4 ms·
22% YoY revenue increase. Doing something right. Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
by adverbly 5mo ago
22% YoY revenue increase.
Doing something right.
Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
- eykanal 5mo agoGoogle was one of the earlier companies to do mass layoffs, back in 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-people-memo-from-ceo-sundar-pichai-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-peop...
- amazingamazing 5mo agoAFAIK this is literally the only time google has laid more than a few thousand off at once
- spwa4 5mo agoOnly if you count a single day. If you count yearly Google has not stopped layoffs of "more than a few thousand" since 2023. And I bet some months get above 1000. The big layoff in 2023 was not actually the first time by the way, that was much earlier (there was a wave of office consolidation in the 2010s). Also the 2023 layoff was at least 3 distinct waves. And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale you'd expect today.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoLink?
- spwa4 5mo agoAsk any Googler.
- eykanal 5mo agoGoogler here! Opinions are my own. Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining. To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this. That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there. [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000043/googexhibit991q12026.htm#:~:text=15%2C228-,Number%20of%20employees,-185%2C719 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
- spwa4 5mo ago> Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year ... https://www.warntracker.com/?company=google https://www.warntracker.com/?company=google blabla calculate summarize, Google has laid off between 1% and 2% of its employees monthly since "the 12000" (since 2023) on average. Btw: on that page you can also see that "the 12000" is a misnomer and it was closer to 20000 individuals. If the total number of employees is going up (as you say, it is) then the obvious explanation is that there must be a massive move underway moving headcount from one location to another ...
- arebop 5mo agoThey did it again in 2024 and then switched to continuous drip of small "layoffs" and encouraging attrition. They have tried various layoff flavors: random, strategic, political, voluntary, and now in their continuous microlayoff era good luck distilling a consistent simple explanation for the day to day decisions of many thousands of managers. Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes, and eliminated many perks and benefits that were peculiar to Google. As the unique characteristics of Google as an institution are pared away, it makes sense that they would also adopt the standard approach to layoffs and that is what we have seen since 2023.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoLink? I don’t recall any mass layoffs in 2024, and by mass I mean multi thousand
- arebop 5mo agohttps://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-engineering-assistant-hardware https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-e...
- amazingamazing 5mo agoI’m talking multi thousand though. More than a few. Google has never done it other than that 2023 layoff. Google like all mega corps have layoffs all the time though sadly.
- SR2Z 5mo agoGoogle has been continuously laying people off for a few years now
- spwa4 5mo agoAND, much less visibly, has been bleeding top engineers that choose to leave like someone cut it's heart open. There's even an internal joke about it (a specific way to refer to one's salary)
- meric_ 5mo agoUhh have you seen the revenue growth of them? Oracle 22%, Amazon is 17% (if im reading it right) and Meta was 33% I don't think any of them are learning the lesson you think they are
- _the_inflator 5mo agoI have internal knowledge, I am closely affiliated with Google. Infrastructure and scalability has been and is key, as well as technical expertise still absolutely super top notch. Let’s put it this way: Google is the only company that knows how to find, store and utilize information beyond a specific narrowing. And I mean it really in the sense of curating, compression, long time storage, load balancing as well as compliance and world wide redundancy with a focus on speed and efficiency. Under the hood of AI is pure engineering genius. Google might be trashed as the Search Engine giant that only displays ads now, but reconsider. Why does all AI provider except for Google have massive problems with load time, reach, etc? Apple chose Google mainly because of the infrastructure. They eat everyone for lunch here. And they earned it. Engineering at Google etc. are still the finest you can read about software engineering at the highest level. It is highly impressive how Google managed to not fall behind OpenAI. Who else was able to join the race? Microsoft? No. Apple? Oh well… Meta etc. won’t get there ever. I think that Gemini is 3rd behind OpenAI and Claude but mainly because Google being Google, they kind of have no versioning for their AI and therefore the results are pretty much random in quality, less predictable than the others. But the creativity and tooling like Nano Banana - fantastic. There you have it. People don’t get that it is the infrastructure the moment they complain about Claude outtakes here.
- bitpush 5mo agoThis is such an interesting take. Thank you.
- mettamage 5mo agoSeconding that, not sure if it's the full take I'd stand behind but the perspective is definitely food for thought and way more thought out than my own.
- windowshopping 5mo agoI noticed early on that Gemini responded multiple times faster than claude and chatgpt do, which is why I use it as my main daily LLM (claude code for coding, gemini for all general queries).
- 5mo ago
- UncleMeat 5mo agoGoogle is also doing layoffs. They just aren't making the news because they are PA by PA and they are preceded by buyouts. But we've had layoffs every year since 2023.
- utopcell 5mo agoLayoffs might not be the best way to keep talent. Imo, Nintendo did it best back in 2014 [1]. [1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/01/iwata_and_miyamoto_both_take_pay_cuts_in_response_to_nintendos_poor_financial_results https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/01/iwata_and_miyamoto...
- JeremyNT 5mo agoIf a huge cloud compute provider with its own TPUs can't profit in the age of "everybody needs compute for AI like never before OMG" then I dunno who could. In the gold rush, the shovel salesmen were selling a hell of a lot of shovels.