Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google to reduce workforce by 12k

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

891–900 of 1001 posts

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#891

Post by scottyah »

UncleMeat wrote: post #847
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people I'll stop you right there. Why would they do a post-mortem for this? They're not accountable to the employees. This should be a reminder for everyone as to who SLT actually works for.

Corporations should be accountable to their employees. The system we have today is harmful.

The employees who stay get paid more than if everyone stayed. Same idea as with unions, you're splitting the pie into less slices so each is bigger.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#892

Post by sireat »

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…

Whenever I see CEO taking "full responsibility" and staying put I am reminded of Gavin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

Full responsibility that does not involve massive shakeup at the top is not full responsibility.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#893

Post by AnIrishDuck »

outworlder wrote: post #861
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 take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here That's a meaningless statement. They never face any consequences. A CEO taking responsibility for layoffs should add their name to the list too.

"It is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure"

Silicon Valley somehow feels even more relevant years after it has wrapped.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#894

Post by prakhar897 »

simmerup wrote: post #268
prakhar897 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other way to view is that even though you could undercut that business by two thirds, you didn’t make enough profit to make it worth pursuing over your day job. So maybe you were selling it far too cheap after all.

I would've made significant more than my day job just by subscriptions (not counting share value). I had just joined workforce and leaving it so early didn't seem right to me.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#895

Post by yafbum »

srveale wrote: post #877
jedberg wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point of view of a CEO of a public company, no post-mortem is necessary because nothing went wrong. Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. Grow when money is cheap, stabilize when it's not. If you don't do that, then you'll get out-competed by the companies that are doing that.

To me the strategy has seemed so backwards the last few years. You are the CEO of a giant tech company, and your goal is to achieve maximum well-being of the company in, say, 3 years time. You are confident you can weather the short term ups and downs. You could: 1. Follow trends. Go on a hiring frenzy at the same time as everyone else. You have to compete with absurd compensation packages because everybody already h…

You can't necessarily survive #2 if it causes the talent you actually need the most to bail in high times. You can play this game at the margin by starting to freeze hiring before everyone else does, so that you can be there earlier to hire again at discounted rates in the downturn

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#896

Post by ssnistfajen »

marvin wrote: post #609
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…

> 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. Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?

Natural end stage of organization growth.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#897

Post by prakhar897 »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #545
prakhar897 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For most of these companies sales and marketing is the moat. Edit: curious to know what was the SaaS that got rattled by your fun experiment.

I'll dm u :)

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#898

Post by riku_iki »

MrDresden wrote: post #889
edgyquant wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not wrong but at the same time I was hiring for a senior engineer a year ago and the market was ridiculous. Seniors only wanted to work if they could do part time for six figures and the consensus was they should be allowed to work 2-3 companies at once. This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it may suck to be an engineer compar…

To a European this kind of description always boggles the mind. Having been in the field for 12 years, with a degree in CS, worked as a senior IC and been personally responsible for critical projects at financial institutions and startups alike, the highest wage I have ever had was 75k. And this is in western Europe. In a way I hope that in the near future more US firms start looking outside their boarders when hirin…

google has plenty of dev offices in western europe. Did you try to apply?..

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#899

Post by robocat »

FpUser wrote: post #221

Earlier in 2022 Google introduced this GRAD performance review system. In my opinion said system turns employment into a rat's race but I digress. One of the goals of that system was to eliminate about 10000 people which falls just in line with this reduction. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...

“Hohn is not factoring in the counterintuitive reason why Google and other tech companies pay software engineers total compensation packages of $300k to $800k. They are hoarding talent from their rivals and paying workers handsomely so there isn’t a motivation to quit and build a startup that will disrupt the status quo.”

Terrible reporting. I would like to see a proper financial analysis on whether hoarding or preventing competition makes financial sense. I think the hoarding idea is a crock of shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487744

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#900

Post by AlbertCory »

When pointing out anything that Sundar did wrong to get to this point, remember the 3 responses of the Management Class to an inconvenient fact:

1. It's not true.

2. It's true, but it's not important.

3. It's true, and it's important, but we already knew it.

Post reply on HN