> 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 Europe, petrol production going down, supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation going massively up... Don't need an MBA to anticipate the economy was par for a correction.
what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.
what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from happening again? "I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well, and don't learn anything in the process. 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. So I guess the answer to this question is "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"
I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes.
Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit:
1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn't have to lose anyone.
2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire at a crazy rate, often competing with insane offers.
3. When the war started, we again went into a hiring freeze, and now a round of layoffs.
In my experience - our management basically did what everyone else did, which meant we couldn't leverage any of our unique advantages and beat the market in some way.
The reason I joined the company I did after the megacorp is that they had a very simple strategy for hiring - hire top talent in strategic areas when you can find it, but ignore anything else, don't lower the quality bars, don't make insane offers, etc.
It's almost as if having common sense is such a rare thing now, that it's become a winning strategy...
When the pandemic hit I was working at a name SF company that immediately -- day one -- cut all contractors & consultants. They pivoted from working on things that had 2 year delivery timeframes to things that had 30 day delivery time frames. Then everyone who was left got run into the ground because their business boomed (one of those companies that thrived during the pandemic).
So sure, they didn't need all those other people when they were trying to build big things that took years of development, but those same people were cut and left to fend for themselves while the company recorded record revenues and profits.
Now, in the case of the pandemic, these things were hard to predict. Contractors & consultants know they're expendable, they're paid to be (though, not like they used to be).
But now companies are giving at least three orthogonal messages: 1) we're doing fine but productivity requires everyone to please come back into the office, and 2) we're not in a recession but we're going to cull the herd in big numbers anyway, and finally 3) we have to control and minimize corporate spending.
It's hard not to think that the cullings are part of an effort by the big corps to assert greater control over their employees. There's a collective hurt being spread across the workforce, a quelling of employee pushback against RTO policies (the pandemic is still happening, in actuality), and a desire to bring salaries back down by minimizing the opportunism of mobility via strategic attrition.
I do wonder a) how the orgs that are remote-first in hiring are faring in this climate, and b) if this will start a tumble in housing in HCOL areas.
I think this is just another case of "history repeats itself"
People who went through COVID will now have an experience that will shape how they handle this situation in the future. This generation won't make this same "mistake" again, but a future generation may.
Just like how people who grew up with extreme bank instability (i.e. the Great Depression) stashed large sums of money in closets and dressers but we don't. Our decisions are largely based on the context of our experiences. If we don't have a certain experience, it probably won't be a factor in decision making.
Of course, you go to school to learn about past mistakes, but
(1) There are a billion mistakes that have been made in the past so even if you learn about them, without direct personal experience, you will probably repeat some anyway.
(2) In the end, we sort of want people to repeat mistakes because sometimes the conditions are different and the outcome could be positive. What happens when we get old is that we encounter negative experiences that discourages us from trying the same things in the future, which is great for survival but extremely negative for innovation. In the case of someone who grew up stashing money, they might be disdainful of banks and this could actually turn out to be a pretty bad trait.
So in the end, it is what it is. Cycles will always be a thing.
> hire top talent in strategic... don't make insane offers
How does this work? I left Google after ten years last year, when the market was still competitive, and I had multiple strong offers. I wasn't going to leave...lets call it significant money on the table if I somehow had a "non-insane" offer somewhere else...
It's interesting, because I took a pay cut to join this startup.
I had grown tired of not being challenged and not learning as much anymore, and I definitely got tired of the corporate politics and endless bureaucracy. Don't get me wrong - I did cool stuff, and I did have impact, but nearly as much as I thought I could.
At the startup, I was really impressed by the caliber of folks I met, and over the past 2 months I've been here, I've only grown more happy with my decision.
It's so thrilling to see what a team of A players can get done when you set clear goals...
I think it's worth the pay cut (to me at least), and I am very hopeful for a further exit to make me more than happy financially as well...
I suspect there is a strong element of “it depends”. If your company needs to grow rapidly to capitalize on an opportunity, having a process that makes hiring this slow doesn’t work. If on the other hand playing the long game is viable, like maybe with a lifestyle type company, this approach is far better. The problem with the pandemic was that it suggested there was a new and big opportunity that made it hard for companies to distinguish the right approach.
"Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn't think "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months". It changed. I am now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the bandwagon and correcting."
Now I don't actually have proof that interest rates directly affect Google (who is probably flush with cash/very profitable/has high margins/has lots of money coming in).
I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it.
I just like to tell myself "these people weren't top performers and if you work for a company like Google (and get paid a lot), you are expected to do a lot/be a top top top performer"
What I'm hearing from Googlers I know -- the layoffs are not on the whole tied to perf. They're across the board in terms of years of service and seniority and product areas and roles and some people recently promoted have gotten the axe, too.
Doesn't seem to be departmental. When Google does that (axe a PA or department or product) they have a process of giving a chunk of time usually to let people move themselves, or be moved; e.g. when they killed Fiber at my site (Waterloo) they moved everyone (including me) into other roles and brought new projects into the office, and people in Mountain View and other places were given a few months to find something else internal.
I'm not suggesting there aren't top tier people but I know firsthand that just being there for 10yr (specifically the past 10 years at G) does not in any shape or form imply you're top tier. You could have been literally coasting for a decade.
Yes, will this is in part the Faustian bargain that is often made to work at Google. People often become mediocre working there, and Google is on the whole frankly fine with this because it keeps those people from going & working at potential competitors.
That this is now changing, is interesting.
In any case, like I said above, this round of layoffs doesn't seem to be indexed on performance. At least not completely, from what I've heard.
It should be interesting to see how many new startups get built out in the next year as a result of this.
> Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling. Large lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the lower performers.
Companies like Google are overstaffed by the lazy, entitled Prima Donnas. You can see it all over HN in its advice:
"Don't go to a startup! You would need to work. Rather get a job at FAANG, get paid a very large salary, leave on the dot, don't ever be on call. Also, best part, you will get at least a few hours a day to play around on the internet. Also, remember, you have a power of pocket veto! If you do not like something, just don't do it. What are they going to do? Fire you? You will get another job in a jiffy!"
With the zero interest rate environment gone the culling is inevitable.
Advice on HN not to go to a startup is because 99% of startups have bullshit equity options these days.
They're not worth the risk and stress because the VCs and founders are keeping potential payouts to themselves but pushing a huge amount of the financial risk and work stress onto their staff.
Unless you're a cofounder or maybe a founding engineer, payout from a reasonable sale of a startup these days -- if it fluked out and actually happened -- ends up being little more than the annual comp at one of these BigCorps.
TLDR, you don't get a job at a FAANG because you're lazy, you get that job because you're looking out for yourself and your family and you'd prefer not to be someone's plaything.
That said I got sick of Google and went and shopped around last year and now I'm working at a smaller, series B funded company now and love it. But I ain't hoping to get rich, just job satisfaction.
When VCs and founders get their shit together on equity agreements, early stage startups will be more attractive again.
EDIT: Also hate to burst your bubble, but on-call rotation is a part of plenty of Google SWE teams, not just SRE. But they do pay a handsome bonus for the time you're on-call.
My buddy and I were just talking about this. A company we were modeling received $4.2M in VC funding and had 20 employees at time of purchase. The purchase price was never advertised, but we assumed a 7x multiple on last known value and assumed the sale price at $25M. $25M turns out to be a little over $1M per employee after 4 years (company started 2012 and was bought in 2016). I asked out loud "why would you do this when you could just go to Microsoft or Apple, do less work, and make the same money in the same amount of time".
Now this price is skewed towards the investors and very early employees, but the point still stands. You will very clearly make more money working for an established corp than a startup.
I mean, if you explore scenarios in https://www.tldroptions.io/ even your scenario of $1M per employee is super rare. Actual stock option agreements I've seen and heard about recently for Series A early stage startups were small fractions of a percentage point of outstanding shares, and subject to potentially many more rounds of dilution.
The only time in my 20+ career I've gotten anything real out of an employer being acquired was when Google bought my employer (for just under $400m) in 2011. In that case, though, the stock conversion of my options was only part of the generous compensation package from Google. And in that case it certainly wasn't "I'm gonna go retire now" money, either.
Many are happier with a more modest lifestyle if it means pursuing something of deep interest. For example, researchers in industry make substantially more than their academia counterparts.
I am quite happy to be doing more interesting work after 10 years of slinging protobufs, hence why I have gone to work for startups recently.
But what I'm trying to say is in reality there are no lottery tickets being issued. Except maybe to the founders. Trying to frame it that way is a real problem. Actual equity agreements are mostly not much money at all. I had a founder try to make this claim to me quite recently -- it's nonsense, because I know the kind of offers he was writing up, there was no "lottery"-like outcome possible.
And it is this inequity in potential outcomes that makes the startups less attractive and also diminishes anybody's desire to work excessively hard. The potential payout isn't there. Maybe if one is an exceptional negotiator, I dunno.
Sure. The question then, is if Google, with its deep pockets will let you pursue your deep interest, better or worse than a startup dedicated to a niche.
Depends, I left Google about half a year back. One of the roles I was considering was a former employer, a non-profit, which would have been roughly a 50% compensation cut. But I loved the work, and loved the team. Ultimately I went another direction because of some poor choices they made around remote work.
The discussion that led to it was "I'd rather we have less money than you be miserable all time time" from my other half. The culture at Google isn't for everyone. I didn't fit with it (or at least in my org) and it was a constant source of frustration on both sides.
I don’t know why you think working the hours you’ve been hired to do is being a “Prima Donna”. And I don’t see how getting paid a large salary, having better work-life balance and being hirable are negative things.
Seems like you would rather advice people to have bad working conditions and sacrifice their personal life for a shitty salary on a startup.
> I don’t know why you think working the hours you’ve been hired to do is being a “Prima Donna”. And I don’t see how getting paid a large salary, having better work-life balance and being hirable are negative things.
You want to do an average work working average hours, you get paid an average salary. That would be about $70k/year.
I'm super happy that FAANG started to cut the fat. The sanity is returning to the market.
Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their business, not in the day to day operations but in the value of the future cash flows vs. risk free rate.
Super simplifying, if risk free interest rate is 0% then you can value current cash flow the same as future ones. When you have 5% risk free in 14 years that new dollar is worth half of what it is today.
This has big impact on enterprise value for growing businesses.
> As the interest rate approaches 5% your willingness to invest falls.
Do we have proof based on their financial statements quarterly that they are actively investing their cash in risk free assets yielding 5% instead of investing in projects? I find it hard to believe that a team of $200k-$300k/yr earning employees at Google can't find a way to generate more than 5% net margin for the company?
> I find it hard to believe that a team of $200k-$300k/yr earning employees at Google can't find a way to generate more than 5% net margin for the company?
But does the decrease of 6% of those employees have a resulting income decrease? Likely most teams will continue to function without the missing employees. Also plenty of the employees are recruiting and HR and other non-income-generating employees.
Also yes they have billions in marketable securities, in debt, and interest income, etc
They are related but different concepts. The value of a company is equal to the discounted value of its future cash flows. If rates go up, that means a higher return can be had for zero risk, which means all cash coming in the future at more than zero risk is now worth less. There is a second term other than risk free rate in the discounting equation which is related to capital structure. So, amount and cost of debt does impact valuation (though there is some debate and theory that makes my statement not quite true), but it is not the only factor.
Are you saying in a perfect world, the perfect CEO would "can" (get rid of) every team/project that isn't projected to 5% ROI yearly (assuming risk free rate has roughly gone from 0.25% -> 5%)?
Obviously there are exceptions where you want to eat losses up from (R&D a big project for a few years hoping it returns a lot down the road)?
How does this apply given that we're assuming Google has enough cash on hand from profit of other aspects of their business that they do not finance most projects through new loans (debt) from banks at current interest rates because they don't need to?
Their cash balance doesn't really matter, it impacts their cost of capital in various ways, but you can still compare the ROIC of any given project to the overall company's cost of capital.
I think this is more of sliding the levers to keep the earnings good. There was a massive amount of money dumped into the economy over the last couple of years. Companies produced record earnings, and their stock prices correspondingly increased. Now to keep "growing" they need to decrease spending to keep earnings at the same or higher levels.
It is also an opportunity to cut some cruft. A lot of good people get swept up too but most large tech companies have had huge layoffs in the past. They can then cite the necessity to do it as "everyone is having to tighten up"
Google could still be profitable without cutting staff, but their profit would drop and be perceived as not "growing"
I think it's beyond that -- with interest rates rising, companies need to increase earnings or else decrease their expenditures, in order to maintain their valuation.
His first argument is bullshit, because Google is effectively debt-free. So Google can choose what to do with its money. He is quite open about that it's simply HIM wanting money:
"TCI also called on Alphabet to increase its already substantial share repurchase programme to run down its $116bn of cash, given that large-scale mergers and acquisitions are limited owing to regulatory scrutiny. It urged it to copy Apple’s approach and become “cash neutral” over time."
His style described in the article sounds like "corporate raiding" from the 80s. One might point out corporate raiding caused a financial crash ...
> Now I don't actually have proof that interest rates directly affect Google (who is probably flush with cash/very profitable/has high margins/has lots of money coming in).
It affects everyone. When interest rates increase, the risk-free rate of return is much higher than when interest rates were 0. That means the ROI of each incremental dollar needs to be higher than it previously was, and when companies have a lot of projects with low risk-adjusted returns, they'll axe those.
> I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it.
Think macro-level. It's not that each individual firm says "oh, debt is cheap" and takes on more debt to increase spending. It's that economy-wide a lot of firms are responding to that incentive, and that increased spending is showing up at other firms as increased revenue (and at the macro level, as a general shift in demand).
So your revenue goes up. What do you do with it? Well, if you have projects you could start or increase funding for that look like they'd be profitable, you do that. You might even leverage it a bit; if you think the risk-adjusted ROI of something is way higher than the interest rates you can get, why wouldn't you?
And even if you think there's a good chance that the cheap credit dries up and the economy goes into recession, (a) leaving money on the table for a long-term bet isn't something most CEOs can pull off without shareholders fighting them on it, and (b) you're not actually aiming for zero layoffs -- any company that is innovating and iterating is going to need to lay off some people to match their workforce to their needs sometimes.
Inflation's effects take place at the level of deep incentives. It's not something you can fix by thinking "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months."
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 has a job or is getting multiple offers.
2. Buck the trend. Hire when others are in the middle of layoffs. Show strength when others are making their sheepish apologies. Pay discounted labour prices for top talent.
To me choice #2 is a no-brainer but obviously nobody will ever put me in a position to decide, and it's easy to be an arm-chair CEO. Is it really that these companies are so short-sighted, and are more worried about next quarter than next year? Could nobody see the interest rate hikes coming? I just can't imagine how executives/boards would overlook the impact on stock price if a company was publicly known to use foresight in their hiring practices. What if the headline was something like "Google hiring continues at same rate during recession," doesn't that send a strong signal to investors?
You can't necessarily survive #2 if it causes the talent you actually need the most to bail in high times. You can play this game at the margin by starting to freeze hiring before everyone else does, so that you can be there earlier to hire again at discounted rates in the downturn
> 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.
There is no fiducary duty to maximise shareholder profit. It doesn't exist, it's basically made up. (There is a duty not to intentionally screw over shareholders, but that's far narrower.) In particular, most US corporations are incorporated in Delaware which has something called the business judgement rule, where so long as executives have reasonable belief that their actions are in the best interests of the business they're protected.
> fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder profit
This keeps coming up and is kind of true, but not really.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring someone else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging for the diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.
Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for
recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring someone
else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging for the
diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.
Can we please dispense with this notion that layoffs target "low performers"? There is zero evidence across any of the current round of layoffs that low performers were systematically targeted. There was zero evidence of this in 2008. There was zero evidence of this in 2001. Mass layoffs hit in a number of ways and "performance" is just one of the criteria used to determine who gets the axe. It might not even be the primary one --- there are plenty of stories, even in this specific layoff, of people who were just promoted and are now being let go.
From the perspective of the individual worker, it's far better to model layoffs as a random lottery. Telling yourself, "Oh, I'll work hard, I'll get good performance reviews, that'll save me from the layoff monster," is just cope. Good people get laid off. Bad people get laid off. Mediocre people get laid off. It's just luck.
> Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure.
If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case. From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack")
This is both a wage depression maneuver, and a meager 4$ bump in stock price. I'd bet my money it is a hail mary to prevent the CEO being outed in a few quarters.
> If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case.
That doesn't follow. What you hire for at one time because you think it's profitable to do so is not necessarily related to who you let go at a later time because you think it's profitable to do so. Market conditions and other factors have changed in the mean time.
> From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack")
And it shouldn't. Who it makes sense to let go of has a number of factors, not just performance. Even software developers are not a homogeneous resource, and ROI on an employee is not just about performance.
> What you hire for at one time because you think it's profitable to do so is not necessarily related to who you let go at a later time because you think it's profitable to do so
Software engineers are one of the most fungible knowledge workers around, save for transition costs.
> ROI on an employee is not just about performance.
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. What's to differentiate them from IBM or Microsoft now?
I'd kind of disagree with this sentiment. Sure, that works for Ford at the assembly line, but you have to get tech companies a little bit more credit. They don't scale with the number of heads if they are doing it right ;-)
> what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.
Nothing could have been done, because nothing needed to be done.
Is there a recession? Probably. Was valuation and market expectation inflated? Obviously. Did Google overhire? looks like it.
But is that the cause for the firing? Of course not. Last quarter revenue was almost 69.1B, 6.1% Y/Y. That is still an offensive amount of money. Management decided to hurt people because other companies are doing it.
Here's your root cause analysis: management is beholden to fads, not facts. Layoffs don't improve performance (https://www.careerusa.org/resources/career-files/158-resourc...), but the market demands it, and nobody in the c-suite has the long term vision and spine to do what is right, rather than to appease short term fads.
That's just makes this decision more harmful, both to the people Pichai and Alphabet management just wrecked their lives, and to the long term prospects of Alphabet the company.
A story my grandma told me about bleak predictions:
Where she grew up, there used to be a fortune teller that would specialize in predicting the sex at birth.
But there was a catch: he'll seal the prediction in an envelope, to be opened only after the healthy baby is born. And if it'd be, in a few months time, that he was wrong, he'll refund his fee.
His trick was that he always wrote "girl". Because if it was a boy, the family was so happy, they didn't bother opening the envelope.
No shit, this guy took ~$250mm in stock in each of the last few years from what I can find, and even if that is worth half of what it was before this year he could give each outgoing employee about $10k of that stock (to sell maybe) to make their lives easier.
Instead he gave them a few words written by some PR manager.
Taking responsibility must mean something different to a CEO than it does to me, a common dude.
> "[...] he could give each outgoing employee about $10k of that stock (to sell maybe) to make their lives easier."
To be fair, I think the package they are actually offering is way, way more valuable than 10k: "We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting."
Plus healthcare, 2022 bonuses being paid out, and some other items on there.
>I've never seen a company produce one after that.
Almost every company does. They may not make it public, but yes leadership will reflect on this.
>"I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well
This isn't how most large tech companies work. If someone causes an outage that costs the company 7 figures there are no consequences assuming it wasn't done maliciously. It is more about learning and figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future and it is not about punishing people.
Just about everyone understands that "full responsibility" is meaningless.
One thing I've come to internalise is in a public (maybe most of private too) company CEO's fiduciary responsibility is to maximise shareholder value. From what I've learnt the switch from "profit" to "share holder value" occurred sometime in the 80s. So they'd do whatever it takes to reduce cost; outsourcing to 3rd world countries, financial engineering, wage suppression, hiring contractors and what not to ensure stock prices keep going up.
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.
Yeah I think I still better than a lot of places is judging by some of the candidates I interview but I think its still true in general that as CS has become more of a established profession and path to high income job the types of person persuing it has changed and the demand for CS degrees has caused colleges to dilute their CS programs quite a bit - especially in terms of number and choice of electives.
Imagine you are running a restaurant and normally you get 100 people a night and you service that with 10 staff, and you know for the next year you will get 200 people a night and can support that business with 20 staff and then after it will go back down to 100 people.
So you can choose to:
1. Refuse to hire the extra staff for a year and lose out on the profits of 100 customers a night for a year.
2. Go with the flow, expanding when demand increases and contracting when demand decreases.
Most people will go with option 2 as that is what gets you more money and also allows the economy to respond to price signals in a rational way. This is particularly true of growth companies like Google. The idea of a growth company is not to maintain constant revenues and employment over time. People who go to work for Google should understand that Google will hire more staff when demand goes up. But then they should also understand that Google will cut staff when demand falls.
That it's predictable that demand goes up and down does nothing to change this calculus. It's like people blaming the home builders in 2010 for expanding home building. I mean, when there is an increased demand for new housing, why wouldn't they expand home building?
Yup, the "I take full responsibility" reminds me of people I know who cause me grief and say "Sorry" with no intent of making any changes. How sorry can you be if you don't intend on avoiding it in the future?
I'll stop you right there. Why would they do a post-mortem for this? They're not accountable to the employees. This should be a reminder for everyone as to who SLT actually works for.
Why? Employees are paid to do a job. Unless they're actual owners, why should a company be accountable to the employees? I'm not sure where a corporation owes anything to employees beyond payment for agreed-upon services. If the company goes out of business, should employees also share in the debt and obligations?
> The employees who stay get paid more than if everyone stayed
As someone who survived numerous rounds of layoffs, that's not true. The employees who stay get to work more (under more job security pressure) but that's about it. It's not like the wages of the workers who get laid off are reallocated as bonuses for the remaining employees.
It isn't the same sized pie in both situations. There's shit that won't get done by my team anymore. I just sent an email to a stakeholder group telling them that I have to kill a valuable project.
It isn't like if Google fired 95% of people that comp for the remainder would hit $10m a person.
> 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.
Yeah, this isn’t an “incident”, this is capitalism working as designed. The pro-forma taking of responsibility is just part of the ritual that labor, management, and capital all know is fake of pretending otherwise. If you don’t want to work at a firm that overhires when the winds are even vaguely positive and overfires when the winds blow the other way, form a labor coop; otherwise, you are a resource to which “cattle, not pets” applies just as much as to one-of-many VM in the cloud.
People simply have different incentives during booming years. Companies want growth in marketshare, so they throw initiatives on the wall to see which ones stick. So, more hiring. Managers want more scope, and size of their teams is a good indicator. So, they hire more. Of course, I don't doubt their motives. They may genuinely believe the causes of their teams and diligently come up with initiatives. It's just that their initiatives may not get the same level of scrutiny when almost-free investment dries up. Again, more hiring.
Meanwhile, here is an actual quote from the figurehead that led the quantitative dumping that put us where we are today: "I don't take responsibility at all"
Remember how a few short years ago, it was widely recognized that Wall Street and Main Street were completely out of sync? That was due to trillions of dollars in helicopter money meant to make the financial markets look good despite the pandemic. These layoffs are part of the bill that's coming due.
> 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.
This isn't a service outage; it was investment that no longer make sense in the new fiscal environment. Google's revenue went from $38.3b (Q2FY20) to $69b (Q3FY22), are you suggesting they should not have hired during that kind of growth?
Since Google is no longer restricted by "don't be evil", overhiring to keep the best employees is a valid business plan. It is easier to overhire than to attract , interview and offer to better candidates and most companies are doing it. Quantity leads to quality, eventually.
> 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 due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse, or the product being unceremoniously dumped after a year. Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.
Their office suite is pretty impressive, but again I can't trust that it (or my files) will be there when I need them.
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 their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.
Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I used to get the best information, websites, media material that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one specific forum in over 20 search pages, but then I had checked my bookmarks and the site was still running and functional and contained what I was exactly looking by the keywords and other possible search factors. These days I just feel I get the information sources that are the most advertised or well branded, but do not reflect the accuracy of what I'm looking for.
it's starting to get really hard to believe that, as people repeat 'wow, search used to be better and now it's trash', remembering only the good parts, rewriting their memories of it, and just having it literally be 'well somebody said it, so it must be true'. 'i remember how it used to be a decade ago', well, sure you do. and yeah, somebody could dig out their search history takeouts and do some kind of opinionated pondering about it, but this ain't it.
and if one wants to experience real search results difference, just switch back to, say, duckduckgo for a bit, and see how many times you just end up giving up and googling stuff instead.
Google results are markedly worse than they used to be. SEO spam routinely pushes the site/content I'm searching for down/off the page. These sites are often just straight up copies of StackOverflow.
My perception is that search queries need to be much more specific in order to avoid SEO trash as well. It used to be fairly common to find special interest forums when looking for product reviews. Now the first page is almost exclusively auto-generated spam sites referral linking to Amazon product pages. Adding "Reddit" sometimes provides helpful advice but there's often a lack of in depth insight that was present before.
I pondered on this for a while, unsure if my memory was false. Then I switched to Kagi and it felt like Google 15 years ago. I was served the content I was looking for, not the content Google wants me to look at. It's not perfect, but 9/10 cases (and I do 50+ searches a day) it's great, and validates my perception of the quality of Google going down (or less cynically, the likelihood that Google is optimising for the general public, and I'm an outlier).
because the rarest sources of the web were relatively speaking much more popular back then when the internet had about 20 pages in total. The entire scale of the web has been growing x-fold every year.
So what was relatively relevant back then is now irrelevant to a general audience and as a result has been pushed back. You could argue Google should bias search much more towards individual history but that has its own pitfalls, both in terms of results and privacy wise.
Basically blame your fellow searchers for clicking and wanting big brand stuff, Google just gives you what the internet considers relevant.
I blame Google and the third party ad model for profiting from and encouraging the creation of the lowest quality cash grabs. Search for any kind of product review and you're faced with a sea of auto-generated shit, the only purpose of which is to serve you an ad and hope you click an amazon affiliate link. It's a prime example that the "value" delivered isn't value to society or the individuals using the service.
I stopped using google a while ago, but try searching for something unusual, add doublequotes around it and notice how your search engine blatantly ignores double quotes (and even your verbatim operator) in order to inflate results.
This cost many minutes most times and is seriously annoying because the search engine ignores me and lies to me.
This could be a regional experience. Some states have 70% apple market share, with Rhode Island having 80%[0]. The difference could be even greater for smaller regions within a state.
If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small. We can think of this as roughly each of your friends tossing a coin and all of them landing heads. If they do, that's a pretty biased bubble (because it isn't a pure random process, but you also don't have a representative and random sample)
> If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small.
If you mostly associate with people who are on pre-paid cell phone plans they got at Walmart or a gas station, you'll see a high concentration of Android. Among people who are in technology or often purchase luxury goods, most your friends with have iPhones.
Is this downvoted by salty Android users, or actually disagreed upon?
Obviously it's a bell curve - not all Android users are cheap and not all iPhone users are luxary goods providers, but my experience (Australia) reflects this generalisation broadly.
You need to multiply the market share by the wealth of the participants.
What fraction of the world’s wealth (easier to measure than influence) runs on Android? Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?
This is why German and Japanese are often localized before other languages with more speakers.
Not saying it’s right, but just pointing out the reality. The world runs based on the decision makers, who use iOS.
I've heard this over and over on HN in recent years and I simply don't understand it. Almost any Google search I run has just what I am looking for as the first or second choice. Google frequently knows what I am looking for after I type in the first few words of the search! Are HN people not logged in when they search?
In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably a top N listicle that search will happily present to you, even if it is auto generated nonsense.
"Mostly" being a minor majority, only recently established (September, 2022)?
> For the first time ever, there are more iPhones in use in the US than any other type of smartphone. Citing data from analytics firm Counterpoint Research, the Financial Times reports the iPhone overtook the entire Android ecosystem in June to claim 50 percent of US market share
[...]
> By 2010, two years after its debut, Android overtook iOS to claim the larger install base. Ever since then, Google’s mobile operating system has been the dominant force in the global smartphone market, claiming more than 70 percent market share as of 2022, according to Statcounter.
In my daily life, all my tech coworkers and zoomer (and older) friends in VRC say it's horrible, myself included. The only people who don't have a problem are it are my very casual-use family members.
TikTok search is apparently better. My version of that is "site:reddit.com", but even that's gotten worse as the culture there becomes more censorious, echo-chambery, and more insane.
To expand on this how often do you have a conversation with someone where you evaluate or recommend search engines? I'm going to assume never because that would be both weird and boring.
Maybe because other people search in different places.
Events/Businesses: Google Maps, Instagram
Trend/Tutorials: Tiktok, IG Reels
News: Twitter/Social Media/News Outlet of choice
Google is for searching new sources of information and either it’s instant (google info box) or takes too long which makes a lasting memory about it being painful.
My mother (quite the opposite of a techie) complains about how hard it is to find stuff on Google - especially unbiased stuff that isn't being promoted by a company or individual with a promotional / commercial agenda.
I don't think the issue for this is with changes Google has made, but rather with the increasing extent to which it's targeted by SEO spam.
People care when things are bad. They don't care when things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets normal folks the information they were looking for the vast majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is irrelevant when the results are still what people were looking for.
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
It’s not a bubble. If you want to hear basic opinions from the everyday person then sure, go talk to your gym bros and grocery store Facebook moms about Google. That’s if you’re not met with blank stares. They don’t know what they don’t know.
HN is a much more distinguished community possessing vast technical knowledge. We can approach products from beyond the level of the everyday person and can give deeper appraisal of their worth. Some here may have even built those products, or at least could build a distilled version of them in a weekend for fun.
The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.
It's happening more and more often that the first result doesn't even include all the words in my fairly short queries.
I'm thankful they have a warning on the result so that I don't waste my time.
They're also extremely liberal with synonyms. For example, yesterday I searched for "linear cohort survival model." The first result has bolded "general linear transformation model." I can't even tell what "general" and "transformational" are mapping to in my query.
The biggest signal in Google's site ranking must be user clicks without returns (IE, user found something they wanted, clicked on it, and didn't come back to Google to search more). That would be good at filtering spammy pages, and shows things that are already known to be popular at the top. Rather than using link structure, use user clicks.
Not sure I agree with that, as ChatGPT is pretty close to being a full-knowledge AI. I can ask it things Google fails to find and get a pretty damn good answer. Yesterday I asked it how Ethernet over Coax worked, what it was called, and specifically how it was able to get such high throughput while using only one conductor.
The top results on Google are for Amazon, zdnet (linking to Amazon referrals), screenbeam.com (shallow article trying to get sales), Newegg, Hitron Tech (same as screenbeam), and only then Wikipedia. And the Wikipedia article doesn't even mention CSMA/CA (still relevant for MoCA apparently)
Heaven help you if you have a specific problem with an emerging technology, like VR/SteamVR, specific 3D avatar issues in Blender or Unity, problems with a specific blueprint issue in Unreal Engine, etc.
Knowledge AI is the future, likely with "fine-tuning as a service" based on the collective sum of everything you do online and on your phone.
I believe it: the Google of 2008 would have been completely buried by the flood of ChatGPT-generated bullshit SEO spam. What they have today is the best version of Google to date, so it's still floating, not just as high as it once was in less adversarial times.
Really? Often, the top links are AI generated spam that, while somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, sounds like it was written by a high school student trying to pad the word count for a few pages.
Yes, Google search results are worse than they were in it's height.
Google front page is a whale of a target. At no point has there been more sophisticated attacks for people trying to hit front page with low-quality content. The position you parent comment took is that Google of today is better at resisting those attacks, and no one version of Google would provide as good results on today's internet.
I believe Google is fundamentally failing at it's mission of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil". That's not to say that Google Search isn't better at searching today's internet than any other iteration of Google Search would have been.
esp. for anything relatively technical. the pages look like they copied and pasted someone else's documentation together.
at this point it's almost always ignore the first 3 hits and go straight to stackoverflow or reddit, or something that's plainly obviously related like python.org documentation.
Maybe this is confirmation bias since I have seen a multitude of blogs and threads popping up around this topic but I have clicked the "Page 2" button on Google multiple times this month. I don't think I have to add anything to make that an argument.
Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc. and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.
Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience. Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor.
No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.
There's always another pay-to-win "strategy" game, another "revolutionary Japanese chefs knife", some brilliant genius that has made a device that heats your house for free
... not a single remotely useful ad.
I too have tried to click them away as not relevant, but I think Google now sell ads by impression, not by clicks so they don't care at all.
Google Lens, AI algorithms for pixel cameras, voice recognition for Assistant, Translate, etc. We really just focus on Search being bad - a lot of which is because of SEO spam.
When it comes to big companies, Google does have pretty good AI in products. I don't particularly find any mature product bad per se.
In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself and more the web. It’s now just a low quality generated content minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it’s a race to the bottom with that stuff. It’ll only become worse as LLMs advance.
At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare:
I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.
Wow. For me the difference is night and day. On my phone, google gives me first two screenfuls of ads, then about the same amount of homepages of companies apparently selling mems sensors, and then some kind of wiki that seems to answer the question, maybe… Bing, otoh, has an explanation of what a mems sensor is and how it works as the first thing on the page.
I guess I’ll try switching default search engine now.
(For me, google results have definitely been getting way, way worse for a couple of years. At the moment, google search plainly _does not work_ for me probably 5-10% of the time, i.e. I _only_ get ads and unrelated results.)
The results are slightly different but where they overlap the summary/preview/description doesn't seem radically different to me. But I'm not familiar with the subject so maybe I'm not seeing it the way you do. Bing has more images/thumbnails from some of the results so maybe that's it?
For this case, the biggest tell of quality is the existence of a block diagram, schematic, or equations.
But, even without images, the "explore further" recommendations are fantastic, with direct links to research papers. Google seems to not recommend research papers (zero on my results).
While "extreme outlier" is probably true, here on HN many of us are extreme outliers. So while true, at least he's in good company.
I am on the road to de-Google my life, or at least add some backups in case of Google locks me out of my account. On HN I've seen articles about people who have been locked out of their Google accounts based on 1) taking a picture of a boy's genitals intended medical purposes, 2) submitting a chargeback for a Pixel phone that never arrived, and 3) unknown reasons, likely Google's AI incorrectly flagging an account.
Even on HN, you’re in the minority. If you took HN as a representative sample, you’d think Linux was the #1 OS by a long shot even though it’s a rounding error for personal usage. There’s a big old bubble here.
At one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name and services which will provide some customer support if there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small price vs. Google's free.
Well Search is definitely better for Google's Shareholders. They've always made a killing but must be making substantially more with how degraded the product has felt recently.
I'll believe it when Google Maps stops asking me if I want to get off the highway, drive around in a big square, then get back on at the same exit going the same way.
No google. I don't care if it's 8 minutes slower. Still not tempted.
Many such cases. Every major company (FAANGM) talks big about being all-in on AI, but when you use their products in your daily life, stupid stuff like parent's map example is glaring.
> 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.
Google product is not the search, but the advertisements. I can believe that Google has gotten better at showing more ads to more people. The services like mail or search are just a way to get people to see that ads.
> I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse
This is my big one as well. As Google refuses to segregate accounts, nebulously AI defined “bad” behavior on YouTube or GCP could lock me out of my digital life.
Its terrifying for anybody ecking an existence in tech (without deep pockets). Those who built businesses around facebook and now twitter know all too well the risks of being a digital serf. But you argue it was their choice.
You cannot do anything techy without exteme dependence on google. This is not how things should bem
> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.
I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time.
I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.
Not grandparent, but I use it every day. It's definitely the buggiest message client I've ever used. Maybe it's because I'm using Safari, rather than Chrome, but problems within the last few months of use include:
* long load times, sometimes I have to retry 15 minutes later. everything else works.
* often shows week old conversations when I open it fresh, eventually updating when it feels like it
* sometimes doesn't scroll to new messages, forcing me to manually scroll, even after page reload
* absolutely massive memory usage (685 Mb for that tab, seriously wtf)
* "open in a popup" used to be extremely buggy, but now it doesn't function at all, not being an actual detached window.
Interesting. One of the small offices I know who’s using spaces with about 30-40 people hasn’t had any complaints except the lack of scheduled do not disturb.
The integration right next to email and calendar that are always open anyway have been very natural, but this isn’t a software company where people are always on it.
The new Workspace suite has a big sidebar where you quickly toggle between Mail, Chat and Spaces (chat rooms/channels). Notifications for all are in one place.
You naturally have everybody in the company available and built in Google Drive/Office integrations are really solid.
The Google Chat iOS app just has Chat and Spaces separated for you too.
I was really surprised at the level of improvement because I needed to find them a chat option with a BAA for compliance, so a good enough solution that was already built in was helpful.
I don’t think it would be good enough for power users or fully remote companies yet, but small-medium businesses who are primarily in office get a solid win.
Yes, I remember being permanently blocked from using Adsense without warning or explanation. As far as I know, I’d done nothing wrong. Nothing even remotely dodgy.
Reading your comment reminds me that I should be careful not to rely too heavily on Google Docs and Workspace.
Google is too big to offer the personal touch. They’re a very cold and uncompromising company.
Speaking of usability, Quip is much better in my experience. Office 365 is more feature rich. If anything, I think GSuite is falling behind. A few killer features that GDocs should've had since years ago:
- A link to any line. Quip has it, yet in gdoc I have to create a bookmark first.
- Any table is a spreadsheet. I mean, isn't it obvious? Who says one never needs to calculate anything in a table, or never needs to format anything in a spreadsheet cell?
- Embed formula anywhere and refer the result anywhere. Dah! So convenient for technical docs, yet gdocs has shit.
- Latex support. I'm sorry, but gdoc's equation is both ugly and crippled.
- Embed any file. I mean, really, this is year 3202 and I still have to upload a file to gdrive, find its link, and paste the link back to my doc?
Google used to an avantgarde in product design. What happened?
Its weird because there was a time when I would have agreed with him. "Google Now" launched years ago and did an amazing job of predicting things. The little four icon thing in their launcher used to almost always have the app that I wanted at the top.
Now, "Google Now" doesn't exist and the launcher rarely predicts an app that I'm wanting to use next.
Search has regressed too. Google Finance and other web properties are maybe about the same, at best.
And these are just a few of the less obvious problems.
This comment from a NYT opinion piece by former Slack CPO added some clarity as to one reason why tech companies are doing this: pressure from investors to keep the share price up. Public companies lose that freedom to do whatever they want even if they have tons of money in the bank.
> Meta and Salesforce combined lost more than $700 billion in market cap last year. Both companies are now dealing with activist investors who have taken prominent positions in their stocks. The activists have called for the companies to slash costs, reduce nonstrategic investments and, notably in Meta’s case, aggressively reduce its work force.
Google don't have to worry about such activist shareholders in the same way that other companies do. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have the controlling share in Alphabet thanks to their Class B shares. They only have a fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.
So does Zuckerberg. But while he and Page/Brin may have a controlling interest in _voting_ stock, they own a much smaller amount of overall shares. Sure, activists can't control the board, and Zuck/Page/Brin are not in danger of being ousted, their fiduciary duty is to the shareholders not just those with voting rights.
Facebook, nor Google, is firing people because of activist investors. They're firing them because they just way over hired people recently, and they have way too many people for what they can adequately put to good use given their size now.
Feels like everyone wants to put a semi "conspiratorial" twist on these announcements when it's pretty obvious what the underlying driver is.
> They're firing them because they just way over hired people recently, and they have way too many people for what they can adequately put to good use given their size now.
I'm not sure that's the case. They didn't hire just to have people twiddle their thumbs, but rather to engage on projects they believe may have some worth. But when the share price drops, investors/Wall Street/media start clamoring for "action", and an easy action is to trim those projects that may or may not work out and that aren't core. But it's not like Meta/Google/Msft are in danger of losing money any time soon -- they're still making $Bs in profit every quarter, but the expectations continue to rise as people buy the stock and expect it to keep going up.
You’re way overestimating the amount of clarity and thought in hiring plans during panic hiring like we had.
Management was overwhelmed and just spending money on anything plausible sounding (even if not really plausible) because they could.
Now there is an accounting happening, and the BS is being found out, and here we are.
Also, new hires have been extremely difficult to onboard (or figure out if they are stuck or not) with remote work, making many of these folks only clearly ‘problems’ a year or so later.
> Management was overwhelmed and just spending money on anything plausible sounding (even if not really plausible) because they could
This is the crux of it. At any company there are always more projects and ideas than there are people to work on them. Limits on hiring force the business to carefully choose what to work on. Not every pet project gets staffed/funded.
The underlying driver is also wage suppression. Why retain overpaid employees when you can collectively fire people and suppress the market wages? The added benefit would be that the rest would work twice as hard.
I think tech is laying people off for the same reason activist investors are so active.
As interest rates increase, more investment money is leaving the stock market and entering the bond market. Companies have to sell their stock harder than ever before. This is part of their strategy to sell their stock to investors.
there's no fiduciary duty to do a dumb thing just because Amazon did the same dumb thing, and saying "we've got loads of cash, we're going to expand and hire the great people Amazon and Meta just stupidly let go and enhance shareholder value in the long term" is a perfectly cromulant thing to say.
Fiduciary duty is more what you call guidelines than rules. It’s there to a) prevent blatant fraud; misguided/rash/anti-shareholder-sentiment decisions are not prosecutable, and b) give a board a reason to oust someone. The former requires a paper trail along the lines of “I’m liking my own pockets at the expense of other shareholders”, and as you said the latter is not a danger for them.
Not directly, sure. But in this case the activist shareholders desires are aligned with what's best for the compensation of execs who are mostly paid in RSUs
Perhaps there is an large internal pressure from the employees themselves?
If many employees have a large amount of salary dependent on the stock price, then those employees will really care about GOOG falling in price on the market.
I lurk on all the generally open Google-internal fora, and I think I have only heard one person try to make this case. The vast majority of employees who say anything about this are opposed to layoffs to increase the stock price.
If there is internal pressure from everyday employees advocating to accomplish this, they are being extraordinarily quiet. Unlike basically every other cause for which employees try to pressure the company. Google is quite open internally to people saying we should change this or that. It's almost a past time.
I've never seen anyone directly make this case. Most people seem to want their colleagues (many of whom are friends) to keep their jobs more than they want the stock price to go up.
It's a serious problem for retention when people's total comp drops by a large amount, and some companies (e.g. Doordash) have given people extra stock to make up for it.
> Still there is pressure to bow to big money investors to continue having access to investment capital.
what "investment capital"? Facebook and Google aren't making up new stock to sell to banks or hedge funds or whatever.
actions like this are to keep the existing stock price up, which doesn't benefit the company directly at all, except indirectly by not pissing off employees with number-of-share-denominated stock grants and not having "wall street analysts" claim a company failed for not making it's numbers match the numbers the analysts made up and publicised before results came out.
This is definitely the case. I was just talking with a Googler after the Microsoft layoffs about how Google is (now was) one of the last big tech companies avoiding layoffs, and Pichai was fighting investors like hell to keep it that way. He supposedly literally told them "these are real people" out of frustration at some point.
It's hard to look at that incredibly generous layoff package an not see it as a "fuck you" to investors telling him to slim down, after forcing his hand.
Says that they have a $6 billion stake. Google's market cap is 211x that. If I owned 0.47% of a startup company, would they even take my phone call to listen to my "opinion" on any matter? Something doesn't add up here. Or perhaps this theory is correct, a company that owns 0.47% of Google gets to call the shots. Really makes you think twice about taking investment money.
Meh. Saying this is a new "era" and the old ways are over is nonsense. We're entering what is likely a mild recessionary period with less flowing capital. It's a market correction. The "era" will last maybe 2 years. Then the upward trajectory will hit again and tech workers will get drone shuttles to work or something by 2030.
It was the period when people started building real companies that created real value and made money instead of bullshit pump and dump IPO schemes. Some of the talented people being laid off right now could create the next wave of innovation that the MAANGs are too ossified for.
> We're entering what is likely a mild recessionary period with less flowing capital. It's a market correction.
If this was the case Google could have done an insane mount of other strategies to cut costs, of course why would they when they made $68B last quarter?
Another comment on this: don't forget that no matter what these CEOs say about their workforce, we're family blah blah blah, they are first and foremost beholden to their shareholders. The very purpose of a capitalist corporation is to serve the interests of its shareholders, aka make more money; everything else is secondary.
This is called "shareholder primacy" and it's more of an ideology than an actual legal requirement. It's going to be true to the extent that the company leadership believes it's true, and a lot of different strategies could be justified as serving the shareholders in the long run.
Matt Levine has written a few columns about how this works out in practice, or doesn't.
But the company leadership either has to be able to convince shareholders to stay the course (as Amazon famously did for years without generating profits as it grew), or has to have enough power to ward off the investors (bearing in mind that most investors are institutional not retail) because of the way the company is structured that he's not in danger of being ousted if the board (which represents the shareholders, not the company) doesn't like the company's performance.
Yes, shareholders can sometimes exercise power over a company via its board, but it doesn’t follow that shareholders necessarily want to maximize the value of that company’s shares, or at least not right away. Shareholders often have other interests. For example, they usually own shares in other companies. Also, ESG is big these days.
This can make deciding what a company should do a messy political process when there’s disagreement about what shareholders want or should want. Like, some shareholders may decide to buy a coal plant to shut it down, others to keep it running as long as possible.
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 they’ve won the game and are the market.
So this one makes complete sense to me. I’m sure everyone still thinks Google only hires engineers, but they actually employ A TON of ad sales people.
Advertising revenue is sensitive but number of engineer Google needs is not proportional to amount of ads they show. It's not like Amazon where if people order less they need less workers at fulfillment centers and less track drivers. And Google still profitable and can afford to keep headcount as an investment into future. Or they have no plans which spans more than a quarter?
Why a project they invested in would suddenly become unprofitable for all foreseeable future? They expect recession to last decades? It more looks like public companies value short term profit (the next quarterly report) more than a long term development and Google is no longer immune to this.
Just a theory but in a downturn I could see a lot of companies increasing their ad spend as they lose existing customers and find they need to work harder to acquire new ones.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to advertising which is just gratuitous brand building.
This is opposite. Marketing budget is second to be cut first being building (space expansion). The R&D budget however goes up mid recession.
Here is how the cuts work
R&D, space expansion, marketing, parties, raises, new product building, warehouses,
I think throughout their existence they tried hard to be more than that. If they settled to be just an advertising business, then easy, you become an equivalent of Lamar Advertising, you post an equivalent of billboards for over a hundred years, perhaps run a few servers and settle for that. An advertising company doesn't need to try to break into cloud computing business and do all these things that Google is actually trying to do (whatever the degree of success).
This all happened in the dotcom crash - all the companies shed staff.
It happened again during the credit-crunch.
It (used to?) happens in reverse every year in the banks - everyone watched Goldmans pay out bonus before xmas and then adjust their bonuses accordingly.
They've had all sorts of chances to expand that business, but have repeatedly shut down popular projects to the point where people hesitate before adopting new Google tools because they might get shut down with little warning.
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...
Yes, but there are a lot of ad agencies that try to do Google ads on behalf of clients for huge fees. I'm sure part of Google sales people's jobs is to try and either drive such agencies out of business or get the agencies to spend more on Google.
The Google of 2005 wouldn't do this. The Google of 2005 would use this as opportunity to monopolize all the talent and move into some new space and eat everything with fantastic software.
* I had a good seat to watch google obliterate mapquest and yahoomaps with amazing javascript maps. It was day and night. Yahoo was penny pinching their mapping engineers while Google was buying geographic satellite companies and innovating with lazy loading javascript maps. It went from, websites can't provide anywhere near the functionality of desktop apps to why would ever use a desktop app for that.
* I was building phone software and mobile search engines before, during, and after the launch of android so I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability. The carriers began going through the stages of grief, while they were still on anger, like the sound of thunder[0] android launched, and reality shifted under their feet. After that it seemed like nothing else had ever been possible or true.
The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.
Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.
Also the new CEO is not a software engineer, so he doesn't understand the problems they are facing day to day.
Sorry, but I haven't seen his code base, and I don't know any significant technical achievement of his other than spamming everybody with Chrome download links everywhere to make it the number 1 browser (it was a great strategy, but not enough to run a company).
Google is paying Jeff Dean, the guy who even after was famous for a lot of things, after imagenet challenge result came out, stopped everything else, read research papers for a week, and implemented a system that separates dogs from cats with unprecedented precision.
People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen to them when they say that the company should go into a direction.
> People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen to them when they say that the company should go into a direction.
I wonder if maybe these people are too principled to spy on people to the extent that Google does to profit the way they do. Maybe they select for a CEO who is talented, but also driven by money enough to prioritize that at all costs.
Demis is a super hard negotiator who was the only person able to get bought while keeping full control. I think he's more than capable of doing business.
Jeff Dean may not care that much about business, as he spent all his life on scalability, but he understands more than most people the exact data needed to be collected to be able to train the neural networks for launching / improving products. He may not want to be CEO, but I don't think that's a bad trait for a CEO.
I doubt you can "understand the nuance of software" without having been in the trenches, even a little. Managing software roadmaps and projects or people is vastly different to dealing with systems and code.
As somebody who started my software company in 2007 and stopped coding full time around 2012/2013 I'd say if you did it long enough you never lose the abstract concepts.
I understand everything my head of engineering tells me and don't need it ELI5'd. However being told it, and being asked to do it are two different things. I would be a very useful or productive coder if I went back in to the trenches.
I made it my goal to get to Google several years back precisely because of stories like these about the Google of 2005 and whatever, Bock’s “Work Rules!” and all that. And I made it! And now I have lost it, I am part of the unfortunate 6%.
The old-timers I knew there must be shocked. They all said “that's just not what we do” when this was rumored months ago. “If those conversations are happening, I haven't heard about it, my managers haven't either.”
The culture that hired them told them both explicitly and implicitly “we did not hire you to do a job, we hired you because you are smart and effective, we trust that you will hate boredom and use your grit to make hard things happen and do the best work of your life.”
The reality from my little spot inside Google Cloud was much more sobering. In my first performance review I was making my bosses happy but not pleasing some faceless committee so the rating came as a shock to both of us. We worked our way out of that pit and then all our incoming headcount was cancelled because Sundar demanded we “sharpen focus,” and so we had to cancel a bunch of planned growth tasks and work on tech debt cleanup and security features, which are less sexy but keep the lights running.
The kicker is, just yesterday I was talking to the team about an experiment for a better way to improve our work, I was helping our new team lead onboard, AND I put out some new code for review that would solve a major pain point. So like I was “in the zone” today, I was legit ready to create a ton of business value. And like last night I woke up hearing the work laptop reboot in the other room and thought “that was weird” but did not give it much more thought, and then today I go to quickly skim HN, “all right let's kick some a... ... ... The affected have already gotten an email, I didn't get an email, I am safe right? ... I also didn't get the emails that we're over some quota, but maybe Kate or Martin fixed that ...? Okay work phone isn't helping, let's check the work laptop....”
Amazingly bad. Just have my manager tell the group, let us all cry together... Not like this.
I think so? I don't have contact with my immediate manager, only my skip-level, who is still there. (I was reorged under a new manager middle of last year and then again at the end of last year.)
I looked up Sundar's background before joining Google out of curiosity and it looks like his educational background is in "metallurgical engineering" (IIT Kharagpur), materials science (Stanford), and MBA (UPenn). And stints at Applied Materials and McKinsey.
Is it though? He hasn't really moved the needle for Google at all other than capitalizing on growth laid out by his predecessors. Satya is far more admired for his accomplishments comparitivly.
Satya is favorably compared to Balmer, whose effectiveness is constantly understated for reasons unknown to me. Anyone who takes over from an unpopular leader gets bimus points for not being unpopular.
Agreed. I have seen this similar scenario played in many context An organization is failing. Owners / Board of directors decides to put in new leader and outgoing leader will take all the blame, valid or not. I think all parties agree on this so that incoming leader can start afresh and also taking credit successes of past initiatives while failures attributed to past leaders. That way they can add to credibility of new leader.
Around '08 or '09 is when IMO it became visible from the outside that Google's culture had shifted radically.
I've read comments before claiming that when Google acquired DoubleClick, Google became more DoubleClick than the other way around. Basically, that the Google we liked was destroyed by that acquisition, and something new emerged. That certainly squares with the timeline.
Google buying Double Click is actually the most profitable acquisition in the history of business, nearly dwarfing the Robber Baron era and the Russians selling us Alaska.
> Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.
This was a good 15% of what I used to do at Facebook. Adapting to the useless changes, that is, not making them.
It felt like if your changes weren't backwards incompatible then they were less visible, and therefore less impactful for your performance reviews. If you made them backwards incompatible you could boast about coordinating hundreds of engineers to transition to the new system. If the transition is seamless, all you have to brag about are improvements from the old system, and frequently there were none.
Not to defend him, but I think by 2015 google has already lost its way, focusing not on developing groundbreaking technology, but on using it's dominance to squeeze any money even if it meant encouraging addictive behaviors.
2015 sounds about right. Three Years of Misery Inside Google is one of the best articles you can find about the seemingly sudden change of culture that made working at Google miserable.
TGIF was not a thing people watched or went to anymore. The number of meetings doubled. Employees were actively discouraged to look through code in google3 and design documents that did not concern their work (search for 'need to know' in Memegen if it still exists).
The main thing that weirded me out and ultimately caused me to decide not to work for Google was that everyone was talking about perf and promotions all the time. Everyone in the team structured their work accordingly, and tales of people who obtained promotions because of heroic effort for achieving something was a recurring topic in group conversations.
There was cost cutting efforts everywhere. There was significantly more red tape involved in requisitioning a heavy duty computer needed for my work (compiler development). The food in the micro kitches were toned down in variety and quality. Food trucks disappeared. The food in the cafes was unchanged but dinner was no longer served at about half of the cafes.
I’ve seen him speak in person, and this is completely correct. He just chases shiny things; there’s no vision for the company at all, just “oh well this seems interesting”.
Not at all. He did lose a lot of money recently, but most of that is "on paper" - he still has at least that much left over. I'd be more than happy to have his problems. He's in a valley right now, but his batting average is very high.
Elon Musk is strongly outspoken, and has strong vision, communicates the vision, although it can change in a day. But at least everybody in the company (or rather everybody on Twitter) knows the plan to execute on.
When Sundar speaks he speaks politically, so that he can never be wrong (at the same time if I just watched his talks, I couldn't even know that I'm at a search company).
He seemed to do a pretty good job with that at Tesla/SpaceX, but I’d argue he’s really dropped the ball at Twitter. No one seems to have any idea what “Twitter 2.0” even is supposed to be.
I agree that he really dropped the ball (I moved to nostr because of him not allowing links to nostr). I think it was because he lost tens of billions of dollars because of the amount of leverage he had, the market downturn, and advertisers dropping so much because of the political uncertainty that Elon brought (advertisers are risk averse by default).
I think all of us have an idea of what social media should be compared to what it is now (looking at what my friends and people I'm interested in it are doing), but it's not compatible with the amount of advertising revenue that needs to be generated to justify a $40B valuation.
There's a deep conflict between the value provided to the users and the value created to advertisers, and Elon highly underestimated that conflict, so now he's (and Tesla investors are) paying the price.
I always assumed his appointment was strategic, Pichai got his position shortly after Nadella took over Microsoft. This coincided with announcements like Android One and other products targeting or focusing on the Indian market which is emerging as a force on the global stage.
Companies do it all the time for diversity and inclusion reasons. I'm not suggesting either CEO is un/under qualified for the position, but rather given a pool of highly qualified candidates they chose to sort the list for a particular attribute.
Neither?
My prediction is the latter will retire coming up and have the next one clean the mess.
Personal opinion and jaded perspective of course. Disclaimer: don't like shortsighted "follow the shiny thing" decisions. I haven't seen evidence the CEO of Google has positioned the company for the long term or to survive. Namely, the bus would have been going fine if not better without some if not all of the Google leadership on the wheel.
> Other tech people change the API for no reason and give work to 1000 more people to ,,upgrade to the newer system'' and stop maintaining the old system.
We're in the middle of rewriting our auth system because Google Sign In is being replaced with Sign In With Google.
I tried Google APIs as well, and also gave up at authentication, even though I just wanted something super simple and small (push messages to mobile phone).
Nowdays I'm just using nostr for storing simple data, as it's super simple with no vendor lockin (I can encrypt messages if needed).
Layoff would be inevitable. Reading its past history, the current Google is nothing like what is was. It used to be a pretty intense place where creators are eager to work (check the history of Android book, it is very informative on that)
I lost touch with Google's internal culture around 2011-ish. What is your take? When did you think Google changed and what drove the change? How gradual was?
For me the two big changes were when Larry took over from Eric and when Amit was fired for harassment.
Larry may have been good or bad leader, but he was just super serious and boring. Eric was amazing at trying to make us think in grand visions and be optimists, what is needed in tech.
With Sundar TGIFs were not about organizing Google to a common goal, it was much more like watching advertisements.
Big team meetings started to be anti-harassment training camps.
I started to not participate in any team events and just code, as the leaders stopped giving us real honest guideance.
During the deep dark days of Google+, at one TGIF a senior (very senior) search engineer stood up and asked Larry why they had to do everything Vic asked, like removing long-term search features and counting logins to Google as Google+ users, and Larry just sort of stood there, confused, and asked the crowd "can't you all just get along?"
It was at that moment I saw the stark difference between Eric and Larry (and later, the difference between them and Sundary). Eric was a leader. He knew how to rally the troops (his speech at TGIF right after the US economy shut down was amazing). he saw economic downturns as times for Google to grow its strengths, not shed its weaknesses.
What's amazing is how much the engineers at Google had to do to convince leadership that our pursuit of social (with the exception of youtube comments) was hurting our brand, and distracting us from the next profitable venture (cloud). I have eternal respect for the people who patiently convinced Yonatan Zunger (who wrote the infrastructure code implementing Real Names) that Real Names was a huge waste of time.
At this point it's clear there's nobody at the top of Google who really has a clue how to move the company forward. They should just put Ruth in charge and complete their transition to being a post-innovator focused entirely on maintaining their monopoly positions.
How about this one? When I was working on my idle cycle harvester I happened to sit near Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. I got invited to have coffee with them many mornings. I told them how I thought Google could contribute to managing genome data, and a few weeks later, they opened up a chat window and said "We wrote a mapreduce to compress DNA. Can you tell us if this is helpful?" and that's how Google Cloud Genomics was born.
yes, my training is in biology and it came about because I thought that biology would be more interesting to hack than computers (all this happened when I was in middle school and high school, hacking on the internet and taking biology classes). It's like being put in front of a magical new computer and being told "we have this thing in the lab, we don't know how it works, so can you sort of play with it and tell us how?"
But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".
Here's another. After working in Ads for a while somehow I convinced senior management to let me use all the idle cycles in prod. I spent the next three years building and running the equivalent of Folding@Home at scale (the largest number I'm allowed to share is that we used more than 700K Xeon cores 24/7 to run protein folding, drug design, and telescope simulations). We published a few high profile papers and then I shut down the project because it was using far too much energy and it made sense to free the resource up for more important projects.
better to join google and go through all the internal history docs, memes (from the beginning) and ask the old timers.
The best books I've read (in terms of truthfully representing what it's like On the Inside) are In The Plex (hilarious because Hackers is what got me to Google), How Google Works (a bit silly, but does have some business knowledge from eric), Voices From The Valley.
There was a big change in 2015 when Ruth replaced Patrick as CEO.
Most of the cost cutting dates to then. She has been undeniably good for the share price, but it's a two-edged sword. There is a lot you can't do when you're focused on the share price.
The share price did well, the company and its reputation much less so.
It's not exactly news that if you want to goose a share price, a big round of layoffs will "reassure investors." Especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.
Eh, Google long ago passed the point where it was about making things, and has been at the point where 99.99% of its energy has to go towards stopping itself from imploding.
Which means processes, approvals, triple checks, departments/groups fighting each other (to protect themselves), etc.
It’s a natural part of the lifecycle and every organization gets there eventually.
What you’re talking about is frustration when you’re part of the picture (and individual ability to get things done) is blocked by the overall organizations dysfunction/morass.
You could argue that the whole point of something like Y Combinator is to back hungry competent founders over stagnant incompetent people working at behemoth companies.
You could also argue that the whole point of YC is to provide a passive(ish) income for Paul Graham by turning small hungry companies into behemoths via rapid forced growth and IPO. Like some kind of battery farming.
> The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.
This seems to be inevitable anywhere. In the social games, biz types beat the nerds.
> The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.
Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?
It was a response to real issues that had to be addressed. When 3 different teams ship 3 different chat apps over the course of just 5 years, that’s the kind of thing that typically signals more leadership and better organization is needed.
Doesn't seem like they've addressed it yet based on the Meet/Hangout fiasco that is still unravelling. Mid-2010's Google was already showing signs of corporate lethargy.
Google's sole purpose now is to increase profit by > 15% till eternity. No innovative tech can give >15% growth in profit every year like a clockwork. So they attracted bunch of number pushers who kept on putting more and more ads in youtube and search. They started chasing Amazon or Apple in Cloud or Phone hardware. They became 100% competition focussed and completely ignored their strength.
They completely forgot that they are sitting on the next goldmine like LLM. It baffles me the the company which invented Transformer and has the worlds largest index can not build something like ChatGPT. But that is not going increase their profit in the next quarterly earning.
It's funny to me because this has been happening in tech a long time and is happening to the current giants. The old giants like IBM, GE, Motorola, etc. all suffered similar fates. And it's been discussed ad nauseum by disgruntled engineers who then go and make new companies/start ups to get away from the "suits".
It's called "Takeover by MBA". You know it's happened when you start hearing phrases like "Cut costs", "Make things more efficient", "LEAN process", etc. Basically the garbage pioneered by Jack Welch and taught at MBA schools everywhere to boost stock prices in the short to medium term.
It’s an anecdote but it’s also what I heard from my doctor dad working in the NHS. There was a time when the UK health system was actually run by doctors or people with medical knowledge. Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead, both in staff and bureaucracy.
In his opinion that’s what ruined the NHS not underfunding.
Business and management courses are not necessarily good.
> Business and management courses are not necessarily good.
I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish" thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting, etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.
I worked in a UK government office once where they had stopped giving teabags to staff as a cost-cutting measure. The project was £50 million over budget. That's a lot of teabags.
I interned at a large well-known tech company. When I started, in the break room, there was a Keurig machine and they would keep a large drawer stocked with plenty of k-cups.
Then one day, they stopped refilling it, saying they're cutting costs. I was like, really? Each employee, at most, is drinking $2 worth of k-cups/day. Meanwhile, you're paying them at LEAST $400/day.
The kicker is that the location had a cafeteria where they could get free coffee, but it was a much longer round trip to get there. It could easily be a 10+ minute ordeal. The productivity loss outdid any savings gains.
I suspect there was a big meeting with a bunch of managers about the need to make up a 7-figure budget deficit and 50 of the 60 minutes was spent bikeshedding about k-cups. :)
> Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead
It's kind of interesting being in a small to mid-size organisation and leading a team where the need to introduce this kind of middle management is asserting itself. I'm instinctively resisting it but the downsides are clear. I have way too many direct reports. I am constantly bogged down in generic meetings - everything from desk arrangements, COVID safety, leave management, etc. Meanwhile most of my staff spend large amounts of their time blocked from their top priority task because they lack input or direction. My unique technical skills are being completely wasted. Yet it kills me that we might decide we have to blow $150k/year which could employ another coal-face engineer simply because we can't figure out how to organise ourselves better.
So should I put in place a generic middle manager to deal with all this stuff? Or not? It may seem like it's obvious in happens to large megacorps that the end result of this is bad. But you can see completely how you end up there. Certainly the people who are doing that are getting way more cred in the organisation and arguably actually getting more done in real terms.
What's fascinating is how long it took for this generation of giants for people to realise it's just the same big enterprise world again, just more shiny. Maybe it's because they revolutionised corporate marketing: Google was a symbol for my generation, a fun tech oriented company completely in rupture with what was before (i.e. wear a suit in a cubicle). The cycle is also complete with "modern" tech stacks starting to feel like enterprise framework at the time like JBoss/Hibernate/...
It's worth stating that Google has been hiring like crazy for years. In their Q3 earnings[0], their year-over-year number of employees increased by 36,751.
Back when I was in school Google was the company that had an aura where it's reserved for geniuses and next to impossible to get into.
That was a number of years ago, I can't help but notice this perception changed among the people I know. I don't think it was entirely because I graduated and start having experience (disclaimer: did not work for Google).
I'm sure there were tons of great engineers at Google, and they probably were incredibly picky with college grads. But I also saw them hire people I had worked with that were experienced but not amazing performers. There are people who have good resumes in that they went to a good school and somewhere along the line worked at a well regarded company. The funny thing is that people like that are typically well regarded their entire career even if they just bounce around. The pedigree doesn't go away. It's hard to evaluate people.
This perception changed 5-7 years ago. I actually can't think of a single software company that induces the same level of awe in university students anymore. Places like Jane Street do but they aren't really Silicon Valley tech companies.
Deepmind is high status as well. However with both these companies - they are looking for experienced researchers usually rather than new grads. Google was famous for hiring bright eyed young geniuses and building their careers.
They used to be quite a niche trading company, known in the functional language community for their use of OCaml. But they grew to one of the highest paying company in the world.
Jane Street did outreaches at MIT (dunno which other schools), wrote blog-like things, used an exotic language, paid a lot of money (word gets around), etc.
It's probably just size. People might believe a company of 20,000 is filled with geniuses, but it's hard to imagine a company of 200,000 filled the same way
> I got the inside perspective on cellular carriers reactions. Google was this a dinosaur ending asteroid to them and their wall gardens. They saw signs, then sky darkened and in their hearts they knew Google would build something 100X better than what they could ever build even if they wanted to give up their walled gardens which was a cognitive improbability
This - and also the iPhone. The two of those were just so much better for the user than Symbian, and also short-circuited all the egregious billing of mobile carriers. It once used to cost £1 to send a message with a picture attached (MMS).
But a lot of anticompetitive hurdles had to be overcome to let that happen. The worst possible outcome for users is where the old company has enough energy to squash competition, usually by cheating, but not enough to actually do so by improving its products - because "improving" to the user would mean cutting into their revenue stream.
Whatever’s happening is a prime example of how disruptions happen in tech industry. Previous giants become fossils and new incumbents take the spot. IBM -> GE -> Google etc will all follow the same trajectory towards irrelevance.
I think this is an old myth that is no longer relevant. Sure, it might happen, but many companies now fully understand "the disruption game" and know how to adjust, primarily through acquisitions. The only way to break this is with more muscular antitrust, which (at least for now) seems to be happening.
For example, Microsoft is famously still doing quite well despite desktop operating systems no longer being the most important game in town. Furthermore, dominant companies actually rarely get disrupted in the sense that someone comes along to take their business, it's that new markets open up that make the old business obsolete. But IBM is still the leader in mainframes, Microsoft still has dominance for desktop operating systems, Google is still dominant in search despite what feels like weekly articles about how search quality has gone down.
The poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history of television [0], which will be studied in high schools 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today.
Elsethread I was reminded of one of my favorite collection of essays on software development. The last post in its collection is titled "Ozymandias" http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234
I chanced upon an ancient cache of code:
a stack of printouts, tall as any man,
that in decaying boxes had been stowed.
Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran.
Abandoned in the blackness to erode,
what steered a ship through blackness to the moon.
The language is unused in this late year.
The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin.
Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope,
a line of code and then these words appear:
# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE
The code beside persisting to the last—
as permanent as aught upon this sphere—
while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.
First time I watched Emperor's Club, I was like hey isn't this just Ozymandias ? It turned out that's a very common confusion, mined by English highschool teachers
Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial Hollywood feature film centered around that poem.
I like that for years (and maybe it's still there) the back of the Facebook logo sign out front was a molding and decrepit Sun Microsystems logo. It was there on purpose as a reminder that regardless of how many brilliant engineers you hire, death awaits you when complacency arrives. And if you paid attention you could find little Sun logos still lingering around the MPK campus...
One of my favorite poems. In my language arts class in high school we could memorize poems and recite them to our teacher for up to 0.3 added to our GPA. This was one of them.
IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad
either¹.
Every incumbent will be replaced eventually². What really matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo packet and kill products loved by users.
> IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad either¹.
Literally, what are you talking about? IBM and GE have both been shrinking for YEARS now. Even the graph you linked above shows GE's stock where it was in 1997. Just compare either GE or IBM to https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?window=MAX
Microsoft is surprisingly hard to kill. They do a little of everything, and internally act much less like one company and more like a conglomerate. This means there is more politics than needed, but also that the company can survive some pretty massive changes.
Microsoft isn't perfect, but it can probably survive even if they lost their top 3 revenue generators, which I'm not sure would be true for Google or Amazon...
I think in a way, MSFT is only doing fine because all the alternatives are doing awful. Google, Apple, Amazon, they're all not exactly at the top of their game. Also MSFT is in a huge dev. marketing campaign phase, so we as dev probably are exposed a lot more to their charm offensive than the rest of the population. Our perspective might be biased.
In general I agree that these companies retract from the forefront and maybe aren't the innovative powerhouses that they once were, however both IBM and GE do fine as businesses and will probably be around for a long time. And I think it's important we have a bit of both in the world.
The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech, but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive projects. Google has been a driving force in laying sub-sea internet cables across Africa and South America for a good chunk of time now, enabling billions of people to come online. I don't think a small company could achieve that since it costs billions of dollars to do.
GE hasn't really been doing fine since the great Recession. The GE of the mid-2000's was a behemoth. If I have to guess and adjusted for inflation, GE hasn't been this poor since the mid-80's.
While I think you're right and GE is a fine example, I'm not so sure with IBM. They seem to really have lost any direction or vision of what they actually want to do.
In my orientation (2017) an executive was there giving a speech about how great the company is. I still remember he said something to the effect of we never layoff people because we’re family. Oh well.
I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent. It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise.
The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.
Hiring process is never perfect, you find after 6-12 months you made a mistake. I saw that many times, I did that myself 3 times (hired people that were later fired, even after being promoted, as they did not perform well even if they were really good on paper and in interviews).
Are your examples also examples of survivorship bias?
I was reading in the WSJ how all tech seems to be paring back their moonshot programs. I think the Google example was a program cut that had $1B in revenue but $6B in costs. (forgive me if the exact numbers are wrong). It seems like prioritizing and cutting back on programs that lose money (despite being innovative or inspiring) is a natural consequence of economic downturns.
There’s definitely some risk of that but I’d put it more at 2008: that’s when Google acquired DoubleClick, and the sea change away from building products which people wanted to use seemed to start a bit later when the ad focus had set in. It’s hard to think of something they’ve done since then which has been a popular success.
Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do much for the "business" other than supporting the data for targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me, has real insight)
I think it’s a little more subtle: the ad focus means they’re unwilling to consider other revenue models or deeply appreciate how customers are different than high volume ad impressions.
The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to make a profit on its own would not have been. Their executives just weren’t sweating the way they would have if they knew their shares would go down when they didn’t execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are running the service in a way which makes it clear they have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the parent company and thus aren’t blowing off customer support, features, security, etc.
You’re right and thanks for the re-focus. I guess I don’t know what else people would expect? All the incentives are for a publicly traded company to focus on what makes money. If you want to work on R&D solely for the sake of R&D, there are other options (notably in the public sphere). Expecting a company to continually funnel money into cool, but ultimately unsuccessful (by business metrics) ventures seems confused.
To be clear, my argument isn’t that they should ignore profitability but that they could have multiple revenue models for different products, not to mention a better understanding of what it takes to succeed in different fields.
I’d use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services but their sales guys showed up like “we’re Google, of course we’re the best” and put approximately as much effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton of people available, listens to what you need (and actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked on it, … and none of that matters if you give up after begging them to show up to sell it.
The Chromecast was pretty market defining, and they’ve made huge inroads in education if you count that as “popular”. Chrome was technically around in late 2008 but it took a while after that to reach its current dominance.
Do you have any idea on what the Chromecast revenue stream was? I couldn't find it after a cursory look. I'm wondering if it's lumped into one of the "other" categories.
I think part of the distinction is how "success" is being defined. A product may be innovative and market defining, yet still not contribute much to the bottom line. It's still cool to work on, but these companies are still trying to make money at the end of the day. I assume their moonshot ideas still have the explicit long-term goal of being profitable.
Yeah, I don’t want to say there’s a line in the sand because nothing happens instantly or completely at a large organization but I’d say most of their successes were started before the ad culture became deeply entrained.
Chromecast is definitely good but it was years after Apple and Roku, and feeds data to the ad impression system so I’m not sure how much it defined the market rather than very successfully competing in it.
Google’s educational efforts are actually super interesting to consider: they had some initial success but seem to have lost their way. My wife is a teacher so we hear people talking about this: most of the districts around us have switched to Office 365 and almost all of the people who’ve mentioned that have been happy because it’s a better product without so many of the never-fixed warts they hit with G-Suite. That feels eerily similar to what I see with GCP where you really get the impression that incremental improvements aren’t favored by whatever incentives their management sets.
The unspoken question: who does get to make all the money?
At which point should the quasi-monopoly with the moat be? Hardware manufacturer? Retailer? Mobile carrier? ISP? Search engine? Social network? All of those companies have valuations which assume they'll work towards capturing most of the value, leaving the others competed away to nothing ..
I dug up the original story* and read it for the first time just now, it was a great read. I particularly like the imagery of Apple and Google dealing the deathblow to that idiotic app-rental scam the carriers had been running
It seems like we've pretty much come full circle in the 10-15 years since then. I wonder who'll be the ones to put old Google to sleep..
Poetic but misguided. The Google of 2005 didn't have so much fat to trim. When you have 150k employees, there's no escaping it. Not everyone is going to be hungry, and certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better. Many are happy to collect their paycheck while doing 20 hours of unambitious work per week.
Now the remainder will do 50 hours of "ambitious" work for projects that will eventually get axed, redone, reorganized etc.
It was never a raw productivity per hour problem, it was an organizing productivity behind meaningful, useful and profitable projects problem.
> certainly not interested or in a position to build things 100x better
in an organizational complexity of 150k -> 138k workforce, no one is in a position to make things 10x better, let alone 100x. Shedding 12k is a scapegoating gesture as if there is such a possibility, merely to ease the anxiety of the market price of shares. It doesn't even directly move the needle for profit/asset ratio, but it will help depressing wages with the theatre of "look what we had to do".
This sounds great, but obliterating tiny markets isn't going to move the needle anymore. Google Cloud is the size of bet required these days. And they are still investing heavily in it.
Though, note that both Android and Google Maps were acquisitions. Someone needed the vision to acquire those companies, for sure, but their initial incarnations aren't great examples of Google innovation.
Another multi-billion dollar company making billions of dollars of profit dumps thousands of staff on the streets.
There are two approaches here.
Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave. Given the sheer size of the company, a hiring freeze and attrition would gradually reduce the size of the workforce. I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately get rid of 12,000 people right now.
Second, stop over recruiting in the first place.
I'm sure google, like the others this week have some company mantra about how precious their staff are, and they're all family. Until they're not.
> Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave
Nobody is retiring - why would you, you get a fat pay cheque and once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is pretty good. Oh and if they fire you rather than you retiring, they have to pay you another stack of cash and keep those options that vest in a few years.
"Seeing people posting about being laid off after 30 years of employment at Microsoft is a great example of corporate loyalty." - is this just a clean out of the expensive old folks after the hiring spree of late? Is it last in first out or first in first out? These are much more interesting discussions.
I have seen almost no one actually talk about who was impacted on these threads.
I was in Nest, and <1yr tenure, and I was let go. i don't know about any co-workers, but most of mine had >7yrs tenure, except me, and many were staff.
Probably not, which is why an attrition strategy might work for both downsizing and trimming the fat, as the less motivated/willing to drink the "kool-aid" are filtered out and not replaced.
I think that your best employees are the people who are most likely to leave a company of their own accord, and so if you rely on attrition to reduce headcount you will also reduce the average quality of your workers.
In the tech industry the best employees are going to leave regardless, especially if they're bored.
Also, like banks, the FAANGs pay bonuses. And also like banks, if you want to 'suggest' to someone that ought to leave, regardless of who they are, you pay them a near-zero bonus, and give them a negative annual review as well.
Conversely, if a company wants to keep someone they pay more to encourage that person to stay.
All the gears and levers are in place in Megacorp, to do this kind of thing.
The whole mass-redundancy thing from companies of this size I find distasteful and cowardly, a reflection of the disrepect and arrogance senior management has for it staff, and an indication of mismanagement at a high level that can be afforded because a company is too large to fail.
I'm not saying that it's good to fire people. And yes, companies have levers to retain their strongest staff. I'm not convinced that they tend to be very good at doing that though.
The (non-FAANG) company I work for has an on-going hiring freeze, and I'm actually quite concerned because the only people who are leaving are the people you wouldn't want to leave - and none of the people you would want to leave are doing so.
That would be the logical approach if their only objective were reducing headcount. In reality, it's both that AND they're trying to get the wage spiral under control. As terrible as it sounds, layoffs send the "stop asking for more money, you should be thankful to even have a job" signal to the workforce.
There is a difference between culling low performers and culling high performers in an org or team that's no longer wanted.
Most layoffs don't just fire low performers. They fire people working on products that turn out to have no future.
I find this especially sad. An individual through no fault of their own could be easily laid off just because of being on the wrong team. In contrast an individual performing unsatisfactorily could not easily be fired (i.e. for cause).
Cull the bottom 10% takes a very long time (and effort) in a big company.
You still have to put the "candidate" on PIP, wait 6 months for the PIP to fail, then run the ejection process (ranging from 0-2 weeks in the US to a few months in EU).
and you have to sacrifice a senior eng to mentor the PIP'ed (else they can sue you for not giving them a fair shot).
The whole thing is much more expensive and slow than a company-wide layoff.
>I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately get rid of 12,000 people right now.
They need to do a layoff to show that they did a layoff, even if they secretly hired a "buffer" of 12k people in the months leading up to it, or will secretly fill back 12k headcounts in the months to come.
Google in particular needs to make intense investments in GCP so that they don't miss the train for capturing the cloud market. It's probably the only credible challenger to the AWS-Azure duopoly. This layoff is probably painful to their business.
Management have control over that already. They can just disband a team and move the team members elsewhere at any time. That is often more than enough for people to voluntarily leave.
Imagine if google disbanded the golang team and moved them to 'maps'. I imagine those team members would quit the company almost immediately.
And that's cheaper as the company doesn't have to pay statutory redundancy pay-offs.
I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not market dynamics.
companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent.
now it's a war on talent.
and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits and can express your political opinions.
but other big companies - say a tech company in the middle of nowhere e.g Epic - was paying good salary and not matching the faang / vc salaries. i'm sure those companies, if they didn't follow the herd ain't laying off people. their people are still employed, getting paid decent (enough). and work normal hours.
Is overhiring really a problem, would the world be better if companies didn’t overhire? Then many of the people now laid off wouldn’t have had a job in the first place. If you accept a job for what it is, a temporary need for your help, and plan for what’s next, a period of layoffs should become manageable.
Consider my situation. I passed my Google interview in October for New Grad 2023 and was told that my starting date would be April.
Now I’m most likely not going to be hired and need to restart my job search and this will have derailed my entire plans for the first few months of this year. I won’t see a cent.
OTOH, you've learned an important lesson early: You aren't hired until your first day of work. The job search never stops and never ends, until you're really ready to stop working.
Next time when someone agrees to hire you in the hypothetical future, you will keep looking and interviewing, at least until you have accepted a formal offer from someone.
(I'm assuming here that they didn't give you an actual, formal offer even if they did tell you about a starting date)
Your situation is one of extreme privilege, being able to have desirable plans, for many months, while unemployed.
I've turned down job offers in the future, because they're empty promises. You're a hiring req in some drawer, until the first day, because everyone is aware it's an empty promise.
Which is worse: never getting hired by google, or getting hired, working for a few years making a great or even outsized salary and then getting laid off after getting great experience? - or never having had the opportunity to in the first place?
An awful lot of people would prefer the first scenario and will come out ahead.
Due to tech giants' overhiring and overpaying policies, a lot of people re-qualified in recent years. Now those Juniors can't find their easy-to-get-dream-jobs f or months and situation is getting worse for Seniors, too, as both bigger and smaller (and also both public and private) companies are doing hiring freezes, layoffs, invoke no-raises policies and all sorts of cost cuts.
Sure - all those people could try to go back to what they were doing earlier but there are layoffs and freezes in not only tech and related industries.
Those people are being punished for doing what the giants-led market demanded.
> companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around
But this concept of over-hiring and overpaying doesn't make sense.
There is no way to predict whether a positive economy will last 10 years or 10 months, and if you don't follow the economic growth you will lose bigger than if you follow it and have to make cuts later.
Everyone is quick to blame companies for "over-hiring", but they would also be quick to blame them for being too careful in a positive economy, and the market would punish them.
for two comparable companies, with comparable products look at Asana vs Basecamp.
How much does Basecamp pay for a senior engineer ? they pay top end of SF salary regardless of location. However, you can best that Asana is paying at least 1.5x what Basecamp pays + RSU's etc.
Yet Basecamp is printing money and yet Asana is bleeding money.
How many engineers does Basecamp have ? How many does Asana have ?
so yeah the concept of overpaying and over-hiring exists and not just a fallacy.
if it was market driven, then the laws of the market would dictate Asana not to pay a premium over Basecamp for talent.
You’re not wrong but at the same time I was hiring for a senior engineer a year ago and the market was ridiculous. Seniors only wanted to work if they could do part time for six figures and the consensus was they should be allowed to work 2-3 companies at once.
This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it may suck to be an engineer compared to the ones hiring them: that’s just the nature of our mode of production.
To a European this kind of description always boggles the mind.
Having been in the field for 12 years, with a degree in CS, worked as a senior IC and been personally responsible for critical projects at financial institutions and startups alike, the highest wage I have ever had was 75k. And this is in western Europe.
In a way I hope that in the near future more US firms start looking outside their boarders when hiring.
Because there is plenty of hungry talent here just waiting for a chance.
Working for Google is not the goal for all developers.
I personally know enough who are or have been employed there to know that the gauntlet to get hired is stressful enough and unlikely enough for a skilled developer to get through that I'm not sure I would even ever give it a go.
From those same personal connections, there have plenty of stories about feeling like a tiny insignifican cog in a giant soulless machine (which any giant company like this would be) that I wouldn't want to work there. Let it also be said I have heard great things from individuals working at Google (it is a large enough workplace that any kind of situation will be found there).
It just doesn't sound like the place for me.
My perfect employer would be a software development company, focusing on a product or product range, with product market fit and an actually profitable, with hopefully no more than 300 employees (not gotten too big).
As someone who threw away too many years writing medical systems for the American market stay away from this industry segment. Do you want lower pay, rent seeking companies, CFO centric not end user products, and the personal stress that you are kind of making the world a better place so too much guilt to leave, then medical software is the perfect fit for you (until you break).
Its entirely that. A business method that relied on inflated valuations over the anticipated future market domination measured in current growth can only be possible in a market that has practically unlimited money entering the economy and it cannot survive in an environment where the money flow stops.
The dollar losing its uncontested dominance as foreign exchange currency due to the results of the sanctions and economic war started over Ukraine with almost entire global south, Asia and most importantly, Arabia moving to trade in their own currencies has killed the zero interest economy. Which stopped the money that Federal reserve and private banks were feeding into the economy. (private banks were doing it through fractional reserve lending).
But people that know that industry segment don't want to work at Epic ;) So crappy employer/crappy industry based on government rent seeking not product quality/crappy pay/crappy location = no thanks brother.
You should check out this guy called Marx, he wrote a couple books about how labor is always disadvantaged in such a system because their power ebbs and flows with the fluctuations of the market. The main check that labor has on this power is to bargain collectively. Seems tech missed that opportunity five years ago when it was top of mind but many people felt things are good why would we need a union.
Boom bust cycles don't end up with contradictions that capitalism can't resolve, it just makes capitalism stronger.
The absolute law of general accumulation doesn't exist either. As tech gets better, unemployment trends down.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall also doesn't exist. Economists have a name for the law that says the tendency for the rate of profit rises over time.
So why should I trust Marxism when at least 4 of his giant predictions are empirically wrong after hundreds of years? Scientific socialism implies that we should have seen successful communist states by now. Zero of them are successful.
I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher performing team. I don't want to work with people who are here to coast.
Are we about to enter a new era of ultra-profitable tech companies?
While companies like GOOG and MSFT have had ridiculously healthy margins compared to traditional industries for some time now, it's also been clear in recent years that these companies have become very loose with spending. Take GOOG for example, they spend so much unnecessary money on fancy offices, free lunches, diversity programs, highly speculative investments, stock based comp, etc.
But perhaps more importantly what happens when all the unprofitable tech companies with 80% gross margins decide to operate profitably? A lot of companies are so wasteful in tech today that they're actually choosing not to operate profitably so they can grow faster. We've seen Uber basically do a u-turn on this stance, but many other companies are following suite.
The media seems to think these cuts are a sign that tech companies are struggling and other industries like energy will now take the lead, but surely being able to drop 10-50% of your workforce with almost no consequences is a sign of strength not weakness?
I guess this whole time the most profitable companies in the world apparently weren't even trying that hard to be profitable.
Feel free to disagree with me on this, but I hold the view that diversity programs erode productivity generally speaking.
And for the record here, I'm not even opposed to them as a worker. It bothers me about as much as companies providing me with free lunches (not at all). In my current place we spend around an hour each week either discussing diversity or in diversity & inclusion training, and it's always the easiest hour of my week.
Diversity programs are best viewed as a relatively cheap marketing expense. They exist to make the company look better to certain people. When there are more pressing concerns, you pare them back because you have better things to worry about that what non-customers think of you.
It's not really about the cost though, is it? If they were donating to the KKK or literally setting cash on fire, I doubt you'd have the same outlook. Wasted or misspent money is never something to overlook, particularly when you could have justified keeping a few more employees on if you'd just stopped setting money on fire.
Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
Falsely equivocating spending on diversity programs to "donating to the KKK or literally setting cash on fire" is really telling.
This monthly discussion comes up on HN and it's already turning into a dumpster fire.
> Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
I hope this is right.
But I keep seeing stats like that being thrown around and implying that the cause of those high financial returns are diversity when it is as likely that projections of high financial returns give you the money and time to focus more heavily on diversity. Both can also be symptoms of a common cause such as healthier management.
Right but it is instead likely the case that companies with ridiculous profitability are likely to have diversity programs. That’s the thing about statements like this, it’s just one interpretation of the data.
> Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
Falsely equivocating correlation and causation is really telling.
And yet, somehow, there is zero correlation between hiring KKK members and organizational competitive success - hence the false equivocation.
Nobody said anything about causation, you raised that straw man yourself. If you'd look up the stat I quoted, you'd see McKinsey says the same thing:
>While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful.
Watch out for the PACs. https://www.protocol.com/tech-company-pacs-2019-2020 (somewhere between donating to the KKK, setting it on fire, and using it for bribes). I wonder what a company that donates equally to both sides is trying to achieve, hmm?
I don't know if you're American or not but that's a common strategy to select higher quality candidates for your side whilst selecting the lowest possible quality candidate for the opposing side via the primary process. That said, that's not always the case and you could absolutely be right.
So "hundreds of millions" is .1% of their spending.
And it is a line item that can be effortly axed in hard times. As others said, it's basically marketing. If you have a company that actively consumes your personal information, but it's a rapacious creepy fascist company, people aren't going to hand over their data to it.
Even if you hate the "woke", you probably still trust a company with a bunch of sensitive, moralistic raving SJWs that will scream if Google is abusing things too much. Which has happened!
A few years ago, I built an exact replica of a Saas product I saw online and priced it 1/3 theirs. The actual founder went mad and started a smear campaign. Lucky for him, Workload at my regular job picked up and I abandoned the project, but this highlighted the weak moats of most of these products.
and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's so that engineers are less inclined to go home and build their own competitor.
The other way to view is that even though you could undercut that business by two thirds, you didn’t make enough profit to make it worth pursuing over your day job.
So maybe you were selling it far too cheap after all.
I would've made significant more than my day job just by subscriptions (not counting share value). I had just joined workforce and leaving it so early didn't seem right to me.
Not even remotely comparable to the other things you listed. People such as yourself seemingly can't stop talking about it though, despite it having no effect on your life.
Well I don't know about GOOG specifically, but I know there has been relatively large diversity teams at every tech company I've worked for in recent years. Again, not GOOG specifically, but it's not uncommon for companies like this to have employees whose job it is to email people informing them to do things like rename their project's master branch to main. There have also been efforts within companies like GOOG to bring in employees who are less qualified simply because they're female or are of a certain racial group. My point about diversity programs is not that the team itself is expensive, but that when these companies push politically-motivative policies within an organisation they often cause larger inefficiencies and disruption. We've seen this in several companies in recent years such as Coinbase and Netflix.
Whether you believe diversity and inclusion is important isn't really relevant to the profitability point my comment was focusing on.
I also don't think it's necessarily comparable to the other things I listed and was actually considering not including it because I know there's always someone like yourself who will just focus solely on the politics and not my point. For example you didn't take issue with my point about their over hiring of kitchen staff? That's probably a much smaller expense and arguably doesn't have the larger productivity costs of diversity programs - it may in fact boost productivity.
I think many of the things you mentioned w.r.t. diversity is actually forward-thinking and potentially yields more returns later. If there's a brilliant swe that feels uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their branches, they won't work there. Same goes for hiring a "less-qualified" individual. How many decisions or projects can be improved because of a diversity of input? Again, a non-linear outcome that is harder to measure than immediate profitability. Those are some arguments for those programs focusing on your productivity point.
I guess my issue is that unless done well it's very often just disruptive. At the place I work the exec team is currently pushing diversity as a major goal and have told us explicitly that there are too many old white men at the company - especially within senior positions.
Since the push to replace white male leaders our corporate Jabber board has been filled with nothing but arguments about race with one side of the opinion that white male leaders need to immediately step down and make way for others, and the other arguing that this is a racist corporate policy which makes them feel unwelcome and without any path to career progression.
I kinda get both sides of the argument, but the focus on diversity was a key catalyst to the problems we now have with diversity at the company. Had the execs just not taken a stance on the ideal racial demographics of the employees we'd probably not be fighting about it.
I see your point and agree it can be frustrating if DEI initiatives are used as a political tool or blindly without considering the pitfalls of a naive implementation.
The issue with your arguments in response is the issue with the entire way DEI is structured in industry. It's not that diversity is unimportant, diversity of /thoughts/ and /beliefs/ is critical to building products that appeal to the widest audience/target market. It's that the way programs are implemented focus on the wrong things, and worse are based on this type of wishy-washy thinking.
Your argument amounts to a completely unsubstantiated what-if "[What] if there's a brilliant swe that feels uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their branches..."
Here's a counter-argument: Productive driven people don't get distracted by irrelevant and petty things like what the repository branch is named in the private repo that no customer ever sees. This is the type of petty nonsense that bureaucracy loves though, and bureaucracy kills innovation, creativity, and productivity. The entire issue with DEI isn't that opponents think diversity is bad, or that we're against hiring people from diverse backgrounds, it's that the way DEI is implemented is a cancerous bureaucracy that kills companies and teams.
It's just another form of the massive spread of administration/non-productive management across large organizations within the West. There's now close to (or in excess of) 1:1 administrators to faculty in most universities in the US, and the majority of the administrative hires are in DEI. These bureaucracies work to advance the bureaucracy, not to advance the mission of the organization they purport to represent. The massive waste of money on administration in hospitals, insurance companies, universities, and large corporations does not make these organizations improve patient outcomes, improve education of students, reduce medical costs to society, or improve products in the market that people rely on in their day to day lives. It's just a huge pile of burning money supporting the existence of roles that effectively detract from the overall productivity and quality of organizations.
This isn't just DEI, by the way, it's all forms of unnecessary bureaucracy. It's one of the reasons why we need stronger anti-trust, because this is an inherent cancer to large organizations. The only solution for which is to have smaller organizations in the first place, so they can be razor focused on their actual core mission and not burning mountains of cash on administrative boondoggles.
Indeed, I didn't cite any sources but I'm fairly sure there's literature studying this phenomenon. I agree that DEI when used as a political tool is a distraction for a company.
Your complete mischaracterization of these programs and outright lies about "efforts within companies like GOOG" reveals that you are completely unqualified to assess their impact on profitability. And thus you are in fact the one mentioning it for political reasons.
You also didn't say "over hiring kitchen staff", you said "free lunches", which are two different things.
Diversity programs have considerable side effects: there's both pressure to hire people who tick DEI boxes, and equivalent resistance to get rid of those who are underperforming. And neither of these does any favors to those who are qualified, but get tarred with the suspicion of being the dreaded "diversity hire".
How could it have no effect on our lives? It has effect when you compete against a diversity hire, it has effect when you have to work with a diversity hire, it has effect when your manager has to decide who to lay off when your coworker is a diversity hire.
What is a "diversity hire"? Anyone that's a minority? Or perhaps someone that _you_ believe wouldn't have been hired if they weren't a minority? Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say it's the latter.
How would you know if a colleague of yours is a "diversity hire" without making assumptions? How do you know that you're just not as good? Because you don't think their work is high quality? Maybe you're a bad judge because your work isn't high quality. Or maybe you only see part of their work? Or maybe your pre-judgement has already doomed you to biased analysis of anything they do.
Or maybe if you're worrying about this you're just not very good.
Your logic can rationalize any kind of unfair treatment in the world and therefore an invalid argument. After all, there alway are some people who are just so good that an unfair system cannot deny them.
Companies don't write magical blank cheques to someone who ticks off the right boxes without having them do any actual work. They are hired with the expectation of delivering value to the company by performing real work adequate to their qualifications. The term "diversity hire" is meaningless and frankly derogatory without evaluating actual individual performance. Companies have pipelines to handle underperforming employees and there are no signs any of them are being spared due to ticking off the right boxes despite that right-wing conspiratory trolls allege.
Of all of the minorities in the world, even of the subset that may compete with you on for a position, you just CAN'T fathom that some of them may be better than you? That in even competition, this person, who just happens to be a (gender, racial, sexual orientation, ability, religous) minority is better than you at the position you're chose to apply for?
Framing your competition as diversity hires (and contemplating the outsized concern that they have on your life) says more about than you think. You're the bottom of the barrel at what you do. "Diversity hires" don't compete at a high level.
I for one know that if my competition wins, whether they are a minority or not, they do it on skill. I've elevated myself out of the concerns of competing with diversity hires, because I'm great at what I do. Level up.
Tell me more about how Asian Americans have to have better grades than Whites, Blacks and Latinos to get into the same school because they are somehow worse.
Because amongst similarly qualified candidates we are THEN allowed to differentiate. It's the same reason you may pursue extracurricular and then put them on your college resume. Differentiation.
Where's your crocodile tears for Vietnamese kid from south central (where the Vietnamese in America are on the lower end of the economic scale) who is admitted to Harvard instead of a Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Indian kid from a well to do family? Lets segment Asian Americans and see how you feel.
When opportunity is equally earned, we can then look to representation. Your argument is just an attempt to claim all spoils.
I don’t understand your case about Vietnamese being admitted to Harvard at all, or how I would have tears let alone crocodile tears. Your words make no sense.
It is illegal to do what Harvard is doing in hiring decisions. It may even be illegal for Harvard to do what it is doing, given how the supreme court decides to rule. Affirmative Action doesn't exist in employment.
Why would it be illegal to have two separate but otherwise identical simultaneous job postings, one only covering the protected group and one only covering the unprotected group? Like, 10 males and 10 females, or 10 whites and 10 non-whites, or 10 elders and 10 youngsters, as long as they are employed without such seggregation after hiring.
And I forgot to say this: all of your words here are ad hominem attacks. You have a condescending attitude implying that somehow if one fails to win, they don’t have the right to complain about the unfair system. An absurd notion, given that they are impacted the most.
There’s a difference between failing to win, and asserting that others cheated. Calling others “diversity hires” implies that others have cheated. You don’t get to claim the high ground there.
It is not cheating if the act is in accordance with the rules of the game. What I am against is the rule itself. Never have I named names or suggested that ALL hires of a certain race are diversity hires. You have to put words in my mouth because you know you cannot refute my argument without purposefully misconstruing my words first.
It does have an effect on his life if the group he belongs to isn't a "diverse" one. I say this as someone who would probably be considered "diverse", I'd like to be judged based on my merits not by diversity quotas the blue haired gestapo has dictated.
It's a literal meaning referring to the idea of a secret ruling class of leftist women in society. They're assumed to have all this societal influence and control ("blue-haired gestapo") despite no actual leaders resembling this. I feel like the burden of proof is pretty high for claims like this.
Maybe it's just another way for them to revolt against society, or they just really like the way it looks. I don't really know why but dying their hair in some outlandish color is pretty popular with that crowd. I'm not against it by the way, it looks nice when done well.
Amusingly enough, “blue hairs” has long been slang for elderly women - a lot of old women used to put a bit of bluing in their yellowish grey hair to make it look whiter/more silvery, and some of them overdid it a bit at times.
What’s bluing? A non-permanent blue dye that used to be used when rinsing white shirts to make them look less yellowed. It’s still sold, but I don’t know anyone under 60 who still buys it.
Amused by this shift in meaning, mostly because I’m now the female equivalent of a “grey beard” in tech, old enough to have experienced the Dotcom bust - there is a fair bit of silver in my hair, and I can’t be bothered to cover it. “Grey bun”?
for a period of time, one of my previous employers had an unwritten policy that you couldn't send a job offer to a non diversity applicant at our headquarters. so yeah, these programs can actually have a pretty big impact on my life.
I think this sentiment comes from Universities (which do have cases of bloated diversity groups) and then that sentiment is passed on to the idea corporations, which to your point are a drop in the ocean in terms of overall costs.
All the so called "cool" technologies from FAANG names in the last 15 years have lost its luster.
There's a new set of companies that are ready to take over. The most obvious ones to fall to the wayside are the ones threatened by ChatGPT and TikTok.
That’s absolutely out of touch with reality. The owner of TikTok Bytedance was massively laying off people already. It is nowhere as profitable as any of the FAANGs.
ChatGPT is nowhere a product that can pay for itself.
If you've ever wondered, this is not about immediate money concerns.
In 2021 Google made $257 billion aka $257 000 000 000. And a profit of $76 bn aka $78 000 000 000.
It had 187 000 employees.
That works out to $1.3 million income per employee. And a net profit of $406 000 per employee.
They don't need to lay off anyone. They just want to.
I've seen smaller companies where they first shift employees around, offer everyone a choice, etc. People are only really laid off is things don't work out over many months or even years.
Google is a company with a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits.
The average employee laid off is going to have 2 months of work - paid - to find a new job, plus an additional close to ~$80k or so to hold them over til they find a new job.
If Google hires people they don't need anymore - regardless of how good they are - are they supposed to just keep them on payroll indefinitely? Why?
Why are we feeling sorry for employees with great severance packages who are deep in the global 1%?
If the worst thing that happens to you in life is that you get laid off at Google, you've got a great life.
Life isn't all roses, there's ups and downs - and some people who were laid off are going to have a hard time, and that's sad. But it's also life.
> fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits.
This is kind of true, but not really.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
They could shuffle them around for 6-9-12 months first...
Now they're just saying "you're bad for our company, period", which is demonstrably false. Some people lost motivation for their current project, current team, current manager, current org, etc, they just need a jolt.
> Google is a company with a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits.
Yes, both true and also a cop out. We should freaking put it in the legal description of a corporation that they also have social responsibility.
Otherwise if you follow your definition to its logical conclusion you end up with the East India Company starving 25% of Bengalis to death because that "maximized shareholder profits" (-.-)
> We should freaking put it in the legal description of a corporation that they also have social responsibility.
Until that happens - people should blame the company, it's the system you have beef with.
> Otherwise if you follow your definition to its logical conclusion you end up with the East India Company starving 25% of Bengalis to death because that "maximized shareholder profits"
Isn't this essentially what we have now? With US companies employing lots of people in Bangladesh & Philippines for like $2 for 10 hours of labor - living and working in unimaginably poor conditions by Western standards?
> Until that happens - people should blame the company, it's the system you have beef with.
Companies bribe, sorry, lobby politicians for that to not happen.
> Isn't this essentially what we have now? With US companies employing lots of people in Bangladesh & Philippines for like $2 for 10 hours of labor - living and working in unimaginably poor conditions by Western standards?
I honestly don't even know what to say for your comparison. Chill out, think about it some more, ask a friend if you have to, then realize why your comment is both incorrect and also bordering on grotesque.
One thing that is easily overlooked is the % of the laid off employees who are on a work VISA. This can be easily looked up and it is not insignifcant. Once an employee on a work VISA is laid off, he/she has a clock ticking. Imagine if such a person has invested their and their kids lives here -- mortgage, school, etc -- this puts an enormous mental stress on such families. I am one of those.
Don't get me wrong I am forever grateful the opportunities this country has given me and my family. But this rule of "get another job in 2 months or get the hell out of the country" is just cruel.
Yes, I did overlook this - and you're absolutely right, and I couldn't agree more. Thanks for calling me out on it.
We shouldn't be booting out some of the most productive / educated people in this country just because they get laid off.
We should be trying as hard as we can to keep them in this country!
To the extent that - a lot of people feel if a company does layoffs - the company should be forced to layoff H1B workers first. I think that is complete BS. Layoff the people it makes sense to layoff - not the people on the other side of the lottery.
Google's board can be sued by its investors if it decides to do something like make a pile of $50b and light it on fire. "We don't think you are maximally leveraging your payroll" is not actually a real concern.
I'm curious why are you looking at 2021 specifically? Isn't the whole idea that 2021 was a huge year for every tech company, leading to overhiring, followed up by 2022 which was a rough year for every tech company?
They went from $18.9B profit in Q3 2021 to $13.9B in Q3 2022. That's a 36% YOY drop and given todays news, it's fair to assume Q4 was even worse.
Wikipedia shows that number. And even if their profits drop, you can't honestly tell me that they will post a loss for 2022 or even 2023. Heck, their profit margin would still be solid.
> They don't need to fire anyone. They just want to.
Why would they want to?
If they make so much money, why fire a few people for a massive amount of bad PR?
So seem to know the reasoning. Enlighten us please.
Everyone's doing it, we might be in a recession, now is the best time. Their announcement both follows a trend and gets lost in the noise, it doesn't stand out as possibly bad management.
Plus someone was saying that it reduces inflationary pressures for employees. I.e. you put a lot of people out on the job market and you scare others inside the company, who are now suddenly happy to still have a job, ergo they stop asking as much for raises or for high salaries when they apply.
> Why would they want to?
Then enlighten me how a <<hugely>> profitable business needs to <<layoff>> large percentages of its workforce???
Its not bad PR when the narrative has already been set. This is a very opportunistic move at cost reduction that would have been scrutinized heavily under regular circumstances.
Because Google employees are really really expensive, and this won't generate a massive amount of bad PR because everyone is doing it. It's the ideal time to sack of employees you don't want.
and visiting the house they built at CES, super boring! The mirror showcasing a very lame feature (when you get close to a speaker it notifies you and asks if you want to connect to it) was much more interesting. So boring, I know they have a google announcement day, but wow, so uninspiring.
> 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 in a unique position to see into the economic future. Google is a bellwether. If the coming recession were truly going to be "mild," then Google wouldn't care.
It's time for everyone in tech to admit that the last two years were a mirage driven in part by corporate FOMO. Many do, but I don't think they're prepared for what comes next.
> 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?
Question for those who got laid-off from tech recently (say since Aug last year): how hard did you find it to get another tech job?
Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited:
If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true then the consequence to the macro environment could be substantial and not in a good way. Basically the fed will probably need another round of hikes to really bring down unemployment to bring down core inflation. Since it would imply that (ironically) the recent fall in unemployment is "transitory" and not sufficient to bring down inflation.
I had a new job lined up roughly a week after they broke the news to me. The tradeoff is that I took a 37% reduction in salary.
Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me, while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research. The best part is that I didn’t have to do any damn leetcode interviews.
I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven’t heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at least till GPT comes for us.
Sure, if you think it’d help. Here’s the message I sent that got me the new job. The context is that they were pushing back a little bit during salary negotiation and asking for a resume, so I channeled my Jewish ancestors and went into full salesman mode:
- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)
ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”
They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.
That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.
I love your background. I'm trying really hard to get my work with getting LMs to be able to write with syntactic constraints (like banning the letter E) to convert into a dedicated ML research role for awhile now. Seems it's relatively easy to get a fat title and money but harder to get a mandate to do research fill time.
I got gwern to pick up my paper about this, so someone with influence saw my work and cared.
But being the first to get LMs to play chess is a pretty big claim to fame. I hope history remembers the pioneers.
Keep it up! I believe in you. Keep trying to do research that yiu personally find interesting; doesn’t matter if it’s small, just that you’re into it. That’s always worked like a compass for me.
And keep in touch. Feel free to DM on Twitter or anywhere else. It can get lonely when it feels like you’re laboring in obscurity, so I’m happy to cheer you on or give feedback.
Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews.
Tier 2: Great comp and medium level difficulty interviews.
Tier 3: Companies that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes don't even have a coding interview!
for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective. I've passed "high bar" technical interviews before, so have some understanding of what it takes. This time around I thought I did pretty well, but didn't get an offer (coincidentally at Google). More candidates + focus on cost cutting has made things much more competitive for really high paying jobs.
For those tier 2/3 jobs they are exactly the same as before. Recruiters constantly messaging and got an offer after only being on the market for a couple of weeks.
Unironically where's this tier 3? I got leetcoded at an interview for what I thought was a sane employer when trying for what amounted to a K8S position. Not developing K8S but setting up a rather elaborate database system on it, LOL.
I was all wondering what they're going to ask questions about optimization strategies WRT their business requirements and instead they roll up with "lets reverse a string in python". Wait what? This isn't a programming position as per the job req?
I think some of the lower tier companies get the idea that they should copy what Google was doing a decade ago, regardless if it makes sense or not.
This. People talk about the job market as if it were a monolithic entity, but there is so much nuance by types and by regions that it is hard to make concise statements
Headhunters are incentivized to chase you constantly, regardless of how many positions they are hiring for. The positions may soon exist, may have already been filled, getting advertised by multiple agencies - doesn't matter. These people are going to reach out, get you booked in and even if that specific position does not work out, they will be hopeful to get you into something else. Observe the same with Estate Agents - they will continue advertising already let/sold houses, just with motivation of getting you into their contact list hoping that it will be useful very soon.
When there are too many recruiters in the industry for the amount of positions that need to be filled, the remaining recruiters need to work their butts off. For some of them, this looks like emailing more people.
Recruiters often hound even when there aren't many jobs available. After all, they aren't paid to sit around and do nothing when there are lulls in hiring...
I am still hounded by recruiters but the quality of the positions they are hiring for are definitely much worse than, say, a year ago.
Loads of temporary contracts on terrible salaries in obscure places with mandatory on-site attendance.
Most local companies have started to demand employees back in office full time also.
Which tells me that management in tech where I live ( nordics ) is generally bad and they just want to see bodies in the office, under the guise of teamwork of course, more than anything.
The international companies that have offices in multiple countries do not bother with mandatory in-office nonsense nearly as much. My guess is they are the ones picking up all available talent at the moment.
I'm from the UK. I got laid off in the first week of Jan and accepted a new contract role yesterday. The market was extremely quiet last week, but it seemed to pick up quite a bit this week. I'd guess it depends on experience and stuff, but there does seem to be stuff out there...
What I did notice was less tech companies seemed to be recruiting. Almost all of the roles I was approached for were in industries like finance, retail, healthcare, etc.
New listings on job boards, inbound calls from recruiters, the number of people responding to my emails, recruiters themselves telling me that things are picking up since the Christmas break.
I included the word "seemed" for a reason. It wasn't intended as an objective statement, but a response to someone asking for anecdotal experiences. I'm sure others may have a different experience depending on where they live, their experience, their CV, the type of companies they're applying for, etc.
It's still quite a defective system because Recruiters are so ruthless since so much money is made in commission. What this causes is the creation of fiefdoms and Recruiters trying to convince organisations or individuals to be exclusive with them, like it gives us any benefit.
The truth is that the noise that Recruiters generate means that most of the time, we only deal with a handful at a time, which means it can be pot luck whether your recruiter places you in our role.
Highly recommend that people do their own searching and apply direct, where possible, to the roles they want to do. I place a lot of kudos in a direct application compared to the Recruiter pitch about their latest "high quality candidate".
Your mileage may vary with this one. Companies sometimes get so much inbound email to careers@ourco that they stop opening any of it (while leaving that as the contact us link on their website). A recruiter is then someone whose email might be read by someone at the company.
I'm in the UK, but quite rarely contacted by recruiters, once a month perhaps. I think I have a decent resume (many years in a FAANG), but maybe I'm too senior/specialized?
It might be because there are fewer companies that hire at your current level of compensation - a few international big tech companies and some trading firms - and all of those are clearly slowing / freezing hiring or laying people off. Most cold messages from recruiters right now will be for positions that pay less than half of what you're making.
If you haven't changed jobs many times in the past (and dealt with recruiters), you're probably not on their radar. Most of the messages I get are from recruiters I talked to in the past, and they added me to their DB (with or without my permission).
I've noticed a small uptick in the number of messages, but I attributed that to being in my current role for about 18 months so I'm coming up to the point where other people start to look for a new job.
Really? Where are you located in the UK? In London I have noticed a definite reduction in recruiter reach outs in comparison to 2022 (and even then it was mainly finance companies)
Pretty sure the Fed "wants" to bring up unemployment. I.e. make wage inflation decrease. To put it another way, they want everyone to feel more poor so they spend less frivolously.
This 'I take full responsibility' thing is getting really tiresome. Of course you take full responsibility, you're the f'ing CEO, and in case on account of this someone loses their house I'm sure you'll make good on it, because it's your responsibility, right?
It's the opposite of taking responsibility though, they're not displaying any actions that can be quantified as them actually being responsible. If a company is doing mass layoffs it's because the executives fucked up, not the employees. The lack of corporate/executive responsibility is off the charts. They make big mistakes and everyone except them pays. I wouldn't be surprised if the executive team have to vacation after this on the company dime and receive an extra bonus since they took "responsibility".
Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation. You would think people that command billions of dollars and tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI, they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...
Agreed. This is the rough equivalent of saying 'I take responsibility' while laughing all the way to the bank over the backs of those that made the money in the first place. Absolutely revolting.
It's an over-compensation for the earlier responses that blamed things on "unforeseeable market conditions" or something in a "we did everything perfectly and this is just the way the world is" kind of excuse.
It doesn't really help the people who are out of a job, but I think it's a nice gesture at least to say "this one is on us, we'll reflect on what went wrong and try to do things differently next time" even though I have around 0 faith that any of these leaders would hire less in another Covid-like scenario where funding was cheap and demand for their services was growing.
It's a two sided street: Google is super profitable and could easily support their workforce through an economic downturn. But they feel their shareholders are more important than their employees. And so the employees, whose loyalty is demanded in good times, receive none of that loyalty in return in bad times.
Also, pretty weird to see 'careers.google.com' up and running and apparently hiring for all kinds of roles while at the same time letting go of all these people.
Microsoft had <24hr old job postings on the day they announced lay-offs. They don't always have to go in lockstep esp for companies this big. There are always teams that need backfills.
If you're saying "I take full responsibility", I'd expect a meaningful consequence on your part, such as resigning, forgoing your bonus for the year or a significant pay cut. That's what's happening to the staff being laid off.
But because exec comp is mostly stock based, he's actually getting a massive pay increase.
The current flood of layoff news from FAANG level companies is surprising, sad, and pathetic.
As others have posted, they could keep the people on but they aren't, probably because it isn't financially optimal in the short term to do so. The two problems I see with that are (1) the loss of institutional knowledge, morale, and attractiveness as a place to work mean it is financially suboptimal in the long term, but companies right now are only thinking 1 quarter ahead (maybe 2); (2) it takes time to ramp up, get acclimated, and execute a vision - that clock resets for each position when someone is released and the a new hire is added back later.
It used to be that when you worked for one of the new big corps (FAANG and those like them) it represented some security.
Now I am saddened to see them adopting the big consulting corp model, where you can get released at will and staff is constantly being optimized for the current task set/direction/clients.
I would guess he means that they use AI algorithms to perform some of the tasks that are performed manually at most companies. If so, most of Google's customers wouldn't really consider this to be a win.
ML-driven account suspensions etc are universally hated and seem to have damaged Google's image, at least in the tech community.
Part of my job is developing and testing a Google calendar sync tool. I've created a secondary throwaway email address so I don't fill my own calendar with test data.
During testing I often have to link/unlink the calendar with different users in my application. Some AI bot has evidently flagged this as 'suspicious' because I now get 'An error has occurred, please try again' when linking my application with Google Calendar. No further details of which error it might be or what I might do to resolve it.
To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this behaviour. Why should I put the time in to test and develop an application that benefits users of Google's calendar when they won't even lift a finger for me?
> To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this behaviour
They will probably never hire humans for support tickets. But they could "hire" their star model PaLM to solve support questions. It could be a good demo and a product useful for many companies. Even if it is only 70% or 80% effective, still better than nothing.
Modern users expect everything to integrate with Google Calendar, unfortunately. You can't avoid them when it comes to developing scheduling applications.
You are right, but those sentiments seem to be limited to tech community ( and even in it, opinion seems split ). I will admit that not once have I heard that mentioned as an issue in my non-tech oriented circle.
I'm not sure if you'd call it a pivot, but Google Brain was initially an X project that was started well before the deep learning craze took off. They hired Geoff Hinton in 2013. Investment in AI has been going on for a long time at Google, probably before Facebook/FAIR got seriously involved, but probably not Microsoft (MSR has been going for ~30 years and Chris Bishop started the Cambridge lab in '97 and they've long been known as a good ML group).
It's not like Google wasn't using ML before that either. Search, recommender systems for ads, anti-spam, translate. Deep learning just turned out to be a lot better than the tools we used to use.
A friend of mine who is in "serious" AI research keeps telling me not to get too excited about Google's AI stuff, as they do release a lot of papers, but these are essentially worthless and non-reproduceable as they hide raw data. He suspects half of them or more are completely made up, as they do not align well with what else happens in the field.
I can't verify that, but whenever the "AI" behind my Google Home gets a bit more stupid (happens once a week nowadays, with it 'forgetting' even the few things that worked before), I am inclined to agree.
agree that they are nonreproduceable, but they are probably not worthless in that i'm sure they have very extensive review processes and theyve said that they actually put models like T5 into production on search. there's no bigger skin in the game than that.
> they do not align well with what else happens in the field
i'm interested in this comment though. havent transformers changed the field? what is this referring to? mind getting your friend to elaborate?
> they actually put models like T5 into production on search
Google search does not show signs of using a decent language model. If they did, then questions like this should work:
> "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?"
This is the quote it gives on top of all results:
> And it was a Towson University graduate to do it the fastest. Two weeks ago, Nik Haynes '00 became a world-record holder by backstroking the English Channel in an astounding 12 hours, 52 minutes. Haynes bested the mark set by Tina Neill in 2005 of 13 hours, 22 minutes.Aug 27, 2020
And the rest of the page is anything but crossing on foot.
Ok, so it missed the core semantics of the question completely. In reality there have been crossings through the Channel Tunnel. And at some point in the distant past the sea level was low enough people could cross on foot.
This kind of problem happens in many searches - if you search topic X which is not very popular, and there is a topic Y close to X that is very popular, Google will reply to Y instead of X. Topic blindness.
Google Ads, their most significant revenue stream, are entirely AI base, and speaking as an advertiser, it's only made it more crap. It's "ai" algorithms are designed to maximise value extraction from advertisers, rather than value creation for advertisers.
There has been a systematic trend over the last 10 years to remove the controls advertisers have over their placements and spend and move towards a black box we are supposed to trust.
Hopefully someone can inform us as to whether they did announce such a pivot (I have no memory of that) but it wouldn't surprise me. ChatGPT feels a lot like search-without-citations to me, and the closest existing thing in production to it is the blurb at the top of Google results, which I suppose will soon be replaced by this kind of thing (if they can ever get it to stop lying.)
Since 2015, Google have rolled out RankBrain, BERT and MUM which are machine learning enhancements of their search algorithm and allow Google to understand the meaning of the terms you search for and provide matches based on that.
So that explains how Google knows that when I'm searching for X, it can give me results for slightly related Y instead. Sometimes it works, often it feels almost hostile.
I've noticed the same thing with YouTube notifications.
It feels like Google wants to recruit/queue my attention as a resource for their client's ads instead of just notifying me when a new video from someone I follow is available.
That at least make some sense, but I don't understand whose benefit is showing results for Rider and IDEA when I search for some detail in CLion that is different from the other IDEs from the same company.
“Computing is evolving again. We spoke last year about this important shift in computing from a mobile-first to an AI-first approach. … In an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to solve user problems.” —Sundar Pichai, 2017
Google had 156,500 full-time employees in 2021, an increase of nearly 16% year-over-year as compared to the 135,301 full-time employees in 2020. Google's pace of hiring was also torrid in the second quarter of 2022 as the company added 10,000 new employees to its 163,906 workforce - that is only through to July 2022.
These "Layoffs" are awful for individuals, but they are simply a sign that they went on a hiring spree in 2022 - plenty here were talking about the massive pay increases on offer all over the valley with demand off the charts.
It's best to split 2022 in two. The first half was quite different from the latter.
I saw it in practice as I left Google at the end of 2021 and job hunted on and off through the year. The pace of hiring everywhere significantly dropped mid-2022.
Wow! I worked at Google circa 2015 and there was an internal web page showing how many employees there were. My recollection is that there were about 50k full-time employees and 50k TVCs then. Even then, it felt crazy how large and incohesive the organisation was. I wonder what it's like now.
I joined end of 2011 and I think there were just north of 20,000 FTEs.
When I left end of last year I had been there longer than 95%+ of the 100k+ (I forget) employees, which I found ... odd... since I still felt like a Noogler.
Google’s best days may be behind it. The search revenue is looking increasingly shaky. New business units like GCP are struggling to operate profitably. They had an amazing cash cow (ad revenue) for a long time but that cow is getting old and starting to look rather ill. Compared to some of the other tech giants Google has struggled to evolve its business to diversify revenue and profit streams and evolve offerings. Now the make or break moment to make more progress there or the company will slowly drift off into the sunset of has-been tech giants.
"Up in the morning and out to school
Mother says there be no work next year
Qualifications once the Golden Rule
Are now just pieces of paper
Well the factories are closing
and the army's full
I don't know what I'm going to do
I've come to see in the land of the free
There's only room for a chosen few. " -- Lars Frederiksen
I feel bad for everybody who spent the past 4 years going $200k into debt for a now worthless compsci degree. New grads, juniors and general employees who are not rock-stars, are in a miserable ride. As everybody casually writes it off to "over-hiring" you are forgetting the fact that there are 150k newly unemployed, a significant portion of whom will take many months, possibly a couple of years to find something. Meanwhile, all of those fresh graduates are now saying "Oh shit, I have to start making $2k/month student loan payments now, and don't have any income.
As an oldster observing what I believe my 4th tech downturn, I am currently advising people to go into the trades instead of becoming a software "engineer". The money can often be far better than tech, and there are actually more opportunities to advance than in tech.
If you consider inflation, offshoring, record profits for many companies who are still laying off, crypto crashing and rapid advances in AI-generated code, then you should be able to read the writing on the wall.
Remember a significant portion of these layoffs are coming from companies whose revenues and profits are increasing .. because they just don't need as many people to keep the investors and c-levels rich.
If you don't have at minimum 18 months worth of living expenses saved up when you get laid off, you could be in a world of hurt.
I work for a company about twice as big as Google. Getting permission to hire anyone is very difficult, and everyone is always 100% busy just to meet customer deadlines(which we often don't).
I guess Google and other FAANG-type companies must work in a different way that I can't comprehend if they can just randomly decide to fire 10% of their workforce.
If 10% of the people on my project were fired, our customers would sue us for not delivering on the contracts we signed.
Google struck oil 20 years ago and money has been flowing in faster than they can spend it ever since. Some of that money let them drill more holes, and about 15 years ago some struck oil again.
Because it's worked in the past and they can afford it, they've continued drilling countless holes. For example, their many incompatible messaging systems [1].
Some of the holes seem to have been drilled without any regard as to whether finding oil in that location is even possible.
Presumably they hope to cut down on go-nowhere drilling, while still doing some drilling, in the areas where an oil strike is most likely.
Google has been over-hiring for years. While there are definitely projects that felt understaffed, there are just as many where you'd join a team and look around and really have no idea what you should be doing with yourself because all the work seemed spoken for.
Honestly, 90-ish% of Google's revenue comes from ads. Almost every other product area there is just a financial loss unless it's supporting search&ads. They keep making "bets" to try to diversify the revenue stream, but it never works. Hence why I don't think this will be the last round of layoffs.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out and what parts of the org and what roles this affected.
(Worked there for 10 years, so find this all... sad and interesting)
A lot of these companies are building stuff now which might deliver revenue in X years, so by firing people now they're effectively borrowing money from the future; they cut costs now and revenue later. They're more sacrificing future growth than ability to deliver on current contracts, in general.
It is beginning to look like all the large companies that were hiring to deny talent to competitors are now feeling comfortable trimming the fat because they know that the startup fundraising scene has shifted dramatically in their favor (fewer potential competitors being funded), and they can trim costs and regain the initiative as far as having more leverage/bargaining power over current and future employees is concerned.
My theory is that it's cyclical: trim costs today, and a few years from now buy up all the startups that resulted from a suddenly flooded tech labor market. Rinse and repeat.
A timid half-step. If you’ve ever visited Google (even before the pandemic) the offices are empty (everyone is “working from the bus”) and only a small minority of employees are involved in revenue products
FANG have been stockpiling very skilled people and letting them atrophy, it’s the biggest tragedy in Silicon Valley and for the US economy generally
I got accepted at Google back in October for New Grad and my job was to start in May 2023. I am still in “Team Matching” and they told me that I should hear from them by January. I have yet to hear from them, so I take that this is not very ideal.
I passed hiring committee in July. Never got the actual offer, don't think it's happening while these interview results are valid. The money is good so maybe I'll try again in a few years, but it is very demoralizing.
I don't understand some of the comments here, maybe someone can explain.
Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed? As far as I am aware working for a company is not a life-long situation.
And further - why don't we invert it and praise these companies for supplying thousands of six figure jobs for years. Surely being employed for several years is better than never being hired at all?
In some cultures the prevalent view is that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck, and that the needs of the business comes first and therefore the business should be free to layoff employees when it deems it necessary.
In other cultures, the view is more that the business benefits from various social contracts (governments providing various structures & regulations so that businesses can flourish, the cost of healthcare/education that leads to a productive workforce being taken on in part or whole by the state, etc), that the employer/employee relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, and therefore that an employer has a social responsibility to provide stability and not do reckless things like hire 20k people to layoff 10k the following year.
US work culture, and tech particularly, lean more towards the first side of the spectrum in my experience, but that doesn’t mean everyone is aligned with it or that it is the One Truth.
I don't think that the US has the culture that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck. The idea of at will employment comes from the ideology of freedom rather than who owes who.
At will employment always always benefits the employers more than employees. Your job is tied to your health insurance as well. So there is a much much bigger incentive for an employee to stay at a company than for a company to keep an employee.
(I am not talking here about Google but more like general)
A company (especially a big one) needs to have an excuse to let people go.
The argument here is two-fold:
1. There is a power imbalance between a company and an employee.
Just as a short example: letting go of 1 employee usually means nothing for the company life, but for the employee is biggest/impactful event happening that month or maybe that half of the year.
Thus we usually balance this with laws (in some countries/states) and, of course, with public expectations.
2. Companies are asking for your whole professional time, and they usually want exclusivity
You can see this usually written in contracts like "you dedicate all your work time", "you cannot work for other companies", "you dedicate all your business time" ...
Thus when a company is asking this from you then they need to offer something in exchange. And this exchange is they need an excuse to let you go.
---
(again I don't speak here about Google as I never worked there so I don't know what they offer and what they ask for)
People have spouses, kids, mortgages. They relocate for work. They pour a lot of their time, energy & emotion into it. It causes people strokes, and hairloss. People bring the stress of their work home, and marriages suffer for it.
Your comment is rather glib. Praise these companies? No thanks.
They need to explain themselves to shareholders (why did they hire so many people in the first place, expensive) and employees (so that people want to keep working there also in the future).
So it seems in Germany you can only fire employees if you are undergoing a downsizing or internal restructuring. I wonder if this Google layoff would apply. If they closing off whole teams this could potentially count as "restructuring".
Comments like these tell me how ingrained capitalism is on people's minds now. We seem to forget that without the people that make up the company, it simply does not exist.
Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people.
Ruthless capitalism is the only reason people can even earn the ridiculously high Google wages in the first places.
Google can fire a small town's worth of employees and only lose 6% of their workforce. These companies are ridiculous in size. Really, this was only a matter of time.
I wouldn't like to live in the USA for the extremely weak employee protections there despite the massive amounts of money you can earn compared to Europe. Personally, I'm all for better employee protections to balance out the overpowering employer, but those protections don't come for free. If a company fulfils its social purpose of making people earn their living for a long time, they also need to be ready to pay their current rates (and up) for a long time. More protections means higher risks for companies, higher risks means fewer hires and lower rewards in case you can't get rid of someone in an economic downturn.
I think these protections are worth it, but I reckon the highest earning American programmers and managers wouldn't; the more you earn, the more those protections will cost you. Applying European protections wouldn't immediately drop wages down to European levels (you need a strong welfare state and such for that too) but it would certainly reduce the amount of disposable income these people have.
I sincerely don't think we should put the salaries as the deciding factor here. The crux of the issue is what you said: employee protections.
The only reason they over-hire in the first place is how cheap and easy it is to layoff afterwards. They are allowed to bet with human capital because of it.
I would most definitely take a paycut if it meant everyone would get better protections, higher salaries and stability. Unfortunately this is not a popular view and will likely never happen anyways.
In my country we had above average labor laws and in recent years all we see are new ways to circumvent them or laws removing those rights. It's sad to see but it's what capitalism's end game dictates.
Google plans to lay off employees in every country. US Googlers were fired overnight, while it will take a couple of months in other countries. I'm curious how it will work with every country legislation, e.g. in France and Germany.
It seems to beneficial to the employers, but with every other short-sighted scheme American capitalists come up with there is a downside to their long-term strategy; employees are extremely focused on jumping ship after a year now which ensures lots of projects will fail simply due to the knowledge base constantly shifting. You can’t have it all but it doesn’t stop them from trying.
At a certain level of earnings you just make your own protections. Google employees in US (in tech) literally make 10x compared to EU so all you have to do is be a responsible adult to have all the protection you need.
How is that even possible in a capitalist society? The game is rigged in favor of profits, not people. Of course even if you do create a successful company that values people above profits, odds are you will get undercut by another company that does not sooner or later.
But that doesn't change my original point though. It's still wrong to have companies above people no matter how we frame it.
> Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people.
A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not?
Further, in a company there might be temporary teams that implement a project and then are laid off. Surely it's better to have these positions than to not hire any people at all.
Even further, life is not static and things change. Not adapting to changes eventually would lead to stagnant and disfunctional situations, where a product would be made more expensive for everyone, just so a some company has the capital to continue hiring 10,000 or so people who are not longer doing any work. But, perhaps more importantly, those 10,000 people are stuck in meaningless positions doing empty "work" for the sake of numbers on some accounting sheet.
And even further futher, if these no longer useful jobs are in manufacturing then continuing them would mean wasting natural resources and polluting the environment.
The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by definition.
As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in this case. They are just looking for even more profits. It's not even close to a "struggling company".
But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules. Of course under these conditions companies will always choose to fire people and keep making profits to its owners.
But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s) profitable.
> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed?
When you work for a small to medium company yeah, I expect something like responsibility and a little more than "just contractual obligations" (from both sides, both the employer and the employee).
But it when it comes to behemoths like Alphabet things change completely, it's all about the money and the contract.
Are all of these layoffs essentially collusion to reduce wages?
If they all end up with the same headcount but with a reduced wage in the next year, there should be a class action. Not that those help anyone but lawyers, but it's nice to have an official punishment on record.
While I don't know if it is the sole reason, it certainly is a nice side benefit. I think all the major tech firms figure they can all do a layoff and then hire each other's talent as needed at reduced compensation.
I'm surprised people aren't connecting all these layoffs with their root cause: the increasing cost of capital. Naturally, projects that were economically profitable only at a very low cost of capital could turn unprofitable at a higher cost of capital, destroying value instead of creating value. Shifting resources away from such projects is the logical thing to do, but if you end up with a surplus of resources, the only other possibility is to trim those resources. Discussions about how much cash Google has on hand are completely irrelevant in my view.
Yes, my suspicion is that most were forced into that position by macro economic trends, i.e. Facebook and smaller start-ups. Where as Google's delay in announcing this helped distance themselves from being lumped into the financial woes/overvaluation concerns of "the tech industry."
That said, I thought they'd at least wait until Q2/Q3, but that's a whole quarter of money to save...
I asked ChatGPT to generate a layoff announcement email for comparison:
Dear valued employees,
It is with a heavy heart that I am writing to inform you that the company will be undergoing a restructuring process that will result in the layoffs of 12,000 employees. This decision was not made lightly, and we understand the impact it will have on our workforce and their families.
We have been closely monitoring the economic climate and have determined that this action is necessary to ensure the long-term success and sustainability of the company. We are committed to treating all affected employees with fairness and respect during this difficult time.
We will be providing severance packages, outplacement support, and other benefits to assist impacted employees in their transition. Additionally, we will be working closely with local authorities to provide job training and other resources to help affected employees find new opportunities.
We understand that this news is difficult to hear, but we are committed to supporting our employees through this transition. We appreciate your contributions to the company and wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
For what is worth, I am employed at the company and I think this is a good thing, the amount of “fat” around here is just astonishing and, quite honestly, demoralizing.
I truly believe that the company could function well, and continue its mission, even with a 30% reduction or more. The number of people who do completely nothing all day, in SWE roles, is just unbelievable.
And this without even counting the incredible severance benefits. 16 weeks of salary + GSU? Wild. I’d sign in a heartbeat if I were offered that.
It depends a lot on which jobs they cut though. Do they know which departments & work groups are the least necessary? Or are most of them needed, but with fewer people so they cut X% of each team?
Cutting the fat at any company is worthless or even catastrophic if the strategy for implementing those cuts is crap.
This is a short-term downward adjustment to what is a long running trend of increasing demand for software professionals across every industry.
I feel private companies who don't have the play the quarterly announcement game can come out stronger given conviction in what they are doing and a strong balance sheet.
For those affected the tech layoffs may be crushing (though by many comments here on HN lots of people are fully comfortable with transactional relations with an employer).
An interesting question is whether this round of layoffs signals some sort of paradigm shift in the broader tech world, a "disruption event" amidst a "bad economy" that would indeed be a motivation for alternative business models, startups etc to pull up their sleeves, hunker down, survive the dinosaur extinction and emerge standing on the other side?
I don't think so. This is just "management-by-public-markets-stock-price", which is in turn management by collective madness
To be honest, I feel like Google and Meta both had far too many employees.
"Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.
There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from. Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all efficient.
If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.
The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number.
A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approximately) the same things. Google has 20k employees in 2009. It has 155k today. I don't see Google doing much for me in 2022 that it wasn't doing in 2009.
I could probably go a long ways before that too.
A lot of what's happened from 2009 to 2022 is churn. Make-work to keep people employed.
> Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Let me spell this out: In many cases, the same thing can be accomplished in 100 lines of code as 10,000 lines of code. That's largely a function of architecture, discipline, and cleverness. 100 lines of code is orders-of-magnitude easier to maintain and faster to evolve.
The Google codebase is *massive*. If you need a new feature, with good communication channels and focus, you can architect it in. With poor communication channels, it get kludged in.
Communications scales as O(n^2) where n is the number of employees. There's a similar power law for how pieces of code can interact and introduce complex bugs.
By "more efficient," I don't mean Google would be able to do more per dollar. With a smaller, better workforce, and a smaller, better codebase, Google would be better able to maintain old products, add new features, and develop new ones.
Cost of employees has gone up as stocks drop due to such high RSU compensation. Stock is 40% off its highs which means they have to make up that difference in either cash or more stock, and neither look good to investors at the moment so smooth the financials 10% layoffs is the go to for large tech here.
I don't follow. RSUs being worth less than they used to be means employees are cheaper. You gave out $X a couple of years ago and when it finally vests it's worth 0.6*$X or similar, that's a direct drop in employee compensation.
Are you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow? Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount down fairly quickly if so.
Ya basically people will feel they are getting a pay cut, and since the higher you go in the company the larger percent of your salary is from RSUs those are the people most likely to be unhappy. You potentially lose your high level core employees while entry level are much less affected
edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm
Employees will (fairly reasonably, IMO) expect a same dollar-value RSU grant in the upcoming grant cycle. That will result in Google having to grant additional RSUs in an upcoming round. (The currency to Google for past grants is the number of shares/RSUs, which doesn't change as the stock goes up or down, but new grants are cheaper to Google in terms of dilution if the stock keeps going up.)
When Meta stock started going into the toilet, they gave out huge top-up RSU bonuses. Amazon is much slower to react, but they give you a target comp that they hope is fulfilled by stock price growth. If it isn’t, they give out-year grants to get you to target.
Beside Apple (whose YoY growth on its workforce was consistent before and after the pandemic), I think almost all tech company made a wrong bet that economical changes will be accelerated by "going online" and thus dominated by FOMO.
The last recession - if you were a software developer, or in tech, you had a great deal of immunity. I remember having spending power when everyone else was unfortunately suffering and taking time to find jobs, etc.
Now it feels like the same is true of machine learning. And to some degree other specialist roles within software engineering. If you're a generalist software developer, you're in a vulnerable position. If you have more specialized skills (AI, etc) you're going to be in a better, more robust position. Being a developer is more commoditized than it ever has been (of course good developers are still hard to find, but a lot of work doesn't really need good developers)
It makes me think that specialization over time is telescoping. At one point computer engineering was a specialization of electrical engineering. Then computer science / software became a specialization out of computer engineering. Now other specializations are being born out of general software developers.
Specialisation is a risky long term bet though. The amount of companies a good generalist software engineer can work at is orders of magnitude more than an ML engineer and I imagine it will remain like that for a long while. Same thing for more extreme niches like compiler engineers - the number of opportunities is substantially less.
This has not been my experience. I have seen plenty of people with generic backend/full-stack keep their jobs, while my Linkedin is full of impacted infrastructure, security and data engineering specialists. Although I do agree that the developer world is becoming increasingly commoditized, I do not think that specialization is really the way to escape it.
Earlier in 2022 Google introduced this GRAD performance review system. In my opinion said system turns employment into a rat's race but I digress. One of the goals of that system was to eliminate about 10000 people which falls just in line with this reduction.
“Hohn is not factoring in the counterintuitive reason why Google and other tech companies pay software engineers total compensation packages of $300k to $800k. They are hoarding talent from their rivals and paying workers handsomely so there isn’t a motivation to quit and build a startup that will disrupt the status quo.”
Terrible reporting. I would like to see a proper financial analysis on whether hoarding or preventing competition makes financial sense. I think the hoarding idea is a crock of shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487744
I wonder if 6% really moves the needle in terms of cost. Coupled with the fact they are still hiring it feels like succumbing to investor pressure rather than a real cost cutting measure.
In the UK they only have 20 roles for hiring and it's been that way for months prior. Not development jobs by the way, that's all jobs.
I've also heard other companies paused hiring (Amazon?) and basically stopped interviewing yet their websites advertise plenty of roles. I wouldn't consider them reliable. You could say it's almost as if they want people to think there are opportunities to aim for at such companies...
What you'll have to see is for the next round of "top" CS graduates how it is.
As I commented elsewhere, Q4 earnings report is in two weeks. The last two were poor and the trend wasn't looking good. I expect this is happening in part because Q4's is going to look even worse.
If the average cost of those employees is 150k usd, then it's 1.8 billion. I imagine it's probably much higher than 150k depending on how many were US based engineers. If they make 55ish billion this year, I think it makes a pretty decent impact.
I 100% support siphoning as much money as possible while doing as little work as possible (a.k.a coasting). However, from a capitalist perspective, it makes sense to try to weed those people out. Gone are the days of a 26 year old making as much as a neurosurgeon while working 20 hours a week.
Is that 24 weeks plus two weeks per year of service? That sounds like an absolute dream. Now I regret not working at Google. That's a vacation of a lifetime plus lots of time to relax, practice and then interview.
Google has 120 billion dollars of cash on hand. Why are they laying off people? They should be poaching talent from other companies experiencing lay-offs to build better products.
The most reliable source of information is the latest earnings report [1], which says 187k as of end of Q3. I guess we'll see in a few days what the number was at the end of the year.
The big companies hired so many new engineers over the past fee years, I wonder how many of them just abused the remote work to score multiple jobs? Like where did all those jobless engineers come from on such short notice?
Is this possible in the US? In many European countries you couldn't do that unless one of the companies employs you "unofficially" (thus breaking labor and tax laws).
Why can’t you have more than one job in Europe? But it sure is possible in the US, multiple posts here bragged about scoring multiple remote jobs in parallel
(Question): Are all major tech companies doing this when everyone else is so that they face less backlash for it ? Also what about the news of companies having record profits during pandemi. Were they false/fake too ?
Major companies are laying off now not because they don't have money. It is mostly because they have been hiring a lot for past year based on growth they had during pandemic. Now as economic situation has changed, they just revert their previous hiring decision. They don't want to risk their money by holding to people they hired 'by mistake'.
Hiring managers have attention span of 1 year max. So if some departments were doing good due to pandemic and now are flop cause times changed and you need to align costs with revenue.
This is about growth they kept hiring as they expected growth if they are not expecting to grow then then need to cut expenses. A lot of people in silicon valley are not realising the pain that is about to come. In the last decade a lot of startups have cropped with the main target instead of a profitable business was getting sold to 1 of the big companies.
Some of it is trimming the fat because these companies grew a lot over the pandemic. These companies are also looking at what's happening right now in their business, not last quarters profits. They are likely all seeing a slow down and preparing.
Ideally, layoffs should happen when employee count is above the amount which maximizes company value. It should never be a response to stock price changes, makes no sense.
apparently : "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."
Seen enough cycles of laying off about 10% [1] of your workforce to try and halt a share price slide and make investors happier to realise it's in the Howto CEO & Keep Your Job manual.
QED, this announcement is almost entirely about share prices sliding in the tech sector since about the beginning of 2022.
ChatGPT's impact on Google is unknown, but it is a fair bet that it will be larger [2].
[1] It's always around 10% because all large companies carry functions and individuals who can be removed from the enterprise, and things will essentially carry on as before once the shock subsides.
[2] I don't think many would doubt Google could have rolled out its own ChatGPT'alike years ago. The fact that they didn't suggests that internally a combination of the undoubted reputational risk, cost and the risk to their existing revenue streams was enough to prevent it. Google's full of very bright people, and they've failed to find a palatable solution in years. So even if it is a solvable problem, it seems unlikely that the recent nasty shock from ChatGPT is going to have changed that.
Despite the hype ChatGPT is not ready to replace search engines yet - no referencing and it literally makes up gibberish if it's not sure. At this point I don't see any advantage to Google rolling that out. GPT4, GPT5... different story maybe!
The hallucination part is somewhat solvable, but the inference cost is huge. Especially in the chat format where you want long history, you have to pay for all the previous tokens in each round of dialogue. The cost is about $0.01 per page, so it can become $0.10 per reply after 10 pages of history accumulated. Even short lines of text have the same overhead.
Fundamentally a Google search typically returns a research project that involves the user attempting to build their own mental model of the "truth".
ChatGPT instead returns an answer that needs research to verify facts.
This second approach is already quicker for many use cases and can get much better.
So yes, the user may still need search engines to verify. But in the future, it seems unlikely that search will be the dominant, primary means of people accessing information.
The problem for Google with ChatGPT-a-like results is that they strip out the presentation of Google's ads and one of its most significant revenue streams. The chief advantage of Google acting quickly is it increases its chances of retaining an ad business.
Everyone's talking about how these companies are preparing for a global recession. But it's striking how specific to large tech companies. Is it possible these companies are just seeing the new remote-first paradigm as an opportunity to replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers?
Obvious this is absurdly difficult, but it's likely more realistic now than it's ever been before.
These companies experienced solid growth during covid (because everyone was home using tech) and now that's starting to recede. They predicted this growth would continue and hired for it. They are choosing to recede that.
> replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers?
The quality of the average engineer entering Google is significantly higher than the one of an average, foreign developer. That is a generalization, but not an over generalization. I know this having worked with a sample size of ~20 on each side of the coin.
It more has to do with tech companies having expanded headcount way more than other industries in the past few years.
The reality is that tech cos overbites since market conditions were extremely ebullient in the tech sector circa 2021. A large fraction of those new hires never had anything productive to even do.
Yes. California is an at-will state. The employer can terminate at any time for any reason. Unless they have a contract, they can do anything they want.
Do employees not have some sort of contract? Surely you'd want to have some level of notice - it's no good for employers for people to quit with no notice either.
Employment in the US is largely at will. Only in large layoffs do workers have any rights to notification, and large layoffs are rare, so most US employees expect there’s zero right to notification.
This is a shock to folks in Europe, but when people quit here they generally give two weeks notice, and no one expects you to do any work in those two weeks.
This equilibrium is bad for labor, but very good for capital. Not shockingly, the US is a magnet for capital! The macro term of art for this is “a dynamic labor market”, and capitalists love it.
If you’re wealthy in the US, it leads to extremely generous compensation for in demand functions. But it’s also correlated with a weak safety net.
I guess I just naively assumed there'd still be some level of notice required. It seems that you can literally walk out of a job in an at-will state with no recourse.
It's surprising to me because in the UK every employment relationship is governed by a contract that stipulates some level of notice. We don't have employment protections until 2 years of service - essentially after 2 years getting rid of an employee becomes quite onerous - but even from day 1 you have a notice period (which works both ways).
I'm surprised companies in California don't get their employees to sign some sort of contracted notice - it can be incredibly disruptive to lose a key employee overnight! It feels like companies here want every longer notice periods - mine is currently 3 months and I'm not even sure why. It works both ways though - even if my employer wanted to get rid of me, they'd have to pay me for 3 months.
Big tech companies have a "Get out of jail free (in the press)" layoff card right now, and they're taking full advantage of that, despite not needing to at all.
One hypothesis is that the big tech companies are just better at sensing what the market is doing and reacting accordingly as quickly as they can, while companies from other industries are sleeping at the wheel. If that's true, we can expect those other companies to eventually follow with the layoffs.
People saying it is deferred PIPs or house cleaning are deluded. At Meta and Amazon I know some senior people who were laid off. People got decent severance so not too much negative comments, but I think it is a blood bath. 10% is not a small number and these are not boot camp employees who will switch out to different careers. It is a bonanza for smaller tech firms, but I think this is going to feel like the dot com bubble :(
I went to grad school during those days and have to say, it really sets you back. It will also depress wages in tech for the next 2-3 years.
I think it will be interesting to see how the layoffs are structured; e.g. how much if from specific product areas vs how much is perhaps performance based [not that we'll ever know that] and how much is SWE vs SRE vs non-eng, etc.
I also remembered the 11k number and just did a search in my browsing history. Turns out there was a rumor saying 11k, with Microsoft said it was not true shortly before they announced the 10k layoff.
Since it all happened in the same week, it is pretty confusing. At least to me.
is it possible that this is all a response to falling stock price.
it seem historically a quick fix for any CEO to bump the stock price is to make layoffs, and it seems to work. and i don't think any of those companies are strapped for cash
I don't think it's the stock price so much as this being good opportunity to fire people who're no longer wanted by the company (at the salary they're collecting), without the reputation loss that usually comes with that.
Soon they will start hiring again, quite possibly finding better candidates at a lower salary.
most good ceos, and definitely ceo's at this level, know not to overreact to stock price which is very macro and short term driven, when they should be playing the 10-20 year game.
My brain somehow skipped that sentence. I would be relatively certain all the affected people were already feeling quite free to do what needs to be done in their individual cases.
Next earnings report (for Q4 2022 results): Feb 2nd. Last reports showed EPS down by ~15%. The one before by ~6%.
Layoffs seemed timed to get out in front of all of this.
All a bit callous and cynical, what these companies are doing.
Still, while I resigned from Google a bit over a year ago, I almost wish I'd stuck around to roll the dice and see if I could have gotten this severance package. Accelerated vesting is pretty sweet, even with the currently lower stock price.
On the other hand I'm glad I left and landed in a place I prefer and didn't have to live through the stress and bleak feeling something like this would bring to the workplace.
I also doubt this will be the last round and if history with other companies is any predictor, the next round of layoffs will have less generous severance packages.
Maybe a hot take but 6 months severence is extremely generous, they don't have to give anything. This is basically being spoiled compared to how the rest of the world is treated. I'm sure these talented engineers can find new gigs within 6 months
Getting laid off can have serious long term consequences. Six months severance is relatively good, but perhaps not enough to cover the losses to an employee (just stating a fact, not saying that companies are only responsible for lifetime of employees).
We find that job displacement leads to a 15-20% increase in death rates during the following 20 years. If such increases were sustained beyond this period, they would imply a loss in life expectancy of about 1.5 years for a worker displaced at age 40.
It is hard to pick a fair balance between economic needs and human needs, but that is one thing society is supposed to be doing for us all.
As others noted here, irrespective of whether there is a coming recession, for companies like Google and Microsoft, 10-20k employees are not so expensive as to be existential for the company, *or even for specific opportunities the company wants to pursue*. (E.g. for Microsoft, buying Blizzard is not predicated upon laying off employees.)
Instead, it's best to see this as a sort of social trend: layoffs to demonstrate fiscal responsibility to investors, in order to promote equity valuations that are in general valuable (either strategically, or as the ultimate purpose of a publicly traded company).
If that sounds like I think this is all reasonable and justified, I don't. But it's a reasonable thing to do if your sole goal is profit, which is how we generally look at public companies in a capitalist economy.
Yes exactly. CEOs that don’t follow the “trend” will be marginalized and questioned. Of course they need to demonstrate that they’re “serious” and can make “tough” decisions.
Keep in mind that being the CEO often requires a person to have a certain kind of personality that might be easier to influence this way.
While this is always bad news, this is also a cold shower - back-to-reality check for anyone who thinks that working for a company is anything beyond just a job.
I hope, that for the ones affected, in the end this will turn up as an opportunity.
Did anyone notice the trend of dilution of candidate quality along with inflation of titles in the past few years? NLP engineers who could mention BERT but nothing else? Recommender experts who couldn't articulate the landscape of recommendation algorithms or their approach of selecting algorithms? Distributed engineers who could draw a few boxes yet couldn't explain or use any single concept in distributed systems? Tech lead who could barely recommend a concrete solution, let alone offering detailed analysis of pros and cons?
A reset in the industry seems a good thing for the health of this sector.
I wonder how much major tech companies are taking into account "revenge" when doing their firing. For example, if I was a GCP Solutions Architect and got laid off, my skills would be well suited to jumping to a customer who is using GCP - but would I be inclined to support this activity, giving the employer who fired me more revenue? Depends on the availability of roles of course, but I would certainly be giving strong consideration to ways to screw them over in return, for example by advocating for another cloud and quietly, tactically airing some dirty laundry.
Nobody behaves this way. A GCP solutions architect has spent years acquiring valuable skills and experience. They aren’t gonna throw it away out of spite.
The only thing laid off employees will generally do is never, ever work for the employer that laid them off ever again.
> A GCP solutions architect has spent years acquiring valuable skills and experience
Citation needed :-)
Joking aside, I think you're right for the vast majority of cases, but "nobody" feeling this way seems highly unlikely. Also, mid-level technical people having a grudge next year aren't a problem - but that might not be the case in 10 years, when the laid-off person is CTO of a big potential customer - at that point, the technical skills are irrelevant, but the impact being laid off had on that person emotionally/financially won't be.
I think for most people 'revenge' either doesnt exist or dissipated quickly. If GCP skills bring money to the account then most people will leverage it regardless of their personal feeling to Google
I think this and the rest of the FAANG (plus M$) layoffs show us that these are now all established corporates. When you're growing and innovating and building new products etc, you hire during recessions to make the things you will sell during the booms (and just to keep up with your growth). But when you're a stable, mature company with no plans for new products, business lines etc, then the name of the game is efficiency. And efficiency is doing the same as last year but with 12k fewer people.
It's not "wrong" per se. It's just that these companies are no longer what they were. Investors and Employees should know what they are engaging with: out is the growth machine where you will have a team hired under you and revenue can be expected to 10x in a decade. In is "every year we get to 5% more revenue and pay 5% less in expenses".
Such is the company life cycle.
Google have done very well to be fair to keep the growth phase going so long...
>> We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles.
When I first read this I saw the word “role” and not “jobs” and therefore interpreted it as more than 12,000 jobs, because a role can be one or more people. By that definition however it’s absurd to think that that many roles would be eliminated.
In the dawn of rounds and rounds of layoffs in the tech sector. How would one advise a new CS BS graduate to tread?
I've been told that young engineers are still in demand, and to look for opportunities in small startups, but seemingly out of the applications, merely no one has moved forward or replied back.
A significant percentage of Google’s workforce are temps, vendors, and contractors (what they call TVC).
They are approximately more than FTE. I believe the stats are 150,000 TVC versus 144,000 full-time employees.
How is Google juggling this reduction in force? Are we talking TVC or FTE?
This post refers to full-time employees. You don't really need to fire TVCs; they're generally on shorter term contracts, which you can choose not to renew.
Any classification is an at-will relationships to Google. Google can choose not to keep/renew anyone. I’ve met many TVCs who have tenure at Google as good as an FTE.
The idea was that TVCs are the buffer headcount during recessions and would be the first to go when rebalancing. If they are truly laying off only FTE, it’s worth asking what Google is doing to TVC headcount. It’s unspoken so far.
After so long, I decided to think of it differently: it's a learning company. You can eventually fix the problem you're responsible for by chopping off a part of it, convince people you can do better, and then move on. (Don't try at home!!!) :)
Now the question for all these learning companies would be: how do they prevent this from happening again? What did they learn and what are they going to do differently? I would seriously like to know.
The way I see it: right now everyone is kind of "rebalancing" their resources, but what's next? How do you prevent over-provisioning of resources (without under-provisioning)? How do you say which (internal) project is worth throwing money at and which one not?
Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024? Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally? Maybe not all the 10000, but maybe 2000 could stay and be in the same role in other teams? Or did they do it already and those 10000 are really people that can't be placed at all internally? (Like we don't want full remote, and we're shutting down that particular office, in which case I can even understand...)
> Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024?
Almost certainly not. Maybe the first few months, fewer will get hired.
> Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally?
They almost certainly will try to do that with the top performers. But I suppose it doesn't make much sense doing this to retain below average performers (even if their average may be a bit high), given their salary levels and the current market.
Moving someone from one type of product to something completely else may require almost as much training as the training of a new hire. Better to hire someone new in a few months, at a lower salary and possibly someone with more potential.
Also, most ex-googlers will probably have an easy time finding other work (especially engineers), so even they may be better off in the end.
Now, I do wonder what kind of roles are seeing the biggest slashes, especially outside of tech. (Ie, sales, marketing, key account, domain experts, content moderation, HR related). If any of those are cut disproportionally, it may indicate a change in direction.
Judging by the comments I think it's safe to assume that the "taking responsibility" part is a meaningless statement at best. What I want to understand is does he even owe anyone an apology? Isn't employment just an agreement to provide services in exchange for money and benefits? Anywhere I work I expect my employer to fire me the moment they don't need my services or find a better/cheaper alternative, I wouldn't think twice if I found a better employer. So why would I be owed an apology or someone to "take responsibility"?
As an outsider, it often feels like Silicon Valley like organisations have a particularly unique culture compared to the rest of the Western corporate world. It's built from decades of hacker culture, start-up mythos, antidisestablishmentarianism, etc. I think people are angry because they thought that Google (and others) were behaving with the same social contract, acting in their interests.
It's a tough pill to realise its just another company behaving as they all do.
I think it's a fair assessment for the general public, but not for the kind of person who is interested in the startup world. I expect an environment like HN to self select against this mindset that is prevalent in the general public.
There's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy effect in this assessment too, so to some extent, it is only as accurate as you believe it to be.
FWIW, I went through sirchit.com top-to-bottom twice, and I have no idea what the product is. It looks like something out of HBO's Silicon Valley. "It's about people" is a weird pitch to make a highly technical utility like a search engine.
"Google's mission is to organize information. Our mission is to help people get stuff done. In order for Google to accomplish its mission, it indexes the web. In order for Sirch to accomplish its mission, it connects users with people; people that offer goods, services, or [sic] infomation". I swear I uttered "those are certainly all words" to myself. Is Sirch a classifieds thing, or like a Craiglist?
Looks like the era of free money for decades and over-hiring had to come to an end. The correction and then crash of the market had bring everyone back to reality since the covid bubble had burst in November 2021 as warned back at the time. [0]
As I said before, no one is safe. Doesn't matter if your a FAAMNG company.
I wonder if some of what is behind this here and at other companies, is the thought that LLMs will make devs more productive thus less are needed. It seems like a reasonable assumption with zero-sum-game mentality. However, I suspect what LLMs actually mean is a more vibrant startup space as fewer people will be able to do more.
I wonder what hidden benefits there are in these layoffs. Sure, companies lose skilled staff and nominally taken a hit in overall corporate output.
On the flipside, people work twice as hard, eager to show their worth. That may be the cynic intent behind these industry-wide layoff. Scare the crap out of everyone and make them do the extra mile.
Fear isn’t a good long term strategy though. If your culture is fear driven, engineers will be less likely to join, or you will attract certain kinds of engineers. When operating on survival mode teams will switch from collaboration to competition. It can become really bad really quickly.
Usually EU countries have quite strict rules for layoffs, it's not like US at-will law. In NL mass layoffs like this have to be approved by the unemployment agency, you have to fire people LIFO and you get 1/3rd of your monthly salary for every year you've worked there. The approval is quite difficult to get so usually a higher severance is offered to leave voluntarily.
In Germany any lawyer (or the work council) will block you from getting fired (because Google has no legal reason to fire you). What they do here in Germany is to negotiate to mutually void your contract by you accepting a financial package.
So in theory you are right, in practice however, most companies (especially the ones like Google) have to buy you out of your contract.
Also, IIRC, when actual layoffs happen, in Germany they actually need to look at tenure and family status of fired people (e.g. fire people without families first).
I guess it just means they will follow the law in each country.
In the case of Germany I believe the minimum notice period is one month (unless on probation, 2 weeks), but it is common to get 3 months. So they will pay for 3 months.
In Germany, local practices could include severance pay too. It is common for long-time employees to receive significant severance payments when they get fired.
60 days is the US minimum for a large company doing a layoff (WARN Act). Some states have stricter standards, which is why Amazon had to pay a minimum of 90 days severance in NY state.
in netherlands, for example, they (Goog) has to negotiate w/ the local-employee-backed Works Council. If they didn't bother setting one up, like Meta NL failed to, it will take about 3 months to do that. Then another 1-2 months for negotiations w/ the council. Then if they come to an agreement (they don't have to) w/ the redundancies and severance the affected can _then_ be notified.
for example, technically the meta layoffs back in November have not even happened here in NL and the affected won't even know until at least March-April!!
Is there any analysis explaining how the new interest rates regime is affecting the number of employees in tech?
I think the impact on VC is probably more direct, but, given what is happening all over FAANGs, I would imagine there could be some causal relation there, too?
might not be a popular opinion, but different perspective.
during pandemic, demand was high and employees where asking anywhere from 60% to 100% hikes to do the same job. no one complained. people were ready to jump every 6 months in search for more pay without thinking career, is the position impacting the company or anything of that sorts. founders (esp smaller ones) had tough time meeting insane demands. people were asking for joining bonus (an insane concept in my view) to the tune of 50% of annual salary.
Now the tables have turned. so if former is accepted then later also has to be accepted without complaints. just how things work in this new age.
That’s exactly how I feel about consumer prices, rising rents and home prices. We accept that they soak up more of our discretionary income with with their high prices. We have every right to complain when they cut jobs as a result.
You can now Join an AI company and wait for Google to acquire the company and make Bank? Looks more like marketing Google investments in AI than anything else on that letter.
12K? What is that 5 to 7% of the total employment.
Just don't hire for 120 days. Accomplish the same results and you don't even need to make a press release.
Layoffs make it easier to get rid of underperforming people without having to file too much paperwork, so it probably has a better effect on the median employee quality to do layoffs instead of a hiring freeze.
Easier but not better.
If you have a performance problem, there is a process in place to to deal with it. Not easy, but it gives the employee notice and the opportunity to improve. Vs. Gone.
Anything we know about the makeup of this or other recent layoffs? Any professions overly represented in the layoffs compared to the firing org’s distribution?
Almost all articles on WFH posted on HN are followed by lots of comments on how WFH is better, less stressful, more productive, more enjoyable, etc. So yes, lots of people find working from home easier.
This is market virtue signaling. Some ascribe it to "copycat" behavior but I don't think the accurately captures the intent.
Sundar is telling the market "we're cutting costs". Even the most generous estimates of what these employees cost mean Google could have them do nothing and still make a healthy profit. Obviously they were doing something though so some value is being lost while costs are being cut.
Remember that every time you hear "we're laying you off because of a recession" or "cheap labor in the developing world took your job" remember that it's all propaganda. In all cases, a capitalist simply decided to eliminate your job and possibly give it to someone else who is ostensibly cheaper.
It's also worth noting that Sundar is financially incentivized to boost the share price [1]. There's not much semantic difference between "I take full responsibility" and "I want to maximize my own (already ridiculously large) pay packet".
Amazon, Microsoft, and now Alphabet. Is this because Twitter showed an example where you can lay off most of the non-core workforce and the tech will still go on?
I do wonder if this is a consequence of the "My day at Linkedin" TikTok videos that were circulating. Looks like they'll have to manage life without the wine on tap and the morning pedicures before attending 1/2 hour of meetings each day.
You think executives had to watch TikTok videos to know what's going on in their companies? I mean they allowed this to happen. It's not the fault of the employees. And of course these videos don't show reality, they cut out the boring parts (the desk work).
That always looked like an abomination to me, for the wine, that is. You either drink the wine poured directly from a bottle (or directly from the barrel, like my grandpa used to do), or you don't.
Musk definitely seem to have served as a convenient excuse[1] for a ton of related articles. Just yesterday, my boss gave us speech on working full 40 hours and not abusing the system. Something is definitely in the works now.
edit: I figured some context may be warranted here. We are obviously salary. Some remote. Some hybrid. Seemingly, it is a result of someone in person in the office complaining. I love people.
6% isn't massive for a profitable company? 1 out of every 17 people getting fired at the same time? That will have huge consequences to internal culture and employee optimism, leading to all kinds of weird people getting to the top.
The repeated mentions of AI comes across as him being completely tone deaf. Does he not realize that people fear AI will cause jobs to be lost? Talking about AI and layoffs at the same time is going to earn him some heat for quite a while.
Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected.
It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain.
It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself.
My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet.
Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.
Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life. Seeing someone else say that was very refreshing. It’s so true that when you’re gone, the company hardly notices. Being let go with no severance and zero days notice was the last straw for me to ever put my soul into a soulless company again.
Luckily there are cool ones out there worth putting yourself into. I managed to find one. Weirdly I now seem to enjoy staying up till crazy o’clock hacking away or doing stuff over the weekend. But only because it’s so much fun; it’s still a selfish motive. Lots of devs really believe that they have a duty to the company or whatever, which is a huge mistake —- one I made too many times.
> Lots of devs really believe that they have a duty to the company
I don't think it's just devs, it seems like a broader "tech culture" or "startup culture" thing, where everyone acting like they're in some weird cult, fully devoted to their company is their entire personality.
I did an internship at a place like that in university. It was generally a fine place but it was weird how I added some people I worked with on social media (something I rarely do now) and ALL of their posts were about the company. I don't know if it was ass-kissing for promotions or something but it always felt weird and alien to me. It wasn't even a particularly small company where everyone knew each other, it was like 300 people across multiple floors of a building.
I think it's probably runoff from everyone trying to be 2009 Google. Would you believe there was a foosball table, and an open work area? Wacky!
What you’re seeing is actually a remnant of pre-startup culture. In late 20th century corporate America, there was no social media, but it was 100% expected that someone serious about their career would passionately describe how they’re working at the best company ever and they’re so lucky to have a chance to be there. If anything, the innovation of tech culture is the idea that being mercenary is even an option for getting ahead in your career.
> I don't think it's just devs, it seems like a broader "tech culture" or "startup culture" thing, where everyone acting like they're in some weird cult, fully devoted to their company is their entire personality.
For me, a Big Red Flag in job interviews is when a potential employer says "this place is a family."
I already have a family - I don't want to work somewhere where they expect that my entire life will be consumed by my employer because "we're family."
It sounds like what you're experiencing is a sense of freely-chosen duty to the company, rather than that duty being taken for granted. It's perfectly okay to choose to feel duty to your employer. A company can earn your respect and sense of obligation, and then instead of resenting the demands it makes on your time, you can feel a genuine sense of shared purpose that drives additional levels of commitment.
The kind of company I'm on the lookout for has definitely shifted over the years. When I was younger, the thought of working at Google and Amazon was very enticing. Then Amazon adopted some fairly regressive HR and business strategies and lost its luster in my eyes; or maybe my view of their existing practices just shifted as I grew older. Now Google is trending in the same direction. At this point in my career I'm on the lookout for smaller companies that are oases and have somehow managed to avoid the HR and business trends that have been adopted by the tech industry on the model of people like Jack Welch, the consulting firms and private equity.
Yup. My employer benefits, but the fact is, I’ve waited basically my whole life to be in the position I am now. If I don’t make a significant research contribution over the next decade, I likely never will.
Three years ago, I was a peasant, scratching out a living (metaphorically as a researcher) using google colab GPUs to experiment. Today I find myself a king, in command of a cluster of GPUs with so much memory and power that they could host GPT-3 four times over. Today that cluster comes online, and you better believe I haven’t felt this excited since I was 10 and my parents got me a playstation 1 for Christmas. I’m gonna final fantasy 7 the heck out of these gpus.
I have literally everything a researcher could possibly dream of. Or at least me. Every single one of the ideas I’ve been brewing over the last few years can now be tested, analyzed, and discarded — and it’s only a matter of time till I find the gold among them.
My daughter’s on the way in T-minus 7 months. I’ll be keeping my life balanced. But damn it feels good to finally have a research target plus resources plus skill. I’ve been playing a game of “choose two” till now.
...or colleagues. it's quite easy to start thinking that if you enjoy what you do so much so that you stay up late, then everyone else should feel and do the same.
> Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life
This isn’t what the comment you’re replying to said. They just said don’t let work slowly kill you. I think there are plenty of people whose work consumes their lives whose work isn’t also slowly killing them. And if you disagree with that I guess I’d say that everything is slowly killing everyone.
Yep, that works until the founders hand the keys of the truck to a random CEO who sends the whole company (and yourself) into what all companies look like.
Significantly better than the tone-deaf email Satya sent Microsoft employees, which continues to cause undue anxiety for employees who have no clue if or when they'll be laid off over the next 90 days.
It's actually better for workers when layoffs are announced in advanced. They can prepare for it and not make an important financial decisions e.g.: buying house while waiting
Does anyone have a summary of what laws need to be abided to in EU, Canada and other countries that prevent them from rolling this out at the same time as the US?
At least, advance notice which might be long depending of the country, probably at least three months in France. Plus, Google will have issues justifying a cut for economic reason in much of Europe. They remain very profitable even if less than before so they might need due cause to fire people.
Generally speaking European laws protect the employees more than the shareholders. You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn. It encourages companies to be more conservative regarding hiring which can be both a blessing and a curse.
> You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn.
Well, you can, but not as direct employees. The usual way is to enter a service contract with a different company who hires the employees and assigns them to work on bigcorp's tasks for 100% of their time. If bigcorp wants to cut costs, they just let the contract with the other company lapse and that company can fire their employees on the basis of "my own economic outlook is bad because we lost the bigcorp contract".
I thought this was a reason Europe has struggled in tech a bit - hard to try things out. I also thought this was why lots is “on contract” - it’s better not to bring people into your actual team (which must have some negatives)
In Japan for instance, you simply cannot fire someone without notice in these situations. You also have to prove that you've tried a whole lot of measures to avoid layoffs, such as reducing exec compensation, asking for voluntary resignations, etc. And I believe there needs to he some actual evidence layoffs are justified in the first place, same as in France I believe.
Strictly speaking, forcing a worker out in these recent tech layoff cases is going to be difficult. I'd expect both in Japan and other countries there will be much more generous severance package offers for "voluntary" quitting. The majority of workers will way that against the reality of staying in a company they know doesn't really want them anymore.
For NL: Those severance packages generally have to be applied broadly so everyone can make the choice. They usually result in the ones who know they can easily find a job moving on and the rest staying and thus don't happen that often. In general they let term-limited contract expire and offer people in early retirement. Doing layoff's when you are making a massive profit is not easy, it might be doable but it's not easy.
Fun part: Sometimes you cannot chose who you fire, the age distribution in the company may not change so firing everyone older than 45 is not an option in general.
The notice in the US is not a notice in the way you would apply it in Japan (or how common sense would dictate). It would be illegal to block someone from accessing company systems or premises just because you tell them "officially you are terminated in 60 days".
That "giving notice" is used in the message is because of some law (I forgot) that requires this time but also permits to actually block people from working as long as they are paid.
They way this kind of thing is usually done in the EU to avoid the hassles of proper layoffs (that need justification and come with restrictions - e.g. in Bulgaria if you've done layoffs you can't hire on the same position within the same unit in the next couple of months) is to propose a mutual termination - we'll give you X months of pay (where X > what the employee would get legally if laid off), you sign here you agree to leave immediately. It's sometimes a bad idea because in that case you're sometimes not eligible for regular unemployment (depends on thr country of course) because you agreed to leave your job, so you have to be sure you'll find a job afterwards. Sometimes it's a great idea because you get a pile of cash and you're "winning" if you find a job faster, or if you want a nice break.
If you make layoffs of over 100 people in the UK, there needs to be a 45 day consultation period with representatives from the groups of people affected. This sometimes means people end up in a horrible situation where they are in a pool that have been told their jobs are at risk but not whether they are actually being made redundant, though presumably it's more fair, and allows staff to volunteer themselves for severance if they so choose.
In some places, a company can't just fire people because they feel like it. In Germany, where this is called a "Betriebsbedingte Kündigung"[1] you have to make a socially adequate choice based on how long someone has been at the company, whether they have kids, etc. and you also have to prove that there isn't an open position elsewhere in the company.
This varies in the EU IIRC for example here in Sweden if you plan to fire more than 5 people you need to alert the public employment agency and employees 2 months in advance and the union which the company has collective bargaining agreements with. There is usually a negotiation between the union and the company on the forms of the fireing.
Yeah Satya’s note was bad for several reasons, not the least of which is he sent it right after attending a private Sting concert. Starting to wonder if rather than being an exceptional leader, he just benefitted from following Steve Ballmer which would make almost anyone look better in comparison.
Also, it clearly states there are layoffs! Anyone skipping over corporate jargon could have easily missed the single line with "btw, we'll lay off 10k people" in Satyas mail.
I'm so rapidly becoming someone who just feels no guilt. It's balance against the abject anxiety I feel no matter what day or time of day it is. The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize that it's Sunday and everything is fine and I'm supposed to be relaxing. It's clearly not healthy.
But yeah, I've got a FAANG(+? what's it called now? I think I'm in whatever the new one is called now?), and the market isn't _so_ bad, I think? But at the end of the day, the checks clear, and it's mostly on me to decide and act on the prerogative that software is just software, and I need to chill. (But it's really hard...9s are addictive...)
> The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize that it's Sunday
The thing that's been messing me up, is the completely unhealthy schedules that are typical when you work with people all over the world. For instance, I got up at 6am today, my first meeting was at 7am. In the meeting were people in three countries and at least five timezones.
This trend where people are located all over the planet leads to a scenario where it's not unusual for me to be taking 7am meetings while also working on infrastructure at three in the morning because that's when the maintenance window is.
If we were going to an office, nobody would tolerate this ridiculous schedule.
But since most of us WFH now, it's just become increasingly common that we're working 20 hours days, but there's a bunch of gaps scattered between a 7am start and a 5am end.
You couldn’t pay me enough to work at 3AM. I suppose it’s up to each person to know what they will tolerate, but that one is a deal breaker for me and always will be.
"9s" are brought up in reliability discussions. They refer to the number of 9's in an uptime metric like 99%, 99.9%, 99.9999%, ...
See also "march of the 9s"
Per my experience, nothing beats the "i work on what i love and passionate".
Coorporate environment of course has some advantages, for what they called "the real world experience". But it doesn't mean they're more capable than "lonely hackers" that can build his own universe by the weekends.
the only thing that beats "i work on what i love and passionate" is "i work on what i love and passionate and therefore I'm well paid" and "i work on what i love and passionate and therefore I'm well paid with a great work life balance"
It feels a little crass to me to judge the wording and character of layoff emails, as if some of them are satisfying artistically and others are unsatisfying to consume somehow.
At the end of the day, a layoff email is a layoff email. Sugarcoating it is just PR.
“It’s only a layoff email if it came from the layoff region of France, otherwise, it’s just a sparkling pink slip”
As a sort of corollary to what you said: being loyal to a company is foolish because companies cannot return that loyalty.
There may be some borderline exceptions with very small companies (less than 10 employees), but in general a company isn't capable of being loyal to individual employees. Just keep in mind that in your relationship with your employer, you only have value insofar as you generate profit for them.
while I agree with the attitude you promote. But it is not that simple. If your visa is attached to your job, you are pretty much fucked. Same goes if you decided to leave your previous job just to join Google (because it was your dream) and now you are let go - you are fucked.
So yes, it is your responsibility to take care of yourselves. But it is hard to be prepared for everything and layoffs like this one doesn't make it easier.
The email/comms might be okay, but this is still their fault and will ruin people's lives. Most (if not all) companies are shit and don't give a shit about you. We're just a necessary cost.
Having Google on one's CV is probably better than not having worked there at all. Sure being let go is painful but I would keep the term "ruined lives" for people getting serious diseases or experiencing loss of the loved ones.
Suicide rates surge after layoffs. Assuming it's "okay" just because they were in a big company earning more than most is disingenuous in my view.
For the company this is a blip. It'll probably even make some profit for shareholders. For the people it's almost always life-changing and for the worst.
it absolutely sucks ass and is a major psychological hit. Also, when lesser brands decide to follow the trend these companies so prominently follow, it will be even worse.
Having Google on your resume is not a good thing depending on who's reading it. Googlers generally need to be extensively re-trained on reality outside of companies that cargo-cult Google's practices, and I'll have some questions about the moral compass of anyone who shows up with Google on the resume.
That tech stack concern and attitude only affects a small-poulation collection of startups.
"Morally opposed to Google" affects a tiny sliver of professionals who boycott Google products or choose to use it despite allegedly being opposed to it.
If you go from Google or similarly large company to a small startup, there's a radically different reality and workstyle required. Any time I see someone with big company experience especially their immediately previous role, it's an orange flag. I know to dig into why a startup and whether they are willing to "repent" their previous ways.
BigCo employees are much more likely to call unnecessary whole team meetings, unnecessarily drag out feature planning, drag their feet on getting MVPs out in favor of a entirely complete solution, propose doing things "the way <x> does it" and it's like "... cool, we don't have the resources and headcount to support that really."
With that said, generally these people have a much deeper knowledge of their particular stack, are valuable to have as long as you can harness them correctly and direct their energies towards much later in the startup.
I guess the problem for affected soon-Xooglers is more like, they've been laid off hence could be seen as underperformers. Moreover, they hit the marketplace in quantities, which makes for a bad negotiation position. Also, I'm wondering if top talent at Google not laid off this time around might soon look elsewhere and leave the sinking ship before it's too late - after all, Google hasn't really diversified despite lots and lots of investment and it's not clear at all top coders are really needed to keep a maturing business going (or are actually still working on eg Search or other key tech considering its demise) over the last 5+ years).
One of my most talented colleague worked at Microsoft in his previous job. My worst experience was with a HR from Twitter, with all the political views and speeches from California, it was awful. She killed the spirit of the company in less than a year.
I have to wonder what your own resume looks like that you maintain such a large blacklist. I can't help but think that a great many corporations won't live up to your standards.
> "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."
I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward. It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term.
Really either the folks writing this crap take us for fools, or they're really shortsighted fools themselves.
>Every time I read stuff like: "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."
I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase.
How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit.
That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in contractions.
> The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit.
Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms.
And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional.
And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company.
As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain.
Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.
Pretty funnily, quite a few companies in the US seem to exist not to maximize profit.
Some, like Amazon, immediately reinvest the profits into their growth and avoid taxes on the profits.
Some, like Uber, seem to exist to only sustain an illusion of future possible profits. Most of startups in the era of cheap money were manifestly unprofitable, and spent more and more attempting to achieve growth and grab the market share.
Beside these, there is a number of barely profitable companies that just exist to sustain their business and give the owners and a few employees some daily bread. Most small restaurants and small stores are like that. They maximize not the short-term profit but the probability to keep earning something in foreseeable future, a bit like subsistence farming.
You are free to believe something else and go off and do whatever you want with your life. Nobody is stopping you, and more importantly, nobody is calling you a villain for believing differently.
And yet here you are, painting everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of maniacal evil-doer because what they believe is different than what you believe.
"Help, my quest to maximize profit at the cost of human misery has people painting me as an un-empathetic, maniacal evil-doer! Why can't people understand that its actually just like, my opinion that causing societal harm for short term quarterly gains is good, is just like my opinion and every opinion is valid!"
I think it is maniacally evil to put peoples housing, healthcare, and ability to remain in the country at risk. It is inherently throwing 12,000 households into sudden insecurity. There better be a better reason than “whoops economic headwinds that we didn’t budget/prepare for”. Peoples access to food, housing, healthcare, and not being expelled from the country should be valued way more than this.
These are people making 3, 5, 10 times the median household income on their own. People with in-demand skills, with good resumes, and access to a remote pool of positions.
With even the slightest bit of foresight or financial planning, they'll be fine for months or longer.
I don’t really care if they’ll be fine for “months”. Months is not a lot of stability! Especially if you have dependents who need healthcare, or have a visa that requires you to find employment immediately or risk expulsion! Or just went into debt because everyone bought a new house with the low rates recently!
It shouldn’t be an individual family’s responsibility to plan for its massively growing, massively productive, massively profitable employer to treat them like a wrapper to be used and tossed in the trash when done.
It’s evil to treat being depended upon to provide a means of food, housing, healthcare, and continued residency as something that can just be shut off without warning, to no fault of the dependents.
The purpose of a company is not to maximize profits because that would mean you have to pay taxes.
The holy goal instead, is to maximize shareholder value. A small, but important difference (and helps explain the existence of companies like Uber and Twitter who have barely turned a profit in the past decade).
As soon as this sentiment prevails, not only during times of personal loss, but also in times of personal prosperity, you can start to think of most humans as being part of the solution instead of this particular problem.
A company is a legal thing that is owned by shareholders. Like if I own a car, I want it to take me from A->B as expediently as possible. I don't want my car to have a social mission. I'm not sure why a company should be different. Now I do think that the disbursed profits to shareholders from the company should be used to fund many social missions, via charities and non-profits and the like.
I'm inclined towards your argument, but to play devil's advocate, I'd say you are making a false equivalence between a car and a company.
A car is exclusively a tool, and a company is a tool from some perspectives, but involves humans. Hence why ethics are involved and there is no clear answer.
If instead you replaced car with horses, or worse yet, with human powered transportation would your answer be any different.
If you own a car you don’t just want it to take you from A->B expediently. You should also want to do it presumably safely, without killing people, following laws, in a way that also keeps the car maintainable. If you want cars to slow down in school crossing zones that’s a social mission.
Breaking the law is not expedient in the larger sense. What I meant is let's not hobble the car by for example like the sibling poster says giving away free rides or having to drop off free meals. These can be better achieved by Charities or Soup Kitchens.
I agree with you. I think the purpose of a company is to help ensure social stability by providing productive and meaningful employment. If the government is doing its job and ensuring an environment in which firms can thrive (financial stability, infrastructural stability, social stability), then the firm's responsibilities should mirror those: take care of employees and customers by treating them fairly (financial, social stability) and the physical environment (infrastructural stability).
Just because Milton Friedman claimed that it is the main objective of a company to maximize shareholder value[1], doesn't mean it is true. Milton Friedman was a bad dude, and part of a bad school of economics[2].
I think this is aligns with Simon Sinek's philosophy in The Infinite Game[0], which I really enjoyed reading. I totally agree with your point: business mindset is a choice.
The only 'harm' in question is that the other evil profit seeking villains are losing their source of profit, left to go back to do wonderful volunteer work at charities or whatever it is that is considered more virtuous. Crushing 12,000 villains in one fell swoop, perhaps Google is the superhero here?
I agree with you, but companies exist in an evolutionary environment where—broad strokes—anyone who doesn’t do this gets out-competed. You can have 99 companies that behave well, but just one that doesn’t can drive them all out of business if it’s willing to do what they won’t. The solution is not to chew them out, but to pass policy and vote with your wallet.
Maximizing profit should be the main signal of creating value, if you have a lot of revenue but no profit - you are actually destroying value.
There are dynamics where profit chasing can be perverted (eg. monopolistic pricing, fraud, etc.) which is why we have regulations. But profit chasing in itself is the best signal of value creation we have.
I've lived in a post socialist country transitioning from socialist to capitalist system and I don't want to live in a world where politics define value, profit chasing can lead to pathologies, but political value system is based on flawed principles.
+1 for your sentiment. Thank you for articulating it.
Feels like so many people in the US has taken the Adam Smith self interest sentiment to the extreme, to the point that people seem to forget we are living in a society - a very interdependent entity that functions poorly if we don't work together.
I don’t think you can choose to apply a different meaning to Google, though. Ad tech is the Platonic ideal of a profit-focused enterprise, and even someone who’s not personally working on ads has to understand that’s where their salary and benefits are coming from.
Successful and well-regarded companies will indeed arithmetically maximize profits if they're around in the long term while they are likely to see short term profiteers fail. Maximizing profits entails rather more than making a quick buck.
The idea is that if you pit those villains against eachother on a level playing field, they'll improve society on the whole.
To a certain extent it's true, and it's only failing in the case of Google/etc because we've allowed mega-companies to become a thing (which distorts the playing field). OTOH we're rapidly heading towards total planetary extinction, so something huge needs to change.
This perspective, implemented broadly, would considerably reduce the pools of available financing accessible to a given company. This in turn would reduce employment levels as companies contract in a more difficult capital environment.
If you are an investor, activist or otherwise, you benefit from the current practice that managers have a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
"Oh, corporations have to be massively harmful entities that crush people under their feet in order to enrich their investors" is a choice. It is a system created entirely by humans.
This is what people say when they talk about how capitalism has so thoroughly won. People speak about it like it is a force of nature or a property of physical reality itself. There is no alternative. If megacorps don't abuse their employees and vacuum up dollars from their customers in every possible way then the line will go down, and we can't have that.
This approach doesn't make sense when it comes to software. Expanding your dev team during a boom year to only contract it in the future bust year - will leave you moving slower in the bust years. While tech has never been known for it's stable job market, seeing the most profitable corporations in the world conducting layoffs doesn't sit well.
How is this any different than any other industry? In manufacturing, slowing reduces the risk that supply will outstrip demand. In software, slowing down means reducing the risk that time is spent producing software that won't have an economic payoff. The effort is focused on the business lines that add to the bottom line and less on the speculative ones. If you look at where a lot of the tech industry layoffs are coming from, they tend to be the not-yet-viable moonshot ideas.
Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers busy themselves adding new production lines and creating more complex manufacturing processes to support products. 2 years later you sack the engineers.
You are left with more complex product and extra assembly lines. You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue - so you run them all.
Is this meant to be an analogy for software production?
It seems like the crux is here:
You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue
This is essentially saying leaders/managers don't know how to prioritize. What much of tech is doing right now is prioritizing by cutting back on the programs that aren't particularly successful. It's the same thing done in manufacturing.
This is such a bean-counter MBA perspective. It’s tech, if you want real growth, you need moonshot ideas. If you want to just become a GE style dependable divided stock, then fine, but your shareholders aren’t going to triple their wealth again.
Nobody is saying reduce moonshot ideas to zero. There's a difference between "throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks" to having a risk/reward way of prioritizing what to fund. What you're alluding to is the "grow at all costs and find a way to be profitable later" strategy that is prevalent in SV, but tends to not work so well in real economic downturns. Sometimes I think people either forget, or are too young, to remember that the pre-2021 decade+ of near-zero interest rates are a historical anomaly.
Put differently, take a look at the R&D costs of google[1]. Note how, despite a constantly increasing amount of investment, they still derive 80% of their revenue from ads. Granted, some of the R&D will contribute to ads revenue, but it may also be indicative of a moonshot strategy that isn't contributing much in terms of "real growth" in alternative revenue streams.
Does a moonshot mean funding a team of 50 without tangible goals for ten years? The original google moonshots leaned heavily on individual engineers producing Herculean results eg gmail.
We are still finalizing annual reviews. It couldn't have been current performance ratings. I know of some low performers on nearby teams who weren't laid off.
Some (many?) teams were entirely unaffected, so somebody up in my management chain decided my team was less critical. No clue how the individual people decisions were made.
Agreed. In this case, google isn’t even claiming this change was unexpected, just that the reality has changed. Seems way more honest than the other corporate-doublespeak layoffs we’ve seen.
They're taking me for a fool in that they say BS with a straight face, pretending that either they couldn't have foreseen or that I couldn't. If they'd phrase all this as "we surged in a hiring race to the bottom, with the intention of scaling back" that'd be the plain truth and no faked stupidity would be required.
Also it's beaten down that the purpose of companies is to make profits. Perhaps in some specific legal context or interpretation it might be, but the purpose of a company is mostly to do whatever the people in charge of it want it to do. A ton of companies' purpose is to principally do other things than just money. People running Apple and making phones like to make money & design beautiful consumer devices. People making rockets like mostly to go to space and hope they can also make some money. People running machine shops like to make moneys and they like to cut metal. People running industrial machinery like to make money and building CNC machines. People making cars like to make money and making cars. People running biotech companies like to advance life sciences and make money. And so on.
Firstly, the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value is a recent myth. Before that, it was understood that corporations are chartered to serve the public interest.
A few may argue that corporations are super-persons imbued with super-rights which outweigh the rights of actual persons. Please note that's a minority viewpoint.
Secondly, corporations are not the only cast members with agency in this narrative.
Our government, the source of all that free money, acting on the goals of full employment and bountiful future tax revenue, probably has some agency.
Us individuals, whose blood and entrails lubricate the gears of the machine built from our bone and sinew, also have agency. Stuff like get fat and happy and watch our grandkids grow up, have enough excess wealth and time to travel a bit, to not bleed out in a ditch, cold and haggard, after a lifetime of toil. And most of us aren't particularly invested in further enriching the latest cohort of robber barons.
It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context.
Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise.
You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth".
The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970.
Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.
First, just because we understand that Google wants to maximize profit doesn't mean they need to lie about it — it means they have no need to lie about it, because nobody's fooled. Either they consider at least some of us fools who would believe such an obvious lie, or they're engaging in a ritual of futile lying whose purpose I cannot grasp.
Second, why must the point of a company be to maximize profit? Why can't it be to make enough profit to remain stable in the long term, instead of growing rapidly to a size where it will eventually either have to engage in monopolistic behavior to survive or else, having extracted all available profit in its sphere, die?
Give me a break. Everyone knew it wouldn’t have lasted, sure, in the same way we all know China won’t be the manufacturing hub of the world forever or the dollar may not be the primary currency.
When will the transition happen? If you knew exactly, like you seem to be indicating, you should make some money off of it. Otherwise hindsight armchair CEO is dull.
So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside.
I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products, services, and entertainment options people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only THEN go into a recession!
But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.
Companies don’t need to be right, they need to maximise the chance of succeeding. Yes, it was obvious that the raining-money period wasn’t going to last… but what if it had? What if Google had decided to ignore it, and then by some ridiculous twist of fate, it did continue and a competitor did leverage it to beat Google?
Firing a bunch of people and killing some projects is a tiny price to pay for the potential upside. As humans, seeing people get fired is painful and we view the individuals responsible in a negative light — which I agree with! — but for Google the corporate entity, and Microsoft and Shopify etc etc it made complete rational sense even in hindsight.
But that's not the intended message when they send out these memos.
They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So, sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired."
I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go."
Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is often a rational thing to do.
Right, because they didn’t know it wouldn’t last hence taking the risk. The message is being written after the fact, and the message isn’t a lie per-se, rather, it’s a human framing of the situation with the subtext of we are a company and a company is not a job factory but a shareholder value factory.
Every message every company ever writes that leans on any amount of humanity is, in your characterisation, a lie… and while, sure, that’s technically true, we all take part in this big theatre production where we expect companies to pretend to have humanity — your problem is with all of us participating in this system pretending a company gives a single solitary fuck about any of us.
These performative messages are just one small part of the performance, writing an “honest” message where they say “you’re all fired and we don’t care” wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be doing a million other pieces of performative humanity.
I think we can give Google executives a little more credit.
They care a bounded amount.
A rough approximation of how much they care would be the rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to employees that Google can afford due to their dominant market position.
Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but they aren't going to matter in the face of another $100,000 in salary.
Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred bucks tho.
I don’t think nice things can be characterised as caring, though. If their decisions were actively harming the company in order to benefit the humanity of their employees, that would be reasonable evidence that they care, but I don’t think we can interpret every nice thing for a person as caring.
For example, providing benefits above and beyond what other companies provide has a clear justification for the business: happier employees means better work from people that are better retained.
A good question would be: if Google stood to benefit from making their employees lives miserable, would they do it? I’d argue, yes, absolutely, and there’s much evidence of it. For example, Google (and many other big tech companies) pay human moderators low wages to do work that causes psychological damage.
Caring about people as people and not employees isn’t demonstrated by giving them nice benefits around the edge, it’s demonstrate by putting their humanity above their employment.
Google does not have evidence that their outrageous salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line outside of the door.
The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make people stay later.
Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.
This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it every time.
The exact lines change depending on local customs and competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin businesses have shittier working environments - there's more competition and less room for executives to care.
The implied lie that this is just an unfortunate and unforeseeable circumstance. The unwillingness to be transparent about it. That's the lie, and it's not speculation if I'm observing their own words.
I think your framing of this as a predictable cycle is deceptive. This isn't about regular crashes. This is about a temporary pandemic-driven situation. Yes, employees hired in the rush could have seen this coming. But it's unfair to assume 100% of them did. I don't think it's unfair to think it would be shockingly foolish for the entire tech leadership class to not have seen it coming.
All I'm saying is: Own it.
I'm not saying it was evil. I would probably have made similar decisions.
But I would have been more transparent about it. I would have hired people on contracts with the explicit understanding that this was surge hiring. That way no one would be surprised when the contracts weren't renewed. That would have been honest.
They did - the employees. The annoying part is the execs pretending like this is all unexpected. They could have skipped that line, just stay quiet. Don't pretend like you didn't know it was coming.
So if I buy a bunch of stock in $RAND because conditions favor their business, and then conditions change and I sell the stock, I’m lying when I say I changed strategy because of changing conditions?
In this oddly specific example: Only if you had every reason to expect things would change, didn't warn anyone, and felt the need to blame the market for your actions. In that case, technically, yes, I would consider that dishonest.
But: To whom did you owe honesty to when buying stock? I'm not sure you owed honesty to anyone there.
When you hire people, you're making decisions that have impacts on their lives and those of their families. In the case of companies like Google, they're impacting entire communities.
So I would say they have a moral (if not legal) obligation to be more transparent with their workers about their intentions. But you, in this stock situation, would not have any moral obligation whatsoever.
Googles revenue grew 41% in 2021, which is higher than normal. But not crazy. It was not about future projections or anything real. It was about cheap money and asset inflation. I don't know the exact mechanisms but I'm not convinced that it was about projections and now a letdown. Revenue is falling sure but it's still growing incredibly fast for such a large company
> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.
I disagree. There's charts showing the proportion of commerce online vs offline and it slowly rises over time over the last 20 years. It's following a pretty stable trend. Until the end of 2021 or so, the data really really looked like there had been a 5-6 year jump ahead on the curve thanks to COVID-19.
The question was never "is this a temporary change", it was "how much of this is temporary and how much is permanent?". When the dust settled, would we see it go back to a 2-year jump-ahead? Stay at a 5-year? Go back to what was expected?
Nobody knew the answer. You didn't. You had a guess. And most people forget what their guess was once they know the answer, and believe they always knew the answer.
Agree with you that all in all those companies are still mostly bigger than they were pre-pandemic, and their business indeed get ahead a notch by the effect of the pandemic. And clearly now the dust settles and they're ahead, overall, but need to trim down headcount, because they're not as ahead as they could have been in an alternate universe. That's all fine, although it's not great for those fired.
I just can't stand the pretense "oh no we didn't know we over hired" like come on. We _all_ knew y'all were over hiring. Just cut the crap.
They needed the increased labor at the time, they got it, utilized it, juiced profits and now don't need it so are getting rid of it. They used the increased labor to increase profits by 41% in 2021. If they did not have the increased labor in that period would their profits have increased by that much?
I see this comment in much the same way I see a bear in a bull market. Stock X is $100 and Bob buys it. Carl tells Bob he is an idiot and the stock is going to go down. Stock X goes to $200. Bob sells. Stock X starts going down and Carl starts telling everyone he was right and he knew the stock would crash. In the mean time Bob is retired and has gotten everything he needed from that particular stock purchase.
"I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward."
They didn't. They knew it wouldn't last. But what they had to do was stay competitive and/or meet demand by scaling up while they could. Now they have a larger pool of talent and can cut people/programs who are too expensive or are under performing.
Yeah, but this sort of thing is common in many industries. The people in power explain things in a political way in the name of communicating with laypeople to avoid bad reactions. This can be CEOs, politicians, doctors, police, developers, etc.
> It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term.
Can you point to any comments that people with a semblance of understanding made back then in which they were able estimate the rough time window when things would come back down to earth?
Fair point! However, I suspect many people have, as I have, been screaming silently for a few years that we will have to pay for all of this at some point soon. I expected what we are seeing, and I'd be amazed if most others on this site are surprised.
If you look the Spanish flu in particular, it eventually fade out after 2-3y, and people resumed life by a mix of adapting to the new reality and stopped caring, and the illness mutated to a less dangerous form. People (at least those I think sounded pragmatic) were talking about that back in Spring 2020.
I don't know of a comment in 2020 that specifically say that, mainly because I don't keep a log and will not go search for it.
I don’t have proof so you probably will dismiss me but I was saying privately back in March 2020 that we’d go back to normal in 18-24 months. This is just based on historical pandemics so it’s not like you have to be some kind of genius.
In a similar vein, I would like to know what the "and I take full responsibility for this" line that CEOs always say in these emails actually looks like besides just saying it in the email.
That’s it. It just means that they are making a point of not blaming their reports (“today is a tough day, especially because Bob over-hired in marketing and Kate talked me into that engineering expansion”)
sure, but the problems back then were immediate for google et al: "we need more people to deal with the increased flow". they hoped those covid patterns will remain after covid. they didn't.
They aren't fools, they just have their own agendas.
Sundar and other Google execs don't actually own that much Google stock, so they have relatively little lose by gambling with company money by over hiring.
From Brian Armstrong's perspective, Coinbase didn't overhire at all. They captured all the crypto revenue they could during the boom, which inflated their stock price while Armstrong was cashing out as much as he could.
That's my point. Larry and Sergey own 3% of Google each, but have long retired from making any decisions at Google. Sundar only owns .01% of Google and gets compensated in bonuses, so he tunes his strategy on maximizing his bonus.
"Every damn body" knows this in retrospect. At the time -- when we were washing our groceries and we weren't sure if the IFR was 1% or 10%, and if it was airborne or if it was morphing into something worse -- our new reality might have been very different.
>>Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.
In hindsight, yes. But by that definition every decision is a coin flip, because no matter how good we get at predicting things, you are always and always making decisions based on past data, and that can't accomodate random 'act of god' sort of events COVID and Ukraine war was.
>>Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase.
There was no way to know COVID was a phase, we still can't say with confidence that COVID is over.
Can you cite you or anyone making specific claims in 2020 or 2021 that the online growth rates are temporary and not a shift?
I was skeptical until mid 2021 when everything in person was opening again, but the shift to online frenzy wasn't slowing. I knew there would be some backsliding, but I thought there was a permanent shift for some people who realized online ordering, online activity is just easier. Some areas haven't backslid much at all (video meetings, WFH, online schooling, etc).
Can't really cite, because I consume a lot of material but don't take notes.
I think if you picture yourself as a population of 1000. Y'all are someone who hasn't used technology X before because you haven't yet had to, and suddenly you're encouraged to do so. The probability that you will do so now, instead of in X period of time, has increased. It's not going to happen all at once, but over some time, which means the adoption rate will compound. But like any adoption curve, some of y'all 1000 will churn, depending on how useful the technology proves out in the long term. What's the average lifetime before a user churn? You can guess for yourself, how quickly do you get bored with most of your new toys? Some toys stick around because you find them drastically better, some others you start ignoring.
So it's not that the online growth rate was temporary, but that it's (sorta) obvious that it was going to recede from it's peak. Like Pokemon Go, which is still popular but nowhere near as it was near day one.
These companies work not for their employees, but for their shareholders. I suppose shareholders would have revolted if they hadn't increased investment to potentially hit it big when they could. Turns out these investments didn't work out, so now they cut their losses. From a shareholder's perspective, I can understand this narrative as not foolish, rather courageous.
From an outside (and employee) perspective, it can seem foolish though.
The problem also is the justification for management pay is that they are able to predict these kind of things and avoid the kind of disruption to the organization that occurs in this.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem the case (that and no one gets the credit for just keeping the system running)
> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.
Are you making the same mistake they did and thinking in 0/1 terms? The last 2 years have shifted the future, but the shifts are gradients with few if any being absolute 0/1.
All of them are doing this to shore up short term value. Say this saves google 1 to 2 Billion over this next year, that's a billion dollars they can spend on stock buy backs and dividend payments.
the worst part is that even when economics growth stopped earlier this year, they didn't stop hiring. They didn't adapt fast enough to reduce the damage. They didn't try to optimize their workforce, they just went on with it till the moment they need to fire 12K
Your clairvoyance must have made you extremely rich as you assess these events with accuracy and perfect timing, and thus made the right open-market financial bets to profit from them.
Really? Cause I'm making a public note here that I didn't know. I fully expected WFH and automation to continue to fuel the need for software development, albeit at a slower rate. I'm also making a public note that even if I foresaw a crash after printing free money, I didn't expect it to be compounded by the most drastic eco-legislation ever, plus a war in Ukraine. And I sure as hell didn't expect the last two to be so perfectly synergistic in increasing energy prices.
I think WFH and automation gained a boost from the pandemic and while the pendulum will continue to balance back, the overall effect will be more WFH and automation than if the pandemic hadn't hit.
Large scale disruptions cause governments to print money, and I think the IRA (which I assume is what you refer to) was in a way predictable, because government historically do infrastructure spending to keep the economy afloat after large scale disruptions. That the Democrats would push infrastructure spending on tech and eco stuff is not particularly surprising. Asian countries have been pouring their R&D in solar panels, chips, batteries, manufacturing, for years. The pandemic very early on made bare the US' dire positioning, versus Asian countries relative advantage in that aspect. I wouldn't have predicted the IRA but it's predictable that an infra bill would have come. That's what happened in prior cases.
I didn't expect the war in Ukraine, but we could expect wars. Trouble times create incentives (disparity) and opportunities. I sadly expect more large conflicts in the coming years. I think the average pragmatic person probably also does.
As for the current economic crisis, I'll go on a limb and guess it'll probably maintain itself for another 2-3-4y horizon, like prior ones did. And the boiling pot it will cause will be fertile ground for conflicts (and innovation).
Not everything is about US :) In Europe they passed EU wide legislation, I think, around the end of 2020? Can't remember, really, and I'm too lazy too look. Either way, energy prices here were already very high in summer 2021, a full 8 months before the war in Ukraine started.
Well at the height of the market euphoria, nobody listened to my warnings a year ago:
From [0] November 2021
Me: 'Finally' The start of the market crash is under way...
>> Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation. [0]
Then more concerns for preparing for the recession months later after I said we were already in a recession. [1].
>> No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a recession. [1]
So after many layoffs, rising inflation, US debt ceiling fears happening since then the lagging indicators of this have now take effect and so 'now' we are preparing for the recession?
It has already happened and is still happening which it is too late to prepare.
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.
He has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders of capital.
> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups
I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”.
Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
Plus many took advantage of this "chaos" to get rid of products they don't want to do anymore - my company did the same. It had very little to do with the global recession etc.
I don't get the panic mode some folks here seem to fall into pretty quickly, probably young/junior ones. Numbers alone do seem scary, but then you 1) put it into global count perspective, we never so far go above few % which ie in banking is simply a no-story, usual yearly culls, every effin' year, sometimes more than once. And 2) all of these greedy companies over-hired massively during covid (and we talk about tens of thousands of hires per giant), so now are shockingly trimming that swing that ended up differently than they wrongly predicted (thank god for that).
Once we will see trims going into 30% territory we can have a story. Now of course its pretty crappy if you are one of those affected, ie those 5%. If we are going to see serious employment issues in IT this is not yet it (and I see few reasons for that personally, but what do I know...)
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
Large publicly traded companies don't really prepare for large recessions. They are fickle beasts. They mostly react to the market feelings and are in a lot of way quaterly focused. What we are seeing now is the combination of WallStreet feeling gloomy after the rate hikes and tech companies 2022 results being under target. They are taking actions to try to protect their stock price.
From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
If you look at the economy as a whole, signs of a major recession are not there yet. SMEs are still the heart of the economy and the bankruptcies rate remains historically low. Unemployement is also really low. Manufacturing is doing great. Energy prices are far from bad in the USA. Inflation is high but rate hikes seem to be working.
I'm not an oracle. I can't predict the future. I won't tell you there won't be a recession especially in a particularly volatile international context. What I can tell you is that currently the signs don't point to us being doomed.
> From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
I'd also add that all of the bets made to expand their TAM's haven't paid off.....
Amazon - Brick and Mortar Retail
Google - Everything other than search
Tesla - Self Driving
Facebook - VR/Metaverse
At some point, investor expectations will tell you to stop investing in future ideas
The PMI is not a manufacturing indicator. It’s a diffusion index on the value of stocks. What you are saying is that the stock market is contracting after seeing a rise at the beginning of the year (also zerohedge, come on, I thought we were having a serious discussion here).
So, if the big companies hire 40-50k new employees each over the past 2 years, and then fire 10-20k, leaving a net 30-40k employee gain for the past 2 years... that means recession?
People have no context for these layoffs. This is not a "recession layoff". This has nothing in common with 2009, which I suppose many of you are too young to remember.
In 2009, we lost a million jobs to layoffs in one month. You'd turn on the news and see 200k jobs disappear in front of your face, so you'd turn it off.
The big tech companies laying off 1/5 of the pandemic boom hires is not a recession to me.
People over here say there's no recession. But believing HN's assertions on global economy makes as much sense as believing it's opinions on Medical or Science threads.
Global growth is projected to decelerate sharply this year, to its third weakest pace in nearly three decades,
overshadowed only by the 2009 and 2020 global recessions. This reflects synchronous policy tightening aimed
at containing very high inflation, worsening financial conditions, and continued disruptions from the Russian
Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. Investment growth in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs)
is expected to remain below its average rate of the past two decades. Further adverse shocks could push the
global economy into yet another recession. Small states are especially vulnerable to such shocks because of their
reliance on external trade and financing, limited economic diversification, elevated debt, and susceptibility to
natural disasters. Urgent global action is needed to mitigate the risks of global recession and debt distress in
EMDEs. Given limited policy space, it is critical that national policy makers ensure that any fiscal support is
focused on vulnerable groups, that inflation expectations remain well anchored, and that financial systems
continue to be resilient
The difference between the average random asshole on the street and the World Bank is there’s at least a chance that the asshole on the street won’t have a 20+ year history of being wrong about literally everything.
The World Bank is and has always been a tool of the power structure to protect the interests of multinational capital. It’s advice is always the same: don’t spend too much money helping people so we can make sure you can always pay back first world banks and governments and don’t seize any of our friends villas or mines.
You realize that’s literally what the last sentence of the quote you posted says right? The World Bank has exactly one job.
What if most companies have no long term vision and just follow the trend, like when they all hired hundred/thousands of employees during covid for seemingly no reasons
During covid the demand for online services went way up, media consumption, remote work and study. They had to try to increase their share of it and now they scale back.
Companies are made of individuals whose interest isn't necessarily aligned with that of its shareholders. For example, Google and Microsoft are run by executives who only own a tiny percentage of their respective company's stock, so they have little to lose by gambling their company's money on over hiring. If these new hires are useful, they get even bigger bonuses, but if they don't they won't be punished too harshly because basically every other executive made the same "mistake".
On the other hand, Zuckerberg would rather create the metaverse rather than cash out on Facebook, so he decided to throw unlimited money at it until he received severe pressure from shareholders.
I’m with you, though with a fraction less pessimism.
I’m not buying into the collusion to compress wages or unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories. These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do. Why don’t we assume they’re a leading indicator of things to come? Why do these moves apparently only make sense when everyone else has finally come to the same conclusion?
The silver linings for me so far has been that a) for many of the bigger companies the reduction is only bringing them back to their pre-pandemic levels of still very huge companies and b) the open lists of laid off people some of these companies have produced at first glance seem to skew very heavy towards recruiters/HR and marketing. Which makes sense if you’re not expecting much growth over the next year.
Even if you don't know the economy will slow down, the uncertainty alone will still make companies extra careful.
Where a lot of IT budgets were only guidelines, they are becoming rules now. Layoffs send a message internally and externally about it. Any reasonably sized company will have people who aren't really contributing anything, this is just an opportune moment to cut some of them and avoid the backlash since "everyone else is doing it".
> These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do.
If that were true, I'd expect them to have hugely profitable proprietary trading desks, which does not seem to be the case?
> However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment; layoffs in one section of one sector are not a particularly good signal for recession one way or another.
>>The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment;
Where?
Every chart I have seen shows total number of positions below pre pandemic levels, work force participation is down
Sure unemployment U3 numbers are still low on a national aggregate in the US, but regionally (including Silicon Valley) they are spiking heavily, and that is after they heavily manipulate the U3 to make unemployment look good by not counting HUGE numbers of people that are unemployed.
So I disagree that employment end of the economy looks good unless you cherry pick data
(It is true that the _percentage employed_ hasn't recovered after covid; given the US's aging population it's possible that that figure will _never_ rise to where it was again. As they say, you can prove anything with statistics....)
This can't be used as an indicator for a variety of reasons. In short, a decline in the the labor force participation rate can be good or bad, depending on the reason people are dropping out of the workforce. If a dual-income family now has the option to earn enough to support the family on one income, then having one person drop out is a sign of economic health. Basically, we don't want the entire nation to be forced to look for work.
Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
>>Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
Or they cant find jobs that pay what they need/want or have working conditions they need/want while using government programs, gig economy, under the table employment, etc to cover their costs.
I have been in more than one meeting where people are discussion why they can not find people... No Exec ever talks about not paying enough, or not providing the correct benefits, etc.
They also look at superficial things, not "hey maybe we do not pay enough"
How many places that pay peanuts that you’ve been to in the last couple years don’t have “help wanted” on their front door? Or a sign on the street? Or a billboard?
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
The tech industry famously over inflated once before in the original dotcom boom. This just seems like another correction.
I don't think the tech industry is big enough to trigger a global recession on its own, but then again, the financial industry have a herd and panic mentality, so perhaps it could trigger a sell-off for no real economic reason.
The recession would be triggered by the end of cheap money we've had since around 2010. The absurd spike in the tech industry's P/E ratios would just be one of the first indicators that situation was getting wonky.
I keep getting reminded of that scene from the movie Margin Call about the 2008 financial crisis (great movie by the way):
There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.
The recession might not be here yet, but it’s a lot easier to reduce costs before it hits.
Okay, but why would these companies secretly know something that the rest of us doesn‘t? Maybe they are preparing, but it doesn’t tell us more about whether that‘s justified or not.
Tech companies have seen compensation skyrocket with no end in sight. Everybody laying off a bunch of people at the same time to flood the market means they all need to compete far less for people. Suddenly "hey I've got another offer, can you beat it?" becomes less feasible.
This is an industry-wide emergent strategy to limit compensation.
Notice how these companies are still hiring after the layoffs.
I’m sure. All of these companies use the same criteria and went on a hiring binge, partially to deny employees to competitors. It’s a like a gas station pump war.
End of the day, when growth slows, it’s hard to justify some of these salaries, becuase you can’t raise prices forever. I lost an employee who is getting paid $450k by AWS to do customer engineer type work. It’s just not worth that to me, and we hired a replacement recent graduate who went to a school that FANG companies will bin him for. The replacement makes $125k, is great, and will probably be with us for 3-4 years.
They were printing money and dealing with chaos. A friend of mine in sales booked multiple deals with a phone call (ie. Give me X widgets by Y date) for >$10M in April-June 2020. Exceeded his yearly goal before end of April.
The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools alone bought almost a million iPads.
Agreed, I don’t think it is productive to have conspiratorial mindset where there is a group of insiders who have access to a key piece of information and then engage in Kremlinology to decipher their macroeconomic views.
To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
The biggest companies have some very strong analysis departments which warn them about these kinds of possible scenarios (recession, etc.), and the companies act with this information.
There were already signs of a global economic recession elsewhere (Asia, Europe to a lesser extent), with different signs (food and energy prices, even before the war). So the companies started to take defensive action before the downturn became visible on their side of the pond.
Now it's looming at the horizon, not like the dotcom bubble or the previous recession(s). I guess it'll be slower, hence it'll be longer and will cut slow and deep.
"recession" talk provides cloud cover for many a company to pare back and prune products, processes, and people in a way that would normally cause more out cry. It's not that such changes aren't needed, but they can pile up until a forcing function triggers a hard look and it's acceptable to do them.
>>I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession
What if left to convince you, most of them have publically stated that is one of the reasons, and the economic indicators are all there.. I am not sure why people keep denying this reality, it is just faith in government that keeps denying it?
> I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
I don't how this 'indication of a recession' could not have been more clearer since November 2021 as predicted a year ago. [0] We were already in a recession [1] and it just took time for the indicators to take effect.
I guess now the people denying about a looming recession are now 'preparing for a recession' which is a bit too late for that.
I'd still bet we avoid a recession in the US, even if certain industries (like tech) contract sharply.
It's easy to forget tech is not the economy at large. What I think most people would classify as tech jobs — working in “internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals” — are less than 0.3% of total payrolls employment.
But tech makes up ~26% of the S&P 500 market cap, so tech gets a lot more media attention because the companies are so valuable.
Layoffs are terrible for anyone involved. But even with the roughly 200K layoffs at public and startup tech firms in 2022 and 2023 so far, that's .001% of total US payroll employment.
I'm convinced industry captains are given stronger indicators from the government that a recession is happening. Yes, they have amazing advisors that could feel this out naturally. I also think senators and representatives tell them directly to prepare before the average consumer gives this forethought.
It's in the government's best interest to support those with capital. All the rest of us be damned.
Maybe. But it's important to bear in mind that when a CEO tells the public something, their goal is to manipulate the public in a way that is beneficial to their company. They might happen to be telling the truth, but that's incidental.
So when Jeff Bezos says, "Batten down the hatches," he's not actually saying it to prepare us for recession.
I was in the “global recession” camp all last year but I’ve started to doubt that.
I don’t see any real economic impact to companies except Meta but that was them losing market share. Otherwise all these layoffs feel like hangover recovery from over hiring the last 3 years.
I think we will be fine. Hiring won’t be like the last 3 years but I also don’t think we are going to go through the Bust 2.0.
"Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially, it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street. "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"
Hadn't looked at it this way. I usually interpret it as a meaningless phrase that everyone expects to be made. How often does "taking the full responsibility" have a real consequence for the top-level management? I would expect several of them to resign and the salaries to be used to pay 5x the number of employees that are way more productive than management anyway.
Yeah, like firing 12k folks isn't the full responsibility of the CEO in the first place?
Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"
I think calling them cockups is a stretch. A few points:
- Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down.
- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
- It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone else is doing it.
>- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.
How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.
Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.
The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6 months, I don't think it's a stretch.
Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton from your fridge a cockup.
From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think cock up is probably a euphemism.
"Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down."
I believe that this is a huge competitive advantage for the USA over most of the world. It's not pleasant, but many of us benefit, on net.
I agree with others here pointing that firing people isn't necessary a sign of having mismanaged the company.
However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging your company is going through rough times would be things like postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would be classy.
Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits. Lead through example.
Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
That would still ultimately be spun as greed and proof they were getting pay increases when everyone else was suffering - at least, that's what happened in the UK when a bunch of CEOs didn't get their normal bonuses during Covid. This substantially decreased the total pay of the average FTSE 100 CEO that year, and once it returned to normal every news outlet ran articles about how their pay had increased by a massive amount in the last year alone whilst ordinary workers' pay had decreased over the last decade. Of course, it was really only their pay returning to normal after dropping substantially over the last year or two in a way that normal workers' pay had not, and the actual numbers in the report this way all based on put their pay at lower than it was a decade ago.
Still, the press managed to turn them taking a temporary cut in pay that ordinary workers didn't suffer from into them getting an increase in pay that ordinary workers didn't get.
What if you could run an ad empire without employees? The human component of marginal cost in that business is zero. From capital's perspective, the final stage of perfection would be just a CEO serving the legal requirement of one existing. Surely that person wouldn't have to fret about their bonus...
The "FAANGs" or "MAFANGs" of today are the Standard Oil / US Steel / Westinghouse / etc of yesterday. Bezos, Musk, Pichai, and all would fit in really well with Rockefeller, Astor, Carnegie of yesterday. With one big exception: at least Carnegie and Astor and Rockefeller created enduring arts, sciences, and public spaces of good. The billionaires of today are primarily takers, with perhaps Gates as a notable exception.
Over-hiring and then firing in big rounds once a decade can sometimes be better... It can be a good way to get the low performers out without fostering a culture of 'must make the metrics look good or I'll be fired'.
>It can be a good way to get the low performers out
It can if individual performance is considered in who gets the axe in mass layoffs. From my understanding, individual performance usually isn't a huge factor in who's laid off.
In my experience it depends on how much of a general share price vs technical pivot is involved in the announcement.
Typically some business functions will be shut down and merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let go.
Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected lists that go up through various meetings where the exact numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists - at least in a well managed company - are based on operational need and regular, standardised, legally defensible, performance appraisals [0].
[0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal systems.
This wasn't that. This was a case of 1) over-hiring during covid, and 2) Google has expanded amoeba-like for the past decade (outside of Ads) and the result is that there are thousands of people, hundreds of projects and dozens of product areas that are staffed with people who A) were excellent hires at the time, but B) due to organizational drift over time, are no longer in roles that play to their strengths or allow them & Google to bring expansive new features & products to the market. I'm sure there are some low performers, but the vast majority of affected employees here (including a lot of the ones who are/were low performers) are that way because of management decisions over time, not because they are individually "bad" employees. Fwiw, getting into this state is partly due to over-exuberant hiring and investment in new things over the past several years, where free money and huge profits made it relatively low risk to do so.
I know but in general when you admit something like that, people also do expect like some preventive actions for the future.
All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location.
They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself.
Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?
It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
He said "I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here"
You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility" means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my bad". Nothing more nothing less.
If you look at the dictionary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the other one.
Taking full responsibility here should have involved firing himself along the 12K. This is the norm in many cultures, resigning (or even killing yourself, sadly) when being responsible for a major failure.
He said responsibility, not consequences. I am still not sure what people expect CEOs to do in these situations to "punish" themselves. Google is not going bankrupt, they are still wildly profitable, they overhired and are adjusting headcount by a few percent.
It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to the leader in these situations.
He could resign. That would be "taking responsibility." Just saying you take responsibility isn't actually taking responsibility. Not in a way that matters to anyone anyway.
If he wasn't planning on resigning, he should have just left that bit out of the statement. It comes off as empty and tone def.
Forcing a leader to resign over a bad bet that is not permanently damaging to the company will only make things worse. That leader still has value to the company, and is probably one of the best persons to learn from and fix their mistakes. If you fire a CEO, you throw the stock market into chaos and all of your other leaders become focused on trying to get the CEO job instead of doing their own jobs. You went from one problem to multiple problems.
Donate 90% (or everything above $2M, whichever amount is higher) of their wealth to the people dismissed, and never take on a leadership position again.
If there were ever a shortage of CEOs because they felt they were being treated unfairly, let me be the first to volunteer. I'd be happy to suffer as they do.
If you ever have to lay people off, you can no longer hold a leadership position? If you hire someone, it's permanent with the exception of their wrongdoing?
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It's a company, and it is publicly traded. Thinkable consequences are plentiful and unspecific. Everything that can be imagined will be reflected in how well it is doing.
What I imagine you are actually asking for are not "consequences" but "punishment". Which is understandable: People are hurt in this and where is the justice. But if we start to think it only be fair to personally hurt people who (to the best of our knowledge) inflict pain while acting legally and only as a side effect (while trying to do what is best in terms of their job description) we are on a somewhat weird path, where the more responsibility you have, the more okay it is to have you personally suffer.
For that, I am not willing to "punish" a CEO who is exercising their legal power, because they did something other people dislike. The responsibility is theirs, which, apparently, as a general concept, we are also okay with as long as it goes smoothly.
If we (as a society) think that what we have right now what we want, we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than a few years at most.
> People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
What is your evidence for that?
> The concept of being a lifer is very rare.
This was the norm up until the neoliberal era. The trend of everyone becoming a gig worker only to be made obsolete by technology is a choice not destiny.
unionization normalizes pay across workers. you trade upside for being a “superstar” for job security. it’s not a controversial opinion.
tech compensation is not normalized. there’s pay bands but it’s historically been wide and “superstar” candidates are enticed with highly variable equity comp.
Both my parents worked for unions and they would be paid based on seniority and established credentials all negotiated by the union. They had a pension, retirement medical benefits, things most people would kill for right now. They also had bargaining power which only the "superstar" employees have today. The majority are exploited all the way down to the gig worker.
The union system seems more transparent than random hot shot new graduates making triple the salary of a productive senior worker that has dedicated many years to the firm. Nobody really knows how much these people are compensated or why. Every day there is a new "it" thing (microservices last month, crypto last week, generative predictive transformers this week). It is only okay, because the silicon valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tells us so.
All I hear about on this forum is how there is a lack of transparency with hiring, firing, and promotion. Complaints about diversity hires, nepotism, old and young workers, interview requirements, credentials, mass layoffs, etc., etc. The system we have now is completely broken.
These comments show up on every one of these layoff letters, but what do people actually want to see?
The CEO resigning would only send the company further into turmoil and tank the stock (which is a significant portion of employee salary) even further down.
Taking accountability doesn’t mean someone needs to suffer drastic consequences.
I think it's there just so no one infers the opposite. It's not unheard for executives to blame everyone else. Pichai is just affirming that he's not blaming anyone else.
This is good management now, but poor management before now. To paraphrase "Manager Tools": Layoffs are the consequence of management's failing to accurately judge market conditions.
Wow, that's salty! Mismanagement compared to what? An omniscient entity that understood exactly what global advertisement demand and capital costs would look like in advance? The real world is messy and runs on estimates for everything. If Google is 6% off on their estimate for human resources, it should not be labelled 'mismanagement'.
Management goes beyond C-suite. Upper management makes predictions of their needs, their productivity, what they achieve and don't all the time, it's literally a job req. My org has consistently less than 2 percent error in predictions while growing.
Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
In the 90s I worked in software development company. We constantly struggled with not having enough people for all the work we were getting so there was overtime involved. On plus side it paid good bonuses to employees on minus side it resulted with people being overstressed. So at one point I asked the owner/CEO why the fuck are we doing this? He said something like "when the other companies fire people because of downturns we don't".
No, all companies underhire or overhire, sometimes both in different departments. There are companies where firing 20% would not result in any efficiency loss, and ones where hiring another 20% would result in 100% efficiency gain.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
He doesn't say it's going to be a punishment or a reward :). I'd bet on the latter. Lower operational cost! Increased stock value! Beefy bonus! Sundar takes all...
I mean, they are fully responsible for those decisions that led to the layoffs. Being responsible for something doesn't imply that there are consequences.
They overhired during the pandemic with the hopes that it was a permanent shift in the e-commerce space, and are now laying off employees when that didn't happen. Nobody else is responsible for that decision but the leadership.
I was also under the impression that working for FAANGs was done because they paid best, had the best perks, had interesting work, and were the most prestigious. I don't think that "job security" was even in the top 5 reasons for taking a FAANG job for most employees.
Probably not - Apple laid off internal recruiter contrators in August 2022 as part of a plan to reduce hiring which was already much lower than the other big tech companies. For example in 2020 and 2021, Alphabet increased their workforce by 13% and 15%. Meta increased their workforce by 30% and 22%. Apple on the other hand only increased by 7% and 4% in those same years.
I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths.
Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around.
Net income for that quarter was almost 14 billion dollars, and net income for "that year" was almost 67 billion dollars.
Things are in decline, sure, but clearly this is a company that can actually afford to keep "great" people that they "love" working with employed, so "affecting Googlers lives" doesn't have to "weight heavily" on anyone.
Sorry, but these antics require revolution. Not a friendly chat with the brand imagery wizards. Not a "well just use DuckDuckGo".
It's rare to encounter a whole "class" of people more desperately deserving barbarians at the gates of their tower.
> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths.
There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision" and it's partly ceremony for the sake of appearances - if you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is using this language, that's a problem with you, not with them.
It's like being indignant when a friend or a colleague replies with "I'm fine, thanks" when they aren't fine, or when they say "I can't complain" when they're in fact capable of complaining - it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.
It's because of an asymmetry in role. As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up. You face consequences. Highlighting the fact that Sundar is responsible for this is saying two things- yes they were his decisions and it's his job to get them right, but secondly, he's going to face no consequences for getting that decision wrong. Instead, the employees- who clearly aren't responsible are going to face the consequences. So it points to a broken system, for the masses, you take responsibility and you take the consequences, for the elite you take the "responsibility" but the masses will still face the consequences.
Of course he faces consequences for getting that wrong. He's losing the services of 12k (soon to be former) employees and the costs it takes to separate them. Those employees are now job searchers, but they were able to take advantage of months or years of Google's infamously adequate pay and benefits. They shouldn't have any trouble finding jobs with Google on their resume.
I get the impression from your writing (and others in this thread) that you feel Google owes something to it's employees other than adequate compensation and a mutually acceptable working environment. That's not how (US) companies work. The CEO has obligations to the board of directors (to run the company in a way they approve) and to the shareholders (to be profitable). No obligation exists to employ as many people for as long as possible, particularly when to do so would impact the aforementioned actual obligations of CEOs. This is why layoffs happen.
When labor is cheap and business is booming, you hire. When labor expenses increase or business declines, you fire. Sometimes that means layoffs to hit quarterly goals. Sometimes that means your five year strategy has a pandemic and economic downturn happen in year three and you have to downscale. The CEO has to take responsibility for that, as he does for everything the company does, but any apology relating is simply a socially graceful admission he lacks omniscience.
Wall St usually looks at cost reductions favourably, so his share options will likely go up making him many more millions. Those are the consequences for him.
(Edit: Before the obvious replies of "but but Google stock is already down 30%", the whole market is down over the last year.)
This was a point that was brought up after the Meta layoffs. Yes the executives lost a lot of money before the layoffs - but they also benefited the most from the post layoff bounce! And none of them were laid off…
> As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up. You face consequences.
Is this really true? For software devs specifically I don't think it's common for someone to get fired when they ship code with a bug in it. Or when they make a production change which causes an outage, even if that outage costs millions of dollars in losses and an untold amount of reputational damage.
I've seen it happen to engineers who were bad at their jobs and aren't socially savvy. If you make people like you, it's hard to get fired for performance from what I've seen. However, the company I work for is very intense and I don't think is normal in how often people are fired. It's a little scary, but i kinda like it. It's really frustrating working with people who don't know what they're doing.
n = 1, but I've messed up a decent amount and never been fired or even laid off in over 15 years. Never seen anyone else mess up (in an accidental way) and end up getting fired for it, either.
> As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up
I'd hate to work somewhere like this. When you fuck up, you take responsibility, you fix it and you ensure no one can fuck up the same way. You don't just fire people who fuck up, or people won't ever do anything for you.
You can tell the places that do this immediately: every action is surrounded by 10x the effort of paper pushing to ensure that the “right person” is fired when the thing goes wrong (which it will, because such organizations are incapable of institutional learning).
It seems like this model would say that Google should not hire without an ironclad assurance that they will never need to do layoffs. Is that fairer - to never employ people in the first place?
> So it points to a broken system, for the masses, you take responsibility and you take the consequences.
What's should happen, but it won't is that the responsibility for hiring too many people and facing a change of perspective should be to have to keep these people event if it means a decline of profit, as long as they don't face bankruptcy they can take the loss and move on.
That's why there are labor laws and worker unions, so the asymmetry can shift a bit to the employee side.
But he didn't. Kind of like how you might get an estimate wrong, it doesn't mean you made an error. Operational decision making are best-guess / heuristic by nature - and he never said he made a mistake in anticipating the economic reality that happened.
The best part about people who take every word literally and demand punishment is that no punishment will ever satisfy all of them.
It wouldn’t matter if Sundar took a pay cut (like Tim Cook) because the same people would say he’s still worth hundreds of millions. It wouldn’t matter if he fired himself because there would be some other, equally fallible human being in the same role that he vacated. That person would be capable of making the same mistake Sundar did.
Have these people never worked in a real organisation where people make mistakes? When an engineer causes an incident, we fixed it and then did a review to understand how we can improve the process to prevent such an incident in future. We didn’t point fingers, we didn’t demand punishment.
Here’s the thing - Sundar is still probably the best person to helm Google, despite this mistake. In fact, a person who has had to lay off thousands will definitely think twice before going on a hiring spree in future. Exactly the sort of person you want in charge.
> When an engineer causes an incident, we fixed it and then did a review to understand how we can improve the process to prevent such an incident in future
Yes, sure most of the time its the process's fault. But not always. The big issue is that unlike an incident review where agreed, measurable fixes will be put in place, in business there is no such thing.
Sure, Sundar admits that he made the wrong call. But, why? what information lead to that call, what changes are going to be made to how decisions are made in the future? how can the rest of the company be sure that this is a one time thing, and not a systemic information bias.
I assume there’s been a post-mortem for this incident, considering the cost to the company in terms of morale, pain for former employees, damage to hiring brand etc. They’ve probably learned lessons from this so they don’t repeat them in future.
It’s hard to make the results of the post-mortem public because most of this would be decisions taken by specific people, instead of systems misfiring. They would not want to publicly throw the people under the bus.
> I assume there’s been a post-mortem for this incident
That requires trust. The sysadmin team where I work have a weekly incident review, its vaguely public and although I don't often go, trust is built because results are not private or hidden.
> It’s hard to make the results of the post-mortem public because most of this would be decisions taken by specific people,
Public yes, but wider inside the company, less so (there are some caveats.) but as for throwing people under a bus, that's never the aim for an incident review. Sure if someone clearly acted with malice, then perhaps action might be taken.
The point of incident reviews is to work out what happened, why, and if its likely to happen again. The general rule is that if you allow people to speak honestly in a review, and not punish them after, you get a better result.
> In fact, a person who has had to lay off thousands will definitely think twice before going on a hiring spree in future. Exactly the sort of person you want in charge.
How about someone who doesn't have to lay off thousands to before they figure this out? Someone with imagination and foresight? Maybe they would be more of an exact match.
Yes, I’d love to find the person who has never made a mistake to be the CEO. Undoubtedly you must be speaking from personal experience of being infallible?
Personally, I don't see taking a paycut or leaving a position of power to be "taking a responsibility". The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary. If you just reduce to the baseline, it's not really a punishment. Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.
> The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary.
This is quite funny, since the 'victims' we're talking about are some of the highest paid people in an already highly paying profession.
> Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.
Also, we should not have error handling because we only hire competent developers and therefore our app doesn't crash, ever. This is clearly absurd.
Plus, the economic situation did change. Calling Satya incompetent for making mistakes while steering a trillion dollar company feels a bit like the management equivalent of "I could build StackOverflow in a weekend".
I am not sure you understood the argument I am making. At least I am confused what you're trying to argue.
All I am saying is this: If I am giving you a handsome reward for a job, and it turns out you are doing it badly, then giving you just half the reward is not a punishment. Even giving you no reward is not a punishment (because you got a chance to do a well-rewarded job). Punishment, to mean something, would be losing more than you would get for doing the acceptable job.
Your argument seems to be that punishment only exists on an absolute scale (or relative to the overall population, not relative to the individual). Am I understanding it correctly?
If so, I heavily disagree and hold the opposite opinion: Punishment (and reward for that matter) are heavily individual. E.g., Only playing with a playstation for 30 mins a day might be a punishment for one kid, as they were playing 2~8h a day before, and a reward for another, as they haven't had access to that before. It is relativ to their life situation and independent of general playstation playtime.
But there are cases where punishment is somewhat absolute, mostly for severe infractions like violent crime. Even then, the degree to what a sentence might feel as a punishment might heavily diverge based on the person receiving it. E.g., a homeless person without a job might feel very different about going to prison for 5 years than a highly paid investment manager.
Of course the punishment should be considered on absolute scale, based on typical (or perhaps even lowest status) people in the society, because it is ultimately administered by the society! Otherwise justice would lose any semblance of fairness.
The point being made is that there are no negative consequences to being responsible, so it's an empty statement. It doesn't even mean anything. They're making the decision because they're being rewarded for it by maintaining a certain level of profitability in the financial reporting game.
>The point being made is that there are no negative consequences to being responsible
What "negative consequences" would you like to see? You want to see executives fired over something like this? How do you think that would affect future hiring practices?
Personally, I would like to see C-Level executives financially responsible for their decisions. Instead of firing a percentage of his staff, he should be sent a bill. With great reward should come great risk; at least thats how it works for the rest of us.
Is that true? If you make your SF salary of >$200k and manage to down production, are you sent a bill for lost revenue?
I don't think so. In fact, since CEOs are (usually) mostly compensated in stock and their job is to create shareholder value, their income is likely far more related to their performance than for your average engineer.
If you cost the company enough money, you will be let go. It is true that you probably will not be sent a bill (although that can happen depending on the circumstances).
The C-Level executive suite, however, will see no repercussions, even though, in reality they are ultimately responsible for overseeing the hiring, training and compliance processes. Even when there are shareholders and a board of directors to answer to (which isn't always) consequences are rarely seen.
In fact, I don't see how they could ever truly be held responsible for anything that goes wrong with the company, but they sure do win (with bonuses and related comp) when things go well while employees usually do not.
It's so wild seeing people making claims like these on hn, considering people here also get treated similarly. Are you going to get fired from your job for minor mistake? Would you go work for a company that will fire devs over minor issues? Why should CEO be treated differently?
I'm not sure what's wild about it. As far as I've seen, what I said is entirely true.
- If someone very low on the totem pole (ex. factory worker) is late a few times, they're far more likely to be fired than someone higher up.
- If a low/mid level manager at a company screws up a project so bad that a bunch of people under them get layed off, they're far more likely to lose their job then a VP that does the same.
The point isn't that everyone should get laid off for every mistake. The point is that, the higher up you are, the less likely you are to face _any_ consequences at all for any mistakes. And it's also not a certainly; just a probability.
It's wild because it's completely separated from realities of the business. If you fired CEO over any minor mistake (overhiring sucks, but for CEO it is a minor mistake), the company would die much sooner, because people wouldn't want to work there. You as a developer also are quite high on that pole, and you (probably) won't get fired if you bring down prod for a moment due to mistake in migrations, why should CEO be treated differently?
me> The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it seems to matter how well you actually do your job.
you> If you fired CEO over any minor mistake
Do you see the disconnect here? At no point did I call for a CEO to be fired over a minor mistake. Rather, I pointed out that, no matter the size of the mistake, the higher up you are the smaller the repercussions. You are responding with what is a perfect example of a straw man argument.
To be clear; no, I don't think a CEO that makes a small mistake should be fired. But I also don't think that a CEO that causes the downfall of a major company should walk away and into the arms of the next company, doing the same job, for just as much (or more) money. And, in between those two, there's a large area where repercussions are currently few and far between.
> What "negative consequences" would you like to see?
None. But if taking responsibility for someone else's injury just involves saying that you're taking responsibility, it's nothing but playing with words.
If your grandmother got sick, I don't think you should be punished. But if you take responsibility for your grandmother getting sick, in English people will expect that you're at her house taking care of her until she's well.
Considering that thousands of people just lost their jobs through no fault of their own, one more who did screw up massively doesn't seem like it should change much, right?
"I don't regret what I did, I don't think it was wrong, I would do it again, I haven't been caught BUT I take full responsibility for the death of the victim."
2. Being held accountable for something, and facing its consequences (e.g. compensating for damage)
It's possible that someone can cause something while avoiding its consequences, deferring the responsibility of making up to someone else. This usually happens due to asymmetry of information or power.
That said, we cannot say definitely in this particular instance that Sundar could have foreseen the financial circumstances or economic crisis of any kind, and it's also possible that Sundar might resign or get fired in the future as a consequence. Still, one can argue that the phrase "I'm taking full responsibility of [...]" is a bit overused in general, and used in a rhetorical manner without actually meaning it.
It’s because guy „taking full responsibility” will still be able to carry on whith his life like nothing happened, having financial security for him and everybody in his family to live off the interest of his bank for generations, and people he just laid off will now need to wonder how many weeks or months will their savings last them before they can find a next gig letting them maintain their living. Or maybe thats impossible and they’ll have to relocate somewhere cheaper, potentially uprooting all their and their partnere and kids life and trying elsewhere?
>It’s because guy „taking full responsibility” will still be able to carry on whith his life like nothing happened
Why is it that some people believe that people reach some level of success and become inhuman, robotic automatons? He had to fire a bunch of people. Have you ever had to fire someone? It sucks. I'm sure he's not happy about it. What else do you expect him to say or do?
>having financial security for him and everybody in his family to live off the interest of his bank for generations
If we're going to play the game of relative wealth, I don't think you're going to find much sympathy for the laid-off Google engineers; these people aren't going to be at the food bank any time soon.
Why is it that some people make up internal states for people that they've never met? He may have fought for months internally in order to lay off 12K people. He may be disappointed to the point of despair that it wasn't 20K, as he may have originally recommended.
Being against making up callousness shouldn't be responded to by making up concern.
> There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision" and it's partly ceremony for the sake of appearances
Yes, we know, on the left we have a word for doing that, it's called "lying."
> if you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is using this language, that's a problem with you, not with them.
The point of the comment is that we _should_ make it a _them_ problem.
> It's like being indignant when a friend or a colleague replies with "I'm fine, thanks" when they aren't fine, or when they say "I can't complain" when they're in fact capable of complaining - it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.
Yeah, sorry, but if someone does white lies and can't communicate, they ain't a friend.
> perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.
I think that depends on how you view the situation. If you see it as twelve thousand people have just had their personal and financial circumstances very significantly disrupted, then this choice of language is very much not normal. I suspect that most normal people would be of the view that taking personal responsibility for such a damaging act would normally be accompanied by actually demonstrating some personal contrition, or accepting a sanction of some kind. I don't think that this pov is infantile or indignant.
If you see it as an exercise in cost reduction then I guess the way it is expressed is pretty normal - but only because abstracting-out the human consequences of such business decisions has been intentionally normalised by corporations.
I suspect what Pichai is really saying here is that he accepts responsibility for the hiring decision because he is taking credit for the firing decision. It's as simple as that. For him, at least.
Also to add to your point, this "I" is very specific as opposed to "we leadership", it is out there in public. Board and/or shareholder can use this to cut Sundar's salary/bonus or whatever that is personal to him. Theoretically, this statement can also be used to fire or demote him, or sue him and not Google.
All hypothetical I know, but he easily could have used some other non-committal words.
> are not "taking responsibility" to the slightest degree
They’re not atoning to the internet’s satisfaction. But they are taking responsibility by saying as much.
The infantilism charge is accurate. Taking responsibility doesn’t require symbolic atonement like standing in a corner. Recognition is sufficient. If they deleted that line, would anyone be satisfied?
> it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.
HN is going to be a tough place for you. A mild, undiagnosed case of autism is not uncommon around here and a non-trivial amount of people seem to mistake that as some superpower for "seeing things how they really are".
I'm more inclined to agree with parent for the reasons stated by child.
I would be more impressed if they did something like this:
1. internally decide we need to trim the fat
2. Announce the problem and what they need to target, and give the employees a deadline to hit that target
3. Encourage employees to look for new jobs on the job
4. or encourage people to take early retirement
4. or take the plunge on starting their own startup,
5. or let them switch to part time even. I'm sure many of these people are married and switch to their spouses insurance.
They all have Google on their resume, it's not going to take long. These companies are the top of the food chain, they could at least act like it.
This turns it back into every other business problem we solve day in and day out. The big dogs at the top are the deciders, and the ones at the bottom are the do'ers.
I would like to see him take responsibility for the Google Pay fiasco.
Here you have a perfectly good payments system, but between some combination of FOMO and reverse imperialism (writers like E.F. Schumacher have talked about inappropriate developed world technologies failing in the developing world, here is an example of the opposite) they wrecked it for themselves and their users.
I'd like to see some responsibility taken for this.
You're right, what they should say is, "Mea culpa! You just lost your house, your family will have to uproot its life, your credit rating is about to be ruined and we booted your ass out in the worst tech job market in a decade.
The good news is I can still afford two buy a new private G40 this year! Wahoo!"
> You just lost your house, your family will have to uproot its life, your credit rating is about to be ruined
Except nothing of this happened to me when I was laid off in 2020. And I was not making 500k/y, not even close. I have full sympathy to those who are getting laid off now, but I assume googlers will be fine.
My point is that a person who earns 500k/y and have Google in their resume will most likely suffer much less than many many others. Too much drama about it honestly.
Did ever a journalist tried to ask how they took responsibility? Had they faced difficulties in their lives or careers or they couldn't concentrate on Succession's finale and had to rewind?
Maybe taking responsibility actually means they did something very positive for the company within the rules of the game and expect a bonus? Are they referring to the events as a mistake they made or are they saying that they were able to grab the talent pool and didn't miss the opportunity?
After all, CEOs and workers have different responsibilities. Hiring and firing for the opportunity and change in conditions is CEOs job and maybe he takes responsibility for properly executing it? Maybe this is the money shot of a CEO reminding the investors that the upside from these actions are solely on him and wants a proper compensation?
"I take full responsibility for punching you in the nether regions. I hope you have a lovely day."
Taking full responsibility typically implies a negative impact on the person offering this. However, this has yet to be the case in tech layoffs.
I would prefer they were honest. CEOs simply overhired to take maximum financial advantage of COVID, and now they no longer need the people who helped them achieve record profits. However, it doesn't read as well in a corporate PR announcement to claim you milked COVID as much as you could.
During Covid, there was an increased demand for certain online services. As a result, companies hired additional permanent staff members to meet the extra demand. Instead, they could have chosen to hire these people on temporary contracts. Hiring staff on a temporary contract would have been more transparent.
In the end, this is a business decision, and it is fair enough. However, claiming responsibility while knowing full well they would make the exact same decision again in the future is a different matter.
I think your view is very simplistic and reductionist on how tech companies work. They are not not factories, they did not over hire to get boots on ground for support. They were hiring and creating brand new things with glee as stock and revenue soared.
Tech companies are "factories" of software products and features. During COVID, there was an increased demand for such products, justifying additional investments in new products or features to remain competitive. This required a wide variety of staff members.
Presumably at least some of them left a job to join Google. They now have no job, but might still have one had they not moved. It may very well be a tiny proportion of the total, of course.
> "The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.
I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also."
For most business people I come across, 80% of decisions of behaviour is imitating what other business people do. There is no rigourous fundamentals behind most of it
I think there's also some amount of "Other companies are laying off, and we secretly kind of like the idea of ranking and yanking, even if we don't need layoffs. So we'll use that already socialized economically driven layoff thing as cover."
Yes, exactly. I don't buy this "contagious" notion. It's simply a change in acceptable behavior. Everyone else is doing this objectionable thing, so suddenly it isn't as objectionable, relatively.
It's like looting. If you take any one looter out of the environment, it's unlikely that he would act. But when the crowd of a thousand gets going, well, he doesn't want to be left with nothing while everyone else is gaining. Gotta strike while the iron's hot.
The larger these tech companies get the more they behave like old tech, like IBM. When a company is publicly traded, shareholders are more important than employees. Silicon Valley and startups are too ingrained with the "IPO/acquisition or bust" mentality and post IPO employees want RSU's or stock grants as part of "total comp".
You say you want a revolution? One where the people at the top are accountable? One where pay is more equitable from the bottom line employee up to CEO? Then people should be starting workers cooperatives[0] and not corporations with a goal of an IPO. Employees having democratic control of their own company, its projects, profits, pay scales, maybe voting in the c-suite executives, what countries they'll do business with, etc.
This assumes democracy, giving everyone an equal vote, will have a net benefit outcome.
I do not believe this is the case. Companies are closer to an autocracy or tribunal (board of trustees, etc)
With everyone having a vote, either nothing will get done because it will be unorganized and the company will have no coherent vision or direction
Or, there will be an autocracy that inevitably forms, with someone ending up at the top and directing what’s to be voted on, to only give the illusion of power of the people.
Furthermore, if you’ve started a company, I don’t see why the people you’ve hired should take the company away from the original owner. That would be corporate “eminent domain”
It would have disastrous effects of companies high tailing it out of the US, and we’d end up cratering our economy.
A less extreme example of this is raising corporate taxes. The reality is, a company is going to try and reduce their tax liability as much as possible (like every person should do, really)
If the cost of moving a company for a better tax rate outweighs the cost of the move, they’ll do it. So raising corporate taxes will most likely have such an effect, taking jobs out of areas and moving them to a different state or country.
One caveat is if the whole modern world agrees to raise corporate taxes, but then there exists other potential problems
> Furthermore, if you’ve started a company, I don’t see why the people you’ve hired should take the company away from the original owner.
Did you read up on worker cooperatives at all? The concept is it is worker managed at its inception. I used the word democracy to convey that concept simply but it can be structured however the people that form it want it structured. It could be electing people onto committees that determine roadmaps, comp structure, etc. and they rotate out to other roles in the company per some rules the workers set up. It could be rules like total comp for highest paid must never exceed 8x of lowest paid and profits are shared, etc.
The ego centric "I started the company so I say what goes (and I get richest)" pyramid/triangle structure will eventually (if successful) lead to a giant megacorp that does layoffs of 12k people. Or gets bought out by a billionaire that layoffs 75% of staff. People on HN complain about these layoffs but then come in hot about total comp comparisons, RSU's, or complain about these large companies doing business with countries with rap sheets of human rights violations. You can't have it both ways.
What do you define as inception? Is forming the LLC as a solo dev taking contract work inception? Or is it when it hits 100 employees?
Committees and such already exist for companies. It seems like you’re suggesting more of regulation for companies.
Total comp for highest paid exec, that sounds closer to price ceilings which I don’t think the government should enforce (which, with a worker cooperative, the gov needs to step in at some point for enforcement)
This is the core of employee at will. Fight against that instead of changing the entire corporate structure. Other countries don’t have employee at will, and have min severances and such that are enforced. That sounds like it would produce closer to what you’re looking for (since it also incentivizes companies not to hire as wastefully)
I'm not talking about government regulating anything. Or saying all company structures should change, just that there are other options. When the company structure is formed instead of a S-corp/LLC structure there is something called a workers cooperative where the workers/employees have say in the company and its direction. I've only read about it so I'm sure there are legal structures involved for that setup. This isn't discussed in any business schools from what I gather so maybe some examples would help: https://institute.coop/examples-worker-cooperatives
A solo-dev starting contract work is a great example. They are the owner/operator of everything, profits, losses, direction. Say their work expands and they hire 3 other people - do those people have a say in direction/projects/clients and share profits/losses or are they just assigned tasks and paid for them? Think of a workers cooperative as more like a farmers coop where everyone gets a share of the literal fruit/veggies coming from the farm because they all worked it and have equity and they collectively decided what the crops were for that season.
Tech companies with stock options/RSU's for individual contributors are equity without any say in the company direction. If that company ends up laying off people because of bad management decisions (hiring too many, bad economic forecast, random projects, etc), the people hurt are the employees who had no say in the direction and usually the bad managers stay or have golden parachutes. Like I said earlier, I'm just suggesting an alternative structure perhaps one that doesn't answer to shareholders demand for infinite quarterly growth.
It's not a charity you know. If they fire those many people, it's because they're confident they can go on without them. There are countries in which the law is more protective of employees, and you can't fire them unless you have serious economic reasons, which is a good thing. But in a country like the US where this isn't the case, I wouldn't shift the moral responsibility to the company itself. Its goal is to make money.
I think it’s the dishonesty that irks me. And the poor human capital management of not planning and allocating.
I remember when GE and Microsoft did their ranking and culling the herd processes of perpetual annual layoffs. They got a lot of flak for that (and I think stopped) and I saw presentations from Google HR about how bad that was and they wouldn’t do that because they are so much smarter.
They are full of shit and would do it if they had better PR. And that’s what they are doing now.
Hiring and firing is expensive. Layoffs are short term corrections and long term inefficiencies.
Google is for profit. And they are managed poorly to have such a layoff. If they were smarter they wouldn’t have to do this. If they were smarter they would retrain and reassign to new projects.
I don’t work at Google. I applied years ago and didn’t even get an interview. I wouldn’t work there now.
I suspect that they only need about 10% of their workforce to make 95% of their earnings. So everyone left is probably wondering if their imposter syndrome is real or not.
I have no beef with that as long as BS about values and one family and the like is dropped. I think the only company that handles this +/- honestly is Netflix.
This is why I advise people to steal as much from their employers as possible. Last time I got laid off I stole 3 laptops, two company phones, and leaked some very embarrassing e-mails.
This may shock you, but a company is not a person.
Further, there is zero wrong with a company's goal for profit. This is like water, or food, for a living organism, without profit the company will wither, and die.
A company does not "owe you" a job. You do work, they pay, and at any time you or they may walk away.
No one is owed a job.
So what's the beef here? You want some sort of corporate socialism?
But that's the thing. So many highly skilled people, put to good use can multiply profits no? That's assuming that those 10k are not some part of their new stack ranking system.
How would you interpret massive layoffs when a company is not making losses?
To me, it looks like their existing projects aren't making the kind of money they want to make and they aren't interested in trying out more things that might give them a chance to make that kind of money.
So many highly skilled people, put to good use can multiply profits no?
No. If true, merely having skilled people would immediately lead to a win for any startup.
How would you interpret massive layoffs when a company is not making losses?
I would only care to try, to spend the hundreds or thousands of hours to analyze google's actions (instead of guessing), if I cared to invest heavily it.
To the above I will add, a well run company does not wait to lose money, but manages finances ahead of the game.
Beyond that, share price is how google acquires, yes? So if share price plummets, acquisition capability plummets...
Being put to good use is what multiplies profits imo. Don't get me wrong, i have seen with skilled/learned engineers, taking horrible technical decisions and causing their companies a lot of financial headaches. So I understand what you mean. Especially about "managing finances ahead of the game".
But at Google's scale (and profits..) it was a little weird to see(/not see?) no efforts of reorganization before all those layoffs.
> This may shock you, but a company is not a person.
Corporations are legally treated like people, that is the point actually [1]. Given that they have similar rights, it is not absurd to expect they also behave like people.
[1] (from wikipedia) A corporation is an organization authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and recognized as such in law for certain purposes.
I mean it's a nice metaphor on the surface, but it completely falls apart because in reality we do a lot of things to prevent rocks from falling and damaging us and our property. From signs that warn of falling rocks to netting/drapery and even elaborate electrical warning systems[0].
We work together and mitigate it. What does this mean for companies? I dunno, but given they are man-made and that societies and attitudes shift over time I suspect it doesn't at all mean that companies doing bad shit are an inevitable thing we should accept and that all we can do is to just try our best not to personally draw their ire.
You assume that nothing was done to mitigate this but you do not have that knowledge you only assume it. You assume there's some alternate universe available to us where everything is good for everyone all the time.
Let's look at the universe where Google becomes a social security service instead of a competitive entity. If only 12,000 people are on the bad side of that one we'd be improbably lucky.
They're part of the universe in the same way as rocks trees and gravity. Rocks and trees are not iherently good or bad except in our minds. They just 'are'. Same with companies. If a rock is falling you get out of the way using the agency available to you, if you fail you die. So it has always been so it will always be. To project qualities onto things that they don't really have, to expect the rock to swerve around you because of your internal system of beliefs is a recipie for stress, confusion and ultimately unhappiness.
Gulags and the breast ripper are part of this universe in the same way as rocks and trees and gravity. Rocks and trees are not iherently good or bad except in our minds
Firstly, rocks exist on mars, Companies and the gas chamber don't - because they are man-made.
Secondly, concepts of good and bad only exist in your mind to begin with.
Thirdly, if we followed this logic for the past 500 years, you would probably be enjoying the breast ripper for treason or something.
> You treat social constructs as immutable part of the universe like rocks and trees.
Fair point.
> If we lived in 1500's you'd replace the word 'company' with 'medieval lord'.
In some ways I see the equivalence because they both have power but luckily our justice system has evolved since then and there are more checks on power. We've also evolved from feudalism to whatever kind of capitalism we're in now. I think capitalism is a long way from perfect because it often doesn't align with our internal belief systems, partly because nobody has a complete view of the situation (even the CEO who cannot see the future) so our belief systems act on incomplete information and partly because there are perhaps not enough rules baked in to insert moralistic behaviour into it.
I don't think that turning companies into social security is a good way forward. Just have social security. Don't loose sight that if your economy isn't competitive in the world then all this becomes moot because you all loose.
Actually we don’t _just_ do that - we also put up fences, we reinforce parts of cliffs that need to stay up, we supply safety equipment to people who need to be there for some reason
Similarly with companies, we don’t just “avoid going near them” (is that actually your proposed solution - opting out of society?); we regulate, we unionise, we hold people accountable and make the most blatantly harmful behaviours illegal
> Companies aren't really people. You wouldn't call a rock falling from a cliff a psychopath, you just don't stand near cliffs.
Decisions in companies are made by people, not rocks. And their decisions aren't a product of laws comparable to theory of gravity. And saying that CEO had no other choice but to fall on head of unsuspecting employee and/or client is a lie.
People who have responsibilities to a wide veriety of people including the remaining 138,000 employees, who have a very great interest in the continued health of the company.
If only owners/management was so interested in well-being of the remaining 138,000 employees and instead of doing buybacks, saved that money for salaries. Also jobs were cut not to save Google from bankruptcy, it was done to raise profits and shares value. They would be fine with few $10^9 less, but they don't want some of the money, they want all the money. Infinite growth is impossible.
I agree they need to stop with the rhetoric... but I am sure we are not going to agree with why or what the end result of that change be
The statement should read "We saw the "day in the life" video, we know you were not doing enough work so now we are reducing head count because clearly you have too much free time"
Yes, employers are not babysitters, nor charities. There seems to have been a large number of bloat position where people simply mess around all day, an maybe attend a few meetings were they talk about working.... then pass the results of that meeting to another group to actually do work...
This is not a new concept, "middle management" style problems except in this case instead of have 5 people managers for every 1 worker, you end up with 5 "project managers" for ever 1 worker... same result too many people talking about work and not enough people actually doing work
>>Also, if so, do you really think that reducing force means reducing force were it's appropriate (triming true fat)?
Maybe, maybe not. Organizations are often prevented from simply trimming "true fat" due to regulations and other things that means layoffs have to occur in a more broad way. Overtime it will even out but the initial cut will probably not be that precise.
> There seems to have been a large number of bloat position where people simply mess around all day, an maybe attend a few meetings were they talk about working.... then pass the results of that meeting to another group to actually do work...
You are not entitled to your multi-six figure job, and no one should feel bad for you if the company decides you are an excess. If you are not creating enough value to justify your presence, the company has every right and frankly society should demand that you be let go, otherwise you are wasting all of our finite resources. Sure, Google should have been a bit more cautious in their hiring during the unsustainable COVID bubble conditions, but at least they are correcting the mistake now.
This sort of attitude is exactly what makes left coast limousine liberal tech workers so insufferable to the rest of the country. Thanks for living up to the stereotype
“If you are not creating enough value to justify your presence, the company has every right and frankly society should demand that you be let go”
That’s not how it works for probably 99% of employees. You do the job management gives to you and have almost no influence on whether you create value or not.
Punished for what? This is all going to plan. Big tech gambled that the pandemic would create huge opportunities and it hasn’t totally panned out. They always planned to lay people off in that situation.
This, punished for what ? In many big US companies, people are chilling as the revenue per employee is very high.
Additionally, the low interest rates situation pushed tech valuations higher, and these employees benefited from the situation by getting a higher salary and relaxing job (see videos from Twitter or Meta employees).
A lot profited from the scheme and are just sad that paradise is not forever with free wine, massages, sports and buffets at work and that downturns occasionally happens.
Well, management should be punished for miscalculating business needs and failing to create a culture of work ethic, leading to a situation where people need to be let go.
It's their job to properly manage the business. They did not do their job properly, leading to the current mass firing. Of course it isn't a crime, but it does mean they are doing their job poorly. In virtually every single role that will have repercussions, so why does management get off scot-free?
> Well, management should be punished for miscalculating business needs and failing to create a culture of work ethic, leading to a situation where people need to be let go.
So, management should be punished for giving 12k people jobs in the first place.
I guess it depends on what they were hired for. If they were on a team for a project that is no longer viable, should they be kept on and given busywork?
The thing that bums me out about all this is that Google used to be a company where so many great products/projects came out of their 20% time. They used to hire "generalists" so they can be of use in wide segments of their company.
Now they are laying people off while still being a profitable company.
Something definitely changed in their company's DNA.
Google hired 10.000 people in Q2 2022 alone. Despite claiming to have a hiring freeze, they hired even more people in Q3.
It looks to me like they were hiring people without even considering whether there was work for them after accounting for the upcoming project culling, leading to the current need to fire 12k people. If they did their hiring freeze properly, they could have probably avoided a significant fraction of these firings.
Not necessarily entirely new projects, could be existing efforts that would just be new to those employees. Doubling down and investing in the areas that matter...
> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished.
"These people" don't deserve punishment any more than a developer who had to make a tough decision does. It's the same situation at a different level with more visibility. Management has its own set of challenges.
> that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working
It wouldn't be fair to them to keep them employed if doing so meant weighing down the company, which could eventually cost everyone else their job. Better to have strong companies that continue to adjust to fit people's needs and let workers move among them.
> these antics require revolution
Revolution to what economic system, exactly? I don't want to live in a world where companies are forced to keep workers in unproductive jobs out of a misplaced sense of goodwill. That sinks the ship for everybody.
True, and it comes with its own set of perks, too.
However, the wording of "taking responsibility for the decisions that led us there" seems to imply that Sundar Pichai agrees that _he_ personally made some _bad_ decisions, and that the _logical_ conclusion is to pass the helm ?
Fun fact: in France, a running gag for political jokes is that the sentence "I take full responsibility for xxxx" is almost mechanically expected to be followed by some form of "..., and therefore I resign", because of this spectacular historical precedent [1].
> J'assume pleinement la responsabilité de cet echec, et j'en tire les conclusion, en me retirant de la vie politique.
> I take full responsibility for this failure, and as a consequence, leave political life.
These companies are over bloated and it seems he can't write "well most of you aren't doing anything useful so we are using the downturn to fire you" so they BS their way through. Nothing to do with current revenue.
We can criticize but this will never change. A CEO is the face of a company, everything they say publically is basically a PR stunt.
- They won't say the company is falling apart until the insolvency, it's some new strategy or refocus.
- They won't say they sold the company for money, it's a new chance to reach out to more people.
- They won't say they laid off people to increase profits, it's all for some other reason.
We cannot stop this without some draconian laws, but let's criticize it and increase awareness, so that other people aren't fooled by it.
If Googe doesn't need these people any more who would it benefit to keep them around? Google isn't social security and in any case who wants to work in a job where it doesn't really matter what you do because you're not really needed and just given busywork. It's just not a good way forward.
Getting all angry over a specific phrase which is clearly meant to take any responsibility or implication away from those being let go seems like a pointless wase of energy.
Due to how the US works, it is the prerogative of the company to let workers go even if they are experiencing utmost prosperity. The CEO using language to take responsibility is an example of professional language. Contrast this to Elon who has the prerogative to let workers go while also shitting on their reputation.
I'm reading these comments and feel the need to speak some truths.
Come on everyone, have we not stopped drinking that koolaid yet ? Are we still that naive ?
The ONLY loyalty of a company is to its shareholders. The SOLE PURPOSE of a company is to increase profits for its shareholders. And you know it.
Yes they sit on plenty of money. It's not your money, it's not the employees money, it's the shareholders money. And they want more of it.
All the rest, the products, the messaging, whatever, is all just the means to reach that singular goal, increase profits for shareholders.
The current news cycle warning for recenssions and though times allows large companies to push through this kind of workforce reductions with less pushback than they would get in order times, and it is the perfect way to increase profitability.
Stock is up 2.3% already.
PS: I feel bad for everyone suffering from this. Losing a job is a personal drama for everyone involved.
Let’s have different point of view. Google has probably cost shareholder billions of dollars through over comp, through employee benefits (pampering). Their profits have consistently shrunk. So does google really care about shareholders? Or has it been lucky decade for all tech giants due to low interest rates. This decade will tell.
I agree, it has definitely been a "lucky decade" in more than one way.
Now that the cost of money is non-zero, I expect to see changes in multiple regards.
I understand the frustration with the PR corporate speak, but that’s to be expected of one of the largest companies in the world.
Cash on hand isn’t a reason to keep people. They probably recognize there’s unhealthy parts of the organization, and this is a restructuring opportunity. It sucks from the employees side.
employee at will goes two ways, and saying that this is bounds for a “revolution” seems a bit far stretched.
Yeah it’s shit, and sucks for anyone who looses a job regardless of severance. Typically at this scale, it’s not on the individual as to why he/she got fired.
But your rhetoric reminds me of a mid-century revolutionary calling to overthrow the Provisional government.
Let history be a teacher as to the consequences of that.
I’m not a fan of the “eat the rich” slogan because it’s not a good solution.
But I understand the sentiment of wanting to torture and destroy people who are directly responsible for these “we wanted $70B and only got $67B so we’re firing you while smiling and offering hugs” events.
I hope those laid off get new positions so it’s not a life threatening situation.
I think most of us are capable and lucky enough to choose where we work. People who choose to work for Google and other organizations like them need to do so with eyes open. Both as potential victims as well as supporting and bearing responsibility for Google actions.
This is independent for working for an adtech company (or sugar company or bomb company or whatnot).
Revolution is an extreme outcome in reaction to a system of determined abuse.
A "good solution" would probably look like taking better care of people and reducing the polarisation of wealth particularly in a business community that is earning billions in profit.
> "We’ll be offering 6 months of healthcare"
This tells us something of the desperation that workers face.
> "The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here."
Hello, I'm your rhetorical assistant Clippy, it looks like you are laying off thousands of people from your profitable, influential business without any good economic reason. Personally, I think the top of your managment pyramid could take a pay cut if you really care.
I think the disconnect we feel with these people supposedly taking responsibility is actually that while the impact of these mistakes is real, their degree of control over this outcome was basically zero.
The problem with the statement is not that there is no action to go with the words, it's that actually they are not responsible for this outcome in any meaningful way which in some ways is worse.
Those employees didn't fire themselves, nor was this the decision of their direct managers. The CEOs are absolutely responsible, and doing mass layoffs while a company is growing should be (and is, in much of the world) illegal.
Having just gone through this yesterday I can tell you that while some of this has to do with $$$, these layoffs/reductions are also used to quickly recalibrate the team by removing low performers and cultural misfits.
It is not about the saving from the 6B in salaries. It is about how much the leadership at Alphabet is hoping that the stock will rebound because of this decision in a month.
Elon musk set a precedent - you can treat your employees (serfs) like shit and get away with it. Layoffs, perks being removed, the tone has generally shifted to "look we have free coffee" to "we own you, be glad to have a job, oh and you might not actually have a job after all".
This is a change of winds, instead of pandering to engineers companies are trying to debase us and remind us where we are in the totem pole.its not about revenues, its about power.
Oh, please. Elon has nothing to do with this. Workers have had the shaft for centuries. Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.
>Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.
This is my reaction reading this thread. It's astonishing.
This same crowd is typically anti-union, cheers on coal mine closures (learn to code!), want to throw finance people in jail, wants all car dealerships to disappear..the list goes on and on. They never seem to realize these business consist of normal people, most making salaries significantly lower than SV.
But high paid software engineers lose their jobs and the same people want a revolution? I'm sorry to say, but the tech crowd doesn't have many labour allies in the "real" world anymore.
Careful, I appreciate your sentiment, but it's quite likely the set of people making the anti-Google comments are not the same set of people making the other comments you find distasteful. Or at least, the intersection of those two sets is small.
Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.
Depends on where you live. In many European countries you cannot just fire someone, e.g. you have to show that the company is in a financially difficult situation or a structural decline in revenue. If your revenue growth looks like this:
COVID seemed to create an awareness amongst employees that they could have better living conditions. There was a capitulation on the part of employers (especially in the tech industry).
Now it seems employers are firing a warning shot across the bow, reminding employees where the power truly lies.
Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function probably begs questions at other companies about how many folks are “essential”.
The macroeconomic situation is probably a factor but one could make the argument that it’s only creating a window of convenience for a little house cleaning.
> Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function
It continues to function as an app, but does it really continue to function as a company?
It lost enormous amount of trust on all sides: advertisers, users, developers. My Twitter feed is way more quiet than it was a few months ago. Advertisers are leaving[0]. Some developers just lost access to API (3rd party clients) with no warning.
They also kill/abandon products - Twitter Spaces (their answer to Clubhouse) looks abandoned, and still doesn't work (or at least is not visible) on the web. Revue (Substack competitor) was killed in December. No idea what happened to communities, but I think they're abandoned as well. From creator's perspective, Twitter is very unreliable.
No. This is giving him an absurd amount of credit. Organizations have treated their employees like this for decades (perhaps centuries). I remember the 90s were rife with profitable companies laying off employees to boost profit.
layoffs are herd behavior among tech execs right now. nobody really knows why they have to do it but everyone else is and wall street likes it. it’s irrational, hurts morale, has little impact on the bottom line, it’s just stupid.
No, but they also don't have to bullshit people by saying "I take full responsibility" when the responsiblity is shared between them and the employees that are now sacked. Nobody insists they say this, and it is just bullshit. I think it is fine that google fired them, but just own up.
Instead of:
> The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.
Just say:
> The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I admit that decisions I made have led us here.
But even this is probably wrong, because while the CEO is the top executive, he does not make decisions in a vacuum or operate in a vacuum.
But they already have their (new?) stack ranking system to take care of dead weight no?
If they themselves say they hire/pay "very talented people", and still layoff so many people while still being very profitable company, what would you infer from that?
But it sounds better than "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share values, and we are accountable for shareholders"
(edited from "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share values, and according to law it is only thing we are force to do")
Public company is accountable to shareholders, in case if share prices will go down shareholders will want to know why, and some activist investor may go to the court complaining that company was able to have better financial results it should not work on some stuff and should fire people.
It's a shame that Google is so good at hiring top talent, and even better at under utilizing them. The company had a hypomanic vision of greatness by throwing everything to see what stuck, and still can't get a new idea that is profitable besides marketing & advertising due to their virtual monopoly. I'm very curious what the breakdown of positions will be. This is a failure of leadership and Sundar should resign.
Your landing page is crazy. Full screen image of awkward looking people talking without audio working (tried a few things, can't get it to make a sound).
Is the product a mobile phone application that you give access to your bank and it displays the same information your bank statement does but sorted into categories?
On MacOS / Safari, the full-screen video loops the first few seconds while bufferring, so I was just looking at the awkward guy on repeat. I also have to agree that it was a "bold" choice to use black text with a dark green background on a website whose primary color is orange.
The quality of their products is consistently on a downward trajectory. Somehow, both search and maps have become worse. Spam that would have previously been easily filtered now gets through my Gmail.
Meanwhile ChatGPT runs circles around Google for any serious query.
Layoff very much due to investors' push. GOOGL, the stock, has been lagging the other big tech companies by a wide margin in the past year or so.
Big picture though, you have to start wondering if WFH trends have largely exposed "unproductive" jobs in these big corporations. It was very hard to identify them in the past but now it's become so evident. You don't really need these gap-filling-there-for-the-optics people. Companies are going to be run that much more efficient.
I don't understand why the comments are mostly upset in these cases. If it makes financial sense for you, as an employee, you are free to leave a company. Shouldn't companies have the same freedom? Why should the CEO be punished in any way for making such a decision? Having too many people being payed for some time and having to pay severance packages is not enough? What is the moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest question.
> What is the moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest question.
If an employee leaves Google, Google loses 1/140k = 0.0007% of its workforce, a negligible amount. If Google fires an employee, employee typically loses 100% of their income, which is non-negligible.
So, Google firing 12k employees means that twelve thousand people will lose 100% of their income, for the sake of... shareholder interests?
Many people see this situation as morally not-okay.
The issue appears to be a little more complicated though. There is no clear reason to do any of it beyond 'signalling' to the market that executives are trying to rein in cost in anticipation of what now appears to be almost inevitable recession ( partially because of signalling just like the one from Google ). It is a vicious cycle.
I am not upset, but I am not yet personally affected. I also have been saying for a while that low rate encourages unhealthy habits ( including in VC realm ).
I guess my beef is that the entire layoff is.. not really necessary?
The issue is not simple. There are various reasons why people may react negatively to news of layoffs. Some may be angry at upper management for not feeling the impact of the layoffs and still receiving bonuses. Others may be worried about the potential for a recession. Additionally, some people may critique the capitalist system, despite participating in it in their own lives on a smaller scale. And on some level you are completely right as it may be necessary for a private company to occasionally lay off employees, like pruning a tree.
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 Europe, petrol production going down, supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation going massively up... Don't need an MBA to anticipate the economy was par for a correction.
what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.
what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from happening again? "I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well, and don't learn anything in the process. 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. So I guess the answer to this question is "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"