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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…
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My observation is that this has already been happening for a long time. I’ve worked with a lot of ex Google people in startups, especially more established ones. They pretty much all found it unsatisfying working there. Too slow. Too little impact. Maybe the layoffs will be a kick in the pants for others too, but they won’t be the first or alone in moving in that direction.
How much impact do you expect to have at a company the size of Google?
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This ratio is key. Impact/pay. And from what I gathered working there until 2020, impact was starting to weigh more on how you elevate others around you. Meaning leadership. These “stars” might have personal brand power, but if they are collecting big pay and even working “hard” it might not be enough
IME, having worked with "tech celebrities", the veneer they can work so hard on maintaining isn't exactly reflective of actually working with them. I worked with one particularly famous person, who barely did anything internally, and spent all their time on external conferences and talks to preserve their external reputation - mostly coasting on past accomplishments. Not saying that's what happened here, but public v…
I know both Chris and Jeremy well and I wouldn't imagine either of them trying to "maintain a veneer"
I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does. And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.
I remember him from The Screensavers as a teenager!
Thanks for watching!
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> "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…
> You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews 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 a…
My own anecdata confirms that /only/ low performers or people working on projects that should never have existed to begin with were let go.
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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…
Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team. Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose? No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't havin…
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
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I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.
Apple didn't write an OS from scratch either. iOS was really a fork of OS X, and followed on the experience Apple & NeXT had in porting NeXTstep around various architectures. Something that MS also had a lot of experience with, with NT. Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius. With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their O…
I would think that such senior guys with so much experience will find it easy to find new jobs. (Unless they demand to work on only open-source software then it may take a bit longer) Still: IBM/RedHat should hire right?
> For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google's OSPO 18 years ago, was let go. Sibling comment excepted, there aren't many companies hiring for this. 18+ years also makes it challenging because for the last two decades, you've only known Google, and it's not clear if you can operate in another environment.
So the problem with Google's earnings was that its exorbitant profit did not stay or grow at the same rate. During a pandemic followed by a global crisis prompted by a war. And they are laying off people. To make hedge funds and shareholders happy. ... What a destructive 'growth at all costs' economic culture. I guess those hedge funds and shareholders will pick up the slack in those open source projects...
It's always about the money. So nothing new here under the sun.
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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