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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

#951

Post by int_19h »

BikiniPrince wrote: post #22
NorwegianDude wrote: post #6

> laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone. That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.

Yet everyone I know that owned a pixel despises it.

I owned several Nexus phones as well as Pixel phones. I'd say that the Pixels were pretty decent; my main annoyance was with the fact that Google deliberately disabled some of the hardware features in that line-up to push their own proprietary solutions - most notably, there's no video output over USB-C nor Miracast, so that your only option is Chromecast.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#952

Post by cromka »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #591
cromka wrote: post #467

> Google confirmed the Assistant cuts, earlier reported by Semafor, and the hardware layoffs, earlier reported by the blog 9to5Google. Nice. So one can reasonably expect the Google Home device et all to get even worse at all the basic functionality it used to be quite good at as far as 2017.

https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/13971691

That's not really what I meant. I mean the issues with basic communication:

Google: (...) would you like to know more?

cromka: YES

Google:

This happens notoriously and effectively it feels as if the devices had became more "dumb" in general, not loosing particular skills.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#953

Post by Clubber »

pkilgore wrote: post #371

This is how you get tech unions.

>This is how you get tech unions.

Apparently not, this has been going on for decades. This is a small culling compared to 2001 and 2008. Google is now a shit company just collecting rents, has been for probably 15 years, and this is indicative of a shit company just collecting rents.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#954

Post by Clubber »

Solvency wrote: post #771
vkou wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The connective thread is that tech growth has slowed/stopped and Wall Street is looking to make cuts, because salaries are expensive, and shit, if they have the option between more expenses and less expenses, they will keep taking 'less expenses', until it clearly and incontroversially affects the bottom line.

Right but where are Atlassian's layoffs, Asana, or any of the other hundreds of "lower" tier tech companies? It's unusual that they're all skating by, to me.

>Today marks a very hard day in our 20-year history. We have made the difficult decision to rebalance our team to better position Atlassian for the long term, meaning we will be saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians, or 5% of our employees.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-team-...

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#955

Post by Kon5ole »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #946
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…

>There is nothing "cool" about it.

Not now of course, but I think that they lost their way mostly after the first decade.

For the first decade they launched a bunch of services that were so much better than anything else it seemed like sci-fi, and they did so without obtrusive advertising or shady tracking.

Even Chrome was cool, to outcompete Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS seemed impossible back then but chrome was just so much better than anything else that they managed to do it.

I think the extreme money-fountain from ads started the corruption, and the threat of Facebook created a paranoia inside Google that removed all the floodgates.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#956

Post by DonnyV »

TheAdamist wrote: post #825
NorwegianDude wrote: post #6

> laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone. That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.

I'm a big fan of the pixel series, if they wind up dropping it or make upcoming hardware terrible its likely to drive me to iphone unfortunately. The various third party android phones have severe drawbacks in their manufacturers tweaked android or inferior hardware.

I know fitbit is going down hill. A lot of paid features aren't working for a lot of people. My wife can't get the sleep stats to work anymore.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#957

Post by DonnyV »

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…

You can prevent this by bringing democracy into the workplace. Right now the workplace is like a dictator ran country or monarchy. Its a very top down tiered system In a co-op structured company it is owned and operated by its employees. You vote as a collective on how much the CEO makes, if you even need one. How the work is done, how much everyone should be getting paid, etc.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#958

Post by tech_tuna »

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…

As a user of many Google products and an old timer who legit appreciates how Google actually made it possible to search the internet effectively, I am no longer a Google fanboy.

I used to dream about working there while knowing that I'd have to study up for several months (I have a family, full time job + I do some consulting) and still probably get rejected.

I'm not dreaming about that anymore. Google has jumped the shark.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#959

Post by poulpy123 »

alexeiz wrote: post #759
madeofpalk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google sells approximately zero Pixel phones. Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.

Pixel phones are OK. They are just not priced competitively. They are priced like iPhones. But who are you kidding? Pixel phones are nowhere near iPhones.

I disagree, they have the best mid-range (300-500€) phone, and iPhone is not even proposing anything in this range

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#960

Post by sneed_chucker »

s_dev wrote: post #224
RayVR wrote: post #119

It seems Google cut several hundred roles…out of how many? Don’t they employ more than 25k engineers? I don’t want to make light of anyone losing their job, but this just doesn’t seem meaningful at this scale

It's news because it's been repeated ad nauseam only recruitment, HR, sales and other non tech roles will be affected by layoffs in big tech companies. The numbers aren't important just that there are numbers because it relates to engineering and it's something the tech community didn't expect.

Hasn't it been a foregone conclusion for over a year now that engineering is definitely part of the layoffs and hiring freezes?

Where are people still saying it's only non-technical roles?

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