> Google said it is cutting jobs at its cloud-computing unit as part of a reorganization aimed at improving operations at the business that has become more central to parent Alphabet Inc.
> Google on Friday said “a small number of employees” have been notified their roles have been eliminated. Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company.
I don't get it. Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? I'm thinking they used the good old "your position is being eliminated due to business reasons" excuse to get rid of people they didn't want to keep.
I hate to be that guy, but I want to point out that more people not always equate to more output. E.g. if you create a "controller" role, they would try to justify their existence and create more work/overhead for others.
And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.
It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
I first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.
Even then they are "working" independently. It's not a pipeline that passes the baby from one to the next. That's just plain parallelism. Either way it would do nothing to latency and so would not get the current one done any sooner.
Most companies have more things they want to do then they can do in the next 6 months. So if you increase throughput without latency, you can still get more of those projects done. Even if you're still doing them all inefficiently.
It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.
If you implement QBPUs (Quantum Baby Processing Units), you could theoretically produce infinite babies. Of course, we're perpetually 10 years away from working QBPUs.
In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong.
In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.
It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.
> In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.
This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization.
People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.
smt88's post was downvoted because it completely misunderstood the point of namelosw's post. smt88 wrote "A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all." Well, in my reading of it, that was exactly namelosw's point. That is, the social pressure in first world countries, and the fact that so many have their identity tied up in their job, demands everyone looks 'busy' even when they are not really doing anything of value.
I made no generalizations. I did exactly the opposite: I pointed out that there are many exceptions to the 1st/3rd world generalizations, rendering them false.
In "defrags" like this, Google does not lay off people outright, it just tells them their job is going away and they have X months to find a new one within Google -- and they usually do.
I've personally been through this twice at Google. The company definitely provides a very attentive set of resources to help you find a new position within the company, but I've always been able to find a new project on my own.
That said, the more flexibility you have the easier it is to find a new position. This naturally favors some people over others.
In my most recent case, it ended up being a bit more challenging due to having to balance the constraints of family life versus the opportunities availed by an extremely arduous commute, but I ended up finding a project I enjoy that works with my commute constraints.
So... Like... What do you do in the interim? Not work, look for teams, and still get paid a shit ton of money? Do you do some training on the side? Work on a side project? How long does it take to find the new team?
From the couple people I know who have done this, I think it's pretty choose-your-own-adventure... Get paid to look for your new job, with very few actual responsibilities.
It's worthwhile to compare this relative downtime to ramp-up time for new hires... who also generally spend a couple-few months being fairly useless (though working hard at it).
And googlers being googlers, there's a decent chance that the 'down' time turns into interesting learning or side project time.
After a recent merger at my employer, had some people in of the teams at my office with very little responsibilities for most of a year. The first six months they had minimal work because the company hadn't told them yet they were dropping them for a competing team on the other side of the merger, then they did inform them and gave them 3 months to find a new role in the company and apart from the odd production incident on their system, there was basically no work incoming to their former team.
I think 3-4 moved within the company, 3 left on their own time before the deadline, and 4 waited out for the redundancy payment.
Lots of networking over coffee. You don't just blindly apply on the internal job board. You talk to people you know in other parts of the company, you schedule meetings with managers with open roles. You reflect on what you actually want to do next. You reach out to mentors on if they know anyone who has interesting open roles or just on advice for next steps.
Also interviewing with other companies. The next best job for you may not be with Google even if you could easily get an internal transfer role. And teams don't just blindly accept you because you already work at Google (although it helps). You still have to go through a somewhat more informal interview loop that you will definitely want to prepare for.
Of course this is up to the individual, you can definitely just screw around for awhile and apply for an interal role with much less care.
Entirely dependent on the team and hiring manager. And the technical requirements of the role you want to move into versus your prior role. If you want to move from working on gmail to working on the android kernel, I imagine there's gonna be some whiteboarding. (Not that gmail is simple software, but just picked two examples that came to mind with different domain expertise).
Sounds reasonable. I was referring more to the gatekeeping type, like a heavy focus on things like balancing trees and recursion for roles that clearly involve neither trees nor recursion.
It's really not that at level. Once at Google you really get the benefit of doubt of clearing a high bar. It's mostly a talk around your work / perf / CLs and then team fit.
If it's anything like amazon they will just be able to look at all of your code for the last N years which is a very strong signal to go along with interview questions. For internal transfers I general focus more on design questions and check the code history for "can they code IRL". Design is harder to check for and also is more dependent on "can we work together to solve problems" which isn't always apparent from just artifacts.
Shrug recursion, where it makes sense, is wonderful and fun. I’m always happy when I find a problem where it makes sense, because those tend to be interesting problems. But in a lot of roles, working in languages like Python and Java, it just isn’t the best option very often.
@ericd, what programming roles don't deal with trees or recursion?
I've dealt with trees in every single domain I've been in, frontend or backend, whether doing "real" programming or building with no-code tools like FileMaker. I've seen admins and accountants build trees and recursion with spreadsheets. I don't think these things are as "gatekeeping" as you imagine.
I don't think people understand that when you work at scale, efficient data structures and algorithms actually matter. I doubt there are many positions in Google that don't fundamentally require the ability to understand both.
Since all programming jobs deal with trees and recursion, and if you are already at Google working on another team, wouldn't it mean you already know about those (since our assumption being all jobs deal with those)? Why not just check directly if you were actually useful instead?
It's 100% not true that all programming jobs deal with trees. I worked for years on a major audio/video/screensharing communications SaaS product and never once needed to write recursive code or use a tree structure. Not all code is for processing data. There was tons of code that had very little to do with data structures or algorithms, and much more to do with implementing network protocols, business logic, managing state, abstracting the differences between the various operating systems we had to support, etc...
They're both occasionally the best tool for the job, but I think they're hugely overrepresented in that type of interview. I haven't found that they come up very often in most web development, as an example, but they definitely come up in interviews for web developers.
Totally depends. My team has specific domain expertise requirements so I interview transfer candidates in addition to speaking to their manager, reading their prior performance reviews, and speaking to them more casually.
There are other teams where there is little need for more formal process.
Not really. It was pretty stressful for me last time since I needed to find a project whose commute allowed to get home in time to take care of my kids, since my spouse's job has no flexibility in that regard.
When I saw this at Google, the employee had 60-90 paid days to find something new within the company. Some people waited til the last few weeks to find something because they essentially got two months paid vacation.
I took a vacation to Tokyo on a whim when I heard about my defrag. Checked out Google Tokyo (just have to find a Googler near the tower in Rappongi willing to take you up where your badge can matter) and enjoyed another month or so of relaxation back here before starting a new job at a different company. In my case, they were paying a multiplier of my salary due to the circumstances of my "defrag". In all I was paid an entire years salary in one quarter while I enjoyed a sabbatical.
This is a very smart tactic that also, as a side effect, brings the average quality across all engineers at the company up. Smart people with desirable skills would have no problem finding another team within Google to transfer to, while bottom tier performers won’t, thus leaving Google.
It'd be interesting to study. My intuition is that over the long term it'd cut in the opposite direction--smart people will move on while bottom tier will linger as long as possible.
In my experience the best leave at the first redeployment. Each subsequent buyout the smarter ones leave, it's rarely the crap people that take a buyout or leave altogether.
On the other side, the company can create a nice "market" by tuning it correctly. When I was at Intel, it was relatively easy to get an internal hiring req, and relatively difficult to get an external one. And... the total number of internal hiring reqs was allowed to over-subscribe the total authorized head count. Coupled with a rule that no manager could block an internal transfer for more than a couple of weeks of clean-up, the net effect was that there was a certain amount of "hole flow", and you could always identify a bad manager by the vacuum that surrounded them. Overall, I thought that was brilliant.
As to people on re-deployment, it did happen that poor performers had a hard time landing a new role -- but then again, they would have had a hard time staying in the company in their old role, so that kind of fits your point. But Intel didn't use redeployment as a "shadow RIF". Intel was not shy about moving people out of the company -- they didn't need to nor bother to hide it.
Back to redeployment -- I can remember occasions of fairly large redeployments (business unit shutting down) where those of us in parts of the company considered more strategic would find ourselves suddenly rich in hiring reqs. Again, the company created the right market conditions and let the hiring managers and employees sort it out.
Unless their skillset just isn't needed at that location anymore and they can't move to a different city for example because they have children in school.
I guess it helps keeping the workforce young and flexible.
A vast majority of full time Googlers are bucketed onto ladders that are needed in pretty much any team. Say SWE, SRE-SWE (that can switch to SWE at will), TPGM, all kinds of managers. Much of the remainder are people who should be able to do the switch, say SRE-SWE to SWE, within the grace period. Legal and accounting might find themselves in a pickle, but these don't move often.
Why would they publicize it this way though. It seems like it would be easy enough to reallocate these folks in a staged manner without creating a news story out of it.
It's a for profit company with a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. There is zero reason to find jobs for people regardless of the cash position.
1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon.
2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
The article is about VPs getting a forced sabbatical after a reorg. No one changes their business tactics due to jokes on a TV show. It's totally normal and nothing anyone is moving a way from.
It has nothing to do with rank and file people getting laid off.
The difference is the timescale. Netflix won’t let you cruise doing nothing for 3 months while you troll an internal job board begging people to take you.
It's extremely rare, but there's nothing that makes my job satisfaction drop more than having someone incompetent (in no way related to experience) on the team, or being lead by someone incompetent.
I come to work to get cool stuff done, and sometimes people just don't fit with that goal.
These thoughts are in no way related to the topic.
It’s not only about incompetence, it’s about letting someone go who did their job very well, but are no longer needed and keeping them around anyway.
The story is legendary about all of the infrastructure guys that were let go at Netflix whose job was to migrate them to AWS.
Is that a bad thing? Can you imagine the opportunities you could have if you said that you were instrumental in the largest cloud migration in history?
I can’t remember her name but there was a top ranking official at Netflix hired by Hastings personally. She was instrumental in helping Netflix in the DVD era. But she knew she was going to be laid off when they started focusing on streaming because that wasn’t her area of expertise. She went in and got “quit fired”. She said there were no hard feelings.
I first heard about this with an interview she did on the Internet History Podcast.
My brother-in-law works with various Netflix managers. One of them got a negative mark on her performance review for not firing enough of her team members over the previous 12 months. Netflix pays about 20% over market value, but it's like Lord of the Flies over there.
> It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
I think it's better to have a good exit strategy, such as another job offer, then get laid off. If you get laid off at a big company, there is usually a severance package.
> Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world
That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
I think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.
Google would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.
That’s completely false. The skills to get through the “famous interview” aren’t related to software engineering practices at all. Let that sink in.
Their interview process is loaded with false negative and false positive rates, despite what they claim. If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.
An interview process that an algorithms/data structure obsessed senior in college can easily pass is clearly not related to elite engineers. It’s sad that people have been tricked into thinking otherwise.
> If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.
I don't disagree with the point you're making, but that's a bad argument. Good engineers are capable of building a bad product if the conditions are right.
How much does it cost to find and hire a Google-tier worker? Many hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you're talking about financial duty surely their duty is to retain the elite workers they've already got.
Given the market’s performance over the last 4 years, it’s most certainly cheaper to fire people who aren’t actively involved in any projects so Google gets the unvested stock back and then hire fresh at current stock price.
Someone who was hired 2 years ago with 500k of stock vesting over 4 years could have enough unvested stock leftover to fund two employees RSU grants...
Hiring google employees is still cheaper than keeping the senior ones.
I don't work for Google, but I think you're making bold assumptions about how much a year or two of domain knowledge is worth to Google compared to a couple hundred k of stock.
If these employees are transitioning to wildly different roles within the company maybe the math changes a bit, but I'm not sure how much.
Edit: not to mention the trust erosion aspect. If I see people getting laid off cause their stock has appreciated, am I going to stay? Basically means stock appreciation is capped. People wouldn't take kindly to that.
> don't work for Google, but I think you're making bold assumptions about how much a year or two of domain knowledge is worth to Google compared to a couple hundred k of stock.
I did. Google is so large the vast majority of engineers contain domain knowledge that is mainly just useful to their group. And if their group is undergoing layoffs, their domain knowledge isn’t too useful.
About the only useful things that a long-time googler will know when joining a new group over a noogler is the test infra and code review process.
Also googlers are sometimes useless outside the Plex. Because of their tendency to religiously reproduce processes that they know so well. And tendency of these processes not to work outside.
> Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted?
The third sentence in the article: "Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company."
Can someone with an MBA or a business understanding explain why they would even make this announcement if it is a small number of roles in the company? Why not just reorganize? I don’t get it unless it’s a signal to the market that the execs are looking at cloud compute.
This is correct. In many jurisdictions, when a certain number of employees are laid off in a given amount of time, they are required to disclose this to the government.
no, you've been at companies that had reorgs that didn't get picked up by the press. They still had to disclose them to the labor department if they were large enough in states that have reporting requirements for those events.
Why? It probably has to do with the two most recent acquisitions, Looker and Appsheet. They both go into GCP and I bet there's a bunch of folks there working on Data Studio and whatever equivalent of Appsheet they had before that need to find themselves a new job. I don't understand the negativity about this non-news.
Considering all the things Google has done in the past year to hurt customer confidence in GCP, this one isn’t that bad at all.
I definitely couldn’t keep myself from wondering what kind of people run their PR, when they released a post late last year, saying that unless GCP hits the financial target $X by 2023, its funding will be noticeably cut. That was literally a release of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wild.
As a google cloud customer, the feature request backlog is long, almost everything useful is in Beta and doesn't have an SLA, and the Support is _absolutely useless_.
They still have us by the balls as a customer, because some companies just will not allow you to put their data in AWS...and mostly in places where Azure is still a poor alternative (I'm looking at you, Central Germany).
They are increasing investment and are arguably the first "cloud" computing company to exist and offer a product to the public.
They might not catch up to the others but it'll still be a highly profitable product suite. I don't see what there is to worry about. GCP also includes Google Maps and GSuite by the way, which have lots of customers.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.
And isn’t that the pitch of every startup? We are worth $billions because the size of the market is $billions x 10 if we only capture $a_small_percentage.
It's hard to believe cloud won't be profitable. You are selling one of the world's greatest engines of innovation (computing) using a proven delivery model (internet services). Combine that with very low execution risk, since big tech has been self-consuming computing as a service over 20 years of growth. It would almost be irresponsible to leave this opportunity on the table. If Google lands in third place $a_small_percentage is actually quite large.
Like I said, it's double-digit billions product line and has a 10+ year history. And internal metrics show lots of profit margin comparable to AWS, although you'll have to find someone to share that with you in person.
Optimizing for growth requires forgoing profit, which is the model in place for GCP (and what everyone seems concerned over) so I don’t see what the problem is.
Is it really that you just don’t feel they’re committed enough for your standards?
Snapchat was (is?) built on AppEngine and they signed a 5 year 3 billion dollar contract with GCP. I wouldn't be surprised if AppEngine is hanging by a thread outside of a few large users as GCP devs have on multiple occasions signaled new projects with the intention of replacing AppEngine (I forget which ones, feel free to verify that anecdote yourself).
AppEngine is just one product in Google Cloud, and the first they released in 2008. Of course there will be new versions and eventually new products that are recommended like VMs, GKE, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and more.
It's still supported and has plenty of usage so I don't see it as "hanging by a thread" unless you have more data than things that people said but apparently you forgot?
So what? I can give you a point-by-point rebuttal of everything on that page.
> The standalone legacy SDK and appcfg tooling
Just use the newer `gcloud` command-line tool.
> Go 1.9 (GA) and Node.js 8 (GA)
Upgrade your language man. This is PaaS. You're expected to keep your app up to date.
> Admin API v1beta4/v1beta5
These are beta versions of the API. Why don't use migrate to the GA versions?
Etc, etc. In fact the large number of deprecations on that page only shows how rapidly new features and runtimes and frameworks are being developed to replace old ones.
While AWS has deprecated runtimes, if you have an old running version of Node for instance on lambda, it will run forever. It will force you to upgrade to a newer version the next time you update the lambda.
As far as I know, AWS has never discontinued a service or turned off an API. They may deprecate a feature or make it unavailable for new accounts or regions.
Heck AWS still supports running an EC2 instance outside of a VPC if your account is old enough,SimpleDB , and using S3 as a BitTorrent seed for old regions.
Not to mention that Google is so full of “smart people” (tm) that their sales force is made up of people who probably would never stoop low enough to do lift and shifts as phase 1. They would probably want you to move everything to k8s and rewrite your entire stack.
As opposed to MS. If a business has a legacy app that requires a 10 year old version of Sql Server running on a 12 year old version of Windows, they will put that in Azure and probably offer extended support for the OS for free.
They push you to use a Beta feature as it's the "preferred" way of interacting with their internal APIs. Meanwhile they know definitively that there's a race condition in their code when using this feature that will _take down the entire service_. It took down our entire Production project, they weren't forthcoming with any information to get us a fix for several hours (until we started sending nasty escalation emails about our P1 ticket not being handled) and then they blamed us for using a feature that was still in Beta.
We'd had literal face to face meetings where they'd told us we need to use this feature.
Interestingly enough, we were assigned new reps this week. I wonder if our AM and TAM were laid off.
Worked at a company that signed a contract with Dyn. Oracle asked to try to sell us additional services so we said sure why not.
Oracle flew 23 people across the entire country, all in expensive suits, to sit in a conference room for a full 10 hour pitch meeting where only 2 people talked.
That didn’t work out very well seeing they are still paying Apple a reported $8 - $12 billion a year to be the default search engine and it came out in the Oracle trial that they only made $23 billion in profit off of Android from its inception until the beginning of the trial.
Apple makes more from Google in mobile than Google makes from Android.
Google's Android operating system has generated revenue of about $31 billion and profit of $22 billion since its release, an Oracle Corp lawyer told a U.S. court hearing the software company's copyright lawsuit against Google.
Your comment history seems very anti-Google. Every time a thread surfaces, you're not very far away, bringing the same, tired and recycled rhetoric. Why?
Why would Google even take the risk of this PR, vs. just moving these people into R&D inside the Cloud group? I feel like this clickbait headline will frighten markets more than the bloated headcount expense.
Amazon doesn't have a reputation for shutting down projects, and no one has any reason to doubt Amazon's long term ability to execute on a cloud platform.
If it costs $10bn a year to run that would mean it represents a $1.1bn loss, and it should be killed if Google can't turn it around. Revenue is a terrible metric to judge something on.
There's a difference between selling something with a fixed cost (and a fixed value) for a fixed price and selling something which has unknown (and variable) value for a fixed price.
Do you have any evidence to believe Google Cloud Platform is negative gross profit?
My background in the industry would lead me to believe GCP (just the infrastructure, not the applications) is 70%+ gross margin with the hardware (and data center) cost (depreciation if capitalized) above the gross margin line.
For a business at that growth rate running a GAAP negative net income is easy to do while still building a high quality profitable long term business.
I’ve made no statements either way. I was responding to the relatively naive idea that increasing revenue without profit was a measure of “success”.
But, cloud companies don’t just have to worry about hardware and infrastructure. They also have to worry about software engineers, “enterprise sales solution architects” and a whole host of other costs.
All cloud providers charge several times what the underlying hardware/electricity/peering is actually costing then. If the goal is to become immediately profitable rather than continue growing, then just stop reinvesting money into the business in the form of hiring and new data center construction.
Investing (at a loss) many years to grow a business where you are starting behind others seems sensible. Let's not forget that Amazon had reported almost no profit or just loss for more than a decade. So as long as the business grows it seems like things are moving in the right direction.
Nothing is happening to Google Cloud overall. This is just a small org where two teams were doing similar stuff, so they got merged. This made a few roles redundant, so those folks will be looking for new roles within Google (Cloud). How this made for a WSJ headline, IDK. I couldn't read the whole article because paywall, but the first few lines do mention that it's a tiny number of employees affected and they can look for new roles.
Note: I'm not authorized to speak for Google, but hopefully this addresses some of the panic in this comment thread.
I think I figured it out. It was announced in the earnings call. So my guess it was a signal to investors that they are stream-ling Google Cloud for some reason. I am not sure why that is a specific concern except to say they are competitive to investors. My guess is that Azure and AWS loom in investors minds for some reason.
“This morning I learned that my role at Google has been eliminated. If you've got an opening for someone who's in Kubernetes and containers security, focuses on content, advocacy, and communication, and has an OSS background, holler!”
They cut a marketing/outreach team. Maybe they want to focus more on product
development or different marketing and that person wants their same marketing/outreach gig.
WSJ has gone hard Murdoch, particularly against Google. In conjunction with comments by Peter Thiel, Trump, and other conservative commentators, it's pretty clear there's a coordinated effort to cast Facebook as a "fair and balanced" face, and to do that, they need a libtard heel, and Google is apparently it.
What's interesting is that Trump easily has more of a beef with Bezos as the owner of the Washington Post, but it's seems the conservatives have a harder time casting the world's richest man as a snowflake when he runs a brutally lean business and launches rockets.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but perhaps this 'leak' to WSJ was calculated to remind some folks thinking of unionizing that layoffs are a real thing in this world.
Google Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to the point where I’m trying to pick a skill to appease a machinic desire’s new and progressive, if a little anti-anthropocentric, labor production power and capital market demands so that I can satisfy a certain power-law probability distribution function’s optimization.
Power laws are brutal. In every codebase there's always ~1 person who actually does all the work. Imagine if everybody you hire/retain is that 1 person. For as woke as they are, big tech corps are still very competitive. Almost Randian. This is why I laugh whenever I hear about unionizing.
I don’t see anything technically wrong with that approach. The top performers are usually outsized contributors compared to the bottom tier or even mid level coworkers. It’s better to keep a very high performing team even if it’s more expensive.
Humans are a finite resource but the comparison to livestock seems unwarranted. A business optimizing talent isn’t inherently removing humanity from its workers.
If the business is only optimizing one specific focus then yeah it is removing the humanity aspect from the co-operation of its worker and focusing only in resource extraction/consumption.
Specific focus of getting the best workers? Since when is competence divorced from humanity? A business isn’t a family, I don’t see your perspective here.
The alternative seems to be that they keep poor talent because it’s more... humane?
We shouldn’t give them much credit on this. It’s not really an approach it has to do with regulations for large companies. This “hr strategy” is just a friendly way to tell an employee to leave or figure out what to do. I wonder if the genius behind this also came up with the term “unlimited vacation”.
Well I personally like unlimited vacation policies and it’s been a hit with most teams I’ve worked on. Adding some basic “mandatory” time off usually solves the problem of workers feeling like they shouldn’t take it. It’s really just dependent on office culture.
Vacation is a great thing. Properly setup PTO policies are better. Eventually you reach a point where accrued time ceilings force you to take a vacation. That’s typically too late from a burnout perspective.
IMO unlimited vacation is simply a sugar coated way to not keep track of time off.
Out of curiosity have you kept track of how many days you’ve taken off?
The company keeps track to make sure people take off the minimum amount. After that take off as much as you need. I don’t keep track but I’ve taken off a day every other week for months. Comes down to company culture and how healthy and focused it is.
Obviously there are reasonable requests and making sure you get your work done, but the last two companies have been my own startups and we have no hard limit.
If you have one where you work then it looks like it's a culture issue, as I've been saying.
You do sometimes get weird effects from top heavy structures like that though. The classic example is Google hiring “super good people” for them to end up doing pretty low level (but important!) ops work
To take Amazon as an example, you can hire a bunch of high performing engineers but you still need people actually putting stuff into boxes so they get shipped (robots nonwithstanding)
I guess I was thinking about "ambitious" people who see certain kind of work as beneath them. I feel like if you had a room full of million dollar engineers than a lot of "papercut"-style issues wouldn't get fixed.
There's a rumor that for a while Valve had this problem because to many people wanted to make games, and not enough wanted to maintain Steam
That's why Bernie needs to be elected so he can bring the neoliberal age to an end. Your career might be over by the time you're 45, but at least you'll have Medicare.
Will this ever happen to Amazon (AWS) which is in hiring spree ? when you have surplus, can't they easily cut loose some when plans didn't go the way it was supposed to.
Amazon does this kind of thing all the time. It's very rare with engineers--they just get moved around. But if you have some reorg, you don't need two sets of marketing folks.
So the new boss is from Oracle, who hired new managers from SAP and Microsoft, they are hiring like crazy and cutting some old jobs. Looks like they are trying to get rid of internal critics, resistance. Interesting wars
I don't have any knowledge of this, but it sounds to me a lot like a typical everyday re-org or "defragmentation" that happen frequently.
Defragmentation example: they have a team with 12 people in California, 5 in New York, 2 in Seattle and 3 in Zurich. They decide to move all roles into one location instead of having the team split all over. If you don't want to move with the role, then you need to find something new.
Alternatively perhaps they just merged some teams and there were surplus folk. In my experience (unrelated to any of this) in rapidly growing orgs, teams/functions often get duplicated/semi-duplicated as different parts independently spin up teams to deal with some need. Ultimately these end up getting rationalised as time progresses.
If they were doing big layoffs of engineers etc, I think we'd have heard about it o we Twitter/blogs/comments/etc by now
I hope you’re right. My team have chosen Google Cloud. With every news like this one, the risk that Google will shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen.
> shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen
That seems extremely unlikely, the products that Google shuts down from time to time are usually not products that make money. GCP is a whole different beast with SLAs, paying customers, huge corporations using it. It also wouldn't make sense to give up the position as one of the few big cloud hosters.
It will start making sense when Google stops shelling out a comparatively-high level of free credits for every new deal. They’re subsidizing their own users to game market share numbers, and at some point the funding to do this will have slow (unless they find out that it actually converts evals to year over year clients).
For that reason alone it seems so silly to me that Google would make this change and cause this headline to occur. Hell like the poor folks rest and vest as the worse case.
Why though? AWS, Azure etc all look much more competent and friendlier to customers, and without Google's history of killing services they don't care for anymore...
Azure is not competent or customer friendly at all. I've been using Azure on and off since its very first days and despite me telling every client that they're better off by using AWS or GCP because it will cause their dev teams less headache, and cost them overall a lot less in engineering cost (time spent by their engineers fighting with Azure instead of building a product) there's still every so often a non technical idiot who got sucked off by some Microsoft Partner manager and trapped in this shitshow of inconsistent, slow, buggy and constantly broken cloud services which Microsoft offers.
Not discounting your experience, but we have clients in all three, and our own experience is that Azure support and service is _significantly_ better than AWS and GCP, to the degree that we primarily recommend Azure for that reason.
> look much more competent and friendlier to customers
How exactly are you measuring "more competent"? Once you pay for support levels you also don't have the problem that Google is a black hole where you don't get any answers like if you are just a free user on Gmail, YouTube,...
It also depends on which services you use, if you are just running everything in Kubernetes and are not locked into proprietary services of any cloud provider it's not that hard to move between clouds. I find it a bit odd to make blanket statements about a company based on some consumer products or Google Reader being killed off years ago.
Here's two reasons:
1. They have I think the most mature manged kubernetes service.
2. They have a managed Airflow offering called Cloud Composer.
If you are just using the basics (VMs, managed SQL, storage), then it probably makes sense to pick primarily based on factors such as price and customer service.
Once you get into more complicated use cases like say big data, distributed systems, or ML, there are important differences between what the cloud providers are offering.
No. I don't work for Google but that earlier unfortunate piece from the inaptly named "The Information" represents a complete misinterpretation of management-speak and a fundamental misunderstanding of cloud market dynamics.
Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe, but what "cloud" means and where the respective monsters go looking for their next meal and how much capital they put into what kind of hunting is going to continue to change and evolve.
For many businesses that are eg large market-like B2B plays I would be more worried about greedy AWS looking up at me and deciding they would like my position and a larger share of my sweet, sweet revenue stream. Those mofos are apex predators and understand there is no problem that cannot be solved with another API.
These are interesting times, but for commodity cloud consumers there is no future in which Google suddenly decides that with the hundreds of billions of capitalized data center investment it makes sense to "shutdown" its cloud business. This is not Reader.
Many theories and opinions . Here is an observation from someone involved with GCP more than many of you (especially more than the WSJ journalists) - These job cuts are not an indication of the health (or lack of it) of GCP division. From the familiarity I got as a partner, it's probably the consolidation of the sales function. Inside Sales Reps (ISRs) being moved to Field Sales Reps (FSRs) and some of the ISRs being asked to find jobs elsewhere because the strategy is to avoid duplication of efforts and close more deals.
I totally agree. Since Thomas Kurian is the new CEO there is a wind of change noticeable if you are familiar with GCP. Every other comment comparing GCP with an arbitrary service or product of Google does not grasp that with GCP Goggle will get more enterprise oriented like Microsoft and SAP.
334 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] thread> Google on Friday said “a small number of employees” have been notified their roles have been eliminated. Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company.
It's a common HR tactic.
And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.
You don’t get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.
In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong.
In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.
It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.
This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization.
People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.
There are two contradicting unsubstantiated observations, or let's just say blatant generalisations, one gets downvoted another flourishes.
That said, the more flexibility you have the easier it is to find a new position. This naturally favors some people over others.
In my most recent case, it ended up being a bit more challenging due to having to balance the constraints of family life versus the opportunities availed by an extremely arduous commute, but I ended up finding a project I enjoy that works with my commute constraints.
It's worthwhile to compare this relative downtime to ramp-up time for new hires... who also generally spend a couple-few months being fairly useless (though working hard at it).
And googlers being googlers, there's a decent chance that the 'down' time turns into interesting learning or side project time.
I think 3-4 moved within the company, 3 left on their own time before the deadline, and 4 waited out for the redundancy payment.
Also interviewing with other companies. The next best job for you may not be with Google even if you could easily get an internal transfer role. And teams don't just blindly accept you because you already work at Google (although it helps). You still have to go through a somewhat more informal interview loop that you will definitely want to prepare for.
Of course this is up to the individual, you can definitely just screw around for awhile and apply for an interal role with much less care.
I've dealt with trees in every single domain I've been in, frontend or backend, whether doing "real" programming or building with no-code tools like FileMaker. I've seen admins and accountants build trees and recursion with spreadsheets. I don't think these things are as "gatekeeping" as you imagine.
I don't agree that all jobs have to deal with trees either.
There are other teams where there is little need for more formal process.
Edit: Wow, just realized that could be a veiled reference to artificial insemination
I've worked away from the head office at other companies, and it's limiting.
For me the quality of life is so much better outside of SV.
As to people on re-deployment, it did happen that poor performers had a hard time landing a new role -- but then again, they would have had a hard time staying in the company in their old role, so that kind of fits your point. But Intel didn't use redeployment as a "shadow RIF". Intel was not shy about moving people out of the company -- they didn't need to nor bother to hide it.
Back to redeployment -- I can remember occasions of fairly large redeployments (business unit shutting down) where those of us in parts of the company considered more strategic would find ourselves suddenly rich in hiring reqs. Again, the company created the right market conditions and let the hiring managers and employees sort it out.
I guess it helps keeping the workforce young and flexible.
1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon.
2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
In fact, this action is probably part of a conscious effort to move away from "benching".
It has nothing to do with rank and file people getting laid off.
https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
“We’re a team, not a family.”
They “hire, develop, and cut smartly”. It doesn’t seem to have hurt their recruitment.
Source: your link.
It's extremely rare, but there's nothing that makes my job satisfaction drop more than having someone incompetent (in no way related to experience) on the team, or being lead by someone incompetent.
I come to work to get cool stuff done, and sometimes people just don't fit with that goal.
These thoughts are in no way related to the topic.
The story is legendary about all of the infrastructure guys that were let go at Netflix whose job was to migrate them to AWS.
Is that a bad thing? Can you imagine the opportunities you could have if you said that you were instrumental in the largest cloud migration in history?
I can’t remember her name but there was a top ranking official at Netflix hired by Hastings personally. She was instrumental in helping Netflix in the DVD era. But she knew she was going to be laid off when they started focusing on streaming because that wasn’t her area of expertise. She went in and got “quit fired”. She said there were no hard feelings.
I first heard about this with an interview she did on the Internet History Podcast.
I think it's better to have a good exit strategy, such as another job offer, then get laid off. If you get laid off at a big company, there is usually a severance package.
That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
Their interview process is loaded with false negative and false positive rates, despite what they claim. If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.
An interview process that an algorithms/data structure obsessed senior in college can easily pass is clearly not related to elite engineers. It’s sad that people have been tricked into thinking otherwise.
I don't disagree with the point you're making, but that's a bad argument. Good engineers are capable of building a bad product if the conditions are right.
That's not always trivial, and I'm sure some will leave the company, but none have to if they don't want to.
Someone who was hired 2 years ago with 500k of stock vesting over 4 years could have enough unvested stock leftover to fund two employees RSU grants...
Hiring google employees is still cheaper than keeping the senior ones.
If these employees are transitioning to wildly different roles within the company maybe the math changes a bit, but I'm not sure how much.
Edit: not to mention the trust erosion aspect. If I see people getting laid off cause their stock has appreciated, am I going to stay? Basically means stock appreciation is capped. People wouldn't take kindly to that.
I did. Google is so large the vast majority of engineers contain domain knowledge that is mainly just useful to their group. And if their group is undergoing layoffs, their domain knowledge isn’t too useful.
About the only useful things that a long-time googler will know when joining a new group over a noogler is the test infra and code review process.
The third sentence in the article: "Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company."
For example, California has the WARN act: https://www.shouselaw.com/employment/warn-act.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
Can't see how this is not going hurt customer confidence.
I definitely couldn’t keep myself from wondering what kind of people run their PR, when they released a post late last year, saying that unless GCP hits the financial target $X by 2023, its funding will be noticeably cut. That was literally a release of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wild.
They still have us by the balls as a customer, because some companies just will not allow you to put their data in AWS...and mostly in places where Azure is still a poor alternative (I'm looking at you, Central Germany).
No it's not a sign that they're going to stop competing in one of the most profitable sectors that they've had an offering in for over a decade.
This doesn't look to me as a hyper growth focus trajectory TBH
They might not catch up to the others but it'll still be a highly profitable product suite. I don't see what there is to worry about. GCP also includes Google Maps and GSuite by the way, which have lots of customers.
You mean, no one except: Home Depot, Target, PayPal, eBay, HSBC, SAP, and thoudands more...
“Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud“
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.
And isn’t that the pitch of every startup? We are worth $billions because the size of the market is $billions x 10 if we only capture $a_small_percentage.
AppEngine has been around for more than a decade. GCP might not catch up to AWS but it's not going away.
it isn't, so draw from that what you will
Also Youtube != Google Cloud.
Is it really that you just don’t feel they’re committed enough for your standards?
It's still supported and has plenty of usage so I don't see it as "hanging by a thread" unless you have more data than things that people said but apparently you forgot?
> The standalone legacy SDK and appcfg tooling
Just use the newer `gcloud` command-line tool.
> Go 1.9 (GA) and Node.js 8 (GA)
Upgrade your language man. This is PaaS. You're expected to keep your app up to date.
> Admin API v1beta4/v1beta5
These are beta versions of the API. Why don't use migrate to the GA versions?
Etc, etc. In fact the large number of deprecations on that page only shows how rapidly new features and runtimes and frameworks are being developed to replace old ones.
As far as I know, AWS has never discontinued a service or turned off an API. They may deprecate a feature or make it unavailable for new accounts or regions.
Heck AWS still supports running an EC2 instance outside of a VPC if your account is old enough,SimpleDB , and using S3 as a BitTorrent seed for old regions.
They've been hiring the pushy sales types to deliver one end of it but not the delivery people required on the other.
As opposed to MS. If a business has a legacy app that requires a 10 year old version of Sql Server running on a 12 year old version of Windows, they will put that in Azure and probably offer extended support for the OS for free.
They push you to use a Beta feature as it's the "preferred" way of interacting with their internal APIs. Meanwhile they know definitively that there's a race condition in their code when using this feature that will _take down the entire service_. It took down our entire Production project, they weren't forthcoming with any information to get us a fix for several hours (until we started sending nasty escalation emails about our P1 ticket not being handled) and then they blamed us for using a feature that was still in Beta.
We'd had literal face to face meetings where they'd told us we need to use this feature.
Interestingly enough, we were assigned new reps this week. I wonder if our AM and TAM were laid off.
Oracle flew 23 people across the entire country, all in expensive suits, to sit in a conference room for a full 10 hour pitch meeting where only 2 people talked.
We didn't buy anything.
Rip Dyn. :(
Android was a hedge against Apple. GCP is a hedge against AWS. I don't see Google putting the brakes on GCP anytime soon.
Apple makes more from Google in mobile than Google makes from Android.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
Google's Android operating system has generated revenue of about $31 billion and profit of $22 billion since its release, an Oracle Corp lawyer told a U.S. court hearing the software company's copyright lawsuit against Google.
Doesn't sound like Google's cloud business is in trouble.
My background in the industry would lead me to believe GCP (just the infrastructure, not the applications) is 70%+ gross margin with the hardware (and data center) cost (depreciation if capitalized) above the gross margin line.
For a business at that growth rate running a GAAP negative net income is easy to do while still building a high quality profitable long term business.
But, cloud companies don’t just have to worry about hardware and infrastructure. They also have to worry about software engineers, “enterprise sales solution architects” and a whole host of other costs.
Which is directly tied to the underlying hardware. That they already optimize to death.
In fact nobody other than AWS mention pure cloud revenue.
Note: I'm not authorized to speak for Google, but hopefully this addresses some of the panic in this comment thread.
It isn’t a good look.
“This morning I learned that my role at Google has been eliminated. If you've got an opening for someone who's in Kubernetes and containers security, focuses on content, advocacy, and communication, and has an OSS background, holler!”
What's interesting is that Trump easily has more of a beef with Bezos as the owner of the Washington Post, but it's seems the conservatives have a harder time casting the world's richest man as a snowflake when he runs a brutally lean business and launches rockets.
The alternative seems to be that they keep poor talent because it’s more... humane?
https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WAR...
IMO unlimited vacation is simply a sugar coated way to not keep track of time off.
Out of curiosity have you kept track of how many days you’ve taken off?
If you have one where you work then it looks like it's a culture issue, as I've been saying.
To take Amazon as an example, you can hire a bunch of high performing engineers but you still need people actually putting stuff into boxes so they get shipped (robots nonwithstanding)
I guess I was thinking about "ambitious" people who see certain kind of work as beneath them. I feel like if you had a room full of million dollar engineers than a lot of "papercut"-style issues wouldn't get fixed.
There's a rumor that for a while Valve had this problem because to many people wanted to make games, and not enough wanted to maintain Steam
Much harder to lose 3 employees than it is to lose 1.
[0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-people-with-powe...
This doesn't make sense.
Defragmentation example: they have a team with 12 people in California, 5 in New York, 2 in Seattle and 3 in Zurich. They decide to move all roles into one location instead of having the team split all over. If you don't want to move with the role, then you need to find something new.
Alternatively perhaps they just merged some teams and there were surplus folk. In my experience (unrelated to any of this) in rapidly growing orgs, teams/functions often get duplicated/semi-duplicated as different parts independently spin up teams to deal with some need. Ultimately these end up getting rationalised as time progresses.
If they were doing big layoffs of engineers etc, I think we'd have heard about it o we Twitter/blogs/comments/etc by now
That seems extremely unlikely, the products that Google shuts down from time to time are usually not products that make money. GCP is a whole different beast with SLAs, paying customers, huge corporations using it. It also wouldn't make sense to give up the position as one of the few big cloud hosters.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
Why though? AWS, Azure etc all look much more competent and friendlier to customers, and without Google's history of killing services they don't care for anymore...
How exactly are you measuring "more competent"? Once you pay for support levels you also don't have the problem that Google is a black hole where you don't get any answers like if you are just a free user on Gmail, YouTube,...
It also depends on which services you use, if you are just running everything in Kubernetes and are not locked into proprietary services of any cloud provider it's not that hard to move between clouds. I find it a bit odd to make blanket statements about a company based on some consumer products or Google Reader being killed off years ago.
Here's two reasons: 1. They have I think the most mature manged kubernetes service. 2. They have a managed Airflow offering called Cloud Composer.
If you are just using the basics (VMs, managed SQL, storage), then it probably makes sense to pick primarily based on factors such as price and customer service.
Once you get into more complicated use cases like say big data, distributed systems, or ML, there are important differences between what the cloud providers are offering.
Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe, but what "cloud" means and where the respective monsters go looking for their next meal and how much capital they put into what kind of hunting is going to continue to change and evolve.
For many businesses that are eg large market-like B2B plays I would be more worried about greedy AWS looking up at me and deciding they would like my position and a larger share of my sweet, sweet revenue stream. Those mofos are apex predators and understand there is no problem that cannot be solved with another API.
These are interesting times, but for commodity cloud consumers there is no future in which Google suddenly decides that with the hundreds of billions of capitalized data center investment it makes sense to "shutdown" its cloud business. This is not Reader.
Maybe consumer space, in enterprise I would not bet on it.
https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...
One of the worst euphemisms for being fired that I've heard.