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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#921

Post by robocat »

leesec wrote: post #879

Maybe a hot take but 6 months severence is extremely generous, they don't have to give anything. This is basically being spoiled compared to how the rest of the world is treated. I'm sure these talented engineers can find new gigs within 6 months

Getting laid off can have serious long term consequences. Six months severance is relatively good, but perhaps not enough to cover the losses to an employee (just stating a fact, not saying that companies are only responsible for lifetime of employees).

From https://www.nber.org/papers/w13626

  We find that job displacement leads to a 15-20% increase in death rates during the following 20 years. If such increases were sustained beyond this period, they would imply a loss in life expectancy of about 1.5 years for a worker displaced at age 40.
It is hard to pick a fair balance between economic needs and human needs, but that is one thing society is supposed to be doing for us all.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#922

Post by snotrockets »

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…

> what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.

Nothing could have been done, because nothing needed to be done.

Is there a recession? Probably. Was valuation and market expectation inflated? Obviously. Did Google overhire? looks like it.

But is that the cause for the firing? Of course not. Last quarter revenue was almost 69.1B, 6.1% Y/Y. That is still an offensive amount of money. Management decided to hurt people because other companies are doing it.

Here's your root cause analysis: management is beholden to fads, not facts. Layoffs don't improve performance (https://www.careerusa.org/resources/career-files/158-resourc...), but the market demands it, and nobody in the c-suite has the long term vision and spine to do what is right, rather than to appease short term fads.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#923

Post by hintymad »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry. > Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever. Does he really believe this? Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day. I worry about using google products for anything essential d…

> Their office suite is pretty impressive

Speaking of usability, Quip is much better in my experience. Office 365 is more feature rich. If anything, I think GSuite is falling behind. A few killer features that GDocs should've had since years ago:

- A link to any line. Quip has it, yet in gdoc I have to create a bookmark first.

- Any table is a spreadsheet. I mean, isn't it obvious? Who says one never needs to calculate anything in a table, or never needs to format anything in a spreadsheet cell?

- Embed formula anywhere and refer the result anywhere. Dah! So convenient for technical docs, yet gdocs has shit.

- Latex support. I'm sorry, but gdoc's equation is both ugly and crippled.

- Embed any file. I mean, really, this is year 3202 and I still have to upload a file to gdrive, find its link, and paste the link back to my doc?

Google used to an avantgarde in product design. What happened?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#924

Post by morepork »

jedberg wrote: post #835
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…

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.

Sure, but Google always billed themselves as a non-traditional company, and prided themselves on social responsibility. That helped in hiring as they became one of the most desirable companies to work for, even when their salaries were outstripped by their peers (e.g. Facebook).

There will be long term effects on their hiring based on this moving further showing they are becoming just another traditional company. What's to differentiate them from IBM or Microsoft now?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#925

Post by lappet »

michaelgrosner2 wrote: post #792
ifyoubuildit wrote: post #699

> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry. > Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever. Does he really believe this? Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day. I worry about using google products for anything essential d…

I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in. OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in thei…

Most people I know use Android. I have noticed Android and IPhone users have their own bubbles.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#926

Post by thrashh »

int0x2e wrote: post #697
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 love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes. Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit: 1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn't have to lose anyone. 2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire a…

I think this is just another case of "history repeats itself"

People who went through COVID will now have an experience that will shape how they handle this situation in the future. This generation won't make this same "mistake" again, but a future generation may.

Just like how people who grew up with extreme bank instability (i.e. the Great Depression) stashed large sums of money in closets and dressers but we don't. Our decisions are largely based on the context of our experiences. If we don't have a certain experience, it probably won't be a factor in decision making.

Of course, you go to school to learn about past mistakes, but

(1) There are a billion mistakes that have been made in the past so even if you learn about them, without direct personal experience, you will probably repeat some anyway.

(2) In the end, we sort of want people to repeat mistakes because sometimes the conditions are different and the outcome could be positive. What happens when we get old is that we encounter negative experiences that discourages us from trying the same things in the future, which is great for survival but extremely negative for innovation. In the case of someone who grew up stashing money, they might be disdainful of banks and this could actually turn out to be a pretty bad trait.

So in the end, it is what it is. Cycles will always be a thing.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#927

Post by KerrAvon »

snotrockets wrote: post #922
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…

> what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business. Nothing could have been done, because nothing needed to be done. Is there a recession? Probably. Was valuation and market expectation inflated? Obviously. Did Google overhire? looks like it. But is that the cause for the firing? Of course not. Last quarter revenue was alm…

Yes, but I would add that we're not in a recession currently. Really. There may be one coming, but it hasn't happened yet.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#928

Post by zmmmmm »

cloutchaser wrote: post #620
nvarsj wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me because this has been happening in tech a long time and is happening to the current giants. The old giants like IBM, GE, Motorola, etc. all suffered similar fates. And it's been discussed ad nauseum by disgruntled engineers who then go and make new companies/start ups to get away from the "suits". It's called "Takeover by MBA". You know it's happened when you start hearing phrases like "Cut costs", "…

It’s an anecdote but it’s also what I heard from my doctor dad working in the NHS. There was a time when the UK health system was actually run by doctors or people with medical knowledge. Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead, both in staff and bureaucracy. In his opinion that’s what ruined the NHS not underfunding. Business and management courses are not necessarily…

> Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead

It's kind of interesting being in a small to mid-size organisation and leading a team where the need to introduce this kind of middle management is asserting itself. I'm instinctively resisting it but the downsides are clear. I have way too many direct reports. I am constantly bogged down in generic meetings - everything from desk arrangements, COVID safety, leave management, etc. Meanwhile most of my staff spend large amounts of their time blocked from their top priority task because they lack input or direction. My unique technical skills are being completely wasted. Yet it kills me that we might decide we have to blow $150k/year which could employ another coal-face engineer simply because we can't figure out how to organise ourselves better.

So should I put in place a generic middle manager to deal with all this stuff? Or not? It may seem like it's obvious in happens to large megacorps that the end result of this is bad. But you can see completely how you end up there. Certainly the people who are doing that are getting way more cred in the organisation and arguably actually getting more done in real terms.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#929

Post by startupsfail »

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…

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