Google Lays Off Hundreds of 'Core' Employees, Moves Some Positions To India and Mexico (cnbc.com) 80
According to CNBC, Google is laying off at least 200 employees from its "Core" teams and moving some roles to India and Mexico. From the report: The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company's flagship products and for protecting users' online safety, according to Google's website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles. At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company's offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.
Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced news of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows. "We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities," Husain wrote in the email. [...] "Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated," Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes "are in service of our broader goals" as a company. The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company's developer tools, an area Google is streamlining as it incorporates more artificial intelligence into the products.
Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced news of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows. "We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities," Husain wrote in the email. [...] "Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated," Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes "are in service of our broader goals" as a company. The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company's developer tools, an area Google is streamlining as it incorporates more artificial intelligence into the products.
Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with replacing highly paid employees with cheaper offshore workers.
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Re:Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has entered the suicide phase of big tech companies. They see a short term downturn in the market and start laying people off, or get some bean counter in who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Successful and long lasting companies retain employees. It's partly self interest, long term employees have a lot of company specific and domain knowledge built up, and tend to be better at long term strategic planning. It's partly because if you want the best people, you need to treat them well, not discard them the moment some accountant says the numbers demand it.
It's a shame, but in time someone else will replace them.
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Perplexity.AI [perplexity.ai] is the answer to Google for me.
I’ve been able to redirect at least 80% of my Google searches to Perplexity and the other 20% to DuckDuckGo. It’s the first thing that ever really met my “needs” like Google did (back in 2019 and earlier).
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https://kagi.com/ [kagi.com] "The search engine you deserve."
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Kagi and DuckDuckGo have great results (I used DDG for years, started using Kagi a few months ago), but they're both infected with "AI" brainworms.
All I want are results that match my query, I don't want "helpful" LLMs burning energy to try to guess what I actually meant, or to summarize something, or to spew out something useless that matches the query but doesn't actually provide the information I was after.
I'm not sure where to look for a "bare" search engine. Everything is polluted with ads and LLM garb
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https://mojeek.com/ [mojeek.com]? https://www.ecosia.org/ [ecosia.org]?
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I'll check those out, thanks.
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I asked it to recommend a PLL and this was the response:
The MAX24188 also has a reference clock PLL that can generate a 125 MHz clock, which can then be divided down to generate various output clock frequencies including 2.048 MHz.
I suppose technically it's true, but practically it's useless.
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Don't know if it's the suicide phase, but it's certainly the giant crappy company stage.
Many giant companies continue to exist and be large and crappy for a long time. IBM, HP, and so on.
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Don't know if it's the suicide phase, but it's certainly the giant crappy company stage.
Many giant companies continue to exist and be large and crappy for a long time. IBM, HP, and so on.
Behemoths like that can take a long-time to self-immolate. But the financial tantrums they throw on the way to that immolation can be quite spectacular. From the outside. Having been at Gateway at the start of its demise? It's not fun from the inside.
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Yep. The rotting carcass of HP is still lumbering zombie like through the world trying to feast on brains and inkjet ink scams.
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That, plus the likelihood that said Indian workers are pretty unlikely to show up to occupy the corporate offices with purple hair and some bullshit entitled complaint.
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True....
But, what good is that if you can't understand a fucking thing they're saying...?
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I like how hard the /. woke crew gets up in the morning to aggressively downvote everything that makes their womanly giblets sad.
We welcome all you work-at-home fans (Score:2)
Welcome to your new home. Work 40 hours. There's extra money to be made; just look in the right places. Hey look on the bright side.
Nothing like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing your American security to India. That tells you right there Google isn't even trying to hide that it doesn't really care about data security.
Presumably the business unit that is responsible for data mining and monetization will remain in the US under tight control.
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Re:Nothing like...becomming ORACLE or IBM (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be skeptical of using any Google APIs, cloud services, or open source software packages from now on.
It's likely that Google will create a foundation to support its jettisoned open source products and / or make existing products open source and donate to the foundation.
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They are replacing American Indians with Indian Indians.
Still -- what a message to send, cutting the Core team.
Re: Nothing like... (Score:2)
I think you mean Indian-Americans, not American Indians.
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> Outsourcing your American security to India.
These people identify as transhumanist global elites, not Americans.
ok then google will get zero h1b workers! (Score:3)
ok then google will get zero h1b workers!
Go On, Take The Money & Run (Score:2, Interesting)
The American Corporation must die. It is an infection of greed and self preservation with no regards to what it kills.
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Before Rockefeller purchased Congress and Standard Oil was made a permanent corporation, they only existed for limited times and for public purposes.
It would be crazy to create an unaccountable immortal entity, they knew, from the mercantalist Chartered companies of the King.
Corporate America is unAmerican.
Re: Go On, Take The Money & Run (Score:2)
Standard Oil "permanent"? That's a weird way to say they were broken up as an illegal monopoly after less than a generation of operation.
Just the first step (Score:2)
indian workers will make great coin (Score:5, Funny)
Indian IT workers are great, at selling confidential data.
Google is going to get screwed over, get the popcorn.
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you don't know much about India, do you? #14 in the global terrorist index
Don't Panic (actually, yes panic) (Score:5, Informative)
Alphabet has transitioned to a "mature" company business model: Milk your existing customers for all they're worth, while avoiding pissing them off enough all at once to convince them to jump ship.
They already announced dividends and stock buyback to shore up the stock price:
https://www.morningstar.com/ma... [morningstar.com]
I would avoid choosing Google as a vendor from this point forward. They've shown an inability to support any new markets they've entered, and they're not putting in the effort to hold on to the markets that they previously dominated (see the enshittification of Google Search.)
Not surprised, but disappointed certainly. I guess all good things do come to an end.
So they can get away with this (Score:1)
If we do not start enforcing antitrust law pretty much everything is going to collapse. The problem is that we need to start making political decisions based on economics and not moral panics and culture wars.
This is hard because people don't understand the difference between a moral panic and civil rights. You can explain the difference to people but like Reagan said if
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Why don't you start your own web search company? Google's results have been shit for years, and they're getting worse. Granted you probably like some of the soft censorship they engage in, but still. The opportunity is there, and it should be relatively cheap to compete as long as you avoid their latest patents.
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It's incredibly hard to create a viable search engine.
However, after 3 months of using Perplexity.AI Pro [perplexity.ai] , it has replaced about 80-90% of my Google searches. It's phenomenal. It's more like an answer engine, and lets you choose between ChatGPT, Claude-3 and their own less-hallucegenic AI models. For $20/month, it's equivalent to, yet superior, to ChatGPT-4, so I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription.
Re: So they can get away with this (Score:2)
Spammy McSpammerson over here.
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I doubt it. Brin and Page did it years ago. By this point you could probably just copy Google's algo from a few decades ago and get a reasonably good search, minus the trashification you'd get from people abusing SEO (you would have to tweak around SEO and it would be a cat-and-mouse game if they adjusted to compensate).
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It's times like these that I'm proud of my yahoo.com email address.
(yahoo's stupid activities are irrelevant, dependable mail service through the decades).
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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10 years ago? You are way too generous. I'd say it started to go downhill after 2010 if not earlier.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I interviewed there, circa 2007/2008, they freely admitted they were an advertising company, not a software company.
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> they could care less
I think you mean "they couldN'T care less" - ie. there is no way to spend any less time caring for their customers.
If they "could care less", then they must care at least some amount at the moment. Not what you meant, I don't think.
I hope Google gets (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you're hiring somewhere you don't sell anything, that's definitely offshoring.
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It retains headcount to keep managers employed.
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Re:I hope Google gets (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly - they're doing it for a short term gain, which will see a larger dividend payment next quarter, or perhaps the quarter after that.
Sundar Pichai must be thinking of moving on - I reckon he's got 3 or 4 more quarters worth of "good ideas" which push up the share price or dividend, then he'll "spend more time with his family" and sell his stake.
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exactly what they are paying for. Not a knock on Mexican or Indian engineers, but in my experience, offshoring is a short-term cost savings but with a much higher longer-term price tag and effect on products/quality.
I don't like Google's approach on this matter, but they are not offshoring. They are opening offices next to new markets (India and Mexico, with Mexico now being our largest trading partner with a significant industrial base.)
This trend to expand into India and Mexico (and South East Asia) is an attempt to adapt to the reshuffling the West (not just the US) is doing away from China (for better or worse.)
Offshoring, at least in my experience, has been with, well, offshoring work to other job markets, for
Google Deletes Core for AI Spending Frenzy (Score:3)
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A more accurate version of the headline.
As a Googler... I think this comment hits the mark, far more than any of the others.
Return to office? (Score:5, Insightful)
After all the mandates and tricks Google pulled to get people to return to office, now suddenly it is no longer important to work together in the same office, huh?
Anyone still doubts that all those RTO mandates were just to get people to quit themselves?
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https://about.google/locations... [about.google]
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After all the mandates and tricks Google pulled to get people to return to office, now suddenly it is no longer important to work together in the same office, huh?
Or is it the opposite?
If the staff aren't in the SF office why pay a premium to employ SF staff?
Should have broken up Google (Score:2)
Scott Galloway made a convincing argument 6 years ago. [youtube.com]
What kind of joke is this ? (Score:1)
To me the worst thing ... (Score:2)
... about this is that they are alienating opinion leaders like me. Of all Megacorps Google had the best reputation with me mostly because their business model doesn't involve keeping people locked into shitty software and they thus were big on supporting open source projects like browser engines, JS runtimes, free open fonts, Dart, Flutter etc.
I wonder how much they can keep this up. Their search engine is still their primary cash cow but if some bean counter is dumb enough to milk that to death this might
Only 200 employees (Score:2, Insightful)
The Sounds of Inevitability (Score:3)
If your job can be done from home, it can be done on the other side of the world, more cheaply. This should have been seen as inevitable and a reason to push back against the "work from home" crowd.
This is why I tell my kids to do something that requires physical work or physical presence, it can't be outsourced. Driving a chair can be done by anybody anywhere, pulling cable, welding, instrument calibration and countless other jobs are done on-premises.
They also pay just as well in many cases.
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I'm a former electrical engineer who became an electrician for this very reason. I got tired of stressing out during every single layoff/offshoring cycle, and while I was never actually laid off, I feel way more secure now than I ever did working as an EE, and I make more money.
Re: The Sounds of Inevitability (Score:3)
While that's true in theory, the reality is I feel very comfortable competing against offshore workers on a value/$ basis.
This might change over time, but America has been pretty good scooping up the brightest and best from around the world, seriously hamstringing the ability for those markets to develop a really high quality workforce. There are pockets of value to be found, but it's a grueling search.
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While that's true in theory, the reality is I feel very comfortable competing against offshore workers on a value/$ basis.
This might change over time, but America has been pretty good scooping up the brightest and best from around the world, seriously hamstringing the ability for those markets to develop a really high quality workforce. There are pockets of value to be found, but it's a grueling search.
I agree in principle, and for the reasons you cite. I've never had many feelings of insecurity for my work because I work in a specialized field that has more or less permanent demand. If you are just a low-level code monkey though, or someone doing DBA or some kind of data wrangling, managing or monitoring type job, the prospects could be different.
Also if you work a field that you have managed to distinguish yourself sufficiently you probably have little to fear, but the mass layoffs in Silly Valley the l
And the enshittification of Google continues (Score:2)
Was only a question of time, really.
Google Employment (Score:3)
And just yesterday, there was a story about how Google wants to up the H1B limit because they can't find any qualified American employees. That's because they keep laying them off.
Why Not Start There? (Score:2)
Why don't these companies just start in India, Mexico and the like? Why don't they move their corporate leadership there as well? /s