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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

#91

Post by komali2 »

idlewords wrote: post #69
revskill wrote: post #49

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. "

I feel quite strongly about this. Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons).

Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hierarchy of "intelligence" should flatten, imo towards people being more knowledgeable. Not like you need to take away people's Harvard PHDs to make sure every American has what they need to at least graduate highschool, or, you know, be able to read.

I don't necessarily agree that greater education leads to greater invulnerability to ads and the modern poisons in our society: most of my friends are smarter than me by many measures, and yet as far as I know I'm the only one not at least mildly addicted to Instagram and co., despite all of us often having conversations where we all seem to agree that that shits bad for you. Nah it takes something other than knowledge / educational privilege, i don't know what specifically, but something else.

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

#92

Post by fzeroracer »

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,…

And below you in the IT sewer are the poor and forsaken, who look upon your work and statements and call you equally privileged while you post on a startup forum started by some of the wealthiest individuals around. You are equally out of touch and yet unable to see this as you look upwards and claim no, it is them that are out of touch.

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

#93

Post by lmm »

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,…

Crab bucket mentality right there.

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

#94

Post by komali2 »

fatih-erikli wrote: post #74
nwiswell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Wait, how is that different from any other s Corp in a country without layoff protections?

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

#95

Post by jacobsenscott »

civilized wrote: post #39

> Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders. This is a myth. Lynn Stout argued against the relevance of Dodge v. Ford (1919) in this article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744 This misstep kind of undermines the rest of the piece, which now reads like a superficial just-so story in t…

Myth or not - mass terminations don't maximize profits anyway. In fact it is impossible to predict what will maximize or reduce profits beyond some trivial scenarios. Imagine if you could - every company would be nearly infinitely profitable. So they can do anything under the guise of "maximizing profits" and nobody can challenge it because there is no objective measure for it.

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

#96

Post by int_19h »

fatih-erikli wrote: post #74
nwiswell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Most of US has at-will employment, so how is it different from everybody else?

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

#97

Post by bfung »

themitigating wrote: post #18
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…

"but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and ves" Is that a fact or just your perception?

Living and working in tech in Bay Area 2010-2020, rest & vest google perception started circa 2013-2014.

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

#98

Post by girvo »

hsn915 wrote: post #40
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,…

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

It’s privilege all the way down in our industry, after all

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

#99

Post by girvo »

fzeroracer wrote: post #92
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,…

And below you in the IT sewer are the poor and forsaken, who look upon your work and statements and call you equally privileged while you post on a startup forum started by some of the wealthiest individuals around. You are equally out of touch and yet unable to see this as you look upwards and claim no, it is them that are out of touch.

None of that really disagrees with the commenters point though. They might indeed be privileged and out of touch (nearly guaranteed in fact), but that does not mean Googlers aren’t even more so.

Not that I particularly mind either way: we are all a privileged lot in the tech world. Myself absolutely included!

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

#100

Post by komali2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #85
komali2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate these people aren't your enemy no matter how much you think they make compared to you. You think it was only blue haired 300k social media managers that got layed off or something? There's sand pounding IT guys there that got layed off too, I know for a fact cause some are my friends. Yeah it was a Google job so it was lux but they were running fiber and getting called in at 2am cause some clueless executive's e…

> larger shareholders who contribute nothing They contributed investment capital to the company.

But what labor did they contribute? Follow the chain and at most what they did was buy someone else's labor and attach it to the Google brand (through having more cash for hiring), there's other ways to do that though, like loans, or structuring as a co-op so all employees are simply the only shareholders.
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