22% YoY revenue increase.
Doing something right.
Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
Doing something right.
Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
Infrastructure and scalability has been and is key, as well as technical expertise still absolutely super top notch.
Let’s put it this way: Google is the only company that knows how to find, store and utilize information beyond a specific narrowing. And I mean it really in the sense of curating, compression, long time storage, load balancing as well as compliance and world wide redundancy with a focus on speed and efficiency.
Under the hood of AI is pure engineering genius. Google might be trashed as the Search Engine giant that only displays ads now, but reconsider.
Why does all AI provider except for Google have massive problems with load time, reach, etc? Apple chose Google mainly because of the infrastructure. They eat everyone for lunch here. And they earned it.
Engineering at Google etc. are still the finest you can read about software engineering at the highest level. It is highly impressive how Google managed to not fall behind OpenAI. Who else was able to join the race? Microsoft? No. Apple? Oh well… Meta etc. won’t get there ever.
I think that Gemini is 3rd behind OpenAI and Claude but mainly because Google being Google, they kind of have no versioning for their AI and therefore the results are pretty much random in quality, less predictable than the others.
But the creativity and tooling like Nano Banana - fantastic.
There you have it. People don’t get that it is the infrastructure the moment they complain about Claude outtakes here.
The reason you don't hear people complaining (esp on HN) is because noone is using Gemini with coding agents. Claude Code, Codex (and IMO OpenCode et al with open weights models) are miles ahead of Gemini CLI/Jules/Antigravity/whatever other coding products Google have.
While the model was "ok" everything else was trash.
Constant 429s or 502s for "reasons".
10 different ways to try and pay for the stupid thing and none of them clear.
My favourite was as a paying customer I could not get it to use the latest model. Sometimes it would but most times it would dump me to 2.5.
All of my experience is exactly the opposite of the gp comment is saying.
The gemini-cli repo is gong show too https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
Earlier on (okay, until recently), Gemini CLI's quota management didn't work very well.
Antigravity tends to have better quota management behavior.
It was paid for through code assist enterprise and had all the flags enabled for the "preview" models. Still the only way to get gemini 3+ was to open and close the application 5 to 10 times and sometimes you would get 3 for a bit and then get dumped back to 2.5 and no matter what you do it would not use 3.
I tossed it after spending like 3 hours total messing around the google cloud console and trying a bunch of shit from the github issues. The other offerings don't waste my time (or waste less of it anyway). If they want me to beta test their shit they shouldn't charge for it.
Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes, and eliminated many perks and benefits that were peculiar to Google. As the unique characteristics of Google as an institution are pared away, it makes sense that they would also adopt the standard approach to layoffs and that is what we have seen since 2023.
And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale you'd expect today.
Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining.
To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this.
That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
https://www.warntracker.com/?company=google
blabla calculate summarize, Google has laid off between 1% and 2% of its employees monthly since "the 12000" (since 2023) on average. Btw: on that page you can also see that "the 12000" is a misnomer and it was closer to 20000 individuals.
If the total number of employees is going up (as you say, it is) then the obvious explanation is that there must be a massive move underway moving headcount from one location to another ...
[1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/01/iwata_and_miyamoto...
In the gold rush, the shovel salesmen were selling a hell of a lot of shovels.
I don't think any of them are learning the lesson you think they are