As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own <1% of the company, it doesn’t explain the rather random and opaque way the layoffs seem to have been conducted. Plus they (so far) haven’t laid off nearly enough to make hedge funds happy.
I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one.
Google engineering culture has long been described as permitting coasters and encouraging employees to structure their work around what might get them promoted; that might be great for an innovative growing company, but I suspect Sundar & Co. know that that label doesn’t really fit google’s position anymore. I really don’t see any other reason they’d lay off high performing employees on important projects - especially OSS giants.
If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
It’s much easier to lose trust that to gain it, and the ramifications of the move will be felt for a very long time. There’s the time before and the time after, and Google won’t ever really look the same to the industry.
That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades.
There’s still massive innovation and builder spirit there, but I’m betting that we’ll have a much easier time poaching our favorite employees from Google now than we have over the last few years.
I’ve been part of several companies that have gone through layoffs, and one thing I’ve learned is that companies that haven’t done it in a while (or ever) typically do it poorly.
Very good points, especially the last one: when trying to understand the logic behind these layoffs, I honestly haven’t considered incompetence enough. Surely people making tens of millions of dollars a year got there through intelligence and merit and not capitalist fiat? Right? Right…?
Yes I’m sure as one of the top paying public companies that issue stock instead of Monopoly money (equity in private companies) tech people are going to refuse to work for Google.
There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These layoffs show that this is not true. Google is a large corporation, like many others.
There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reeling from this, but it’s really just another day in corporate America.
Very fair, it is typical in many ways, and ofc there’s no one reason for a decision of this size. I’d argue that the culture is (was?) special, though - definitely not unique in the tech sector, but different from e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Amazon in many ways. I think that’s been a huge advantage of theirs for years when competing for talent: Google is known as a eng-first, open, innovative company, and people often take lowball offers to get that cred on their resume.
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
We got a little blip in human history where employers were forced to treat their employees like actual people. Was nice while it lasted. Back to having a boot stomping on our faces again...
Sundar's recent pay package tied more of his compensation to performance of GOOG relative to the rest of the S&P 100 [1, 2]. That could also be related.
I left Google last year (after 10 years), and, yeah, I mostly agree. It's especially dubious that these layoffs happened right in sequence after "everybody else" was doing it. It leaves the whole tech sector vulnerable and all of us in a worse bargaining position. It's a way of enforcing labour discipline into our sector.
Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.
I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or seem like they will do.
Here’s some reliable second-hand information I’m posting on this one-off account. Take this with whatever degree of salt you wish.
My understanding from somebody in a position to know is each VP was given a target/quota of cuts. Then they basically had big spreadsheets with salaries and performance ratings, and then pseudo-blindly cut teams or people to make quotas without input from directors/managers, and gave those lists to SPVs. On receipt of these lists some of the VPs were then canned.
To avoid lawsuits for discrimination in the USA they then added some statistical “noise” by firing a number of people randomly so the numbers balanced out with no “bias”.
The company is run by total morons in my opinion. I’m an extremely high performer with world class expertise. I didn’t get cut, but I’m interviewing elsewhere. I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll. I’d rather take PIP culture. Ultimately Google needs me more than the other way around.
Yep. I think it really is the end for them as a company with a reputation for attracting really bright people. They were in decline over the last 6-7 years, but now Sundar really really blew it. The sheen will just wear off more and more until they just look like any another spent SV company from the past.
There was I'm sure a way to make a whole restructuring or cost cutting process happen in a way that could have salvaged their reputation. But they didn't spend any effort trying to find it.
And if ad spend drops significantly and/or there's actual anti-monopoly enforcement against them, it will really accelerate things.
They have enough $$ they can coast for years, but it isn't going to be pretty.
> I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll.
Having lived through multiple layoffs in the last few years, I'm not sure there's any org larger than, just handwaving here, 1k people that doesn't do this.
I think you'd have to go to a startup before your absence is actually felt.
Because that in particular will freak everyone else in the company out, and .. most importantly... Google is no longer scared about those people going to their competition, because their competition is also flushing talent away. In the past, Google was willing to dump all sorts of cash into talent as long as it kept people from creating a truly competitive landscape. Now, they don't have to worry as much.
The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.
> Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters.
The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.
I’m not a Google employee, but can’t help to think that the injection of Oracle and Oracle
diaspora folks into the Cloud division has to effect the executive culture.
Even before this most recent round, Google fired most of their internal IT staff,
as well as the GCP support team, and replaced them with cheaper labor from a lower cost of living country, so I'd say yeah.
> If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
That isn't exactly a hardball question. Honestly, if it wasn't something that was already known either way, that is already a miss at that level. Especially in contrast to the way that Tim Cook handled the same idea.
Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs.
It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.
On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.
All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.
I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability.
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.
I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go.
From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter.
Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up.
I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.
The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.
The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
Yesterday I searched "apache kafka" on my phone because I can never remember if it's apache.kafka.org or kafka.apache.org (it's the latter, the former is registered by an Italian developer), and I had to scroll past five or six "sponsored" results from managed Kafka vendors to get the actual result.
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back
Waze has been consistently better, especially for traffic rerouting. It's also way better at letting you know about road events, like accidents, than Google Maps. Maps is better to search stuff on a map, but for navigation, it is so barebones (and not even in a good minimalist way).
I'm not sure how GMaps can still lag so far behind when Waze is also owned by Google.
> Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.
This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.
Maps decline has been a real annoyance for me. I’ve dropped all of Google products: mail, years ago for Fastmail; search, I pay for Kagi; youtube, I pay netflix and spotify; docs, I use it at work but still looking for alternatives; voice, Skype does well. I’m almost off the Google bandwagon. I think if there is a good map system out-there, I’d finally have no dependency on the whole Google stack.
A week or so ago I was freaked out when some Google app nudged me with a link to email that said I needed to return a defective heatsink/fan by a certain date to avoid being charged for it. I looked, and found the email saying they'd gotten it; I had already sent it. If it's going to look for things like that, it should look for evidence that it's already been taken care of.
I don't know about the recent decline. Google has sometimes seemingly switched to an "I feel like going for a country drive" mode for years. Which is particularly annoying in areas where it snows and narrow country roads are often not in great shape even if the main streets are pretty well cleared.
> ...search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android
Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents).
This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day?
As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
People really don't seem to understand. Google doesn't make most of its money by making "stuff" it's value is in it's ad monopoly. Who is most responsible for maintaining this monopoly? It's Pichai. Larry and Sergei brought in the passion and innovation which has led to Google's AI lead and numerous money sink X projects. The trio need to get back together to make AI monopoly happen.
Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.
Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.
> Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting.
Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.
Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners.
I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.
As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.
For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...
> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.
Internally at Microsoft, the flops were obvious. Employees made fun of the zune, there was a lot of embarrassment that staff were preferring iphones to free company-provided alternatives, etc. Leadership was putting $ in (remember the Nokia acquisition disaster?) and individual teams were doing neato things, but leadership was feudal & by-the-numbers with many tiny product owners, and not led by a good overall product person.
Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target.
Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.
Isn't it more that nurturing more than one unicorn is vanishingly unlikely? All these companies can do is to wield their enormous power for as long as they can until the inevitable happens and they become an also ran.
I mostly agree, but to be a little fair to Pichai: He didn't get a company that was really in a dominant (or at least not already rapidly declining) market position. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet might have been inherited from Gates, but Google not missing but still absolutely fucking up social networking, immediately prior to Pichai taking the role, is all on former leadership.
Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
Pichai didn't completely inherit the cash cow? He led Chrome to quiet dominance, on the basis of a better product, in the face of entrenched and better funded competitors. That is quite different from Ballmer.
One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
This doesn't quite line up for me. Ballmer, for his lack of technical foresight, managed an incredibly profitable business. People act like anybody could have just stepped in to milk Windows and Office for all they were worth, but the focus and execution are easy to scoff at in hindsight. If MS had focused on mobile, who's to say they would have succeeded? And perhaps in the process of losing, also ceded dominance to an upstart in the office software space.
Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
I worked at Microsoft during the Ballmer era. Profits and revenue continued to increase under his watch.
They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
Search has particularly gone south last 3-4 months. Quotes and exact phrasing is now a necessity and I find myself rather use ChatGPT.
What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does.
I've known Cat Allman (one of the other folks laid off) since we worked together 23 years ago. She's one of the kindest, most thoughtful people, and exceptional at her job. This is a huge loss for both Google and the Open Source community.
Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.
I only worked with Chris on a few occasions, and those interactions had been very pleasant -- he was in a relatively high ranking position and definitely had a lot of responsibilities, but he still communicated plainly and treated everyone like a peer. I wish him the best.
The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t.
I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play.
Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff.
Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years.
That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.
Many moons ago, Chris wanted to recruit me to work on video compression/streaming (this was I think before they acquired Youtube). He found out I was a big Pythonista, an up-and-coming language at the time.
Chris then invited me to meet at a playground where our kids could play and we could talk tech. He also brought along his colleague, Guido Van Rossum! We had a fun chat but in the end I decided bigco was not for me.
Alternative take: when I was there he was tyrannical and constantly blocking employees from open sourcing code developed on their own weekends and evenings, purely on a personal whim. People had to fight internal battles to get like little video games and stuff put up on github. You'd think head of OSPO would do whatever it took to get code open sourced but no far from it. Loads of grumbling about how he was just an ex-Slashdot editor who couldn't even code, on a power trip abusing contract ip clauses.
This is pretty much the only comment I'm going to reply to (I'm technically a google employee until march 31st) and just say how pleased I am to see this. The Screensavers was so much fun to do, Leo, Morgan and the crew were just terrific, and made it very easy for me to look like I knew what I was doing.
My observation is that this has already been happening for a long time. I’ve worked with a lot of ex Google people in startups, especially more established ones. They pretty much all found it unsatisfying working there. Too slow. Too little impact. Maybe the layoffs will be a kick in the pants for others too, but they won’t be the first or alone in moving in that direction.
It would be amazing to see but I am not sure we will see it happening. Google is the one that taught the whole generation that amazing products and services should be free. It will be very hard to compete against google and other big tech companies that are essentially using predatory pricing to kill any competition.
I hope at some point to see legislation passed that will break up Google's advertising aspects into multiple businesses.
They own the front, middle, and back of the whole thing, and strangle (even if they have to acquire) any other business that tries to break in and get a better deal for publishers, or advertisers both.
(It was especially disheartening/confirming to see them outright admit (in quotes the DOJ acquired) that they bought my former employer (AdMeld) explicitly to make it disappear from the "competitive landscape." When I worked at Google, I seem to recall having to take yearly training courses on how I should say stuff like that, but these people... felt free)
Funding is absolutely available. In fact it is easy to raise in a down economy if you are the right people. A very significant fraction of successful companies were founded at or around down economies. Everything is easier and cheaper and you don’t need to rush.
TCI / Chris Hon are only doing this because his fund is mainly invested in Microsoft and Alphabet[1]. Guess what, his fund recently lost a bit of money for the first time: TCI[2]
Its ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING that MS and Alphabet are being pushed into laying off collectively over 20K people so this billionaire can recover a bit. Like, could this not be a national security issue? This man is able to have Google trash their open source initiatives on a whim, making the company weaker. It should be very very illegal.
I really wouldn't assume Chris Hon has this much pull or that these decisions are due to investor pressure. Maybe a flimsy rationale but if he did have that kind of influence I kinda doubt he'd be speaking publicly – seems more like a personal branding effort.
There are definitely billionaires profiting from the layoffs, but if you look at who owns shares of Google stock it isn't people who own a paltry <1% of shares
Yes that is correct, but specifically this person is the activist investor publicly pushing for this. Maybe that had no effect, but certainly it seems like this man might be a bit responsible.
> It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm.
It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem.
Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer stories of gmail accounts getting shut off for no reason after 15 years with no recourse.
> a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
So yeah, I would hope that an algorithm was used. As opposed to what? "I like that guy more than the other guy".
You seem to have the interpretation that some guy in finance wrote a script, it output some employee IDs, and then no one checked the output before laying them all off, as if slaves to the machine. Do you really believe that?
First off, you know that "used an algorithm" in modern parlance means "was done by AI without human intervention".
And based on that, absolutely I think Google did that. They run everything with data and statistics without humans. That's how they are so efficient.
This is backed up by the fact that the managers who work there were simply told who they were losing and had no input into the process, and aren't even aware of who has been let go yet.
I'm a part of a medium-sized team working on a popular infrastructure open-source project. There was no impact on our team, so it is not like Google hates open-source now.
Readit News
I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one.
Google engineering culture has long been described as permitting coasters and encouraging employees to structure their work around what might get them promoted; that might be great for an innovative growing company, but I suspect Sundar & Co. know that that label doesn’t really fit google’s position anymore. I really don’t see any other reason they’d lay off high performing employees on important projects - especially OSS giants.
If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades.
There’s still massive innovation and builder spirit there, but I’m betting that we’ll have a much easier time poaching our favorite employees from Google now than we have over the last few years.
I’ve been part of several companies that have gone through layoffs, and one thing I’ve learned is that companies that haven’t done it in a while (or ever) typically do it poorly.
There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reeling from this, but it’s really just another day in corporate America.
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
Few people think Google is special in 2023. They just pay well.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-links-more-ceo-p... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21031629/google-ceo-sund...
Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.
I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or seem like they will do.
My understanding from somebody in a position to know is each VP was given a target/quota of cuts. Then they basically had big spreadsheets with salaries and performance ratings, and then pseudo-blindly cut teams or people to make quotas without input from directors/managers, and gave those lists to SPVs. On receipt of these lists some of the VPs were then canned.
To avoid lawsuits for discrimination in the USA they then added some statistical “noise” by firing a number of people randomly so the numbers balanced out with no “bias”.
The company is run by total morons in my opinion. I’m an extremely high performer with world class expertise. I didn’t get cut, but I’m interviewing elsewhere. I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll. I’d rather take PIP culture. Ultimately Google needs me more than the other way around.
There was I'm sure a way to make a whole restructuring or cost cutting process happen in a way that could have salvaged their reputation. But they didn't spend any effort trying to find it.
And if ad spend drops significantly and/or there's actual anti-monopoly enforcement against them, it will really accelerate things.
They have enough $$ they can coast for years, but it isn't going to be pretty.
Having lived through multiple layoffs in the last few years, I'm not sure there's any org larger than, just handwaving here, 1k people that doesn't do this.
I think you'd have to go to a startup before your absence is actually felt.
AT&T and whatever company inherited the Bell Labs might have done rounds after rounds of layoffs but never fired Dennis Ritchie, for example.
People such as DiBona and Allison are assets to any company who can afford to hire them. This is simply unexplainable.
The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.
The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.
Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.
How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.
On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.
All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.
Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.
First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."
That usually means laying off a mass of people without consideration for their individual attributes.
Layoffs are literally never personal… at least in theory.
Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.
From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter.
Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up.
I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.
The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.
Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents).
This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day?
As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting.
Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.
I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.
As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.
For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...
> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.
> They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat
So...they missed mobile.
Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
And they still own YouTube, don’t forget.
One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
That is no longer the case.
alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard.
No magic here.
Deleted Comment
And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.
Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.
The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t.
I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play.
Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff.
- Your Average Xoogler
That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.
I'm really curious as to the motivation and background to this. How much can you tell us without revealing your identity?
Chris then invited me to meet at a playground where our kids could play and we could talk tech. He also brought along his colleague, Guido Van Rossum! We had a fun chat but in the end I decided bigco was not for me.
No regrets.
Thanks for watching!
They own the front, middle, and back of the whole thing, and strangle (even if they have to acquire) any other business that tries to break in and get a better deal for publishers, or advertisers both.
Take a read through this, it's a good read: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/downl...
(It was especially disheartening/confirming to see them outright admit (in quotes the DOJ acquired) that they bought my former employer (AdMeld) explicitly to make it disappear from the "competitive landscape." When I worked at Google, I seem to recall having to take yearly training courses on how I should say stuff like that, but these people... felt free)
(I seem to recall that was about Facebook at the time, not Google, but same same.)
Its ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING that MS and Alphabet are being pushed into laying off collectively over 20K people so this billionaire can recover a bit. Like, could this not be a national security issue? This man is able to have Google trash their open source initiatives on a whim, making the company weaker. It should be very very illegal.
1: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4567705-chris-hohn-tci-fund... 2: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fun...
This is broad and across the industry.
It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem.
Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer stories of gmail accounts getting shut off for no reason after 15 years with no recourse.
Ah, a man can dream.
> a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
So yeah, I would hope that an algorithm was used. As opposed to what? "I like that guy more than the other guy".
You seem to have the interpretation that some guy in finance wrote a script, it output some employee IDs, and then no one checked the output before laying them all off, as if slaves to the machine. Do you really believe that?
And based on that, absolutely I think Google did that. They run everything with data and statistics without humans. That's how they are so efficient.
This is backed up by the fact that the managers who work there were simply told who they were losing and had no input into the process, and aren't even aware of who has been let go yet.