Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 142 posts

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#41

Post by onion2k »

champagnepapi wrote: post #34
turdprincess wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get excited for one reason and one reason only - the money. FAANG jobs pay between double and triple of normal software gigs. Some folks want to optimize for interesting work, or groundbreaking products or autonomy. Thats cool - you might not find that at a FAANG. Some folks optimize for the biggest paycheck. For that its basically two options - FAANG (and adjacent) or High Frequency Trading. To each their own!

How does one get into HFT?

Learn low latency network programming in either C++ or something safe like Rust. If you make something people notice HFT companies will beat a path to your door.

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#42

Post by drstewart »

newaccount2023 wrote: post #6

the employees were fools for falling in love with their employer, not sure how else to say it they should be grateful they were paid so well for so long to do so little...chances are they will never see comp like that for work like that again ...and hopefully no one is naive enough to think Google is "done"...after next earnings I expect an even bigger round the same thing is happening all over tech - go down to a re…

>the same thing is happening all over tech - go down to a reduced staff of essential contributors and re-hire later for much lower comp

If supply and demand stay the same, then why do you think the price will change?

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#43

Post by aix1 »

jdsully wrote: post #23
Mizoguchi wrote: post #20

Not sure what the author expected Google to do. Are they supposed to have individual meetings and a farewell party with 10K (ex) employees? My dad worked for the same company for 35 years then retired. In my 20 year career I have worked for at least half a dozen companies. There's no such thing as job security anymore, as long as you are employed by someone else you are disposable, no matter how hard you work and how…

> Are they supposed to have individual meetings Yes? Surely they have managers proportional to their employees - I certainly don't expect the CEO to have the meetings but having their direct or skip level manager meet with them is the right way to do it.

The GP paints individual meetings as an infeasible, far-fetched idea. However, Google has held individual meetings in some non-US jurisdictions, where the ratio of management to front-line workers is comparable to that in the US. This shows that it's not infeasible, it's a choice.

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#44

Post by [deleted] »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #2

Was Google really a beloved employer? I feel like that was vapor marketing hype most real people saw through as bs, you'd pretty much see constant stories of overwork and toxic teams run by incompetent "project managers" just like every other overvalued Silicon Valley FAANG shop

[deleted]

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#45

Post by cromwellian »

dekhn wrote: post #28
cromwellian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked at Google for 15 yrs, who also worked at Oracle and IBM, I can confidently say that Google was the least toxic, least overworked place I've ever been. That's not to say there aren't management problems, especially around the erratic way they launch new projects and kill others with no real rhyme or reason, but working environment was never one of the complaints. At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly…

I worked for Google for 10 years- at first in a great but intense (overworked) SRE team, then later as a SWE running my own project (again intense and overworked, but totally self-imposed) and then on various ML and 3D printing teams. By and large it was great, but it got worse over time (increasingly clueless managers with night-school MBAs) and more toxic. Occasionally I'd see memes or posts from other teams that d…

Wow, I'm shocked to hear that. Was this at a US office? I know some overseas offices have different culture. I guess it's not unprecedented. My wife (eng manager) resigned from Google around 2015 I think, in part because Google Cloud had brought on a new boss in a re-org who was a McKinsey-and-associates person, and her boss tasked her mostly with making spreadsheets of business processes, because that's the format she was used to doing all her work in (spreadsheets). She went from managing Chrome engineers and sitting in on meetings to discuss features, to doing spreadsheets. :(

There was definitely a decline over the years, I was probably lucky in that the teams I joined (Infra, Gmail, AI) were run mostly by engineers and pretty cool people.

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#46

Post by muzz »

I view it more like a corporate version of John Locke's social contract, and that it's not the way they laid off people, but the simple fact that they did.

Some good performers were laid off, so the pre-existing situation-- where one could join Google and focus on work without worrying about downsizing-- no longer exists

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#49

Post by cromwellian »

turdprincess wrote: post #26
costanzaDynasty wrote: post #21

I may be a very basic software engineer with neither high YOE or high quality skills but what would I get excited about from a FAANG job nowadays? These companies that I've used everyday for nearing 2 decades from even a user perspective have become stale. Mountains of money and the best talent and even simple issues that have lingered for years are not fixed in favor of big ideas that no one wants.

You get excited for one reason and one reason only - the money. FAANG jobs pay between double and triple of normal software gigs. Some folks want to optimize for interesting work, or groundbreaking products or autonomy. Thats cool - you might not find that at a FAANG. Some folks optimize for the biggest paycheck. For that its basically two options - FAANG (and adjacent) or High Frequency Trading. To each their own!

I used to believe that, but searching for a job now, I see many non-FAANG companies with compensation in-line, or better, with the exception of those who aren't public. OpenAI for example, has base salaries in the $400k range for ML jobs at $250k range elsewhere at like an IC5 level, because of non-public equity.

Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

#50

Post by mlazos »

costanzaDynasty wrote: post #21

I may be a very basic software engineer with neither high YOE or high quality skills but what would I get excited about from a FAANG job nowadays? These companies that I've used everyday for nearing 2 decades from even a user perspective have become stale. Mountains of money and the best talent and even simple issues that have lingered for years are not fixed in favor of big ideas that no one wants.

I’ve worked at a couple, I’ve probably been an outlier but I’ve really enjoyed them as long as you’re ruthless about finding projects that you enjoy. There is a ton of opportunity to work on pretty much anything you want at a large corporation. I’ve mostly focused on r&d hardware and compiler projects.
Post reply on HN