Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google to reduce workforce by 12k

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#621

Post by 7ewis »

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…

I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent. It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise.

The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#622

Post by xiphias2 »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #613
xiphias2 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there. The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things. Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system. Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't unders…

> Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there. I lost touch with Google's internal culture around 2011-ish. What is your take? When did you think Google changed and what drove the change? How gradual was?

For me the two big changes were when Larry took over from Eric and when Amit was fired for harassment.

Larry may have been good or bad leader, but he was just super serious and boring. Eric was amazing at trying to make us think in grand visions and be optimists, what is needed in tech.

With Sundar TGIFs were not about organizing Google to a common goal, it was much more like watching advertisements.

Big team meetings started to be anti-harassment training camps.

I started to not participate in any team events and just code, as the leaders stopped giving us real honest guideance.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#623

Post by vineyardmike »

shapefrog wrote: post #164
DrBazza wrote: post #110

Another multi-billion dollar company making billions of dollars of profit dumps thousands of staff on the streets. There are two approaches here. Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave. Given the sheer size of the company, a hiring freeze and attrition would gradually reduce the size of the workforce. I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if i…

> Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave 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 it last in first out or first in first out?

I have seen almost no one actually talk about who was impacted on these threads.

I was in Nest, and 7yrs tenure, except me, and many were staff.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#624

Post by foogazi »

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…

> If your visa is attached to your job, you are pretty much fucked.

Everyone on a visa knows this - it’s part of the gamble on immigration

You take the risk hoping for a payoff. If it doesn’t work out you try again with FAANG on you resume

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#626

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

acdha wrote: post #577
bumby wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are your examples also examples of survivorship bias? I was reading in the WSJ how all tech seems to be paring back their moonshot programs. I think the Google example was a program cut that had $1B in revenue but $6B in costs. (forgive me if the exact numbers are wrong). It seems like prioritizing and cutting back on programs that lose money (despite being innovative or inspiring) is a natural consequence of economi…

There’s definitely some risk of that but I’d put it more at 2008: that’s when Google acquired DoubleClick, and the sea change away from building products which people wanted to use seemed to start a bit later when the ad focus had set in. It’s hard to think of something they’ve done since then which has been a popular success.

The Chromecast was pretty market defining, and they’ve made huge inroads in education if you count that as “popular”. Chrome was technically around in late 2008 but it took a while after that to reach its current dominance.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#627

Post by AYBABTME »

mabbo wrote: post #506
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 damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. I disagree. There's charts showing the proportion of commerce online vs offline and it slowly rises over time over the last 20 years. It's following a pretty stable trend. Until the end of 2021 or so, the data really really looked like there had been a 5-6 year jump ahead on the curve thanks to COVID-19. The question was never "is thi…

Agree with you that all in all those companies are still mostly bigger than they were pre-pandemic, and their business indeed get ahead a notch by the effect of the pandemic. And clearly now the dust settles and they're ahead, overall, but need to trim down headcount, because they're not as ahead as they could have been in an alternate universe. That's all fine, although it's not great for those fired.

I just can't stand the pretense "oh no we didn't know we over hired" like come on. We _all_ knew y'all were over hiring. Just cut the crap.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#628

Post by neel8986 »

marvin wrote: post #609
xiphias2 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there. The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things. Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system. Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't unders…

> The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things. Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?

Google's sole purpose now is to increase profit by > 15% till eternity. No innovative tech can give >15% growth in profit every year like a clockwork. So they attracted bunch of number pushers who kept on putting more and more ads in youtube and search. They started chasing Amazon or Apple in Cloud or Phone hardware. They became 100% competition focussed and completely ignored their strength. They completely forgot that they are sitting on the next goldmine like LLM. It baffles me the the company which invented Transformer and has the worlds largest index can not build something like ChatGPT. But that is not going increase their profit in the next quarterly earning.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#629

Post by unholiness »

Possibly naive question:

Everyone's talking about how these companies are preparing for a global recession. But it's striking how specific to large tech companies. Is it possible these companies are just seeing the new remote-first paradigm as an opportunity to replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers?

Obvious this is absurdly difficult, but it's likely more realistic now than it's ever been before.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#630

Post by FlyingSnake »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #580
FlyingSnake wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is an old myth that is no longer relevant. Sure, it might happen, but many companies now fully understand "the disruption game" and know how to adjust, primarily through acquisitions. The only way to break this is with more muscular antitrust, which (at least for now) seems to be happening. For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the mos…

> Microsoft is famously still doing quite well

IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.

Every incumbent will be replaced eventually². What really matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo packet and kill products loved by users.

1: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GE:NYSE?window=MAX

2: https://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Post reply on HN