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

Google to reduce workforce by 12k

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

971–980 of 1001 posts

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#971

Post by AndyNemmity »

morepork wrote: post #924
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.

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. Wha…

They stopped that a while ago, they are just another company now.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#972

Post by gpt5 »

Octokiddie wrote: post #581

> Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today. Translation: we fell for the economic mirage. I'm not buying it. Google sees something on the economic horizon and is now bracing for impact. And that something is not a mean reversion. It's an overcorrection. Google's main product, advertising, puts it…

> Google sees something on the economic horizon and is now bracing for impact

They haven't been successful in foreseeing the current bust, and were hiring like crazy a year ago. Why do you think that they'd be so good at seeing into the future now?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#973

Post by andromeduck »

kaczordon wrote: post #938
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…

Hindsight is 20/20(pun). Did you sell all your stocks at the top in Jan 2022? No one can predict a recession otherwise they’d be billionaires. How would you expect other people to predict that there would be a recession? IMO google tried to stave off layoffs for as long as possible.

The bar for onsite got rediculoisly low at on point. It varied quite a bit by org but many new hires were clearly not the same caliber as previous years.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#974

Post by lta »

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…

I was wondering and started asking around me, and while they probably don't express it the same we people here do, a significant proportion of the people I asked (~50%) noticed that they spend more time avoiding bad quality connect

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#975

Post by thebryant »

FearlessNebula wrote: post #956
pembrook wrote: post #58

A lot of people seem to be chalking this one up in the “memetic imitation among tech execs” column. However, in the case of Google, I’m not so sure. Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is extremely sensitive to changes in the economy (Companies cut ad spending when there isn’t as much demand to soak up). In the last recession Google was still rapidly stealing ad share from old media, but now th…

> they actually employ A TON of ad sales people Why? Don’t customers submit their own ads to Google?

I mean, if you can pay 150k to employ a salesperson to bring in an extra 400k of revenue, why wouldn't you?

Of course, the math kind of goes the other way once you're projecting that your salesperson is only going to bring in 100k due to economic circumstances...

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#976

Post by SuperQue »

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…

> "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"

Yup, I know someone who had been there since 2006 that was laid off. Not even high scores on Perf will save you.

I have no idea what methodology went into it. That's a whole postmortem on its own.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#977

Post by vasco »

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…

> and your goal is to achieve maximum well-being of the company in, say, 3 years time

Your fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder profit. Not sure where you got the "well-being" from, but your premise is utterly wrong so your presented choices and how you deal with them are not connected to reality.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#978

Post by saos »

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 bet you that if/when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn't move and we see the same move in another 5/10y

Of course

I agree. It’s my mantra in the workplace now. My place of work is not my friend or family. I’m there to offer my skills and service for a certain time and then I’m out.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#979

Post by hypnotortoise »

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…

You should probably listen to this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#980

Post by eitland »

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…

Maybe because we were early power users and knew how well it used to work?
Post reply on HN