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Googler... ex-Googler

nerdy.dev

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Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#531
post #110

Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hou…

VDX.tv?

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#532
post #448

Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.

They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way tha…

> Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".

On some level yes. With the massive disparity in who owns the markets, your argument is basically “Is google doing a good job of making the rich richer?”. Hiring H1Bs and offshoring while firing American labor is not a good look.

Why keep a company like that around?

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#534
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the last part of 'TLA' form the Jargon File (I had a hard copy back in college that I read cover to cover). http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html ... The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 9…

Now I want to use the dictionary file to figure the actual probability of a letter appearing in a TLA. It's not nearly 1/26.

There's likely a good bit of analysis that could be done on TLAs. Consider TLA itself is {Adjective : Count} {Noun} {Noun}. Meanwhile, DUI is {Gerund} {Preposition} {Noun} with the stop word 'the' removed.

It might be interesting to take a sample of TLAs used and look what words can be used in those spots. If the third position is 90% likely to be a noun, that could change the distribution... guessing not in a significant way itself but it could be interesting to see.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#536
> Works for massive advertising company on Chrome, the browser widely known for anti-competitive practices and destroying the ecosystem of the Web.

> Surprised when company does nasty, profit-driven thing.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#537
post #110

Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hou…

Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google. Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually m…

Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude.

Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#539

[flagged]

You are probably gonna get downvoted for lack of empathy but I completely agree. I feel bad for OP, but simultaneously if you are a technocrat who thinks they are somehow insulated or not part of the larger system, you need a reality check.

> I was supposed to help with the developer keynote, ensuring things matched reality and were beautiful. Gone.

Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.

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