G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.
I see a recurring pattern of chief people officers and their minions totally destroying company brands and internal morale. This isn't traditional HR nonsense but pure Peter Principle. It really must be too much run plans and messaging through a comms or marketing team first. As a manager, this stuff pisses me off to no end because it seeds worry in the minds of team members that are in no way at risk.
Yep. I know so many people that joined google from other places because of the culture and perks. I certainly chose not to leave because of those things. That calculus is clearly changing.
If everyone is gunning for L6 after 8 years or L6 -> director in 8 more years, then the culture will be much worse. Assuming the long-tenured senior SWE is actually a solid engineer but doesn't want to play politics or manage up as required for L6+, this was a person who made G a very pleasant place to work. I know many L5 like this: smart, helpful, and made excellent colleagues.
That being said, I doubt it was mostly targeting people who were tenured too long without enough promos. My guess is these are people without the full backing of their upper mgmnt chain. Since even directors had no input into this layoff round, you needed your VP's support.
Added: maybe the person above is right since the grad changes are already moving G's culture into a more aggressive mode. G will slowly become like the other big tech companies (G will just pay slightly less since people will still have the outdated perception that the culture is better).
I wouldn't call Amazon Prime same day. Amazon had prime now for awhile in response to Google's Express program; these were both same-day services that delivered in 2-4 hours from order placement. Both programs were cancelled when it became clear they were unsustainable.
Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.
The chapters on Watson are super interesting. If Isaacson had written the book primarily about Watson, it likely would've been at the same level of Steve Jobs.
The last sentence is only true if you believe the Fed will actually sell back the assets. When I look at this chart, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL, I have very little confidence that the Fed will sell a meaningful portion back (notice the Fed already gave up BEFORE covid when we supposedly had one of the best economies in recent times). In fact, it looks to me that the assets held by the Fed are growing exponentially and definitely growing faster than our productivity growth.
That's correct. If you're a software developer and interested in maximizing pay while minimizing stress, you obviously avoid the gaming industry. The only news here is that the company seems to have reneged on the promise it made, but it's not obvious how a union would have solved this problem. Would the union help get the game shipped on time?
The TV and film industries are heavily unionised across multiple sectors--tech, writers, actors, directors, etc.--and it's the norm to complete projects on time and on budget, or with immediate compensation for planning failures leading to overtime/crunch time. Think about the massive amount of content routinely produced for TV and film and tell me how unions make that impossible.
Somehow, the large investors still make lots of money. The primary effect of unions in this space seems to be that they put an actual dollar cost on poor management. When you hear about boondoggles like Heaven's Gate or Waterworld, what you hear isn't that unions screwed it up; you hear about the prima donna director who couldn't get it all "just so" with a couple hundred million to work with.
My employer, a digital services agency, pays hourly overtime of 1.5x. Then the professional PMs we have work very hard to accurately forecast and estimate. I've had crunch periods in which I've been paid overtime, but they're rare because the business has incentived itself to execute on-time and on-budget, mostly by not promising what we can't deliver and expecting the workers to pick up the slack.
When I worked in public sector with a strong union, we didn't do crunch, we accepted that deadlines are malleable and my project managers always anticipated and resolved deadline problems before they became a problem.
Now I work for IBM, and I am expected to work late as much as it takes to ship on time. "On time" is of course completely arbitrary and determined by people who have no understanding of the technical tasks required to ship the project (and most pertinent, don't listen to me when I provide my expert opinion that the timeline is not viable). And they expect to not have to pay me for that overtime.
Not being able to exploit your workers encourages realistic deadlines.
> Would the union help get the game shipped on time?
This is such a weird logic. Since when should the company financial incentives have higher priority over the employees well-being? Arguably, if the existence of the company is threatened by a few delays and that the only solution is to exploit people, it should instead close shop and let people get other jobs that will make them happier.
So no, a union would probably not help the game be shipped in time, and if it did, it would be the shittiest union. And if enforcing humane working conditions against the profits of the employer makes the business unsustainable, this means the business should not exist in the first place.
> The only news here is that the company seems to have reneged on the promise it made, but it's not obvious how a union would have solved this problem. Would the union help get the game shipped on time?
Quite likely yes, though not directly. Foreclosing avenues that management tends to fall into which are both empirically not particularly effective and also miserable working conditions, like more than brief crunch time, probably does improve delivery, though that's not the main goal.
I disagree. This would prove why big government is dangerous. This is the perfect example of how powerful individuals can leverage governmental power to enrich themselves. He's like Trump, pointing out all these problems while exploiting them to the max.
So you're letting him off the hook for hypocrisy? There's lots of other libertarians and non-libertarians playing by the rules and not benefitting from crony capitalism. Are you excusing Thiel for being a total hypocrite (e.g. making his money from government contracts) all the while telling everyone else to be a rugged individualist?
Are we supposed to admire looting the government as a kind of 5 dimensional chess, where the profiteers weren't actually grifters, but merely trying to make a philosophical point?
You know in security research, there are white hats, who find the exploits, notify about them, and are rewarded with recognition and sometimes bounties.
And there are black hats who use the exploits to pillage. These people don't get credit for 'raising awareness'
And in my view, Palantir is not a white hat libertarian exercise demonstrating how crony capitalism is bad and how we need smaller government.
Wrong data. You're looking at confirmed cases, which Sweden is massively falling behind on because they're under-testing so badly, as you can see from their absolutely incredible (as in unbelievable) reported case fatality rate of 9%. It's not that 9% of their population is dying from this, it's that they're not even catching 1 out of every 50 people that even have it. Their stats look low because they're so severely under-reported.
The correct figures to be comparing here are per capita deaths. Sweden is currently sitting at 1,014 deaths per 10M people while the United States is at 789. Ergo, Sweden's outbreak is roughly a third worse than the US so far, and growing worse.
