231–240 of 339 posts
It will be interesting to see amazing talent leave Google and build new companies and institutions now that it’s slowly being mismanaged to death.
This can only happen with funding. Is this available lately?
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…
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
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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…
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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 layin…
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…
Managers were not informed because there are so many of them at Google that it would have leaked long before the process was over. The process was conducted manually by 750 directors and VPs.
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…
> If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned” How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
There's no story here beyond well-known people on the open source team getting laid off and botching the layoffs with people learning their badges don't work. One is a valid strategic decision, the other is sloppy, neither is evil, or even all that interesting.
Of course badges stop working when you're let go. What possible good can come of leaving the badges on? All it takes is one in 12000 disgruntled ex-employees to make it not worth it.
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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…
are you suggesting that they are intentionally scaring their staff in order to increase productivity? What management school is this thesis from?
Have you forgotten this is the same company that had a backroom non-poaching pact with Apple (and probably other SV firms) a decade ago? And got caught red handed and got in a shitload of trouble for it?
When I joined Google in 2011 they were still dealing the fallout from that.
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I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance". Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a…
> "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance". Do you actually believe this to be the case? Why on Earth would Google do this? You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews, so at best this is just a hunch you have. Ask yourself if it's a hunch that makes sense. Sundar is never going to actively cast shade on the people he j…
I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by the layoffs, while people who were high performers in the current and/or prior cycles were impacted by the layoffs. The experiences of other people managers within the company (and at Amazon and Microsoft) agree with this.
I don't want to get too into Kremlinology, because I don't have enough data to say for sure how people in my org were selected beyond "performance wasn't a major consideration". But there is definite high-level tilt towards cutting people from certain areas in the company (parts of maps and devices were hit hard, most of cloud was barely impacted).
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Random layoffs that affect high performers and low performers equally doesn't encourage performing higher. If anything it encourages performing lower because why bother if it's not going to even save your job?
It might not be so much about encouraging performance as encouraging compliance.