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

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#751

Post by twelve40 »

pembrook wrote: post #58

A 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…

I think throughout their existence they tried hard to be more than that. If they settled to be just an advertising business, then easy, you become an equivalent of Lamar Advertising, you post an equivalent of billboards for over a hundred years, perhaps run a few servers and settle for that. An advertising company doesn't need to try to break into cloud computing business and do all these things that Google is actually trying to do (whatever the degree of success).

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#752

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> Does he really believe this?

I believe it: the Google of 2008 would have been completely buried by the flood of ChatGPT-generated bullshit SEO spam. What they have today is the best version of Google to date, so it's still floating, not just as high as it once was in less adversarial times.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#753

Post by ipaddr »

justin_oaks wrote: post #738
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…

Yup, the "I take full responsibility" reminds me of people I know who cause me grief and say "Sorry" with no intent of making any changes. How sorry can you be if you don't intend on avoiding it in the future?

Wouldn't full responsibility be paying for these people's salaries over the last 2 years and finding new work for all 12,000 people yourself?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#754

Post by wishfish »

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 one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name and services which will provide some customer support if there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small price vs. Google's free.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#755

Post by threadweaver34 »

gcr wrote: post #604
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…

This guy! Imagine thinking “diversity programs” are a significant cost center, as if their spend were comparable to real estate or employee compensation

Diversity programs are best viewed as a relatively cheap marketing expense. They exist to make the company look better to certain people. When there are more pressing concerns, you pare them back because you have better things to worry about that what non-customers think of you.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#756

Post by simonswords82 »

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…

> and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's so that engineers are less inclined to go home and build their own competitor.

This is most definitely not true.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#757

Post by acituan »

suddenexample wrote: post #730
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…

Poetic but misguided. The Google of 2005 didn't have so much fat to trim. When you have 150k employees, there's no escaping it. Not everyone is going to be hungry, and certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better. Many are happy to collect their paycheck while doing 20 hours of unambitious work per week.

Now the remainder will do 50 hours of "ambitious" work for projects that will eventually get axed, redone, reorganized etc.

It was never a raw productivity per hour problem, it was an organizing productivity behind meaningful, useful and profitable projects problem.

> certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better

in an organizational complexity of 150k -> 138k workforce, no one is in a position to make things 10x better, let alone 100x. Shedding 12k is a scapegoating gesture as if there is such a possibility, merely to ease the anxiety of the market price of shares. It doesn't even directly move the needle for profit/asset ratio, but it will help depressing wages with the theatre of "look what we had to do".

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#758

Post by justin_oaks »

ipaddr wrote: post #753
justin_oaks wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, the "I take full responsibility" reminds me of people I know who cause me grief and say "Sorry" with no intent of making any changes. How sorry can you be if you don't intend on avoiding it in the future?

Wouldn't full responsibility be paying for these people's salaries over the last 2 years and finding new work for all 12,000 people yourself?

Exactly. "Full responsibility" with no particular consequences is meaningless.

Or perhaps he could take a paycut as a proportion of people fired. It's not the same, but it's a step in the right direction.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#759

Post by _ea1k »

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…

Its weird because there was a time when I would have agreed with him. "Google Now" launched years ago and did an amazing job of predicting things. The little four icon thing in their launcher used to almost always have the app that I wanted at the top.

Now, "Google Now" doesn't exist and the launcher rarely predicts an app that I'm wanting to use next.

Search has regressed too. Google Finance and other web properties are maybe about the same, at best.

And these are just a few of the less obvious problems.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#760

Post by 98codes »

int0x2e wrote: post #697
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…

I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes. Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit: 1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn't have to lose anyone. 2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire a…

The fact that even with all that I can't tell which tech giant you're talking about feels like a strong signal of the problem you described.
Post reply on HN