20 ms·
Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- duringmath 3y ago[flagged]
- iJohnDoe 3y agoAgreed. They get paid $400k-$600k a year to do 10% work and slack off the rest of the time. Then started complaining when Google told they needed to start actually working.
- duringmath 3y agoI mean just look around you everyone's getting fired but you don't see the same smarmy "look at me" behavior from other companies' employees.
- LightBug1 3y agoWork? Who's that? ... Is he a colleague?
- option 3y agoTheir CEO needs to go, he has no tech vision
- zx8080 3y agoCEO helps profits and ensures stock price. Engineers only spend money. Who should go? /s
- not2b 3y agoI know, /s, but: If you have someone who aimlessly kills products and fires people but lacks vision or a decent plan, you could find someone much cheaper, and save tens of millions on executive compensation. If operating margin is so crucial now, then it seems cutting pay of top executives is the easiest way to achieve that with the least damage to the company.
- zx8080 3y agoFiring people actually helps raising a stock price [0]. 0 - https://money.com/tech-layoffs-affect-stock-prices/ https://money.com/tech-layoffs-affect-stock-prices/
- zx8080 3y agoRaising stock price makes so many people happy than firing a few wealthy individuals does some small harm for the greater good of many. /s
- zx8080 3y ago> so many people Meaning shares holders, of course.
- not2b 3y agoImproving operating margin helps raise the stock price: the company then can at least temporarily produce the same revenue for lower cost. But firing employees is only one way to do it. Executive compensation is now so bloated that reducing it might produce the same gain as from firing hundreds of employees, with less impact to future growth (talent is retained).
- wtracy 3y agoLook at Tesla and Nvidia in recent years. Exciting innovations can cause stock prices to soar completely independently of the company's fundamentals.
- mouse_ 3y agoNo, he has money vision. They're at an all time high right now. He's not going anywhere
- flkiwi 3y agoWe'll see how short-term thinking works out for them in a decade. "Rich but irrelevant" isn't a good place to end up. But at least shareholders in 2024 got a percentage more in gains.
- jaggederest 3y agoJust like IBM, outperforming the S&P by -4500% overall since the 1960s.
- esafak 3y agoIBM's stock hasn't even tripled since Google's IPO in 2004. You buying?
- pcloadletter_ 3y agoTech CEOs seem to have realized the really short-term wins drive stock prices up. Feel especially bad recently. Feels like we're going to see crumbling software soon
- ChatGTP 3y agoThey've just turned into regular companies.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago> “I guess I will just hang around and do my job until Google no longer wants me,” she finished her post. Welcome to having a regular non-union job? There's several billion other people in the club. It's not exciting, and you will be let go whenever the company wants a boost in their financials. There's also no free snacks or chefs, but you (at Google) still get a bigger salary than anyone else in the world with your job, if that helps. If you want fulfillment, excitement, vision, etc, you could always change jobs to a smaller company whose reason for being isn't selling ads.
- away271828 3y agoPerhaps not popular but, if you're getting paid well, the work is tolerable enough, the grass is often not actually greener somewhere else, you have mouths to feed, maybe you're close to retiring/semi-retiring, etc. continuing to hang around for a while isn't necessarily the worst strategy. I probably wouldn't do it indefinitely but it can make sense to hang around for a while.
- kurthr 3y agoTo be fair disparagement for middle management has been around for ages. Nobody (10 years ago) I knew wanted to be promoted into management, if only because it was so hard to manage. It seemed like there was an outside hiring binge of middle managers who wanted to grow empires (from Amazon/MS etc). Hmmm... would be interesting to go look at LinkedIn data to see if it's really true. Of course it wouldn't fix this problem. Workers are now unhappy with senior management, which is new. Although, I think some of the empire building resulted in a lot of the pandemic over hiring (and departures of long term staff).
- nine_zeros 3y agoGoogle - as well as faag, faang adjacent, and wannabe faang companies - all have the same problem: The entire management track is filled with mediocre paper pushers instead of innovators.
- geodel 3y agoThis frees up innovators to launch their own companies.
- klyrs 3y agoI love me a boring boss. Inept, I have zero patience for.
- sianemo 3y agoOutside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.
- blibble 3y agodesigning a new music app and/or chat app every 2 years sounds pretty fun
- standardUser 3y agoBut then you might have to watch it get killed right before your eyes. And the lack of new features and general support for a lot of their products makes me think there are a lot of employees wishing they could continue work on the products they've built, but can't.
- esafak 3y agoSeeing your work get canned is not fun.
- MikeTheRocker 3y agoI'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
- chaostheory 3y agoHopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.
- 3y ago
- treprinum 3y ago"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’" Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.
- xt00 3y agoSurvivorship bias in action.. "I'm glad to be alive.. thanks boss!" How many of the people laid off said "thank you for simplifying.." ..
- standardUser 3y agoThis is a serious problem. There will always been a handful of "career-oriented' sycophants who will tell the top bosses exactly what they want to hear. That let's those bosses ignore complaints (if people dare complain) or simply assume everything must be wonderful since they keep getting such positive feedback.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bradleyjg 3y agoThere’s a powerful evolutionary force which provides very rich or powerful people with whatever yes-men are appealing to their particular personalities. The returns to being an accepted yes-man are so high that attempts are going to continually be made until someone clicks. Eventually someone is going to click. It’s near impossible not to become detached from reality under such circumstances. Hence all the legends across many cultures of the king dressing up as a commoner and sneaking around his kingdom.
- api 3y agoI forget where I heard this but I once read a saying that “communication is only possible between equals.” I think that’s too extreme as a blanket statement but it’s definitely true that when there are major wealth or position differences communication becomes difficult and all kinds of perverse incentives come into play. If you wonder how, for example, George Bush II thought it really was “mission accomplished” in Iraq or Vladimir Putin thought they’d conquer Ukraine in a few weeks, the mechanism you describe is the answer. “Yes sir. Everything is great sir.” Nobody wants to contradict or bear bad news. The larger the power/wealth differential and the larger and older the organization the worse it gets. Older matters because it means there has been lots of time for these perverse incentives to take root. Large matters because the organization is too big for most people to really know one another. This is probably a major mechanism of civilization decline. Eventually you end up with layers of leadership that become increasingly detached from reality as you go up. It’s pretty incredible that primate social behaviors evolved for small hunting bands and tribes can scale this big at all, but they certainly don’t do so very well. The inefficiency and error rate is incredible.
- andrewstuart 3y agoIts amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.
- vondur 3y agoGoogle is still making money every quarter. Doubt they will get rid of him.
- yreg 3y agoThey are going to be left behind once enough capable people leave.
- whatshisface 3y agoPublic markets are not known for combining ten-year-long outlooks with deep domain knowledge. In fact that's the two things they're best known for lacking! (P.S. They've already been left behind by whatever Kagi is doing to filter out LLM garbage.)
- alwa 3y ago+1 to your observation about Kagi’s filtering. Whatever they’re doing sure seems to be working, and cumulatively with the rest of their small, quietly user-centric decisions over the past year or two, has really made them feel like an oasis relative to the sharp and quick deterioration that’s gone on over in Mountain View’s product.
- DanHulton 3y agoThey're gonna make money due to inertia for a while, until suddenly they won't, and then there won't be anything left to use to salvage the situation. When that happens, there are going to be a whole lot of "Whatever happened to Google?" articles that are going to be easy to sum up as "a long history of shortsighted decisions by inept management finally added up to more than the older history of good, forward thinking decisions ever did."
- TillE 3y agoGoogle does plenty of stuff well, but what's their last big exciting new product or even new feature? Bard is good but they're chasing OpenAI. Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung. Or YouTube Shorts and Tiktok. It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.
- utopcell 3y agoDo you mean, Google is one CEO change away from turning it around, like Microsoft did ?
- throwup238 3y agoMore like Sundar is one bad conference away from a viral video of him running around on stage covered in sweat yelling "Shareholders! Shareholders! Shareholders!"
- vineyardmike 3y agoGoogle is mostly owned by Larry and Sergey, so as long as they’re happy, nothing can be done. And they can have that discussion in private. Sundar just needs to smile through any conference and keep going. My guess is that he’ll say some off color on a hot mic or email leak. Considering his lack of effort in addressing Caste issues at Google… that’s possibly an issue. Could be antitrust stuff too. He’s been in hot water lately.
- parineum 3y ago> Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung Market share wise but not feature wise. Everyone is chasing them in regards to photo quality.
- solardev 3y agoA bit out of the loop here... who are you saying has the better photo quality now, Pixel or Samsung?
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoWhat ever happened to Google X, have they released a single product or is it all resume padding just like their balloons or whatever
- ojbyrne 3y agoWaymo came out of X.
- ghaff 3y agoThe question remains. Waymo is not really a product and it's unclear when it will become one in a broadly-deployed way.
- pb7 3y agoWhat product does Uber or Lyft or DoorDash or Instacart have? People take Waymo on a daily basis without incident. Just because it may not be available to you doesn't mean it's not real. It is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the industry.
- dekhn 3y agoThe technology predates X; X just housed it for a while. There were self-driving cars at Google in 2008, that look almost exactly like the ones that drive around now, except the computer vision hardware was bulkier.
- SllX 3y agoThat doesn’t sound right. Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.
- dekhn 3y agoGoogle X starting 2010. I saw self-driving cars (large spinning cameras) in the lot of Crittenden within a year of joining. So maybe it was 2009, but it was definitely before X existed.
- pcloadletter_ 3y agoI think you're just in for a rude awakening if you expect the Google from 20 years ago. It's no longer a scrappy startup, it's closer to Microsoft at this point.
- utopcell 3y agoI'd be happy with the Google from 5 years ago.
- gonzo41 3y agoNah, it's closer to IBM.
- PessimalDecimal 3y agoCame here to say exactly this.
- inamberclad 3y agoThe thing that struck me about Google is that it's a really well running machine. The documentation is all there, the build system is easy, and just about every issue is fixed with a single form submitted or email sent. You quickly develop a very high standard for how an organization should function.
- dekhn 3y agoI think you left out the sarcasm tag
- inamberclad 3y agoCompared to a lot of startups, it's not sarcasm
- away271828 3y agoCompanies grow and they have to change. I was at a company that grew to about 10x the size of when I joined. It was still pretty successful but it was a different company. I didn't have the freedom and flexibility, there was more process, etc. Not as fun but you really can't run a 10x company like you run a 1x one.
- lgleason 3y agoGoogle no longer hires the best and the brightest.
- PessimalDecimal 3y agoAren't they offshoring a lot of their roles to either India or eastern Europe? How'd that work out for IBM and others who tried this before them?
- whoswho 3y ago[flagged]
- webninja 3y ago[flagged]
- proc0 3y agoI've wondered about the connection between organizations at the human level, and entropy. Nothing can avoid the increase in entropy, not even teams and their work culture. The processes used get old and unwieldy, domain knowledge becomes fragmented, features take longer and have more bugs, etc. Perhaps this is inevitable, but maybe organizations could become aware of the changes in entropy and try to do the equivalent of maintenance and refactoring at the organizational level. There is probably some of this already happening, but I wonder if information theory can be applied at the people level to optimize and prevent increases in entropy.
- vineyardmike 3y ago“Refactoring at the org level” sounds like re-orgs and layoffs. I think it’s unavoidable. You hire to grow, but growth changes you. You can’t layoff to un-grow and return to former self because they layoffs take a toll.
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoWe need UBI and less dependence on private enterprises for basic human needs like income to survive and healthcare Would give both companies and individuals more flexibility and dynamism
- deprecative 3y agoBut then lazy "people" would benefit and we don't like that.
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoThe amount of time and effort people spend looking at others instead of themselves is maddening
- astrange 3y agoThere have been a lot of trials of UBI now and the evidence is very strong that… it doesn't affect employment much either way. So it doesn't make people lazy, but it's probably a disappointment to people who don't believe in work. In the end, positional wealth matters about as much as absolute wealth, so people still want to work even if they can already pay for food.
- nharada 3y ago"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed
- bazil376 3y agoAt least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up
- jiveturkey 3y agoYes. Those that don't make it to those transition points have "failed".
- wolverine876 3y agoWhy would that shift it from 'for the benefit of Google' to 'for the benefit of whoever makes the decision'?
- LoganDark 3y agoBecause once the company is big enough, it becomes competitive and immoral enough for employees to start to fear each other. So everyone starts to develop an "every man for themselves" mentality.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoIf you're cashing out all of your RSUs over the next 5 years, you don't necessarily care about the long term ramifications of your decision. Just that it pumps the stock price in the short term
- kevinventullo 3y agoAnd yet…
- jokethrowaway 3y agoNothing to do with it. We're not mature enough to recognize the importance of a flat hierarchy and adopting a startup-like model with our internal teams (business and technical independence, succeed and you'll be rich, fail and you're fired) As a result, the larger the company, the larger the hierarchy, the larger the inefficencies. At the extreme you approximate the government of a country. Layers of managers who care only about collecting a paycheck, engaging in company politics and looking busy cause exactly this problem. Managers will pick the best decision for them, not anyone else.
- christkv 3y agoFailure is growth. Failure is learning. But sometimes failure is just failure. I think... I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.
- hathawsh 3y agoIn case anyone else is wondering: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Gavin_Belson https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Gavin_Belson
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ungreased0675 3y agoI’m not sure Google leadership appreciate how fragile their search business is. The core product has slipped significantly in quality and is ripe for disruption. From the outside, the company looks rudderless, coasting along on (significant) momentum.
- brokencode 3y agoYup, time to bring in the consultants and MBAs, let them turbocharge the stock price by laying a bunch of people off and switching to single ply toilet paper, and cash out quick to pay for a new mega yacht.
- aiisdoomed 3y ago[flagged]
- asah 3y ago(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list. Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materially more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, reasonably priced and people love them. The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc. Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular. Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water. Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features. As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor). As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet - we should only be so luck to have bought-and-held that stock. Meanwhile, Google owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price. Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
- smeej 3y agoI don't understand the complaint from the guy who has been there for 15 years and doesn't like that it's changed. Growing companies don't stay the same for 15 years. People who like working at young companies generally don't like working at old ones. This isn't a problem. It's just a reality. If you think the early stage is fun because you're called upon to wear many hats and contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. Leave before a company gets that size!
- nine_zeros 3y ago> contribute to the vision of what could happen next, you're going to hate working under three layers of management, all of which have to be seen to be "doing something," so they tell you how to do your job even though they have no actual idea how to do your job. This is by far the biggest frustration for smart people. You can't just have so many layers of mediocrity have authority over smart people. When you have so many mediocre people who want to be seen as "doing something", they are literally destroying the innovation by virtue of just existing in that company at that level. The solution is actually pretty simple - make management track people go on call. That way, they develop empathy for customers, engineers and services. Make them spend less time on committees, promo packets, performance reviews and instead, spend more time on services. Make them fix bugs. Be close to the work that they are supposedly the face of.
- carlthome 3y agoIs there any company that has tried that idea? Sounds interesting (akin to DevOps).
- smeej 3y agoI think it also behooves these smart people just to realize that they're not "one company for the long haul" people. I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment. But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applying at raise an eyebrow over it. I think there's a tangential tricky element here too, that most financial advice is written for the masses of people who do have predictable career paths and long-term plans. There's nothing wrong with that. Those people need to have plans too. But there's not much written for the people who know they're going to be in and out of work, how to maximize each while preparing for the other, stuff like that, and I wish there were. I could use decent advice, but "be a different kind of person, because the kind of person you are isn't like me" doesn't really help. I'm financially way ahead of my friends in traditional roles, because risk is often rewarded and ownership matters, but I've yet to find an advisor who has the first idea what to do with me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nerpderp82 3y agoMorale from the initial and continued layoffs have utterly pulled the rug out from underneath the culture at Google. Any productivity savings they think they earned has afaict, but dwarfed by large margin in reduced productivity as people scramble to try and perform for whatever algorithm is being used to remove people. Leadership all the way to the top is completely inept.
- jjjjoe 3y ago> whatever algorithm is being used to remove people Different functions/teams/departments seemed to use very different algorithms, suggesting there was just no leadership at all. I posted a separate top level comment, but seeing one function do last-in/first-out and another jettison its most-tenured (most expensive? non-pristine HR record? who knows!) folks makes it hard for employees to understand what the new rules of engagement are.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis is just so totally absurd that I’m surprised nobody has pushed back hard on this claim: “The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,” That sounds like a massive hyperbolic exaggeration at best and pure fabrication at worst. If true though it’s a massive indictment on the leadership that shows how inept they are at even having a semblance of knowing what their people do and taking care of them.
- htrp 3y agoPR running interference as best they can
- citizenpaul 3y ago>sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. Sounds like Pichai has been drinking the linkedin toxic positivity kool-aid. I would think that quote came from the onion 5 years ago.
- therealdrag0 3y agoA team that lost a low performer may appreciate it, otherwise not.
- krade 3y agothis worker came to me, crying, tears in his eyes: Thank you Mr. Puchai for firing all these people.
- karaterobot 3y ago> Hirsh Theriault complained that executives are “trying to point in a vague direction” toward AI while waiting for lower-level staff to propose concrete, actionable ideas. I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what but how—is way worse.
- nine_zeros 3y ago>I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what but how—is way worse. There is another alternative, "The executive rallies people behind a vision, encourages people to come up with ideas and solutions, sets up incentives such that low level ICs can bypass all middle management nonsense, encourage failures, and skill themselves up to be able to make tough calls." But that's not what executives do. They set some vague vision, force middle management to trickle it down to ICs. Everyone is under pressure to do something with no reward for doing that something. Everyone still has to follow the chain of command and everyone still has to manage mediocre middle management politics.
- iboisvert 3y agoI agree, but I think there are a couple important stages that should be explicit: actively solicit proposals and fund the proposals
- paxys 3y agoIs there a single tech company where morale has been high since 2022? Microsoft had multiple layoffs and froze promos, bonuses and stock grants for all employees, and now they are the most valuable company in the world and have a great reputation in the industry. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta and the rest aren't much different. If you are looking for groundbreaking innovation, competent management, no politics, freedom from shareholder demands etc. then it's best to steer clear of any multi-trillion dollar corporation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johnnyanmac 3y agoProbably Apple. They didn't go on a hiring spree, most of their products are still consumer focused, and there isn't really too many employee complaints unless you're a contractor. And of course they still have excellent PR from the customers. They probably aren't making anything groundbreaking (outside of some obligatory LLM) but they seem least likely to drop employees as if they were throwing darts on a board.
- lulznews 3y agoFailing up and sucking up are the two most powerful forces in corporate America.
- jjjjoe 3y agoThe reason the word "inept" keeps coming up is just how opaque and senseless to the rank and file the January 2023 layoffs were. High performers, low performers, newest hires, most tenure: we saw all kinds of heads roll. I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. A growing deployment team was actively hiring before and after it got a 6% haircut. The simplest explanation would be that every cost center/P&L had to offer up 6% of its people, regardless of that cost center's overall trajectory, place in company strategy or open headcount. And that every cost center's VP or general manager or whatever just got collared by HR, was given a list on a piece of paper and couldn't leave until they chose 6% by ...whatever metric they came up with on the spot. Whatever actually happened I'll never know, but what I've seen was 100% compatible with that theory. Which in turn looks pretty inept.
- willio58 3y ago> I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"
- CamelCaseName 3y agoIs it possible they did this on purpose to expand their team size?
- arvinsim 3y agoNot uncommon. Take out the old guard and hire new people for empire building.
- refulgentis 3y agoNo that's absolutely bonkers and an edge case. 5 women don't have a baby in 1.8 months, and headcount has been frozen-ish since late 2021 unless you're Bard, so we're looking at someone dangerously stupid sticking their neck out to over-compensate, for no good reason, and inexperienced with basic tech shibboleths. Also, the large firing decisions in January 2023 and January 2024 were made up several steps up the ladder. There's been probably just as much firings done informally inbetween, and to your point, some were very purposeful: multiple people in Assistant org. reported independently that new directors and their couterie were grafted onto the org, they were shuffled onto "Still Very Important" Assistant teams, then the not-so-important Assistant teams were let go en masse.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoAnything new here? Or is this article just aggregating every piece from the last month about layoffs, the leaked memo, discontent, boring etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39101384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39101384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39125467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39125467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39260956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39260956
- nojvek 3y agoGoogle is printing more money than ever before. Google could likely fire 1000s more and it wouldn’t change their trajectory. Same with Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc. Their core businesses are massive empires. They can make so many stupid mistakes, hire inept layers of management and still cash billions. They can randomly fire 5% of their workforce with roll of dice. There is enough redundancy and resilience that they’ll bounce back. We, the average working joes are bound by gravity. We can escape into space, but with immense force and spice of luck. We have to work for money. Mega trillion corporations are like black holes. They curve space time so hard, money works for them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoAt current trajectories, nVDA could surpass GOOG within a month. MSFT already did-so within the past year (after providing OpenAI funding). ---- All I'm suggesting is that the money fountain isn't forever.
- nojvek 3y agoTrue. My point being that all of mega tech corps are like hive intelligences. They are all optimizing for shareholder value. At that scale, the individuals don't really matter. If you make your Job your identity, you're in for a big surprise. The truth is that most of us are replaceable. We are not special snowflakes in the eyes of Mega Tech Corps.
- diogenescynic 3y agoMy friend who works there says it's because they let people who've been there a long enough time transfer into roles they have no experience in, but because of their experience, they are automatically put into senior positions but lack the experience to actually do the job.
- theGnuMe 3y ago"CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,” he said, per the Verge." When CEOs say this, you know you have a huge morale and leadership problem. Statements like that are incredulous. It's the boot lickers who say that stuff to the CEO. Sundar is out of his depth at worse and disconnected at best if he believes that is the way to defend layoffs. I am surprised HR/PR let him say this...
- devwastaken 3y agoThis is the time to make startups. The market is ripe for disruption when the old players become visionless shells only recognizable by name.
- mfru 3y agoAs with every time when scandals in tech land break: "You Deserve a Tech Union" https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union Put in the work, organize, unionize. The alternative is sisyphusian repetition of the same situations.
- anacrolix 3y agoI left Google 10 years ago because it was boring. Any interesting things it does is restricted to an elite cabal. It's horribly conservative with programming innovation for a company its size. Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors.
- avidiax 3y ago> Its main reason to hire is to deny talented programmers to its competitors. Maybe they think that they don't really have competitors at this point, or rather, no competitors that can meaningfully reduce the market share in key areas, or competitors that are in a position to hire the laid off employees.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoYeah, pretty much. I think Meta was more or less on record saying this back in the early 2010's. I think by the late 2010's they stopped doing this because they are well established in the market now.
- lencastre 3y agothose TPS reports aren’t going to generate themselves,
- felarof 3y ago[flagged]
- Vinaas 3y agoLife can be so cruel sometimes but even worst when you have a cheating partner. I got to discover my spouse was having an affair through the help of { remote spy wise @ gm ail c o m } who gave me access to his device remotely without his notice. I got access to all social media apps, call logs and sms and deleted datas and messages too. Do not be a victim to lies and mischief. Get in contact with him and stay safe.