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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

#971

Post by tensility »

happytiger wrote: post #314
oaiey wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it. The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on…

It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on. For example, Google: https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/ Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have…

Agreed. As a legitimate inventor and innovator, these management teams are signaling to me that they are not worth working for. The rest of talent that creates actual value, whether in engineering, sales, management, or otherwise, should seriously pay attention and do the same.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#973

Post by remich »

spamizbad wrote: post #869
dodiggity32 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the code be subpar? Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India? What you are thinking about was outsourcing which is very different than Google hiring in India. Just because you are paid more you are not a ‘better’ programmer

You're going to hear the same answer you always hear, which never satisfies people, but it's a culture thing. Americans are more willing to say "no" or try and negotiate with their boss/leadership on what they can realistically accomplish. The end result is that engineering will push back against unrealistic deadlines or unreasonable feature requests - theoretically making a successful outcome more likely. You'll not…

It seems like it's a two-way street, isn't it? If American devs are more likely to say "no" and push back, then American managers/bosses on some level come to expect that behavior.

I wonder what it's like at Indian tech companies with Indian engineers. Managers there must have a cultural way of dealing with this that works.

IMO, that's the big problem with offshoring. It's rarely the case that the company that offshores stands up an office in the other country and staffs it with people who were held to the same standards in hiring as candidates for U.S.-based jobs would be. If companies did it that way, they might be more successful at navigating cultural differences, but most of the time they use subcontractors instead.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#974

Post by remich »

scoofy wrote: post #911
riffraff wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to tax the wealth.. have a wealth tax? It's a thing in countries including Norway and Switzerland, and similar things exist in others (e.g. Italy taxes assets in some weird non linear way).

This is a scheme to tax capital gains, not wealth. The point of this prescription isn't that "the rich have too much money," it is that we have gotten to the point where some of the largest capital gains go untaxed, period . The idea that a gain isn't a gain until the asset is sold is nonsense. That'd literally be like saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett never made a dime on any of their stock that they are givi…

Our system would make sense if it was the case that the literal only way to turn and asset into money was to sell it. But, because assets can instead be used as collateral for loans, asset owners (overwhelmingly the wealthy in the U.S.) get to have their cake and eat it too.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#975

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway13394 wrote: post #442

I work in Core Eng at google. Woke up this morning and saw my director - who we all loved and had been at Google for 20 years - is gone. One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.

[deleted]

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#976

Post by jamesrr39 »

SideQuark wrote: post #351
sinuhe69 wrote: post #127

Seriously, why people in tech are opposed to unions? In Europe, unions and Betriebsrat (works committee) are the norm. Why not in the US?

The US also pays significantly more. Unions change the risk calculation for employers, and the result will be changes in compensation, and often increased costs to consumers. Also unions in the US have quite often rewarded seniority over skill and effort, making them less attractive to high performers. Early on in tech I outperformed all those I started with, and was able to make significantly more as a result. My fr…

Many differences between the US and EU, not just workers benefits.

IMO, more likely to affect startup company success in becoming big:

- One common language, one culture, one currency across the US (sure, differences between states in culture but not as diverse as in Europe). This is gradually converging via the EU, but the US has a couple of centuries headstart...

- VC funding concentration in California (think about how many of those "US" companies are from California); VC investors in US are global names if you work in the industry, in EU they are regional names.

- Generalising a bit here, but from my experience, I find work/life balance generally considered more important in EU compared to US. In the US, work is given a higher priority and if your boss asks you to stay late/work on a weekend, many colleagues in the US would do it, European colleagues would put e.g. family first instead.

- Side note; work/life balance point can be reflected in terms of national culture, e.g. "The American Dream"

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#977

Post by leoh »

ur-whale wrote: post #724
throwaway13394 wrote: post #442

I work in Core Eng at google. Woke up this morning and saw my director - who we all loved and had been at Google for 20 years - is gone. One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.

> One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, Yup, that's a very visible pattern at this point. The other one is when entire reporting chains are mainland Chinese (or in the process of being converted to via "reorgs" such as this one). And before anyone calls racism into the discussion, it's fairly easy to objectively check that it is the case in the intern…

Interestingly, according to Googlegeist in 2020, it was Asian folks that scored the highest in terms of "enjoying" working at Google. Caucasian satisfaction scores were much lower.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#979

Post by leoh »

depressedpanda wrote: post #895
arcbyte wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was innovative about Stadia?

The controllers connected directly to Stadia servers over WiFi, avoiding an unnecessary roundtrip via the device displaying the video feed.

That's... not that impressive imo.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#980

Post by dude2000bc »

Google's biggest problem is lack of good strategic decisions at higher levels of management, their higher up management are not committed to anything and the company is run as chaos without any clear goals.

They are often late to the game and then they try to do a rip off of the other tech companies services and they fail.

Those that are really good services, they don't have the vision to stick with and improve until it works. They expect to get to a billion users in 2 years else the project goes on resource deprivation and then cancelling.

They are starting to hit the cap on advertisement market, filling Search results and YouTube with crappy ads, hurting user experience. YouTube had turned into a house of pain because of the number of ads. You cannot keep growing Ads revenue year after year by 20% indefinitely.

Their Deepmind folks overpromise and underdeliver. Their Gemini model is not even as good as GPT3.5 in benchmarks, let alone GPT4. And their folks don't really care about the products, they want to work on cool AGI stuff instead. They have been promising AGI next year for the last 10 years if not more, yet their model cannot even compete with GPT4.

Bard has few daily users, and no paying users, while OpenAI has over 100 million daily users.

No one is really responsible to user experience, the company is built from a bunch of dysfunctional silos don't their own thing competing with other got resources, no one knows how many chat apps they have launched to users and then killed. People get promoted through a dysfunctional system by hoarding resources and growing org sizes without delivering value to users.

Internal incentives for engineering and project folks are set towards launching new things, not delivering value to users.

They don't execute well because of mismanagement at higher levels and they are trying to address execution problems by laying off people who ended up working on the wrong project that the upper management was highlighting a while ago in their earnings call.

Their Cloud is doing ok, but they are far behind AWS and Azure from market share perspective and Azure seems to be growing much faster.

Their CFO is stepping down after cutting a lot of projects and investing and losing billions of dollars in real estate during covid and doubling the number of employees in 2020.

There are rumors that Sergey Brin came back to help Sundar Pichai deal with challenges but it doesn't seem to be working so far.

The relationship between their higher management and general employees seems broken and dysfunctional. The employees do not believe in the upper management.

Overall Google seems to be in big trouble. The future for Google doesn't look bright. They are likely going to end up like Yahoo!

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