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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#801

Post by lazide »

tootie wrote: post #522
insane_dreamer wrote: post #438

This comment from a NYT opinion piece by former Slack CPO added some clarity as to one reason why tech companies are doing this: pressure from investors to keep the share price up. Public companies lose that freedom to do whatever they want even if they have tons of money in the bank. > Meta and Salesforce combined lost more than $700 billion in market cap last year. Both companies are now dealing with activist inves…

Meh. Saying this is a new "era" and the old ways are over is nonsense. We're entering what is likely a mild recessionary period with less flowing capital. It's a market correction. The "era" will last maybe 2 years. Then the upward trajectory will hit again and tech workers will get drone shuttles to work or something by 2030.

Didn’t work that way for the chip companies.

Those highly paid jobs pretty much just ceased to exist.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#802

Post by brightball »

bosch_mind wrote: post #763
brightball wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see. I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside s…

Google chat is the worst software I’ve ever used

When did you use it last?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#803

Post by bretpiatt »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #686
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…

> you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. "Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn't think "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months". It changed. I am now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the bandwagon and correcting." Now I don't actually have proof that…

Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their business, not in the day to day operations but in the value of the future cash flows vs. risk free rate.

Super simplifying, if risk free interest rate is 0% then you can value current cash flow the same as future ones. When you have 5% risk free in 14 years that new dollar is worth half of what it is today.

This has big impact on enterprise value for growing businesses.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#804

Post by neuronic »

sangnoir wrote: post #752
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.

Maybe this is confirmation bias since I have seen a multitude of blogs and threads popping up around this topic but I have clicked the "Page 2" button on Google multiple times this month. I don't think I have to add anything to make that an argument.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#805

Post by lazide »

skybrian wrote: post #691
insane_dreamer wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another comment on this: don't forget that no matter what these CEOs say about their workforce, we're family blah blah blah, they are first and foremost beholden to their shareholders. The very purpose of a capitalist corporation is to serve the interests of its shareholders, aka make more money; everything else is secondary.

This is called "shareholder primacy" and it's more of an ideology than an actual legal requirement. It's going to be true to the extent that the company leadership believes it's true, and a lot of different strategies could be justified as serving the shareholders in the long run. Matt Levine has written a few columns about how this works out in practice, or doesn't.

Unless the bylaws and structure are explicitly setup to be different, the shareholders elect the board, and the board appoints the corporate officers.

So any board that doesn’t get the shareholders what they want doesn’t last long.

And any corporate officers that don’t get the board what they want don’t last long either.

Of course, many opportunities for ‘capture’, owner/agent issues, market perception and ‘fog of war’, etc.

It’s an ideology for a reason, it’s the naive truth.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#806

Post by neuronic »

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…

But then youn cannot just do the same things again next time without admitting that you consciously repeated mistakes.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#807

Post by adamsb6 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #584
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…

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…

> 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.

This was a good 15% of what I used to do at Facebook. Adapting to the useless changes, that is, not making them.

It felt like if your changes weren't backwards incompatible then they were less visible, and therefore less impactful for your performance reviews. If you made them backwards incompatible you could boast about coordinating hundreds of engineers to transition to the new system. If the transition is seamless, all you have to brag about are improvements from the old system, and frequently there were none.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#808

Post by gniv »

herodoturtle wrote: post #16
laserlight wrote: post #8

Can we update the title to let everyone know of the size: 12000?

Out of a total of roughly 140,000 employees (according to Wikipedia as of 2021). So a tad less than 10% of their workforce. Just thought I'd add that for perspective.

The most reliable source of information is the latest earnings report [1], which says 187k as of end of Q3. I guess we'll see in a few days what the number was at the end of the year.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q3_alphabet_earnings...

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#809

Post by MuffinFlavored »

bretpiatt wrote: post #803
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. "Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn't think "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months". It changed. I am now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the bandwagon and correcting." Now I don't actually have proof that…

Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their business, not in the day to day operations but in the value of the future cash flows vs. risk free rate. Super simplifying, if risk free interest rate is 0% then you can value current cash flow the same as future ones. When you have 5% risk free in 14 years that new dollar is worth half of what it is today. This has big impact on enterprise value for growing busine…

> Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their business

Can you expand on how please?

Wouldn't this depend on Google (or other companies) actively financing things through debt with loans from banks?

Why would they need to do this if they have tons of cash on hand?

> Alphabet cash on hand for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $116.259B

If anything, can't they put that money somewhere and earn interest on it? Higher interest rates means they'll earn more on it.

How do they experience increased costs from interest rates if they aren't financing projects through debt? Or are they?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#810

Post by mbar84 »

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…

Gavin Belson taking full responsibility

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

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