Sundar Pichai hints at more job cuts at Google | Hacker News Reader

Sundar Pichai hints at more job cuts at Google

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46 pointscandiodari41 comments

Imagine running a company that's making billions of dollars a quarter and all you and your CFO can offer in terms of growing revenue/profits is laying people off and cutting back on paperclips. Must be nice to have that kind of job security.

In past life Sundar owned a cow farm, and was very good at it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Sundar is forced to step down, his tenure at Google wasn’t that great

I try to remember what great product did Google release since he took over.

I fail to find one. Except milking the YouTube and Google search/ads cows that now are increasingly unbearable.

YouTube is worse than cable tv with ads every couple of minutes. Google search is polluted with seo optimized results. Ads are pushing plain scam companies without any due diligence.

So yes he increased the revenues, by putting the system in overdrive, but failed to release the next big thing. And now that the cash cows are running out of steam I am not sure where Google is going.

Haha he might just be dropping random hints so that people stay on their toes. Pretty dumb, but then again so is the hire->months->fire cycle in the first place.

Negative manipulation tactics at scale

Of all the FAANGs Alphabet is the most mismanaged now. He either needs to wake up or go the way of Steve Ballmer. The unfortunate disease is that some share holders only care about continued short term profits.

He needs to get fired. The job of a CEO is to steady the ship during temporary economic anomalies. The inability to see life and policy under Covid as such an anomaly and to get misled into a hiring binge demonstrates shocking incompetence.

2019 Net Income - $36B

2022 Net Income - $60B

Yeah the number of people who seem to forget that Google is among the most profitable companies on the planet both in absolute numbers and in terms of margin is wild.

Yes, Google's revenue and income growth rates aren't stratospheric like they used to be. It seems to have more competition for core products than in the past. But like, it makes an absolute shitload of money.

For now!

People have been saying this for years. Maybe it'll happen and Sundar will go down in history as a disaster, but its not there yet.

I don't think he will be a disaster, steve ballmer wasn't . The concern is it will be mediocre. Profits but just enough to make investors happy in the short term. You can be very profitable and not be #1 or a leader.

And keep in mind, google's winning strategy has been to overhire and drain the talent pool from its competition. Laying off people to follow a trend is utter incompetence when those people are your ultimate winning strategy.

You're proving my point. MS was profitable under ballmer as well but lost many competitions. It could have been many times more profitable than apple.

Your point is purely speculation. This is a 65% increase in profit in 4 years for a ~20 year old company. The reason I think Pichai sucks is because he's firing people while profit is $60B.

MS was making a lot if profit too when it tanked several products trying to catchup with market leaders. Google has been a leader but it isn't just openai that has it playing catchup that just happens to affect it's core business.

Don't forget the real estate binge.. even as more and more people were WFH'ing.

It struck me yesterday that the biggest thing keeping me using Google is no longer there. I'll regularly run into an issue while writing software that I'm "stuck" on, leading me to open dozens and dozens of tabs in a frustrated effort to get unstuck. In the past I would always come back to Google because these issues are much harder to find solutions for on any other search engine. But with GPT-4 it usually only takes me a couple minutes to find a solution. GPT-4 almost never just fixes it for me, but the format of back and forth is so much better than endlessly googling my errors messages.

I think I'll switch all my devices off Google today and see how it goes.

I felt the same way once I started using GPT-4. It can't do everything as well as Google, but so many things are answered with a similar level of accuracy and waaay better user experience. The problem for Google is that even if they can match it with Bard, they'll still be eating into their Google search profits significantly. I just don't see how they get out of this unscathed.

I did switch away from Google mostly, and I've been pretty happy. Here's a query I just did with GPT-4 that I wouldn't have imagined doing a few months ago:

> Show me the top VR games with the teleportation movement option.

> Re-generate the list, but filter on shooters.

> Filter again on games available on HTC Vive.

I didn't copy its answer here (it's pretty long), but it was very helpful. Definitely better than searching on Google and trying to click through random blog posts.

I'd really like to see a graph of daily searches on Google YTD.

Wait, wasn’t Google “query site:stackoverflow.com” search engine long before GPT? Technically you could’ve dropped it years ago for SO internal search + docs. I don’t feel GPT being superior to those still.

I use plenty of Google services: gmail, docs, chrome, Android, YouTube, maps, photos etc. But the problem is that the one I'm most ready to drop is their main money maker, and I'm sure this is true for many others as well.

I think Google will go down in history more as a bellwether for how good a workplace could be for employees (obviously pre ~2015 ish), rather than its products.

I know it's en vogue to bash Google's products these days, but Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive are or were class-leading products. They might not be any more, but at one point they were among the best and definitely had huge impacts on the industry.

Search as well, and although it has issues these days, no one else really does it better.

You know they shipped a brilliant product when it was so ubiquitous that their name was literally turned into one of the most common verbs in modern language.

Don't forget Google Maps. It's still class-leading, by a long stretch; nothing comes even close for navigating Tokyo.

> It's still class-leading, by a long stretch

City Mapper is nicer for all the cities I have tried. Google Maps UX is terrible if you want to use public transports.

What exactly is the problem with Google Maps UX on public transports? It works amazingly well for me.

For Paris, it poorly tells you where to enter stations. It gives exit as street names whereas Paris metro exits use numbers. It doesn’t tell you where you should stand in the train to easily grab the next train. It doesn’t show if there is an incident on the line it’s suggesting you take. It’s extremely annoying going back and forth between the solutions it’s suggesting.

In Tokyo, it's fantastic in my experience. It tells me exactly which exit number to use from the station (and some Metro stations have many different exits), it tells me exactly when the train will leave (and when the next one leaves in case I miss it), which car to sit in for the most efficient transfer, etc. It tells you if there's an incident and your train will be late, etc. It does everything you complain about here.

Perhaps this is a problem with local teams (or perhaps a lack thereof)? Tokyo has 2 large Google locations so all the localization work is done here.

> Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive are or were class-leading products. They might not be any more, but at one point they were among the best and definitely had huge impacts on the industry.

I still find them to be fantastic products and happily use them daily.

What an amazing example of sensationalism and rumor milling! Not a single thing was said about the possibility of a second round of layoffs but hey - the fact Pichai didn't flat out denied it must mean it is in the works!

Feels like this article is stretching a bit here. But then again, a second round wouldn't surprise me. So I guess it's easy to speculate and throw up an article like this for clicks.

Absolutely, it’s a stretch. The profit margins aren’t growing as quickly as they’d like, but that shouldn’t be news to anyone watching tech.

TFA doesn’t mention any hints about layoffs, but I suppose the timing is about right relative to an earnings call that it makes sense to predict it soon. Nobody will remember if they’re wrong. (Personally I think they’re right.)

At this point it’s clear big tech is outsourcing these decisions to the same set of outside consultants with the short-term goal of stock price bumps (and long-term goal of driving engineer comp down of course).

I find the narratives fascinating. Earlier this year everyone was saying Google was right not releasing an AI chat bot because Sydney was so poor for Bing. Then GPT4 came out and everyone shifted to saying Google is late to the party. All of this happened in like the span of two weeks. You can see the comments here on HN as examples.

What's interesting is that both of these statements can be true!

Google has long had its moonshots and yet Open AI blew them out of the water. Amazing really. Even more crazy is that the LLM tech was invented at Google so they, in retrospect, "squandered" the early opportunity... Why did they? I would read that 'management' book.

This really shows you the power of startups and the out of nowhere existential risk even giants face.

Sundar is not a leader, he is a manager.

It's one thing to manage Google's insanely profitable business, and another to lead a (large, diverse) group of people through a corporate rebirth.

He's no Satya.

Want to increase productivity and reduce your cost base? Make everyone come back into the office. You'll attrit a huge number of people naturally, and your people will be more productive when they're working together in the office. Then, reward hard work and good outcomes.

Sounds more like a guide on how to get your high-performers (who have way more outside employment options than your mediocre performers) to leave. Which is rather a strange approach to increasing productivity and output.

Niiice try! (:

There's no evidence that working in the office leads to better productivity. There were some reports during covid time that productivity was slightly up, but I think it's unclear. You should reward hard work and get outcomes regardless of where your workers are located.

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