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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

#981

Post by [deleted] »

dodiggity32 wrote: post #511
throwaway_iusa wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work remotely for a big US company and I have heard talk of similar plans within the company, offshoring entire products' engineering work to India. Luckily my work is very niche (vuln research). I can only imagine the subpar and vulnerability ridden code we'll be seeing over the next few years from all the offshoring + irresponsible overusage of AI tools.

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

[deleted]

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#982

Post by runsWphotons »

JaumeGreen wrote: post #751
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

> Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India? It depends. There are people in India that are brighter and more hard-working than most people in the USA, just by statistical chance. But there is something that can happen there that I don't know what it is and affects some. In another job our company had a site in India and I remotely supported them. Most people I interacted with wanted ste…

This just isnt true about "statistical chance". The IQ distributions are very different and a huge amount of the top talent emigrates anyway. 130 iq is order 1/100 in america and more than 1/1000 in india. Population difference doesnt make up the gap.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#983

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

tensility wrote: post #969
depressedpanda wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple might be less bad than, say Oracle, but it's still an evil mega corp. Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA. By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.

I would agree with you on most points; however, having worked within the fruit company directly on its chain of trust, I will tell you that the privacy angle runs extremely deep and is genuine. Regardless, that angle is obviously different and independent about being authoritarian within its privately-owned monopolistic marketplace.

I think the issue, though, is that people should realize that a company's "values" only go so far as to support the profit motive - thus, they're not really values at all, as the second they become an obstacle to profit, they will be jettisoned.

For Apple, who sells their own hardware and OS and has always desired tight ecosystem control, privacy usually helps their profit motive, but not always - look at their approach to iMessage. I mean, iMessage already, and always, has degraded to SMS when sending to non-iOS users. But SMS has zero encryption features and is pretty horrible for privacy. And the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat means nobody gets encrypted messages. If Apple truly cared about user privacy, they could easily provide an Android iMessage client, or publish a spec. Not only don't they do that, they specifically broke the one client that worked around their intransigeance, which, despite Apple's spin, was way worse for privacy, even for users that only use iOS (assuming they ever talk to an Android user).

The whole point of having values is they provide guidelines of how to behave even when behaving that way is hard. Corporations are simply unable to commit to anything that could threaten profit growth, so we should stop pretending they're capable of having durable values.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#984

Post by dartharva »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #40
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.

Pixel is not officially sold and supported in a substantial number of countries. It results in many issues, such as 5G not working when traveling from country to country. Or in case of Chromecast dongle, 5GHz Wi-Fi not working. Which makes my head explode, considering that they employ only "top talent" and has considerable resources to properly catalogue and implement all radio frequencies of the world. Google cannot…

Honestly, I don't see anything that a phone manufacturer _requires_ to localise apart from frequency bands. How is Apple managing to sell iPhones with literally no other localisation?

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#985

Post by dartharva »

nashashmi wrote: post #894
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.

Way to go for DEI initiatives.

This has been the case from long before DEI. Indians rather have the highest entry barriers for expat entry into the US, waitlists for visa and green cards run towards hundreds of years for each candidate.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#986

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

huppeldepup wrote: post #217
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

The meaning is found in the combination of the name and verb in the title, afaik the first occurrence.

No, there were layoffs at this time last year.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#987

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

gopher2000 wrote: post #606
10xDev wrote: post #466

What is interesting is that now with all the layoffs we also have more CS graduates than ever [0] who were told that tech companies are struggling to find candidates to fill their vacancies. We are reaching a point, if not already at the point where we will have bunch of unemployed CS grads who will have to make a pivot into something entirely different. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.…

Are you sure we're reaching that point? The market has certainly cooled but tech jobs are still available. I do think that many new grads will have to adjust their expectations from high 6 figure jobs in FAANGs to normal-but-still-fine compensation in tier 3-4 companies. I would also argue that it's hard to predict what the market looks like 4 years into the future. That's a reality people should acknowledge when the…

No new grad making even mid six figures. High six figures is only reached at pretty senior levels most FAANG employees won't reach.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#988

Post by valval »

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 swear communism is going to work this time guys!!”

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#989

Post by valval »

dodiggity32 wrote: post #511
throwaway_iusa wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work remotely for a big US company and I have heard talk of similar plans within the company, offshoring entire products' engineering work to India. Luckily my work is very niche (vuln research). I can only imagine the subpar and vulnerability ridden code we'll be seeing over the next few years from all the offshoring + irresponsible overusage of AI tools.

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

Yes, the average US engineer is better than the average Indian engineer. Any other questions?

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#990

Post by asd88 »

dodiggity32 wrote: post #511
throwaway_iusa wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work remotely for a big US company and I have heard talk of similar plans within the company, offshoring entire products' engineering work to India. Luckily my work is very niche (vuln research). I can only imagine the subpar and vulnerability ridden code we'll be seeing over the next few years from all the offshoring + irresponsible overusage of AI tools.

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

> Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India?

Yes. I can’t speak for Google employees but I’ve worked with Indian FTE teams at another big tech company. Indian FTEs are generally less competent than US FTEs at the same level. Upper management knows this and they don’t care because US employees are 3-4x more expensive, so they can hire 3 senior engineers in India for the cost of 1 in the US, which is still a good deal on a cost-per-output basis.

I think the reason for this competency discrepancy may be the huge incentive to move to the US because of pay. In other words, if Indian engineers were as good as their US counterparts, they would move to the US and make 3-4x as much, which leaves only those incapable or unwilling to move in the Indian market.

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