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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

#71

The market for talent is quite competitive. Companies need to pay market rates and have a staff that's large enough to compete. In a market where capital is cheap they will bid up rates and hire more people. If you don't do this you give your competitors a chance to beat you. Companies might be able to slow it down a little bit, but not entirely. Similarly in a market where capital is expensive they need to reduce th…

> The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up

You can certainly get health insurance without being tied to employment. Without COBRA or any other workarounds. Has everone forgotten Obamacare? (Single payer would be nicer though.)

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

#74
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like employed by google means being unemployed if they are going to be laid off whenever the managers want. So I don't want to work in Google

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

#75
post #52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observing super priviliged people whining about how unfair it is to get laid off is really something.

There's nothing "privileged" about working at Google. It's a job, like anything else in tech.

Given median comp at Google, working at Google is quite privileged.

Going to Stanford is likewise privileged.

Being privileged isn't an insult, just a recognition of fact.

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

#76

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,…

[deleted]

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

#77

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.

And literally all of them are not from the past decade.

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

#78
Everyone keeps complaining about being locked out of systems with just an email. Seriously, why do you care about this? You don't work there anymore: say goodbye to your friends over text message or email. The reason from the employer's side is obvious: knowledgeable, angry people with access to sensitive systems can wreak a lot of havoc. So take your severance and get out! Locking people out of systems is not a new practice and the outraged indignation I'm seeing on LinkedIn--Xooglers calling the practice "inhuman" and "abusive"--are just incredibly entitled and naive. No one in any other profession is getting the level of severance that these people are getting in a layoff; you are a highly paid professional with Google on your resume and you're going to be just fine.

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

#79

As people get more intelligent and smarter, the Ad business will die. I'm sure about it. In my whole life, there's no single ad that makes sense for me to see and click, because it's annoying. I love smart search results, not smart ad results.

There's a good HL Mencken quote about the likelihood of people getting collectively smarter: "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "

That's why i said "as people get smarter", it's for the great mass of plain people.

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

#80
post #36

The market for talent is quite competitive. Companies need to pay market rates and have a staff that's large enough to compete. In a market where capital is cheap they will bid up rates and hire more people. If you don't do this you give your competitors a chance to beat you. Companies might be able to slow it down a little bit, but not entirely. Similarly in a market where capital is expensive they need to reduce th…

> The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up True but COBRA coverage lets you pay to stay on your job-based health insurance (cheaper) for a limited time after your job ends (usually 18 months). https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...

In my experience, COBRA is not cheaper, because you end up paying the company's part, as well as your own, and you suddenly realize how much of the load they carried.

I live in a state with a pretty damn good Obamacare implementation, and I'm quite grateful.

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