Google cancels half the projects at its internal R&D group Area 120 | Hacker News Reader

Google cancels half the projects at its internal R&D group Area 120

techcrunch.com

49 pointselsewhen11 comments

120 = 51 in base sqrt(52)-sqrt(1) which is kinda like 51 if sqrt were linear.

i bet they have alien tech there.

I'm not sure if you have that backwards or whether the phrasing is just ambiguous in my head.

  120 in base 10 --> 51 in base 23.8.

  51 in base 10 --> 120 in base ~6.2111 which is more precisely sqrt(52) - 1.

the antecedent could be ambiguous, should be a comma and explicit bases

120_sqrt52-1 = 51_10, in......

i didn't want to "split the equality" so to speak

120 in base .... is equal to 51 (implicit 10)

> Employees whose projects will not continue were told they’ll need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023, or they’ll be terminated.

It seems sensible to cut very experimental stuff first.

And it's good that they're giving them time to transition internally instead of just laying them off. Now the hiring freeze makes more sense, if a team elsewhere is desperate to find an engineer, this is their chance.

It doesn't work like this. If there is a hiring freeze in place, it means that internal headcounts are also limited. The "desperate team elsewhere" must have money to pay for the new engineer.

I've also seen people who had to transfer in a month and couldn't find a team and were simply terminated- because no other team wanted them.

They’ve also been given a very reasonable amount of time to find a replacement job internally - and I imagine there are a bunch of teams who want more people but can’t recruit due to some degree of new hiring freeze.

As noted earlier, the other team would need an open headcount, whether they are hiring from outside or doing an internal transfer. If Google management waived this requirement (unexpected in a time of belt-tightening), the article didn’t mention it.

Is it sensible that Google went on a hiring spree in 2022 while all other tech companies had already started to freeze hiring? added an enormous-for-them 30,000 new employees in a quarter, then asked all employees how to fix "productivity", and finally decided to cut down on research teams (~100-200 people?) that represent less than 1% of the new employees they added in the previous months.

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