81–90 of 107 posts
One of my best friends landed a job at Google after graduation. She told me about a fellow new hire she met during orientation who said she planned to coast along in the job since she had learned that Google never lays people off. I guess there is no such thing as a completely secure job, even at a company like Google.
They have always fired people for under performing though.
A friend of mine worked at a public airline and whenever they had a bad quarter, things like coffee would get cut so people would feel it. But those types of industries operate on razor thin margins.
how did your friend feel it when they had a good quarter?
Surely I can't be the only HN reader that thought, "I can't remember the last time I touched a stapler." Frankly, I think the headline writer threw staplers in there just for the sizzle. If I might so boldly suggest reading TFA, staplers are just one example of other things that made a lot of sense. Yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when a lot of folks WFH (or not at all on a Friday afternoon)? Handing out multi-cor…
When I joined a new job about 7 years back I was given a brand new stapler, a roll of tape and other office supplies on the joining day. When I left 4 years later I hadn't even finished one cartridge of stapler lins. Tape was unused as well. A company of Google's size must be wasting a non trivial amount of money on things nobody uses as frequently anymore.
There is a sort of quirk here that causes people to focus on things like this, even if they are overwhelmingly insubstantial.
Wasting physical objects feels bad. Something about the physicality of it. Whereas salary is more abstract and intangible - we experience it as numbers changing on a screen. Important numbers that greatly affect our lives, but the visceral impact of this is more removed.
Reducing waste is good, obviously. But in a cost-saving effort, basic office supplies are a completely useless thing to focus on.
Surely I can't be the only HN reader that thought, "I can't remember the last time I touched a stapler." Frankly, I think the headline writer threw staplers in there just for the sizzle. If I might so boldly suggest reading TFA, staplers are just one example of other things that made a lot of sense. Yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when a lot of folks WFH (or not at all on a Friday afternoon)? Handing out multi-cor…
Now, one could argue that Google has been going down this path for a while, but I still think it's a sad sign. What I think is even sadder is that I haven't seen anything come out of Google in the past couple years that clearly and clear-headedly addresses some of their well-known cultural problems (that are often discussed on HN). For example, if Google senior management said they were totally overhauling their "promotion-oriented development" style, or that they were finally deciding on a better way to handle "Killed by Google" products so that customers aren't scared to try their new stuff in the first place, or that they were becoming more forthcoming in their roadmap visibility, I'd be thrilled. But instead we get the oldest-of-old-school "cost cutting will continue until morale improves" MBA spiel.
Wow, just wow. I have no doubt that Google has a lot of excess to cut, but IMO I always see it as the death knell for large companies when they start a nickel-and-dime approach to cost cutting. I can certainly see the argument for cuts where they are needed to improve focus, and lots of the FAANGs had too many "frilly" expenses in the past 5-10 years, but cutting expenses that improve your employee's productivity is…
If I owned any Google stock right now, I'd be thinking hard about selling it. Not because everything here is silly, but just because: A. over the course of 20+ years in this industry I've noticed a trend that when companies start worrying about things like tape dispensers or staplers (or the free coffee in the cafeteria, or the cost of the subsidized sodas in the breakroom, etc) it's almost always a Really Bad Sign f…