Google to reduce workforce by 12k

Almost certainly not. Maybe the first few months, fewer will get hired.

> Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally?

They almost certainly will try to do that with the top performers. But I suppose it doesn't make much sense doing this to retain below average performers (even if their average may be a bit high), given their salary levels and the current market.

Moving someone from one type of product to something completely else may require almost as much training as the training of a new hire. Better to hire someone new in a few months, at a lower salary and possibly someone with more potential.

Also, most ex-googlers will probably have an easy time finding other work (especially engineers), so even they may be better off in the end.

Now, I do wonder what kind of roles are seeing the biggest slashes, especially outside of tech. (Ie, sales, marketing, key account, domain experts, content moderation, HR related). If any of those are cut disproportionally, it may indicate a change in direction.

Nobody is retiring - why would you, you get a fat pay cheque and once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is pretty good. Oh and if they fire you rather than you retiring, they have to pay you another stack of cash and keep those options that vest in a few years.

"Seeing people posting about being laid off after 30 years of employment at Microsoft is a great example of corporate loyalty." - is this just a clean out of the expensive old folks after the hiring spree of late? Is it last in first out or first in first out? These are much more interesting discussions.

“ https://battle.shawwn.com/Shawn%20Presser's%20Resume.pdf was the resume I used for Groq. I planned to update it after finishing out the year. In terms of my ML work, here's some highlights of my work prior to Groq:

- A Newsweek article about various GPT work I did https://www.newsweek.com/openai-text-generator-gpt-2-video-g...

- I was the first to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/10/gpt2_chess/

- ... which DeepMind referenced: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1226916484938530819

- GPT-2 music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame...

- Invented swarm training https://www.docdroid.net/faDq8Bu/swarm-training-v01a.pdf

- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027

- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)

- Reverse engineered BigGAN’s model over the course of ~6mo to locate a bug in their open source implementation https://github.com/google/compare_gan/issues/54

ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”

They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.

That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.

There has been a systematic trend over the last 10 years to remove the controls advertisers have over their placements and spend and move towards a black box we are supposed to trust.

To anyone wondering whether to share your personal experience, please do; comments like this one are my favourites.