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Comment by MrSqueezles | Hacker News Reader

I was laid off from Google. I keep seeing posts from people who, I have to assume, just figured out how the world works and want to teach us. Guys, seriously, who didn't already know this?

Some companies stay lean, plan for difficult times. Others spend like crazy in good times and cut back in bad. Google always prided itself on being small and scrappy. That changed under Sundar, the current CEO. They started hiring a ton and now they're cutting back. The CEO still hasn't come to terms with the fact that he fucked up. He made comments in leaked meetings like, "Just imagine if we continued to grow and didn't have all of those extra people. Where would we have been?" Dude, you would have been fine. You don't grow a business by sticking more people in it. This is how accountants think about business, not leaders.

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The thing is that Alphabet made a $13.62 billion profit in Q4 of last year[0] so these are not "lean times". Their profit was down from $13.91 billion in the previous quarter.

In other words, this is a company that is making at least $50 billion a year in profit yet is pretending to be so poor that layoffs are necessary! Even if Google lost a billion or 2 in a lean year, that's still a drop in the bucket compared to their profits and what an actual leader would do.

[0]: https://9to5google.com/2023/02/02/alphabet-q4-2022-earnings/

Revenue is generally highest in Q4 due to Christmas spending.[1] So comparing 2022 Q4 to 2022 Q3 isn't really fair. If you compare it to 2021 Q4, it's much worse. Operating income declined from $20.6B in 2021 Q4 to $13.6B in 2022 Q4.[2] Disclosure: I work at Google but don't have any insight into company finances.

[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/revenues

[2] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...

Dude, it's still 13.91 Billion in income. Unless they are projecting losses I don't see where the need for layoffs is. It's smells like investor greed. I don't think they hired 12000 people in the last year, so justifying layoffs due to a loss of profit is plain and simple greed.

From the same report, Google had 156,500 employees on 2021-12-31 and 190,234 employees on 2022-12-31. That's a growth of 33,734. Amount hired would be even higher than that due to people who left during that period.

I see your point, and acknowledge my oversight, but I still stand by what I wrote. One downward trajectory point in profits should not prompt a mass layoff. People uproot their lives to come work somewhere. It's not just about money, but I guess nobody wants to admit that companies are made up of humans.

Yep! Sundar was strong-armed by investors, plain and simple.

> Guys, seriously, who didn't already know this?

Fresh, starry-eyed people enter the workforce every day. As long as new humans keep being born, there is no point at which anyone is ever finished teaching the same lessons over and over again.

Unless you assume you're not the first one to be experiencing a particular situation. On a broader scale that's the reason why you doomed to repeat history.

That puts in perspective all the apocalyptic talk about the falling birth rate.

Yeah but they don't put their insights into painfully cliched blog posts

I think this is a little uncharitable to… everyone actually.

First to the employee laid off: I’m not against layoffs in principle (maybe I’ll change my tune if/when it happens to me) but companies can take a more human-centred approach to things. Publicly shaming them when they don’t is one of the few tools people in this position have left to try and push them to better behaviour.

Second to Sundar: he’s not crying “woe is me,” he’s explaining the company position. I don’t even think he “fucked up” here because these situations are simply difficult to make the right call. Yes, maybe Google would have been “fine” but CEOs aren’t paid to keep things “fine.” They’re paid to put the company in a position to go after opportunities when they crop up. Even these layoffs will factor that goal in. Only time will tell who made the right decisions and who didn’t.

Guy has the vision of a vegetable. I look forward to using vibrant products from new entrants.

> imagine if we continued to grow and didn't have all of those extra people

This is the problem with FAANG, to a very large extent with all VC-funded companies, and to some extent with capitalism in general. Everyone looks at total dollar value, not at efficiency (loosely revenue per employee) and certainly not at anything hard to measure in dollars (e.g. quality of life). The only way to keep driving that number up is to grow, not to improve. Growth is mandatory, necessary even, and ultimately becomes like that other thing that keeps trying to grow without bound: cancer. Innovation is an uncertain route to growth over the long term. The sure routes are monopolization, regulatory capture, rent seeking (especially in the form that Cory Doctorow has called "enshittification"), and so on. So guess which one CEOs - whose pay is tied to that growth and not to more human-oriented metrics - go for. Every time.

To tell you the truth I think Sundar was not the one who fucked up. It was Larry and Sergey.

That guy doesn't have what it takes to be the CEO of one of the most important tech companies in the world, just like Trump/Biden are probably not the most talented leaders of the most important country either.

Eric Schmidt was great, and Google has lots of other much more talented leaders who understand programming on a deep level.

When we asked Eric Schmidt years ago of why some stupid things are happening (Christmas present of donating Google laptops to US children especially when most of us are from poorer countries), his answer was ,,I'm not the CEO''.

> Guys, seriously, who didn't already know this?

One of the 10 000:

* https://xkcd.com/1053/

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