6 ms·
Alphabet Seeks to Cut 10k Poor-Performing Googlers
- falconinthesun 4y ago>billionaire investor complains that google is paying avg salaries of 300K >They are hoarding talent from their rivals and paying workers handsomely so there isn’t a motivation to quit and build a startup that will disrupt the status quo. What is this article? I don't understand if this is tongue-in-cheek or if there really is something as tone-deaf as this. Regardless, the cut is expected at this point.
- black_13 4y ago
- DeltaCoast 4y agoDoesn't every company hire as if they were hoarding Monopoly houses but not building hotels, so nobody else can build?
- lovich 4y agoWhy is this tone deaf? This is relatively consistent with the stories I've been hearing from friends at FAANGs and from a lower tier company, we have definitely been feeling the lack of engineers to hire for several years at this point
- genocidicbunny 4y agoI think the tone-deaf part might be that its a billionaire saying that people being paid well under a million a year are making too much money.
- aisofteng 4y agoNobody becomes a billionaire off salary. Generally speaking, billionaires come to be billionaires because they created something that has value in the billions. Someone who has created their own worth saying that there are people being paid salaries without creating enough value to justify said salaries is not tone deaf. I bet most billionaires - at the very least, the self made ones, which is most of them in the US - have a better sense of value than most other people. The comment isn’t about making too much money. It’s about being given too much money in exchange for what is produced.
- chrisseaton 4y agoI don’t get it - which bit do you think is tone-death? Companies definitely try to keep engineers even if they don’t really need them to deny to others. But even if that’s not true how would it be ‘tone-death’?
- ulfw 4y agoHow on earth is this tone deaf? Anyone in the industry knows that's exactly why so many are hired and so little output happens. Anyone who has friends at the company will tell you those stories.
- lm28469 4y agoI've heard it from ex googlers themselves when I worked in SV. We recruited two of them, they hadn't worked on anything even remotely important/interesting at google for months, that was in 2015
- HNTW 4y agoThe article quotes a paywalled article about perf changes and an investor letter. While the writing might be on the wall, this article is just gossip
- mc32 4y agoThey aren't so much poor performers as much as Google coddled and incentivized this behavior, like many other service tech companies, as opposed to hw tech companies, in order to "corner" the talent and prevent much competition in core areas.
- izacus 4y agoWhat is an "activist investor"?
- kevinventullo 4y agohttps://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/activist-investor.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/activist-investor.asp
- izacus 4y agoSo basically they want to force Alphabet to fire people, the company itself hasn't decided to do so yet?
- fatneckbeardz 4y agothey are technically owners of the company. so yes. that is what activist investors do.
- dilyevsky 4y agoOr they heard google is already planning to do it (which a lot of ppl heard too) and trying to get ahead of it in the news cycle
- UncleMeat 4y agoWho has heard it? The rumors presented in the article are about the renaming of the performance review system, not actual evidence or even rumoring of layoffs. This system was announced in like March. Nothing about it has changed since then.
- valdiorn 4y ago"the company" is it's investors, or the will of the majority of the investors, at least. A company does not have agency or free will.
- 4y ago
- boppo1 4y agoStuff like this makes me wonder if a career pivot to learning to program was a mistake. Smells like everyone but the veeery top 2% is gonna get knocked down to $100k or below and be treated as lackeys for features dreamt up by sales. https://youtu.be/_NeJ3Kg6OUo https://youtu.be/_NeJ3Kg6OUo
- roflyear 4y agoThe high end is certainly overpaid. Many of us know a dev at Amazon that has no business making that mone
- GlickWick 4y agoCompetition at the low level is going to be rough. However, it's pretty hyperbolic to say experienced people are going to be dropped under 100k. Are the days of 750k TC due to stock appreciation over? Prolly. Do engineering staff tend to bring considerably more value than they cost at mid-level companies? Yes.
- fxtentacle 4y agoThe mistake is likely living in the US because with a $100k salary you'll have a very nice lifestyle in pretty much all of Europe. Even in Singapore that'll pay for a nice flat with rooftop tennis court, pools, and gym in walking distance to 100+ restaurants. With remote work, you're competing against all of those people who are ecstatic about a $80k annual salary.
- muro 4y agoRents in Singapore increased a lot lately, so probably not anymore.
- fred_is_fred 4y agoBut that doesn't work for people who really like stuff like being able to chew gum.
- SR2Z 4y agoYeah, but remote work is difficult enough to manage IN THE US where people are rarely more than a few hours apart and share a common language and culture. Companies are not going to find it easy to hire Eastern European or Singaporean devs and get them to produce value - at least not any more than they did pre-pandemic. Remote work has been massively overhyped; IMO it does noticeably make organizations less productive after some time has passed and people need to plan the next big project. Seeing someone in-person is insanely high bandwidth. It takes an hour to plan a thing that might have taken a day's worth of frustrating meetings and two design docs. I'm convinced at this point that anyone saying otherwise is either senior enough to be able to browbeat everyone else who has thoughts on their plans (and then design truly awful systems ime) or knows the truth and enjoys the extra free time.
- tjpnz 4y agoIs the work two hours a day and go home/eat lunch for the rest of it still a thing there?
- madengr 4y ago
- more_corn 4y agoKeep in mind that everyone at google passed one of the hardest technical screens on the planet. In any organization you can stack rank and fire the lowest whatever percent of people. Don’t think they are somehow bad software engineers.
- throwboi123 4y ago> Keep in mind that everyone at google passed one of the hardest technical screens on the planet. Nope.
- adam_arthur 4y agoImagine thinking grinding leetcode makes somebody a good software engineer. Many poor performers at my startup ended up at Google and Facebook
- edmundsauto 4y agoHow did you determine that their poor performance was an attribute of the employee, rather than a consequence of their strengths in a given environment? Everyone’s performance differs depending on the environment and their personal context. I’ve know poor performers whose impact shot up once they were no longer asked to do things that frustrated them, for example.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- valdiorn 4y agoYou can be very talented at your job but a shit worker. I much prefer working with good people who are average coders than brilliant coders who are insufferable colleagues.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Ancalagon 4y agoHow many software engineers have been released to the market at this point? Except for twitter, I was under the impression most Software Engineers and product managers weren’t actually being let go, and that all these layoffs was more centered around recruitment, D&I, and sales?
- GlickWick 4y agoDefinitely seems like that, outside of the crypto space. The industry still is treating 10+ YoE engineers like rare finds. I do expect competition for entry-level is going to be fiercer than ever, though.
- chrisseaton 4y agoMeta fired a lot of serious staff/senior-staff people.
- scatterhead 4y agoThis article doesn't support its claim. It references an article that claims Google asked managers to rate a certain percentage of employees as poor performers. But the claim that Google intends to lay off these poor performers seems to be totally unsubstantiated.
- UncleMeat 4y agoYeah this entire thing is just people overreacting on Blind and then that getting picked up by garbage forbes contributors. There's been a performance review system forever. There's been expected distributions across large groups forever. The only two things that are new are 1. The system has a new name 2. There is a new bucket for "below expectations but not so far below that it crushes your compensation for next year" That's it. Nobody knows if Google will lay people off. But this game of telephone rumors is a mess.
- canadianfella 4y ago
- pjmlp 4y agoWould that include Android's NDK and AGK, which seem to be handled like 10% projects for the whole Android's lifetime?
- ksec 4y agoI am wondering if they are still paying $200K for fresh grad.