Google employees pressure execs at all-hands meeting for clarity on cost cuts
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
What more clarity is necessary?
They will declare it a state of national security later down the road, when the companies all did this to save money and increase their salaries. Companies aren't people and they have no loyalty to the country they are in, despite what people try to push. It's business and profits come first always.
Layoffs aside (70k at Facebook is obscene), instead of India we now get RTO mandates.
Also we should be talking about unionizing again.
Good luck obtaining the same amount of leverage you would've had in the 2010s ever again. Good luck trying to steer the direction of these companies ever again. Good luck trying to establish a baseline for morality and conduct ever again.
Communicating these things ahead of time doesn't do any good for anyone. If you're concerned, start looking for other work.
2) If someone is still drinking the google juice and believes executives have their interests at heart, they may well believe enough in the "culture of transparency" that if they're worried about layoffs they ask about it at an all-hands.
3) They might suspect you're full of it and that your response to this question will be a litmus test
My guess is one of those three
To turn it around: Why should one work hard if there is a high chance of some global sweep soon, where they might randomly pick me without any reasoning.
This seems like taking huge logical leaps. If a friend expressed mine expressed it I would recommend them talking to a therapist about their self sabotaging thinking and perhaps depression.
If there is a layoff and I am at risk, I would rather have hard work to show. If Im not laid off, I would rather have hard work to capitalize on the aftermath. If I am laid off, I would rather have good reputation with my network .
Good work output is the smart choice if I will be retained OR if I will be fired. crapping out ignores the fact that the chance of being fired is low, even if it is random (google isnt going to go full twitter, if there even is a layoff). Being the guy who's work goes to shit when a layoff is announced sticks with you if you stay. If your boss is firing based on their subjective impressions OR quantitative ones, it actively hurts your chances.
There are big cognitive distortions at play here at each progressive leap: Randomness exists > Randomness is predominant > Nothing I do matters> It is a good idea to give up.
This is how I think when I am clinically depressed. It is self defeating and self fulfilling.
Or are you saying that ads are the golden goose?
I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.
but this started on the last year of Schmidt. when he gave up to Icahn and other zombies on the board.
not on mine, they won't.
As the recent anti-trust lawsuits reveal, everything else Google has done since has been to leverage that dominance into other advertising businesses; specifically display ads and now video ads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
1998 is not outside "living memory"
I also remember the IPO. Didn’t have any money at the time, but still wish I had invested… or gotten my parents to invest.
I don't think that's fair unless you can find something that says that was their intent (sibling posts in this thread claim there's actually evidence to the contrary). I don't see the problem with "startup trying to figure out a sustainable business" and leaving it like that. It's not like that's something unprecedented or even unusual.
Now, to which extent they REALLY wanted to do this, and REALLY impacted the day to day decision, I don't know. Neither if said pitch deck had other options.
But the shareholders and board don't want to innovate. They don't want to maintain innovation. They really ONLY WANT TO EXTRACT returns.
It is paradoxical. The theory of capitalism says that shareholders will want to maintain their golden goose right? Take care of their assets and property right?
But turns out, public shareholders, large funds, and PE investors only want to maximize their return by sucking the life out of a profitable innovative business. Once they have sucked out enough, they move on to the next profitable venture to suck the life out of.
This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction.
Google is an extremely well-built machine - built with thousands of the best engineers the world has ever seen, with the best products the world has ever seen. To shareholders, this is a giant blob of tasty juice to suck out of.
After years of sucking the life out of it, now that there is an alternative to suck from - treasuries - they are asking Google execs to suck more, faster, or else they'll move on to suck the tax payers - treasuries.
The shareholders and board absolutely want Pichai. They want a CEO who can cut benefits for shareholder returns.
See also: almost every private equity acquisition we've seen in the last ten or twenty years.
Google's culture wasn't a problem – and maybe a good thing! – when you had a gigantic money printer working in the background, paying for everything. But it was there, ready to be a problem once times got tough.
Should never have led on LLM and not let OpenAI get so big
in a sense, google solved this by trashing it's own reputation, so it's not actually a "net" problem that it spews garbage on the result page now.
"But that will make the product objectively worse."
"But it's what customers want."
"Is it?"
"It's what clueless investors want the customer to want."
"Fair enough."
see, that's just untrue. you could see the company turning all sorts of knobs to increase revenue over the last ten years - cutting down on perks, cutting down on food quality, increasing ad density, making promo harder, etc, etc - this was all happening and it was all happening at a high enough rate to let Ruth announce records almost every quarter. it was a finely oiled machine. and people grumbled, but quietly - it was fine!
doing mass layoffs absolutely changed the game - it showed that Pichai would be pushed around by random "researchers" publishing revenue guesses, it showed that the company would provide dire consequences for employees who were on projects that didn't pan out or were bad ideas, etc. the cost for all that is now everyone is correctly more nervous and pissed off!
> I can't think of another company where a greater share of its employees actively despised the industry that paid for them all to be there.
this is absolutely true, but as you say, it was fine - people still ran the ads machine and processed the firehose of cash, and a thousand other machines besides.
I disagree that it was "fine" because the people who were respected and held up as prime examples of Googlers – for decades – almost always had nothing to do with the ads business. This sends a signal to the rest that the ads business doesn't really matter, it's not the important work, it's akin to the janitorial work that has to happen so the rest of us can work here. If you do that long enough you end up with people optimizing towards things that aren't aligned with the needs of the business. It was on autopilot, relatively, compared to other areas.
I would also add all of the companies that were bought by Google in hopes they would ease some of the laser focus on their search/ad business and never panned out and then were subsequently killed by them.
I think this one of the overlooked issues they've had. When they've repeatedly tried to venture into other areas by buying smaller companies in hopes they could grow their revenue and create another revenue stream, the failure rate of those companies is pretty staggering.
All three of these have not made it easy for them to try and re-brand themselves as anything but a search/ad company.
Yeah right, they'll definitely let you know when they lay you off, but not a minute sooner.
Doesn't seem like a big deal. Most people I know don't think they are in the bottom 10%
Meta started carrying out the last batch of a three-part round of layoffs on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter, as part of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles.
Layoffs and reorgs will be need to be disclosed to shareholders and that's going to probably be done to both groups at a similar time.
Expecting early disclosure to employees is unrealistic.
Or that the answer to “will there be any more layoffs?” is never going to be answered truthfully or satisfactorily.
It's a lose-lose situation to be up on stage and get asked this question, and I think it shows a bit of immaturity or naiveté to pose it.
I've never understood people who do this. If you think you're on the chopping block for layoffs or cost cutting? You dust off your resume. You start networking. You reach out to recruiters. You actively PLAN to get laid off and have a Plan B or move before you do get laid off. If you're already working at Google, I'm sure it will be easy to find another job rather quickly.
Why would you put yourself on the radar when the company is already looking for people to lay off?