Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.

No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.

A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.

The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.

I look at them from an EU enterprise perspective. Back 10-15 when the big move into the cloud started Google was ahead of their competition. They had online office, and they still have some excellent services that are sort of unmatched by both Amazon and AWS in terms of managed backends like Firebase, but today they make up almost no enterprise sales. This is largely because they never managed to transition into a world where they could sell their products to enterprise. One part is their data and privacy policies which are an obvious issue the other part is support. One of the most important things Microsoft sells to Enterprise is support, and I don’t mean the stuff you and I get as private persons, I mean how their headquarters will call your CTO with updates when something goes down, how you have direct channels to get things changed like when teams was turned on by default instead of something your IT department controlled, or how you can even visit their Azure server centres and look at “your” server if you’re a big enough customer. This is why AWS sort of “lost” in the EU, because when they first entered the market they had the automated support similar to what Google has now, where you can talk to a useless chatbot and never get anywhere even if you’re paying them millions of dollars. Unlike Google, Amazon quickly adjusted and suddenly they had better support and EU compliance than Microsoft (who still can’t guarantee that only EU citizens ever work on the maintenance of their data centres where your data is stored).

The one place Google was a little different was in Education. They actually seemed to know how to sell that, but even here their advertising roots are now losing them deals. Because now there is a focus on how everything in Google education is shared with Google, and while that data might be valuable to Google it’s losing them all their sales in education, which also means they lose the data…

Unless Google somehow changes course, and becomes both an advertising company, and, a tech company, they are just never going to be relevant outside of advertising again. At least for Enterprise, but even as a private customer, you’re probably thinking twice about their products considering how many of them they shut down.

I think it’s a shame considering a lot of their products are very good and affordable, but is what it is.

That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway.

I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.