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Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

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Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#241

Post by usrusr »

EMM_386 wrote: post #193
neilv wrote: post #22

So what's a good employer now, now that Google has been losing the reputation for treating employees well? (Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.)

> Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well. How is this not just "business"? That's what Google is. Granted, they make billions of dollars a quarter and it won't hurt them to keep employees around. But every company I've ever worked for over the last decades has laid people off, mad…

That's what publicly traded companies are. They literally can't do "this is going well, let's continue going well", because in that case there'd inevitably be someone out there who thinks "but it could go even better". And with their optimistic projections, they are willing to pay more than even the happiest "yay, this is going well and will go well forever" considers the shares to be worth. Ownership by the biggest optimist is inevitable and when they discover that their hopes were unfounded and there's no even bigger optimist the take the bag, they'll rather burn the house for an imagined chance of still winning than accept the losses.

(VC funded is no different of course, that's just a shortcut to arrive at the optimism-race without ever going through "this is going well")

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#242

Post by usrusr »

danieldisu wrote: post #238
usrusr wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone involved, think of those poor investors! Spot on about the contractors. The city I live in contains some of the larger data processing hot-spots of the German government (not so much in terms of large number-crunching server farms, but in terms of ever changing complicated business logic running at high volume) and there's a crazy number of consultancies serving that market and nobody else. But ironicall…

Working as a contractor for a public entity, I can't think of anything that I would like to do less than that...

I can certainly feel what you mean, it's where those who will take on anything to get a bigger car congregate in these parts. But it's actually not that bad I think, deployments are not "the temp guy in an in-house team" but projects with a presumably not too difficult buyer: the customer-side person you are working with doesn't have too much skin in the game. Realistic expectations and all that. One of the more graspeable downsides I think (never worked that way, but went though the hiring process once) is that those state clients seem to never outsource a complete project, but insist on keeping projects neutral by staffing them from as many different consultancies as possible, which means that you'll only ever work with people who are nominally your competitors.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#243

Post by oblio »

mmcallister wrote: post #187
happyopossum wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> standards. It isn't like they are simply reading a spec out of an existing document and coding up a conformant program. Err, yes - that’s what 98% of modern TCP/IP development work is. There aren’t frequent new RFCs for TCP - it is established, standardized, and stable.

The other 2% keeps engineers fairly busy, I imagine. Custom congestion control algorithms come to mind

Yeah, but even so, that pales in comparison to Joe Product Manager saying "the new French tax code dropped last Tuesday" or "our biggest competitors just signed an agreement that they will implemented a new standard they're proposing and we need to get onboard".

Non-technical stuff is crazy complex compared to purely technical stuff, which tends to be a lot better defined.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#244

Post by RHSeeger »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #211
RHSeeger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.

If we accept the premise, then why wouldn't it make sense to fire developers in specific positions? If a position is no longer viable, it won't matter to you if you fire that person, since presumably any person you choose would also be a "good developer."

I'm making the assumption that they're _also_ still hiring, and that the people that were fired could, instead, be transitioned into other roles. I would be amazingly surprised if they were not still hiring.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#245

Post by BossingAround »

pests wrote: post #222
BossingAround wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like all we needed were really fast horses too.

Except they didn't invent a car. They invented a complex device to drive the existing horses.

Well, this particular tech hasn't panned out yet, I agree. But with that outlook ("just use buttons"), you'd never make any changes, which is even worse.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#246

Post by agent008t »

jiqiren wrote: post #190
JKCalhoun wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I retired from Apple a few years ago but still follow the company. I am not aware of any layoffs at Apple. Others have pointed out that Apple didn't go on the same hiring boom that other companies did during Covid.

Also retired from Apple (FIRE). I never worked so hard or got paid so much in my life. Would recommend AAAAAaaa+++++ would do again

Have you written about your FI/RE story anywhere? Would be interesting to read. E.g. which SWR, did you end up moving somewhere cheaper, what do you do day-to-day now? How have you found actually living on your withdrawals - has it not caused more worry? How do you avoid the FOMO of seeing your former colleagues pressing on?

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#247

Post by kaashif »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #139
kaashif wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that country would become an extremely unattractive place to hire employees. Massive incentive to do whatever you can to only use contractors or whatever. Somehow classify your employees as self employed, something like that. Maybe it wouldn't even be a loophole: everyone would just have to actually go freelance and have no employee protections. I wonder if any country has anything close to layoffs being illegal…

> Then that country would become an extremely unattractive place to hire employees Works fine for France, it's very hard to do layoffs there, to the point that a common myth is that they're illegal there. 7th largest GDP. Unemployment rate is at 7% (about 2x the USA), but it's also not the existential risk it is in the US - you are given 75% of whatever your pay was for up to 2-3 years. > Massive incentive to do what…

> 7th largest GDP

This isn't relevant when we're talking about individual welfare. France is 23rd for nominal GDP per capita and 26th for PPP.

Which is still good! A lot of the countries near the top are petrostates or tax havens. But not the US.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#248

Post by johnnyanmac »

mvdtnz wrote: post #70
johnnyanmac wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, without those rudimentary building blocks they wouldn't have a lot of data and talent ready to investigate LLM's (and ofc, lots of polish on the NLP framework. Not as flashy, but very important for the UX). I don't see it as a failed experiment so much as a raw prototype if we believe LLM's can realize the true potential. Heck, for all we know, we were actually just training the model for this past decade.

What are you talking about? What "rudimentary building blocks" came as a result of voice assistants? They have nothing at all in common with LLMs. Your post is pure non-sequitur.

A bulk of data that the product trained upon in order to execute a task based upon promoting instead of a rigid command?

They only have nothing in common if you think of a Voice assistant as no smarter than those auto prompt customer support lines. Clearly Siri/Cortana/Google assistant had sole basic context mapping.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#249

Post by xnx »

modeless wrote: post #21

I don't use any feature of Google Assistant that wasn't present in the original Android voice search feature over a decade ago. And the few features I do use haven't improved in any way that I've noticed. In fact I feel like reliability has regressed. Google could have fired almost the whole team years ago and my user experience would not be different today. I consider voice assistants to be a failed experiment. It's…

Weird to call Google Assistant failed when it's about to get vastly more capable by being wired to Bard/Gemini. Already, I want to talk to Google Assistant like it's an LLM, but it's not there yet.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#250

Post by chefandy »

SenHeng wrote: post #167
danjac wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And suppose you have a spouse with a career that isn't so mobile? Language barriers? Work visas? Elderly parents? Tons of reasons people can't just up and migrate at the drop of a hat.

Millions of people leave their spouses, kids and parents to move to another country for work. Most don't even work anywhere adjacent to tech. We call them migrants. If you're ambitious/hungry enough, you'll do whatever it takes.

> Most don't even work anywhere adjacent to tech. We call them migrants.

As I indicated, at the beginning of your career as a young person without a family or much tying you down, moving to a place where you're more likely to get a job in your field obviously makes complete sense, but that's not who we're talking about here. These are professionals-- many in their mid to late careers-- that got laid off, largely without notice. Being expected to abandon your life, mid-career to flock to the latest career hotspot because we complacently allow large established employers to pick up and discard large numbers of employees at their convenience-- demanding loyalty and offering none in return-- is not the same thing.

> Millions of people leave their spouses, kids and parents to move to another country for work.

Millions of people also have nutritional rickets.

> If you're ambitious/hungry enough, you'll do whatever it takes.

If you think system this rewards ambition anywhere close to as much as it rewards people already within the existing power structures, you're fooling yourself. Tech is no different than many other industries: it treats less privileged classes like donkeys while the privileged sit on top with a carrot on a stick being sure to let them get a bite every now and again when their frustration starts impacting their output. Of course there are individual success stories you can cherry pick to make it seem like reality for the majority, but you could take the worst NBA free-thrower and cherry pick them a perfect record.

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