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Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

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361–370 of 401 posts

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#361
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube, Google maps, Gmail ...

Name a single YouTube content creator who is satisfied with that arrangement.

Here's Tom Scott quoted on MKBHD's channel where he literally says "this is my dream job"

https://youtu.be/GQAvce3MA44?si=deP0GG1hICPp9jr8&t=93

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#362

I left Google 10 years ago because it was boring. Any interesting things it does is restricted to an elite cabal. It's horribly conservative with programming innovation for a company its size. Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors.

> Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors.

Maybe they think that they don't really have competitors at this point, or rather, no competitors that can meaningfully reduce the market share in key areas, or competitors that are in a position to hire the laid off employees.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#363
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But couldn't the founders put a competent CEO in the chair and still pursue their passion projects on the side?

Well, if they could've they would've. Also in unlikely case they could've different thinking about competence than yours.

> Well, if they could've they would've

Um.. that isn't how anything works. Not sure what kind of argument this is

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#364
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Vision Pro.

So late to the VR headset market they thought they needed to stick googly eyes on it... dunno maybe I'm missing something?

>dunno maybe I'm missing something?

Yeah, vision.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#365
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people who…

>I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products

Only if you're certain they will never quit their jobs. In tech where the average tenure is supposedly 2-3 years, a large number of employees are hired to make key persons redundant, groom for succession, and to make sure key persons can offload some bandwidth to work on emergent issues. It's irrational to have billions of dollars of revenue (or even tens of millions) riding on a single person who can decide to walk away with 2 weeks notice.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to describe the pure absolute hell that can be working there, you'd be surprised how quickly the money becomes not worth it.

This feels excessive... ? It's Google, not a coal mine.

coal mines are only hellish while you're down. yeah there is the black lung, but you can wear filters.

the goog tracks you (and everyone) 24-7, and depending on teams and egos, could be ugly. you spend your whole life tryin to get to FAANG tier, and now it's miserable.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#367
post #204

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…

One possible explanation is that companies try to avoid discrimination lawsuits by laying off employees in a way that provides plausible deniability of discrimination. That tends to mean broad sweeping layoffs that select whole orgs, functions, lines of business or locations. Often that means rehiring (sometimes the same people) to rebuild what was lost by some broad sweeping blind decision. There’s also some gaming…

Probably age discrimination. Fire broadly and you'll catch a lot of older workers, then rehire younger later.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a lot of trials of UBI now and the evidence is very strong that… it doesn't affect employment much either way. So it doesn't make people lazy, but it's probably a disappointment to people who don't believe in work. In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.

I hope we'll get there. I see studies and reports of things like UBI and 4 day work weeks and even basic things folks in EU countries get and it's honestly difficult to ever envision any of it actually coming to the US for most of us regular folk.

Americans are significantly higher earning than Europeans, who are bad at running their economy and keep doing austerity.

This is especially true for lower wage Americans who've seen great wage growth since 2019.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#369
post #361
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a single YouTube content creator who is satisfied with that arrangement.

Here's Tom Scott quoted on MKBHD's channel where he literally says "this is my dream job" https://youtu.be/GQAvce3MA44?si=deP0GG1hICPp9jr8&t=93

show me a “dream job” and I’ll show you an industry that is notorious for chewing up dreams and spitting them out

game developer, musician, mangaka, streamer, etc

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels excessive... ? It's Google, not a coal mine.

coal mines are only hellish while you're down. yeah there is the black lung, but you can wear filters. the goog tracks you (and everyone) 24-7, and depending on teams and egos, could be ugly. you spend your whole life tryin to get to FAANG tier, and now it's miserable.

this comment is really something
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