Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
The latest cuts come as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.
Repulsive.
So they ditch the people who helped make them successful? What kind of ass-backwards strategy is this?
“Juice the next 3 months.”
Thats it. Thats the whole strategy each exec uses until they leave.
How can I get one of these jobs? Important detail I’m not rich.
Seems like a low skill job.
There’s a recent podcast talking about this if you’re interested - https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
TLDR; they fired the guy largely responsible for building google search and replaced him with the guy running google ads.
Yup, and that’s why monopolies are bad. Once you get a dominant position, the way to increase profits is by abusing your market position. And publicly traded companies need to increase profits because that’s what shareholders expect.
In this case, reducing the quality of search means people need to search more often, which means they see more ads. As a double-whammy, if you improve the relevance of the ad results while reducing the relevance of the regular results, you get more click-through on the ads. So Google has little incentive, while it has a dominant position, of having a good search product. They’ll only care again if that dominance gets threatened.
Yes. They have let go people that worked there for over 15 years.
I believe what Mark Zuckerberg said about the tech layoffs, streamlining by getting rid of more management roles.
Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
They’ll say the work is not needed. That’s because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
They’ll say the work is not needed.
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, but then there’s not real point in debating the role of the union in that completely different context.
There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
Sure, it can, because I’m going to blow your mind: businesses aren’t about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company’s best long term asset–they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs–yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it’s still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn’t going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn’t really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it’s not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla’s ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn’t look like it’s going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn’t make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
Wealth (whether it be “money”, resources, or anything else) and power are one and the same. Two sides of the same coin. Either one provides access to the other. I don’t think of them as separate or distinct at all… which is why it’s problematic for the aristocratic hoarders when plebes start to pool either and work collectively.
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it’s not really that bad. It’s not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it’s way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.
Ask a professional plumber which they find more taxing: being bent into awkward spaces on their hands and knees all day, or sitting at a desk thinking hard about a problem someone has likely already solved.
But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do
Borg Voice
"We Are Pipes. "
“Our Voice Is The Expression Of The Pipe.”
“The First Technology was The Pipe.”
“The Last Technology will be The Pipe.”
“Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Computer Pipes.”
“Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Shit Pipes”
“We Are One”
“We Are The Pipe.”
I’m an infrastructure engineer working at a government contractor and I’m in a union with OPEIU 1010, the tech workers’ local. Others are unionizing independently, with CWA, etc… It’s still early days for the tech industry but there are examples. We’re really not that different from other industries with a larger union presence.
Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it’s hard to envision what I could actually do.
I’m very pro-union btw, it just seems like there are certain things that can sometimes make it more difficult to make happen
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as outsourcing.
Not even outsourcing, they are internal hires, just elsewhere.
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as *outsourcing
*Class Warfare
FTFY
Outsourcing is the problem and you are called racist or xenophobic if you even mention it. Unions have nothing to do with it, they would only exasperate the speed of the transfer of knowledge and jobs to lesser developed countries with lower cost labor.
The government needs to break up these oligopolies who have more money than the government itself. That money is spent on people who have no idea what is going on in the tech world, they just listen to the lobbyists, accept their checks and investment returns. They couldn’t care less about the long term effects.
You know, firing C level employees creates a lottttttttta cap space for actual employees!
OMG what if Google moves to India/Mexico permanently and is subject to the TikTok ban.
Oh, I can dream. Haha!
This always comes down to the fact that labor is competitive. Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year? Competition drives the prices of labor down. Maybe there needs to be better regulation for labor competition like corporations enjoy.
Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year?
Assuming the same job’s quality, a possible answer is “because to live where your company is you need to be paid $200K/year”
“because to live where your company is you need to be paid $200K/year”
How do people live in these areas without making $200k/year?
They cannot, that is the reason you need to pay that much to work for you.
What I don’t understand is why does competition matter for workers but somehow not for CEOs? I kind of understand and agree in the free market to an extent - if you’re fine with hiring a dev for $100 instead of another dev for $1000, and you’re okay with the difference in quality / time / etc. then go for it. But where is all this competition happening for CEOs?
Surely someone must be as qualified as Bitchai and willing to do the same job for a measly 100 million a year instead of his 200 million.
Ceo pay is advertised and used against each other to get top dollar. Lowers like us have out pay hidden so companies can low ball without us knowing. That’s what needs to change. It should be law to be advertised pay rate so the lowballers get exposed and no one applies, forcing pay to go up.
but somehow not for CEOs?
Workers do the actual work. CEOs just make decisions that anyone can make and they have a board of people usually backing them up.
What I’m perplexed at is - what if I went to the board and said “I have a guaranteed way to increase profit by 150 million - just pay me 50 million a year and fire Bitchai”. I would legit do my best to make great decisions for 50 million.
Why doesn’t the board care about cutting costs by cutting CEO pay? I can’t imagine any difference that would really justify Bitchai 's pay difference.
I also cannot imagine they are all part of some secret conspiracy where they all know each other and like each other so much that they just want to pay him that money because they’re buddies.
Wouldn’t $150 million be more than enough justification to hire someone else?
CEOs just make decisions that anyone can make
LMK when your company hits a billion dollars in revenue and we’ll see how easy the job is.
