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Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

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Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#191

Post by trashtester »

bananapub wrote: post #168
trashtester wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company that plans ahead a little can also relocate top talent BEFORE the layoff rounds start, and even relocate people they want to get rid of TO the part of the or where layoffs are coming. I'm sure some orgs stealthily start planning this months if not years ahead of such events, especially if they identify that they have unproductive people on board that are difficult to fire the regular way (like European empl…

this is a very weird claim. big tech companies regularly fire employees in Europe for low performance, they have entire elaborate machinery for it.

They do. And in some countries it's even about as easy as in the US. I wasn't granular enough.

_Some_ countries in Europe have very strong worker protection laws, probably correlated to trade union participation rate:

   https://qery.no/trade-unions-worldwide/
For instance, if you want to do layoffs in Sweden, you probably have to coordinate it with union representatives before even making it public. Firing is even harder.

Another factor that may also apply to the US, is that if the people you want to get rid of disproportionally belong to some demographic groups or other identity groups, have medical conditions or have participated in disruptive activism, etc, claiming that they are fired for bad performance (even if true) makes the risk of bad press significantly worse.

Exactly what traits risk come with such risks may very from place to place.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#192

Post by vineyardmike »

danjac wrote: post #150
sytelus wrote: post #13

Wow... What is going on it tech? We are just 10 days in the new year and every day there has been surprise layoffs! Unity Twitch Several startups And now.. Google! This is at the same time when stocks are almost all time high :).

It's the end of an industry as we knew it. There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities, and some legacy code support for a while, but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years. Some people are claiming "things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.

> It's the end of an industry as we knew it.

I was considering agreeing that "the old Silicon Valley" was probably no more.

> There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities

Yea....

> and some legacy code support for a while,

Well sure, we still famously have Cobol...

> but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years.

Hmm. Uh.

> "things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.

Nah, I think it'll pick up real soon. We saw inflation quickly come under control, high employment rates, wage growth, etc. It's generally a healthy economy. These giants shedding fat is probably good for juicing the rest of the industry and spreading talent around. Suck for the individuals of course, that can be very challenging to experience. But lots of people have been pretty unhappy with the products big tech has been giving, so hopefully this can put some smart entrepreneurs into the waters.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#193

Post by EMM_386 »

neilv wrote: post #22

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.)

> 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.

How is this not just "business"? That's what Google is.

Granted, they make billions of dollars a quarter and it won't hurt them to keep employees around.

But every company I've ever worked for over the last decades has laid people off, made others nervous, etc.

It may sound harsh but they aren't a charity. People will be laid off, others will be nervous they may be next.

If you are looking for a company where everyone just happy hums along with no fear of job loss, those don't exist.

Except maybe in the Government.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#194

Post by trashtester »

refulgentis wrote: post #125
trashtester wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had on very good word that Bard / Assistant was used as a husk for this. 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 exce…

> 8 weeks later

This sounds like they've been in a rush. Maybe there are bonus deadlines coming up.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#195

Post by modeless »

vineyardmike wrote: post #181
modeless wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Skills" will be obsolete very soon. AI agents will use the same software tools and services that humans do. They won't need special separate AI-only interfaces. I'm not excited about the Rabbit R1 as a hardware device but their software vision is exactly right and there are new startups coming out of stealth seemingly every day now attacking this problem.

Skills are just APIs that conform to a similar look. We'll definitely continue to have AI-only or developed-for-AI APIs for future "agents" to act against. They probably won't spend much effort formatting text to sound good to a person, but the infrastructure is here.

I disagree. These special APIs will not have the breadth of capabilities that the human UI does, so AIs will use the human UIs out of necessity. But I think in the long term we will eventually see a simplification of UIs. As it becomes less common for humans to actually use them, they will no longer need fancy animations or dark mode or client-side validation or pretty styling. In the extreme, a return to plain HTML forms that a human can use in a pinch but are mostly used by AI agents. At that point I guess you're blurring the lines between UI and API.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#196

Post by MrDresden »

pm90 wrote: post #111
neilv wrote: post #22

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.)

I don’t think there are any left. The cycle repeats itself though. The leas desirable Google becomes, the more talent is freed up into startups, some of which eventually will offer something similar.

Problem being that capital is not free anymore, as it has been for close to two decades.

As startups run on venture funding, I'm not so sure there will be a wellspring of new positions generated for those hit by the layoffs, this time around.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#198

Post by mschuster91 »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #73
wilg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion what is the proper way to do a layoff? Or if any layoff is a problem, how do you prevent companies from hiring too quickly or whatever?

Layoff should be done with a large cut, but one round. If done right, it gives people the motivation to turn things around. Multiple rounds of layoff in a short amount of time (multiple rounds per year for example) gives the signal that the management can't figure out what is needed to turn the company around. At that time, your bests and brightests will leave.

> At that time, your bests and brightests will leave.

The best and brightest will start looking for greener grass the second the first layoff round hits, no matter what.

Companies that offload the risk of bad management decisions to employees instead of investors are not any employee's friend.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#199

Post by nirimda »

modeless wrote: post #144
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty strongly disagree. First, from an accuracy perspective, Google Assistant has gotten much better. It almost never misunderstands me, even when I'm mumbling and I'm surprised it can understand me. I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spot…

I agree that its transcribing accuracy is better (largely thanks to general progress in neural nets rather than anything Assistant did as a product). However transcription accuracy was already surprisingly good many years ago, and in my experience any improvement since has been swamped by actually reduced reliability in understanding intent and performing actions. Ultimately it doesn't matter if it misheard me or got…

One difference I have noticed is that it used to be when I said "five minute timer" it would maybe ten percent of the time hear "five minutes timer" and decide it should search youtube for matching videos. Nowadays, it seems to treat "five minutes timer" and "five minute timer" as equal, but I get more silent misses where it ignores everything I said.

On the other hand, I gave up some kinds of requests. For instance, I used to try "start directions home" when I was driving and it would say "here's a route I found, do you want to start (or some such)" and there would be no way to actually start the directions home without breaking the very expensive law against touching your phone while driving. Does that work today? I don't know, because I've mostly been driving with Android Auto in the last few years and my wife's been in the car on the rare occasion I haven't. But it seems like the Assistant team could straightforwardly improve it.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#200

Post by rokkitmensch »

vineyardmike wrote: post #178
hulitu wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spotify... But I don't see this at all as a "failed experiment" So since 10 years, all it can do is play some music and tell the weather, all of this only online, so it is not a failed experiment. /s

Yea! A product that has become pervasive in most households in America, that does it's one task, and tries to do it well. The problem is that companies built out these organizations and marketed these products as the next step of computing after mobile, and it's just not that easy to monetize. My washer/drier, "all it can do" is spin clothes around and apply heat. I paid a lot more money for that "failed experiment".…

You might have enjoyed the reaction from the normies at a party recently when they figured out that my family doesn't have any voice control anything in our house and they started grilling my (comically, for the conversation, nontechnical) wife as to why.

After much very polite dancing around the politics of "listen, it's just a personal choice and nobody here is judging anyone else, I just don't want my children playing arbitrary stupid music and buying things on my credit card", she finally capitulated and pointed out that "well it's listening, isn't it? my husband" (I was actively playing with children at the time), "would have better details, but if it's listening, that means it's recording and sending those recordings to Amazon or Google or whomever".

At which point the lady of the house got up and turned her Alexa off. I attempted to not die laughing in the corner with the children.

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