10/10 chance google gets a new ceo in the next 1-2 years.
Google to reduce workforce by 12k
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
> diversity programs... Not even remotely comparable to the other things you listed. People such as yourself seemingly can't stop talking about it though, despite it having no effect on your life.
> despite it having no effect on your life. How could it have no effect on our lives? It has effect when you compete against a diversity hire, it has effect when you have to work with a diversity hire, it has effect when your manager has to decide who to lay off when your coworker is a diversity hire.
Companies don't write magical blank cheques to someone who ticks off the right boxes without having them do any actual work. They are hired with the expectation of delivering value to the company by performing real work adequate to their qualifications. The term "diversity hire" is meaningless and frankly derogatory without evaluating actual individual performance. Companies have pipelines to handle underperforming employees and there are no signs any of them are being spared due to ticking off the right boxes despite that right-wing conspiratory trolls allege.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#913[dead]
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another comment on this: don't forget that no matter what these CEOs say about their workforce, we're family blah blah blah, they are first and foremost beholden to their shareholders. The very purpose of a capitalist corporation is to serve the interests of its shareholders, aka make more money; everything else is secondary.
This is called "shareholder primacy" and it's more of an ideology than an actual legal requirement. It's going to be true to the extent that the company leadership believes it's true, and a lot of different strategies could be justified as serving the shareholders in the long run. Matt Levine has written a few columns about how this works out in practice, or doesn't.
But the company leadership either has to be able to convince shareholders to stay the course (as Amazon famously did for years without generating profits as it grew), or has to have enough power to ward off the investors (bearing in mind that most investors are institutional not retail) because of the way the company is structured that he's not in danger of being ousted if the board (which represents the shareholders, not the company) doesn't like the company's performance.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#915Larry and Sergey used to proudly boast that they are not a “conventional company”. In fact, this quote is still in Alphabet’s home page: > As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Google looks more and more like a conventional big company with moves like this. They’ve become really boring in the last 5-6 years.
It's like a person who won the lottery more than a decade ago finally having their directionless identity crisis unravel in full force.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#916Earlier 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…
Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring someone else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging for the diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#917Earlier 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…
Pinchai has been a Terrible pick. He made google just worse. Like a passive aggressive leader...
Google market cap has more than doubled since he took over.
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#918> 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…
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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#919> 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…
> 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…
> I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it.
Think macro-level. It's not that each individual firm says "oh, debt is cheap" and takes on more debt to increase spending. It's that economy-wide a lot of firms are responding to that incentive, and that increased spending is showing up at other firms as increased revenue (and at the macro level, as a general shift in demand).
So your revenue goes up. What do you do with it? Well, if you have projects you could start or increase funding for that look like they'd be profitable, you do that. You might even leverage it a bit; if you think the risk-adjusted ROI of something is way higher than the interest rates you can get, why wouldn't you?
And even if you think there's a good chance that the cheap credit dries up and the economy goes into recession, (a) leaving money on the table for a long-term bet isn't something most CEOs can pull off without shareholders fighting them on it, and (b) you're not actually aiming for zero layoffs -- any company that is innovating and iterating is going to need to lay off some people to match their workforce to their needs sometimes.
Inflation's effects take place at the level of deep incentives. It's not something you can fix by thinking "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months."
Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k
#920Google had 156,500 full-time employees in 2021, an increase of nearly 16% year-over-year as compared to the 135,301 full-time employees in 2020. Google's pace of hiring was also torrid in the second quarter of 2022 as the company added 10,000 new employees to its 163,906 workforce - that is only through to July 2022. These "Layoffs" are awful for individuals, but they are simply a sign that they went on a hiring spre…
Wow! I worked at Google circa 2015 and there was an internal web page showing how many employees there were. My recollection is that there were about 50k full-time employees and 50k TVCs then. Even then, it felt crazy how large and incohesive the organisation was. I wonder what it's like now.
I joined end of 2011 and I think there were just north of 20,000 FTEs.
When I left end of last year I had been there longer than 95%+ of the 100k+ (I forget) employees, which I found ... odd... since I still felt like a Noogler.