the rush could have seen this coming.
| But it's unfair to assume 100% of them did. I don't think
| it's unfair to think it would be shockingly foolish for
| the entire tech leadership class to not have seen it
| coming.
|
| All I'm saying is: Own it.
|
| I'm not saying it was evil. I would probably have made
| similar decisions.
|
| But I would have been more transparent about it. I would
| have hired people on contracts with the explicit
| understanding that this was surge hiring. That way no one
| would be surprised when the contracts weren't renewed.
| That would have been honest.
| b345 wrote:
| Nope, pretty sure Google is not the one being milked
| here.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a
| semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled
| situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the
| medium term.
|
| Can you point to any comments that people with a semblance of
| understanding made back then in which they were able estimate
| the rough time window when things would come back down to
| earth?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't have proof so you probably will dismiss me but I was
| saying privately back in March 2020 that we'd go back to
| normal in 18-24 months. This is just based on historical
| pandemics so it's not like you have to be some kind of
| genius.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| If you look the Spanish flu in particular, it eventually fade
| out after 2-3y, and people resumed life by a mix of adapting
| to the new reality and stopped caring, and the illness
| mutated to a less dangerous form. People (at least those I
| think sounded pragmatic) were talking about that back in
| Spring 2020.
|
| I don't know of a comment in 2020 that specifically say that,
| mainly because I don't keep a log and will not go search for
| it.
| Eupraxias wrote:
| Fair point! However, I suspect many people have, as I have,
| been screaming silently for a few years that we will have to
| pay for all of this at some point soon. I expected what we
| are seeing, and I'd be amazed if most others on this site are
| surprised.
| kloch wrote:
| > Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not
| representative of the future.
|
| Don't humans almost always extrapolate their present situation
| far out in the future?
| erfgh wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20.
| rvz wrote:
| Well at the height of the market euphoria, nobody listened to
| my warnings a year ago:
|
| From [0] November 2021
|
| Me: 'Finally' The start of the market crash is under way...
|
| >> Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high
| inflation. [0]
|
| Then more concerns for preparing for the recession months later
| after I said we were already in a recession. [1].
|
| >> No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a
| recession. [1]
|
| So after many layoffs, rising inflation, US debt ceiling fears
| happening since then the lagging indicators of this have now
| take effect and so 'now' we are preparing for the recession?
|
| It has already happened and is still happening which it is too
| late to prepare.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| _> Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we've
| seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth,
| we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face
| today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the
| last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody
| knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a
| phase._
|
| How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is
| not to maximize employment, it's to maximize profit.
|
| That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in
| contractions.
|
| That's exactly what they said they have done.
| lumost wrote:
| This approach doesn't make sense when it comes to software.
| Expanding your dev team during a boom year to only contract
| it in the future bust year - will leave you moving slower in
| the bust years. While tech has never been known for it's
| stable job market, seeing the most profitable corporations in
| the world conducting layoffs doesn't sit well.
| bumby wrote:
| > _will leave you moving slower in the bust years_
|
| How is this any different than any other industry? In
| manufacturing, slowing reduces the risk that supply will
| outstrip demand. In software, slowing down means reducing
| the risk that time is spent producing software that won't
| have an economic payoff. The effort is focused on the
| business lines that add to the bottom line and less on the
| speculative ones. If you look at where a lot of the tech
| industry layoffs are coming from, they tend to be the not-
| yet-viable moonshot ideas.
| lumost wrote:
| Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire
| extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers
| busy themselves adding new production lines and creating
| more complex manufacturing processes to support products.
| 2 years later you sack the engineers.
|
| You are left with more complex product and extra assembly
| lines. You aren't sure which ones you need or are
| obligated to continue - so you run them all.
| bumby wrote:
| Is this meant to be an analogy for software production?
|
| It seems like the crux is here:
|
| _You aren't sure which ones you need or are obligated to
| continue_
|
| This is essentially saying leaders/managers don't know
| how to prioritize. What much of tech is doing right now
| is prioritizing by cutting back on the programs that
| aren't particularly successful. It's the same thing done
| in manufacturing.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| This is such a bean-counter MBA perspective. It's tech,
| if you want real growth, you need moonshot ideas. If you
| want to just become a GE style dependable divided stock,
| then fine, but your shareholders aren't going to triple
| their wealth again.
| bumby wrote:
| Nobody is saying reduce moonshot ideas to zero. There's a
| difference between "throwing everything at the wall to
| see what sticks" to having a risk/reward way of
| prioritizing what to fund. What you're alluding to is the
| "grow at all costs and find a way to be profitable later"
| strategy that is prevalent in SV, but tends to not work
| so well in real economic downturns. Sometimes I think
| people either forget, or are too young, to remember that
| the pre-2021 decade+ of near-zero interest rates are a
| historical anomaly.
|
| Put differently, take a look at the R&D costs of
| google[1]. Note how, despite a constantly increasing
| amount of investment, they still derive 80% of their
| revenue from ads. Granted, some of the R&D will
| contribute to ads revenue, but it may also be indicative
| of a moonshot strategy that isn't contributing much in
| terms of "real growth" in alternative revenue streams.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/507858/alphabet-
| google-r...
| lumost wrote:
| Does a moonshot mean funding a team of 50 without
| tangible goals for ten years? The original google
| moonshots leaned heavily on individual engineers
| producing Herculean results eg gmail.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Not only that, but layoffs are not precise.
|
| People on my team were fired today. They weren't my lowest
| performers.
| riku_iki wrote:
| any idea what was the selection criteria?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| No.
|
| We are still finalizing annual reviews. It couldn't have
| been current performance ratings. I know of some low
| performers on nearby teams who weren't laid off.
|
| Some (many?) teams were entirely unaffected, so somebody
| up in my management chain decided my team was less
| critical. No clue how the individual people decisions
| were made.
| nkozyra wrote:
| The argument is that the explanation is disingenuous. Which,
| I get that it's corporate speak, but when nobody buys it why
| bother with the lie?
| specialist wrote:
| Firstly, the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value is
| a recent myth. Before that, it was understood that
| corporations are chartered to serve the public interest.
|
| A few may argue that corporations are super-persons imbued
| with super-rights which outweigh the rights of actual
| persons. Please note that's a minority viewpoint.
|
| Secondly, corporations are not the only cast members with
| agency in this narrative.
|
| Our government, the source of all that free money, acting on
| the goals of full employment and bountiful future tax
| revenue, probably has some agency.
|
| Us individuals, whose blood and entrails lubricate the gears
| of the machine built from our bone and sinew, also have
| agency. Stuff like get fat and happy and watch our grandkids
| grow up, have enough excess wealth and time to travel a bit,
| to not bleed out in a ditch, cold and haggard, after a
| lifetime of toil. And most of us aren't particularly invested
| in further enriching the latest cohort of robber barons.
| subradios wrote:
| It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an
| organization or class of organization "is" something
| depends on legal and social context.
|
| Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the
| field of economics, and even popular left economists like
| Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise.
|
| You can think it _shouldn 't_ be popular among economists
| for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to
| suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more
| correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if
| you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as
| "truth".
|
| The robber barons you speak of have created the single
| largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the
| west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically
| blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the
| CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of
| living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970.
|
| Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism,
| but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the
| common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist"
| processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.
| agluszak wrote:
| > That's exactly what they said they have done.
|
| But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about
| employees than profits.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Would they be more "caring about employees" if the didn't
| fire anyone now but they had not hired tens of thousands in
| the last couple of years?
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| They're framing it that way because framing it that way is
| a strategy to maximize profits.
| nebolo wrote:
| I don't think so: they say explicitly that they hired to
| "match and fuel [...] growth".
| AYBABTME wrote:
| They're taking me for a fool in that they say BS with a
| straight face, pretending that either they couldn't have
| foreseen or that I couldn't. If they'd phrase all this as "we
| surged in a hiring race to the bottom, with the intention of
| scaling back" that'd be the plain truth and no faked
| stupidity would be required.
|
| Also it's beaten down that the purpose of companies is to
| make profits. Perhaps in some specific legal context or
| interpretation it might be, but the purpose of a company is
| mostly to do whatever the people in charge of it want it to
| do. A ton of companies' purpose is to principally do other
| things than just money. People running Apple and making
| phones like to make money & design beautiful consumer
| devices. People making rockets like mostly to go to space and
| hope they can also make some money. People running machine
| shops like to make moneys and they like to cut metal. People
| running industrial machinery like to make money and building
| CNC machines. People making cars like to make money and
| making cars. People running biotech companies like to advance
| life sciences and make money. And so on.
| ericpauley wrote:
| Agreed. In this case, google isn't even claiming this change
| was unexpected, just that the reality has changed. Seems way
| more honest than the other corporate-doublespeak layoffs
| we've seen.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| First, just because we understand that Google wants to
| maximize profit doesn't mean they need to lie about it -- it
| means they have _no need_ to lie about it, because nobody 's
| fooled. Either they consider at least some of us fools who
| would believe such an obvious lie, or they're engaging in a
| ritual of futile lying whose purpose I cannot grasp.
|
| Second, why _must_ the point of a company be to maximize
| profit? Why can 't it be to make enough profit to remain
| stable in the long term, instead of growing rapidly to a size
| where it will eventually either have to engage in
| monopolistic behavior to survive or else, having extracted
| all available profit in its sphere, die?
| boplicity wrote:
| > The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it's
| to maximize profit.
|
| Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this
| wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is _not_
| to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms.
|
| And frankly, believing this _is_ optional. It 's like saying
| the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure,
| you _can_ choose to think that, but if you do, it would be
| easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that
| way is completely optional.
|
| And...just because many people _do_ think that way doesn 't
| mean we have to. We can choose to apply a _different_ meaning
| to the idea of a company.
|
| As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our
| company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way.
| Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of
| the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term
| monetary gain.
|
| Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Companies don't exist to maximize profit.
|
| As soon as this sentiment prevails, not only during times
| of personal loss, but also in times of personal prosperity,
| you can start to think of most humans as being part of the
| solution instead of this particular problem.
| barneygale wrote:
| The idea is that if you pit those villains against
| eachother on a level playing field, they'll improve society
| on the whole.
|
| To a certain extent it's true, and it's only failing in the
| case of Google/etc because we've allowed mega-companies to
| become a thing (which distorts the playing field). OTOH
| we're rapidly heading towards total planetary extinction,
| so something huge needs to change.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Maximizing profit should be the main signal of creating
| value, if you have a lot of revenue but no profit - you are
| actually destroying value.
|
| There are dynamics where profit chasing can be perverted
| (eg. monopolistic pricing, fraud, etc.) which is why we
| have regulations. But profit chasing in itself is the best
| signal of value creation we have.
|
| I've lived in a post socialist country transitioning from
| socialist to capitalist system and I don't want to live in
| a world where politics define value, profit chasing can
| lead to pathologies, but political value system is based on
| flawed principles.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> we could solve so many harms._
|
| The only 'harm' in question is that the other evil profit
| seeking villains are losing their source of profit, left to
| go back to do wonderful volunteer work at charities or
| whatever it is that is considered more virtuous. Crushing
| 12,000 villains in one fell swoop, perhaps Google is the
| superhero here?
| melvinmelih wrote:
| The purpose of a company is not to maximize profits because
| that would mean you have to pay taxes.
|
| The holy goal instead, is to maximize shareholder value. A
| small, but important difference (and helps explain the
| existence of companies like Uber and Twitter who have
| barely turned a profit in the past decade).
| justahuman74 wrote:
| At some point there does have to be a cash-out, otherwise
| what would motivate the person at the end of the line to
| buy the shares that you're selling
| iglio wrote:
| The cash out is selling the shares and realising the
| capital gain?
|
| For these types of business, there's always someone next
| in line to buy, hoping for the same performance.
| yboris wrote:
| +1 for your sentiment. Thank you for articulating it.
|
| Feels like so many people in the US has taken the Adam
| Smith self interest sentiment to the extreme, to the point
| that people seem to forget we are living in a _society_ - a
| very interdependent entity that functions poorly if we don
| 't work together.
| glacials wrote:
| I agree with you, but companies exist in an evolutionary
| environment where--broad strokes--anyone who doesn't do
| this gets out-competed. You can have 99 companies that
| behave well, but just one that doesn't can drive them all
| out of business if it's willing to do what they won't. The
| solution is not to chew them out, but to pass policy and
| vote with your wallet.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yep. This is entirely our choice.
|
| "Oh, corporations _have_ to be massively harmful entities
| that crush people under their feet in order to enrich their
| investors " is a choice. It is a system created entirely by
| humans.
|
| This is what people say when they talk about how capitalism
| has so thoroughly won. People speak about it like it is a
| force of nature or a property of physical reality itself.
| There is no alternative. If megacorps don't abuse their
| employees and vacuum up dollars from their customers in
| every possible way then the line will go down, and we can't
| have that.
| politician wrote:
| This perspective, implemented broadly, would considerably
| reduce the pools of available financing accessible to a
| given company. This in turn would reduce employment levels
| as companies contract in a more difficult capital
| environment.
|
| If you are an investor, activist or otherwise, you benefit
| from the current practice that managers have a fiduciary
| duty to shareholders.
| p0pcult wrote:
| I agree with you. I think the purpose of a company is to
| help ensure social stability by providing productive and
| meaningful employment. If the government is doing its job
| and ensuring an environment in which firms can thrive
| (financial stability, infrastructural stability, social
| stability), then the firm's responsibilities should mirror
| those: take care of employees and customers by treating
| them fairly (financial, social stability) and the physical
| environment (infrastructural stability).
|
| Just because Milton Friedman claimed that it is the main
| objective of a company to maximize shareholder value[1],
| doesn't mean it is true. Milton Friedman was a bad dude,
| and part of a bad school of economics[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think you can choose to apply a different meaning
| to _Google_ , though. Ad tech is the Platonic ideal of a
| profit-focused enterprise, and even someone who's not
| personally working on ads has to understand that's where
| their salary and benefits are coming from.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Successful and well-regarded companies will indeed
| arithmetically maximize profits if they're around in the
| long term while they are likely to see short term
| profiteers fail. Maximizing profits entails rather more
| than making a quick buck.
| abh123 wrote:
| A company is a legal thing that is owned by shareholders.
| Like if I own a car, I want it to take me from A->B as
| expediently as possible. I don't want my car to have a
| social mission. I'm not sure why a company should be
| different. Now I do think that the disbursed profits to
| shareholders from the company should be used to fund many
| social missions, via charities and non-profits and the
| like.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| If you own a car you don't just want it to take you from
| A->B expediently. You should also want to do it
| presumably safely, without killing people, following
| laws, in a way that also keeps the car maintainable. If
| you want cars to slow down in school crossing zones
| that's a social mission.
| abh123 wrote:
| Breaking the law is not expedient in the larger sense.
| What I meant is let's not hobble the car by for example
| like the sibling poster says giving away free rides or
| having to drop off free meals. These can be better
| achieved by Charities or Soup Kitchens.
| foogazi wrote:
| > If you want cars to slow down in school crossing zones
| that's a social mission.
|
| That's risk avoidance - social mission would be driving
| around town giving free rides to people
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Isn't risk avoidance social in nature when it's dealing
| with people?
| jeffreyq wrote:
| I'm inclined towards your argument, but to play devil's
| advocate, I'd say you are making a false equivalence
| between a car and a company.
|
| A car is exclusively a tool, and a company is a tool from
| some perspectives, but involves humans. Hence why ethics
| are involved and there is no clear answer.
|
| If instead you replaced car with horses, or worse yet,
| with human powered transportation would your answer be
| any different.
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| Pretty funnily, quite a few companies in the US seem to
| exist not to maximize profit.
|
| Some, like Amazon, immediately reinvest the profits into
| their growth and avoid taxes on the profits.
|
| Some, like Uber, seem to exist to only sustain an illusion
| of future possible profits. Most of startups in the era of
| cheap money were manifestly unprofitable, and spent more
| and more attempting to achieve growth and grab the market
| share.
|
| Beside these, there is a number of barely profitable
| companies that just exist to sustain their business and
| give the owners and a few employees some daily bread. Most
| small restaurants and small stores are like that. They
| maximize not the short-term profit but the probability to
| keep earning something in foreseeable future, a bit like
| subsistence farming.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Companies exist to maximize profits with existing legal
| rules and social norms.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| I think this is aligns with Simon Sinek's philosophy in The
| Infinite Game[0], which I really enjoyed reading. I totally
| agree with your point: business mindset _is_ a choice.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Game
| pc86 wrote:
| You are free to believe something else and go off and do
| whatever you want with your life. Nobody is stopping you,
| and more importantly, nobody is calling you a villain for
| believing differently.
|
| And yet here _you_ are, painting everyone who disagrees
| with you as some sort of maniacal evil-doer because what
| they believe is different than what you believe.
| barneygale wrote:
| Mindless accumulation of wealth _is_ evil. All major
| world religions and ethics systems acknowledge this.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| "Help, my quest to maximize profit at the cost of human
| misery has people painting me as an un-empathetic,
| maniacal evil-doer! Why can't people understand that its
| actually just like, my opinion that causing societal harm
| for short term quarterly gains is good, is just like my
| opinion and every opinion is valid!"
| marknutter wrote:
| Why does maximizing profit have to come at the cost of
| human misery? I would argue that maximizing profit is a
| direct result of _reducing_ human misery.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think it is maniacally evil to put peoples housing,
| healthcare, and ability to remain in the country at risk.
| It is inherently throwing 12,000 households into sudden
| insecurity. There better be a better reason than "whoops
| economic headwinds that we didn't budget/prepare for".
| Peoples access to food, housing, healthcare, and not
| being expelled from the country should be valued way more
| than this.
| pc86 wrote:
| These are people making 3, 5, 10 times the median
| _household_ income on their own. People with in-demand
| skills, with good resumes, and access to a remote pool of
| positions.
|
| With even the slightest bit of foresight or financial
| planning, they'll be fine for months or longer.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I don't really care if they'll be fine for "months".
| Months is not a lot of stability! Especially if you have
| dependents who need healthcare, or have a visa that
| requires you to find employment immediately or risk
| expulsion! Or just went into debt because everyone bought
| a new house with the low rates recently!
|
| It shouldn't be an individual family's responsibility to
| plan for its massively growing, massively productive,
| massively profitable employer to treat them like a
| wrapper to be used and tossed in the trash when done.
|
| It's evil to treat being depended upon to provide a means
| of food, housing, healthcare, and continued residency as
| something that can just be shut off without warning, to
| no fault of the dependents.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Really? Cause I'm making a public note here that I didn't know.
| I fully expected WFH and automation to continue to fuel the
| need for software development, albeit at a slower rate. I'm
| also making a public note that even if I foresaw a crash after
| printing free money, I didn't expect it to be compounded by the
| most drastic eco-legislation ever, plus a war in Ukraine. And I
| sure as hell didn't expect the last two to be so perfectly
| synergistic in increasing energy prices.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'm a bit out of the loop. What is the drastic eco-
| legislation you're referring to?
| pnutjam wrote:
| please elaborate on the "drastic eco-legislation", sounds
| like a talking point from a dubious source.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I assume the Inflation Reduction Act.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I think WFH and automation gained a boost from the pandemic
| and while the pendulum will continue to balance back, the
| overall effect will be more WFH and automation than if the
| pandemic hadn't hit.
|
| Large scale disruptions cause governments to print money, and
| I think the IRA (which I assume is what you refer to) was in
| a way predictable, because government historically do
| infrastructure spending to keep the economy afloat after
| large scale disruptions. That the Democrats would push
| infrastructure spending on tech and eco stuff is not
| particularly surprising. Asian countries have been pouring
| their R&D in solar panels, chips, batteries, manufacturing,
| for years. The pandemic very early on made bare the US' dire
| positioning, versus Asian countries relative advantage in
| that aspect. I wouldn't have predicted the IRA but it's
| predictable that an infra bill would have come. That's what
| happened in prior cases.
|
| I didn't expect the war in Ukraine, but we could expect wars.
| Trouble times create incentives (disparity) and
| opportunities. I sadly expect more large conflicts in the
| coming years. I think the average pragmatic person probably
| also does.
|
| As for the current economic crisis, I'll go on a limb and
| guess it'll probably maintain itself for another 2-3-4y
| horizon, like prior ones did. And the boiling pot it will
| cause will be fertile ground for conflicts (and innovation).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Everyone knew things would change.
|
| Nobody knew when and how.
| [deleted]
| jpadkins wrote:
| Can you cite you or anyone making specific claims in 2020 or
| 2021 that the online growth rates are temporary and not a
| shift? I was skeptical until mid 2021 when everything in person
| was opening again, but the shift to online frenzy wasn't
| slowing. I knew there would be some backsliding, but I thought
| there was a permanent shift for some people who realized online
| ordering, online activity is just easier. Some areas haven't
| backslid much at all (video meetings, WFH, online schooling,
| etc).
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Can't really cite, because I consume a lot of material but
| don't take notes.
|
| I think if you picture yourself as a population of 1000.
| Y'all are someone who hasn't used technology X before because
| you haven't yet had to, and suddenly you're encouraged to do
| so. The probability that you will do so now, instead of in X
| period of time, has increased. It's not going to happen all
| at once, but over some time, which means the adoption rate
| will compound. But like any adoption curve, some of y'all
| 1000 will churn, depending on how useful the technology
| proves out in the long term. What's the average lifetime
| before a user churn? You can guess for yourself, how quickly
| do you get bored with most of your new toys? Some toys stick
| around because you find them drastically better, some others
| you start ignoring.
|
| So it's not that the online growth rate was temporary, but
| that it's (sorta) obvious that it was going to recede from
| it's peak. Like Pokemon Go, which is still popular but
| nowhere near as it was near day one.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| What do you want them to say? "It's our right to fire people
| and we've now chosen to do so!" Technically true but sounds
| bad.
|
| They're just putting a PR spin on it.
| kmlx wrote:
| sure, but the problems back then were immediate for google et
| al: "we need more people to deal with the increased flow". they
| hoped those covid patterns will remain after covid. they
| didn't.
| grugagag wrote:
| At that level of money decisions only make sense financially
| with complete disregard for anything else and without any
| efficiency in mind
| asciimov wrote:
| All of them are doing this to shore up short term value. Say
| this saves google 1 to 2 Billion over this next year, that's a
| billion dollars they can spend on stock buy backs and dividend
| payments.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone,
| really believed that this was the new reality going forward."
|
| They didn't. They knew it wouldn't last. But what they had to
| do was stay competitive and/or meet demand by scaling up while
| they could. Now they have a larger pool of talent and can cut
| people/programs who are too expensive or are under performing.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Yup. And I'm annoyed that they pretend it was all a mistake,
| and try to pass me the reader for a fool by writing this
| sentence. That's all.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, but this sort of thing is common in many industries.
| The people in power explain things in a political way in
| the name of communicating with laypeople to avoid bad
| reactions. This can be CEOs, politicians, doctors, police,
| developers, etc.
| projectramo wrote:
| "Every damn body" knows this in retrospect. At the time -- when
| we were washing our groceries and we weren't sure if the IFR
| was 1% or 10%, and if it was airborne or if it was morphing
| into something worse -- our new reality might have been very
| different.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| That was only for a few months
| htrp wrote:
| The problem also is the justification for management pay is
| that they are able to predict these kind of things and avoid
| the kind of disruption to the organization that occurs in this.
|
| Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem the case (that and no one
| gets the credit for just keeping the system running)
| Aunche wrote:
| They aren't fools, they just have their own agendas.
|
| Sundar and other Google execs don't actually own that much
| Google stock, so they have relatively little lose by gambling
| with company money by over hiring.
|
| From Brian Armstrong's perspective, Coinbase didn't overhire at
| all. They captured all the crypto revenue they could during the
| boom, which inflated their stock price while Armstrong was
| cashing out as much as he could.
| nova22033 wrote:
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g.
| ..
|
| The top individual insider shareholders of Google are Larry
| Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai
| Aunche wrote:
| That's my point. Larry and Sergey own 3% of Google each,
| but have long retired from making any decisions at Google.
| Sundar only owns .01% of Google and gets compensated in
| bonuses, so he tunes his strategy on maximizing his bonus.
| micropresident wrote:
| They're shortsighted fools.
| oblio wrote:
| If you've ever wondered, this is not about immediate money
| concerns.
|
| In 2021 Google made $257 billion aka $257 000 000 000. And a
| profit of $76 bn aka $78 000 000 000.
|
| It had 187 000 employees.
|
| That works out to $1.3 million income per employee. And a net
| profit of $406 000 per employee.
|
| They don't need to lay off anyone. They just want to.
|
| I've seen smaller companies where they first shift employees
| around, offer everyone a choice, etc. People are only really laid
| off is things don't work out over many months or even years.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Google is a company with a fiduciary obligation to maximize
| shareholder profits.
|
| The average employee laid off is going to have 2 months of work
| - paid - to find a new job, plus an additional close to ~$80k
| or so to hold them over til they find a new job.
|
| If Google hires people they don't need anymore - regardless of
| how good they are - are they supposed to just keep them on
| payroll indefinitely? Why?
|
| Why are we feeling sorry for employees with great severance
| packages who are _deep_ in the global 1%?
|
| If the worst thing that happens to you in life is that you get
| laid off at Google, you've got a great life.
|
| Life isn't all roses, there's ups and downs - and some people
| who were laid off are going to have a hard time, and that's
| sad. But it's also life.
| warunsl wrote:
| One thing that is easily overlooked is the % of the laid off
| employees who are on a work VISA. This can be easily looked
| up and it is not insignifcant. Once an employee on a work
| VISA is laid off, he/she has a clock ticking. Imagine if such
| a person has invested their and their kids lives here --
| mortgage, school, etc -- this puts an enormous mental stress
| on such families. I am one of those.
|
| Don't get me wrong I am forever grateful the opportunities
| this country has given me and my family. But this rule of
| "get another job in 2 months or get the hell out of the
| country" is just cruel.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Yes, I did overlook this - and you're absolutely right, and
| I couldn't agree more. Thanks for calling me out on it.
|
| We shouldn't be booting out some of the most productive /
| educated people in this country just because they get laid
| off.
|
| We should be trying as hard as we can to keep them in this
| country!
|
| To the extent that - a lot of people feel if a company does
| layoffs - the company should be forced to layoff H1B
| workers first. I think that is complete BS. Layoff the
| people it makes sense to layoff - not the people on the
| other side of the lottery.
| oblio wrote:
| They could shuffle them around for 6-9-12 months first...
|
| Now they're just saying "you're bad for our company, period",
| which is demonstrably false. Some people lost motivation for
| their current project, current team, current manager, current
| org, etc, they just need a jolt.
|
| > Google is a company with a fiduciary obligation to maximize
| shareholder profits.
|
| Yes, both true and also a cop out. We should freaking put it
| in the legal description of a corporation that they also have
| social responsibility.
|
| Otherwise if you follow your definition to its logical
| conclusion you end up with the East India Company starving
| 25% of Bengalis to death because that "maximized shareholder
| profits" (-.-)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > We should freaking put it in the legal description of a
| corporation that they also have social responsibility.
|
| Until that happens - people should blame the company, it's
| the system you have beef with.
|
| > Otherwise if you follow your definition to its logical
| conclusion you end up with the East India Company starving
| 25% of Bengalis to death because that "maximized
| shareholder profits"
|
| Isn't this essentially what we have now? With US companies
| employing lots of people in Bangladesh & Philippines for
| like $2 for 10 hours of labor - living and working in
| unimaginably poor conditions by Western standards?
| oblio wrote:
| > Until that happens - people should blame the company,
| it's the system you have beef with.
|
| Companies bribe, sorry, lobby politicians for that to not
| happen.
|
| > Isn't this essentially what we have now? With US
| companies employing lots of people in Bangladesh &
| Philippines for like $2 for 10 hours of labor - living
| and working in unimaginably poor conditions by Western
| standards?
|
| I honestly don't even know what to say for your
| comparison. Chill out, think about it some more, ask a
| friend if you have to, then realize why your comment is
| both incorrect and also bordering on grotesque.
| gilbetron wrote:
| > fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits.
|
| This is kind of true, but not really.
|
| To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the Hobby Lobby
| case: "Modern corporate law does not require for-profit
| corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything
| else, and many do not."
|
| https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html
| UncleMeat wrote:
| People misunderstand this.
|
| Google's board can be sued by its investors if it decides to
| do something like make a pile of $50b and light it on fire.
| "We don't think you are maximally leveraging your payroll" is
| not actually a real concern.
| W4ldi wrote:
| > They don't need to fire anyone. They just want to.
|
| Why would they want to? If they make so much money, why fire a
| few people for a massive amount of bad PR? So seem to know the
| reasoning. Enlighten us please.
| pm90 wrote:
| Its not bad PR when the narrative has already been set. This
| is a very opportunistic move at cost reduction that would
| have been scrutinized heavily under regular circumstances.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because Google employees are really really expensive, and
| this _won 't_ generate a massive amount of bad PR because
| everyone is doing it. It's the ideal time to sack of
| employees you don't want.
| oblio wrote:
| Everyone's doing it, we might be in a recession, now is the
| best time. Their announcement both follows a trend and gets
| lost in the noise, it doesn't stand out as possibly bad
| management.
|
| Plus someone was saying that it reduces inflationary
| pressures for employees. I.e. you put a lot of people out on
| the job market and you scare others inside the company, who
| are now suddenly happy to still have a job, ergo they stop
| asking as much for raises or for high salaries when they
| apply.
|
| > Why would they want to?
|
| Then enlighten me how a <<hugely>> profitable business needs
| to <<layoff>> large percentages of its workforce???
| ehsankia wrote:
| I'm curious why are you looking at 2021 specifically? Isn't the
| whole idea that 2021 was a huge year for every tech company,
| leading to overhiring, followed up by 2022 which was a rough
| year for every tech company?
|
| They went from $18.9B profit in Q3 2021 to $13.9B in Q3 2022.
| That's a 36% YOY drop and given todays news, it's fair to
| assume Q4 was even worse.
| csvm wrote:
| Amazon, Microsoft, and now Alphabet. Is this because Twitter
| showed an example where you can lay off most of the non-core
| workforce and the tech will still go on?
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I do wonder if this is a consequence of the "My day at
| Linkedin" TikTok videos that were circulating. Looks like
| they'll have to manage life without the wine on tap and the
| morning pedicures before attending 1/2 hour of meetings each
| day.
| lexapro wrote:
| You think executives had to watch TikTok videos to know
| what's going on in their companies? I mean they allowed this
| to happen. It's not the fault of the employees. And of course
| these videos don't show reality, they cut out the boring
| parts (the desk work).
| coredog64 wrote:
| Not the execs, the shareholders. They were seeing this and
| in turn that increased the pressure on executives to
| rationalize staffing.
| pm90 wrote:
| This is not how any of this works.
| paganel wrote:
| > the wine on tap
|
| That always looked like an abomination to me, for the wine,
| that is. You either drink the wine poured directly from a
| bottle (or directly from the barrel, like my grandpa used to
| do), or you don't.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Musk definitely seem to have served as a convenient excuse[1]
| for a ton of related articles. Just yesterday, my boss gave us
| speech on working full 40 hours and not abusing the system.
| Something is definitely in the works now.
|
| edit: I figured some context may be warranted here. We are
| obviously salary. Some remote. Some hybrid. Seemingly, it is a
| result of someone in person in the office complaining. I love
| people.
|
| [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-elon-musk-your-bosss-
| anger-t...
| datalus wrote:
| I hope startups focused on letting builders build is a net
| positive outcome of this and all the other tech layoffs.
| deanmoriarty wrote:
| For what is worth, I am employed at the company and I think this
| is a good thing, the amount of "fat" around here is just
| astonishing and, quite honestly, demoralizing.
|
| I truly believe that the company could function well, and
| continue its mission, even with a 30% reduction or more. The
| number of people who do completely nothing all day, in SWE roles,
| is just unbelievable.
|
| And this without even counting the incredible severance benefits.
| 16 weeks of salary + GSU? Wild. I'd sign in a heartbeat if I were
| offered that.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| It depends a lot on which jobs they cut though. Do they know
| which departments & work groups are the least necessary? Or are
| most of them needed, but with fewer people so they cut X% of
| each team?
|
| Cutting the fat at any company is worthless or even
| catastrophic if the strategy for implementing those cuts is
| crap.
| kderbyma wrote:
| Sounds like poor poor management, probably many layers thick.
| Too many people is not a problem a company like Google if run
| well....
| Romen_b wrote:
| [dead]
| bapetel wrote:
| It has begun after E. Musk fired lot of people. He showed that TT
| can work with less people. Now that covid is far away, everyone
| is cutting.
| dymk wrote:
| It certainly did not start with Musk. We've been in a pandemic
| for over 3 years now.
| lessname wrote:
| This leaves only Apple as a tech giant that has not announced
| layoffs yet. I wonder if they are going to follow this "trend".
| moneywoes wrote:
| Well guess I finally got something in common with google
| employees
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| You can blame companies all you want but it was governments who
| said the new normal was here to stay.
|
| And then it was they who backtracked when they realised just what
| kind of social chaos they'd unleashed...
|
| Companies only followed what was happening and statements by
| government officials.
| trabant00 wrote:
| I don't understand why the comments are mostly upset in these
| cases. If it makes financial sense for you, as an employee, you
| are free to leave a company. Shouldn't companies have the same
| freedom? Why should the CEO be punished in any way for making
| such a decision? Having too many people being payed for some time
| and having to pay severance packages is not enough? What is the
| moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest
| question.
| kazakx wrote:
| The issue is not simple. There are various reasons why people
| may react negatively to news of layoffs. Some may be angry at
| upper management for not feeling the impact of the layoffs and
| still receiving bonuses. Others may be worried about the
| potential for a recession. Additionally, some people may
| critique the capitalist system, despite participating in it in
| their own lives on a smaller scale. And on some level you are
| completely right as it may be necessary for a private company
| to occasionally lay off employees, like pruning a tree.
| yakireev wrote:
| > What is the moral or legal base for attacking these
| companies? Honest question.
|
| If an employee leaves Google, Google loses 1/140k = 0.0007% of
| its workforce, a negligible amount. If Google fires an
| employee, employee typically loses 100% of their income, which
| is non-negligible.
|
| So, Google firing 12k employees means that twelve thousand
| people will lose 100% of their income, for the sake of...
| shareholder interests?
|
| Many people see this situation as morally not-okay.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Broadly, yes.
|
| The issue appears to be a little more complicated though. There
| is no clear reason to do any of it beyond 'signalling' to the
| market that executives are trying to rein in cost in
| anticipation of what now appears to be almost inevitable
| recession ( partially because of signalling just like the one
| from Google ). It is a vicious cycle.
|
| I am not upset, but I am not yet personally affected. I also
| have been saying for a while that low rate encourages unhealthy
| habits ( including in VC realm ).
|
| I guess my beef is that the entire layoff is.. not really
| necessary?
| xyst wrote:
| These companies must hire the same marketing or PR people to
| write these letters.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Seen enough cycles of laying off about 10% [1] of your workforce
| to try and halt a share price slide and make investors happier to
| realise it's in the Howto CEO & Keep Your Job manual.
|
| QED, this announcement is almost entirely about share prices
| sliding in the tech sector since about the beginning of 2022.
|
| ChatGPT's impact on Google is unknown, but it is a fair bet that
| it will be larger [2].
|
| [1] It's always around 10% because all large companies carry
| functions and individuals who can be removed from the enterprise,
| and things will essentially carry on as before once the shock
| subsides.
|
| [2] I don't think many would doubt Google could have rolled out
| its own ChatGPT'alike years ago. The fact that they didn't
| suggests that internally a combination of the undoubted
| reputational risk, cost and the risk to their existing revenue
| streams was enough to prevent it. Google's full of very bright
| people, and they've failed to find a palatable solution in years.
| So even if it is a solvable problem, it seems unlikely that the
| recent nasty shock from ChatGPT is going to have changed that.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Despite the hype ChatGPT is not ready to replace search engines
| yet - no referencing and it literally makes up gibberish if
| it's not sure. At this point I don't see any advantage to
| Google rolling that out. GPT4, GPT5... different story maybe!
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Fundamentally a Google search typically returns a research
| project that involves the user attempting to build their own
| mental model of the "truth".
|
| ChatGPT instead returns an answer that needs research to
| verify facts.
|
| This second approach is already quicker for many use cases
| and can get much better.
|
| So yes, the user may still need search engines to verify. But
| in the future, it seems unlikely that search will be the
| dominant, primary means of people accessing information.
|
| The problem for Google with ChatGPT-a-like results is that
| they strip out the presentation of Google's ads and one of
| its most significant revenue streams. The chief advantage of
| Google acting quickly is it increases its chances of
| retaining an ad business.
| visarga wrote:
| The hallucination part is somewhat solvable, but the
| inference cost is huge. Especially in the chat format where
| you want long history, you have to pay for all the previous
| tokens in each round of dialogue. The cost is about $0.01 per
| page, so it can become $0.10 per reply after 10 pages of
| history accumulated. Even short lines of text have the same
| overhead.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This 'I take full responsibility' thing is getting really
| tiresome. Of course you take full responsibility, you're the
| f'ing CEO, and in case on account of this someone loses their
| house I'm sure you'll make good on it, because it's your
| responsibility, right?
| morepork wrote:
| If you're saying "I take full responsibility", I'd expect a
| meaningful consequence on your part, such as resigning,
| forgoing your bonus for the year or a significant pay cut.
| That's what's happening to the staff being laid off.
|
| But because exec comp is mostly stock based, he's actually
| getting a massive pay increase.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| It's the opposite of taking responsibility though, they're not
| displaying any actions that can be quantified as them actually
| being responsible. If a company is doing mass layoffs it's
| because the executives fucked up, not the employees. The lack
| of corporate/executive responsibility is off the charts. They
| make big mistakes and everyone except them pays. I wouldn't be
| surprised if the executive team have to vacation after this on
| the company dime and receive an extra bonus since they took
| "responsibility".
|
| Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation.
| You would think people that command billions of dollars and
| tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI,
| they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're
| Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...
| ritzaco wrote:
| It's an over-compensation for the earlier responses that blamed
| things on "unforeseeable market conditions" or something in a
| "we did everything perfectly and this is just the way the world
| is" kind of excuse.
|
| It doesn't really help the people who are out of a job, but I
| think it's a nice gesture at least to say "this one is on us,
| we'll reflect on what went wrong and try to do things
| differently next time" even though I have around 0 faith that
| any of these leaders would hire less in another Covid-like
| scenario where funding was cheap and demand for their services
| was growing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's a two sided street: Google is super profitable and could
| _easily_ support their workforce through an economic
| downturn. But they feel their shareholders are more important
| than their employees. And so the employees, whose loyalty is
| demanded in good times, receive none of that loyalty in
| return in bad times.
|
| Also, pretty weird to see 'careers.google.com' up and running
| and apparently hiring for all kinds of roles while at the
| same time letting go of all these people.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Microsoft had <24hr old job postings on the day they
| announced lay-offs. They don't always have to go in
| lockstep esp for companies this big. There are always teams
| that need backfills.
| nix23 wrote:
| >Of course you take full responsibility
|
| But politicians normally don't say that, but they also don't
| have stocks :)
| jatins wrote:
| I wonder if 6% really moves the needle in terms of cost. Coupled
| with the fact they are still hiring it feels like succumbing to
| investor pressure rather than a real cost cutting measure.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| In the UK they only have 20 roles for hiring and it's been that
| way for months prior. Not development jobs by the way, that's
| all jobs.
|
| I've also heard other companies paused hiring (Amazon?) and
| basically stopped interviewing yet their websites advertise
| plenty of roles. I wouldn't consider them reliable. You could
| say it's almost as if they want people to think there are
| opportunities to aim for at such companies...
|
| What you'll have to see is for the next round of "top" CS
| graduates how it is.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| As I commented elsewhere, Q4 earnings report is in two weeks.
| The last two were poor and the trend wasn't looking good. I
| expect this is happening in part because Q4's is going to look
| even worse.
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| If the average cost of those employees is 150k usd, then it's
| 1.8 billion. I imagine it's probably much higher than 150k
| depending on how many were US based engineers. If they make
| 55ish billion this year, I think it makes a pretty decent
| impact.
|
| I 100% support siphoning as much money as possible while doing
| as little work as possible (a.k.a coasting). However, from a
| capitalist perspective, it makes sense to try to weed those
| people out. Gone are the days of a 26 year old making as much
| as a neurosurgeon while working 20 hours a week.
| makach wrote:
| Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are
| affected.
|
| It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the
| workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to
| you, and no promise is certain.
|
| It's your responsibility to take care of yourself.
|
| My take, don't be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible
| and get back on your feet.
|
| Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.
| oaiey wrote:
| Agree with that. The wording is very human and focus on the bad
| parts of it. I hate the term "let people go".
| gcr wrote:
| It feels a little crass to me to judge the wording and
| character of layoff emails, as if some of them are satisfying
| artistically and others are unsatisfying to consume somehow.
|
| At the end of the day, a layoff email is a layoff email.
| Sugarcoating it is just PR.
|
| "It's only a layoff email if it came from the layoff region
| of France, otherwise, it's just a sparkling pink slip"
| nkingsy wrote:
| I think it's worth focusing attention on getting the
| delivery vehicle for such life-changing news right.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life. Seeing
| someone else say that was very refreshing. It's so true that
| when you're gone, the company hardly notices. Being let go with
| no severance and zero days notice was the last straw for me to
| ever put my soul into a soulless company again.
|
| Luckily there are cool ones out there worth putting yourself
| into. I managed to find one. Weirdly I now seem to enjoy
| staying up till crazy o'clock hacking away or doing stuff over
| the weekend. But only because it's so much fun; it's still a
| selfish motive. Lots of devs really believe that they have a
| duty to the company or whatever, which is a huge mistake ---
| one I made too many times.
| hbn wrote:
| > Lots of devs really believe that they have a duty to the
| company
|
| I don't think it's just devs, it seems like a broader "tech
| culture" or "startup culture" thing, where everyone acting
| like they're in some weird cult, fully devoted to their
| company is their entire personality.
|
| I did an internship at a place like that in university. It
| was generally a fine place but it was weird how I added some
| people I worked with on social media (something I rarely do
| now) and ALL of their posts were about the company. I don't
| know if it was ass-kissing for promotions or something but it
| always felt weird and alien to me. It wasn't even a
| particularly small company where everyone knew each other, it
| was like 300 people across multiple floors of a building.
|
| I think it's probably runoff from everyone trying to be 2009
| Google. Would you believe there was a foosball table, and an
| open work area? Wacky!
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| What you're seeing is actually a remnant of _pre_ -startup
| culture. In late 20th century corporate America, there was
| no social media, but it was 100% expected that someone
| serious about their career would passionately describe how
| they're working at the best company ever and they're so
| lucky to have a chance to be there. If anything, the
| innovation of tech culture is the idea that being mercenary
| is even an option for getting ahead in your career.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > I don't think it's just devs, it seems like a broader
| "tech culture" or "startup culture" thing, where everyone
| acting like they're in some weird cult, fully devoted to
| their company is their entire personality.
|
| For me, a Big Red Flag in job interviews is when a
| potential employer says "this place is a family."
|
| _I already have a family_ - I don 't want to work
| somewhere where they expect that my entire life will be
| consumed by my employer because "we're family."
| neon_electro wrote:
| Families do not hire and fire.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Yep, that works until the founders hand the keys of the truck
| to a random CEO who sends the whole company (and yourself)
| into what all companies look like.
| profstasiak wrote:
| it's amazing how you contradict yourself in two paragraphs
|
| > Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life
|
| > Weirdly I now seem to enjoy staying up till crazy o'clock
| hacking away or doing stuff over the weekend.
| hun3 wrote:
| > But only because it's so much fun; it's still a selfish
| motive.
|
| This implies that the overtime work isn't necessarily the
| most beneficial to the employer.
| rytis wrote:
| ...or colleagues. it's quite easy to start thinking that
| if you enjoy what you do so much so that you stay up
| late, then everyone else should feel and do the same.
| nine_k wrote:
| Overtime work is like an afterburner in a jet engine: it
| does allow you to get somewhere faster, but at a
| disproportionately higher cost than normal.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yup. My employer benefits, but the fact is, I've waited
| basically my whole life to be in the position I am now.
| If I don't make a significant research contribution over
| the next decade, I likely never will.
|
| Three years ago, I was a peasant, scratching out a living
| (metaphorically as a researcher) using google colab GPUs
| to experiment. Today I find myself a king, in command of
| a cluster of GPUs with so much memory and power that they
| could host GPT-3 four times over. Today that cluster
| comes online, and you better believe I haven't felt this
| excited since I was 10 and my parents got me a
| playstation 1 for Christmas. I'm gonna final fantasy 7
| the heck out of these gpus.
|
| I have literally everything a researcher could possibly
| dream of. Or at least me. Every single one of the ideas
| I've been brewing over the last few years can now be
| tested, analyzed, and discarded -- and it's only a matter
| of time till I find the gold among them.
|
| My daughter's on the way in T-minus 7 months. I'll be
| keeping my life balanced. But damn it feels good to
| finally have a research target plus resources plus skill.
| I've been playing a game of "choose two" till now.
| grugagag wrote:
| Happy to see you're doing well and will be a father soon.
| That will certainly change perspective on things in a
| positive way
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you :) It was such a long road (5 years, 2 of IVF).
| paulcole wrote:
| > Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life
|
| This isn't what the comment you're replying to said. They
| just said don't let work slowly kill you. I think there are
| plenty of people whose work consumes their lives whose work
| isn't also slowly killing them. And if you disagree with that
| I guess I'd say that everything is slowly killing everyone.
| RangerScience wrote:
| Second you on this one. I've taken to calling that kind of
| fun time "wizarding" so my friends and partner understand.
| allochthon wrote:
| The kind of company I'm on the lookout for has definitely
| shifted over the years. When I was younger, the thought of
| working at Google and Amazon was very enticing. Then Amazon
| adopted some fairly regressive HR and business strategies and
| lost its luster in my eyes; or maybe my view of their
| existing practices just shifted as I grew older. Now Google
| is trending in the same direction. At this point in my career
| I'm on the lookout for smaller companies that are oases and
| have somehow managed to avoid the HR and business trends that
| have been adopted by the tech industry on the model of people
| like Jack Welch, the consulting firms and private equity.
| adriand wrote:
| It sounds like what you're experiencing is a sense of freely-
| chosen duty to the company, rather than that duty being taken
| for granted. It's perfectly okay to _choose_ to feel duty to
| your employer. A company can earn your respect and sense of
| obligation, and then instead of resenting the demands it
| makes on your time, you can feel a genuine sense of shared
| purpose that drives additional levels of commitment.
| SethTro wrote:
| Do you know the subject line of the follow up email (for those
| laid off)?
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| "Notice of unemployment" (personal email address)
| falcrist wrote:
| As a sort of corollary to what you said: being loyal to a
| company is foolish because companies cannot return that
| loyalty.
|
| There may be some borderline exceptions with very small
| companies (less than 10 employees), but in general a company
| isn't capable of being loyal to individual employees. Just keep
| in mind that in your relationship with your employer, you only
| have value insofar as you generate profit for them.
| revskill wrote:
| Per my experience, nothing beats the "i work on what i love and
| passionate".
|
| Coorporate environment of course has some advantages, for what
| they called "the real world experience". But it doesn't mean
| they're more capable than "lonely hackers" that can build his
| own universe by the weekends.
|
| "Learn/Work by heart" is a dangerous thing.
| pelasaco wrote:
| the only thing that beats "i work on what i love and
| passionate" is "i work on what i love and passionate and
| therefore I'm well paid" and "i work on what i love and
| passionate and therefore I'm well paid with a great work life
| balance"
| revskill wrote:
| Reality is not though.
| pelasaco wrote:
| for you maybe?
| revskill wrote:
| For all unemployeed or fired of course ;)
| pelasaco wrote:
| My first impression is that ex-googler won't have problem
| to find a new dream job. Probably not earning 400k/year,
| for sure :)
| Jagerbizzle wrote:
| Significantly better than the tone-deaf email Satya sent
| Microsoft employees, which continues to cause undue anxiety for
| employees who have no clue if or when they'll be laid off over
| the next 90 days.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Also, it clearly states there are layoffs! Anyone skipping
| over corporate jargon could have easily missed the single
| line with "btw, we'll lay off 10k people" in Satyas mail.
| wideem wrote:
| It's actually better for workers when layoffs are announced
| in advanced. They can prepare for it and not make an
| important financial decisions e.g.: buying house while
| waiting
| [deleted]
| tempsy wrote:
| Seattle real estate has already been one of the harder hit
| areas for the past year
| OnionBlender wrote:
| Harder hit in which direction? Have prices gone down or
| up in general?
| rippercushions wrote:
| Google US employees know if they'll be laid off or not
| immediately, but all non-US employees are still waiting.
| Jagerbizzle wrote:
| Does anyone have a summary of what laws need to be abided
| to in EU, Canada and other countries that prevent them from
| rolling this out at the same time as the US?
| quelltext wrote:
| In Japan for instance, you simply cannot fire someone
| without notice in these situations. You also have to
| prove that you've tried a whole lot of measures to avoid
| layoffs, such as reducing exec compensation, asking for
| voluntary resignations, etc. And I believe there needs to
| he some actual evidence layoffs are justified in the
| first place, same as in France I believe.
|
| Strictly speaking, forcing a worker out in these recent
| tech layoff cases is going to be difficult. I'd expect
| both in Japan and other countries there will be much more
| generous severance package offers for "voluntary"
| quitting. The majority of workers will way that against
| the reality of staying in a company they know doesn't
| really want them anymore.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| They are giving 60 days notice
| consp wrote:
| For NL: Those severance packages generally have to be
| applied broadly so everyone can make the choice. They
| usually result in the ones who know they can easily find
| a job moving on and the rest staying and thus don't
| happen that often. In general they let term-limited
| contract expire and offer people in early retirement.
| Doing layoff's when you are making a massive profit is
| not easy, it might be doable but it's not easy.
|
| Fun part: Sometimes you cannot chose who you fire, the
| age distribution in the company may not change so firing
| everyone older than 45 is not an option in general.
| sofixa wrote:
| They way this kind of thing is usually done in the EU to
| avoid the hassles of proper layoffs (that need
| justification and come with restrictions - e.g. in
| Bulgaria if you've done layoffs you can't hire on the
| same position within the same unit in the next couple of
| months) is to propose a mutual termination - we'll give
| you X months of pay (where X > what the employee would
| get legally if laid off), you sign here you agree to
| leave immediately. It's sometimes a bad idea because in
| that case you're sometimes not eligible for regular
| unemployment (depends on thr country of course) because
| you agreed to leave your job, so you have to be sure
| you'll find a job afterwards. Sometimes it's a great idea
| because you get a pile of cash and you're "winning" if
| you find a job faster, or if you want a nice break.
| tephra wrote:
| This varies in the EU IIRC for example here in Sweden if
| you plan to fire more than 5 people you need to alert the
| public employment agency and employees 2 months in
| advance and the union which the company has collective
| bargaining agreements with. There is usually a
| negotiation between the union and the company on the
| forms of the fireing.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| At least, advance notice which might be long depending of
| the country, probably at least three months in France.
| Plus, Google will have issues justifying a cut for
| economic reason in much of Europe. They remain very
| profitable even if less than before so they might need
| due cause to fire people.
|
| Generally speaking European laws protect the employees
| more than the shareholders. You can't really just employ
| a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to
| fire them if there is a downturn. It encourages companies
| to be more conservative regarding hiring which can be
| both a blessing and a curse.
| majewsky wrote:
| > You can't really just employ a lot of people when
| things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is
| a downturn.
|
| Well, you can, but not as direct employees. The usual way
| is to enter a service contract with a different company
| who hires the employees and assigns them to work on
| bigcorp's tasks for 100% of their time. If bigcorp wants
| to cut costs, they just let the contract with the other
| company lapse and that company can fire their employees
| on the basis of "my own economic outlook is bad because
| we lost the bigcorp contract".
| htrp wrote:
| But at the same time the ServiceCo's employees also
| understand that this is a two tiered system with them at
| the bottom.
| onphonenow wrote:
| I thought this was a reason Europe has struggled in tech
| a bit - hard to try things out. I also thought this was
| why lots is "on contract" - it's better not to bring
| people into your actual team (which must have some
| negatives)
| foepys wrote:
| In Germany, and possibly many other EU countries, there
| is a mandatory notice period plus a social plan.
|
| The longer you are with the company, the longer notice
| period, starting from 4 weeks and can get up to 6 months.
|
| You also cannot fire a parent of a newborn if you keep
| the single 20-something in the same position.
| oblio wrote:
| Sometimes they need to negotiate with unions or
| government agencies.
|
| They could still notify employees, it would be the nice
| thing to do.
|
| "You'll be laid off once we get approval from the
| relevant groups".
|
| Of course, that disrupts productivity for these target
| employees for 1-2-3 months, so they won't do it.
|
| I wonder if the hit to productivity to <<everyone>> is
| worth it.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| If you make layoffs of over 100 people in the UK, there
| needs to be a 45 day consultation period with
| representatives from the groups of people affected. This
| sometimes means people end up in a horrible situation
| where they are in a pool that have been told their jobs
| are at risk but not whether they are actually being made
| redundant, though presumably it's more fair, and allows
| staff to volunteer themselves for severance if they so
| choose.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| In some places, a company can't just fire people because
| they feel like it. In Germany, where this is called a
| "Betriebsbedingte Kundigung"[1] you have to make a
| socially adequate choice based on how long someone has
| been at the company, whether they have kids, etc. and you
| also have to prove that there isn't an open position
| elsewhere in the company.
|
| [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betriebsbedingte_K%C3%
| BCndigun...
| ralph84 wrote:
| Yeah Satya's note was bad for several reasons, not the least
| of which is he sent it right after attending a private Sting
| concert. Starting to wonder if rather than being an
| exceptional leader, he just benefitted from following Steve
| Ballmer which would make almost anyone look better in
| comparison.
| [deleted]
| ddevault wrote:
| Having Google on your resume is not a good thing depending on
| who's reading it. Googlers generally need to be extensively re-
| trained on reality outside of companies that cargo-cult
| Google's practices, and I'll have some questions about the
| moral compass of anyone who shows up with Google on the resume.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Now it's bad to work with some of the brightest talent in the
| world? Come on...
| [deleted]
| itsyaboi wrote:
| 2012 Google? Sure, pretty good chance you're getting world
| class talent.
|
| 2023? Lmao not even close. Anyone with a heartbeat and
| memorized leets can receive an offer, and the offers aren't
| even particular competitive.
| bdavis__ wrote:
| The moral compass points to the money
| hgsgm wrote:
| That tech stack concern and attitude only affects a small-
| poulation collection of startups.
|
| "Morally opposed to Google" affects a tiny sliver of
| professionals who boycott Google products or choose to use it
| despite allegedly being opposed to it.
| otikik wrote:
| Oh, you would be surprised.
|
| I once met a bank director that would call Google "those
| hippies". In his view Googlers where "not enough money-
| centered".
| dachryn wrote:
| on the ethical side, I'll pick an ex-googler over microsoft,
| meta, amazon, IBM, Snap anyday.
|
| Ex-Microsoft people and ex-accenture people are never setting
| foot again in our organisation
| rdmreader3319 wrote:
| One of my most talented colleague worked at Microsoft in
| his previous job. My worst experience was with a HR from
| Twitter, with all the political views and speeches from
| California, it was awful. She killed the spirit of the
| company in less than a year.
| nullhash wrote:
| > Ex-Microsoft people and ex-accenture people are never
| setting food again in our organization
|
| May I ask why you this is the case?
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I have to wonder what your own resume looks like that you
| maintain such a large blacklist. I can't help but think
| that a great many corporations won't live up to your
| standards.
| foogazi wrote:
| They are just people like you
| cbarrick wrote:
| > I'll have some questions about the moral compass of anyone
| who shows up with Google on the resume.
|
| What about former Microsoft employees? Amazon employees?
|
| Is big tech an ethical issue for you? Or is it just Google?
| madamelic wrote:
| Not an ethical issue, but a workstyle question.
|
| If you go from Google or similarly large company to a small
| startup, there's a radically different reality and
| workstyle required. Any time I see someone with big company
| experience especially their immediately previous role, it's
| an orange flag. I know to dig into why a startup and
| whether they are willing to "repent" their previous ways.
|
| BigCo employees are much more likely to call unnecessary
| whole team meetings, unnecessarily drag out feature
| planning, drag their feet on getting MVPs out in favor of a
| entirely complete solution, propose doing things "the way
| <x> does it" and it's like "... cool, we don't have the
| resources and headcount to support that really."
|
| With that said, generally these people have a much deeper
| knowledge of their particular stack, are valuable to have
| as long as you can harness them correctly and direct their
| energies towards much later in the startup.
| foogazi wrote:
| > If you go from Google or similarly large company to a
| small startup, there's a radically different reality and
| workstyle required.
|
| This assumes they were always at G or other big co
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I guess the problem for affected soon-Xooglers is more
| like, they've been laid off hence could be seen as
| underperformers. Moreover, they hit the marketplace in
| quantities, which makes for a bad negotiation position.
| Also, I'm wondering if top talent at Google not laid off
| this time around might soon look elsewhere and leave the
| sinking ship before it's too late - after all, Google
| hasn't really diversified despite lots and lots of
| investment and it's not clear at all top coders are really
| needed to keep a maturing business going (or are actually
| still working on eg Search or other key tech considering
| its demise) over the last 5+ years).
| lwhi wrote:
| Will a workforce of ex-Googlers create a positive benefit to
| other non-Google companies?
| mi_lk wrote:
| This is the right attitude. Other higher-voted threads trying
| to shame the company/CEO etc. are only depressing to see.
| Draiken wrote:
| I'd argue these aren't mutually exclusive.
|
| The email/comms might be okay, but this is still their fault
| and will ruin people's lives. Most (if not all) companies are
| shit and don't give a shit about you. We're just a necessary
| cost.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Having Google on one's CV is probably better than not
| having worked there at all. Sure being let go is painful
| but I would keep the term "ruined lives" for people getting
| serious diseases or experiencing loss of the loved ones.
| Draiken wrote:
| Suicide rates surge after layoffs. Assuming it's "okay"
| just because they were in a big company earning more than
| most is disingenuous in my view.
|
| For the company this is a blip. It'll probably even make
| some profit for shareholders. For the people it's almost
| always life-changing and for the worst.
| twelve40 wrote:
| it absolutely sucks ass and is a major psychological hit.
| Also, when lesser brands decide to follow the trend these
| companies so prominently follow, it will be even worse.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| I've been let go more than once from small companies that
| were effectively shut down. Once on a work authorization
| tied to the employer.
|
| I am sorry but I won't feel sorry for those ex-Googlers.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| I'm so rapidly becoming someone who just feels no guilt. It's
| balance against the abject anxiety I feel no matter what day or
| time of day it is. The balance against waking up on in a panic
| that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to
| realize that it's Sunday and everything is fine and I'm
| supposed to be relaxing. It's clearly not healthy.
|
| But yeah, I've got a FAANG(+? what's it called now? I think I'm
| in whatever the new one is called now?), and the market isn't
| _so_ bad, I think? But at the end of the day, the checks clear,
| and it's mostly on me to decide and act on the prerogative that
| software is just software, and I need to chill. (But it's
| really hard...9s are addictive...)
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's
| 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize
| that it's Sunday
|
| The thing that's been messing me up, is the completely
| unhealthy schedules that are typical when you work with
| people all over the world. For instance, I got up at 6am
| today, my first meeting was at 7am. In the meeting were
| people in three countries and at least five timezones.
|
| This trend where people are located all over the planet leads
| to a scenario where it's not unusual for me to be taking 7am
| meetings while _also_ working on infrastructure at three in
| the morning because that 's when the maintenance window is.
|
| If we were going to an office, nobody would tolerate this
| ridiculous schedule.
|
| But since most of us WFH now, it's just become increasingly
| common that we're working 20 hours days, but there's a bunch
| of gaps scattered between a 7am start and a 5am end.
|
| Sleeping in shifts is a drag.
| spacemadness wrote:
| You couldn't pay me enough to work at 3AM. I suppose it's
| up to each person to know what they will tolerate, but that
| one is a deal breaker for me and always will be.
| mradek wrote:
| What do u mean 9s are addictive
| nlowell wrote:
| "9s" are brought up in reliability discussions. They refer
| to the number of 9's in an uptime metric like 99%, 99.9%,
| 99.9999%, ... See also "march of the 9s"
| Zvez wrote:
| while I agree with the attitude you promote. But it is not that
| simple. If your visa is attached to your job, you are pretty
| much fucked. Same goes if you decided to leave your previous
| job just to join Google (because it was your dream) and now you
| are let go - you are fucked.
|
| So yes, it is your responsibility to take care of yourselves.
| But it is hard to be prepared for everything and layoffs like
| this one doesn't make it easier.
| foogazi wrote:
| > If your visa is attached to your job, you are pretty much
| fucked.
|
| Everyone on a visa knows this - it's part of the gamble on
| immigration
|
| You take the risk hoping for a payoff. If it doesn't work out
| you try again with FAANG on you resume
| grugagag wrote:
| Maybe this will make people wary of joining hiring sprees in
| the FAANG space as you could easily become jobless in an
| economic downturn.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This kinda makes me feel old...
|
| When I joined Google in 2006, we were 8k _total_.
| unholiness wrote:
| Possibly naive question:
|
| Everyone's talking about how these companies are preparing for a
| global recession. But it's striking how specific to large tech
| companies. Is it possible these companies are just seeing the new
| remote-first paradigm as an opportunity to replace US devs with
| cheaper, foreign developers?
|
| Obvious this is absurdly difficult, but it's likely more
| realistic now than it's ever been before.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| It more has to do with tech companies having expanded headcount
| way more than other industries in the past few years.
|
| The reality is that tech cos overbites since market conditions
| were extremely ebullient in the tech sector circa 2021. A large
| fraction of those new hires never had anything productive to
| even do.
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| Maybe but likely not. Lots of devs overseas who work for these
| tech giants have also been cut. The 12k cuts is global.
| dopeboy wrote:
| These companies experienced solid growth during covid (because
| everyone was home using tech) and now that's starting to
| recede. They predicted this growth would continue and hired for
| it. They are choosing to recede that.
|
| > replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers?
|
| The quality of the average engineer entering Google is
| significantly higher than the one of an average, foreign
| developer. That is a generalization, but not an over
| generalization. I know this having worked with a sample size of
| ~20 on each side of the coin.
| charles_f wrote:
| I don't think this is true, I have seen a number of small
| companies doing the same thing in here.
| neodypsis wrote:
| Amazon and Meta I can understand why. But why Microsoft and now
| Google? What positions were affected in Google? Just developers?
| summerlight wrote:
| Beside Apple (whose YoY growth on its workforce was consistent
| before and after the pandemic), I think almost all tech company
| made a wrong bet that economical changes will be accelerated by
| "going online" and thus dominated by FOMO.
| bantunes wrote:
| It's correcting a decade of over-hiring, and a shortcut to a
| slightly higher stock price.
| cdiddy2 wrote:
| Cost of employees has gone up as stocks drop due to such high
| RSU compensation. Stock is 40% off its highs which means they
| have to make up that difference in either cash or more stock,
| and neither look good to investors at the moment so smooth the
| financials 10% layoffs is the go to for large tech here.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I don't follow. RSUs being worth less than they used to be
| means employees are cheaper. You gave out $X a couple of
| years ago and when it finally vests it's worth 0.6*$X or
| similar, that's a direct drop in employee compensation.
|
| Are you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused
| by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow?
| Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount
| down fairly quickly if so.
| coredog64 wrote:
| When Meta stock started going into the toilet, they gave
| out huge top-up RSU bonuses. Amazon is much slower to
| react, but they give you a target comp that they hope is
| fulfilled by stock price growth. If it isn't, they give
| out-year grants to get you to target.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Employees will (fairly reasonably, IMO) expect a same
| dollar-value RSU grant in the upcoming grant cycle. That
| will result in Google having to grant additional RSUs in an
| upcoming round. (The currency to Google for past grants is
| the number of shares/RSUs, which doesn't change as the
| stock goes up or down, but new grants are cheaper to Google
| in terms of dilution if the stock keeps going up.)
| cdiddy2 wrote:
| Ya basically people will feel they are getting a pay cut,
| and since the higher you go in the company the larger
| percent of your salary is from RSUs those are the people
| most likely to be unhappy. You potentially lose your high
| level core employees while entry level are much less
| affected
|
| edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is
| stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm
| [deleted]
| blagie wrote:
| To be honest, I feel like Google and Meta both had far too many
| employees.
|
| "Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.
|
| There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the
| quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut
| won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from.
| Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all
| efficient.
|
| If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one
| who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.
|
| The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an
| elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less
| technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
| davedx wrote:
| > Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at
| all efficient.
|
| Where on earth do you get that number from?
|
| Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more
| "efficient" do they need to be?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| This is an opportunity to flood the market with unemployed and
| reset salaries. They just needed the excuse: another company
| doing it first.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Definitely not just developers; I know a non-dev who lost their
| job today. Of course, 1 out of 12,000 isn't a very helpful
| statistic, though.
| shmde wrote:
| (Question): Are all major tech companies doing this when everyone
| else is so that they face less backlash for it ? Also what about
| the news of companies having record profits during pandemi. Were
| they false/fake too ?
| d3m0t3p wrote:
| apparently : "Over the past two years we've seen periods of
| dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a
| different economic reality than the one we face today."
| rk06 wrote:
| I hope it is because they intended to do it, but decided to
| wait till Holiday Season was over.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| This is about growth they kept hiring as they expected growth
| if they are not expecting to grow then then need to cut
| expenses. A lot of people in silicon valley are not realising
| the pain that is about to come. In the last decade a lot of
| startups have cropped with the main target instead of a
| profitable business was getting sold to 1 of the big companies.
| [deleted]
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Hiring managers have attention span of 1 year max. So if some
| departments were doing good due to pandemic and now are flop
| cause times changed and you need to align costs with revenue.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| layoffs aren't only when profits plummet, they are when stock
| prices must rise because of some bonus package
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Ideally, layoffs should happen when employee count is above
| the amount which maximizes company value. It should never be
| a response to stock price changes, makes no sense.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| C*Os only have one incentive and that's their compensation
| package
| Zvez wrote:
| Major companies are laying off now not because they don't have
| money. It is mostly because they have been hiring a lot for
| past year based on growth they had during pandemic. Now as
| economic situation has changed, they just revert their previous
| hiring decision. They don't want to risk their money by holding
| to people they hired 'by mistake'.
| matwood wrote:
| Some of it is trimming the fat because these companies grew a
| lot over the pandemic. These companies are also looking at
| what's happening _right now_ in their business, not last
| quarters profits. They are likely all seeing a slow down and
| preparing.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Do we have details on which geographies and teams are affected?
| hintymad wrote:
| Did anyone notice the trend of dilution of candidate quality
| along with inflation of titles in the past few years? NLP
| engineers who could mention BERT but nothing else? Recommender
| experts who couldn't articulate the landscape of recommendation
| algorithms or their approach of selecting algorithms? Distributed
| engineers who could draw a few boxes yet couldn't explain or use
| any single concept in distributed systems? Tech lead who could
| barely recommend a concrete solution, let alone offering detailed
| analysis of pros and cons?
|
| A reset in the industry seems a good thing for the health of this
| sector.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| I don't understand some of the comments here, maybe someone can
| explain.
|
| Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there
| a right to stay employed? As far as I am aware working for a
| company is not a life-long situation.
|
| And further - why don't we invert it and praise these companies
| for supplying thousands of six figure jobs for years. Surely
| being employed for several years is better than never being hired
| at all?
| electriclove wrote:
| I agree with this. There is an economic cycle and this always
| happens.
| gls2ro wrote:
| (I am not talking here about Google but more like general)
|
| A company (especially a big one) needs to have an excuse to let
| people go.
|
| The argument here is two-fold:
|
| 1. There is a power imbalance between a company and an
| employee.
|
| Just as a short example: letting go of 1 employee usually means
| nothing for the company life, but for the employee is
| biggest/impactful event happening that month or maybe that half
| of the year.
|
| Thus we usually balance this with laws (in some
| countries/states) and, of course, with public expectations.
|
| 2. Companies are asking for your whole professional time, and
| they usually want exclusivity
|
| You can see this usually written in contracts like "you
| dedicate all your work time", "you cannot work for other
| companies", "you dedicate all your business time" ...
|
| Thus when a company is asking this from you then they need to
| offer something in exchange. And this exchange is they need an
| excuse to let you go.
|
| ---
|
| (again I don't speak here about Google as I never worked there
| so I don't know what they offer and what they ask for)
| progbits wrote:
| > Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is
| there a right to stay employed
|
| Not in late-stage capitalism, but elsewhere yes. For example:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Redundancies_Dire...
| belugacat wrote:
| In some cultures the prevalent view is that employees should be
| grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a
| paycheck, and that the needs of the business comes first and
| therefore the business should be free to layoff employees when
| it deems it necessary.
|
| In other cultures, the view is more that the business benefits
| from various social contracts (governments providing various
| structures & regulations so that businesses can flourish, the
| cost of healthcare/education that leads to a productive
| workforce being taken on in part or whole by the state, etc),
| that the employer/employee relationship is fundamentally
| asymmetrical, and therefore that an employer has a social
| responsibility to provide stability and not do reckless things
| like hire 20k people to layoff 10k the following year.
|
| US work culture, and tech particularly, lean more towards the
| first side of the spectrum in my experience, but that doesn't
| mean everyone is aligned with it or that it is the One Truth.
| netheril96 wrote:
| I don't think that the US has the culture that employees
| should be grateful to their employer for providing them with
| a job and a paycheck. The idea of at will employment comes
| from the ideology of freedom rather than who owes who.
| lscdlscd wrote:
| At will employment always always benefits the employers
| more than employees. Your job is tied to your health
| insurance as well. So there is a much much bigger incentive
| for an employee to stay at a company than for a company to
| keep an employee.
| [deleted]
| paganel wrote:
| > Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is
| there a right to stay employed?
|
| When you work for a small to medium company yeah, I expect
| something like responsibility and a little more than "just
| contractual obligations" (from both sides, both the employer
| and the employee).
|
| But it when it comes to behemoths like Alphabet things change
| completely, it's all about the money and the contract.
| lmm wrote:
| > Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is
| there a right to stay employed?
|
| Generally in developed countries, yes.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Oh, this is new to me. Which developed countries have the
| right to stay employed?
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Germany, for example.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| So it seems in Germany you can only fire employees if you
| are undergoing a downsizing or internal restructuring. I
| wonder if this Google layoff would apply. If they closing
| off whole teams this could potentially count as
| "restructuring".
| [deleted]
| Draiken wrote:
| Comments like these tell me how ingrained capitalism is on
| people's minds now. We seem to forget that without the people
| that make up the company, it simply does not exist.
|
| Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its
| owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER
| be more important than people.
|
| I don't understand how we can lose sight of that.
| shric wrote:
| Do you have an example of a successful company that puts
| people above profits?
| x86x87 wrote:
| Here:
|
| https://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/2010/02/bobs_red
| _...
| Draiken wrote:
| No, I don't know of any that survive long enough.
|
| How is that even possible in a capitalist society? The game
| is rigged in favor of profits, not people. Of course even
| if you do create a successful company that values people
| above profits, odds are you will get undercut by another
| company that does not sooner or later.
|
| But that doesn't change my original point though. It's
| still wrong to have companies above people no matter how we
| frame it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Ruthless capitalism is the only reason people can even earn
| the ridiculously high Google wages in the first places.
|
| Google can fire a small town's worth of employees and only
| lose 6% of their workforce. These companies are ridiculous in
| size. Really, this was only a matter of time.
|
| I wouldn't like to live in the USA for the extremely weak
| employee protections there despite the massive amounts of
| money you can earn compared to Europe. Personally, I'm all
| for better employee protections to balance out the
| overpowering employer, but those protections don't come for
| free. If a company fulfils its social purpose of making
| people earn their living for a long time, they also need to
| be ready to pay their current rates (and up) for a long time.
| More protections means higher risks for companies, higher
| risks means fewer hires and lower rewards in case you can't
| get rid of someone in an economic downturn.
|
| I think these protections are worth it, but I reckon the
| highest earning American programmers and managers wouldn't;
| the more you earn, the more those protections will cost you.
| Applying European protections wouldn't immediately drop wages
| down to European levels (you need a strong welfare state and
| such for that too) but it would certainly reduce the amount
| of disposable income these people have.
| Draiken wrote:
| I sincerely don't think we should put the salaries as the
| deciding factor here. The crux of the issue is what you
| said: employee protections.
|
| The only reason they over-hire in the first place is how
| cheap and easy it is to layoff afterwards. They are allowed
| to bet with human capital because of it.
|
| I would most definitely take a paycut if it meant everyone
| would get better protections, higher salaries and
| stability. Unfortunately this is not a popular view and
| will likely never happen anyways.
|
| In my country we had above average labor laws and in recent
| years all we see are new ways to circumvent them or laws
| removing those rights. It's sad to see but it's what
| capitalism's end game dictates.
| spacemadness wrote:
| It seems to beneficial to the employers, but with every
| other short-sighted scheme American capitalists come up
| with there is a downside to their long-term strategy;
| employees are extremely focused on jumping ship after a
| year now which ensures lots of projects will fail simply
| due to the knowledge base constantly shifting. You can't
| have it all but it doesn't stop them from trying.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| > Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its
| owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't
| EVER be more important than people.
|
| A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire
| 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000
| - why not?
|
| Further, in a company there might be temporary teams that
| implement a project and then are laid off. Surely it's better
| to have these positions than to not hire any people at all.
|
| Even further, life is not static and things change. Not
| adapting to changes eventually would lead to stagnant and
| disfunctional situations, where a product would be made more
| expensive for everyone, just so a some company has the
| capital to continue hiring 10,000 or so people who are not
| longer doing any work. But, perhaps more importantly, those
| 10,000 people are stuck in meaningless positions doing empty
| "work" for the sake of numbers on some accounting sheet.
|
| And even further futher, if these no longer useful jobs are
| in manufacturing then continuing them would mean wasting
| natural resources and polluting the environment.
| Draiken wrote:
| The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because
| of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by
| definition.
|
| As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in
| this case. They are just looking for even more profits.
| It's not even close to a "struggling company".
|
| But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling
| company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes
| that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules.
| Of course under these conditions companies will always
| choose to fire people and keep making profits to its
| owners.
|
| But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these
| 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s)
| profitable.
| netheril96 wrote:
| > A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually
| fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing
| 10,000 - why not?
|
| This argument, true or false, is not applicable in this
| situation, as Google is still enjoying high profits.
| malteof wrote:
| They need to explain themselves to shareholders (why did they
| hire so many people in the first place, expensive) and
| employees (so that people want to keep working there also in
| the future).
| [deleted]
| helmholtz wrote:
| > Is there a right to stay employed?
|
| People have spouses, kids, mortgages. They relocate for work.
| They pour a lot of their time, energy & emotion into it. It
| causes people strokes, and hairloss. People bring the stress of
| their work home, and marriages suffer for it.
|
| Your comment is rather glib. Praise these companies? No thanks.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| All the TikTok "I work in tech" women who sends 3 emails a day
| finally getting the axe + middle managers
|
| This and MS layoffs
|
| Boohoo
| mouzogu wrote:
| > As part of that, if you are just starting your work day, please
| feel free to work from home today.
|
| i feel like we are living a black comedy sometimes.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I think this and the rest of the FAANG (plus M$) layoffs show us
| that these are now all established corporates. When you're
| growing and innovating and building new products etc, you hire
| during recessions to make the things you will sell during the
| booms (and just to keep up with your growth). But when you're a
| stable, mature company with no plans for new products, business
| lines etc, then the name of the game is efficiency. And
| efficiency is doing the same as last year but with 12k fewer
| people.
|
| It's not "wrong" per se. It's just that these companies are no
| longer what they were. Investors and Employees should know what
| they are engaging with: out is the growth machine where you will
| have a team hired under you and revenue can be expected to 10x in
| a decade. In is "every year we get to 5% more revenue and pay 5%
| less in expenses".
|
| Such is the company life cycle.
|
| Google have done very well to be fair to keep the growth phase
| going so long...
| DrBazza wrote:
| Another multi-billion dollar company making billions of dollars
| of profit dumps thousands of staff on the streets.
|
| There are two approaches here.
|
| Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave. Given
| the sheer size of the company, a hiring freeze and attrition
| would gradually reduce the size of the workforce. I'd be
| astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would
| be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately get rid of 12,000
| people _right now_.
|
| Second, stop over recruiting in the first place.
|
| I'm sure google, like the others this week have some company
| mantra about how precious their staff are, and they're all
| family. Until they're not.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| That would be the logical approach if their only objective were
| reducing headcount. In reality, it's both that AND they're
| trying to get the wage spiral under control. As terrible as it
| sounds, layoffs send the "stop asking for more money, you
| should be thankful to even have a job" signal to the workforce.
| rvba wrote:
| The employees who can leave on their own are often the "better"
| ones.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > dumps thousands of staff on the streets
|
| > Second, stop over recruiting in the first place.
|
| Following your logic, Google would be a trillion dollar company
| _leaving_ people on the streets if they froze hiring. And that
| 's somehow better?
|
| At the end of the day, what you're really asking for is a
| better social safety net. I'm just not sure why you think
| Google should play this role.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > simply don't replace those that leave.
|
| You need to have control over which roles / projects you're
| gonna downsize.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Management have control over that already. They can just
| disband a team and move the team members elsewhere at any
| time. That is often more than enough for people to
| voluntarily leave.
|
| Imagine if google disbanded the golang team and moved them to
| 'maps'. I imagine those team members would quit the company
| almost immediately.
|
| And that's cheaper as the company doesn't have to pay
| statutory redundancy pay-offs.
| lozenge wrote:
| That's illegal in the UK, unless the company actually stops
| developing the product of the disbanded team.
| jwhiles wrote:
| I think that your best employees are the people who are most
| likely to leave a company of their own accord, and so if you
| rely on attrition to reduce headcount you will also reduce the
| average quality of your workers.
| DrBazza wrote:
| In the tech industry the best employees are going to leave
| regardless, especially if they're bored.
|
| Also, like banks, the FAANGs pay bonuses. And also like
| banks, if you want to 'suggest' to someone that ought to
| leave, regardless of who they are, you pay them a near-zero
| bonus, and give them a negative annual review as well.
|
| Conversely, if a company wants to keep someone they pay more
| to encourage that person to stay.
|
| All the gears and levers are in place in Megacorp, to do this
| kind of thing.
|
| The whole mass-redundancy thing from companies of this size I
| find distasteful and cowardly, a reflection of the disrepect
| and arrogance senior management has for it staff, and an
| indication of mismanagement at a high level that can be
| afforded because a company is too large to fail.
| jwhiles wrote:
| I'm not saying that it's good to fire people. And yes,
| companies have levers to retain their strongest staff. I'm
| not convinced that they tend to be very good at doing that
| though.
|
| The (non-FAANG) company I work for has an on-going hiring
| freeze, and I'm actually quite concerned because the only
| people who are leaving are the people you wouldn't want to
| leave - and none of the people you would want to leave are
| doing so.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The best won't leave Microsoft because up until now it was
| known for "rest and vest" and for being the tech workers
| retirement home.
|
| Being bored is a perk of many jobs.
| newsclues wrote:
| 3, these decisions are made by the financial institutions and
| even the biggest tech companies are beholden to big money.
|
| Seems like Big Money wants a recession.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Big Money wants the Feds to hear the ship creaking loud and
| clear.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave
|
| Nobody is retiring - why would you, you get a fat pay cheque
| and once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is
| pretty good. Oh and if they fire you rather than you retiring,
| they have to pay you another stack of cash and keep those
| options that vest in a few years.
|
| "Seeing people posting about being laid off after 30 years of
| employment at Microsoft is a great example of corporate
| loyalty." - is this just a clean out of the expensive old folks
| after the hiring spree of late? Is it last in first out or
| first in first out? These are much more interesting
| discussions.
| lrem wrote:
| > once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is
| pretty good
|
| Life is good, but I don't look back at the Jr levels as a
| meat grinder. In many aspects, obviously excluding money,
| life was way better back then.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| IBM did this and got in trouble. I imagine Xoogler lawyers
| will review this. There is always a paper trail.
| 2143 wrote:
| > Is it last in first out or first in last out?
|
| Aren't they the same?
| shapefrog wrote:
| Corrected!
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Is it last in first out or first in first out?
|
| I have seen almost no one actually talk about who was
| impacted on these threads.
|
| I was in Nest, and <1yr tenure, and I was let go. i don't
| know about any co-workers, but most of mine had >7yrs tenure,
| except me, and many were staff.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Sorry to hear, I hope you find your feet (if you are even a
| little off balance) again quickly!
| pm90 wrote:
| I would be surprised if they let go Senior Staff/Principal
| engineers.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Higher-level engineers are evaluated like anybody else, and
| they need to meet their very high expectations. If they
| don't, they don't get a free pass.
| redleader55 wrote:
| Meta did, I think MSFT and GOOG will do as well. It has to
| be balanced among all sorts of groups otherwise the company
| is liable to be sued.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Under what law would you sue for some job roles being
| affected and others not?
| theGnuMe wrote:
| There are protected classes. For example if you want to
| layoff anyone over age 40 for example you've got to be
| above board.
|
| Whole departments or groups though, fair game.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Nobody is retiring - why would you
|
| Turnover rates in these companies are pretty high!
| Surprisingly many employees leave after 1-2 years.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah but are those the good employees?
| bmcfeeley wrote:
| Probably not, which is why an attrition strategy might
| work for both downsizing and trimming the fat, as the
| less motivated/willing to drink the "kool-aid" are
| filtered out and not replaced.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| If you can get offers anywhere you want repeatedly, your
| most likely pretty good at least at leetcoding or at
| cheating on leetcode interviews.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| 1. The cost saving is much (much) faster with layoffs
|
| 2. You don't lose (or get rid of, for that matter) the same
| people when you do layoffs vs organic attrition
|
| On (2), I don't only mean "good" vs "not good" people, but also
| distribution per department.
| DrBazza wrote:
| No, but you can give zero bonus, zero payrise, and negative
| annual review as a clear indication that you're not wanted.
|
| In fact, don't many of the Megacorp companies have a 'cull
| the bottom 10% annually' policy anyway?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Cull the bottom 10% takes a very long time (and effort) in
| a big company.
|
| You still have to put the "candidate" on PIP, wait 6 months
| for the PIP to fail, then run the ejection process (ranging
| from 0-2 weeks in the US to a few months in EU).
|
| _and_ you have to sacrifice a senior eng to mentor the PIP
| 'ed (else they can sue you for not giving them a fair
| shot).
|
| The whole thing is much more expensive and slow than a
| company-wide layoff.
| kccqzy wrote:
| There is a difference between culling low performers and
| culling high performers in an org or team that's no longer
| wanted.
|
| Most layoffs don't just fire low performers. They fire
| people working on products that turn out to have no future.
|
| I find this especially sad. An individual through no fault
| of their own could be easily laid off just because of being
| on the wrong team. In contrast an individual performing
| unsatisfactorily could not easily be fired (i.e. for
| cause).
| roncesvalles wrote:
| >I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2
| trillion would be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately
| get rid of 12,000 people right now.
|
| They need to do a layoff to show that they did a layoff, even
| if they secretly hired a "buffer" of 12k people in the months
| leading up to it, or will secretly fill back 12k headcounts in
| the months to come.
|
| Google in particular needs to make intense investments in GCP
| so that they don't miss the train for capturing the cloud
| market. It's probably the only credible challenger to the AWS-
| Azure duopoly. This layoff is probably painful to their
| business.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Question for those who got laid-off from tech recently (say since
| Aug last year): how hard did you find it to get another tech job?
|
| Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light
| on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers
| are finding it easy to get re-recruited:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-f...
|
| If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true then the
| consequence to the macro environment could be substantial and not
| in a good way. Basically the fed will probably need another round
| of hikes to really bring down unemployment to bring down core
| inflation. Since it would imply that (ironically) the recent fall
| in unemployment is "transitory" and not sufficient to bring down
| inflation.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I had a new job lined up roughly a week after they broke the
| news to me. The tradeoff is that I took a 37% reduction in
| salary.
|
| Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me,
| while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research.
| The best part is that I didn't have to do any damn leetcode
| interviews.
|
| I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels
| like I'm an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven't
| heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting
| laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at
| least till GPT comes for us.
| thih9 wrote:
| > I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it
| feels like I'm an outlier and maybe not relevant.
|
| To anyone wondering whether to share your personal
| experience, please do; comments like this one are my
| favourites.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you :) that meant a lot. I hope you have a wonderful
| weekend and a lovely rest of your January.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Can you give us more details concerning your
| seniority/domain/tech stack?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sure, if you think it'd help. Here's the message I sent
| that got me the new job. The context is that they were
| pushing back a little bit during salary negotiation and
| asking for a resume, so I channeled my Jewish ancestors and
| went into full salesman mode:
|
| " https://battle.shawwn.com/Shawn%20Presser's%20Resume.pdf
| was the resume I used for Groq. I planned to update it
| after finishing out the year. In terms of my ML work,
| here's some highlights of my work prior to Groq:
|
| - A Newsweek article about various GPT work I did
| https://www.newsweek.com/openai-text-generator-
| gpt-2-video-g...
|
| - I was the first to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play
| chess https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/10/gpt2_chess/
|
| - ... which DeepMind referenced:
| https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1226916484938530819
|
| - GPT-2 music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-
| generated-videogame...
|
| - Invented swarm training
| https://www.docdroid.net/faDq8Bu/swarm-training-v01a.pdf
|
| - Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a
| training dataset for language models (later used to train
| GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
|
| - Started the first ML discord server, grew the community
| to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)
|
| - Reverse engineered BigGAN's model over the course of ~6mo
| to locate a bug in their open source implementation
| https://github.com/google/compare_gan/issues/54
|
| ML research makes me happy, so I'll be doing it for the
| foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in
| bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion
| training. I'd prefer to work with you, but if it's not
| possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I
| understand. Are you sure you can't bump it?"
|
| They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don't
| know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to,
| say, someone in webdev. But if you're a talented dev and
| someone's lowballing you, be sure to at least try to
| negotiate. Don't let the recession fears prevent you from
| turning down an initial offer.
|
| That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a
| position where they'd be thankful to have any work at all.
| And I imagine I'll be in that position soon enough -- 35 is
| getting too close to 55 for comfort.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I love your background. I'm trying really hard to get my
| work with getting LMs to be able to write with syntactic
| constraints (like banning the letter E) to convert into a
| dedicated ML research role for awhile now. Seems it's
| relatively easy to get a fat title and money but harder
| to get a mandate to do research fill time.
|
| I got gwern to pick up my paper about this, so someone
| with influence saw my work and cared.
|
| But being the first to get LMs to play chess is a pretty
| big claim to fame. I hope history remembers the pioneers.
| bearmode wrote:
| Not been laid off myself, but I'm still being absolutely
| hounded by recruiters. There are still a ton of tech jobs out
| there, at least in the UK.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Recruiters often hound even when there aren't many jobs
| available. After all, they aren't paid to sit around and do
| nothing when there are lulls in hiring...
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I'm in the UK, but quite rarely contacted by recruiters, once
| a month perhaps. I think I have a decent resume (many years
| in a FAANG), but maybe I'm too senior/specialized?
| jstx1 wrote:
| It might be because there are fewer companies that hire at
| your current level of compensation - a few international
| big tech companies and some trading firms - and all of
| those are clearly slowing / freezing hiring or laying
| people off. Most cold messages from recruiters right now
| will be for positions that pay less than half of what
| you're making.
| cjrp wrote:
| If you haven't changed jobs many times in the past (and
| dealt with recruiters), you're probably not on their radar.
| Most of the messages I get are from recruiters I talked to
| in the past, and they added me to their DB (with or without
| my permission).
| avip wrote:
| The correlation between how much you're being "hounded by
| recruiters" and how many open positions are out there, is
| either 0 or negative.
| bearmode wrote:
| These are specific roles they're recruiting for. Job sites
| are still filled with open positions.
| conjectures wrote:
| Do explain.
| postexitus wrote:
| Headhunters are incentivized to chase you constantly,
| regardless of how many positions they are hiring for. The
| positions may soon exist, may have already been filled,
| getting advertised by multiple agencies - doesn't matter.
| These people are going to reach out, get you booked in
| and even if that specific position does not work out,
| they will be hopeful to get you into something else.
| Observe the same with Estate Agents - they will continue
| advertising already let/sold houses, just with motivation
| of getting you into their contact list hoping that it
| will be useful very soon.
| lozenge wrote:
| When there are too many recruiters in the industry for
| the amount of positions that need to be filled, the
| remaining recruiters need to work their butts off. For
| some of them, this looks like emailing more people.
| lexapro wrote:
| The fewer jobs are available, the more desperate
| recruiters become to earn their commissions.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| Then that wouldn't be zero correlation.
| neodypsis wrote:
| How can you tell if a recruiter that hounds you is legit or
| not?
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| In the US, you can usually tell by where they work. Firms
| with bad reputations are pretty easy to identify with some
| searches.
| lbriner wrote:
| It's still quite a defective system because Recruiters are so
| ruthless since so much money is made in commission. What this
| causes is the creation of fiefdoms and Recruiters trying to
| convince organisations or individuals to be exclusive with
| them, like it gives us any benefit.
|
| The truth is that the noise that Recruiters generate means
| that most of the time, we only deal with a handful at a time,
| which means it can be pot luck whether your recruiter places
| you in our role.
|
| Highly recommend that people do their own searching and apply
| direct, where possible, to the roles they want to do. I place
| a lot of kudos in a direct application compared to the
| Recruiter pitch about their latest "high quality candidate".
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Your mileage may vary with this one. Companies sometimes
| get so much inbound email to careers@ourco that they stop
| opening any of it (while leaving that as the contact us
| link on their website). A recruiter is then someone whose
| email might be read by someone at the company.
| dom96 wrote:
| Really? Where are you located in the UK? In London I have
| noticed a definite reduction in recruiter reach outs in
| comparison to 2022 (and even then it was mainly finance
| companies)
| bearmode wrote:
| Manchester.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| I am still hounded by recruiters but the quality of the
| positions they are hiring for are definitely much worse than,
| say, a year ago. Loads of temporary contracts on terrible
| salaries in obscure places with mandatory on-site attendance.
|
| Most local companies have started to demand employees back in
| office full time also. Which tells me that management in tech
| where I live ( nordics ) is generally bad and they just want
| to see bodies in the office, under the guise of teamwork of
| course, more than anything.
|
| The international companies that have offices in multiple
| countries do not bother with mandatory in-office nonsense
| nearly as much. My guess is they are the ones picking up all
| available talent at the moment.
| onion2k wrote:
| I've noticed a small uptick in the number of messages, but I
| attributed that to being in my current role for about 18
| months so I'm coming up to the point where other people start
| to look for a new job.
| [deleted]
| ak_111 wrote:
| Interesting I am not noticing this in the UK, what part of
| tech do you work in?
| substation13 wrote:
| Tune the keywords on your LinkedIn a bit and you should see
| loads of recruiter inbound.
| bearmode wrote:
| Web dev.
| kypro wrote:
| I'm from the UK. I got laid off in the first week of Jan
| and accepted a new contract role yesterday. The market was
| extremely quiet last week, but it seemed to pick up quite a
| bit this week. I'd guess it depends on experience and
| stuff, but there does seem to be stuff out there...
|
| What I did notice was less tech companies seemed to be
| recruiting. Almost all of the roles I was approached for
| were in industries like finance, retail, healthcare, etc.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > The market was extremely quiet last week, but it seemed
| to pick up quite a bit this week.
|
| Are you just counting your inbound messages? Because
| there's no way you can personally tell what's happening
| on the market on a week-to-week basis.
| kypro wrote:
| New listings on job boards, inbound calls from
| recruiters, the number of people responding to my emails,
| recruiters themselves telling me that things are picking
| up since the Christmas break.
|
| I included the word "seemed" for a reason. It wasn't
| intended as an objective statement, but a response to
| someone asking for anecdotal experiences. I'm sure others
| may have a different experience depending on where they
| live, their experience, their CV, the type of companies
| they're applying for, etc.
| varjag wrote:
| This reminds me of Slashdot posts early in dotcom bust.
| "Everyone says there's a downturn but I'm not feeling it!"
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| I like to categorize jobs into 3 tiers.
|
| Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews. Tier 2: Great
| comp and medium level difficulty interviews. Tier 3: Companies
| that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes
| don't even have a coding interview!
|
| for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as
| often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective.
| I've passed "high bar" technical interviews before, so have
| some understanding of what it takes. This time around I thought
| I did pretty well, but didn't get an offer (coincidentally at
| Google). More candidates + focus on cost cutting has made
| things much more competitive for really high paying jobs.
|
| For those tier 2/3 jobs they are exactly the same as before.
| Recruiters constantly messaging and got an offer after only
| being on the market for a couple of weeks.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There are plenty of places that pay below market rate and
| think Leetcode hard is the last word in interviewing
| engineers.
| Raed667 wrote:
| This. People talk about the job market as if it were a
| monolithic entity, but there is so much nuance by types and
| by regions that it is hard to make concise statements
| VLM wrote:
| Unironically where's this tier 3? I got leetcoded at an
| interview for what I thought was a sane employer when trying
| for what amounted to a K8S position. Not developing K8S but
| setting up a rather elaborate database system on it, LOL.
|
| I was all wondering what they're going to ask questions about
| optimization strategies WRT their business requirements and
| instead they roll up with "lets reverse a string in python".
| Wait what? This isn't a programming position as per the job
| req?
|
| I think some of the lower tier companies get the idea that
| they should copy what Google was doing a decade ago,
| regardless if it makes sense or not.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| 12k is just FTEs. How much if you include TVCs? Probably 30k+.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| 10/10 chance google gets a new ceo in the next 1-2 years.
| robbiet480 wrote:
| This week:
|
| Amazon 18,000
|
| Microsoft 10,000
|
| Alphabet/Google 12,000
| mouzogu wrote:
| is it possible that this is all a response to falling stock
| price.
|
| it seem historically a quick fix for any CEO to bump the stock
| price is to make layoffs, and it seems to work. and i don't
| think any of those companies are strapped for cash
| swyx wrote:
| most good ceos, and definitely ceo's at this level, know not
| to overreact to stock price which is very macro and short
| term driven, when they should be playing the 10-20 year game.
| adql wrote:
| That's what people who own company do, not the ones that
| get yearly bonus based on short term performance
| asdfasdfasdf42 wrote:
| The stakeholders purposedly pin CEO's pay to the stock
| price to avoid them doing so:
| https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-ceo-sundar-
| pichai-...
| trashtester wrote:
| I don't think it's the stock price so much as this being good
| opportunity to fire people who're no longer wanted by the
| company (at the salary they're collecting), without the
| reputation loss that usually comes with that.
|
| Soon they will start hiring again, quite possibly finding
| better candidates at a lower salary.
| throwawaybbq1 wrote:
| People saying it is deferred PIPs or house cleaning are
| deluded. At Meta and Amazon I know some senior people who were
| laid off. People got decent severance so not too much negative
| comments, but I think it is a blood bath. 10% is not a small
| number and these are not boot camp employees who will switch
| out to different careers. It is a bonanza for smaller tech
| firms, but I think this is going to feel like the dot com
| bubble :(
|
| I went to grad school during those days and have to say, it
| really sets you back. It will also depress wages in tech for
| the next 2-3 years.
| mi_lk wrote:
| > People saying it is deferred PIPs or house cleaning are
| deluded. At Meta and Amazon I know some senior people who
| were laid off.
|
| Not sure what you are implying. Senior people don't
| automatically perform better, it's only natural some get
| PIP'd.
| cubancigar11 wrote:
| Not every junior becomes senior in the same company. They
| are already the top of the cream.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think it will be interesting to see how the layoffs are
| structured; e.g. how much if from specific product areas vs
| how much is perhaps performance based [not that we'll ever
| know that] and how much is SWE vs SRE vs non-eng, etc.
| rk06 wrote:
| Microsoft mentioned 10,000. Where did you get 11000 from?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Lots of sources were predicting 11K before the actual
| announcement.
|
| I thought it was 11K too, had to look it up.
| rfoo wrote:
| I also remembered the 11k number and just did a search in my
| browsing history. Turns out there was a rumor saying 11k,
| with Microsoft said it was not true shortly before they
| announced the 10k layoff.
|
| Since it all happened in the same week, it is pretty
| confusing. At least to me.
| robbiet480 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out, corrected.
| leesec wrote:
| Maybe a hot take but 6 months severence is extremely generous,
| they don't have to give anything. This is basically being spoiled
| compared to how the rest of the world is treated. I'm sure these
| talented engineers can find new gigs within 6 months
| robocat wrote:
| Getting laid off can have serious long term consequences. Six
| months severance is relatively good, but perhaps not enough to
| cover the losses to an employee (just stating a fact, not
| saying that companies are only responsible for lifetime of
| employees).
|
| From https://www.nber.org/papers/w13626 We find
| that job displacement leads to a 15-20% increase in death rates
| during the following 20 years. If such increases were sustained
| beyond this period, they would imply a loss in life expectancy
| of about 1.5 years for a worker displaced at age 40.
|
| It is hard to pick a fair balance between economic needs and
| human needs, but that is one thing society is supposed to be
| doing for us all.
| gowld wrote:
| > I'm sure these talented engineers can find new gigs within 6
| months
|
| Not everyone laid off is an engineer, and even among engineers,
| how likey is that is all these companies are shedding staff at
| the same time?
| hsn915 wrote:
| I find it odd that most of the comments here are angry, as if at
| someone who stole the livlihoods of thousands of people.
|
| I understand the general public thinks their life depends on a
| company.
|
| I find it odd that this sentiment is so strong on HN.
| nness wrote:
| As an outsider, it often feels like Silicon Valley like
| organisations have a particularly unique culture compared to
| the rest of the Western corporate world. It's built from
| decades of hacker culture, start-up mythos,
| antidisestablishmentarianism, etc. I think people are angry
| because they thought that Google (and others) were behaving
| with the same social contract, acting in their interests.
|
| It's a tough pill to realise its just another company behaving
| as they all do.
| [deleted]
| frays wrote:
| Which areas of the business are likely to be impacted? I assume
| it'd be primarily ads, but any other obvious areas I'm not aware
| of?
| JCM9 wrote:
| Google's best days may be behind it. The search revenue is
| looking increasingly shaky. New business units like GCP are
| struggling to operate profitably. They had an amazing cash cow
| (ad revenue) for a long time but that cow is getting old and
| starting to look rather ill. Compared to some of the other tech
| giants Google has struggled to evolve its business to diversify
| revenue and profit streams and evolve offerings. Now the make or
| break moment to make more progress there or the company will
| slowly drift off into the sunset of has-been tech giants.
| kderbyma wrote:
| way behind it....like....Trump was not yet elected...
| laserlight wrote:
| Can we update the title to let everyone know of the size: 12000?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Seems to be updated.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Out of a total of roughly 140,000 employees (according to
| Wikipedia as of 2021).
|
| So a tad less than 10% of their workforce.
|
| Just thought I'd add that for perspective.
| danpalmer wrote:
| It's just over 6%, the company is much bigger now than in
| 2021 due to hiring and the Mandiant acquisition.
| mkl wrote:
| Mandiant was only 2-3000 people -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandiant.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Oh ok, that's quite a bit smaller than I thought. Thanks.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I saw a comment on the recent MS layoffs of 10k, after they
| hired 40k in the last 2-3 years (iirc), so they were still
| _up_ 30k jobs...
| thecompilr wrote:
| The big companies hired so many new engineers over the past
| fee years, I wonder how many of them just abused the remote
| work to score multiple jobs? Like where did all those jobless
| engineers come from on such short notice?
| lexapro wrote:
| Is this possible in the US? In many European countries you
| couldn't do that unless one of the companies employs you
| "unofficially" (thus breaking labor and tax laws).
| thecompilr wrote:
| Why can't you have more than one job in Europe? But it
| sure is possible in the US, multiple posts here bragged
| about scoring multiple remote jobs in parallel
| unmole wrote:
| Bloomberg says it's 6% of the global workforce:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/google-
| cu...
| gniv wrote:
| The most reliable source of information is the latest
| earnings report [1], which says 187k as of end of Q3. I guess
| we'll see in a few days what the number was at the end of the
| year.
|
| [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q3_alphabet_earni
| ngs...
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| afandian wrote:
| > Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago
|
| That seems like a weird thing to throw in there. Does anyone else
| read it as a hasty "we were doing AI before ChatGPT was cool"?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Hopefully someone can inform us as to whether they did announce
| such a pivot (I have no memory of that) but it wouldn't
| surprise me. ChatGPT feels a lot like search-without-citations
| to me, and the closest existing thing in production to it is
| the blurb at the top of Google results, which I suppose will
| soon be replaced by this kind of thing (if they can ever get it
| to stop lying.)
| knorker wrote:
| "Computing is evolving again. We spoke last year about this
| important shift in computing from a mobile-first to an AI-
| first approach. ... In an AI-first world, we are rethinking
| all our products and applying machine learning and AI to
| solve user problems." --Sundar Pichai, 2017
|
| https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/google-goes-ai-first-
| io...
| ta988 wrote:
| It is not lying, it is not conscious. It is just displaying
| whatever it says using confidence filled sentences.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > it is not conscious
|
| Obviously. Whatever you want to call it, it needs to stop
| consistently vomiting up false statements before it's fully
| useful.
| spuz wrote:
| Since 2015, Google have rolled out RankBrain, BERT and MUM
| which are machine learning enhancements of their search
| algorithm and allow Google to understand the meaning of the
| terms you search for and provide matches based on that.
| oriolid wrote:
| So that explains how Google knows that when I'm searching
| for X, it can give me results for slightly related Y
| instead. Sometimes it works, often it feels almost hostile.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I've noticed the same thing with YouTube notifications.
|
| It feels like Google wants to recruit/queue my attention
| as a resource for their client's ads instead of just
| notifying me when a new video from someone I follow is
| available.
| oriolid wrote:
| That at least make some sense, but I don't understand
| whose benefit is showing results for Rider and IDEA when
| I search for some detail in CLion that is different from
| the other IDEs from the same company.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I would guess he means that they use AI algorithms to perform
| some of the tasks that are performed manually at most
| companies. If so, most of Google's customers wouldn't really
| consider this to be a win.
|
| ML-driven account suspensions etc are universally hated and
| seem to have damaged Google's image, at least in the tech
| community.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Part of my job is developing and testing a Google calendar
| sync tool. I've created a secondary throwaway email address
| so I don't fill my own calendar with test data.
|
| During testing I often have to link/unlink the calendar with
| different users in my application. Some AI bot has evidently
| flagged this as 'suspicious' because I now get 'An error has
| occurred, please try again' when linking my application with
| Google Calendar. No further details of which error it might
| be or what I might do to resolve it.
|
| To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my
| account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this
| behaviour. Why should I put the time in to test and develop
| an application that benefits users of Google's calendar when
| they won't even lift a finger for me?
| visarga wrote:
| > To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my
| account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this
| behaviour
|
| They will probably never hire humans for support tickets.
| But they could "hire" their star model PaLM to solve
| support questions. It could be a good demo and a product
| useful for many companies. Even if it is only 70% or 80%
| effective, still better than nothing.
| lmm wrote:
| > Why should I put the time in to test and develop an
| application that benefits users of Google's calendar when
| they won't even lift a finger for me?
|
| Well, why are you? They treat you like that because you let
| them.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Modern users expect everything to integrate with Google
| Calendar, unfortunately. You can't avoid them when it
| comes to developing scheduling applications.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| You are right, but those sentiments seem to be limited to
| tech community ( and even in it, opinion seems split ). I
| will admit that not once have I heard that mentioned as an
| issue in my non-tech oriented circle.
| achow wrote:
| Quite possible (ChatGPT related).
|
| Considering this was the Tweet that he sent yesterday..
| https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1615820298305118221
|
| As a followup to AI blogpost (which is clearly in response to
| ChatGPT) https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-
| research-2022-beyon...
| swyx wrote:
| > "we were doing AI before ChatGPT was cool"
|
| definitely google is on the defensive right now[0] and just
| this week they had jeff dean do a "here's all our AI
| credentials" recap [1]
|
| 0: https://lspace.swyx.io/p/google-vs-openai
|
| 1: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-
| research-2022-beyon...
| DocTomoe wrote:
| A friend of mine who is in "serious" AI research keeps
| telling me not to get too excited about Google's AI stuff, as
| they do release a lot of papers, but these are essentially
| worthless and non-reproduceable as they hide raw data. He
| suspects half of them or more are completely made up, as they
| do not align well with what else happens in the field.
|
| I can't verify that, but whenever the "AI" behind my Google
| Home gets a bit more stupid (happens once a week nowadays,
| with it 'forgetting' even the few things that worked before),
| I am inclined to agree.
| swyx wrote:
| agree that they are nonreproduceable, but they are probably
| not worthless in that i'm sure they have very extensive
| review processes and theyve said that they actually put
| models like T5 into production on _search_. there 's no
| bigger skin in the game than that.
|
| > they do not align well with what else happens in the
| field
|
| i'm interested in this comment though. havent transformers
| changed the field? what is this referring to? mind getting
| your friend to elaborate?
| visarga wrote:
| > they actually put models like T5 into production on
| search
|
| Google search does not show signs of using a decent
| language model. If they did, then questions like this
| should work:
|
| > "What is the world record for crossing the English
| Channel entirely on foot?"
|
| This is the quote it gives on top of all results:
|
| > And it was a Towson University graduate to do it the
| fastest. Two weeks ago, Nik Haynes '00 became a world-
| record holder by _backstroking_ the English Channel in an
| astounding 12 hours, 52 minutes. Haynes bested the mark
| set by Tina Neill in 2005 of 13 hours, 22 minutes.Aug 27,
| 2020
|
| And the rest of the page is anything but crossing on
| foot.
|
| Ok, so it missed the core semantics of the question
| completely. In reality there have been crossings through
| the Channel Tunnel. And at some point in the distant past
| the sea level was low enough people could cross on foot.
|
| This kind of problem happens in many searches - if you
| search topic X which is not very popular, and there is a
| topic Y close to X that is very popular, Google will
| reply to Y instead of X. Topic blindness.
| netheril96 wrote:
| > as they do release a lot of papers, but these are
| essentially worthless and non-reproduceable as they hide
| raw data.
|
| Well, I know at least that the transformers from Google are
| widely used in industry outside Google.
| visarga wrote:
| The authors of that paper have long left Google and are
| on a bunch of startups. So you could say they already
| lost that advantage.
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| Jeff Dean has been doing yearly recaps since 2017.
|
| 2017 https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-
| google-brain-team-looking-back-on.html
|
| 2018 https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/01/the-
| google-brain-team-looking-back-on.html (part 1)
| https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/01/the-google-brain-team-
| looking-back-on_12.html (part 2)
|
| 2019
| https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/01/looking-back-at-googles-
| research.html
|
| 2020 http://ai.googleblog.com/2021/01/google-
| research-looking-back-at-2020.html
|
| 2021 http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-
| research-themes-from-2021-and.html
|
| 2022 http://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-
| research-2022-beyond-language.html
| cutenewt wrote:
| This is definitely tone deaf.
|
| Who cares if you were held the lead in the first leg of the
| marathon?
|
| All that matters is who's in the lead now and who's in the lead
| at the finish.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| In Google I/O 2017 they announced a "pivot to AI".
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2017-05-20-at-i-o-2017-google-doubl...
|
| Google Assistant, Tensorflow, Google Lens, Cloud TPU, Google
| Goggles, auto mail responses etc.
|
| A lot of interesting stuff but nothing that has made the
| popular press like chatGPT, dall-e etc.
| kgwgk wrote:
| DeepMind has occasionally made to the popular press - but not
| like ChatGPT. Coverage was more like that of IBM's Watson and
| Deep Blue back in the day.
| samwillis wrote:
| Google Ads, their most significant revenue stream, are entirely
| AI base, and speaking as an advertiser, it's only made it more
| crap. It's "ai" algorithms are designed to maximise value
| extraction from advertisers, rather than value creation for
| advertisers.
|
| There has been a systematic trend over the last 10 years to
| remove the controls advertisers have over their placements and
| spend and move towards a black box we are supposed to trust.
| joshvm wrote:
| I'm not sure if you'd call it a pivot, but Google Brain was
| initially an X project that was started well before the deep
| learning craze took off. They hired Geoff Hinton in 2013.
| Investment in AI has been going on for a long time at Google,
| probably before Facebook/FAIR got seriously involved, but
| probably not Microsoft (MSR has been going for ~30 years and
| Chris Bishop started the Cambridge lab in '97 and they've long
| been known as a good ML group).
|
| It's not like Google wasn't using ML before that either.
| Search, recommender systems for ads, anti-spam, translate. Deep
| learning just turned out to be a lot better than the tools we
| used to use.
| charles_f wrote:
| > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
|
| When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of
| 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at
| the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce
| one after that.
|
| _What was the root cause?_ crazy hiring, massive wage war
|
| _Could the current situation be anticipated?_ hell yeah, out of
| a pandemic, war raging in Europe, petrol production going down,
| supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation
| going massively up... Don 't need an MBA to anticipate the
| economy was par for a correction.
|
| _what could you have done to prevent this?_ realize it was too
| good to be true. Don 't enter the rat race, be cautious about
| hiring. Focus business.
|
| _what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from
| happening again?_ "I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to
| say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences
| as well, and don't learn anything in the process. I bet you that
| if/when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as
| before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn't move and we
| see the same move in another 5/10y. So I guess the answer to this
| question is "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I
| tell you that no-one is safe"
| mbar84 wrote:
| Gavin Belson taking full responsibility
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ
| charcircuit wrote:
| >I've never seen a company produce one after that.
|
| Almost every company does. They may not make it public, but yes
| leadership will reflect on this.
|
| >"I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's
| completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well
|
| This isn't how most large tech companies work. If someone
| causes an outage that costs the company 7 figures there are no
| consequences assuming it wasn't done maliciously. It is more
| about learning and figuring out what went wrong and how to
| avoid it in the future and it is not about punishing people.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Focus business
|
| People simply have different incentives during booming years.
| Companies want growth in marketshare, so they throw initiatives
| on the wall to see which ones stick. So, more hiring. Managers
| want more scope, and size of their teams is a good indicator.
| So, they hire more. Of course, I don't doubt their motives.
| They may genuinely believe the causes of their teams and
| diligently come up with initiatives. It's just that their
| initiatives may not get the same level of scrutiny when almost-
| free investment dries up. Again, more hiring.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem.
|
| "Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what
| every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest
| rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn't think "hmm...
| this might change in the next 6-12 months". It changed. I am
| now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the
| bandwagon and correcting."
|
| Now I don't actually have proof that interest rates directly
| affect Google (who is probably flush with cash/very
| profitable/has high margins/has lots of money coming in).
|
| I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with
| "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays
| into it.
|
| I just like to tell myself "these people weren't top performers
| and if you work for a company like Google (and get paid a lot),
| you are expected to do a lot/be a top top top performer"
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries
| with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation
| plays into it.
|
| Think macro-level. It's not that each individual firm says
| "oh, debt is cheap" and takes on more debt to increase
| spending. It's that _economy-wide_ a lot of firms _are_
| responding to that incentive, and that increased spending is
| showing up at other firms as increased revenue (and at the
| macro level, as a general shift in demand).
|
| So your revenue goes up. What do you do with it? Well, if you
| have projects you could start or increase funding for that
| look like they'd be profitable, you do that. You might even
| leverage it a bit; if you think the risk-adjusted ROI of
| something is way higher than the interest rates you can get,
| why wouldn't you?
|
| And even if you think there's a good chance that the cheap
| credit dries up and the economy goes into recession, (a)
| leaving money on the table for a long-term bet isn't
| something most CEOs can pull off without shareholders
| fighting them on it, and (b) you're not actually aiming for
| zero layoffs -- any company that is innovating and iterating
| is going to need to lay off some people to match their
| workforce to their needs sometimes.
|
| Inflation's effects take place at the level of deep
| incentives. It's not something you can fix by thinking
| "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months."
| ngcazz wrote:
| Hearing a lot about top performers getting laid off too
| charles_f wrote:
| > these people weren't top performers
|
| Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling. Large
| lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the lower
| performers.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What I'm hearing from Googlers I know -- the layoffs are
| not on the whole tied to perf. They're across the board in
| terms of years of service and seniority and product areas
| and roles and some people recently promoted have gotten the
| axe, too.
|
| Doesn't seem to be departmental. When Google does that (axe
| a PA or department or product) they have a process of
| giving a chunk of time usually to let people move
| themselves, or be moved; e.g. when they killed Fiber at my
| site (Waterloo) they moved everyone (including me) into
| other roles and brought new projects into the office, and
| people in Mountain View and other places were given a few
| months to find something else internal.
| charles_f wrote:
| It's the same at Microsoft and Amazon, I've seen top-tier
| people with >10y service getting axed in both instances.
| tgma wrote:
| I'm not suggesting there aren't top tier people but I
| know firsthand that just being there for 10yr
| (specifically the past 10 years at G) does not in any
| shape or form imply you're top tier. You could have been
| literally coasting for a decade.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yes, will this is in part the Faustian bargain that is
| often made to work at Google. People often _become_
| mediocre working there, and Google is on the whole
| frankly fine with this because it keeps those people from
| going & working at potential competitors.
|
| That this is now changing, is interesting.
|
| In any case, like I said above, this round of layoffs
| doesn't seem to be indexed on performance. At least not
| completely, from what I've heard.
|
| It should be interesting to see how many new startups get
| built out in the next year as a result of this.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| There are like 46k Xooglers or something.. +12k Xooglers
| now. That is like startup gold. So much opportunity if
| these folks self-organize.
| notyourday wrote:
| > Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling.
| Large lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the
| lower performers.
|
| Companies like Google are overstaffed by the lazy, entitled
| Prima Donnas. You can see it all over HN in its advice:
|
| "Don't go to a startup! You would need to work. Rather get
| a job at FAANG, get paid a very large salary, leave on the
| dot, don't ever be on call. Also, best part, you will get
| at least a few hours a day to play around on the internet.
| Also, remember, you have a power of pocket veto! If you do
| not like something, just don't do it. What are they going
| to do? Fire you? You will get another job in a jiffy!"
|
| With the zero interest rate environment gone the culling is
| inevitable.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Advice on HN not to go to a startup is because 99% of
| startups have bullshit equity options these days.
|
| They're not worth the risk and stress because the VCs and
| founders are keeping potential payouts to themselves but
| pushing a huge amount of the financial risk and work
| stress onto their staff.
|
| Unless you're a cofounder or maybe a founding engineer,
| payout from a reasonable sale of a startup these days --
| if it fluked out and actually happened -- ends up being
| little more than the annual comp at one of these
| BigCorps.
|
| TLDR, you don't get a job at a FAANG because you're lazy,
| you get that job because you're looking out for yourself
| and your family and you'd prefer not to be someone's
| plaything.
|
| That said I got sick of Google and went and shopped
| around last year and now I'm working at a smaller, series
| B funded company now and love it. But I ain't hoping to
| get rich, just job satisfaction.
|
| When VCs and founders get their shit together on equity
| agreements, early stage startups will be more attractive
| again.
|
| EDIT: Also hate to burst your bubble, but on-call
| rotation is a part of plenty of Google SWE teams, not
| just SRE. But they do pay a handsome bonus for the time
| you're on-call.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| My buddy and I were just talking about this. A company we
| were modeling received $4.2M in VC funding and had 20
| employees at time of purchase. The purchase price was
| never advertised, but we assumed a 7x multiple on last
| known value and assumed the sale price at $25M. $25M
| turns out to be a little over $1M per employee after 4
| years (company started 2012 and was bought in 2016). I
| asked out loud "why would you do this when you could just
| go to Microsoft or Apple, do less work, and make the same
| money in the same amount of time".
|
| Now this price is skewed towards the investors and very
| early employees, but the point still stands. You will
| very clearly make more money working for an established
| corp than a startup.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their
| business, not in the day to day operations but in the value
| of the future cash flows vs. risk free rate.
|
| Super simplifying, if risk free interest rate is 0% then you
| can value current cash flow the same as future ones. When you
| have 5% risk free in 14 years that new dollar is worth half
| of what it is today.
|
| This has big impact on enterprise value for growing
| businesses.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their
| business
|
| Can you expand on how please?
|
| Wouldn't this depend on Google (or other companies)
| actively financing things through debt with loans from
| banks?
|
| Why would they need to do this if they have tons of cash on
| hand?
|
| > Alphabet cash on hand for the quarter ending September
| 30, 2022 was $116.259B
|
| If anything, can't they put that money somewhere and earn
| interest on it? Higher interest rates means they'll earn
| more on it.
|
| How do they experience increased costs from interest rates
| if they aren't financing projects through debt? Or are
| they?
| formercoder wrote:
| They are related but different concepts. The value of a
| company is equal to the discounted value of its future
| cash flows. If rates go up, that means a higher return
| can be had for zero risk, which means all cash coming in
| the future at more than zero risk is now worth less.
| There is a second term other than risk free rate in the
| discounting equation which is related to capital
| structure. So, amount and cost of debt does impact
| valuation (though there is some debate and theory that
| makes my statement not quite true), but it is not the
| only factor.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Are you saying in a perfect world, the perfect CEO would
| "can" (get rid of) every team/project that isn't
| projected to 5% ROI yearly (assuming risk free rate has
| roughly gone from 0.25% -> 5%)?
|
| Obviously there are exceptions where you want to eat
| losses up from (R&D a big project for a few years hoping
| it returns a lot down the road)?
| formercoder wrote:
| WACC = (E/D x Ke) + ((D/E x Kd) x (1 - T))
|
| E = equity value
|
| D = debt value
|
| Ke = cost of equity
|
| Kd = cost of debt
|
| T = tax rate
|
| Ke = Rf + B * ERP
|
| Rf = risk free rate
|
| B = beta of company
|
| ERP = equity risk premium
|
| Kd = Rf + credit spread
|
| In theory, if a project's ROIC is less than WACC, it does
| not generate economic value.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| and charlie munger said he never used calculus
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| How does this apply given that we're assuming Google has
| enough cash on hand from profit of other aspects of their
| business that they do not finance most projects through
| new loans (debt) from banks at current interest rates
| because they don't need to?
| formercoder wrote:
| Their cash balance doesn't really matter, it impacts
| their cost of capital in various ways, but you can still
| compare the ROIC of any given project to the overall
| company's cost of capital.
| fwungy wrote:
| If you can make a 5% return on investment and borrow
| money at 0% interest than you're going to invest a lot.
|
| As the interest rate approaches 5% your willingness to
| invest falls.
|
| Tech runs wild on low interest rates because the return
| potential is so high. It falters on high interest rates
| because the risk is high.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > As the interest rate approaches 5% your willingness to
| invest falls.
|
| Do we have proof based on their financial statements
| quarterly that they are actively investing their cash in
| risk free assets yielding 5% instead of investing in
| projects? I find it hard to believe that a team of
| $200k-$300k/yr earning employees at Google can't find a
| way to generate more than 5% net margin for the company?
| fwungy wrote:
| The particulars don't matter. That was just an example.
|
| If a company sees an opportunity that it thinks it can
| profit on above its costs it will do so, if it has the
| resources.
| specialp wrote:
| I think this is more of sliding the levers to keep the
| earnings good. There was a massive amount of money dumped
| into the economy over the last couple of years. Companies
| produced record earnings, and their stock prices
| correspondingly increased. Now to keep "growing" they need to
| decrease spending to keep earnings at the same or higher
| levels.
|
| It is also an opportunity to cut some cruft. A lot of good
| people get swept up too but most large tech companies have
| had huge layoffs in the past. They can then cite the
| necessity to do it as "everyone is having to tighten up"
|
| Google could still be profitable without cutting staff, but
| their profit would drop and be perceived as not "growing"
| jbay808 wrote:
| I think it's beyond that -- with interest rates rising,
| companies need to _increase_ earnings or else decrease
| their expenditures, in order to maintain their valuation.
| kaczordon wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20(pun). Did you sell all your stocks at the
| top in Jan 2022? No one can predict a recession otherwise
| they'd be billionaires.
|
| How would you expect other people to predict that there would
| be a recession? IMO google tried to stave off layoffs for as
| long as possible.
| [deleted]
| outworlder wrote:
| > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
|
| That's a meaningless statement. They never face any
| consequences. A CEO taking responsibility for layoffs should
| add their name to the list too.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| "It is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their
| failure"
|
| Silicon Valley somehow feels even more relevant years after
| it has wrapped.
| ok_dad wrote:
| No shit, this guy took ~$250mm in stock in each of the last
| few years from what I can find, and even if that is worth
| half of what it was before this year he could give each
| outgoing employee about $10k of that stock (to sell maybe) to
| make their lives easier.
|
| Instead he gave them a few words written by some PR manager.
|
| Taking responsibility must mean something different to a CEO
| than it does to me, a common dude.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| "oooh you mean _financial_ responsibility. yeah I take none
| of that. "
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood
| of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect
| at the very least a post-mortem.
|
| Yeah, this isn't an "incident", this is capitalism working as
| designed. The pro-forma taking of responsibility is just part
| of the ritual that labor, management, and capital _all_ know is
| fake of pretending otherwise. If you don't want to work at a
| firm that overhires when the winds are even vaguely positive
| and overfires when the winds blow the other way, form a labor
| coop; otherwise, you are a resource to which "cattle, not pets"
| applies just as much as to one-of-many VM in the cloud.
| charles_f wrote:
| "I take full responsibility" indicates that, at least on the
| PR side, that there is responsibility to take, ergo that's an
| incident.
| 8note wrote:
| He might be expecting a fat compensation bonus, by being
| responsible for a profit increase
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| >> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us
| here
|
| Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ
| snotrockets wrote:
| > what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too
| good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about
| hiring. Focus business.
|
| Nothing could have been done, because nothing needed to be
| done.
|
| Is there a recession? Probably. Was valuation and market
| expectation inflated? Obviously. Did Google overhire? looks
| like it.
|
| But is that the cause for the firing? Of course not. Last
| quarter revenue was almost 69.1B, 6.1% Y/Y. That is still an
| offensive amount of money. Management decided to hurt people
| because other companies are doing it.
|
| Here's your root cause analysis: management is beholden to
| fads, not facts. Layoffs don't improve performance
| (https://www.careerusa.org/resources/career-
| files/158-resourc...), but the market demands it, and nobody in
| the c-suite has the long term vision and spine to do what is
| right, rather than to appease short term fads.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yes, but I would add that we're not in a recession currently.
| Really. There may be one coming, but it hasn't happened yet.
| YokoZar wrote:
| Planet Money had an episode this week showing a poll where
| literally 99% of CEOs responded that they thought a
| recession was going to happen in 2023.
| snotrockets wrote:
| That's just makes this decision more harmful, both to the
| people Pichai and Alphabet management just wrecked their
| lives, and to the long term prospects of Alphabet the
| company.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people
|
| I'll stop you right there. Why would they do a post-mortem for
| this? They're not accountable to the employees. This should be
| a reminder for everyone as to who SLT actually works for.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Corporations should be accountable to their employees. The
| system we have today is harmful.
| scottyah wrote:
| The employees who stay get paid more than if everyone
| stayed. Same idea as with unions, you're splitting the pie
| into less slices so each is bigger.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It isn't the same sized pie in both situations. There's
| shit that won't get done by my team anymore. I just sent
| an email to a stakeholder group telling them that I have
| to kill a valuable project.
|
| It isn't like if Google fired 95% of people that comp for
| the remainder would hit $10m a person.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > The employees who stay get paid more than if everyone
| stayed
|
| As someone who survived numerous rounds of layoffs,
| that's not true. The employees who stay get to work more
| (under more job security pressure) but that's about it.
| It's not like the wages of the workers who get laid off
| are reallocated as bonuses for the remaining employees.
| morepork wrote:
| Google pays a large amount of stock based comp, so at
| least that part of their wages will likely go up, at
| least in the short term.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Yup, the "I take full responsibility" reminds me of people I
| know who cause me grief and say "Sorry" with no intent of
| making any changes. How sorry can you be if you don't intend on
| avoiding it in the future?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Wouldn't full responsibility be paying for these people's
| salaries over the last 2 years and finding new work for all
| 12,000 people yourself?
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Exactly. "Full responsibility" with no particular
| consequences is meaningless.
|
| Or perhaps he could take a paycut as a proportion of people
| fired. It's not the same, but it's a step in the right
| direction.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| This isn't a service outage; it was investment that no longer
| make sense in the new fiscal environment. Google's revenue went
| from $38.3b (Q2FY20) to $69b (Q3FY22), are you suggesting they
| should not have hired during that kind of growth?
| [deleted]
| jedberg wrote:
| From the point of view of a CEO of a public company, no post-
| mortem is necessary because nothing went wrong.
|
| Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as
| the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. Grow
| when money is cheap, stabilize when it's not. If you don't do
| that, then you'll get out-competed by the companies that are
| doing that.
| morepork wrote:
| Sure, but Google always billed themselves as a non-
| traditional company, and prided themselves on social
| responsibility. That helped in hiring as they became one of
| the most desirable companies to work for, even when their
| salaries were outstripped by their peers (e.g. Facebook).
|
| There will be long term effects on their hiring based on this
| moving further showing they are becoming just another
| traditional company. What's to differentiate them from IBM or
| Microsoft now?
| srveale wrote:
| To me the strategy has seemed so backwards the last few
| years.
|
| You are the CEO of a giant tech company, and your goal is to
| achieve maximum well-being of the company in, say, 3 years
| time. You are confident you can weather the short term ups
| and downs. You could:
|
| 1. Follow trends. Go on a hiring frenzy at the same time as
| everyone else. You have to compete with absurd compensation
| packages because everybody already has a job or is getting
| multiple offers.
|
| 2. Buck the trend. Hire when others are in the middle of
| layoffs. Show strength when others are making their sheepish
| apologies. Pay discounted labour prices for top talent.
|
| To me choice #2 is a no-brainer but obviously nobody will
| ever put me in a position to decide, and it's easy to be an
| arm-chair CEO. Is it really that these companies are so
| short-sighted, and are more worried about next quarter than
| next year? Could nobody see the interest rate hikes coming? I
| just can't imagine how executives/boards would overlook the
| impact on stock price if a company was publicly known to use
| foresight in their hiring practices. What if the headline was
| something like "Google hiring continues at same rate during
| recession," doesn't that send a strong signal to investors?
| yafbum wrote:
| You can't necessarily survive #2 if it causes the talent
| you actually need the most to bail in high times. You can
| play this game at the margin by starting to freeze hiring
| before everyone else does, so that you can be there earlier
| to hire again at discounted rates in the downturn
| startupsfail wrote:
| The approach one is what happens when you hire a CEO from a
| cunning, but not particularly smart culture. That hadn't
| produced anything outstanding really.
|
| The approach two is what happens rarely, when you still
| have a technical founder interested, onboard and with the
| decision making power.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for
| recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring
| someone else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging
| for the diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.
| acituan wrote:
| > Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go
| as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure.
|
| If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff,
| which is not the case. From what I gather it doesn't even
| match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the
| bottom 6% of the "stack")
|
| This is both a wage depression maneuver, and a meager 4$ bump
| in stock price. I'd bet my money it is a hail mary to prevent
| the CEO being outed in a few quarters.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff,
| which is not the case.
|
| That doesn't follow. What you hire for at one time because
| you think it's profitable to do so is not necessarily
| related to who you let go at a later time because you think
| it's profitable to do so. Market conditions and other
| factors have changed in the mean time.
|
| > From what I gather it doesn't even match with the
| performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of
| the "stack")
|
| And it shouldn't. Who it makes sense to let go of has a
| number of factors, not just performance. Even software
| developers are not a homogeneous resource, and ROI on an
| employee is not just about performance.
| acituan wrote:
| > What you hire for at one time because you think it's
| profitable to do so is not necessarily related to who you
| let go at a later time because you think it's profitable
| to do so
|
| Software engineers are one of the most fungible knowledge
| workers around, save for transition costs.
|
| > ROI on an employee is not just about performance.
|
| Why is it called performance then?
| tipalti_layoff wrote:
| I'd kind of disagree with this sentiment. Sure, that works
| for Ford at the assembly line, but you have to get tech
| companies a little bit more credit. They don't scale with the
| number of heads if they are doing it right ;-)
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Since Google is no longer restricted by "don't be evil",
| overhiring to keep the best employees is a valid business plan.
| It is easier to overhire than to attract , interview and offer
| to better candidates and most companies are doing it. Quantity
| leads to quality, eventually.
| mindslight wrote:
| Meanwhile, here is an actual quote from the figurehead that led
| the quantitative dumping that put us where we are today: "I
| don't take responsibility at all"
|
| Remember how a few short years ago, it was widely recognized
| that Wall Street and Main Street were completely out of sync?
| That was due to trillions of dollars in helicopter money meant
| to make the financial markets look good despite the pandemic.
| These layoffs are part of the bill that's coming due.
| neuronic wrote:
| But then youn cannot just do the same things again next time
| without admitting that you consciously repeated mistakes.
| sireat wrote:
| Whenever I see CEO taking "full responsibility" and staying put
| I am reminded of Gavin:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ
|
| Full responsibility that does not involve massive shakeup at
| the top is not full responsibility.
| int0x2e wrote:
| I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to
| suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes.
|
| Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years
| until I recently quit: 1. When the pandemic hit, mangement
| froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so
| we wouldn't have to lose anyone. 2. When the pandemic concerned
| turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire at a crazy rate,
| often competing with insane offers. 3. When the war started, we
| again went into a hiring freeze, and now a round of layoffs.
|
| In my experience - our management basically did what everyone
| else did, which meant we couldn't leverage any of our unique
| advantages and beat the market in some way.
|
| The reason I joined the company I did after the megacorp is
| that they had a very simple strategy for hiring - hire top
| talent in strategic areas when you can find it, but ignore
| anything else, don't lower the quality bars, don't make insane
| offers, etc. It's almost as if having common sense is such a
| rare thing now, that it's become a winning strategy...
| hbrn wrote:
| > most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and
| very bad deciding making processes
|
| I think that's an accepted fact of life. I don't expect big
| companies to be fast and make good decisions.
|
| But I do expect people not to be hypocrites.
| thrashh wrote:
| I think this is just another case of "history repeats itself"
|
| People who went through COVID will now have an experience
| that will shape how they handle this situation in the future.
| This generation won't make this same "mistake" again, but a
| future generation may.
|
| Just like how people who grew up with extreme bank
| instability (i.e. the Great Depression) stashed large sums of
| money in closets and dressers but we don't. Our decisions are
| largely based on the context of our experiences. If we don't
| have a certain experience, it probably won't be a factor in
| decision making.
|
| Of course, you go to school to learn about past mistakes, but
|
| (1) There are a billion mistakes that have been made in the
| past so even if you learn about them, without direct personal
| experience, you will probably repeat some anyway.
|
| (2) In the end, we sort of want people to repeat mistakes
| because sometimes the conditions are different and the
| outcome could be positive. What happens when we get old is
| that we encounter negative experiences that discourages us
| from trying the same things in the future, which is great for
| survival but extremely negative for innovation. In the case
| of someone who grew up stashing money, they might be
| disdainful of banks and this could actually turn out to be a
| pretty bad trait.
|
| So in the end, it is what it is. Cycles will always be a
| thing.
| 98codes wrote:
| The fact that even with all that I can't tell which tech
| giant you're talking about feels like a strong signal of the
| problem you described.
| endtime wrote:
| > hire top talent in strategic... don't make insane offers
|
| How does this work? I left Google after ten years last year,
| when the market was still competitive, and I had multiple
| strong offers. I wasn't going to leave...lets call it
| significant money on the table if I somehow had a "non-
| insane" offer somewhere else...
| int0x2e wrote:
| It's interesting, because I took a pay cut to join this
| startup. I had grown tired of not being challenged and not
| learning as much anymore, and I definitely got tired of the
| corporate politics and endless bureaucracy. Don't get me
| wrong - I did cool stuff, and I did have impact, but nearly
| as much as I thought I could.
|
| At the startup, I was really impressed by the caliber of
| folks I met, and over the past 2 months I've been here,
| I've only grown more happy with my decision. It's so
| thrilling to see what a team of A players can get done when
| you set clear goals... I think it's worth the pay cut (to
| me at least), and I am very hopeful for a further exit to
| make me more than happy financially as well...
| browningstreet wrote:
| When the pandemic hit I was working at a name SF company that
| immediately -- day one -- cut all contractors & consultants.
| They pivoted from working on things that had 2 year delivery
| timeframes to things that had 30 day delivery time frames.
| Then everyone who was left got run into the ground because
| their business boomed (one of those companies that thrived
| during the pandemic).
|
| So sure, they didn't need all those other people when they
| were trying to build big things that took years of
| development, but those same people were cut and left to fend
| for themselves while the company recorded record revenues and
| profits.
|
| Now, in the case of the pandemic, these things were hard to
| predict. Contractors & consultants know they're expendable,
| they're paid to be (though, not like they used to be).
|
| But now companies are giving at least three orthogonal
| messages: 1) we're doing fine but productivity requires
| everyone to please come back into the office, and 2) we're
| not in a recession but we're going to cull the herd in big
| numbers anyway, and finally 3) we have to control and
| minimize corporate spending.
|
| It's hard not to think that the cullings are part of an
| effort by the big corps to assert greater control over their
| employees. There's a collective hurt being spread across the
| workforce, a quelling of employee pushback against RTO
| policies (the pandemic is still happening, in actuality), and
| a desire to bring salaries back down by minimizing the
| opportunism of mobility via strategic attrition.
|
| I do wonder a) how the orgs that are remote-first in hiring
| are faring in this climate, and b) if this will start a
| tumble in housing in HCOL areas.
| [deleted]
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Just about everyone understands that "full responsibility" is
| meaningless.
|
| One thing I've come to internalise is in a public (maybe most
| of private too) company CEO's fiduciary responsibility is to
| maximise shareholder value. From what I've learnt the switch
| from "profit" to "share holder value" occurred sometime in the
| 80s. So they'd do whatever it takes to reduce cost; outsourcing
| to 3rd world countries, financial engineering, wage
| suppression, hiring contractors and what not to ensure stock
| prices keep going up.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I wonder if some of what is behind this here and at other
| companies, is the thought that LLMs will make devs more
| productive thus less are needed. It seems like a reasonable
| assumption with zero-sum-game mentality. However, I suspect what
| LLMs actually mean is a more vibrant startup space as fewer
| people will be able to do more.
| drstewart wrote:
| >I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
|
| There it is! The free bingo space
| mk89 wrote:
| After so long, I decided to think of it differently: it's a
| learning company. You can eventually fix the problem you're
| responsible for by chopping off a part of it, convince people
| you can do better, and then move on. (Don't try at home!!!) :)
|
| Now the question for all these learning companies would be: how
| do they prevent this from happening again? What did they learn
| and what are they going to do differently? I would seriously
| like to know.
|
| The way I see it: right now everyone is kind of "rebalancing"
| their resources, but what's next? How do you prevent over-
| provisioning of resources (without under-provisioning)? How do
| you say which (internal) project is worth throwing money at and
| which one not?
|
| Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for
| 2023-2024? Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role
| internally? Maybe not all the 10000, but maybe 2000 could stay
| and be in the same role in other teams? Or did they do it
| already and those 10000 are really people that can't be placed
| at all internally? (Like we don't want full remote, and we're
| shutting down that particular office, in which case I can even
| understand...)
| trashtester wrote:
| > Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for
| 2023-2024?
|
| Almost certainly not. Maybe the first few months, fewer will
| get hired.
|
| > Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role
| internally?
|
| They almost certainly will try to do that with the top
| performers. But I suppose it doesn't make much sense doing
| this to retain below average performers (even if their
| average may be a bit high), given their salary levels and the
| current market.
|
| Moving someone from one type of product to something
| completely else may require almost as much training as the
| training of a new hire. Better to hire someone new in a few
| months, at a lower salary and possibly someone with more
| potential.
|
| Also, most ex-googlers will probably have an easy time
| finding other work (especially engineers), so even they may
| be better off in the end.
|
| Now, I do wonder what kind of roles are seeing the biggest
| slashes, especially outside of tech. (Ie, sales, marketing,
| key account, domain experts, content moderation, HR related).
| If any of those are cut disproportionally, it may indicate a
| change in direction.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > I take full responsibility
|
| but no consequences.
| rk06 wrote:
| Of course not. He will be taking extra bonus and stocks. Not
| to mention stock value increase due to his direct decision
| rmk wrote:
| It is beginning to look like all the large companies that were
| hiring to deny talent to competitors are now feeling comfortable
| trimming the fat because they know that the startup fundraising
| scene has shifted dramatically in their favor (fewer potential
| competitors being funded), and they can trim costs and regain the
| initiative as far as having more leverage/bargaining power over
| current and future employees is concerned.
| mailmrg wrote:
| might not be a popular opinion, but different perspective. during
| pandemic, demand was high and employees where asking anywhere
| from 60% to 100% hikes to do the same job. no one complained.
| people were ready to jump every 6 months in search for more pay
| without thinking career, is the position impacting the company or
| anything of that sorts. founders (esp smaller ones) had tough
| time meeting insane demands. people were asking for joining bonus
| (an insane concept in my view) to the tune of 50% of annual
| salary.
|
| Now the tables have turned. so if former is accepted then later
| also has to be accepted without complaints. just how things work
| in this new age.
| fundad wrote:
| That's exactly how I feel about consumer prices, rising rents
| and home prices. We accept that they soak up more of our
| discretionary income with with their high prices. We have every
| right to complain when they cut jobs as a result.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Will Google and other big tech run their college summer intern
| programs this year? They may not be able to hire new grads.
| hbarka wrote:
| A significant percentage of Google's workforce are temps,
| vendors, and contractors (what they call TVC). They are
| approximately more than FTE. I believe the stats are 150,000 TVC
| versus 144,000 full-time employees.
|
| How is Google juggling this reduction in force? Are we talking
| TVC or FTE?
| cmyr wrote:
| This post refers to full-time employees. You don't really need
| to fire TVCs; they're generally on shorter term contracts,
| which you can choose not to renew.
| hbarka wrote:
| Any classification is an at-will relationships to Google.
| Google can choose not to keep/renew anyone. I've met many
| TVCs who have tenure at Google as good as an FTE.
|
| The idea was that TVCs are the buffer headcount during
| recessions and would be the first to go when rebalancing. If
| they are truly laying off only FTE, it's worth asking what
| Google is doing to TVC headcount. It's unspoken so far.
| kart23 wrote:
| usually when a company says layoffs, it's FTEs. contractors
| probably don't even get an announcement and aren't included in
| this number.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Well, developing AI systems which are able to replace you and
| your abilities was not the best idea I guess.
| kmac_ wrote:
| Wait until everyone realize there is no AI but a really large
| statistical string concatenate machine.
|
| Edit: I forgot /s
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| does it matter? it can already write computer code and will
| form now on only get better.
| tuyiown wrote:
| The trick is writing useful code autonomously, with is
| widely yet to be proven.
| ben_w wrote:
| It can definitely do OK at that. Not Google-level, also
| definitely, but it can make stuff that works.
|
| Virtually everyone I've been talking to has a question
| about if the chats are logged (bad for corporate secrecy
| if so).
| ben_w wrote:
| A large statistical string concatenation machine by any other
| name will smell just as much of redundancy.
| testplzignore wrote:
| The repeated mentions of AI comes across as him being
| completely tone deaf. Does he not realize that people fear AI
| will cause jobs to be lost? Talking about AI and layoffs at the
| same time is going to earn him some heat for quite a while.
| astrange wrote:
| Since Google employees don't do any revenue-generating work, an
| AI doesn't need any skills in order to also not do any of that.
| est wrote:
| Could there some kind of labor law that if you fire big chunks of
| workforce then the hiring should be frozen for some years or so?
|
| It's so unfair seeing companies mass firing ppl then instantly
| aggressively hiring when markets recovers.
| sgsag33 wrote:
| Amazon as well coming with 18k layoff
| names_are_hard wrote:
| > As part of that, if you are just starting your work day, please
| feel free to work from home today.
|
| This closing line is what stuck out most to me. Is there really
| such a strict WFO culture there that this needs to be said
| explicitly?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Next earnings report (for Q4 2022 results): Feb 2nd. Last reports
| showed EPS down by ~15%. The one before by ~6%.
|
| Layoffs seemed timed to get out in front of all of this.
|
| All a bit callous and cynical, what these companies are doing.
|
| Still, while I resigned from Google a bit over a year ago, I
| almost wish I'd stuck around to roll the dice and see if I could
| have gotten this severance package. Accelerated vesting is pretty
| sweet, even with the currently lower stock price.
|
| On the other hand I'm glad I left and landed in a place I prefer
| and didn't have to live through the stress and bleak feeling
| something like this would bring to the workplace.
|
| I also doubt this will be the last round and if history with
| other companies is any predictor, the next round of layoffs will
| have less generous severance packages.
| chirau wrote:
| Is Apple doing cuts as well?
| pm90 wrote:
| At this time almost certainly. They already have a hiring
| freeze in plce.
| Hacktrick wrote:
| Google has 120 billion dollars of cash on hand. Why are they
| laying off people? They should be poaching talent from other
| companies experiencing lay-offs to build better products.
| md_ wrote:
| I found https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-
| tech-la... to be very insightful, framing layoffs as "social
| contagion."
|
| As others noted here, irrespective of whether there is a coming
| recession, for companies like Google and Microsoft, 10-20k
| employees are not so expensive as to be existential for the
| company, *or even for specific opportunities the company wants to
| pursue*. (E.g. for Microsoft, buying Blizzard is not predicated
| upon laying off employees.)
|
| Instead, it's best to see this as a sort of social trend: layoffs
| to demonstrate fiscal responsibility to investors, in order to
| promote equity valuations that are in general valuable (either
| strategically, or as the ultimate purpose of a publicly traded
| company).
|
| If that sounds like I think this is all reasonable and justified,
| I don't. But it's a reasonable thing to do if your sole goal is
| profit, which is how we generally look at public companies in a
| capitalist economy.
| pm90 wrote:
| Yes exactly. CEOs that don't follow the "trend" will be
| marginalized and questioned. Of course they need to demonstrate
| that they're "serious" and can make "tough" decisions.
|
| Keep in mind that being the CEO often requires a person to have
| a certain kind of personality that might be easier to influence
| this way.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| This comment from a NYT opinion piece by former Slack CPO added
| some clarity as to one reason why tech companies are doing this:
| pressure from investors to keep the share price up. Public
| companies lose that freedom to do whatever they want even if they
| have tons of money in the bank.
|
| > Meta and Salesforce combined lost more than $700 billion in
| market cap last year. Both companies are now dealing with
| activist investors who have taken prominent positions in their
| stocks. The activists have called for the companies to slash
| costs, reduce nonstrategic investments and, notably in Meta's
| case, aggressively reduce its work force.
|
| edit: link to article:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/opinion/tech-layoffs-meta...
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| This is definitely the case. I was just talking with a Googler
| after the Microsoft layoffs about how Google is (now _was_ )
| one of the last big tech companies avoiding layoffs, and Pichai
| was fighting investors like hell to keep it that way. He
| supposedly literally told them "these are _real people_ " out
| of frustration at some point.
|
| It's hard to look at that incredibly generous layoff package an
| not see it as a "fuck you" to investors telling him to slim
| down, after forcing his hand.
| abdabab wrote:
| Who are these investors that he's fighting?
| avrionov wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/hedge-fund-tci-says-
| alpha...
| chippiewill wrote:
| Google don't have to worry about such activist shareholders in
| the same way that other companies do. Larry Page and Sergey
| Brin have the controlling share in Alphabet thanks to their
| Class B shares. They only have a fiduciary responsibility to
| the other shareholders.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| So does Zuckerberg. But while he and Page/Brin may have a
| controlling interest in _voting_ stock, they own a much
| smaller amount of overall shares. Sure, activists can't
| control the board, and Zuck/Page/Brin are not in danger of
| being ousted, their fiduciary duty is to the shareholders not
| just those with voting rights.
| bananapub wrote:
| ok?
|
| there's no fiduciary duty to do a dumb thing just because
| Amazon did the same dumb thing, and saying "we've got loads
| of cash, we're going to expand and hire the great people
| Amazon and Meta just stupidly let go and enhance
| shareholder value in the long term" is a perfectly
| cromulant thing to say.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Facebook, nor Google, is firing people because of activist
| investors. They're firing them because they just way over
| hired people recently, and they have way too many people
| for what they can adequately put to good use given their
| size now.
|
| Feels like everyone wants to put a semi "conspiratorial"
| twist on these announcements when it's pretty obvious what
| the underlying driver is.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The underlying driver is also wage suppression. Why
| retain overpaid employees when you can collectively fire
| people and suppress the market wages? The added benefit
| would be that the rest would work twice as hard.
| lazide wrote:
| Well, _look_ like they're working twice as hard anyway.
| htag wrote:
| I think tech is laying people off for the same reason
| activist investors are so active.
|
| As interest rates increase, more investment money is
| leaving the stock market and entering the bond market.
| Companies have to sell their stock harder than ever
| before. This is part of their strategy to sell their
| stock to investors.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > They're firing them because they just way over hired
| people recently, and they have way too many people for
| what they can adequately put to good use given their size
| now.
|
| I'm not sure that's the case. They didn't hire just to
| have people twiddle their thumbs, but rather to engage on
| projects they believe may have some worth. But when the
| share price drops, investors/Wall Street/media start
| clamoring for "action", and an easy action is to trim
| those projects that may or may not work out and that
| aren't core. But it's not like Meta/Google/Msft are in
| danger of losing money any time soon -- they're still
| making $Bs in profit every quarter, but the expectations
| continue to rise as people buy the stock and expect it to
| keep going up.
| lazide wrote:
| You're way overestimating the amount of clarity and
| thought in hiring plans during panic hiring like we had.
|
| Management was overwhelmed and just spending money on
| anything plausible sounding (even if not really
| plausible) because they could.
|
| Now there is an accounting happening, and the BS is being
| found out, and here we are.
|
| Also, new hires have been extremely difficult to onboard
| (or figure out if they are stuck or not) with remote
| work, making many of these folks only clearly 'problems'
| a year or so later.
|
| Classics
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > You're way overestimating the amount of clarity and
| thought in hiring plans during panic hiring like we had.
|
| you may be right; I don't work at one of those companies
| or have any special insight into them
| alach11 wrote:
| > Management was overwhelmed and just spending money on
| anything plausible sounding (even if not really
| plausible) because they could
|
| This is the crux of it. At any company there are always
| more projects and ideas than there are people to work on
| them. Limits on hiring force the business to carefully
| choose what to work on. Not every pet project gets
| staffed/funded.
| newsclues wrote:
| Still there is pressure to bow to big money investors to
| continue having access to investment capital.
| bananapub wrote:
| > Still there is pressure to bow to big money investors to
| continue having access to investment capital.
|
| what "investment capital"? Facebook and Google aren't
| making up new stock to sell to banks or hedge funds or
| whatever.
|
| actions like this are to keep the existing stock price up,
| which doesn't benefit the company directly at all, except
| indirectly by not pissing off employees with number-of-
| share-denominated stock grants and not having "wall street
| analysts" claim a company failed for not making it's
| numbers match the numbers the analysts made up and
| publicised before results came out.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Not directly, sure. But in this case the activist
| shareholders desires are aligned with what's best for the
| compensation of execs who are mostly paid in RSUs
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| In fairness, neither did Meta. Zuckerberg has a similar dual
| class structure through which he can control the company.
| robocat wrote:
| Perhaps there is an large internal pressure from the
| employees themselves?
|
| If many employees have a large amount of salary dependent on
| the stock price, then those employees will really care about
| GOOG falling in price on the market.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I lurk on all the generally open Google-internal fora, and
| I think I have only heard one person try to make this case.
| The vast majority of employees who say anything about this
| are opposed to layoffs to increase the stock price.
|
| If there is internal pressure from everyday employees
| advocating to accomplish this, they are being
| extraordinarily quiet. Unlike basically every other cause
| for which employees try to pressure the company. Google is
| quite open internally to people saying we should change
| this or that. It's almost a past time.
|
| So I think this explanation is very unlikely.
| twblalock wrote:
| It's a serious problem for retention when people's total
| comp drops by a large amount, and some companies (e.g.
| Doordash) have given people extra stock to make up for it.
| mshenfield wrote:
| I've never seen anyone directly make this case. Most people
| seem to want their colleagues (many of whom are friends) to
| keep their jobs more than they want the stock price to go
| up.
| tootie wrote:
| Meh. Saying this is a new "era" and the old ways are over is
| nonsense. We're entering what is likely a mild recessionary
| period with less flowing capital. It's a market correction. The
| "era" will last maybe 2 years. Then the upward trajectory will
| hit again and tech workers will get drone shuttles to work or
| something by 2030.
| lazide wrote:
| Didn't work that way for the chip companies.
|
| Those highly paid jobs pretty much just ceased to exist.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Seems like it just changed companies - Google/Apple/Nvidia
| saw an opportunity and poached a lot of them to death.
| lazide wrote:
| Nope, completely different people and skills.
|
| Original silicon valley was actual making chips, silicon
| type. And there were a ton of folks here who were expert
| at it.
|
| When it moved to Taiwan, those jobs disappeared from
| here.
|
| The types of jobs you're talking about (high level design
| layer) didn't exist then.
| woeirua wrote:
| Remind me, what happened after the DotCom bubble imploded?
| tootie wrote:
| Tech sector recovered to astronomical new heights?
| dimal wrote:
| It was the period when people started building real
| companies that created real value and made money instead of
| bullshit pump and dump IPO schemes. Some of the talented
| people being laid off right now could create the next wave
| of innovation that the MAANGs are too ossified for.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| The companies that had real objectives instead of pure
| speculation went on to become multibillion dollar
| companies?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Another comment on this: don't forget that no matter what these
| CEOs say about their workforce, we're family blah blah blah,
| they are first and foremost beholden to their shareholders. The
| very purpose of a capitalist corporation is to serve the
| interests of its shareholders, aka make more money; everything
| else is secondary.
| skybrian wrote:
| This is called "shareholder primacy" and it's more of an
| ideology than an actual legal requirement. It's going to be
| true to the extent that the company leadership believes it's
| true, and a lot of different strategies could be justified as
| serving the shareholders in the long run.
|
| Matt Levine has written a few columns about how this works
| out in practice, or doesn't.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Costco seems to do a pretty good job at saying no and they
| have not had repercussions.
| lazide wrote:
| Unless the bylaws and structure are explicitly setup to be
| different, the shareholders elect the board, and the board
| appoints the corporate officers.
|
| So any board that doesn't get the shareholders what they
| want doesn't last long.
|
| And any corporate officers that don't get the board what
| they want don't last long either.
|
| Of course, many opportunities for 'capture', owner/agent
| issues, market perception and 'fog of war', etc.
|
| It's an ideology for a reason, it's the naive truth.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| But the company leadership either has to be able to
| convince shareholders to stay the course (as Amazon
| famously did for years without generating profits as it
| grew), or has to have enough power to ward off the
| investors (bearing in mind that most investors are
| institutional not retail) because of the way the company is
| structured that he's not in danger of being ousted if the
| board (which represents the shareholders, not the company)
| doesn't like the company's performance.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, shareholders can sometimes exercise power over a
| company via its board, but it doesn't follow that
| shareholders necessarily want to maximize the value of
| that company's shares, or at least not right away.
| Shareholders often have other interests. For example,
| they usually own shares in other companies. Also, ESG is
| big these days.
|
| This can make deciding what a company should do a messy
| political process when there's disagreement about what
| shareholders want or should want. Like, some shareholders
| may decide to buy a coal plant to shut it down, others to
| keep it running as long as possible.
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
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