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Google isn’t a work program. It is set up to make money and return money to investors either via capital gains (buybacks) or income (dividends). The fact that t

by voisin 2y ago

Google isn’t a work program. It is set up to make money and return money to investors either via capital gains (buybacks) or income (dividends). The fact that they laid people off means they felt they could accomplish this mission better without those people. These facts are irrefutable and confusing them for your own desire for how the world should work is a waste of time. If you don’t like this setup, then don’t work for Google or other companies prone to mass layoffs. Start your own business. Work for government. There are plenty of ways to avoid layoff risk. But you won’t get paid Google salaries.

MrSkelter 2y ago
They could sell the assets shutter the company as fire everyone for huge dividend. It’s more complicated than that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Invictus0 2y ago
But the layoff letter wasn't empathetic enough!* *got 12 weeks severance at $7k/week
throwup238 2y ago
Or better yet, work for companies like Google and do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted. Cold hard self interest works both ways. If Google’s trajectory is any indication, that’s what their workers are doing anyway.
- fnord77 2y ago
  > do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted The minimum is actually a lot, because at companies like that individual performance is monitored closely and other people are going to be working very hard.
  - gmassman 2y ago
    From what I understand though, it’s often possible to just “look” busy without actually being productive. Seems like cranking out design docs and scheduling meetings to make yourself and your work appear important can push one up the ladder a lot faster than making improvements to the codebase will. Optics matter most in organizations the size of Google.
    - mypalmike 2y ago
      My experience at a FAANG was that it's like any other job. You are on a team and you have a supervisor. You are expected to be productive. The stories of people finding themselves floating freely at a huge company without being expected to deliver business value are mostly apocryphal.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        I don't think we are talking about people floating freely without management. Everyone is on a team and has a supervisor, but different people have wildly different skill at politics and "appearing productive." We all know at least one person who was hired at a lower or similar level, yet who basically does nothing productive. They make up for it with bullshit: lots of managing upward, credit taking, writing good sounding but ultimately contentless docs, they're well dressed and groomed, charming, high charisma, ivy league mannerisms. They always end up with a sharp upward career trajectory, parachuting into Director, VP, SVP and so on roles.
- andybak 2y ago
  I think there's a subtle point here about the cost of layoffs being hard to quantify but hugely underestimated by large companies. A culture where employees feel that their dedication to the company mission is reciprocated must surely provide value?
  - boringg 2y ago
    I think what you are talking about was what large companies that were startups built over the last 5-10 years and felt betrayed by the anti company sentiment even though they had all a ton of fantastical things for employees and mostly unchecked employee growth. Now its swinging the other way. Also don't confuse my statement reading the market with what i believe.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- vasco 2y ago
  I think it's a bigger slight against yourself to "not try" in your life and your work. You won't learn as much and feel less accomplished. Just find somewhere where you'll feel good about it.
  - philipov 2y ago
    You should definitely try hard in your life and your work. Google is not your life, however, and you don't own your work for them. They only deserve the dedication they demonstrate towards others, which is none.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      Still, kinda sad to be spend such a big portion of your time on earth doing something nobody gives a shit about, not even you. Me, I’d sooner take a job where I’m contributing positively to society, even if I could make a bit more in adtech.
      - anal_reactor 2y ago
        Don't think about the time you waste. Think about the time you actually can use.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Doing the bare minimum at work isn’t “not trying” in your life. It’s not even “not trying” at work. It’s just trying the agreed upon amount.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      Thought experiment: tell the interviewer you “plan to do the bare minimum at work”. If that harms your chance to be hired, that’s evidence that the status quo agreement isn’t that.
      - ToxicMegacolon 2y ago
- aloe_falsa 2y ago
  > absolute bare minimum Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy. (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - candiodari 2y ago
    > (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.) Too bad all of those totally don't matter. What you're saying here comes down to doing what management wants. And management, above all else, DOES NOT WANT THE STATUS-QUO UPSET. The chairs in management are to be divided according to endless politicking and 5000 meetings for every line in the org chart, the only thing that matters. If any effort is actually successful beyond what was agreed beforehand ... that would undo the "work" of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of management meetings. In other work drafting design documents, doing interviews, improving existing codebases, mentoring junior ICs (to do the same) ... it's not a design document to create a new successful product on the internet. It's a design document discussing whether component #1823871 of Google maps should be monitored by a Python, C++, Java or Go program, and whether it this monitoring server gets configured using json, yml, chubby, files with strings, protobuf, python (configuration in code, python to configure flags, python to configure startup files, python to change build files, or python read by the program upon startup), Go, Java or Go. Don't forget: 8 page minimum, and you can't have less than 40 reviewers. This document is then followed by a manager from outside your org deciding that the whole monitoring is being shipped to India, and 3 months later you check on borg ... and surprise! There ISN'T anything monitoring it, as far as you can tell. Your manager assures you your work was not for nothing, but your design document curiously has never been accessed, and everybody you ask (btw: you're quickly told you're not supposed to do that) says management forbade them from looking at your design document. Later you learn that there isn't a single team in India that actually has access to your document (if you're working long enough at Google and actually know how to check that, which used to be 99%, but now ... perhaps 20%). A year later, the product takes down all of Google maps, your team's lack of monitoring gets blamed for the outage ... but 10 minutes after you go to your manager with this the postmortem, suddenly, gives you "access denied". Then, you get scheduled for a support checkin where the person doing the support checkin has no idea what it's about. Of course, what it's really about is that your forced one of the managers in your org to explain to higher ups how your concern is being addressed while still meeting budget constraints ... Which could have upset the status quo (recognizable by "Moderate impact" on your GRAD review) or actually upset the status quo ("Not Enough Impact" on your review). Congratulations!
- ToxicMegacolon 2y ago
  +1 I don't understand why people work hard for such corporations. Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm. I think if the execs can pay themselves $200M for taking the responsibility and being so horribly wrong about the direction they took the company in, then why shouldn't the rank and file employees do the bare fucking minimum that they are paid to do. Treat intellectual work the same as bagging groceries, do it from 9 to 5, only when sitting at the desk, and only for bugs that have been assigned. If the bug don't say "add an extra debug log" then don't add an extra debug log. <Rant Over>
  - Hock88sdx 2y ago
    [dead]
  - candiodari 2y ago
    > Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm Of course, it is the norm. Any real idea, any real effort does what is absolutely number 1 on the forbidden, sacrilege, NEVER DO THIS list: it would upset the social balance in management. More than that, it would upset the balance in unpredictable ways.
piva00 2y ago
This business thinking is not a law of nature, it's a choice. Putting investors as the most important cohort of all the people involved in a business (workers, society, and investors) is a relatively new invention from the 80s after Jack Welch's tenure at GE. So talking about it is important, we don't need to have business causing damages just to please investors. Even more when said investors in a public company have not contributed to the bottom line of a business, they bought some papers expecting that those papers would yield them some value, they haven't participated in the business to actually create the value they expect. They haven't directly funded the business for product research and/or expansion. This way of thinking has been disseminated as being "The Truth" of business while... It actually isn't, returning money to investors used to come only after taking care of your workers and after providing a benefit to society, training workers used to be a thing so your company could keep its edge in the long-term. The way you believe business should be is completely taken over by the financialisation of everything, businesses should be returning value to investors because they provide value to society, because they employ and train good people, not to just suck out the most value possible in the short term. Discussing this is necessary, Google isn't a jobs program but it also doesn't need to be a purely return-to-investors machine, a business is much more than that, reducing it to that point is what gave the USA what Boeing has become, I don't think you would like more of that.
- FredPret 2y ago
  > This way of thinking has been disseminated as being "The Truth" of business while... It actually isn't, returning money to investors used to come only after taking care of your workers and after providing a benefit to society, training workers used to be a thing so your company could keep its edge in the long-term. Business always has and always will be investor focused. Because they own it. Because the whole thing is literally made up out of their money. Likewise, the tradeoff between short-term cashflow and long-term viability always has and always will be a choice investors have to make. The optimal choice depends on the business and where it is in the business cycle. A wise investor ends up with Berkshire Hathaway; a foolish one ends up with Boeing and loses his shirt.
  - mordae 2y ago
spacephysics 2y ago
What industries are less prone to layoffs? I thought cybersecurity was one of them, then my buddy got snagged during a recent layoff cycle.
thfuran 2y ago
>These facts are irrefutable and confusing them for your own desire for how the world should work is a waste of time. Are you seriously saying that identifying the gap between how things work and how things should work is useless? The only domain in which that is true is the laws of physics. In other domains, the way things work can be changed.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Are you seriously saying that identifying the gap between how things work and how things should work is useless I'm not sure how you're getting that impression. It's pretty obvious the linked tweet is upset at google's behavior specifically, rather than the relationship between employees and companies in our society. That's what the parent commenter is objecting to.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Yes, and in doing so suggesting that the relationship between companies and society is immutable and that companies acting this way is inevitable. Neither is the case, since companies are a legal construct created by societies that can be regulated as those societies choose. And, indeed, other societies have chosen to regulate companies differently and don't have companies doing this sort of thing nearly as much.
- 0xf8 2y ago
  It’s also arguably the most beneficially productive imperative in those domains that are shaped by iterative change towards an idealized conception.
richrichie 2y ago
Google actually works for government. It came about from DoD funding FYI and continues to make a fuck ton of money from government contracts.
- neilc 2y ago
  Google makes a very small percentage of their revenue from government contracts.
enkid 2y ago
The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970. Questioning whether or not it should be the basis of how we organize an economy is perfectly valid. Simply saying "this is the responsibility of Google" is missing the point. Cases like this should make us ask if this should be the way we assign responsibility to businesses or if we should assign them different responsibilities.
- gruez 2y ago
  >The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970. What were the robber barons of the 19th century doing then? Or do you think that companies like standard oil were not "only set up to make money"?
  - enkid 2y ago
    The robber barons are specifically examples of people considered not to be fulfilling their social responsibilities. The idea that business are only responsible to make money is the new concept, not that people were acting only to make money previously. It was seen as a bad thing, now its a deflection for bad behavior.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 2y ago
  To anyone curious I'd also really recommend reading the original piece https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr... The argument made here includes not just that the company should not spend it's resources on things other than profit for the sake of shareholders, but also worries about employees and customers. At least in this article Friedman was advocating for something much more positive than the situation we found ourselves in today
strken 2y ago
It is also a fact that Google had an average tenure of 1.1 years in 2022. Perhaps this extraordinarily low figure might be connected to your facts.
- caddemon 2y ago
  Company loyalty was already mostly dead in big tech before the layoffs. It was also the fault of the companies, but more to do with the ability to get raises via job hopping versus internal promotion, not job security.
- ytNumbers 2y ago
  There's probably no single cause for such a short average tenure length. However, Marcus Lemonis always blames high turnover on bad management. Every time a boss tries to argue with that premise he immediately shuts them down.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    Let's try to enumerate possible causes for short tenures: * Actual job was not the thing promised in the interview * Hired person and work environment do not "click" * Got a better paid offer after N months * Hired person was not up to the task and fired * Work environment was toxic * Hired person was toxic And probably a few more. In all these cases, IMO there is a much bigger responsibility on the company,because they are the stronger side and the one that has the last word on hiring someone. So, it ends up being manager's fault. Having been a hiring manager myself, I can only excuse the manager in the case of a really, really, good faker during the interview phase. But those are not the norm.
    - RestlessMind 2y ago
      > and the one that has the last word on hiring someone False. A lot of times, companies make an offer which are then rejected by a candidate because they have another better offer. Maybe not in 2024, but it was very common until 2022.
pinewurst 2y ago
Google is an advertising company - why do its employees seem to think they work for Doctors Without Borders?
- thfuran 2y ago
  Because Google is good at advertising?
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  Because that's what Google has been telling everyone, and especially their employees. Every wall has a motivational poster.
api 2y ago
Also it’s public so a lot of those shareholders are pension funds and your 401k. Buybacks are just time boxed dividends.
neya 2y ago
Well said. As someone who has worked with Google consultants throughout his career, I always felt they were overpaid for the value they brought to the table. A few years ago, one of my clients wanted some advice on what Google Cloud products to migrate to their high traffic website while keeping costs at check. Our backend systems were fully SQL based. We may have met 3 consultants from their HQ at least and none of them even had any idea on a) the offerings that were available and b) which product should be used when. One of their consultants just kept throwing product names at us hoping it would stick, but it got really bad when he recommended a very expensive NOSQL offering for our completely SQL backend. We both walked out of the meeting mid-way after being annoyed with them. Their lifestyle is quite luxurious - you can roam around their entire campus without being asked questions, there's gaming rooms and places where you can take a nap at work and half the time people were barely at their desks doing their actual jobs. I always thought this was also one of the reasons why many clients started moving off their platforms (apart from also becoming more expensive over the years) to the point where Google is almost considered a laggard now in the AI space.
- ZuckMusk 2y ago
  Can you share there years of experience and alma mater (If you don't mind)
  - neya 2y ago
    One of them had over 3 years in the cloud space alone. The other two probably close to 5 years. All of them were from the top 3 universities in the country. I guess it had to do with the forced quota system. In big companies, there is a need to mandatorily fill their positions with x percent of locals. Sometimes, it is not a good thing.
IX-103 2y ago
Or they felt that investors wanted them to have layoffs. From talking to people in the know, the layoffs don't even seem to make sense. Why layoff all the developers in a project and keep the program managers, product managers, and engineering managers (and not even cancel the project)? Why kill the Python team and ask the Flutter team to take over their work? Why do projects seem to have more managers than individual contributors? I don't think this is part of a coherent long term strategy. It's just a reflexive reaction to demands to from major investors to reduce costs. Nevermind that Google is still hiring for the positions that they are laying people off for.
- hintymad 2y ago
  This is because Google has grown to be one of the most bureaucratic companies in industry, and it is the bureaucrats who have the utmost power in such companies. Naturally, it is engineers who are let go and bureaucrats who stay during a layoff
b3ing 2y ago
I make sure to tell all homeless people, “just start a business bro” /s
- voisin 2y ago
  Do you come across homeless people directly impacted by or even upset about Google’s mass layoffs?
Timshel 2y ago
Might be irrefutable but it's not like it's immutable. Buybacks used to be illegal so it's not like it couldn't change again depending of peoples "desire".
phmqk76 2y ago
Stock buybacks are an illegal stock manipulation that were routinely prosecuted as such before the Reagan administration waved a magic wand and decided it was kosher. If Google has $70 billion for stock buybacks, then Google has $70 for taxes, and strong pro-unionization rules are called for to tip the balance of power towards workers. Why did we create rules of the road where corporations and shareholders became the guiding force of our economy, when workers’ spending power keeps us afloat?
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
> It is set up to make money and return money to investors either via capital gains (buybacks) or income (dividends). Seeing this always saddens me. That the primary purpose of these insanely rich and powerful entities is just 'make the rich richer' and everything else is considered incidental. Is this really the best we can do?
- luminaobscura 2y ago
  yes. Capitalism is the best system. Even in communist china, only after transitioning to market capitalism they got tech companies producing prosperity. We also allow forming other kinds of companies. You can create worker cooperative tech company that has more diverse goal instead of just making money.
  - voisin 2y ago
    I’m not sure it is the Chinese tech companies that produced prosperity. It is due to their low cost manufacturing base for the last thirty years and consequent rapid urbanization. If anything, their tech companies have been largely laggards on the world stage with most being simple derivatives of western brands capitalizing on their large population base and barrier to foreign entry. They don’t have a very good track record of being issued patents outside their jurisdiction either.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > If anything, their tech companies have been largely laggards on the world stage with most being simple derivatives of western brands capitalizing on their large population base and barrier to foreign entry. That is because they started out without basically anything 25 years ago as one of the poorest countries in the world. It takes about 25 years to build up your infrastructure by using capitalism, they are there now, today they can start to innovate. Before they caught up the most productive effort will always be to just build up all the standard infrastructure instead of trying to innovate, so of course they didn't innovate. But today there is no such thing, you will see them transition to an innovative economy just like Japan did 50 years ago. Edit: Note that tech company includes computer hardware manufacturing, those companies are absolutely a core part to Chinas miracle, being able to produce high end computer parts at scale requires a very developed economy. If not for US bans China would be even more dominating there.
tim333 2y ago
You can argue it's unethical to overhire as it takes bright hardworking people who could otherwise be curing cancer or whatever and instead allocates them to busywork just so Facebook etc can't hire them instead.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  Google didnt purposefully overhire. They misread the landscape during covid and then business plans changed.
  - tim333 2y ago
    I don't have personal knowledge here but there are headlines like this https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake-114331193.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake...
hintymad 2y ago
Maybe Google employees should really ask why it's okay not to launch a major product in the past 10 years, why it is okay to have their Gemini blatantly censor users, why it is okay that most of the E6+ engineers are either in the meeting or on the way to a meeting room, why the company needed to double its headcount during the Covid era, why there are VPs who report to VPs who report to VPs, and directors who report to directors who report to directors, or why a god damn internal tool that has 30 users would need a director PM. The list goes on, and the empire rottens from within. And all these are not evil but layoff is? Yet just because a company is making money the company can’t optimize itself? Some people deserve to be fired.

by voisin 2y ago

MrSkelter 2y ago

They could sell the assets shutter the company as fire everyone for huge dividend. It’s more complicated than that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Invictus0 2y ago

But the layoff letter wasn't empathetic enough!* *got 12 weeks severance at $7k/week

throwup238 2y ago

Or better yet, work for companies like Google and do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted. Cold hard self interest works both ways. If Google’s trajectory is any indication, that’s what their workers are doing anyway.

fnord77 2y ago
> do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted The minimum is actually a lot, because at companies like that individual performance is monitored closely and other people are going to be working very hard.
- gmassman 2y ago
  From what I understand though, it’s often possible to just “look” busy without actually being productive. Seems like cranking out design docs and scheduling meetings to make yourself and your work appear important can push one up the ladder a lot faster than making improvements to the codebase will. Optics matter most in organizations the size of Google.
  - mypalmike 2y ago
    My experience at a FAANG was that it's like any other job. You are on a team and you have a supervisor. You are expected to be productive. The stories of people finding themselves floating freely at a huge company without being expected to deliver business value are mostly apocryphal.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      I don't think we are talking about people floating freely without management. Everyone is on a team and has a supervisor, but different people have wildly different skill at politics and "appearing productive." We all know at least one person who was hired at a lower or similar level, yet who basically does nothing productive. They make up for it with bullshit: lots of managing upward, credit taking, writing good sounding but ultimately contentless docs, they're well dressed and groomed, charming, high charisma, ivy league mannerisms. They always end up with a sharp upward career trajectory, parachuting into Director, VP, SVP and so on roles.
andybak 2y ago
I think there's a subtle point here about the cost of layoffs being hard to quantify but hugely underestimated by large companies. A culture where employees feel that their dedication to the company mission is reciprocated must surely provide value?
- boringg 2y ago
  I think what you are talking about was what large companies that were startups built over the last 5-10 years and felt betrayed by the anti company sentiment even though they had all a ton of fantastical things for employees and mostly unchecked employee growth. Now its swinging the other way. Also don't confuse my statement reading the market with what i believe.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
vasco 2y ago
I think it's a bigger slight against yourself to "not try" in your life and your work. You won't learn as much and feel less accomplished. Just find somewhere where you'll feel good about it.
- philipov 2y ago
  You should definitely try hard in your life and your work. Google is not your life, however, and you don't own your work for them. They only deserve the dedication they demonstrate towards others, which is none.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Still, kinda sad to be spend such a big portion of your time on earth doing something nobody gives a shit about, not even you. Me, I’d sooner take a job where I’m contributing positively to society, even if I could make a bit more in adtech.
    - anal_reactor 2y ago
      Don't think about the time you waste. Think about the time you actually can use.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Doing the bare minimum at work isn’t “not trying” in your life. It’s not even “not trying” at work. It’s just trying the agreed upon amount.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    Thought experiment: tell the interviewer you “plan to do the bare minimum at work”. If that harms your chance to be hired, that’s evidence that the status quo agreement isn’t that.
    - ToxicMegacolon 2y ago
aloe_falsa 2y ago
> absolute bare minimum Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy. (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- candiodari 2y ago
  > (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.) Too bad all of those totally don't matter. What you're saying here comes down to doing what management wants. And management, above all else, DOES NOT WANT THE STATUS-QUO UPSET. The chairs in management are to be divided according to endless politicking and 5000 meetings for every line in the org chart, the only thing that matters. If any effort is actually successful beyond what was agreed beforehand ... that would undo the "work" of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of management meetings. In other work drafting design documents, doing interviews, improving existing codebases, mentoring junior ICs (to do the same) ... it's not a design document to create a new successful product on the internet. It's a design document discussing whether component #1823871 of Google maps should be monitored by a Python, C++, Java or Go program, and whether it this monitoring server gets configured using json, yml, chubby, files with strings, protobuf, python (configuration in code, python to configure flags, python to configure startup files, python to change build files, or python read by the program upon startup), Go, Java or Go. Don't forget: 8 page minimum, and you can't have less than 40 reviewers. This document is then followed by a manager from outside your org deciding that the whole monitoring is being shipped to India, and 3 months later you check on borg ... and surprise! There ISN'T anything monitoring it, as far as you can tell. Your manager assures you your work was not for nothing, but your design document curiously has never been accessed, and everybody you ask (btw: you're quickly told you're not supposed to do that) says management forbade them from looking at your design document. Later you learn that there isn't a single team in India that actually has access to your document (if you're working long enough at Google and actually know how to check that, which used to be 99%, but now ... perhaps 20%). A year later, the product takes down all of Google maps, your team's lack of monitoring gets blamed for the outage ... but 10 minutes after you go to your manager with this the postmortem, suddenly, gives you "access denied". Then, you get scheduled for a support checkin where the person doing the support checkin has no idea what it's about. Of course, what it's really about is that your forced one of the managers in your org to explain to higher ups how your concern is being addressed while still meeting budget constraints ... Which could have upset the status quo (recognizable by "Moderate impact" on your GRAD review) or actually upset the status quo ("Not Enough Impact" on your review). Congratulations!
ToxicMegacolon 2y ago
+1 I don't understand why people work hard for such corporations. Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm. I think if the execs can pay themselves $200M for taking the responsibility and being so horribly wrong about the direction they took the company in, then why shouldn't the rank and file employees do the bare fucking minimum that they are paid to do. Treat intellectual work the same as bagging groceries, do it from 9 to 5, only when sitting at the desk, and only for bugs that have been assigned. If the bug don't say "add an extra debug log" then don't add an extra debug log. <Rant Over>
- Hock88sdx 2y ago
  [dead]
- candiodari 2y ago
  > Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm Of course, it is the norm. Any real idea, any real effort does what is absolutely number 1 on the forbidden, sacrilege, NEVER DO THIS list: it would upset the social balance in management. More than that, it would upset the balance in unpredictable ways.

piva00 2y ago

This business thinking is not a law of nature, it's a choice. Putting investors as the most important cohort of all the people involved in a business (workers, society, and investors) is a relatively new invention from the 80s after Jack Welch's tenure at GE. So talking about it is important, we don't need to have business causing damages just to please investors. Even more when said investors in a public company have not contributed to the bottom line of a business, they bought some papers expecting that those papers would yield them some value, they haven't participated in the business to actually create the value they expect. They haven't directly funded the business for product research and/or expansion. This way of thinking has been disseminated as being "The Truth" of business while... It actually isn't, returning money to investors used to come only after taking care of your workers and after providing a benefit to society, training workers used to be a thing so your company could keep its edge in the long-term. The way you believe business should be is completely taken over by the financialisation of everything, businesses should be returning value to investors because they provide value to society, because they employ and train good people, not to just suck out the most value possible in the short term. Discussing this is necessary, Google isn't a jobs program but it also doesn't need to be a purely return-to-investors machine, a business is much more than that, reducing it to that point is what gave the USA what Boeing has become, I don't think you would like more of that.

FredPret 2y ago
> This way of thinking has been disseminated as being "The Truth" of business while... It actually isn't, returning money to investors used to come only after taking care of your workers and after providing a benefit to society, training workers used to be a thing so your company could keep its edge in the long-term. Business always has and always will be investor focused. Because they own it. Because the whole thing is literally made up out of their money. Likewise, the tradeoff between short-term cashflow and long-term viability always has and always will be a choice investors have to make. The optimal choice depends on the business and where it is in the business cycle. A wise investor ends up with Berkshire Hathaway; a foolish one ends up with Boeing and loses his shirt.
- mordae 2y ago

spacephysics 2y ago

What industries are less prone to layoffs? I thought cybersecurity was one of them, then my buddy got snagged during a recent layoff cycle.

thfuran 2y ago

>These facts are irrefutable and confusing them for your own desire for how the world should work is a waste of time. Are you seriously saying that identifying the gap between how things work and how things should work is useless? The only domain in which that is true is the laws of physics. In other domains, the way things work can be changed.

gruez 2y ago
>Are you seriously saying that identifying the gap between how things work and how things should work is useless I'm not sure how you're getting that impression. It's pretty obvious the linked tweet is upset at google's behavior specifically, rather than the relationship between employees and companies in our society. That's what the parent commenter is objecting to.
- thfuran 2y ago
  Yes, and in doing so suggesting that the relationship between companies and society is immutable and that companies acting this way is inevitable. Neither is the case, since companies are a legal construct created by societies that can be regulated as those societies choose. And, indeed, other societies have chosen to regulate companies differently and don't have companies doing this sort of thing nearly as much.
0xf8 2y ago
It’s also arguably the most beneficially productive imperative in those domains that are shaped by iterative change towards an idealized conception.

richrichie 2y ago

Google actually works for government. It came about from DoD funding FYI and continues to make a fuck ton of money from government contracts.

neilc 2y ago
Google makes a very small percentage of their revenue from government contracts.

enkid 2y ago

The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970. Questioning whether or not it should be the basis of how we organize an economy is perfectly valid. Simply saying "this is the responsibility of Google" is missing the point. Cases like this should make us ask if this should be the way we assign responsibility to businesses or if we should assign them different responsibilities.

gruez 2y ago
>The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970. What were the robber barons of the 19th century doing then? Or do you think that companies like standard oil were not "only set up to make money"?
- enkid 2y ago
  The robber barons are specifically examples of people considered not to be fulfilling their social responsibilities. The idea that business are only responsible to make money is the new concept, not that people were acting only to make money previously. It was seen as a bad thing, now its a deflection for bad behavior.
X6S1x6Okd1st 2y ago
To anyone curious I'd also really recommend reading the original piece https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr... The argument made here includes not just that the company should not spend it's resources on things other than profit for the sake of shareholders, but also worries about employees and customers. At least in this article Friedman was advocating for something much more positive than the situation we found ourselves in today

strken 2y ago

It is also a fact that Google had an average tenure of 1.1 years in 2022. Perhaps this extraordinarily low figure might be connected to your facts.

caddemon 2y ago
Company loyalty was already mostly dead in big tech before the layoffs. It was also the fault of the companies, but more to do with the ability to get raises via job hopping versus internal promotion, not job security.
ytNumbers 2y ago
There's probably no single cause for such a short average tenure length. However, Marcus Lemonis always blames high turnover on bad management. Every time a boss tries to argue with that premise he immediately shuts them down.
- darkwater 2y ago
  Let's try to enumerate possible causes for short tenures: * Actual job was not the thing promised in the interview * Hired person and work environment do not "click" * Got a better paid offer after N months * Hired person was not up to the task and fired * Work environment was toxic * Hired person was toxic And probably a few more. In all these cases, IMO there is a much bigger responsibility on the company,because they are the stronger side and the one that has the last word on hiring someone. So, it ends up being manager's fault. Having been a hiring manager myself, I can only excuse the manager in the case of a really, really, good faker during the interview phase. But those are not the norm.
  - RestlessMind 2y ago
    > and the one that has the last word on hiring someone False. A lot of times, companies make an offer which are then rejected by a candidate because they have another better offer. Maybe not in 2024, but it was very common until 2022.

pinewurst 2y ago

Google is an advertising company - why do its employees seem to think they work for Doctors Without Borders?

thfuran 2y ago
Because Google is good at advertising?
anal_reactor 2y ago
Because that's what Google has been telling everyone, and especially their employees. Every wall has a motivational poster.

api 2y ago

Also it’s public so a lot of those shareholders are pension funds and your 401k. Buybacks are just time boxed dividends.

neya 2y ago

Well said. As someone who has worked with Google consultants throughout his career, I always felt they were overpaid for the value they brought to the table. A few years ago, one of my clients wanted some advice on what Google Cloud products to migrate to their high traffic website while keeping costs at check. Our backend systems were fully SQL based. We may have met 3 consultants from their HQ at least and none of them even had any idea on a) the offerings that were available and b) which product should be used when. One of their consultants just kept throwing product names at us hoping it would stick, but it got really bad when he recommended a very expensive NOSQL offering for our completely SQL backend. We both walked out of the meeting mid-way after being annoyed with them. Their lifestyle is quite luxurious - you can roam around their entire campus without being asked questions, there's gaming rooms and places where you can take a nap at work and half the time people were barely at their desks doing their actual jobs. I always thought this was also one of the reasons why many clients started moving off their platforms (apart from also becoming more expensive over the years) to the point where Google is almost considered a laggard now in the AI space.

ZuckMusk 2y ago
Can you share there years of experience and alma mater (If you don't mind)
- neya 2y ago
  One of them had over 3 years in the cloud space alone. The other two probably close to 5 years. All of them were from the top 3 universities in the country. I guess it had to do with the forced quota system. In big companies, there is a need to mandatorily fill their positions with x percent of locals. Sometimes, it is not a good thing.

IX-103 2y ago

Or they felt that investors wanted them to have layoffs. From talking to people in the know, the layoffs don't even seem to make sense. Why layoff all the developers in a project and keep the program managers, product managers, and engineering managers (and not even cancel the project)? Why kill the Python team and ask the Flutter team to take over their work? Why do projects seem to have more managers than individual contributors? I don't think this is part of a coherent long term strategy. It's just a reflexive reaction to demands to from major investors to reduce costs. Nevermind that Google is still hiring for the positions that they are laying people off for.

hintymad 2y ago
This is because Google has grown to be one of the most bureaucratic companies in industry, and it is the bureaucrats who have the utmost power in such companies. Naturally, it is engineers who are let go and bureaucrats who stay during a layoff

b3ing 2y ago

I make sure to tell all homeless people, “just start a business bro” /s

voisin 2y ago
Do you come across homeless people directly impacted by or even upset about Google’s mass layoffs?

Timshel 2y ago

Might be irrefutable but it's not like it's immutable. Buybacks used to be illegal so it's not like it couldn't change again depending of peoples "desire".

phmqk76 2y ago

Stock buybacks are an illegal stock manipulation that were routinely prosecuted as such before the Reagan administration waved a magic wand and decided it was kosher. If Google has $70 billion for stock buybacks, then Google has $70 for taxes, and strong pro-unionization rules are called for to tip the balance of power towards workers. Why did we create rules of the road where corporations and shareholders became the guiding force of our economy, when workers’ spending power keeps us afloat?

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

> It is set up to make money and return money to investors either via capital gains (buybacks) or income (dividends). Seeing this always saddens me. That the primary purpose of these insanely rich and powerful entities is just 'make the rich richer' and everything else is considered incidental. Is this really the best we can do?

luminaobscura 2y ago
yes. Capitalism is the best system. Even in communist china, only after transitioning to market capitalism they got tech companies producing prosperity. We also allow forming other kinds of companies. You can create worker cooperative tech company that has more diverse goal instead of just making money.
- voisin 2y ago
  I’m not sure it is the Chinese tech companies that produced prosperity. It is due to their low cost manufacturing base for the last thirty years and consequent rapid urbanization. If anything, their tech companies have been largely laggards on the world stage with most being simple derivatives of western brands capitalizing on their large population base and barrier to foreign entry. They don’t have a very good track record of being issued patents outside their jurisdiction either.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > If anything, their tech companies have been largely laggards on the world stage with most being simple derivatives of western brands capitalizing on their large population base and barrier to foreign entry. That is because they started out without basically anything 25 years ago as one of the poorest countries in the world. It takes about 25 years to build up your infrastructure by using capitalism, they are there now, today they can start to innovate. Before they caught up the most productive effort will always be to just build up all the standard infrastructure instead of trying to innovate, so of course they didn't innovate. But today there is no such thing, you will see them transition to an innovative economy just like Japan did 50 years ago. Edit: Note that tech company includes computer hardware manufacturing, those companies are absolutely a core part to Chinas miracle, being able to produce high end computer parts at scale requires a very developed economy. If not for US bans China would be even more dominating there.

tim333 2y ago

You can argue it's unethical to overhire as it takes bright hardworking people who could otherwise be curing cancer or whatever and instead allocates them to busywork just so Facebook etc can't hire them instead.

HDThoreaun 2y ago
Google didnt purposefully overhire. They misread the landscape during covid and then business plans changed.
- tim333 2y ago
  I don't have personal knowledge here but there are headlines like this https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake-114331193.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake...

hintymad 2y ago

Maybe Google employees should really ask why it's okay not to launch a major product in the past 10 years, why it is okay to have their Gemini blatantly censor users, why it is okay that most of the E6+ engineers are either in the meeting or on the way to a meeting room, why the company needed to double its headcount during the Covid era, why there are VPs who report to VPs who report to VPs, and directors who report to directors who report to directors, or why a god damn internal tool that has 30 users would need a director PM. The list goes on, and the empire rottens from within. And all these are not evil but layoff is? Yet just because a company is making money the company can’t optimize itself? Some people deserve to be fired.