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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

#101

Post by analyst74 »

abadger9 wrote: post #44

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…

I have a very similar observation.

My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.

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

#102

Post by mc32 »

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?

That's what people there tell me. I'm sure it depends a lot on what part of Google people work for, but yeah, come in late, leave early, long lunches, work-outs, meetings to discuss meetings... I don't know how they got things done. In plenty of companies things that took a team of seven with a manager could be accomplished by two. So, yeah, the reputation has some known basis but may not reflect all of Google.

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

#103

Post by nerdponx »

paxys wrote: post #89
mediaman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that logic everyone in the world is privileged compared to those earning 5% less than them, including every person here complaining about a Google employee's privilege. So what does that word mean exactly?

Yes

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

#104

Post by civilized »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #95
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.

Stout's article and follow-up book The Shareholder Value Myth both make much the same argument. She thinks people want to have a simple picture of the "purpose" of a corporation, and lean on this idea of shareholder value maximization as a crutch. In reality, a corporation is just another chaotic political body with different voting rules.

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

#106

Post by nerdponx »

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.

Google is an outlier in that the employees (in some departments) can begin to approach the wealth of the large investors. In most companies, the shareholders are rewarded far and away beyond what employees are rewarded with, even though their opportunity costs are generally lower (even if they theoretically risked large nominal amounts in their investments). The assertion is that investors generally tend to be rewarded disproportionately to their value contributed.

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

#107

Post by gretch »

mediaman wrote: post #75
paxys wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> just a recognition of fact

It's literally not a fact, it's an opinion.

Hey what's your job? You don't need to tell me. But I'm gonna go ahead and say you're privileged compared to a rural chinese farmer that has never held a phone.

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

#108

Post by vore »

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.

Yeah, but this is literally a rich-get-richer kind of thing. Labor doesn't have that privilege.

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

#109

Post by revskill »

meltyness wrote: post #86
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.

You think the 12-15 course hours you took in OOP languages was some sort of purely academic pursuit? Marketers probably have a similar view, and lo and behold you're both looking through the same lens, namely, Google and The Current Forces Shaping The Ad Market. Advertising is a useful and symbiotic relationship, but may best be disintermediated... so to speak.

An ad is useful to me as soon as they told both good and bad things about their products. But in reality , it's not. It's almost the same as lie, until you fall into the traps.

Don't believe me ? Just try them until you find out bad things by yourself.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

bfung wrote: post #97
themitigating wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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