Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google to reduce workforce by 12k

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 1001 posts

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#691

Post by skybrian »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #467
insane_dreamer wrote: post #438

This comment from a NYT opinion piece by former Slack CPO added some clarity as to one reason why tech companies are doing this: pressure from investors to keep the share price up. Public companies lose that freedom to do whatever they want even if they have tons of money in the bank. > Meta and Salesforce combined lost more than $700 billion in market cap last year. Both companies are now dealing with activist inves…

Another comment on this: don't forget that no matter what these CEOs say about their workforce, we're family blah blah blah, they are first and foremost beholden to their shareholders. The very purpose of a capitalist corporation is to serve the interests of its shareholders, aka make more money; everything else is secondary.

This is called "shareholder primacy" and it's more of an ideology than an actual legal requirement. It's going to be true to the extent that the company leadership believes it's true, and a lot of different strategies could be justified as serving the shareholders in the long run.

Matt Levine has written a few columns about how this works out in practice, or doesn't.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#692

Post by cmyr »

hbarka wrote: post #657

A significant percentage of Google’s workforce are temps, vendors, and contractors (what they call TVC). They are approximately more than FTE. I believe the stats are 150,000 TVC versus 144,000 full-time employees. How is Google juggling this reduction in force? Are we talking TVC or FTE?

This post refers to full-time employees. You don't really need to fire TVCs; they're generally on shorter term contracts, which you can choose not to renew.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#693

Post by charles_f »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #686
charles_f wrote: post #656

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…

> you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. "Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn't think "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months". It changed. I am now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the bandwagon and correcting." Now I don't actually have proof that…

> these people weren't top performers

Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling. Large lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the lower performers.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#694

Post by kart23 »

hbarka wrote: post #657

A significant percentage of Google’s workforce are temps, vendors, and contractors (what they call TVC). They are approximately more than FTE. I believe the stats are 150,000 TVC versus 144,000 full-time employees. How is Google juggling this reduction in force? Are we talking TVC or FTE?

usually when a company says layoffs, it’s FTEs. contractors probably don’t even get an announcement and aren’t included in this number.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#695

Post by unity1001 »

raverbashing wrote: post #60
dzonga wrote: post #30

I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not market dynamics. companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent. now it's a war on talent. and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits…

Yeah, I also wonder how much of the current layoffs are "we need to fire people as to look good on paper for the market"

Its entirely that. A business method that relied on inflated valuations over the anticipated future market domination measured in current growth can only be possible in a market that has practically unlimited money entering the economy and it cannot survive in an environment where the money flow stops.

The dollar losing its uncontested dominance as foreign exchange currency due to the results of the sanctions and economic war started over Ukraine with almost entire global south, Asia and most importantly, Arabia moving to trade in their own currencies has killed the zero interest economy. Which stopped the money that Federal reserve and private banks were feeding into the economy. (private banks were doing it through fractional reserve lending).

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#696

Post by gmoot »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #613
xiphias2 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there. The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things. Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system. Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't unders…

> Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there. I lost touch with Google's internal culture around 2011-ish. What is your take? When did you think Google changed and what drove the change? How gradual was?

There was a big change in 2015 when Ruth replaced Patrick as CEO.

Most of the cost cutting dates to then. She has been undeniably good for the share price, but it's a two-edged sword. There is a lot you can't do when you're focused on the share price.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#697

Post by int0x2e »

charles_f wrote: post #656

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…

I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes.

Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit: 1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn't have to lose anyone. 2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire at a crazy rate, often competing with insane offers. 3. When the war started, we again went into a hiring freeze, and now a round of layoffs.

In my experience - our management basically did what everyone else did, which meant we couldn't leverage any of our unique advantages and beat the market in some way.

The reason I joined the company I did after the megacorp is that they had a very simple strategy for hiring - hire top talent in strategic areas when you can find it, but ignore anything else, don't lower the quality bars, don't make insane offers, etc. It's almost as if having common sense is such a rare thing now, that it's become a winning strategy...

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#698

Post by gotorazor »

BowBun wrote: post #566
FlyingSnake wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever’s happening is a prime example of how disruptions happen in tech industry. Previous giants become fossils and new incumbents take the spot. IBM -> GE -> Google etc will all follow the same trajectory towards irrelevance.

In general I agree that these companies retract from the forefront and maybe aren't the innovative powerhouses that they once were, however both IBM and GE do fine as businesses and will probably be around for a long time. And I think it's important we have a bit of both in the world. The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech, but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive projects. Google has…

GE hasn't really been doing fine since the great Recession. The GE of the mid-2000's was a behemoth. If I have to guess and adjusted for inflation, GE hasn't been this poor since the mid-80's.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#699

Post by ifyoubuildit »

> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry.

> Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever.

Does he really believe this?

Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day.

I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse, or the product being unceremoniously dumped after a year. Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.

Their office suite is pretty impressive, but again I can't trust that it (or my files) will be there when I need them.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#700

Post by jbirer »

xiphias2 wrote: post #584
EthanHeilman wrote: post #543

The Google of 2005 wouldn't do this. The Google of 2005 would use this as opportunity to monopolize all the talent and move into some new space and eat everything with fantastic software. * I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night. Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was buying geographic satellite companies and in…

Google of 2008 didn't do this, I was there. The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things. Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system. Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't unders…

It's really unfair that the incompetent have so much power over the competent and block their potential.
Post reply on HN