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

Googler... ex-Googler

nerdy.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#901

Post by seanmcdirmid »

deepsun wrote: post #800
SteveNuts wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume. He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions". I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these p…

One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.

Oh ya this. Also their recruiters aren’t the best but they are the most persistent. Meta seems to be going in the Amazon direction unfortunately, I still think Google is the least bad of the three.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#902

Post by constantcrying »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #174
abdj8 wrote: post #110

Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hou…

Wow, the last paragraph is really touching. That comment from the CEO is brilliant: "I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today." That will stay with me for some time!

It is a genuinely terrible idea by the CEO though. Yesterday you paid them, today you don't. If you think that doesn't change your relationship, you have to be a fool.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#903

Post by constantcrying »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #181
abdj8 wrote: post #110

Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hou…

What happens if your company supports billions of dollars in economic output, and a few employees decides to go rogue and sabotage some systems that then causes an international loss of billions of dollars, and possibly property damages and loss of life? If you were the CEO, would you take criminal/financial responsibility for that?

>If you were the CEO, would you take criminal/financial responsibility for that?

That is obviously decided by a court.

Ironically exactly this happens at VW, where getting fired is exceedingly difficult. Neither incompetence nor underperformance are enough.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#904

Post by seanmcdirmid »

yodsanklai wrote: post #520
mycatisblack wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in a (now defunct) US co in West-EU I can say it’s a subtle blend of the two. The layoff was announced, shortly after a few people received a call by HR, were escorted to their desk by security and had to turn in all company belongings on the spot. They were not allowed to touch a computer or telephone and were then escorted out of the premises. Afterwards, we learned that they had received a severance…

I work for a US company but in western Europe. The layoffs have been much more humane here than in the US. There was a negociation process which lasted several months, and the severance was better and on a voluntary basis. I don't think a company making profit can easily get rid of employees over here, but probably depends on the country. Regarding performance-based layoffs, they did manage to fire people too, but ag…

I wonder about the dynamic tradeoffs. Maybe a better example are labor markets that are even more dynamic than the USA (like China, despite having formal labor contracts). Maybe if jobs are so easy to get losing one won’t feel as painful.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#905

Post by selimthegrim »

selimthegrim wrote: post #629
Tainnor wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm not yet desperate to the point that I would agree to that.

I had to do one of those for some local government lobbyists association in DC. They ended up hiring some undergrad instead.

And just got asked to do another one for an internship

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#906

Post by gtirloni »

supportengineer wrote: post #782
gtirloni wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).

If you're being forced to sell something, wouldn't you want to maximize its value? Wouldn't you retain the most valuable people?

That's a good question. I don't know about the author's credentials but it seem very high and indeed I'm sure they would find a job anywhere they apply to.

But from the PoV of a higher up making layoff decisions, the sooner they severe the organization from the rest of the company, the less traumatic it will be when the time comes. I think at this point they realize it's better to start treating Chrome et al more like Waymore, which seems to have some isolation from the borg collective.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#907

Post by FromOmelas »

supportengineer wrote: post #782
gtirloni wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).

If you're being forced to sell something, wouldn't you want to maximize its value? Wouldn't you retain the most valuable people?

Not if they might become a competitor, or thrive (proving that the sale was a good idea). Better to keep them weak and likely to fail.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#908

Post by bee_rider »

PaulHoule wrote: post #892
als0 wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out. Shocking how real this is.

Just wait for IBM to turn into Red Har Linux or maybe Infosysl

That would be nice, if it turned into Red Hat.

But IBM was first, right?

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#909

Post by SR2Z »

paganel wrote: post #771
DannyBee wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive" So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure. But some of the data here is just very wrong. Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At…

> But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, That’s the thing, they might be winning all the productivity battles there are (and I genuinely believe that they do, on top of great tools Google employs good-enough programmers to make use of those tools), but at the same time they’re losing the general war. Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when i…

> Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.

People repeat this a lot, but it's obviously not true. Google Photos is recent, really good, and had more than a billion users really quickly. Waymo is like a decade away from eating the entire urban taxi market. Gemini is the best LLM for writing code right now. I guess you could call these "rare exceptions" but I don't think that's a useful way to describe them.

Hell, even YouTube improves every year by leaps and bounds from both a revenue/profit standpoint, AND from a creator support standpoint.

Google deserves to be heckled mercilessly for how easy engineers have it there and how eager it is to kill off products, but suggesting that it's a dying company coasting on ad money is just totally wrong.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#910

Post by kvark »

atotic wrote: post #654
azangru wrote: post #324

I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck. To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers…

Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly. What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years. Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that unde…

David Baron was a distinguished engineer at Mozilla - not someone you fire at a whim. What makes you think he didn't leave voluntarily?
Post reply on HN