this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Are you disputing that their AI offering is better than what Google have produced in the same space?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

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

  1. Stop making work engaging
  2. The geniuses act less engaged and leave or get salty (the Dead Sea Effect)
  3. "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.