That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades.
There’s still massive innovation and builder spirit there, but I’m betting that we’ll have a much easier time poaching our favorite employees from Google now than we have over the last few years.
I’ve been part of several companies that have gone through layoffs, and one thing I’ve learned is that companies that haven’t done it in a while (or ever) typically do it poorly.
As far as I know the rankings were
- Facebook (but I don’t hate myself enough to consider working there)
- Amazon
- Apple
- Microsoft
But Facebook has had a worse stock price drop than the rest.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-links-more-ceo-p... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21031629/google-ceo-sund...
There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reeling from this, but it’s really just another day in corporate America.
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
Few people think Google is special in 2023. They just pay well.
AT&T and whatever company inherited the Bell Labs might have done rounds after rounds of layoffs but never fired Dennis Ritchie, for example.
People such as DiBona and Allison are assets to any company who can afford to hire them. This is simply unexplainable.
The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.
The Big Names are actually filled with so many smart and productive people that it doesn't matter who they lay off.
The more I read about this stuff, the more I realize that a lot of is out of sheer luck of hitting product market fit. Google monopolized open internet ads 20 years ago and except for protecting their moat they haven't done much else, 90% of their money still comes from there. They're trying to expand with the cloud, but they're a distant 3rd or 4th.
Have you forgotten this is the same company that had a backroom non-poaching pact with Apple (and probably other SV firms) a decade ago? And got caught red handed and got in a shitload of trouble for it?
When I joined Google in 2011 they were still dealing the fallout from that.
Its as if someone has forgotten that they can increase revenue instead.
It still hasn't stopped, though it may have slowed a bit in its increase. But there's no danger on the revenue front. Just danger on stock price, because investors really want Number Go Up continually.
So the moves last week were really about making investors think Google is Doing Something and exercising downward pressure on wages.
Its a sector-wide move to put downward pressure on wages and bargaining power, and Google is only a small part of it.
Ads is a money printing machine. The most important roles there are SRE, data centre, and ops/infra jobs that keep the machine up and running.
"Profits [in Q3 2022] were at $13.9 billion, down from $18.9 billion in Q3 2021"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/google-profits-plumm...
Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.
I know both Chris and Jeremy well and I wouldn't imagine either of them trying to "maintain a veneer"
Pretty comparable is "Developer Advocate". The job is to grease the wheels between people using your services and the developers developing them. In that role, they playact as both customer and provider, both to developers and consumers. An awful lot of Developer Advocates are mediocre at both, but you don't need to be good; In fact, in some ways being mediocre is a plus, because the point is to represent each side to the other.
Whereas, the people who have done great things and spend their time on brand instead of "Doing X"; Often they are coasting on reputation, but it's a form of retirement for them. They still like X. They still want to do X, but as a hobby, and getting paid to talk about X and get others excited about X is like having your cake and eating it.
Your suspicion is what would need to be substantiated. Contributions made by these people are well known.
The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.
The ROIC Renaissance
"You’re not in the same situation as oppressed workers of the past." I don't have to be to recognize that a soul-sucking job sucks... If we're just comparing levels of oppression, then yes, you are making the "just shut up and be glad you only have one boot on your face instead of two" argument.
If you can, without comparing levels of oppression, make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty, then I'm all ears. "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
> I'll be forced into the "shit pay plus 2 hour commute per day, sit for nine hours in a tiny cubicle"
That's not exactly how jobs in Bay Area at least look. I mean 2 hrs commute can happen, if you live in a cheap place and not in walk distance from Google campus, but the pay likely would be not "shit" at all, especially for somebody who worked at good salary in Google.
> make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty,
That's it, from the point of view of about 99.9999% of Earth population, it will still be dream come true. From the point of somebody who has been living in the paradise, they will be living in a bit less luxurious paradise, and that would, I agree, sting and be very distressing. I mean, it is natural for people to strive for perfection, and for improvement of their own conditions. If you are hungry, you want to be sated. If you are never hungry, you want tasty food. If you have tasty food, you want it prepared specially well, be of appropriate spiciness, be healthy, have variety, maybe get some exotic foods from foreign lands, or authentic food from specific region, or prepared in some special ways by uniquely creative cooks. There's always something that can be better. Or, as it happens, worse. But if somebody who had access to Michelin three-stars restaurants, now has to eat in star-less ones, he shouldn't complain he is dying of hunger. His soul may be distressed, but it's not distressed in the same way as would be if he was actually hungry. Yes, there are levels, and yes, understanding them is good.
> "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
Maybe that's why somebody else has to tell it. As they say, you can't tickle yourself. So maybe you realize this point, and maybe realize that the suffering that you are feeling may be caused by framing, and also cured by framing too.
Side note, but it also strikes me as a sign of how normalized corporate treatment of people is that people is when we're on a thread about an article that talks about an exec making over 5 times a googlers salary per day and instead of people going "what the fuck? If that's true, 500k should be the norm for more people!", I get pushback on my comment about how this is a bad omen for the rest of us and called whiny.
Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.
I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or will do.
How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
Of course, very anecdotal and personal take. All I have to go off of is my team and the handful of company-wide forums.
There was I'm sure a way to make a whole restructuring or cost cutting process happen in a way that could have salvaged their reputation. But they didn't spend any effort trying to find it.
And if ad spend drops significantly and/or there's actual anti-monopoly enforcement against them, it will really accelerate things.
They have enough $$ they can coast for years, but it isn't going to be pretty.
Having lived through multiple layoffs in the last few years, I'm not sure there's any org larger than, just handwaving here, 1k people that doesn't do this.
I think you'd have to go to a startup before your absence is actually felt.
I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one.
Google engineering culture has long been described as permitting coasters and encouraging employees to structure their work around what might get them promoted; that might be great for an innovative growing company, but I suspect Sundar & Co. know that that label doesn’t really fit google’s position anymore. I really don’t see any other reason they’d lay off high performing employees on important projects - especially OSS giants.
If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”