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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

#941

Post by SirMaster »

tidbits wrote: post #762
SirMaster wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your job is NOT safe. Maybe your job(s). But there are certainly companies out there that actually care about the welfare of their employees. Usually family owned and such. That's where I choose to work and they have always taken care of my needs and listened to me. I never really understood why people have such a desire to work for these big companies that don't care about you. I guess it's just different strokes..…

I worked at such a place right out of college. Always claiming we were family and that they would take care of their workers. Then covid happened, they lost some money, and laid off 25% of their employees, including people who had been there 10+ years. Now I work at a big company and make 3x as much with similar workloads. Glad I learned early on that no company is actually a family and will put your needs above the…

>Glad I learned early on that no company is actually a family and will put your needs above the needs of the company!

You learned that 1 company isn't a family company and puts your needs above the company...

When covid hit and work dried up where I work, the company told employees to go out and find charity work and the company paid our full salary to do the charity work.

Just one example of the way they think and act. I've been there 15 years and never seen a single instance or case that would make me believe they would act any other way.

They pay plenty fair and I make more than I know what to do with for myself.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#942

Post by sz4kerto »

borroka wrote: post #718
sz4kerto wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotio…

> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works. I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected ev…

> Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.

I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#943

Post by trashtester »

lobsterthief wrote: post #286
zensayyy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

must disagree. A bloated company is the killer of innovation. Job security is no indicator for innovation. In fact, the most unsecure job produce the most innovative Tech (see Startups).

This viewport is very misleading. Startups don’t produce the most innovative tech _because_ they’re less secure.

In a way, it's natural selection that drives evolution, by removing the unfit genes from the gene pool. This is arguably more important than mutation, and mutations would accumulate to be catastrophic over time without natural selection.

Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation.

The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#944

Post by verinus »

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…

This is so theoretical it will never work in an acceptable way. Because of who will decide is responsible and on what grounds?

What will come of it will most likely be analogous to the Communist system where just a central committee was in charge of making all the decisions. and to be quite clear: this system failed utterly and completely. Without the capitalist west there would have been famines in DDR and the east.

On what I agree is, that we need a strong state factoring in stuff like ecological consequences via taxation- so the decision to buy or make stuff is distributed.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#945

Post by krolley »

alexeiz wrote: post #756
mnbion wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is increasingly treating Android as an iOS alternative for the developing world and outsourcing core Android development to its Indian offices. The reason they are doing this is probably because the non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones.

> non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones That's a kiss of death. I remember while working at Windows Phone team at Microsoft, a lot of program managers and designers were using iPhones and Macs. Unsurprisingly their own product never got off the ground because they failed to develop a vision for it. Android at Google is in a slightly better position, but this kind of attitude of not using your…

I recall around that time reading a story where if Steve Ballmer would catch you using an iPhone on the MSFT campus he would blow up. At the time, comments were "make a better phone" but I agree with your position. It's surprising though, eating your own dogfood is one of the golden rules of development. Such a pity Microsoft didn't stick with Windows Phone.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#946

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

The company never had any integrity^1 and has always lacked a moral compass.^2

1. Paper at TREC announcing the search engine cited harmful influence of advertising and promised a search engine "in the academic realm". They never delivered. Sold out. That was before they even went public.

2. "Don't be evil". Given the amount of highly personal data it collects, and the lack of regulation, the company truly needed some sort of ethical code. But they never even tried. Instead they let their senior management engage in harassment, settled every suit brought against them for privacy violations, paid off the competition, and routinely accepted enormous regulatory fines. Pure, unaudulterated greed.

The Google playbook is the furthest thing from "keep the margins less than or equal to 10%". It's the work of SillyCon Valley. It's the same playbook adopted by Facebook to keep Zuckerberg from being ousted. Keep reasonable people from having any ability to change anything.

There is nothing "cool" about it.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#947

Post by jbverschoor »

kentm wrote: post #826
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…

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.

Google ads used to be great. Just include some ads based on the content you’re looking at. Not based on some weird history and cookies.

I don’t mind those ads. But just keep them small, light, non interesting, and don’t sell my data.. be the platform that protects my data when matching up advertisers.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#948

Post by offices »

killerstorm wrote: post #344
offices wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a company has embedded itself so deeply in public life - globally - it's reasonable to have strong feelings about its actions. When we say layoffs work, are we considering the way the same companies overhired just a few years ago, harming the rest of the employment market? Do we remember this in later discussions when we treat these companies as prescient hiveminds, in spite of them using overtuned bang-bang con…

I find it a bit hilarious that programmers feel entitled being employed for life in one company. Did you ever consider finishing the project? Getting it done and delivered? My first paid job as a programmer was like that. We made an exam software for university, a complete package covering the process from authoring test questions to making reports. We made it in 6 months and it was done. Finished. Working. There was…

>But, perhaps, that should be addressed at societal level - e.g. unemployment benefits.

Google lobby.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#949

Post by int_19h »

kentm wrote: post #826
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…

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.

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].*

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#950

Post by Kon5ole »

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…

>All business is inherently unethical

Ethics are not a law of nature, it's basically an opinion. Your opinion may be that all business is unethical, but most people disagree.

Most people consider it to be ethical to trade money for goods and services at an agreed price, for example.

Similarly I think most people would agree that hiding the truth from people in order to have them do things they wouldn't do if they knew the truth, is unethical. Tracking people's activity without telling them that you are doing it would be unethical by that standard.

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