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Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group
- pgodzin 7y ago> Google said it is cutting jobs at its cloud-computing unit as part of a reorganization aimed at improving operations at the business that has become more central to parent Alphabet Inc. > Google on Friday said “a small number of employees” have been notified their roles have been eliminated. Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company.
- pcurve 7y agoI don't get it. Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? I'm thinking they used the good old "your position is being eliminated due to business reasons" excuse to get rid of people they didn't want to keep. It's a common HR tactic.
- vtail 7y agoI hate to be that guy, but I want to point out that more people not always equate to more output. E.g. if you create a "controller" role, they would try to justify their existence and create more work/overhead for others. And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- godzillabrennus 7y agoI like the analogy: You don’t get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month.
- moandcompany 7y agoThis is often attributed to Fred Brooks in his seminal book "The Mythical Man Month" * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
- hoorayimhelping 7y agoI first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.
- basementcat 7y agoIf you assemble a 9+ stage pipeline, you may reach a point where you produce approximately one baby each month.
- wwweston 7y agoSweet. The baby-in-a-month problem is reduced to assembling and priming a nine-stage pipeline in a month!
- phkahler 7y agoEven then they are "working" independently. It's not a pipeline that passes the baby from one to the next. That's just plain parallelism. Either way it would do nothing to latency and so would not get the current one done any sooner.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- znpy 7y agoThat's throughput, not latency.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- namelosw 7y agoIt's good to point it out. In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong. In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports. It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.
- kunglao 7y agoThis is so true man! I've seen this first hand both ways.
- smt88 7y ago> In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports. This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization. People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.
- balladeer 7y agoInteresting. There are two contradicting unsubstantiated observations, or let's just say blatant generalisations, one gets downvoted another flourishes.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agosmt88's post was downvoted because it completely misunderstood the point of namelosw's post. smt88 wrote "A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all." Well, in my reading of it, that was exactly namelosw's point. That is, the social pressure in first world countries, and the fact that so many have their identity tied up in their job, demands everyone looks 'busy' even when they are not really doing anything of value.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoIn "defrags" like this, Google does not lay off people outright, it just tells them their job is going away and they have X months to find a new one within Google -- and they usually do.
- danans 7y agoI've personally been through this twice at Google. The company definitely provides a very attentive set of resources to help you find a new position within the company, but I've always been able to find a new project on my own. That said, the more flexibility you have the easier it is to find a new position. This naturally favors some people over others. In my most recent case, it ended up being a bit more challenging due to having to balance the constraints of family life versus the opportunities availed by an extremely arduous commute, but I ended up finding a project I enjoy that works with my commute constraints.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoSo... Like... What do you do in the interim? Not work, look for teams, and still get paid a shit ton of money? Do you do some training on the side? Work on a side project? How long does it take to find the new team?
- sdenton4 7y agoFrom the couple people I know who have done this, I think it's pretty choose-your-own-adventure... Get paid to look for your new job, with very few actual responsibilities. It's worthwhile to compare this relative downtime to ramp-up time for new hires... who also generally spend a couple-few months being fairly useless (though working hard at it). And googlers being googlers, there's a decent chance that the 'down' time turns into interesting learning or side project time.
- wyclif 7y agoSo...it's kind of like being Big Head working at Hooli? Hanging out on the roof, or building potato guns and piezoelectric sensors?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pm90 7y agoWhy would they publicize it this way though. It seems like it would be easy enough to reallocate these folks in a staged manner without creating a news story out of it.
- aaomidi 7y agoLegal requirement
- goatherders 7y agoIt's a for profit company with a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. There is zero reason to find jobs for people regardless of the cash position.
- downerending 7y agoHere's a couple: 1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon. 2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
- kortilla 7y ago> Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.
- ALittleLight 7y agoGoogle would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.
- Niten 7y ago> Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? The third sentence in the article: "Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company."
- vonmoltke 7y agoWhy do they need an excuse?
- chvid 7y agoWhat is cloud computing here? Is it some of Google services such as Mail or Drive. Or is it the cloud hosting competing with MS Azure or AWS?
- DevKoala 7y agoGCP
- jkaplowitz 7y agoYes, but also other products like G Suite.
- jkaplowitz 7y agoGoogle Cloud includes GCP but also G Suite and maybe certain other product lines. So, all of the above.
- combatentropy 7y agoWhat they call the Google Cloud Platform encompasses dozens of products: https://cloud.google.com/products https://cloud.google.com/products
- downerending 7y agoHa ha. Have they published a termination date for GCP yet?
- sjg007 7y agoCan someone with an MBA or a business understanding explain why they would even make this announcement if it is a small number of roles in the company? Why not just reorganize? I don’t get it unless it’s a signal to the market that the execs are looking at cloud compute.
- paxys 7y agoIt's not an announcement as much as a legal obligation to disclose, and news sources just pick up on it.
- stygiansonic 7y agoThis is correct. In many jurisdictions, when a certain number of employees are laid off in a given amount of time, they are required to disclose this to the government. For example, California has the WARN act: https://www.shouselaw.com/employment/warn-act.html https://www.shouselaw.com/employment/warn-act.html
- sjg007 7y agoSo this is a WARN act announcement?
- stygiansonic 7y agoIf it is you can expect it to show here in a few days: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN.htm#ListingofWARNNotices https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WAR...
- drdeadringer 7y agoIIRC, WARN announcements are triggered if at least 50 people are being laid off at the same time.
- NonEUCitizen 7y agoNote there's also a federal WARN act (link above mentions California's WARN is modeled after federal, with additional protections for workers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
- tanilama 7y agoIs this a sign Google is not going to compete in Cloud anymore? Can't see how this is not going hurt customer confidence.
- filoleg 7y agoConsidering all the things Google has done in the past year to hurt customer confidence in GCP, this one isn’t that bad at all. I definitely couldn’t keep myself from wondering what kind of people run their PR, when they released a post late last year, saying that unless GCP hits the financial target $X by 2023, its funding will be noticeably cut. That was literally a release of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wild.
- busterarm 7y agoAs a google cloud customer, the feature request backlog is long, almost everything useful is in Beta and doesn't have an SLA, and the Support is _absolutely useless_. They still have us by the balls as a customer, because some companies just will not allow you to put their data in AWS...and mostly in places where Azure is still a poor alternative (I'm looking at you, Central Germany).
- manigandham 7y agoIt's a basic reorganization of a trivial amount of jobs for a trillion dollar company. No it's not a sign that they're going to stop competing in one of the most profitable sectors that they've had an offering in for over a decade.
- tanilama 7y agoWhat I am worrying now is that Cloud is supposedly a fast growing sector they should double down on investing. This doesn't look to me as a hyper growth focus trajectory TBH
- manigandham 7y agoThey are increasing investment and are arguably the first "cloud" computing company to exist and offer a product to the public. They might not catch up to the others but it'll still be a highly profitable product suite. I don't see what there is to worry about. GCP also includes Google Maps and GSuite by the way, which have lots of customers.
- springwell 7y agothis kind of news is why no one wants to use gcp in case google decides to axe it completely
- tzury 7y agoNo one wants to use GCP? You mean, no one except: Home Depot, Target, PayPal, eBay, HSBC, SAP, and thoudands more...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 7y agoDecember 2019 “Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud“ https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202... The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.
- astrodust 7y agoWhat are the Vegas odds that they blow the whole thing up if they don't end up #1?
- enos_feedler 7y agoPretty low considering the growing market size. We are just at the beginning of cloud movement and it’s already generating significant revenue
- scarface74 7y agoRevenue != profit. And isn’t that the pitch of every startup? We are worth $billions because the size of the market is $billions x 10 if we only capture $a_small_percentage.
- enos_feedler 7y agoIt's hard to believe cloud won't be profitable. You are selling one of the world's greatest engines of innovation (computing) using a proven delivery model (internet services). Combine that with very low execution risk, since big tech has been self-consuming computing as a service over 20 years of growth. It would almost be irresponsible to leave this opportunity on the table. If Google lands in third place $a_small_percentage is actually quite large.
- btown 7y agoWhy would Google even take the risk of this PR, vs. just moving these people into R&D inside the Cloud group? I feel like this clickbait headline will frighten markets more than the bloated headcount expense.
- qeqeqeqe 7y agoAmazon lets people go regularly, I don't get what the issue is.
- austhrow743 7y agoGoogle has recently had a leak about potentially cutting cloud. Afaik Amazon hasn't.
- rvnx 7y agoBut isn't Cloud their biggest growth opportunity ?
- seneca 7y agoAmazon doesn't have a reputation for shutting down projects, and no one has any reason to doubt Amazon's long term ability to execute on a cloud platform.
- shokobo 7y agoYou're assuming it's R&D folks, I've seen one person tweet that it happened to them and they were in marketing.
- jorblumesea 7y agoAre they trying to ensure that Google Cloud fails? I feel like all this does is just spook potential customers.
- petilon 7y agoGoogle generated $8.9 billion in cloud sales last year, up 52.7% from $5.8 billion in 2018 and $4.1 billion the year prior. Doesn't sound like Google's cloud business is in trouble.
- onion2k 7y agoIf it costs $10bn a year to run that would mean it represents a $1.1bn loss, and it should be killed if Google can't turn it around. Revenue is a terrible metric to judge something on.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- petilon 7y agoI was pointing to growth, not revenue. A business that doubled its revenue in two years is great to have, even if it is not currently profitable.
- scarface74 7y agoSo if I sell $1 bills for $0.90, I guess I should be glad if my “revenues grow”?
- johnghanks 7y agoThere's a difference between selling something with a fixed cost (and a fixed value) for a fixed price and selling something which has unknown (and variable) value for a fixed price.
- scarface74 7y agoSo there are no variable costs in servers?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- neil_s 7y agoNothing is happening to Google Cloud overall. This is just a small org where two teams were doing similar stuff, so they got merged. This made a few roles redundant, so those folks will be looking for new roles within Google (Cloud). How this made for a WSJ headline, IDK. I couldn't read the whole article because paywall, but the first few lines do mention that it's a tiny number of employees affected and they can look for new roles. Note: I'm not authorized to speak for Google, but hopefully this addresses some of the panic in this comment thread.
- sjg007 7y agoI think I figured it out. It was announced in the earnings call. So my guess it was a signal to investors that they are stream-ling Google Cloud for some reason. I am not sure why that is a specific concern except to say they are competitive to investors. My guess is that Azure and AWS loom in investors minds for some reason.
- ec109685 7y agoIt still seems strange they don’t need more of this person’s role and would instead eliminate it: https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/1228108429505351680?s=21 https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168... It isn’t a good look. “This morning I learned that my role at Google has been eliminated. If you've got an opening for someone who's in Kubernetes and containers security, focuses on content, advocacy, and communication, and has an OSS background, holler!”
- lonelappde 7y agoThey cut a marketing/outreach team. Maybe they want to focus more on product development or different marketing and that person wants their same marketing/outreach gig.
- PunchTornado 7y agowhy? do you think cloud marketing people are hard to find?
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- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/OCc3B https://archive.md/OCc3B
- jwilk 7y ago↑ archived copy without paywall
- killjoywashere 7y agoWSJ has gone hard Murdoch, particularly against Google. In conjunction with comments by Peter Thiel, Trump, and other conservative commentators, it's pretty clear there's a coordinated effort to cast Facebook as a "fair and balanced" face, and to do that, they need a libtard heel, and Google is apparently it. What's interesting is that Trump easily has more of a beef with Bezos as the owner of the Washington Post, but it's seems the conservatives have a harder time casting the world's richest man as a snowflake when he runs a brutally lean business and launches rockets.
- scarface74 7y agoThe WSJ has never been a Trump supporter.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- szermer 7y agoI haven't seen this mentioned yet, but perhaps this 'leak' to WSJ was calculated to remind some folks thinking of unionizing that layoffs are a real thing in this world.
- lonelappde 7y agoYou are saying that someone in management orchestrated a layoff to motivate employees to unionize faster to negotiate better layoff compensation?
- bigcohoneypot 7y agoSad. I hope it works out for the smart hardworking googlers.
- webdva 7y agoGoogle Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to the point where I’m trying to pick a skill to appease a machinic desire’s new and progressive, if a little anti-anthropocentric, labor production power and capital market demands so that I can satisfy a certain power-law probability distribution function’s optimization.
- zelly 7y agoPower laws are brutal. In every codebase there's always ~1 person who actually does all the work. Imagine if everybody you hire/retain is that 1 person. For as woke as they are, big tech corps are still very competitive. Almost Randian. This is why I laugh whenever I hear about unionizing.
- manigandham 7y agoI don’t see anything technically wrong with that approach. The top performers are usually outsized contributors compared to the bottom tier or even mid level coworkers. It’s better to keep a very high performing team even if it’s more expensive.
- hello_moto 7y agoLogically there's nothing wrong if "human" is viewed as a finite resource or as livestock.
- manigandham 7y agoHumans are a finite resource but the comparison to livestock seems unwarranted. A business optimizing talent isn’t inherently removing humanity from its workers.
- 7y ago
- coverband 7y agohttps://outline.com/38xHGT https://outline.com/38xHGT
- rammy1234 7y agoWill this ever happen to Amazon (AWS) which is in hiring spree ? when you have surplus, can't they easily cut loose some when plans didn't go the way it was supposed to.
- AlphaSite 7y agoI know some of companies that cut with one hand and hire with another. ️
- yaitsyaboi 7y agoAmazon does this kind of thing all the time. It's very rare with engineers--they just get moved around. But if you have some reorg, you don't need two sets of marketing folks.
- sidcool 7y agoIt could easily be attributed to automation than business troubles
- rurban 7y agoSo the new boss is from Oracle, who hired new managers from SAP and Microsoft, they are hiring like crazy and cutting some old jobs. Looks like they are trying to get rid of internal critics, resistance. Interesting wars
- stingraycharles 7y agoDo you have a source for this?
- mmmBacon 7y agoWhy is this so hard to believe? Politics is a real force.
- Craighead 7y agoAnecdotes are not worth the same as evidence
- cbg0 7y agoBecause without some ounce of truth to back it up, it's just a conspiracy theory.
- stingraycharles 7y agoOf course it’s entirely possible, but if it cannot be backed up with facts it’s just speculation / rumor.
- nstj 7y ago“ The People With Power at Google Cloud”[0] [0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-people-with-power-at-google-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-people-with-powe...
- martius 7y agoAt Google, resistance and critics live well beyond the boundaries of a product/area. This doesn't make sense.
- mattlondon 7y agoI don't have any knowledge of this, but it sounds to me a lot like a typical everyday re-org or "defragmentation" that happen frequently. Defragmentation example: they have a team with 12 people in California, 5 in New York, 2 in Seattle and 3 in Zurich. They decide to move all roles into one location instead of having the team split all over. If you don't want to move with the role, then you need to find something new. Alternatively perhaps they just merged some teams and there were surplus folk. In my experience (unrelated to any of this) in rapidly growing orgs, teams/functions often get duplicated/semi-duplicated as different parts independently spin up teams to deal with some need. Ultimately these end up getting rationalised as time progresses. If they were doing big layoffs of engineers etc, I think we'd have heard about it o we Twitter/blogs/comments/etc by now
- corentin88 7y agoI hope you’re right. My team have chosen Google Cloud. With every news like this one, the risk that Google will shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen.
- dewey 7y ago> shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen That seems extremely unlikely, the products that Google shuts down from time to time are usually not products that make money. GCP is a whole different beast with SLAs, paying customers, huge corporations using it. It also wouldn't make sense to give up the position as one of the few big cloud hosters.
- PrivateRepo 7y agoIt will start making sense when Google stops shelling out a comparatively-high level of free credits for every new deal. They’re subsidizing their own users to game market share numbers, and at some point the funding to do this will have slow (unless they find out that it actually converts evals to year over year clients).
- 7y ago
- holografix 7y agoAt least one person is taking the news as “I need a new job” situation. https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/1228108429505351680?s=21 https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- randomguy-gcp 7y agoMany theories and opinions . Here is an observation from someone involved with GCP more than many of you (especially more than the WSJ journalists) - These job cuts are not an indication of the health (or lack of it) of GCP division. From the familiarity I got as a partner, it's probably the consolidation of the sales function. Inside Sales Reps (ISRs) being moved to Field Sales Reps (FSRs) and some of the ISRs being asked to find jobs elsewhere because the strategy is to avoid duplication of efforts and close more deals.
- KptMarchewa 7y ago>being asked to find jobs elsewhere One of the worst euphemisms for being fired that I've heard.
- skj 7y agoElsewhere within the company.
- mrahbar 7y agoI totally agree. Since Thomas Kurian is the new CEO there is a wind of change noticeable if you are familiar with GCP. Every other comment comparing GCP with an arbitrary service or product of Google does not grasp that with GCP Goggle will get more enterprise oriented like Microsoft and SAP.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y agoI'm going to make an outrageous prediction: due to the changing geopolitical landscape which has been going on since 9/11, loss of trust in the US as a "leader" that can keep the data safe, we will move away from the cloud and back to a model where data sovereignty trumps all else. This will be enabled by changes to the underlying infrastructure - moving away from BGP and adopting (BGP backward compatible) protocols like SCION[1], as currently implemented by Swiss carriers, which allow improved traffic shaping, and more importantly: jurisdictional geo-fencing. We'll also see more legislation by the EU to level the playing field against US companies who currently do business with a Double Irish Dutch sandwich. The current model where the US is the only cloud provider with virtually no EU based competitor and where EU data is locked into US corps is unsustainable. Europeans trust into US companies has never been strong to begin with and current politics (+horrible foreign policy) will reduce it further. The cloud is dead imo. Because in a climate where national interests are suddenly more important than partnerships and international trade, the cloud is more of a risk than anything else. The US makes that same case too, illustrated by their hostility towards Chinese products (I'm not defending China here at all btw). [1] https://www.scion-architecture.net/ https://www.scion-architecture.net/ edit: I have to dig up this quote again from Aral Balkan's recent talk at the EU parliament: "You are acting as an unpaid Research and Development department for silicon valley. Because if a startup here succeeds, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. If it fails, we pick up the bill.": https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-cf1de592c8a0 https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-c...
- colechristensen 7y agoIn the whole chain, not very many people care that much. Maintaining data centers requires expertise and many years of commitment and is simply more expensive at any scale unless you are extremely cautious and predictable. Maintain your own data centers and they become cost centers, with silly games for getting and maintaining capacity, reluctance to expand capacity, and old technology. A few people will talk loudly about it but not much will actually get done because the people who have experience with the cloud providers and the alternatives won't have any interest in moving back for vague ideals or vague threats. The only thing most anybody cares about is their cloud providers directly competing with the customer's business model (most notably Amazon). A more real threat reaction is jurisdictions going after the big five or so for antitrust issues and trying to break a few of them apart. Amazon or any of them don't care about national interests any more than they have to and they'll do whatever they need to to calm fears (more or less just strengthening the legal regional isolation as necessary).
- xchaotic 7y agoHow to cut expenses by a million a year? Fire 3-4 software engineers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]