Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
Google’s death spiral will take a while but it’s clearly circle the drain.
It will likely never completely die the same way IBM never died but it will stop being the desired placed for new graduates.
Source: I’ve done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).
That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they’ll pay you every year is meaningless if they’ll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.
They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we’re a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.
Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how “fun” an office could be. They’re now relegated to normal companies…and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP’s move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?
IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They’ll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.
Openai lol.
the two big tech companies that showed people how “fun” an office could be. They’re now relegated to normal companies…and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners
- Stop making work engaging
- The geniuses act less engaged and leave or get salty (the Dead Sea Effect)
- “Why would millennials do this to us?”
Seems Google forgot what made it great.
But it’s correctable:
- let the smart people be smart
- hire and organize worker bees around the hard work of maintenance and code evolution that isn’t SRE
- don’t give up on slow starts (ohai Wave)
- run the old folks home for beloved projects that are just PR wins to keep people happy (ohai gReader, Picasa, and a cast of thousands)
Worker-bees don’t need to save the world every quarter. They also don’t earn the big bucks, but form the ecosystem to retain culture amid superstar churn.
Build a functional company again. And fire the people thinking quarter by quarter.
- Pichai ignores the fact that part of the reason the pay is so well at Big Tech is that they’re paying you to not have ethics. His failure to understand that is gonna seriously hurt Google.
- Looking for cheaper labor… in Germany? Where worker protections are WAY stronger than in the US? Lol. (That’s not a shot at Germany. That’s commentary on American labor protections, or lack thereof).
European salaries for software developers are half of what they are in the USA. It’s a problem on both sides of the Atlantic, honestly.
Source: software developer in Europe who usually works for American companies.
Be that as it may, Europeans don’t have to live with the constant fact that they might just lay you off today due to “staffing optimization” and there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do about it.
The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they’ll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.
If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals’ stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.
And, in the end, they’ll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated “we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button” basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.
Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don’t actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.
Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.
they can lobby the Feds
The reason why Tik Tok is getting banned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
Foreign governments and businesses have always been allowed to lobby US officials, under the condition that they register as agents of another government.
Banning TikTok doesn’t prevent business agents from Singapore or China from lobbying in the US. It doesn’t even prevent ByteDance specifically from lobbying in the US.
Ok? They still banned tik Tok because it was a threat to alphabet
The Senate dropped the original TikTok Ban Bill as a stand alone. The House stapled the TikTok ban to its Ukraine relief bill, which Schumer considered a Must-Pass. There’s no shortage of Silicon Valley shills in the Dem Majority US Senate, but that’s not why the amendment ultimately succeeded.
This is because Steven Mnuchin is trying to force a buyout for personal gain and lobbying Congressional Republicans to do his dirty work. Its got far less to do with Sundar Pichai fearing that TikTok might eclipse YouTube.
That’s nice. Doesn’t change what I said but whatever.
If you track the history of the failed independent TikTok bill in the Senate, you’ll understand the situation better.
We can always hope for another Enron.
As a Houston native that gives me IBS just to think about.
Which is annoying as people will say yeah but capitalism will bring competition. If Google isn’t doing well someone else will step up.
But no. They don’t. Google will be to big to fail and we will support them like you said.
capitalism will bring competition
Because we’re all trapped in the Primitive Accumulationist mindset long after the frontier has closed. Now there’s no more worlds to be conquered. The only question is who has the cheapest lines of credit.
Sundar Pichai-led company
Is that really a better description than just saying Google?
CEOs. Name them. Shame them.
Folks need to start naming Prabhakar Raghavan, he’s the mother fucker that fucked up the search side to increase ad revenue, which is what Pacai hired him to do like a good little McKinsey alum
he’s also the guy who wrecked yahoo search. fuck Prabhakar Raghavan.
Honestly he’s doing a great job of slowly killing the company.
