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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#441

Post by notyourwork »

ddevault wrote: post #355
makach wrote: post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

Having Google on your resume is not a good thing depending on who's reading it. Googlers generally need to be extensively re-trained on reality outside of companies that cargo-cult Google's practices, and I'll have some questions about the moral compass of anyone who shows up with Google on the resume.

Now it’s bad to work with some of the brightest talent in the world? Come on…

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#442

Post by prettyStandard »

jstx1 wrote: post #278
ergonaught wrote: post #234

I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths. Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around. Net income for that quarter w…

> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths. There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision" and it's partly ceremony for…

I'm more inclined to agree with parent for the reasons stated by child.

I would be more impressed if they did something like this: 1. internally decide we need to trim the fat 2. Announce the problem and what they need to target, and give the employees a deadline to hit that target 3. Encourage employees to look for new jobs on the job 4. or encourage people to take early retirement 4. or take the plunge on starting their own startup, 5. or let them switch to part time even. I'm sure many of these people are married and switch to their spouses insurance.

They all have Google on their resume, it's not going to take long. These companies are the top of the food chain, they could at least act like it.

This turns it back into every other business problem we solve day in and day out. The big dogs at the top are the deciders, and the ones at the bottom are the do'ers.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#443

Post by prepend »

Rezwoodly wrote: post #274
ergonaught wrote: post #234

I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths. Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around. Net income for that quarter w…

Elon musk set a precedent - you can treat your employees (serfs) like shit and get away with it. Layoffs, perks being removed, the tone has generally shifted to "look we have free coffee" to "we own you, be glad to have a job, oh and you might not actually have a job after all". This is a change of winds, instead of pandering to engineers companies are trying to debase us and remind us where we are in the totem pole.…

> Elon musk set a precedent

No. This is giving him an absurd amount of credit. Organizations have treated their employees like this for decades (perhaps centuries). I remember the 90s were rife with profitable companies laying off employees to boost profit.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#444

Post by Sebb767 »

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #151
makach wrote: post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

Significantly better than the tone-deaf email Satya sent Microsoft employees, which continues to cause undue anxiety for employees who have no clue if or when they'll be laid off over the next 90 days.

Also, it clearly states there are layoffs! Anyone skipping over corporate jargon could have easily missed the single line with "btw, we'll lay off 10k people" in Satyas mail.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#445

Post by shapefrog »

komadori wrote: post #224
shapefrog wrote: post #148

Google had 156,500 full-time employees in 2021, an increase of nearly 16% year-over-year as compared to the 135,301 full-time employees in 2020. Google's pace of hiring was also torrid in the second quarter of 2022 as the company added 10,000 new employees to its 163,906 workforce - that is only through to July 2022. These "Layoffs" are awful for individuals, but they are simply a sign that they went on a hiring spre…

Wow! I worked at Google circa 2015 and there was an internal web page showing how many employees there were. My recollection is that there were about 50k full-time employees and 50k TVCs then. Even then, it felt crazy how large and incohesive the organisation was. I wonder what it's like now.

GOOG ; 2016, 72,053 ; 2015, 61,814 ; 2014, 53,600 ; 2013, 47,756.

2015 is really not that long ago either!

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#446

Post by saurik »

AYBABTME wrote: post #422

Every time I read stuff like: > "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, C…

So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside.

I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products, services, and entertainment options people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only THEN go into a recession!

But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#447

Post by Zvez »

AYBABTME wrote: post #422

Every time I read stuff like: > "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, C…

the worst part is that even when economics growth stopped earlier this year, they didn't stop hiring. They didn't adapt fast enough to reduce the damage. They didn't try to optimize their workforce, they just went on with it till the moment they need to fire 12K

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#448

Post by Nullabillity »

jstx1 wrote: post #278
ergonaught wrote: post #234

I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths. Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around. Net income for that quarter w…

> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths. There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision" and it's partly ceremony for…

Saying "I'm fine" when you aren't doesn't usually involve abruptly robbing thousands of people of their livelihoods.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#450

Post by phtrivier »

brushfoot wrote: post #391
ergonaught wrote: post #234

I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths. Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around. Net income for that quarter w…

> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. "These people" don't deserve punishment any more than a developer who had to make a tough decision does. It's the same situation at a different level with more visibility. Management has its own set of challenges. > that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working It wouldn't be fair to them to keep them…

> Management has its own set of challenges

True, and it comes with its own set of perks, too.

However, the wording of "taking responsibility for the decisions that led us there" seems to imply that Sundar Pichai agrees that _he_ personally made some _bad_ decisions, and that the _logical_ conclusion is to pass the helm ?

Fun fact: in France, a running gag for political jokes is that the sentence "I take full responsibility for xxxx" is almost mechanically expected to be followed by some form of "..., and therefore I resign", because of this spectacular historical precedent [1].

> J'assume pleinement la responsabilité de cet echec, et j'en tire les conclusion, en me retirant de la vie politique.

> I take full responsibility for this failure, and as a consequence, leave political life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msObVR8EDYk

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