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What is Google doing with its open source teams?

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Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#111

Post by bbor »

downrightmike wrote: post #93
bbor wrote: post #36

As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…

It is a Capital Revolt. Workers were getting too comfortable, and now Money is teaching them a lesson

Thank you for this comment; this is exactly my opinion but expressed much more clearly.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#112

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bbor wrote: post #36

As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…

I left Google last year (after 10 years), and, yeah, I mostly agree. It's especially dubious that these layoffs happened right in sequence after "everybody else" was doing it. It leaves the whole tech sector vulnerable and all of us in a worse bargaining position. It's a way of enforcing labour discipline into our sector.

Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.

I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or seem like they will do.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#113

Post by vineyardmike »

phpisthebest wrote: post #61
mike_d wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...

That is based on huge assumptions, and it is unclear how the internal billing works (i.e is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening). Is the AWS Revenue just from external customers using the services.

> is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening

AWS bills Amazon an internal rate. It’s a closely held secret that few employees know but supposedly it’s better than at-cost.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#114

Post by cmrdporcupine »

sombragris wrote: post #86
bbor wrote: post #36

As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…

Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters. AT&T and whatever company inherited the Bell Labs might have done rounds after rounds of layoffs but never fired Dennis Ritchie, for example. People such as DiBona and Allison are assets to any company who can afford to hire them. This is simply unexplainable.

Because that in particular will freak everyone else in the company out, and .. most importantly... Google is no longer scared about those people going to their competition, because their competition is also flushing talent away. In the past, Google was willing to dump all sorts of cash into talent as long as it kept people from creating a truly competitive landscape. Now, they don't have to worry as much.

The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#115

Post by scarface74 »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #58
bbor wrote: post #36

As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…

There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These layoffs show that this is not true. Google is a large corporation, like many others. There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reel…

> There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These

Few people think Google is special in 2023. They just pay well.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#116

Post by garganzol »

> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.

At the hands of Google, open source is just a weapon of the complement commoditization. So no wonder they are letting those people go now. In this way, they are trying to lower the antimonopoly pressure against them. The second benefit is preserving all those money that would go to the salaries of those fired people.

I doubt this will change the trajectory of accusations. But it gives some momentum in terms of reaping the peak monetary benefits to shareholders before a possible company division through legislation.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#117

Post by vineyardmike »

jeffbee wrote: post #101
ethbr0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.

That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.

It does if Google can double their footprint. They announced reduced profitability recently in part due to capex for data centers.

Last year google started warning some internal teams that they had to limit usage. It’s possible they’re running out of compute.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#118

Post by HideousKojima »

sombragris wrote: post #100
dgacmu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small. Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourc…

And what about Fuchsia? The primary value I see for it is that it looks like the un-Linux, especially in the license space. Google really hates copyleft and the GPL.

I mean if Fuchsia ever starts getting used for production at some point by anyone, anywhere. Seems like more of a way to do systems research by Google than something designed for real world use.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#119

Post by Sunspark »

klodolph wrote: post #92
mike_d wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

IMO it makes perfect sense for Google to be in cloud. Cloud infrastructure services are a race to the bottom—storage, compute, etc. You get people into your ecosystem and upsell them on SaaS offerings that integrate with your IaaS offerings. You have to be able to scale without growing staff linearly, which is already Google’s model (although Apple and Amazon are better at it). Google’s main problem IMO is the lack o…

Google doesn't have the ability to speak with a customer at ALL. If there is a problem, basically the only recourse you have is to flail about on HN, Reddit or Twitter and hope that you are noticed by a random Google employee who feels sympathy for your plight and decides to try and help you.

The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only.

This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support.

I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#120

Post by gretch »

jedberg wrote: post #67

> It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm. It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem. Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer s…

The definition of algorithm is:

> a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

So yeah, I would hope that an algorithm was used. As opposed to what? "I like that guy more than the other guy".

You seem to have the interpretation that some guy in finance wrote a script, it output some employee IDs, and then no one checked the output before laying them all off, as if slaves to the machine. Do you really believe that?

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