Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
Sundar Pichai-led company
Is that really a better description than just saying Google?
CEOs. Name them. Shame them.
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.
What exactly does this accomplish?
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.
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
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.
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.
We can always hope for another Enron.
As a Houston native that gives me IBS just to think about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Cheaper labour in the most expensive town in a country that is well known for high labour costs?
Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.
When you have a much better social safety net, work-life balance and in general can expect to be treated like a human and not a work-battery to be used up and discarded, people are satisfied with much less money.
Should they maybe instead just try that in the US? Nah, of course not.
Yeah, but you still have to pay social taxes on top for every worker. That’s why salary and labour cost are two different things. And boy is it a difference in Germany.
And as far as I’ve been led to believe, workers in the USA will be bullied into not taking any time off. Germans will take their entitled holidays and use sick leave when they are sick.
Workers in the US may not even have sick time. They do make more money though, probably because lots of European tech workers come to the US for better pay.
In practice anyone with this salary is likely to have at least 2 weeks + 10 or so federal holidays. It’s the retail and factory folks who are hurt most there.
Vacation time is not sick time. If you want any type of vacation at all, you need to plan ahead of time. Offering only 2 weeks is a joke. If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.
Monitoring and rationing sick time is like limiting bathroom breaks or coffee time. if your job does it, you have a crappy employer.
If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.
I have never worked anywhere in the United States with a policy like that. It may be your experience but it’s certainly not the norm.
Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap.
So is West Virginia or Oklahoma.
True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.
If only there was a way to, like, have workers work on things without having to be anywhere near the office. Like distance workers or something, then you could hire people from all over the country in cheap places! Ah well, we need that face time though! ~Executives
But salary does not equal labour cost.
Even doubling the salary is far less than what you’d pay in the US, and as a rule of thumb, German labour, including all the indirect costs, is about twice the gross salary.
Even doubling the salary is far less than what you’d pay in the US,
I’m certain there’s plenty of Python programmers available in the United States for less than $200,000 per year.
These python programmers are literally maintainers of the language. They’re not a dime a dozen. Not saying it’s impossible or anything but you’re looking to get very high caliber engineers for under 140k
Take home or total cost?
For instance, is there a pension to be funded with costs not included in that 100k?
Could easily be that they have a bunch of people in Munich they can not fire since German labour laws are at least compared to a lot of places not that bad and they have to come up with some work for them. So having them work on this is still cheaper then having the people in the valley plus “useless” people in Munich.
You know where there is also cheaper labor? Other places in the US that are not in Bay Area CA.
Maybe they will save money because they don’t have to offer healthcare?
That was my first thought.
Employers in Germany have to bear half of the mandatory social security contributions.
This is on top of gross salary and includes mandatory health insurance.
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You’re missing the whole “growth starts to plateau so management looks for ways to cut costs”
And
“Product comparatively stable so it gets hired out to contractors who inevitably fuck it up because they’re cheap and there was 0 knowledge transfer but it’s too late you laid off the entire original team”
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.
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.
It’s a scripting language, its typing system is more than adequate.
It’s my favorite scripting language, but far from my favorite language overall.
Its type system is janky and bolted on.
I’ve got to disagree
Collin, Tony, or Guido? Which one are you?
Where is the “legacy system needs to be maintained, salary goes up”? But yeah, it’s a pretty good picture of the tech landscape
For a blissful moment I thought the headline was saying “Google Lays Off 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.
And this is if he does the shittiest job he can possibly do and gets fired.
Cheap labor = moving entire python workforce to other countries.
Capitalism 101
Yet we stubbornly refuse to eat the rich. It would take just one billionaire CEO cannibalized in front of the company’s headquarters, and the vibes would flip.
CEOs are sociopaths.
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
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
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.
München is not cheap city to reside in nor are the suburbs.
Compared to… San Francisco?
Lot of knowledge to just throw out there, Sundar.
Let’s hope your documentation can handle it, or a whole lot of important stuff is going to take forever to fix if/when it breaks
Really dumb considering the recent FTC noncompete ruling lol
They’re just going to throw a few more projects on the Google graveyard then
Making CEO decisions, is easy for AI. Cant AI just replace these CEO’s more readily than programmers.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter_layoffs/
Perhaps a bit better source. At least a bit less irritating to read.
Ahhh, the truest sign of a company in decline, cutting costs by firing talented people.
Was the former python team working on the surface of Io?
…why isn’t he hiring hindu people instead? 🧐
Out of curiosity, does anybody know how big was the team?
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.
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.
