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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#901

Post by eightysixfour »

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…

This isn't a service outage; it was investment that no longer make sense in the new fiscal environment. Google's revenue went from $38.3b (Q2FY20) to $69b (Q3FY22), are you suggesting they should not have hired during that kind of growth?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#902

Post by acituan »

jedberg wrote: post #835
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…

From the point of view of a CEO of a public company, no post-mortem is necessary because nothing went wrong. Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. Grow when money is cheap, stabilize when it's not. If you don't do that, then you'll get out-competed by the companies that are doing that.

> Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure.

If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case. From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack")

This is both a wage depression maneuver, and a meager 4$ bump in stock price. I'd bet my money it is a hail mary to prevent the CEO being outed in a few quarters.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#903

Post by moultano »

bobinux wrote: post #840
michaelgrosner2 wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I used to get the best information, websites, media material that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one sp…

Send me your queries to debug if you remember them.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#904

Post by hintymad »

Did anyone notice the trend of dilution of candidate quality along with inflation of titles in the past few years? NLP engineers who could mention BERT but nothing else? Recommender experts who couldn't articulate the landscape of recommendation algorithms or their approach of selecting algorithms? Distributed engineers who could draw a few boxes yet couldn't explain or use any single concept in distributed systems? Tech lead who could barely recommend a concrete solution, let alone offering detailed analysis of pros and cons?

A reset in the industry seems a good thing for the health of this sector.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#905

Post by crdrost »

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…

I made it my goal to get to Google several years back precisely because of stories like these about the Google of 2005 and whatever, Bock’s “Work Rules!” and all that. And I made it! And now I have lost it, I am part of the unfortunate 6%.

The old-timers I knew there must be shocked. They all said “that's just not what we do” when this was rumored months ago. “If those conversations are happening, I haven't heard about it, my managers haven't either.”

The culture that hired them told them both explicitly and implicitly “we did not hire you to do a job, we hired you because you are smart and effective, we trust that you will hate boredom and use your grit to make hard things happen and do the best work of your life.”

The reality from my little spot inside Google Cloud was much more sobering. In my first performance review I was making my bosses happy but not pleasing some faceless committee so the rating came as a shock to both of us. We worked our way out of that pit and then all our incoming headcount was cancelled because Sundar demanded we “sharpen focus,” and so we had to cancel a bunch of planned growth tasks and work on tech debt cleanup and security features, which are less sexy but keep the lights running.

The kicker is, just yesterday I was talking to the team about an experiment for a better way to improve our work, I was helping our new team lead onboard, AND I put out some new code for review that would solve a major pain point. So like I was “in the zone” today, I was legit ready to create a ton of business value. And like last night I woke up hearing the work laptop reboot in the other room and thought “that was weird” but did not give it much more thought, and then today I go to quickly skim HN, “all right let's kick some a... ... ... The affected have already gotten an email, I didn't get an email, I am safe right? ... I also didn't get the emails that we're over some quota, but maybe Kate or Martin fixed that ...? Okay work phone isn't helping, let's check the work laptop....”

Amazingly bad. Just have my manager tell the group, let us all cry together... Not like this.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#906

Post by ssnistfajen »

woeirua wrote: post #846
tootie wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remind me, what happened after the DotCom bubble imploded?

The companies that had real objectives instead of pure speculation went on to become multibillion dollar companies?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#908

Post by hbrn »

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…

> most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes

I think that's an accepted fact of life. I don't expect big companies to be fast and make good decisions.

But I do expect people not to be hypocrites.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#909

Post by Matticus_Rex »

acituan wrote: post #902
jedberg wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point of view of a CEO of a public company, no post-mortem is necessary because nothing went wrong. Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. Grow when money is cheap, stabilize when it's not. If you don't do that, then you'll get out-competed by the companies that are doing that.

> Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case. From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack") This is both a wage depression maneuver, and a meager 4$ bump in stock price. I'd bet my money it…

> If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case.

That doesn't follow. What you hire for at one time because you think it's profitable to do so is not necessarily related to who you let go at a later time because you think it's profitable to do so. Market conditions and other factors have changed in the mean time.

> From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack")

And it shouldn't. Who it makes sense to let go of has a number of factors, not just performance. Even software developers are not a homogeneous resource, and ROI on an employee is not just about performance.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#910

Post by kccqzy »

DrBazza wrote: post #419
whiplash451 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The cost saving is much (much) faster with layoffs 2. You don't lose (or get rid of, for that matter) the same people when you do layoffs vs organic attrition On (2), I don't only mean "good" vs "not good" people, but also distribution per department.

No, but you can give zero bonus, zero payrise, and negative annual review as a clear indication that you're not wanted. In fact, don't many of the Megacorp companies have a 'cull the bottom 10% annually' policy anyway?

There is a difference between culling low performers and culling high performers in an org or team that's no longer wanted.

Most layoffs don't just fire low performers. They fire people working on products that turn out to have no future.

I find this especially sad. An individual through no fault of their own could be easily laid off just because of being on the wrong team. In contrast an individual performing unsatisfactorily could not easily be fired (i.e. for cause).

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