Tell HN: Google-Wide Layoffs
Leads across Google are sending coordinated emails within their orgs announcing layoffs. They've all gone out in the last 2 hours or so.
They've fragmented the layoffs on purpose to make them seem more localized, but it's affecting the whole company.
Orgs that I've heard/I'm part of that have been impacted so far include Ads, Search, Assistant, Maps Android & Core.
I'm sure there are more, but I can't confirm.
I can't find WARN notices yet, so I assume they haven't been filed yet in any state.
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[ 13.2 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadFrom my understanding core developer is somebody who works on something fundamental, like build system, general monorepo structure and architecture.
I would be curious to hear insights if anyone has understanding or experience in these roles.
The coasting day care is over and Google is in code red wartime mode in a state of panic.
Sorry. The market is brutal and it does not care.
No one is safe, not even Google.
Google stock is up 56% YoY. Fifty six percent.
What do you think it should be? 2000%?
It's a huge mature company. 56% in a year is unheard of.
That's it?
Screaming about 56% in one year is hardly anything to be celebrating about.
Compared with the likes of Meta with >200% in 1 year with just buying and holding alone tells us that was a much better return than Google which is already getting disrupted as it flails about.
> What do you think it should be? 2000%?
If you're talking making 2000% in one year, go and do some 0DTE options gambling on some other stocks.
> It's a huge mature company. 56% in a year is unheard of.
That means absolutely nothing. We gave Google enough time to respond to its rising competition and all it could do was fabricate a demo in front of the world.
No wonder the layoffs happened.
MSFT is up 60% yoy. To say nothing about NVDA.
Anyway, the market rebounded. GOOG and most of the market are flat from 2 years ago.
Google Cloud alone grew 22%.
https://erp.today/storm-clouds-for-google-as-q3-misses-analy...
You’ve got to (a) zoom out and look at trend, (b) focus on profit, not revenue, and (c) look at forecast (future, not past).
Alphabet net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $66.732B, a 0.39% decline year-over-year. Their annual net income for 2022 was $59.972B, a 21.12% decline from 2021. And their annual net income for 2021 was $76.033B, a 88.81% increase from 2020.
If you believe that companies should grow, then a trend of rapidly decreasing profits is very worrisome and that you need to turn around.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...
I wish they were a little more strategic, but this time they are allowing affected team members to keep corporate access and apply internally to open roles.
not the market but the capitalists
I think for a lot of people this seems nice on paper, but in the past I've realized that you can be so bored that you actually start doing work.
They aren't yet finalized, but pretty damn close. Don't you think this probably plays into it? VPs were likely told 'put 6% of your engineers below 'meets expectations', and some VPs probably thought about it and said "actually we have a really weak division, i'd rather axe that, than taking a 6% haircut across the board.
It makes sense, if you have a few teams of rockstars, a division of 'meh', and one weak director that has hired a few weaker managers who also hires weaker engineers, why give everyone the same PiP quota?
1. This wasn't just entire divisions. I've seen massive cuts on some teams and ticky-tack cuts elsewhere.
2. This was clearly coordinated above the VP level and could not have been just individual unilateral decisions by VPs who saw specific grad numbers coming through.
3. I've seen people who were not low performers get fired in this ticky-tack manner.
4. Nobody on my team was fired, but I sure as hell wasn't told "don't worry about expected distributions of low performers since we'll just cut from elsewhere."
Second, why take the PR hit and not just crank the PiP quota or something?
0: https://www.extremetech.com/deals/307468-microsoft-azure-is-...
1: https://zipdo.co/statistics/microsoft-office/
They do already have several "train your own model"-style ChatGPT products available though.
Microsoft built a whole another company called Azure. Smartly acquired 2 other companies called LinkedIn and Github. Then invested early in the biggest phenomenon of the post covid world - Openai.
Google ended the 2000s with Ads, Search, Youtube and Android. It's 2023 and not much has changed. Facebook sustains it's growth entirely through multi-billion$ acquisitions.
In all cases, the original middle management did very little to help.
Azure is the only exception.
Office 365 + Sharepoint is a major, major business.
The number of employees that need Office 365 accounts is always going to be more than the number that need a Figma, Salesforce or chatGPT account.
All you've pointed out is Wall Street's demand for eternal growth is untenable, as if we didn't already know that.
You have?
Ad setup doesn't work, you are hitting random errors on setting up API calls, basic UX and non-functional pixel setups, some weird limits or even plain unresponsive pages.
Just few days ago, talking to their support about ficitonal ad account limit after hitting 5 ad accoutns, they responded to me randomly with system messages in vietnamese - my acc has never had association with vietnamese.
I mean this seriously:
Who are you (not name, but in terms of your significance in the community), and why does it matter what you've been saying for a while now?
And yet Sundar is happy to destroy morale by keeping to fire people.
after saying "Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, Says Laying Off 12,000 Workers Was the Worst Moment in the Company's 25-Year History"
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/googles-ceo-sundar-pichai-say...
That's not what the stock ticker says. That's what the CEO's job is at megacorps, not "product innovation". Google has one core product, Ads.
Everything else loses money.
(Our job postings are all published on the usual job database sites under the usual sysadmin/opseng titles, and I don’t have any sort of special intake process to offer beyond that.)
I lost my job when my company closed a few years ago in the middle of the pandemic and I am very appreciative of those who reached out. That limbo of uncertainty even if I could survive for years with what I had didn’t feel nice.
the reason it's shit for tech is the greed of wall street. they want more short term gains
Even this is overstating it. It's shit for some segments of the tech sector, but in other segments it's going gangbusters. On the whole, it doesn't seem unusually good or bad.
> Google: the tax change was minimal, because Google was voluntarily amortizing software development expenses for most staff, already. This was for all projects that reached “technological feasibility,” which is a milestone products pass before public release.
Source: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
Of course, knowing how to code and being good at creating software are two different things. Just like knowing how to write and being able to succeed as a novelist are two different things.
But that is also why the "best of the field" get laid off - why pay FAANG salaries to get the best, when entry/mid-level salaries to get "good enough" still meets business needs?
Of course, normal users use the terminal as much now as they do, then, but mostly because "they don't ever have to"[0], but yet they're able to accomplish things that might have been relegated to the category of "computer programming" just a decade ago.
Programming software is just another way of using a computer in a more advanced manner than mere mortals. Programming gets simpler, more enter the field, junior developers become more powerful and the difference between the expert and the novice increases or decreases depending on which direction you look at it from.
In 1986, my Dad, a non-programmer, and a "power user" but not expert in PCs, used Lotus 1-2-3 to design an invoicing and accounting tool that had a UI, forms, printed formatted output and tracked everything in a database-like manner in a file. I called him a non-programmer, but was he?
[0] When your PC boots into a `C>`, you better know what to type to get it to do something other than that.
Why ? I’d say parental (real, no phone) presence in the kids life / education.
I have an BS in Mechanical Engineering from Berkeley, and I've had women from no name schools with a masters in marketing try to talk down my education.
I don’t really buy that the next generation is going to be more computer literate, I’ve been hearing that meme for a long time now and I just don’t see it.
Yep, I tried to persuade my "zoomer" sister to learn how to program, but she declined. :( She is simply not interested.
Maybe a better chant for town hall meetings would be "We're number 2! We're number 2!"...
meanwhile gen z have no concept of file browsers or the command line, they've only ever dealt in apps.
They were hired as a product manager by Google, based on their years of being a scrum master or whatever at a few other bay companies.
It's good if this way of thinking dies. It does a disservice to those taking the course, and it does a disservice to the industry.
Hasn't this group of people always comprised like 90% of the Everyone Can Code group?
Nature is healing itself. The boom cycle is over. Correction is in the process.
Not surprised