5 ms·

I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck. To me,

I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck. To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos). What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.

gtirloni 2y ago
It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).
- supportengineer 2y ago
  If you're being forced to sell something, wouldn't you want to maximize its value? Wouldn't you retain the most valuable people?
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    That's a good question. I don't know about the author's credentials but it seem very high and indeed I'm sure they would find a job anywhere they apply to. But from the PoV of a higher up making layoff decisions, the sooner they severe the organization from the rest of the company, the less traumatic it will be when the time comes. I think at this point they realize it's better to start treating Chrome et al more like Waymore, which seems to have some isolation from the borg collective.
  - FromOmelas 2y ago
    Not if they might become a competitor, or thrive (proving that the sale was a good idea). Better to keep them weak and likely to fail.
raffael_de 2y ago
While possibly a traumatic experience for Adam, I fail to see the significance of this beyond anecdotal level. And I find it rather odd to argue that after all Google did and didn't do that this is what is causing disillusionment with Google. By now Chrome is basically just a Trojan Horse with advertisement and surveillance for this purpose hidden in the inside.
- chilmers 2y ago
  I think the OP explained the broader significance very well: If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers. That's bad news for anyone who builds for the web or who relies on it as an open platform for the dissemination of information and software. I think the position your take re. Google and Chrome is an extreme one. It always surprises me that such black and white opinions about big tech companies are commonplace even on HN. Yes, Google have done things around privacy that I strongly disagree with, but the idea that Chrome is simply a trojan horse for advertising/surveillance is absurdly reductive and ignores the history of Google as a company. Google was, originally, a web-first company. Their business success relied on the web being an open, competitive platform. And, at a time when Microsoft were still trying to maintain monopoly control of personal computing, Google's development of Chrome did a huge amount of good in maintaining and enhancing the web as an open alternative. And they employed a lot of people who were genuinely believed in that mission, such as Adam. Make no mistake, the death or spin-off of Chrome will not be a win for privacy or openness. Building a web browser is a hugely expensive and difficult endeavor, and it has to be paid for somehow. Yes, Google has leveraged Chrome in some ways to collect data, but far less than they could have done, and far less than any successor will have to do, just to keep the lights on. Look at what has happened to Mozilla and Firefox if you need proof.
  - raffael_de 2y ago
    The history of Chrome and Google is interesting but not very relevant for assessing their status quo. If anything you'd have to factor in the trajectory (which I did: "by now") and given its direction it certainly wouldn't improve a valuation. Regarding your "reductive" opinion of Firefox and Mozilla, all I can say is I use Firefox and I'm quite satisfied with it. Ironically, the worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions can be traced back to it being funded by ... Google.
gman83 2y ago
Maybe they're not confident in the case against them: https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-divest-chrome/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...
- extra88 2y ago
  This round of layoffs wasn't only on the Chrome team but also for Android.
wiether 2y ago
> for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil". https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumper-stickers-avoid-spike-in-vehicle-torchings/ https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...
- mcv 2y ago
  Google dropped their "don't be evil" a very long time ago.
  - anacrolix 1y ago
    Before I even started there, in 2014. Don't be evil ended when Schmidt stopped being CEO.
    - gyesxnuibh 1y ago
      I could've sworn it was removed from the handbook like 2018/2019
- rurp 2y ago
  I can't wait for everyone to be shocked, shocked, in five years when the biggest genAI companies get caught engaging in a bunch of sleazy behavior.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    You don't have to wait at all, given that OpenAI has been at it for some time now.
  - matchanovice 1y ago
    Sleazy like when Meta torrented 81TB worth of ebooks to train their AI models? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
noosphr 2y ago
>What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer. I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs. To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week. I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  Hasn't Google given up on tensorflow for JAX now? It looks like tensorflow is going down the slow legacy/sunset trajectory at this point.
  - azangru 2y ago
    Have they given up on tensorflow.js for the browser as well? Is there any replacement?
    - janalsncm 2y ago
      In the instances where I’ve needed to run inference in the browser I have used Onnx runtime web to run weights that were exported from PyTorch training. You have to convert your browser data to onnx tensors, but it’s not that bad. I don’t do actual training in the browser though, so maybe someone else can answer that part.
    - codybontecou 1y ago
      Is Transformers.js a replacement?
- thatguysaguy 2y ago
  The user love/passion on the JAX team is super high. Interacting with them is whatever the opposite of Kafkaesque is.
weatherlite 2y ago
It probably just didn't have enough economic value for the company, from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either. The guy probably earned enough money in a few years that would take me 15 years of work, I'm not sure this as a "personal tragedy".
- ldom66 2y ago
  Completely agree. What is a tragedy though, is that if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort. If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails. It's just incentivizing people to treat their job the same way the company treats their employees. A culture of distrust and minimum effort. It's very sad to see.
  - weatherlite 2y ago
    > If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails I guess the half million dollars yearly (I'm assuming he made) and the fact there aren't tons of other places he can get that kind of money and prestige for doing that kind of job. I'm not saying I'm loving any of this, but yeah the system we've built treats all of us like replaceable cogs. During good economic times we don't really feel it, but we are now in a rough patch and we see the capitalist economic reality for what it is.
  - dkarl 2y ago
    > if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort This is bizarre to me because my impression from three years ago was that they were trying to correct from that, and it sounds like they overcorrected right back to it. I spoke with a Google engineer I think in 2022, he had heard rumors there were going to be layoffs on his team, and he had sent a message to a more senior team member that he hadn't heard from in months to let her know that she should, to put it delicately, maybe manage her visibility better. And she responded that she had lost interest in the job anyway, hadn't done anything except respond to emails and messages in over a year, and had 99% transitioned to managing a collection of properties she had been accumulating over the years, so if he heard she got laid off, he shouldn't feel bad for her. I'm pretty sure that was in 2022. To see Google go from tolerating being ghosted by highly compensated senior+ engineers in 2022 to laying off people who were doing excellent and high-profile work in 2025 must be surreal for people inside Google. If this is all accurate, they swung the pendulum from one zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty right through the healthy zone and into another zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty with dizzying speed.
drdrek 2y ago
There are very serious talks about forcing google to divest from Chrome/Android, I would bet that's the reason
Geenkaas 2y ago
I am listening to a podcast Adam Argyle is talking in, listening to what he is passionate about and then getting axed by Google is painful to hear as now it is clear that Google is not passionate about those things (anymore). It is also painful personally because it is what I am passionate about (and my job). Link: https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-design-and-gaming-ui-with-adam-argyle https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-de...
atotic 2y ago
Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly. What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years. Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome. It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.
- kvetching 2y ago
  "The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome" -Wired (March 7, 2025)
- azangru 2y ago
  > Chrome has not been well funded for years. Hasn't it? It has still been developing quite rapidly; and used to lead in interop scores (reflecting how well a browser conforms to the specs).
- kvark 1y ago
  David Baron was a distinguished engineer at Mozilla - not someone you fire at a whim. What makes you think he didn't leave voluntarily?
jldugger 2y ago
> What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? It probably says "the DOJ really is gonna force us to sell Chrome."
- rchaud 2y ago
  Unless the prospective buyer's name rhymes with Melon Tusk, I doubt the DOJ will do anything to challenge Google's web monopoly this strongly.
  - jldugger 1y ago
    You don't think DOJ will force Google sell chrome? https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-divest-chrome/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...
    - rchaud 1y ago
      No, not unless there is a large American buyer already in place. The DOJ did not force Microsoft to sell IE in 2001 either, and back then there was no US software company anywhere near Microsoft's size that would have purchased it. DOJ are not in the business of eliminating a global monopoly if a US company holds said monopoly.
      - jldugger 1y ago
        Hear me out: direct listing!
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. I have trouble relating to the evangelist fervor that some developers develop toward their craft.
forestgreen76 2y ago
This certainly isn't new. I know someone who worked at Google who mentioned the company culture has been souring since the start of the pandemic. I suspect Google will have a slow death akin to Yahoo in the coming years.
throwanem 2y ago
> What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? Everything that's needed saying for at least the last decade.

gtirloni 2y ago

It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).

supportengineer 2y ago
If you're being forced to sell something, wouldn't you want to maximize its value? Wouldn't you retain the most valuable people?
- gtirloni 2y ago
  That's a good question. I don't know about the author's credentials but it seem very high and indeed I'm sure they would find a job anywhere they apply to. But from the PoV of a higher up making layoff decisions, the sooner they severe the organization from the rest of the company, the less traumatic it will be when the time comes. I think at this point they realize it's better to start treating Chrome et al more like Waymore, which seems to have some isolation from the borg collective.
- FromOmelas 2y ago
  Not if they might become a competitor, or thrive (proving that the sale was a good idea). Better to keep them weak and likely to fail.

raffael_de 2y ago

While possibly a traumatic experience for Adam, I fail to see the significance of this beyond anecdotal level. And I find it rather odd to argue that after all Google did and didn't do that this is what is causing disillusionment with Google. By now Chrome is basically just a Trojan Horse with advertisement and surveillance for this purpose hidden in the inside.

chilmers 2y ago
I think the OP explained the broader significance very well: If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers. That's bad news for anyone who builds for the web or who relies on it as an open platform for the dissemination of information and software. I think the position your take re. Google and Chrome is an extreme one. It always surprises me that such black and white opinions about big tech companies are commonplace even on HN. Yes, Google have done things around privacy that I strongly disagree with, but the idea that Chrome is simply a trojan horse for advertising/surveillance is absurdly reductive and ignores the history of Google as a company. Google was, originally, a web-first company. Their business success relied on the web being an open, competitive platform. And, at a time when Microsoft were still trying to maintain monopoly control of personal computing, Google's development of Chrome did a huge amount of good in maintaining and enhancing the web as an open alternative. And they employed a lot of people who were genuinely believed in that mission, such as Adam. Make no mistake, the death or spin-off of Chrome will not be a win for privacy or openness. Building a web browser is a hugely expensive and difficult endeavor, and it has to be paid for somehow. Yes, Google has leveraged Chrome in some ways to collect data, but far less than they could have done, and far less than any successor will have to do, just to keep the lights on. Look at what has happened to Mozilla and Firefox if you need proof.
- raffael_de 2y ago
  The history of Chrome and Google is interesting but not very relevant for assessing their status quo. If anything you'd have to factor in the trajectory (which I did: "by now") and given its direction it certainly wouldn't improve a valuation. Regarding your "reductive" opinion of Firefox and Mozilla, all I can say is I use Firefox and I'm quite satisfied with it. Ironically, the worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions can be traced back to it being funded by ... Google.

gman83 2y ago

Maybe they're not confident in the case against them: https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-divest-chrome/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...

extra88 2y ago
This round of layoffs wasn't only on the Chrome team but also for Android.

wiether 2y ago

> for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil". https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumper-stickers-avoid-spike-in-vehicle-torchings/ https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...

mcv 2y ago
Google dropped their "don't be evil" a very long time ago.
- anacrolix 1y ago
  Before I even started there, in 2014. Don't be evil ended when Schmidt stopped being CEO.
  - gyesxnuibh 1y ago
    I could've sworn it was removed from the handbook like 2018/2019
rurp 2y ago
I can't wait for everyone to be shocked, shocked, in five years when the biggest genAI companies get caught engaging in a bunch of sleazy behavior.
- int_19h 2y ago
  You don't have to wait at all, given that OpenAI has been at it for some time now.
- matchanovice 1y ago
  Sleazy like when Meta torrented 81TB worth of ebooks to train their AI models? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

noosphr 2y ago

>What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer. I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs. To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week. I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.

whiplash451 2y ago
Hasn't Google given up on tensorflow for JAX now? It looks like tensorflow is going down the slow legacy/sunset trajectory at this point.
- azangru 2y ago
  Have they given up on tensorflow.js for the browser as well? Is there any replacement?
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    In the instances where I’ve needed to run inference in the browser I have used Onnx runtime web to run weights that were exported from PyTorch training. You have to convert your browser data to onnx tensors, but it’s not that bad. I don’t do actual training in the browser though, so maybe someone else can answer that part.
  - codybontecou 1y ago
    Is Transformers.js a replacement?
thatguysaguy 2y ago
The user love/passion on the JAX team is super high. Interacting with them is whatever the opposite of Kafkaesque is.

weatherlite 2y ago

It probably just didn't have enough economic value for the company, from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either. The guy probably earned enough money in a few years that would take me 15 years of work, I'm not sure this as a "personal tragedy".

ldom66 2y ago
Completely agree. What is a tragedy though, is that if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort. If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails. It's just incentivizing people to treat their job the same way the company treats their employees. A culture of distrust and minimum effort. It's very sad to see.
- weatherlite 2y ago
  > If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails I guess the half million dollars yearly (I'm assuming he made) and the fact there aren't tons of other places he can get that kind of money and prestige for doing that kind of job. I'm not saying I'm loving any of this, but yeah the system we've built treats all of us like replaceable cogs. During good economic times we don't really feel it, but we are now in a rough patch and we see the capitalist economic reality for what it is.
- dkarl 2y ago
  > if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort This is bizarre to me because my impression from three years ago was that they were trying to correct from that, and it sounds like they overcorrected right back to it. I spoke with a Google engineer I think in 2022, he had heard rumors there were going to be layoffs on his team, and he had sent a message to a more senior team member that he hadn't heard from in months to let her know that she should, to put it delicately, maybe manage her visibility better. And she responded that she had lost interest in the job anyway, hadn't done anything except respond to emails and messages in over a year, and had 99% transitioned to managing a collection of properties she had been accumulating over the years, so if he heard she got laid off, he shouldn't feel bad for her. I'm pretty sure that was in 2022. To see Google go from tolerating being ghosted by highly compensated senior+ engineers in 2022 to laying off people who were doing excellent and high-profile work in 2025 must be surreal for people inside Google. If this is all accurate, they swung the pendulum from one zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty right through the healthy zone and into another zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty with dizzying speed.

drdrek 2y ago

There are very serious talks about forcing google to divest from Chrome/Android, I would bet that's the reason

Geenkaas 2y ago

I am listening to a podcast Adam Argyle is talking in, listening to what he is passionate about and then getting axed by Google is painful to hear as now it is clear that Google is not passionate about those things (anymore). It is also painful personally because it is what I am passionate about (and my job). Link: https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-design-and-gaming-ui-with-adam-argyle https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-de...

atotic 2y ago

Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly. What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years. Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome. It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.

kvetching 2y ago
"The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome" -Wired (March 7, 2025)
azangru 2y ago
> Chrome has not been well funded for years. Hasn't it? It has still been developing quite rapidly; and used to lead in interop scores (reflecting how well a browser conforms to the specs).
kvark 1y ago
David Baron was a distinguished engineer at Mozilla - not someone you fire at a whim. What makes you think he didn't leave voluntarily?

jldugger 2y ago

> What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? It probably says "the DOJ really is gonna force us to sell Chrome."

rchaud 2y ago
Unless the prospective buyer's name rhymes with Melon Tusk, I doubt the DOJ will do anything to challenge Google's web monopoly this strongly.
- jldugger 1y ago
  You don't think DOJ will force Google sell chrome? https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-divest-chrome/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...
  - rchaud 1y ago
    No, not unless there is a large American buyer already in place. The DOJ did not force Microsoft to sell IE in 2001 either, and back then there was no US software company anywhere near Microsoft's size that would have purchased it. DOJ are not in the business of eliminating a global monopoly if a US company holds said monopoly.
    - jldugger 1y ago
      Hear me out: direct listing!

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. I have trouble relating to the evangelist fervor that some developers develop toward their craft.

forestgreen76 2y ago

This certainly isn't new. I know someone who worked at Google who mentioned the company culture has been souring since the start of the pandemic. I suspect Google will have a slow death akin to Yahoo in the coming years.

throwanem 2y ago

> What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence? Everything that's needed saying for at least the last decade.