Google to reduce workforce by 12k • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#761

Post by threadweaver34 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

prakhar897 wrote: post #176

kypro wrote: post #146

Are we about to enter a new era of ultra-profitable tech companies? While companies like GOOG and MSFT have had ridiculously healthy margins compared to traditional industries for some time now, it's also been clear in recent years that these companies have become very loose with spending. Take GOOG for example, they spend so much unnecessary money on fancy offices, free lunches, diversity programs, highly speculativ…

A few years ago, I built an exact replica of a Saas product I saw online and priced it 1/3 theirs. The actual founder went mad and started a smear campaign. Lucky for him, Workload at my regular job picked up and I abandoned the project, but this highlighted the weak moats of most of these products. and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's so that engineers are less inclined to go home and build thei…

If hosting is cheap, I'd be tempted to put it out for free just to up the ante with the other company.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#762

Post by endtime » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

int0x2e wrote: post #697

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 a…

> hire top talent in strategic... don't make insane offers

How does this work? I left Google after ten years last year, when the market was still competitive, and I had multiple strong offers. I wasn't going to leave...lets call it significant money on the table if I somehow had a "non-insane" offer somewhere else...

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#763

Post by bosch_mind » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #740

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> 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 d…

> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see. I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside s…

Google chat is the worst software I’ve ever used

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#764

Post by dopeboy » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

unholiness wrote: post #629

Possibly naive question: Everyone's talking about how these companies are preparing for a global recession. But it's striking how specific to large tech companies. Is it possible these companies are just seeing the new remote-first paradigm as an opportunity to replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers? Obvious this is absurdly difficult, but it's likely more realistic now than it's ever been before.

These companies experienced solid growth during covid (because everyone was home using tech) and now that's starting to recede. They predicted this growth would continue and hired for it. They are choosing to recede that.

> replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers?

The quality of the average engineer entering Google is significantly higher than the one of an average, foreign developer. That is a generalization, but not an over generalization. I know this having worked with a sample size of ~20 on each side of the coin.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#765

Post by lazide » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #748

thanhhaimai wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but search seems worse every day. Search is a reflection of the internet. The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.

It is a reflection on how google views popularity over usefulness.

Huh?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#766

Post by cmrdporcupine » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #693

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What I'm hearing from Googlers I know -- the layoffs are not on the whole tied to perf. They're across the board in terms of years of service and seniority and product areas and roles and some people recently promoted have gotten the axe, too.

Doesn't seem to be departmental. When Google does that (axe a PA or department or product) they have a process of giving a chunk of time usually to let people move themselves, or be moved; e.g. when they killed Fiber at my site (Waterloo) they moved everyone (including me) into other roles and brought new projects into the office, and people in Mountain View and other places were given a few months to find something else internal.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#767

Post by systemvoltage » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

anxman wrote: post #634

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…

I worked on Sundars team at Google in 2006. He is highly technical and understands the nuance of software.

CEO of Google should be a software engineer. There are many execs at Google that can do a better job than uninspiring Sundar.

If I were a shareholder of Google/Alphabet, I would be demanding a better CEO.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#768

Post by dehrmann » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:37 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #110

Another multi-billion dollar company making billions of dollars of profit dumps thousands of staff on the streets. There are two approaches here. Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave. Given the sheer size of the company, a hiring freeze and attrition would gradually reduce the size of the workforce. I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if i…

> dumps thousands of staff on the streets

> Second, stop over recruiting in the first place.

Following your logic, Google would be a trillion dollar company leaving people on the streets if they froze hiring. And that's somehow better?

At the end of the day, what you're really asking for is a better social safety net. I'm just not sure why you think Google should play this role.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#769

Post by JKCalhoun » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

thanhhaimai wrote: post #737

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> 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 d…

> but search seems worse every day. Search is a reflection of the internet. The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.

What you and other's replying here are suggesting then is a downward spiral for Google's search.

Either Google needs to significantly shift gears or all of us need to look toward the next search paradigm that is not blighted by AI SEO crap.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#770

Post by AdrianB1 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #705

7ewis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent. It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise. The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.

> fat trimming exercise The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively difficult interview process has "fat"? How?

Hiring process is never perfect, you find after 6-12 months you made a mistake. I saw that many times, I did that myself 3 times (hired people that were later fired, even after being promoted, as they did not perform well even if they were really good on paper and in interviews).