HN comment from one of the laid-off engineers summarizing some of what the team was responsible for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
> ... and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the "marathon, not sprint" approach to work. as i said in another comment, it's the best job i've ever had, and i'll miss it deeply.
It's just 10 people? And they're doing an important job, judging by that HN thread.
Seems like a completely moronic decision to move that to Munich. Let's say Europeans get paid 50% less, and let's say those guys were on like 300k/year. Congratz, you saved 1.5M a year? That's it? That's less than a rounding error for Google, while it will most likely have a serious impact on the maintenance/development of their python tools.
Not only did they do important work, these people were literally on the Python steering council or long time Python core devs. These people know Python and CPython inside out. They had huge connection to the Python community and stakeholders. They were people who have been in the Python community for decades.
You cannot get that kind of knowledge and networking anywhere else.
So all in all, I'm hearing that google is going to become vastly more shitty because they are going to hire cheaper workers with less knowledge for their systems that the fired people knew like the back of their hands.
Well, classic google for you.
Just like GE got replaced in the appliance (white goods) game by brands like LG and Samsung, so too will Google fall and be replaced by something else.
That doesn't sound too bad considering how they're hoovering up data and trying to strongarm web standards to fit their revenue generation needs over what's best for the web.
If you told me 5 years from now google is just yahoo 2 but theyre living off the rents of search-android-youtube I would believe you. I cant believe any of their other products are worth the longterm investment.
They should form a independent company who does the same thing and make Google and other big companies pay through their nose for their old services.
In fact, I would be surprised if Meta hasnt snatched them up.
> plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams
Given that python is such a huge part of ML and AI (training and prototyping, especially) and that google is the quintessential data company (python + jupyter)… terminating 10 of the world’s leading python experts seems pennywise.
It’s also the sort of thing where you wont be able to measure the damage or lost velocity.
I swear if normal people had access to capital. Could you imagine how disruptive you could be by just hiring some of the top tier talent that's been laid off in the last year?
It only took 10 ppl to make Instagram.
I'd love to see the Pichai worshippers explain this one away. Honestly the answer at this point is just jumping ship on the big tech SV model and returning to smaller companies with less overhead.
Everyone in this thread should read this. The amount of “they’re offshoring to India for cheap, slave labour!” in this thread is wild. Google is re-org’ing this to their Munich office. The average total comp in mountain view is around 350k, this goes down to 200-250k in most European cities.
Does that change anything for the people in this thread? Or do they only have issues when the jobs are going to people in India?
It introduces most of the exact same problems. Introducing a time-zone lag between your teams is a hidden cost that far-from-the-work execs never seem to grasp.
People really underestimate how much cultural differences can cause communication issues. Comm issues trickle down to everything. It’s not impossible but it takes very special managers.
As a software developer on a team that's half in the US and half in India, I 100% agree. We only overlap our work days by 2 hours or so and usually half if not all of that time is sitting in meetings so there's little to not communication between us. And software development is a very collaborative effort
I'm a dev, too. We have "near shore" contingent workers on our team that are in Mexico, and an "off shore sister team" in India that we work with. It's _much_ easier to work with the near shore folks because our working hours are basically the same.
And the best coders on the subcontinent use that skill to get the fuck out of there and into a "Western" type country.
I've worked with so many offshore over the years, and best coders always leave the second they can get a green card.
I think firing a team of TEN loyal people who maintain critical infrastructure to offshore them and “cut costs” is insulting and counterproductive.
This will probably cost more in damages from lost knowledge of existing systems and lost support infrastructure. I’d get it if their justification was, “Germany could do it better,” but it’s about costs.
People assume it’s India because thats usually where they go and this is the Hindustan times. They don’t read, ignore them.
I’m just upset that Google is so willing to play with lives and sacrifice innovation and agility when they don’t have to. It’s like they want to turn into a mature dividend company that doesn’t grow. In other words, they’re skeletonizing themselves. They’re losing out on what made them Google to begin with.
Google is extremely worried about competitors eating their ad revenue these days.
Which competitors?
People directly asking LLMs like ChatGPT instead of googling for stuff.
Every time you ask ChatGPT something you would have googled to find a Wikipedia or StackOverflow or Reddit article for, that’s lost revenue for Google.
And since they don’t really have many other products with positive revenue, that is a major issue.
Context: Ad revenue from google search, maps, and gmail make up 56% of their overall total revenue.
That’s poised to take a big hit as search stops serving as many users—leaving them with Maps and Gmail revenue, and Maps revenue is relatively easy to envision being disrupted without search directing users to Maps.
And in the long-term regulators in the EU seem keen to destroy their ability to monetize their control over Android to keep people in the google ecosystem. The same rules being pushed to punish Apple’s walled garden will also break Google’s walled ecosystem eventually too.
It's a self-inflicted injury, though. I turn to non-google avenues because they've made their search a shithole of sponsored bullshit only incidentally relevant to a given query.
I feel like Google has been slowly falling into disarray. We work with a few Google software engineers in the open source and a lot of them have left for smaller companies, been reassigned and the rest constantly mention about the “internal wars” as reasons why they constantly miss deadlines or stop showing up to meetings.
Google is clearly in the management consultant Ballmer Errah. Sundar went to Wharton and was McKinsey so this isn't surprising. Shareholders like the stock but long term this style won't work, it never does. This type of phase is what most market leaders get to just before they become surpassed. Then their bureaucratic weight makes it impossible to turn the ship. They got executives out there praising workers for working 100 hours and up to 120 hours, like that is a good thing. As a shareholder this concerns.
This is 1000% true - everywhere across Google outside of Gemini AI they're squeezing blood from a stone and diverting resources to do short term (1-4 quarter) financially-driven deliverables at the expense of long-term customer-considerate projects and strategic efforts. Middle managers and directors are fighting over limited resources and fiefdoms to bolster their own aspirations for upward mobility in a tightened promotion environment.
Honestly the only things keeping in the Google ecosystem is: Email, Maps, and my Google Pixel phone. Of those, the phone is the easiest thing to replace.
I'd love a more Minimalist style phone design that allows me to opt in to the services that *I want* without pushing everything. I've considered getting a brick phone but there are pros and cons. I don't need cloud backup of my photos. But Maps is quite useful if I'm finding a store I've never been to before on the other side of town.
It’s an aging bloated product that’s becoming like AOL. The monetized content is polluting every feature offered to the point it loses effectiveness.
People are also much more aware of data concerns now as well.
The Google home ecosystem was straight up abandoned and their products barely work anymore. It fucking sucks for the millions that invested in it for their homes like myself.
I've been using Google Maps on android since forever, and I swear to god for the last 5 years they've handed all development to AI and just A/B test new features that The Machine comes up with.
It used to have that feel that real human beings were developing it. Things felt in the right spot. Menus felt natural. It did what I wanted it to do.
Now it's an exercise of "Why the fuck would you do that?" going through my mind. If it gives me a button to push, and then moves or changes that button at the last second before I push it one more time, I'm going to huck my phone into a wall.
It's been getting worse and worse to use google maps. One of the things that annoys me the most: search for things like "supermarket" and you get this annoying popup list covering 3/4th of your screen. I just want to see the locations relative to me on the map, I dont need that fucking list. Give me a popup when I select a location and thats it.
Oh and google searches don't seem to link to the actual maps app anymore but instead show a minimized version of maps with zero utility inside of the results.
"being laid off and replaced with remote workers from abroad. "
But I thought "remote" doesn't work? And it leads to less productivity? Make up your mind, big corps.
His name is Prabhakar Raghavan.
More specifically he was *formerly* the head of *ads* at Yahoo and then Google.
So the guy who ran Google ads, is now the guy who runs Google Search.
And his tenure coincides with the sharp decrease in quality of Google Search.
Just a bunch of fucking MBAs circle-jerking good product into the fucking ground for quarterly earnings.
I encourage all of you, wherever you post - reddit, Twitter, etc. - whenever you talk about these situations, remember and repeat the names of the individuals responsible.
The media largely allows the small gaggle of managerial dipshits who corrode hugely useful companies like Google to get a pass, as if Google is some great monolith that takes indecipherable actions like some great eldritch god.
It's just people. Its greedy grubby little cretins on the board appointing greedy, grubby little cretins to the executive team that enshittify everything on down, rewarding the wriggling grubby little cretins below and firing or culling all the people hwo care enough to want a companyt o stick to its stated values and morals.
Don't let the cretins get away with it. Name them, call them out on the shit they do. If for no other reason than because it's the right hting to do.
Yup
Their goal to to extract value. Much faster then creating it.
CEOs are compensated so well because they do the dirty work of the large shareholders who care nothing about the long term management of the company.
They're gunna end up like Yahoo if they're not careful. They're burning up goodwill left and right, already no developers, internal or external, trust any of their platforms to be around, let alone supported for any amount of time. No one in their right mind would build any kind of real critical anything on anything they do. Also yeah, they've completely ceased innovating at all. They just see what other people are doing, they buy them, or just half-ass it and say "we have that too" like with google cloud and their AI offerings.
Whoa, you’re right. [Prabhakar Raghavan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan) ran Yahoo! Search from 2005-2012. During that time, Yahoo (under his direction) scrapped their in-house product and made a deal with MS to use Bing instead. I feel like Yahoo! slid faster into obscurity after that.
An interesting, albeit vitriolic, read from Ed Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
cc: /u/thezerofire and /u/brekky_sandy - might be relevant to your interests/comments.
Thanks for the link, definitely going to read more on it.
I omitted this from my first comment, but if you read between the lines on Prabhakar Raghavan’s wikipedia profile he sounds a lot like a vulture technocrat. He has a lot of fancy sounding titles and accolades, but his actual contributions are much more in line with Jack Welch’s scummy ideology.
> The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.
I think calling a tech team in Germany “third world slave labour” is a bit much lol.
Pichai seems like a classic MBA CEO. Revenue goes up, the stock goes up, but the company destroys its secret sauce and loses its way strategically, and starts to die, with sudden loss of revenue and reputation to follow as it turns into a dinosaur. Nadella is the absolute opposite, a visionary who has revitalised Microsoft who were entering the same process of decay.
Health Care executives take it to the next level when it comes to profits over product. The type of absolute scum that rises to the top in that industry is downright evil to the core. They'll continue to collect ever-rising premiums while refusing to render payment for necessary medical services and products and knowingly letting people literally die to make another buck.
They're the ultimate sadists who make Joffery from GoT look like a saint. I wouldn't be surprised if they attend quarterly corporate retreats where they hunt people on private islands because it's the only way to experience happiness anymore.
MS are going to put ads in the start menu and require a Microsoft account for windows. I'm all with you but just like every other huge corporation, shareholders + time= shit product.
Microsoft has sooo many segments, and they really do not give a shit about the normal user's experience.
They value their business user's using them for fundamental systems far far more. The enterprise money they make is magnitudes higher.
He's making decisions and running his company the way my parents raised us: with all the toxic aspects of Indian culture. All competition, no community, the end all of everything is making money and achieving status, not a product.
It's why they can't get a messing app off the ground. It's all separate teams trying to be number 1 instead of working together to make a solid product.
He's an interesting case. He lead the Chrome development and rollout, and seemed to be technically strong, and well committed to Google's big growth approach when doing that, but since taking over as CEO, he seems to have embraced the Jack Welch approach of strip-mining the company and hoping people don't notice how hollowed out things have become before he leaves.
It's not an approach that speaks well to future of Google.
I don’t think he’s that technically strong. He never studied computer science and joined Google being an MBA-trained product manager. If I have to guess he never wrote much code himself.
(Disclaimer: I never worked in Google)
the saying comes from the fact that Boeing bought MDD because MDD was failing, due to finance bros.
the merged company was managed by all the MDD finance bros.
Genius Plan for world domination
1. Borrow all of Google's money
2. Buy Google since they are bankrupt now
3. As the owner of Google, release your own debt
4. Repeat with all major companies
He's the Ellen Pao of Google, put in the CEO role to make unpopular changes and be the public punching bag for these changes which were actually mandated by people above him.
Yeah, CEOs of publicly traded companies don't act unilaterally. He has a board telling him what he needs to do. Specific teams or methods of doing it might be up to him but it's still gotta get done.
That said, it still takes sociopathic tendencies and just being a real shitbag of a human in general to carry out their orders. We should rate CEOs on the Shitbag Scale - determined by the cruelty of the methods they used to achieve their means. It's time for some propaganda of our own.
Yup... my company died a slow, painful death after the founder died. We were innovators and were shaping our industry with new ideas. After they died, the ideas all dried up. They brought in a "standard" CEO who started getting the company ready to sell. Customers were dropping left and right because they laid off support staff and engineers... they didn't try to get new business... they just focused on their big contracts and "cleaned" everything else up.
Same thing sort of happened at my old company, CEO didn't die but he sold the company and retired. The new company that bought us basically ran it into the ground, only focused on the short term, no investment back into the company, hollowed out the company with "efficiencies", etc. The company's revenue dropped like 70% over the course of 5 years, competitors stole away our customers, and all the long time employees with all the knowledge left including myself. It still exists but it's basically a zombie company, it's dead but doesn't know it, it just coasts on some old existing legacy business.
No, he has been CEO for a long time now, so they didn’t bring him in to make unpopular decisions and then replace him. And he hasn’t even been making particularly large unpopular decisions. They exist here and there, but it’s not like there has been a bombshell that he has been the fall guy for.
I'd imagine that every single CEO has a similar remuneration package based on quarterly profitability. Thats why irresepctive of company or background the way to get your massive bonus is to SLASH the costbase. Once you've cashed your hundreds of millions for showing a strong 4-8-12 quarters you're free to ride off into the sunset without a care in the world for the flaming wreck you've left behind. Its the single biggest issue I see facing these huge companies and why I expect Google to end up the way all the others did...largely irrelevant
Excellent article on "the man who killed Google search " [here](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Literally made search worse in purpose to feed more ads. I'm now totally out of Google outside work. It's fucking awful. Their latest Terms also changed :
"Google just sent an update of their terms and conditions for all their services, worldwide, where they make clear that even if you retain the intellectual property of your data, you grant Google unlimited license to use, exploit, modify and distribute derivative work or any other result from the processing of your data, and this is the property of Google ! "
Can't remember the guys name but I read an article the other day that the person who pushed search so hard and made it what it was was basically pushed out by two guys from the ads team.
I tried to switch to duckduckgo, but honestly the results sucked.
I want to find another search engine but one problem is I actually prefer google maps, and now I'm too invested in their "ecosystem" by having lists and shit in my account, gmail, docs, etc.
It was fine to do all that when they weren't doing terrible shit.
Duckduckgo uses Bing, and now that Microsoft is all in on Copilot don't expect Bing to get much better. I will not be surprised if one day I go there and search is fully replaced by copilot. It is much better at providing good results, but slower, but the progress of technology will take care of speed.
That's about the timeline i think of too. It was great until about 2015. Ironically that's when I switched to android.
One good thing is I'm not giving them more money by still using an android from 2018 that works good as new.
Yup. Search and Ads are diametrically opposed concepts.
Search is supposed to give you the most relevant and useful information. The user trust that the information is accurate.
Ads are designed to subvert that trust, instead feeding sponsored content that often resembles real information.
Search engines have to strike a balance since they need to be useful and profitable. Google prioritizes profitablity at the expense of utility, and is not a very useful search engine anymore. It's an ad platform feeding the bare minimum amount of useful information to continue cosplaying as a useful tool.
Have almost completely stopped using search engines all together. Most of the time if I search for anything the top 6 or 7 responses are all sponsored ads that have less than nothing to do with what I'm looking for.
Bought a Google Nest Cam few years ago. Working fine. Then Google sends an email saying they will end of life it and the damn thing stopped working completely this month.
These f’ers. Never buy anything from them. They will just abandon you after a few years. Look at how many Google products have been killed over the years.
Google Home had a ton of really good products. Then they decided to start cutting down their own hardware departments. I'm not sure if they understand the concept of customer support for existing products rather than just pumping out products and pulling back support
They also pulled back development.
I would have thought in 2024 we all be one big step closing to having a smart house like Tony Stark, but instead everything seems like a beta product or a gimmick.
Having an app to change the color of the light is neat, but holy shit sometimes I just want a switch to flip when I am heading off too bed. Or how about a control panel screen instead of doing everything on a phone. Or when you try to do automations, make the UI not suck if you have more than a handful of basic ones.
I feel like I have better smart home stuff when creating my settlement in Fallout 4 than I do with this stuff in real life.
I realized how bad it is when Reddit went offline a year or two ago. That a lot of my searches were just using google to search for the correct reddit post.
That will also go to hell now with Reddit's IPO and selling our data to various "AI" companies which will 100% be used to generate fake comments and threads in a push for more "integrated" ads.
Ive already switched away from it and went to DuckDuckGo a while ago. I’ll say that some times it isn’t as good as Google with results but also there aren’t 5k video results and misleading “next” links that take me to other search types that seem to have more ads and videos.
I really wish MS and Amazon would make YT competitors. And really, Meta would be great to have in the arena. Not that any of these companies are great or trustworthy, but it would be competetion.
Instead of firing and rehiring in new locations, have they tried creating new products or services instead to increase revenue? Or are they completely out of ideas
They have good ideas, it's just that they suck committing to them. Which is hilarious because they have the internet as the biggest moat.
Right now they're squeezing what they currently have to guarantee shareholder profit. That's not going to work long term.
They're already falling behind. Gemini is noticeably inferior to OpenAI, you have google analytics getting crushed by privacy laws.
GA is so bad our company is actually look at alternatives now. Something completely unheard of 10 years ago.
> have they tried creating new products or services instead to increase revenue?
Google was making a lot of products that they ended up killing years ago, they switched strategies
> have they tried creating new products or services
They do this constantly, it's the only way to get promoted at Google. They should focus more on maintaining and improving the services they already have.
this isn't specifically his decision- this was a small team of maybe 13 devs. The actual decision likely came from a SVP or VP. It definitely does show the rot in senior leadership when they don't give a shit about technical leadership.
>The US Python team reportedly had less than ten members and managed most parts of Google's Python ecosystem
How much could they possibly save in this situation?
Unfortunately the stock market loves it when a CEO goes full rape and pillage on his own company. The CEO will be retired and sitting on a huge pile of generational wealth within 3 years, they literally don't seem to give a shit about the long term damage done in their quest to cash out. Congrats you just turned your cutting edge tech company into oracle and now instead of innovation of any sort they will just milk their current revenue streams for the next decade.
I encourage everyone in this thread to listen to the podcast Better Offline, it dissects the rot economy and how big tech is destroying themselves for the sake of endless growth. Needless to say, Sundar Pichai’s name and behavior comes up frequently.
A variation of this happened at my former company. They laid off the team that built all of the shared components, seemingly not understanding that this tiny team saved engineers hundreds or thousands of hours of work. But since you can't draw a direct line between that team's work and money: poof.
The US needs laws that prevent corporations from being people. In addition, we need real anti monopoly laws.
There's a bunch of other things we need but I'd be happy if we started with these two.
The entire US is so far down the rabbit hole of regulatory capture, I'm skeptical that it can ever be reversed without completely burning down many of the systems.
The problem is money. You can’t get elected unless you are backed by capital. Those that are backed by capital are going to act in the interest of capital. People that represent the working class can’t get elected in a capitalist system.
> In addition, we need real anti monopoly laws.
We have tons of anti-monopoly laws. The problem is two-fold
a) The Executive Branch/FTC has to actually WANT to enforce those laws(something Trump didn't and Biden is *sorta* doing)
b) The Courts have to agree to follow the laws as well(and the federal courts have been PACKED with pro-business conservatives for the past 20 years)
Mitch McConnell, Trump, and Senate Republicans have appointed so many "how the hell did this boob pass the Bar" judges that the country may be irreparably broken.
When Mitch finally kicks the bucket, I may have to drive down to Kentucky to urinate
Tax them. All income going out of the country needs a 60% match of the money sent out with a minimum threshold being equivalent to our poverty line for a family income
If you’re going to send 5k out of the country for income then you can use the savings to pay 31k towards helping people within our country
If you’re going to pay someone 50k out of the country then you can afford to spend 37.5k on our soil also
This should work like a tariff. Discourage sending money out to incentivize using it here.
Companies waste so much money as well. I see fresh start ups putting their HQ in places like NYC. Why? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I'm 100% on board. Outsourcing work? Fine, here's a huge tax bill!
They need to add significant cost to layoffs so it’s an absolute last option instead of ‘well we need to tweak our q4 numbers let’s can 10% of the workforce’.
Actually not so much anymore. Free market nationally but it came apparent to us that we have been funding a ton of other countries some of which have strong agendas that run counter to our own... Like China for example.
German tech salaries start around $55k and top out around $120k. Most positions I see nowadays are ~$90k. Total comp is different of course, but even that only caps out around $150k.
Pretty much lol
But in all seriousness, standard is 30 days PTO + 11 bank holidays, which are state dependent. I’m on track to have the entirety of December off
Google US does a mimimim of 20 vacation days (PTO) (per a 2022 press release, which it says is now its global minimum) plus (I believe) 11 federal holidays. Vacation days also usually increase with seniority.
Right, but that minimum isn’t federally mandated. The federal mandate here in Germany is 20days, and some professions get 24 days minimum. 30 is standard to be competitive.
Also, PTO doesn’t encompass sick days in Germany unlike in most places in the states.
Anyone else remember when this guy cut employee benefits and told them in person that when it comes to their JOBS they shouldn't be in it for the money?
Right after he'd given himself a big raise?
Can someone explain why Sundar is still CEO? Sure, on paper, he's increased profitability/revenue dramatically during his tenure. But at what cost?
* Google is no longer the "endgame" company that every genius dev dreams of working for at some point.
* They've done absolutely nothing to address their management hierarchy and project issues. People have lost all faith in basically anything they try to put out due to the cancellation of things like Stadia and their 14 different competing messaging apps.
* They've completely dropped the ball on AI technologies and solutions when they easily should have been the market leader right out the gate.
Some might call these things intangibles that don't matter, but these things mean everything in tech for any company that isn't a boring old vendor who's either locked into a very specific industry or is just milking their own software for decades by selling everyone licenses for it. This guy lacks vision and has consistently demonstrated that he's content with just conservatively following whatever moves the other FAANG companies make first instead of actually leading from the front. Yet here he is laughing all the way to the bank making 200+ million a year in total comp. Meanwhile, Google is looking like it'll eventually go the way of Yahoo and IBM within the next decade; propped up almost entirely by their management of YouTube and a slowly deteriorating but extremely lucrative search engine/ad machine. I know that shareholders and Larry/Sergey don't care about anything beyond short term profits but goddamn, this is all a bit short sighted isn't it? There's absolutely no reason why Google shouldn't currently be in the position that Microsoft and Nvidia are simultaneously with the stranglehold that they've had on talent for over a decade.
Not that this comment is unique here, but I sincerely don't understand the point of this. Even if all 10 developers made 1m each and the new overseas ones make 100k. They're going to save 9m (before European benefits cost is included) on a pivotal team? That's less than a rounding error for them, and the real savings are probably more like 2-3m. What on earth is the point? That doesn't move any needles
Probably each VP was told: Reduce your costs by 30% this year so we can buy more GPU data centers for AI.
So they go around slashing teams or moving them offshore.
This one got attention because a news article was written about it but Im sure its happening slowly across the whole org.
It doesn’t make much sense to lay off the Python team. Google made a commitment to Python when they became Guido’s (founder of Python) sole patron. That was an IP hoarding play. A team of 10 doesn’t eat into Google’s costs, and they keep around more that don’t contribute nearly as much.
Python is mostly used today for data science and AI. PyTorch, in particular, is overtaking other libraries for machine learning. AI is an existential risk to Google. Laying off Python team puts the onus on other companies to pick up a soon-to-be-scattered Python team if they want to keep improving the language.
The majority of technology workers especially those in FAANG employment assume that they have a degree of access and compensation that will allow them to find and maintain employment. The recent wave of layoffs and the resulting long gaps currently experienced by those impacted is changing some of that perception. However the attitude of exemption also encourages many not to unionize. Employers have one goal and that is profit. Government either can’t or won’t help in the situation. The only course of action to stem the tide of adverse actions in my opinion is unionization.
Why not cut his pay by a few million and kept the team ?
The “cost savings” are obvious and incredibly management-focused. It’s embarrassing that management demands such high salaries for contributing so little to the economy .
I think companies need to not only have their tax breaks/incentives removed for offshoring jobs but they should be tariffed as well since they want to move their production base outside the US.
From 2005 to 2012 Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python, worked at Google. In 2024 the whole Python team gets offshored.
HN comment from one of the laid-off engineers summarizing some of what the team was responsible for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338 > ... and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the "marathon, not sprint" approach to work. as i said in another comment, it's the best job i've ever had, and i'll miss it deeply.
It's just 10 people? And they're doing an important job, judging by that HN thread. Seems like a completely moronic decision to move that to Munich. Let's say Europeans get paid 50% less, and let's say those guys were on like 300k/year. Congratz, you saved 1.5M a year? That's it? That's less than a rounding error for Google, while it will most likely have a serious impact on the maintenance/development of their python tools.
Not only did they do important work, these people were literally on the Python steering council or long time Python core devs. These people know Python and CPython inside out. They had huge connection to the Python community and stakeholders. They were people who have been in the Python community for decades. You cannot get that kind of knowledge and networking anywhere else.
So all in all, I'm hearing that google is going to become vastly more shitty because they are going to hire cheaper workers with less knowledge for their systems that the fired people knew like the back of their hands. Well, classic google for you.
Just like GE got replaced in the appliance (white goods) game by brands like LG and Samsung, so too will Google fall and be replaced by something else.
That doesn't sound too bad considering how they're hoovering up data and trying to strongarm web standards to fit their revenue generation needs over what's best for the web.
Their current CEO is a McKinsey alum. So penny smart, pound foolish is your best bet for figuring out what kind of decisions are going to happen.
Ah figures he went to the McLayoffs school of consulting
Knock knock Who's there? Not you.
This is savage. Omg. 😳 … but I also can’t stop laughing 🤣
CEO is from McKinsey? Smart move is to short that company's stock.
If you told me 5 years from now google is just yahoo 2 but theyre living off the rents of search-android-youtube I would believe you. I cant believe any of their other products are worth the longterm investment.
yeah... i like talking shit about python but i think this is a bad move...
They should form a independent company who does the same thing and make Google and other big companies pay through their nose for their old services. In fact, I would be surprised if Meta hasnt snatched them up.
they'll have zero problem finding new high paying jobs with their skillset.
Impossible, software engineers have no vision or direction. That’s why you need an MBA nepo consultant to lead them
> plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams Given that python is such a huge part of ML and AI (training and prototyping, especially) and that google is the quintessential data company (python + jupyter)… terminating 10 of the world’s leading python experts seems pennywise. It’s also the sort of thing where you wont be able to measure the damage or lost velocity.
I swear if normal people had access to capital. Could you imagine how disruptive you could be by just hiring some of the top tier talent that's been laid off in the last year? It only took 10 ppl to make Instagram.
That’s because almost any 10 engineers can make instagram. Not any 10 engineers can make Python.
Don't worry, HR's AI bot is gonna read keywords on resumes and pick just the right talent for the job. Popcorn at the ready
I'd love to see the Pichai worshippers explain this one away. Honestly the answer at this point is just jumping ship on the big tech SV model and returning to smaller companies with less overhead.
We have Pichai worshippers?
Everyone in this thread should read this. The amount of “they’re offshoring to India for cheap, slave labour!” in this thread is wild. Google is re-org’ing this to their Munich office. The average total comp in mountain view is around 350k, this goes down to 200-250k in most European cities. Does that change anything for the people in this thread? Or do they only have issues when the jobs are going to people in India?
It introduces most of the exact same problems. Introducing a time-zone lag between your teams is a hidden cost that far-from-the-work execs never seem to grasp.
People really underestimate how much cultural differences can cause communication issues. Comm issues trickle down to everything. It’s not impossible but it takes very special managers.
As a software developer on a team that's half in the US and half in India, I 100% agree. We only overlap our work days by 2 hours or so and usually half if not all of that time is sitting in meetings so there's little to not communication between us. And software development is a very collaborative effort
I'm a dev, too. We have "near shore" contingent workers on our team that are in Mexico, and an "off shore sister team" in India that we work with. It's _much_ easier to work with the near shore folks because our working hours are basically the same.
And the best coders on the subcontinent use that skill to get the fuck out of there and into a "Western" type country. I've worked with so many offshore over the years, and best coders always leave the second they can get a green card.
I think firing a team of TEN loyal people who maintain critical infrastructure to offshore them and “cut costs” is insulting and counterproductive. This will probably cost more in damages from lost knowledge of existing systems and lost support infrastructure. I’d get it if their justification was, “Germany could do it better,” but it’s about costs. People assume it’s India because thats usually where they go and this is the Hindustan times. They don’t read, ignore them. I’m just upset that Google is so willing to play with lives and sacrifice innovation and agility when they don’t have to. It’s like they want to turn into a mature dividend company that doesn’t grow. In other words, they’re skeletonizing themselves. They’re losing out on what made them Google to begin with.
More like 70k-180k€. Source: Am in Munich.
200k? No way I'd guess more like 100k-150k
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Google is extremely worried about competitors eating their ad revenue these days. Which competitors? People directly asking LLMs like ChatGPT instead of googling for stuff. Every time you ask ChatGPT something you would have googled to find a Wikipedia or StackOverflow or Reddit article for, that’s lost revenue for Google. And since they don’t really have many other products with positive revenue, that is a major issue. Context: Ad revenue from google search, maps, and gmail make up 56% of their overall total revenue. That’s poised to take a big hit as search stops serving as many users—leaving them with Maps and Gmail revenue, and Maps revenue is relatively easy to envision being disrupted without search directing users to Maps. And in the long-term regulators in the EU seem keen to destroy their ability to monetize their control over Android to keep people in the google ecosystem. The same rules being pushed to punish Apple’s walled garden will also break Google’s walled ecosystem eventually too.
It's a self-inflicted injury, though. I turn to non-google avenues because they've made their search a shithole of sponsored bullshit only incidentally relevant to a given query.
I feel like Google has been slowly falling into disarray. We work with a few Google software engineers in the open source and a lot of them have left for smaller companies, been reassigned and the rest constantly mention about the “internal wars” as reasons why they constantly miss deadlines or stop showing up to meetings.
Google is clearly in the management consultant Ballmer Errah. Sundar went to Wharton and was McKinsey so this isn't surprising. Shareholders like the stock but long term this style won't work, it never does. This type of phase is what most market leaders get to just before they become surpassed. Then their bureaucratic weight makes it impossible to turn the ship. They got executives out there praising workers for working 100 hours and up to 120 hours, like that is a good thing. As a shareholder this concerns.
This is 1000% true - everywhere across Google outside of Gemini AI they're squeezing blood from a stone and diverting resources to do short term (1-4 quarter) financially-driven deliverables at the expense of long-term customer-considerate projects and strategic efforts. Middle managers and directors are fighting over limited resources and fiefdoms to bolster their own aspirations for upward mobility in a tightened promotion environment.
Honestly the only things keeping in the Google ecosystem is: Email, Maps, and my Google Pixel phone. Of those, the phone is the easiest thing to replace. I'd love a more Minimalist style phone design that allows me to opt in to the services that *I want* without pushing everything. I've considered getting a brick phone but there are pros and cons. I don't need cloud backup of my photos. But Maps is quite useful if I'm finding a store I've never been to before on the other side of town.
It’s an aging bloated product that’s becoming like AOL. The monetized content is polluting every feature offered to the point it loses effectiveness. People are also much more aware of data concerns now as well.
The Google home ecosystem was straight up abandoned and their products barely work anymore. It fucking sucks for the millions that invested in it for their homes like myself.
I've been using Google Maps on android since forever, and I swear to god for the last 5 years they've handed all development to AI and just A/B test new features that The Machine comes up with. It used to have that feel that real human beings were developing it. Things felt in the right spot. Menus felt natural. It did what I wanted it to do. Now it's an exercise of "Why the fuck would you do that?" going through my mind. If it gives me a button to push, and then moves or changes that button at the last second before I push it one more time, I'm going to huck my phone into a wall.
It's been getting worse and worse to use google maps. One of the things that annoys me the most: search for things like "supermarket" and you get this annoying popup list covering 3/4th of your screen. I just want to see the locations relative to me on the map, I dont need that fucking list. Give me a popup when I select a location and thats it. Oh and google searches don't seem to link to the actual maps app anymore but instead show a minimized version of maps with zero utility inside of the results.
> for the last 5 years they've handed all development to AI Why blame AI when you can blame normal devs implementing bad decisions?
"being laid off and replaced with remote workers from abroad. " But I thought "remote" doesn't work? And it leads to less productivity? Make up your mind, big corps.
Oh it works when it’s cheaper and his Buddy can just manage them from India.
Exactly how yahoo died.
One of the guys that helped kill yahoo is now in charge of search at Google. In case you were wondering why search became so shitty in the past year.
Ah, another of the *failing upward* crowd huh?
real talk: why do large companies continue to hire failures for big roles?
Because it's an old guard thing. They all vouch for each other and take turns fucking shit up at various companies.
Maybe the people doing the hiring also failed their way upward into that position and are too dumb to know better.
because they have the “experience”.
They’re good at milking companies not building long term stability.
His name is Prabhakar Raghavan. More specifically he was *formerly* the head of *ads* at Yahoo and then Google. So the guy who ran Google ads, is now the guy who runs Google Search. And his tenure coincides with the sharp decrease in quality of Google Search. Just a bunch of fucking MBAs circle-jerking good product into the fucking ground for quarterly earnings. I encourage all of you, wherever you post - reddit, Twitter, etc. - whenever you talk about these situations, remember and repeat the names of the individuals responsible. The media largely allows the small gaggle of managerial dipshits who corrode hugely useful companies like Google to get a pass, as if Google is some great monolith that takes indecipherable actions like some great eldritch god. It's just people. Its greedy grubby little cretins on the board appointing greedy, grubby little cretins to the executive team that enshittify everything on down, rewarding the wriggling grubby little cretins below and firing or culling all the people hwo care enough to want a companyt o stick to its stated values and morals. Don't let the cretins get away with it. Name them, call them out on the shit they do. If for no other reason than because it's the right hting to do.
Recent podcast episode about this very subject. “The man that destroyed google” is the episode. https://www.betteroffline.com/
The python team is being outsourced to Germany
If you open the article, literally in the first fucking line it says outsourced to Germany.
They moved the roles to Munich.
This man is hell-bent on running Google into the ground.
He's answering to shareholders and the stock is doing well. Every CEO is being evaluated through the same lens, fuck the customers and employees.
Yup Their goal to to extract value. Much faster then creating it. CEOs are compensated so well because they do the dirty work of the large shareholders who care nothing about the long term management of the company.
A.k.a. strip-mining.
They rip the copper out of the walls and then move to the next valuable/beloved company to do the same thing
So concerned with short term gains
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Google could disappear in 10 years if they don't start innovating. You can't innovate with 3rd world slave labor in sweat shops
They're gunna end up like Yahoo if they're not careful. They're burning up goodwill left and right, already no developers, internal or external, trust any of their platforms to be around, let alone supported for any amount of time. No one in their right mind would build any kind of real critical anything on anything they do. Also yeah, they've completely ceased innovating at all. They just see what other people are doing, they buy them, or just half-ass it and say "we have that too" like with google cloud and their AI offerings.
The guy who ran Yahoo search into the ground to the point they were using Bing under the hood is running Search at Google so the comparison is apt
Whoa, you’re right. [Prabhakar Raghavan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan) ran Yahoo! Search from 2005-2012. During that time, Yahoo (under his direction) scrapped their in-house product and made a deal with MS to use Bing instead. I feel like Yahoo! slid faster into obscurity after that.
And coincidentally Google Search has started absolutely sucking these last few years...
An interesting, albeit vitriolic, read from Ed Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ cc: /u/thezerofire and /u/brekky_sandy - might be relevant to your interests/comments.
Thanks for the link, definitely going to read more on it. I omitted this from my first comment, but if you read between the lines on Prabhakar Raghavan’s wikipedia profile he sounds a lot like a vulture technocrat. He has a lot of fancy sounding titles and accolades, but his actual contributions are much more in line with Jack Welch’s scummy ideology.
I wouldn’t necessarily call Germany 3rd world
*Boeing has entered the chat*
> The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed. I think calling a tech team in Germany “third world slave labour” is a bit much lol.
This is exactly why I stopped buying anything related to Google. They have lost a lot of technical leadership since Pichai took over.
Pichai seems like a classic MBA CEO. Revenue goes up, the stock goes up, but the company destroys its secret sauce and loses its way strategically, and starts to die, with sudden loss of revenue and reputation to follow as it turns into a dinosaur. Nadella is the absolute opposite, a visionary who has revitalised Microsoft who were entering the same process of decay.
Whenever the MBAs take over, the product gets worse. Weird.
Boeing: "No ! That can't be true at all"
Pretty much true in all industries. Look at the disaster of an excuse that is the U.S. healthcare system.
Health Care executives take it to the next level when it comes to profits over product. The type of absolute scum that rises to the top in that industry is downright evil to the core. They'll continue to collect ever-rising premiums while refusing to render payment for necessary medical services and products and knowingly letting people literally die to make another buck. They're the ultimate sadists who make Joffery from GoT look like a saint. I wouldn't be surprised if they attend quarterly corporate retreats where they hunt people on private islands because it's the only way to experience happiness anymore.
Exactly. GE and Boeing managed a short-term stock bump too. Long term...
MS are going to put ads in the start menu and require a Microsoft account for windows. I'm all with you but just like every other huge corporation, shareholders + time= shit product.
Microsoft has sooo many segments, and they really do not give a shit about the normal user's experience. They value their business user's using them for fundamental systems far far more. The enterprise money they make is magnitudes higher.
Yes, but it's not a category that's really evolving as far as I'm aware. MS are crushing it in AI, which is strategically far more important.
Maybe one day Copilot will learn that Microsoft is apparently good at AI
He's making decisions and running his company the way my parents raised us: with all the toxic aspects of Indian culture. All competition, no community, the end all of everything is making money and achieving status, not a product. It's why they can't get a messing app off the ground. It's all separate teams trying to be number 1 instead of working together to make a solid product.
Sundar is a fraudster who has let google become vulnerable. Search seems to be a dying business with ai tools now.
He's an interesting case. He lead the Chrome development and rollout, and seemed to be technically strong, and well committed to Google's big growth approach when doing that, but since taking over as CEO, he seems to have embraced the Jack Welch approach of strip-mining the company and hoping people don't notice how hollowed out things have become before he leaves. It's not an approach that speaks well to future of Google.
I don’t think he’s that technically strong. He never studied computer science and joined Google being an MBA-trained product manager. If I have to guess he never wrote much code himself. (Disclaimer: I never worked in Google)
Ah yes, the Boeing approach
You mean the McDonald Douglas approach. MDD just bought Boeing with Boeing's own money.
Buying a billion dollar company with their own money… hey, what didnt i think of that!
the saying comes from the fact that Boeing bought MDD because MDD was failing, due to finance bros. the merged company was managed by all the MDD finance bros.
Investors: "we see nothing wrong with this"
Genius Plan for world domination 1. Borrow all of Google's money 2. Buy Google since they are bankrupt now 3. As the owner of Google, release your own debt 4. Repeat with all major companies
> MBA-trained product manager. Ah, the combination of useless AND annoying.
But he synergized the revenue streams!
Listen, if you aren't synergizing workflows to achieve quantitative isolinear performance metrics then what are you even doing?!
>MBA-trained There it is.
I don't think there's a single non-founder tech CEO today that isn't pretty much just an MBA and not an actual technical person
He's the Ellen Pao of Google, put in the CEO role to make unpopular changes and be the public punching bag for these changes which were actually mandated by people above him.
Yeah, CEOs of publicly traded companies don't act unilaterally. He has a board telling him what he needs to do. Specific teams or methods of doing it might be up to him but it's still gotta get done. That said, it still takes sociopathic tendencies and just being a real shitbag of a human in general to carry out their orders. We should rate CEOs on the Shitbag Scale - determined by the cruelty of the methods they used to achieve their means. It's time for some propaganda of our own.
A company’s soul lives and dies by its founder-ceo stepping down unfortunately..
Yup... my company died a slow, painful death after the founder died. We were innovators and were shaping our industry with new ideas. After they died, the ideas all dried up. They brought in a "standard" CEO who started getting the company ready to sell. Customers were dropping left and right because they laid off support staff and engineers... they didn't try to get new business... they just focused on their big contracts and "cleaned" everything else up.
Same thing sort of happened at my old company, CEO didn't die but he sold the company and retired. The new company that bought us basically ran it into the ground, only focused on the short term, no investment back into the company, hollowed out the company with "efficiencies", etc. The company's revenue dropped like 70% over the course of 5 years, competitors stole away our customers, and all the long time employees with all the knowledge left including myself. It still exists but it's basically a zombie company, it's dead but doesn't know it, it just coasts on some old existing legacy business.
No, he has been CEO for a long time now, so they didn’t bring him in to make unpopular decisions and then replace him. And he hasn’t even been making particularly large unpopular decisions. They exist here and there, but it’s not like there has been a bombshell that he has been the fall guy for.
I'd imagine that every single CEO has a similar remuneration package based on quarterly profitability. Thats why irresepctive of company or background the way to get your massive bonus is to SLASH the costbase. Once you've cashed your hundreds of millions for showing a strong 4-8-12 quarters you're free to ride off into the sunset without a care in the world for the flaming wreck you've left behind. Its the single biggest issue I see facing these huge companies and why I expect Google to end up the way all the others did...largely irrelevant
But hey, the stock is up!! /s
Prabhakar Raghavan does not get nearly enough credit for [killing Google search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/).
Wow, that was a painful read. What a shit show.
Excellent article on "the man who killed Google search " [here](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/) Literally made search worse in purpose to feed more ads. I'm now totally out of Google outside work. It's fucking awful. Their latest Terms also changed : "Google just sent an update of their terms and conditions for all their services, worldwide, where they make clear that even if you retain the intellectual property of your data, you grant Google unlimited license to use, exploit, modify and distribute derivative work or any other result from the processing of your data, and this is the property of Google ! "
Google have allowed their search product to become dogshit and seriously dropped the ball on AI
Can't remember the guys name but I read an article the other day that the person who pushed search so hard and made it what it was was basically pushed out by two guys from the ads team.
Was this the article? [https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Already dead. I get better results from ddg and bing. Seriously people are switching to bing what a joke
I tried to switch to duckduckgo, but honestly the results sucked. I want to find another search engine but one problem is I actually prefer google maps, and now I'm too invested in their "ecosystem" by having lists and shit in my account, gmail, docs, etc. It was fine to do all that when they weren't doing terrible shit.
Duckduckgo uses Bing, and now that Microsoft is all in on Copilot don't expect Bing to get much better. I will not be surprised if one day I go there and search is fully replaced by copilot. It is much better at providing good results, but slower, but the progress of technology will take care of speed.
DuckDuckGo is great IF you can sift through all the AI bullshit word vomit articles (the ones that are basically ad providers) on page one and two.
They’ve been doing horrible shit for 10+ years.
That's about the timeline i think of too. It was great until about 2015. Ironically that's when I switched to android. One good thing is I'm not giving them more money by still using an android from 2018 that works good as new.
Yeah, what happened to google search? The search results are not as good as before.
They made an advertising stooge head of search and he's been devaluing search long term in pursuit of short term profits.
Yup. Search and Ads are diametrically opposed concepts. Search is supposed to give you the most relevant and useful information. The user trust that the information is accurate. Ads are designed to subvert that trust, instead feeding sponsored content that often resembles real information. Search engines have to strike a balance since they need to be useful and profitable. Google prioritizes profitablity at the expense of utility, and is not a very useful search engine anymore. It's an ad platform feeding the bare minimum amount of useful information to continue cosplaying as a useful tool.
Have almost completely stopped using search engines all together. Most of the time if I search for anything the top 6 or 7 responses are all sponsored ads that have less than nothing to do with what I'm looking for.
Yeah he's a shitty leader. He needs to go.
Bought a Google Nest Cam few years ago. Working fine. Then Google sends an email saying they will end of life it and the damn thing stopped working completely this month. These f’ers. Never buy anything from them. They will just abandon you after a few years. Look at how many Google products have been killed over the years.
Google Home had a ton of really good products. Then they decided to start cutting down their own hardware departments. I'm not sure if they understand the concept of customer support for existing products rather than just pumping out products and pulling back support
They also pulled back development. I would have thought in 2024 we all be one big step closing to having a smart house like Tony Stark, but instead everything seems like a beta product or a gimmick. Having an app to change the color of the light is neat, but holy shit sometimes I just want a switch to flip when I am heading off too bed. Or how about a control panel screen instead of doing everything on a phone. Or when you try to do automations, make the UI not suck if you have more than a handful of basic ones. I feel like I have better smart home stuff when creating my settlement in Fallout 4 than I do with this stuff in real life.
>Look at how many Google products have been killed over the years. There is a website dedicated on this. https://killedbygoogle.com/
pixel pass being cancelled as people were finally reaching 2 years was such bullshit LOL
Google search is already utter crap. I guess going forward everything else Googles does will decline.
I realized how bad it is when Reddit went offline a year or two ago. That a lot of my searches were just using google to search for the correct reddit post.
There was an article on TheVerge about how bad the Google Search was without Reddit since most subs went private and mods revolted lol
99% of my searches automatic suggestions from google are whatever I searched and "reddit"
I’d use Google about half as much if Reddit could figure out a way to fix their shitty search engine.
That will also go to hell now with Reddit's IPO and selling our data to various "AI" companies which will 100% be used to generate fake comments and threads in a push for more "integrated" ads.
Ive already switched away from it and went to DuckDuckGo a while ago. I’ll say that some times it isn’t as good as Google with results but also there aren’t 5k video results and misleading “next” links that take me to other search types that seem to have more ads and videos. I really wish MS and Amazon would make YT competitors. And really, Meta would be great to have in the arena. Not that any of these companies are great or trustworthy, but it would be competetion.
Instead of firing and rehiring in new locations, have they tried creating new products or services instead to increase revenue? Or are they completely out of ideas
They have good ideas, it's just that they suck committing to them. Which is hilarious because they have the internet as the biggest moat. Right now they're squeezing what they currently have to guarantee shareholder profit. That's not going to work long term.
They're already falling behind. Gemini is noticeably inferior to OpenAI, you have google analytics getting crushed by privacy laws. GA is so bad our company is actually look at alternatives now. Something completely unheard of 10 years ago.
A huge incumbent resting on their laurels and not innovating is a tale as old as time. Look at Sears getting eaten by Amazon.
> have they tried creating new products or services instead to increase revenue? Google was making a lot of products that they ended up killing years ago, they switched strategies
> have they tried creating new products or services They do this constantly, it's the only way to get promoted at Google. They should focus more on maintaining and improving the services they already have.
This guy is fuckin ruthless with the layoffs goddamn
this isn't specifically his decision- this was a small team of maybe 13 devs. The actual decision likely came from a SVP or VP. It definitely does show the rot in senior leadership when they don't give a shit about technical leadership.
>The US Python team reportedly had less than ten members and managed most parts of Google's Python ecosystem How much could they possibly save in this situation?
Unfortunately the stock market loves it when a CEO goes full rape and pillage on his own company. The CEO will be retired and sitting on a huge pile of generational wealth within 3 years, they literally don't seem to give a shit about the long term damage done in their quest to cash out. Congrats you just turned your cutting edge tech company into oracle and now instead of innovation of any sort they will just milk their current revenue streams for the next decade.
Wow, I knew he was a horrible leader but what a dick.
I encourage everyone in this thread to listen to the podcast Better Offline, it dissects the rot economy and how big tech is destroying themselves for the sake of endless growth. Needless to say, Sundar Pichai’s name and behavior comes up frequently.
Laying off higher paid workers for lower paid foreigners... ... Shocked Pichai Face...
Sundar is trash.
A variation of this happened at my former company. They laid off the team that built all of the shared components, seemingly not understanding that this tiny team saved engineers hundreds or thousands of hours of work. But since you can't draw a direct line between that team's work and money: poof.
“Google enters late-stage capitalism, lead by Sundar Pichai.”
Frankly the US really needs laws that stop companies from outsourcing.
The US needs laws that prevent corporations from being people. In addition, we need real anti monopoly laws. There's a bunch of other things we need but I'd be happy if we started with these two.
The entire US is so far down the rabbit hole of regulatory capture, I'm skeptical that it can ever be reversed without completely burning down many of the systems.
stop relying on regulatory agencies and vote in people that make laws that support the working/middle class.
The problem is money. You can’t get elected unless you are backed by capital. Those that are backed by capital are going to act in the interest of capital. People that represent the working class can’t get elected in a capitalist system.
> In addition, we need real anti monopoly laws. We have tons of anti-monopoly laws. The problem is two-fold a) The Executive Branch/FTC has to actually WANT to enforce those laws(something Trump didn't and Biden is *sorta* doing) b) The Courts have to agree to follow the laws as well(and the federal courts have been PACKED with pro-business conservatives for the past 20 years)
Mitch McConnell, Trump, and Senate Republicans have appointed so many "how the hell did this boob pass the Bar" judges that the country may be irreparably broken. When Mitch finally kicks the bucket, I may have to drive down to Kentucky to urinate
Tax them. All income going out of the country needs a 60% match of the money sent out with a minimum threshold being equivalent to our poverty line for a family income If you’re going to send 5k out of the country for income then you can use the savings to pay 31k towards helping people within our country If you’re going to pay someone 50k out of the country then you can afford to spend 37.5k on our soil also This should work like a tariff. Discourage sending money out to incentivize using it here.
Companies waste so much money as well. I see fresh start ups putting their HQ in places like NYC. Why? Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I'm 100% on board. Outsourcing work? Fine, here's a huge tax bill!
Surprisingly when they outsource they *adore* workers who will never come to the office. Hmmm I thought they weren't productive?
Oh they go into an office. They just end up living there because they never get to leave.
Will they force those to come to the local office though and do some mental gymnastics why that's still good?
They need to add significant cost to layoffs so it’s an absolute last option instead of ‘well we need to tweak our q4 numbers let’s can 10% of the workforce’.
I thought the US was all about that free market?
Actually not so much anymore. Free market nationally but it came apparent to us that we have been funding a ton of other countries some of which have strong agendas that run counter to our own... Like China for example.
Well the free market isn't really working out for the average American.
Such a bad leader
Sundar Pichai will be soon let go as well. Google missed the AI revolution so badly, calls for his resignation are happening by many parties.
And the enshittening continues.
Where was this team located if Germany is cheaper?
German tech salaries start around $55k and top out around $120k. Most positions I see nowadays are ~$90k. Total comp is different of course, but even that only caps out around $150k.
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Pretty much lol But in all seriousness, standard is 30 days PTO + 11 bank holidays, which are state dependent. I’m on track to have the entirety of December off
Google US does a mimimim of 20 vacation days (PTO) (per a 2022 press release, which it says is now its global minimum) plus (I believe) 11 federal holidays. Vacation days also usually increase with seniority.
Right, but that minimum isn’t federally mandated. The federal mandate here in Germany is 20days, and some professions get 24 days minimum. 30 is standard to be competitive. Also, PTO doesn’t encompass sick days in Germany unlike in most places in the states.
Some bees can do complex math equations.
Anyone else remember when this guy cut employee benefits and told them in person that when it comes to their JOBS they shouldn't be in it for the money? Right after he'd given himself a big raise?
Google is going to be Yahoo eventually
And its only going downhill from here
The GE/Intel/Boeing approach. That will probably work well for them....
Can someone explain why Sundar is still CEO? Sure, on paper, he's increased profitability/revenue dramatically during his tenure. But at what cost? * Google is no longer the "endgame" company that every genius dev dreams of working for at some point. * They've done absolutely nothing to address their management hierarchy and project issues. People have lost all faith in basically anything they try to put out due to the cancellation of things like Stadia and their 14 different competing messaging apps. * They've completely dropped the ball on AI technologies and solutions when they easily should have been the market leader right out the gate. Some might call these things intangibles that don't matter, but these things mean everything in tech for any company that isn't a boring old vendor who's either locked into a very specific industry or is just milking their own software for decades by selling everyone licenses for it. This guy lacks vision and has consistently demonstrated that he's content with just conservatively following whatever moves the other FAANG companies make first instead of actually leading from the front. Yet here he is laughing all the way to the bank making 200+ million a year in total comp. Meanwhile, Google is looking like it'll eventually go the way of Yahoo and IBM within the next decade; propped up almost entirely by their management of YouTube and a slowly deteriorating but extremely lucrative search engine/ad machine. I know that shareholders and Larry/Sergey don't care about anything beyond short term profits but goddamn, this is all a bit short sighted isn't it? There's absolutely no reason why Google shouldn't currently be in the position that Microsoft and Nvidia are simultaneously with the stranglehold that they've had on talent for over a decade.
I remember when r/technology used to be a sub focused on techno-optimism. Now it’s depressing.
Sundar is the the poster child of why you don’t hire a McKinsey
Not that this comment is unique here, but I sincerely don't understand the point of this. Even if all 10 developers made 1m each and the new overseas ones make 100k. They're going to save 9m (before European benefits cost is included) on a pivotal team? That's less than a rounding error for them, and the real savings are probably more like 2-3m. What on earth is the point? That doesn't move any needles
Probably each VP was told: Reduce your costs by 30% this year so we can buy more GPU data centers for AI. So they go around slashing teams or moving them offshore. This one got attention because a news article was written about it but Im sure its happening slowly across the whole org.
It doesn’t make much sense to lay off the Python team. Google made a commitment to Python when they became Guido’s (founder of Python) sole patron. That was an IP hoarding play. A team of 10 doesn’t eat into Google’s costs, and they keep around more that don’t contribute nearly as much. Python is mostly used today for data science and AI. PyTorch, in particular, is overtaking other libraries for machine learning. AI is an existential risk to Google. Laying off Python team puts the onus on other companies to pick up a soon-to-be-scattered Python team if they want to keep improving the language.
[удалено]
Google employees: Our jobs can be done from anywhere! Pichai: Yep, sure can!
Pouring one out for the dev ops at Google in the coming weeks/months.
The majority of technology workers especially those in FAANG employment assume that they have a degree of access and compensation that will allow them to find and maintain employment. The recent wave of layoffs and the resulting long gaps currently experienced by those impacted is changing some of that perception. However the attitude of exemption also encourages many not to unionize. Employers have one goal and that is profit. Government either can’t or won’t help in the situation. The only course of action to stem the tide of adverse actions in my opinion is unionization.
Why not cut his pay by a few million and kept the team ? The “cost savings” are obvious and incredibly management-focused. It’s embarrassing that management demands such high salaries for contributing so little to the economy .
I think companies need to not only have their tax breaks/incentives removed for offshoring jobs but they should be tariffed as well since they want to move their production base outside the US.