Google to reduce workforce by 12k
blog.google
blog.google
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"
"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"
Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling. Large lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the lower performers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only time in my 20+ career I've gotten anything real out of an employer being acquired was when Google bought my employer (for just under $400m) in 2011. In that case, though, the stock conversion of my options was only part of the generous compensation package from Google. And in that case it certainly wasn't "I'm gonna go retire now" money, either.
The lottery ticket is just a bonus.
But what I'm trying to say is in reality there are no lottery tickets being issued. Except maybe to the founders. Trying to frame it that way is a real problem. Actual equity agreements are mostly not much money at all. I had a founder try to make this claim to me quite recently -- it's nonsense, because I know the kind of offers he was writing up, there was no "lottery"-like outcome possible.
And it is this inequity in potential outcomes that makes the startups less attractive and also diminishes anybody's desire to work excessively hard. The potential payout isn't there. Maybe if one is an exceptional negotiator, I dunno.
The discussion that led to it was "I'd rather we have less money than you be miserable all time time" from my other half. The culture at Google isn't for everyone. I didn't fit with it (or at least in my org) and it was a constant source of frustration on both sides.
Seems like you would rather advice people to have bad working conditions and sacrifice their personal life for a shitty salary on a startup.
You want to do an average work working average hours, you get paid an average salary. That would be about $70k/year.
I'm super happy that FAANG started to cut the fat. The sanity is returning to the market.
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.
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?
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)?
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.
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.
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?
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.
But does the decrease of 6% of those employees have a resulting income decrease? Likely most teams will continue to function without the missing employees. Also plenty of the employees are recruiting and HR and other non-income-generating employees.
Also yes they have billions in marketable securities, in debt, and interest income, etc
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20220427_alphabet_10Q.pd...
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"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...
His first argument is bullshit, because Google is effectively debt-free. So Google can choose what to do with its money. He is quite open about that it's simply HIM wanting money:
"TCI also called on Alphabet to increase its already substantial share repurchase programme to run down its $116bn of cash, given that large-scale mergers and acquisitions are limited owing to regulatory scrutiny. It urged it to copy Apple’s approach and become “cash neutral” over time."
His style described in the article sounds like "corporate raiding" from the 80s. One might point out corporate raiding caused a financial crash ...
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."
It affects everyone. When interest rates increase, the risk-free rate of return is much higher than when interest rates were 0. That means the ROI of each incremental dollar needs to be higher than it previously was, and when companies have a lot of projects with low risk-adjusted returns, they'll axe those.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ
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.
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.
It isn't like if Google fired 95% of people that comp for the remainder would hit $10m a person.
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.
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.
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?
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.
From the perspective of the individual worker, it's far better to model layoffs as a random lottery. Telling yourself, "Oh, I'll work hard, I'll get good performance reviews, that'll save me from the layoff monster," is just cope. Good people get laid off. Bad people get laid off. Mediocre people get laid off. It's just luck.
Your fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder profit. Not sure where you got the "well-being" from, but your premise is utterly wrong so your presented choices and how you deal with them are not connected to reality.
This keeps coming up and 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.”
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
That's a meaningless statement. They never face any consequences. A CEO taking responsibility for layoffs should add their name to the list too.
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.
To be fair, I think the package they are actually offering is way, way more valuable than 10k: "We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting."
Plus healthcare, 2022 bonuses being paid out, and some other items on there.
Silicon Valley somehow feels even more relevant years after it has wrapped.
It is ethically meaningless, like "thoughts and prayers".
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.
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.
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.
Full responsibility that does not involve massive shakeup at the top is not full responsibility.
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.
Where she grew up, there used to be a fortune teller that would specialize in predicting the sex at birth.
But there was a catch: he'll seal the prediction in an envelope, to be opened only after the healthy baby is born. And if it'd be, in a few months time, that he was wrong, he'll refund his fee.
His trick was that he always wrote "girl". Because if it was a boy, the family was so happy, they didn't bother opening the envelope.
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.
Just kidding(a little bit). So many smart people at google though in general the average caliber IME was always really high compared to other places.
So you can choose to:
1. Refuse to hire the extra staff for a year and lose out on the profits of 100 customers a night for a year.
2. Go with the flow, expanding when demand increases and contracting when demand decreases.
Most people will go with option 2 as that is what gets you more money and also allows the economy to respond to price signals in a rational way. This is particularly true of growth companies like Google. The idea of a growth company is not to maintain constant revenues and employment over time. People who go to work for Google should understand that Google will hire more staff when demand goes up. But then they should also understand that Google will cut staff when demand falls.
That it's predictable that demand goes up and down does nothing to change this calculus. It's like people blaming the home builders in 2010 for expanding home building. I mean, when there is an increased demand for new housing, why wouldn't they expand home building?
Yup, I know someone who had been there since 2006 that was laid off. Not even high scores on Perf will save you.
I have no idea what methodology went into it. That's a whole postmortem on its own.
Of course
I agree. It’s my mantra in the workplace now. My place of work is not my friend or family. I’m there to offer my skills and service for a certain time and then I’m out.
> 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.
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.
If you squint, you can call that Linux.
"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.
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).
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.
You cannot do anything techy without exteme dependence on google. This is not how things should bem
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
You naturally have everybody in the company available and built in Google Drive/Office integrations are really solid.
The Google Chat iOS app just has Chat and Spaces separated for you too.
I was really surprised at the level of improvement because I needed to find them a chat option with a BAA for compliance, so a good enough solution that was already built in was helpful.
I don’t think it would be good enough for power users or fully remote companies yet, but small-medium businesses who are primarily in office get a solid win.
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.
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.
What do you mean? It's still part of their current values.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's always another pay-to-win "strategy" game, another "revolutionary Japanese chefs knife", some brilliant genius that has made a device that heats your house for free
... not a single remotely useful ad.
I too have tried to click them away as not relevant, but I think Google now sell ads by impression, not by clicks so they don't care at all.
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.
OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.
> Next to no one uses Android, etc.
That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.
> 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-...
Claiming "next to no one uses Android" is just plain wrong even in the US.
Wait, what?
Who's in the bubble now?
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.
Does he buy that many phones? /S
I agree with your point, but catering to luxury users certainly has an advantage. Android, globally, is doing ok.
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...
[0]: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-popularity-by-us-stat...
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.
Obviously it's a bell curve - not all Android users are cheap and not all iPhone users are luxary goods providers, but my experience (Australia) reflects this generalisation broadly.
We generally assume too much about the shared knowledge basis. There would be much less friction if we could improve on that
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.
Same with IE, if no one showed them Firefox they just stuck with IE.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I was trying to cater to a broader set of use cases and users, I'd probably have more of Google's problems as a result.
This cost many minutes most times and is seriously annoying because the search engine ignores me and lies to me.
Machines shouldn't do that.
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.
But try to find a specific error message from an npm package!
First you get useless results because Google found something it rather wanted to show you.
Then you add doublequotes and realize the Google results are full of utterly irrelevant pages lacking half my keywords.
I don't think the issue for this is with changes Google has made, but rather with the increasing extent to which it's targeted by SEO spam.
Google is for searching new sources of information and either it’s instant (google info box) or takes too long which makes a lasting memory about it being painful.
Does S.U.N.D.A.R. really believe anything?
Do advanced holographic CEO chat bots dream of electric employees?
No google. I don't care if it's 8 minutes slower. Still not tempted.
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.
This is also a signal to the stock markets that Google is getting onto the AI bandwagon, to milk the current hype around AI.
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?
Google is too big to offer the personal touch. They’re a very cold and uncompromising company.
> 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...
Matt Levine has written a few columns about how this works out in practice, or doesn't.
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.
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.
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.
Feels like everyone wants to put a semi "conspiratorial" twist on these announcements when it's pretty obvious what the underlying driver is.
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.
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
you may be right; I don't work at one of those companies or have any special insight into them
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.
I cannot wait to come back to this in 1 year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those highly paid jobs pretty much just ceased to exist.
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.
If this was the case Google could have done an insane mount of other strategies to cut costs, of course why would they when they made $68B last quarter?
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.
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.
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.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to advertising which is just gratuitous brand building.
But the reason ad spends decrease during downturns is that people consume less, so there's no point in advertising when nobody's buying.
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.
Very true
Why? Don’t customers submit their own ads to Google?
Of course, the math kind of goes the other way once you're projecting that your salesperson is only going to bring in 100k due to economic circumstances...
* 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
The companies you list build a legal moat around their business (establishing some amount of monopoly) and then begin sucking taxpayer money
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.
Or, alternatively, the giants focus on maintenance and "innovate" through acquiring the new incumbents.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
There was a period about 10-12 years ago when Microsoft was basically left for dead
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.
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/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=MAX
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422...
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).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-new-b...
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 ..
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
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.
Then they killed it.
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.
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).
He seemed to do a pretty good job with that at Tesla/SpaceX, but I’d argue he’s really dropped the ball at Twitter. No one seems to have any idea what “Twitter 2.0” even is supposed to be.
I think all of us have an idea of what social media should be compared to what it is now (looking at what my friends and people I'm interested in it are doing), but it's not compatible with the amount of advertising revenue that needs to be generated to justify a $40B valuation.
There's a deep conflict between the value provided to the users and the value created to advertisers, and Elon highly underestimated that conflict, so now he's (and Tesla investors are) paying the price.
The self motivated bottom up Google way can’t scale like this.
Personal opinion and jaded perspective of course. Disclaimer: don't like shortsighted "follow the shiny thing" decisions. I haven't seen evidence the CEO of Google has positioned the company for the long term or to survive. Namely, the bus would have been going fine if not better without some if not all of the Google leadership on the wheel.
I hope I am wrong.
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.
Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?
What's unique about Google is not that they ended up there. It's how they avoided it for so long.
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?
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.
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.
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.
But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I were a shareholder of Google/Alphabet, I would be demanding a better CEO.
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.
I wonder if maybe these people are too principled to spy on people to the extent that Google does to profit the way they do. Maybe they select for a CEO who is talented, but also driven by money enough to prioritize that at all costs.
Jeff Dean may not care that much about business, as he spent all his life on scalability, but he understands more than most people the exact data needed to be collected to be able to train the neural networks for launching / improving products. He may not want to be CEO, but I don't think that's a bad trait for a CEO.
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.
Checks out alright.
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
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.
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.
“I’m competent but I can’t reach my potential because others are blocking me.”
This seems to be inevitable anywhere. In the social games, biz types beat the nerds.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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
Hopefully soon, I make a concerted effort to avoid using Google services wherever possible. Even in cases where the alternatives are inferior.
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.
In his opinion that’s what ruined the NHS not underfunding.
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.
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.
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.
Really, it’s a general organizational scaling issue IMO.
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.
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".
The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively difficult interview process has "fat"? How?
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 £1 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Being bored is a perk of many jobs.
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.
Turnover rates in these companies are pretty high! Surprisingly many employees leave after 1-2 years.
Whole departments or groups though, fair game.
Aren't they the same?
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.
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.
You need to have control over which roles / projects you're gonna downsize.
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.
Seems like Big Money wants a recession.
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.
In fact, don't many of the Megacorp companies have a 'cull the bottom 10% annually' policy anyway?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is good, that's what the management is supposed to do.
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).
Really it's what all the big companies are doing, but at least some of them can claim solvency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
That overhired person who's not productive in Google could have done something better for society.
Epic is also a private company and yes pays less but they’ve taken up with Google now as well.
Obviously everyone was proven very wrong.
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.
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.
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.
I personally know enough who are or have been employed there to know that the gauntlet to get hired is stressful enough and unlikely enough for a skilled developer to get through that I'm not sure I would even ever give it a go.
From those same personal connections, there have plenty of stories about feeling like a tiny insignifican cog in a giant soulless machine (which any giant company like this would be) that I wouldn't want to work there. Let it also be said I have heard great things from individuals working at Google (it is a large enough workplace that any kind of situation will be found there).
It just doesn't sound like the place for me.
My perfect employer would be a software development company, focusing on a product or product range, with product market fit and an actually profitable, with hopefully no more than 300 employees (not gotten too big).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You also didn't say "over hiring kitchen staff", you said "free lunches", which are two different things.
No. Humans are not equal in aptitude. Neither are human groups. Either account for it, or don't, but be consistent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand this reference. What does blue hair (assuming metaphorical and not literal?) mean in this context?
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”?
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.
So maybe you were selling it far too cheap after all.
Edit: curious to know what was the SaaS that got rattled by your fun experiment.
This is most definitely not true.
Imagine thinking “diversity programs” are a significant cost center, as if their spend were comparable to real estate or employee compensation
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.
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.
Falsely equivocating correlation and causation is really telling.
Nobody said anything about causation, you raised that straw man yourself. If you'd look up the stat I quoted, you'd see McKinsey says the same thing:
>While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...
This is the rare case where BIPOC is actually a useful concept. Is this still true when counting only BIPOCS (no Asians, no Hispanics, etc.)?
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.
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.
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?
ChatGPT is nowhere a product that can pay for itself.
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.
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.
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???
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.
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" (-.-)
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?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They haven't been successful in foreseeing the current bust, and were hiring like crazy a year ago. Why do you think that they'd be so good at seeing into the future now?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.
And keep in touch. Feel free to DM on Twitter or anywhere else. It can get lonely when it feels like you’re laboring in obscurity, so I’m happy to cheer you on or give feedback.
Good luck :)
To anyone wondering whether to share your personal experience, please do; comments like this one are my favourites.
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.
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.
But politicians normally don't say that, but they also don't have stocks :)
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.
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.
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...
But because exec comp is mostly stock based, he's actually getting a massive pay increase.
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.
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"?
https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/google-goes-ai-first-io...
Obviously. Whatever you want to call it, it needs to stop consistently vomiting up false statements before it's fully useful.
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.
ML-driven account suspensions etc are universally hated and seem to have damaged Google's image, at least in the tech community.
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?
Well, why are you? They treat you like that because you let them.
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.
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...
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...
2017
https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-google-brain-team-looking-back-on.html
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)
https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/01/looking-back-at-googles-research.html
http://ai.googleblog.com/2021/01/google-research-looking-back-at-2020.html
http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-research-themes-from-2021-and.html
http://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyond-language.htmlI 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.
> 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?
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.
Well, I know at least that the transformers from Google are widely used in industry outside Google.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2015 is really not that long ago either!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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-...
b) Google grew by 30k last year.
c) Google is such a profitable company, because their revenue is not directly tied to number of employees.
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
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...
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?
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.
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)
Not in late-stage capitalism, but elsewhere yes. For example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Redundancies_Dire...
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.
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.
Generally in developed countries, yes.
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.
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.
This argument, true or false, is not applicable in this situation, as Google is still enjoying high profits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, I thought they'd at least wait until Q2/Q3, but that's a whole quarter of money to save...
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
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.
Cutting the fat at any company is worthless or even catastrophic if the strategy for implementing those cuts is crap.
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.
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
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.
edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm
"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.
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?
Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number.
A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approximately) the same things. Google has 20k employees in 2009. It has 155k today. I don't see Google doing much for me in 2022 that it wasn't doing in 2009.
I could probably go a long ways before that too.
A lot of what's happened from 2009 to 2022 is churn. Make-work to keep people employed.
> Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Let me spell this out: In many cases, the same thing can be accomplished in 100 lines of code as 10,000 lines of code. That's largely a function of architecture, discipline, and cleverness. 100 lines of code is orders-of-magnitude easier to maintain and faster to evolve.
The Google codebase is *massive*. If you need a new feature, with good communication channels and focus, you can architect it in. With poor communication channels, it get kludged in.
Communications scales as O(n^2) where n is the number of employees. There's a similar power law for how pieces of code can interact and introduce complex bugs.
By "more efficient," I don't mean Google would be able to do more per dollar. With a smaller, better workforce, and a smaller, better codebase, Google would be better able to maintain old products, add new features, and develop new ones.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...
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
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.
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.
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.
I will never tire of reading phrasing/euphemisms like these. Language can be so beautiful even when its something bad.
So a tad less than 10% of their workforce.
Just thought I'd add that for perspective.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q3_alphabet_earnings...
When I joined Google in 2006, we were 8k total.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).
Weird flex. Would it be legal not to?
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.
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.
Amazon 18,000
Microsoft 10,000
Alphabet/Google 12,000
I thought it was 11K too, had to look it up.
Since it all happened in the same week, it is pretty confusing. At least to me.
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
Soon they will start hiring again, quite possibly finding better candidates at a lower salary.
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.
Not sure what you are implying. Senior people don't automatically perform better, it's only natural some get PIP'd.
What a generous offer.
This is such a weird Friday.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I hope, that for the ones affected, in the end this will turn up as an opportunity.
A reset in the industry seems a good thing for the health of this sector.
The only thing laid off employees will generally do is never, ever work for the employer that laid them off ever again.
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.
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...
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”?
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.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542681/how-many-jobs-...
How is Google juggling this reduction in force? Are we talking TVC or 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.
It's so unfair seeing companies mass firing ppl then instantly aggressively hiring when markets recovers.
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?
There it is! The free bingo space
but no consequences.
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...)
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.
I understand the general public thinks their life depends on a company.
I find it odd that this sentiment is so strong on HN.
It's a tough pill to realise its just another company behaving as they all do.
And do you think this is not a fair assessment?
There's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy effect in this assessment too, so to some extent, it is only as accurate as you believe it to be.
sirchit.com josh@sirchit.com
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So in theory you are right, in practice however, most companies (especially the ones like Google) have to buy you out of your contract.
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!!
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?
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.
Best of luck to anyone affected.
Is he saying employees can work from work, because he's equating working from home as an easier ride?
i feel like we are living a black comedy sometimes.
-- ai inserted ad through duplication of similar elements with custom text --
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...
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.
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...
Edit: I forgot /s
Virtually everyone I've been talking to has a question about if the chats are logged (bad for corporate secrecy if so).
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.
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”
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.
> 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.
This implies that the overtime work isn't necessarily the most beneficial to the employer.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
That "giving notice" is used in the message is because of some law (I forgot) that requires this time but also permits to actually block people from working as long as they are paid.
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betriebsbedingte_K%C3%BCndigun...
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.
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.
I am sorry but I won't feel sorry for those ex-Googlers.
"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.
I once met a bank director that would call Google “those hippies”. In his view Googlers where “not enough money-centered”.
2023? Lmao not even close. Anyone with a heartbeat and memorized leets can receive an offer, and the offers aren't even particular competitive.
What about former Microsoft employees? Amazon employees?
Is big tech an ethical issue for you? Or is it just Google?
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.
This assumes they were always at G or other big co
Ex-Microsoft people and ex-accenture people are never setting foot again in our organisation
May I ask why you this is the case?
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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
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.
> "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.
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 :(.
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%
Your numbers show that the revenue is increasing, but the growth is slower, which is very different than the revenue is falling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about employees than profits.
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.
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.
With even the slightest bit of foresight or financial planning, they'll be fine for months or longer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
For these types of business, there’s always someone next in line to buy, hoping for the same performance.
If you are an investor, activist or otherwise, you benefit from the current practice that managers have a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That’s risk avoidance - social mission would be driving around town giving free rides to people
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
People on my team were fired today. They weren't my lowest performers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The top individual insider shareholders of Google are Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai
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.
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?
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.
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.
Nobody knew when and how.
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.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem the case (that and no one gets the credit for just keeping the system running)
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.
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.
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.
From an outside (and employee) perspective, it can seem foolish though.
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.
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.
They're just putting a PR spin on it.
Don't humans almost always extrapolate their present situation far out in the future?
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.
> 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.
It’s just that people are so used to this entitlement that they overlook it by default.
Personally?
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.
The other option is he blames some external force or some other leader in the company.
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".
How do you know they didnt?
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.
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
Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/01/19/microsoft-held-sting-concert-i...
The economy correctly drives company behavior, and that's not a CEO's fault.
Making promises you can't keep, or being wasteful or grossly overestimating your capacity to deliver is a sign of mismanagement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2021/2022 numbers or higher.
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...)
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.
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.
When you're paid peanuts compared to the real cost of living those "near-record levels of employment" don't matter that much anymore.
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
(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....)
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.
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"
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.
But the impact to these companies is, in general, less about inflation and more about free money.
As I remember it, the Fed kept saying things were fine until faced with at a hard, cold 8.5% inflation rate.
Has this been quantified? And on the downslope too?
The idea that the pandemic would create some new world never really made any sense for a global rampup anyway.
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.
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.
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".
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.
If that were true, I'd expect them to have hugely profitable proprietary trading desks, which does not seem to be the case?
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.
He's going to do whatever it takes to stop regular people from getting higher wages.
Spending free fedcoin will require recipient to signup for FedCoin also. Then, the real fun begins.
To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
- 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.
why?
The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools alone bought almost a million iPads.
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.
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.
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.
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?*
Everyone expects a recession, companies and individuals starts saving and being more frugal, which leads to an actual recession.
Wait, are you telling me that I picked a wrong time to quick my job and work on side projects, again?
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?
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://openknowledge.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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
It's in the government's best interest to support those with capital. All the rest of us be damned.
So when Jeff Bezos says, "Batten down the hatches," he's not actually saying it to prepare us for recession.
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.
Which is another way of saying "inducing a recession", as any educated person should know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
As long as they pay well, I don't think it will. And it's not like alternatives are safer.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I'm not joking.
To own the decision. Not pass the buck.
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.
When you break a window you don't give awway the house.
cockups?
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
...and that's why I don't think those are cockups.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fwiw Cook took a pay cut and Apple seems to have only slowed hiring. (So far as I’ve heard)
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.
What a shame that "we" won't get a look in.
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.
Ah, the heavy cost of a troubled mind /s.
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?"
> 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.
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.
And the workers will face the consequences of these decisions.
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.
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.
Now they are laying people off while still being a profitable company.
Something definitely changed in their company's DNA.
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.
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"
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.
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.
And you ascertained that from…a video on TikTok?
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.
What does this even mean? Are you implying these people would have been better off not being hired?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really? That habit is older than Henry Ford.
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.
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/twitter-r...
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.
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?
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.
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.
This is what being responsible for something means.
You've got your dictionaries mixed up
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.
"Responsibility" is ambiguous as you said, and that's exactly why he chose that word.
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?
The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it seems to matter how well you actually do your job.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
If it turns out that the layoff were a mistake, punishment will come.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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."
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?
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.
Enraging? That's your personal choice.
(Edit: Before the obvious replies of "but but Google stock is already down 30%", the whole market is down over the last year.)
But he didn't say he got it wrong.
He kinda did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(And no, before the pedants come in, the absolute amount isn't what matters, the absurd level of inequality is.)
All hypothetical I know, but he easily could have used some other non-committal words.
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.
He didn't fire anybody. He reduced a number in a spreadsheet. This is Dunbar's number at work:
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.
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.
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.
That's imposing US cultural norms on the rest of the world.
The good news is I can still afford two buy a new private G40 this year! Wahoo!"
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.
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.
"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.
That’s from Shrek
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".
Autism is actually...
(/s; couldn't resist; your points are absolutely true)
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.
Here you have a perfectly good payments system, but between some combination of FOMO and reverse imperialism (writers like E.F. Schumacher have talked about inappropriate developed world technologies failing in the developing world, here is an example of the opposite) they wrecked it for themselves and their users.
I'd like to see some responsibility taken for this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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...
But at Google's scale (and profits..) it was a little weird to see(/not see?) no efforts of reorganization before all those layoffs.
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.
Otherwise the state could say “yes prepend, you have freedom of speech, but the church you belong to can’t say stuff.” Etc etc.
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.
If they behave like psychopaths in a systematic way, I don't think they should be granted that right.
Etc etc.
Don’t anthropomorphize corporations. They aren’t people. They are algorithms to maximize shareholder equity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Translates to "I accept it's my fault but I am still going to sack you."
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
"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...
> "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
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.
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.
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.
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?
So, management should be punished for giving 12k people jobs in the first place.
Yeah, I think by "responsibility" he means "profit". He takes full profit of the decisions that took them there.
Maybe it just requires people not buying that rosy corporate lingo BS in the first place.
Silicon Valley (the TV series) should be re-categorized as documentary.
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.
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.
what you’re describing is what if employees were all unionized and had more protections
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).
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.
"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.
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 responsabilité 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.
- 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
This and MS layoffs
Boohoo
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.
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.
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.
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?