> Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.
What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.
As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.
The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.
It’s fine to say the best engineers want to work on the most interesting problems, and that’s totally valid, but truthfully Google and other big tech companies need an army of highly skilled engineers to turn the red button blue. A simple fact is that maintaining the behemoth requires lots of skill and relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale to the army that Google would need to employ (even if it reduced its current headcount).
The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems for a pay that is high enough to cover quality of life.
If your company shows a slowdown in growth--not loss: less growth--the idea that you're suffering from macroeconomic effects and need to cut spending makes very little sense. You're still making a profit quarter after quarter, where's the financial hardship?
(You might go "what about that 4 billion dollar fine from the EU??" To which the response is "did you look at their earnings report? Google made just shy of 20 billion in operating income last quarter alone, on a 30+% profit margin. $4b is literally still a trivial amount as a fine, constituting less than a month's worth of earnings)
I wonder whether the mention of swag in the reporting was a red herring.
I would've liked to see the full question, and all the other questions, and whatever could be learned from their absolute and relative votings.
Questions on my mind:
1. How many people are concerned about loss of swag, and if so, why? (Is it because they want the swag, or see it as a canary, or because they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?)
2. If some people are concerned about travel, is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
3. How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
4. Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to? (For example, were some people already feeling like they were overextending themselves, or stressed over pursuing a promotion, and now they're wondering whether changes will make make that situation harder?)
(I'd like to understand how different organizations are feeling, and how that changes with circumstances, and the news article's mention of swag might be confusing things. And also, I've always had a soft spot for Google, and I want it to be its best self.)
It isn't like the trade is that we get to work on interesting problems because the travel budget is slashed. Because of headcount clawbacks and concerns about backfill what I'm seeing is teams becoming more conservative and focused on keeping core customers happy rather than focusing on exciting new problems.
>For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
It is funny how people always consider their own politics as neutral. This is an inherently political statement as it sets up "advancing politics" as opposition to "meaningful work".
For some people the "meaningful work" they "just want to do" is to make the world a better place and that often isn't possible without "advancing politics". Maybe the "interesting product space" is to get one of the world's largest companies to reduce carbon emissions. People like that might view building adtech as the chore they endure for the opportunity to do "meaningful work" of fighting climate change.
I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM. They're a huge company that consistently has neat ideas that they cripple with mismanagement and are slowly looking to squeeze what they have harder and harder with time to keep up profit growth.
As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.
YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.
Google search barely works anymore.
Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.
Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.
Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure
In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.
You clearly don't remember television. A 30 minute TV slot had ~7 minutes of unskippable ads, and that's not including the product placement inside the shows. YouTube will have more like 1-2 minutes of skippable ads for a 20-30 minute show, plus an ad inside the show you can fast forward past.
I agree Google search barely works anymore though. I've currently switched to yandex which is still broken in other ways, and I've had bad luck with brave search and DDG results.
Most episodes of "hour-long" shows from ten to twenty years ago are 42 minutes long. That's because US television had standardized on 18 minutes of ads per hour. I don't think YouTube is quite there yet.
This seems a bit exaggerated. Can you provide some examples? Also for the problem you are encountering, what alternative do you use? I have no issues with Google search that I can think of.
> Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.
I can't speak for their phones, but the Android OS has been rock solid for me for years. I loathe the Apple experience - on both iPhone and Macbook Pro - so this idea that they can't compete with Apple is not something I can agree with. I'm not even sure if it's a fair comparison as they have different goals aside from the mobile experience.
>I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM. They're a huge company that consistently has neat ideas that they cripple with mismanagement and are slowly looking to squeeze what they have harder and harder with time to keep up profit growth.
Because they still pay at top tier levels so the hustle cult kiddies are still obsessed with it.
> Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.
There are things that can be improved in Android software, and some of those upstream problems, plus vendor add-ons, can cause phones to be buggy. But there are three billion active Android devices in use - buggy or not, it is in significant use.
It's also nice being able to compile AOSP (or in my case LineageOS), and sideload it onto my Motorola Edge 5G and be able to futz around with it.
> I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM.
Because they aren't?
> As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.
This will happen whether or not employees love them. Every company gets replaced. Very few have staying power. Id be shocked if <insert your favorite tech company> isn't replaced.
> Google search barely works anymore.
Oh? I've been able to find everything I'm looking for, and the new QA cards, leaving aside the ethical argument, actually saves me so much time. Not sure which google you're using.
> YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.
Hmm, on your version of youtube are you able to skip parts of the video you find boring? On your TV does watching certain videos serve up more videos in the same vein? If not, then they are nothing alike.
> Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.
Maybe tensorflow doesn't mean much to you, but I bet others would be thankful for its release. Besides they have no obligation to release any new AI development to the public. This is just your personal expectation of them.
> Their phones have all been pretty buggy.
Every phone is buggy compared to Apple, but their own phones are significantly less buggy than 3rd party android phones. Have you used an Oppo or Xiaomi phone?
> Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure
Not sure this is relavant. This probably highlights more of the other two's strength's rather than GCP's weakness. Personally for new projects I use GCP over AWS for various reasons.
> In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.
I remember when my old company cut the "swag" to the tune of about $100,000 a year. The CFO was proud of himself but the work environment wasn't great before that, which lead to a few key people leaving. They had stayed not for swag but the social parts of the job were keeping people happy. A few more followed them. It wasn't long before half of the tech team had gone.
At the time we were spending about 40k for recruiter fees to replace each engineer. During my exit interview I asked the CFO if he thought that math worked out. He had some regrets.
Seriously, Googlers are the softest, whiniest people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. We are coddled and spoiled and at the first hint of not being spoiled, people are falling apart and crumbling.
One person had the nerve to say Google was “hurting” employees by taking away the travel and entertainment expenses. Hurting? I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.
Another characterized Google as “aggressively cost cutting.” Holy fuck. All they did was freeze hiring and stop unnecessary T&E. If they think this is aggressive cost cutting, their mind will be blown if a recession hits is hard.
I wish Google would go through the Meta route and lay off 15%. I’ve never worked with a lazier, more spoiled group of people in my life.
A long time ago at Google ,,fun'' was equal to user and customer obsession (looking at logs and other data and trying to understand how to make the products better).
Sundar is an amazing sales person and PM, but Google went too much on the PM/Sales side and puts too much pressure and impossible amount of work on engineers (I started my last quarter by knowing that I won't be able to finish most of the OKRs that were put on by other people from other teams to me, I signaled to my TL, but I didn't care at that point as I was planning to quit anyways).
The pressure is so high that the best engineers and engineering managers there that I know are moving to research where they are left alone to do great and fun stuff.
I worked at Google as an SRE. I'm at Meta now. I always disliked all the swag (goes straight into the trash) and parties and travel. But I'm a suburban mom so I don't need more junk and I like to be home with my family. Remote work is all the perks I'll ever want or need. Maybe tech companies should hire more suburban moms. We can be placated with boxes of wine and zoom yoga classes lmaooo.
imo the problem with big tech executives who rose through the ranks in the growth phase of the company is that after the exponential growth in the employee count they expect the individual performance to be the same as their time in the company without changing anything in the leadership style.
being scrappy might work when you have <1000 employees since the chaos might be manageable but when you have 100000 people working in the company scattered around the world, the leadership must also adapt otherwise you get bloated companies that are ran like a headless chicken.
Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors for having fun instead of working and slacking off but it's so hard for them to hold themselves accountable for the situation of their companies. They get their bonuses when the company is performing well but when times are tough it's because of a regular employee slacking off. ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
> ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
This is the lifecycle of all corporations.
Before Google and Facebook we had Yahoo and Myspace. Now TikTok is doing the same thing and Sundar and Zuckerberg are crying about it.
They shot themselves in the foot de-platforming and censor content creators. Those creators were welcomed with open arms by Google and Facebook competitors. I see more and more creators pushing their YouTube and Instagram audiences over to Rumble or TikTok. Clearly it's starting to be a real problem for the bottom line.
Before you say TikTok does the same, that's true, but it's not the point. Creators don't like having to walk on eggshells if they can avoid it.
Money for me, but not for thee. During times of record profits and huge cash reserves, difficult choices must be made. If you are not passionate about making stakeholders and leadership more money while they decrease spending on you, then you need to rethink your priorities!
This morning I saw a Google Cloud executive post on their LinkedIn page that they had an offsite where they made custom Nike shoes that looked like Noogler hats.
he's been CEO for the last 7 years, any drastic culture change is on him.
Funny to watch these CEOs try to shift blame for their failures recently. All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason and now are crying about "deadweight" employees. Perhaps the people who approved the hiring plans are who should be blamed?
Tech workers became too cocky and this is basically a message from the ones in charge, the billionaire class to say “know your place”.
Your money and privilege can be taken from you at any moment.
This is not about economy or things slowing down. It is about showing the tech workers they are just cogs in the machine, the laborers that should focus on work and not talk back to their employers.
Lodging in city centers has become outrageously expensive and I talked to several people at Meta recently who were struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets. If I had to stress out about affording a room during a mandatory work trip, I'd be pissed too. If you can't afford to put your staff up at a decent hotel near your office, don't make them travel.
I had to travel for work from London to Ottawa. They put me up in a suite hotel; there was a kitchenette, a huge TV, another huge TV in the bedroom, a second double bedroom, and a bathroom with twin washbasins.
The next day I discovered a utility room with a washer and dryer; and a second bathroom, also with twin washstands. The only problem was that the hotel had no bar; to get booze, I had to go to the hotel next door.
I later learned that there was a major international conference going on in Ottawa at that time, and all the hotel rooms had been taken by politicians and diplomats. They weren't doing me a favour; they were just ensuring as best they could that I didn't jump on the next flight back to London.
> struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets
Don't they have a travel department to worry about booking accommodations? I can confirm hotels in some cities (downtown Boston, for example), are crazy pricy these days. It seems like you can't even find a bad hotel under $450 depending on what is happening that week or weekend.
> Google launched an effort in July called “Simplicity Sprint,” which aimed to solicit ideas from its more than 174,000 employees on how to “get to better results faster” and “eliminate waste.” Earlier this month, Pichai said he hoped to make the company 20% more productive while slowing hiring and investments.
> One of the top-rated questions posed by employees at this week’s meeting asked Pichai to elaborate on his commentary regarding improved productivity and the 20% goal.
> “I think you could be a 20-person team or a 100-person team, we are going to be constrained in our growth in a looking-ahead basis,” Pichai said. “Maybe you were planning on hiring six more people but maybe you are going to have to do with four and how are you going to make that happen? The answers are going to be different with different teams.”
Lol, this reads like Google just got bought by a private-equity firm. Just desperately trying to cut costs any way they can, with little regard to how that will play into the core business
I'm obviously biased here, but imo an engineering organization succeeds by hiring smart engineers, making them happy, giving them agency, and giving them just enough structure so that they're working towards useful goals instead of spinning their wheels. This is what made Google so successful in the earlier days.
The more you constrain with management and process, the more you slash-and-burn costs, the more you kill that energy:
> Pichai admitted that it’s not just the economy that’s caused challenges at Google but also an expanding bureaucracy at Google.
Sounds like Google's on the downhill. Subjectively feels like it started around the time Pichai became CEO- though correlation isn't causation.
> Google has record profits and huge cash reserves
It's clear this is being driven by short-term shareholder demands instead of actual operational desperation. Sad to see Google get strangled like this (though maybe also not sad, given what they've morphed into over the years).
It's embarrassing when a company puts out a giant suggestion box to figure out how to be efficient. It means the company has no clue how it operates. You shouldn't have to ask random employees what the problems are. You should already know, because identifying and eliminating inefficiency (in order to improve quality) should be part of your standard practice. Putting out a giant suggestion box is the laziest and least useful way imaginable. You have no idea which 'suggestion' is a bigger problem, you have no metrics, no context. It's just 7,000 people complaining about 7,000 random things.
Don't get me wrong - the low-level people always know what is wrong and know how to fix it. But nobody in upper management gives a shit. Which is why your company is inefficient. Soliciting advice from random ICs now will result in the same dont-give-a-shit syndrome by management. And management continues to do whatever bullshit helps themselves rather than the company or ICs.
Sometimes, a suggestions box is a hunt for a scape goat. Do you plan to make an unpopular change but don't want any of the blame? Gather a bunch of suggestions, then choose one close to your original plan. Now nobody can say your choices show your disconnect from regular employees.
A company that releases three messaging apps during their yearly conference and leaves city roads in ruins because they are no longer interested in one of their projects, is not “well run”.
Never really thought about it until you laid it out, and yeah it is troubling.
At my company there have been meetings on how to be “innovative.” The suggestions are straight out of Dilbert. Someone said we needed more meetings and everyone agreed. Another said that everything we do is innovative and everyone agreed.
I have no idea how a modern corporation is suppose to work I guess. Maybe the dream is be innovative me become large then watch the next few generations of leadership slowly tear the company down into irrelevancy.
I forgot where I read this but there’s an idea of a “manager” class that refuses to innovative or change anything because rocking the boat potentially means losing out on bonuses or stocks or promotions, so you do everything in your power to maintain the status quo until you go to the next gig basically playing a game of hot potato until you retire. The “manager” class has taken over the corporate world for decades.
Last year I signed up for YouTube premium, but cancelled it after a few months.
Then, a few months later, I noticed that Google was still billing me -- so I put in a complaint and explained the problem and pointed out the receipts I had... and they just rejected my complaint after "careful review" (lol) and didn't reimburse my money.
It was only about $75, but I remember thinking to myself that Google is obviously going to &%^.
I felt like I had no recourse and Google had just stolen $75 from me and then told me to #$%^ off.
I realized this year that the big tech companies are no longer the scrappy startups I grew up with. They're the IBM and Sears of today. Their days are numbered.
Similar thing happened to me with Stadia, signed up for free month, cancelled, noticed they billed me 2 months. Pointed it out to them, they said they wouldn't reimburse me. They'll never get a cent from me again.
As a sibling commented: "WE STOLE YOUR MONEY, NOW FUCK OFF."
> “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” he said. “Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”
Google is not small.
Is too regulated to be scrappy.
And is NOT a startup
It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.
There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations.
This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.
It's so funny to me hearing Sundar Pichai of all people advocating for scrappiness considering he is probably the most overpaid CEO in the world [1]. Now also consider that Google's profits have never been higher [2]. The amount of net income per employee is eye-watering.
This is end-stage capitalism and the relentless search for profit growth that ultimately squeezes the workers who make that profit possible.
Years ago when I still worked at Google Patrick Pichette (then CFO before Ruth Porat) got up on stage at an annual meeting and announced that their scrappiness efforts had saved $40 million and that's a lot of money. Someone produced a meme saying "yes, that's the difference between your pay rise and mine". He did in fact get a pay rise that year of $40 million.
The employees are right. Even when I was still there there were clearly cuts in the food, cuts in the MKs, cuts in swag, cuts in entertainment budgets and so on.
Google works on interesting things? I guess to PhDs into ML.
They scrapped cutting edge R&D and became a one-trick ad-pushing pony. When the companies trajectory has been away from interesting ideas into ad laden messes and Gmail UX refreshes, the perks are all people show up for. I could work on shoving 10 ads in a YT video? Sign me up!
I question whether Sundar is a good CEO. Google succeeded given the broader economic shift to tech, not his leadership. Pedaling nostalgia for a time when growth was easy suggests to me he has no idea how to iterate forward in interesting ways.
[+] [-] bko|3 years ago|reply
What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.
As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.
The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.
[+] [-] orange_joe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|3 years ago|reply
If your company shows a slowdown in growth--not loss: less growth--the idea that you're suffering from macroeconomic effects and need to cut spending makes very little sense. You're still making a profit quarter after quarter, where's the financial hardship?
(You might go "what about that 4 billion dollar fine from the EU??" To which the response is "did you look at their earnings report? Google made just shy of 20 billion in operating income last quarter alone, on a 30+% profit margin. $4b is literally still a trivial amount as a fine, constituting less than a month's worth of earnings)
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
I would've liked to see the full question, and all the other questions, and whatever could be learned from their absolute and relative votings.
Questions on my mind:
1. How many people are concerned about loss of swag, and if so, why? (Is it because they want the swag, or see it as a canary, or because they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?)
2. If some people are concerned about travel, is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
3. How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
4. Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to? (For example, were some people already feeling like they were overextending themselves, or stressed over pursuing a promotion, and now they're wondering whether changes will make make that situation harder?)
(I'd like to understand how different organizations are feeling, and how that changes with circumstances, and the news article's mention of swag might be confusing things. And also, I've always had a soft spot for Google, and I want it to be its best self.)
[+] [-] jollyllama|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleMeat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djbusby|3 years ago|reply
Those choices are easier when you have a nice cushion.
[+] [-] slg|3 years ago|reply
It is funny how people always consider their own politics as neutral. This is an inherently political statement as it sets up "advancing politics" as opposition to "meaningful work".
For some people the "meaningful work" they "just want to do" is to make the world a better place and that often isn't possible without "advancing politics". Maybe the "interesting product space" is to get one of the world's largest companies to reduce carbon emissions. People like that might view building adtech as the chore they endure for the opportunity to do "meaningful work" of fighting climate change.
[+] [-] discordance|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bioemerl|3 years ago|reply
As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.
YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.
Google search barely works anymore.
Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.
Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.
Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure
In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.
[+] [-] guywithahat|3 years ago|reply
I agree Google search barely works anymore though. I've currently switched to yandex which is still broken in other ways, and I've had bad luck with brave search and DDG results.
[+] [-] pwinnski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y-c-o-m-b|3 years ago|reply
This seems a bit exaggerated. Can you provide some examples? Also for the problem you are encountering, what alternative do you use? I have no issues with Google search that I can think of.
> Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.
I can't speak for their phones, but the Android OS has been rock solid for me for years. I loathe the Apple experience - on both iPhone and Macbook Pro - so this idea that they can't compete with Apple is not something I can agree with. I'm not even sure if it's a fair comparison as they have different goals aside from the mobile experience.
I agree with everything else you said though.
[+] [-] adamsmith143|3 years ago|reply
Because they still pay at top tier levels so the hustle cult kiddies are still obsessed with it.
[+] [-] Ologn|3 years ago|reply
There are things that can be improved in Android software, and some of those upstream problems, plus vendor add-ons, can cause phones to be buggy. But there are three billion active Android devices in use - buggy or not, it is in significant use.
It's also nice being able to compile AOSP (or in my case LineageOS), and sideload it onto my Motorola Edge 5G and be able to futz around with it.
[+] [-] intev|3 years ago|reply
Because they aren't?
> As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.
This will happen whether or not employees love them. Every company gets replaced. Very few have staying power. Id be shocked if <insert your favorite tech company> isn't replaced.
> Google search barely works anymore.
Oh? I've been able to find everything I'm looking for, and the new QA cards, leaving aside the ethical argument, actually saves me so much time. Not sure which google you're using.
> YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.
Hmm, on your version of youtube are you able to skip parts of the video you find boring? On your TV does watching certain videos serve up more videos in the same vein? If not, then they are nothing alike.
> Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.
Maybe tensorflow doesn't mean much to you, but I bet others would be thankful for its release. Besides they have no obligation to release any new AI development to the public. This is just your personal expectation of them.
> Their phones have all been pretty buggy.
Every phone is buggy compared to Apple, but their own phones are significantly less buggy than 3rd party android phones. Have you used an Oppo or Xiaomi phone?
> Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure
Not sure this is relavant. This probably highlights more of the other two's strength's rather than GCP's weakness. Personally for new projects I use GCP over AWS for various reasons.
> In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.
All companies die.
[+] [-] mrj|3 years ago|reply
At the time we were spending about 40k for recruiter fees to replace each engineer. During my exit interview I asked the CFO if he thought that math worked out. He had some regrets.
[+] [-] noogler2022|3 years ago|reply
Seriously, Googlers are the softest, whiniest people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. We are coddled and spoiled and at the first hint of not being spoiled, people are falling apart and crumbling.
One person had the nerve to say Google was “hurting” employees by taking away the travel and entertainment expenses. Hurting? I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.
Another characterized Google as “aggressively cost cutting.” Holy fuck. All they did was freeze hiring and stop unnecessary T&E. If they think this is aggressive cost cutting, their mind will be blown if a recession hits is hard.
I wish Google would go through the Meta route and lay off 15%. I’ve never worked with a lazier, more spoiled group of people in my life.
[+] [-] xiphias2|3 years ago|reply
Sundar is an amazing sales person and PM, but Google went too much on the PM/Sales side and puts too much pressure and impossible amount of work on engineers (I started my last quarter by knowing that I won't be able to finish most of the OKRs that were put on by other people from other teams to me, I signaled to my TL, but I didn't care at that point as I was planning to quit anyways).
The pressure is so high that the best engineers and engineering managers there that I know are moving to research where they are left alone to do great and fun stuff.
[+] [-] theprincess|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dontreact|3 years ago|reply
To me it felt like a CEO explaining difficult choices and the reasoning behind them.
[+] [-] kesri|3 years ago|reply
being scrappy might work when you have <1000 employees since the chaos might be manageable but when you have 100000 people working in the company scattered around the world, the leadership must also adapt otherwise you get bloated companies that are ran like a headless chicken.
Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors for having fun instead of working and slacking off but it's so hard for them to hold themselves accountable for the situation of their companies. They get their bonuses when the company is performing well but when times are tough it's because of a regular employee slacking off. ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
[+] [-] infamouscow|3 years ago|reply
This is the lifecycle of all corporations.
Before Google and Facebook we had Yahoo and Myspace. Now TikTok is doing the same thing and Sundar and Zuckerberg are crying about it.
They shot themselves in the foot de-platforming and censor content creators. Those creators were welcomed with open arms by Google and Facebook competitors. I see more and more creators pushing their YouTube and Instagram audiences over to Rumble or TikTok. Clearly it's starting to be a real problem for the bottom line.
Before you say TikTok does the same, that's true, but it's not the point. Creators don't like having to walk on eggshells if they can avoid it.
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
That will do much good to their hiring process...
[+] [-] awestroke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
Um, maybe you should start your cuts there.
[+] [-] ren_engineer|3 years ago|reply
Funny to watch these CEOs try to shift blame for their failures recently. All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason and now are crying about "deadweight" employees. Perhaps the people who approved the hiring plans are who should be blamed?
[+] [-] mathverse|3 years ago|reply
Your money and privilege can be taken from you at any moment.
This is not about economy or things slowing down. It is about showing the tech workers they are just cogs in the machine, the laborers that should focus on work and not talk back to their employers.
[+] [-] standardUser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traveler01|3 years ago|reply
I guess they want workers to be presential but don't want to pay them enough for the expenses huh.
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
The next day I discovered a utility room with a washer and dryer; and a second bathroom, also with twin washstands. The only problem was that the hotel had no bar; to get booze, I had to go to the hotel next door.
I later learned that there was a major international conference going on in Ottawa at that time, and all the hotel rooms had been taken by politicians and diplomats. They weren't doing me a favour; they were just ensuring as best they could that I didn't jump on the next flight back to London.
[+] [-] francisofascii|3 years ago|reply
Don't they have a travel department to worry about booking accommodations? I can confirm hotels in some cities (downtown Boston, for example), are crazy pricy these days. It seems like you can't even find a bad hotel under $450 depending on what is happening that week or weekend.
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
> One of the top-rated questions posed by employees at this week’s meeting asked Pichai to elaborate on his commentary regarding improved productivity and the 20% goal.
> “I think you could be a 20-person team or a 100-person team, we are going to be constrained in our growth in a looking-ahead basis,” Pichai said. “Maybe you were planning on hiring six more people but maybe you are going to have to do with four and how are you going to make that happen? The answers are going to be different with different teams.”
Lol, this reads like Google just got bought by a private-equity firm. Just desperately trying to cut costs any way they can, with little regard to how that will play into the core business
I'm obviously biased here, but imo an engineering organization succeeds by hiring smart engineers, making them happy, giving them agency, and giving them just enough structure so that they're working towards useful goals instead of spinning their wheels. This is what made Google so successful in the earlier days.
The more you constrain with management and process, the more you slash-and-burn costs, the more you kill that energy:
> Pichai admitted that it’s not just the economy that’s caused challenges at Google but also an expanding bureaucracy at Google.
Sounds like Google's on the downhill. Subjectively feels like it started around the time Pichai became CEO- though correlation isn't causation.
> Google has record profits and huge cash reserves
It's clear this is being driven by short-term shareholder demands instead of actual operational desperation. Sad to see Google get strangled like this (though maybe also not sad, given what they've morphed into over the years).
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|3 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong - the low-level people always know what is wrong and know how to fix it. But nobody in upper management gives a shit. Which is why your company is inefficient. Soliciting advice from random ICs now will result in the same dont-give-a-shit syndrome by management. And management continues to do whatever bullshit helps themselves rather than the company or ICs.
[+] [-] bushbaba|3 years ago|reply
Well run is Amazon or Apple. Not perfect but the best run large companies out their today
[+] [-] vharuck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
[+] [-] azemetre|3 years ago|reply
At my company there have been meetings on how to be “innovative.” The suggestions are straight out of Dilbert. Someone said we needed more meetings and everyone agreed. Another said that everything we do is innovative and everyone agreed.
I have no idea how a modern corporation is suppose to work I guess. Maybe the dream is be innovative me become large then watch the next few generations of leadership slowly tear the company down into irrelevancy.
I forgot where I read this but there’s an idea of a “manager” class that refuses to innovative or change anything because rocking the boat potentially means losing out on bonuses or stocks or promotions, so you do everything in your power to maintain the status quo until you go to the next gig basically playing a game of hot potato until you retire. The “manager” class has taken over the corporate world for decades.
I think this was Econ talk but I’m unsure.
[+] [-] jononomo|3 years ago|reply
Then, a few months later, I noticed that Google was still billing me -- so I put in a complaint and explained the problem and pointed out the receipts I had... and they just rejected my complaint after "careful review" (lol) and didn't reimburse my money.
It was only about $75, but I remember thinking to myself that Google is obviously going to &%^.
I felt like I had no recourse and Google had just stolen $75 from me and then told me to #$%^ off.
[+] [-] arcbyte|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdog12|3 years ago|reply
As a sibling commented: "WE STOLE YOUR MONEY, NOW FUCK OFF."
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takanori|3 years ago|reply
Google is not small. Is too regulated to be scrappy. And is NOT a startup
It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations.
This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.
[+] [-] cletus|3 years ago|reply
This is end-stage capitalism and the relentless search for profit growth that ultimately squeezes the workers who make that profit possible.
Years ago when I still worked at Google Patrick Pichette (then CFO before Ruth Porat) got up on stage at an annual meeting and announced that their scrappiness efforts had saved $40 million and that's a lot of money. Someone produced a meme saying "yes, that's the difference between your pay rise and mine". He did in fact get a pay rise that year of $40 million.
The employees are right. Even when I was still there there were clearly cuts in the food, cuts in the MKs, cuts in swag, cuts in entertainment budgets and so on.
[1]: https://qz.com/1979291/alphabets-sundar-pichai-is-the-most-o...
[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...
[+] [-] behaveEc0n00|3 years ago|reply
They scrapped cutting edge R&D and became a one-trick ad-pushing pony. When the companies trajectory has been away from interesting ideas into ad laden messes and Gmail UX refreshes, the perks are all people show up for. I could work on shoving 10 ads in a YT video? Sign me up!
I question whether Sundar is a good CEO. Google succeeded given the broader economic shift to tech, not his leadership. Pedaling nostalgia for a time when growth was easy suggests to me he has no idea how to iterate forward in interesting ways.
[+] [-] pickovven|3 years ago|reply
I don't even disagree, it's just hilarious coming from a CEO of one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world.