Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.

Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.

  • Clent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1713·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1041·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        the two big tech companies that showed people how “fun” an office could be. They’re now relegated to normal companies…and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners

        1. Stop making work engaging
        2. The geniuses act less engaged and leave or get salty (the Dead Sea Effect)
        3. “Why would millennials do this to us?”

        Seems Google forgot what made it great.

        But it’s correctable:

        • let the smart people be smart
        • hire and organize worker bees around the hard work of maintenance and code evolution that isn’t SRE
        • don’t give up on slow starts (ohai Wave)
        • run the old folks home for beloved projects that are just PR wins to keep people happy (ohai gReader, Picasa, and a cast of thousands)

        Worker-bees don’t need to save the world every quarter. They also don’t earn the big bucks, but form the ecosystem to retain culture amid superstar churn.

        Build a functional company again. And fire the people thinking quarter by quarter.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago
      • 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).
    • Wooki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Dunno where I saw the headline but supposedly big tech isnt the place fresh graduates dream of going to as their first place.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • doublejay1999@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1004·
    1 year ago

    Please treat this as an explanation, and not an apology for big tech. If you work in tech, or are thinking about it, understand the rules of the game :

    1. First, a new skill goes hot - maybe functionally superior, may just be a trend. In tech, it’s always the new shiny.

    2. Demand for skills outstrips supply

    3. Salaries go up !

    4. Big tech flex, offer big money to hoover up the talent. Sometimes it’s for projects, sometimes it’s just to keep them out of the hands of competition, in case the trend becomes a standard

    5. Time passes

    6. Chasing big salaries, lots of people acquire the skill.

    7. Supply outstrips demand, skill becomes a commodity.

    8. Salaries come down

    9. Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending, but at the very least - are now available at market at a much lower rate. If you include globalisation, it could be 30% of what they are paying.

    10. The high salary hires get cut, because there’s a new skill trending, or, the same skill is now available at much lower rate .

    11. Everyone is shocked !

    This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      386·
      1 year ago

      Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending

      I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops “trending”. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.

      But also you’re not just supporting the language. You’re supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.

      Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.

      Also, the story of Boeing’s planes-that-don’t-fly-good. Decades of engineering out the door to save money in a single quarter means accumulating tail risk that you - a manager who will be up or out in another five years - never have to deal with.

      This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing

      Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That’s the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm’s bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
        325·
        1 year ago

        Python is great for what it is, but the best language developed in your lifetime? Its type system is janky and bolted on. A good type system is one of the main things I look for to call a programming language great.

      • Zink@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        That’s the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm’s bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.

        This, as with enshittification in general, is a symptom of our fucked up culture that views money as a virtue. And with the business culture in particular, regardless of cartel or monopoly status, if the bottom line gets better the managers are doing a “good job” and almost nobody cares about inconveniences to customers or tarnishing of the brand.

    • bitfucker@programming.devEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Where is the “legacy system needs to be maintained, salary goes up”? But yeah, it’s a pretty good picture of the tech landscape

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    966·
    1 year ago

    Sundar Pichai-led company

    Is that really a better description than just saying Google?

    • sebinspace@lemmy.worldEnglish
      25·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • pop@lemmy.mlEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      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

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    721·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • vanderbilt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • badbytes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    601·
    1 year ago

    Making CEO decisions, is easy for AI. Cant AI just replace these CEO’s more readily than programmers.

      • DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    531·
    1 year ago

    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

    • ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      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

      • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Pixels are a minuscule fraction of Android devices. Google would get more money by improving Android than by trying to increase their own marketshare.

      • nasduia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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

    • Reawake9179@lemmy.kde.socialEnglish
      171·
      1 year ago

      To be totally honest, i might be a sociopath too if i only have to work for a year and have enough money for a many generations

      • SandbagTiara2816@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        17·
        1 year ago

        Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not

        • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          Money isn’t quite zero sum, but you don’t need to zoom in very far for it certainly look like it.

          Then you start trying to think about better solutions. If you’ve got a decent understanding of human history you can see the solutions you come up with played out over the last 5,000 years of human civilization with various levels of success or massive failures resulting in war, slavery, or famine.

          Then you think about what would happen if we all return to subsistence farming to avoid all that where our entire world be what we see with our eyes in the morning when we get out of bed. Then again you realize you’re back to war, slavery, or famine except on a micro scale with just yourself and your neighbor instead of on a nation-state sized version.

          The least-worse (not the best, because there is no best) solution I can think of at the moment is a nation that jumpstarts on war, slavery, and/or famine, and transitions to an egalitarian socialist society when its powerful and rich enough. That still doesn’t remove the very human element of corruption or exploitation that just want more than that ‘perfect society’ would produce.

    • GiddyGap@lemm.eeEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      The irony is that they are moving to Germany, one of the most unionized countries in the entire world. Also not exactly “cheap” labor.

      • orrk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        the IT wages in Germany aren’t as high, you’re looking at €3000-€5000 above your typical factory worker for the type of work they seem to be looking for, BUT therefor they also have German levels of workers right XD, just wait 5 years when Google decides to outsource somewhere else again, and realizes it can’t afford to pay the severance of all those employees

        • GiddyGap@lemm.eeEnglish
          14·
          1 year ago

          IT wages may not be as high in Germany as in Silicon Valley (cost of living is also a lot lower), but they are certainly a far cry from “cheap.” Also, German workers have much, much better labor conditions overall than US workers. They aren’t easy to cast aside like Google has a habit of doing.