211–220 of 439 posts
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Ideally it takes a full year for them to realize that you're not competent, at which point you hit your 1 year cliff and can snag 25% of your options or RSUs before you get PIP'ed out.
If you're at Amazon you'll walk away with 5% after one year, and only 20% after two years.
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And now they can. It is good that people are being laid off. They can now go do the valuable thing. Perhaps Google's true target should have been 50% layoffs so that they can release people to go work on their valuable stuff instead of working at Google.
That's mostly Google's decision. :shrug: Anyway, I see a difference between hiring and laying off vs. not hiring in the first place with regard to disruption in worker's lives.
I’ll take some of that kind of disruption, please.
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"Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job." Some of us never become competent.
And if you do become competent, you're soon promoted to another job you're not competent for.
It all comes down to Apple being a very focused company. They know their customers, what they want and they have a much better business model. Steve Jobs once explained it by saying they say no to a lots of things even to those who seem on paper great ideas. All that to stay focus. On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very distracted and confident that they will always be the indisputable kind i…
The problem is the culture. Google is an exceptionally poorly managed company as a rule I claim this is by design from the beginning: as an engineering meritocracy, the technically best ideas won (over time) and employees voted with their feet. That doesn't scale. I'd argue that it began to fail pretty dramatically around the time Diane Greene took over Cloud and Prabhakar moved over (you could probably also argue that those org changes were lagging indicators, and the real start to the "problems" began when Ruth was hired) to run Ads/Search. As the board became increasingly business focused, the lack of solid management or even strategic leadership became more problematic.
What's rule #1 of B2B? Being responsive to your customers' needs and acting predictably. The lack of top-to-bottom management combined with the legacy meritocratic culture have not lent themselves to the same sort of command-and-control hierarchy you see at places like Apple & Microsoft, both of which have been almost entirely market driven for decades.
If you look at this[1] org chart cartoon from about ten years ago, you see what things looked like then. You had the Cult of Jobs at Apple, where a singular leader compartmentalized the entire company. You see the Sales & Marketing driven Microsoft, where Ballmer created stupid internal coopetition, and you see the insane messes at FB & Google. I suggest these are no longer accurate representations. As all of these big tech businesses have matured, everyone is converging on Amazon's & Oracle's command & control model, which is the traditional strategy for managing large organizations. It has been easier for some to get there (MSFT, for example, just had to remove the "guns" from their org chart), but at places like Google & Facebook there are fundamental changes that are required for the corporations to run efficiently that are also orthogonal to the founders' principles of how things should work, and (in my opinion) what you've been seeing in the past few quarters are "light" attempts at dealing with that. For Google it was the "cut off your nose to spite your face" 12k layoff. For FB it was a more existential staff cut but also the more recent notice to middle management that many of them are expected to become ICs again, to remove redundant layers.
I don't think it's in Google's current culture to "turn the ship quickly". Frankly, under the circumstances, I think the only way to legitimately force this would be to divorce Ads from the rest of the business (or even just make it its own Bet). Anything else will likely fail, slowly, and feel like death by a thousand cuts for the rank & file and like pushing a string uphill to the leadership.
[1] https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...
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Ideally it takes a full year for them to realize that you're not competent, at which point you hit your 1 year cliff and can snag 25% of your options or RSUs before you get PIP'ed out.
I've been at my company for 10 years. It went: competent -> high performer -> competent (promotion) -> high performer -> competent -> low performer
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It’s pretty hard to be choosy at that scale. I don’t get the impression that these large scale layoffs were targeting individual low performers, but are rather slashing entire business units. (I might be mistaken, but that’s the impression I’ve got)
Yeah, from what others have said, entire teams are being cut.
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> [Apple is] probably one of the best run companies in the world. I would argue that perhaps Apple's business side of things is arguably well-run. I personally disagree; I think that since Tim Cook has taken over, Apple's business focus is more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality. But I would also strongly argue that their software side of things has been trending downward ( especially in terms of qualit…
>...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality... Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term. (FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)
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Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity. You have a bunch of people starting that are still learning. Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job. Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
> They are probably one of the best run companies in the world. I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and r…
How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
Let's say you have an iOS app.
If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5. And you sell 100,000.
App Store nets you $350k.
And let's say you sold the app direct to users and did everything yourself:
$5 sales price, you keep $5 however, you also have to collect and remit sales tax for jurisdictions in which you sell. Your street price is $5 + tax, and you keep the $5 but you incur some expense for sales tax compliance.
You have to use a payment processor. That's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So if you sold 100k apps at $5, that's $455,500 in revenue after credit card fees are paid.
However, there's also chargebacks. Chargeback ratio averages roughly 0.6% across all industries (it's much higher for digital goods and CNP transactions -- so let's call it 1.5%) So from 100k sales, you really sell 98,5000, so your revenue is $448,667 (after cc fees.) However, you have 1500 in chargebacks that cost $20 each (per stripe.). So that's $30k in chargeback fees. So now your revenue is $418,667. Apple rarely loses chargebacks and refunds are extremely rare. So that sales loss is negligible.
You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth. As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required. That's a non-zero cost.
Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
Let's just assume that you sell just as many outside the App Store as you would doing it yourself. (That won't happen, but let's assume your marketing is so good that it's the case.)
The difference is $419-$350k. (That's assuming zero expense for hosting, marketing, customer support, etc.) So you're "losing" $69k per year. After tax however -- $280k from the App Store, $335k doing it yourself. So $55k additional. Yet you have hosting, customer support, marketing -- etc. $55k per year as a salary for doing those tasks is tiny and that doesn't include the cost of the hosting and bandwidth.
> Apple, meanwhile, was more cautious. Its headcount increased just 20% from 2020 to 2022 At Apples size this is still pretty huge. At least, I thought it was until I saw that Amazon, Meta and Salesforce basically DOUBLED in 2 years. If this data is correct isnt that insane? How can you effectively double orgs of this size over a 2 year period? Its not like a startup with 50 people or something. I guess I was out of…
> How can you effectively double orgs of this size over a 2 year period? Apparently you can't.
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Those are probably the ones being let go. That has always been a concern to me about being laid off in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty much understood that in these moves the companies are removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you as you search for a new job.
If they can't hire competently, why do yoy think they can fire competently?