12k is just FTEs. How much if you include TVCs? Probably 30k+.
Google to reduce workforce by 12k
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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#562Google’s best days may be behind it. The search revenue is looking increasingly shaky. New business units like GCP are struggling to operate profitably. They had an amazing cash cow (ad revenue) for a long time but that cow is getting old and starting to look rather ill. Compared to some of the other tech giants Google has struggled to evolve its business to diversify revenue and profit streams and evolve offerings. Now the make or break moment to make more progress there or the company will slowly drift off into the sunset of has-been tech giants.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#563The 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.
Too many of us kid ourselves about 'irrelevance'
The companies you list build a legal moat around their business (establishing some amount of monopoly) and then begin sucking taxpayer money
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
> simply don't replace those that leave. You need to have control over which roles / projects you're gonna downsize.
Management have control over that already. They can just disband a team and move the team members elsewhere at any time. That is often more than enough for people to voluntarily leave. Imagine if google disbanded the golang team and moved them to 'maps'. I imagine those team members would quit the company almost immediately. And that's cheaper as the company doesn't have to pay statutory redundancy pay-offs.
That's illegal in the UK, unless the company actually stops developing the product of the disbanded team.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#565Every 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…
They're shortsighted fools.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#566The 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.
In general I agree that these companies retract from the forefront and maybe aren't the innovative powerhouses that they once were, however both IBM and GE do fine as businesses and will probably be around for a long time. And I think it's important we have a bit of both in the world.
The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech, but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive projects. Google has been a driving force in laying sub-sea internet cables across Africa and South America for a good chunk of time now, enabling billions of people to come online. I don't think a small company could achieve that since it costs billions of dollars to do.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#567Google has 120 billion dollars of cash on hand. Why are they laying off people? They should be poaching talent from other companies experiencing lay-offs to build better products.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#568might not be a popular opinion, but different perspective. during pandemic, demand was high and employees where asking anywhere from 60% to 100% hikes to do the same job. no one complained. people were ready to jump every 6 months in search for more pay without thinking career, is the position impacting the company or anything of that sorts. founders (esp smaller ones) had tough time meeting insane demands. people we…
That’s exactly how I feel about consumer prices, rising rents and home prices. We accept that they soak up more of our discretionary income with with their high prices. We have every right to complain when they cut jobs as a result.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google don't have to worry about such activist shareholders in the same way that other companies do. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have the controlling share in Alphabet thanks to their Class B shares. They only have a fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.
So does Zuckerberg. But while he and Page/Brin may have a controlling interest in _voting_ stock, they own a much smaller amount of overall shares. Sure, activists can't control the board, and Zuck/Page/Brin are not in danger of being ousted, their fiduciary duty is to the shareholders not just those with voting rights.
ok?
there's no fiduciary duty to do a dumb thing just because Amazon did the same dumb thing, and saying "we've got loads of cash, we're going to expand and hire the great people Amazon and Meta just stupidly let go and enhance shareholder value in the long term" is a perfectly cromulant thing to say.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#570The last recession - if you were a software developer, or in tech, you had a great deal of immunity. I remember having spending power when everyone else was unfortunately suffering and taking time to find jobs, etc. Now it feels like the same is true of machine learning. And to some degree other specialist roles within software engineering. If you're a generalist software developer, you're in a vulnerable position. I…
Specialisation is a risky long term bet though. The amount of companies a good generalist software engineer can work at is orders of magnitude more than an ML engineer and I imagine it will remain like that for a long while. Same thing for more extreme niches like compiler engineers - the number of opportunities is substantially less.