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Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#881

Post by serf »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #868
freedomben wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the ethical alternative? everybody must produce everything they want/need without any sort of trading, and without owning any land? or does the government just force people to work and distribute everything anybody needs?

The ethical alternative is one that balances innovation and entrepreneurship with ecological and social responsibility. You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits. And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitat…

nothing to spur innovation like panning every idea through a global counsel of magicians who know what's best for the planet.

aside from global consensus on ideas like 'the planet', it'd require mass labor force control and government assignment, two ideas i'm not thrilled about.

I could see it working in a sci-fi novel, but I have a hard time closing the gaps between them and us.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#882

Post by htss2013 »

forward1 wrote: post #834
kentm wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beginning to believe that it's just impossible to do advertising ethically. The hypothesis is that an advertising firm that attempts to do so will perform worse than ones doing unethical things, and eventually lose customers.

All business is inherently unethical and relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery. Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it. People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business…

My furnace broke after 15 years. I called a business to fix it. They replaced the dead pump motor and it worked again. The repair guy was paid well and I was happy to pay. What exactly is inherently unethical about this?

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#883

Post by forward1 »

htss2013 wrote: post #882
forward1 wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All business is inherently unethical and relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery. Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it. People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business…

My furnace broke after 15 years. I called a business to fix it. They replaced the dead pump motor and it worked again. The repair guy was paid well and I was happy to pay. What exactly is inherently unethical about this?

How about the cost of producing and shipping the new motor pump, and the cost of disposing of the old one?

And do you think the individuals who made the motor pump are treated and compensated fairly, or are they likely exploited in third-world dystopia to bring you (but mostly the business) cost savings?

And this is saying nothing of the actual use of the furnace and all the energy it requires.

And I have yet to see ONE example of a business which does not exploit someone or something, only cognitive dissonance.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#884

Post by hajile »

pavlov wrote: post #15
bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that sarcasm?

It's what happened. Intel was primarily a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips in the early 1980s. They pivoted hard to CPUs instead when it started looking like the IBM PC clone platform is a winner and their 386 chip could define the industry.

Intel pivoted because they couldn't keep up with Asian RAM makers in the race to the bottom.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#885

Post by Panzer04 »

Matumio wrote: post #767
riffraff wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to tax the wealth.. have a wealth tax? It's a thing in countries including Norway and Switzerland, and similar things exist in others (e.g. Italy taxes assets in some weird non linear way).

Yes there is a wealth tax in Switzerland, but... it would have to be much higher to make a difference. Raising it will not pass a referendum, which it practically has to in Switzerland. It has one big advantage, though: official numbers about wealth distribution. I think micro taxation on all transactions (including at ATMs) would work better. Easier to explain, harder to avoid since you tax both sides of each transa…

This is what a GST/VAT is, but far less disruptive. Taxing transactions that don't actually exchange ownership would be bonkers.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#886

Post by cyanydeez »

Kon5ole wrote: post #804

Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around. Is it inevit…

IBM used to count Jews in the ghetto.

This is corporate America. it's your cool uncle when you're young and it's the same uncle when you realize as an adult that that's just not how adults should behave.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#887

Post by oh_sigh »

onion2k wrote: post #836
oh_sigh wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably didn't get to the point of making $18B a quarter by keeping on a bunch of organizational dead weight.

Regardless of anything else a layoff at Google is an admission that the leadership team have nothing for those people to do that's worth keeping them around for. They're 'dead weight' because Google's ideas, ambitions, and taste for audacious ground-breaking projects have died as well. We should all be a little sad about that.

Maybe Google never had the ambition or ideas to employ 200,000+ people. How big were they in the golden era that you're imagining?

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#888

Post by depressedpanda »

whyenot wrote: post #833
Kon5ole wrote: post #804

Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around. Is it inevit…

Patagonia is an example of a company that is trying to be "decent" even after its founder is no longer involved. So far, it seems to be working. In tech, I am not aware of any good examples. I feel like Apple is one of the less bad compared to others. They are at least making efforts to be good about privacy, even if their motivation may be less than pure.

Apple might be less bad than, say Oracle, but it's still an evil mega corp.

Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA.

By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#889

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

ChatGTP wrote: post #95
wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel I am one of those developers that codes 100 times faster since ai tools came out. I was not slow before by the way. But now I can take a well defined interface and class example, ask gpt4 for a new well defined variant, and out it comes. one tweak and a test later its done. Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours. Novel work can't yet be autom…

You’re benchmarking yourself based on your own experience of course. Not to say this is horribly wrong but yeah, doesn’t tell the rest of us much about productivity. Like saying that you run faster after a cup of coffee, cool ?

No this is not a psychological trick.

Much of what I've done with ai tools I have had to do before and struggled over days. I was a python dev mostly but I had cases at work where I needed to write java, c, or c++. The genicam compliant industrial camera nonsense it got me through in a few hours was insane. And using a fuzzy logic library. I did not have to spend tons of time reading the documentation, struggling with cmake, or figuring out how to install and link dlls or even syntax for that matter. I can start to type a comment of a high level description of a small codeblock and copilot spits it out. This works in any language.

It isnt that it speeds up every single operation I do. When I get in the zone I toggle it off. But 80% of the time i hit a snag it instantly short circuits me through the issue. I can and do ask follow up questions about how the thing works so the next time I come across it it wont even be a snag. So I have had slowly compounding speed boosts from it for two years. I code faster with it also because it taught me things, and I have learned when to turn it off (often)

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#890

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

collyw wrote: post #308
wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel I am one of those developers that codes 100 times faster since ai tools came out. I was not slow before by the way. But now I can take a well defined interface and class example, ask gpt4 for a new well defined variant, and out it comes. one tweak and a test later its done. Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours. Novel work can't yet be autom…

How much better do you find ChatGPT 4 compared to the free version?

The free version is essentially worthless. Gpt4 is an incredible tool I have learned so much from.
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