Layoffs are always counter-productive as going forward employees take fewer risks, to evade being the one laid off. Layoffs kill innovation.
What killed it for me was when new management came in, refused to talk to anyone internal, brought in outside hires to be the innovators and change agents, and then shut down any of the legacy employees who tried to speak or bring ideas to the table. A lot of really talented people have left, and maybe that was the goal, as it avoids having to pay severance.
For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list.
CEO? He also has to follow orders.
Who's to blame then? I wonder.
The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.
I'm not even sure Dell has been that good at capital management as of late. His last good shot, and an amazing one, was to buy out his own company at a much undervalued price, with plenty of financing support from investment banks. 10 years ago already.
That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway.
I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.
Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.
The world’s most valuable company comes to mind.
Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation.
The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.
If you’re just laying off engineers to meet some profitability measure for Wall Street then you’re not going to fix innovation. You need to replace all of management who are the ones who are in charge of what the engineers are doing.
Google is completely lost and doesn’t know what it does. Management launches new products just to look good and shuts them down a year later, and still the only thing making money is search and ads. That’s not going to be fixed by laying off engineers.
In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.
Says another rando who doesn't have a stake.
It was starting to be sustainable: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
I don't know exactly what they did in 2020 to mess up their numbers, but 2017 - 2021 shows a company that was stabilizing at ok profit margins.
Changes? Yes. Often superficial changes. Change "Twitter" to "X", change blue checkmarks to yellow or gray or whatever, and sell blue to the lowest bidders. As for improvements? No, I haven't seen Twitter improve much if at all since the acquisition. In fact, the removal of third-party clients for example was a gross vandalization of the service.
> Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation.
This quip misses the biggest part of the story, which is that Apple didn't cut its way to success but rather acquired NeXT for over $400 million, a massive investment at the time, and Steve was merely replacing the old guard with his people.
Like going to the masseur during working hours?