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Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

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Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#31

Post by effingwewt »

riku_iki wrote: post #25
stingraycharles wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every comment I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and then watching you squander it.

No engineer worth their salt is going to work for these companies after this. The 'mediocre employees' as you put it are exactly what GP was talking about.

It's victim blaming at its finest. Remember- google only hires the very best.

You are shilling so hard you've now entered complete fallacy territory. You are not just making stuff up to fit your narrative, you are actively ignoring the truth and that's destructive to the conversation.

And I'm saying all this as someone who for years warned people about what was coming. Still, they are not to be blamed as all this started with the C-suite and management all going on hiring sprees for no better reason than to deprive the competition of workers.

They infantilized their workforce and made them as dependent as possible.

They attached golden handcuffs which started the whole rest and vest situation.

They are to blame, not the workers all about to be put on PIPs.

Tell google PR to come up with something better, or at least something that doesn't fly in the face of the facts everyone can see with their own eyes.

The sky is not purple. The emperor is wearing no clothes.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#32

Post by LarsDu88 »

Google is a de-facto ad search monopoly that can (and continues to be able to) afford dead weight. The real threat to Google is NOT a bunch of unproductive employees. They could probably run the ad search groups, android, g-mail, docs, and more with 10% of their current headcount if employees were worked to the bone. As a conglomerate, Alphabet can and does burn money in attempts to be innovative in a true sense with Google X, Calico, Verily, DeepMind, and more.

What Google cannot afford is for that incredibly talented dead weight that they have go off an make a COMPETING search engine and associated platform ecosystem (i.e. android, g-mail, chrome). That talent is not just sitting on its ass for no reason.

Google was started from a garage with bare-metal linux servers on hardware that is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi cluster today. Making a search engine using someone else's cloud is vastly easier in 2022 than in 1999. Replacing the platform ecosystem lock-in is significantly harder, but doable with the right talent. Its in Google's interest to keep at least a proportion of that talent inside the company.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#33

Post by desmosxxx »

kyrra wrote: post #8

Googler, 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…

In my experience, these slackers do exists in meaningful numbers (maybe most of PIPed but I know at least a few long timers). That said, an even bigger problem is that the majority of people are incentized to slack in some capacity.

The impact & output of work within Google follows something like a perato distribution and yet the payscale is pretty flat. It creates this weird incentive system that almost encourages some base level of slacking unless you really want that promotion. And the difference in output makes it pretty hard to staff project and superstars often end up overworked which is hardly fair to the people doing the work.

This wasn't always the case, but is probably the norm at larger companies. It does seem to me like the way comp is modeled isn't ideal, but I'm definitely not a comp expert. My guess is that more discretion in pay would open companies up to all kinds of legal liabilities not to mention actual unfairness.

All that is to say that there is likely some extra slack that can be let go with little effect.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#34

Post by de6u99er »

This will backfire very hard. Pichai just wants to deflect from his incompetence, by blaming those who made Google into what it once was.

It's his fault, that the "Don't be evil" motto had been erased from Google's culture. And it's his incompetence that made Google spending money in areas which were not only not profitable enough, but rather such money pits that he has to squeeze money out from profitable divisions so hard that it makes Google's users switch to alternatives like Apple or make them degoogle their lives.

He and the likes of his are a cancer that is growing at Google.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#35

Post by de6u99er »

davewbrwn wrote: post #22

Google 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.

And there's also quantum computing.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#36

Post by dzhiurgis »

riku_iki wrote: post #24
matrix_overload wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.

Can anyone put serve ads on Google SERPs? No, only Google. We don't even have any transparency how it works.

Google is turning into utility and should be regulated as such. At the very least we should regulate how their support is done.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#37

Post by yakak »

riku_iki wrote: post #29
indecisive_user wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the discussion was any monopoly that serves as a cash cow to enable poor management.

For comparison, AT&T had a monopoly only on long distance, so people could choose drastically different behavior if they wanted to defund AT&T. I.e. you didn't need to move out of the region where most of your relations lived but it was a better deal to pay AT&T's tax (and regional monopolies charged more than true long distance on many regional calls). Potentially making a lot more money and having an entirely different life out weighed higher than market phone rates that made AT&T a successful cash cow.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#38

Post by glimshe »

eduction wrote: post #11

I’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…

Completely agree. If they are going to remove deadweight, Google's leaders must be the first to go. My friends have been telling me about these inefficiencies for years and they have done nothing about it. Google has one of the greatest concentrations of talented engineers of any business in history. What did Google's leadership position these engineers to build?

When you look at Sundar Pichai, what exactly has he brought to the table? Which unique insights and strategic decisions from the CEO have made Google richer? It's not enough to point at the profit growth; Google owns a historical money-making machine in its Ads business and any half decent administrator could have increased its profits over the past years.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#39

Post by de6u99er »

kyl3B3nzl3 wrote: post #2

Title is excessively editorialized. Here is the ONLY thing said by anyone at Google about the subject, "Pichai revisited Google's plan to find efficiencies wherever it could, citing their plan for a 'simplicity sprint' and even discussing a possible reduction in headcount of up to 20 percent."

They just increased their staff by 20% within the past year. To me it looks more like Pichai wants to be perceived by stock holdets like he's doing something.

Re: Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

#40

Post by Arnt »

indecisive_user wrote: post #28
riku_iki wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

I think that's true. But I think you may be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.

Google has a number of advertising businesses, largely distinct. I think Youtube, adwords and adsense are the names of the three big ones. Adwords is a monopoly (that is, only Google sells advertising on www.google.com) and Youtube is too. But you didn't mean to to say that Google has a monopoly on selling ads on google.com and youtube.com, did you?

I think you had the third business in mind. That's the one that serves ads on third-party web sites. And what does Google's 92% market share for search have to do with its market share for that business? Or, put differently, how does Google's 92% market share help sell that product to more web site owners?

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