Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

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90 pointspg_1234117 comments

Sundar should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns.

But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too. Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

The laying off Sundar should be what investors want the most.

> The laying off Sundar should be what investors want the most.

Alphabet union [1] should put forth such a public letter, in keeping with tradition of Google stakeholders publicly demanding unnecessary expenses to be reined in [2].

[1] https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/

[2] https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...

Ruth Porat IMHO is a worse offender. After the layoffs last year she was like "I was head of Morgan Stanley during the Global Financial Crisis" and Memegen was all "That is not the flex you think it is." Go from ruining the American economy to ruining Google...

Most of the dysfunction within Google comes from management trying to manipulate a finance department that is not-very-bright to loosen their purse strings for their pet projects. There's a lot of "That Slides presentation seems pretty promising, here's another $250M for you" and not a whole lot of understanding of how to build an enduring product.

Idk man Bard has been better than ChatGPT imho.

It has reduced my time spent on Google Search or watching long youtube videos (which is where most of their Ad revenue comes from). Not sure if thats already showing up in quarterly results but it's a hard job keeping those numbers up while this big transition is happening. Doesn't matter who the CEO is.

Not working for me.

And, I'd like to add, "Hey Google" has also effectively stopped working, despite me having a Pixel phone (I used to use it to dial hands-free. That's no longer possible). And it's literally every feature, even the "hey, Google" recognition has become a crapshoot.

I have seen a similar degradation with my AirPods Pro. However I was thinking that to be an artifact of them aging and the mics to just be degraded…

Weird as I have been noticing all my HomePods (older and newer models) are also less responsive to “Hey Siri”. Used to be I could walk through a room and turn lights on as I went. Now they do nothing. I have to talk directly to them.

I have gotten the feeling they tweaked it to ignore voice if audio fidelity does not hit thresholds that suggest the speaker is being talked to directly. Perhaps it limits false positives, reduces poor translation.

To make users speak directly at it with clear diction would make for “smaller model” to translate which seems en vogue with AI now.

I say old a new because it makes me doubt mic degradation (a couple in the house were brand new Xmas gifts).

I'm not sure my Homepods are less responsive but Siri for sure is. Tons of "hold on" and "there's been a problem" for kitchen timers that I set. I don't know what it needs to do to be able to tell me the time on a timer, but at the end of their life (or before) that'll be it for Homepods.

Unless you look at things with the money lense.

Seems to me Search must be yielding like crazy. Android is too. User trust is high. Youtube is booming even though tiktok.

I think the man is doing great. At least he is printing real money.

Momentum is hard to slow down though. All the new products absolutely have sucked.

At this point though, I don't think layoffs are going to do anything. His approach has fundamentally, and pretty permanently changed Google. It is very easy to ruin the culture of a company top-down, it is nearly impossible to fix it once its been broken.

Google isn't going anywhere anytime soon, it will create strong returns for years to come, but it will no longer be a front-runner in innovation and technology. Although, Google's momentum is no where near as what IBM, Oracle, etc were since they don't have any large-company dependency on them that can't be disrupted.

>Seems to me Search must be yielding like crazy. Android is too. User trust is high. Youtube is booming even though tiktok.

None of which have been built or even improved during his tenure. He's just cashing in on the momentum of the money printers built by those before him. The products shipped under him had flopped.

> The products shipped under him had flopped

He was the PM for Google Chrome and Google Drive, and took over the Android org in 2013.

He has essentially proven himself with 2 major product releases and managing an additional major product line, but Google is a different company in 2024 compared to 2014, let alone 2004.

When you're a large public company who's stock is owned by major pension funds, 401k funds, sovereign wealth funds, PE funds, etc Investor Relations becomes the critical function of a CEO.

Just because a glacier is huge doesn't mean you would say it isn't melting.

Wait a minute!

Hire thousands of half genius from the best Universities in the World.Torture them with algorithmic party tricks, give them infinite budget and time for years... And....When they are unable to create competitive products outside of the usual cash cow, blame the CEO?

CEO did not know this was happening? The company is (sadly) it's leadership

And a Coach gets the wind behind the wings from its Players.

Ah yes, I love this argument!

So CEO's are supposed to be magical super-rare humans who do nothing but are worth 1000s of regular workers and take all credit for good returns...

Until things go bad and then it's all the worker's fault! The ship was too big to steer!

If CEOs are worth as much as they think they are then they should have no problems taking all of their comp in stock, and bonuses (if any!) should be handcuffed to hard goals.

I did not argue that CEO's are deserving of their absurd pay, I argued to look into the overall Team results and the players before simply blaming the Coach.

So it's fair that CEO is not going to know how an org does its hiring on a day to day basis. It is too much detail. But leadership is a lot about vision (point to where you want to go - with input of course), setting the culture (how do you wanna behave in getting there - ie be a dick? Don't be dicks?), rewarding the right behaviors (promo cultures, rubriks, leadership principles, bonuses etc). Yes they do it through their generals but you get the point.

When I was at Google, I noticed a very large emphasis on process and "homogeneity". Group think was absurdly high - down to the kind of language you were "encouraged" to use at different settings. Amazon in comparison felt like a more direct (albeit brutal) place. You could see the knife coming at you.

This culture may not have been initiated by Sundar but was highly tolerated by him. And he tolerated it because the cash cow wasn't under threat and they kept hoarding decent talent (and keeping them under utilized just so competition doesn't get them) despite not being the highest paying employer.

Yes the coasters and resters and vesters had fun but allowing them to do so is all leadership.

Yes. You can't just hire a bunch of smart people and be surprised when a product doesn't get made. That's not how building stuff works.

Actually purely stochasticaly if you would distribute cash among them and add a reward function, you should at least have VC performance.

Finally a metric we can work with.

You’re showing very little understanding for how the world works with this reply. Do you think developers have free rein in big companies?

Product Managers and Division Managers and Staff Engineers and Research Scientists do, and there are thousands of each of these at Google.

Maybe the problem is deeper and stem from culture and hiring practices that privilege academia, instead of real world industry and engineering experience?

And who built Google as it is? Both founders were from academia.

This can be spin in any way somebody wants, but after 20 years, no budget limits, no lack of expertise inhouse, and no lack of time for experiments, the malaise is clear. It hints at fundamental cultural and organizational issues, that wont be solved either with layoffs or new management.

Until that is addressed, Google future trend is to become another IBM, only this time with others eating away their lunch much faster.

Your diatribe makes little sense. A healthy company has Product Managers in charge of each product, and in complex products its customary to break them off further into feature sets and even markets, each managed exclusively by a Product Manager.

Staff engineers are the result of having a hierarchical org where you need highly specialized and experienced people to take the lead of technical projects. What problem do you exactly see in this?

Researchers focus in research. What problem do you see in this, exactly?

It sounds like you are desperately trying to find something to complain about in spite of not having any grasp on the subject you're discussing.

The results speak for itself. I offered my diagnostic. Why don't you indulge us with yours?

> Search sucks.

Subjective, but rings true.

> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.

I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users.

> Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too.

This seems to be consensus, yes.

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

Is this actually true? Seems meme-ish.

> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.

> I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way

This has indeed become a very common take. "I'm not getting involved in another Google product. They'll just cancel it."

> I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users.

For their hardware products, this is definitely the case. Stadia, When they bought Fitbit, Google Home devices are few things that come to mind.

When they shut down Stadia and refunded everyone, "I would have bought games and tried out Stadia if they at least put this as part of their release announcement". What a sad state of things really.

Sundar is coming out as inspiring as Ray Ozzie, let's put it this way

My hot take is any executive who cannot think up of meaningful projects for some of the world's top engineering and research talent should be let go for lack of imagination, if nothing else.

Hiring people is expensive, building infrastructure is expensive, large organizations should be able to make use of that talent.

Even if it means spinning teams off in to separate companies and then "acquiring" them back later (with huge handsome payouts for the team) Microsoft used to do that all the time! It works well, instant funding with startup energy, and everyone is motivated to succeed because you get rich if you pull it off!

Google should figure out their inefficiencies, violently work to solve them so that developer productivity is increased, and then make smaller independent teams that can build on existing infrastructure that empowers teams to get things done faster.

Instead they are just laying people off.

TBF very few large organizations (if any) have figured out how to maintain productivity as they grow. Communication and political overhead becomes so high that large organizations grind to a halt.

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

huh?

> Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too.

I've had a great experience using GCP over the last 14 years, and I didn't have a rep inside. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

> Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience

How so? I’ve used it for a while and really liked the experience. It was wayyyy more intuitive than AWS for example (services are named correctly!). The UI is consistent and it even displays the commands to run and Terraform config on each config.

What’s wrong with GCP?

> I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns.

From the time Sundar became CEO to the start of covid Google stock was up 100%. From the start of covid to now Google stock is up 100%

> Search sucks.

Still the best.

> Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers).

A fumble for sure, but all indications Google has massively reoriented toward AI in every product.

> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.

Only HN weirdos like us care about this. Hard to think of a single cancellation that made mainstream headlines.

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

Could anyone give anonymous examples of this? Could the recent waves of layoffs stop this if it was happening?

Can anyone name one thing of value this dude has actually done in his time in charge.

Feel in a few years he's gonna have a worse reputation than Ballmer in terms of squandering potential.

At least Ballmer was funny and charismatic.

funny: ok. charismatic: this is too much!

He had this weird manic energy.

Yeah, he was maniac for sure.

Developers, developers, developers!

Nowadays would be LLMs, LLMs LLMs

No, because developers actually provide value to the world.

I've actually met one of his high school friends once. He made a really interesting comment about Ballmer: He was the only guy who was on both the football team and the math club. In fact at Harvard, he was the manager of the football team and got a degree in applied mathematics. He was a nerd who was also really athletic or vice versa. Oh and he's a first generation college graduate. Maybe he wasn't the best CEO for Microsoft but he's still a really impressive guy on a personal level.

Out of all the billionaires he seems to be one of the most under-the-radar ones while living his best life kind of person.

growing chrome from nothing to monopoly-level browser?

He pitched the creation of Chrome, but that was before he was "in charge" of Google

I think that's a rather low bar. Coming off of IE6, any browser that is advertised on the front page of Google just needs to not suck to be successful.

I think OP is referring to Sundar's time as a CEO which started in October 2015. Crome's rise had already flattened out by then: https://www.statista.com/statistics/545520/market-share-of-i...

Stock went up ~18% per year since Oct 2015. Does anything else matter to Pichai's bosses (board & shareholders)?

Stock was juiced by cheap money, cultural zeitgeist for magical mobile phone tech. Macro economic trends have nothing to do with Sundar.

Google is >20 years old and lacks history of diverse innovation and generational buy in of a company like IBM (I don’t feel IBM is relevant to tech anymore, but for many nostalgia seems to lead them to believe it is central to big tech economics).

Google may very well be entering a protracted death spiral. Without diversifying I doubt it will ever endear itself on people for 80+ more years the way IBM was able to[1].

IMO generational churn and new technologies are going to wipe out a whole lot of 2000s technology software-dev specific companies. Facebook and Google are my picks for biggest brands whose success is coupled to 2000s tech fetish explosion that may not exist in 10-15 years. Everything about tech corp is just straitjacketed “line go up” memes.

[1] (given the lack of competition IBM faced; government up and donated transistor technology to IBM to move them off vacuum tubes; IBMs history of success is a propaganda fueled mirage. It’s been propped up many times to serve the state)

Seems good until you compare it to msft or another big qqq holding over that same time span

Sundar is just a poor fit for a top leadership role in an innovative and growing company. He comes across as a timid people pleaser, not a commander. It always felt like someone else was really in charge, like the company was actually being run by his reports managing up.

Google has been standing on their laurels for the last decade but these days they have bigger competition for their Ad market and also landscape changed:

1) Apple new permission for tracking affected probably not only Facebook but Google as well

2) Web turned into bigger junk and SEO game and Google Search is not that useful anymore

3) Some (small fraction) still moved to DuckDuckGo / Bing or other search engines

4) Apple competing with google map with their own product

5) Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok/Twitter eating a bigger chunk of their Ads cake

6) They tried to dominate Facebook with Google+ and failed

7) They tried to dominate Whatsapp / Messenger with google meetup / hangout ( / whatever) and failed

8) Amazon also eating some of Google Ads profits with their Ads inside amazon.com (they failed with Google Shopping)

9) Now ChatGPT and friends also ganging up for google search

10) Lots of regulatory obstacles in EU and elsewhere.

They focused too much on cloning competitors rather than innovating something new:

Google+ after Facebook

Google Shopping after Amazon

Google Cloud after AWS / Azure

Google Meetup after Whatsapp / Messenger

Youtube Shorts after Tiktok / Instagram

Literally any one of their crazy messaging apps could have worked had they just you know - Picked One and Stuck To It.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...

Nearly $20B in profit in a quarter? Good time for layoffs.

that's irrelevant

they overhired and now they are fixing it, and that profit margin will rise with the reduction in compensation

they're firing because they can

There shouldn't be much controversy over fixing pandemic-era over hiring. But that's just the public-facing rationale. Betting more heavily on AI tech might be the real reason.

You should fix overhiring by firing the people that overhired. That never happens though because there's no accountability in leadership in any major tech company.

Overhiring should be punished. But it isn't. A shitty CEO can tell his company to overhire and then when that becomes a problem, he can tell his company to do layoffs and never pay a price.

Maybe he's just optimizing the short-term stock market value so he can sell all his shares.

He has rolling multi year vests and annual trading plans.

Profit doesn't mean you invested in hiring for the right things in the right departments, especially with as much shift in the overall market as we've seen in the last year.

Neither does random layoffs.

Nor does sitting on thumbs for years and missing the AI revolution, right after inventing it.

Random, or any kind of large-scale layoffs make everyone in the company each other's enemy. It destroys cooperation to the point that most people actively start trying to sabotage each other (because climbing the ladder is no longer the primary concern: you must make sure there's people above you on the firing list)

This is a distraction from the real problem.

Yes, 'cost savings' in the form of layoffs is bad given the amount of money Google is making. But the real issue is that they hardly seem to be really narrowing their focus and pushing out something that captures people's imagination and gives them a reason to believe in the company.

I believe the technical folks have mostly done their job across the years. The product, marketing and comms folks seem to be MIA though. Not every technical feat Google accomplishes will be a home run, but between ChromeOS/Pixelbooks, Stadia, Bard (so far), Nest/Smarthome their should be at least one winner. IMO in every case I think you can trace the failure back to bad product launches, poor PR and comms, and poor marketing. Very rarely is the tech 'bad'.

I think this is just expected. Google hired way too many people during the pandemic.

Really a question of why they thought that was a good idea. They added like 70k employees in about 4 years. For what?

Money was stupid cheap, so employees didn't have to return much value to be a positive investment. Now, money is more expensive so they aren't worth it anymore.

They aren't firing the people they allegedly wrongly hired.

Google is still valued as a growth company. They need to hire everyone they can to build new profitable things.

Judging by what's happening to Google's search results, perhaps adding another 70k employees would have been the better tactic.

I know a person who works there that barely did their job when I worked with them. I know it’s anecdotal but when they got hired there I knew they just not have the same standards as they used to. I know another person there who says there isn’t even enough work to stay busy.

Google is still a juggernaut BUT...

I don't think anyone here would claim competitor's "AI" isn't going to take a chunk of their search market, would they? Search quality was diminishing for the past few years as it is, but there was no real alternative. Now I'm using ChatGPT as much (or more) than Google. Almost everything about Google Search is mediocre.

I agree, google has been coasting way to long on past successes - they are ripe for smaller/nimbler/newer companies to start chipping away at their revenues.

Microsoft is financing OpenAI.

correct, now they are - but OpenAI got a pretty good head start and foothold before Microsoft made an investment, and inarguably, were smaller and nimbler than google at the time - but I am not talking just about openAI, google has many, many products and services - they need to defend them all from lots of different startups and smaller players simultaneously who only need to be good at that one thing to start making dents in googles armour.

coasting on their search+ads monopoly you mean.

Github Copilot was the real killer for me. I would say around 80% of the time I no longer have to leave my IDE for trivial problems (e.g. I no longer Google the regex) that I'd otherwise just rip from Stack Overflow.

Those searches aren't monetized anyway afaik, so I'm not sure it's really a bad thing for Google that you no longer make those queries.

Well, I would argue that if the company had the gumption to do a 180 (on short-term spam/enshit/ads) they are the best placed company to revitalize and still dominate the search market 5 years from now.

It's really hard to argue they don't have everything they would need to build the best product on a technical level - information, AI-talent, capital. But somehow we all know they are going to kill the golden goose for a quick feast.

Why do you think ChatGPT will stay free of ads, SEO-spam, tracking, profiling, all the stuff that's wrong with traditional search?

I think SEO-spam would be much harder to implemented in an LLM vs. a traditional search engine. The harder part is figuring out an economic model where sources get any traffic in the first place.

In fact LLMs are precisely what is helping SEO spam destroy Google (and all other) search. That may be why MS loves ChatGPT so much.

I’ve mostly switched to Bard, which I find superior to ChatGPT. More nuanced for most of the questions and conversations I have and I especially appreciate them linking out to sources!

Superior technology is not enough to win. For the most part, people are happy with Google, it integrates well into all that various surfaces folks use, etc. ChatGPT had a lot of hype and seemed the closest to getting mind share to the point where it would affect search usage, but from what I can tell, it's not made a dent. Anecdotes from the bubble of technologists don't really speak to the wider trends anymore.

Things which are mediocre and still dominate their segments include: Toyota cars, Heinz ketchup, GoPro cameras, Microsoft Windows, etc. Brand loyalty, trust, and familiarity simply go further than you think.

Those of us Of A Certain Age™ would add VHS to that list in your second paragraph. BetaMax was better in almost every way and even had the Sony name behind it, but in the end it didn’t matter.

Assuming there's competition, doesn't dominating a market mean your product is the new mediocre? Competitors will try to compete on price but be low quality, compete on quality but be high priced, and you're in the sweet big middle spot?

Search quality is diminishing because "the web" as a graph of hyperlinked text documents where any domain name is a priori equally likely to contain a gem of information you're looking for, doesn't really exist anymore.

It does, Google just heavily penalizes non-top-website pages for some inexplicable reason, sometimes outright de-indexing them. I guess you could argue this is a consequence of stopping spam - better to just ignore all small sites rather than risk catching blogspam. But somehow there's still plenty of blogspam.

More layoffs will certainly make Google's search better!

Google search has gotten so bad I’m genuinely considering trying bing

Yeah, me too. Never thought I'd ever do that.

I switched to Bing (and some smaller engines) after Google failed to find exact ASCII matches on sites I care about.

Bing is not yet superior, but it's mostly good enough and abandoning Google felt like a big relief somehow...

google still controls the search bars in android and ios. At most, openAI+apple could conspire to take their chunk away

There's people that use those bars? It could be Baidu, those search bars, and in 10+ years of using ios and android (ipad + android phone), I'd never have noticed.

i mean the omnibox

What's the omnibox?

I've switched to Kagi a year ago and haven't looked back. I've tried Bing and DDG before and went back to Google immediately. Not so with Kagi, since switching over to it I've googled less than a handful of times. Seriously, try it.

I second this, Kagi is amazing.

I did try Kagi, IMHO cost limit by no of searches did not meet my needs and felt over priced. DDG and perplexity meets my needs and gives my money worth

I've been using DuckDuckGo for more than a year now.

It's OK, I did it because I do not like how powerful Google has become.

I've used it for nearly a decade now. I almost never use anything else or the !g command. I find that I manage to get great results but the migration from Google was tough. I think Google uses your profile to infer a lot about your search context, and ddg doesn't have all that data about me, so I've had to tune my queries to be more explicit as a result. I think it's a great product and I'm happy to be using it.

There seems to be this weird A/B test going on right now that is ruining search even more.

For example on my account I do not have the auto-calculator capabilities nor does "My IP" return a valid result.

Brave search is ok. Google, Bing and Duckduckgo have terrible results.

What do you mean by "terrible"?

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo quite a while ago now, at least a decade I think, and it meets my needs well enough that I have never bothered to try anything else.

I will frame this comment as a sign of the times. I feel like at the end of an era :-)

Bing isn't objectively "better," just different. Same with DuckDuckGo. Yandex is the only way to find whatever Kiwi Farms' current address is.

It's 1997 all over again. We had to find stuff using Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos (and others) before AskJeeves and Dogpile started aggregating results. Then some weird company called Google showed up and blew them all away.

Bing is pretty great now. You get Bing points (redeemable for ~$100 in swag per year) and free Chat GPT that usually answers your question before you decide which link to click on.

> “Improve company velocity, efficiency, and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings,” said one of the seven stated goals

> The top goal on Google’s list was to “deliver the world’s most advanced, safe, and responsible AI.”

> The cost-cutting moves came as Google pours more resources into its heated competition with Microsoft-backed OpenAI

So are they reducing headcount so that they can buy a load more A100s or whatever? Or is this being demanded by shareholders? How does the means connect with the objective(s)?

I wonder if this move is sound. Granted, inflation of consumer products hasn't died down, so they are getting choosier in how they spend, affecting Google's advertising revenue. So Google is betting more heavily on AI as a potential vehicle for revenue. But will the current AI tech really prove so disruptive, with high pricing?

What does Google even do anymore? I can't think of any innovation they've made in the past five years or so? Anyone?

Waymo, Google Brain, and now DeepMind (acquired).

Google Brain is like the Betamax of the 2010s.

Wow, this is bad! I dreamt of working at Google since I was 16, but now I am not sure if it's the right place anymore!

Google Domains, a product that gave them some change(189M), was shut down.

It seems like they'll shut down any product that doesn't cause the world to stop.

We're using some products and upper management is thinking on moving parts of the core business to different platforms "just in case".

Google is loosing what little credibility they have left by always shutting down perfectly good products.

I know someone who works there who says there isn’t even enough work for people to stay busy.

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