> To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today
I will never tire of reading phrasing/euphemisms like these. Language can be so beautiful even when its something bad.
Google to reduce workforce by 12k
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#702I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not market dynamics. companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent. now it's a war on talent. and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits…
You should check out this guy called Marx, he wrote a couple books about how labor is always disadvantaged in such a system because their power ebbs and flows with the fluctuations of the market. The main check that labor has on this power is to bargain collectively. Seems tech missed that opportunity five years ago when it was top of mind but many people felt things are good why would we need a union.
The LVT is incoherent when applied to tech work.
We don't exploit electrons.
Boom bust cycles don't end up with contradictions that capitalism can't resolve, it just makes capitalism stronger.
The absolute law of general accumulation doesn't exist either. As tech gets better, unemployment trends down.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall also doesn't exist. Economists have a name for the law that says the tendency for the rate of profit rises over time.
So why should I trust Marxism when at least 4 of his giant predictions are empirically wrong after hundreds of years? Scientific socialism implies that we should have seen successful communist states by now. Zero of them are successful.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#703A lot of people seem to be chalking this one up in the “memetic imitation among tech execs” column. However, in the case of Google, I’m not so sure. Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is extremely sensitive to changes in the economy (Companies cut ad spending when there isn’t as much demand to soak up). In the last recession Google was still rapidly stealing ad share from old media, but now th…
It’s memetic because google is insanely profitable.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#704Every 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…
Can you cite you or anyone making specific claims in 2020 or 2021 that the online growth rates are temporary and not a shift? I was skeptical until mid 2021 when everything in person was opening again, but the shift to online frenzy wasn't slowing. I knew there would be some backsliding, but I thought there was a permanent shift for some people who realized online ordering, online activity is just easier. Some areas…
Can't really cite, because I consume a lot of material but don't take notes.
I think if you picture yourself as a population of 1000. Y'all are someone who hasn't used technology X before because you haven't yet had to, and suddenly you're encouraged to do so. The probability that you will do so now, instead of in X period of time, has increased. It's not going to happen all at once, but over some time, which means the adoption rate will compound. But like any adoption curve, some of y'all 1000 will churn, depending on how useful the technology proves out in the long term. What's the average lifetime before a user churn? You can guess for yourself, how quickly do you get bored with most of your new toys? Some toys stick around because you find them drastically better, some others you start ignoring.
So it's not that the online growth rate was temporary, but that it's (sorta) obvious that it was going to recede from it's peak. Like Pokemon Go, which is still popular but nowhere near as it was near day one.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#705The 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.
> fat trimming exercise
The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively difficult interview process has "fat"? How?
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#706Every 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…
You must be rich from being able to predict the future so well.
I did in fact make good money from these broad predictable things. Like these big corps did. And probably a ton of people.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#707> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…
> When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you’d expect at the very least a post-mortem.
Yeah, this isn’t an “incident”, this is capitalism working as designed. The pro-forma taking of responsibility is just part of the ritual that labor, management, and capital all know is fake of pretending otherwise. If you don’t want to work at a firm that overhires when the winds are even vaguely positive and overfires when the winds blow the other way, form a labor coop; otherwise, you are a resource to which “cattle, not pets” applies just as much as to one-of-many VM in the cloud.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#708The 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…
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.
This seems to be inevitable anywhere. In the social games, biz types beat the nerds.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#709Earlier 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…
The best won't leave Microsoft because up until now it was known for "rest and vest" and for being the tech workers retirement home.
Being bored is a perk of many jobs.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#710> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry. > Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever. Does he really believe this? Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day. I worry about using google products for anything essential d…
I would say you are an extreme outlier. Most people use all these Google products with no problems nor do they seem to share your fears.