191–200 of 339 posts
I'm being facetious here but this is in line with what I would expect from an organisation that continually reaches for automation over human interaction
crazy to see people with 15-20 year tenures hit in layoffs
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If the sector believes that it can do just as well with 10% fewer employees, I'm not sure if that's the same as collusion to suppress wages. Surly some greedy player would be saying "no, I can make more incremental revenue by hiring these people." The story that tech overhired during the pandemic makes more sense.
Then why wouldn't they simply lay off the new hires instead of company veterans?
I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…
The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label. The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negativ…
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First off, you know that "used an algorithm" in modern parlance means "was done by AI without human intervention". And based on that, absolutely I think Google did that. They run everything with data and statistics without humans. That's how they are so efficient. This is backed up by the fact that the managers who work there were simply told who they were losing and had no input into the process, and aren't even awa…
I’ve worked at Google for a long time and I assure you the chances of some AI being involved in the selection process for these layoffs is very close to zero. Don’t be so confident in something you apparently know so little about.
I know some people who used to be on the team. Given that they built analytics to automatically sort resumes, automatically identify retention risks, and automatically set salaries, it wouldn't surprise me that they had developed a system to determine layoffs.
Google isn't the only company that does it. It's not like it's unique to Google or anything. But yes, I absolutely believe that Google used an AI to determine the layoffs, at least to inform them if nothing else.
[0] https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/people-anal...
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Then why wouldn't they simply lay off the new hires instead of company veterans?
A new hire is expected to be an average employee in a year. A veteran might have a track record of being a below-average employee for several years.
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The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label. The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negativ…
maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back
It feels like the sensitivity to traffic is turned up way too high.
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Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target. Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mob…
Nah, Blackberry, ohsa, Nokia dominance, etc. were way more relevant to the markets than Windows Mobile (not really CE as CE is more relevant for embedded and tablet like verticals).
So in a sense they had a lot of the parts of the winning recipe. They just didn't have capacitive touchscreens. Or decent batteries. Or affordable flash memory. Or gorilla glass. Or an on-screen keyboard you could usefully use without a stylus. And mobile data was slow and very expensive.
The rest of the phone market, at the time, was off doing weird things like WAP.
Microsoft missed the market in the sense they weren't on the flight when it took off - but they didn't miss it, in the sense they were at the right departure gate hours before any of the other passengers.
Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs. It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an imp…
Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.
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I’ve worked at Google for a long time and I assure you the chances of some AI being involved in the selection process for these layoffs is very close to zero. Don’t be so confident in something you apparently know so little about.
What kind of tools do you think the people analytics team builds? [0] I know some people who used to be on the team. Given that they built analytics to automatically sort resumes, automatically identify retention risks, and automatically set salaries, it wouldn't surprise me that they had developed a system to determine layoffs. Google isn't the only company that does it. It's not like it's unique to Google or anythi…