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Alphabet unit Verily to trim more than 200 jobs
- ergonaught 4y agoIf we're keeping this "an Google/Alphabet Bet" component, can we decide to use "an Alphabet/Google Bet" or "a Google/Alphabet Bet" instead? Thanks so much.
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- pvg 4y agoIt's not a great title and not a great URL since corp press releases tend to be bad. The story has decent press coverage, eg https://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabet-unit-verily-to-trim-more-than-200-jobs-11673466950 https://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabet-unit-verily-to-trim-mo...
- ComplexSystems 4y agoYeah yeah, but "an Google"?
- politician 4y agoObviously, it should be "a Google/Alpha...bet :emoji:".
- jehb 4y agoI'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Alphabet, is in fact, Google/Alphabet, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Google plus Alphabet.
- filoleg 4y agoFirst time in a long while that an HN comment actually made me laugh outloud, great job.
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- chitowneats 4y agoClearly the solution is "Alpha Bet"
- byronicle 4y agoDone
- byronicle 4y agoIn a new path forward for precision health, Verily's new CEO 'eliminates' 15% of it's staff in a restructuring to focus on less things.
- naetius 4y ago*its
- jonatron 4y agoIt's not complicated
- thrownawaydad 4y agoIf its is not it is, it is its. If its is it is, it's it's.
- cwilkes 4y agoAlso Intrisic the robotics arm cut 20% https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabet-job-cuts-widen-to-robotics-subsidiary https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabet-job-cuts-wi...
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- localcdn 4y agoA snippet near the end: we’ll re-establish the former “Ops Chat” as a new Veep chat space soon What does this mean?
- voganmother42 4y agoSo if Veeps are “Verily People”, I have to assume this is like a slack channel or some such?
- ccc3 4y agoTalk about burying the lede
- hgsgm 4y agoThat letter is a self-eulogy.
- operatingthetan 4y agoThey should have had a PR person write it.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoThey got through about 60% of the text before the ‘unfortunately…’
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- ramesh31 4y agoMust be nice to be born and raised into the managerial class. You get promoted while us working stiffs get the curb. Shameless.
- code_duck 4y agoIt seems like just about every tech company is doing 15% layoffs. > They include the development of technology for Dexcom’s G6 and G7 continuous glucose monitors (CGM), the smallest CGMs of their kind. That’s very cool! I have worn a Dexcom for 2 years and I had no idea. CGMs are extremely helpful for people who need them. While the market is fairly small for t1 diabetics, it’s expanding to people engaged in fitness.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> It seems like just about every tech company is doing 15% layoffs It's "selection" bias or confirmation bias or some kind of fancy word bias that we see headlines posted here (or other places) about ____ doing 15-20% layoffs. If you combined all the headlines we've seen past 6-12 months about layoffs, what % of companies out there would that represent total? 5%? 10% max? How routine is 1/10th of every tech company in the country doing 15-20% layoffs in terms of business cycles as far as history goes? Quite common? Are we overblowing the significance?
- thrashh 4y agoPeople keep talking about tech companies like tech is itself an industry. A tech company in the energy industry is going to be affected by world events differently than a tech company focused on, say, the medical industry.
- lumost 4y agoHistorically it’s been unfortunately common. Folks tend to avoid companies with past layoffs as the company has a suboptimal cap table from a down round - or is public and only cares about profits. Either option is limiting for a tech worker. So historically successful companies have tried to avoid layoffs like the plague. This has likely lead to some excesses in firms who haven’t adjusted over time.
- johannes1234321 4y agoWon't that the the place to join? - The parts where they hire is where they see the business going, which might be more stable than a random corner in a corporation, which didn't the rif, yet.
- xwowsersx 4y ago> Our most immediate priority is ensuring that these Veeps FFS, who teaches these people that referring to their employees with these cringeworthy names, especially in a layoff announcement, is a good idea? They're not "Veeps", they're people who have an identity and existence without reference to their roles at Verily. Just call them people. "ensure that these people..." Is that hard to do? Can you not resist the ra ra corporate bullshit for two damn seconds? Gross.
- silisili 4y agoMade doubly awful by the fact 'veep' already has a meaning in US English - vice president. So it could be read that they are giving all the credit and sympathy to the VPs.
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- christkv 4y agoThe veeps can now veep themselves into unemployment. Publishing this kind of thing makes you look like really bad. In what world do people publish this and think they come over as reasonable, mature and compassionate?
- borroka 4y ago> They're not "Veeps", they're people who have an identity and existence without reference to their roles at Verily The words used by HR from this and other companies clearly show that for the company, they are not people with an identity, existence or raison d'être other than providing some kind of service to the company. The invitation is to treat them accordingly.
- jeffbee 4y agoNice to see that someone who recently vested $200 million in Google Class C stock hasn't gotten soft, still knows how to take the axe to worthless scientists and roboticists.
- lostlogin 4y agoI can’t tell if this is sarcastic or serious.
- dboreham 4y agoThe former surely?
- KKKKkkkk1 4y agoWhy would they give him Alphabet stock when Verily has its own equity? Do you have a source for this?
- jeffbee 4y agoWhen I clicked on the article it was this one that features a picture of Porat. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabet-job-cuts-widen-to-robotics-subsidiary https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabet-job-cuts-wi...
- Rebelgecko 4y agoAre you mixing up Ruth and Stephen?
- camdenlock 4y ago> Some Veeps will be redeployed to other teams I really hope this ultra-cringe trend of referring to our employees and colleagues by twee corporate demonyms comes to a swift and timely end, especially in serious contexts like this one where the CEO is announcing that a bunch of people are being booted out.
- killingtime74 4y agoThen the person who’s job it is to come up with these will need to be laid off too!
- Maursault 4y agoWe apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked. We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked. The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
- twelve40 4y agoprobably the dude himself, he's going to have to kick himself out
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- moron_investor 4y agoWhy not just axe the division? What exactly is the P/E ratio at Verily, Waymo, GoogleFiber, AugmentedBS, etc? Let's put more wood behind more intelligent arrows, rather than dulling extremely dull arrows that obviously go nowhere - or just do stock buybacks.
- beambot 4y agoP/E is undefined with E=0. Verily (at least) is an independent entity. Google maintains a hefty equity position, but there are other outside investors too.
- jcims 4y ago>Verily (at least) is an independent entity. On paper. I interviewed for a position there a few years ago and it was very clear that they were still quite dependent on Google operationally. It actually left me wondering when one of the ’bets leaves Google how they would manage the transition. My guess is most would actually have to be acquired.
- cudgy 4y agoIt’s ok, because E < 0
- moneywoes 4y agoThey are Moonshots perhaps
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoSee you here next January.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AlotOfReading 4y agoGoogle fiber wasn't intended as a profitable enterprise. It might have been if the stars had aligned, but the goal was to have a credible threat to force ISPs to up their game. The alternative was Google slowly getting strangled. It succeeded enough to prevent that and they were able to pivot to a much more sustainable buildout plan with webpass. Waymo is actually one of the few ventures whose TAM might rival their ads business and they're the market leader.
- ccn0p 4y agoblah blah blah blah blah you're laid off blah blah blah blah
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- johnwheeler 4y agoThis is the most accurate portrayal
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- lxe 4y agoYet again we have a layoff email from the CEO calling their staff a cutesy demonym. > Dear Flooferboofer, you've been fired! You're still a Flooferboofer though because we're a team and a family.
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- oxfordmale 4y agoThere should be a special circle in hell for a CEOs calling their staff family. A family is for life, a company just until the last paycheck arrives.
- haunter 4y ago>eliminates At first it sounds like a Squid Game-style method lol
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- Alex3917 4y ago> We have advanced foundational capabilities that allow us to improve healthcare from many vantage points US life expectancy just dropped by 3 years, how much improving do they think they did?
- nebula8804 4y agoMaybe life expectancy should also be regarded as a 'K' shaped recovery. How do the numbers look for the top 50% of earners? What if we separate liberal states vs conservative?
- wheelinsupial 4y agoThis sort of already exists in Vancouver, BC, Canada. There is more to it than just salary, but there is a huge gap at the neighborhood level. “ But zoom in to the neighbourhood level — what Statistics Canada calls “census tracts” — and you’ll see that life expectancy can vary by as much as 30 years. The area with the lowest life expectancy is the Downtown Eastside, where the average resident is expected to live 60.2 years. The area with the highest life expectancy is the University Endowment Lands, where the average resident is expected to live 90.4 years.” https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/01/17/Life-Expectancy-Gap-30-Years-Vancouver/?fbclid=IwAR0M5GmbrvSwLWNrN5pFGVY4q_m7u-VeW4qBLiWhZZU29PxpOyGtKOjSOdo https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/01/17/Life-Expectancy-Gap-30-Ye...
- _8j50 4y agoOk fellas, we all know this is b.s. bandwagoning right? Put another way, these companies are participating in a hype-train where the only objective is to prepare for and therefore ensure a tech recession. Kind of like shorting your own companies stocks. The only question is, is this pure greed or are these companies doing this to legitimately protect their future and succeess?
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- birdyrooster 4y agoThey have to signal to the Fed there is capitulation before they will stop raising interest rates and this is the sort of signal the Fed is looking for.
- _8j50 4y agoWow, I didn't even think of that. I can totally believe that they're playing with people's ability to make ends meet so they can pay less on their loan's interest.
- college_physics 4y agoWont work if people find work
- sangnoir 4y agoThe feds look at raw numbers and not how many people were laid off. AFAICT: there are plenty of job openings to go around, I haven't seen any evidence of underemployment in tech. As a matter of fact, unemployment levels are close to record lows, consumer demand is still stubbornly high, so the fed is unlikely to lower rates any time soon.
- birdyrooster 4y agoI think they look at many signals, including direct lobbying from companies and banks.
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoWhoever works in their PR team, they have done a very poor job at communicating this.
- russellbeattie 4y agoIf you want to keep track: https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- hahaxdxd123 4y agoLooking at this guy's career: Corbis Starbucks Best Buy Symantec Why was he considered the best choice to run a health-tech Bet?
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- tediousdemise 4y agoWhen layoffs like this happen, I cringe for these companies and the poor souls who keep joining them. What HR really needs to do is a full retracement. Who hired "X" employee, and why? Follow this up the chain. Follow it as far up as it needs to go, to the very email or slide deck from an upper-level exec whose failure of a pet project was greenlit to begin with. Fire the entire chain of command complicit in the lowest level employee's firing. Truly, drain the entire swamp, otherwise the execs will keep making bad choices and playing music chairs while the boots on the ground get mutilated for them.
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- mr90210 4y agoThe issue appears to start from the funding model VCs often use where companies are incentivized to grow (in in headcount) as fast as they can to justify its current round of investment and then seek more, and then become a publicly traded company so that investors recoup their money, and the founders get even richer. Sadly, none of these companies will likely do what you suggested because mass-hiring is just part of the game when there is too much money flowing into their accounts from VCs.
- r00fus 4y agoThis sounds like an expensive fishing expedition with limited upside for the organization & leadership. Is it always the case that bad hires come from bad managerial decisions? You might end up finding the entire ZIRP funding based thinking complicit.
- dang 4y agoWe changed the URL from https://verily.com/blog/one-verily-forward/ https://verily.com/blog/one-verily-forward/ to a third-party article. There's also https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/alphabet-to-cut-staff-of-health-sciences-unit-verily-by-15percent.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/alphabet-to-cut-staff-of-hea....
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- TheRealPomax 4y agobut you changed it to a paywalled article =( (on that note, we still need a [paywall] suffix for links like these. Great for folks who have subscription, near-useless to the rest of us who only get to see 5 links a year)
- dang 4y agoIt wasn't paywalled when I changed it. In any case, there's a workaround here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34348334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34348334.
- ddlutz 4y agoInteresting, wouldn't first party article be preferred to third party?
- pvg 4y agoUsually not in the case of press releases since the press releases and similar forms of corporate communication tend to include more spin, have bad titles, language that spawns lots of repetitive irritated comments, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=press%20release%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- devlife 4y agoAll one is interested in is if he/she has a job. Rest is just corporate BS which one has to go along with.
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- jlund-molfese 4y agohttps://archive.ph/uCA9T https://archive.ph/uCA9T
- mikeortman 4y agoSpent 1 paragraph telling people they are doing layoffs, immediately followed by a long bullet-point list saying that almost every leader is keeping their jobs or getting more responsibility. Who reviewed this?
- progbits 4y agoThe big egos who keep their jobs, pat themselves on the back with a bonus and don't actually suffer any negative effect when "taking full responsibility", who else?