Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

https://www.semafor.com/article/01/10/2024/google-lays-off-hundreds-working-on-its-voice-activated-assistant

by thm • 3 years ago

240 251 3 years ago

fxtentacle• 3 years ago

Google lays off 0.05% in a restructuring. Is that really "the scoop" and newsworthy?

ggm2• 3 years ago

I think it is, because it suggests that a development arc either has maxed out, or is now subject to a different dynamic.

Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6. It's arguably one of the most important parts of the software stack. But, it's late stage mature code. Netflix had 4-6 people working on TCP flow control. Google had a small team, based in Japan, doing IPv6 for android. If a team has 100+ members and they can go, it poses "wow, at scale, how many people do you need to do things" questions when things as mission-critical as the entire IP stack can be done by less than 10 people.

Maybe I'm in an odd corner, but I find this thing fascinating. When they laid off the adsense sales and support staff because AI can do it cheaper, I found that fascinating too.

(I don't work for Apple, Google or Netflix, and my numbers are approximate based on bar conversations with some of the people in each team in each company. Consider them Fermi numbers)

haswell• 3 years ago

I’d be careful not to conflate criticality with complexity.

The TCP/IP stack is extremely well defined and covers a finite problem space.

Products higher up the software stack tend to balloon in complexity as they reach into concrete use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of overweight teams, but most products can’t survive with 4-6 people.

netdebugg3• 3 years ago

Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6

Do you know who they are and how to reach them? I have filed 3 or 4 bugs with proper reproducers through Apple's feedback assistant over the years and till this day those issues haven't even received a single comment nor any acknowledgement that the report has been read.

BLKNSLVR2• 3 years ago

because AI can do it cheaper

I'm interested to see how this works out in the mid-longer term to see where it tracks on the graph with "Cheaper" on one axis and "Better" on the other (where '0' is in the centre of the "Better" axis, not at the bottom/left).

astrange• 3 years ago

This underrates contributing size a little because there's a lot more who occasionally contribute in the layers above or below - like if you're working on cellular modem performance you also care about TCP behavior, or someone working on video streaming is going to want to tune networking themselves.

oceanplexian• 3 years ago

Yes because the more that news says “Layoff” the more they can create the perception that the market is terrible and trick employees into accepting lower wages.

tdb78933• 3 years ago

I'm hearing they laid off thousands today actually but it could be my friend has the number wrong.

jridgewell• 3 years ago

With the number of VPs sending emails, I think it's much larger than "hundreds".

upupupandaway• 3 years ago

It's a much larger layoff. My friend's three VPs (heh) were all laid off in Fitbit. Entire orgs were wiped there.

srj• 3 years ago

At least in my area it's 10%.

nekitamo• 3 years ago

There were also large layoffs in Google’s ad sales org today, but I haven’t seen any news articles about it.

jrockway2• 3 years ago

Sales seems like a truly miserable role. You have to sell whatever the company makes, which often times isn't what the customer wants. You mostly get paid by commission, so if someone just goes out and buys your product without talking to you, you don't get paid. Finally, it's treated by business as some sort of resource they can autoscale up and down as necessary. Need more money? Get more salespeople. Out of money? Fire all the salespeople.

I just find it so weird.

danpalmer4• 3 years ago

I also see it as a position I wouldn't want in a million years, but whenever I talk to salespeople I can absolutely see why they do it. There seems to be a mindset, or a particular kind of motivation, that fits with the act of selling and with the idea of commission based earnings.

I'm also not sure that many salespeople see their role as "sell whatever the company makes". There's a common trope of engineers scrambling to build what the sales team have sold, but even aside from that, I think many salespeople see their job as building and growing accounts in their clients, and finding the products or features available to grow into. Perhaps just a perspective difference, but that can be all that matters.

mcmoor2• 3 years ago

It's also the role that have the most direct employee compensation per generated company profit that you can get without betting any money as investment. It certainly appeals to someone who thinks they can bootstrap themselves instantly to the top.

sulam5• 3 years ago

And DSPA. Some news articles about that one.

Ivoirians• 3 years ago

Doesn't Google do that thing where if your team becomes redundant, they don't lay you off, they give you some time to find another team if you choose to transfer?

PessimalDecimal2• 3 years ago

They have done that before. But they have also laid off 12,000 employees without doing that as well. Do we know which today's announcement resembles?

aaomidi• 3 years ago

Looks more like last years Jan layoffs. Laptops restarting & people getting locked out.

danpalmer4• 3 years ago

From what I saw in the UK, the Jan 2023 layoffs (the 12k) had a lot of people redeployed. Of the 3 people I knew personally impacted by it, 2 were redeployed elsewhere in the business (1 eng, 1 HR). I know it happened extensively in at least one other country too.

anifru• 3 years ago

Are you referring to the 60 days (from WARN act) to find another team before getting removed from the company? If so, yes, but imagine the difficulty of finding another team to take you while the company is actively shedding roles.

emmanueloga_• 3 years ago

No, Google did not give people that chance last Jan. Even if it had been on the table, imagine 12,000 ppl looking for an internal move at once.

Rebelgecko3• 3 years ago

Technically yes, but when there's no open roles it doesn't matter

sytelus• 3 years ago

Wow... What is going on it tech? We are just 10 days in the new year and every day there has been surprise layoffs!

Unity

Twitch

Several startups

And now.. Google!

This is at the same time when stocks are almost all time high :).

lgleason2• 3 years ago

Employees are a companies most valuable assets. All that a company has to do is to lay off a bunch of them and it realizes that value with a higher stock price :). Edit: in case anybody missed the nuance, this comment is meant as satire.

CrimsonChapulin• 3 years ago

By that logic monetary value is a company’s most valuable asset.

Edit: I understand it was satire.

jrockway2• 3 years ago

I do always laugh a little about these things. "Safety is our top priority." It can't be, or you wouldn't be in the business of drilling mines or whatever. Safety is the second priority.

matrix_overload• 3 years ago

High interest rates. If Fed dropped them to 0 overnight, everyone on the list would have happily hired everyone back. But then the grocery prices would start growing faster than SPX.

rsanek• 3 years ago

The timing is surprising if this was the main motivation. Rates have been flat for nearly a half year and are projected to come down later in 2024 -- https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...

mustacheemperor• 3 years ago

About twelve months ago professional tax doing people advised me to wait and see what would happen with section 941 long term with the expectation there was a good chance Congress would revise the rules again in 2023. That didn’t happen, and if anyone was waiting to gauge the long term impact of the r&d credit rule changes they may be making cuts accordingly now.

bogomipz2• 3 years ago

Also Amazon Prime Video. https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-lay-off-employees-...

stock_toaster• 3 years ago

Section-174[1] maybe?

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

everfrustrated• 3 years ago

Possibly these companies decided to make redundancies late in 2023 but deferred announcements until after Christmas

danjac8• 3 years ago

It's the end of an industry as we knew it.

There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities, and some legacy code support for a while, but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years.

Some people are claiming "things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.

ChatGTP3• 3 years ago

This comment won’t age well.

vineyardmike5• 3 years ago

It's the end of an industry as we knew it.

I was considering agreeing that "the old Silicon Valley" was probably no more.

There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities

Yea....

and some legacy code support for a while,

Well sure, we still famously have Cobol...

but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years.

Hmm. Uh.

"things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.

Nah, I think it'll pick up real soon. We saw inflation quickly come under control, high employment rates, wage growth, etc. It's generally a healthy economy. These giants shedding fat is probably good for juicing the rest of the industry and spreading talent around. Suck for the individuals of course, that can be very challenging to experience. But lots of people have been pretty unhappy with the products big tech has been giving, so hopefully this can put some smart entrepreneurs into the waters.

scrollaway• 3 years ago

Companies have started to understand that tech workers are overpaid and now that it’s no longer a workers market, they can lay off people in large numbers, rehire later at far lower prices.

lgleason2• 3 years ago

I have both Nest Mini's and Alexas strewn throughout my house hooked up to my home automation etc.. Over time I've found that Alexa works better and that the google assistant progressively gets worse. This will probably not help things. Makes me wonder if they are slowly stepping away from Google assistant.

kohbo• 3 years ago

Agreed. The quality in not only GAs responses but also its ability to understand intent has seemingly been on a downward trend for at least a couple of years now.

ASinclair• 3 years ago

It was much more broad than the Assistant org.

MattGaiser2• 3 years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033994/google-reorganiz...

Fitbit and AR too.

ricktdotorg• 3 years ago

from a consumer perspective, the Fitbit acquisition has pretty much been a disaster/no-op:

- bizarre, fitness-feature-removal "updates" to the iOS Fitbit app

- piss-poor UI refresh

- very buggy "move Fitbit to your Google account" post-acqui-process

i suppose i was an idiot as a paying (G Suite) Google user + paying Fitbit user to expect anything other than Google:

1. acquiring fitbit

2. integrate Fitbit user tracking data into waves hands Borg

3. do All The Things that Google does with human tracking data etc

4. kill the app

modeless9• 3 years ago

I don't use any feature of Google Assistant that wasn't present in the original Android voice search feature over a decade ago. And the few features I do use haven't improved in any way that I've noticed. In fact I feel like reliability has regressed. Google could have fired almost the whole team years ago and my user experience would not be different today.

I consider voice assistants to be a failed experiment. It's clear that they were doomed to fail without the true ability to understand natural language and perform common sense reasoning that is only now starting to become a possibility with large language models.

aspectmin2• 3 years ago

I would counter that voice assistants are not a failed experiment. I would suggest that Amazon and Google’s execution of said experiments have failed.

I am extremely excited about the potential of projects like the Rabbit R1 and Humane.

modeless9• 3 years ago

I agree, I just think these new projects based on LLMs should be considered a different category, AI agents or something. The traditional grammar-based voice assistant architecture used by Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Bixby, etc is an abject failure, and not for lack of trying.

rwc• 3 years ago

Things don't seem to be going well at Humane, either: https://www.fastcompany.com/91008117/ai-pin-humane-layoffs

ramraj07• 3 years ago

Not sure if any comment that holds Humane in high regard can be taken seriously though.

razodactyl2• 3 years ago

I think your last paragraph contrasts and slightly contradicts itself but I agree with the failure part. If we consider a real-life PA performing tasks on our phone for us the question can be asked if it makes much sense or if it would be an interesting novelty.

Basic functionality has always been the key winner with this tech. Calling, setting reminders etc. nothing too complex.

modeless9• 3 years ago

I just think the new LLM-based agents are in a different category. I don't see them as a continuation of the Siri/Alexa/etc lineage.

I do think a human personal assistant who had unlimited access to my data and could perform any task my phone or desktop could do would be exceedingly useful, even if the only interaction possibility was voice. And I think that AI agents will approach that level of usefulness within a decade or two.

johnnyanmac2• 3 years ago

I mean, without those rudimentary building blocks they wouldn't have a lot of data and talent ready to investigate LLM's (and ofc, lots of polish on the NLP framework. Not as flashy, but very important for the UX). I don't see it as a failed experiment so much as a raw prototype if we believe LLM's can realize the true potential. Heck, for all we know, we were actually just training the model for this past decade.

mvdtnz2• 3 years ago

What are you talking about? What "rudimentary building blocks" came as a result of voice assistants? They have nothing at all in common with LLMs. Your post is pure non-sequitur.

joshspankit3• 3 years ago

I think that voice assistants could have been much more usable this whole time if they had avoided getting mired in pushing products/music and instead stayed focused on doing a few things well.

ertian• 3 years ago

Yes, but there's no money in just being usable.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

I pretty strongly disagree. First, from an accuracy perspective, Google Assistant has gotten much better. It almost never misunderstands me, even when I'm mumbling and I'm surprised it can understand me.

I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spotify... But I don't see this at all as a "failed experiment". On the contrary, I see it as a successful experiment, at least from a human utility perspective: I ask it to do a concrete task, and it does it.

The reason it's failed from a larger business perspective is because the format is less amenable to big tech sucking any more of our money or mind out of it. But I say Amen to that! Wherever I go I feel like tech interfaces get relentlessly shittier as they just try to hook us into more mindless scrolling (this HN post on the topic is one of my favorites of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507) That's just fundamentally harder to do with a voice assistant because nobody has yet figured out how to plug in voice "algorithms" in a way that would make the device control you like they do with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

If anything, I think the rest of tech that gets you to do things you really don't want to do should be the thing that's considered a "failed experiment".

modeless9• 3 years ago

I agree that its transcribing accuracy is better (largely thanks to general progress in neural nets rather than anything Assistant did as a product). However transcription accuracy was already surprisingly good many years ago, and in my experience any improvement since has been swamped by actually reduced reliability in understanding intent and performing actions. Ultimately it doesn't matter if it misheard me or got the words correct but misinterpreted the meaning or simply failed due to internal errors. The user experience is similarly bad in all these cases.

Also I don't feel that hotword detection has improved much, and hotword issues continue to be a big pain point for me. I'm sure the team has a dashboard somewhere that shows consistent gains in their hotword metrics, but as a user I don't feel it at all.

The reason I say it's a failed experiment is that the original ambition was to build the Star Trek computer (explicitly, in Google's case: the project was code named "Majel"), and it hasn't worked out. There may be a couple of features that are somewhat convenient (which, again, largely worked fine already a decade ago) but they don't come close to justifying the level of resources spent on these projects over the last decade.

hulitu• 3 years ago

I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spotify... But I don't see this at all as a "failed experiment"

So since 10 years, all it can do is play some music and tell the weather, all of this only online, so it is not a failed experiment. /s

ChildOfChaos2• 3 years ago

Google assistant is awful via the nest mini, I'd hard disagree that the accuracy has gotten better.

I ask it for the time and it quotes some article on wikipedia about what time is or various movies with time in the name.

I ask it to turn of the lights and it tells me 'power control is not supported yet' at least half the time.

It's gotten worse since I bought it, it never did this and that is with even the most basic of tasks.

Maro• 3 years ago

I have multiple Google Home speaker devices at home. My experience that about 1/3 of the time, even in silence, it does not understand simple commands like "Stop" or "Pause". Sometimes I say "Stop" and it interprets this as "Stocks" and starts reading out stock prices. The fact that it only works 2/3 of the time makes it a frustrating UX, I hate trying to "use" it. (First world problems..)

phatskat• 3 years ago

Yep, I’ve got a few speakers and it feels like a crapshoot. I pretty much only say “lights on/off”, “play rain sounds”, and “stop”. But the goog hears _something_ that translates to “playing lights53 on Spotify”, or “here’s what’s playing near you”. Usually in quiet environments too when it mishears me - oddly good at parsing stuff in noisy environments or low volume, if I’m talking (masculine voice) but my roommate (more femme) usually doesn’t get heard at all.

xnx2• 3 years ago

Weird to call Google Assistant failed when it's about to get vastly more capable by being wired to Bard/Gemini. Already, I want to talk to Google Assistant like it's an LLM, but it's not there yet.

dekhn• 3 years ago

LLMs at Google aren't going to augment Assistant, they're going to replace it. With something that isn't an assistant, and doesn't do anything useful.

neilv2• 3 years ago

So what's a good employer now, now that Google has been losing the reputation for treating employees well?

(Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.)

toomuchtodo5• 3 years ago

Federal government. No equity, but stability. Best place to take shelter during economic uncertainty or bearish conditions imho. Rode out the 2008 GFC at a DOE lab.

https://www.usajobs.gov/

danpalmer4• 3 years ago

And you get bonus days off any time congress needs to raise the debt ceiling!

bsdpufferfish2• 3 years ago

the value of stability is inversely related to confidence

BobaFloutist• 3 years ago

Incredible lens, to see working for the federal government as the employment version of investing in gold. A real fun concept.

photonbeam• 3 years ago

Q: whats a realistic salary a SWE or SRE who is 10-15 years deep might expect?

I do understand it’ll be lower, but the GS pay system isn’t that clear to outsiders

rockskon• 3 years ago

Federal government is mostly a miserable place to work if you enjoy up-to-date tech and flat organizational structures with high autonomy to get your work done. Also a miserable place to work if you enjoy earning money.

BHSPitMonkey• 3 years ago

Stability, unless conservatives retake power: https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump...

wilg3• 3 years ago

In your opinion what is the proper way to do a layoff? Or if any layoff is a problem, how do you prevent companies from hiring too quickly or whatever?

tdb78933• 3 years ago

They are making over a billion a week in profits (and still growing). Layoffs can be justified but it's a bit of a head scratcher to be doing them when the company seems to be doing generally well

thanhhaimai• 3 years ago

Layoff should be done with a large cut, but one round. If done right, it gives people the motivation to turn things around. Multiple rounds of layoff in a short amount of time (multiple rounds per year for example) gives the signal that the management can't figure out what is needed to turn the company around. At that time, your bests and brightests will leave.

JKCalhoun3• 3 years ago

I had an interesting thought: what if hiring were like bringing a child into your family. No, no layoffs ever. It's the equivalent of disowning your own child.

If the company begins to sink, so be it, the whole family goes down together (or flee as they see fit).

It would make a company hesitant to hire — they would have to think very long term making a decision like that. Perhaps companies would train (re-train) their employees if the jobs or company evolve.

Interesting though that, in the U.S. at least, the relationship we have with our employer is perhaps 180 degrees from that of the relationship we have with our family. That seems a little sad.

(Reminded suddenly of Tim's speech at the end of The Office (U.K.) — pass me a hanky. https://youtu.be/5AlZ-ZYbbPU)

snotrockets• 3 years ago

Start at the top.

qp11• 3 years ago

Just use your resume to Move to location where ever they are hiring. Dont worry about "good employer" certifications. That stuff belongs to a bygone era thats never coming back.

Large corps spanning hundreds of countries are managed primarily by finance arbitragers who use cross border differences in labor costs/interest rates/tax rates/govt regulations/freebies/tariffs etc to keep the lights on. As they get faster and faster at responding and taking advantage of these constant changes world wide, these methods come to dominate decision making, especially during uncertain times.

So dont worry about what they are doing. It will never make sense unless you spend time reading financial statements every day. Just move to whereever they are hiring. And they are always hiring.

chefandy4• 3 years ago

Picking up and moving to the “it” tech city assuming you’ll get hired sounds like a great solution… that is, if you don’t have family obligations, or, really… a family, long-term responsibilities of any kind, a chronic health condition, or lack money to support an expensive interstate/city/country move probably with an increased cost of living while unemployed… and all to assume that your employer is going to cast you side when they’re done with you so you’ll have to do it all over again?

You’re either wealthy enough to not realize how infeasible this is for most people over 25, or you’ve got a serious case of tech industry Stockholm syndrome. I’ll continue to vet my employers.

joshspankit3• 3 years ago

I think you’re missing an entire category of businesses: ones who are making both a good product/service and a good income.

ChatGTP3• 3 years ago

Sounds like a defeatist comment.

JKCalhoun3• 3 years ago

I retired from Apple a few years ago but still follow the company. I am not aware of any layoffs at Apple. Others have pointed out that Apple didn't go on the same hiring boom that other companies did during Covid.

bpye• 3 years ago

I looked at Apple a long while ago - and whilst they certainly have teams doing interesting work - relocating to California will always be a hard no for me… They have positions elsewhere but much less varied.

sulam5• 3 years ago

My friends at Apple say they avoided layoffs because they didn't hire as much during the pandemic. Sounds great, right? Except instead they just worked more hours. Dunno which approach I prefer.

jiqiren2• 3 years ago

Also retired from Apple (FIRE). I never worked so hard or got paid so much in my life. Would recommend AAAAAaaa+++++ would do again

pm90• 3 years ago

I don’t think there are any left.

The cycle repeats itself though. The leas desirable Google becomes, the more talent is freed up into startups, some of which eventually will offer something similar.

MrDresden• 3 years ago

Problem being that capital is not free anymore, as it has been for close to two decades.

As startups run on venture funding, I'm not so sure there will be a wellspring of new positions generated for those hit by the layoffs, this time around.

karmasimida• 3 years ago

None

There is no job security in this market right now. Even if you have a job, you can be replaced quickly.

Might as well just don't think about it, and prepare for the worst if you are anxious about the future.

sjhdjshdjskhds2• 3 years ago

If you are anxious about future job market, just remind yourself that you would be dead one day anyway.

hashtag-til2• 3 years ago

Is that the US reality, I guess?

Based in Europe, I'm not seeing this here.

sjhdjshdjskhds2• 3 years ago

Join a monastery.

EMM_386• 3 years ago

Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.

How is this not just "business"? That's what Google is.

Granted, they make billions of dollars a quarter and it won't hurt them to keep employees around.

But every company I've ever worked for over the last decades has laid people off, made others nervous, etc.

It may sound harsh but they aren't a charity. People will be laid off, others will be nervous they may be next.

If you are looking for a company where everyone just happy hums along with no fear of job loss, those don't exist.

Except maybe in the Government.

BossingAround3• 3 years ago

I empathize with this POV, and I largely hold it myself. That said, there is something incredibly insulting about having a layoff when making billions of dollars.

Look, if a company is going under, everyone can understand they have to lay off huge number of folks (otherwise, they'll lay off everyone). But laying people off when you're profitable just because you want to be more profitable..?

We need some regulation for it, the problem is what regulation. But I don't think it's controversial to say that this behavior shouldn't be encouraged (despite the fact that it is not illegal, and very few would say that it should be illegal).

yyyfb• 3 years ago

Even so - I don't have a moral objection to profit motive, I just think they're going about it wrong.

There is one large shift happening now in the industry, to AI. Google will need tons of talent to rise to the challenge. There have been other such shifts before (social, mobile). In the past, Google handled these shifts very differently, by retraining and reorganizing engineering staff, which had for the most part been hired for its generalist ability and could therefore jump to other areas. The theory was that there wasn't a need to know the domain too much, since you were going to reinvent it anyways. It worked exceptionally well for a lot of things. People there didn't build data centers using techniques from the field, they didn't build maps like ESRI or Navteq, etc.

Now it seems to handle it differently, through layoffs that give their employees clear signals that the company will look outside for talent first. Employees are no longer valued as adaptable generalist hires but as narrow-function cogs.

That's a strategic mistake, because the AI field is still so nascent and full of hacks that generalists able to handle novel challenges in innovative ways are so sorely needed. It isn't a mature space at all and outside hires - at the scale that will be needed - will almost certainly be of lower quality and productivity.

What would make sense if they wanted to increase profits: routinely cut low performers to keep people motivated to do their best, and completely drop entire business lines that are losses for the company. It doesn't seem like either thing is happening. By their own admission, it's not the lowest performers that get cut ("role eliminations"), and businesses that cause losses are expected to continue operating with less staff. Staff cuts don't fix structurally lossy businesses, they just make them limp longer. It seems like it's setting up these businesses for a long and painful agony.

usrusr6• 3 years ago

That's what publicly traded companies are. They literally can't do "this is going well, let's continue going well", because in that case there'd inevitably be someone out there who thinks "but it could go even better". And with their optimistic projections, they are willing to pay more than even the happiest "yay, this is going well and will go well forever" considers the shares to be worth. Ownership by the biggest optimist is inevitable and when they discover that their hopes were unfounded and there's no even bigger optimist the take the bag, they'll rather burn the house for an imagined chance of still winning than accept the losses.

(VC funded is no different of course, that's just a shortcut to arrive at the optimism-race without ever going through "this is going well")

kvathupo• 3 years ago

I wonder if layoffs will affect company loyalty in the future? I'm leaning towards not, given the frequency of turnover at big tech companies for higher TC

nashashmi• 3 years ago

Do you know of any founders with these superiority complexes built upon some ideas of how great their career and field is? Like PhDs were at Google? Or Engineers were at IBM?

That's the foundation of a good company until some MBA type comes and takes over. Then it is not about the work you do but the metric you are judged upon.

And the metrics for Google Assistant are not great. And neither are the metrics for a lot of google projects. But the team and fascination behind their technologies are the only roots keeping them from being X'd.

This is why Android and Chrome will continue to be heavy handed. The current CEO came from over there and started/led the team. But things like Google Search will always be judged by the numbers and metrics, not by the ideas of connecting people with info.

(I ranted. But to answer your question, go to place that is a darling of the power broker.)

googlelayoff242• 3 years ago

Google's done company wide layoffs today in a fragmented way to make them look localized, but it's affecting the whole company, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947580

PessimalDecimal2• 3 years ago

This link seems broken.

googlelayoff242• 3 years ago

I created a thoraway account, maybe I can't post yet?

klausa• 3 years ago

The link is dead and won't work for anyone without [showdead] enabled; for posterity here's the content:

  Leads across Google are sending coordinated emails within their orgs announcing layoffs. They've all gone out in the last 2 hours or so.

  They've fragmented the layoffs on purpose to make them seem more localized, but it's affecting the whole company.

  Orgs that I've heard/I'm part of that have been impacted so far include Ads, Search, Assistant, Maps Android & Core.

  I'm sure there are more, but I can't confirm.

  I can't find WARN notices yet, so I assume they haven't been filed yet in any state.

razodactyl2• 3 years ago

Why lay-off instead of repurpose?

Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense.

It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.

cvhashim04• 3 years ago

Why lay-off instead of repurpose?

Appease investors probably

EasyMark• 3 years ago

Generally to boost numbers for the quarter, it takes a while for the damage to propagate through the system after a mass firing (in terms of new code/features/products) but the profits increase instantly, appeasing investors who think only in terms of weeks and quarters.

RHSeeger2• 3 years ago

I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.

ehsankia• 3 years ago

Right, that doesn't quite make sense. The previous layoff was all across the board and likely trimming lower rated engineers across the whole company. Wiping a specific team, with potentially top tier talent, makes no sense.

Are we sure this is actually general engineers? The headline only says "working on". It could be people doing very specific work, like prompt validation, QA, etc.

LegitShady• 3 years ago

out of good positions

trashtester8• 3 years ago

If a company wants to fire some people they believe can cause legal trouble if fired individually, somtimes they will spend a year or two reorganizing in a way that incidentally have many of these people all ending up in the same part of the organization.

Then they can do layoffs there, seemingly without violating any wrongful termination laws.

Somehow the best developers and others who contribute directly to the bottom line tend to be unaffected by such events.

refulgentis4• 3 years ago

This is an excellent point, Xoogler and been struggling to explain concisely why I've been offended / think all this is fundamentally misleading. And that's it right there. We were all special snowflakes who could always help the mothership. Now we're ballast that Sundar and VPs need to take yearly turns Optimizing.

bitshiftfaced• 3 years ago

If we accept the premise, then why wouldn't it make sense to fire developers in specific positions? If a position is no longer viable, it won't matter to you if you fire that person, since presumably any person you choose would also be a "good developer."

kevingadd• 3 years ago

That's definitely not how Google does hiring anymore. They don't do true generalist interviews, that's for sure. Every Google interview gauntlet I went through was at least 50% specialists asking me specialist questions, and in the end when I got hired it was when I got interviewed by specialists appropriate for my domain, and I was hired for a specific position.

resolutebat• 3 years ago

I have no context on what's happening in this particular case, but Google usually indeed does not layoff straight up: teams get "defragged" and the people working on them have some time to try to find new roles.

refulgentis4• 3 years ago

It's not like that anymore sadly, so pathetic. Like it kinda is: you can "find a new role". But you're locked out of everything except Grow. Everything. No chat, no email. And everyone has negative headcount anyway, there's no roles on Grow. It's not the cool old school kind where you had opportunities to pick from and legit month(s) to find the right spot, with encouragement to take your time

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

Why lay-off instead of repurpose?

Because they are overstaffed already and the cost reduction is more attractive.

ijhuygft776• 3 years ago

maybe the manager(s) corrupted the employees

tommiegannert• 3 years ago

Level 1: "we need to reduce costs; everyone work on that"

Level 2: "we've been told to cut costs, and staff is the lowest hanging fruit; which products should we kill?"

Level 3: "hey, I need to reduce the number of products, and staff is the lowest hanging fruit; which teams should we reduce?"

Level 4: "since I can't ask if anyone is actually doing anything without raising suspicion, we'll just pick the largest cost sinks, and cull a bit; here's a list"

I doubt anyone really cared which products got reduced. In an org with 100k employees, it's just numbers all the way down to level 5-6 somewhere.

xnx2• 3 years ago

Probably related: "Google reorganizing Pixel hardware: Fitbit’s James Park leaving, layoffs hit AR team" https://9to5google.com/2024/01/10/google-reorganizing-hardwa...

fumar• 3 years ago

I had not visited Semafor before. I like the simplicity of it. The word choice is clear and simple. Anyone have thoughts on reading Semafor once a week? Even though I am on here, I try to avoid too much daily news.

happyopossum2• 3 years ago

Semafor is great for getting the news without getting caught in the news-hype-scare-cycle.

MattGaiser2• 3 years ago

I imagine that killedbygoogle will soon be adding Fitbit and Assistant to the graveyard.

mvdtnz2• 3 years ago

It's not like that team has achieved a single thing in 6+ years. I'm shocked to hear anyone at all is still working there.

bananapub3• 3 years ago

wonder if there will be any actual consequences for senior management this time?

I'd be absolutely fascinated to see the analysis of how they decided that eliminating the (almost) sacrosanct rule of "oh don't worry about your project, if it gets canned you can just chill out for a bit and find another team" was worthwhile.

how valuable did they think instilling fear in the company was?

matchbok• 3 years ago

That's not how any business works. Googlers aren't entitled to a job at Google, believe it or not. Even if their feelings are hurt.

Please, please, take 1 minute and imagine a world where a company is punished by (someone?) for laying people off. Please think of the consequences of that. lol.

alephnan• 3 years ago

The finance industry expects people to work way harder then tech, but the E.V. is usually less. Yes, there are stories about quants making 7 figures, but that's exceedingly rare now compared to the early 2ks. The people who had this aptitude and skillset would have thrived in tech anyways. For example, Jeff Bezos used to be a trader.

There was even a window of time where people in finance saw how the grass was greener in tech.

It just happened to be that the finance industry is mature, whereas tech was nascent, with a skills shortage during a period of exponential growth. The pool of graduates studying CS has grown an order of magnitude, while demand for jobs has contracted.

What we are seeing is the tech industry maturing. The golden era of tech is over. Tech will just be another middle class job. Tech will only be slightly better than other middle class white collar jobs, but it will no longer be the be the guaranteed path to being a millionaire after 5-10 years of working.

mega-flop2• 3 years ago

Depends on what you mean by middle class job. Salaried employment in general is inextricably middle class in my opinion.

theshackleford2• 3 years ago

but it will no longer be the be the guaranteed path to being a millionaire after 5-10 years of working.

For the vast majority, this has not been a thing in the first place.

isuckatcoding• 3 years ago

Is GCP affected?

Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

Related Stories