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Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (

Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Yes, and they're still hiring too, while doing this at the same time. As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people. But the layoff process has been sadistic. And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff. Today's Google really sucks.
- wffurr 2y ago
  >> the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences They should have been first out the door, but Sundar is part of the problem.
  - jiveturkey 2y ago
    This is incorrect thinking. Over-hiring is very easily corrected. You are weighting the 'human' in human resources too much. It's 'resources' that gets the emphasis. This is a success at Sundar's level.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  > In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. They're doing exactly that, veiled in euphemisms like "making our talent pool more reflective of our user base."
slivym 2y ago
They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  This is an important point. Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult." I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service. That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
    - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
      Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had. My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.
      - jjk7 2y ago
concordDance 2y ago
While the manner of layoff, role of layoff and person to lay off all seem foolish, profits do not mean that layoffs are a bad idea. You should hire people you need and if you want to good in the world, donate to the most effective charities (in QALYs/£).

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

Yes, and they're still hiring too, while doing this at the same time. As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people. But the layoff process has been sadistic. And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff. Today's Google really sucks.

wffurr 2y ago
>> the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences They should have been first out the door, but Sundar is part of the problem.
- jiveturkey 2y ago
  This is incorrect thinking. Over-hiring is very easily corrected. You are weighting the 'human' in human resources too much. It's 'resources' that gets the emphasis. This is a success at Sundar's level.
bsimpson 2y ago
> In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. They're doing exactly that, veiled in euphemisms like "making our talent pool more reflective of our user base."

slivym 2y ago

They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
This is an important point. Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult." I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service. That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had. My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.
    - jjk7 2y ago

concordDance 2y ago

While the manner of layoff, role of layoff and person to lay off all seem foolish, profits do not mean that layoffs are a bad idea. You should hire people you need and if you want to good in the world, donate to the most effective charities (in QALYs/£).