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The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

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Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#41

Post by bikeshaving »

kerblang wrote: post #20

You work for google because you make insane money and have cachet you can take anywhere and get hired instantly. Hell, you can pull in 10 million funding for your startup idea if you like. Or just retire, get a boat, go sailing. Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already. I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no,…

How many rats would you say you fight in a typical fiscal year, if you don’t mind me asking?

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#42

Post by CydeWeys »

logicalmonster wrote: post #11

Is there any publicly available commentary on what kinds of roles these big tech companies such as Google were chopping, and in what percentages? Were these layoffs mostly recruiting/HR types, various managers, marketers, etc, or programmers? Did they chop 70% of their recruiting/HR types, but closer to 1% of their techies, or vice versa? Analyzing these layoffs IMO might be best done through the lens of what kind of…

Pay attention to the upcoming earnings call on Feb 2. I bet they'll talk about some of these details. Until then, saying anything would be, I suspect, materially significant non-public information.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#43

Post by syspec »

kerblang wrote: post #20

You work for google because you make insane money and have cachet you can take anywhere and get hired instantly. Hell, you can pull in 10 million funding for your startup idea if you like. Or just retire, get a boat, go sailing. Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already. I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no,…

Worth noting that many of the people let go were not your 300K/year engineers.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#44

Post by abadger9 »

I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and not mess it up and maybe grow it by x%. Most engineering leadership above the staff level is usually better at "aligning" with upper management and that's why they're kept around.

The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#45

Post by berkle4455 »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #26
berkle4455 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past decade, Google paid massive salaries to people building one failed bet after another, while Search and Youtube Ad revenue continued to grow and literally nothing else matters.

Maps, android and its ecosystem (play store, etc.), cloud, nest, gmail & google docs. All those have a significant market.

Cloud has a significant market yes and is losing money. The Uber strategy of pay $1 to earn $0.90 is not sustainable.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#46

Post by bfeynman »

epicureanideal wrote: post #9
fatih-erikli wrote: post #5

Who wants to work in Google anyway?

No kidding. When I see FAANG on a resume I read: grinds leetcode, comfortable jumping through mindless hoops, comfortable with extreme amounts of bureaucracy as long as they’re being paid, etc. I’d generally prefer someone from a technically sound venture funded startup.

I too go to dinner and expect to pay with the pearl I find in my oyster. FAANG are relatively merit based jobs that pays exceptionally above band and a lot of people try to get into them. The jobs are scarce, sure there is more talent, but you basically are getting insurance on candidate quality.. Saying I'd rather hire someone who comes from something much more statistically unlikely and even harder to do due diligence.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#47

Post by fnfjfk »

paxys wrote: post #33
fnfjfk wrote: post #12

I understand that layoffs are a blunt instrument and it is unlikely that all of the “right” people were affected, but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and vest. No Facebook PSC, no Amazon stack ranking, no Netflix “sports team”. Obviously it is team dependent, but it really has that reputation. The well-known tradeoff is that getting a promo to a post-senior level is borde…

Google had that reputation when compared to Amazon and Facebook, but that is hardly a bad thing considering the culture at those companies (and it's not like they are doing too hot right now either despite all that stack ranking and overwork). There are plenty of large tech companies with real "retirement home" reputations – Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, VMware, Adobe, Intel, HP, Dell... There's no comparison betwee…

Are places like HP and Dell really comparable to Google on TC?

You can also chill out working at a quiet local bookstore or other “BaristaFIRE” jobs that people like, but you’re not getting paid $500k to do it…

(Microsoft definitely competes now)

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#48

Post by nwiswell »

zaphar wrote: post #21
epicureanideal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding. When I see FAANG on a resume I read: grinds leetcode, comfortable jumping through mindless hoops, comfortable with extreme amounts of bureaucracy as long as they’re being paid, etc. I’d generally prefer someone from a technically sound venture funded startup.

I worked at Google for 7 years, admittedly a decade ago. We didn't grind leetcode, We didn't jump through mindless hoops, and we had almost 0 bureaucracy. So for at least that letter in the acronym it was nothing like you describe.

> admittedly a decade ago

In 2011 Google had 32,467 employees.

In 2021 Google had 156,500 employees.

It is simply not the same organization as it was when you worked there. The 2011 employees account for at most 10% of the workforce today once attrition is taken into account.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#50

Post by paxys »

fnfjfk wrote: post #47
paxys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had that reputation when compared to Amazon and Facebook, but that is hardly a bad thing considering the culture at those companies (and it's not like they are doing too hot right now either despite all that stack ranking and overwork). There are plenty of large tech companies with real "retirement home" reputations – Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, VMware, Adobe, Intel, HP, Dell... There's no comparison betwee…

Are places like HP and Dell really comparable to Google on TC? You can also chill out working at a quiet local bookstore or other “BaristaFIRE” jobs that people like, but you’re not getting paid $500k to do it… (Microsoft definitely competes now)

There's probably a significant difference when you factor in stock appreciation (particularly for the long timers), but I'd wager base salary stays within 10-20% at all these companies for the same level/experience/location.
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