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Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant
- fxtentacle 3y agoGoogle lays off 0.05% in a restructuring. Is that really "the scoop" and newsworthy?
- ggm 3y agoI think it is, because it suggests that a development arc either has maxed out, or is now subject to a different dynamic. Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6. It's arguably one of the most important parts of the software stack. But, it's late stage mature code. Netflix had 4-6 people working on TCP flow control. Google had a small team, based in Japan, doing IPv6 for android. If a team has 100+ members and they can go, it poses "wow, at scale, how many people do you need to do things" questions when things as mission-critical as the entire IP stack can be done by less than 10 people. Maybe I'm in an odd corner, but I find this thing fascinating. When they laid off the adsense sales and support staff because AI can do it cheaper, I found that fascinating too. (I don't work for Apple, Google or Netflix, and my numbers are approximate based on bar conversations with some of the people in each team in each company. Consider them Fermi numbers)
- haswell 3y agoI’d be careful not to conflate criticality with complexity. The TCP/IP stack is extremely well defined and covers a finite problem space. Products higher up the software stack tend to balloon in complexity as they reach into concrete use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of overweight teams, but most products can’t survive with 4-6 people.
- necheffa 3y agoTCP/IP is so well defined because the engineers on these small teams are the ones publishing the standards. It isn't like they are simply reading a spec out of an existing document and coding up a conformant program.
- happyopossum 3y ago> standards. It isn't like they are simply reading a spec out of an existing document and coding up a conformant program. Err, yes - that’s what 98% of modern TCP/IP development work is. There aren’t frequent new RFCs for TCP - it is established, standardized, and stable.
- mmcallister 3y agoThe other 2% keeps engineers fairly busy, I imagine. Custom congestion control algorithms come to mind
- oblio 3y agoYeah, but even so, that pales in comparison to Joe Product Manager saying "the new French tax code dropped last Tuesday" or "our biggest competitors just signed an agreement that they will implemented a new standard they're proposing and we need to get onboard". Non-technical stuff is crazy complex compared to purely technical stuff, which tends to be a lot better defined.
- netdebugg 3y ago> Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6 Do you know who they are and how to reach them? I have filed 3 or 4 bugs with proper reproducers through Apple's feedback assistant over the years and till this day those issues haven't even received a single comment nor any acknowledgement that the report has been read.
- schaefer 3y agoPerhaps write it up as an open letter/blog article and link it here??
- netdebugg 3y agoI prefer just getting those bugs addressed. A lot of times writing these blogs and open letters just brings some attention to the blog/article and the real issue never gets addressed. Plus at least 2 of these would involve me sharing internal details which I prefer doing only through the official bug reporting channels.
- Shank 3y agoIf you file something through FA, the advice in the community lately has been to re-file the bug against every beta of the OS and every new version of the OS until it's resolved. If you have any new information at all, re-file the bug with the new version. Apple's bug triage team doesn't route things that are old/ancient/sitting in the system forever. Your bugs probably haven't reached the team yet.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago> because AI can do it cheaper I'm interested to see how this works out in the mid-longer term to see where it tracks on the graph with "Cheaper" on one axis and "Better" on the other (where '0' is in the centre of the "Better" axis, not at the bottom/left).
- trashtester 3y agoBuilding an AI stack to perform some task can often be budgeted as capex even where it would be opex if humans did it. Capex tasks can be considered to be either "Cheaper" (as they're investments, not expenses) or "Better", since they create long term value on top of the short term, depending on how you want to define your axes. When doing this budgeting, moving items from opex to capex in this way is mostly based on belief structures, as it's too early to tell if the capex generates lasting value or not. Short term, though, it tends to be good for the stock price regardless.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoOpex to capex is a reverse machine that goes ping. And so the pendulum swings.
- trashtester 3y agoAnd while it swings, people get promoted or move to another company.
- astrange 3y agoThis underrates contributing size a little because there's a lot more who occasionally contribute in the layers above or below - like if you're working on cellular modem performance you also care about TCP behavior, or someone working on video streaming is going to want to tune networking themselves.
- oceanplexian 3y agoYes because the more that news says “Layoff” the more they can create the perception that the market is terrible and trick employees into accepting lower wages.
- tahnyall 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tdb7893 3y agoI'm hearing they laid off thousands today actually but it could be my friend has the number wrong.
- jridgewell 3y agoWith the number of VPs sending emails, I think it's much larger than "hundreds".
- upupupandaway 3y agoIt's a much larger layoff. My friend's three VPs (heh) were all laid off in Fitbit. Entire orgs were wiped there.
- srj 3y agoAt least in my area it's 10%.
- nekitamo 3y agoThere were also large layoffs in Google’s ad sales org today, but I haven’t seen any news articles about it.
- jrockway 3y agoSales seems like a truly miserable role. You have to sell whatever the company makes, which often times isn't what the customer wants. You mostly get paid by commission, so if someone just goes out and buys your product without talking to you, you don't get paid. Finally, it's treated by business as some sort of resource they can autoscale up and down as necessary. Need more money? Get more salespeople. Out of money? Fire all the salespeople. I just find it so weird.
- danpalmer 3y agoI also see it as a position I wouldn't want in a million years, but whenever I talk to salespeople I can absolutely see why they do it. There seems to be a mindset, or a particular kind of motivation, that fits with the act of selling and with the idea of commission based earnings. I'm also not sure that many salespeople see their role as "sell whatever the company makes". There's a common trope of engineers scrambling to build what the sales team have sold, but even aside from that, I think many salespeople see their job as building and growing accounts in their clients, and finding the products or features available to grow into. Perhaps just a perspective difference, but that can be all that matters.
- mcmoor 3y agoIt's also the role that have the most direct employee compensation per generated company profit that you can get without betting any money as investment. It certainly appeals to someone who thinks they can bootstrap themselves instantly to the top.
- sulam 3y agoAnd DSPA. Some news articles about that one.
- Ivoirians 3y agoDoesn't Google do that thing where if your team becomes redundant, they don't lay you off, they give you some time to find another team if you choose to transfer?
- Rebelgecko 3y agoTechnically yes, but when there's no open roles it doesn't matter
- PessimalDecimal 3y agoThey have done that before. But they have also laid off 12,000 employees without doing that as well. Do we know which today's announcement resembles?
- aaomidi 3y agoLooks more like last years Jan layoffs. Laptops restarting & people getting locked out.
- danpalmer 3y agoFrom what I saw in the UK, the Jan 2023 layoffs (the 12k) had a lot of people redeployed. Of the 3 people I knew personally impacted by it, 2 were redeployed elsewhere in the business (1 eng, 1 HR). I know it happened extensively in at least one other country too.
- berdario 3y agoI also personally knew about 9 people affected in the UK. Of those, only one managed to find another team before the end of the garden leave.
- trashtester 3y agoA company that plans ahead a little can also relocate top talent BEFORE the layoff rounds start, and even relocate people they want to get rid of TO the part of the or where layoffs are coming. I'm sure some orgs stealthily start planning this months if not years ahead of such events, especially if they identify that they have unproductive people on board that are difficult to fire the regular way (like European employees, where regulations makes it harder to fire people than in the US).
- sytelus 3y agoWow... What is going on it tech? We are just 10 days in the new year and every day there has been surprise layoffs! Unity Twitch Several startups And now.. Google! This is at the same time when stocks are almost all time high :).
- lgleason 3y agoEmployees are a companies most valuable assets. All that a company has to do is to lay off a bunch of them and it realizes that value with a higher stock price :). Edit: in case anybody missed the nuance, this comment is meant as satire.
- CrimsonChapulin 3y agoBy that logic monetary value is a company’s most valuable asset. Edit: I understand it was satire.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 3y agoI do always laugh a little about these things. "Safety is our top priority." It can't be, or you wouldn't be in the business of drilling mines or whatever. Safety is the second priority.
- matrix_overload 3y agoHigh interest rates. If Fed dropped them to 0 overnight, everyone on the list would have happily hired everyone back. But then the grocery prices would start growing faster than SPX.
- rsanek 3y agoThe timing is surprising if this was the main motivation. Rates have been flat for nearly a half year and are projected to come down later in 2024 -- https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch-tool.html https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...
- lgleason 3y agoI have both Nest Mini's and Alexas strewn throughout my house hooked up to my home automation etc.. Over time I've found that Alexa works better and that the google assistant progressively gets worse. This will probably not help things. Makes me wonder if they are slowly stepping away from Google assistant.
- kohbo 3y agoAgreed. The quality in not only GAs responses but also its ability to understand intent has seemingly been on a downward trend for at least a couple of years now.
- ASinclair 3y agoIt was much more broad than the Assistant org.
- MattGaiser 3y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033994/google-reorganization-fitbit-park-friedman-ar-layoffs https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033994/google-reorganiz... Fitbit and AR too.
- ricktdotorg 3y agofrom a consumer perspective, the Fitbit acquisition has pretty much been a disaster/no-op: - bizarre, fitness-feature-removal "updates" to the iOS Fitbit app - piss-poor UI refresh - very buggy "move Fitbit to your Google account" post-acqui-process i suppose i was an idiot as a paying (G Suite) Google user + paying Fitbit user to expect anything other than Google: 1. acquiring fitbit 2. integrate Fitbit user tracking data into waves hands Borg 3. do All The Things that Google does with human tracking data etc 4. kill the app
- modeless 3y agoI don't use any feature of Google Assistant that wasn't present in the original Android voice search feature over a decade ago. And the few features I do use haven't improved in any way that I've noticed. In fact I feel like reliability has regressed. Google could have fired almost the whole team years ago and my user experience would not be different today. I consider voice assistants to be a failed experiment. It's clear that they were doomed to fail without the true ability to understand natural language and perform common sense reasoning that is only now starting to become a possibility with large language models.
- aspectmin 3y agoI would counter that voice assistants are not a failed experiment. I would suggest that Amazon and Google’s execution of said experiments have failed. I am extremely excited about the potential of projects like the Rabbit R1 and Humane.
- modeless 3y agoI agree, I just think these new projects based on LLMs should be considered a different category, AI agents or something. The traditional grammar-based voice assistant architecture used by Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Bixby, etc is an abject failure, and not for lack of trying.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoI think many parts of the architecture can be reused - in Alexa terms, all of the “skills” that integrate the assistant with various other services. IMO one of the main problems with assistants is that I don’t know what skills are available or how to invoke them. It’s like I’m a wizard who has to memorize all the spells I could be casting. It never happens because I don’t care enough. I think LLM’s could potentially help my making it easier to discover and invoke those skills.
- modeless 3y ago"Skills" will be obsolete very soon. AI agents will use the same software tools and services that humans do. They won't need special separate AI-only interfaces. I'm not excited about the Rabbit R1 as a hardware device but their software vision is exactly right and there are new startups coming out of stealth seemingly every day now attacking this problem.
- neilv 3y agoSo what's a good employer now, now that Google has been losing the reputation for treating employees well? (Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.)
- toomuchtodo 3y agoFederal government. No equity, but stability. Best place to take shelter during economic uncertainty or bearish conditions imho. Rode out the 2008 GFC at a DOE lab. https://www.usajobs.gov/ https://www.usajobs.gov/
- danpalmer 3y agoAnd you get bonus days off any time congress needs to raise the debt ceiling!
- toomuchtodo 3y agoSometimes better than random layoffs because someone needed to juice the stock price. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-excessive-pay-investor-alphabet-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce... (“A major Alphabet investor said the company should cut even more jobs and address 'excessive' pay in the wake of mass layoffs”) (Edit: retracted an unnecessarily snarky statement) (I admit Congress needs to get its shit together)
- danpalmer 3y agoHey both of these suck for everyone involved, I was just trying to point out that government work is not without its own issues. You may be right about government jobs being more stable, you're certainly less likely to just lose your job. They do tend to pay significantly less though from what I've seen. I'm from the UK so while we do have layoffs, like much of Europe we have relatively good employment protections. The government here don't tend to do layoffs, but do tend to use contractors significantly more than most businesses and do flex their contractor base up and down.
- googlelayoff24 3y agoGoogle's done company wide layoffs today in a fragmented way to make them look localized, but it's affecting the whole company, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947580
- PessimalDecimal 3y agoThis link seems broken.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- googlelayoff24 3y agoI created a thoraway account, maybe I can't post yet?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoMaybe post the link in your reply here (not the link the the HN submission, but to what the submission was supposed to link to).
- klausa 3y agoThe link is dead and won't work for anyone without [showdead] enabled; for posterity here's the content: Leads across Google are sending coordinated emails within their orgs announcing layoffs. They've all gone out in the last 2 hours or so. They've fragmented the layoffs on purpose to make them seem more localized, but it's affecting the whole company. Orgs that I've heard/I'm part of that have been impacted so far include Ads, Search, Assistant, Maps Android & Core. I'm sure there are more, but I can't confirm. I can't find WARN notices yet, so I assume they haven't been filed yet in any state.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- razodactyl 3y agoWhy lay-off instead of repurpose? Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense. It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.
- cvhashim04 3y ago> Why lay-off instead of repurpose? Appease investors probably
- EasyMark 3y agoGenerally to boost numbers for the quarter, it takes a while for the damage to propagate through the system after a mass firing (in terms of new code/features/products) but the profits increase instantly, appeasing investors who think only in terms of weeks and quarters.
- joshspankit 3y agoI’m continually surprised that this tactic still works. It’s been rinsed and repeated so many times that the inevitable damage (and effect on the company financials) is practically boring.
- RHSeeger 3y agoI seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.
- ehsankia 3y agoRight, that doesn't quite make sense. The previous layoff was all across the board and likely trimming lower rated engineers across the whole company. Wiping a specific team, with potentially top tier talent, makes no sense. Are we sure this is actually general engineers? The headline only says "working on". It could be people doing very specific work, like prompt validation, QA, etc.
- xnx 3y agoProbably related: "Google reorganizing Pixel hardware: Fitbit’s James Park leaving, layoffs hit AR team" https://9to5google.com/2024/01/10/google-reorganizing-hardware/ https://9to5google.com/2024/01/10/google-reorganizing-hardwa...
- fumar 3y agoI had not visited Semafor before. I like the simplicity of it. The word choice is clear and simple. Anyone have thoughts on reading Semafor once a week? Even though I am on here, I try to avoid too much daily news.
- happyopossum 3y agoSemafor is great for getting the news without getting caught in the news-hype-scare-cycle.
- MattGaiser 3y agoI imagine that killedbygoogle will soon be adding Fitbit and Assistant to the graveyard.
- mvdtnz 3y agoIt's not like that team has achieved a single thing in 6+ years. I'm shocked to hear anyone at all is still working there.
- Doubtme 3y ago[dead]
- bananapub 3y agowonder if there will be any actual consequences for senior management this time? I'd be absolutely fascinated to see the analysis of how they decided that eliminating the (almost) sacrosanct rule of "oh don't worry about your project, if it gets canned you can just chill out for a bit and find another team" was worthwhile. how valuable did they think instilling fear in the company was?
- matchbok 3y agoThat's not how any business works. Googlers aren't entitled to a job at Google, believe it or not. Even if their feelings are hurt. Please, please, take 1 minute and imagine a world where a company is punished by (someone?) for laying people off. Please think of the consequences of that. lol.
- alephnan 3y agoThe finance industry expects people to work way harder then tech, but the E.V. is usually less. Yes, there are stories about quants making 7 figures, but that's exceedingly rare now compared to the early 2ks. The people who had this aptitude and skillset would have thrived in tech anyways. For example, Jeff Bezos used to be a trader. There was even a window of time where people in finance saw how the grass was greener in tech. It just happened to be that the finance industry is mature, whereas tech was nascent, with a skills shortage during a period of exponential growth. The pool of graduates studying CS has grown an order of magnitude, while demand for jobs has contracted. What we are seeing is the tech industry maturing. The golden era of tech is over. Tech will just be another middle class job. Tech will only be slightly better than other middle class white collar jobs, but it will no longer be the be the guaranteed path to being a millionaire after 5-10 years of working.
- mega-flop 3y agoDepends on what you mean by middle class job. Salaried employment in general is inextricably middle class in my opinion.
- theshackleford 3y ago> but it will no longer be the be the guaranteed path to being a millionaire after 5-10 years of working. For the vast majority, this has not been a thing in the first place.
- isuckatcoding 3y agoIs GCP affected?