Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
The only staff who need firing is Sundar. Google and android should have been easy better by now but he made them stagnant.
Android is still the best mobile os but it could have been even better under better leadership. Plus they could have enabled and experimented with the OEM’s to allow for additional hardware buttons, button remapping, a native Dex on all Androids, official gcam port to all OEM’s so they don’t need to make their own camera algorithms and even the cheapest droid could have had flagship level cameras.
And we haven’t even touched on software yet…
Fire his useless ass
Why would it be in googles interest to provide better cameras to OEMs? Google has to love that people buy pixel phones because other vendors cameras are years behind
Because the market is bigger than Pixels and they could license much of it (I’d like to see more of it as open source, but it’s easier for a corporation to justify licensing the cutting edge stuff). I think a lot of OEMs would like access to Night Sight
Of course a lot of OEMs would like it, but google is incentivised to keep the best part of Android as pixel exclusives.
Regardless of the actual software processing details, in the wider population of Android consumers I’m pretty sure it’s Samsung that has the reputation for photography.
Samsung’s advertising focus is on advertising things that people understand and think they want, not AI assistants and cleaner versions of Android. Most of the reviews of the Pixel 8 criticise no telephoto lens while Samsung tends to have an excess being shown off.
Like everything Google does, I’m not sure it is any good at understanding people as humans rather than people as aggregate statistical models and that shows in its consumer devices.
Samsung’s 10x camera is amazing, I’m pretty miffed they dropped down to a digial zoom 10x though and made it a 5x on the S24 series, even if it gives other benefits like higher quality mid zooms between the 3x and 10x.
I really hope they bring it back or someone else has a good 10x lens by the time I need a new phone.
Fuck only having a 3x after having a 10x
Pixels are a minuscule fraction of Android devices. Google would get more money by improving Android than by trying to increase their own marketshare.
I’m really starting to think Google has gone to shit now.
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Jesus Christ you’re dumb as fuck.
Or a troll
It got much worse around 2018, but they are speed running.
You are only starting to think that NOW?
For a blissful moment I thought the headline was saying “Google Lays of Sundar Pichai”
Before I got the hyphen I was starting to get down on the floor.
Even if he gets layed off or even fired, he will still receive a larger compensation package than either you or I will receive as compensation in the whole of our working lives, most likely both of ours together his compensation package will dwarf even ten times what we will make together our whole lives.
Sundar Pichai-led company
Is that really a better description than just saying Google?
Hindustan Times is an Indian site. Sundar Pichai is Indian.
Personally I like seeing his name nailed to the worst era in Google’s history. The company has gone into the shitter since he arrived.
CEOs. Name them. Shame them.
What exactly does this accomplish?
The board of directors probably plays bigger roles when it comes to layoffs than the C-Suites.
So no ones at fault, if companies knew that they could save so much money. Apparently CEOs do fuck all and banking hundreds of millions.
Folks need to start naming Prabhakar Raghavan, he’s the mother fucker that fucked up the search side to increase ad revenue, which is what Pacai hired him to do like a good little McKinsey alum
he’s also the guy who wrecked yahoo search. fuck Prabhakar Raghavan.
Microsoft and Google have indian CEOs so they can penetrate the billion people market (indians are deeply patriotic, and it plays into overall brand loyalty) and these companies plan lower costs while doing so.
What’s a few million dollar paid for a (specifically chosen for the purpose) CEO, when you can make billions by using it to gain grounds in a emerging market.
Win-Win
It’s not Google technically: it’s alphabet. Which is why they phrased it like that.
Why not just: “Alphabet (e.g. Google)”?
It’s about accountability
Ahhh, the truest sign of a company in decline, cutting costs by firing talented people.
While reporting record profits! lmao you can’t make this shit up.
Until a couple years from now when they wonder why other companies are destroying them, and they become a shell of their former self. THE literal case study on this is GE.
am i still banned I can’t tell
interesting
I see you… nutsack
Google, who was famous for employing Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) is now firing their python team. I wonder why they didn’t reassign them to the ML/AI division.
Guido van Rossum is working at Microsoft now.
Honestly he’s doing a great job of slowly killing the company.
I think he might be an infiltrator
Out of curiosity, does anybody know how big was the team?
I believe it was entirely big.
Python team was ~10 people I think
10 * 350k of total comp is 3.5 million dollars… guessing the german counterparts probably get 120k of total comp so only 1.2 million dollars, assuming it’s 1:1 staff swap.
Never heard of american software engineers at FAANG getting anything less than superstar sf bay wages, never heard of crazy wages in all of the EU for any kind of worker… but maybe someone can correct me on the german team’s salaries.
People at Google Munich pull north of 150k euros TC, so with taxes, insurance etc will end up costing Google around 200k. Still significant savings.
Wait… You get 350k doing python coding?!
$350k includes the salary but also all of the health insurance benefits, taxes, stock options, office space and perks, compute hardware, software services… the works. An employer will have an averaged overhead factor for their skilled workforce, which can be anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 typically. A worker with an annual pre-tax salary of $140k could cost Google $350k in overall expenses per year. Labor is expensive.
Also, these people weren’t just making simple Python scripts. Most of them were contributing core functionality into Python itself and managing the internal Python version and the ecosystem of Google software stacks that depend on it.
Just for the sake of comparison, Alphabet had $308 billion in revenue and $74 billion in profit in 2023 if I’m reading the numbers correctly. But they need cheaper labour.
Google’s death spiral will take a while but it’s clearly circle the drain.
It will likely never completely die the same way IBM never died but it will stop being the desired placed for new graduates.
Dunno where I saw the headline but supposedly big tech isnt the place fresh graduates dream of going to as their first place.
The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they’ll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.
If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals’ stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.
And, in the end, they’ll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated “we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button” basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.
Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don’t actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.
Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.
they can lobby the Feds
The reason why Tik Tok is getting banned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
Foreign governments and businesses have always been allowed to lobby US officials, under the condition that they register as agents of another government.
Banning TikTok doesn’t prevent business agents from Singapore or China from lobbying in the US. It doesn’t even prevent ByteDance specifically from lobbying in the US.
Ok? They still banned tik Tok because it was a threat to alphabet
The Senate dropped the original TikTok Ban Bill as a stand alone. The House stapled the TikTok ban to its Ukraine relief bill, which Schumer considered a Must-Pass. There’s no shortage of Silicon Valley shills in the Dem Majority US Senate, but that’s not why the amendment ultimately succeeded.
This is because Steven Mnuchin is trying to force a buyout for personal gain and lobbying Congressional Republicans to do his dirty work. Its got far less to do with Sundar Pichai fearing that TikTok might eclipse YouTube.
That’s nice. Doesn’t change what I said but whatever.
If you track the history of the failed independent TikTok bill in the Senate, you’ll understand the situation better.
We can always hope for another Enron.
As a Houston native that gives me IBS just to think about.
one is plenty enough already i’d say
Which is annoying as people will say yeah but capitalism will bring competition. If Google isn’t doing well someone else will step up.
But no. They don’t. Google will be to big to fail and we will support them like you said.
capitalism will bring competition
Because we’re all trapped in the Primitive Accumulationist mindset long after the frontier has closed. Now there’s no more worlds to be conquered. The only question is who has the cheapest lines of credit.
Source: I’ve done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).
That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they’ll pay you every year is meaningless if they’ll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.
They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we’re a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.
Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how “fun” an office could be. They’re now relegated to normal companies…and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP’s move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?
IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They’ll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.
Openai lol.
Are you disputing that their AI offering is better than what Google have produced in the same space?
Whooosh
the two big tech companies that showed people how “fun” an office could be. They’re now relegated to normal companies…and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners
- Stop making work engaging
- The geniuses act less engaged and leave or get salty (the Dead Sea Effect)
- “Why would millennials do this to us?”
Seems Google forgot what made it great.
But it’s correctable:
- let the smart people be smart
- hire and organize worker bees around the hard work of maintenance and code evolution that isn’t SRE
- don’t give up on slow starts (ohai Wave)
- run the old folks home for beloved projects that are just PR wins to keep people happy (ohai gReader, Picasa, and a cast of thousands)
Worker-bees don’t need to save the world every quarter. They also don’t earn the big bucks, but form the ecosystem to retain culture amid superstar churn.
Build a functional company again. And fire the people thinking quarter by quarter.
Google is too big to fail. Yes they’ll lose a lot of customers and products but they only need to keep the ads and maybe google cloud engine running. Everything else is irrelevant until Google.com becomes irrelevant.
- Pichai ignores the fact that part of the reason the pay is so well at Big Tech is that they’re paying you to not have ethics. His failure to understand that is gonna seriously hurt Google.
- Looking for cheaper labor… in Germany? Where worker protections are WAY stronger than in the US? Lol. (That’s not a shot at Germany. That’s commentary on American labor protections, or lack thereof).
European salaries for software developers are half of what they are in the USA. It’s a problem on both sides of the Atlantic, honestly.
Source: software developer in Europe who usually works for American companies.
Be that as it may, Europeans don’t have to live with the constant fact that they might just lay you off today due to “staffing optimization” and there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do about it.
Its not a death spiral but a typical downturn caused by poor leadership. nothing hard for a capable board to rectify.
At googles core their business model could still stomp the competition with capable leadership. AI is simply not the disruptor being marketed.
Sundar Pichai will go down as one of the worst tech CEOs. Dude appears as such a nice guy from podcasts I’ve listened with him but really awful at his job and has zero consistent personality. He’s a straight up corporate robot with no original opinions or idealogies. Unfortunately, none of that is visible or really matters because Google has infinite source of ad money so any KPIs are made irrelevant.
The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it’s Raghaven who’s being enabled by Sundar to do it. They’ve been hit with the problem that Ads isn’t growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it’s no wonder why. It’s clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it’s enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he’s deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.
It’s like he looked at Carly Fiorina’s run on HP and said “hold my beer”.
If all of us fire all of our employee at the same time, then all of us hire each other employee again, we will got them cheaper.
Get fucked Google
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Oh, a one day, sorry 2hour account. Lol
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Well now you know.
Was the former python team working on the surface of Io?
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G8 b8 m8
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