Surprised to see another cycle of layovers happening here. What’s going on in the industry?
Rewarding shareholders.
Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
71–80 of 141 posts
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#72Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#73Google stock is up 56% compared to a year go. And yet Sundar is happy to destroy morale by keeping to fire people. after saying "Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, Says Laying Off 12,000 Workers Was the Worst Moment in the Company's 25-Year History" https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/googles-ceo-sundar-pichai-say...
It’s shocking he hasn’t been sacked yet. He’s completely incompetent, has led exactly zero successful initiatives, and has arguably trashed Google’s brand with constant product shutdowns.
> He’s completely incompetent, has led exactly zero successful initiatives,
That's not what the stock ticker says. That's what the CEO's job is at megacorps, not "product innovation". Google has one core product, Ads.
Everything else loses money.
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#74As I have been saying for a while Google, Amazon, Facebook, all these companies are on the decline. We have allowed them to become so big that they don't fall fast but it's very apparent that they would have been disrupted if they were normal sized like companies were in the past.
By what measure?
By the one they that was revealed in their dream.
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft was once on the decline and it's now bouncing back. Having billions and captive markets (by network effect) seems to help.
Microsoft has access to ALL corporate data of ALL companies (sharepoint, teams, outlook, office365). Remaining step is to link chatgpt to it and train automated agents.
They can't legally do that though for a vast swath of those companies due to various data-protection regs.
They do already have several "train your own model"-style ChatGPT products available though.
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors want more money
They always do. Are you one of those who'd prefer to be poor and sick rather than rich and healthy yourself?
If I'm already rich and healthy why would I prefer to make others poor so that I could become even MORE rich? We don't need to excuse greed. It's okay to criticize it without having to say "well I like having money too." It's not an either-or.
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#77I wonder what does this mean for the "Everyone can code" movement (bootcamps, initiatives within Google and the like, government funding). They keep saying that you can get a high paying job if you do a 9 month course. When the best of the field are getting laid off, I wonder how long will the "Everyone can code" movement survive
Erm, who says the folks being laid off are the "best of the field?"
Best of the field was an exaggeration but I just meant very experienced devs. For newbie devs, it is the same. People that either in paper, in practice or both are better than your average $NONAME company dev. To get a job at FAANG, you need to be a good programmer. The folks at FAANGs aren't regular devs. And they are being laid off.
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#78I wonder what does this mean for the "Everyone can code" movement (bootcamps, initiatives within Google and the like, government funding). They keep saying that you can get a high paying job if you do a 9 month course. When the best of the field are getting laid off, I wonder how long will the "Everyone can code" movement survive
That concept doesn't hold water. If everyone can code, it won't be a high paying skill. And soon, it will really be true that everyone can code. Schools are teaching computational thought as early as kindergarten, so the next generation is growing up with coding being a basic literacy skill. Of course, knowing how to code and being good at creating software are two different things. Just like knowing how to write and…
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Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey guys, this is a pretty decent gesture no matter what you think of Microsoft after mass layoffs. No need to be snarky.
How is this a decent gesture ? Any employer with visibility and cash flow wants to hire engineers. Do you think employers are doing workers a favor and being so nice and humane when they go out of their way and give us poor peons a chance at a job ?
I don’t see how it’s anything that’s not at least a positive gesture. You can have problems with the capitalist system as a whole but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what he wrote. It’s better than nothing.
I lost my job when my company closed a few years ago in the middle of the pandemic and I am very appreciative of those who reached out. That limbo of uncertainty even if I could survive for years with what I had didn’t feel nice.
Re: Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
#80I wonder what does this mean for the "Everyone can code" movement (bootcamps, initiatives within Google and the like, government funding). They keep saying that you can get a high paying job if you do a 9 month course. When the best of the field are getting laid off, I wonder how long will the "Everyone can code" movement survive
That concept doesn't hold water. If everyone can code, it won't be a high paying skill. And soon, it will really be true that everyone can code. Schools are teaching computational thought as early as kindergarten, so the next generation is growing up with coding being a basic literacy skill. Of course, knowing how to code and being good at creating software are two different things. Just like knowing how to write and…
I think about it this way -- when I was a kid, being able to navigate a command prompt (DOS!) put you in a category way ahead of most adults using computers every day.
Of course, normal users use the terminal as much now as they do, then, but mostly because "they don't ever have to"[0], but yet they're able to accomplish things that might have been relegated to the category of "computer programming" just a decade ago.
Programming software is just another way of using a computer in a more advanced manner than mere mortals. Programming gets simpler, more enter the field, junior developers become more powerful and the difference between the expert and the novice increases or decreases depending on which direction you look at it from.
In 1986, my Dad, a non-programmer, and a "power user" but not expert in PCs, used Lotus 1-2-3 to design an invoicing and accounting tool that had a UI, forms, printed formatted output and tracked everything in a database-like manner in a file. I called him a non-programmer, but was he?
[0] When your PC boots into a `C>`, you better know what to type to get it to do something other than that.