Google has been in a decaying orbit for awhile. Plus was dead on arrival. They don’t seem to even be able to steward their money making endeavors that well. Ads are a black hole of money, money goes in and it’s unclear what you get out.
Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
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Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#12Where are the happy offices these days? Which companies are the new “Google” who people are very eager to work for?
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programmers in my experience are some of the least risky people I know. The majority will absolutely take their talents to the next highest bidder regardless of moral or ethical scruples. I don’t blame em, personally, I also see it as the only logical outcome
In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? You need to sock away massive amounts of money as quickly as possible if you want to reduce tail risk and as a side bonus you might get to reach financial freedom earlier. My choices would be very different if I didn't think I was more or less on my own.
> In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option?
Yes, there is really another option, because most people don't even have the option of taking Google-level compensation.
Indeed, it's very likely that working as a software engineer for less than BigCo compensation will still put you ahead financially of most people.
"How is it an option to live like 99% of the people actually do live?" seems like a very strange idea to me.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programmers in my experience are some of the least risky people I know. The majority will absolutely take their talents to the next highest bidder regardless of moral or ethical scruples. I don’t blame em, personally, I also see it as the only logical outcome
In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? You need to sock away massive amounts of money as quickly as possible if you want to reduce tail risk and as a side bonus you might get to reach financial freedom earlier. My choices would be very different if I didn't think I was more or less on my own.
My country does have a good safety net, so I choose to work for a company that shares my core ethics and has a solid work/life balance. I could be earning a lot more but I choose sanity over wealth.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#15Xoogler here, left in 2015. I don't think Google's offices have been "happy" or "exuberant" for a long time. The big cultural shift was already underway when I left.
Xoogler as well - arguably, you could see this coming in the late 2000s. but also: it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in and especially who your manager is - I know a lot of happy googlers who continue to knock-out kickass stuff.
> it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in
Yep, that seems to be the takeaway message and applies to any large organization you find yourself in. Applies to not just companies, but country locations and city locations.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#16Where are the happy offices these days? Which companies are the new “Google” who people are very eager to work for?
It's a depressing era with post-covid sugar crash, new wars, getting over inflation, job market being in the trash, etc. etc.
I'd argue there are no "happy offices" as a whole, and won't be for another ~10 years until everything settles and we're on an upwards trajectory (and sugar rush) again.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#17All this stuff listed: Google News, Voice Assistant, Street View in maps like at best it's thing that were once great but are weirdly worse than they were years ago or things you're questioning if it even still existed.
End of the day the time for Google pushing things forward are is long over and only huge reshuffles, restructures and firings will give it a chance of still being relevant at all 10 years from now.
I mean that top to bottom, Sundar is a joke and just a Ballmer style numbers guy with no vision. Google's AI teams need to start being forced to work towards products that ship and make money not just work towards papers under their names. Rest of the products sometimes the less done the better look how badly Search, Image Search and Maps have regressed since launch.
Image search is now inferior to Yandex, Maps can't even find a store you type the name of when zoomed in on the street it's on, instead it zooms out and shows you a different store across town. YouTube is fighting ad blockers when it should be building to fight the inevitable TikTok long-form attack that will be it's Facebook moment.
Only thing I can say still works pretty well is probably Docs and Android in the sense that it's the only option for building devices above a certain complexity on.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful what you wish for: Many of those highly talented individuals will likely end up channeling their skills into areas that one could view as equally negative societally, such as hedge funds or defense contracting (like Palantir). This isn't to justify the current state of advertising, but rather to express skepticism that dismantling an industry will lead talented individuals to willingly accept a significant…
Programmers in my experience are some of the least risky people I know. The majority will absolutely take their talents to the next highest bidder regardless of moral or ethical scruples. I don’t blame em, personally, I also see it as the only logical outcome
That’s an interesting change, from when I graduated two decades ago. I remember I did not want to work for defense contractor and wanted to work on worthwhile work like NASA or something. Course is early-Internet, and I had no idea how expensive life was going to be.
But a lot of people did not want to work for a big company, like Microsoft, and open source was a much more heralded movement.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#19Wondering if anyone can confirm this, but....
I saw somewhere that part of the problem at google is how their mono repo code base is so cumbersome that they are more likely and willing to kill services just because of the maintenance overhead of maintaining the code.
Any insight from Xooglers? I feel like I read this somewhere on here or reddit, but can't recall the specifics.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#20Thoughts and prayers and all that but honestly this is for the best. As an economy we can finally reassign the massive investment of talent into something other than advertising. And maybe we can be honest with ourselves that Wall Street always wins in the long run.
People don't want to pay for digital content, search, or social networking. Advertising, data harvesting, aka surveillance capitalism is the only remaining major business model for the web. This is like saying your neighborhood gas/petrol station is downsizing because of mismanagement, and you're cheering because you think that means the end of the fossil fuels industry is near. Whatever replaces Google, if it fails, will certainly be at least as invested in advertising as they are.