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Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

wsj.com

211–220 of 335 posts

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#211
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!

We hired an engineer once. He wrote a tail recursive function. We had to fire him. We hadn't tested him on that on the whiteboard.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#212
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

no you’re equating pay to skill and there’s no correlation. there’s incredible pickers and you still want your team staffed with them

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans are a finite resource but the comparison to livestock seems unwarranted. A business optimizing talent isn’t inherently removing humanity from its workers.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Well I personally like unlimited vacation policies and it’s been a hit with most teams I’ve worked on. Adding some basic “mandatory” time off usually solves the problem of workers feeling like they shouldn’t take it. It’s really just dependent on office culture.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely profitable (assuming that's all it is for the number 1 video destination online) is still profitable. Also Youtube != Google Cloud.

Yes I realize that but having revenue without profit is kind of meaningless.

Optimizing for growth requires forgoing profit, which is the model in place for GCP (and what everyone seems concerned over) so I don’t see what the problem is.

Is it really that you just don’t feel they’re committed enough for your standards?

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#216

WSJ has gone hard Murdoch, particularly against Google. In conjunction with comments by Peter Thiel, Trump, and other conservative commentators, it's pretty clear there's a coordinated effort to cast Facebook as a "fair and balanced" face, and to do that, they need a libtard heel, and Google is apparently it. What's interesting is that Trump easily has more of a beef with Bezos as the owner of the Washington Post, bu…

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Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#217
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You can have high performers in every position, not just software engineering.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#218

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).

@ericd, what programming roles don't deal with trees or recursion? I've dealt with trees in every single domain I've been in, frontend or backend, whether doing "real" programming or building with no-code tools like FileMaker. I've seen admins and accountants build trees and recursion with spreadsheets. I don't think these things are as "gatekeeping" as you imagine.

Trees as data structures are inevitable. Did you have to balance them or perform other nontrivial graph theoretic transformations though?

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#219
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very smart tactic that also, as a side effect, brings the average quality across all engineers at the company up. Smart people with desirable skills would have no problem finding another team within Google to transfer to, while bottom tier performers won’t, thus leaving Google.

Unless their skillset just isn't needed at that location anymore and they can't move to a different city for example because they have children in school. I guess it helps keeping the workforce young and flexible.

A vast majority of full time Googlers are bucketed onto ladders that are needed in pretty much any team. Say SWE, SRE-SWE (that can switch to SWE at will), TPGM, all kinds of managers. Much of the remainder are people who should be able to do the switch, say SRE-SWE to SWE, within the grace period. Legal and accounting might find themselves in a pickle, but these don't move often.

Re: Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Humans are a finite resource but the comparison to livestock seems unwarranted. A business optimizing talent isn’t inherently removing humanity from its workers.

If the business is only optimizing one specific focus then yeah it is removing the humanity aspect from the co-operation of its worker and focusing only in resource extraction/consumption.
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