Live data from Hacker News

Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

wsj.com

201–210 of 335 posts

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#201
post #161

Google Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to t…

I don’t see anything technically wrong with that approach. The top performers are usually outsized contributors compared to the bottom tier or even mid level coworkers. It’s better to keep a very high performing team even if it’s more expensive.

Logically there's nothing wrong if "human" is viewed as a finite resource or as livestock.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every employee that is hired is really top tier, there are probably some average people that get through. Also people can get lax and complicit.

Also googlers are sometimes useless outside the Plex. Because of their tendency to religiously reproduce processes that they know so well. And tendency of these processes not to work outside.

It's not like any one uses hadoop or kubernetes and has any success am I right?

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#203
post #161

Google Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to t…

I don’t see anything technically wrong with that approach. The top performers are usually outsized contributors compared to the bottom tier or even mid level coworkers. It’s better to keep a very high performing team even if it’s more expensive.

We shouldn’t give them much credit on this. It’s not really an approach it has to do with regulations for large companies. This “hr strategy” is just a friendly way to tell an employee to leave or figure out what to do. I wonder if the genius behind this also came up with the term “unlimited vacation”.

https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WAR...

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#204
post #161

Google Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to t…

Trading 3 employees @ 333K for 1 employee @ 1M would increase organizational risk assuming equivalent value/productivity.

Much harder to lose 3 employees than it is to lose 1.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#205
post #198

So the new boss is from Oracle, who hired new managers from SAP and Microsoft, they are hiring like crazy and cutting some old jobs. Looks like they are trying to get rid of internal critics, resistance. Interesting wars

Do you have a source for this?

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#206
post #161

Google Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to t…

I don’t see anything technically wrong with that approach. The top performers are usually outsized contributors compared to the bottom tier or even mid level coworkers. It’s better to keep a very high performing team even if it’s more expensive.

You do sometimes get weird effects from top heavy structures like that though. The classic example is Google hiring “super good people” for them to end up doing pretty low level (but important!) ops work

To take Amazon as an example, you can hire a bunch of high performing engineers but you still need people actually putting stuff into boxes so they get shipped (robots nonwithstanding)

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that at level. Once at Google you really get the benefit of doubt of clearing a high bar. It's mostly a talk around your work / perf / CLs and then team fit.

what is CL?

Change List: internal Google lingo for what is more commonly known as patch, diff, or pull request in the Open source wold.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.

I think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.

Google would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#210
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely dependent on the team and hiring manager. And the technical requirements of the role you want to move into versus your prior role. If you want to move from working on gmail to working on the android kernel, I imagine there's gonna be some whiteboarding. (Not that gmail is simple software, but just picked two examples that came to mind with different domain expertise).

Sounds reasonable. I was referring more to the gatekeeping type, like a heavy focus on things like balancing trees and recursion for roles that clearly involve neither trees nor recursion.

Roles that don't involve recursion? What next, no for loops please - we are developers!!
Post reply on HN