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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#791

Post by Nifty3929 »

nullhash wrote: post #591
ako wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is overhiring really a problem, would the world be better if companies didn’t overhire? Then many of the people now laid off wouldn’t have had a job in the first place. If you accept a job for what it is, a temporary need for your help, and plan for what’s next, a period of layoffs should become manageable.

Consider my situation. I passed my Google interview in October for New Grad 2023 and was told that my starting date would be April. Now I’m most likely not going to be hired and need to restart my job search and this will have derailed my entire plans for the first few months of this year. I won’t see a cent.

OTOH, you've learned an important lesson early: You aren't hired until your first day of work. The job search never stops and never ends, until you're really ready to stop working.

Next time when someone agrees to hire you in the hypothetical future, you will keep looking and interviewing, at least until you have accepted a formal offer from someone.

(I'm assuming here that they didn't give you an actual, formal offer even if they did tell you about a starting date)

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#792

Post by michaelgrosner2 »

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 literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in.

OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#793

Post by red-iron-pine »

ok123456 wrote: post #771
sangnoir wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Really? Often, the top links are AI generated spam that, while somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, sounds like it was written by a high school student trying to pad the word count for a few pages.

esp. for anything relatively technical. the pages look like they copied and pasted someone else's documentation together.

at this point it's almost always ignore the first 3 hits and go straight to stackoverflow or reddit, or something that's plainly obviously related like python.org documentation.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#794

Post by nvrspyx »

deadmutex wrote: post #777
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? Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc. and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.

Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience. Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor.

No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#795

Post by KingFelix »

ra7 wrote: post #638

Larry and Sergey used to proudly boast that they are not a “conventional company”. In fact, this quote is still in Alphabet’s home page: > As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Google looks more and more like a conventional big company with moves like this. They’ve become really boring in the last 5-6 years.

and visiting the house they built at CES, super boring! The mirror showcasing a very lame feature (when you get close to a speaker it notifies you and asks if you want to connect to it) was much more interesting. So boring, I know they have a google announcement day, but wow, so uninspiring.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#796

Post by ROTMetro »

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…

But people that know that industry segment don't want to work at Epic ;) So crappy employer/crappy industry based on government rent seeking not product quality/crappy pay/crappy location = no thanks brother.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#797

Post by VLM »

pocket_cheese wrote: post #124
ak_111 wrote: post #4

Question for those who got laid-off from tech recently (say since Aug last year): how hard did you find it to get another tech job? Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited: https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-f... If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true…

I like to categorize jobs into 3 tiers. Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews. Tier 2: Great comp and medium level difficulty interviews. Tier 3: Companies that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes don't even have a coding interview! for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective. I've passed "high bar" technical…

Unironically where's this tier 3? I got leetcoded at an interview for what I thought was a sane employer when trying for what amounted to a K8S position. Not developing K8S but setting up a rather elaborate database system on it, LOL.

I was all wondering what they're going to ask questions about optimization strategies WRT their business requirements and instead they roll up with "lets reverse a string in python". Wait what? This isn't a programming position as per the job req?

I think some of the lower tier companies get the idea that they should copy what Google was doing a decade ago, regardless if it makes sense or not.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#798

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#799

Post by fooker »

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", "…

The conjoined triangles of Success!!

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#800

Post by adamsb6 »

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's happening more and more often that the first result doesn't even include all the words in my fairly short queries.

I'm thankful they have a warning on the result so that I don't waste my time.

They're also extremely liberal with synonyms. For example, yesterday I searched for "linear cohort survival model." The first result has bolded "general linear transformation model." I can't even tell what "general" and "transformational" are mapping to in my query.

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