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Google Memo on Cost Cuts Sparks Heated Debate Inside Company
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- akhilcacharya 8y ago> The brainstorming deck also proposed reducing wage bumps when workers get promoted. It also suggested changing Google’s approach to "spot bonuses," sums that managers can award at any time of year. Managers receive emails reminding them to dispense this money. The slide deck proposed ending the emails, arguing that few people would notice. The proposal also included converting holiday gifts to staff into charitable donations -- something Google did at the end of 2016. As someone that works at a notoriously “resource efficient” company the fact that people would be mad about this is absolutely hysterical.
- dlubarov 8y agoAs a former Googler, the way the company ended holiday gifts was irritating just because of the pretense. Leadership spun it as "we're redirecting the funds into Chromebook donations". As if money wasn't fungible, and the decision to donate Chromebooks was somehow intertwined with the decision to end the holiday gift.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoThe idea that they call distributing hardware that locks people to their ecosystems is a "donation" is also comical. Giving a school a bunch of Chromebooks is a way to expand your services business, not an act of generosity. It's like giving away a free printer: The money is in the ink.
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoYep most of us would have just been fine with them just saying "you're all paid well enough, the company is too big, we're stopping the holiday gift". Instead it was a long slow process of "pick your charity from the list" w/ a song and dance around it.
- UncleMeat 8y agoGiven the nearly continuous stream of internal shitshows getting leaked to the press by unhappy people, I'm pretty confident that the response wouldn't have been positive if they had said this.
- ehsankia 8y agoI thought they made it pretty clear that the logistics for distributing actual gifts at Google's growing scale was just not worth it anymore. It probably cost more in time and resources than the gift themselves were worth, let alone the extra tax offset they had to pay on it. I'm not sure why you were lead to believe the Chromebook solution was a "spin". I do agree that giving you a choice of charity though is much better, but I assume they couldn't have pulled it off on short notice.
- ehsankia 8y agoNot only that, this was just a deck of ideas, not even actual policies. Apparently, you're not even allowed to have any controversial ideas in a brain storming session...
- owaty 8y ago> The document also discussed how the proposals could be best presented to employees to minimize frustration, according to one of the people. That caused the most anger among some staff after the document was circulated, said this person. Not leaking this slide deck was rather important to minimize frustration.
- aboutruby 8y ago"In case of employees having knowledge of those slides, ..."
- saagarjha 8y ago> The document also discussed how the proposals could be best presented to employees to minimize frustration, according to one of the people. > The document said this could be rolled out without upsetting staff because workers didn’t know what the existing rate was, so wouldn’t notice if it declined. I really don't know what they expected. You're cutting the salaries of your employees; the best case, yet highly unlikely scenario is that nobody notices. More likely, your attrition rate will increase as Google becomes slightly less attractive for employees to stay at, or the worst case but highly likely scenario is that you have these slides get out and now everyone is unhappy because they're being paid less and having information willfully hidden from them.
- BossingAround 8y ago> You're cutting the salaries of your employees They were allegedly cutting their bonuses, not salaries. That's a pretty significant difference if you ask me.
- saagarjha 8y agoI'm using the term loosely to describe total compensation.
- BossingAround 8y agoI understand; counting bonuses as a regular part of your compensation is dangerous though. While it is a part of your compensation, the employer is fully within their right to reduce or raise this part as much as they see fit. Getting angry because of this is rather strange. That's precisely what you sign up for with bonuses: "This part is variable and may go up or down."
- saagarjha 8y agoYes, I see your point; slashing base salary is different than not paying a bonus or significantly reducing it. However, the net effect is still the same: employees take home less money, and their estimation of how much they can "expect" to get is thrown off. The change here is actually more insidious, because it takes advantage of the fact that employees don't actually know what the "average" bonus is, so by tweaking it a few percent is unlikely to be noticed by any individual employee.
- flunhat 8y agoI've heard that getting promoted at Google is kind of a shitshow -- that your manager can't vouch for you and it's basically up to how well you summarize and present your work to a faceless promotion committee (i.e. how well you play politics). I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, per se. In light of this memo, however, I wonder if the layered bureaucracy of the promotion process is an intentional way of not promoting promotion-worthy employees and keeping costs down.
- dmitrygr 8y ago"kind of a shitshow" would be an improvement over what it really is. If you intend to work at google, negotiate your title up front, while you still can.
- BossingAround 8y agoTo be honest, promotion is a difficult process in general. I'd like to hear of a company where promotion isn't a 'shit show'. Generally, either companies like to err on the side of 'this is gonna be very difficult, buckle up!' or they promote too many people, which has a number of side effects. That leads to even worse results if you ask me.
- BossingAround 8y agoIt seems to me like Google is slowly becoming another one of these huge corporations that one works for simply to simply pay the bills. I mean, sure, it may not be such at this particular moment, but that's what it seems they are heading towards. Though they still have an amazing reputation, I don't buy it anymore.
- eikenberry 8y agoSeems like they've been there for quite a while now.
- curiousDog 8y agoThey have close to a 100k employees. It’s hard to maintain “Googlyness” at even 1/10th of that size.
- rleigh 8y agoIt already looked this way to me when I interviewed with them 8 years ago. But it takes time for public perception to catch up with the reality. When they scaled up and hired tens of thousands, they became yet another faceless corporate entity. Perhaps not intentionally; I feel this is simply a factor of growing and having to establish the same corporate bureaucracy as all the rest.
- vidarh 8y agoThis reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinsons "Three Californias" trilogy. One of them is set in a future where to counter many of the effects of large corporations, companies are strictly restricted in terms of number of employees and other things. No company in the novel can have more than 100 employees. For projects that require more, companies have to establish consortia, but each company remained independent. I have no opinion on whether that'd be viable or beneficial, but it's a fascinating idea to think about the consequences of, both externally in terms of effects on wider society, and what it'd mean for corporate cultures.
- alkibiades 8y agogoddamn leakers. i thought we were fine because it had been a few days. most entitled employees in the world.
- mtgx 8y agoI see Google anti-whistleblowing propaganda internally is also having some effect.
- gipp 8y agoCost cutting pitches from some HR team hardly counts as "whistleblowing". The anti leaking sentiment at Google is pretty firmly grassroots. It's an incredibly narrow lens into a huge operation that necessarily creates an extremely skewed view of things, and erodes a long tradition of internal transparency. The utility of leaks as a hedge against bad leadership is also much lower because Google provides vastly bigger levers for employees to pressure leadership internally than any other company I've worked for, including several startups. Not big enough, obviously, I'm not blind to the events of the past year or so. So Dragonfly or Maven, sure. But this is just petty misleading stuff that there's no reason to put out in the world, and makes it harder to keep Google on the straight and narrow on stuff that actually matters.
- Aeolun 8y agoThese people have no loyalty, they’re the scum of the world! /s
- vkou 8y agoThis is precisely why tech employees need to negotiate collectively. When your employer is posting record profits, but is lowering compensation, you have a much stronger negotiating position when you work as a team.
- AnthonyMouse 8y agoOnly you don't. If you go to a competitor and negotiate a 25% higher salary and bring it back to your current employer, either they give you a 25% raise or you leave. Either way you get 25% more money. If you go to a union and ask for a raise, they go to the employer, the employer can't afford to give everyone a 25% raise, so they give everyone a 2.5% raise. Then you have to quit and go work for the competitor. Only now they won't pay you 25% more because now they know your current salary based on where you work, your position and the terms of the union contract, so they know they only have to pay you 5% more. So either way you're making less. Meanwhile the competitor is still offering more, so your current employer starts bleeding talent, which reduces revenue generation and thereby the amount of money they have to pay employees in the future. It's not as if many people still aspire to work for GM.
- jakobegger 8y agoIs that how unions work in the US? Here in Austria we have "collective contracts" which are negotiated by unions. The "collective contract" specifies a minimum salary (depending on job title/experience), but employees are free to negotiate higher salaries. Senior developers usually earn way more than the minimum. The union also negotiates a minimum raise every year (I think it is 2.6% for IT workers in 2019). Employers are free to offer additional raises, and typically they do.
- sublupo 8y agoSo the valuable employees pay a percentage of their paycheck as union fees, so that the union can negotiate the salary of the not so valuable employees? That of course leaves less money for the high value employees. If the company was a factory, or something similar where the top employees are similar to the average employee, then maybe unions could work. But in the case of programmers, there is a big difference between top employees and average ones. That means that not so many top employees wound want to join unions, making employers even less likely to employ union workers.
- miguelmota 8y agoI've worked in a large corporation before and getting promoted is not easy because you're just a tiny cog in a large machine so it's hard for people in position of giving out promotions to see that you're worth being given a promotion because you're seen as any other grunt in the company. You pretty much need to suck up to the managers and the managers need to suck up to their managers, etc till it reaches someone with promotion powers. Working at a startup however is much easier because you work very closely with execs and people in positions that have power to give you promotions so the value you bring is easily visible and recognized.
- sethammons 8y agoThe advice I've heard: if you want to grow professionally, work at a place that's growing.
- partingshots 8y agoTo me, it feels like people not getting the promotions they think they deserve is an extremely mundane problem. That’s fine though, since I can see how such a thing might be of legitimate concern for many of us and is worth discussing overall. What mainly bothers me mostly, is how click-baity this article is. Such a heavy emphasis on drama and controversy, with every attempt to garner as much divisiveness as possible. It’s annoying, and I notice Bloomberg is notorious for almost always putting out these types of highly charged articles. Do authors get bonuses for releasing fiery volatile articles at Bloomberg or something?
- googlerx 8y ago> To me, it feels like people not getting the promotions they think they deserve is an extremely mundane problem. Google management to this day claims that eligibility for promotion is based solely on whether or not an employee is consistently performing at the next level on a well defined job ladder. If they are, they're promoted. The problem is not the lack of promotions. The problem is that introducing promotion quotas or limits directly conflicts with the merit-ONLY-based promotion system that management claims exists.
- Aeolun 8y agoMore clicks gathered is more money gained.
- gaius 8y agoDo authors get bonuses for releasing fiery volatile articles at Bloomberg or something? Actually, yes: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensation-2013-12?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa... It isn't necessarily nefarious, it's a metric for gauging how important a story is and to direct their staff towards reporting on important stuff. But nevertheless, it does happen.
- GhostVII 8y ago> One worker asked why Pichai was paid hundreds of millions of dollars, while some Google employees struggle to afford to live in Silicon Valley I mean I understand getting upset at the income gap between CEO's and regular people, but it seems kind of strange to be complaining about your salary as a Google employee, where you are almost certainly making well over $100k, and walk past rows of camper trailers and homeless people on the way to work. Saying that you are struggling to afford to live in Silicon Valley seems like a bit of a stretch if you are an engineer at Google. I can sympathize with non-tech workers at Google who are probably making less though.
- hrktb 8y agoI feel a lot of Google employee’s request would be to not struggle to live. Whatever the place and salary, if it’s enough that they don’t have to think about it, they would be fine.
- pgeorgi 8y ago> your salary as a Google employee, where you are almost certainly making well over $100k ... I can sympathize with non-tech workers at Google who are probably making less though. Quite a few of these "non-tech workers" are employees, too.
- gaius 8y agoQuite a few of these "non-tech workers" are employees, too Google (et al) go to considerable, some might say elaborate, lengths to keep their service staff - cleaners, catering, security, etc - off the payroll and partitioned off. It makes no sense really, treating these people with respect would cost barely a rounding error in Google's bottom line. But even so they have a pathological urge to do it, to stratify a caste system almost.
- lrem 8y agoChances are the question was asked by a childcare provider or a cook (some of them are still proper FTEs)... Edit: for clarity, even if you're a Google FTE, Google will only pay you "nearly top of the market for your job description", which for professions mentioned won't be all that much.
- artpop 8y agoThe tech boom is over. Now we should incentivise the restoration of the environment to keep both the economy afloat and us breathing.
- warp_factor 8y agoI would love to see more details on the actual compensation at Google. My anecdotal feeling after discussing with multiple googlers is that the top performers are overly well paid, but most engineers are paid under what they could get at another company. They use their marketing hype/PR and their brand name to be able to achieve this, with an unlimited supply of fanboys that want to get in even possibly while being paid under market rate.
- koalaman 8y agoThis is not true. Google pays better than pretty much everybody except for fintech and Facebook.
- warp_factor 8y agoOn average, maybe due to their top earners. But not sure that the median salary is any higher than other companies in the bay.
- cobookman 8y agoFrom the pay data I've seen Google pays more median total comp than others. Uber, Pinterest, AirBnB, Lyft...etc might pay more but not in liquid comp.
- ummonk 8y agoEvery one of the companies you mentioned is about to IPO.
- joshuamorton 8y agoAnd it remains to be seen if the value of their shares stays high enough for long enough to be competitive. It didn't happen for snap.
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- austincheney 8y agoWeird that people are complaining about this now, but not a few years ago when $16m salaries (not bonuses) were a common thing at Waymo. https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-1-ab&ei=mFpMXNfdJtHCwQK43ryQAQ&q=google+self+driving+car+serious+fuck+you+money&oq=google+self+driving+car+serious+fuck+you+money&gs_l=psy-ab.3...6244.8133..8428...0.0..0.255.1632.0j4j4......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71.HZCHol-cd6A https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-1...
- vonmoltke 8y ago> $16m salaries (not bonuses) The second link in that search explicitly says they were bonuses, and the first strongly implies it.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoRemember that Google pays Porat over $40 million per year to do what is probably one of the easier jobs at the company. If I was going to cut costs I know where I’d start.
- cobookman 8y agoHer job is not just to cut costs. And its not a simple job by any stretch.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shereadsthenews 8y agoNeither is writing optimizer passes for llvm, but the people doing that are making less than a million a year while having a huge impact on the company’s bottom line. For some management clown to come along and suggest that those people should not get promoted so that Porat et al can continue taking helicopters to work is disgusting.
- tomrod 8y agoI know how much it hurts to have these kind of documents become known. It's an unfortunate reality in corporate structure that the incentives of employers are not aligned with the best interest of employees. That doesn't mean every employer is out to get employees--only that discussions of this type are a harsh reality among folks who are judged by how much they cut costs.
- drugme 8y agoPerhaps the most significant change in the proposal called for trimming the rate of promotions. Each year, a certain number of employees are up for promotions based on performance and other metrics. The slide deck suggested reducing this by 2 percentage points. The document said this could be rolled out without upsetting staff because workers didn’t know what the existing rate was, so wouldn’t notice if it declined. That last sentence is quite telling about Google's attitude toward its employees.
- joezydeco 8y agoIs this public knowledge where you work? Because in my entire career I've never seen management talk about these kinds of metrics to employees.
- drugme 8y agoCompanies on the smaller side tend not to have "metrics" like these, actually. But I would agree with you that there's probably nothing special about Google in this context.
- alexashka 8y agoThis is the attitude of every employer, please do not be fooled into believing otherwise. Promotions don't increase performance, they simply cost money, in exchange for improved retention, maybe.
- DannyBee 8y agoIt also said that Google doesn't have enough higher level work for people if it promoted them (because the promo rate is so much higher than industry average, and Google has shifted right in levels) but just about everyone ignored that. You can't create larger scope/etc roles out of thin air (you actually have to need the work done), and levels always seem to right shift over time.
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoThen maybe Google needs to stop advertising that it needs and has the most intelligent engineers in the industry. If they don't have enough work to feed them, they don't need to have them.
- tmp092 8y agoThis is only semi-related, but I just finished Bad Blood (Theranos book) and started looking up some of the characters on LinkedIn to see what they were up to. The infamous HR person (Balwani's right hand person) just started a new position at no other than Google less than 2 months ago!
- i_am_nomad 8y agoThat is indeed troubling. Keep in mind, though, that lots of great people worked at Theranos - I’ve hired one and she’s the standout on an already very talented team. And of course, I would hire Tyler Schultz without a second thought.
- tmp092 8y agoSure, would have no issue with an IC or someone not cozy with management, but this was a specific senior HR person close to Balwani who was complicit in intimidating/spying on employees and trying to get them to sign shady NDAs, among other atrocities. And Google still hired them. IMO it speaks to the "skills" that big tech want in their HR people. The fact that they did all these things is exactly what they look for in "good" HR people e.g. protect the company at all cost and no mercy for employees.
- trhway 8y agoany regime needs the same police.
- bitpush 8y agoSource?
- tmp092 8y agoI don't care to name names, but if you've read the book you should know who I'm talking about and can easily search on LinkedIn for this person.
- throwaway15273 8y agoMaybe I need to stop reading Google related articles on HN. I'm joining Google in less than a month, and some of the comments in threads like these get me worried. I graduated less than a year ago and have been working at a startup in my hometown since then, and didn't bother applying to Google because I thought I'd never make it. Actually it was a thread on HN that convinced me to go for it. I'm moving away from everything and everyone I've ever known because I've always heard that Google is the place to be to really grow as an engineer. I'm still excited, and I was nervous with or without reading these threads, but can someone chime in and give me some hope?
- fermentation 8y agoHN is very pessimistic. You've got a good job and there is a pretty good chance you'll enjoy it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- scarejunba 8y agoAll my friends at Google are happy. You're going to be fine and you'll find that your work will probably be enjoyable. If you listened to the Internet, my town of San Francisco is a faeces filled shithole where people will mug you at every corner. My other home in London is a bastion of knife crime and Sharia law with a bit of terrorism mixed in. I should live in perpetual fear that my life may be ended at any moment by actively malicious people bent upon religious and culture war. In truth, life is pretty good in both these places. I love them both. What you actually should do is stop giving these people any credence. Any fool can write a blog. And recycled news like this article is usually written by bottom feeders. The world is a lovely place. Don't let the losers keep you down.
- mindfulplay 8y agoA vocal tiny majority has gotten hold of the loudest most annoying sound box. It's hard to even close your ears.
- 8y ago
- Animats 8y ago"Most of the cost cuts that emerged since then have focused on divisions outside the core internet business, such as drones, wearable devices and other "moonshots." Google/Alphabet is still doing badly at anything consumer-facing that isn't ad-supported. Not for lack of trying. Google Fiber, Google Express, etc. They've had some success at enterprise apps and cloud services, but they're not the major player in that space. The self-driving car thing is not going as well as expected. Ads are still 94% of Google revenue, and they're probably overstaffed for that business.
- manigandham 8y agoThe entire ad industry is overstaffed. Could easily remove 50% and have no effect, or actually improve results.
- stevenwliao 8y agoYou're now the dictator of the industry. Which 50% needs to go and how do you identify them? How do you prevent your metrics from being gamed?
- boulos 8y agoDisclosure: I work at Google. Hmm. Do you count Fi, Flights, and Hardware in that category? (Particularly Nest, Home and Pixel). One could argue that some longer term plan for Home is ads/cross-sell, but let's just focus on whatever the hardware sales turns out to be. I don't think those need to be on the scale of Apple's or Samsung's revenue to be considered as not "doing badly". Similarly, I assume (but have no knowledge!) that Flights is mostly a referral business. That's not "ads" to me in the same classic sense. That is I've never heard anyone refer to Kayak as "ad-supported".