Beside Apple (whose YoY growth on its workforce was consistent before and after the pandemic), I think almost all tech company made a wrong bet that economical changes will be accelerated by "going online" and thus dominated by FOMO.
Cost of employees has gone up as stocks drop due to such high RSU compensation. Stock is 40% off its highs which means they have to make up that difference in either cash or more stock, and neither look good to investors at the moment so smooth the financials 10% layoffs is the go to for large tech here.
I don't follow. RSUs being worth less than they used to be means employees are cheaper. You gave out $X a couple of years ago and when it finally vests it's worth 0.6*$X or similar, that's a direct drop in employee compensation.
Are you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow? Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount down fairly quickly if so.
Ya basically people will feel they are getting a pay cut, and since the higher you go in the company the larger percent of your salary is from RSUs those are the people most likely to be unhappy. You potentially lose your high level core employees while entry level are much less affected
edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm
Employees will (fairly reasonably, IMO) expect a same dollar-value RSU grant in the upcoming grant cycle. That will result in Google having to grant additional RSUs in an upcoming round. (The currency to Google for past grants is the number of shares/RSUs, which doesn't change as the stock goes up or down, but new grants are cheaper to Google in terms of dilution if the stock keeps going up.)
When Meta stock started going into the toilet, they gave out huge top-up RSU bonuses. Amazon is much slower to react, but they give you a target comp that they hope is fulfilled by stock price growth. If it isn’t, they give out-year grants to get you to target.
To be honest, I feel like Google and Meta both had far too many employees.
"Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.
There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from. Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all efficient.
If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.
The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number.
A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approximately) the same things. Google has 20k employees in 2009. It has 155k today. I don't see Google doing much for me in 2022 that it wasn't doing in 2009.
I could probably go a long ways before that too.
A lot of what's happened from 2009 to 2022 is churn. Make-work to keep people employed.
> Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Let me spell this out: In many cases, the same thing can be accomplished in 100 lines of code as 10,000 lines of code. That's largely a function of architecture, discipline, and cleverness. 100 lines of code is orders-of-magnitude easier to maintain and faster to evolve.
The Google codebase is *massive*. If you need a new feature, with good communication channels and focus, you can architect it in. With poor communication channels, it get kludged in.
Communications scales as O(n^2) where n is the number of employees. There's a similar power law for how pieces of code can interact and introduce complex bugs.
By "more efficient," I don't mean Google would be able to do more per dollar. With a smaller, better workforce, and a smaller, better codebase, Google would be better able to maintain old products, add new features, and develop new ones.
(Question): Are all major tech companies doing this when everyone else is so that they face less backlash for it ? Also what about the news of companies having record profits during pandemi. Were they false/fake too ?
Ideally, layoffs should happen when employee count is above the amount which maximizes company value. It should never be a response to stock price changes, makes no sense.
Major companies are laying off now not because they don't have money. It is mostly because they have been hiring a lot for past year based on growth they had during pandemic. Now as economic situation has changed, they just revert their previous hiring decision. They don't want to risk their money by holding to people they hired 'by mistake'.
Some of it is trimming the fat because these companies grew a lot over the pandemic. These companies are also looking at what's happening right now in their business, not last quarters profits. They are likely all seeing a slow down and preparing.
apparently : "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
This is about growth they kept hiring as they expected growth if they are not expecting to grow then then need to cut expenses. A lot of people in silicon valley are not realising the pain that is about to come. In the last decade a lot of startups have cropped with the main target instead of a profitable business was getting sold to 1 of the big companies.
Hiring managers have attention span of 1 year max. So if some departments were doing good due to pandemic and now are flop cause times changed and you need to align costs with revenue.
Question for those who got laid-off from tech recently (say since Aug last year): how hard did you find it to get another tech job?
Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited:
If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true then the consequence to the macro environment could be substantial and not in a good way. Basically the fed will probably need another round of hikes to really bring down unemployment to bring down core inflation. Since it would imply that (ironically) the recent fall in unemployment is "transitory" and not sufficient to bring down inflation.
I'm from the UK. I got laid off in the first week of Jan and accepted a new contract role yesterday. The market was extremely quiet last week, but it seemed to pick up quite a bit this week. I'd guess it depends on experience and stuff, but there does seem to be stuff out there...
What I did notice was less tech companies seemed to be recruiting. Almost all of the roles I was approached for were in industries like finance, retail, healthcare, etc.
New listings on job boards, inbound calls from recruiters, the number of people responding to my emails, recruiters themselves telling me that things are picking up since the Christmas break.
I included the word "seemed" for a reason. It wasn't intended as an objective statement, but a response to someone asking for anecdotal experiences. I'm sure others may have a different experience depending on where they live, their experience, their CV, the type of companies they're applying for, etc.
Recruiters often hound even when there aren't many jobs available. After all, they aren't paid to sit around and do nothing when there are lulls in hiring...
I'm in the UK, but quite rarely contacted by recruiters, once a month perhaps. I think I have a decent resume (many years in a FAANG), but maybe I'm too senior/specialized?
It might be because there are fewer companies that hire at your current level of compensation - a few international big tech companies and some trading firms - and all of those are clearly slowing / freezing hiring or laying people off. Most cold messages from recruiters right now will be for positions that pay less than half of what you're making.
If you haven't changed jobs many times in the past (and dealt with recruiters), you're probably not on their radar. Most of the messages I get are from recruiters I talked to in the past, and they added me to their DB (with or without my permission).
Headhunters are incentivized to chase you constantly, regardless of how many positions they are hiring for. The positions may soon exist, may have already been filled, getting advertised by multiple agencies - doesn't matter. These people are going to reach out, get you booked in and even if that specific position does not work out, they will be hopeful to get you into something else. Observe the same with Estate Agents - they will continue advertising already let/sold houses, just with motivation of getting you into their contact list hoping that it will be useful very soon.
When there are too many recruiters in the industry for the amount of positions that need to be filled, the remaining recruiters need to work their butts off. For some of them, this looks like emailing more people.
It's still quite a defective system because Recruiters are so ruthless since so much money is made in commission. What this causes is the creation of fiefdoms and Recruiters trying to convince organisations or individuals to be exclusive with them, like it gives us any benefit.
The truth is that the noise that Recruiters generate means that most of the time, we only deal with a handful at a time, which means it can be pot luck whether your recruiter places you in our role.
Highly recommend that people do their own searching and apply direct, where possible, to the roles they want to do. I place a lot of kudos in a direct application compared to the Recruiter pitch about their latest "high quality candidate".
Your mileage may vary with this one. Companies sometimes get so much inbound email to careers@ourco that they stop opening any of it (while leaving that as the contact us link on their website). A recruiter is then someone whose email might be read by someone at the company.
I've noticed a small uptick in the number of messages, but I attributed that to being in my current role for about 18 months so I'm coming up to the point where other people start to look for a new job.
Really? Where are you located in the UK? In London I have noticed a definite reduction in recruiter reach outs in comparison to 2022 (and even then it was mainly finance companies)
I am still hounded by recruiters but the quality of the positions they are hiring for are definitely much worse than, say, a year ago.
Loads of temporary contracts on terrible salaries in obscure places with mandatory on-site attendance.
Most local companies have started to demand employees back in office full time also.
Which tells me that management in tech where I live ( nordics ) is generally bad and they just want to see bodies in the office, under the guise of teamwork of course, more than anything.
The international companies that have offices in multiple countries do not bother with mandatory in-office nonsense nearly as much. My guess is they are the ones picking up all available talent at the moment.
I had a new job lined up roughly a week after they broke the news to me. The tradeoff is that I took a 37% reduction in salary.
Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me, while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research. The best part is that I didn’t have to do any damn leetcode interviews.
I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven’t heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at least till GPT comes for us.
Sure, if you think it’d help. Here’s the message I sent that got me the new job. The context is that they were pushing back a little bit during salary negotiation and asking for a resume, so I channeled my Jewish ancestors and went into full salesman mode:
- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)
ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”
They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.
That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.
I love your background. I'm trying really hard to get my work with getting LMs to be able to write with syntactic constraints (like banning the letter E) to convert into a dedicated ML research role for awhile now. Seems it's relatively easy to get a fat title and money but harder to get a mandate to do research fill time.
I got gwern to pick up my paper about this, so someone with influence saw my work and cared.
But being the first to get LMs to play chess is a pretty big claim to fame. I hope history remembers the pioneers.
Keep it up! I believe in you. Keep trying to do research that yiu personally find interesting; doesn’t matter if it’s small, just that you’re into it. That’s always worked like a compass for me.
And keep in touch. Feel free to DM on Twitter or anywhere else. It can get lonely when it feels like you’re laboring in obscurity, so I’m happy to cheer you on or give feedback.
Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews.
Tier 2: Great comp and medium level difficulty interviews.
Tier 3: Companies that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes don't even have a coding interview!
for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective. I've passed "high bar" technical interviews before, so have some understanding of what it takes. This time around I thought I did pretty well, but didn't get an offer (coincidentally at Google). More candidates + focus on cost cutting has made things much more competitive for really high paying jobs.
For those tier 2/3 jobs they are exactly the same as before. Recruiters constantly messaging and got an offer after only being on the market for a couple of weeks.
This. People talk about the job market as if it were a monolithic entity, but there is so much nuance by types and by regions that it is hard to make concise statements
Unironically where's this tier 3? I got leetcoded at an interview for what I thought was a sane employer when trying for what amounted to a K8S position. Not developing K8S but setting up a rather elaborate database system on it, LOL.
I was all wondering what they're going to ask questions about optimization strategies WRT their business requirements and instead they roll up with "lets reverse a string in python". Wait what? This isn't a programming position as per the job req?
I think some of the lower tier companies get the idea that they should copy what Google was doing a decade ago, regardless if it makes sense or not.
Pretty sure the Fed "wants" to bring up unemployment. I.e. make wage inflation decrease. To put it another way, they want everyone to feel more poor so they spend less frivolously.
I also remembered the 11k number and just did a search in my browsing history. Turns out there was a rumor saying 11k, with Microsoft said it was not true shortly before they announced the 10k layoff.
Since it all happened in the same week, it is pretty confusing. At least to me.
is it possible that this is all a response to falling stock price.
it seem historically a quick fix for any CEO to bump the stock price is to make layoffs, and it seems to work. and i don't think any of those companies are strapped for cash
most good ceos, and definitely ceo's at this level, know not to overreact to stock price which is very macro and short term driven, when they should be playing the 10-20 year game.
I don't think it's the stock price so much as this being good opportunity to fire people who're no longer wanted by the company (at the salary they're collecting), without the reputation loss that usually comes with that.
Soon they will start hiring again, quite possibly finding better candidates at a lower salary.
People saying it is deferred PIPs or house cleaning are deluded. At Meta and Amazon I know some senior people who were laid off. People got decent severance so not too much negative comments, but I think it is a blood bath. 10% is not a small number and these are not boot camp employees who will switch out to different careers. It is a bonanza for smaller tech firms, but I think this is going to feel like the dot com bubble :(
I went to grad school during those days and have to say, it really sets you back. It will also depress wages in tech for the next 2-3 years.
I think it will be interesting to see how the layoffs are structured; e.g. how much if from specific product areas vs how much is perhaps performance based [not that we'll ever know that] and how much is SWE vs SRE vs non-eng, etc.
The big companies hired so many new engineers over the past fee years, I wonder how many of them just abused the remote work to score multiple jobs? Like where did all those jobless engineers come from on such short notice?
Is this possible in the US? In many European countries you couldn't do that unless one of the companies employs you "unofficially" (thus breaking labor and tax laws).
Why can’t you have more than one job in Europe? But it sure is possible in the US, multiple posts here bragged about scoring multiple remote jobs in parallel
The most reliable source of information is the latest earnings report [1], which says 187k as of end of Q3. I guess we'll see in a few days what the number was at the end of the year.
Hopefully someone can inform us as to whether they did announce such a pivot (I have no memory of that) but it wouldn't surprise me. ChatGPT feels a lot like search-without-citations to me, and the closest existing thing in production to it is the blurb at the top of Google results, which I suppose will soon be replaced by this kind of thing (if they can ever get it to stop lying.)
“Computing is evolving again. We spoke last year about this important shift in computing from a mobile-first to an AI-first approach. … In an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to solve user problems.” —Sundar Pichai, 2017
Since 2015, Google have rolled out RankBrain, BERT and MUM which are machine learning enhancements of their search algorithm and allow Google to understand the meaning of the terms you search for and provide matches based on that.
So that explains how Google knows that when I'm searching for X, it can give me results for slightly related Y instead. Sometimes it works, often it feels almost hostile.
I've noticed the same thing with YouTube notifications.
It feels like Google wants to recruit/queue my attention as a resource for their client's ads instead of just notifying me when a new video from someone I follow is available.
That at least make some sense, but I don't understand whose benefit is showing results for Rider and IDEA when I search for some detail in CLion that is different from the other IDEs from the same company.
I would guess he means that they use AI algorithms to perform some of the tasks that are performed manually at most companies. If so, most of Google's customers wouldn't really consider this to be a win.
ML-driven account suspensions etc are universally hated and seem to have damaged Google's image, at least in the tech community.
Part of my job is developing and testing a Google calendar sync tool. I've created a secondary throwaway email address so I don't fill my own calendar with test data.
During testing I often have to link/unlink the calendar with different users in my application. Some AI bot has evidently flagged this as 'suspicious' because I now get 'An error has occurred, please try again' when linking my application with Google Calendar. No further details of which error it might be or what I might do to resolve it.
To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this behaviour. Why should I put the time in to test and develop an application that benefits users of Google's calendar when they won't even lift a finger for me?
Modern users expect everything to integrate with Google Calendar, unfortunately. You can't avoid them when it comes to developing scheduling applications.
> To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this behaviour
They will probably never hire humans for support tickets. But they could "hire" their star model PaLM to solve support questions. It could be a good demo and a product useful for many companies. Even if it is only 70% or 80% effective, still better than nothing.
You are right, but those sentiments seem to be limited to tech community ( and even in it, opinion seems split ). I will admit that not once have I heard that mentioned as an issue in my non-tech oriented circle.
A friend of mine who is in "serious" AI research keeps telling me not to get too excited about Google's AI stuff, as they do release a lot of papers, but these are essentially worthless and non-reproduceable as they hide raw data. He suspects half of them or more are completely made up, as they do not align well with what else happens in the field.
I can't verify that, but whenever the "AI" behind my Google Home gets a bit more stupid (happens once a week nowadays, with it 'forgetting' even the few things that worked before), I am inclined to agree.
agree that they are nonreproduceable, but they are probably not worthless in that i'm sure they have very extensive review processes and theyve said that they actually put models like T5 into production on search. there's no bigger skin in the game than that.
> they do not align well with what else happens in the field
i'm interested in this comment though. havent transformers changed the field? what is this referring to? mind getting your friend to elaborate?
> they actually put models like T5 into production on search
Google search does not show signs of using a decent language model. If they did, then questions like this should work:
> "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?"
This is the quote it gives on top of all results:
> And it was a Towson University graduate to do it the fastest. Two weeks ago, Nik Haynes '00 became a world-record holder by backstroking the English Channel in an astounding 12 hours, 52 minutes. Haynes bested the mark set by Tina Neill in 2005 of 13 hours, 22 minutes.Aug 27, 2020
And the rest of the page is anything but crossing on foot.
Ok, so it missed the core semantics of the question completely. In reality there have been crossings through the Channel Tunnel. And at some point in the distant past the sea level was low enough people could cross on foot.
This kind of problem happens in many searches - if you search topic X which is not very popular, and there is a topic Y close to X that is very popular, Google will reply to Y instead of X. Topic blindness.
I'm not sure if you'd call it a pivot, but Google Brain was initially an X project that was started well before the deep learning craze took off. They hired Geoff Hinton in 2013. Investment in AI has been going on for a long time at Google, probably before Facebook/FAIR got seriously involved, but probably not Microsoft (MSR has been going for ~30 years and Chris Bishop started the Cambridge lab in '97 and they've long been known as a good ML group).
It's not like Google wasn't using ML before that either. Search, recommender systems for ads, anti-spam, translate. Deep learning just turned out to be a lot better than the tools we used to use.
Google Ads, their most significant revenue stream, are entirely AI base, and speaking as an advertiser, it's only made it more crap. It's "ai" algorithms are designed to maximise value extraction from advertisers, rather than value creation for advertisers.
There has been a systematic trend over the last 10 years to remove the controls advertisers have over their placements and spend and move towards a black box we are supposed to trust.
After so long, I decided to think of it differently: it's a learning company. You can eventually fix the problem you're responsible for by chopping off a part of it, convince people you can do better, and then move on. (Don't try at home!!!) :)
Now the question for all these learning companies would be: how do they prevent this from happening again? What did they learn and what are they going to do differently? I would seriously like to know.
The way I see it: right now everyone is kind of "rebalancing" their resources, but what's next? How do you prevent over-provisioning of resources (without under-provisioning)? How do you say which (internal) project is worth throwing money at and which one not?
Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024? Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally? Maybe not all the 10000, but maybe 2000 could stay and be in the same role in other teams? Or did they do it already and those 10000 are really people that can't be placed at all internally? (Like we don't want full remote, and we're shutting down that particular office, in which case I can even understand...)
> Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024?
Almost certainly not. Maybe the first few months, fewer will get hired.
> Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally?
They almost certainly will try to do that with the top performers. But I suppose it doesn't make much sense doing this to retain below average performers (even if their average may be a bit high), given their salary levels and the current market.
Moving someone from one type of product to something completely else may require almost as much training as the training of a new hire. Better to hire someone new in a few months, at a lower salary and possibly someone with more potential.
Also, most ex-googlers will probably have an easy time finding other work (especially engineers), so even they may be better off in the end.
Now, I do wonder what kind of roles are seeing the biggest slashes, especially outside of tech. (Ie, sales, marketing, key account, domain experts, content moderation, HR related). If any of those are cut disproportionally, it may indicate a change in direction.
The repeated mentions of AI comes across as him being completely tone deaf. Does he not realize that people fear AI will cause jobs to be lost? Talking about AI and layoffs at the same time is going to earn him some heat for quite a while.
Looks like the era of free money for decades and over-hiring had to come to an end. The correction and then crash of the market had bring everyone back to reality since the covid bubble had burst in November 2021 as warned back at the time. [0]
As I said before, no one is safe. Doesn't matter if your a FAAMNG company.
I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not market dynamics.
companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent.
now it's a war on talent.
and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits and can express your political opinions.
but other big companies - say a tech company in the middle of nowhere e.g Epic - was paying good salary and not matching the faang / vc salaries. i'm sure those companies, if they didn't follow the herd ain't laying off people. their people are still employed, getting paid decent (enough). and work normal hours.
> companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around
But this concept of over-hiring and overpaying doesn't make sense.
There is no way to predict whether a positive economy will last 10 years or 10 months, and if you don't follow the economic growth you will lose bigger than if you follow it and have to make cuts later.
Everyone is quick to blame companies for "over-hiring", but they would also be quick to blame them for being too careful in a positive economy, and the market would punish them.
for two comparable companies, with comparable products look at Asana vs Basecamp.
How much does Basecamp pay for a senior engineer ? they pay top end of SF salary regardless of location. However, you can best that Asana is paying at least 1.5x what Basecamp pays + RSU's etc.
Yet Basecamp is printing money and yet Asana is bleeding money.
How many engineers does Basecamp have ? How many does Asana have ?
so yeah the concept of overpaying and over-hiring exists and not just a fallacy.
if it was market driven, then the laws of the market would dictate Asana not to pay a premium over Basecamp for talent.
Its entirely that. A business method that relied on inflated valuations over the anticipated future market domination measured in current growth can only be possible in a market that has practically unlimited money entering the economy and it cannot survive in an environment where the money flow stops.
The dollar losing its uncontested dominance as foreign exchange currency due to the results of the sanctions and economic war started over Ukraine with almost entire global south, Asia and most importantly, Arabia moving to trade in their own currencies has killed the zero interest economy. Which stopped the money that Federal reserve and private banks were feeding into the economy. (private banks were doing it through fractional reserve lending).
Is overhiring really a problem, would the world be better if companies didn’t overhire? Then many of the people now laid off wouldn’t have had a job in the first place. If you accept a job for what it is, a temporary need for your help, and plan for what’s next, a period of layoffs should become manageable.
Which is worse: never getting hired by google, or getting hired, working for a few years making a great or even outsized salary and then getting laid off after getting great experience? - or never having had the opportunity to in the first place?
An awful lot of people would prefer the first scenario and will come out ahead.
Due to tech giants' overhiring and overpaying policies, a lot of people re-qualified in recent years. Now those Juniors can't find their easy-to-get-dream-jobs f or months and situation is getting worse for Seniors, too, as both bigger and smaller (and also both public and private) companies are doing hiring freezes, layoffs, invoke no-raises policies and all sorts of cost cuts.
Sure - all those people could try to go back to what they were doing earlier but there are layoffs and freezes in not only tech and related industries.
Those people are being punished for doing what the giants-led market demanded.
Consider my situation. I passed my Google interview in October for New Grad 2023 and was told that my starting date would be April.
Now I’m most likely not going to be hired and need to restart my job search and this will have derailed my entire plans for the first few months of this year. I won’t see a cent.
Your situation is one of extreme privilege, being able to have desirable plans, for many months, while unemployed.
I've turned down job offers in the future, because they're empty promises. You're a hiring req in some drawer, until the first day, because everyone is aware it's an empty promise.
OTOH, you've learned an important lesson early: You aren't hired until your first day of work. The job search never stops and never ends, until you're really ready to stop working.
Next time when someone agrees to hire you in the hypothetical future, you will keep looking and interviewing, at least until you have accepted a formal offer from someone.
(I'm assuming here that they didn't give you an actual, formal offer even if they did tell you about a starting date)
As someone who threw away too many years writing medical systems for the American market stay away from this industry segment. Do you want lower pay, rent seeking companies, CFO centric not end user products, and the personal stress that you are kind of making the world a better place so too much guilt to leave, then medical software is the perfect fit for you (until you break).
You should check out this guy called Marx, he wrote a couple books about how labor is always disadvantaged in such a system because their power ebbs and flows with the fluctuations of the market. The main check that labor has on this power is to bargain collectively. Seems tech missed that opportunity five years ago when it was top of mind but many people felt things are good why would we need a union.
Boom bust cycles don't end up with contradictions that capitalism can't resolve, it just makes capitalism stronger.
The absolute law of general accumulation doesn't exist either. As tech gets better, unemployment trends down.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall also doesn't exist. Economists have a name for the law that says the tendency for the rate of profit rises over time.
So why should I trust Marxism when at least 4 of his giant predictions are empirically wrong after hundreds of years? Scientific socialism implies that we should have seen successful communist states by now. Zero of them are successful.
I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher performing team. I don't want to work with people who are here to coast.
But people that know that industry segment don't want to work at Epic ;) So crappy employer/crappy industry based on government rent seeking not product quality/crappy pay/crappy location = no thanks brother.
You’re not wrong but at the same time I was hiring for a senior engineer a year ago and the market was ridiculous. Seniors only wanted to work if they could do part time for six figures and the consensus was they should be allowed to work 2-3 companies at once.
This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it may suck to be an engineer compared to the ones hiring them: that’s just the nature of our mode of production.
To a European this kind of description always boggles the mind.
Having been in the field for 12 years, with a degree in CS, worked as a senior IC and been personally responsible for critical projects at financial institutions and startups alike, the highest wage I have ever had was 75k. And this is in western Europe.
In a way I hope that in the near future more US firms start looking outside their boarders when hiring.
Because there is plenty of hungry talent here just waiting for a chance.
Working for Google is not the goal for all developers.
I personally know enough who are or have been employed there to know that the gauntlet to get hired is stressful enough and unlikely enough for a skilled developer to get through that I'm not sure I would even ever give it a go.
From those same personal connections, there have plenty of stories about feeling like a tiny insignifican cog in a giant soulless machine (which any giant company like this would be) that I wouldn't want to work there. Let it also be said I have heard great things from individuals working at Google (it is a large enough workplace that any kind of situation will be found there).
It just doesn't sound like the place for me.
My perfect employer would be a software development company, focusing on a product or product range, with product market fit and an actually profitable, with hopefully no more than 300 employees (not gotten too big).
Your landing page is crazy. Full screen image of awkward looking people talking without audio working (tried a few things, can't get it to make a sound).
Is the product a mobile phone application that you give access to your bank and it displays the same information your bank statement does but sorted into categories?
On MacOS / Safari, the full-screen video loops the first few seconds while bufferring, so I was just looking at the awkward guy on repeat. I also have to agree that it was a "bold" choice to use black text with a dark green background on a website whose primary color is orange.
My brain somehow skipped that sentence. I would be relatively certain all the affected people were already feeling quite free to do what needs to be done in their individual cases.
I guess it just means they will follow the law in each country.
In the case of Germany I believe the minimum notice period is one month (unless on probation, 2 weeks), but it is common to get 3 months. So they will pay for 3 months.
60 days is the US minimum for a large company doing a layoff (WARN Act). Some states have stricter standards, which is why Amazon had to pay a minimum of 90 days severance in NY state.
In Germany, local practices could include severance pay too. It is common for long-time employees to receive significant severance payments when they get fired.
Usually EU countries have quite strict rules for layoffs, it's not like US at-will law. In NL mass layoffs like this have to be approved by the unemployment agency, you have to fire people LIFO and you get 1/3rd of your monthly salary for every year you've worked there. The approval is quite difficult to get so usually a higher severance is offered to leave voluntarily.
In Germany any lawyer (or the work council) will block you from getting fired (because Google has no legal reason to fire you). What they do here in Germany is to negotiate to mutually void your contract by you accepting a financial package.
So in theory you are right, in practice however, most companies (especially the ones like Google) have to buy you out of your contract.
Also, IIRC, when actual layoffs happen, in Germany they actually need to look at tenure and family status of fired people (e.g. fire people without families first).
in netherlands, for example, they (Goog) has to negotiate w/ the local-employee-backed Works Council. If they didn't bother setting one up, like Meta NL failed to, it will take about 3 months to do that. Then another 1-2 months for negotiations w/ the council. Then if they come to an agreement (they don't have to) w/ the redundancies and severance the affected can _then_ be notified.
for example, technically the meta layoffs back in November have not even happened here in NL and the affected won't even know until at least March-April!!
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.
Taking full responsibility here should have involved firing himself along the 12K. This is the norm in many cultures, resigning (or even killing yourself, sadly) when being responsible for a major failure.
He said "I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here"
You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility" means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my bad". Nothing more nothing less.
If you look at the dictionary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the other one.
I know but in general when you admit something like that, people also do expect like some preventive actions for the future.
All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location.
They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself.
Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?
It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
Wow, that's salty! Mismanagement compared to what? An omniscient entity that understood exactly what global advertisement demand and capital costs would look like in advance? The real world is messy and runs on estimates for everything. If Google is 6% off on their estimate for human resources, it should not be labelled 'mismanagement'.
Management goes beyond C-suite. Upper management makes predictions of their needs, their productivity, what they achieve and don't all the time, it's literally a job req. My org has consistently less than 2 percent error in predictions while growing.
Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
No, all companies underhire or overhire, sometimes both in different departments. There are companies where firing 20% would not result in any efficiency loss, and ones where hiring another 20% would result in 100% efficiency gain.
In the 90s I worked in software development company. We constantly struggled with not having enough people for all the work we were getting so there was overtime involved. On plus side it paid good bonuses to employees on minus side it resulted with people being overstressed. So at one point I asked the owner/CEO why the fuck are we doing this? He said something like "when the other companies fire people because of downturns we don't".
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
This is good management now, but poor management before now. To paraphrase "Manager Tools": Layoffs are the consequence of management's failing to accurately judge market conditions.
> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups
I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
The tech industry famously over inflated once before in the original dotcom boom. This just seems like another correction.
I don't think the tech industry is big enough to trigger a global recession on its own, but then again, the financial industry have a herd and panic mentality, so perhaps it could trigger a sell-off for no real economic reason.
The recession would be triggered by the end of cheap money we've had since around 2010. The absurd spike in the tech industry's P/E ratios would just be one of the first indicators that situation was getting wonky.
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”.
Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
I don't get the panic mode some folks here seem to fall into pretty quickly, probably young/junior ones. Numbers alone do seem scary, but then you 1) put it into global count perspective, we never so far go above few % which ie in banking is simply a no-story, usual yearly culls, every effin' year, sometimes more than once. And 2) all of these greedy companies over-hired massively during covid (and we talk about tens of thousands of hires per giant), so now are shockingly trimming that swing that ended up differently than they wrongly predicted (thank god for that).
Once we will see trims going into 30% territory we can have a story. Now of course its pretty crappy if you are one of those affected, ie those 5%. If we are going to see serious employment issues in IT this is not yet it (and I see few reasons for that personally, but what do I know...)
Plus many took advantage of this "chaos" to get rid of products they don't want to do anymore - my company did the same. It had very little to do with the global recession etc.
> However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment; layoffs in one section of one sector are not a particularly good signal for recession one way or another.
How many places that pay peanuts that you’ve been to in the last couple years don’t have “help wanted” on their front door? Or a sign on the street? Or a billboard?
>>The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment;
Where?
Every chart I have seen shows total number of positions below pre pandemic levels, work force participation is down
Sure unemployment U3 numbers are still low on a national aggregate in the US, but regionally (including Silicon Valley) they are spiking heavily, and that is after they heavily manipulate the U3 to make unemployment look good by not counting HUGE numbers of people that are unemployed.
So I disagree that employment end of the economy looks good unless you cherry pick data
(It is true that the _percentage employed_ hasn't recovered after covid; given the US's aging population it's possible that that figure will _never_ rise to where it was again. As they say, you can prove anything with statistics....)
This can't be used as an indicator for a variety of reasons. In short, a decline in the the labor force participation rate can be good or bad, depending on the reason people are dropping out of the workforce. If a dual-income family now has the option to earn enough to support the family on one income, then having one person drop out is a sign of economic health. Basically, we don't want the entire nation to be forced to look for work.
Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
>>Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
Or they cant find jobs that pay what they need/want or have working conditions they need/want while using government programs, gig economy, under the table employment, etc to cover their costs.
I have been in more than one meeting where people are discussion why they can not find people... No Exec ever talks about not paying enough, or not providing the correct benefits, etc.
They also look at superficial things, not "hey maybe we do not pay enough"
What if most companies have no long term vision and just follow the trend, like when they all hired hundred/thousands of employees during covid for seemingly no reasons
During covid the demand for online services went way up, media consumption, remote work and study. They had to try to increase their share of it and now they scale back.
Companies are made of individuals whose interest isn't necessarily aligned with that of its shareholders. For example, Google and Microsoft are run by executives who only own a tiny percentage of their respective company's stock, so they have little to lose by gambling their company's money on over hiring. If these new hires are useful, they get even bigger bonuses, but if they don't they won't be punished too harshly because basically every other executive made the same "mistake".
On the other hand, Zuckerberg would rather create the metaverse rather than cash out on Facebook, so he decided to throw unlimited money at it until he received severe pressure from shareholders.
I’m with you, though with a fraction less pessimism.
I’m not buying into the collusion to compress wages or unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories. These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do. Why don’t we assume they’re a leading indicator of things to come? Why do these moves apparently only make sense when everyone else has finally come to the same conclusion?
The silver linings for me so far has been that a) for many of the bigger companies the reduction is only bringing them back to their pre-pandemic levels of still very huge companies and b) the open lists of laid off people some of these companies have produced at first glance seem to skew very heavy towards recruiters/HR and marketing. Which makes sense if you’re not expecting much growth over the next year.
Even if you don't know the economy will slow down, the uncertainty alone will still make companies extra careful.
Where a lot of IT budgets were only guidelines, they are becoming rules now. Layoffs send a message internally and externally about it. Any reasonably sized company will have people who aren't really contributing anything, this is just an opportune moment to cut some of them and avoid the backlash since "everyone else is doing it".
> These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do.
If that were true, I'd expect them to have hugely profitable proprietary trading desks, which does not seem to be the case?
I keep getting reminded of that scene from the movie Margin Call about the 2008 financial crisis (great movie by the way):
There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.
The recession might not be here yet, but it’s a lot easier to reduce costs before it hits.
Okay, but why would these companies secretly know something that the rest of us doesn‘t? Maybe they are preparing, but it doesn’t tell us more about whether that‘s justified or not.
Agreed, I don’t think it is productive to have conspiratorial mindset where there is a group of insiders who have access to a key piece of information and then engage in Kremlinology to decipher their macroeconomic views.
To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
They were printing money and dealing with chaos. A friend of mine in sales booked multiple deals with a phone call (ie. Give me X widgets by Y date) for >$10M in April-June 2020. Exceeded his yearly goal before end of April.
The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools alone bought almost a million iPads.
Tech companies have seen compensation skyrocket with no end in sight. Everybody laying off a bunch of people at the same time to flood the market means they all need to compete far less for people. Suddenly "hey I've got another offer, can you beat it?" becomes less feasible.
This is an industry-wide emergent strategy to limit compensation.
Notice how these companies are still hiring after the layoffs.
I’m sure. All of these companies use the same criteria and went on a hiring binge, partially to deny employees to competitors. It’s a like a gas station pump war.
End of the day, when growth slows, it’s hard to justify some of these salaries, becuase you can’t raise prices forever. I lost an employee who is getting paid $450k by AWS to do customer engineer type work. It’s just not worth that to me, and we hired a replacement recent graduate who went to a school that FANG companies will bin him for. The replacement makes $125k, is great, and will probably be with us for 3-4 years.
> I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
I don't how this 'indication of a recession' could not have been more clearer since November 2021 as predicted a year ago. [0] We were already in a recession [1] and it just took time for the indicators to take effect.
I guess now the people denying about a looming recession are now 'preparing for a recession' which is a bit too late for that.
So, if the big companies hire 40-50k new employees each over the past 2 years, and then fire 10-20k, leaving a net 30-40k employee gain for the past 2 years... that means recession?
People have no context for these layoffs. This is not a "recession layoff". This has nothing in common with 2009, which I suppose many of you are too young to remember.
In 2009, we lost a million jobs to layoffs in one month. You'd turn on the news and see 200k jobs disappear in front of your face, so you'd turn it off.
The big tech companies laying off 1/5 of the pandemic boom hires is not a recession to me.
>>I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession
What if left to convince you, most of them have publically stated that is one of the reasons, and the economic indicators are all there.. I am not sure why people keep denying this reality, it is just faith in government that keeps denying it?
People over here say there's no recession. But believing HN's assertions on global economy makes as much sense as believing it's opinions on Medical or Science threads.
Global growth is projected to decelerate sharply this year, to its third weakest pace in nearly three decades,
overshadowed only by the 2009 and 2020 global recessions. This reflects synchronous policy tightening aimed
at containing very high inflation, worsening financial conditions, and continued disruptions from the Russian
Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. Investment growth in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs)
is expected to remain below its average rate of the past two decades. Further adverse shocks could push the
global economy into yet another recession. Small states are especially vulnerable to such shocks because of their
reliance on external trade and financing, limited economic diversification, elevated debt, and susceptibility to
natural disasters. Urgent global action is needed to mitigate the risks of global recession and debt distress in
EMDEs. Given limited policy space, it is critical that national policy makers ensure that any fiscal support is
focused on vulnerable groups, that inflation expectations remain well anchored, and that financial systems
continue to be resilient
The difference between the average random asshole on the street and the World Bank is there’s at least a chance that the asshole on the street won’t have a 20+ year history of being wrong about literally everything.
The World Bank is and has always been a tool of the power structure to protect the interests of multinational capital. It’s advice is always the same: don’t spend too much money helping people so we can make sure you can always pay back first world banks and governments and don’t seize any of our friends villas or mines.
You realize that’s literally what the last sentence of the quote you posted says right? The World Bank has exactly one job.
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
Large publicly traded companies don't really prepare for large recessions. They are fickle beasts. They mostly react to the market feelings and are in a lot of way quaterly focused. What we are seeing now is the combination of WallStreet feeling gloomy after the rate hikes and tech companies 2022 results being under target. They are taking actions to try to protect their stock price.
From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
If you look at the economy as a whole, signs of a major recession are not there yet. SMEs are still the heart of the economy and the bankruptcies rate remains historically low. Unemployement is also really low. Manufacturing is doing great. Energy prices are far from bad in the USA. Inflation is high but rate hikes seem to be working.
I'm not an oracle. I can't predict the future. I won't tell you there won't be a recession especially in a particularly volatile international context. What I can tell you is that currently the signs don't point to us being doomed.
The PMI is not a manufacturing indicator. It’s a diffusion index on the value of stocks. What you are saying is that the stock market is contracting after seeing a rise at the beginning of the year (also zerohedge, come on, I thought we were having a serious discussion here).
> From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
I'd also add that all of the bets made to expand their TAM's haven't paid off.....
Amazon - Brick and Mortar Retail
Google - Everything other than search
Tesla - Self Driving
Facebook - VR/Metaverse
At some point, investor expectations will tell you to stop investing in future ideas
The biggest companies have some very strong analysis departments which warn them about these kinds of possible scenarios (recession, etc.), and the companies act with this information.
There were already signs of a global economic recession elsewhere (Asia, Europe to a lesser extent), with different signs (food and energy prices, even before the war). So the companies started to take defensive action before the downturn became visible on their side of the pond.
Now it's looming at the horizon, not like the dotcom bubble or the previous recession(s). I guess it'll be slower, hence it'll be longer and will cut slow and deep.
"recession" talk provides cloud cover for many a company to pare back and prune products, processes, and people in a way that would normally cause more out cry. It's not that such changes aren't needed, but they can pile up until a forcing function triggers a hard look and it's acceptable to do them.
I'm convinced industry captains are given stronger indicators from the government that a recession is happening. Yes, they have amazing advisors that could feel this out naturally. I also think senators and representatives tell them directly to prepare before the average consumer gives this forethought.
It's in the government's best interest to support those with capital. All the rest of us be damned.
Maybe. But it's important to bear in mind that when a CEO tells the public something, their goal is to manipulate the public in a way that is beneficial to their company. They might happen to be telling the truth, but that's incidental.
So when Jeff Bezos says, "Batten down the hatches," he's not actually saying it to prepare us for recession.
I'd still bet we avoid a recession in the US, even if certain industries (like tech) contract sharply.
It's easy to forget tech is not the economy at large. What I think most people would classify as tech jobs — working in “internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals” — are less than 0.3% of total payrolls employment.
But tech makes up ~26% of the S&P 500 market cap, so tech gets a lot more media attention because the companies are so valuable.
Layoffs are terrible for anyone involved. But even with the roughly 200K layoffs at public and startup tech firms in 2022 and 2023 so far, that's .001% of total US payroll employment.
I was in the “global recession” camp all last year but I’ve started to doubt that.
I don’t see any real economic impact to companies except Meta but that was them losing market share. Otherwise all these layoffs feel like hangover recovery from over hiring the last 3 years.
I think we will be fine. Hiring won’t be like the last 3 years but I also don’t think we are going to go through the Bust 2.0.
He doesn't say it's going to be a punishment or a reward :). I'd bet on the latter. Lower operational cost! Increased stock value! Beefy bonus! Sundar takes all...
I agree with others here pointing that firing people isn't necessary a sign of having mismanaged the company.
However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging your company is going through rough times would be things like postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would be classy.
Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits. Lead through example.
Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
That would still ultimately be spun as greed and proof they were getting pay increases when everyone else was suffering - at least, that's what happened in the UK when a bunch of CEOs didn't get their normal bonuses during Covid. This substantially decreased the total pay of the average FTSE 100 CEO that year, and once it returned to normal every news outlet ran articles about how their pay had increased by a massive amount in the last year alone whilst ordinary workers' pay had decreased over the last decade. Of course, it was really only their pay returning to normal after dropping substantially over the last year or two in a way that normal workers' pay had not, and the actual numbers in the report this way all based on put their pay at lower than it was a decade ago.
Still, the press managed to turn them taking a temporary cut in pay that ordinary workers didn't suffer from into them getting an increase in pay that ordinary workers didn't get.
What if you could run an ad empire without employees? The human component of marginal cost in that business is zero. From capital's perspective, the final stage of perfection would be just a CEO serving the legal requirement of one existing. Surely that person wouldn't have to fret about their bonus...
Over-hiring and then firing in big rounds once a decade can sometimes be better... It can be a good way to get the low performers out without fostering a culture of 'must make the metrics look good or I'll be fired'.
>It can be a good way to get the low performers out
It can if individual performance is considered in who gets the axe in mass layoffs. From my understanding, individual performance usually isn't a huge factor in who's laid off.
In my experience it depends on how much of a general share price vs technical pivot is involved in the announcement.
Typically some business functions will be shut down and merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let go.
Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected lists that go up through various meetings where the exact numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists - at least in a well managed company - are based on operational need and regular, standardised, legally defensible, performance appraisals [0].
[0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal systems.
This wasn't that. This was a case of 1) over-hiring during covid, and 2) Google has expanded amoeba-like for the past decade (outside of Ads) and the result is that there are thousands of people, hundreds of projects and dozens of product areas that are staffed with people who A) were excellent hires at the time, but B) due to organizational drift over time, are no longer in roles that play to their strengths or allow them & Google to bring expansive new features & products to the market. I'm sure there are some low performers, but the vast majority of affected employees here (including a lot of the ones who are/were low performers) are that way because of management decisions over time, not because they are individually "bad" employees. Fwiw, getting into this state is partly due to over-exuberant hiring and investment in new things over the past several years, where free money and huge profits made it relatively low risk to do so.
Probably not - Apple laid off internal recruiter contrators in August 2022 as part of a plan to reduce hiring which was already much lower than the other big tech companies. For example in 2020 and 2021, Alphabet increased their workforce by 13% and 15%. Meta increased their workforce by 30% and 22%. Apple on the other hand only increased by 7% and 4% in those same years.
I think calling them cockups is a stretch. A few points:
- Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down.
- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
- It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone else is doing it.
>- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.
How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.
Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.
The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6 months, I don't think it's a stretch.
Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton from your fridge a cockup.
From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think cock up is probably a euphemism.
"Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down."
I believe that this is a huge competitive advantage for the USA over most of the world. It's not pleasant, but many of us benefit, on net.
He said responsibility, not consequences. I am still not sure what people expect CEOs to do in these situations to "punish" themselves. Google is not going bankrupt, they are still wildly profitable, they overhired and are adjusting headcount by a few percent.
It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to the leader in these situations.
Donate 90% (or everything above $2M, whichever amount is higher) of their wealth to the people dismissed, and never take on a leadership position again.
If there were ever a shortage of CEOs because they felt they were being treated unfairly, let me be the first to volunteer. I'd be happy to suffer as they do.
If you ever have to lay people off, you can no longer hold a leadership position? If you hire someone, it's permanent with the exception of their wrongdoing?
He could resign. That would be "taking responsibility." Just saying you take responsibility isn't actually taking responsibility. Not in a way that matters to anyone anyway.
If he wasn't planning on resigning, he should have just left that bit out of the statement. It comes off as empty and tone def.
Forcing a leader to resign over a bad bet that is not permanently damaging to the company will only make things worse. That leader still has value to the company, and is probably one of the best persons to learn from and fix their mistakes. If you fire a CEO, you throw the stock market into chaos and all of your other leaders become focused on trying to get the CEO job instead of doing their own jobs. You went from one problem to multiple problems.
People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than a few years at most.
> People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
What is your evidence for that?
> The concept of being a lifer is very rare.
This was the norm up until the neoliberal era. The trend of everyone becoming a gig worker only to be made obsolete by technology is a choice not destiny.
unionization normalizes pay across workers. you trade upside for being a “superstar” for job security. it’s not a controversial opinion.
tech compensation is not normalized. there’s pay bands but it’s historically been wide and “superstar” candidates are enticed with highly variable equity comp.
Both my parents worked for unions and they would be paid based on seniority and established credentials all negotiated by the union. They had a pension, retirement medical benefits, things most people would kill for right now. They also had bargaining power which only the "superstar" employees have today. The majority are exploited all the way down to the gig worker.
The union system seems more transparent than random hot shot new graduates making triple the salary of a productive senior worker that has dedicated many years to the firm. Nobody really knows how much these people are compensated or why. Every day there is a new "it" thing (microservices last month, crypto last week, generative predictive transformers this week). It is only okay, because the silicon valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tells us so.
All I hear about on this forum is how there is a lack of transparency with hiring, firing, and promotion. Complaints about diversity hires, nepotism, old and young workers, interview requirements, credentials, mass layoffs, etc., etc. The system we have now is completely broken.
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It's a company, and it is publicly traded. Thinkable consequences are plentiful and unspecific. Everything that can be imagined will be reflected in how well it is doing.
What I imagine you are actually asking for are not "consequences" but "punishment". Which is understandable: People are hurt in this and where is the justice. But if we start to think it only be fair to personally hurt people who (to the best of our knowledge) inflict pain while acting legally and only as a side effect (while trying to do what is best in terms of their job description) we are on a somewhat weird path, where the more responsibility you have, the more okay it is to have you personally suffer.
For that, I am not willing to "punish" a CEO who is exercising their legal power, because they did something other people dislike. The responsibility is theirs, which, apparently, as a general concept, we are also okay with as long as it goes smoothly.
If we (as a society) think that what we have right now what we want, we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
He has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders of capital.
I mean, they are fully responsible for those decisions that led to the layoffs. Being responsible for something doesn't imply that there are consequences.
They overhired during the pandemic with the hopes that it was a permanent shift in the e-commerce space, and are now laying off employees when that didn't happen. Nobody else is responsible for that decision but the leadership.
I was also under the impression that working for FAANGs was done because they paid best, had the best perks, had interesting work, and were the most prestigious. I don't think that "job security" was even in the top 5 reasons for taking a FAANG job for most employees.
The "FAANGs" or "MAFANGs" of today are the Standard Oil / US Steel / Westinghouse / etc of yesterday. Bezos, Musk, Pichai, and all would fit in really well with Rockefeller, Astor, Carnegie of yesterday. With one big exception: at least Carnegie and Astor and Rockefeller created enduring arts, sciences, and public spaces of good. The billionaires of today are primarily takers, with perhaps Gates as a notable exception.
"Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially, it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street. "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"
Hadn't looked at it this way. I usually interpret it as a meaningless phrase that everyone expects to be made. How often does "taking the full responsibility" have a real consequence for the top-level management? I would expect several of them to resign and the salaries to be used to pay 5x the number of employees that are way more productive than management anyway.
Yeah, like firing 12k folks isn't the full responsibility of the CEO in the first place?
Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"
These comments show up on every one of these layoff letters, but what do people actually want to see?
The CEO resigning would only send the company further into turmoil and tank the stock (which is a significant portion of employee salary) even further down.
Taking accountability doesn’t mean someone needs to suffer drastic consequences.
I think it's there just so no one infers the opposite. It's not unheard for executives to blame everyone else. Pichai is just affirming that he's not blaming anyone else.
A lot of people seem to be chalking this one up in the “memetic imitation among tech execs” column. However, in the case of Google, I’m not so sure.
Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is extremely sensitive to changes in the economy (Companies cut ad spending when there isn’t as much demand to soak up). In the last recession Google was still rapidly stealing ad share from old media, but now they’ve won the game and are the market.
So this one makes complete sense to me. I’m sure everyone still thinks Google only hires engineers, but they actually employ A TON of ad sales people.
This all happened in the dotcom crash - all the companies shed staff.
It happened again during the credit-crunch.
It (used to?) happens in reverse every year in the banks - everyone watched Goldmans pay out bonus before xmas and then adjust their bonuses accordingly.
Just a theory but in a downturn I could see a lot of companies increasing their ad spend as they lose existing customers and find they need to work harder to acquire new ones.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to advertising which is just gratuitous brand building.
This is opposite. Marketing budget is second to be cut first being building (space expansion). The R&D budget however goes up mid recession.
Here is how the cuts work
R&D, space expansion, marketing, parties, raises, new product building, warehouses,
They've had all sorts of chances to expand that business, but have repeatedly shut down popular projects to the point where people hesitate before adopting new Google tools because they might get shut down with little warning.
Advertising revenue is sensitive but number of engineer Google needs is not proportional to amount of ads they show. It's not like Amazon where if people order less they need less workers at fulfillment centers and less track drivers. And Google still profitable and can afford to keep headcount as an investment into future. Or they have no plans which spans more than a quarter?
Why a project they invested in would suddenly become unprofitable for all foreseeable future? They expect recession to last decades? It more looks like public companies value short term profit (the next quarterly report) more than a long term development and Google is no longer immune to this.
I think throughout their existence they tried hard to be more than that. If they settled to be just an advertising business, then easy, you become an equivalent of Lamar Advertising, you post an equivalent of billboards for over a hundred years, perhaps run a few servers and settle for that. An advertising company doesn't need to try to break into cloud computing business and do all these things that Google is actually trying to do (whatever the degree of success).
I mean, if you can pay 150k to employ a salesperson to bring in an extra 400k of revenue, why wouldn't you?
Of course, the math kind of goes the other way once you're projecting that your salesperson is only going to bring in 100k due to economic circumstances...
Yes, but there are a lot of ad agencies that try to do Google ads on behalf of clients for huge fees. I'm sure part of Google sales people's jobs is to try and either drive such agencies out of business or get the agencies to spend more on Google.
Yes. California is an at-will state. The employer can terminate at any time for any reason. Unless they have a contract, they can do anything they want.
Do employees not have some sort of contract? Surely you'd want to have some level of notice - it's no good for employers for people to quit with no notice either.
Employment in the US is largely at will. Only in large layoffs do workers have any rights to notification, and large layoffs are rare, so most US employees expect there’s zero right to notification.
This is a shock to folks in Europe, but when people quit here they generally give two weeks notice, and no one expects you to do any work in those two weeks.
This equilibrium is bad for labor, but very good for capital. Not shockingly, the US is a magnet for capital! The macro term of art for this is “a dynamic labor market”, and capitalists love it.
If you’re wealthy in the US, it leads to extremely generous compensation for in demand functions. But it’s also correlated with a weak safety net.
I guess I just naively assumed there'd still be some level of notice required. It seems that you can literally walk out of a job in an at-will state with no recourse.
It's surprising to me because in the UK every employment relationship is governed by a contract that stipulates some level of notice. We don't have employment protections until 2 years of service - essentially after 2 years getting rid of an employee becomes quite onerous - but even from day 1 you have a notice period (which works both ways).
I'm surprised companies in California don't get their employees to sign some sort of contracted notice - it can be incredibly disruptive to lose a key employee overnight! It feels like companies here want every longer notice periods - mine is currently 3 months and I'm not even sure why. It works both ways though - even if my employer wanted to get rid of me, they'd have to pay me for 3 months.
Big tech companies have a "Get out of jail free (in the press)" layoff card right now, and they're taking full advantage of that, despite not needing to at all.
This is a short-term downward adjustment to what is a long running trend of increasing demand for software professionals across every industry.
I feel private companies who don't have the play the quarterly announcement game can come out stronger given conviction in what they are doing and a strong balance sheet.
Yes, my suspicion is that most were forced into that position by macro economic trends, i.e. Facebook and smaller start-ups. Where as Google's delay in announcing this helped distance themselves from being lumped into the financial woes/overvaluation concerns of "the tech industry."
That said, I thought they'd at least wait until Q2/Q3, but that's a whole quarter of money to save...
Amazon, Microsoft, and now Alphabet. Is this because Twitter showed an example where you can lay off most of the non-core workforce and the tech will still go on?
I do wonder if this is a consequence of the "My day at Linkedin" TikTok videos that were circulating. Looks like they'll have to manage life without the wine on tap and the morning pedicures before attending 1/2 hour of meetings each day.
You think executives had to watch TikTok videos to know what's going on in their companies? I mean they allowed this to happen. It's not the fault of the employees. And of course these videos don't show reality, they cut out the boring parts (the desk work).
That always looked like an abomination to me, for the wine, that is. You either drink the wine poured directly from a bottle (or directly from the barrel, like my grandpa used to do), or you don't.
Musk definitely seem to have served as a convenient excuse[1] for a ton of related articles. Just yesterday, my boss gave us speech on working full 40 hours and not abusing the system. Something is definitely in the works now.
edit: I figured some context may be warranted here. We are obviously salary. Some remote. Some hybrid. Seemingly, it is a result of someone in person in the office complaining. I love people.
I don't understand why the comments are mostly upset in these cases. If it makes financial sense for you, as an employee, you are free to leave a company. Shouldn't companies have the same freedom? Why should the CEO be punished in any way for making such a decision? Having too many people being payed for some time and having to pay severance packages is not enough? What is the moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest question.
> What is the moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest question.
If an employee leaves Google, Google loses 1/140k = 0.0007% of its workforce, a negligible amount. If Google fires an employee, employee typically loses 100% of their income, which is non-negligible.
So, Google firing 12k employees means that twelve thousand people will lose 100% of their income, for the sake of... shareholder interests?
Many people see this situation as morally not-okay.
The issue appears to be a little more complicated though. There is no clear reason to do any of it beyond 'signalling' to the market that executives are trying to rein in cost in anticipation of what now appears to be almost inevitable recession ( partially because of signalling just like the one from Google ). It is a vicious cycle.
I am not upset, but I am not yet personally affected. I also have been saying for a while that low rate encourages unhealthy habits ( including in VC realm ).
I guess my beef is that the entire layoff is.. not really necessary?
The issue is not simple. There are various reasons why people may react negatively to news of layoffs. Some may be angry at upper management for not feeling the impact of the layoffs and still receiving bonuses. Others may be worried about the potential for a recession. Additionally, some people may critique the capitalist system, despite participating in it in their own lives on a smaller scale. And on some level you are completely right as it may be necessary for a private company to occasionally lay off employees, like pruning a tree.
This 'I take full responsibility' thing is getting really tiresome. Of course you take full responsibility, you're the f'ing CEO, and in case on account of this someone loses their house I'm sure you'll make good on it, because it's your responsibility, right?
It's an over-compensation for the earlier responses that blamed things on "unforeseeable market conditions" or something in a "we did everything perfectly and this is just the way the world is" kind of excuse.
It doesn't really help the people who are out of a job, but I think it's a nice gesture at least to say "this one is on us, we'll reflect on what went wrong and try to do things differently next time" even though I have around 0 faith that any of these leaders would hire less in another Covid-like scenario where funding was cheap and demand for their services was growing.
It's a two sided street: Google is super profitable and could easily support their workforce through an economic downturn. But they feel their shareholders are more important than their employees. And so the employees, whose loyalty is demanded in good times, receive none of that loyalty in return in bad times.
Also, pretty weird to see 'careers.google.com' up and running and apparently hiring for all kinds of roles while at the same time letting go of all these people.
Microsoft had <24hr old job postings on the day they announced lay-offs. They don't always have to go in lockstep esp for companies this big. There are always teams that need backfills.
It's the opposite of taking responsibility though, they're not displaying any actions that can be quantified as them actually being responsible. If a company is doing mass layoffs it's because the executives fucked up, not the employees. The lack of corporate/executive responsibility is off the charts. They make big mistakes and everyone except them pays. I wouldn't be surprised if the executive team have to vacation after this on the company dime and receive an extra bonus since they took "responsibility".
Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation. You would think people that command billions of dollars and tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI, they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...
Agreed. This is the rough equivalent of saying 'I take responsibility' while laughing all the way to the bank over the backs of those that made the money in the first place. Absolutely revolting.
If you're saying "I take full responsibility", I'd expect a meaningful consequence on your part, such as resigning, forgoing your bonus for the year or a significant pay cut. That's what's happening to the staff being laid off.
But because exec comp is mostly stock based, he's actually getting a massive pay increase.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 493 ms ] threadAre you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow? Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount down fairly quickly if so.
edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm
"Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.
There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from. Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all efficient.
If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.
The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
Where on earth do you get that number from?
Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number.
A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approximately) the same things. Google has 20k employees in 2009. It has 155k today. I don't see Google doing much for me in 2022 that it wasn't doing in 2009.
I could probably go a long ways before that too.
A lot of what's happened from 2009 to 2022 is churn. Make-work to keep people employed.
> Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Let me spell this out: In many cases, the same thing can be accomplished in 100 lines of code as 10,000 lines of code. That's largely a function of architecture, discipline, and cleverness. 100 lines of code is orders-of-magnitude easier to maintain and faster to evolve.
The Google codebase is *massive*. If you need a new feature, with good communication channels and focus, you can architect it in. With poor communication channels, it get kludged in.
Communications scales as O(n^2) where n is the number of employees. There's a similar power law for how pieces of code can interact and introduce complex bugs.
By "more efficient," I don't mean Google would be able to do more per dollar. With a smaller, better workforce, and a smaller, better codebase, Google would be better able to maintain old products, add new features, and develop new ones.
Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-f...
If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true then the consequence to the macro environment could be substantial and not in a good way. Basically the fed will probably need another round of hikes to really bring down unemployment to bring down core inflation. Since it would imply that (ironically) the recent fall in unemployment is "transitory" and not sufficient to bring down inflation.
What I did notice was less tech companies seemed to be recruiting. Almost all of the roles I was approached for were in industries like finance, retail, healthcare, etc.
Are you just counting your inbound messages? Because there's no way you can personally tell what's happening on the market on a week-to-week basis.
I included the word "seemed" for a reason. It wasn't intended as an objective statement, but a response to someone asking for anecdotal experiences. I'm sure others may have a different experience depending on where they live, their experience, their CV, the type of companies they're applying for, etc.
The truth is that the noise that Recruiters generate means that most of the time, we only deal with a handful at a time, which means it can be pot luck whether your recruiter places you in our role.
Highly recommend that people do their own searching and apply direct, where possible, to the roles they want to do. I place a lot of kudos in a direct application compared to the Recruiter pitch about their latest "high quality candidate".
Most local companies have started to demand employees back in office full time also. Which tells me that management in tech where I live ( nordics ) is generally bad and they just want to see bodies in the office, under the guise of teamwork of course, more than anything.
The international companies that have offices in multiple countries do not bother with mandatory in-office nonsense nearly as much. My guess is they are the ones picking up all available talent at the moment.
Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me, while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research. The best part is that I didn’t have to do any damn leetcode interviews.
I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven’t heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at least till GPT comes for us.
“ https://battle.shawwn.com/Shawn%20Presser's%20Resume.pdf was the resume I used for Groq. I planned to update it after finishing out the year. In terms of my ML work, here's some highlights of my work prior to Groq:
- A Newsweek article about various GPT work I did https://www.newsweek.com/openai-text-generator-gpt-2-video-g...
- I was the first to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/10/gpt2_chess/
- ... which DeepMind referenced: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1226916484938530819
- GPT-2 music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame...
- Invented swarm training https://www.docdroid.net/faDq8Bu/swarm-training-v01a.pdf
- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)
- Reverse engineered BigGAN’s model over the course of ~6mo to locate a bug in their open source implementation https://github.com/google/compare_gan/issues/54
ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”
They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.
That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.
I got gwern to pick up my paper about this, so someone with influence saw my work and cared.
But being the first to get LMs to play chess is a pretty big claim to fame. I hope history remembers the pioneers.
And keep in touch. Feel free to DM on Twitter or anywhere else. It can get lonely when it feels like you’re laboring in obscurity, so I’m happy to cheer you on or give feedback.
Good luck :)
To anyone wondering whether to share your personal experience, please do; comments like this one are my favourites.
Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews. Tier 2: Great comp and medium level difficulty interviews. Tier 3: Companies that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes don't even have a coding interview!
for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective. I've passed "high bar" technical interviews before, so have some understanding of what it takes. This time around I thought I did pretty well, but didn't get an offer (coincidentally at Google). More candidates + focus on cost cutting has made things much more competitive for really high paying jobs.
For those tier 2/3 jobs they are exactly the same as before. Recruiters constantly messaging and got an offer after only being on the market for a couple of weeks.
I was all wondering what they're going to ask questions about optimization strategies WRT their business requirements and instead they roll up with "lets reverse a string in python". Wait what? This isn't a programming position as per the job req?
I think some of the lower tier companies get the idea that they should copy what Google was doing a decade ago, regardless if it makes sense or not.
Amazon 18,000
Microsoft 10,000
Alphabet/Google 12,000
I thought it was 11K too, had to look it up.
Since it all happened in the same week, it is pretty confusing. At least to me.
it seem historically a quick fix for any CEO to bump the stock price is to make layoffs, and it seems to work. and i don't think any of those companies are strapped for cash
Soon they will start hiring again, quite possibly finding better candidates at a lower salary.
I went to grad school during those days and have to say, it really sets you back. It will also depress wages in tech for the next 2-3 years.
Not sure what you are implying. Senior people don't automatically perform better, it's only natural some get PIP'd.
So a tad less than 10% of their workforce.
Just thought I'd add that for perspective.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q3_alphabet_earnings...
That seems like a weird thing to throw in there. Does anyone else read it as a hasty "we were doing AI before ChatGPT was cool"?
https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/google-goes-ai-first-io...
Obviously. Whatever you want to call it, it needs to stop consistently vomiting up false statements before it's fully useful.
It feels like Google wants to recruit/queue my attention as a resource for their client's ads instead of just notifying me when a new video from someone I follow is available.
ML-driven account suspensions etc are universally hated and seem to have damaged Google's image, at least in the tech community.
During testing I often have to link/unlink the calendar with different users in my application. Some AI bot has evidently flagged this as 'suspicious' because I now get 'An error has occurred, please try again' when linking my application with Google Calendar. No further details of which error it might be or what I might do to resolve it.
To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this behaviour. Why should I put the time in to test and develop an application that benefits users of Google's calendar when they won't even lift a finger for me?
Well, why are you? They treat you like that because you let them.
They will probably never hire humans for support tickets. But they could "hire" their star model PaLM to solve support questions. It could be a good demo and a product useful for many companies. Even if it is only 70% or 80% effective, still better than nothing.
Considering this was the Tweet that he sent yesterday.. https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1615820298305118221
As a followup to AI blogpost (which is clearly in response to ChatGPT) https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...
definitely google is on the defensive right now[0] and just this week they had jeff dean do a "here's all our AI credentials" recap [1]
0: https://lspace.swyx.io/p/google-vs-openai
1: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...
2017
2018 2019 2020 2021 2022I can't verify that, but whenever the "AI" behind my Google Home gets a bit more stupid (happens once a week nowadays, with it 'forgetting' even the few things that worked before), I am inclined to agree.
> they do not align well with what else happens in the field
i'm interested in this comment though. havent transformers changed the field? what is this referring to? mind getting your friend to elaborate?
Google search does not show signs of using a decent language model. If they did, then questions like this should work:
> "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?"
This is the quote it gives on top of all results:
> And it was a Towson University graduate to do it the fastest. Two weeks ago, Nik Haynes '00 became a world-record holder by backstroking the English Channel in an astounding 12 hours, 52 minutes. Haynes bested the mark set by Tina Neill in 2005 of 13 hours, 22 minutes.Aug 27, 2020
And the rest of the page is anything but crossing on foot.
Ok, so it missed the core semantics of the question completely. In reality there have been crossings through the Channel Tunnel. And at some point in the distant past the sea level was low enough people could cross on foot.
This kind of problem happens in many searches - if you search topic X which is not very popular, and there is a topic Y close to X that is very popular, Google will reply to Y instead of X. Topic blindness.
Well, I know at least that the transformers from Google are widely used in industry outside Google.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-05-20-at-i-o-2017-google-doubl...
Google Assistant, Tensorflow, Google Lens, Cloud TPU, Google Goggles, auto mail responses etc.
A lot of interesting stuff but nothing that has made the popular press like chatGPT, dall-e etc.
It's not like Google wasn't using ML before that either. Search, recommender systems for ads, anti-spam, translate. Deep learning just turned out to be a lot better than the tools we used to use.
There has been a systematic trend over the last 10 years to remove the controls advertisers have over their placements and spend and move towards a black box we are supposed to trust.
Who cares if you were held the lead in the first leg of the marathon?
All that matters is who's in the lead now and who's in the lead at the finish.
There it is! The free bingo space
but no consequences.
Now the question for all these learning companies would be: how do they prevent this from happening again? What did they learn and what are they going to do differently? I would seriously like to know.
The way I see it: right now everyone is kind of "rebalancing" their resources, but what's next? How do you prevent over-provisioning of resources (without under-provisioning)? How do you say which (internal) project is worth throwing money at and which one not?
Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024? Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally? Maybe not all the 10000, but maybe 2000 could stay and be in the same role in other teams? Or did they do it already and those 10000 are really people that can't be placed at all internally? (Like we don't want full remote, and we're shutting down that particular office, in which case I can even understand...)
Almost certainly not. Maybe the first few months, fewer will get hired.
> Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally?
They almost certainly will try to do that with the top performers. But I suppose it doesn't make much sense doing this to retain below average performers (even if their average may be a bit high), given their salary levels and the current market.
Moving someone from one type of product to something completely else may require almost as much training as the training of a new hire. Better to hire someone new in a few months, at a lower salary and possibly someone with more potential.
Also, most ex-googlers will probably have an easy time finding other work (especially engineers), so even they may be better off in the end.
Now, I do wonder what kind of roles are seeing the biggest slashes, especially outside of tech. (Ie, sales, marketing, key account, domain experts, content moderation, HR related). If any of those are cut disproportionally, it may indicate a change in direction.
Edit: I forgot /s
Virtually everyone I've been talking to has a question about if the chats are logged (bad for corporate secrecy if so).
Looks like the era of free money for decades and over-hiring had to come to an end. The correction and then crash of the market had bring everyone back to reality since the covid bubble had burst in November 2021 as warned back at the time. [0]
As I said before, no one is safe. Doesn't matter if your a FAAMNG company.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent.
now it's a war on talent.
and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits and can express your political opinions.
but other big companies - say a tech company in the middle of nowhere e.g Epic - was paying good salary and not matching the faang / vc salaries. i'm sure those companies, if they didn't follow the herd ain't laying off people. their people are still employed, getting paid decent (enough). and work normal hours.
But this concept of over-hiring and overpaying doesn't make sense.
There is no way to predict whether a positive economy will last 10 years or 10 months, and if you don't follow the economic growth you will lose bigger than if you follow it and have to make cuts later.
Everyone is quick to blame companies for "over-hiring", but they would also be quick to blame them for being too careful in a positive economy, and the market would punish them.
for two comparable companies, with comparable products look at Asana vs Basecamp.
How much does Basecamp pay for a senior engineer ? they pay top end of SF salary regardless of location. However, you can best that Asana is paying at least 1.5x what Basecamp pays + RSU's etc.
Yet Basecamp is printing money and yet Asana is bleeding money.
How many engineers does Basecamp have ? How many does Asana have ?
so yeah the concept of overpaying and over-hiring exists and not just a fallacy.
if it was market driven, then the laws of the market would dictate Asana not to pay a premium over Basecamp for talent.
Which is good, that's what the management is supposed to do.
The dollar losing its uncontested dominance as foreign exchange currency due to the results of the sanctions and economic war started over Ukraine with almost entire global south, Asia and most importantly, Arabia moving to trade in their own currencies has killed the zero interest economy. Which stopped the money that Federal reserve and private banks were feeding into the economy. (private banks were doing it through fractional reserve lending).
Really it's what all the big companies are doing, but at least some of them can claim solvency.
Which is worse: never getting hired by google, or getting hired, working for a few years making a great or even outsized salary and then getting laid off after getting great experience? - or never having had the opportunity to in the first place?
An awful lot of people would prefer the first scenario and will come out ahead.
Sure - all those people could try to go back to what they were doing earlier but there are layoffs and freezes in not only tech and related industries.
Those people are being punished for doing what the giants-led market demanded.
Now I’m most likely not going to be hired and need to restart my job search and this will have derailed my entire plans for the first few months of this year. I won’t see a cent.
I've turned down job offers in the future, because they're empty promises. You're a hiring req in some drawer, until the first day, because everyone is aware it's an empty promise.
Next time when someone agrees to hire you in the hypothetical future, you will keep looking and interviewing, at least until you have accepted a formal offer from someone.
(I'm assuming here that they didn't give you an actual, formal offer even if they did tell you about a starting date)
That overhired person who's not productive in Google could have done something better for society.
Epic is also a private company and yes pays less but they’ve taken up with Google now as well.
Obviously everyone was proven very wrong.
We don't exploit electrons.
Boom bust cycles don't end up with contradictions that capitalism can't resolve, it just makes capitalism stronger.
The absolute law of general accumulation doesn't exist either. As tech gets better, unemployment trends down.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall also doesn't exist. Economists have a name for the law that says the tendency for the rate of profit rises over time.
So why should I trust Marxism when at least 4 of his giant predictions are empirically wrong after hundreds of years? Scientific socialism implies that we should have seen successful communist states by now. Zero of them are successful.
This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it may suck to be an engineer compared to the ones hiring them: that’s just the nature of our mode of production.
Having been in the field for 12 years, with a degree in CS, worked as a senior IC and been personally responsible for critical projects at financial institutions and startups alike, the highest wage I have ever had was 75k. And this is in western Europe.
In a way I hope that in the near future more US firms start looking outside their boarders when hiring.
Because there is plenty of hungry talent here just waiting for a chance.
I personally know enough who are or have been employed there to know that the gauntlet to get hired is stressful enough and unlikely enough for a skilled developer to get through that I'm not sure I would even ever give it a go.
From those same personal connections, there have plenty of stories about feeling like a tiny insignifican cog in a giant soulless machine (which any giant company like this would be) that I wouldn't want to work there. Let it also be said I have heard great things from individuals working at Google (it is a large enough workplace that any kind of situation will be found there).
It just doesn't sound like the place for me.
My perfect employer would be a software development company, focusing on a product or product range, with product market fit and an actually profitable, with hopefully no more than 300 employees (not gotten too big).
Is the product a mobile phone application that you give access to your bank and it displays the same information your bank statement does but sorted into categories?
What a generous offer.
This is such a weird Friday.
In Germany I could imagine it to be "You're fired. Go to the Arbeitsagentur and find a new job". Of course within the legal forewarning period.
In the case of Germany I believe the minimum notice period is one month (unless on probation, 2 weeks), but it is common to get 3 months. So they will pay for 3 months.
So in theory you are right, in practice however, most companies (especially the ones like Google) have to buy you out of your contract.
for example, technically the meta layoffs back in November have not even happened here in NL and the affected won't even know until at least March-April!!
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.
It’s just that people are so used to this entitlement that they overlook it by default.
Personally?
You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility" means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my bad". Nothing more nothing less.
If you look at the dictionary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the other one.
The other option is he blames some external force or some other leader in the company.
All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location.
Look at that: https://careers.google.com/
They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself.
Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?
It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
How do you know they didnt?
Lots of salty people with poor reading comprehension… An “indication” is just that, a possible hint at an underlying issue, not an accusation.
I did not claim it’s entirely a C-suite fault either. “Management” goes beyond the C-suite.
2. Company has more money to hire more developers and invest in itself
3. Code stays in the company and potentially produces profit all the time
4. Developers are fired, but the code stays and produces value
Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/01/19/microsoft-held-sting-concert-i...
The economy correctly drives company behavior, and that's not a CEO's fault.
Making promises you can't keep, or being wasteful or grossly overestimating your capacity to deliver is a sign of mismanagement.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
If we weren't heading into a recession, it would have been good management before now.
Hindsight is the only thing that's 20/20.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
We shall survive.
The tech industry famously over inflated once before in the original dotcom boom. This just seems like another correction.
I don't think the tech industry is big enough to trigger a global recession on its own, but then again, the financial industry have a herd and panic mentality, so perhaps it could trigger a sell-off for no real economic reason.
I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”.
Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2021/2022 numbers or higher.
Once we will see trims going into 30% territory we can have a story. Now of course its pretty crappy if you are one of those affected, ie those 5%. If we are going to see serious employment issues in IT this is not yet it (and I see few reasons for that personally, but what do I know...)
Plus many took advantage of this "chaos" to get rid of products they don't want to do anymore - my company did the same. It had very little to do with the global recession etc.
The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment; layoffs in one section of one sector are not a particularly good signal for recession one way or another.
When you're paid peanuts compared to the real cost of living those "near-record levels of employment" don't matter that much anymore.
Where?
Every chart I have seen shows total number of positions below pre pandemic levels, work force participation is down
Sure unemployment U3 numbers are still low on a national aggregate in the US, but regionally (including Silicon Valley) they are spiking heavily, and that is after they heavily manipulate the U3 to make unemployment look good by not counting HUGE numbers of people that are unemployed.
So I disagree that employment end of the economy looks good unless you cherry pick data
(It is true that the _percentage employed_ hasn't recovered after covid; given the US's aging population it's possible that that figure will _never_ rise to where it was again. As they say, you can prove anything with statistics....)
This can't be used as an indicator for a variety of reasons. In short, a decline in the the labor force participation rate can be good or bad, depending on the reason people are dropping out of the workforce. If a dual-income family now has the option to earn enough to support the family on one income, then having one person drop out is a sign of economic health. Basically, we don't want the entire nation to be forced to look for work.
Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
Or they cant find jobs that pay what they need/want or have working conditions they need/want while using government programs, gig economy, under the table employment, etc to cover their costs.
I have been in more than one meeting where people are discussion why they can not find people... No Exec ever talks about not paying enough, or not providing the correct benefits, etc.
They also look at superficial things, not "hey maybe we do not pay enough"
During covid the demand for online services went way up, media consumption, remote work and study. They had to try to increase their share of it and now they scale back.
But the impact to these companies is, in general, less about inflation and more about free money.
As I remember it, the Fed kept saying things were fine until faced with at a hard, cold 8.5% inflation rate.
Has this been quantified? And on the downslope too?
The idea that the pandemic would create some new world never really made any sense for a global rampup anyway.
On the other hand, Zuckerberg would rather create the metaverse rather than cash out on Facebook, so he decided to throw unlimited money at it until he received severe pressure from shareholders.
I’m not buying into the collusion to compress wages or unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories. These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do. Why don’t we assume they’re a leading indicator of things to come? Why do these moves apparently only make sense when everyone else has finally come to the same conclusion?
The silver linings for me so far has been that a) for many of the bigger companies the reduction is only bringing them back to their pre-pandemic levels of still very huge companies and b) the open lists of laid off people some of these companies have produced at first glance seem to skew very heavy towards recruiters/HR and marketing. Which makes sense if you’re not expecting much growth over the next year.
Where a lot of IT budgets were only guidelines, they are becoming rules now. Layoffs send a message internally and externally about it. Any reasonably sized company will have people who aren't really contributing anything, this is just an opportune moment to cut some of them and avoid the backlash since "everyone else is doing it".
Why not? Every FAANG company has been accused of colluding with each other to suppress (not compress) wages.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
They have literally been tried, and admitted guilt, for doing exactly this.
If that were true, I'd expect them to have hugely profitable proprietary trading desks, which does not seem to be the case?
There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.
The recession might not be here yet, but it’s a lot easier to reduce costs before it hits.
He's going to do whatever it takes to stop regular people from getting higher wages.
Spending free fedcoin will require recipient to signup for FedCoin also. Then, the real fun begins.
To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
- Everyone overhired during the pandemic.
- Interest rates are impacting the business at all levels.
- Wall St demands sacrifice to the volcano gods. Microsoft and Amazon did layoffs, so must google.
why?
The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools alone bought almost a million iPads.
Tech companies have seen compensation skyrocket with no end in sight. Everybody laying off a bunch of people at the same time to flood the market means they all need to compete far less for people. Suddenly "hey I've got another offer, can you beat it?" becomes less feasible.
This is an industry-wide emergent strategy to limit compensation.
Notice how these companies are still hiring after the layoffs.
End of the day, when growth slows, it’s hard to justify some of these salaries, becuase you can’t raise prices forever. I lost an employee who is getting paid $450k by AWS to do customer engineer type work. It’s just not worth that to me, and we hired a replacement recent graduate who went to a school that FANG companies will bin him for. The replacement makes $125k, is great, and will probably be with us for 3-4 years.
I don't how this 'indication of a recession' could not have been more clearer since November 2021 as predicted a year ago. [0] We were already in a recession [1] and it just took time for the indicators to take effect.
I guess now the people denying about a looming recession are now 'preparing for a recession' which is a bit too late for that.
Should have prepared as early in November 2021.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710
People have no context for these layoffs. This is not a "recession layoff". This has nothing in common with 2009, which I suppose many of you are too young to remember.
In 2009, we lost a million jobs to layoffs in one month. You'd turn on the news and see 200k jobs disappear in front of your face, so you'd turn it off.
The big tech companies laying off 1/5 of the pandemic boom hires is not a recession to me.
Alphabet staff:
2018 98771
2019 118899
2020 135301
2021 156500
2022 186779
2023 174000?*
Everyone expects a recession, companies and individuals starts saving and being more frugal, which leads to an actual recession.
Wait, are you telling me that I picked a wrong time to quick my job and work on side projects, again?
What if left to convince you, most of them have publically stated that is one of the reasons, and the economic indicators are all there.. I am not sure why people keep denying this reality, it is just faith in government that keeps denying it?
For financial information about the world economic situation I tend to prefer reading WorldBank, who's Global Economic Prospects for 2023 is not that positive: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/3...
---
Global growth is projected to decelerate sharply this year, to its third weakest pace in nearly three decades, overshadowed only by the 2009 and 2020 global recessions. This reflects synchronous policy tightening aimed at containing very high inflation, worsening financial conditions, and continued disruptions from the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. Investment growth in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is expected to remain below its average rate of the past two decades. Further adverse shocks could push the global economy into yet another recession. Small states are especially vulnerable to such shocks because of their reliance on external trade and financing, limited economic diversification, elevated debt, and susceptibility to natural disasters. Urgent global action is needed to mitigate the risks of global recession and debt distress in EMDEs. Given limited policy space, it is critical that national policy makers ensure that any fiscal support is focused on vulnerable groups, that inflation expectations remain well anchored, and that financial systems continue to be resilient
The World Bank is and has always been a tool of the power structure to protect the interests of multinational capital. It’s advice is always the same: don’t spend too much money helping people so we can make sure you can always pay back first world banks and governments and don’t seize any of our friends villas or mines.
You realize that’s literally what the last sentence of the quote you posted says right? The World Bank has exactly one job.
Large publicly traded companies don't really prepare for large recessions. They are fickle beasts. They mostly react to the market feelings and are in a lot of way quaterly focused. What we are seeing now is the combination of WallStreet feeling gloomy after the rate hikes and tech companies 2022 results being under target. They are taking actions to try to protect their stock price.
From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
If you look at the economy as a whole, signs of a major recession are not there yet. SMEs are still the heart of the economy and the bankruptcies rate remains historically low. Unemployement is also really low. Manufacturing is doing great. Energy prices are far from bad in the USA. Inflation is high but rate hikes seem to be working.
I'm not an oracle. I can't predict the future. I won't tell you there won't be a recession especially in a particularly volatile international context. What I can tell you is that currently the signs don't point to us being doomed.
SPR reserve draining was key to manipulating gas prices to have taking points for US midterms and inflation calculations, for starters.
Manufacturing numbers are also down
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/ism-manufacturing-contra...
I'd also add that all of the bets made to expand their TAM's haven't paid off.....
Amazon - Brick and Mortar Retail Google - Everything other than search Tesla - Self Driving Facebook - VR/Metaverse
At some point, investor expectations will tell you to stop investing in future ideas
There were already signs of a global economic recession elsewhere (Asia, Europe to a lesser extent), with different signs (food and energy prices, even before the war). So the companies started to take defensive action before the downturn became visible on their side of the pond.
Now it's looming at the horizon, not like the dotcom bubble or the previous recession(s). I guess it'll be slower, hence it'll be longer and will cut slow and deep.
It's in the government's best interest to support those with capital. All the rest of us be damned.
So when Jeff Bezos says, "Batten down the hatches," he's not actually saying it to prepare us for recession.
It's easy to forget tech is not the economy at large. What I think most people would classify as tech jobs — working in “internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals” — are less than 0.3% of total payrolls employment.
But tech makes up ~26% of the S&P 500 market cap, so tech gets a lot more media attention because the companies are so valuable.
Layoffs are terrible for anyone involved. But even with the roughly 200K layoffs at public and startup tech firms in 2022 and 2023 so far, that's .001% of total US payroll employment.
Which is another way of saying "inducing a recession", as any educated person should know.
I don’t see any real economic impact to companies except Meta but that was them losing market share. Otherwise all these layoffs feel like hangover recovery from over hiring the last 3 years.
I think we will be fine. Hiring won’t be like the last 3 years but I also don’t think we are going to go through the Bust 2.0.
However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging your company is going through rough times would be things like postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would be classy.
Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits. Lead through example.
Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
Still, the press managed to turn them taking a temporary cut in pay that ordinary workers didn't suffer from into them getting an increase in pay that ordinary workers didn't get.
My understanding is it is simply firing season because markets will not punish companies for layoffs right now.
Being in the job market right now myself it’ll be interesting to see how competitive things get.
It can if individual performance is considered in who gets the axe in mass layoffs. From my understanding, individual performance usually isn't a huge factor in who's laid off.
Typically some business functions will be shut down and merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let go.
Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected lists that go up through various meetings where the exact numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists - at least in a well managed company - are based on operational need and regular, standardised, legally defensible, performance appraisals [0].
[0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal systems.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
As long as they pay well, I don't think it will. And it's not like alternatives are safer.
- Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down.
- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
- It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone else is doing it.
More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.
How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.
Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.
The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6 months, I don't think it's a stretch.
Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton from your fridge a cockup.
From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think cock up is probably a euphemism.
I believe that this is a huge competitive advantage for the USA over most of the world. It's not pleasant, but many of us benefit, on net.
It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to the leader in these situations.
No, I'm not joking.
To own the decision. Not pass the buck.
If he wasn't planning on resigning, he should have just left that bit out of the statement. It comes off as empty and tone def.
When you break a window you don't give awway the house.
cockups?
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
...and that's why I don't think those are cockups.
The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than a few years at most.
What is your evidence for that?
> The concept of being a lifer is very rare.
This was the norm up until the neoliberal era. The trend of everyone becoming a gig worker only to be made obsolete by technology is a choice not destiny.
unionization normalizes pay across workers. you trade upside for being a “superstar” for job security. it’s not a controversial opinion.
tech compensation is not normalized. there’s pay bands but it’s historically been wide and “superstar” candidates are enticed with highly variable equity comp.
The union system seems more transparent than random hot shot new graduates making triple the salary of a productive senior worker that has dedicated many years to the firm. Nobody really knows how much these people are compensated or why. Every day there is a new "it" thing (microservices last month, crypto last week, generative predictive transformers this week). It is only okay, because the silicon valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tells us so.
All I hear about on this forum is how there is a lack of transparency with hiring, firing, and promotion. Complaints about diversity hires, nepotism, old and young workers, interview requirements, credentials, mass layoffs, etc., etc. The system we have now is completely broken.
Fwiw Cook took a pay cut and Apple seems to have only slowed hiring. (So far as I’ve heard)
It's a company, and it is publicly traded. Thinkable consequences are plentiful and unspecific. Everything that can be imagined will be reflected in how well it is doing.
What I imagine you are actually asking for are not "consequences" but "punishment". Which is understandable: People are hurt in this and where is the justice. But if we start to think it only be fair to personally hurt people who (to the best of our knowledge) inflict pain while acting legally and only as a side effect (while trying to do what is best in terms of their job description) we are on a somewhat weird path, where the more responsibility you have, the more okay it is to have you personally suffer.
For that, I am not willing to "punish" a CEO who is exercising their legal power, because they did something other people dislike. The responsibility is theirs, which, apparently, as a general concept, we are also okay with as long as it goes smoothly.
If we (as a society) think that what we have right now what we want, we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
What a shame that "we" won't get a look in.
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/canto-45/summary
They overhired during the pandemic with the hopes that it was a permanent shift in the e-commerce space, and are now laying off employees when that didn't happen. Nobody else is responsible for that decision but the leadership.
I was also under the impression that working for FAANGs was done because they paid best, had the best perks, had interesting work, and were the most prestigious. I don't think that "job security" was even in the top 5 reasons for taking a FAANG job for most employees.
Ah, the heavy cost of a troubled mind /s.
Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
Taking responsibility is the opposite of assigning blame. Taking responsibility doesn't mean there are or should be consequences for him.
As for what are the consequences for himself, that's definitely not for him to say or chose. It's up to those who hired him.
And the workers will face the consequences of these decisions.
The CEO resigning would only send the company further into turmoil and tank the stock (which is a significant portion of employee salary) even further down.
Taking accountability doesn’t mean someone needs to suffer drastic consequences.
Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is extremely sensitive to changes in the economy (Companies cut ad spending when there isn’t as much demand to soak up). In the last recession Google was still rapidly stealing ad share from old media, but now they’ve won the game and are the market.
So this one makes complete sense to me. I’m sure everyone still thinks Google only hires engineers, but they actually employ A TON of ad sales people.
It happened again during the credit-crunch.
It (used to?) happens in reverse every year in the banks - everyone watched Goldmans pay out bonus before xmas and then adjust their bonuses accordingly.
Business always watches what the other guy does.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to advertising which is just gratuitous brand building.
But the reason ad spends decrease during downturns is that people consume less, so there's no point in advertising when nobody's buying.
I don't think they should. But if they did, I'd hope they'd focus on more worthy causes than paying US engineers $300k/year.
Very true
Why? Don’t customers submit their own ads to Google?
Of course, the math kind of goes the other way once you're projecting that your salesperson is only going to bring in 100k due to economic circumstances...
> We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).
Weird flex. Would it be legal not to?
This is a shock to folks in Europe, but when people quit here they generally give two weeks notice, and no one expects you to do any work in those two weeks.
This equilibrium is bad for labor, but very good for capital. Not shockingly, the US is a magnet for capital! The macro term of art for this is “a dynamic labor market”, and capitalists love it.
If you’re wealthy in the US, it leads to extremely generous compensation for in demand functions. But it’s also correlated with a weak safety net.
It's surprising to me because in the UK every employment relationship is governed by a contract that stipulates some level of notice. We don't have employment protections until 2 years of service - essentially after 2 years getting rid of an employee becomes quite onerous - but even from day 1 you have a notice period (which works both ways).
I'm surprised companies in California don't get their employees to sign some sort of contracted notice - it can be incredibly disruptive to lose a key employee overnight! It feels like companies here want every longer notice periods - mine is currently 3 months and I'm not even sure why. It works both ways though - even if my employer wanted to get rid of me, they'd have to pay me for 3 months.
I feel private companies who don't have the play the quarterly announcement game can come out stronger given conviction in what they are doing and a strong balance sheet.
That said, I thought they'd at least wait until Q2/Q3, but that's a whole quarter of money to save...
That always looked like an abomination to me, for the wine, that is. You either drink the wine poured directly from a bottle (or directly from the barrel, like my grandpa used to do), or you don't.
edit: I figured some context may be warranted here. We are obviously salary. Some remote. Some hybrid. Seemingly, it is a result of someone in person in the office complaining. I love people.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-elon-musk-your-bosss-anger-t...
If an employee leaves Google, Google loses 1/140k = 0.0007% of its workforce, a negligible amount. If Google fires an employee, employee typically loses 100% of their income, which is non-negligible.
So, Google firing 12k employees means that twelve thousand people will lose 100% of their income, for the sake of... shareholder interests?
Many people see this situation as morally not-okay.
The issue appears to be a little more complicated though. There is no clear reason to do any of it beyond 'signalling' to the market that executives are trying to rein in cost in anticipation of what now appears to be almost inevitable recession ( partially because of signalling just like the one from Google ). It is a vicious cycle.
I am not upset, but I am not yet personally affected. I also have been saying for a while that low rate encourages unhealthy habits ( including in VC realm ).
I guess my beef is that the entire layoff is.. not really necessary?
But politicians normally don't say that, but they also don't have stocks :)
It doesn't really help the people who are out of a job, but I think it's a nice gesture at least to say "this one is on us, we'll reflect on what went wrong and try to do things differently next time" even though I have around 0 faith that any of these leaders would hire less in another Covid-like scenario where funding was cheap and demand for their services was growing.
Also, pretty weird to see 'careers.google.com' up and running and apparently hiring for all kinds of roles while at the same time letting go of all these people.
Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation. You would think people that command billions of dollars and tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI, they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...
But because exec comp is mostly stock based, he's actually getting a massive pay increase.