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How do they plan on doing that if they've downsized the group recently?
by monksy 7y ago
How do they plan on doing that if they've downsized the group recently?
- vlovich123 7y agoEngineers are why things take so long to build. Without engineers things will build faster.
- rsashwin 7y agoMade me chuckle
- danudey 7y agoSomeone read the mythical man-month and realized that more engineers doesn't make things faster, and can actually make things slower. The next logical step is to hire fire people until you reach the optimal number, in some kind of binary search approach.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoTo some degree that’s true. Less engineers definitely can speed things up if they get autonomy. At my company there are a lot of people talking about work, doing planning, scheduling and whatever. They don’t contribute much but also hold the engineers up with constant information requests.
- xiphias2 7y agoThe days of autonomy for engineers at Google is over. At this point product managers fight for their ideas to be implemented so that they can get promoted, even if it's an inferiour solution.
- smt88 7y agoRight. Has Google ever produced a profitable product outside of ads and G Suite? YouTube likely isn't profitable, but even if it were, they bought it. This article is far too credulous and feels like it was planted by a Google marketing person worried about customers being scared off by the downsizing news and by Google's culture of whimsical product creation/destruction in general.
- jes5199 7y agoadding more engineers makes development go more slowly -- does that work in reverse??
- reaperducer 7y agoadding more engineers makes development go more slowly -- does that work in reverse?? Sure. That's why we see so many blog links on HN with titles like "I scaled my startup from $0 to $883 million with no employees in six days and only spent 49¢."
- jes5199 7y agoyou have missed the point of my question
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- David 7y agoCan you point to a source here? I work on Google Cloud and I don't think I've heard anything like that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paxys 7y agoMore employees doesn't automatically mean more productivity/launches/success. Downsizing can be an effective tool to get back on the right track (if done correctly, of course).
- cameronbrown 7y agoReorgs like this happen all the time at Google -- they didn't downsize Cloud, they found two parts of the business doing the same thing and merged them - so some people were redundant there. They could've just let those employees go, but they are giving them time to find a new role (and paying them the whole time they're not working). Disclaimer: Am a Google employee.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoIsn’t that how layoffs at all large companies go?
- CydeWeys 7y agoNo. It's very much the exception, not the norm.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoIve heard of this happening at Cisco and HP while being termed a lay-off. Is it different?
- kyrra 7y ago(googler, opinions are my own) Btw, the "finding a new role" is easily within Google. One of the "cloud" teams that was defragged was in my office, and some of those people were people I've worked with over the years. Local management are trying to make sure they have places to land on other teams in the office. Yes, they can look for new jobs externally, but this is how Google deals with cleaning up teams from time-to-time. Luckily Google is still hiring, and people moving to new teams tends to work out without much fuss. Outside Google, I've seen the same behavior. A friend that worked at waffle.io got a similar 3-6 month transition window (find a new job internally or externally). They ended up staying at Broadcom, so it's a good way for companies to retain talent in a tight labor market.
- mav3rick 7y agoThere is no such provision when Amazon lays off people
- outworlder 7y agoNot all reorgs are downsizes.