Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers | Hacker News Reader

Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers

cnbc.com

113 pointszvonimirs103 comments

Wow, just wow. I have no doubt that Google has a lot of excess to cut, but IMO I always see it as the death knell for large companies when they start a nickel-and-dime approach to cost cutting. I can certainly see the argument for cuts where they are needed to improve focus, and lots of the FAANGs had too many "frilly" expenses in the past 5-10 years, but cutting expenses that improve your employee's productivity is just totally boneheaded. I'm reminded of when Bernie Ebbers (of WorldCom scandal fame) railed that employees were "stealing coffee" because the amount of coffee used per filter was out of whack - nevermind that WorldCom was about to collapse in a giant accounting fraud. Obviously I don't believe the fraud aspect applies to Google, but the "focusing on the wrong shit" definitely does.

> death knell for large companies when they start a nickel-and-dime approach to cost cutting

Nickel and dimming would be requiring approvals and paperwork to buy a stapler. This is Google just not buying them. That seems reasonable at a tech company?

Nickel and dimming is when you are looking for cost savings that aren't even rounding errors in operational costs. Quietly not buying things that aren't getting used is fine. Announcing it as a "cost savings action" is borderline nuts in light of what that signals.

Note that none of us are discussing the fitness classes. Staples, though? Seriously? How did that make the memo?

“If you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow.”

So each stapler use requires, say, a 5 minute detour (minimum, not counting lost focus or queueing) to the receptionist. At Google salaries, that's easily $10 in cost, so it's difficult to conceive how Google is expecting to come out ahead in the bargain.

Indeed. At a former employer, when they announced removing free soda, I assumed they were about to stagnate very hard. Compared to the costs and profits of flying hundreds of sales engineers around weekly and any executive-level expenses the cost rounded to zero. It was routine to hear about the $200/person dinners for big groups of leaders when courting visiting customers. So when they start cutting something as cheap as soda maintenance, they're definitely desperate and going to cut all the wrong expenses.

Coincidence or not, their stock has slowly fallen and they've lost their shine since then.

I think "broadly cutting tiny costs" means the company is done believing in itself.

Reminds me of this article:

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Yeah, I talked to a project manager who was in the loop on one of these things once. They took suggestions for cost-cutting measures and apparently lots of people suggested getting rid of the soda (not me - I drank probably half a gallon of Sprite Zero a day back then). She said that for a global company with a couple billion in revenue, the soda costs were about $50K/year. Which tracks - these were fast food style fountains and my understanding is that the profit margins at retail are huge.

> Obviously I don't believe the fraud aspect applies to Google

Not literally fraud, but that headline makes me wonder what Google is hiding and if they are close to failure.

Up to now, I assumed all the acting was there to prop the stock prices. But the nickel-and-dime things can't save enough to impact anything.

Yeah this will be interesting. Either Google still believes people go to work at a faang for a reason other than the comp or they are expecting higher attrition to avoid paying severance?

It's just as likely (more so, given this is Google) that management is looking for a _visible_ sign of cost-cutting to pass a message to staff that times have changed, so chilling effect on raises/bonuses and probably increased attrition (which is more cost-effective than down-sizing and doesn't make headlines).

I am sure their finance people can read the expense %ages just as well as HN commenters: e.g. changing your cleaning supplier to a much cheaper one could actually save more $$$ but will not be staff-visible for a while. Perks are mainly signals, not cost centers.

Source: led down-sizing and kept perks when I wanted to retain people, reduced perks where I preferred some additional attrition.

Google is starting to look like an IT episode of "Triangle of Sadness" - https://youtu.be/VDvfFIZQIuQ

The rich are the Phds and the Management is a crew asleep at the Helm...suddenly Kubernetes takes a whole new meaning...

If I owned any Google stock right now, I'd be thinking hard about selling it. Not because everything here is silly, but just because:

A. over the course of 20+ years in this industry I've noticed a trend that when companies start worrying about things like tape dispensers or staplers (or the free coffee in the cafeteria, or the cost of the subsidized sodas in the breakroom, etc) it's almost always a Really Bad Sign for their future.

B. (related to A of course) when this stuff starts happening, it tends to send the best employees heading for the doors, either because they feel slighted, and/or because they assume (rightly or not) that the company is spiraling the drain. And the best employees leaving can have exactly the effect of sending the company spiraling down the drain...

These things have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies (or at least self-reinforcing negative feedback loops). At best, it's vanishingly rare for this to be harbinger of anything good.

This was the #1 lesson I learned from 2000 and the first dotcom bust.

In the past 20 years, how many times have we had a low interest rate? Now ZIRP is dead, the incumbency of the USD as the world reserve currency is not a certain thing anymore.

Your average company in average times, sure your heuristic makes sense. I'm guessing this will give many other companies the green light to cut back their perks as well.

Just a thought - where are all those "best employees" going to go? Everyone is battening the hatches for a recession and VCs don't have tons of cash to hand out for new startups.

Just a thought - where are all those "best employees" going to go?

The last time I looked there were almost 2 job openings per unemployed person in America. Unemployment right now is around 3.6% which is a slight uptick from other recent numbers, but still close to "historically low" territory. There are jobs out there.

Everyone is battening the hatches for a recession and VCs don't have tons of cash to hand out for new startups.

I would say it's a bit myopic to think that tech workers can only go to work for tech startups, or even companies that identify as "tech companies". So maybe somebody from Google winds up at John Deere, or Kohls, or Farmer's Insurance, or what-have-you. Now of course there's always going to be those people who have the mindset "I'm too good to work for company that makes tractors, pppffawwww." or whatever. So sure, they might not be rushing to leave unless the flood waters are literally swirling around their ankles. But clearly not everybody is going to fall into that category.

Surely I can't be the only HN reader that thought, "I can't remember the last time I touched a stapler." Frankly, I think the headline writer threw staplers in there just for the sizzle. If I might so boldly suggest reading TFA, staplers are just one example of other things that made a lot of sense. Yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when a lot of folks WFH (or not at all on a Friday afternoon)? Handing out multi-core full-blown laptops to non-technical roles that could just as easily get by with a Chromebook? Buses running with one passenger? Get a company Google's size, and that stuff starts to add up to real money.

So, yeah, Google is swirling the toilet because someone has to walk to the receptionist's desk once a year to get a piece of tape or borrow a stapler. I'd be more worried about a company that just hands out shit that no one uses, without ever once asking if anyone actually uses it.

My first thought when I saw this story was Milton in the movie Office Space. Google is coming for your stapler!

> Handing out multi-core full-blown laptops to non-technical roles that could just as easily get by with a Chromebook?

I have, over and over, seen companies burn the cost of a decent laptop at a rate between one per quarter and one per month per employee because they try to cheap out and the shitware they force on their workers runs like crap on anything that's not fairly powerful, wasting hours per week per employee.

Whole divisions at some larger companies lose incredible amounts of money every year over reluctance to give the mere worker-drones nice hardware.

My non-technical wife is always pegging her corporate computer running Adobe Creative Suite. I joke with her that she can use it as a heater in winter. Me? The programmer...I barely ever hear my fan.

I hope she gives the computer a kiss first.

Hopefully my comment was understood as pegging all her laptop CPU cores at 100%.

It sounds like the problem isn't the hardware, it's the shitty, bloated software.

How do you attach multiple pages together? I use a stapler about as often as I use a printer, which is to say about once every month or two.

Fine, you get a stapler. In five years at my current company, I don't know that I've even (literally) touched the one I was given. You could have mine, assuming I could even find it. It's probably right next to that tape dispenser and the stack of sticky notes that are still in the cellophane.

What share of your salary does a stapler cost?

When working on the office, it makes perfect sense to buy plenty of them so everybody would have one nearby (at the same cabinet as the perforator, folders, printer paper, extra sticky notes, pens, and whatever else).

When working at home, I'd guess it's used exactly never, so yes, it doesn't make sense to buy them.

Does everybody at Google work at home?

Anyway, the stapler is the most interesting part of the headline. How much did it cost to decide to stop buying them? Does it save enough to pay the decision-making?

Or a paper clip or a binder clip. But, yeah, although I do print more than one a month is not something I do on anything like a daily basis.

I don't remember the last time I've printed anything at work, apart from my notice.

When I joined a new job about 7 years back I was given a brand new stapler, a roll of tape and other office supplies on the joining day. When I left 4 years later I hadn't even finished one cartridge of stapler lins. Tape was unused as well. A company of Google's size must be wasting a non trivial amount of money on things nobody uses as frequently anymore.

At my company there is a room full of office supplies - called the supply room. If you need something you go and get it there. It has all the usual things. If they run low, they buy more. If things aren't running low, they don't buy more. As a new employee you are told where this is and you get what you need when you need it. If you don't need it, you don't take it. Seems like a pretty sensible system.

The cost of those items is incredible trivial compared to the salary they paid you.

There is a sort of quirk here that causes people to focus on things like this, even if they are overwhelmingly insubstantial.

Wasting physical objects feels bad. Something about the physicality of it. Whereas salary is more abstract and intangible - we experience it as numbers changing on a screen. Important numbers that greatly affect our lives, but the visceral impact of this is more removed.

Reducing waste is good, obviously. But in a cost-saving effort, basic office supplies are a completely useless thing to focus on.

I can get a stapler and a tape dispenser (a really nice heavy one) for 110 yen each at my local Daiso. That's USD$0.83 each, at retail prices.

It's $1.50-2.00 each for those items at Daiso in the US.

Not wrong, but the same question goes to the internal memo. Why mention staples? Even if you are ramping down on purchasing them, you just stop buying them. You don't mention it.

And if you are worried about google handing out things nobody uses.... I have really bad news for you. :D

And if you are worried about google handing out things nobody uses.... I have really bad news for you.

As one who used to have enough Microsoft-branded shirts to wear one to work everyday for a month and not repeat myself, I'm under no illusion that a large corporation doesn't hand out a lot of useless junk. :-)

let's assume they're assigning a stapler to every single employee, at $15 per stapler, and a stapler has an average life of 10 years. at their current 190k headcount, they're spending ~275k per year on staplers.

that definitely seems like the sort of expense a company should review from time to time. assume that tape is a similar expense, the person who changes the policy from "we give you a stapler and tape whether you want it or not" to "if you want a stapler just come and get one" has saved the company 2-3x their annual salary. i'm sure there's plenty of staff at google who are less effective than that.

275k/year is less than one FTE, even given your favorable estimates of a really fancy stapler given to everyone when they walk in the door. (Bulk mediocre staplers are like $3, but a 10 year estimate is high, so we'll take it).

Presume an employee proposes this change. Some additional people have to approve and implement this new policy, updating documentation training and budgets and adding it to some inventory system and now you've spent in total, weeks or months of collective effort to maybe come out ahead but maybe just break even.

I think this kinda misses the point. Any one, or even most, of these cutbacks can be seen as reasonable - the details are almost unimportant. It's just that whenever (and I mean like 100% of the time) I've seen this focus on cost cutting minutia (and by "focus" I don't mean there was a board meeting about it, just that it had reason to bubble up to a widely-distributed memo), it's the beginning of the end for the company: they've jumped the shark from the "innovation" stage of a company to purely the "financialization" stage.

Now, one could argue that Google has been going down this path for a while, but I still think it's a sad sign. What I think is even sadder is that I haven't seen anything come out of Google in the past couple years that clearly and clear-headedly addresses some of their well-known cultural problems (that are often discussed on HN). For example, if Google senior management said they were totally overhauling their "promotion-oriented development" style, or that they were finally deciding on a better way to handle "Killed by Google" products so that customers aren't scared to try their new stuff in the first place, or that they were becoming more forthcoming in their roadmap visibility, I'd be thrilled. But instead we get the oldest-of-old-school "cost cutting will continue until morale improves" MBA spiel.

I’ve seen employees who treat MacBooks like they were $5 note books which they repeatedly drop or spill drinks on and say “oh well, the company will get me another one”

I’m not a major Google shareholder, but if I were I would fire the management. I’ve never heard of such a large company itemizing an expense as trivial as staplers.

It’s pretty clear the company has lost its innovation culture.

My company (mid sized software company) tried to eliminate plastic spoons from the break rooms. Not for any sort of noble environmental reason, either, but explicitly to cut costs. You can buy them in cases of 1000 for $7.20. I am a shareholder, but not powerful enough to call for the termination of whatever bonehead thought that was worth more than 2 seconds of thought.

$20 says the company that cared about the spoons had a special bathroom for executives.

You'll have a hard time finding anybody to take the other side of that deal.

> as trivial as staplers.

I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...

Came here for Milton. Was not disappointed.

Now that’s just getting petty. How about cutting down on Sundar’s RSU grants? What exactly has he done to deserve them? A stuffed Sundar doll would have done just as well over that last half a decade. He never makes any tough calls. He waits for a consensus to form and then pretends that that was his idea all along.

-xoogler who saw him come to power and the complete lack of direction since

I remember during a Conan O’Brien chat with Simpsons writers they told how at the height of billions of dollars of ancillary sales of Simpsons merch, the head of production of 20th Century Fox was complaining that the writers were charging up too much in expenses on pretzels.

https://youtu.be/DtJ28qOEG1g at 28:07

One of my best friends landed a job at Google after graduation. She told me about a fellow new hire she met during orientation who said she planned to coast along in the job since she had learned that Google never lays people off.

I guess there is no such thing as a completely secure job, even at a company like Google.

Horrible. Where I'm from, we call those people uhljebi and they're the worst people to work with since they always look for ways to offload their work to others.

They have always fired people for under performing though.

And large scale layoffs often don't take into account performance (they just cut teams).

Underperforming people are routinely managed out or just plain let go. It's not unusual at all.

Better to start by cutting the number of chat apps being released in a given year? Probably pay for a lot of staplers hmm?

It's not about cost savings, it's about psychological manipulation of employees as servants to the corporation. Why would they be any exception to its users?

I believe that’s the case as well. Some sort of psychological pressure and signaling. “Better not expect any raises, promotions or bonuses”

“We have been asked to pull all tape/dispensers through out the building,” a San Francisco facility directive stated. “If you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow.”

Tape is kinda silly but who staples and distributes paper documentation these days. People just gather all this shit then throw it in a drawer to never use out of decade old force of habit.

I used a round drawer. It self archived every night.

Also... how bad off is the company if they are worried about the expense of staples/tape!? Just, wow.

They have better than 25% operating margin on a company with massive revenue. They're fine, but the shareholders must be appeased with human sacrifice.

Do they? A large chunk of the market is held by retirement accounts. My 401k doesn't care about staplers, and I would very much value long-term gains over short-term savings.

Collectively, 401k holders don't have much of a voice. I suppose Vanguard might, but even so, retirement accounts are specifically balanced such that they have less short-term risk the nearer they come to fruition, and Vanguard's motive, in theory, should be to provide me with better long-term gains, not short-term savings at the expense of a worse retirement.

I think I want to see a stronger argument for "the shareholders" … and/or these sorts of (idiotic) decisions (that we see far more companies doing than just Google; cf the McD's article that trended earlier where McD is laying people off while beating profit expectations!) would seem to fall squarely on bad management.

Apparently activist investors have been pushing for cost cutting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/activist-investor-calls-on-goog...

I've read that activist investors have pushed for this at several tech companies and even heard theories that that's what actually kicked off the layoff avalanche.

> My 401k doesn't care about staplers

Are you sure?

If it is actively managed, it cares about a whole lot of things that you don't know about. And if it passively invested, it cares about what the average of the active managers care about.

One wonders how large that line item could possibly be across literally the entire company.

Running a quick Fermi calculation, multiplying my personal rate of staple usage over the past year by the number of employees at Google we get... $0 spent on staplers.

This may be an underestimate.

Still... here's 5,000 staples for 4.29, with no particular effort put into price shopping: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/749601/Office-Depot-B... which yields 1.2 million staples for a cool $1000. In reality I'm sure bulk buying could push that down even more.

I'm finding it hard to believe even Google goes through much more than that in a year. But even if I'm wrong, does it go through 120 million staples per year, necessary to get up to even a semblance of one employee's salary?

What an astonishing message to send to stockholders and investors.

The alternative explanation is that they have a theft problem.

Maybe some intern realized they could arbitrage $0 work staplers into >$0 eBay staplers.

If that is a problem, you deal with it by litigation against the bad actor. No need for a corporate "lets drop all staples" announcement.

Worse, if stapling at the reception now takes significant more time than stapling before, that's costly too. Particularly when the stapler is in use when you need it, or someone borrowed it and now no-one can find it. Before you know it, you've wasted an hour stapling a stack of forms or so.

As an aside, the organization I worked at before had two to four secretaries per floor. Before the pandemic, most were in their offices when you needed anything practical, like staples, batteries, etc. After the pandemic, most of them work from home most days of the week. That's great for them, but I've had days that I had to go through the whole building to get this or that.

These small informal conveniences and ways-of-working aren't on the organization's radar, and when they're gone, it takes some doing to get them organized again. Until then, and until everyone in the organization knows about the new ways of working, this can be quite frustrating and inefficient.

Can I keep my red Swingline stapler?

Only if you move your office to the basement.

So if you could go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, OK?

Fun fact: when that movie came out, swingline actually didn't make a red stapler - the producers painted a black one red because it showed up better on camera. After the movie came out, demand for red swingline staplers was so high, they started producing them and it became their biggest seller for years.

And thus the wheel of destiny makes another rotation and Google becomes the next IBM.

True story: I was hosting author talks

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t...

and of course those authors aren't paid. But I'd take them to the Google Store and let them pick out a gift for themselves, as a small thank you. They were all very modest in their choices. Eventually Google imposed a hard limit on the amount they could spend. Think of the savings!

But staplers! Good grief, how many staplers did I go through? (actually, I don't think I had one)

You'd have to be a master of business to come up with such a brilliant play.

Aside from iOS development, Google laptops are just a terminal into a dev desktop or cloud VM type of environment. Still, top of the line MacBook pros were the norm seemingly just as a "perk" in the very literal sense - I tried reproducing the remote dev experience on a $500 or so Chinese barebones laptop and was satisfied in general with it. Google Meet for some reason was really laggy though, so maybe that's why MacBook pros are required to get work done.

A friend of mine worked at a public airline and whenever they had a bad quarter, things like coffee would get cut so people would feel it. But those types of industries operate on razor thin margins.

how did your friend feel it when they had a good quarter?

Buzzed on caffeine, I'd assume.

Probably they would get free coffee.

This made me laugh harder than it should have.

Everyone gets an extra coffee for a day

Strange that the "tape and stapler" part wasn't presented as a modernization effort. They must be trying to send a strong message, that times are dire.

I thought it was common in most companies to have a little "hub" where your office/section/area printers are housed. Here is where you'd normally look to find a stapler, tape, or any other supplies needed for printing. I don't even know who I'd talk to if I needed to borrow a stapler, just find it yourself at the printing kiosk and leave it there for the next guy.

I used a stapler at home yesterday though I'm sure I have a great deal of redundant paper-related office stuff I rarely use.

I guess the purpose of a company-wide email is to signal "Tighten your belts." But it absolutely makes sense to cut back on supplies that aren't needed as much or don't need to be refreshed as much--or on services that aren't being utilized with fewer people in offices.

Hm, April Fool's? When will Bard burn things down because its metaverse stapler hasn't been returned?

If this is true Google/Alphabet has really spiraled downward. Such a boneheaded move.

This is a company that provides free food all day, and their first inclination is to cut the tape and staplers? Cutting one meal service across all locations would save a lot more, but maybe that would cause more employees to complain.

Yeah no. Free food != superflous staplers. Hard disagree on that one

I'm not suggesting they should do it, but that cutting office supplies seems like kind of a joke or PR motivated move considering their known expenses like food. That said I think it's definitely on the table to cut given the current trend of companies behaving hostile to their employees.

This sounds like sending a message to internal culture/HR or to Wall Street.

So dumb to cheap out on laptops and computer equipment for employees. Internal IT just gets a tonne of "my computer slow/out of space" that is impossible to fix without upgrading the hardware...

Obligatory mention- https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

The replacement of Patrick and his orange backpack with a Morgan Stanley alum made the leaving Google decision much easier.

You can never rule out the velocity and efficiency - it certainly makes sense. God knows where the velocity would stand if not for this efficient decision.

This is all signaling to shareholders that are panic selling because of BARD vs ChatGPT.

Not to worry, management is on it. They immediately went public and ...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/8/23590864/google-ai-chatbot...

The rare insight is that entities start to decline when they have reached their peak.

What does the average Googler even need a stapler for?

I haven't used a stapler in years.

If nobody needs it, why are people asking for them to buy some?

That is what I'm asking.

You honestly want to know what people want a stapler for?

TPS Reports? Better make sure they have the right cover page. The memo about the cover page went out to everyone.

This made me LOL

God forbid the profit margin drop a tiny smidge below 25% (in a mature market with more competitors every day), that would be a real catastrophe for the shareholders and, therefore, the company.

How do the other 99% of American companies manage? /s

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