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Sundar Pichai hopes to make Google more efficient, hints at potential cuts
- metadat 4y agoGood, the market can and will soak up the excess talent.
- wikfwikf 4y agoStatistically a large proportion of those people have spent a decade or more avoiding any work at all while making the most of the free salad. Unlike the Xoogler waves of people who wanted a new challenge and spread Google techniques and philosophies all across the industry, many of the people laid off are going to be the ones who don't produce anything at all. It might be hard for them to find work; or maybe it will be easy because of a halo effect but those who hire them will go on to regret it.
- Theodores 4y agoThis is my sister's estimation - a lot of Google (and FAANG) isn't actually tech. She works in science and has an uncanny ability to reel of stats about where the scientific papers are coming from and what companies are doing research of value. The upshot of this is a belief that 'we have tech' when we don't. It is a dangerous illusion.
- kilotaras 4y ago> where the scientific papers are coming from and what companies are doing research of value. Genuinely curious: what are the companies that are doing research of value?
- natch 4y agoYou had me until “talent.”
- gerikson 4y agoIndeed, renaming to GOOG is a good start, saving 34% right there.
- ProAm 4y agoGood, Google has so much fat they can trim, between products that are useless to employees that don't do anything. They could double profitability over night if they wanted to.
- klyrs 4y ago1) realize that gmail is a messaging app in beta 2) yeet it 3) ??? 4) profit
- chickenpotpie 4y agoPlease don't refer to people and their livelihoods as "fat." Cheering people losing their jobs is gross.
- ProAm 4y ago> Please don't refer to people and their livelihoods as "fat." Cheering people losing their jobs is gross. Trimming the fat is a commonly used idiom, not only in business but anywhere there is excess and unnecessary items not helping the bottomline. As an investor I care much more about Google's profitability than the ineffective headcount. They can trim plenty of employees and still be an effective ad company. People hardly work there (not all but a significant amount), its been known in the industry forever.
- chickenpotpie 4y ago> Trimming the fat is a commonly used idiom, not only in business but anywhere there is excess and unnecessary items not helping the bottomline There are lots of commonly used idioms that are gross, especially in certain contexts. > As an investor I care much more about Google's profitability than the ineffective headcount. And your investments are objectively less important than people putting food on the table.
- dontblink 4y agoTrimming the fat can be used to also be net zero in employment loss. E.g. cutting projects that are not going to make money and reinvest the effort from Engineers into extending more impactful (profitable?) products.
- solardev 4y agoMaybe we'll only get two new chat apps this year.
- Demonsult 4y agoCan't wait to tell all my friends on Allo, Chat, Duo, Hangouts, Spaces, Messenger, Voice and Wave. Pretty sure I'm missing a few.
- i67vw3 4y agoNewest nonsense from google, two Google Meet apps https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/05/googles-merging-of-video-chat-app-begins-now-there-are-two-google-meet-apps/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/05/googles-merging-of-video-c...
- davidw 4y agoThis drives me bonkers. 10 years ago, I could easily place a call to my mom from Gmail. This was easy, and importantly, easy for her to figure out. This endless parade of chat and video things that don't work very well is just nonsense. 'Meet' required an email invitation. So we went from clicking a button in Gmail itself to having to sit there and send an email. This Duo thing doesn't autocomplete email addresses that are in your contacts. And it ALL WORKED FINE 10 years ago! It's not like they're moving in fits and starts towards something that works. They had something that worked, and just utterly wrecked it.
- Melatonic 4y agoWe originally had Google Chat which was similar - super simple - super easy to use for existing gmail users. Reliable. Lots of people had it. I swear they rebranded it like 5 times and each time had new interfaces, apps, features, dropped features, etc etc. And where did we end up now? Google Chat :-D
- davidw 4y agoYeah - I could send both 'chat' messages as well as SMS' right from inside Gmail. Now there's some Messages web app that is kind of lame.
- tpetry 4y agoTranslation: We‘re firing the last 5 customer support people in the organization.
- tenpies 4y agoChaser: those 5 customer support people's actual role is something else - they're just occasionally doing customer support because desperate clients have nowhere else to go.
- pram 4y agothe suggestion that Google has five support humans is a gross overestimation
- wahnfrieden 4y agoGoogle has many thousands of fulltime customer support workers https://www.extremetech.com/internet/336765-google-contractors-accuse-recruiting-company-of-systemic-wage-theft https://www.extremetech.com/internet/336765-google-contracto... why so invisible in all these ways I do wonder
- marcosdumay 4y agoThat article doesn't seem to be about customer support. But anyway, Google does have customer support people. Make an adsense account, buy a small amount of ads and stop, and you will get plenty of contact with them.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoThe article is about support roles as a leading role for contract-based hiring. >Tech companies often hire contractors for support roles, especially when those roles are in high demand or might be outsourced to other countries within a relatively short time frame. From Google's own page about their contractors, where they spend paragraphs justifying why this practice is normal/acceptable because they're ashamed of it and otherwise hide it https://about.google/extended-workforce/ https://about.google/extended-workforce/ : >We contract with businesses around the world to provide specialized services where we don’t have appropriate in-house expertise or resources, often in fields that require significant specialized training like cafe operations, medical care, transportation, customer support [...]
- jollyllama 4y agoI was wondering what the result of the "simplicity sprint" was.
- bko 4y agoMost probably agree that places like Google are bloated. There's a lot of people there that are highly paid that don't add much value. Even if you ignore products that are unprofitable, there are people that really don't do much and get paid a lot to do it, which is kind of odd in a competitive market. My (conspiracy?) theory is that payrolls are padded by design. Suppose Google gets out of the unprofitable aspects of their business and cuts back drastically. You can probably get rid of 50% of people while keeping 90% of revenue. You could say that its not forward looking as these "other bets" could pay off in the medium to long term, but this has been going on for a while and it's pretty obvious by now that other bets are almost always bad, definitely not worth the investment. Even if they are, a place like Google doesn't have the right structure to compete in these markets. Things aren't dire. I remember a portion of Chaos Monkeys where the author describes Google+ as an existential threat to Facebook, so he drives to the Google parking lot on a weekend and finds no one there. Obviously Google+ wasn't a serious enough concern to Google that would require weekend hours so the author concluded (correctly) that its not the existential threat that Facebook thought it was. So what would efficiency look like? Well, Google's gross profit margins are 55+% and their net profit margin is around 25%. It's hard to find those margins in other competitive industries. So what would their margin be if they cut expenses by 50%? They would have uncomfortably high margins that look bad to regulators. Similarly they would have a ton of excess cash that they would have to pay out in dividends or stock buybacks (also politically unpopular). To add to that, managers would reign over a smaller domain. You see the same behavior at utilties companies where they're allowed to charge cost + markup. They have no incentive to bring costs down if it just means they have to charge less. Obviously there are no price controls affecting Google, but if their margins shot up to 100%, it wouldn't look good. So a place like Google allows for inefficiencies and bloated payrole because it keeps everyone happy (other than shareholders) and it keeps them off the radar of more strict regulation. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/prof...
- wahnfrieden 4y agoOne reason is that google acquires to squash competition rather than always to obtain their talent for anything else
- WalterBright 4y agoThe common presumption with free markets is that companies will grow until they consume the world. But as this article suggests, what actually happens is that companies grow until their internal bureaucracy strangles them. Google's search business is heavily optimized towards and dependent on selling ads. Competing directly with them in search is not likely to work. But another way of doing search (I don't know what that might be) could completely undermine it. After all, Google sank Alta Vista and Yahoo with another way of doing search.
- kashkhan 4y agocompetition (winner takes all) naturally results in oligopoly or monopoly in any market. The market is unstable. You can fight this by unending regulation/antitrust. Or by finding better ways to distribute scarce resources.
- WalterBright 4y ago> competition (winner takes all) naturally results in oligopoly or monopoly in any market. Naturally? Name one. Google/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Tesla don't have monopolies.
- jen20 4y agoTo name two which have formed oligopolies: - cellphone carriers in the US - airlines in the US
- WalterBright 4y agoNot monopolies.
- jen20 4y agoSo? The post mentioned monopolies _AND_ oligopolies. Whether they're monopolies is thus irrelevant.
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- awill 4y ago>>Pichai also gave more specific examples of how he hopes to [increase efficiency of the company]. He gave a past example of aligning YouTube Music and Google Play Music into one product. I see creating YouTube Music when you have Google Play Music as textbook Not Invented Here (I'm aware of the irony of that statement). They could have just rebranded it, but no, they started from scratch. They switched audio codecs, and rebuild the entire app and backend infrastructure. Probably because YouTube is run like a separate company inside Google. They've done this type of stuff over and over. It boggles my mind.
- fatherzine 4y agoIt's less stupid than it looks. Back in the day there was Google Videos and YouTube. Technically speaking, both decent video hosting & streaming services for the time. YouTube won the market and Google Videos is a forgotten footnote. Q: If you are a Google C-suite executive in 2005, which video service do you bet on? A: Give both Google Videos and YouTube a few years of runway and see which one demonstrates better traction.
- ahtihn 4y agoWasn't Youtube acquired after Google Videos was already created?
- lesuorac 4y agoNot just that but it was launched _after_ google videos (January 25, 2005 vs February 14, 2005) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
- desmosxxx 4y agoHe's talking about music though. The fact that YouTube was able to start their own music app and then eat the Google brand - and then Sundar gives this as an example of efficiency. Missing the forest for the trees IMO. I would point to YouTube music (and movies/shows) as being one of Google's biggest mistakes (not because I loved Google music, but because YT music a confused product/brand and reduces revenue opportunities). The weak leadership at Google is certainly a inefficiency.
- natch 4y agoHe could start by cutting the team that flags Google’s own emails as phishing attempts.
- dekhn 4y agoWhy not start with projects like Wing? Pretty much any project whose goal is "save the world" not "make more profit for google in the short term" should be considered.
- jmoak3 4y ago>Google CEO says he hopes to make company 20% more efficient The 20% number makes sense: According to their latest Quarterly Report, Google's Q2 2022 profit was identical to Google's Q2 2021 profit, yet the company increased headcount by roughly 20%. This means profit per employee is down ~17%. Page 2 of https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings... has both number of employees and quarterly profit for each quarter. This is also likely why Sundar keeps saying "There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have" - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/31/google-ceo-to-employees-productivity-and-focus-must-improve.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/31/google-ceo-to-employees-prod... EDIT: Added more links and notes EDIT2: Math
- xtracto 4y agoOoof, will they be letting go 20,000-30,000 employees? Sounds scary.
- jmoak3 4y agoI don't think so, but to close that profit-per-employee gap they'll have to find ways to get profit up, while likely letting normal resignation/performance churn trim the count.
- monkeydust 4y agoYea I cant see that happening. 20% productivity doesn't mean cutting 20% of heads.
- wollsmoth 4y agoBut why go on such a hiring spree this year??
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoGoogle OpEx for 2022 was ~$180B [1]. IIUC, salaries are ~$20B - total R&D spending is ~$31B [2]. However, at least some software developer expenses are counted in Costs of Revenue [3]. Unless my numbers are wrong - it appears cutting OpEx by 20% would be hard to achieve by cutting headcount. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/operating-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/oper... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/507858/alphabet-google-rd-costs/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/507858/alphabet-google-r... [3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/000165204422000029/goog-20220331.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/000165204...
- VikingCoder 4y ago19% more efficient, I could have gotten behind. But 20%?! Come on.
- elforce002 4y agoWell, I got a message from a Google HR telling me about different vacances within Google. I don't know what's their game here.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoAn old trick used during downsizing. Place a job ad or two, and fire up the recruiters. It creates confusion in the market about what they're actually up to.
- zackmorris 4y agoIt's almost too easy now to point out problems at megacorps, but I'm thinking that probably Google won't be able to fix their problems and still follow the profit model they've chosen. These are the issues I see, please let us know if there are fixes now: * Keywords missing from results, no way to set verbatim as default outside of Chrome * SEO results aren't filtered out, no easy way to report results as spam without a Google account * Results differ by user, huge consequences for society around the big lie and deep fakes * Google took first order ad market revenue, Facebook took second order, we subsist on third order scraps (the 1% remaining) * Any of us could change the world with $1 million, Google has $1 trillion, so maybe the world was denied a million innovations (see opportunity cost, guns vs butter) * Even at its height, Google search couldn't provide something akin to SQL queries for manually refining results * Alphabet exists in the face of antitrust laws * Google and the other tech companies perpetuate Fizz Buzz interviewing instead of hiring by credentials and experience, feeding elitist dogma * After all these years and countless billions of dollars, still no micropayments, crowdfunding or UBI model, especially for open source/invention/automation * Google knows how we think, Amazon knows what we want, Facebook knows who we have a crush on As long as FAANG companies vacuum up nearly all available capital, I don't see a way out of this mess. I wanted a gift economy by now, instead we got whatever all this is, with less than 10 years now until AI surpasses humans at any task and 20 years until AGI surpasses humans at all tasks. Is this alarmist? Is 5G disrupting weather prediction alarmist? Is 10,000 Starlink satellites disrupting astronomy because they couldn't be bothered to spray on a $20 antireflective coating because they wanted us to see them as an advertisement (see McDonalds sign on the moon) alarmist? Is PFAS in all rainwater alarmist? Don't look up, etc, etc. I miss the old Google so much.
- pc86 4y agoOh man you made some really good points until the AI nonsense and unrelated anti-capitalist rants.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zackmorris 4y ago
- immigrantheart 4y agoI've known people who got into Google who shouldn't be there. They don't have good DS&A knowledge enough to pass the interviews, but they passed anyway (hint: diversity and inclusion). They also said that they frequently do nothing all day, just collect paycheck. Downvotes incoming. Bring it on.
- VirusNewbie 4y agoGoogle has been in a 'hiring pause'/reorg for 8 weeks now, with candidates completely frozen in the hiring pipeline because VPs are reviewing each open req one by one. It's amazing how tone deaf this is when concurrently with this announcement is leadership causing a completely cluster fuck in the hiring pipeline because they need to micromanage each req. I'm not saying they shouldn't change their hiring goals, but they seem utterly baffled about what reqs to keep and what to close. I think the problem with G is the leadership...
- retskrad 4y agoThe stock price of Alphabet never made any sense to me. Google has the best AI in the business, YouTube is an 800 pound gorilla with billions of monthly users, and their search and ad business literally print money out of thin air. It makes no sense for Apple to be worth $1 Trillion more when their business is on a much more shaky ground. Their entire chip business relies on TSMC and China dictates the manufacturing side of things.
- keepquestioning 4y ago> It makes no sense for Apple to be worth $1 Trillion more when their business is on a much more shaky ground. Apple is bankrolling TSMC R&D and their supply chain is a tightly run ship. The market is rewarding them for these moves.
- mrkramer 4y agoI'll take a wild guess: Google's servers' chips are also manufactured in Taiwan and China. Am I right or not?
- solardev 4y agoNobody really seems to know what Google is doing. Google itself can't seem to get its various teams to work together instead of against each other. It's like a broken government... gets a bunch of money and then wastes it all on random pork barrel projects with no real vision. Their successes are all acquisitions from past decades, spammed to death now with terrible advertising. Their new experiments are mostly dead or dying. Don't think they've really succeeded at anything after Gmail, Workspace, and Android... Meanwhile Apple singlehandedly invented (and continues to reinvent) the premium devices segment, and is about to capture the advertising market on their platforms because they were willing to play dirty (privacy lol). Apple does a few things well. Google does a hundred things mediocrely and then spams ads everywhere if they succeed.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoYou can increase efficiency without cutting people.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- AlbertCory 4y ago"More efficient" LOL. I think that means "get rid of 3/4 of the managers and half the developers." I was actually in Google Maps for a year and a half. There were about 12 people, plus PMs, who were working on a monetizing version of Maps. A whole new unnecessary database system ("the Vector DB") was developed, which led to its architect publishing an academic paper. (You can still see some of my work if you upload a CSV of places to a "private maps" layer, AFAIK) It was nearly all wasted. Was there any accountability for that? I think you know the answer. On the "other bets" issue, though: I do know someone in Fiber who says it's reorganized and making good progress, so maybe that one will work out eventually.
- Melatonic 4y agoI think Googles problem (and a lot of big companies in general) is that when they get this huge there is obviously huge bureaucratic issues. There is maybe a need for the company to be developing new features (like probably specific aspects of what you all worked on while developing a monetized Google Maps) but some manager somewhere needs to internally pitch a product (that will directly generate revenue) for the internal investments to be made in engineering time, market research, etc etc. My opinion is that large orgs like this should instead open a whole new arm that is purely dedicated to research - no direct profit motive - and the assumption that on paper it will be a huge loss each year. Hire good people who want to make cool shiny stuff that is probably but maybe not even required to be related to products and services you already sell. Integrate those features then as needed into existing and new revenue driven products and stop developing products that are redundant or unnecessary.
- AlbertCory 4y agoYeah, no argument. Except every two years (or whatever the turnover period in top execs is), you have some suit arguing that "research needs to be more closely aligned to product development." And hordes of mid-level drones complaining that Research hasn't done anything for them lately. It's a constant guerrilla war the CEO has to fight.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoI suspect they will start with the troublemakers, such as that anti-Israel "activist," who got caught lying about retaliation. https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/09/activist-who-says-google-demanded-her.html https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/09/activist-who-says-...