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Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#22Thoughts 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.
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…
I don't think exciting is the right word here. What's being called for is careers that are deemed worthy/virtuous according to the OP.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 li…
That doesn’t address the tail risk concern, and a huge number of people are living far below a comfortable level. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s reasonable or desirable.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#24Xoogler 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.
I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html
This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change.
It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly.
It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there.
(I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#25Wondering 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.
Am Googler. I do a lot of work on google3 code health and maintenance.
I do not think that this is the primary cause of product turndowns. Messy product design, left-hand/right-hand problems, internal politics, unfunded regulatory mandates, and other organizational complexity seem like much more direct causes. People like to add promotion-focus to this list but I don't actually buy that since there are tons of Googlers who are happy at their current level and want to maintain stuff even we if take it as a given that maintenance can't get people promoted. VPs showing up and changing org priorities so that various products no longer match the priorities and then get their funding cut is way more common.
I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead.
However, I also think that the monorepo is a superpower. What I describe above is a problem but there are so many incredible benefits (under the assumption that you've got tooling as good as Google's) that I feel that the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs. Comparing the code quality of the stuff in google3 vs the stuff in various isolated git repos is night and day.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#26> "From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare... It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer."
Good. I mentor early career and nontraditional-background engineers, and among this set, Google has acquired a certain reputation. To paraphrase, if you can just pass the interview bar, you'll find yourself in an organization where the pay is amazing, the oversight is minimal, the visa/greencard policy is generous, and the HR processes rarely fire anyone. I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there.
If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest, I'm all for it.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#27All 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…
Google News has been going bad for a long time. But that’s probably not entirely on Google. The news business has been going bad for a long time, and has gotten even worse in the past year as a lot of legacy news organizations completely fold, or operate on an absolute skeleton crew. The meaningful content is behind paywalls. (Yes, I know, that’s a broad generalization, but between the NYTimes, the Economist, WSJ…that’s a lot of paywalled content.)
Voice Assistant is a somewhat surprise flop. For a while there, voice assistants were The Big Thing that you had to have. Maybe they saw the metrics and realized everybody eventually gave up in frustration once you realized that outside of setting timers, the interaction model doesn’t scale well.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#28I don't recall a similar story when Amazon went through their first major layoffs in 2022 (which heavily hit their office on the same street as the Google Cambridge office mentioned in the first sentence), but I do recall stories about Google's layoffs including glossy photos of ex-Googlers and members of the Alphabet Workers Union.
None when my current company did layoffs last year.
At what point do non-Googlers matter enough to get a New York Times article?
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#29Thoughts 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.
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…
Actual defense contracting (Boeing/Lockheed, not Palantir) are hugely societally positive in defending the homeland. Unfortunately, Google engineers likely think of these companies as employing lesser people, mostly because they genuinely do pay very poorly.
Re: Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs
#30Xoogler 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.
I think it's really the new open layouts where you might not even sit with your team members.
It's definitely a different experience being in a row of desks with a lot of random people versus being in a cube-farm with your team.