Google to reduce workforce by 12k • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#541

Post by grugagag » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

Zvez wrote: post #436

makach wrote: post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

while I agree with the attitude you promote. But it is not that simple. If your visa is attached to your job, you are pretty much fucked. Same goes if you decided to leave your previous job just to join Google (because it was your dream) and now you are let go - you are fucked. So yes, it is your responsibility to take care of yourselves. But it is hard to be prepared for everything and layoffs like this one doesn't…

Maybe this will make people wary of joining hiring sprees in the FAANG space as you could easily become jobless in an economic downturn.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#542

Post by mradek » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

jyrkesh wrote: post #431

makach wrote: post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

I'm so rapidly becoming someone who just feels no guilt. It's balance against the abject anxiety I feel no matter what day or time of day it is. The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize that it's Sunday and everything is fine and I'm supposed to be relaxing. It's clearly not healthy. But yeah, I've got a FAANG(+? what's it called now? I think I'…

What do u mean 9s are addictive

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#543

Post by EthanHeilman » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

The Google of 2005 wouldn't do this. The Google of 2005 would use this as opportunity to monopolize all the talent and move into some new space and eat everything with fantastic software.

* I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night. Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was buying geographic satellite companies and innovating with lazy loading javascript maps. It went from, websites can't provide anywhere near the functionality of desktop apps to why would ever use a desktop app for that.

* I was building phone software and mobile search engines before, during, and after the launch of android so I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability. The carriers began going through the stages of grief, while they were still on anger, like the sound of thunder[0] android launched, and reality shifted under their feet. After that it seemed like nothing else had ever been possible or true.

Hungry Google was sight to behold.

[0]: The Sound of Thunder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#544

Post by jwhiles » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #416

jwhiles wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that your best employees are the people who are most likely to leave a company of their own accord, and so if you rely on attrition to reduce headcount you will also reduce the average quality of your workers.

In the tech industry the best employees are going to leave regardless, especially if they're bored. Also, like banks, the FAANGs pay bonuses. And also like banks, if you want to 'suggest' to someone that ought to leave, regardless of who they are, you pay them a near-zero bonus, and give them a negative annual review as well. Conversely, if a company wants to keep someone they pay more to encourage that person to sta…

I'm not saying that it's good to fire people. And yes, companies have levers to retain their strongest staff. I'm not convinced that they tend to be very good at doing that though.

The (non-FAANG) company I work for has an on-going hiring freeze, and I'm actually quite concerned because the only people who are leaving are the people you wouldn't want to leave - and none of the people you would want to leave are doing so.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#545

Post by FlyingSnake » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:46 PM UTC

prakhar897 wrote: post #176

kypro wrote: post #146

Are we about to enter a new era of ultra-profitable tech companies? While companies like GOOG and MSFT have had ridiculously healthy margins compared to traditional industries for some time now, it's also been clear in recent years that these companies have become very loose with spending. Take GOOG for example, they spend so much unnecessary money on fancy offices, free lunches, diversity programs, highly speculativ…

A few years ago, I built an exact replica of a Saas product I saw online and priced it 1/3 theirs. The actual founder went mad and started a smear campaign. Lucky for him, Workload at my regular job picked up and I abandoned the project, but this highlighted the weak moats of most of these products. and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's so that engineers are less inclined to go home and build thei…

For most of these companies sales and marketing is the moat.

Edit: curious to know what was the SaaS that got rattled by your fun experiment.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#546

Post by lumost » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:46 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #463

AYBABTME wrote: post #422

Every time I read stuff like: > "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, C…

>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. How are they taking you as a fool? The p…

This approach doesn't make sense when it comes to software. Expanding your dev team during a boom year to only contract it in the future bust year - will leave you moving slower in the bust years. While tech has never been known for it's stable job market, seeing the most profitable corporations in the world conducting layoffs doesn't sit well.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#547

Post by unglaublich » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:46 PM UTC

civilized wrote: post #426

eCa wrote: post #51

I guess someone has to write this comment: > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are. It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.

"Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially, it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street. "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"

Yeah, like firing 12k folks isn't the full responsibility of the CEO in the first place?

Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#548

Post by specialist » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #463

AYBABTME wrote: post #422

Every time I read stuff like: > "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, C…

>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. How are they taking you as a fool? The p…

Firstly, the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value is a recent myth. Before that, it was understood that corporations are chartered to serve the public interest.

A few may argue that corporations are super-persons imbued with super-rights which outweigh the rights of actual persons. Please note that's a minority viewpoint.

Secondly, corporations are not the only cast members with agency in this narrative.

Our government, the source of all that free money, acting on the goals of full employment and bountiful future tax revenue, probably has some agency.

Us individuals, whose blood and entrails lubricate the gears of the machine built from our bone and sinew, also have agency. Stuff like get fat and happy and watch our grandkids grow up, have enough excess wealth and time to travel a bit, to not bleed out in a ditch, cold and haggard, after a lifetime of toil. And most of us aren't particularly invested in further enriching the latest cohort of robber barons.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#549

Post by lonelyasacloud » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

Neil44 wrote: post #340

lonelyasacloud wrote: post #317

Seen enough cycles of laying off about 10% [1] of your workforce to try and halt a share price slide and make investors happier to realise it's in the Howto CEO & Keep Your Job manual. QED, this announcement is almost entirely about share prices sliding in the tech sector since about the beginning of 2022. ChatGPT's impact on Google is unknown, but it is a fair bet that it will be larger [2]. [1] It's always around 1…

Despite the hype ChatGPT is not ready to replace search engines yet - no referencing and it literally makes up gibberish if it's not sure. At this point I don't see any advantage to Google rolling that out. GPT4, GPT5... different story maybe!

Fundamentally a Google search typically returns a research project that involves the user attempting to build their own mental model of the "truth".

ChatGPT instead returns an answer that needs research to verify facts.

This second approach is already quicker for many use cases and can get much better.

So yes, the user may still need search engines to verify. But in the future, it seems unlikely that search will be the dominant, primary means of people accessing information.

The problem for Google with ChatGPT-a-like results is that they strip out the presentation of Google's ads and one of its most significant revenue streams. The chief advantage of Google acting quickly is it increases its chances of retaining an ad business.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#550

Post by FlyingSnake » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #543

The Google of 2005 wouldn't do this. The Google of 2005 would use this as opportunity to monopolize all the talent and move into some new space and eat everything with fantastic software. * I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night. Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was buying geographic satellite companies and in…

Whatever’s happening is a prime example of how disruptions happen in tech industry. Previous giants become fossils and new incumbents take the spot. IBM -> GE -> Google etc will all follow the same trajectory towards irrelevance.