News Google CEO 'Takes Full Responsibility" Lays Off 12,000 Employees

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bit_user

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Maybe it's time to start "Privatizing" all the "Big Tech" companies so they don't have to be "Beholdened" to dumb Wall-Street expectations of endless growth and be realistic with what is possible with each company.
If we think investors are doing more harm than good, a much better solution is to adjust corporate governance rules and capital gains taxes.

I think public ownership of corporations is actually a good idea. It allows a much broader swath of society to participate in the capitalist system, rather than just a small number of elites. It also provides much greater visibility into their books and operations. A private company is basically a black box.
 

Kamen Rider Blade

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If we think investors are doing more harm than good, a much better solution is to adjust corporate governance rules and capital gains taxes.

I think public ownership of corporations is actually a good idea. It allows a much broader swath of society to participate in the capitalist system, rather than just a small number of elites. It also provides much greater visibility into their books and operations. A private company is basically a black box.
But given that most people treat "Stock Trading" like "Betting on Horse Racing", it's not helping.
The valuation of the stock is largely over blown in many cases and people shouldn't be allowed to trade on "Shorts".
 

bit_user

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But given that most people treat "Stock Trading" like "Betting on Horse Racing", it's not helping.
As I was alluding, that can be addressed through tax policy. If you disincentivize short-term trades, then investors will be forced to think more in the medium & longer-term.

The valuation of the stock is largely over blown in many cases and people shouldn't be allowed to trade on "Shorts".
I think advocates of short-selling would actually say it helps keep prices in check (or "keep markets honest", as they like to say). As for the downsides of shorts, I think there have been various proposals to prohibit naked shorting, which seem to make sense.

I'm not an expert in this area, nor is it very relevant to the story at hand (or, if it is, maybe you should state your case as to why). So, that's all I have to say about shorting.
 
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korekan

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Okay, right now I type "i7-12900K" and my very first hit is the ark.intel.com entry for it. And it's not a sponsored link, either. Tried a private window - same thing. And this isn't usual. When I google a CPU model number, I don't remember a time the ark.intel.com link wasn't the first hit.

Your experience might have more to do with your browser, ad blocker, other browsing behavior, local laws & regulations, etc.
yup. probably the profile from my country still abused
i tried it again the first one is ark.intel now. but after that all is shop shop shop shop
 

JamesJones44

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How do you know that's the beginning and not the peak? People can only hold off replacing their cell phones for so long... I'm already on the second battery in my 4-year-old phone, and its life is starting to shorten.

Phones have become increasingly incremental these days. A Pixel 3 or iPhone XS can still run the latest OS decently, with only some lag (unofficially with the Pixel 3, but hardware wise it can do it). That's a big change from what it was like just a few years ago, the iPhone 6s and Pixel 1 were slow about 3 years after they were released and almost unusable by they time their support expired.

Tech inclined people will likely still update ever few years, but I'm not so sure the average consumer will given the small advances we've seen in phones and tablets as of late.
 
Huh, seems like an "oh, those guys were probably useless anyway, they deserve to get laid off" attitude is prevalent to an unhealthy degree...

I have a large number of colleagues who work for the FAANG companies, the mass reduction is being targeted at departments / individuals who aren't producing. High value employees are actually being given raises and bonus's to stay due to the insane amount of poaching that happens in this industry, while lower value employees or those who can't hack it are being removed. AWS has a "hiring freeze" yet I recently turned down an offer for an engineering job due to my current company providing a nice set of raises recently, they didn't even know about the offer and were acting purely out of concern of poaching of "at risk" employees.

Lots of high paying positions were handed out in the past few years due to DEI initiatives wanting a certain percentage of those employees making above a certain amount to match a specific set of DEI criteria. That is being toned down, because in the end, the bottom line makes corporate policy.

As I mentioned, for years Tech was thought to be "recession proof", especially the big companies and they did a lot of inefficient things. Well times are changing and they are going to adapt, for now. I fully expect the silliness to come back in another five to seven years.
 
Yes yes, the "working really hard" folks just needed their 27 on site massage therapists.
The layoffs include 27 of the on-site massage therapists that worked at the YouTube campus.

https://www.yahoo.com/now/google-fires-27-massage-therapists-104418861.html

https://www.todayonline.com/world/google-layoff-employees-2097241

The other laid off employees are demanding Google cover the costs of therapy for the mental harm of being laid off.

Lots of BS titles in that list of folks being let go, overpaid secretaries, managers of secretaries and directors of secretaries.
 

King_V

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I don't think just repeating the executive/corporate mantra of "oh, we were generously supporting worthless people, but now we've gotta tighten our belts, so you've gotta go" actually proves anything.

Maybe my experience was different - but, layoffs didn't happen because there was bloat. Layoffs happened because someone's next bonus was structured on cutting costs, or someone wanted to cash out stock options.

One was, legitimately, during an economic downturn, and it was a small company. So, all it took were one or two big clients to decide "Uh, yeah, remember those things we talked about buying? The stock market is a little shaky, so we're not buying." I will absolutely give credit to that particular employer of mine in that the layoffs were top to bottom proportionally.


Still, for those repeating that "oh, they're just all bloat" . . I haven't seen my original point actually brought up, which was: "Are these companies suddenly no longer profitable, thus leading to layoffs?"

I'm not a betting man, but I'd bet the answer is no. Which, naturally, would lead to the question: "Well, then, to what end are they laying people off?"



As a side note: some people also seem to forget that some of the biggest advancements in computing happened because of research/skunkworks.
 
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Still, for those repeating that "oh, they're just all bloat" . . I haven't seen my original point actually brought up, which was: "Are these companies suddenly no longer profitable, thus leading to layoffs?"

You nor other people are owed a job, you aren't owed a paycheck and you definitely aren't owned the concern of anything in this universe. People who are exchanging time for money, employees, are being paid X per hour while the company is making Y per hour in revenue off them. If X is ever greater then Y then that employee has become a loss for the employer and is now on a clock to invert that relationship.

You don't think that's fair, it doesn't matter what you think, the universe doesn't care and neither does anyone else.


The uncomfortable truth is that the employer vs employee relationship is a zero sum game, a game that is framed and painted with bright pastel colors to make people think otherwise. Employee salaries and benefits are a liability, it's a red number that gets deducted from net revenue, the less the compensation pool the more profit is earned. Without employee's companies can not make money, it's a situation where they will compensate only as much as they think they can get away with and it's done per employee. Employees want to get paid as much as possible while employers want to pay as little as possible, so we get back to the X vs Y equation from earlier. It's the individuals responsibility to ensure they contribute more to the bottom line then their compensation package is worth. Doing this gives the employee the greater bargaining position, instead of acting like a log and only doing the minimum to get by.

To answer your question, it's simply that X vs Y valuation has changed. Previously revenue was good enough that employers can and did hire more people and then stuffed them into positions that had only a few hours of actual work every day, with the understanding that they might eventually need them or that it raised some HR metric above a certain value. Investors were happy with the RoI and didn't ask Alphabet why they needed 27 massage therapists, why Meta needed daily yoga classes or why Amazon had onsite five star chefs for catering. Now the RoI has dropped and investors have started to show worry to board members, who have a fiduciary duty to question the Chief Officers about budgetary choices. That is how publicly traded companies are legally required to operate.
 
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bit_user

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You nor other people are owed a job, you aren't owed a paycheck and you definitely aren't owned the concern of anything in this universe.
You're definitely not wrong about this, but companies also aren't owed the ability to exist or free and unfettered access to infrastructure, resources, or markets. I think people tend to forget that capitalism exists for the benefit of society, and its fate is therefore jeopardized when enough consumers and employees decide it's no longer serving their interests.

People who are exchanging time for money, employees, are being paid X per hour while the company is making Y per hour in revenue off them. If X is ever greater then Y then that employee has become a loss for the employer and is now on a clock to invert that relationship.
That's the theory, but it becomes complicated by various accounting and budgeting rules & practices.

There's also the question of a company's strategic direction, and of course corporate politics. I once worked on a project that I later found almost got cancelled, simply because a director favored a different group over ours. Luckily, we had a product manager guy who went out on a limb for us and risked his neck by standing up to the director in a meeting with senior management. He went so far as to openly challenge incorrect factual claims made by said director.

The uncomfortable truth is that the employer vs employee relationship is a zero sum game,
The developers and engineers I've worked with who fit this mindset most were never the best. They tended to take short-cuts and use bandaid fixes, didn't put in extra time to do things right, and left a lot of technical debt in their wake. They tended to change jobs too frequently (i.e. before they'd been around long enough to have a deep & lasting impact) and often ended up going into management or marketing.

There's an aspect of work that involves craftsmanship or professionalism, and that goes beyond the direct sort of transactional relationship you describe. Sadly, it tends to be underappreciated by managers. However, it does go some ways towards explaining why companies still have long-term employees, rather than turning everyone into contractors.

Employee salaries and benefits are a liability, it's a red number that gets deducted from net revenue, the less the compensation pool the more profit is earned.
Yes, this is how "job creators" truly think. I get that the economics ultimately have to work out, but there's also a situation here with known costs vs. sometimes harder-to-quantify outputs (unless you determine the entire product line or business is non-viable). Cutting too deep or hiring too few can burn out core employees, and that doesn't show up on the balance sheet until the damage is already done.

It's the individuals responsibility to ensure they contribute more to the bottom line then their compensation package is worth. Doing this gives the employee the greater bargaining position,
It's worse than that. If all you do is slightly more than break-even, you've failed. Basically, you need to add disproportionate value, to have any negotiating leverage.

Investors were happy with the RoI and didn't ask Alphabet why they needed 27 massage therapists, why Meta needed daily yoga classes or why Amazon had onsite five star chefs for catering. Now the RoI has dropped and investors have started to show worry to board members, who have a fiduciary duty to question the Chief Officers about budgetary choices. That is how publicly traded companies are legally required to operate.
I think the issue we probably take with your characterization isn't that these companies had no fat to trim, just that when you're talking about workforce reductions so big, it's impossible that it's all fat. I've definitely worked in the industry long enough to see solid contributors get caught up in layoffs that were done more to humor investors than because those folks weren't valuable contributors.

I can't speak for @King_V , but the thing that really rubs me the wrong way about your post is the sense that everyone who's losing their job somehow had it coming. Yes, the tech industry has been doing quite well and is definitely carrying some excess. But, you can't seriously claim that every individual being let go wasn't pulling their weight. That sounds to me a lot like victim blaming, just so that we don't have to acknowledge what a harsh, uncaring, and sometimes unfair system we have.
 
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I think the issue we probably take with your characterization isn't that these companies had no fat to trim, just that when you're talking about workforce reductions so big, it's impossible that it's all fat. I've definitely worked in the industry long enough to see solid contributors get caught up in layoffs that were done more to humor investors than because those folks weren't valuable contributors.

I can't speak for @King_V , but the thing that really rubs me the wrong way about your post is the sense that everyone who's losing their job somehow had it coming. Yes, the tech industry has been doing quite well and is definitely carrying some excess. But, you can't seriously claim that every individual being let go wasn't pulling their weight. That sounds to me a lot like victim blaming, just so that we don't have to acknowledge what a harsh, uncaring, and sometimes unfair system we have.

This speaks more about you then me.
You added the extreme interpretation on your own, then mentally argued against that extreme interpretation.

For-profit companies exist to make money, publicly traded companies are required by law to look out for the best interests of the share holders. It is an SEC violation for a board of directors or a chief officer to fail to do this. This is why the board is elected by the share holders ,and the board is who hires the CEO. The CEO's compensation package is determined by that board and is heavily loaded with financial incentives geared towards profitability. That profitability drives share prices and dividend returns for the investors. If someone can't understand that fundamental concept then nothing else will make sense and everything will be anti-business and "those evil corporations".

When a company downsizes or has mass layoffs, it's done on a per-business unit level. So yes each business unit is going to be dumping anyone whos position doesn't return sufficient revenue to keep around. At the same time, entire business units that are not profitable will be dumped. Doesn't matter how good an engineer is, if the business unit's focus is enabling IPv6 communication on IoT Twinkie wrappers, they won't be keeping that job. Entire business units are discarded, which is why you see directors being laid off.

Which brings us the point above about poaching, good folk will have nothing to worry about as the job market for competent IT folks is really tight and companies are actively poaching the best from each other. Talented people will be given offers to other positions, if such positions exist. The nature of dumping business units means there won't be many of those open positions so what we get is the company trying to keep the best it can. Everyone becomes in competition with every other coworker in the same specialization. All those folks who were hired to pad HR stats are suddenly in competition with more experienced coworkers for the same limited pool of available positions. The results are predictable and it's already hitting the news. I'm in the process of hiring some folks for our team and we've had these vacancies for months now, qualified self motivating folks are hard to find and harder to keep.

Again I can not stress this, you nor anyone else is "owed" a job. Instead you (the royal you) must attract a buyer (company) then sell them on why they should select you, above the rest, for a position. The employer vs employee relation is always a zero sum game, no amount of flowery dressing changes that. There is a finite compensation pool that the company must extract maximum value from, everyone is in competition with everyone else. As for "companies", companies are just property that are owned by people. What you just said was that people don't have a right to own property and that property should be for the betterment of society. There are several failed States that had that philosophy. Do you have any form of investment accounts? How about something like the simple 401K IRA that everyone gets? Then congratulations you are an investor and part owner of those same companies. Your investor votes are being proxied through your IRA account manager but they still exist. You are a beneficiary of the actions and policies those CEOs and BoD's take.
 
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bit_user

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This speaks more about you then me.
You added the extreme interpretation on your own, then mentally argued against that extreme interpretation.
I'm just telling you how your comments were received. Perhaps I'm not alone in feeling like you're being too dismissive? Anyway, now you have one datapoint to consider, for future reference.

For-profit companies exist to make money, publicly traded companies are required by law to look out for the best interests of the share holders.
Yes, and I think I acknowledged this aspect. It's fundamental, but also not the end of the story.
(and yes, I know how corporate governance works, but fair to explain as maybe not everyone does)

if the business unit's focus is enabling IPv6 communication on IoT Twinkie wrappers, they won't be keeping that job.
It's even more granular than that. Sometimes, projects are canceled and the entire team let go. Just before the pandemic, this happened at my job. There were a couple extremely solid contributors on that team. One woman, let's call her Jan, was somewhat reserved but well-liked, diligent, worked there for over a decade, knew the systems up & down, and you couldn't find anyone with anything less than praise-worthy to say about her. Rather than factor these folks elsewhere into the org (for instance, back into the product team they'd come from, months earlier), they were let go with the entire rest of the team.

good folk will have nothing to worry about as the job market for competent IT folks is really tight and companies are actively poaching the best from each other.
Some will, but not everyone is good at networking or marketing themselves. The interview game has also changed quite a bit, in the past decade or so, and seems to favor younger folks recently out of university. And at my company, we haven't been hiring in the US since last fall, even though they're having trouble finding competent people at sites in other countries. They have a new policy of hiring only in "best-cost" countries.

Again I can not stress this, you nor anyone else is "owed" a job.
This speaks more about you than me. I never said these people shouldn't have been cut. Just that we shouldn't speak as though none were doing their jobs or that they were all failing to pull their weight.

As for "companies", companies are just property that are owned by people. What you just said was that people don't have a right to own property and that property should be for the betterment of society.
Businesses are legal entities that we've created for the benefit of society. They're a legal fiction created for pragmatic purposes. We lose sight of that, at our peril.

There are several failed States that had that philosophy.
There are also quite successful States that have more restrictive business laws than the US. It's not a black-or-white thing. As long as you don't have state ownership playing a major role in the economy and it still seems to be working, I think you probably haven't gone too far.

I'll go a step further and say that some of the restrictions on employers I've heard about in countries like France and Italy strike me as going too far. Still, I find it hard to believe the US has struck the optimal balance.

Speaking of other countries, something that puts the US at a disadvantage is requirements for employer-provided healthcare insurance. I doubt most companies really want to deal with it (much less subsidize it), either.

Do you have any form of investment accounts? How about something like the simple 401K IRA that everyone gets?
You can't use that to justify everything and anything publicly-traded companies do. The beauty of capitalism is that if some business or industry gets hit with new regulations that affect their profitability (like, maybe because they were destroying the planet), capital just reroutes elsewhere. Sure, there might be some short-term hiccups, but also maybe you (or your investment fund manager) should be more wary of whom you're supporting.
 
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King_V

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sigh . . I have to keep this short but...

There is NO LAW that says that companies must strive for short term gains at the expense.

There is NO reason to have a "if it's not profitable right now and at all times, it must be cut, regardless of whether the company can easily continue with it" mentality.

And, with that dogma that you keep preaching over and over again, we would very likely not have had yet, or at all, things like:
  • PCs with a GUI
  • Unix
  • Amazon
and that's just off the top of my head. These were either skunkworks, or big money losers . . until they became gigantic.

Victim blaming may, arguably, be worse than the "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap mentality.
 
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USAFRet

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There is NO LAW that says that companies must strive for short term gains at the expense.

There is NO reason to have a "if it's not profitable right now and at all times, it must be cut, regardless of whether the company can easily continue with it" mentality.
Similarly, there is no rule or law that dictates that a company MUST keep any and all product lines and ideas around forever and ever.
For a variety of reasons, things, and people, get cut.
 
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King_V

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Similarly, there is no rule or law that dictates that a company MUST keep any and all product lines and ideas around forever and ever.
For a variety of reasons, things, and people, get cut.
Agreed. My comment there was in reference to the fact that "required by law to look out for the best interest of shareholders" was used as a defense of these layoffs.

Not that I particularly buy the idea that these layoffs were done for the benefit of shareholders, or even that all shareholders care for maximizing short term gains over all other considerations.
 

bit_user

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King_V

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A bit more information . . . (sorry, @bit_user , no pun intended on your name!)

Have been trying to figure out exactly how Google decided who it was going to fire. The pattern doesn't seem particularly clear - people got let go right up to VP level, including some very long-standing employees who were well known as admired thought leaders. Some people who got promoted in the last cycle got fired. At least one SRE got fired while they were oncall for production stuff.

From: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/layoff-brain?utm_source=pocket-newtab
 

bit_user

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Uh, that's not exactly a short article and you can't even be bothered to explain what we're meant to get from it or what part we should read?

It's not just you, either. The author, herself, seems to presume interest and investment on the part of the reader, as even she doesn't give us any indication of what we should expect to take from it. And she's purportedly an accomplished web author.
 
D

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Yes, they have fiduciary duties to their shareholders

look, this isn’t communism. Layoffs are going to happen.
 
D

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Agreed. I am sad to see the good ones go but hopefully they will form new businesses and start kicking butt.

I am sure internal politics had a hand playing this
 
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