Google CEO Tells Employees To Expect More Job Cuts This Year (theverge.com) 53
Google has laid off over a thousand employees across various departments since January 10th. CEO Sundar Pichai's message is to brace for more cuts. The Verge: "We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year," Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo that was shared with me. "The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices." So far, those "tough choices" have included layoffs and reorganizations in Google's hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams.
"These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year's reductions, and will not touch every team," Pichai wrote in his memo -- a reference to when Google cut 12,000 jobs this time last year. "But I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted." Pichai said the layoffs this year were about "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas." He confirmed what many inside Google have been fearing: that more "role eliminations" are to come. "Many of these changes are already announced, though to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted," he wrote.
"These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year's reductions, and will not touch every team," Pichai wrote in his memo -- a reference to when Google cut 12,000 jobs this time last year. "But I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted." Pichai said the layoffs this year were about "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas." He confirmed what many inside Google have been fearing: that more "role eliminations" are to come. "Many of these changes are already announced, though to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted," he wrote.
Re:The Indian from Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Expects a $10 million bonus!!!!
He was paid $280M last year, so $10M is less than what he makes in a month.
Highest paid US CEOs [northwest.education]
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When you're hacking off your personnel count, you need something to soothe the pain.
Re:The Indian from Google (Score:4)
So why why is this being pre-announced, bearing in mind that this will obviously reduce morale and productivity?
1. Google wants staff to pre-emptively leave so that these exits don't show as layoffs
2. Google doesn't care that the higher quality staff, who are more job-mobile than the typical minion, are the ones that leave
Let the crapification continue.
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The answer is likely in this bit: "I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted."
Given C-suites are, way more often than not, sociopaths, I read that as "I have heard from well-paid, trusted people, that normal people, for some reason I cannot really comprehend, feel some kind of 'difficulty' to see colleagues and teams impacted. That was a very novel information, and I'm curious to learn more about that strange feeling you normies experience, so I'm trying a few things. How did it go?"
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Given C-suites are, way more often than not, sociopaths
They are supposed to be sociopaths. Their job is to do what is best for the company and not let "feelings" and emotions interfere with that.
There's plenty of evidence that sociopaths make better leaders. McClellan's concern for his soldiers led to indecision and squandered opportunities. Grant callously sent his men to their deaths at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, but he won the war. Patton encircled 40,000 Germans at Falaise, while Monty was dithering on the beach in Caen.
Apparently, psychopaths make good [cnbc.com]
Re: The Indian from Google (Score:2)
'We had no tents, so we occupied the porch of a house which had been taken for a rebel hospital and which was filled with wounded and dying who had been brought from the battlefield we had just left.
While a battle is raging one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand, or the ten thousand, with great composure; but after the battle these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as a friend.'
-The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Gra
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Their job is to do what is best for the company
Real sociopaths look for what's best for themselves. Everything and everyone is a step to be stepped on in the pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement. They don't care for the company, much less for what's best for it, at least not directly. They do care, on some level, but only to the extent it serves their own self-interest. The instant it doesn't, they couldn't care less.
That's why laws generally try to rein in their worst traits. Left to their own devices, sociopathic CEOs are all too happy to use slav
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These CEO salaries are obscene. I'm sure Sundar is an amazing fellow, but there are really great managers and engineers with a 100K salary. Even if these were only 5% as capable as Sundar, Sundar should be making 20x their salary, which would be 2 million, which is still a lot and sounds reasonable. CEO's shouldn't be making almost 3000x their salary. That is fucking crazy.
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Look at it from a shareholder's viewpoint:
Google's profit in 2023 was $67 billion.
Would you rather pay an average CEO 0.0003% of that or pay 0.3% for a CEO twenty times as capable?
Even the salary of someone like Pachai is an insignificant rounding error, and it is worth paying very high salaries just for small performance improvements.
That is why almost all salary cap proposals are voted down by shareholders.
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It's still not right. Sundar could be making 1000x the salary of a good engineer or manager, and they would be able to hire 2000 additional good people with the rest of his inflated salary. Imagine the projects 2000 people can work on. That's a whole company there, but also families earning a living. It's still crazy and obscene, even for the CEO of one of the biggest corps in the world.
what a complete lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has $120B cash reserves: https://companiesmarketcap.com... [companiesmarketcap.com]
Pichai is just spouting lies to justify cost cutting to boost stock prices since CEO pay is based on stock price.
Re:what a complete lie (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that "creating the capacity for this investment" is nothing but marketing speak because the truth sounds bad.
Though the truth, in all likelihood, is "we have hired more people than we need. We have a lot of wasted redundant effort going on, and some people have too little work to keep them busy. So we are letting them go."
I don't work there, I have no idea if that is true or not. I am just reasoning that businesses usually don't cut mission-critical positions when they are turning a profit. It doesn't make sense to. But when an internal review shows that a lot of positions are redundant, it simply doesn't make sense to keep paying for them.
It's common for us to get angry at rich businesses that cut jobs, since they can clearly afford to keep those jobs. We need jobs, so naturally we feel entitled to them, and expect that employers should create as many as they can afford to. Unfortunately, such charitable attitudes don't keep a business profitable in the long run, and simply doesn't make sense. Do you buy more food than you need just to keep farmers employed? Do you buy more electricity than you need just to keep electric workers employed? Do you buy more houses than you need just to keep construction workers employed? Of course not. Even if you can afford to, it simply doesn't make sense.
Same deal here, at least most of the time.
Re:what a complete lie (Score:5, Insightful)
These smaller layoff cycles can also be attributed to individual (or even group) performance issues as well. It is often much easier to layoff someone saying they are re-allocating resources and priorities than simply saying we are not happy with your performance. Not sure about Google, but in most large companies there is usually an entire sequence of events that has to be followed before letting someone go for low performance (warnings, remedial training, improvement plans, etc). By just saying it's a budget/priority call makes it much simpler. It often provides a softer landing for the affected employee as well (easier to get unemployment benefits, less of a black mark on their CV, etc).
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I agree that "creating the capacity for this investment" is nothing but marketing speak because the truth sounds bad.
Though the truth, in all likelihood, is "we have hired more people than we need. We have a lot of wasted redundant effort going on, and some people have too little work to keep them busy. So we are letting them go."
I don't work there, I have no idea if that is true or not. I am just reasoning that businesses usually don't cut mission-critical positions when they are turning a profit. It doesn't make sense to. But when an internal review shows that a lot of positions are redundant, it simply doesn't make sense to keep paying for them.
It's common for us to get angry at rich businesses that cut jobs, since they can clearly afford to keep those jobs. We need jobs, so naturally we feel entitled to them, and expect that employers should create as many as they can afford to. Unfortunately, such charitable attitudes don't keep a business profitable in the long run, and simply doesn't make sense. Do you buy more food than you need just to keep farmers employed? Do you buy more electricity than you need just to keep electric workers employed? Do you buy more houses than you need just to keep construction workers employed? Of course not. Even if you can afford to, it simply doesn't make sense.
Same deal here, at least most of the time.
I was at Salesforce when they reported their first US$4 Billion revenue quarter and record profits. The very next sentence was that due to a changing market they had to lay off over 1,000 employees. Businesses want to always increase revenue and profit, especially when stock holders are involved. Maybe Salesforce thought they needed to make a drastic change to keep up performance. Maybe Google thinks the status quo won't keep profits going up.
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Probably from PhbGPT
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That's a pretty long winded way of saying that capitalism fails to deliver job security and housing while lining the pockets of billionaires.
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That's a pretty long winded way of saying that capitalism fails to deliver job security and housing while lining the pockets of billionaires.
It also lines the pockets of 401k holders. Vanguard is Google's largest shareholder, owning 7.81% of the company (more than double the second largest shareholder).
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Why is it the job of capitalism to deliver job security? Seems like that would be the job of socialism.
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On the one hand - yeah.. it does seem like job security might be a job for socialism. On the other hand, my bad for bringing in the ideological argument about the specific economic model.
You already know this, but thanks for indulging my gripe.
To your "why should it be the job of...?" question - state-side, the government's right to exist is based on the premise that it is "for the people, by the people, of the people," and corporations exist via government fiat. If we take the foundation of our country se
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If they hired more people than they need, that means that they're incompetent at judging the size of their workforce.
So why would they be any better at doing so now?
Smoke and mirrors. Maybe they're trying to boost the stock price. I was a few years ago impacted by a layoff that was clearly meant to goose the IPO. Lots of good people doing good work were thrown under that bus, but CEO 3.0 cared only for feathering his nest and those of his cronies -- all of whom were already rich.
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The reserves are not the issue, throwing more people (or keeping the same) at something that can be simplified is the reason. With the invention of the lawn mower, do you keep employing 10 people to cut your field with machetes? How do you justify the cost to shareholders? That's essentially the argument being made. Is it ethical? That's another debate.
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With the invention of the lawn mower, do you keep employing 10 people to cut your field with machetes? How do you justify the cost to shareholders? .
How do you justify the layoffs to sharecroppers? Will they turn into Luddites, and attack the machine with pitchforks?
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How do you justify the layoffs to sharecroppers?
Historically, you don't. You as the landowner have the power of the state to enforce your decision.
"Get off my property".
Re:what a complete lie (Score:5, Interesting)
With the invention of the lawn mower, do you keep employing 10 people to cut your field with machetes? How do you justify the cost to shareholders? That's essentially the argument being made.
Have a look through Google's products. Many of them show serious stagnation. Even the real ones - that is to say their advertizing systems - seem to survive more on inertia and effective monopoly than on serious product development. Their AI systems have been considerably worse than their advantage in training data should make them. Google has given up investing where it should because if they were investing what they should invest, then just being a person that likes and understands Google should be enough to get anyone competent a transfer into a division doing something new.
When companies that should be investing big time start to fire people, it's normally a sign that anyone competent should also start looking elsewhere and that's a sign that the company will die if it doesn't change course.
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Did we read the same thing? "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity" and "ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities". I have friends and family that work at Google. I think the days of working on your side-project are over, and I don't want to see anyone fired, but Google is working the corporate paradigm that is embedded in our society like everyone else. They're just becoming more corporate and less 'do no evil', in my opinion.
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I also do wish we were just a tad bit less litigious in this country to where Google and other corps could dispense with the nonsense talk and just come out and say "we have too many people and not enough work or revenue in this division, we are going to downsize and re-evaluate" because that's all it is.
The corporate speak is just exhausting but everyone does it because if they slip up a lawyer is going to take them to court over it.
Google's descent into mega-corp has been decades in the making. "Don't be
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No matter how much profit you make, if an employee is spending the day looking at plane memoriabilia, drinking Chai lattes, and taking meetings in themed room, you're basically wasting money.
Maybe those employees should think about what it is they actually do before they make Tik Toks about how useless their role in the company is.
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Other than the TikTok bit, you've basically described the average day of a CEO, not the day of any of the employees being laid off.
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Except the CEO is actually on the hook for decisions.
The girl in question that made the "My workday at Google" (followed by the very hilarious "My day getting layed off from Google") wasn't on the hook for anything. She was basically going to daycare for adults.
Companies aren't in the business of providing daycare with salary to adults.
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Business as usual. These people are unmitigated scum.
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The problem with "Today's Google" is not that they hired too many people.
The problem is they are unable to manage all those projects that would come from such a large workforce.
In "Old Google", ideas came from the engineers, Gmail, AdSense, and some "Cardboard" VR goggles all came from those efforts. And in "Old Google" teams usually chose to collaborate with each other, as multiple competing VPs trying to get promotion did not require undermining other projects.
Can Google do better? Of course, there are ma
They're already firing people with AI (Score:5, Informative)
And that's just the LLM stuff. There's a massive general automation boom going on because CEOs got excited about "AI" and are going top to bottom looking for stuff they can automate in their orgs.
We're not ready for this. Not socially or economically.
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they've replaced about 100 sales reps with chatbots. I've started seeing posts on reddit with people venting because they've lost jobs to AI too.
And that's just the LLM stuff. There's a massive general automation boom going on because CEOs got excited about "AI" and are going top to bottom looking for stuff they can automate in their orgs.
We're not ready for this. Not socially or economically.
Sometime in the near future there will be a CxO AI bot as well... not to worry.
Re:They're already firing people with AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime in the near future there will be a CxO AI bot as well... not to worry.
There could be, but the decision to implement such a thing would have to come from someone higher up than them...which, I believe, leaves only the board who I suspect would be unlikely to do this...
Why would that be unlikely? Boards and directors have one concern and one concern only: profit. The bast way to increase profits is to cut costs. What's one of the larger employee salaries in a company? C suits. If the board deems an AI C suit does "good enough" to get the job done, they'll replace every C suit with AI as quickly as they can implement the functions necessary. Where the board will balk is when the AI insists on a seat at the table. They don't want to replace themselves. They just want to replace everybody else they possibly can.
Because they're all members of the same club (Score:2)
The board won't turn on their CEO buddies because that CEO sits on the board of directors where they're at too.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it. Or as Warren Buffet said, "There is a class war, and my class is winning".
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and they take care of each other. They have class solidarity. They won't fire their buddies any more than you would. The difference is you might have 1 buddy and zero say in whether they're fired. They've got a network of fellow 1%ers and absolute say in who is and isn't fired. The board won't turn on their CEO buddies because that CEO sits on the board of directors where they're at too. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. Or as Warren Buffet said, "There is a class war, and my class is winning".
Maybe the CEO, but it's very few companies that have the entire C suite population sitting on the board, and most of those folks are going to be ripe for the plucking at some point. Maybe that comes after clearing out all the employees under the C suite that they can, but it will happen one way or another. The penny pinching day-dreamers won't stop until it's automation all the way down. The ultimate fantasy of the 1% is sitting around sipping tea while their systems generate profit. Gonna be a rude awakeni
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I wonder if the CxO is more readily replaced by an AI bot. The lower level people generally have to deal with other people. The CxOs do too, but far fewer people and they likely do it in more specialized jargon - the type of thing an AI could do well at. They also need access to an inhuman breadth and depth of knowledge - another thing an AI is good at.
There have been many quips about Amazon using algorithms to direct human workers. Maybe they haven't experimented enough yet with moving those algorithms
No there won't (Score:2)
Sorry if I'm coming off as rude, but I'm tired of seeing this. It's a dodge to make people think the upper class will put the breaks on automation in order to save their skins. It implies that they're just like you and me.
They're not. Like you and me that is. They have solidarity. They take care of their own. We turn on each other at the drop of a hat.
Would it help everyone understand thi
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Unlikely. If CEOs weren't replaced with magic-8-balls, AI sure won't do it either. It's more expensive and yields about the same results as CEOs and magic-8-balls.
The underlings are getting uppity (Score:2)
"The council is worried about the economy heating up. They wondered if it'd be possible to fire 500000. Maybe from one of the smaller companies where no one would notice... Like one of the cab companies."
"Fire one million." -- Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
Unionize (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's time. Probably should have done it a long time ago. Hell, the corporate overlords have been laughing at us for not unionizing when we had the chance. Instead we got free lunches and ping pong tournaments. Well I think it's time we started thinking like they do. You think they give shit about us? This AI push just shows they don't and they want to replace us asap.
And AI will never replace us. It will just make us smarter. We can adapt and will.
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I think it's time. Probably should have done it a long time ago. Hell, the corporate overlords have been laughing at us for not unionizing when we had the chance. Instead we got free lunches and ping pong tournaments. Well I think it's time we started thinking like they do. You think they give shit about us? This AI push just shows they don't and they want to replace us asap.
And AI will never replace us. It will just make us smarter. We can adapt and will.
I don't know, man. I look at our current trajectory and think there's nothing in this universe that will make us smarter. At least, not here in the States.
And in the end, companies will replace every human they can with automation tools if at all possible. Even if the automation is only 90% of the way to doing as good a job as a human, if they do that 90% effective job hundreds of times faster than the average human, don't complain about breaks or pay, and don't require the add-on administrative costs of a
Re:Unionize (Score:5, Insightful)
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Having a union in no way prevents layoffs, it only means the company is forced to layoff people strictly according to seniority. That means regardless of performance, fit, or need, the youngest or most recently hired employees will be let go first. How does that help anyone? The seniority based systems unions demand are atrocious 99% of the time.
I'm not in favor of unionization, but unionization doesn't mean layoffs must be seniority-based, it just means that layoffs must abide by the terms of the negotiated labor contract. The contracts many large unions (e.g. Teamsters) have negotiated apply seniority to everything, because when you're comparing truck drivers there isn't a whole lot else to base it on. But software engineering performance is much more varied.
Congrats, you put yourselves out of a job! (Score:1, Insightful)
This is pretty much the long and short of the Google story.
Theme for I.T. in 2023-24 .... (Score:2)
Seems like Google is just doing exactly what I'm hearing most business out there are doing right now? They all want to react to the costs of inflation by cutting back on I.T. staff. Make one person do the work of 2 or 3!
When I follow the itcareer forum on Reddit and others like it, this is a really common theme right now. Lots of predictions things will "open up" in 2025 (probably as a reaction to how bad I.T. gets for places after they try this for a year or more). But it's surprisingly common right now to