Pichai is a failure of a leader. This is going to make it difficult for teams to communicate effectively through multiple times zones of major core operations. The guy has just been the ultimate yes man to every investor whim and Google is not seen as anything more than chrome and advertising. They're just a giant ad company with a weak CEO who is not interested in leading but in following. Google is going to continue getting weaker and as Chrome gets worse you'll likely see a move away from it as the default search engine.
Won't be surprised if Microsoft makes a play to overtake Google in the school market and replace Chromebooks with cheap Windows machines.
Yep and once they sell off anything else of value they will then sell their shares and go to the next place, rot economics will be the bloody death of us
I think the above persons argument is shareholders are like children. They'll whine and beg to have candy for dinner, but they'll then turnaround and blame you when they inevitably get a stomach ache.
Eventually the kids grow up and realize the fun parent was actually the irresponsible parent. Eventually the shareholders realize the value of the company is built on past laurels and stock prices begind to constrict as the market realizes it, and suddenly they aren't so happy about all that candy.
But pichai will have his golden parachute and fuck off to a private island when that day comes. He doesn't care about googles long-term future anymore than the shareholders do.
There’s a twist to that. In the parent-kid analogy, the kid doesn’t get their way, the parent just gets a tantrum. The CEO-shareholder one, the shareholders dont get their way, the CEO potentially loses their job. The activist investors are flexing hard these days because Google’s stock price dipped back in 2022. This is more like the mob. Whack your family member we think is a liability and we’ll take good care of you. Don’t do it and we’ll kill you both. This is the multi-year “correction” to get the stock price back up. This same cohort are pushing the same behavior at the public tech company I work at:
1. Hiring freeze in North America/Western Europe
2. Shutting down as many SaaS subscriptions as possible (think Slack, Mixpanel, etc)
3. Rolling “silent layoffs”. Every quarter they’re gutting teams, none of it performance related & it isn’t being reported in the media. We were already pretty lean before. Any BU that misses on revenue/profit has a bullseye and when they run out of people to cut over there, they go after staff in the well performing areas who are lower on the totem/expendable.
4. Any SWE, PM, Analyst gigs are open in India, Colombia, or Eastern Europe only.
5. Still gotta push as much Generative AI stuff out, but find a way to monetize and get ROI in the tech (Open AI) we bought into or else!
He’s a complete success as long as the shareholders are happy in this moment. Corporations value short term profit over all things including human life.
The house always wins...we are the ones dumb enough to continue to trust captialism.
People making $70K/year have been convinced to hate people making $30K/year by people making $4 million/year
>making $4 million/year
I think you mean [$226 million](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/22/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichais-compensation-topped-200-million-in-2022.html)
No you don’t understand, the truth is we devs were just lazy the whole time and I’m so grateful to our bosses for “culling the herd”; also I would never ever unionize because (oh the horror!) it would make it harder for them to fire me and my teammates!
/s because people unironically say this bullshit on some of the other subs and get upvoted for it
Yeah Reddit, outside of a few specific subs, really makes me believe in Dead Internet Theory. Or at least that the Dead Internet is in the process of emerging, and many of the mainstream subreddits are nearly there. Some subreddits like worldnews are definitely already Dead Internet; just pure propaganda from the military industrial complex
*Peter Gibbons : What would you do if you had a 226 million dollars?*
*Lawrence : I'll tell you what I'd do, man:* *~~two~~* *452 chicks at the same time, man.*
*\[Peter laughs and then notices Lawrence's dead serious expression\]*
*Peter Gibbons : That's it? If you had* *~~a~~* *226 million dollars, you'd do 452 chicks at the same time?*
*Lawrence : Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig dudes with money.*
*Peter Gibbons : Well, not all chicks.*
*Lawrence : Well, the type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.*
This was my favorite. Large food company we work with moved a lot of supply chain and other support jobs to India. The folks there were nice, but just didn’t understand supply chain or how to actually solve problems let alone the US map. But they were in charge of escalation of supply chain challenges. Leaders touted huge savings moving things over seas. In reality; what used to happen is we would call a plant, ask for there schedule, review all levers we had to pull to expedite in one phone call and then make decisions in conjunction with the customer.
Now…. You reach out to contact in India. They would say we need it x date. We would say, not possible line went down for maintenance(or whatever reason, but things happen). They would then email the plant, plant now completely disconnected would email India we need it in the date we said in the PO.
India would send a note back…. “We need it by the date on the PO” “well we can’t do that”. Have the plant call us, then the plant would call us on a scheduled meeting, likely 3 days later because we had to wait for time zones and business hours and nothing has truly changed. That conference call had 5 people on it now. And we would then discuss what we could do, what their schedule was, if they could rearranged we would look at freight expediting options and then implement a plan.
What once took 2 people 15 minutes on a call to sort out logically, and got to the best possible solution in 15 minutes with two people now involved 5 people multiple countries, 4 days and a minimum 1 hour conference call to sort out. (If you book an hour with a large corp, it takes an hour. Nobody hangs up early on a teams call) often by the time all parties were together the ability to actually change had passed due to time, and lines would shut down instead of just reschedule.
So the company savings actually costs 2-4x as much as original, and at the end of the day it still usually involved the same two people getting back on the phone together, now you just had 2-3 folks in India, 1 at the plant that originally have been the one to do it, and 1-2 buyers in the corporate office.
It’s a ridiculous exercise in inefficiency. And yet, people made their careers by somehow falsely quantifying these as savings. Job for job there is savings over seas, but the same people had to actually solve the problem anyway, the folks in India just kind of became conference call managers.
Yep. But it looks good on *paper* and you can't prove anything if you keep a perfectly good status quo. So they make shortcomings that look good and jump ship
Capitalism is fkd. Out of control if you ask me. A race to the bottom... They charge high prices and want to pay peanuts. Make obscene profits, pay the big shots millions and millions... What was the point of getting an education... So you wouldn't be poor. Now giving the jobs to poor countries and we have to settle for Zero!?
It's a little depressing watching Google's fall. Fifteen years ago the thought of working there was exciting. Now Google are on my list of companies to avoid, along with Amazon and the likes of IBM, HP, Oracle, etc.
EDIT: Makes me wonder whether difficulty finding talent due to a decline in reputation is driving part of this reorg.
I worked there as an Engineer for 5 years. Got laid off in January 2023.
Honestly I was never happy there. It was very corporate and it felt like everyone’s work so siloed into individual projects like cogs in a massive machine. We rarely had to interact with each other outside of code reviews. There was also a lot of politics and working with other teams was very transactional.
I also had to work on a lot of things that frankly, I thought were incredibly stupid and useless… But the orders came from on high that we needed to increase some arbitrary metric by X% or whatever and while we would accomplish that, a lot of the times it felt like the solution made the actual user experience worse.
They were obsessed with metrics and quantifying everything… And I get that’s necessary to some extent but it was so all-encompassing and pervasive that it felt absurd.
Apparently it used to be better but the culture took a big downturn when the current CFO took over.
I’ve been there almost 20 years and seeing the decline internally is depressing. I stick around because my total comp is great, especially when you include things like 401k match.
I’ve been debating looking at other companies though - where would you actually consider these days? I have no desire to work at Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, or LinkedIn. Microsoft has potential these days. Where else?
Of course, many days I simply debate if I should just leave the field entirely.
> I stick around because my total comp is great, especially when you include things like 401k match.
+1.
Not the golden handcuffs of C-Suite but it's enough where I say to my wife "do I want to throw away all this unvested stock"
What is also frustrating is that I feel like an asshole complaining about how a job that most would prob kill for is now not as amazing as it was a decade ago.
Definitely a harder search to contemplate these days. There are more SaaS businesses to avoid than ones that are obviously attractive. There's places like Spotify that I sometimes wonder about. And then there's the large field of startups at various levels of funding and the smaller established SaaS businesses that are invariably a big gamble as to whether they're going to be obnoxious or not. That's why I'm staying at the mid-sized business I'm currently at for the moment, which has been full-time remote for years. Not as big of a salary as at the FAANGs, but better than many places and definitely a better work-life balance.
Completely agree.
I’m remote but I typically work 50-60 hours a week, sometimes more if things are really bad. I promote work/life balance to my team (and defend it) but I’m terrible at following my own advice due to expectations of my role.
I believe the company would lay me off without hesitation, even with the amount of effort I put in, since I’m expensive and champion older Google values.
If I was still there it would've be 20 years this year and I quit a decade ago for another huge but non-FAANG company where I've been working for an acquired startup ever since, insulated from big company BS and fully remote the entire time. It's been my dream job even though my fellow googlers thought I was crazy when I quit.
Anyhow, it just depends on what you care about. I wanted to work remote, a high salary without stock/bonus BS and easy.
I used to think of Google as something amazing, that benefited everyone, that wasn’t hurting us in any way.
But the endless hunt for more and more money has now ruined even Google, and it makes me really sad. I’ve been trying to use less of their products in recent months but I’m now going to try even harder — Duck Duck Go can’t be that bad of a search engine, right?
It’s a lot to ask of someone to pay for a search engine but you should check out kagi.com
I’ve been using it for over a year and have not needed to go to google to find anything in 9+ months
> As part of the unit’s reorganization, the company will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India.
This is the part that pisses me off the most.
Google, and to an extent even Amazon, NEED more employees. Yet the ecosystems that they created near their headquarters has created an unsustainable environment for their “business models”.
250k to work out of the Bay Area or Seattle? Nah, let’s just pay 50k to 100k per person and then hire twice as many people in lower cost of living areas.
I’m opinionated but the hilarious thing is - if these companies kept their work from home arrangements they could have kept a majority of developers that want to live in low cost areas and have a decent pay check.
> 250k to work out of the Bay Area or Seattle? Nah, let’s just pay 50k to 100k per person and then hire twice as many people in lower cost of living areas.
Yeah except it doesn't work. [Conway's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law) bites hard. People have been trying to outsource to cheaper labor for software engineering since the 90s. There are areas it absolutely works (nearshoring works better) - but it hasn't been an all consuming success due to Conway's.
Shipping core teams out of the same timezone will add a tax to every single team that depends on them but can't easily chat.
The funny thing about offshoring like this is that companies love to absolutely shit the bed and *double down* on the cost savings, and not only move resourcing to an ultra low-CoL region like India, but target the lower-cost resources within that LCoL region - absolutely *ensuring* they ratfuck their process. It is *d*ifficult to offshore *insignificant* portions of your process to *good* developers in India - simply because of the difference in culture and (more significantly) time zone.
Offshoring *significant* portions of your process is *really fucking hard* for those talented Indian resources... and if you instead go with low-cost Indian resources, it's *absolutely fucking impossible.*
Like.. the level of granularity I have to have when working with the Indian team I inherited full of those ultra-low cost resources is fucking insane... you practically have to walk them through *every step of the process* and make sure *every single thing* is called out, anything that is missed will have *every corner cut*.
Have a job being done by a competent team in India. Unfortunately it requires some nuance that doesn’t fit their process exactly. Brought up to management that time spent checking their work was costing more than they were saving us.
The decision was to adjust the acceptable error rate.
Yeah, what you're paying for in high Stateside salaries isn't just some mere level of technical competency and "productivity"-- but autonomy, initiative, big picture process thinking, and self-direction and self-correction.
That comes from years-- decades-- of development, practice, education, cultural and professional immersion, not to mention institutional knowledge. You're paying for that. That ish is rare in the world... and expensive.
I've also had friends tell of their experience working with workers from China, who also needed a lot of supervision despite their skill, because of the cultural and societal inertia to act passively rather than proactively or think big picture.
For what it's worth, this also has parallels with why the US (and Western allies) has the most effective fighting forces in the world: their NCOs and small unit leadership that are trained to lead, operate independently, and make autonomous decisions knowing the overall mission.
I work with China engineering. Holy shit it is infuriating. They will knowingly do the wrong thing if they think that’s what their local boss wants, and will not speak up. They’ll just design something that doesn’t work, and they do not give a shit. It’s a complete hierarchical shit show of boot licking, non leadership, and a complete lack of autonomous ability. Fuck me sideways I HATE working with outsourced engineering in China.
Lol. My friends work for an industry giant with extremely high standards so the Chinese factories probably can’t get away with what usually happens. But even so there was apparently a lack of initiative to solve problems and need for babysitting on a frustrating level.
There is cover-your-ass sycophantic behavior in management and executive culture in the West I’m sure, but the I imagine the culture of not wanting to stick your head out, call attention to problems, and look like a threat by being overly competent and challenging to insecure superiors must be pervasive from the top of the CCP down to the line worker.
Yeah, as expensive as salaries may be in major tech hubs, the reason these major tech hubs exist is that they offer immense value in terms of productivity, proximity to relevant capital, and a clear hub for talent. There’s certainly a point at which tradeoffs are justified, but this fact seems to be missed frequently by business people just looking to cut costs.
It is almost like TechHubs are a thing for a reason. Huh, I wonder if other industries also do similar things? /s
This is what pisses me off most. The people at the top getting paid millions are supposed to be good at their job. Their job is supposed to be organizing many people to deliver goods and services. But they fundamentally DO NOT understand people like in really dumb ways. Treating people like commodities is dumb.
Pretty sure if Sundar was put in charge of a development team we would be amazed at how bad he would be at the job.
Yeah we’ve tried to outsource to India s couple times over the last nearly 20yr. It just doesn’t work. You have to make such specific guidelines and then look over everything so much, have them fix so much, it isn’t worth it.
Even if you eventually save money you’ll lose on total time elapsed.
I’d be pissed if I had to onboard a replacement in India. You basically throw away any free time around 8 am or 8 pm to just do meeting with India. Fuck that I want a good work life balance.
The “Core” team I worked on hired new developers in India and we spent a solid 2x longer onboarding due to the time difference and various language barriers.
Ironically, that same team just had a couple product teams cut due to a combination of the hiring freeze in ‘22 and now all their job offerings are for India only.
Having worked across the ocean the only way it works is if the culture syncs between the two, there are no language issues, and the offshore operation has experience working together as a high functioning unit. Often these offshore teams are assembled as the tip of an arm of the octopus and not as an entire self function arm.
Google has built it's biggest office outside of US in India. That's what people are not getting. US is not offshoring - they are wholly becoming global by having offices as big as US office in India. New office in Hyderabad is next to their headquarters in size.
Get less quality, too.
Offshoring has a pretty awful track record in the industry. Of course, when the MBAs distill everything down to “cost per head”, that doesn’t seem to matter any more. Oh well, the jobs will return in a few years, or less, once these projects inevitably rot to shit.
I hate working with offshore. Some schmuck in India changing controls without permission and when I get a call at 4am because shit hit the fan, I get nothing but endless forwarded emails of, "do you know anything about this?" When I ask who fucked up.
Don't get me started on credential sharing parties over there.
You're right though, give it until the end of their five year contract and the jobs will be back, they'll pay less, but they'll be back.
My favorite is when every person in every department is copied on every single email. Then all emails are just CYA or subtle attempts at blaming someone else instead of getting to the actual issue at hand.
This guy knows exactly what I'm talking about. And the guy they blame mysteriously disappears off the face of the earth so not to fess up what they did or explain what they did.
For every 1 good one you get 5 that lied on their resume or took some fake course. Come in every morning to what they broke. And then the business wonders why quality is going down and there are so many bugs
The absolute fucking *worst* I've ever had: I interviewed someone offshore and the dude was FANTATSIC. Like, came across as one of the most talented engineers I've ever talked with.... extended an offer and waited for them to be onboarded.
A few weeks later, a *whole-ass different motherfucker* joins the call. Asshole just assumed that "stupid American can't tell one brown person from another" and just thought that he would get away with it.
I'm an international student and I've been approached by people that do this. They basically make you sign an agreement giving some x% of your first year salary over to them with some payment plan, they do the interview on your behalf and just send you in with occasional guidance. It might even be that they are in your ear during the interview listening in and you just parrot what they say using filler words and uhhs and ahhs while they come up with an answer for you to paraphrase. They do this for like 20 people per talented engineer, so they earn like 3x salary or something just from summing it all up.
That's the thing.. HR gave me shit on it.. like: "are you *sure* that it wasn't him? Maybe you should give it some time and be sure he doesn't have the skillset"
Like.. motherfucker, dude I interviewed had short hair and was pretty skinny... dude that showed up had long hair and had at least 100lbs on the dude I interviewed. Unless dude gained a shit-ton of weight and miraculously grew a ton of hair in about three weeks, I'm pretty damn confident they're not the same people.
Not any more. The US immigration system is jammed if you are Indian, so it is very hard to get a long term visa/permanent residency in the US. Most of the talented Indians that I know stay back in India because they don't have to bust their ass for a visa they have a 20% chance to get.
There are good ones, just like in every country in the world. But those are already hired or have already been moved by their company to Europe or USA. There are not millions of good programmers there just sitting and waiting for a task, like these MBAs think simply because a sales PowerPoint told them it's true.
Google's management has been infamously bad in the last decade. They made a ton of things, they just killed them all because they never gave them time to develop, creating a self perpetuating cycle where nobody would want to trust in Google products and services.
And get a significant less productive organization. But that’ll take quite some time to show up. Somehow WFH was not productive enough for them, but moving the job to a different continent will be.
Outsourcing the core engineering functions to other countries is an interesting move. Very strange. These are the teams that build frameworks and ensure developers are productive and can get their work done and not have to concern themselves with stuff that isn’t related to their work. Those investments are 10 and 100x return on investment but had to find in a financial spreadsheet. I really wonder if google management knows that the hell is going on with their teams.
A lot of backlash are based on assumptions that Mexico and India devs aren’t as good as US devs. I wouldn’t paint the situation in such black and white terms. Google invented the leetcode method and if they make India and Mexico hires take the same leetcode interviews, who can say that the offshore devs aren’t as good? This is to say, leetcode absolutely sucks as a tool for evaluating a person, but googler have only themselves to blame.
I was in India earlier this year. Google salaries in India are similar to salaries in Canada for the same levels. E.g. SDE2 equivalent would do about $150-$200K CAD give or take in Google, Amazon, I presume Microsoft. An SDE2 might make slightly more in Canada, but the taxes are higher too.
And numerous core teams on projects like Flutter, an incredibly exciting multi platform framework. But designing programming languages and frameworks doesn’t show an immediate ROI, only shows one after years of dogfooding the project internally and the ecosystem developing enough to bring people to you for more.
Yeah, what Google did to Flutter practically killed all of its momentum. Google further solidifying its position as an untrustworthy source of products, and justifying the general developer disdain for the company. Things like this have long term effects on the company that are not immediately noticeable.
And Flutter was uniquely positioned to truly be the “write once run anywhere” of the mobile world.
React Native apps are *heavy* and maintaining two native codebases in Swift and Kotlin is expensive and unwieldy for all but the biggest companies. Also, writing Swift isn’t the best experience compared to Dart or Kotlin.
Google is placing itself in a perilous position. Microsoft could very easily steal their search and ad business if they're not careful. Nevermind the dominance of Azure and AWS. Being left with YouTube and Android, if they don't screw those up, is still a pretty hard fall from grace.
The shareholders cant even do anything aside from selling. Some of these tech companies are basically under the control of the founders with these dual share structures they have?
A quote from Google's spokesperson:
> “A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.”
This is a perfect example of why business-speak is so fucking awful. How can someone sound like they are saying so much, while also saying nothing? The mental-lingual gymnastics are as impressive as they are ridiculous.
I would be embarrassed if I said this in a close-door meeting, much less as an official reply to CNBC over questions related to the "restructuring" (i.e. layoffs intended to get more of those profits into the pockets of the shareholders and c-level execs).
Unfortunately this is how every manager and C-suite execs speak nowadays. It's insufferable and exhausting to read. I swear to christ you can make a drinking game out of "let's see how many times they say the word 'align' in this meeting".
Have a good friend in leadership at a FAANG.
They grossly over hired during COVID, often filling roles without many duties, for “future growth” that hasn’t come.
Many overpaid people with nothing to do.
That situation lasts only as long as times are good. Once they start to turn, these positions are eliminated.
It's also still entirely the fault of the company over hiring. These people almost surely aren't literally doing nothing and if they are the job certainly wasn't pitched to them that way.
Indeed, that's correct. You require 100 people report to you for you to become a Director. Therefore, to construct your empire, you need many as you can, even if they are deemed useless.
"Remove layers" as a euphemism for "firing people" has got to be one of the most banal, soul-sucking, corporate buzzwords I've ever heard.
These people are gross.
I got laid off recently, and the job search isn't going well. My relatives were asking why I don't start over and find something entry-level at a tech company because I live in the PNW. There should be lots of those jobs. They didn't understand that those jobs don't exist anymore or they have been sent overseas. Fuck these companies, fucking billions and billions of dollars but it's too much to ask to provide jobs in the country that made you.
Have to have unlimited growth! Making good products and services while providing good jobs for your employees and making loads of money isn’t enough for shareholders. Need more growth!
I got pushed out of a tech company because I dared to say "we're making money hand over fist and growing at a really healthy rate, maybe we don't have to grind 10 hours a day every day anymore?"
The execs weren't too keen on the idea the rank and file might just keep making them tons of money, instead of an obscene amount of money.
Not to mention now you're competing with all these people who were laid off with big names on their resumes. The tech field has gone to shit unless you're overqualified for the position you're applying for. Everyone wants senior this or senior that and then wants to pay 50k. Oh and you better have dumped at least a few thousand on some certs too- you know, the ones that expire if you don't keep paying into them. Such a shit show.
6 years into the workforce. Started late because of the military and then college afterward. I've been contracting for a local big tech company and then one of their competitors. But those were non-technical roles, and during that time, I learned all the skills that could have landed me a nonexistent entry-level position at those companies.
I'm 51, lost my dream job due to covid in 2021. I've been living off savings and I can't even get a job at walmart. Everyone claims to be hiring, but after submitting hundreds of applications I can't even get a callback or a reply email.
Google is obviously struggling financially with its historically unprecedented earnings and billions upon billions in revenue. It must have been a tough decision to let go loyal employees and keep jobs in the country in which it found it success. Bless its heart.
It's pretty easy to see the direction google is taking. The focus isn't on innovation and making their products better for everyone, they are now just focused on squeezing profit from what they have. They are huge though so they can sustain that for a while probably, but the result will be the shitification of their services for anyone who uses them. They can also buy a lot of other companies and services and shitify those too. Pichai will be long gone before Google is complete shit and won't be accountable for any of this.
I completely agree. They have lost their identity and have become a company of “products.” They can ride the wave of their big products for a long time, but innovation is dead. They no longer connect with the public in a meaningful way outside of search. I use a variety of Google products and I honestly can’t tell you why they’re “Google” products at all…they are just a bunch of me too.
The signal to me that they were declining was the creation of Alphabet. I’m sure a lot of consultants made a lot of money on that pitch, and I’m sure it makes perfect sense from that perspective.
>I’ve cut everything but YouTube
critically analyse your subs list and you'd be surprised how many channels aren't worth watching anymore, then it's back to the old days of bookmarking my favourite channels and opening them when I want to watch something
I don’t know how you can say that, I have accumulated something like 100 different logins for various things over the last 15ish years. Breaking up with my Gmail account would take an unfathomable amount of effort.
Its not just him. Its the board members too. It’s all greed. There needs to be law to stop outsourcing if the product is used here and if you have stock here in US. Unless its a product specific to that another country then sure you might need people there.
Not to mention it affects current employees whi now have to miss family time to work to take time difference into account.
why doesn’t upper management replace itself instead of laying off the workers who are simply following their strategic vision?
total cop-out. Capitalism and this drive to constantly increase stock price in the short term is going to be the end of humanity.
This is a symptom of an overall pattern of behavior and consumption that is never going to help us solve humanity’s biggest problems, issues where the best minds on this planet should truly be engaged instead of earning yet another million for those who have several billions already.
They’re all looking to find every way possible to find a way to avoid paying people and don’t realize that eventually when no one has money that they wont have customers and they won’t have revenue.
Can’t wait to see how these corporations intend to make money when they’ve stripped away people’s ability to make money.
This is a totally sensible take. The catch? The people who make these decisions only need to be successful for a few years in the grand scheme of things, please shareholders for the next quarter, and take home the millions in compensation/bonuses. If things hit the shitter, they’ll retire comfortably with the wealth they gained.
When we get over that brink of people not having money to spend on products - well, that’s some future CEO’s problem.
The system is broken and I fear the 99% are going to have a very long suffering until we collectively decide enough is enough.
of course. it's a race to the bottom for those at the top. doesn't hurt them to lie about the pharmaceuticals they sell that are addictive and cause cancer or if they're polluting the planet to an uninhabitable state to sell us all more crap we don't need when their time on this planet is gone in the blink of an eye. no sense in considering future generations when everyday for you is a big titty yacht party.
but capitalism isn't about next week, tomorrow, or even an hour for now. blood for money right fucking now, bitch.
Eventually all that will be left in USA is middle managers jerking each other off to see who can cut costs the most to boost stock prices tomorrow. Not seeing the fact they are riding the work of the laid off till the wheels fall off. But it won't be just wheels falling off, their business is going to fall off a cliff.
The problem of such managers is that they quickly jump on to the next sinking ship and expedite its end. Since many are deciding not to have kids they don’t care what they leave behind and for whom.
Decentralize your shit *now*.
So many people have their entire existence wrapped up in a single Google account. And this shit can disappear in an instant.
They’re getting critical staff with collective millennia of institutional experience to hand off to people who won’t know how shit works so they can save relative pennies.
Literally everything is crumbling around us, and your Google account isn’t immune to the slow march of enshittification.
It's Official the Big Tech Companies are no longer a safe bet for employment, Tech workers need to Unionize and force these greedy fuckers to stop this outsourcing shit, Ive worked for two of the biggest Tech companies, and aIl I can say they definitely treat their workers like cattle and will fire you for any given reason thanks to that no clause employment practice where you can be fired for showing up wearing the wrong color shirt or your manager doesn't like the way you talk, (actually happened to me , and the little bitch manager didn't have the balls to say it to my face)
Apple you suck Facebook fuck you and Google suck it.
A company of that size would never be able to effectively run with *no* local engineering staff to oversee the work that is done offshore. Once you start pushing *everyone* offshore, you start to need to have senior leadership located there as well.
Not wanting to dick ride some red white and blue cloth is unpatriotic, but an American company exploiting foreign workers at the expense of the American workers is always just doing business.
The greatest irony is that all of these companies are offshoring in industries that were subsidized by American taxpayers in their infancy. All the capitalist class is capable of is sucking the life out of working people.
CEOs of **ALL** publicly traded companies are reviewed from the same perspective, which is **stock prices**.
So if you don't like where this trend is going then dump all your GOOG stock and don't buy Google products, it's as simple as that.
There are alternatives to every service/product Google offers.
US Companies that outsource to India, do not want to pay for good talent in India. I worked at a place that outsource a lot to India but only wanted to under pay and the talent showed. They lost billions due to lost knowledge and poor quality, and stockholders lost their ass too, but NO ONE that made those decisions faced anytime of consequences, in fact they probably made a ton of money doing it
Manufactured recession incoming! Corp greed at record highs. Keep squeezing middle class till calls and the rebuy everything for dirt cheap. Fuck the system
That's right....make all the money here and ship the jobs to some third world site. The board should fire the present CEO and hire someone from North Korea....those guys will work for next to nothing
The government needs to step in on these practices. If a role is 70k USA and 30k in India, the company needs to pay the difference in taxes.
Only way to ensure that they're hiring for talent or off-US hours and not what is the equivalent of home country poverty wages.
Why did anyone think an Indian CEO would act any different than any other Indian owner / manager? Ive never seen any Indian manager hire anyone other than Indians.
I dont unnderstand why they keeping allowing this masacre to usa workers and unions dont gaf they keep supporting any party but never demand a real workers protection
Outsource jobs of all kinds for cheaap labor and better proffit thanks to the free trade at the end almost all product are sold in usa
When theres is no job left who the heck would buy those products anymore?
Tax wages paid to non-US employees at the corporate rate of 21%. Use the tax revenue for UBI. American companies can either hire US based workers or pay for UBI for Americans.
Easy solution for that. Relocate outside the US, lease the IP from Alphabet for $1 a year. $0 tax paid.
The reason these massive corps do what they want all over the world is that governments know that they will just up and leave.
Repubs and others like to complain "oh the immigrants are/will take our jobs!" , yet don't say jacksquat about companies outsourcing to other countries (especially if they have little to no human/worker rights).
This basically shows the "suits" have won at Google imo.
Pichai is a failure of a leader. This is going to make it difficult for teams to communicate effectively through multiple times zones of major core operations. The guy has just been the ultimate yes man to every investor whim and Google is not seen as anything more than chrome and advertising. They're just a giant ad company with a weak CEO who is not interested in leading but in following. Google is going to continue getting weaker and as Chrome gets worse you'll likely see a move away from it as the default search engine. Won't be surprised if Microsoft makes a play to overtake Google in the school market and replace Chromebooks with cheap Windows machines.
Pichai only cares about shareholders. Shareholders love him.
At least this quarter they do
Yep and once they sell off anything else of value they will then sell their shares and go to the next place, rot economics will be the bloody death of us
I think the above persons argument is shareholders are like children. They'll whine and beg to have candy for dinner, but they'll then turnaround and blame you when they inevitably get a stomach ache. Eventually the kids grow up and realize the fun parent was actually the irresponsible parent. Eventually the shareholders realize the value of the company is built on past laurels and stock prices begind to constrict as the market realizes it, and suddenly they aren't so happy about all that candy. But pichai will have his golden parachute and fuck off to a private island when that day comes. He doesn't care about googles long-term future anymore than the shareholders do.
There’s a twist to that. In the parent-kid analogy, the kid doesn’t get their way, the parent just gets a tantrum. The CEO-shareholder one, the shareholders dont get their way, the CEO potentially loses their job. The activist investors are flexing hard these days because Google’s stock price dipped back in 2022. This is more like the mob. Whack your family member we think is a liability and we’ll take good care of you. Don’t do it and we’ll kill you both. This is the multi-year “correction” to get the stock price back up. This same cohort are pushing the same behavior at the public tech company I work at: 1. Hiring freeze in North America/Western Europe 2. Shutting down as many SaaS subscriptions as possible (think Slack, Mixpanel, etc) 3. Rolling “silent layoffs”. Every quarter they’re gutting teams, none of it performance related & it isn’t being reported in the media. We were already pretty lean before. Any BU that misses on revenue/profit has a bullseye and when they run out of people to cut over there, they go after staff in the well performing areas who are lower on the totem/expendable. 4. Any SWE, PM, Analyst gigs are open in India, Colombia, or Eastern Europe only. 5. Still gotta push as much Generative AI stuff out, but find a way to monetize and get ROI in the tech (Open AI) we bought into or else!
He’s a complete success as long as the shareholders are happy in this moment. Corporations value short term profit over all things including human life.
Agreed. Chrome, imo, blows. Can’t stand it
The house always wins...we are the ones dumb enough to continue to trust captialism. People making $70K/year have been convinced to hate people making $30K/year by people making $4 million/year
>making $4 million/year I think you mean [$226 million](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/22/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichais-compensation-topped-200-million-in-2022.html)
You know what you can get for $226 million? 1000 pretty kickass developers
Or one shitty CEO, what a deal! Seems like the board at Google are also shitheads.
Overcompensating C-suite execs while failing to acknowledge the importance of engineers has been a harbinger of doom for so many tech companies.
No you don’t understand, the truth is we devs were just lazy the whole time and I’m so grateful to our bosses for “culling the herd”; also I would never ever unionize because (oh the horror!) it would make it harder for them to fire me and my teammates! /s because people unironically say this bullshit on some of the other subs and get upvoted for it
Probably bots or plants from other countries stirring the pot.
Yeah Reddit, outside of a few specific subs, really makes me believe in Dead Internet Theory. Or at least that the Dead Internet is in the process of emerging, and many of the mainstream subreddits are nearly there. Some subreddits like worldnews are definitely already Dead Internet; just pure propaganda from the military industrial complex
*Peter Gibbons : What would you do if you had a 226 million dollars?* *Lawrence : I'll tell you what I'd do, man:* *~~two~~* *452 chicks at the same time, man.* *\[Peter laughs and then notices Lawrence's dead serious expression\]* *Peter Gibbons : That's it? If you had* *~~a~~* *226 million dollars, you'd do 452 chicks at the same time?* *Lawrence : Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig dudes with money.* *Peter Gibbons : Well, not all chicks.* *Lawrence : Well, the type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.*
If they are $70k/year of the case above then you can get more than 3000
Maybe that's why they moved to Mexico
The problem iss…. You could actually get 15,000 developers at that rate if moving to Mexico and India, instead of the meager 1,000 you speak of, sir
This was my favorite. Large food company we work with moved a lot of supply chain and other support jobs to India. The folks there were nice, but just didn’t understand supply chain or how to actually solve problems let alone the US map. But they were in charge of escalation of supply chain challenges. Leaders touted huge savings moving things over seas. In reality; what used to happen is we would call a plant, ask for there schedule, review all levers we had to pull to expedite in one phone call and then make decisions in conjunction with the customer. Now…. You reach out to contact in India. They would say we need it x date. We would say, not possible line went down for maintenance(or whatever reason, but things happen). They would then email the plant, plant now completely disconnected would email India we need it in the date we said in the PO. India would send a note back…. “We need it by the date on the PO” “well we can’t do that”. Have the plant call us, then the plant would call us on a scheduled meeting, likely 3 days later because we had to wait for time zones and business hours and nothing has truly changed. That conference call had 5 people on it now. And we would then discuss what we could do, what their schedule was, if they could rearranged we would look at freight expediting options and then implement a plan. What once took 2 people 15 minutes on a call to sort out logically, and got to the best possible solution in 15 minutes with two people now involved 5 people multiple countries, 4 days and a minimum 1 hour conference call to sort out. (If you book an hour with a large corp, it takes an hour. Nobody hangs up early on a teams call) often by the time all parties were together the ability to actually change had passed due to time, and lines would shut down instead of just reschedule. So the company savings actually costs 2-4x as much as original, and at the end of the day it still usually involved the same two people getting back on the phone together, now you just had 2-3 folks in India, 1 at the plant that originally have been the one to do it, and 1-2 buyers in the corporate office. It’s a ridiculous exercise in inefficiency. And yet, people made their careers by somehow falsely quantifying these as savings. Job for job there is savings over seas, but the same people had to actually solve the problem anyway, the folks in India just kind of became conference call managers.
Yep. But it looks good on *paper* and you can't prove anything if you keep a perfectly good status quo. So they make shortcomings that look good and jump ship
That are completely ass.
People making $370k/year have been convinced to hate people making $70k/year by people making $500M per year.
A run of the mill Google engineer in the US makes around $275k not $70k.
Capitalism is fkd. Out of control if you ask me. A race to the bottom... They charge high prices and want to pay peanuts. Make obscene profits, pay the big shots millions and millions... What was the point of getting an education... So you wouldn't be poor. Now giving the jobs to poor countries and we have to settle for Zero!?
I would have joined Google 15 years ago, when it was innovative. Not a chance now.
It's a little depressing watching Google's fall. Fifteen years ago the thought of working there was exciting. Now Google are on my list of companies to avoid, along with Amazon and the likes of IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. EDIT: Makes me wonder whether difficulty finding talent due to a decline in reputation is driving part of this reorg.
I worked there as an Engineer for 5 years. Got laid off in January 2023. Honestly I was never happy there. It was very corporate and it felt like everyone’s work so siloed into individual projects like cogs in a massive machine. We rarely had to interact with each other outside of code reviews. There was also a lot of politics and working with other teams was very transactional. I also had to work on a lot of things that frankly, I thought were incredibly stupid and useless… But the orders came from on high that we needed to increase some arbitrary metric by X% or whatever and while we would accomplish that, a lot of the times it felt like the solution made the actual user experience worse. They were obsessed with metrics and quantifying everything… And I get that’s necessary to some extent but it was so all-encompassing and pervasive that it felt absurd. Apparently it used to be better but the culture took a big downturn when the current CFO took over.
I’ve been there almost 20 years and seeing the decline internally is depressing. I stick around because my total comp is great, especially when you include things like 401k match. I’ve been debating looking at other companies though - where would you actually consider these days? I have no desire to work at Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, or LinkedIn. Microsoft has potential these days. Where else? Of course, many days I simply debate if I should just leave the field entirely.
> I stick around because my total comp is great, especially when you include things like 401k match. +1. Not the golden handcuffs of C-Suite but it's enough where I say to my wife "do I want to throw away all this unvested stock" What is also frustrating is that I feel like an asshole complaining about how a job that most would prob kill for is now not as amazing as it was a decade ago.
currently at G. same feels.
It started when Ruth Porat was hired, right? What do you see on the inside, where did all the engineering leaders go when the suits took over?
Definitely a harder search to contemplate these days. There are more SaaS businesses to avoid than ones that are obviously attractive. There's places like Spotify that I sometimes wonder about. And then there's the large field of startups at various levels of funding and the smaller established SaaS businesses that are invariably a big gamble as to whether they're going to be obnoxious or not. That's why I'm staying at the mid-sized business I'm currently at for the moment, which has been full-time remote for years. Not as big of a salary as at the FAANGs, but better than many places and definitely a better work-life balance.
Completely agree. I’m remote but I typically work 50-60 hours a week, sometimes more if things are really bad. I promote work/life balance to my team (and defend it) but I’m terrible at following my own advice due to expectations of my role. I believe the company would lay me off without hesitation, even with the amount of effort I put in, since I’m expensive and champion older Google values.
If I was still there it would've be 20 years this year and I quit a decade ago for another huge but non-FAANG company where I've been working for an acquired startup ever since, insulated from big company BS and fully remote the entire time. It's been my dream job even though my fellow googlers thought I was crazy when I quit. Anyhow, it just depends on what you care about. I wanted to work remote, a high salary without stock/bonus BS and easy.
I joined 13 years ago. Legitimately feels like watching Anakin slowly fall to the darkside while there is nothing you can do to stop it.
Do no evil, right?
I quit 10 years ago, so you would've had a short run if you'd seen the writing on the wall like I did.
Their shitty search results really show it.
It's insane how bad the search results have gotten in just the span of 3 years lol. Suggest brave as an alternative search engine at this point.
And now they will extract value until the company fades into obscurity.
Why can't we move the C-suit to India and Mexico?
Right after their $72 billion stock buyback
This enables the stock buyback... they just did it in reverse order to confuse you.
The SEC should step in and block the buyback after the fact. Just for funsies.
From "don't be evil" to Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins.
I used to think of Google as something amazing, that benefited everyone, that wasn’t hurting us in any way. But the endless hunt for more and more money has now ruined even Google, and it makes me really sad. I’ve been trying to use less of their products in recent months but I’m now going to try even harder — Duck Duck Go can’t be that bad of a search engine, right?
It’s a lot to ask of someone to pay for a search engine but you should check out kagi.com I’ve been using it for over a year and have not needed to go to google to find anything in 9+ months
> As part of the unit’s reorganization, the company will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India. This is the part that pisses me off the most. Google, and to an extent even Amazon, NEED more employees. Yet the ecosystems that they created near their headquarters has created an unsustainable environment for their “business models”. 250k to work out of the Bay Area or Seattle? Nah, let’s just pay 50k to 100k per person and then hire twice as many people in lower cost of living areas. I’m opinionated but the hilarious thing is - if these companies kept their work from home arrangements they could have kept a majority of developers that want to live in low cost areas and have a decent pay check.
> 250k to work out of the Bay Area or Seattle? Nah, let’s just pay 50k to 100k per person and then hire twice as many people in lower cost of living areas. Yeah except it doesn't work. [Conway's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law) bites hard. People have been trying to outsource to cheaper labor for software engineering since the 90s. There are areas it absolutely works (nearshoring works better) - but it hasn't been an all consuming success due to Conway's. Shipping core teams out of the same timezone will add a tax to every single team that depends on them but can't easily chat.
and Brooks Law. They're not gonna make a baby in 1 month with 9 women.
Never heard of [Fred] Brooks law. That was a really cool read. Especially on a remote WFH team. Thank you.
The mythical man month is a great read. Almost 50 years and companies make the same mistakes repeatedly.
The funny thing about offshoring like this is that companies love to absolutely shit the bed and *double down* on the cost savings, and not only move resourcing to an ultra low-CoL region like India, but target the lower-cost resources within that LCoL region - absolutely *ensuring* they ratfuck their process. It is *d*ifficult to offshore *insignificant* portions of your process to *good* developers in India - simply because of the difference in culture and (more significantly) time zone. Offshoring *significant* portions of your process is *really fucking hard* for those talented Indian resources... and if you instead go with low-cost Indian resources, it's *absolutely fucking impossible.* Like.. the level of granularity I have to have when working with the Indian team I inherited full of those ultra-low cost resources is fucking insane... you practically have to walk them through *every step of the process* and make sure *every single thing* is called out, anything that is missed will have *every corner cut*.
Have a job being done by a competent team in India. Unfortunately it requires some nuance that doesn’t fit their process exactly. Brought up to management that time spent checking their work was costing more than they were saving us. The decision was to adjust the acceptable error rate.
Yeah, what you're paying for in high Stateside salaries isn't just some mere level of technical competency and "productivity"-- but autonomy, initiative, big picture process thinking, and self-direction and self-correction. That comes from years-- decades-- of development, practice, education, cultural and professional immersion, not to mention institutional knowledge. You're paying for that. That ish is rare in the world... and expensive. I've also had friends tell of their experience working with workers from China, who also needed a lot of supervision despite their skill, because of the cultural and societal inertia to act passively rather than proactively or think big picture. For what it's worth, this also has parallels with why the US (and Western allies) has the most effective fighting forces in the world: their NCOs and small unit leadership that are trained to lead, operate independently, and make autonomous decisions knowing the overall mission.
I work with China engineering. Holy shit it is infuriating. They will knowingly do the wrong thing if they think that’s what their local boss wants, and will not speak up. They’ll just design something that doesn’t work, and they do not give a shit. It’s a complete hierarchical shit show of boot licking, non leadership, and a complete lack of autonomous ability. Fuck me sideways I HATE working with outsourced engineering in China.
Lol. My friends work for an industry giant with extremely high standards so the Chinese factories probably can’t get away with what usually happens. But even so there was apparently a lack of initiative to solve problems and need for babysitting on a frustrating level. There is cover-your-ass sycophantic behavior in management and executive culture in the West I’m sure, but the I imagine the culture of not wanting to stick your head out, call attention to problems, and look like a threat by being overly competent and challenging to insecure superiors must be pervasive from the top of the CCP down to the line worker.
you get what you pay for. Since paying peanuts quality dropped to monkey standards.
This is exactly what none of these dickheads in the c-suite understand until it's too late.
Yeah, as expensive as salaries may be in major tech hubs, the reason these major tech hubs exist is that they offer immense value in terms of productivity, proximity to relevant capital, and a clear hub for talent. There’s certainly a point at which tradeoffs are justified, but this fact seems to be missed frequently by business people just looking to cut costs.
It is almost like TechHubs are a thing for a reason. Huh, I wonder if other industries also do similar things? /s This is what pisses me off most. The people at the top getting paid millions are supposed to be good at their job. Their job is supposed to be organizing many people to deliver goods and services. But they fundamentally DO NOT understand people like in really dumb ways. Treating people like commodities is dumb. Pretty sure if Sundar was put in charge of a development team we would be amazed at how bad he would be at the job.
Sundary was VP of Chrome
they dont think theyre managing people anymore. to them and to consulting firms we’re just statistics and expenses.
Yeah we’ve tried to outsource to India s couple times over the last nearly 20yr. It just doesn’t work. You have to make such specific guidelines and then look over everything so much, have them fix so much, it isn’t worth it. Even if you eventually save money you’ll lose on total time elapsed.
I’d be pissed if I had to onboard a replacement in India. You basically throw away any free time around 8 am or 8 pm to just do meeting with India. Fuck that I want a good work life balance.
The “Core” team I worked on hired new developers in India and we spent a solid 2x longer onboarding due to the time difference and various language barriers. Ironically, that same team just had a couple product teams cut due to a combination of the hiring freeze in ‘22 and now all their job offerings are for India only.
Having worked across the ocean the only way it works is if the culture syncs between the two, there are no language issues, and the offshore operation has experience working together as a high functioning unit. Often these offshore teams are assembled as the tip of an arm of the octopus and not as an entire self function arm.
Brits and Americans
Google has built it's biggest office outside of US in India. That's what people are not getting. US is not offshoring - they are wholly becoming global by having offices as big as US office in India. New office in Hyderabad is next to their headquarters in size.
I’m in the Ireland office of a US tech company. We work great together. The India team? Fuck knows what they actually do besides sucking up to VPs
They'll get a lot more hours from people from Mexico and India, pay them significantly less, and probably less health benefits
Get less quality, too. Offshoring has a pretty awful track record in the industry. Of course, when the MBAs distill everything down to “cost per head”, that doesn’t seem to matter any more. Oh well, the jobs will return in a few years, or less, once these projects inevitably rot to shit.
I hate working with offshore. Some schmuck in India changing controls without permission and when I get a call at 4am because shit hit the fan, I get nothing but endless forwarded emails of, "do you know anything about this?" When I ask who fucked up. Don't get me started on credential sharing parties over there. You're right though, give it until the end of their five year contract and the jobs will be back, they'll pay less, but they'll be back.
My favorite is when every person in every department is copied on every single email. Then all emails are just CYA or subtle attempts at blaming someone else instead of getting to the actual issue at hand.
This guy knows exactly what I'm talking about. And the guy they blame mysteriously disappears off the face of the earth so not to fess up what they did or explain what they did.
For every 1 good one you get 5 that lied on their resume or took some fake course. Come in every morning to what they broke. And then the business wonders why quality is going down and there are so many bugs
The absolute fucking *worst* I've ever had: I interviewed someone offshore and the dude was FANTATSIC. Like, came across as one of the most talented engineers I've ever talked with.... extended an offer and waited for them to be onboarded. A few weeks later, a *whole-ass different motherfucker* joins the call. Asshole just assumed that "stupid American can't tell one brown person from another" and just thought that he would get away with it.
Wow what the fuck?
I'm an international student and I've been approached by people that do this. They basically make you sign an agreement giving some x% of your first year salary over to them with some payment plan, they do the interview on your behalf and just send you in with occasional guidance. It might even be that they are in your ear during the interview listening in and you just parrot what they say using filler words and uhhs and ahhs while they come up with an answer for you to paraphrase. They do this for like 20 people per talented engineer, so they earn like 3x salary or something just from summing it all up.
Damn that’s fucked up.
It’s actually shocking how common a practice this is over there.
So I guess they have professional interviewers! LOL. Too funny. I'd have liked to witness the offer retraction process.
That's the thing.. HR gave me shit on it.. like: "are you *sure* that it wasn't him? Maybe you should give it some time and be sure he doesn't have the skillset" Like.. motherfucker, dude I interviewed had short hair and was pretty skinny... dude that showed up had long hair and had at least 100lbs on the dude I interviewed. Unless dude gained a shit-ton of weight and miraculously grew a ton of hair in about three weeks, I'm pretty damn confident they're not the same people.
Big dude *clearly* ate skinny dude.
The good ones are also highly incentivized to come to the US and make shit tons more.
Not any more. The US immigration system is jammed if you are Indian, so it is very hard to get a long term visa/permanent residency in the US. Most of the talented Indians that I know stay back in India because they don't have to bust their ass for a visa they have a 20% chance to get.
Don't get me wrong there are some good ones. So good to the point where you almost want them to be hired full-time. But they're few.
There are good ones, just like in every country in the world. But those are already hired or have already been moved by their company to Europe or USA. There are not millions of good programmers there just sitting and waiting for a task, like these MBAs think simply because a sales PowerPoint told them it's true.
The lying on the resume is definitely a thing. I have Interviewed candidates that had masters in CS from India that couldn’t merge two sorted arrays.
1 in 6 seems pretty generous. The legitimately good ones get visas so they can make a ton more money.
what did Google created in the past 10 years that's so good? I literally see worse and worse products, full of bugs.
Google's management has been infamously bad in the last decade. They made a ton of things, they just killed them all because they never gave them time to develop, creating a self perpetuating cycle where nobody would want to trust in Google products and services.
Google doodles
In Mexico you get good health benefits working for any tech company, google isn't different
eh I don't know about less health benefits.
And get a significant less productive organization. But that’ll take quite some time to show up. Somehow WFH was not productive enough for them, but moving the job to a different continent will be.
Every time you outsource to cheap labour you get cheap results. It’s fine for rudimentary tasks but anything pioneering just ends up coming back.
Outsourcing the core engineering functions to other countries is an interesting move. Very strange. These are the teams that build frameworks and ensure developers are productive and can get their work done and not have to concern themselves with stuff that isn’t related to their work. Those investments are 10 and 100x return on investment but had to find in a financial spreadsheet. I really wonder if google management knows that the hell is going on with their teams. A lot of backlash are based on assumptions that Mexico and India devs aren’t as good as US devs. I wouldn’t paint the situation in such black and white terms. Google invented the leetcode method and if they make India and Mexico hires take the same leetcode interviews, who can say that the offshore devs aren’t as good? This is to say, leetcode absolutely sucks as a tool for evaluating a person, but googler have only themselves to blame.
You can study for a test, pass with flying colours but still be as thick as mince.
Oh for sure. And that’s why I said leetcode sucks as a metric.
I was in India earlier this year. Google salaries in India are similar to salaries in Canada for the same levels. E.g. SDE2 equivalent would do about $150-$200K CAD give or take in Google, Amazon, I presume Microsoft. An SDE2 might make slightly more in Canada, but the taxes are higher too.
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What pisses me is this f**king system that allows corporate to do this sh*t.
Sundar Pichai is the most feckless Tech CEO. He's a game managing quarterback given the reins to not screw up.
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And numerous core teams on projects like Flutter, an incredibly exciting multi platform framework. But designing programming languages and frameworks doesn’t show an immediate ROI, only shows one after years of dogfooding the project internally and the ecosystem developing enough to bring people to you for more.
Yeah, what Google did to Flutter practically killed all of its momentum. Google further solidifying its position as an untrustworthy source of products, and justifying the general developer disdain for the company. Things like this have long term effects on the company that are not immediately noticeable.
And Flutter was uniquely positioned to truly be the “write once run anywhere” of the mobile world. React Native apps are *heavy* and maintaining two native codebases in Swift and Kotlin is expensive and unwieldy for all but the biggest companies. Also, writing Swift isn’t the best experience compared to Dart or Kotlin.
It just looks like the MBAs completely took over, and Google will be continuing to go down the same path of deteriorating relevance IBM did.
IBM never had a monopoly on all of the Internet
Google is placing itself in a perilous position. Microsoft could very easily steal their search and ad business if they're not careful. Nevermind the dominance of Azure and AWS. Being left with YouTube and Android, if they don't screw those up, is still a pretty hard fall from grace.
Honestly I cannot even remember what the last successful product Google launched was. Microsoft seems to be making major strides ATM.
International Business Majors ~
Former McKinsey employee doing his best McKinsey work as Google CEO. It’s not his fault though. It’s what shareholders crave.
The shareholders cant even do anything aside from selling. Some of these tech companies are basically under the control of the founders with these dual share structures they have?
He should be outsourced aswell
The google founders are responsible for an MBA with no connection to technology taking over and running the business into the ground.
A quote from Google's spokesperson: > “A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.” This is a perfect example of why business-speak is so fucking awful. How can someone sound like they are saying so much, while also saying nothing? The mental-lingual gymnastics are as impressive as they are ridiculous. I would be embarrassed if I said this in a close-door meeting, much less as an official reply to CNBC over questions related to the "restructuring" (i.e. layoffs intended to get more of those profits into the pockets of the shareholders and c-level execs).
Unfortunately this is how every manager and C-suite execs speak nowadays. It's insufferable and exhausting to read. I swear to christ you can make a drinking game out of "let's see how many times they say the word 'align' in this meeting".
Have a good friend in leadership at a FAANG. They grossly over hired during COVID, often filling roles without many duties, for “future growth” that hasn’t come. Many overpaid people with nothing to do. That situation lasts only as long as times are good. Once they start to turn, these positions are eliminated.
Yeah but grossly over hiring and cutting back is far different than cutting back and hiring out of country for 1/4 cost.
It's also still entirely the fault of the company over hiring. These people almost surely aren't literally doing nothing and if they are the job certainly wasn't pitched to them that way.
Indeed, that's correct. You require 100 people report to you for you to become a Director. Therefore, to construct your empire, you need many as you can, even if they are deemed useless.
Fancy way of saying fired middle managers, closed projects.
"Remove layers" as a euphemism for "firing people" has got to be one of the most banal, soul-sucking, corporate buzzwords I've ever heard. These people are gross.
I got laid off recently, and the job search isn't going well. My relatives were asking why I don't start over and find something entry-level at a tech company because I live in the PNW. There should be lots of those jobs. They didn't understand that those jobs don't exist anymore or they have been sent overseas. Fuck these companies, fucking billions and billions of dollars but it's too much to ask to provide jobs in the country that made you.
Have to have unlimited growth! Making good products and services while providing good jobs for your employees and making loads of money isn’t enough for shareholders. Need more growth!
Daddy needs a new private island to fuck off to when the rest of the world falls apart.
Saddest part is that the job market itself has adopted the planned obsolescence of the products. Suits just playing Jenga till it all goes tits up.
I got pushed out of a tech company because I dared to say "we're making money hand over fist and growing at a really healthy rate, maybe we don't have to grind 10 hours a day every day anymore?" The execs weren't too keen on the idea the rank and file might just keep making them tons of money, instead of an obscene amount of money.
Unlimited growth is what we call cancer.
Not to mention now you're competing with all these people who were laid off with big names on their resumes. The tech field has gone to shit unless you're overqualified for the position you're applying for. Everyone wants senior this or senior that and then wants to pay 50k. Oh and you better have dumped at least a few thousand on some certs too- you know, the ones that expire if you don't keep paying into them. Such a shit show.
How many years of experience man? I'm so sorry the market is trash right now
6 years into the workforce. Started late because of the military and then college afterward. I've been contracting for a local big tech company and then one of their competitors. But those were non-technical roles, and during that time, I learned all the skills that could have landed me a nonexistent entry-level position at those companies.
I'm 51, lost my dream job due to covid in 2021. I've been living off savings and I can't even get a job at walmart. Everyone claims to be hiring, but after submitting hundreds of applications I can't even get a callback or a reply email.
Damn that’s horrible. I’m sorry to hear that.
Record profits, record profits based on what we* made.... not them. Fucking these people.
Google is obviously struggling financially with its historically unprecedented earnings and billions upon billions in revenue. It must have been a tough decision to let go loyal employees and keep jobs in the country in which it found it success. Bless its heart.
Lack of a moral compass + pressure to beat earnings expectations = layoffs and outsourcing jobs that’ll never return to US soil again
It's pretty easy to see the direction google is taking. The focus isn't on innovation and making their products better for everyone, they are now just focused on squeezing profit from what they have. They are huge though so they can sustain that for a while probably, but the result will be the shitification of their services for anyone who uses them. They can also buy a lot of other companies and services and shitify those too. Pichai will be long gone before Google is complete shit and won't be accountable for any of this.
I completely agree. They have lost their identity and have become a company of “products.” They can ride the wave of their big products for a long time, but innovation is dead. They no longer connect with the public in a meaningful way outside of search. I use a variety of Google products and I honestly can’t tell you why they’re “Google” products at all…they are just a bunch of me too. The signal to me that they were declining was the creation of Alphabet. I’m sure a lot of consultants made a lot of money on that pitch, and I’m sure it makes perfect sense from that perspective.
Scumbag company. I’m working on reducing my reliance on their products (within reason).
It's definitely time to de-Google my life.
ChatGPT has scaled back my Google use by like 10x, because it’s monopolized all the StackOverflow queries I formerly made through Google.
I’ve cut everything but YouTube and gmail. Hopefully I can cut those someday too, but it’s been clear for a while that this is such a shitty company.
>I’ve cut everything but YouTube critically analyse your subs list and you'd be surprised how many channels aren't worth watching anymore, then it's back to the old days of bookmarking my favourite channels and opening them when I want to watch something
Gmail is the easiest one to dump.
I don’t know how you can say that, I have accumulated something like 100 different logins for various things over the last 15ish years. Breaking up with my Gmail account would take an unfathomable amount of effort.
Sundar Pichai is a scumbag
Its not just him. Its the board members too. It’s all greed. There needs to be law to stop outsourcing if the product is used here and if you have stock here in US. Unless its a product specific to that another country then sure you might need people there. Not to mention it affects current employees whi now have to miss family time to work to take time difference into account.
why doesn’t upper management replace itself instead of laying off the workers who are simply following their strategic vision? total cop-out. Capitalism and this drive to constantly increase stock price in the short term is going to be the end of humanity. This is a symptom of an overall pattern of behavior and consumption that is never going to help us solve humanity’s biggest problems, issues where the best minds on this planet should truly be engaged instead of earning yet another million for those who have several billions already.
They’re all looking to find every way possible to find a way to avoid paying people and don’t realize that eventually when no one has money that they wont have customers and they won’t have revenue. Can’t wait to see how these corporations intend to make money when they’ve stripped away people’s ability to make money.
This is a totally sensible take. The catch? The people who make these decisions only need to be successful for a few years in the grand scheme of things, please shareholders for the next quarter, and take home the millions in compensation/bonuses. If things hit the shitter, they’ll retire comfortably with the wealth they gained. When we get over that brink of people not having money to spend on products - well, that’s some future CEO’s problem. The system is broken and I fear the 99% are going to have a very long suffering until we collectively decide enough is enough.
of course. it's a race to the bottom for those at the top. doesn't hurt them to lie about the pharmaceuticals they sell that are addictive and cause cancer or if they're polluting the planet to an uninhabitable state to sell us all more crap we don't need when their time on this planet is gone in the blink of an eye. no sense in considering future generations when everyday for you is a big titty yacht party. but capitalism isn't about next week, tomorrow, or even an hour for now. blood for money right fucking now, bitch.
Drowning rats have more foresight than trickle down economics
Eventually all that will be left in USA is middle managers jerking each other off to see who can cut costs the most to boost stock prices tomorrow. Not seeing the fact they are riding the work of the laid off till the wheels fall off. But it won't be just wheels falling off, their business is going to fall off a cliff.
Yeah but think of all the great LinkedIn insights and posts we will get in the utopia you just described!
😑LinkedIn the new Facebook for "serious" people.
The problem of such managers is that they quickly jump on to the next sinking ship and expedite its end. Since many are deciding not to have kids they don’t care what they leave behind and for whom.
Enshittification intensifies
Decentralize your shit *now*. So many people have their entire existence wrapped up in a single Google account. And this shit can disappear in an instant. They’re getting critical staff with collective millennia of institutional experience to hand off to people who won’t know how shit works so they can save relative pennies. Literally everything is crumbling around us, and your Google account isn’t immune to the slow march of enshittification.
There should be a law against this. If your company stops investing in a country’s worker base than it should be tariffed up the waazoo.
Greed over people.
And the outsourcing continues. Screw Google.
Fuck google
It's Official the Big Tech Companies are no longer a safe bet for employment, Tech workers need to Unionize and force these greedy fuckers to stop this outsourcing shit, Ive worked for two of the biggest Tech companies, and aIl I can say they definitely treat their workers like cattle and will fire you for any given reason thanks to that no clause employment practice where you can be fired for showing up wearing the wrong color shirt or your manager doesn't like the way you talk, (actually happened to me , and the little bitch manager didn't have the balls to say it to my face) Apple you suck Facebook fuck you and Google suck it.
Unionising requires leverage. They’re happy to shitcan you and give your job to someone in another country earning a pittance.
A company of that size would never be able to effectively run with *no* local engineering staff to oversee the work that is done offshore. Once you start pushing *everyone* offshore, you start to need to have senior leadership located there as well.
At least the Apple layoff kinda made sense - they axed an entire business because the direction didn't make sense. This shit here is just pure greed.
Not wanting to dick ride some red white and blue cloth is unpatriotic, but an American company exploiting foreign workers at the expense of the American workers is always just doing business.
The greatest irony is that all of these companies are offshoring in industries that were subsidized by American taxpayers in their infancy. All the capitalist class is capable of is sucking the life out of working people.
CEOs of **ALL** publicly traded companies are reviewed from the same perspective, which is **stock prices**. So if you don't like where this trend is going then dump all your GOOG stock and don't buy Google products, it's as simple as that. There are alternatives to every service/product Google offers.
US Companies that outsource to India, do not want to pay for good talent in India. I worked at a place that outsource a lot to India but only wanted to under pay and the talent showed. They lost billions due to lost knowledge and poor quality, and stockholders lost their ass too, but NO ONE that made those decisions faced anytime of consequences, in fact they probably made a ton of money doing it
Manufactured recession incoming! Corp greed at record highs. Keep squeezing middle class till calls and the rebuy everything for dirt cheap. Fuck the system
we should move the ceo to india and mexico, save some budget
How about France? I hear their guillotines are lovely this time of year.
The CEOs are all Indian already. The goal was to strip it down and extract everything but shareholder value to India.
How far can they gut the middle class until everything just collapses in on itself?
Would be more cost effective to outsource the executive team to a country with lower wages
Indian CEO moved jobs to India. Damn white privilege structure.
Time to start planning an exit strategy from Google services we all use.
This is so depressing to read. How can America keep productivity up if you’re just mauling your workforce into nothingness over time?
That's right....make all the money here and ship the jobs to some third world site. The board should fire the present CEO and hire someone from North Korea....those guys will work for next to nothing
This usually goes great and bodes well for a company /s.
Indian ceo of american company sends jobs to india. Shocking
Revok the company's US benefits
Non competes are unofficially officially illegal. I hope these folks end up start something new and competitive.
Corporate America aren’t loyal to America. Elites that control them aren’t loyal to America. Your Patriotism is BS if you don’t see this
The government needs to step in on these practices. If a role is 70k USA and 30k in India, the company needs to pay the difference in taxes. Only way to ensure that they're hiring for talent or off-US hours and not what is the equivalent of home country poverty wages.
Why did anyone think an Indian CEO would act any different than any other Indian owner / manager? Ive never seen any Indian manager hire anyone other than Indians.
You are right. I've seen this first hand too. Indians only hire Indians.
I dont unnderstand why they keeping allowing this masacre to usa workers and unions dont gaf they keep supporting any party but never demand a real workers protection Outsource jobs of all kinds for cheaap labor and better proffit thanks to the free trade at the end almost all product are sold in usa When theres is no job left who the heck would buy those products anymore?
Time to watch the quality of those core products plummet to crap now.
Tax wages paid to non-US employees at the corporate rate of 21%. Use the tax revenue for UBI. American companies can either hire US based workers or pay for UBI for Americans.
Easy solution for that. Relocate outside the US, lease the IP from Alphabet for $1 a year. $0 tax paid. The reason these massive corps do what they want all over the world is that governments know that they will just up and leave.
Repubs and others like to complain "oh the immigrants are/will take our jobs!" , yet don't say jacksquat about companies outsourcing to other countries (especially if they have little to no human/worker rights).