The floating advertising and popups on that inc.com url are absolute cancer.
Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#22Google has over invested in AI research projects and, while they are pumping out good research, they aren’t exactly pumping out great products. If I were Pichai I’d trim the fat there first. As for rest and vesters, it sounds like it refers to senior people who have climbed the ladder high enough to coast at “meeting expectations” which obviously is not good enough grounds for firing someone.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#23Googler, opinions are my own. The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings). But I only interact with a tiny fr…
I dunno. I remember seeing quite a contingent of people not doing very much work at Google. You're walking to a meeting, pass by the game room, and it's always the same group of people playing ping pong no matter the time of the day. You try to grab lunch in a 30 minute slot between meetings, and there's a 45 minute long line to get food. Some people appeared to have a lot more free time than others. I certainly didn't have it.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What a company. I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. Unless the management deliberately pilots the company into the ground, their cash cow will outshine the competition out of sheer inertia. The quality of decision making is seen when the rules of the game change and the companies are forced to adapt. This may or may not happen this cycle, depending on what happens to interest rates.
> They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide.
that's not true, there are plenty of competition, meta, tiktok, reddit, display exchanges, amazon, apple. If they will deliver better ROI from ads, advertisers will be happy to switch budgets from google.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What a company. I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
Depends; these would seem like the kind of decisions that affect the long term a lot more than the short term. In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent. They spent decades building the image of “one of the best” employers for skilled software engineers, and they could potentially throw that away with just a…
> In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent.
it could be opposite, talents usually interested in challenging work with appropriate rewards, while current message is about cutting mediocre employees.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#26I’ve watched Google through its entire “journey” and I have to say it’s revealing how quickly they jettisoned their rhetoric about having, attracting, and retaining what they claimed were the best engineers in the world at the slightest whiff of economic headwinds. Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is…
> What a company. I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary, yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over).
The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.
Google makes themselves out to be an innovative company that hires the best engineers in the world, but I'm struggling to think of anything notable they've created over the past decade.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What a company. I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary, yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over). The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point. Google makes themselves out to be an innovative company that hires the best engineers in the world, but I'm struggling to think of anything notable the…
> Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary
I think current google salary can even be below market average.
> yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over).
ads is just way of monetization, actual product portfolio is very diverse.
> The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.
My understanding is that they switched from idea of building tons of lower quality products some of which survived to full focus on fewer areas. Current focus is AI and cloud, where there is enough space for innovation.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. Unless the management deliberately pilots the company into the ground, their cash cow will outshine the competition out of sheer inertia. The quality of decision making is seen when the rules of the game change and the companies are forced to adapt. This may or may not happen this cycle, depending on what happens to interest rates.
> They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. that's not true, there are plenty of competition, meta, tiktok, reddit, display exchanges, amazon, apple. If they will deliver better ROI from ads, advertisers will be happy to switch budgets from google.
You can compete with Facebook by creating another social media site, as TikTok and Snapchat have demonstrated.
Google search has 92% market share. It is an ad monopoly in the areas it controls.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. that's not true, there are plenty of competition, meta, tiktok, reddit, display exchanges, amazon, apple. If they will deliver better ROI from ads, advertisers will be happy to switch budgets from google.
You can compete with Facebook by creating another social media site, as TikTok and Snapchat have demonstrated. Google search has 92% market share. It is an ad monopoly in the areas it controls.
> Google search has 92% market share.
its generic search, when you go to vertical searches, say Amazon may beat google for shopping searches. Reddit can build good search one day, and many people including me will switch to searching inside reddit, instead of adding "reddit" to google search query.
You are right, google is currently generic search monopoly, but we were talking about ads, and there are plenty of other ads verticals.
Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
#30Why would I ever want to work at Google if the management setup tolerates this sort of organizational flotsam? What a poorly managed place it must be if there’s no chain of accountability for senior employees.
It doesn't, in my experience. In the previous incarnation of the perf review system(which just slightly changed recently), there were effectively 3 buckets: Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations. The first one is "I'm going to get fired ASAP if I don't improve". The second one is still viewed as a failure even though you're meeting every aspect of your current role. The third one is "okay go…
That sounds fucking horrifically stressful.