Alphabet unit Verily to trim more than 200 jobs
wsj.com
wsj.com
> They include the development of technology for Dexcom’s G6 and G7 continuous glucose monitors (CGM), the smallest CGMs of their kind.
That’s very cool! I have worn a Dexcom for 2 years and I had no idea. CGMs are extremely helpful for people who need them. While the market is fairly small for t1 diabetics, it’s expanding to people engaged in fitness.
It's "selection" bias or confirmation bias or some kind of fancy word bias that we see headlines posted here (or other places) about ____ doing 15-20% layoffs.
If you combined all the headlines we've seen past 6-12 months about layoffs, what % of companies out there would that represent total? 5%? 10% max?
How routine is 1/10th of every tech company in the country doing 15-20% layoffs in terms of business cycles as far as history goes? Quite common? Are we overblowing the significance?
Either option is limiting for a tech worker. So historically successful companies have tried to avoid layoffs like the plague. This has likely lead to some excesses in firms who haven’t adjusted over time.
Mega caps struggle to understand what matters and what doesn’t - the track record for mega caps is that once they start layoffs, they don’t really stop until the company is irrelevant. See IBM.
IBM spun off quite a few businesses, like more parts from Lenovo and what is now Kyndryl.
A tech company in the energy industry is going to be affected by world events differently than a tech company focused on, say, the medical industry.
There’s a natural ratio of engineering to sales to recruiting to finance.
Also all these companies exist in the same environment- interest rates are pretty much the same for everyone, so is inflation
i don’t think Google has announced layoffs yet.
Tech companies are also in a really unique situation when it comes to layoffs as a way to appear economically healthy. Outside of critical infrastructure like ops and a few other key tasks required to maintain tool quality - development can pretty much be full stopped for a few months without seriously degrading the quality of the product or expected revenue - yes, continued feature development and maintenance is needed to keep a company relevant in the long term but in the short term nobody is going to notice if the maintenance patch that would've been released this week is delayed until June. Our (as in customers, even power users like HN folks) ability to comprehend code rot in the products we're using is extremely weak - sure you might subscribe to the git repo of a tool or two that you're specifically interested in, but it's infeasible to track the good news about every single application that passes through your hands on a daily basis. And, while this isn't true for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that even most of us tech literate HN users only really notice software patches when they break things. Humans are very biased to noticed negative changes.
There's also https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/alphabet-to-cut-staff-of-hea....
(on that note, we still need a [paywall] suffix for links like these. Great for folks who have subscription, near-useless to the rest of us who only get to see 5 links a year)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
What does this mean?
Shameless.
Who reviewed this?
Corbis Starbucks Best Buy Symantec
Why was he considered the best choice to run a health-tech Bet?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabet-unit-verily-to-trim-mo...
Put another way, these companies are participating in a hype-train where the only objective is to prepare for and therefore ensure a tech recession. Kind of like shorting your own companies stocks. The only question is, is this pure greed or are these companies doing this to legitimately protect their future and succeess?
I really hope this ultra-cringe trend of referring to our employees and colleagues by twee corporate demonyms comes to a swift and timely end, especially in serious contexts like this one where the CEO is announcing that a bunch of people are being booted out.
We apologise for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible have been
sacked.
We apologise again for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible for sacking
the people who have just been sacked,
have been sacked.
The directors of the firm hired to
continue the credits after the other
people had been sacked, wish it to
be known that they have just been
sacked.Verily (at least) is an independent entity. Google maintains a hefty equity position, but there are other outside investors too.
On paper. I interviewed for a position there a few years ago and it was very clear that they were still quite dependent on Google operationally. It actually left me wondering when one of the ’bets leaves Google how they would manage the transition. My guess is most would actually have to be acquired.
Waymo is actually one of the few ventures whose TAM might rival their ads business and they're the market leader.
Google Fiber is, as far as I can tell, one part naïveté and one part long-term strategic plan to keep Google's main business running. Fiber dreamed big and it turned out that they underestimated the logistical and bureaucratic hurdles involved in all that last-mile business. But... Fiber is also a strategic asset so Google can more easily face certain types of threats posed by companies like Comcast. Just my take.
I don't know about the rest. My understanding is that the strategy is to invest in a bunch of ideas with median P/E of 0, but average P/E much higher--at least, over a long enough term.
Poetry.
At first it sounds like a Squid Game-style method lol
> Dear Flooferboofer, you've been fired! You're still a Flooferboofer though because we're a team and a family.
FFS, who teaches these people that referring to their employees with these cringeworthy names, especially in a layoff announcement, is a good idea? They're not "Veeps", they're people who have an identity and existence without reference to their roles at Verily. Just call them people. "ensure that these people..." Is that hard to do? Can you not resist the ra ra corporate bullshit for two damn seconds? Gross.
The words used by HR from this and other companies clearly show that for the company, they are not people with an identity, existence or raison d'être other than providing some kind of service to the company. The invitation is to treat them accordingly.
Veeps join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Tweeps, Peeps, Rackers, Krakenites and Plaids.
I was wondering why anyone generally would be caring so much what happened to the Vice Presidents of each division, especially when they’re being laid off.
Now that I know what he actually means by Veeps it sounds even more stupid.
"I have made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by 20%, which means saying goodbye to many talented Scaliens." [1]
I would expect Verily employees to be called something like “Verilians”.
> This sentence is a play on words, using the homophones "it's" and "its" in different ways to create a pun. The first half of the sentence is using the phrase "it's not it is" as a way to say that something is not true, while the second half is using the phrase "it is its" as a way to say that something belongs to itself. The second sentence is in similar way "it's it's" meaning " it is its" and "it is it's" meaning "it's is it"
That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity, And pity 'tis, 'tis true
Who hired "X" employee, and why? Follow this up the chain. Follow it as far up as it needs to go, to the very email or slide deck from an upper-level exec whose failure of a pet project was greenlit to begin with. Fire the entire chain of command complicit in the lowest level employee's firing.
Truly, drain the entire swamp, otherwise the execs will keep making bad choices and playing music chairs while the boots on the ground get mutilated for them.
Sadly, none of these companies will likely do what you suggested because mass-hiring is just part of the game when there is too much money flowing into their accounts from VCs.
Is it always the case that bad hires come from bad managerial decisions?
You might end up finding the entire ZIRP funding based thinking complicit.
US life expectancy just dropped by 3 years, how much improving do they think they did?
“ But zoom in to the neighbourhood level — what Statistics Canada calls “census tracts” — and you’ll see that life expectancy can vary by as much as 30 years.
The area with the lowest life expectancy is the Downtown Eastside, where the average resident is expected to live 60.2 years.
The area with the highest life expectancy is the University Endowment Lands, where the average resident is expected to live 90.4 years.”
https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/01/17/Life-Expectancy-Gap-30-Ye...