Google to reduce workforce by 12k • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#741

Post by azinman2 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> 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…

In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself and more the web. It’s now just a low quality generated content minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it’s a race to the bottom with that stuff. It’ll only become worse as LLMs advance.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#742

Post by capitalsigma » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:11 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #30

I 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…

I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher performing team. I don't want to work with people who are here to coast.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#743

Post by tarsinge » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:11 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #598

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…

It's funny to me because this has been happening in tech a long time and is happening to the current giants. The old giants like IBM, GE, Motorola, etc. all suffered similar fates. And it's been discussed ad nauseum by disgruntled engineers who then go and make new companies/start ups to get away from the "suits". It's called "Takeover by MBA". You know it's happened when you start hearing phrases like "Cut costs", "…

What's fascinating is how long it took for this generation of giants for people to realise it's just the same big enterprise world again, just more shiny. Maybe it's because they revolutionised corporate marketing: Google was a symbol for my generation, a fun tech oriented company completely in rupture with what was before (i.e. wear a suit in a cubicle). The cycle is also complete with "modern" tech stacks starting to feel like enterprise framework at the time like JBoss/Hibernate/...

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#744

Post by rumblefrog » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

nmca wrote: post #732

rumblefrog wrote: post #586

In the dawn of rounds and rounds of layoffs in the tech sector. How would one advise a new CS BS graduate to tread? I've been told that young engineers are still in demand, and to look for opportunities in small startups, but seemingly out of the applications, merely no one has moved forward or replied back.

Do a PhD at ETH Zurich

I'm sorry I'm not familiar with ETH Zurich, is that a Switzerland thing? I reside in the US.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#745

Post by bastardoperator » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #99

This 'I take full responsibility' thing is getting really tiresome. Of course you take full responsibility, you're the f'ing CEO, and in case on account of this someone loses their house I'm sure you'll make good on it, because it's your responsibility, right?

It's the opposite of taking responsibility though, they're not displaying any actions that can be quantified as them actually being responsible. If a company is doing mass layoffs it's because the executives fucked up, not the employees. The lack of corporate/executive responsibility is off the charts. They make big mistakes and everyone except them pays. I wouldn't be surprised if the executive team have to vacation after this on the company dime and receive an extra bonus since they took "responsibility".

Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation. You would think people that command billions of dollars and tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI, they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#746

Post by throwawayway99 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #711

dzonga wrote: post #30

I 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…

Epic the games company??

The medical software company in Madison WI I think

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#747

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

jbirer wrote: post #700

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…

It's really unfair that the incompetent have so much power over the competent and block their potential.

Only if the competent let them.

You could argue that the whole point of something like Y Combinator is to back hungry competent founders over stagnant incompetent people working at behemoth companies.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#748

Post by ipaddr » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

thanhhaimai wrote: post #737

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> 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…

> but search seems worse every day. Search is a reflection of the internet. The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.

It is a reflection on how google views popularity over usefulness.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#749

Post by AdrianB1 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #656

> 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…

Since Google is no longer restricted by "don't be evil", overhiring to keep the best employees is a valid business plan. It is easier to overhire than to attract , interview and offer to better candidates and most companies are doing it. Quantity leads to quality, eventually.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#750

Post by nomel » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

clint wrote: post #710

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> 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.

At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare:

"how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work"

bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+press...

google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors...

I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.