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Google employees alarmed that the company suddenly expects them to do work
- version_five 4y agoI saw a similar situation once where a funded company hired "the smartest" people with the downside that they felt they had to let them do what they wanted to be competitive. The downside was you got people who wanted to do what they wanted instead of work on business-relevant stuff (almost with the kind of academic allergy to something "applied") which ends up being a pretty entitled, political and disagreeable group, and that once you've given people the freedom, it's almost impossible to go back and ask them to do something.
- nyokodo 4y ago> it's almost impossible to go back But, if they’re all working on business irrelevant things it’s unusually low risk to fire them all for cause and hire new employees.
- version_five 4y agoIn the example I saw, they had convinced investors that this critical mass of "geniuses" would eventually usher in profitability somehow. I think that's part of the idea with google as well, hire the best let them work and they'll do great things. Just firing them admits that was a bad idea, I'd expect making it not so simple
- riku_iki 4y ago> I think that's part of the idea with google as well, hire the best let them work and they'll do great things. Google also has big impact focused culture, if employee doesn't produce business relevant impact, he is not rewarded (bonuses, promotion).
- version_five 4y agoIf that is (and had historically been) true, what is the article about then, or do you believe it's inaccurate? The whole thesis is that people are now being asked to be productive who were not previously held to productivity Edit: or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk?
- dekhn 4y agoGoogle is an incredibly complicated situation. Yes, it's impact-driven. But many other variables affect how your impact is perceived. For amusing reasons, over the past decade, the number of people who can and want to work on the core parts of google3- the load balancer/front end/web server/search/ads- has been dropping. No CS grad wants to work on a 15 year old web server that is mostly patches to deal with odd cases and a million tests that fail if you look at a load bearing comment oddly. The dwindling pool of experts has seized the memes of production (ha) and has the ability to work less because they are absolutely needed. The best anecdote I ever heard from an SRE was "the VP was chagrined when I told them it didn't matter I was in a nerf war, because nothing was broken or needed to be fixed, but they still saw my point and let me continue" (I used to work in an SRE area that overlapped with an SVP's preferred meeting room so Susan Wojcicki was always getting pinged by a rogue nerf bullet). As for slackers? Sure, when I joined around 2008 there were definitely folks who were slacking off. in fact they got rid of sabbatical because so many people were taking it then coming back and quitting.
- dc-programmer 4y agoGoing to have to steal “load bearing comment”
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoNothing wrong with slacking off unless you have a real job as a firefighter or ER nurse.
- 4y ago
- hotpotamus 4y agoI wonder if the Google Graveyard is full of business-relevant stuff or personal projects. Either way, it's funny to think that a more productive Google might just mean more tombstones.
- version_five 4y agoWell even if 1% of projects become profitable or valuable and the rest get killed, more tombstones should mean more value overall (Edit: what's the objection to this comment? Usually I can tell, here I have no idea)
- throwawaylinux 4y agoThat is if you don't count the cost of them or the possible damage to the brand that the killed projects might result in.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoYeah you're right nobody is using anything Google makes
- viscanti 4y agoIt's possible for there to be damage to a brand without it sending overall usage to zero. Maybe someone would be skeptical of future social networks or URL shorteners or news reading apps or video chat apps from Google. It's conceivable that some of those (or any of a number of other failed products) could keep them from getting adoption elsewhere in the future.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoI'm not sure how to answer this. Do you really believe you addressed what I wrote with a logically sound rebuttal? I would be happy to try to explain my position if you were making a genuine attempt.
- kidfiji 4y agoIsn't this kind of how Valve's (Steam) corporate structure is set up?
- xwolfi 4y agoExactly.
- namelessoracle 4y agoValve has been called out as fairly dysfunctional. They havent made any quality games in awhile. The last major project they got out the door was what the handheld device? That they are taking losses on? And how much of that was contracted out?
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoSteamdeck, Alyx, SteamOS, Proton
- swalsh 4y agoAlso, the index hardware kind sucks (ive had constant hardware issues, and quest 2 is kind of superior in every category that isnt FOV). Facebook is proving to iterate on VR much better, despite Valve taking VR seriously for several years.
- urthor 4y agoI can only speculate. I assumed Valve decided that competing witu literally Apple, and Facebook, for VR headware wasn't clever.
- lamp987 4y agoyes and they dont produce anything anymore, only collect free money from Steam that they created many years ago. makes you think...
- bombcar 4y agoThey can’t even finish the team fortress comic. I check once a year.
- oneepic 4y agoIBM I believe kept a research group around for 2 years and let them work on whatever they wanted. Results? Basically nothing. So they disbanded the group.
- not2b 4y agoIBM still has a research group. Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off. AT&T I believe kept a research group for much longer than that and they only invented or co-invented the transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, information theory, Unix, the C language, and the photovoltaic cell.
- trelane 4y ago> Sometimes hiring great researchers and letting them do what they want pays off Almost like research is not a guaranteed thing. Kinda like you're trying to figure out the unknown.
- not2b 4y agoSo is venture capitalism; it's expected that most bets don't pay off and money is made because, if the VC makes good choices, some will pay off hugely. I think it's a matter of hiring the right people and managing them well.
- trelane 4y agoin my experience, management is the problem rather than a hello, let alone the solution
- brutusborn 4y agoMy understanding was that Bell labs was full of researchers from wartime labs. These researchers were used to freedom, quick iteration and a focus on application to wartime efforts. I think it would be hard to replicate this with modern day researchers. There just isn't the same pressure or importance that wartime provides.
- codefreeordie 4y agoThis is such an angry ranty version of this story... ...but at the same time, this feels like the angry ranty version of the story that [a certain set of] Googlers deserve.
- willio58 4y ago> this feels like the angry ranty version of the story that [a certain set of] Googlers deserve. If people fail to work a healthy amount on a day-to-day basis at a company, that speaks more to the company than it does those workers. People like to work on things they find interesting. Google is failing by not putting workers on interesting things, or things they want to work on.
- breakds 4y agoBut in reality, it seems that working on something that interests you, is a privilege.
- bradleyjg 4y agoRight. Most people work because they get paid to work and figure out how to think of it as interesting as a sort-of post hoc defense mechanism, if at all.
- x3n0ph3n3 4y agoSorry, but work is work, and not every task at work is a fun problem. Sometimes you need to buckle down and grind through hard problems that aren't the most fulfilling.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoIt's not this. It's that a large number of Google engineers are risk-averse, and a lot of the rest of them love to do empire-building. All of this means that there are a lot of people saying "no" in between any individual engineer and a project. When you can't do anything like this, a lot of people just check out. It's not even about interesting work, it's about the fact that for each person trying to do X, there are >10 trying to make sure that X doesn't get done without their approval.
- caprock 4y agoI'm curious. Were there many newspaper and magazine articles about life at IBM, GE, and other large corporations in the the 1950-1980 time frame? Did this trend of corporate culture commentary arise with periodicals like Byte, Dr. Dobb's, and Wired Magazine? Before?
- UncleOxidant 4y agoI don't remember any corporate culture stuff in hardcore tech magazines like Byte or Dr. Dobb's. Wired came later and it seems like it had corporate culture articles.
- gopher_space 4y agoPeople talked about corporate culture at IBM all the time, it was just in hushed tones.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoTrue, you heard about corporate culture at IBM, I just don't recall reading articles about it in Byte or Dr. Dobb's.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoWhole books even: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
- userbinator 4y agoThat title reads like The Onion... Then again, given what they've done to many of their products, especially their search engine recently, I'm not surprised. I just hope they don't end up trying to save themselves by stuffing in even more dark patterns and other user-hostile crap.
- chubot 4y agoThis is low quality clickbait, almost no real info in the article
- nonethewiser 4y agoThere were several direct quotes from google management and some anecdotes by current employees. What would you consider real info?
- c0nducktr 4y agoMaybe there's "real info" there, a few quotes without context, but this reads like nypost decided to make an edition for silicon valley.
- xenospn 4y ago“Cancel more products! Quickly!”
- wmf 4y agoI assume this is sarcasm but... rather than squeezing all employees to work harder, why shouldn't Google cancel a bunch of unprofitable products like, say, space lasers, Pixelbooks, and maybe Fuchsia?
- jayzalowitz 4y agoNOT THE SPACE LASERS!
- arrow7000 4y agoBecause they'll burn through even the tiny bit of trust they have remaining?
- slig 4y agoIt feels like they canceled their spam team at Gmail and YouTube.
- rconti 4y agoMy spam filter is a 2-position slider. I'm afraid to mark anything as spam because it just flips the switch the other way, and now way too much stuff is in spam. Mark something not spam? Welcome to spam-fest! Why they can't do something so simple as, I don't know, blocking messages in foreign charactersets I don't understand, block messages with obvious spam senders and subjects, .. I mean, come on, I don't get 10 Norton receipts a day, guys.
- Aeolun 4y ago> there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have What a weird concern. Increasing head count decreases productivity (per person anyway). Why would you expect it to increase? I have to imagine at some point the marginal benefits are near zero, and Google probably reached that scale years ago.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoI don't think he means "per person", the sentence makes sense without that assumption.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoIs this the onion? In all seriousness, if my bosses at G wanted me to do work when I was there, I would have had to explain to them that I would love to do work, but there are about 10 other people at G whose job it is to make sure that I don't do any work. The only work that gets done at G is done by virtue of herculean efforts from engineers and frontline managers to convince a mountain of other people that their work is a priority. After that, one offhand comment from a VP or an SVP can get your entire project cancelled.
- cheriot 4y agoIs there a company that pays well and has a reasonable work life balance where that's not the case? Asking for a friend.
- andrew_ 4y agoThey don't pay like Google (most of the time, I hear ML is wild with salaries) but smaller startups under 20 people have, in my experience, excellent pay with excellent work life balance.
- zac23or 4y agoI've never worked for Google, but in every company I've worked for, when productivity was considered low or something, developers and designers weren't to blame for the low productivity. 1. We had 26 teams and 16 meeting rooms, and we often didn't have rooms for meetings. How was this fixed? They created a new meeting room. 2. After the discovery of "low productivity", a new meeting was created, obliging all teams to participate in meetings on "the reasons for low productivity" 3. The most productive week is the week when all scrum managers have been in training for one week. But the accusations always came to the development team...It was hell on earth. Probably something similar is happening at Google.
- not2b 4y agoYes, if they aren't getting the results they want from all those smart people, it's because they aren't managing right. Most people want to do good work, but sometimes process and teams fighting each other gets in the way.
- adolph 4y agoMaybe similar to a startup incubator/fund the idea is that most effort does fail and as long as some small percentage is wildly successful the whole enterprise continues. The “low productivity” is a feature indicating low priority effort is appropriately prioritized. A key challenge is when something without a strategic purpose/value is released and becomes a beloved product that eventually must be depreciated, like Google Reader. It is much better to develop and never release than to release something without strategic benefit that causes problems in long run.
- theGnuMe 4y agoGoogle should be investing everything in next generation AI smart assistants and search. Otherwise it’s dead. Search is otherwise overrated.
- adventured 4y ago~175,000 employees. They can probably run the company just fine with tens of thousands fewer employees. But, when it comes to productivity / profitability, it really doesn't seem so bad, frankly; consider: 2018 operating income margin: 22.9% ($31.4b op income) 2021 operating income margin: 30.5% ($78.7b op income) And they nearly doubled sales in three years, from 2018 at $136.8b in sales to $257b at the end of fiscal 2021. That's something beyond astounding for a company so big. This reeks of Sundar and top management worrying about their jobs, trying too hard to please Wall Street.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoThis reeks of wallstreet getting greedier.
- UncleMeat 4y agoYeah this is what is frustrating internally. The company is still ludicrously profitable. Just not as much as last year. But it isn't like in 2019 there were big disruptive cuts and massive wrenches thrown into hiring plans. This isn't a "oh boy we don't have enough runway and need to do something fast" thing that startups or unprofitable unicorns run into. Instead this is "the stock market will be angry if they see lower margins."
- propogandist 4y agothey increased operating revenues in part by making Search results unusable, decreasing the quality of search results to drive more ad impressions and clicks. Ads themselves have been optimized to blend in with organic traffic, taking over the page, to drive more revenue.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago2020 was a record year because nobody touched grass for 9 months. 2021 was a record year because they juiced the monetization on search and youtube to the max. 2022 still seems to be fine so far since the brand equity hit from juicing up the ads hasn't made it to the bottom line yet, but it will.
- 4y ago
- issung 4y agoKek this puts a smile on my face, all those smug rich kid interns that "work at google" and their whole day is just going to some meeting, doing 1 hour of shuffling tickets, then playing lacrosse and going to a drag show or some shit, with the final hours of the day spent editing the footage to go on TikTok.
- coffee_beqn 4y agoIf they lowered their hiring bar I’d be happy to do Jack shit all day too
- astrange 4y agoConsidering their growth rate it probably isn't as high anymore.
- swalsh 4y agoTiktok isn't real life
- skynetv2 4y agoWhen I was working there, I was surprised how many engineers did NOT work. I would see people watching Netflix all day, hitting the gym twice a day, sitting in cafes and chatting, taking tours of various cafes, even driving 30m each way to a different campus to eat at that cafe, sitting around to eat dinner while watching movies. They would get large groups of friends to dinner so they can eat for free, dick around all day, run after nonsense issues, create trouble, social justice warriors of all kinds ... there was one case I was completely baffled - a new hire wanting to change government policies around how contractors are paid and somehow it was Google HR problem to solve it. My own org was different, people were very productive and I struggled to keep up but this was the exception. Maybe because were in Infra and focussed on results oriented systems research. Most teams in infra were like this, infra teams were hard. Everyone else was a different world. I did not envy them but its no surprise with the headcount they have, they are struggling to justify the numbers. They can cut 30% of the workforce and still be fine.
- Bakary 4y agoI mean why work hard if they don't force you to? It's not like it's an orphanage or a power-plant or something, but a gigantic data-siphoning ad company.
- antisthenes 4y agoLife's easy when you're a rent-extracting monopoly in the richest market on the planet.
- random314 4y agoFunny how Google became a trillion dollar company with employees sitting around doing nothing
- davidgerard 4y agoWhat sort of weird bootlicker wrote that headline? Also, this is a cheap and bad reblog of this Insider article: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-freeze-cuts-performance-improvement-plans-2022-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-freeze-cuts-pe...
- lordswork 4y agoHere are the 4 sources of information in this article, none of which are new nor support the garbage clickbait title: >CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told employees that "there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have," and "we should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity." >a manager [explained] that if next quarter sales "don't look up, there will be blood on the streets," >"The communication has been rude," another Googler told the outlet, "and it's threatening people to make sure we hit numbers. >"Volume has picked up and the busyness of the workday has picked up with how rough things have been," one unnamed contractor told Insider. "I haven't heard of reductions, but there are definitely no additions."
- GoodJokes 4y ago
- jklm 4y agoExtreme clickbait article a la Vanity Fair or New York Post…not what I’d expect to see on HN. @dang, are these submissions now acceptable?