Google fires 31 massage therapists as part of layoffs

https://nypost.com/2023/01/26/google-fires-31-massage-therapists-as-part-of-layoffs/

by gmays • 3 years ago

48 77 3 years ago

pclmulqdq2• 3 years ago

When I worked there, it was already very difficult to book a time for a massage, and you got one massage every year for free, and had to pay for any additional ones. I never got one. The "benefit" of massages was already pretty much gone (except in name).

paulcole• 3 years ago

What years did you work there?

pclmulqdq2• 3 years ago

2018-2021, I was recent.

cmrdporcupine7• 3 years ago

Yep people need to understand that as a perk, this wasn't much. People were not getting free massages (which I guess they got in the early days the company maybe?) It just meant they'd bring a massage therapist on site, which you could book for your own $$ and get at a pretty reasonable rate, and I guess it wasn't looked down on that you would do this during the work day. But bookings were also often hard to get. And, yeah, some free massage points got deposited once a year for your birthday (most people I knew didn't ever use them.)

philliphaydon4• 3 years ago

Altho the massage therapists were hardly used by alot of people and maybe that's due to them being booked out or difficult to obtain bookings. I still think Google/Facebook/Twitter are just giant daycare centers for adult babies.

This is a generalisation but it's what it seems like when you have these people posting 'day in the life of twitter' 'day in the life as a google yelp elitist', etc. Where it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working.

We hear about these US jobs with perks, 200k salaries, shares, benefits bumping packages to like 500k etc, while outside of the US (atleast for me) we work hard for our salaries which pale in comparison.

bushbaba• 3 years ago

I worked at google in the mid 2010s. It was definitely a perk then with many colleagues booking massages every 2-3 weeks for free.

ciceryadam• 3 years ago

ExxonMobil Prague Corporate office has onsite massages: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/locations/czech-republic/ou...

Afaik you can have a 30 min session every month for free. Over here it's not that unusual of a perk to have even for non-IT desk jockey jobs.

distances• 3 years ago

I used to take a massage roughly every second week, as a normal developer in a normal European company. You would pay half of the cost and company the other half, which meant my part was 10€.

I felt it's a cheap way to keep neck issues at bay, benefiting everyone. Seems pointless to label it as something extravagant.

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

Fire 12000 employees, you need fewer massage therapists.

squarefoot• 3 years ago

If I worked in a place which started to sack people by the thousands, I'd probably need more treatment.

drcongo• 3 years ago

Where's @veen to tell us these people are the bourgeoise and we shouldn't feel sorry for them?

thih9• 3 years ago

Curious, how are contractors affected by these layoffs?

The article quotes the number of employees affected; does this number also include contractors? If not, would contractors have it better? Or worse?

ilyt• 3 years ago

I'd imagine significantly worse, as usual

oneoff786• 3 years ago

I’m not so sure. It can be easier to pay for contractors for various budgeting reasons.

rightbyte2• 3 years ago

Not necessarily. Google could be outsourcing and replacing FTEs with contractors to cut cost.

Most body shops should be significantly cheaper than the internal FAANG wage folks and of you don't cheap out too much about as good.

Remember the average tenure at Google is like what, two years? You lose almost nothing by going with contractors for two years instead.

0xmarcin• 3 years ago

Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long. Now the stakeholders want better results than one failed launch per year. It is unfathomable how GCP can be so far behind AWS and Azure. I think Google will soon have a new CEO, during last few years they provided very little innovation that can pay for itself.

throwaway5959• 3 years ago

I’m amazed that they don’t have a new CEO already, or at least haven’t dramatically cut his pay.

hnfong• 3 years ago

Multiple share classes means that Alphabet's CEO only needs to curry favor with two people to keep his job.

I wonder whether this would end up being a case study in MBA classes....

BuyMyBitcoins• 3 years ago

Further evidence that their core product, search, has deteriorated so badly that they can’t find a better CEO. /s

mnd999• 3 years ago

Cash burn or burn rate are usually terms applied to investor backed startups. Google is a profitable company, it doesn’t have cash burn.

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

There are no stakeholders, there is only Larry and Sergey. Due to the innovative IPO, the founders keep voting control of the company with only 3% ownership and the shareholders come along for the ride.

hansvm4• 3 years ago

Voting control gives you power, but you still have responsibilities. You can't just ignore those 97%.

echelon• 3 years ago

there is only Larry and Sergey.

Who are goofing off building blimps and flying on their private jets. They seem to have little interest in Google.

This is good if you're a founder. This massive chink in Google's armor could prove fatal. It's a tremendous opportunity that rarely presents itself.

They have a single biggest golden goose, and if it dies, they'll be in more dire straits than Intel.

Disrupt Google. They're so very vulnerable.

ajross• 3 years ago

I don't see how one gets the Stadia shutdown as a failure of management? As software, it worked really (frankly shockingly) well. You might argue that it was a failure of product targetting, maybe of business relationship management, maybe that the pricing didn't match the cost of service, etc...

But the employees tasked by Google to produce a cloud-based streaming gaming service, successfully shipped a cloud-based streaming gaming service. That's good management, not bad.

Edit: ooph, I can see where this is going but people have replied so I should leave it up. FWIW: the term "management" in this context is generally interpreted strictly, and not just a shorthand for "every decision made by an executive". The complaints people have with Stadia are better termed "marketing" (building the wrong product or canceling it too soon) or "sales" (failing to get enough games on the product). "Management" (the application of corporate resources to achieve results) did their job.

And in particular, in the context of layoffs ("management" by definition) it seems like the usage above was ambiguous enough to demand a correction. Stadia being mismarketed simply isn't relevant to the employment status of massage therapists.

hiddencost• 3 years ago

I think you're affirming what the parent said?

Engineering did their job, well. Leadership and product did not.

This has been the trend at Google during Sundar and Ruth's tenure: a company led by engineers became a company led by product management and finance.

And it shows. Google's made a crushing number of business decisions that flew in the face of good engineering principles, and undermined the company's excellence.

sitkack• 3 years ago

As typical here, you both aren’t taking about the same things.

One is talking about market strategy and perseverance. The other is talking about technical leadership.

You could have made the same insightful (inciteful) post by just commenting on how good technical leadership was.

I was shocked the other day when a solid respectable chip designer said Alpha was a failure because DEC went out of business.

kampsduac• 3 years ago

Where can I learn more about the claim that GCP is behind AWS and Azure?

sokoloff2• 3 years ago

Use any search engine for something like "AWS Azure GCP market share".

The first link I got was: https://wire19.com/amazon-microsoft-and-google-cloud-infrast... which shows AWS as 3+x GCP and Microsoft ~2x GCP.

xhkkffbf• 3 years ago

Yes. I'm curious too. The commodity servers seem competitive in terms of price and performance. Plus, it has several nice features like Firebase. But if someone wants to chime in, I would like to hear how they're behind.

mbesto• 3 years ago

Google is so badly managed.

Google's market cap is $1.2T and their TTM net income was ~$65B.

zoover20202• 3 years ago

I think heir comment was more talking from an R&D perspective, I.e. them being innovative.

I agree that slowly sliding the "% of ads our customers see"-slider to the right over the last couple of years until it becomes unbearable isn't really _that_ innovative but still yields a ton of profit.

qbasic_forever• 3 years ago

What cash burn? They've been turning profit quarter after quarter.

The cost of 31 massage therapists is a rounding error compared to salaries for senior engineers, of which there are tens of thousands employed.

hn_throwaway_995• 3 years ago

Saying a company is "burning cash" is not the same as saying they're unprofitable.

Indeed, the general argument is that Google's ads machine is so profitable that they can run the business horribly inefficiently because they don't know where to put all that cash.

hn_throwaway_995• 3 years ago

I think stuff like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion may light the fire under Google they finally need. Washington Post had a good article on this today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/27/chatgpt...

What happened to Google is what happens to all fat monopolists: they had the luxury of losing focus because their monopoly was so profitable. I do really feel that Google (among others) is finally seeing the type of existential risk much better AI is to Google's ad business. While I'm definitely not of the opinion that "ChatGPT is a Google killer", it's not that hard to see that a company whose velocity in this space is currently much faster that Google's could eventually overtake Google's bread-and-butter search business in 5-10 years.

Quarrelsome2• 3 years ago

FYI there are muscular issues that one can suffer from if they spend 12+ hours a day at a computer. I suffer from one of them and when it flares up productivity nosedives. In some cases muscles near nerves can trigger RSI-like symptoms which can be terrifying and debilitating.

So people that suggest this can only be "pampering" are perhaps missing this part of the puzzle.

hn_throwaway_995• 3 years ago

1. Google doesn't force (nor expect) any of it's employees to spend "12+ hours a day" in front of a computer.

2. Most (maybe all?) insurance plans will cover at least some number of medically prescribed massages. Furthermore, nearly all of the US workforce manages fairly decently without in-house massage staff.

It was a luxury perk simply because Google could afford it.

Quarrelsome2• 3 years ago

1. Ye but the type of people who work in tech overlay with many of the people that spend 12+ hours a day.

2. Ye but you have to sort that and go someplace else. Maybe you've got some crunch coming up and feel pressured to commit to the hours even if its burning, if its coming to your workplace, its way easier for it to happen.

ssnistfajen3• 3 years ago

Most companies that provide such perks would just cover it under employee medical insurance or "wellness" bonuses. 31 massage therapists would not have the capacity to serve 150k employees even if they worked 16hrs per day every day.

brilee• 3 years ago

Only FTE massage therapists were laid off, and their positions were reopened as contractor positions. It's a shitty but not unexpected move.

Google's first masseuse was FTE and got to be part of the IPO, so the symbolism is rich... https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html

motohagiography• 3 years ago

I always thought massage therapists in offices seemed a bit Marie Antoinette.

Showing appreciation with tokens of gratitude and respect is different from leaving a bowl of treats out, mostly because of the implied direction of the gratitude. Where if I give staff something thoughtful because I want to recognize them, gratitude is expressed toward them, whereas if I leave a bowl of treats out, their gratitutde is implied toward me. If someone said, "here are some luxury goods, enjoy them," and then said, "oh yeah, btw someone has to pay for those luxury goods you used, time to work them off," we have other words for what that is.

Imo, personal boundaries in an office environment provide dignity to people, which is an essential part of maintaining the high and elite-level performance mental health necessary to manage in professional environments. It's a kind of athleticism. Providing "treats" is (un-)subtly degrading, and as a direct result I would estimate that the level of staff well being in the dozens of companies I have consulted to was inversely proportional to the presence of snacks, alcohol, toys, beanbag chairs, and furry onesie costumes in their offices.

Sorry to hear the therapists were laid off, and they were probably the hardest working people at Google, but medium term, it sounds like it could be better for everyone involved.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

I didn't really used the massages, but one cool thing was that after I quit and Google and rejoined a few years later, that although I lost my options, I got back my massage points.

Google fires 31 massage therapists as part of layoffs

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