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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Google seems to be falling flat on its face growth-wise. Its ad revenue is down, its Pixel 3 platform fell completely flat, it shuttered Google + and had a security breach?

How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's the extent of the influence. Google is a reference implementation that everyone copycats.

Then is the Pixel 3's lack of creative innovation symbolic of a strong tech culture that seems to prize science and tech over creativity? For reference, they copied the iPhone in numerous ways aesthetically and marketing-wise: the size is identical, glass replaced metal, the price was pumped up to make it appear premium, even the color names have goofy Apple-y names, etc.

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> Its ad revenue is down

Ad revenue is not down. Ad revenue is growing slower than in the past.

> How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce?

Security is stupendously hard. It is also not a stable state. Software engineering as a discipline does not have methods of turning dollars into security with confidence. There is no company on the planet that avoids getting pwned.

> Ad revenue is growing slower than in the past.

It's also a second degree derivative, which is inherently noisy. A single data point isn't enough to show a trend.

> Security is stupendously hard.

It also wasn't a breach. Breach implies it was exploited. They actually found the bug and fixed it, and there was as far as they could there no signs that it was abused.

Google has some of the best security security researchers out there. Look at Project Zero, they've found the majority of the largest zero days in the past few years.

> there was as far as they could there no signs that it was abused

As would be expected from the class of hackers that would be able to exploit it.

It was an unintentionally exposed API. You didn't need to be an expert.

Well let’s look at the more important number that is down. Net income is down year over year as are margins.

https://9to5google.com/2019/04/29/alphabet-q1-2019-earnings/

Complete aside: all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue.

They've become bloated.

Ironically they just purchased last year a huge block of Manhattan - presumably for even more employees[1].

1 - https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/google-bought-manhattans-c...

Google already has a huge amount of office space in Chelsea Market, though. That's more about owning rather than renting.

If you want to talk expansion, look at the new Hudson Square expansion about a mile south of Chelsea Market: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144448/google-nyc-camp...

> Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue.

Isn't that true for a large amount of large tech companies?

I was under the impression that a large amount of the workers are working on incremental improvements to existing services or working on new features/services entirely. If those people stop working that shouldn't disrupt the service and you shouldn't see the revenue fall until a competitor catches up & out innovates.

I think it's more that there are a large number of employees who don't actually contribute much and treat it like a retirement gig. I've seen people who are only in the office from 10-5, take long breaks for lunches, socializing, working out, massages, etc. and regularly "WFH" one day a week on top of that, and clearly aren't very productive (note: there are people who keep that kind of schedule and do get a lot done; I'm not talking about them).

It's possible to give the appearance of being busy and valuable if you make every project way more complex than it needs to be by scheduling lots of meetings that end up mostly involving bike shedding, publishing lots of design docs and spreadsheets to gain visibility, submitting mediocre code so that you can subsequently submit lots of cleanup CLs, and so on. The game is easier to play these days because the company is so large that entire teams can go off the radar and not have to be accountable.

This happens at every big company and it isn't the norm at Google, but it happens quite often. It's really hard to fire employees, and a pain for managers. It's way easier to just let them be, and for a low-mid level manager that can even make it easier for them to justify additional headcount, which makes their org bigger and increases their standing.

Why is it hard to fire employees? Workers have extremely weak protections in the United States. I never buy this argument. If google wanted to clean shop they can, other tech companies do it regularly (IBM, Oracle, etc).

> Why is it hard to fire employees?

Because when you are billions-of-dollars profitable, and you go ahead and fire a lot of people, it tanks morale, and good performers start looking for the door. (Note: This does not hold in the middle of a recession. We aren't in the middle of a recession, though.)

Because a company could be just as successful without XY% of its workforce, but nobody can correctly identify which XY%. (This one still holds in the middle of a recession.)

Because a lot of that XY% would be more productive, if they were instructed to do something that's more useful to the bottom line.

In addition to what vkou said, firing individuals for low performance in the US, as opposed to mass layoffs, typically requires putting them through the PIP process (performance improvement plan), which is onerous and stressful for the manager. My limited understanding is it involves the manager, HR, and employee agreeing on a project and timeline that would constitute satisfactory performance, then constantly checking in and documenting progress. The purpose is for the company to collect proof the employee can't perform their job to indemnify themselves.

But I've seen people just temporarily work really hard and/or get lots of help while they're on a PIP, succeed at it, and then revert to old habits. In a lot of cases rather than go through the trouble to put a report through a PIP, which may not have the desired outcome anyway, the manager will just put them off in a corner and give them unimportant tasks, making it that much easier for them to just coast.

Also, doing so demonstrates a failure on the manager's part (How did they let a formerly good report get so bad that they need a PIP? Were they paying any attention to what they were doing for the past year?)

> "...if you make every project way more complex than it needs to be by scheduling lots of meetings that end up mostly involving bike shedding, publishing lots of design docs and spreadsheets to gain visibility, submitting mediocre code so that you can subsequently submit lots of cleanup CLs, and so on. The game is easier to play these days because the company is so large that entire teams can go off the radar and not have to be accountable.."

This is a lot of work just to appear "busy"... are you saying they shouldn't be documenting?

I've spoken with people who are connected much higher up and the truth is that they could get rid of 70% plus and still bring in the same profit. The unsaid thing is that most profit is still from search ads, the rest of the spending makes it look, to Wall Street, like they have something beyond search ads and are not a one trick pony. So far they really are not and have become very bloated and inefficient, but Wall Street has been rewarding this behavior with a higher stock price....though the better thing may have been for them to just hoard the cash....especially if none of the other bets ever pan out. Some of this is the curse of being a public company and the skewed incentives.

Whether or not Google is effectively innovative is one thing, but statements like this don't offer much insight. Sure, Google can cut all the investment in R&D and keep the lights on, but that strategy isn't going to do much for the long-term future of the company.

Do they know which 30%?

> all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue.

Do all your friends who work there include themselves in the 30% by any chance? I assume not. And I also assume whoever you ask they will also say 30% could be fired, but they will then also all say it should not of course be themselves...

That's probably true of most large companies.

I've heard they deliberate over-hire to capture talent, keeping them from winding up with competitors. Not sure if true, but sounds plausible. Or to be able to always have a reserve to tap if a project suddenly needs engineers.

And yet they still don't have enough employees to enable them to follow the law, like for example not earning ad money on pirated content.

> a security breach

Wasn't it a security vulnerability? IIRC they were returning data they shouldn't have for some calls, but didn't have conclusive evidence that anyone had ever made those calls because of log rotation policies. (Maybe I misremembered, or maybe you're talking about a different issue?)

yup that's how I remember it as well

Alphabet's CFO blamed the ad revenue drop primarily on Youtube and specifically recent changes in their Youtube algorithm (which paradoxically now favors advertiser-friendly, sanitized mainstream media channels). Apparently "cleaning things up for advertisers" leads to less money from advertisers.

> brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce

The Google worship around here...

Its ad revenue growth rate decelerated, is what I believe you meant to say...

Or he could have said that net income dropped...

Waymo is looking like it took the wrong direction too. So bad news all around

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