Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it.

People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business are simply unaware or willfully ignorant of its costs. Typically it is the latter, or as Upton Sinclair beautifully put it — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

But really the role that the marketing industry (at least for typical products and services) actually plays is to selectively give information to consumers to influence their buying decisions against how they would behave in an efficient market. And then it's a very short and slippery slope to just straight up lying about products and manipulating consumers through their insecurities, which we see happening all the time with how the marketing industry has developed for the last few decades especially with online advertisements.

(I'm separating the ethical matters in advertising from those in selling here, even if spreading awareness through advertising was made less unethical by removing the stalking and other irritations, that still leaves a lot of room for unethical sales techniques)

Advertising is psychological manipulation at scale and it's effective. How does one ethically manipulate someone into doing something they wouldn't do if not influenced to do so? Ethical advertising can't exist, the same way two masses can't occupy the same point in space at the same time.

I’m in no hurry to defend advertisers but it’s easy to think of non abusive, morally neutral advertising.

Local grocer has a sign hanging in the little league outfield, etc.

I don’t mind those ads. But just keep them small, light, non interesting, and don’t sell my data.. be the platform that protects my data when matching up advertisers.

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

Absolute control is the only way.

Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA.

By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.

Not now of course, but I think that they lost their way mostly after the first decade.

For the first decade they launched a bunch of services that were so much better than anything else it seemed like sci-fi, and they did so without obtrusive advertising or shady tracking.

Even Chrome was cool, to outcompete Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS seemed impossible back then but chrome was just so much better than anything else that they managed to do it.

I think the extreme money-fountain from ads started the corruption, and the threat of Facebook created a paranoia inside Google that removed all the floodgates.

Yeah yeah, why did I keep buying them? I have no idea. I guess I assumed the rest of Android phones sucked more.

(I've had various android phones going back to the T-Mobile G1).

Pixel 6s were on sale and I got one of those, no regrets. I am not enthusiastic about Google as a company, and I may consider an iPhone for my next cell, but I've been satisfied with the Pixel line so far.

They sell a lot of them, very very far from zero...

I'm a happy Pixel owner.

The market share speaks for itself.

For what it's worth, India with over a billion people is a large market for Android.

Anyway, the iOS market share seems to be increasing rapidly in India. See https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/devices/ip...).

That's a kiss of death. I remember while working at Windows Phone team at Microsoft, a lot of program managers and designers were using iPhones and Macs. Unsurprisingly their own product never got off the ground because they failed to develop a vision for it. Android at Google is in a slightly better position, but this kind of attitude of not using your own product but preferring a competitor's one leads to inevitable decline.

Google has a ton of employees in Bangalore that passed the same interviews and are paid way more than typical offshore devs, this just isn't true. Google gets the best people in India who wants to stay there, those are good enough to develop software without much help.

Then anyone who wanted material benefit off of their wealth would be required to pay taxes on it, rather than "benefit now, leave the gains to my estate".

When the loan is repaid and AMZN is uncollaterized, treat it as a new buy event with a new cost basis.

At that point, it doesn't matter that they borrowed against their positions because spending the money they borrowed still taxes their stocks indirectly.

This is how other businesses have always had to treat the work product of their IP generated from R&D...

Software businesses were exploiting a loophole, which was fine when they were limiting themselves to their own turf. When they started encroaching into and destroying other industries, it no longer made sense to keep this loophole in place. So basically, the software industry has only itself to blame for this.

I guess that the government isn’t considering the expense of the employee as much as they are considering the value that the company has retained. Say the developer creates some software that you turn around and license to your customers. That software now has a value, and it will have a value next year too. It probably won’t have a value forever, which is why you can expense a certain percentage of it every year for x number of years.

The money you spent on the employee is probably a direct expense that year, but the product they created still has a value. The simplest way of valuing the product, from the governments perspective, is just to consider it equal to the development cost.

6 years ago, with cheap money and everyone eager to start new firms makes success more of a lottery than a systematized effort. I'd rather be a startup founder raised on lean capital with less of a crowded marketplace.

Whether or not it is extra work or if it is worth the extra work is dependent on the individual.

So in my case, it was having a network and connecting across it regularly.

This is the USA: poor people continue to suffer and governments at the state and federal level are increasing their suffering, especially kids. That is also getting reported.

It’s like the crime stats: people believe crime is raging “elsewhere though not here” even though trends are down mostly across the board.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf

Where are people still saying it's only non-technical roles?

Most of the people around me are very adapted to this very specific hyper-structured environment that we are in. This is not a criticism - they are thriving in this environment and everyone is happy.

But no way would I want to take these people with me on a new venture. (the inverse is also true; I would not take a shoot-from-the-hip go-getter and put them into a mature product environment that with intense legal scrutiny)

I am fortunate enough to have been educated in Europe and without any student debt. I can switch careers, without needing to keep income at a level to pay living expenses and loans.

They are literally the cause why fresh CS grad with 1 year of experience says no to a 140k salary in NYC/Boston. (at least before the first wave of layoffs)

There are dumb stories on the first page even with 3 and 4 votes. HN ranking is seriously broken.

I don't buy the "it's users flagging, bro" excuses anymore...

My first paid job as a programmer was like that. We made an exam software for university, a complete package covering the process from authoring test questions to making reports.

We made it in 6 months and it was done. Finished. Working. There was some maintenance/improvement, but that was a separate deal. We did not expect university to employ us for life to maintain it.

Shouldn't that be a norm?

Like, yeah, obviously Google has a lot of projects, so they can allocate programmers to do something different after something is done. But they didn't promise employment for life, did they?

Obviously, people like being securely employed. But, perhaps, that should be addressed at societal level - e.g. unemployment benefits.

yup.

> Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring

Ok, let's define "over-hiring".

Google...

had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023.

and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023.

They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hiring??? Each person added as much revenue as the ones before them.

Over-hiring would have been if post-Covid business would have dropped, which, guess what, did NOT happen for FAANG. It was, in the worst case scenario, stable (even then, slightly growing).

Is this the consensus then that is really rough out there right now? I know that big tech has been hit hard the last year but is the outlook equally bad for startups, enterprise etc. as well?

For example, Google:

https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/

Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have used a cycle of expansion and contraction to crush the working people’s power in the interest of controlling inflation (which is really largely the direct result of excess government money printing as a result of imbalanced spending), all the while consolidating more-and-more wealth in smaller and smaller circles of people. It’s an absolutely psychotic way to run a business cycle, and it kills a great many people directly:

https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-austerity-ki...

The latest deleveraging of worker cries and demands for better conditions and pay comes as workers are asking for more work-at-home and flexibility, a more balanced work/life balance, and focus on similar health and wellness goals, as well as demands for salary raises to keep up with the ongoing inflation.

For three decades worker pay has been dropping. The gap between the growth of productivity and that of a typical worker’s pay has grown quite extreme, and continues to grow through the application of austerity principle:

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

While it looks like “inflation and interest rates are causing the problems,” it remains easily predictable economic theory that we would find ourselves here. People may not realize it, but since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.

This of course causes “inflation,” which is in no small part what the news likes to call “excess corporate profits.” Basically inflation benefits those that hold real assets and are closest to the money printers, while crushing those who don’t and are the furthest (often the most marginalized).

And again, austerity is applauded:

https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/marc-benioff-salesforce-earni...

Consider that the market rewards these companies handsomely for their layoffs:

- Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.

- Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.

- Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.

- Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.

https://www.business.com/finance/big-tech-earnings-and-layof...

So it’s unfortunately financially rewarding to lay people off, and it’s a measurable economic impact you can show the board and your investors…

Meanwhile there are some CEOs who have figured out how to keep everyone employed, and it points to the fact that this model isn’t the only possible way for businesses to operate:

https://www.benefitnews.com/news/a-tech-ceo-avoided-mass-lay...

There will come a day when the current management ethos becomes unfashionable and mass layoffs become a sign of failure and poor executive management, but unfortunately the market rewards it right now, and ultimately products and employee quality of life are secondary concerns to our rather sociopathic business cycle.

Forgive my diatribe. I have developed quite a passion for this issue over the years, as my training taught me all about layoffs and how to do them, but after running companies for a long while, I’ve become quite unhappy with “business as usual.” This system sucks, and it’s causing massive breakdowns in trust between employees and employers that ultimately cause irreversible harm to actual global competitiveness. The system people live and work in has to be in those people’s best interests to proliferate and ultimately needs to align profit with the best interests of society.

In my mind, the long term concequences of the current system’s breakdown of trust is devastating to everyone involved and counterproductive to lasting global competitiveness (which requires cooperation, teamwork and a growth mindset these adversarial conditions cannot foster), and yet we happily pedal along as if everything is fine.

It’s not.

I guess we'll see if this turns out to be true. If it does, they'll realize their mistakes, and the competitors that didn't let people go should outperform them. If it doesn't, then it'll show that many tech companies simply overhired, which I think we all know they did over the past few years.

I myself work at a telco where business has stagnated over the past decade, due to market saturation and new, cheaper competition. We've had layoffs each year since I started since that's the only way to keep increasing profits. One day it'll probably hit me, but oh well. I know our company has fat to trim and if I'm actually not making any real impact, then I'm fine with looking for a job where I do. Efficient companies are important for a healthy economy.

This is an overly narrow definition, so I label it is largely incorrect.

Think of it this way: society involves dynamically-shifting power balances. To the extent the goals of a society include:

(a) standardizing certain rights and norms

(b) providing checks and balances so the powerful have less temptation and ability to exploit the less

We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.

> So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers.

This statement is silly and ignores the realities I've seen. Sure, a union left to its own devices might be tempted to push too far. But given the dynamic one tends to see in western economies, there is always some kind of negotiation with the associated corporation. Such negotiation is quite similar to parties in the legal system hashing it out. Both may start off far apart but the negotiation tends to lead towards compromise. In the United States, unions that push to far face public backlash and even Presidential action.

I'm not making any dogmatic claims here. I'm simple rejecting overly simplistic arguments against unions. I will readily accept that unions are not silver bullets and there are documented cases of corruption and misaligned incentives. But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world. I laugh at people who aren't even trained economists who interpret their models as some kind of reality -- or worse, some kind of normative specification.

Very few dogmatic claims pro- or anti- union survive contact with reality.

If you have a lot of money, you have their ear..

Second, there isnt a single budget for hiring that interviews everyone and ships them out everywhere. certain groups/products can be growing within google while others are shrinking. should the chrome team not be allowed to grow because google+ was in the trash can?

third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuffle everyone around the company. You cant just take someone from the google maps team and have them start working on nexus phones.

all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.

Google wouldn't exist as you know it if they didn't didn't build great data center and network hardware.

Their problems in consumer hardware are not about the hardware specifically. It is about product management and go-to-market.

You might say these don't scale as well as standardized testing of university classical algorithms knowledge. The general response to that would be that if you're optimizing for scale, then you're not optimizing for quality, so stop the hype around Google only hiring "the best."

It's telling that as Google has begun to regularly lay off engineers, they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process.

Another part is that tech interviews are often sort of useless. One of the most expensive mistakes you can make as a manager is to hire the wrong person. Even in Denmark where it’s relatively easy to let a new hire go within the first three months, you’ve still invested an enormous amount of resources into the process as well as the impact a wrong hire will have on team moral. So what we look for first and foremost is cultural and personal fit within the team you’re supposed to be working in. We’re far more likely to do some personality test on you than a technical interview, not because we believe those are a science or accurate in anyway but because they are great talking points to get to know you in a high stress situation. We do this because technical skills can also be taught, and regardless of your background, we’re going to have to “adjust” you into the way we work.

We may ask you some technical questions, but they’ll typically be on a more theoretical level than practical because we want to know how you think about tech. Again to see if your “ideological” fit is good rather than to test your technical prowess.

In my anecdotal experience this is a far better process than technical interviews. But it is made possibly by education, precious work experience and the fact that if you really turn out to be terrible then it’s “free” to let you go. It also requires direct managers and often team members to handle the process with HR on the sideline, rather than HR handling the entire hiring process… but I can’t imagine working for someone I’ve never met.

Leetcode interviewing is lazy interviewing. It's for when you don't want to put an effort in your interviewing process to check if the candidates have the skills you need for the position you are filling.

For example. My interview process nowadays is one web API interaction challenge: Https://challenge.bax-dev.com (in Spanish, so you may have to do a Google translate. Use with curl)

In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email. They arrive to my email and I check the code quality of submissions with my morning coffee.

Then in the ONLY 90 minutes Interview with me, we talk 30 mins about experience in their resume, 30 mins about our company and the position, and we code the "server" side to the web client they created .

We do it pair programming style. The questions I achieve to answer are: would I pair program with thus guy? (Like, is she cool to work with?) And does she know what she is doing?

I've had very good results with this method.

And, from the code exercises I am sure anyone can guess what skills am I looking for.

There was a great circlejerk on reddit in one of the outages where people asked whither Google engineers have inverted enough binary trees to bring their systems online. Basically saying that the skills they hire for are for Algirithm competitions, not for building enterprise software.

And I say this as a CompSci PhD who did his good share of data structure and algorithms during my time in academia.

There's a sibling comment by @xtracto that's marked "[dead]", but IMO shouldn't be.

Is there any normal means of appealing that status without bothering the admins?

Why can't we repeat that in interview? I don't care if some dev can code some method names or detailed algorithms from his head, when it takes 3 seconds to find exact solution. In other words, there is little real added value from such a skill. You get much better peek into somebody's head with above - but it requires significantly more effort on interviewee's side, heck maybe even some preparation.

You can to certain extent hack leetcode process by just doing leetcode. Its much harder to be verbally fluent about designs, concepts and libraries that you never used. And for the rest, there is a trial period, you can't skip that 3 months experience and cram it into interviews.

Hiring at scale with some bar of quality needs industrial processes. That's a real constraint of the system.

Any alpha gets ruthlessly optimized away. Referrals? Now sold for split. GitHub Open Source? Now produced for cash or undifferentiated slop.

People who don't run large orgs don't get this. But also many people who run small orgs don't get this: you don't need to run large org machinery for small orgs. Part of the advantage is agility. Part of the advantage is that everyone is still on the same page and that it's obvious when they're not.

So big orgs have no choice. Small orgs have no need.

Encourage a competitive market environment where there aren't just a handful of polarized "make it" companies that everyone is applying to regardless of fit or career objective because landing a job there is a golden ticket?

OP said "just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer", for which leetcode is useless.

Communication skills, organizational skills, hell, even general knowledge isn't covered by leetcode-like interviews.

Personally, speaking as someone who doesn't like but has to interview potential hires, I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.

> If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested

I think this is a naive perspective. If there is any takeaway from the recent wave of layoffs, it would be that company wide decisions may be driven by factors that have no relation with actual financial performance. Google could have kept all these engineers and still make an absurd profit.

The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.

Not picking on you, this is a very common refrain. The apparent advantages of scalable processes seem to trump the demonstrable disadvantages, especially in hiring. The end result is a system most people acknowledge flat-out sucks, it just flat-out sucks in bulk. We say "hiring the right people is the most important thing we do, so let's mechanize it and spend as little time-per-unit as possible". I find it more sad than funny.

Architecture suggestions for a relatively simple problem, discuss the suggestions.

Also it's funny that engineers leaving Google, Amazon, et all NEED to practice these skills in order to get other roles because it just shows that these skills aren't needed (read: exercised, grown) working in their day-to-day jobs.

As a senior developer currently looking for work, I have mixed feelings about leetcode-like questions. Here's my take:

Pro: They rule out most/all applicants who lack basic programming competence.

Con: Any timed or live programming test can make some applicants fail because of performance anxiety.

Pro/con: Some of the problems require (a) very high intelligence or (b) familiarity with how people have solved that specific problem in the past.

I think (b) is a major source of complaints, because for most people the only solution is Leetcode grinding, which outside of the interview process isn't a good use of one's professional development time.

Con: At least for timed problems on Hackerrank, you have a dilemma: A simple, straightforward solution takes little time to code, and is easy to explain. But it might also take too long to run on some of the test cases, which then requires you to guess at the source of slowness, and try to fix it.

But in multi-problem Hackerrank tests, you don't necessarily know if you have enough time to do that, because the other problems in the set might or might not require lots of time as well. And you can't revisit an earlier problem once you've submitted a solution.

But I’ll give Google a bit more credit than you and guess that they ask questions that are at least above the “easy” level.

Just take a look at the list https://leetcode.com/problem-list/top-google-questions/

The Google-style process (that so many people copied) acts as if the ability to do that kind of thinking under time pressure and in front of a generally-elitist interviewer is some kind of marker of the ability to work on the job. It isn't.

Plus I worked at Google for a decade and the amount of times I had to do actual algorithm/data structure fundamental stuff was about 0. 90% of Googlers are wiring existing crap together, and if they stray outside of that they'll get spanked in a code review anyways.

These problems (known as fermi problems) have been out of vogue for over a decade now. Google is one of the companies that pioneered algorithm-centric leetcode problems as a replacement for fermi problems.

Leetcode problems are not hugely useful outside of the data given by solving a fizzbuzz. Rather, it’s just another excuse so interviewers can convince themself a person is smart, call it signal, and justify a hire.

The last time Google gave me a job offer, one of my interviews was literally a souped up fizzbuzz - straightforward imperative code with no trick, no complicated algorithms, and no fancy data structures. I suppose that may be the reason I got an offer, that I didn’t need fancy algorithms that I hadn’t prepared.

Ultimately it’s impossible to know if someone will be a good hire from an interview. Being a good engineer requires a bunch of traits that simply can’t be tested. The leetcode interview, as I see it, acknowledges this weakness and instead chooses to filter out low-effort candidates, as anyone persistent can practice leetcoding and interviewing (in theory).

So it's definitely still happening.

No I didn't get the job because they were too hard for me to even get a brute force solution.

There was a rather aggressive interviewer who drilled me on an architectural web services question despite interviewing for a systems programming position on Fuchsia and having a resume solely in embedded/systems programming. From my limited experience I'd say the interview process is broken, but not in the way people on here think.

https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=531

Which? I regularly use Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Home, Voice, and Takeout. I don’t think any of those are bloated or slow, but maybe I’m missing something.

I’m also curious which you think are top class.

OTOH, they're pretty smart.

True to some extent, but IT salaries are high in my opinion because until recently there was a very limited tech talent pool but huge demand for IT talent. I mean IT was only really seen as a good career around 15-20 years ago.

We just got lucky. We had the right skills at the right time. We rode the wave of big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook growing into the most profitable companies in the world. With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some and with plenty of freshly well educated IT talent entering the market there's really no reason to not expect this high salaries to continue. In my opinion they'll most likely fall to what your more typical middle class job pays.

Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.

Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?

This place can wear a man down fast.

Google: (...) would you like to know more?

cromka: YES

Google: <silence>

This happens notoriously and effectively it feels as if the devices had became more "dumb" in general, not loosing particular skills.

Workers have the power. They just need to remember it.

Until the huge bubble around tech companies explodes.

This has happened to me twice in my career and both times its like you're talking to a whole different person.

In my cynical opinion, being that different person is the number 1 trait companies look for when selecting managers

You likely won't see redundancy coming. Chances are you'll be dismissed out of the blue one random day.

Social resilience and social welfare have been vilified enough that I see just enough blanket downvotes in some social fora, as if its an icky subject or an allergy. Those who are at the top benefit from it, as long as as they have enough lackeys to do their bidding.

The big cultural change happened in the early 80s as MBA culture became the norm, with a shift towards zero sum neoliberal extremism and the uncoupling of pay from productivity.

While this is a respectable way to see employer / employee relationships, it does not apply to every company / employee out there.

In particular, I think this is very true for BigCo, where most people are seen as fungible cogs.

The smaller the company, the better.

It doesn't work both ways. They only get the benefits. You do not.

And it applies to everyone up to the CEO.

At my company a new CEO came in to much fanfare. A year later they were unceremoniously turfed out because the board decided they weren’t up to the “new direction” the company needed to go.

And not to mention the people under the CEO who road her coattails. They were all turfed in quick succession (or smartly saw the writing on the wall and bailed first).

It’s a business relationship. That’s all. Treat it as such. Get as much money as you can. Don’t kill yourself in the hope your sacrifice will be repaid, it probably won’t.

Basically take the emotion out of it. When management talks of “our big family” they are just saying that because people like to hear it. It’s not true.

And once you’ve gotten enough years under your belt you start to see through the talk pretty easily. Trust your gut. If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last. Or at least plan according and don’t assume your job will be there next year or even next month.