Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant
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I consider voice assistants to be a failed experiment. It's clear that they were doomed to fail without the true ability to understand natural language and perform common sense reasoning that is only now starting to become a possibility with large language models.
I am extremely excited about the potential of projects like the Rabbit R1 and Humane.
I'm not excited about the Rabbit R1 as a hardware device but their software vision is exactly right and there are new startups coming out of stealth seemingly every day now attacking this problem.
With ChatGPT I can see the appeal for certain tasks like having it create a custom text adventure for you, but I can't see it being too useful in my day to day life yet.
If they're meant to be a usable $30 kitchen timer and music player, they're pretty great.
Is that a story of failure or of success?
Starbucks launched to sell beans and espresso machines. YouTube launched as a video dating site. Are they also failures?
I think people see more than $30 of value in them, at least as their revealed preferences suggest.
(I'm deliberately excluding the "ten words to 'author' a holodeck scene" part, that had always been stretching my imagination a little too far, more "this can't work!" than space travel and transporter beams. Then stable diffusion happened)
I believe it is possible to have made it better, but they didn't try, they just gave up, like much of google products.
I ordered a rabbit r1. I can see it’s missing some key functionality (Bluetooth for headphones so everyone doesn’t have to hear?) But… I think it’s an example of a first, promising, step to the era of real voice assistants/agents.
This is a critical missing feature. I would never ever use this unless it's in my ear alone.
And I hope it doesn't become socially acceptable to be carrying these around forcing everyone else to listen to whatever this device has to tell the user. There is already far too many noise and inconsiderate people in this world.
Even gesture control would be a tough sell, and even that only if it's not "AR, where you push buttons projected across your field of vision" but "AR, where you can do the equivalent of gamepad buttons with hand movement anywhere the device can see the hand". Voice output (earbuds) would be far too slow for that kind of interaction, because you can't skim a list. Compared to the strictly sequential nature of audio, screens are the equivalent of embarrassingly parallel.
By the way, that slowness of voice output vs screen is also what I consider the true motivation companies had for creating those essentially free voice assistants: searching for product/service on a screen, even if it's just a small handheld screen, makes you pick from a list. With voice in the other hand, going through the list is so slow and cumbersome that the chances for just picking the first, "I'm feeling lucky", are much, much bigger. The value of placement (bought directly or bought indirectly, "this must be very relevant because we know how much they can spend on our other ad services") is just so much bigger with voice. Chances are people are less likely to listen to the second hit on voice than to go to the second page on screen.
Basic functionality has always been the key winner with this tech. Calling, setting reminders etc. nothing too complex.
I do think a human personal assistant who had unlimited access to my data and could perform any task my phone or desktop could do would be exceedingly useful, even if the only interaction possibility was voice. And I think that AI agents will approach that level of usefulness within a decade or two.
They only have nothing in common if you think of a Voice assistant as no smarter than those auto prompt customer support lines. Clearly Siri/Cortana/Google assistant had sole basic context mapping.
I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spotify... But I don't see this at all as a "failed experiment". On the contrary, I see it as a successful experiment, at least from a human utility perspective: I ask it to do a concrete task, and it does it.
The reason it's failed from a larger business perspective is because the format is less amenable to big tech sucking any more of our money or mind out of it. But I say Amen to that! Wherever I go I feel like tech interfaces get relentlessly shittier as they just try to hook us into more mindless scrolling (this HN post on the topic is one of my favorites of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507) That's just fundamentally harder to do with a voice assistant because nobody has yet figured out how to plug in voice "algorithms" in a way that would make the device control you like they do with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, etc.
If anything, I think the rest of tech that gets you to do things you really don't want to do should be the thing that's considered a "failed experiment".
Also I don't feel that hotword detection has improved much, and hotword issues continue to be a big pain point for me. I'm sure the team has a dashboard somewhere that shows consistent gains in their hotword metrics, but as a user I don't feel it at all.
The reason I say it's a failed experiment is that the original ambition was to build the Star Trek computer (explicitly, in Google's case: the project was code named "Majel"), and it hasn't worked out. There may be a couple of features that are somewhat convenient (which, again, largely worked fine already a decade ago) but they don't come close to justifying the level of resources spent on these projects over the last decade.
On the other hand, I gave up some kinds of requests. For instance, I used to try "start directions home" when I was driving and it would say "here's a route I found, do you want to start (or some such)" and there would be no way to actually start the directions home without breaking the very expensive law against touching your phone while driving. Does that work today? I don't know, because I've mostly been driving with Android Auto in the last few years and my wife's been in the car on the rare occasion I haven't. But it seems like the Assistant team could straightforwardly improve it.
Those kinds of things seem to work absolutely flawlessly for me lately. I had similarly given up on those requests. Heck I had given up on setting timers since that just plain stopped working. A month ago or so I tried changing navigation by voice while driving and to my surprise it worked fine. Since then I've been picking up my use of the assistant more and have yet to have a miss. My main gripe is the trigger word being kinda iffy at times, but I suspect that's due to me still rocking the original pixel. As I understand it the trigger word stuff runs locally so is dependent on your hardware being good.
So since 10 years, all it can do is play some music and tell the weather, all of this only online, so it is not a failed experiment. /s
A product that has become pervasive in most households in America, that does it's one task, and tries to do it well. The problem is that companies built out these organizations and marketed these products as the next step of computing after mobile, and it's just not that easy to monetize.
My washer/drier, "all it can do" is spin clothes around and apply heat. I paid a lot more money for that "failed experiment".
I think Apple really should have made the HomePod earlier, and all this could be avoided. They were heavily criticized for not supporting 3P "skills" when it came out. Today, Apple is one of the better sellers, and has properly managed their products expectation from the start.
You think Google home has over 50% penetration?
Assuming smartphones in general have 90%+ market penetration, 42% market share for Android, and an average household size of 3, it seems reasonable to assume that 50%+ of households will have at least one device running Assistant.
Sonos now have a voice assistant (far more limited though) and many cars are rolling out some sort of assistant too.
I know plenty of people with multiple speakers and from competing brands.
Oh and obviously every iPhone in the last decade has it built in. That’s 50% of the population right there. Then there’s android phones, where I don’t know if they all have it wakeword enabled, but it’s probably another big chunk too.
Regardless, do you think over 50% of households use the voice commands to the extent we call it "pervasive"?
After much very polite dancing around the politics of "listen, it's just a personal choice and nobody here is judging anyone else, I just don't want my children playing arbitrary stupid music and buying things on my credit card", she finally capitulated and pointed out that "well it's listening, isn't it? my husband" (I was actively playing with children at the time), "would have better details, but if it's listening, that means it's recording and sending those recordings to Amazon or Google or whomever".
At which point the lady of the house got up and turned her Alexa off. I attempted to not die laughing in the corner with the children.
It's listening, and so are contractors and employees.
https://apnews.com/article/9000fd56f68043e48a2de8a08997a1fd
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20758491/microsoft-voice-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Companies will pinky promise that it doesn't happen, and say all kinds of things about their security polices and access controls, but spying on people's homes is basically the entire point of these devices. What else would you expect when you bug your home with an internet connected microphone from a company who makes their money collecting as much information about people as they can, especially their most private data.
They're also collecting data on children, and even targeting kids. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon have already been caught and got nothing more than slaps on the wrist, but collecting kid's data is basically inevitable when the house is bugged and kids are intentionally playing with it.
I ask it for the time and it quotes some article on wikipedia about what time is or various movies with time in the name.
I ask it to turn of the lights and it tells me 'power control is not supported yet' at least half the time.
It's gotten worse since I bought it, it never did this and that is with even the most basic of tasks.
(Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce... (“A major Alphabet investor said the company should cut even more jobs and address 'excessive' pay in the wake of mass layoffs”)
(Edit: retracted an unnecessarily snarky statement)
(I admit Congress needs to get its shit together)
I'm from the UK so while we do have layoffs, like much of Europe we have relatively good employment protections. The government here don't tend to do layoffs, but do tend to use contractors significantly more than most businesses and do flex their contractor base up and down.
Spot on about the contractors. The city I live in contains some of the larger data processing hot-spots of the German government (not so much in terms of large number-crunching server farms, but in terms of ever changing complicated business logic running at high volume) and there's a crazy number of consultancies serving that market and nobody else. But ironically those are the safest jobs nonetheless, because that demand could only ever go away in total state collapse.
(Risk management is a component of my work)
Indeed, and I am under no such illusions. But it's silly to live in fear of. Hubris would be thinking that your organization or relationship is special.
7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine.
I do understand it’ll be lower, but the GS pay system isn’t that clear to outsiders
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/techs-new-business-model-do-...
My dad was in a different field and when the company he worked for did layoffs the company was in a serious financial state and in danger of just folding entirely and also the employees had a say in how layoffs were implemented. Until I started working in tech I had assumed that was the norm but now I realize that that amount of respect for the employees from leadership was the exception (at least at large companies).
The best and brightest will start looking for greener grass the second the first layoff round hits, no matter what.
Companies that offload the risk of bad management decisions to employees instead of investors are not any employee's friend.
If the company begins to sink, so be it, the whole family goes down together (or flee as they see fit).
It would make a company hesitant to hire — they would have to think very long term making a decision like that. Perhaps companies would train (re-train) their employees if the jobs or company evolve.
Interesting though that, in the U.S. at least, the relationship we have with our employer is perhaps 180 degrees from that of the relationship we have with our family. That seems a little sad.
(Reminded suddenly of Tim's speech at the end of The Office (U.K.) — pass me a hanky. https://youtu.be/5AlZ-ZYbbPU)
Maybe it wouldn't even be a loophole: everyone would just have to actually go freelance and have no employee protections.
I wonder if any country has anything close to layoffs being illegal and how that went.
Works fine for France, it's very hard to do layoffs there, to the point that a common myth is that they're illegal there. 7th largest GDP. Unemployment rate is at 7% (about 2x the USA), but it's also not the existential risk it is in the US - you are given 75% of whatever your pay was for up to 2-3 years.
> Massive incentive to do whatever you can to only use contractors or whatever. Somehow classify your employees as self employed, something like that.
Going back to France, they'll fine the hell out of a company that did that. Misclassifying your employees to abuse the system is enforced there.
As an American, I am extremely jealous of France's employee protections. Even the most leftist states like CA pale in comparison to the protections the French have.
Salaries are low, unemployment was high for a long time (and still is, especially for the youth), companies make massive use of contractors (via big consulting companies) and getting a permanent contract is very difficult (without which getting a mortgage is pretty much impossible).
Once you have your permanent contract, it's fine, but for newcomers to the job market, it's hell.
This isn't relevant when we're talking about individual welfare. France is 23rd for nominal GDP per capita and 26th for PPP.
Which is still good! A lot of the countries near the top are petrostates or tax havens. But not the US.
If it were mandated, but somehow nothing else changed, then it would be unattractive to hire. If other things also changed, not necessarily.
Large corps spanning hundreds of countries are managed primarily by finance arbitragers who use cross border differences in labor costs/interest rates/tax rates/govt regulations/freebies/tariffs etc to keep the lights on. As they get faster and faster at responding and taking advantage of these constant changes world wide, these methods come to dominate decision making, especially during uncertain times.
So dont worry about what they are doing. It will never make sense unless you spend time reading financial statements every day. Just move to whereever they are hiring. And they are always hiring.
You’re either wealthy enough to not realize how infeasible this is for most people over 25, or you’ve got a serious case of tech industry Stockholm syndrome. I’ll continue to vet my employers.
Tons of reasons people can't just up and migrate at the drop of a hat.
You spelled "exploitable" wrong.
If IT goes that way, I would rather move to the countryside and grow my own food, than become an international wage slave who moves wherever our rich overlords want.
As I indicated, at the beginning of your career as a young person without a family or much tying you down, moving to a place where you're more likely to get a job in your field obviously makes complete sense, but that's not who we're talking about here. These are professionals-- many in their mid to late careers-- that got laid off, largely without notice. Being expected to abandon your life, mid-career to flock to the latest career hotspot because we complacently allow large established employers to pick up and discard large numbers of employees at their convenience-- demanding loyalty and offering none in return-- is not the same thing.
> Millions of people leave their spouses, kids and parents to move to another country for work.
Millions of people also have nutritional rickets.
> If you're ambitious/hungry enough, you'll do whatever it takes.
If you think system this rewards ambition anywhere close to as much as it rewards people already within the existing power structures, you're fooling yourself. Tech is no different than many other industries: it treats less privileged classes like donkeys while the privileged sit on top with a carrot on a stick being sure to let them get a bite every now and again when their frustration starts impacting their output. Of course there are individual success stories you can cherry pick to make it seem like reality for the majority, but you could take the worst NBA free-thrower and cherry pick them a perfect record.
I completely agree that moving to the tech city _du jour_ caters to the demographic of mid-20 "anywheres". Having a family, long-term friends or obligations such as elderly care rules you out. Or god forbid: A time-consuming hobby or in general something apart from work that gives meaning to your life.
And that's exactly the point! You only get those high wages when you put in the 60–80 hours a week (or 40 very focused hours a week) that you can spend if you live for your work. To the employer, such dependent, driven employees are very valuable. Much more than some family father who comes in for 20 hours a week and is often tired and just wants to get back home to play with his children.
The cycle repeats itself though. The leas desirable Google becomes, the more talent is freed up into startups, some of which eventually will offer something similar.
As startups run on venture funding, I'm not so sure there will be a wellspring of new positions generated for those hit by the layoffs, this time around.
There is no job security in this market right now. Even if you have a job, you can be replaced quickly.
Might as well just don't think about it, and prepare for the worst if you are anxious about the future.
Based in Europe, I'm not seeing this here.
How is this not just "business"? That's what Google is.
Granted, they make billions of dollars a quarter and it won't hurt them to keep employees around.
But every company I've ever worked for over the last decades has laid people off, made others nervous, etc.
It may sound harsh but they aren't a charity. People will be laid off, others will be nervous they may be next.
If you are looking for a company where everyone just happy hums along with no fear of job loss, those don't exist.
Except maybe in the Government.
Look, if a company is going under, everyone can understand they have to lay off huge number of folks (otherwise, they'll lay off everyone). But laying people off when you're profitable just because you want to be more profitable..?
We need some regulation for it, the problem is what regulation. But I don't think it's controversial to say that this behavior shouldn't be encouraged (despite the fact that it is not illegal, and very few would say that it should be illegal).
There is one large shift happening now in the industry, to AI. Google will need tons of talent to rise to the challenge. There have been other such shifts before (social, mobile). In the past, Google handled these shifts very differently, by retraining and reorganizing engineering staff, which had for the most part been hired for its generalist ability and could therefore jump to other areas. The theory was that there wasn't a need to know the domain too much, since you were going to reinvent it anyways. It worked exceptionally well for a lot of things. People there didn't build data centers using techniques from the field, they didn't build maps like ESRI or Navteq, etc.
Now it seems to handle it differently, through layoffs that give their employees clear signals that the company will look outside for talent first. Employees are no longer valued as adaptable generalist hires but as narrow-function cogs.
That's a strategic mistake, because the AI field is still so nascent and full of hacks that generalists able to handle novel challenges in innovative ways are so sorely needed. It isn't a mature space at all and outside hires - at the scale that will be needed - will almost certainly be of lower quality and productivity.
What would make sense if they wanted to increase profits: routinely cut low performers to keep people motivated to do their best, and completely drop entire business lines that are losses for the company. It doesn't seem like either thing is happening. By their own admission, it's not the lowest performers that get cut ("role eliminations"), and businesses that cause losses are expected to continue operating with less staff. Staff cuts don't fix structurally lossy businesses, they just make them limp longer. It seems like it's setting up these businesses for a long and painful agony.
(VC funded is no different of course, that's just a shortcut to arrive at the optimism-race without ever going through "this is going well")
That's the foundation of a good company until some MBA type comes and takes over. Then it is not about the work you do but the metric you are judged upon.
And the metrics for Google Assistant are not great. And neither are the metrics for a lot of google projects. But the team and fascination behind their technologies are the only roots keeping them from being X'd.
This is why Android and Chrome will continue to be heavy handed. The current CEO came from over there and started/led the team. But things like Google Search will always be judged by the numbers and metrics, not by the ideas of connecting people with info.
(I ranted. But to answer your question, go to place that is a darling of the power broker.)
Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense.
It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.
Appease investors probably
Are we sure this is actually general engineers? The headline only says "working on". It could be people doing very specific work, like prompt validation, QA, etc.
This is simply untrue for the Jan 2023 Alphabet layoffs. Entire orgs (>200 FTE) were let go regardless of individual performance.
Then they can do layoffs there, seemingly without violating any wrongful termination laws.
Somehow the best developers and others who contribute directly to the bottom line tend to be unaffected by such events.
New managers managers manager moves in with a good chunk of people to Help With Bard.
Then 6 months later you and the older handers are asked to move to an exciting new opportunity in Assistant.
of course it's an opportunity, we're investing in it. Bla bla bla.
8 weeks later your roles have been eliminated, you're locked out of everything except the internal jobs listing site for the next 8 weeks. (Note this was happening _before_ tonight's culling)
Sundar's really done a great job with culture
This sounds like they've been in a rush. Maybe there are bonus deadlines coming up.
A friend who's role has been cut says they were locked out of everything except Grow, Meet, and email and has 60 days to find a new role. Can't even get in the building to access the food onsite.
Because they are overstaffed already and the cost reduction is more attractive.
Level 2: "we've been told to cut costs, and staff is the lowest hanging fruit; which products should we kill?"
Level 3: "hey, I need to reduce the number of products, and staff is the lowest hanging fruit; which teams should we reduce?"
Level 4: "since I can't ask if anyone is actually doing anything without raising suspicion, we'll just pick the largest cost sinks, and cull a bit; here's a list"
I doubt anyone really cared which products got reduced. In an org with 100k employees, it's just numbers all the way down to level 5-6 somewhere.
Unity
Twitch
Several startups
And now.. Google!
This is at the same time when stocks are almost all time high :).
Edit: I understand it was satire.
Expecting interest rates to drop later this year is big for the stock market, which runs on expectations, but doesn't matter to people borrowing money and issuing debt before then, since you cannot attract lenders at rates below the US treasury yield.
There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities, and some legacy code support for a while, but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years.
Some people are claiming "things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.
Do you have any idea what the societal costs of such a change would be?
Even if it was due to "AI", hundreds of thousands of AI augmented developers are going to be off launching new startups writing more and more software, hacking stuff, it's not just going to end tomorrow because there is value in software and software solutions.
Everything else "AI powered developers are going to startup all the things!!!" is just hype by some poster literally calling themselves (ironically I hope) ChatGPT.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/08/700_it_jobs_us/
The blood-letting is still ongoing (Pixar and Discord, just talking about today).
I think the overall reason is that a lot of startups and services have been unprofitable for a while, and the zero-interest-rate environment of the past decade was the high tide that covered a lot of people swimming naked, as Buffett once put it. There might be other reasons for example SAAS platforms being consolidated into fewer and fewer big players. Long term AI will play its part - perhaps creating lots of junk code, but CEOs don't really care about long term quality these days, just short term earnings calls.
Of course there are going to be niches and things like payroll or flight booking programs that will need maintenance work from now until the end of time, and some programmers will be around in 10 years, just not as many.
Again, I would love to be proven wrong.
So that's 99% of the code base right there. X has proven 80% aren't doing much of importance.
Of the remaining 1%, 3/4ths are probably rewriting to some flavor of the week and 1/4th are developing some real feature.
I was considering agreeing that "the old Silicon Valley" was probably no more.
> There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities
Yea....
> and some legacy code support for a while,
Well sure, we still famously have Cobol...
> but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years.
Hmm. Uh.
> "things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.
Nah, I think it'll pick up real soon. We saw inflation quickly come under control, high employment rates, wage growth, etc. It's generally a healthy economy. These giants shedding fat is probably good for juicing the rest of the industry and spreading talent around. Suck for the individuals of course, that can be very challenging to experience. But lots of people have been pretty unhappy with the products big tech has been giving, so hopefully this can put some smart entrepreneurs into the waters.
I just find it so weird.
I'm also not sure that many salespeople see their role as "sell whatever the company makes". There's a common trope of engineers scrambling to build what the sales team have sold, but even aside from that, I think many salespeople see their job as building and growing accounts in their clients, and finding the products or features available to grow into. Perhaps just a perspective difference, but that can be all that matters.
Fitbit and AR too.
- bizarre, fitness-feature-removal "updates" to the iOS Fitbit app
- piss-poor UI refresh
- very buggy "move Fitbit to your Google account" post-acqui-process
i suppose i was an idiot as a paying (G Suite) Google user + paying Fitbit user to expect anything other than Google:
1. acquiring fitbit
2. integrate Fitbit user tracking data into waves hands Borg
3. do All The Things that Google does with human tracking data etc
4. kill the app
I'm sure some orgs stealthily start planning this months if not years ahead of such events, especially if they identify that they have unproductive people on board that are difficult to fire the regular way (like European employees, where regulations makes it harder to fire people than in the US).
_Some_ countries in Europe have very strong worker protection laws, probably correlated to trade union participation rate:
https://qery.no/trade-unions-worldwide/
Another factor that may also apply to the US, is that if the people you want to get rid of disproportionally belong to some demographic groups or other identity groups, have medical conditions or have participated in disruptive activism, etc, claiming that they are fired for bad performance (even if true) makes the risk of bad press significantly worse.
Exactly what traits risk come with such risks may very from place to place.
But if you offer packages to people who are underqualified or underperforming for the terms they currently enjoy, it may require a very high sum to make them sign it.
And in markets where every job basically come with the same terms as academic tenure, people will be less worried that the company will play hardball and just fire them without compensation if the package is refused.
However, most if not all European countries allow layoffs, even though the terms of the layoffs may have to be approved by the union in a few places, or at least have the selection criteria for who gets laid off made public.
And if some department can be stuffed full of all underperformers, it can serve as a convenient proxy for performance to lay off mostly from that department, based on lack of profitability there.
I'm sure this happens in the US, too, at least if it turns out that a higher fraction of those on the way out belong to some protected identity group, which may easily be the case in tech companies where essential developers are disproportionality male and/or asian/white, while various support staff, account managers etc are recruited from a more diverse pool.
there were a very small number of exceptions and the process was made deliberately hard/impossible.
Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6. It's arguably one of the most important parts of the software stack. But, it's late stage mature code. Netflix had 4-6 people working on TCP flow control. Google had a small team, based in Japan, doing IPv6 for android. If a team has 100+ members and they can go, it poses "wow, at scale, how many people do you need to do things" questions when things as mission-critical as the entire IP stack can be done by less than 10 people.
Maybe I'm in an odd corner, but I find this thing fascinating. When they laid off the adsense sales and support staff because AI can do it cheaper, I found that fascinating too.
(I don't work for Apple, Google or Netflix, and my numbers are approximate based on bar conversations with some of the people in each team in each company. Consider them Fermi numbers)
The TCP/IP stack is extremely well defined and covers a finite problem space.
Products higher up the software stack tend to balloon in complexity as they reach into concrete use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of overweight teams, but most products can’t survive with 4-6 people.
Err, yes - that’s what 98% of modern TCP/IP development work is. There aren’t frequent new RFCs for TCP - it is established, standardized, and stable.
Non-technical stuff is crazy complex compared to purely technical stuff, which tends to be a lot better defined.
Do you know who they are and how to reach them? I have filed 3 or 4 bugs with proper reproducers through Apple's feedback assistant over the years and till this day those issues haven't even received a single comment nor any acknowledgement that the report has been read.
edit: added the stuff within brackets
I'm interested to see how this works out in the mid-longer term to see where it tracks on the graph with "Cheaper" on one axis and "Better" on the other (where '0' is in the centre of the "Better" axis, not at the bottom/left).
Capex tasks can be considered to be either "Cheaper" (as they're investments, not expenses) or "Better", since they create long term value on top of the short term, depending on how you want to define your axes.
When doing this budgeting, moving items from opex to capex in this way is mostly based on belief structures, as it's too early to tell if the capex generates lasting value or not. Short term, though, it tends to be good for the stock price regardless.
And so the pendulum swings.
There was even a window of time where people in finance saw how the grass was greener in tech.
It just happened to be that the finance industry is mature, whereas tech was nascent, with a skills shortage during a period of exponential growth. The pool of graduates studying CS has grown an order of magnitude, while demand for jobs has contracted.
What we are seeing is the tech industry maturing. The golden era of tech is over. Tech will just be another middle class job. Tech will only be slightly better than other middle class white collar jobs, but it will no longer be the be the guaranteed path to being a millionaire after 5-10 years of working.
For the vast majority, this has not been a thing in the first place.
I'd be absolutely fascinated to see the analysis of how they decided that eliminating the (almost) sacrosanct rule of "oh don't worry about your project, if it gets canned you can just chill out for a bit and find another team" was worthwhile.
how valuable did they think instilling fear in the company was?
Please, please, take 1 minute and imagine a world where a company is punished by (someone?) for laying people off. Please think of the consequences of that. lol.
Leads across Google are sending coordinated emails within their orgs announcing layoffs. They've all gone out in the last 2 hours or so.
They've fragmented the layoffs on purpose to make them seem more localized, but it's affecting the whole company.
Orgs that I've heard/I'm part of that have been impacted so far include Ads, Search, Assistant, Maps Android & Core.
I'm sure there are more, but I can't confirm.
I can't find WARN notices yet, so I assume they haven't been filed yet in any state.