741–750 of 1001 posts
Are layoffs becoming an annual thing in tech now? Last year there was the "macroeconomic conditions" excuse that every company used. How are they justifying this round?
> laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone. That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.
I wonder what the reality is regarding Pixel's success; they lost me as a customer this year after it turns out the "free" Pixel 2 watch is mostly a paper weight because Fitbit and its new unified Google account requirement doesn't support Workspace custom domains. I pay for Workspaces, I paid for the device(s), but the penny has finally dropped in regards to their real motivations, they can't allow Workspaces to min…
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I definitely try to pick jobs based on vibe, but that's still not 100% safe. I adore my current employer. Best place I've ever worked. But we're contractors, and my team's contract just ended unexpectedly. I trust they respect me enough to rotate me to another team, but I gotta sweat bullets and send out résumés nonetheless.
> my team's contract just ended unexpectedly. Is it really a contract if it can end unexpectedly? I know it is, but really the original purpose of a contract is to set the terms and conditions, so nothing was surprise when it happened. We really need a better term for these one sided work agreements.
The cost of the contract being one cost, so when you think about cost of managing the contract and contracts etc. severing it via a payout can be cheaper, and is often sudden to the contractors unfortunately.
Google is almost a 2T company. The amount of wealth that big google shareholders hold in the 1T+ tech companies is mind boggling. Perhaps US should consider raising capital gains tax.
How is that relevant to the layoffs?
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Pissed me off when I realised you could use not Nest cameras nor doorbell if you have a Google Workspace account. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Cannot use them with a Google workspace account? Or cannot use them if you merely have a workspace account? The former seems like it might be reasonable (and I wouldn't want to lock a piece of home infrastructure to a workspace account anyway); the latter seems utterly insane.
I have a workspace account that is my main email and such. With the Pixel 2 watch I had to use a @gmail.com account in order to use it. Not a huge deal, but annoying for sure.
Would be the same issue for someone who doesn't have an @gmail.com account at all. They would have to create one in order to use the Pixel 2 watch.
Well, hopefully there's a silver lining to all this: Talented and underappreciated engineers (or those just caught in the crossfire of shitty policies) will go on and start new, more exciting companies.
> and start new, more exciting companies Which what money? With these interest rates and Section 174, it's pretty rough out there to start one as compared to ~6 years ago.
6 years ago, with cheap money and everyone eager to start new firms makes success more of a lottery than a systematized effort. I'd rather be a startup founder raised on lean capital with less of a crowded marketplace.
Google is almost a 2T company. The amount of wealth that big google shareholders hold in the 1T+ tech companies is mind boggling. Perhaps US should consider raising capital gains tax.
I've thought about this for a long time. If we wanted to actually tax this wealth, we should just make people pay capital gains on marked-to-market positions every 10 years. Now before everyone starts shouting "yea, but the valuations aren't value," you could easily tax them on the lowest reasonable marked-to-market nominal value over the last decade, and you'd still get that tax revenue, just a decade later. It's just a way to have a property tax on a very speculative type of property.
I've been a casual investor my entire life, and I still think it's ridiculous that you can just hold an asset forever and never pay a property tax on it, but some guy scraping together a life for his wife and kid has to pay property taxes on his house every year.
I'm surprised to see so many comments here taking layoffs personally, or talking about how layoffs are stupid. Layoffs are not personal, and the corollary to that is that you should never treat your company as a friend. It's a company trying to maximize value. Also, layoffs do work. Almost every large, successful company has done them at some stage. They are an expected, and necessary, part of operating a company and…
The person who is laid off has to scramble in order to say, not have to move countries, or pay for their healthcare bills.
It's not personal for the company, but it is personal for each person who was laid off
> laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone. That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.
Yet everyone I know that owned a pixel despises it.
In relative terms, it's not huge - NYT is no more specific than hundreds, so let's say 500, out of 182,000 - that's 0.27% (though obviously a higher impact on engineering - you might that would be what they'd cut last).
And it seems to be layoffs in hardware which, frankly, Google is not great with. Yes, Pixel has improved vs previous years. But Pixel is mostly US, Apple owns the US market and Pixel is not making any inroads (at best it is eating other Android devices). Google has no real runaway hardware hits. It's had a few promising launches but then they manage to take them in bad directions (Google WiFi going from a simple focu…