121–130 of 265 posts
So what's a good employer now, now that Google has been losing the reputation for treating employees well? (Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.)
Why lay-off instead of repurpose? Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense. It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.
I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.
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I agree, I just think these new projects based on LLMs should be considered a different category, AI agents or something. The traditional grammar-based voice assistant architecture used by Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Bixby, etc is an abject failure, and not for lack of trying.
If the Alexa/Echo-category of devices are meant to be some widely flexible and pervasively useful device from Star Trek, they're a failure. If they're meant to be a usable $30 kitchen timer and music player, they're pretty great.
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I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.
If a company wants to fire some people they believe can cause legal trouble if fired individually, somtimes they will spend a year or two reorganizing in a way that incidentally have many of these people all ending up in the same part of the organization. Then they can do layoffs there, seemingly without violating any wrongful termination laws. Somehow the best developers and others who contribute directly to the bot…
New managers managers manager moves in with a good chunk of people to Help With Bard.
Then 6 months later you and the older handers are asked to move to an exciting new opportunity in Assistant.
of course it's an opportunity, we're investing in it. Bla bla bla.
8 weeks later your roles have been eliminated, you're locked out of everything except the internal jobs listing site for the next 8 weeks. (Note this was happening _before_ tonight's culling)
Sundar's really done a great job with culture
Why lay-off instead of repurpose? Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense. It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.
I have no context on what's happening in this particular case, but Google usually indeed does not layoff straight up: teams get "defragged" and the people working on them have some time to try to find new roles.
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They are making over a billion a week in profits (and still growing). Layoffs can be justified but it's a bit of a head scratcher to be doing them when the company seems to be doing generally well
I feel like this has been a theme for the last year - big tech companies with big profits doing mass layoffs. We've seen Microsoft, Facebook, Goggle, Spotify etc all do this. It's this whole obsession with the word "efficiency" and the phrase "doing more with less." It really makes you think these CEOs are all a bunch of sheep. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/techs-new-business-model-do-...
My dad was in a different field and when the company he worked for did layoffs the company was in a serious financial state and in danger of just folding entirely and also the employees had a say in how layoffs were implemented. Until I started working in tech I had assumed that was the norm but now I realize that that amount of respect for the employees from leadership was the exception (at least at large companies).
There were also large layoffs in Google’s ad sales org today, but I haven’t seen any news articles about it.
Sales seems like a truly miserable role. You have to sell whatever the company makes, which often times isn't what the customer wants. You mostly get paid by commission, so if someone just goes out and buys your product without talking to you, you don't get paid. Finally, it's treated by business as some sort of resource they can autoscale up and down as necessary. Need more money? Get more salespeople. Out of money?…
I'm also not sure that many salespeople see their role as "sell whatever the company makes". There's a common trope of engineers scrambling to build what the sales team have sold, but even aside from that, I think many salespeople see their job as building and growing accounts in their clients, and finding the products or features available to grow into. Perhaps just a perspective difference, but that can be all that matters.
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I think it is, because it suggests that a development arc either has maxed out, or is now subject to a different dynamic. Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6. It's arguably one of the most important parts of the software stack. But, it's late stage mature code. Netflix had 4-6 people working on TCP flow control. Google had a small team, based in Japan, doing IPv6 for android. If a team ha…
> Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6 Do you know who they are and how to reach them? I have filed 3 or 4 bugs with proper reproducers through Apple's feedback assistant over the years and till this day those issues haven't even received a single comment nor any acknowledgement that the report has been read.
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I prefer just getting those bugs addressed. A lot of times writing these blogs and open letters just brings some attention to the blog/article and the real issue never gets addressed. Plus at least 2 of these would involve me sharing internal details which I prefer doing only through the official bug reporting channels.
If you file something through FA, the advice in the community lately has been to re-file the bug against every beta of the OS and every new version of the OS until it's resolved. If you have any new information at all, re-file the bug with the new version. Apple's bug triage team doesn't route things that are old/ancient/sitting in the system forever. Your bugs probably haven't reached the team yet.