Google fires 31 massage therapists as part of layoffs
nypost.com
nypost.com
This is a generalisation but it's what it seems like when you have these people posting 'day in the life of twitter' 'day in the life as a google yelp elitist', etc. Where it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working.
We hear about these US jobs with perks, 200k salaries, shares, benefits bumping packages to like 500k etc, while outside of the US (atleast for me) we work hard for our salaries which pale in comparison.
It's the payoff for keeping the money printing machine running.
In WAT, prior to 2016? or so? we used to get a yearly surprise steak and lobster meal around the holidays. The date was never announced in advance, but one day in December you'd show up and there'd be fresh lobster and steak and fixings. Fantastic :-)
And even if someone manage to share their actual work you likely will never see it because it's not something that goes viral.
Its just a way to pay people in things that aren't money. After a certain point more $$$ becomes meaningless to most people (its just a number at some point) and these types of perks give more bank for their buck in attracting workers than upping salaries.
Is there really a shortage of people wanting to work at these big companies regardless of perks tho?
Also 'base' compensation at Google was never that high when I was there. It was the RSUs that made it a very prosperous place to work. And those take a few years to vest and get you up into Really Good Money territory. So in the meantime, perks are key in retention.
But the key point is that Google is just swimming in stupid amounts of $$ from ad revenues. Not spending good $$ on employee retention and compensation would actually have deleterious effects on morale. Most jobs are just slinging protobufs around and keeping those $$ systems up and running-- but those systems are important to Google.
People saying Google is irresponsible with money probably haven't looked at the balance sheet. They can spend boatloads on compensation and still make more money than almost any other company.
I would not take those videos of representative of an actual “day in the life”. They obviously don’t include any actual working, as it would violate non disclosure agreements.
I've been seeing this comment a lot in the last year as the TikTok tech-worker influencers started making waves, and I've struggled to understand it.
There are even videos where non-monetary perks aren't shown, it's just the tech worker in their nice apartment using nice things they buy, and people still lose their minds thinking "this person doesn't work". Do you need to see an 8 hour long video of them at their desk? Their commutes, too?
I think we're still in the transition period where there's enormous groups of people who don't understand how social media works. Reminds me of that apocryphal story of the theater audience screaming in terror when they saw a train moving towards the camera.
The other was a Google girl who was part of the layoffs and she posted about going into the office and having breakfast and then going to these rooms to listen to music etc.
And so I wonder what these people’s roles actually are?!?
And/Or some people just really get off on being outraged/indignant.
awesome fact: some time in the late 2000s after years of trying, the masseuses were converted from contract to full-time, complete w/benefits and all the perks of being a real 'googler'! :)
don't know if that's still the case, but it was kinda awesome that the masseuses fought for this and won.
Afaik you can have a 30 min session every month for free. Over here it's not that unusual of a perk to have even for non-IT desk jockey jobs.
I felt it's a cheap way to keep neck issues at bay, benefiting everyone. Seems pointless to label it as something extravagant.
I wonder whether this would end up being a case study in MBA classes....
That said (and IANAL), at least the couple suits I'm familiar with in this area have to do with minority shareholders arguing some decision was made to benefit majority owners at the expense of minority shareholders. It's much, much more difficult to just argue "bad decision making" if all shareholders are affected equally.
Yes, that's precisely why those who hold controlling voting power can get away with pretty much anything.
The founders are not stupid. They are not giving away Google's source codes or company assets in proccesses that are 100% detrimental to the company's net value. Whatever consequences there will be due to some Wallstreet suits fuming at their annual investment return having 1% fewer growth YoY is going to have a very hard time building an actual case for a lawsuit. Should anything come close to materializing in a lawsuit, the legal teams will certainly relay that to Sergey and Larry so that they could respond accordingly.
Who are goofing off building blimps and flying on their private jets. They seem to have little interest in Google.
This is good if you're a founder. This massive chink in Google's armor could prove fatal. It's a tremendous opportunity that rarely presents itself.
They have a single biggest golden goose, and if it dies, they'll be in more dire straits than Intel.
Disrupt Google. They're so very vulnerable.
But the employees tasked by Google to produce a cloud-based streaming gaming service, successfully shipped a cloud-based streaming gaming service. That's good management, not bad.
Edit: ooph, I can see where this is going but people have replied so I should leave it up. FWIW: the term "management" in this context is generally interpreted strictly, and not just a shorthand for "every decision made by an executive". The complaints people have with Stadia are better termed "marketing" (building the wrong product or canceling it too soon) or "sales" (failing to get enough games on the product). "Management" (the application of corporate resources to achieve results) did their job.
And in particular, in the context of layoffs ("management" by definition) it seems like the usage above was ambiguous enough to demand a correction. Stadia being mismarketed simply isn't relevant to the employment status of massage therapists.
Engineering did their job, well. Leadership and product did not.
This has been the trend at Google during Sundar and Ruth's tenure: a company led by engineers became a company led by product management and finance.
And it shows. Google's made a crushing number of business decisions that flew in the face of good engineering principles, and undermined the company's excellence.
One is talking about market strategy and perseverance. The other is talking about technical leadership.
You could have made the same insightful (inciteful) post by just commenting on how good technical leadership was.
I was shocked the other day when a solid respectable chip designer said Alpha was a failure because DEC went out of business.
The first link I got was: https://wire19.com/amazon-microsoft-and-google-cloud-infrast... which shows AWS as 3+x GCP and Microsoft ~2x GCP.
Edit to add: it looks like Alphabet reports GSuite as part of Google Cloud as well.
Google's market cap is $1.2T and their TTM net income was ~$65B.
I agree that slowly sliding the "% of ads our customers see"-slider to the right over the last couple of years until it becomes unbearable isn't really _that_ innovative but still yields a ton of profit.
The cost of 31 massage therapists is a rounding error compared to salaries for senior engineers, of which there are tens of thousands employed.
Indeed, the general argument is that Google's ads machine is so profitable that they can run the business horribly inefficiently because they don't know where to put all that cash.
> Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long.
That is, I (and I think most others) interpreted that as Google was essentially lighting a big pile of their cash on fire due to poor management, not that they were unprofitable. That would be very different, for example, than a statement like "Most of these new car companies are burning cash at an unsustainable rate."
What happened to Google is what happens to all fat monopolists: they had the luxury of losing focus because their monopoly was so profitable. I do really feel that Google (among others) is finally seeing the type of existential risk much better AI is to Google's ad business. While I'm definitely not of the opinion that "ChatGPT is a Google killer", it's not that hard to see that a company whose velocity in this space is currently much faster that Google's could eventually overtake Google's bread-and-butter search business in 5-10 years.
Google's first masseuse was FTE and got to be part of the IPO, so the symbolism is rich... https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html
Showing appreciation with tokens of gratitude and respect is different from leaving a bowl of treats out, mostly because of the implied direction of the gratitude. Where if I give staff something thoughtful because I want to recognize them, gratitude is expressed toward them, whereas if I leave a bowl of treats out, their gratitutde is implied toward me. If someone said, "here are some luxury goods, enjoy them," and then said, "oh yeah, btw someone has to pay for those luxury goods you used, time to work them off," we have other words for what that is.
Imo, personal boundaries in an office environment provide dignity to people, which is an essential part of maintaining the high and elite-level performance mental health necessary to manage in professional environments. It's a kind of athleticism. Providing "treats" is (un-)subtly degrading, and as a direct result I would estimate that the level of staff well being in the dozens of companies I have consulted to was inversely proportional to the presence of snacks, alcohol, toys, beanbag chairs, and furry onesie costumes in their offices.
Sorry to hear the therapists were laid off, and they were probably the hardest working people at Google, but medium term, it sounds like it could be better for everyone involved.
The article quotes the number of employees affected; does this number also include contractors? If not, would contractors have it better? Or worse?
Most body shops should be significantly cheaper than the internal FAANG wage folks and of you don't cheap out too much about as good.
Remember the average tenure at Google is like what, two years? You lose almost nothing by going with contractors for two years instead.
Cheaper, not cheap, is the keyword.
Google programmer staff is way too big to be any sort of elite. They are not a 1 in 100 programmer.
Maybe the 60 percentile or whatever at their scale.
Since the stereotypical silly good programmer skill is negatively correlated with social skills it would not surprise me at all if the median Google employee is even below median due to their recruiting process.
I.e. their recruiting is worse than dice rolls.
So people that suggest this can only be "pampering" are perhaps missing this part of the puzzle.
2. Most (maybe all?) insurance plans will cover at least some number of medically prescribed massages. Furthermore, nearly all of the US workforce manages fairly decently without in-house massage staff.
It was a luxury perk simply because Google could afford it.
2. Ye but you have to sort that and go someplace else. Maybe you've got some crunch coming up and feel pressured to commit to the hours even if its burning, if its coming to your workplace, its way easier for it to happen.