When I worked there, it was already very difficult to book a time for a massage, and you got one massage every year for free, and had to pay for any additional ones. I never got one. The "benefit" of massages was already pretty much gone (except in name).
Yep people need to understand that as a perk, this wasn't much. People were not getting free massages (which I guess they got in the early days the company maybe?) It just meant they'd bring a massage therapist on site, which you could book for your own $$ and get at a pretty reasonable rate, and I guess it wasn't looked down on that you would do this during the work day. But bookings were also often hard to get. And, yeah, some free massage points got deposited once a year for your birthday (most people I knew didn't ever use them.)
Altho the massage therapists were hardly used by alot of people and maybe that's due to them being booked out or difficult to obtain bookings. I still think Google/Facebook/Twitter are just giant daycare centers for adult babies.
This is a generalisation but it's what it seems like when you have these people posting 'day in the life of twitter' 'day in the life as a google yelp elitist', etc. Where it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working.
We hear about these US jobs with perks, 200k salaries, shares, benefits bumping packages to like 500k etc, while outside of the US (atleast for me) we work hard for our salaries which pale in comparison.
Yeah some of them were TikTok. I don't know if it's gloating or recruitment tools, I'm just observing as a non-US person that's never seen perks even remotely similar.
For sure. Frankly even food I didn't care much for. But sure. 401k and health care were the only must haves for me. People keep saying $$ but it was largely dependent on the quality of counter offers and refreshers were pretty average.
Food was worse in MTV than in some other offices. I worked out of WAT and our food was pretty fantastic for years, and NYC and TOR were even better when I visited. MTV had a lot more variety but nothing stellar from what I experienced. Smaller sites could do fancier stuff with their budget because less people.
In WAT, prior to 2016? or so? we used to get a yearly surprise steak and lobster meal around the holidays. The date was never announced in advance, but one day in December you'd show up and there'd be fresh lobster and steak and fixings. Fantastic :-)
Even if it's not a recruitment tool, you won't see people sharing them actually working because: 1) it's boring; 2) they don't want to risk sharing something confidential.
And even if someone manage to share their actual work you likely will never see it because it's not something that goes viral.
> I still think Google/Facebook/Twitter are just giant daycare centers for adult babies
Its just a way to pay people in things that aren't money. After a certain point more $$$ becomes meaningless to most people (its just a number at some point) and these types of perks give more bank for their buck in attracting workers than upping salaries.
Compensation at Google went up over the years. A lot of the serious perks were put in in the early days when Google was a much smaller company scrambling to try to get the brightest people it could. Honestly most of us who came later were merely riding the coat-tails of that era.
Also 'base' compensation at Google was never that high when I was there. It was the RSUs that made it a very prosperous place to work. And those take a few years to vest and get you up into Really Good Money territory. So in the meantime, perks are key in retention.
But the key point is that Google is just swimming in stupid amounts of $$ from ad revenues. Not spending good $$ on employee retention and compensation would actually have deleterious effects on morale. Most jobs are just slinging protobufs around and keeping those $$ systems up and running-- but those systems are important to Google.
People saying Google is irresponsible with money probably haven't looked at the balance sheet. They can spend boatloads on compensation and still make more money than almost any other company.
> it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working
I would not take those videos of representative of an actual “day in the life”. They obviously don’t include any actual working, as it would violate non disclosure agreements.
> when you have these people posting 'day in the life of twitter' 'day in the life as a google yelp elitist', etc. Where it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working
I've been seeing this comment a lot in the last year as the TikTok tech-worker influencers started making waves, and I've struggled to understand it.
There are even videos where non-monetary perks aren't shown, it's just the tech worker in their nice apartment using nice things they buy, and people still lose their minds thinking "this person doesn't work". Do you need to see an 8 hour long video of them at their desk? Their commutes, too?
I think we're still in the transition period where there's enormous groups of people who don't understand how social media works. Reminds me of that apocryphal story of the theater audience screaming in terror when they saw a train moving towards the camera.
I haven’t seen any of their apartments. I’ve only seen the ones at the office. The tiktok girl about Twitter and she spent most of the morning being lazy then having a meeting in a pod then being lazy.
The other was a Google girl who was part of the layoffs and she posted about going into the office and having breakfast and then going to these rooms to listen to music etc.
And so I wonder what these people’s roles actually are?!?
worked there 2003-2011. massages were definitely not free, but heavily subsidized (something like $30 for an hour session).
awesome fact: some time in the late 2000s after years of trying, the masseuses were converted from contract to full-time, complete w/benefits and all the perks of being a real 'googler'! :)
don't know if that's still the case, but it was kinda awesome that the masseuses fought for this and won.
was never like that (fulltime masseuse) in our Waterloo office. Was always provided by a third party massage service company that came in a couple times a week.
I used to take a massage roughly every second week, as a normal developer in a normal European company. You would pay half of the cost and company the other half, which meant my part was 10€.
I felt it's a cheap way to keep neck issues at bay, benefiting everyone. Seems pointless to label it as something extravagant.
Google programmer staff is way too big to be any sort of elite. They are not a 1 in 100 programmer.
Maybe the 60 percentile or whatever at their scale.
Since the stereotypical silly good programmer skill is negatively correlated with social skills it would not surprise me at all if the median Google employee is even below median due to their recruiting process.
Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long. Now the stakeholders want better results than one failed launch per year. It is unfathomable how GCP can be so far behind AWS and Azure. I think Google will soon have a new CEO, during last few years they provided very little innovation that can pay for itself.
There are no stakeholders, there is only Larry and Sergey. Due to the innovative IPO, the founders keep voting control of the company with only 3% ownership and the shareholders come along for the ride.
The company still has a fiduciary duty to all shareholders, not just majority owners. A smaller shareholder could still argue in court that management is breaching those responsibilities.
That said (and IANAL), at least the couple suits I'm familiar with in this area have to do with minority shareholders arguing some decision was made to benefit majority owners at the expense of minority shareholders. It's much, much more difficult to just argue "bad decision making" if all shareholders are affected equally.
If we're being pedantic, you can't do so without incurring a non-negligible risk of legal consequences often exceeding the personal gains from screwing over the shareholders.
Those 97% only have 49% of the voting power, so of course they can be ignored. 50% + 1 is more than enough to completely override all interests and demands from the other side. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in any system that involved voting power.
The question isn't whether they could be outvoted, just whether doing so is actually consequence-free. It isn't a pure democracy because the majority power has certain duties and obligations imposed by external actors (the court system) regardless of their ability or inclination to override other interests and demands.
Yes, that's precisely why those who hold controlling voting power can get away with pretty much anything.
The founders are not stupid. They are not giving away Google's source codes or company assets in proccesses that are 100% detrimental to the company's net value. Whatever consequences there will be due to some Wallstreet suits fuming at their annual investment return having 1% fewer growth YoY is going to have a very hard time building an actual case for a lawsuit. Should anything come close to materializing in a lawsuit, the legal teams will certainly relay that to Sergey and Larry so that they could respond accordingly.
I don't see how one gets the Stadia shutdown as a failure of management? As software, it worked really (frankly shockingly) well. You might argue that it was a failure of product targetting, maybe of business relationship management, maybe that the pricing didn't match the cost of service, etc...
But the employees tasked by Google to produce a cloud-based streaming gaming service, successfully shipped a cloud-based streaming gaming service. That's good management, not bad.
Edit: ooph, I can see where this is going but people have replied so I should leave it up. FWIW: the term "management" in this context is generally interpreted strictly, and not just a shorthand for "every decision made by an executive". The complaints people have with Stadia are better termed "marketing" (building the wrong product or canceling it too soon) or "sales" (failing to get enough games on the product). "Management" (the application of corporate resources to achieve results) did their job.
And in particular, in the context of layoffs ("management" by definition) it seems like the usage above was ambiguous enough to demand a correction. Stadia being mismarketed simply isn't relevant to the employment status of massage therapists.
Engineering did their job, well. Leadership and product did not.
This has been the trend at Google during Sundar and Ruth's tenure: a company led by engineers became a company led by product management and finance.
And it shows. Google's made a crushing number of business decisions that flew in the face of good engineering principles, and undermined the company's excellence.
Yes. I'm curious too. The commodity servers seem competitive in terms of price and performance. Plus, it has several nice features like Firebase. But if someone wants to chime in, I would like to hear how they're behind.
I think heir comment was more talking from an R&D perspective, I.e. them being innovative.
I agree that slowly sliding the "% of ads our customers see"-slider to the right over the last couple of years until it becomes unbearable isn't really _that_ innovative but still yields a ton of profit.
Saying a company is "burning cash" is not the same as saying they're unprofitable.
Indeed, the general argument is that Google's ads machine is so profitable that they can run the business horribly inefficiently because they don't know where to put all that cash.
If a company is "burning cash" at the same time that they are "printing cash", I think you're definitely using the first phrase in a non-conventional way.
> Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long.
That is, I (and I think most others) interpreted that as Google was essentially lighting a big pile of their cash on fire due to poor management, not that they were unprofitable. That would be very different, for example, than a statement like "Most of these new car companies are burning cash at an unsustainable rate."
What happened to Google is what happens to all fat monopolists: they had the luxury of losing focus because their monopoly was so profitable. I do really feel that Google (among others) is finally seeing the type of existential risk much better AI is to Google's ad business. While I'm definitely not of the opinion that "ChatGPT is a Google killer", it's not that hard to see that a company whose velocity in this space is currently much faster that Google's could eventually overtake Google's bread-and-butter search business in 5-10 years.
FYI there are muscular issues that one can suffer from if they spend 12+ hours a day at a computer. I suffer from one of them and when it flares up productivity nosedives. In some cases muscles near nerves can trigger RSI-like symptoms which can be terrifying and debilitating.
So people that suggest this can only be "pampering" are perhaps missing this part of the puzzle.
1. Google doesn't force (nor expect) any of it's employees to spend "12+ hours a day" in front of a computer.
2. Most (maybe all?) insurance plans will cover at least some number of medically prescribed massages. Furthermore, nearly all of the US workforce manages fairly decently without in-house massage staff.
It was a luxury perk simply because Google could afford it.
1. Ye but the type of people who work in tech overlay with many of the people that spend 12+ hours a day.
2. Ye but you have to sort that and go someplace else. Maybe you've got some crunch coming up and feel pressured to commit to the hours even if its burning, if its coming to your workplace, its way easier for it to happen.
Most companies that provide such perks would just cover it under employee medical insurance or "wellness" bonuses. 31 massage therapists would not have the capacity to serve 150k employees even if they worked 16hrs per day every day.
I always thought massage therapists in offices seemed a bit Marie Antoinette.
Showing appreciation with tokens of gratitude and respect is different from leaving a bowl of treats out, mostly because of the implied direction of the gratitude. Where if I give staff something thoughtful because I want to recognize them, gratitude is expressed toward them, whereas if I leave a bowl of treats out, their gratitutde is implied toward me. If someone said, "here are some luxury goods, enjoy them," and then said, "oh yeah, btw someone has to pay for those luxury goods you used, time to work them off," we have other words for what that is.
Imo, personal boundaries in an office environment provide dignity to people, which is an essential part of maintaining the high and elite-level performance mental health necessary to manage in professional environments. It's a kind of athleticism. Providing "treats" is (un-)subtly degrading, and as a direct result I would estimate that the level of staff well being in the dozens of companies I have consulted to was inversely proportional to the presence of snacks, alcohol, toys, beanbag chairs, and furry onesie costumes in their offices.
Sorry to hear the therapists were laid off, and they were probably the hardest working people at Google, but medium term, it sounds like it could be better for everyone involved.
I didn't really used the massages, but one cool thing was that after I quit and Google and rejoined a few years later, that although I lost my options, I got back my massage points.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadThis is a generalisation but it's what it seems like when you have these people posting 'day in the life of twitter' 'day in the life as a google yelp elitist', etc. Where it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working.
We hear about these US jobs with perks, 200k salaries, shares, benefits bumping packages to like 500k etc, while outside of the US (atleast for me) we work hard for our salaries which pale in comparison.
It's the payoff for keeping the money printing machine running.
In WAT, prior to 2016? or so? we used to get a yearly surprise steak and lobster meal around the holidays. The date was never announced in advance, but one day in December you'd show up and there'd be fresh lobster and steak and fixings. Fantastic :-)
And even if someone manage to share their actual work you likely will never see it because it's not something that goes viral.
Its just a way to pay people in things that aren't money. After a certain point more $$$ becomes meaningless to most people (its just a number at some point) and these types of perks give more bank for their buck in attracting workers than upping salaries.
Is there really a shortage of people wanting to work at these big companies regardless of perks tho?
Also 'base' compensation at Google was never that high when I was there. It was the RSUs that made it a very prosperous place to work. And those take a few years to vest and get you up into Really Good Money territory. So in the meantime, perks are key in retention.
But the key point is that Google is just swimming in stupid amounts of $$ from ad revenues. Not spending good $$ on employee retention and compensation would actually have deleterious effects on morale. Most jobs are just slinging protobufs around and keeping those $$ systems up and running-- but those systems are important to Google.
People saying Google is irresponsible with money probably haven't looked at the balance sheet. They can spend boatloads on compensation and still make more money than almost any other company.
I would not take those videos of representative of an actual “day in the life”. They obviously don’t include any actual working, as it would violate non disclosure agreements.
I've been seeing this comment a lot in the last year as the TikTok tech-worker influencers started making waves, and I've struggled to understand it.
There are even videos where non-monetary perks aren't shown, it's just the tech worker in their nice apartment using nice things they buy, and people still lose their minds thinking "this person doesn't work". Do you need to see an 8 hour long video of them at their desk? Their commutes, too?
I think we're still in the transition period where there's enormous groups of people who don't understand how social media works. Reminds me of that apocryphal story of the theater audience screaming in terror when they saw a train moving towards the camera.
The other was a Google girl who was part of the layoffs and she posted about going into the office and having breakfast and then going to these rooms to listen to music etc.
And so I wonder what these people’s roles actually are?!?
And/Or some people just really get off on being outraged/indignant.
awesome fact: some time in the late 2000s after years of trying, the masseuses were converted from contract to full-time, complete w/benefits and all the perks of being a real 'googler'! :)
don't know if that's still the case, but it was kinda awesome that the masseuses fought for this and won.
Afaik you can have a 30 min session every month for free. Over here it's not that unusual of a perk to have even for non-IT desk jockey jobs.
I felt it's a cheap way to keep neck issues at bay, benefiting everyone. Seems pointless to label it as something extravagant.
The article quotes the number of employees affected; does this number also include contractors? If not, would contractors have it better? Or worse?
Most body shops should be significantly cheaper than the internal FAANG wage folks and of you don't cheap out too much about as good.
Remember the average tenure at Google is like what, two years? You lose almost nothing by going with contractors for two years instead.
Cheaper, not cheap, is the keyword.
Google programmer staff is way too big to be any sort of elite. They are not a 1 in 100 programmer.
Maybe the 60 percentile or whatever at their scale.
Since the stereotypical silly good programmer skill is negatively correlated with social skills it would not surprise me at all if the median Google employee is even below median due to their recruiting process.
I.e. their recruiting is worse than dice rolls.
I wonder whether this would end up being a case study in MBA classes....
That said (and IANAL), at least the couple suits I'm familiar with in this area have to do with minority shareholders arguing some decision was made to benefit majority owners at the expense of minority shareholders. It's much, much more difficult to just argue "bad decision making" if all shareholders are affected equally.
Yes, that's precisely why those who hold controlling voting power can get away with pretty much anything.
The founders are not stupid. They are not giving away Google's source codes or company assets in proccesses that are 100% detrimental to the company's net value. Whatever consequences there will be due to some Wallstreet suits fuming at their annual investment return having 1% fewer growth YoY is going to have a very hard time building an actual case for a lawsuit. Should anything come close to materializing in a lawsuit, the legal teams will certainly relay that to Sergey and Larry so that they could respond accordingly.
Who are goofing off building blimps and flying on their private jets. They seem to have little interest in Google.
This is good if you're a founder. This massive chink in Google's armor could prove fatal. It's a tremendous opportunity that rarely presents itself.
They have a single biggest golden goose, and if it dies, they'll be in more dire straits than Intel.
Disrupt Google. They're so very vulnerable.
But the employees tasked by Google to produce a cloud-based streaming gaming service, successfully shipped a cloud-based streaming gaming service. That's good management, not bad.
Edit: ooph, I can see where this is going but people have replied so I should leave it up. FWIW: the term "management" in this context is generally interpreted strictly, and not just a shorthand for "every decision made by an executive". The complaints people have with Stadia are better termed "marketing" (building the wrong product or canceling it too soon) or "sales" (failing to get enough games on the product). "Management" (the application of corporate resources to achieve results) did their job.
And in particular, in the context of layoffs ("management" by definition) it seems like the usage above was ambiguous enough to demand a correction. Stadia being mismarketed simply isn't relevant to the employment status of massage therapists.
Engineering did their job, well. Leadership and product did not.
This has been the trend at Google during Sundar and Ruth's tenure: a company led by engineers became a company led by product management and finance.
And it shows. Google's made a crushing number of business decisions that flew in the face of good engineering principles, and undermined the company's excellence.
One is talking about market strategy and perseverance. The other is talking about technical leadership.
You could have made the same insightful (inciteful) post by just commenting on how good technical leadership was.
I was shocked the other day when a solid respectable chip designer said Alpha was a failure because DEC went out of business.
The first link I got was: https://wire19.com/amazon-microsoft-and-google-cloud-infrast... which shows AWS as 3+x GCP and Microsoft ~2x GCP.
Edit to add: it looks like Alphabet reports GSuite as part of Google Cloud as well.
Google's market cap is $1.2T and their TTM net income was ~$65B.
I agree that slowly sliding the "% of ads our customers see"-slider to the right over the last couple of years until it becomes unbearable isn't really _that_ innovative but still yields a ton of profit.
The cost of 31 massage therapists is a rounding error compared to salaries for senior engineers, of which there are tens of thousands employed.
Indeed, the general argument is that Google's ads machine is so profitable that they can run the business horribly inefficiently because they don't know where to put all that cash.
> Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long.
That is, I (and I think most others) interpreted that as Google was essentially lighting a big pile of their cash on fire due to poor management, not that they were unprofitable. That would be very different, for example, than a statement like "Most of these new car companies are burning cash at an unsustainable rate."
What happened to Google is what happens to all fat monopolists: they had the luxury of losing focus because their monopoly was so profitable. I do really feel that Google (among others) is finally seeing the type of existential risk much better AI is to Google's ad business. While I'm definitely not of the opinion that "ChatGPT is a Google killer", it's not that hard to see that a company whose velocity in this space is currently much faster that Google's could eventually overtake Google's bread-and-butter search business in 5-10 years.
So people that suggest this can only be "pampering" are perhaps missing this part of the puzzle.
2. Most (maybe all?) insurance plans will cover at least some number of medically prescribed massages. Furthermore, nearly all of the US workforce manages fairly decently without in-house massage staff.
It was a luxury perk simply because Google could afford it.
2. Ye but you have to sort that and go someplace else. Maybe you've got some crunch coming up and feel pressured to commit to the hours even if its burning, if its coming to your workplace, its way easier for it to happen.
Google's first masseuse was FTE and got to be part of the IPO, so the symbolism is rich... https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html
Showing appreciation with tokens of gratitude and respect is different from leaving a bowl of treats out, mostly because of the implied direction of the gratitude. Where if I give staff something thoughtful because I want to recognize them, gratitude is expressed toward them, whereas if I leave a bowl of treats out, their gratitutde is implied toward me. If someone said, "here are some luxury goods, enjoy them," and then said, "oh yeah, btw someone has to pay for those luxury goods you used, time to work them off," we have other words for what that is.
Imo, personal boundaries in an office environment provide dignity to people, which is an essential part of maintaining the high and elite-level performance mental health necessary to manage in professional environments. It's a kind of athleticism. Providing "treats" is (un-)subtly degrading, and as a direct result I would estimate that the level of staff well being in the dozens of companies I have consulted to was inversely proportional to the presence of snacks, alcohol, toys, beanbag chairs, and furry onesie costumes in their offices.
Sorry to hear the therapists were laid off, and they were probably the hardest working people at Google, but medium term, it sounds like it could be better for everyone involved.