"We are no longer valued like a startup, we are now a major player in a saturated space that is feeling the crunch of global economic headwinds and dwindling value for our real users, advertisers, and our bet on AI doesn't seem to be attracting the same energy that it is for others."
Might as well just move the whole company to India. The software industry will be consolidated there in 20yrs just like manufacturing went to China.
They will declare it a state of national security later down the road, when the companies all did this to save money and increase their salaries. Companies aren't people and they have no loyalty to the country they are in, despite what people try to push. It's business and profits come first always.
Government needs to step in and prevent this. Massive taxes on any payroll leaving the country. Corporations will always act this way, we need to fight back using the only lever big enough.
There are plenty of American software engineers interested in making software and getting paid for it. Let the ones that are running a race to the bottom leave if that's what they want to do.
For all the people who ridiculed the idea of Collective Bargaining for Software Engineers so that they could have a decade of increased salary, here you go. FANNG engineers had the most leverage, they had the numbers, they still would have had enormous salaries regardless, and they gave it up.
Good luck obtaining the same amount of leverage you would've had in the 2010s ever again. Good luck trying to steer the direction of these companies ever again. Good luck trying to establish a baseline for morality and conduct ever again.
I can't speak for all the downvotes, but I just don't understand what the comment had to do with the article it's supposedly commenting on. The article describes Google's weekly meeting where executives answer adversarial questions from employees, in which employees expressed that they're concerned about future layoffs. What part of that story would be different if more of them had joined the union? If the implication is that unionized employees never have to worry about layoffs, that's not accurate.
1) When someone is unhappy and you ask for questions, they will often ask the question they think you will find most uncomfortable to answer. They don't have much power but they can make you squirm.
2) If someone is still drinking the google juice and believes executives have their interests at heart, they may well believe enough in the "culture of transparency" that if they're worried about layoffs they ask about it at an all-hands.
3) They might suspect you're full of it and that your response to this question will be a litmus test
It's not only about the one being fired. It's also about the ones not affected knowing it was the last round for a while so they can focus on their work, not on fear of losing it.
Being transparent can create trust. Trust is important for motivation. Motivation is important for "knowledge workers"
To turn it around: Why should one work hard if there is a high chance of some global sweep soon, where they might randomly pick me without any reasoning.
>Why should one work hard if there is a high chance of some global sweep soon, where they might randomly pick me without any reasoning.
This seems like taking huge logical leaps. If a friend expressed mine expressed it I would recommend them talking to a therapist about their self sabotaging thinking and perhaps depression.
If there is a layoff and I am at risk, I would rather have hard work to show. If Im not laid off, I would rather have hard work to capitalize on the aftermath. If I am laid off, I would rather have good reputation with my network .
What I said is true even if you believe it is random (which I don't).
Good work output is the smart choice if I will be retained OR if I will be fired. crapping out ignores the fact that the chance of being fired is low, even if it is random (google isnt going to go full twitter, if there even is a layoff). Being the guy who's work goes to shit when a layoff is announced sticks with you if you stay. If your boss is firing based on their subjective impressions OR quantitative ones, it actively hurts your chances.
There are big cognitive distortions at play here at each progressive leap: Randomness exists > Randomness is predominant > Nothing I do matters> It is a good idea to give up.
This is how I think when I am clinically depressed. It is self defeating and self fulfilling.
The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it.
In my living memory, Google has never NOT been an ad-company. They started with one exceptionally good product - search - and monetized it very well via ads.
As the recent anti-trust lawsuits reveal, everything else Google has done since has been to leverage that dominance into other advertising businesses; specifically display ads and now video ads.
Didn't Google mostly live on VC money during that period? If they did I think it is probably fair to call Google out as having always been an advertising company. I think what made Google function for a long time after 2000 was the fact that they managed to keep their advertising business and their products fairly separate. The big downfall began when people like Ben Gomes lost to Venkataraman. Venkataraman who's now infamous for ruining both Yahoo and Google Search... But Venkataraman's recent "promotion" isn't exactly something that should bring us much hope though. Not considering that he's being replaced by an actual McKinsey spreadsheet.
> think it is probably fair to call Google out as having always been an advertising company
I don't think that's fair unless you can find something that says that was their intent (sibling posts in this thread claim there's actually evidence to the contrary). I don't see the problem with "startup trying to figure out a sustainable business" and leaving it like that. It's not like that's something unprecedented or even unusual.
I've mentioned this before, but in the “Measure What Matters” book the author talks about investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads. It was in their pitch deck.
Now, to which extent they REALLY wanted to do this, and REALLY impacted the day to day decision, I don't know. Neither if said pitch deck had other options.
Google has never not been an ad company, except for that brief period of time where they were talking about how a search engine that serves ads is working against its users interests. Then they needed money so they did it anyway.
Did Google make any money before ads by just innovating?
I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.
google was the good exception. while everyone was just dialing ads to the max and turning into portals... google was at least churning new products and buying interesting ones to diversify ads. on their heyday they had some ads on search, some on youtube, some on apps, some on maps etc... now they've killed search by making it two page full of ads. they are in the process of killing youtube by showing more ads than daytime tv. and will soon show ads on android lock screen if this continues.
but this started on the last year of Schmidt. when he gave up to Icahn and other zombies on the board.
That's the trajectory of most businesses. A startup innovates, grows big, doubles down on what makes them profitable, and milks that as long as it can. It's very, very rare that a company will ever have multiple breakthrough hits, if they do it's usually from acquiring innovative startups (YouTube, Instagram, Oculus, etc).
> The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it.
But the shareholders and board don't want to innovate. They don't want to maintain innovation. They really ONLY WANT TO EXTRACT returns.
It is paradoxical. The theory of capitalism says that shareholders will want to maintain their golden goose right? Take care of their assets and property right?
But turns out, public shareholders, large funds, and PE investors only want to maximize their return by sucking the life out of a profitable innovative business. Once they have sucked out enough, they move on to the next profitable venture to suck the life out of.
This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction.
Google is an extremely well-built machine - built with thousands of the best engineers the world has ever seen, with the best products the world has ever seen. To shareholders, this is a giant blob of tasty juice to suck out of.
After years of sucking the life out of it, now that there is an alternative to suck from - treasuries - they are asking Google execs to suck more, faster, or else they'll move on to suck the tax payers - treasuries.
The shareholders and board absolutely want Pichai. They want a CEO who can cut benefits for shareholder returns.
Pichai inherited one of the most difficult challenges: he had to figure out how to grow revenue right as search revenue was plateauing and money was becoming expensive, all against the headwinds of Google's culture. Your comment is a good example of the headwind: I can't think of another company where a greater share of its employees actively despised the industry that paid for them all to be there.
Google's culture wasn't a problem – and maybe a good thing! – when you had a gigantic money printer working in the background, paying for everything. But it was there, ready to be a problem once times got tough.
google was leading on LLM, Search just (correctly) didn't want to tarnish their good name with the disaster that putting matrix-multiplied text generation on it would case.
in a sense, google solved this by trashing it's own reputation, so it's not actually a "net" problem that it spews garbage on the result page now.
I don't think that's quite correct. I have my screenshot from years back when google was "correcting" your query so I asked google what year Marilyn Munroe shot JFK and it said 1962. I'm reasonably sure this is before the transformers paper.
> Pichai inherited one of the most difficult challenges: he had to figure out how to grow revenue right as search revenue was plateauing and money was becoming expensive
see, that's just untrue. you could see the company turning all sorts of knobs to increase revenue over the last ten years - cutting down on perks, cutting down on food quality, increasing ad density, making promo harder, etc, etc - this was all happening and it was all happening at a high enough rate to let Ruth announce records almost every quarter. it was a finely oiled machine. and people grumbled, but quietly - it was fine!
doing mass layoffs absolutely changed the game - it showed that Pichai would be pushed around by random "researchers" publishing revenue guesses, it showed that the company would provide dire consequences for employees who were on projects that didn't pan out or were bad ideas, etc. the cost for all that is now everyone is correctly more nervous and pissed off!
> I can't think of another company where a greater share of its employees actively despised the industry that paid for them all to be there.
this is absolutely true, but as you say, it was fine - people still ran the ads machine and processed the firehose of cash, and a thousand other machines besides.
Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture. I agree, the first half of the sentence is a common scenario among CEOs, it's the 2nd bit that makes it especially challenging.
I disagree that it was "fine" because the people who were respected and held up as prime examples of Googlers – for decades – almost always had nothing to do with the ads business. This sends a signal to the rest that the ads business doesn't really matter, it's not the important work, it's akin to the janitorial work that has to happen so the rest of us can work here. If you do that long enough you end up with people optimizing towards things that aren't aligned with the needs of the business. It was on autopilot, relatively, compared to other areas.
>> Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture.
I would also add all of the companies that were bought by Google in hopes they would ease some of the laser focus on their search/ad business and never panned out and then were subsequently killed by them.
I think this one of the overlooked issues they've had. When they've repeatedly tried to venture into other areas by buying smaller companies in hopes they could grow their revenue and create another revenue stream, the failure rate of those companies is pretty staggering.
All three of these have not made it easy for them to try and re-brand themselves as anything but a search/ad company.
lol. This is exactly what the board and shareholders wanted! Obsessed with earnings growth they killed their golden goose. Firing Pichai won’t change a culture built on an addiction to ads. Treat any business with an advertising business model as ephemeral - the business model simply begs to be disrupted.
What golden goose? Has any innovation outside of ads even turned a profit? My impression is that everything else that google does is some form of a loss leader.
Search was their golden goose spitting off ad revenue and in search for continuous growth they have left search ripe for disruption by an ad free competitor with better results.
>In response to another question about ongoing layoffs and reorganizations and what might be coming in the future, Pichai said, "If we are making companywide decisions, we'll definitely let you know."
Yeah right, they'll definitely let you know when they lay you off, but not a minute sooner.
It's worse than that. All Pichai has to do is say "We're not laying off anyone who works in <some tiny department in the basement of Mountain View with 4 people>" and suddenly it's no longer a "companywide decision" so the board can weasel out of telling everyone.
My take on these kinds of meetings is there's not a lot of information that they could share that's of consequence to employees, but not of consequence to shareholders.
Layoffs and reorgs will be need to be disclosed to shareholders and that's going to probably be done to both groups at a similar time.
Expecting early disclosure to employees is unrealistic.
I’ve noticed the common employee doesn’t really understand that executives aren’t going to tell them any material non-public information at all hands meetings.
Or that the answer to “will there be any more layoffs?” is never going to be answered truthfully or satisfactorily.
It's not about what they will say but what they won't say. When companies are confident they won't need to do layoffs soon, CEOs can and do say something to that effect instead of "If we are making companywide decisions, we’ll definitely let you know".
The problem is, no executive can (responsibly) say that. What if macro conditions worsen? Some kind of black swan event? I don't think it's appropriate to say "we're definitely not doing layoffs soon." Not to mention, people will quibble about what they mean by soon and start asking for timelines.
It's a lose-lose situation to be up on stage and get asked this question, and I think it shows a bit of immaturity or naiveté to pose it.
Yeah, that’s kinda for the best. Have you ever worked someplace where layoffs had been pre-announced? Humans don’t act well in an environment like that.
It's not unheard of. I personally know of people at Splunk, HP, and Groupon who knew they would be laid off / fired months before it actually happened.
Meta started carrying out the last batch of a three-part round of layoffs on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter, as part of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles.
I’ve worked with several excellent Indian SWE colleagues in my career.
That said, they had all moved to the USA. In the past, top engineers would come to the USA for higher salaries, mobility, and sometimes for American citizenship and its benefits.
If companies stop hiring and supporting immigration to the USA you may find more top engineers staying in India.
Im not interested in steel-manning the position that cultural acceptance of trash translates to bad code. I am defending the fact that humans do in fact have cultures, and those cultures have real world impacts. You would not see scenes like that in Japan or Singapore, or at least much more rarely.
>Im not interested in steel-manning the position that cultural acceptance of trash translates to bad code
Okay, but quite obviously OP is.
>I am defending the fact that humans do in fact have cultures, and those cultures have real world impacts. You would not see scenes like that in Japan or Singapore, or at least much more rarely.
Indians are such a major presence in Singapore that Tamil is one of its official languages. Littering is also a part of both countries' criminal codes, with hefty fines and, in SG's case, jail time being prescribed. It seems pretty clear, then, that cultural essentiality is at least insufficient as an explanation in these contexts.
Law and policy is a reflection and product of culture, or at least the dominant culture. There is influence and feedback that goes both ways.
You can ask why Singapore and Japan have harsh fines, and India does not. You can also look at how people behave when there isn't a cop watching them.
At a high level, law is just a tool for enforcing cultural norms, and is only sufficient to police small amounts of deviation on the margin. If the majority, or even a significant minority, of people woke up tomorrow and decided to break the law, there would be little that could be done in any country.
Im not opposed to direct measures. You could do observational studies looking at how frequently people litter when nobody is watching or surveys of how bad people feel littering is.
This would help you get a pulse of the comparative culture. That said, observing culture directly IS measurable.
You look at culture that leaves trash everywhere and that itself is a data point.
Sorry for the late reply, but I was rate limited by HN.
If you live in a culture that does not appreciate quality and the only focus is to make money whatever way possible, you will do whatever in order to make money. The likelihood of people starting to produce quality stuff in such a community is very low.
If everyone around you is throwing trash on the street, you will likely do that as well. You must have your basic needs met before you can start worry about things like quality and unfortunately many people in India does not have this kind of security afaik.
1. Doctors that prescribe drugs and shouldn't be prescribed to a lot of people.
2. A too unregulated big pharma that makes a lot of money selling these drugs and pushing them to the doctors.
3. Unhealthy food that leads to people taking these unnecessary drugs in the first place.
4. No social security net for people that obviously need help and are unable to help themselves.
This summer I visited the US and let me tell you that the food is really, really bad and probably a big source to a lot of issues the US have in my opinion. If you consume hazardous foods, you will get sick both mentally and physically and it was nearly impossible to get good healthy food during my visit. After my visit to Bulgaria it was easily the worst breakfasts and food in general I've had. I was bloated and feeling like shit the entire time in I was in the US and chocked of all the homeless people clearly on drugs that were just hanging around everywhere in the big cities. I actually lost 2kg during my stay because I was a bit disgusted by the food. It was just fat with extra fat. Every. Single. Meal.
Then I went to Italy, and my stomach was back to normal almost immediately and I've never had better food than in italy. My stomach was thanking me every day and it's easy to see why. They have make everything from fresh produce, basically no conservatives and other crap that both the US and the western/northen europe have in basically everything.
Man the bread in Italy is on another level and available everywhere. Even if you order a sandwich in a gas station it's like freshly baked and tastes amazing. When you go to restaurants, the pasta is made the same day as you order it and so on. Zero km restaurants.
The world should copy whatever Italy is doing food wise because man they have shit figured out.
I've never seen a company that allowed the employees to dictate so much of their policies and decisions. How many times have employees staged walk outs and protests and the company continually bent the knee for them?
I've never understood people who do this. If you think you're on the chopping block for layoffs or cost cutting? You dust off your resume. You start networking. You reach out to recruiters. You actively PLAN to get laid off and have a Plan B or move before you do get laid off. If you're already working at Google, I'm sure it will be easy to find another job rather quickly.
Why would you put yourself on the radar when the company is already looking for people to lay off?
What more clarity is necessary?