Google lays off Bay Area workers, closes Mtn View child care center

You mean the self-propelled code production units that cost more than the other self-propelled code production units? Why would we want to retain those?

Lots of perks aren't widely used, but mostly by choice; a perk I could potentially use is still a perk, and it feels good to have that option.

Pushing toward remote work or asking someone to work on a different campus also makes the on-prem daycare a bit weird.

But yeah, a company day care that has enough spots to serve most interested parents would be a pretty nice perk. But, I think for most parents, a daycare near home is much better, especially those not working from office every day.

Caveat: only if you absolutely need to go to work in the first place, or you couldn't remote for critical reasons (granted, someone being unremediably miserable at home would be one)

Otherwise dealing with kids is one of the primary factor in choosing remote work, and it's life changing.

A local, close to your home daycare means you have options on who brings the kids and who takes them. It's a few minutes away, so yes you get more time with your kids, it fits into a standard work break, you're there quick enough when puke hits the fan, you get access to your local doctors and hospitals who have your kids' records, etc. All of these "perks" persist if you change job, your kids go to school, etc.

* You don't just take your kids in to work with you. The Google daycares were not any closer to whatever office you happen to work in than some third-party daycare. [edit: they weren't particularly close a long time ago when Google was concentrated in North Bayshore, and then became even less so as Google's offices were spread out more and people bounced around more often, and then became even less so with wfh...]

* You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time (because sibling priority), then later a lottery system where you pay money to play but never win.

* From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in. The typical tenure for a teacher was like a month, which is shockingly bad. Like how do you screw up pay/work environment so badly that's possible? And their understanding of children's needs wasn't great either. For example, they organized the kids into rooms by age (which is common but not universal) and...had no transition period at all or hint to the kids that these transitions were coming. They were just in one room one day with one set of teachers, then unexpectedly in another room with another set of teachers the next, which was super confusing and alarming to them.

* It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive. [edit to add: when I first heard about it, this was explained to me as a consequence of it having very high-quality staff who are paid well, but this doesn't match up with the bullet above. Maybe what I heard from the daycare provider was wrong. Maybe quality has gone downhill. Maybe it was never good. I think there are a variety of factors that would have allowed it to continue existing until now without ever having been good. An absolutely tiny proportion of interested people actually were able to try it. Those who did probably felt very lucky to get in and disinclined to complain/give up their exclusive spot, and folks on the waitlist disinclined to listen to their complaints... additionally, many of the parents who went there had never had kids in another daycare to compare against...]

I’m not convinced that any modern tech company is actually interested in keeping people around for too long.

I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong, but my own experience has me a bit cynical.

Childcare is good for folks in their mid-to-late twenties, and early thirties. Not even that “senior.” People older than that, often don’t need childcare as much.

So it seems as if they want to have a workforce of extremely young, unmarried people, or maybe a few older, “empty nesters.”

Some would prefer early 20-something’s with no life outside work.

Other roles in the company also bring in value, and can be considered a "core asset"

They were caught in the innovation dilemma [2] where improving the search engine will diminish their revenue. I now see several row of ads after a search. More than a year ago, and a year before that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25477535

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

lmao

Step outside the echo chamber and realize macro-economic trends have replaced the need to innovate with a basic instinct to just survive the coming storm caused by a decade of free money.

I'm an outsider, but Sundar is a man who knows how to make the money machine print money. I'm sure he would claim that he is all for innovation and research, but if you're at google but not a part of the immediate money machinery, I doubt if he thinks about you at all.

The basic mindset is summed up by a bunch of Eli Goldratt books, which, y'know, don't make them into a new Bible for business or anything, but they raise better questions than the ones you started with. You, oh corporate leader, look out upon the business and reason, "Well, I'm supposed to increase profits. Profits are revenues minus costs. As for revenues, money is coming in through these pipelines, and that's governed by these deals and those contracts and that's fine, there's not much I can do about that. I've got my sales staff, they are paid on commission, that's humming along just fine. So the main thing to increase my profits must be to cut my costs. So let us engage in broad-spectrum cost-cutting to reduce headcount, reduce benefits where we think we can, tighten belts, and then we'll be running a lean, mean, production machine."

This happens especially but not exclusively when companies are either experiencing or worried about hard times and money is getting tight.

The problem is, the broad spectrum. The easiest way for me to communicate this is pure numbers. You want to think that your company has an 80/20 rule, so 20% of your employees ultimately drive 80% of your performance. You shrink headcount by 10% and you try really hard to use some objective measurements to target that on the 80% of less-performant employees, but you don't succeed fully. Maybe that 20% becomes 19.5% while the 80% becomes 70.5%, to get your 19.5% + 70.5% = 90% and you have cut 10% of headcount. Great, you did so much better than chance! And in theory your performance is only 96% of what it was, so you take that 6% and pocket it as extra profit, right? Except, wrong. The people who were fired were doing something and even if you can work out ways to cancel half of it, you still have 90% of the people doing 95% of what the company did, and this 5% inefficiency is spread across the whole company with no regard for high or low performers.

So you actually basically break even, maybe make 1% more profit but it's hard to tell. And the next cycle you have the exact same calculation. It again seems like you'll make 6% more profit by removing the 10% lowest performers, so you do it again, and you don't make the extra profit again.

This note is implicit in any exchange with a party vastly more powerful than you.

Did you enjoy working there?

From what I hear, it sounds like in US you are immediately considered an enemy spy or saboteur and need to be escorted by security. I can't imagine how chaotic it must be to take over work from someone who was fired like that.

I think usual way is to send you email at night: you don't go to the office tomorrow.