221–230 of 401 posts
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You can communicate, even in difficult situations, sincerely, genuinely, and truthfully, while providing good leadership. That is a manager's job description, effectively.
That’s only theory. In reality, people who spin everything in a positive light survive longer in a big organization.
Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers…
I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
Google could likely fire 1000s more and it wouldn’t change their trajectory.
Same with Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc.
Their core businesses are massive empires.
They can make so many stupid mistakes, hire inept layers of management and still cash billions.
They can randomly fire 5% of their workforce with roll of dice. There is enough redundancy and resilience that they’ll bounce back.
We, the average working joes are bound by gravity. We can escape into space, but with immense force and spice of luck. We have to work for money.
Mega trillion corporations are like black holes. They curve space time so hard, money works for them.
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I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
Considering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers…
designing a new music app and/or chat app every 2 years sounds pretty fun
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse ? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too. > Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Google Docs has some of the most cur…
The reason the word "inept" keeps coming up is just how opaque and senseless to the rank and file the January 2023 layoffs were. High performers, low performers, newest hires, most tenure: we saw all kinds of heads roll. I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. A growing deployment team was actively hiring before and after it got a 6…
My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"
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Firing people actually helps raising a stock price [0]. 0 - https://money.com/tech-layoffs-affect-stock-prices/
Raising stock price makes so many people happy than firing a few wealthy individuals does some small harm for the greater good of many. /s
Meaning shares holders, of course.
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> what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has at least 5000 engineers worth of interesting work. Chrome has a pretty advanced javascript engine and cutting edge security features. Android, which is sorta-kinda open source. Youtube's pretty much the only place that serves working 4k video. The self-…
> Gmail was great when it launched; nothing's really surpassed it, and they've largely avoided fucking it up. Mail client. Relational data best formatted in a tabular style. Takes 5-10 seconds to load. Avoided fucking it up, huh.
I've been using the HTML version (https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) but now they're threatening to shut it down too. First it was January, now February. I wonder why it's still up but don't have hopes that it'll stay up for long.