As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own <1% of the company, it doesn’t explain the rather random and opaque way the layoffs seem to have been conducted. Plus they (so far) haven’t laid off nearly enough to make hedge funds happy.
I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one.
Google engineering culture has long been described as permitting coasters and encouraging employees to structure their work around what might get them promoted; that might be great for an innovative growing company, but I suspect Sundar & Co. know that that label doesn’t really fit google’s position anymore. I really don’t see any other reason they’d lay off high performing employees on important projects - especially OSS giants.
If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
It’s much easier to lose trust that to gain it, and the ramifications of the move will be felt for a very long time. There’s the time before and the time after, and Google won’t ever really look the same to the industry.
That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades.
There’s still massive innovation and builder spirit there, but I’m betting that we’ll have a much easier time poaching our favorite employees from Google now than we have over the last few years.
I’ve been part of several companies that have gone through layoffs, and one thing I’ve learned is that companies that haven’t done it in a while (or ever) typically do it poorly.
Very good points, especially the last one: when trying to understand the logic behind these layoffs, I honestly haven’t considered incompetence enough. Surely people making tens of millions of dollars a year got there through intelligence and merit and not capitalist fiat? Right? Right…?
Yes I’m sure as one of the top paying public companies that issue stock instead of Monopoly money (equity in private companies) tech people are going to refuse to work for Google.
There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These layoffs show that this is not true. Google is a large corporation, like many others.
There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reeling from this, but it’s really just another day in corporate America.
Very fair, it is typical in many ways, and ofc there’s no one reason for a decision of this size. I’d argue that the culture is (was?) special, though - definitely not unique in the tech sector, but different from e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Amazon in many ways. I think that’s been a huge advantage of theirs for years when competing for talent: Google is known as a eng-first, open, innovative company, and people often take lowball offers to get that cred on their resume.
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
We got a little blip in human history where employers were forced to treat their employees like actual people. Was nice while it lasted. Back to having a boot stomping on our faces again...
I think getting from 500k+ salary to slightly under 500k salary and maybe having to visit a bunch of interviews hardly qualifies as dystopian nightmare. I realize being fired is no fun. It is very stressful and upsetting and people undergoing it should have all the sympathy. But let's be real - if we're talking about people making 10x national averages, they are not downtrodden underprivileged proletariat. So makes sense to do a reality check here and tone it down a bit.
Barf!!!! To compare a 2023 Google employee to any population that’s had “boot stomping on their faces” is so out of touch with historical reality that it’s disturbing, disgusting and laughable all at the same time. We’re not talking about kids cleaning chimney sweeps here, or even modern slaves digging in cobalt mines. But Google employees, where 6% were allowed to go find another lucrative position and are sacrificing their massage services? Tone down the hyperbole sir.
This is just the "stop complaining, there's starving kids in Africa so shut up" argument. Most employers don't care whether or not you hate yourself going into a soul-sucking job as a worker drone and will absolutely regress to that in the few industries that don't have it currently the moment market forces allow them to. There's a reason that sociopathy rates are higher amount CEOs than the general population. Call me out of touch all you want, but "stop whining about being forced into a job where you're dead on the inside like your parents were, since chimney sweeps had it worse" does absolutely nothing to change my pessimism
No, that’s not the argument. I’m calling out your false comparison that positions it as if modern tech workers are in some sort of proletarian struggle against their oppressors. I’m sorry if being in one of the most lucrative and cushy jobs in history still leaves you feeling like there’s a big hole in your life. That’s an existential crisis. That’s not corporate oppression. You’re not in the same situation as oppressed workers of the past.
I feel like we're miscommunicating here somehow. I don't think you read my comments correctly. I appreciate the blip I get to be in where my employer has to treat me like I have an actual soul. I'm complaining about the fact that those same employers are just waiting for the market forces to allow them to start treating us like drones again, and seeing news about the market moving in that direction and being reminded that in all likelihood I'll be forced into the "shit pay plus 2 hour commute per day, sit for nine hours in a tiny cubicle" life before I am allowed to retire.
"You’re not in the same situation as oppressed workers of the past." I don't have to be to recognize that a soul-sucking job sucks... If we're just comparing levels of oppression, then yes, you are making the "just shut up and be glad you only have one boot on your face instead of two" argument.
If you can, without comparing levels of oppression, make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty, then I'm all ears. "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
Soul sucking job sucks, but if it also makes you a millionaire, then I think feeling oppressed is not entirely earned by your reality. You can always take you million and go on a spiritual quest in Himalayas for next 10 years. Somebody who earns the median wage in the US - which is a lot of people - may not have this option. So I don't think framing it in these terms makes much sense.
> I'll be forced into the "shit pay plus 2 hour commute per day, sit for nine hours in a tiny cubicle"
That's not exactly how jobs in Bay Area at least look. I mean 2 hrs commute can happen, if you live in a cheap place and not in walk distance from Google campus, but the pay likely would be not "shit" at all, especially for somebody who worked at good salary in Google.
> make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty,
That's it, from the point of view of about 99.9999% of Earth population, it will still be dream come true. From the point of somebody who has been living in the paradise, they will be living in a bit less luxurious paradise, and that would, I agree, sting and be very distressing. I mean, it is natural for people to strive for perfection, and for improvement of their own conditions. If you are hungry, you want to be sated. If you are never hungry, you want tasty food. If you have tasty food, you want it prepared specially well, be of appropriate spiciness, be healthy, have variety, maybe get some exotic foods from foreign lands, or authentic food from specific region, or prepared in some special ways by uniquely creative cooks. There's always something that can be better. Or, as it happens, worse. But if somebody who had access to Michelin three-stars restaurants, now has to eat in star-less ones, he shouldn't complain he is dying of hunger. His soul may be distressed, but it's not distressed in the same way as would be if he was actually hungry. Yes, there are levels, and yes, understanding them is good.
> "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
Maybe that's why somebody else has to tell it. As they say, you can't tickle yourself. So maybe you realize this point, and maybe realize that the suffering that you are feeling may be caused by framing, and also cured by framing too.
You can whine all you like, at least until Zuckerberg buys HN and starts to ban wrongthinkers. It's just that using "struggle of the downtrodden workers under the boot of the capital" doesn't sound as impressive when the downtrodden makes 10x more in a year than his average compatriot. I don't want to diminish anybody feelings, but I feel there should be a sense of proportion of things being not exactly hellscape yet for tech workers.
There's a miscommunication here. I'm not complaining about people being "over"-paid (though they'd save way more by cutting executive pay). I'm complaining about the signs that our overlords who have been briefly forced to treat people decently are eagerly awaiting any chance to reduce that and get back to treating everyone like shit. And I'm cynical that I absolutely find this stuff to be potential early signs of the end of the blip.
Side note, but it also strikes me as a sign of how normalized corporate treatment of people is that people is when we're on a thread about an article that talks about an exec making over 5 times a googlers salary per day and instead of people going "what the fuck? If that's true, 500k should be the norm for more people!", I get pushback on my comment about how this is a bad omen for the rest of us and called whiny.
Sundar's recent pay package tied more of his compensation to performance of GOOG relative to the rest of the S&P 100 [1, 2]. That could also be related.
What, exactly, makes Sundar qualified to be CEO? In my view, nothing. He’s at best a figure head for Ruth who actually calls the shots. He’s done nothing as CEO other than keep Larry and Sergei’s piggy bank full. He’s just a moderately intelligent man way over his head, doing what other people tell him, without ever making a tough call.
For me the decline began when Ruth took over from Patrick, and when the whole Alphabet-ization thing was (clumsily) executed. It was clear at the time they had no idea what they were doing. At all-hands Larry & Sergey couldn't answer basic questions about the strategy and how it would affect large parts of the company (I was in the 'Access' PA at the time -- the PA that ran Fiber, and launched Google WiFi, et -- and Sergey didn't even seem to get that it existed,). They had mentally checked out, and it was obvious.
I left Google last year (after 10 years), and, yeah, I mostly agree. It's especially dubious that these layoffs happened right in sequence after "everybody else" was doing it. It leaves the whole tech sector vulnerable and all of us in a worse bargaining position. It's a way of enforcing labour discipline into our sector.
Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.
I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or seem like they will do.
Here’s some reliable second-hand information I’m posting on this one-off account. Take this with whatever degree of salt you wish.
My understanding from somebody in a position to know is each VP was given a target/quota of cuts. Then they basically had big spreadsheets with salaries and performance ratings, and then pseudo-blindly cut teams or people to make quotas without input from directors/managers, and gave those lists to SPVs. On receipt of these lists some of the VPs were then canned.
To avoid lawsuits for discrimination in the USA they then added some statistical “noise” by firing a number of people randomly so the numbers balanced out with no “bias”.
The company is run by total morons in my opinion. I’m an extremely high performer with world class expertise. I didn’t get cut, but I’m interviewing elsewhere. I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll. I’d rather take PIP culture. Ultimately Google needs me more than the other way around.
Yep. I think it really is the end for them as a company with a reputation for attracting really bright people. They were in decline over the last 6-7 years, but now Sundar really really blew it. The sheen will just wear off more and more until they just look like any another spent SV company from the past.
There was I'm sure a way to make a whole restructuring or cost cutting process happen in a way that could have salvaged their reputation. But they didn't spend any effort trying to find it.
And if ad spend drops significantly and/or there's actual anti-monopoly enforcement against them, it will really accelerate things.
They have enough $$ they can coast for years, but it isn't going to be pretty.
> I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll.
Having lived through multiple layoffs in the last few years, I'm not sure there's any org larger than, just handwaving here, 1k people that doesn't do this.
I think you'd have to go to a startup before your absence is actually felt.
Because that in particular will freak everyone else in the company out, and .. most importantly... Google is no longer scared about those people going to their competition, because their competition is also flushing talent away. In the past, Google was willing to dump all sorts of cash into talent as long as it kept people from creating a truly competitive landscape. Now, they don't have to worry as much.
The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.
Random layoffs that affect high performers and low performers equally doesn't encourage performing higher. If anything it encourages performing lower because why bother if it's not going to even save your job?
Because it doesn't matter. The idea that these companies are overflowing with "low performers" is a complete myth, a lie that people use to comfort themselves.
The Big Names are actually filled with so many smart and productive people that it doesn't matter who they lay off.
That would put me on notice that it is not worth working for such a company and I'd start sending résumés to various recruiters. No matter how you would explain this, it is nothing short of idiotic.
This reasoning seems plausible to me, but it seems to be having the opposite on employees from what I have seen. Why invest yourself in a company that will fire thousands of people for petty reasons? I think this will cause many employees to shift more focus on how to look good on paper, versus doing actual interesting or useful work that might fly under the radar.
Google makes so much money on ad revenues that their entire workforce could be completely lazy and unproductive and get almost nothing done and they'd still have money to burn.
Ads is a money printing machine. The most important roles there are SRE, data centre, and ops/infra jobs that keep the machine up and running.
The management school of stupidity, which in practice is met a lot more than any other management school, even at top tier companies.
The more I read about this stuff, the more I realize that a lot of is out of sheer luck of hitting product market fit. Google monopolized open internet ads 20 years ago and except for protecting their moat they haven't done much else, 90% of their money still comes from there. They're trying to expand with the cloud, but they're a distant 3rd or 4th.
it's not to increase productivity, it's to increase compliance and push down salary bands.
Have you forgotten this is the same company that had a backroom non-poaching pact with Apple (and probably other SV firms) a decade ago? And got caught red handed and got in a shitload of trouble for it?
When I joined Google in 2011 they were still dealing the fallout from that.
Google doesn't have a revenue problem and hasn't since its IPO. For the past 15 years they've made the stockmarket happy by somehow magically conjuring increases in ad revenues every single quarter. It's a mind boggling firehose of money that just never seemed like it would stop increasing in intensity.
It still hasn't stopped, though it may have slowed a bit in its increase. But there's no danger on the revenue front. Just danger on stock price, because investors really want Number Go Up continually.
So the moves last week were really about making investors think Google is Doing Something and exercising downward pressure on wages.
Its a sector-wide move to put downward pressure on wages and bargaining power, and Google is only a small part of it.
> Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters.
The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.
This ratio is key. Impact/pay. And from what I gathered working there until 2020, impact was starting to weigh more on how you elevate others around you. Meaning leadership. These “stars” might have personal brand power, but if they are collecting big pay and even working “hard” it might not be enough
IME, having worked with "tech celebrities", the veneer they can work so hard on maintaining isn't exactly reflective of actually working with them. I worked with one particularly famous person, who barely did anything internally, and spent all their time on external conferences and talks to preserve their external reputation - mostly coasting on past accomplishments. Not saying that's what happened here, but public visibility isn't correlated to internal engineering/leadership impact imo, and can even be detrimental.
Not to argue at all, but for some of those hires "Maintain Google's Brand Image in X Category" is their job - They're not there to work hard and drive innovation in those sectors, but to represent that Google hires and does work in that area.
It's not uncommon; There's a title for it - "Brand ambassador" - Though it's often the case that your official job title is something different while you act in that role. I doubt people in that position have illusions about what their role is, and in fact most are probably offered the choice of how much they lean into the branding and how much "Real Work" they do, with expectations set around "You are famous/known for X, we want X people to like us, go off and talk about X to cast us in positive light".
Pretty comparable is "Developer Advocate". The job is to grease the wheels between people using your services and the developers developing them. In that role, they playact as both customer and provider, both to developers and consumers. An awful lot of Developer Advocates are mediocre at both, but you don't need to be good; In fact, in some ways being mediocre is a plus, because the point is to represent each side to the other.
Whereas, the people who have done great things and spend their time on brand instead of "Doing X"; Often they are coasting on reputation, but it's a form of retirement for them. They still like X. They still want to do X, but as a hobby, and getting paid to talk about X and get others excited about X is like having your cake and eating it.
Brand ambassadors are a different thing. Thats like when a famous rapper is the official fan of an NBA club. Employees hired on to positions with technical contributions (developer advocate) which is just a cover for some kind of image building in the market.. dunno
I’m not a Google employee, but can’t help to think that the injection of Oracle and Oracle
diaspora folks into the Cloud division has to effect the executive culture.
Even before this most recent round, Google fired most of their internal IT staff,
as well as the GCP support team, and replaced them with cheaper labor from a lower cost of living country, so I'd say yeah.
> If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
That isn't exactly a hardball question. Honestly, if it wasn't something that was already known either way, that is already a miss at that level. Especially in contrast to the way that Tim Cook handled the same idea.
Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs.
It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.
On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.
All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.
A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays?
“Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.”
- https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311....
“Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation”
- https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
“They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...
I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".
Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors.
Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit.
It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.
Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team.
Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
> "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".
Do you actually believe this to be the case? Why on Earth would Google do this? You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews, so at best this is just a hunch you have. Ask yourself if it's a hunch that makes sense.
Sundar is never going to actively cast shade on the people he just let go, but he did emphatically say "the process was far from random".
> You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews
I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by the layoffs, while people who were high performers in the current and/or prior cycles were impacted by the layoffs. The experiences of other people managers within the company (and at Amazon and Microsoft) agree with this.
I don't want to get too into Kremlinology, because I don't have enough data to say for sure how people in my org were selected beyond "performance wasn't a major consideration". But there is definite high-level tilt towards cutting people from certain areas in the company (parts of maps and devices were hit hard, most of cloud was barely impacted).
Yes, clearly certain product areas were targeted which makes obvious business sense. But you're making it sound like high performers were actually targeted by these layoffs, which is patently ridiculous.
My own anecdata confirms that /only/ low performers or people working on projects that should never have existed to begin with were let go.
I've some pretty "hilarious" things about the round of firing.
For example, one friend mentioned that someone on his team was let go while they were on call and actively handling a security incident.
Another person had two people critical to their project laid off. They didn't cut the whole team, just the two most critical people. Regardless, that team is kinda up shit creek now, but still employed by Google.
The key definition people are missing here is "good performing". What does that mean? In times of macroeconomic certainty, companies are going to focus on core revenue generating business. It makes a ton of sense that some OSS folks got fired, because OSS doesn't generate revenue. Managed services generate revenue.
I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability.
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.
I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go.
From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter.
Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up.
I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.
The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.
The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
Yesterday I searched "apache kafka" on my phone because I can never remember if it's apache.kafka.org or kafka.apache.org (it's the latter, the former is registered by an Italian developer), and I had to scroll past five or six "sponsored" results from managed Kafka vendors to get the actual result.
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back
I’m no expert, but the “eco” routes don’t usually pass the smell test with me. I’ll be routed away from a thoroughfare that’s mostly flat/downhill to take a slightly-shorter side street that’s a steep incline. It just seems like half-baked greenwashing.
I’m convinced that Google Maps occasionally routes people through detours to gather data about the detour’s current road conditions and traffic speeds.
In the Canary Islands it took us down a utility road that was literally being used as a mountain mike trail. We were in an Opel Corso. Fortunately a beater, and my friend’s superior driving skill got us out, but just barely. We were resigned to abandoning the car… and Google had treated it just like a regular paved road.
TIL... for someone like me who's never been to Australia and doesn't know much about its geography, that's a pretty crazy story!
And it turns out Connie Sue is still out there, running desert tours except not now because of lingering Covid restrictions.
> Connie's work background started with 10 years of general nursing and midwifery, 14 years as a violinist in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and has studied Computer Systems Engineering at TAFE part-time.
Long before I wrote earth scale digital mapping software in 1990s (yes, before google Maps .. and even Keyhole) I was taught how to use a theodolite by Len Beadall (I was ~ 12 or so at the time and pretty keen).
If you're interested in the landscape those roads pass through, here's a 13 minute intro:
Good roads until 6:00 minutes in .. and then they take the David Carnegie Rd.
Just checked my maps app and I do not have this option, but have recently been dealing with Maps picking utterly non-sensical routes (random small streets rather than main roads).
It feels like the sensitivity to traffic is turned up way too high.
Waze has been consistently better, especially for traffic rerouting. It's also way better at letting you know about road events, like accidents, than Google Maps. Maps is better to search stuff on a map, but for navigation, it is so barebones (and not even in a good minimalist way).
I'm not sure how GMaps can still lag so far behind when Waze is also owned by Google.
They run them as separate teams and don’t necessarily collaborate. Marking Police traps had been on Waze for years and Google Maps just got it last year.
Waze isn't a separate team anymore - it got merged into Maps[0], which means that its probably going to join the Google Graveyard in the next cost-cutting round[1].
> Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.
This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.
Maps decline has been a real annoyance for me. I’ve dropped all of Google products: mail, years ago for Fastmail; search, I pay for Kagi; youtube, I pay netflix and spotify; docs, I use it at work but still looking for alternatives; voice, Skype does well. I’m almost off the Google bandwagon. I think if there is a good map system out-there, I’d finally have no dependency on the whole Google stack.
A week or so ago I was freaked out when some Google app nudged me with a link to email that said I needed to return a defective heatsink/fan by a certain date to avoid being charged for it. I looked, and found the email saying they'd gotten it; I had already sent it. If it's going to look for things like that, it should look for evidence that it's already been taken care of.
I don't know about the recent decline. Google has sometimes seemingly switched to an "I feel like going for a country drive" mode for years. Which is particularly annoying in areas where it snows and narrow country roads are often not in great shape even if the main streets are pretty well cleared.
> ...search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android
Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents).
This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day?
As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
People really don't seem to understand. Google doesn't make most of its money by making "stuff" it's value is in it's ad monopoly. Who is most responsible for maintaining this monopoly? It's Pichai. Larry and Sergei brought in the passion and innovation which has led to Google's AI lead and numerous money sink X projects. The trio need to get back together to make AI monopoly happen.
Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.
Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.
That is based on huge assumptions, and it is unclear how the internal billing works (i.e is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening). Is the AWS Revenue just from external customers using the services.
It is not secret. There is an internal spreadsheet that documents all the prices.
Everyone has access! Everyone I worked with at Amazon knew the prices they were spending for the different services they were using or thinking of using.
Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival.
Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.
IMO it makes perfect sense for Google to be in cloud. Cloud infrastructure services are a race to the bottom—storage, compute, etc. You get people into your ecosystem and upsell them on SaaS offerings that integrate with your IaaS offerings. You have to be able to scale without growing staff linearly, which is already Google’s model (although Apple and Amazon are better at it).
Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.
Google doesn't have the ability to speak with a customer at ALL. If there is a problem, basically the only recourse you have is to flail about on HN, Reddit or Twitter and hope that you are noticed by a random Google employee who feels sympathy for your plight and decides to try and help you.
The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only.
This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support.
I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.
When Google released Anthos, we were in the market for something along those lines for Kubernetes on our own hardware (policy requirements). Talked to our reps, asked for some quotes … nothing. Tried again. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. This left everyone wondering what it'd be like if we (as an existing GCP customer) needed support for any reason.
The only company I've ever dealt with which was worse at taking your money was IBM. In both cases, it was eerily similar: you could get a room full of people to do a demo but the salespeople seemed to assume their reputation meant success was inevitable and they didn't have to actually do anything like … eeew … work to close deals. In neither case were we the biggest deal in town but also far from the smallest, and in both cases the experience meant they missed out on larger sales later.
I think you may be misreading the situation. When Anthos was announced, it didn't exist yet. They didn't have anything to sell you and you weren't important enough to be trusted with that knowledge. In this regard, your comparison was probably apt (especially if you were inquiring about Watson).
Released, not announced - they actually contacted us about it and then ghosted when we asked for a quote. At the very least I’d have expected a simple “we’ll get back to you”.
IBM was similar: we were trying to buy Opteron servers, let our rep know, had a bunch of people show up, ended with them saying they’d send us a quote, no reply to multiple requests. Maybe they weren’t interested in mere 6 figure purchases but they could have said so.
(And, sure, we aren’t the biggest customer but you don’t get large deals if you can’t handle medium size deals. AWS shows up & they get considerably more business.)
Once I had an issue with a Google App Store (I paid for some app expensive subscription but did not get access) payment and got a pretty quick and efficient customer support. They were very polite, checked the issue, explained what happened, and offered some solution. Perharps they provide better support in my country due to customer protection laws or I just got lucky.
Nope. Major accounts require tons of dedicated technical resources and hand holding. You might not have been directly involved, but the people side of Cloud is scaling out of control right now - even during "hiring freeze" and layoffs.
Culturally it didn’t get enterprise, e.g. “ditch oracle and move to spanner”.
Technology wise it was not setup for enterprise.
Staff wise it was paying way too high of a total-comp for non revenue roles. TAMs making 400k/year on accounts spending < 5M/year.
However it could have addressed all those. There were people inside advocating for those changes. Eng and Product leadership refused to listen. And the CEO refused to reward business success and instead rewarded product launches od multiple un-successful messaging apps.
Those are all marginally profitable staff billed through post sales. Consulting business sides of tech companies shouldn’t be considered part of the core footprint as they’re profit centers based on staff scale. The core product itself is designed to scale independently of people, because the marginal person doesn’t increase profits while the marginal unit of infrastructure. Sources, I was directly involved.
Edit: my experience is with aws not gcp. Gcp is a bit of a non entity in enterprise cloud.
What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?
AWS was re-built from the ground up. Based on systems Amazon knew it already had and how to do better.
S3 was built from the old image hosting designs, but better.
StepFunctions and SWF before it are re-designed based on the 5 internal workflow engines that existed (and still do exist).
SQS is a re-do of AMP.
DynamoDB is a re-do of Sable.
Redshift is a re-do of their internal partitioning and querying of Oracle databases but on non-Oracle databases. Their new iteration of Redshift is designed to replicate Andes + Dryad/Cradle.
How we saying anything different? Of course AWS was built based on what Amazon learned from operating at scale.
But that doesn’t mean they just took a few extra computers they had to spare and start hosting external customers on the same metal used by Amazon retail.
The only product that I know of in recent history that came from Amazon to AWS without many changes (and without any API or automation story) is Amazon Connect.
They’re the same CPUs they just use an internal API to provision and not AWS APIs. I’m pretty sure the internal APIs also just wrap ec2 et al at this point (for backwards compatibility)
I guess I should disclose that I work at AWS. But it’s publicly well documented how the infrastructure of AWS came to be.
Much of the Amazon infrastructure predates AWS and was built on homegrown systems. A lot of wasn’t ported over.
If you want to see what it looks like to have an Amazon product made available to AWS and that wasn’t designed specifically for AWS, look no further than Amazon Connect. There were no publicly available APIS for years to automate anything. Every AWS native service is API first.
That just does not describe google. If you look at their published systems papers, particularly the borg traces and the B4 SDN, their hardware runs essentially flat out 24x7. They don’t need to backfill diurnal or annual capacity
> Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting.
Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.
Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners.
I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.
As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.
For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...
> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.
I had a succession of Windows CE devices (iPaq 3600, 3800, 4500, whatever the monochromatic one was, plus some Toshiba (?) that used an SH4, and 3 or 4 more that I could maybe pick out of a lineup but no longer remember). If memory serves, the Toshiba and the later iPaqs weren’t nearly so destructive on updates.
Whoa, you were a much more dedicated user than I ever was. Thanks for providing historical context that they learned from feedback and/or mistakes.
To be fair, I think, in retrospect, the iPod and iTunes sync process and system gave Apple a multi-year headstart with building and developing a consumer-friendly backup and sync process.
Internally at Microsoft, the flops were obvious. Employees made fun of the zune, there was a lot of embarrassment that staff were preferring iphones to free company-provided alternatives, etc. Leadership was putting $ in (remember the Nokia acquisition disaster?) and individual teams were doing neato things, but leadership was feudal & by-the-numbers with many tiny product owners, and not led by a good overall product person.
My introduction to Microsoft's problems came about 20 years ago. I was talking to a developer that worked there who kept emphasizing that Microsoft was such a boring place to work compared to companies like Google. Open source was the enemy, and they were supposed to give their all to further the Windows and Office monopolies - proprietary, corporate software. Meanwhile he was watching what was happening in the Linux world and elsewhere. There was a plan, it's just that it was to maximize next quarter's revenue.
Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target.
Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
Nah, Blackberry, ohsa, Nokia dominance, etc. were way more relevant to the markets than Windows Mobile (not really CE as CE is more relevant for embedded and tablet like verticals).
The iPAQ H3600 came out in 2000, and the O2 XDA in 2003 - pocket-sized, touchscreen, keyboardless, ARM-based devices with web browsers - with Microsoft providing the OSes for them.
So in a sense they had a lot of the parts of the winning recipe. They just didn't have capacitive touchscreens. Or decent batteries. Or affordable flash memory. Or gorilla glass. Or an on-screen keyboard you could usefully use without a stylus. And mobile data was slow and very expensive.
The rest of the phone market, at the time, was off doing weird things like WAP.
Microsoft missed the market in the sense they weren't on the flight when it took off - but they didn't miss it, in the sense they were at the right departure gate hours before any of the other passengers.
Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs).
Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.
YouTube hardly mattered on mobile at the time we're talking about, iPhone 1 didn't even do 3G. Gmail isn't a monopoly and never has been. iPhone came out just a few years after Gmail did, whilst Microsoft had Outlook/Exchange in the enterprise which practically was a monopoly.
The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.
Microsoft never came close to the level of intersecting monopolies Google has. Also, Google learned from Microsoft's mistake: It spread political money early and often to ensure it wouldn't get regulated nearly as quickly. Google aggressively paid off Democrats and Republicans alike, and despite bipartisan support for dealing with them, regulation work is still slow and ineffective.
Now that's not to say Microsoft doesn't hold any monopolistic positions or engage in monopolistic behavior, most large companies eventually do and Microsoft still does where opportunity presents.
But if you think Microsoft is a monopoly and Google isn't, you have a view of the industry that is two decades out of date.
I think the most monopolistic portion of Google besides search would be their hold on the ad tech industry (and even then you have other online giants Meta, Tiktok, Amazon, etc.) but I don't necessarily understand how you can say they have a monopoly on consumer products large enough to drive adoption of Android especially 15 years ago.
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome and Android either have direct competitors in other ecosystem or are open source. YouTube and search are the only ones I can think of without direct competition. And the competition for these products come from Apple and Microsoft who are more/just as entrenched in owning and growing their entire platform.
Something like 70% of email is controlled by Google, and you cannot operate an email service if you do not meet Google's demands. If your business isn't listed in Google Maps, it doesn't matter what industry you are in, Google has killed you. Chrome and Android aren't open source (at least, not the version running on 99.9% of their respective install bases), and both operate as near complete monopolies. Chrome has used its position to reshape the very standards of the web to meet Google's business need and try to block competitors. Android has no competition at all, as I explained above: For manufacturers building devices it's the only OS in town.
While ignoring all these huge monopolies, you claim search has no competition. Ironically, about a third of global search queries are serviced by Bing! I would go so far as to say the monopolies above are as powerful, or moreso, than Google's grip on search.
Yeah I truly don't understand how you can look at email and maps and say Apple and Microsoft aren't also competing in those spaces.
Chromium and AOSP also aren't trivial contributions to open source and having the ability to fork those projects is much preferable to me than a proprietary solution that's more democratic once it achieves market dominance. Manufacturers building their own devices having nowhere to go was a problem pre-Android and a reason they'd rather license Google's OS rather than compete against Apple. And I think the decision of web standards has grown to be a bigger issue beyond what W3C or Google should be handling at this point, we treat the internet as public utility with the promise of standards without actual regulations and our browsers are an extension of that mess currently (not to say government is actually equipped to solve the issue).
I wasn't ignoring those other services I was doubting their monopolies unless we're changing the definition. I'd say the majority of dominant tech products have a large market share with few competitors but which are monopolies? I'd agree Android/Chrome was a monopoly if iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Safari, Windows, Azure, AWS and I guess bing all start getting a look at for markets with seemingly only one/two other competitors, especially when you look at the fact they contribute little to nothing back for public benefit.
That statistic does not mean what you think it means, it's about clients. That ignores the fact that people open their Gmail with Samsung, Apple, and Windows mail apps. 66% of folks are not running around with icloud.com addresses.
I’d say the key mistake they made was accepting carrier and OEM intermediation. Apple figured out how to get the carriers out of the way (trading off support down to a single carrier!) while also owning the hardware, and Android OEMs piggybacked on this model.
Microsoft recognized that GUIs were important enough to their future to make what were arguably the best mice available. If they had “caught” mobile, they would have done the same for phones.
I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.
Apple didn't write an OS from scratch either. iOS was really a fork of OS X, and followed on the experience Apple & NeXT had in porting NeXTstep around various architectures. Something that MS also had a lot of experience with, with NT.
Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius.
With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their OS to multiple 3rd party vendors, trying to create a commodity marketplace for their OS on other people's devices.
Apple won on vertical integration, created a focus product, and profited off the experiences and reputation they had with iPod in order to make a winner.
But people also forget that at this point in Apple's history, it was kind of... make or break. The iPod and then iPhone were huge gambles, that paid off in spades. If they had failed Apple would have continued to be a minority PC producer with poor profit margins and a reputation for being "weird" and "niche." Even after the success of the iMac in the late 90s, they were still in quite a bit of $$ risk.
The intense vertical integration and the product focus in the iPhone could also have failed. It was risky but it paid off for them. MS (and others) had a lot more to lose, and was more conservative.
I believe WinCE was a "new" (or at least different) OS. it sort of had Win32 like APIs on top of it, but the core was fundamentally different than NT. They only sort of got things moving in the right direction (only to then abandon it) when they had their mobile platform on top of the "normal" (pared down) NT stack.
I read recently that the Xbox team maintained Ballmer’s support for their project by leading him to believe the Xbox would run Windows, while they were actually writing a dedicated console OS.
Isn't it more that nurturing more than one unicorn is vanishingly unlikely? All these companies can do is to wield their enormous power for as long as they can until the inevitable happens and they become an also ran.
I mostly agree, but to be a little fair to Pichai: He didn't get a company that was really in a dominant (or at least not already rapidly declining) market position. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet might have been inherited from Gates, but Google not missing but still absolutely fucking up social networking, immediately prior to Pichai taking the role, is all on former leadership.
Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
They could have done literally nothing and ended up in a preferable position to today. It blew immeasurable goodwill and burned whole teams of developers.
(And by some stories I heard, “literally nothing” might even have been Pichai’s approach had it been his choice.)
Pichai didn't completely inherit the cash cow? He led Chrome to quiet dominance, on the basis of a better product, in the face of entrenched and better funded competitors. That is quite different from Ballmer.
One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
This doesn't quite line up for me. Ballmer, for his lack of technical foresight, managed an incredibly profitable business. People act like anybody could have just stepped in to milk Windows and Office for all they were worth, but the focus and execution are easy to scoff at in hindsight. If MS had focused on mobile, who's to say they would have succeeded? And perhaps in the process of losing, also ceded dominance to an upstart in the office software space.
Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
I worked at Microsoft during the Ballmer era. Profits and revenue continued to increase under his watch.
They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
> Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
The new app platform happened maybe a couple years before the Nokia acquisition. I don’t remember the whole timeline but don’t forget Steven Elop (who had been the business head of Office) left Microsoft to become the Nokia CEO, had the company dump their own mobile platform for Windows Phone, then when that failed closed to deal for Microsoft to buy their
cratered mobile business.
In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
Culturally my impression is Microsoft was never happy about digital distribution or really grokked it: even today, things like the System File Checker will ask for original installation media rather then just downloading whatever they need from Microsoft when a problem is found.
Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).
Search has particularly gone south last 3-4 months. Quotes and exact phrasing is now a necessity and I find myself rather use ChatGPT.
What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does.
I've known Cat Allman (one of the other folks laid off) since we worked together 23 years ago. She's one of the kindest, most thoughtful people, and exceptional at her job. This is a huge loss for both Google and the Open Source community.
Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.
I only worked with Chris on a few occasions, and those interactions had been very pleasant -- he was in a relatively high ranking position and definitely had a lot of responsibilities, but he still communicated plainly and treated everyone like a peer. I wish him the best.
The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t.
I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play.
Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff.
Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years.
That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.
As a small person, I have zero desire to invite recrimination from anyone. This is not a comment about the person the thread concerns. It is a small world and industry.
My only intention was to provide a little bit more nuanced depth to the original conversation. It’s not just puppies and rainbows. People and organizations are complex and operate in shades of gray.
Many moons ago, Chris wanted to recruit me to work on video compression/streaming (this was I think before they acquired Youtube). He found out I was a big Pythonista, an up-and-coming language at the time.
Chris then invited me to meet at a playground where our kids could play and we could talk tech. He also brought along his colleague, Guido Van Rossum! We had a fun chat but in the end I decided bigco was not for me.
Alternative take: when I was there he was tyrannical and constantly blocking employees from open sourcing code developed on their own weekends and evenings, purely on a personal whim. People had to fight internal battles to get like little video games and stuff put up on github. You'd think head of OSPO would do whatever it took to get code open sourced but no far from it. Loads of grumbling about how he was just an ex-Slashdot editor who couldn't even code, on a power trip abusing contract ip clauses.
Every for profit cares about money. The issue is that Google has struggled to try to come up with a new product that convinced people to give it money.
This is pretty much the only comment I'm going to reply to (I'm technically a google employee until march 31st) and just say how pleased I am to see this. The Screensavers was so much fun to do, Leo, Morgan and the crew were just terrific, and made it very easy for me to look like I knew what I was doing.
My observation is that this has already been happening for a long time. I’ve worked with a lot of ex Google people in startups, especially more established ones. They pretty much all found it unsatisfying working there. Too slow. Too little impact. Maybe the layoffs will be a kick in the pants for others too, but they won’t be the first or alone in moving in that direction.
It would be amazing to see but I am not sure we will see it happening. Google is the one that taught the whole generation that amazing products and services should be free. It will be very hard to compete against google and other big tech companies that are essentially using predatory pricing to kill any competition.
I hope at some point to see legislation passed that will break up Google's advertising aspects into multiple businesses.
They own the front, middle, and back of the whole thing, and strangle (even if they have to acquire) any other business that tries to break in and get a better deal for publishers, or advertisers both.
(It was especially disheartening/confirming to see them outright admit (in quotes the DOJ acquired) that they bought my former employer (AdMeld) explicitly to make it disappear from the "competitive landscape." When I worked at Google, I seem to recall having to take yearly training courses on how I should say stuff like that, but these people... felt free)
Funding is absolutely available. In fact it is easy to raise in a down economy if you are the right people. A very significant fraction of successful companies were founded at or around down economies. Everything is easier and cheaper and you don’t need to rush.
TCI / Chris Hon are only doing this because his fund is mainly invested in Microsoft and Alphabet[1]. Guess what, his fund recently lost a bit of money for the first time: TCI[2]
Its ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING that MS and Alphabet are being pushed into laying off collectively over 20K people so this billionaire can recover a bit. Like, could this not be a national security issue? This man is able to have Google trash their open source initiatives on a whim, making the company weaker. It should be very very illegal.
I really wouldn't assume Chris Hon has this much pull or that these decisions are due to investor pressure. Maybe a flimsy rationale but if he did have that kind of influence I kinda doubt he'd be speaking publicly – seems more like a personal branding effort.
There are definitely billionaires profiting from the layoffs, but if you look at who owns shares of Google stock it isn't people who own a paltry <1% of shares
Yes that is correct, but specifically this person is the activist investor publicly pushing for this. Maybe that had no effect, but certainly it seems like this man might be a bit responsible.
He's a convenient scapegoat for the people who actually made the decisions, the execs that are paid primarily in stock and have perverse incentives for maximizing short term gains.
> It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm.
It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem.
Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer stories of gmail accounts getting shut off for no reason after 15 years with no recourse.
> a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
So yeah, I would hope that an algorithm was used. As opposed to what? "I like that guy more than the other guy".
You seem to have the interpretation that some guy in finance wrote a script, it output some employee IDs, and then no one checked the output before laying them all off, as if slaves to the machine. Do you really believe that?
First off, you know that "used an algorithm" in modern parlance means "was done by AI without human intervention".
And based on that, absolutely I think Google did that. They run everything with data and statistics without humans. That's how they are so efficient.
This is backed up by the fact that the managers who work there were simply told who they were losing and had no input into the process, and aren't even aware of who has been let go yet.
I’ve worked at Google for a long time and I assure you the chances of some AI being involved in the selection process for these layoffs is very close to zero. Don’t be so confident in something you apparently know so little about.
What kind of tools do you think the people analytics team builds? [0]
I know some people who used to be on the team. Given that they built analytics to automatically sort resumes, automatically identify retention risks, and automatically set salaries, it wouldn't surprise me that they had developed a system to determine layoffs.
Google isn't the only company that does it. It's not like it's unique to Google or anything. But yes, I absolutely believe that Google used an AI to determine the layoffs, at least to inform them if nothing else.
In the post I replied to you said “without human intervention” and now you’re saying “at least to inform”. Can’t even stay consistent within this thread? Again you are basing your assumptions on pretty much nothing. (Fwiw the page you linked has nothing to do with AI.)
I think this is a ridiculous take. Just because Google uses algorithms to handle millions of queries without human intervention does not mean they use algorithm in HR. Do you also believe Google's hiring process is devoid of human intervention?
Managers were not informed because there are so many of them at Google that it would have leaked long before the process was over. The process was conducted manually by 750 directors and VPs.
> Do you also believe Google's hiring process is devoid of human intervention?
No, of course not. But that doesn't say anything about their firing process. Also they brag about their people analytics team and how they manage their people with the same automation that they manage other parts of the business. So it's not that ridiculous of a take. Especially when you consider how much automation they use in the parts of their business that should use humans, like customer service.
I'm a part of a medium-sized team working on a popular infrastructure open-source project. There was no impact on our team, so it is not like Google hates open-source now.
I feel like a good explanation for all this is that tech giants saw this as an opportunity to collaborate to reduce wage inflation. I feel like that explanation squares better with the fact that, during many of these layoffs, employee performance has often appeared to not factor in as strongly. In fact, the opposite seems to be true in many cases.
If the sector believes that it can do just as well with 10% fewer employees, I'm not sure if that's the same as collusion to suppress wages. Surly some greedy player would be saying "no, I can make more incremental revenue by hiring these people." The story that tech overhired during the pandemic makes more sense.
That could often be the case. Although the Google veterans mentioned in the article seem to be examples of top performers that weren't just resting on their laurels. But I suppose there could have been other reasons they were let go that were not public, like company politics, etc.
So the problem with Google's earnings was that its exorbitant profit did not stay or grow at the same rate. During a pandemic followed by a global crisis prompted by a war. And they are laying off people. To make hedge funds and shareholders happy.
...
What a destructive 'growth at all costs' economic culture. I guess those hedge funds and shareholders will pick up the slack in those open source projects...
However you look, their exorbitant, humongous profits have declined a slight bit !during a recession caused by a war!. This should not be a concern for any sane investor but the ones who want growth at all costs.
Well maybe it'll be a renaissance for many different and new projects. With Google hoardning all this talent and cushioning them on non-strategic, prestige tasks the ecosystem became desolate (thus enhancing Google's role as beacoun of OSS).
It sucks for those fired but let's be honest, just a bit. They're household names in their respective industries, and they'll be welcomed in no time onto new projects.
It's like a fire sweeping in a forest, clearing the undergrowth and making space for a new growth frenzy.
There's no story here beyond well-known people on the open source team getting laid off and botching the layoffs with people learning their badges don't work. One is a valid strategic decision, the other is sloppy, neither is evil, or even all that interesting.
I would take it a step further and deny that the layoffs were botched. How are you supposed to broadcast this information such that everyone learns at the same time and in the right way?
Of course badges stop working when you're let go. What possible good can come of leaving the badges on? All it takes is one in 12000 disgruntled ex-employees to make it not worth it.
Yeah, I hate the way they were conducted but can't think of a better way that wouldn't open the company up to a lot of risk.
I'm not convinced that announcing them in advance is actually better anyways. We have partner teams in Europe who get to spend a month or more after the announcement worrying about whether or not they still have a job. Morale on the teams in the US took a noticeable hit, but the teams in EU have seemed utterly miserable for the last week.
I was laid off in the EU (not from Google, and not in this wave) — and yeah, productivity completely tanked for months while we waited for the relevant information to seep through HR’s stonewalling.
I think it’s better to have some warning, but it would have been great if they could have said “your job ends in three months, here are your options” instead of leaving people hanging while they figured out the details on the corporate side. Or even, if paranoid about disgruntled employees, to say “welcome to your garden leave, here are your options.”
Really? The open source teams have the best of the best in terms of reputation and quality output often delivering more value and goodwill compared to the traditional marketing department. They should move some of those folks into search..
> They should move some of those folks into search
Given the choice, I know a lot of people deeply involved in the OSS community who would rather leave for another OSS-friendly role at another company rather than get pulled into something that pulls their time and attention away from their OSS activities.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.
That’s good for us that they were let go. Google sucked them up and nailed their feet to the floor with amazing comp.
This article feels like it was written by a friend of someone who is named as let go. Google let a lot of good people go last week. Some more and some less deserving than those in the OSPO.
Google has never had a particularly coherent open source strategy (look at how many repos are on the github.com/google org) and I don’t think this latest layoff says much about what the future of the strategy holds either.
With Firebase and the rest of GCP, there's absolutely no reason why those products are as hard to use as they are.
Supabase, Vercel, etc. all stepped in to fill that massive void that Google could have taken care of so long ago. IMO that's a massive miss and failure on Google's part.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.
At the hands of Google, open source is just a weapon of the complement commoditization. So no wonder they are letting those people go now. In this way, they are trying to lower the antimonopoly pressure against them. The second benefit is preserving all those money that would go to the salaries of those fired people.
I doubt this will change the trajectory of accusations. But it gives some momentum in terms of reaping the peak monetary benefits to shareholders before a possible company division through legislation.
(Putting this note under here instead of at root level…)
FTA:
> It has been widely reported that … those fired included staffers who had just received high performance reviews … with annual compensation packages of $500,000 to $1 million. … Many … were the best of the best in Google's open source program office (OSPO) and other open source efforts.
FWIW, we are actively hiring a handful of engineers in this competency+range, into a well funded (founder funded, not VC backed) startup. We are doing interesting things and intend to release generally useful patterns as open source. It's also an entrepreneurial change of pace for builders/makers after an enterprise, even an SV enterprise.
My username at the freemail owned by the company in the article.
> For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google's OSPO 18 years ago, was let go.
Sibling comment excepted, there aren't many companies hiring for this. 18+ years also makes it challenging because for the last two decades, you've only known Google, and it's not clear if you can operate in another environment.
I'm not saying this is the case, but if this is the case, it's really his own fault and not Google's. What is Google supposed to do, fire everyone after 10 years so they don't grow too complacent?
Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any usage of a library is a derivative work and infects. This is always going to be poisonous to any commercial use, and PyTorch and Tensorflow only gained the traction they have because they could be used commercially - they wouldn't have been successful if GPL'd.
Even LGPL is super challenging here due to requiring dynamic linking. This is fine in Java (unless you use Graal AOT compilation) and Python, impossible in Go, and at best discouraged in other compiled languages like Rust and C++.
I think there's likely a copyleft middle ground - something like the Mozilla public license seems about right, where it copylefts improvements without infecting users. I don't know why Google chose Apache 2.0 over MPL or the like - for something like Android it makes sense, for something like Guava it's not clearcut. But, when people talk copyleft, they're rarely, rarely talking MPL.
I think it's unlikely that Google opensourced Tensorflow with a view to getting some free dev hours, they're doing it to push their OSS agenda, to wield influence over how everyone else does work.
This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small.
Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourced, the world reinvented in Hadoop and the progress started happening there instead of in MR) and wanted to avoid becoming the bit player in a space they pioneered in. It's a reasonable strategy. (The risk is that you're giving away something that could be a competitive advantage.)
K8s another example. Kind of amazing that Google effectively owns the now-standard deployment solution off of 'we don't really use K8s but want you to build your applications like us and K8s is a bit like something we do use'. At least Tensorflow's actually what Google runs internally (to best of my knowledge)!
I mean if Fuchsia ever starts getting used for production at some point by anyone, anywhere. Seems like more of a way to do systems research by Google than something designed for real world use.
If that was the case (an academic exercise in systems research, nothing for the real world), then arguably a strong copyleft license such as GPL would have been even better.
You forgot step 1.5: make contributing to open-source an unwritten rule to getting a job in the industry
Full disclosure: I got my current job before I had contributed anything to open source but I was asked a lot about it while applying to companies like it's expected that you work in your free time
I think in my entire time working I haven't met anyone who has significantly contributed to open source (aside from "let me fix some bug that's annoying me in a library"), so I'm not sure how required it really is
It varies on focus area. Most big OSS projects are infrastructural in nature, and so if you're working in that space there's actually a lot of engineers who you meet with OSS experience beyond fixing random bugs. Even then, for every OSS engineer doing big OSS contributions, there are many who never do, it's just the nature of the business. I know of just one hiring decision (out of hundreds and hundreds) that was made because of OSS contributions, and I know no interviewers who routinely checked OSS contributions beyond surface level.
Enterprises are (slower than I’d hoped) learning the value of contributing to the open source projects they use. More companies are establishing Open Source Program Offices and I expect the rate of contribution to go up. Most contribution from companies will go to software licensed under MIT/BSD/Apache.
US government policy is that software developed with public funding is a public good. Current policy encourages government software to released under the most permissive license possible (ideally Public Domain, but practically permissive licenses like MIT/BSD). GPL is farther from the Public Domain than licenses like MIT/BSD. To enter the rabbit hole of material on this topic start at https://code.gov/about/overview/introduction/.
Side note… the most interesting thing I learned today is that DoD (and probably other agencies) consider “Open Source Software” to be “Commercial Software”. This is a great development and likely means it will be much simpler to include OSS in make/buy trade studies. See “Is Open Source Software Commercial Software”, https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#q-is-os...
Open source software and free software are philosophically different but refer to mostly the set of programs (with two different but equivalent definitions [1,2]).
> step one: shift the focus from free software (liberty minded software) on to "open source" software. i.e. software which you can look but not touch
I’m pretty sure when you say “look but not touch,” you’re talking about project governance, where outside contributors have limited input into the direction of the project. If that’s the case, I don’t like this conflation of governance and “freedom”. Google’s open source software is free software by all definitions (including FSF).
For a project to be open source or free software, users need to have the “four essential freedoms”. The ability to get your changes merged upstream is not one of those freedoms.
It is totally valid to criticize the corporate governance model of open source software. But it’s best not to confuse our already overloaded definitions by saying that corporate software with a free license isn’t really “free.”
Remember when SV was the center of innovation - 'disruptive innovation' - in everything, which included management, and included valuing employees in order to bring out the most innovation possible.
Where is the innovation here? How are these moves cutting edge? It's the opposite - reactionary, megalomaniacal, short-term greed drives. That is not a culture that will produce innovation.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire.
I'm being facetious here but this is in line with what I would expect from an organisation that continually reaches for automation over human interaction
Probably laying them off, the cheap paperwork-free, confrontation-free way, by simply revoking their access rights and door passes and "letting things work themselves out naturally" as the Bobs might say.
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Is there something about a tenure of that duration which precludes someone from underperformance? Lots of middling engineers in the 15-20 year range are likely to be coasting and over-compensated relative to their output.
But those with a longer tenure did get a more generous severance package (more than a year's salary for a 20 year Googler), so they weren't treated with disrespect. They now have an entire year to figure out what to do next --- although someone who was there for Google's IPO is likely to be in a position to retire if they so choose.
Google no longer paying developers of code that we all use for free is obviously not good (for us or those developers), but this article is otherwise really quite bogus because it suggests that "open source developer" is a thing, when it...isn't. The article implies that Google is cutting off its own nose because the prime OSS devs they fired could just as well be writing OSS AI code. That's not how this stuff works.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Isn’t it true that someone experienced + respected in the OSS community would be the very best kind of person to transfer to e.g. the TensorFlow team?
As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own <1% of the company, it doesn’t explain the rather random and opaque way the layoffs seem to have been conducted. Plus they (so far) haven’t laid off nearly enough to make hedge funds happy.
I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one.
Google engineering culture has long been described as permitting coasters and encouraging employees to structure their work around what might get them promoted; that might be great for an innovative growing company, but I suspect Sundar & Co. know that that label doesn’t really fit google’s position anymore. I really don’t see any other reason they’d lay off high performing employees on important projects - especially OSS giants.
If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
It’s much easier to lose trust that to gain it, and the ramifications of the move will be felt for a very long time. There’s the time before and the time after, and Google won’t ever really look the same to the industry.
That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades.
There’s still massive innovation and builder spirit there, but I’m betting that we’ll have a much easier time poaching our favorite employees from Google now than we have over the last few years.
I’ve been part of several companies that have gone through layoffs, and one thing I’ve learned is that companies that haven’t done it in a while (or ever) typically do it poorly.
Very good points, especially the last one: when trying to understand the logic behind these layoffs, I honestly haven’t considered incompetence enough. Surely people making tens of millions of dollars a year got there through intelligence and merit and not capitalist fiat? Right? Right…?
Yes I’m sure as one of the top paying public companies that issue stock instead of Monopoly money (equity in private companies) tech people are going to refuse to work for Google.
Their compensation isn’t that good (at least for non famous folks) within Big Tech.
Compared to who? Amazon (my employer)? Apple? Microsoft? Facebook?
As far as I know the rankings were
- Facebook (but I don’t hate myself enough to consider working there)
- Google
- Amazon
- Apple
- Microsoft
But Facebook has had a worse stock price drop than the rest.
There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These layoffs show that this is not true. Google is a large corporation, like many others.
There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reeling from this, but it’s really just another day in corporate America.
Very fair, it is typical in many ways, and ofc there’s no one reason for a decision of this size. I’d argue that the culture is (was?) special, though - definitely not unique in the tech sector, but different from e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Amazon in many ways. I think that’s been a huge advantage of theirs for years when competing for talent: Google is known as a eng-first, open, innovative company, and people often take lowball offers to get that cred on their resume.
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
> There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These
Few people think Google is special in 2023. They just pay well.
It is a Capital Revolt. Workers were getting too comfortable, and now Money is teaching them a lesson
We got a little blip in human history where employers were forced to treat their employees like actual people. Was nice while it lasted. Back to having a boot stomping on our faces again...
I think getting from 500k+ salary to slightly under 500k salary and maybe having to visit a bunch of interviews hardly qualifies as dystopian nightmare. I realize being fired is no fun. It is very stressful and upsetting and people undergoing it should have all the sympathy. But let's be real - if we're talking about people making 10x national averages, they are not downtrodden underprivileged proletariat. So makes sense to do a reality check here and tone it down a bit.
Barf!!!! To compare a 2023 Google employee to any population that’s had “boot stomping on their faces” is so out of touch with historical reality that it’s disturbing, disgusting and laughable all at the same time. We’re not talking about kids cleaning chimney sweeps here, or even modern slaves digging in cobalt mines. But Google employees, where 6% were allowed to go find another lucrative position and are sacrificing their massage services? Tone down the hyperbole sir.
This is just the "stop complaining, there's starving kids in Africa so shut up" argument. Most employers don't care whether or not you hate yourself going into a soul-sucking job as a worker drone and will absolutely regress to that in the few industries that don't have it currently the moment market forces allow them to. There's a reason that sociopathy rates are higher amount CEOs than the general population. Call me out of touch all you want, but "stop whining about being forced into a job where you're dead on the inside like your parents were, since chimney sweeps had it worse" does absolutely nothing to change my pessimism
No, that’s not the argument. I’m calling out your false comparison that positions it as if modern tech workers are in some sort of proletarian struggle against their oppressors. I’m sorry if being in one of the most lucrative and cushy jobs in history still leaves you feeling like there’s a big hole in your life. That’s an existential crisis. That’s not corporate oppression. You’re not in the same situation as oppressed workers of the past.
I feel like we're miscommunicating here somehow. I don't think you read my comments correctly. I appreciate the blip I get to be in where my employer has to treat me like I have an actual soul. I'm complaining about the fact that those same employers are just waiting for the market forces to allow them to start treating us like drones again, and seeing news about the market moving in that direction and being reminded that in all likelihood I'll be forced into the "shit pay plus 2 hour commute per day, sit for nine hours in a tiny cubicle" life before I am allowed to retire.
"You’re not in the same situation as oppressed workers of the past." I don't have to be to recognize that a soul-sucking job sucks... If we're just comparing levels of oppression, then yes, you are making the "just shut up and be glad you only have one boot on your face instead of two" argument.
If you can, without comparing levels of oppression, make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty, then I'm all ears. "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
Soul sucking job sucks, but if it also makes you a millionaire, then I think feeling oppressed is not entirely earned by your reality. You can always take you million and go on a spiritual quest in Himalayas for next 10 years. Somebody who earns the median wage in the US - which is a lot of people - may not have this option. So I don't think framing it in these terms makes much sense.
> I'll be forced into the "shit pay plus 2 hour commute per day, sit for nine hours in a tiny cubicle"
That's not exactly how jobs in Bay Area at least look. I mean 2 hrs commute can happen, if you live in a cheap place and not in walk distance from Google campus, but the pay likely would be not "shit" at all, especially for somebody who worked at good salary in Google.
> make an actual argument for why I should be gung-ho happy about about the future of work reverting back to being shitty,
That's it, from the point of view of about 99.9999% of Earth population, it will still be dream come true. From the point of somebody who has been living in the paradise, they will be living in a bit less luxurious paradise, and that would, I agree, sting and be very distressing. I mean, it is natural for people to strive for perfection, and for improvement of their own conditions. If you are hungry, you want to be sated. If you are never hungry, you want tasty food. If you have tasty food, you want it prepared specially well, be of appropriate spiciness, be healthy, have variety, maybe get some exotic foods from foreign lands, or authentic food from specific region, or prepared in some special ways by uniquely creative cooks. There's always something that can be better. Or, as it happens, worse. But if somebody who had access to Michelin three-stars restaurants, now has to eat in star-less ones, he shouldn't complain he is dying of hunger. His soul may be distressed, but it's not distressed in the same way as would be if he was actually hungry. Yes, there are levels, and yes, understanding them is good.
> "Someone else had it shittier" does nothing for me.
Maybe that's why somebody else has to tell it. As they say, you can't tickle yourself. So maybe you realize this point, and maybe realize that the suffering that you are feeling may be caused by framing, and also cured by framing too.
You can whine all you like, at least until Zuckerberg buys HN and starts to ban wrongthinkers. It's just that using "struggle of the downtrodden workers under the boot of the capital" doesn't sound as impressive when the downtrodden makes 10x more in a year than his average compatriot. I don't want to diminish anybody feelings, but I feel there should be a sense of proportion of things being not exactly hellscape yet for tech workers.
There's a miscommunication here. I'm not complaining about people being "over"-paid (though they'd save way more by cutting executive pay). I'm complaining about the signs that our overlords who have been briefly forced to treat people decently are eagerly awaiting any chance to reduce that and get back to treating everyone like shit. And I'm cynical that I absolutely find this stuff to be potential early signs of the end of the blip.
Side note, but it also strikes me as a sign of how normalized corporate treatment of people is that people is when we're on a thread about an article that talks about an exec making over 5 times a googlers salary per day and instead of people going "what the fuck? If that's true, 500k should be the norm for more people!", I get pushback on my comment about how this is a bad omen for the rest of us and called whiny.
The worker bonanza is only starting in many countries. Ageing populations mean that there is a severe labor shortage coming in the next decade or two.
"history where [some tech industry, only] employers were forced"
Only if you accept it. You write as if you are powerless.
Thank you for this comment; this is exactly my opinion but expressed much more clearly.
Precisely. I saw it coming last year with all that print wasted on the "great resignation" and the "WFH revolution". It's the post-COVID Restoration.
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Sundar's recent pay package tied more of his compensation to performance of GOOG relative to the rest of the S&P 100 [1, 2]. That could also be related.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-links-more-ceo-p... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21031629/google-ceo-sund...
Yeah I’ve seen this a lot. I really hope that isn’t the reason, cause if so it didn’t even work that well…
What, exactly, makes Sundar qualified to be CEO? In my view, nothing. He’s at best a figure head for Ruth who actually calls the shots. He’s done nothing as CEO other than keep Larry and Sergei’s piggy bank full. He’s just a moderately intelligent man way over his head, doing what other people tell him, without ever making a tough call.
For me the decline began when Ruth took over from Patrick, and when the whole Alphabet-ization thing was (clumsily) executed. It was clear at the time they had no idea what they were doing. At all-hands Larry & Sergey couldn't answer basic questions about the strategy and how it would affect large parts of the company (I was in the 'Access' PA at the time -- the PA that ran Fiber, and launched Google WiFi, et -- and Sergey didn't even seem to get that it existed,). They had mentally checked out, and it was obvious.
[dead]
I left Google last year (after 10 years), and, yeah, I mostly agree. It's especially dubious that these layoffs happened right in sequence after "everybody else" was doing it. It leaves the whole tech sector vulnerable and all of us in a worse bargaining position. It's a way of enforcing labour discipline into our sector.
Hence the layoffs had nothing to do with performance ratings, seniority, ability, etc. Just an across the board "Watch Us" moment to Googlers.
I also think Google really was over-hired and over-staffed for years, and some intense re-focusing and defragmentation is/was needed. Except that's not what the layoffs did or seem like they will do.
Here’s some reliable second-hand information I’m posting on this one-off account. Take this with whatever degree of salt you wish.
My understanding from somebody in a position to know is each VP was given a target/quota of cuts. Then they basically had big spreadsheets with salaries and performance ratings, and then pseudo-blindly cut teams or people to make quotas without input from directors/managers, and gave those lists to SPVs. On receipt of these lists some of the VPs were then canned.
To avoid lawsuits for discrimination in the USA they then added some statistical “noise” by firing a number of people randomly so the numbers balanced out with no “bias”.
The company is run by total morons in my opinion. I’m an extremely high performer with world class expertise. I didn’t get cut, but I’m interviewing elsewhere. I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll. I’d rather take PIP culture. Ultimately Google needs me more than the other way around.
Yep. I think it really is the end for them as a company with a reputation for attracting really bright people. They were in decline over the last 6-7 years, but now Sundar really really blew it. The sheen will just wear off more and more until they just look like any another spent SV company from the past.
There was I'm sure a way to make a whole restructuring or cost cutting process happen in a way that could have salvaged their reputation. But they didn't spend any effort trying to find it.
And if ad spend drops significantly and/or there's actual anti-monopoly enforcement against them, it will really accelerate things.
They have enough $$ they can coast for years, but it isn't going to be pretty.
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> I won’t work someplace my tenure is based on a dice roll.
Having lived through multiple layoffs in the last few years, I'm not sure there's any org larger than, just handwaving here, 1k people that doesn't do this.
I think you'd have to go to a startup before your absence is actually felt.
That’s a good point, also why I’m looking closely at startups.
Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters.
AT&T and whatever company inherited the Bell Labs might have done rounds after rounds of layoffs but never fired Dennis Ritchie, for example.
People such as DiBona and Allison are assets to any company who can afford to hire them. This is simply unexplainable.
Because that in particular will freak everyone else in the company out, and .. most importantly... Google is no longer scared about those people going to their competition, because their competition is also flushing talent away. In the past, Google was willing to dump all sorts of cash into talent as long as it kept people from creating a truly competitive landscape. Now, they don't have to worry as much.
The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.
Random layoffs that affect high performers and low performers equally doesn't encourage performing higher. If anything it encourages performing lower because why bother if it's not going to even save your job?
It might not be so much about encouraging performance as encouraging compliance.
That’s my impression of large companies. They value compliance way more than performance.
Because it doesn't matter. The idea that these companies are overflowing with "low performers" is a complete myth, a lie that people use to comfort themselves.
The Big Names are actually filled with so many smart and productive people that it doesn't matter who they lay off.
That would put me on notice that it is not worth working for such a company and I'd start sending résumés to various recruiters. No matter how you would explain this, it is nothing short of idiotic.
This reasoning seems plausible to me, but it seems to be having the opposite on employees from what I have seen. Why invest yourself in a company that will fire thousands of people for petty reasons? I think this will cause many employees to shift more focus on how to look good on paper, versus doing actual interesting or useful work that might fly under the radar.
Google makes so much money on ad revenues that their entire workforce could be completely lazy and unproductive and get almost nothing done and they'd still have money to burn.
Ads is a money printing machine. The most important roles there are SRE, data centre, and ops/infra jobs that keep the machine up and running.
Are you sure about that?
"Profits [in Q3 2022] were at $13.9 billion, down from $18.9 billion in Q3 2021"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/google-profits-plumm...
are you suggesting that they are intentionally scaring their staff in order to increase productivity? What management school is this thesis from?
The management school of stupidity, which in practice is met a lot more than any other management school, even at top tier companies.
The more I read about this stuff, the more I realize that a lot of is out of sheer luck of hitting product market fit. Google monopolized open internet ads 20 years ago and except for protecting their moat they haven't done much else, 90% of their money still comes from there. They're trying to expand with the cloud, but they're a distant 3rd or 4th.
it's not to increase productivity, it's to increase compliance and push down salary bands.
Have you forgotten this is the same company that had a backroom non-poaching pact with Apple (and probably other SV firms) a decade ago? And got caught red handed and got in a shitload of trouble for it?
When I joined Google in 2011 they were still dealing the fallout from that.
> it's not to increase productivity, it's to increase compliance and push down salary bands.
Its as if someone has forgotten that they can increase revenue instead.
Google doesn't have a revenue problem and hasn't since its IPO. For the past 15 years they've made the stockmarket happy by somehow magically conjuring increases in ad revenues every single quarter. It's a mind boggling firehose of money that just never seemed like it would stop increasing in intensity.
It still hasn't stopped, though it may have slowed a bit in its increase. But there's no danger on the revenue front. Just danger on stock price, because investors really want Number Go Up continually.
So the moves last week were really about making investors think Google is Doing Something and exercising downward pressure on wages.
Its a sector-wide move to put downward pressure on wages and bargaining power, and Google is only a small part of it.
Which one is easier for executives, particularly during a recession?
fair point, short-termism is so ick and its such little thinking.
Ok but why work harder when the message was "it doesn't matter how hard you work"?
> Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters.
The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.
> These are not coasters.
Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.
This ratio is key. Impact/pay. And from what I gathered working there until 2020, impact was starting to weigh more on how you elevate others around you. Meaning leadership. These “stars” might have personal brand power, but if they are collecting big pay and even working “hard” it might not be enough
IME, having worked with "tech celebrities", the veneer they can work so hard on maintaining isn't exactly reflective of actually working with them. I worked with one particularly famous person, who barely did anything internally, and spent all their time on external conferences and talks to preserve their external reputation - mostly coasting on past accomplishments. Not saying that's what happened here, but public visibility isn't correlated to internal engineering/leadership impact imo, and can even be detrimental.
> IME, having worked with "tech celebrities", the veneer they can work so hard on maintaining...Not saying that's what happened here...
I know both Chris and Jeremy well and I wouldn't imagine either of them trying to "maintain a veneer"
Knowing Jeremy fairly well, I would certainly agree on that.
Not to argue at all, but for some of those hires "Maintain Google's Brand Image in X Category" is their job - They're not there to work hard and drive innovation in those sectors, but to represent that Google hires and does work in that area.
Imagine learning that was your job.
It's not uncommon; There's a title for it - "Brand ambassador" - Though it's often the case that your official job title is something different while you act in that role. I doubt people in that position have illusions about what their role is, and in fact most are probably offered the choice of how much they lean into the branding and how much "Real Work" they do, with expectations set around "You are famous/known for X, we want X people to like us, go off and talk about X to cast us in positive light".
Pretty comparable is "Developer Advocate". The job is to grease the wheels between people using your services and the developers developing them. In that role, they playact as both customer and provider, both to developers and consumers. An awful lot of Developer Advocates are mediocre at both, but you don't need to be good; In fact, in some ways being mediocre is a plus, because the point is to represent each side to the other.
Whereas, the people who have done great things and spend their time on brand instead of "Doing X"; Often they are coasting on reputation, but it's a form of retirement for them. They still like X. They still want to do X, but as a hobby, and getting paid to talk about X and get others excited about X is like having your cake and eating it.
Brand ambassadors are a different thing. Thats like when a famous rapper is the official fan of an NBA club. Employees hired on to positions with technical contributions (developer advocate) which is just a cover for some kind of image building in the market.. dunno
> Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.
Your suspicion is what would need to be substantiated. Contributions made by these people are well known.
I’m not a Google employee, but can’t help to think that the injection of Oracle and Oracle diaspora folks into the Cloud division has to effect the executive culture.
Even before this most recent round, Google fired most of their internal IT staff, as well as the GCP support team, and replaced them with cheaper labor from a lower cost of living country, so I'd say yeah.
> If my guess is right, it worked, to say the least; the internal culture is best characterized as “terrified” and “stunned”
How is it terrified and stunned when one of the top-voted questions at the all-hands that came immediately after the layoff was whether Sundar is going to take a pay cut.
That isn't exactly a hardball question. Honestly, if it wasn't something that was already known either way, that is already a miss at that level. Especially in contrast to the way that Tim Cook handled the same idea.
Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs.
It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.
On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.
All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.
> layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance
Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp
First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."
A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays?
“Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.” - https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311....
“Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation” - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
“Microsoft Uses Layoffs to Push Underperforming Employees Out” - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-p...
“They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...
I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".
Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors.
Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit.
It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.
Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team.
Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
> "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".
Do you actually believe this to be the case? Why on Earth would Google do this? You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews, so at best this is just a hunch you have. Ask yourself if it's a hunch that makes sense.
Sundar is never going to actively cast shade on the people he just let go, but he did emphatically say "the process was far from random".
> You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews
I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by the layoffs, while people who were high performers in the current and/or prior cycles were impacted by the layoffs. The experiences of other people managers within the company (and at Amazon and Microsoft) agree with this.
I don't want to get too into Kremlinology, because I don't have enough data to say for sure how people in my org were selected beyond "performance wasn't a major consideration". But there is definite high-level tilt towards cutting people from certain areas in the company (parts of maps and devices were hit hard, most of cloud was barely impacted).
Yes, clearly certain product areas were targeted which makes obvious business sense. But you're making it sound like high performers were actually targeted by these layoffs, which is patently ridiculous.
My own anecdata confirms that /only/ low performers or people working on projects that should never have existed to begin with were let go.
I've some pretty "hilarious" things about the round of firing.
For example, one friend mentioned that someone on his team was let go while they were on call and actively handling a security incident.
Another person had two people critical to their project laid off. They didn't cut the whole team, just the two most critical people. Regardless, that team is kinda up shit creek now, but still employed by Google.
Parent commenter's point is that they have to fire some good performing to make it legally a layoff, not a mass firing.
The key definition people are missing here is "good performing". What does that mean? In times of macroeconomic certainty, companies are going to focus on core revenue generating business. It makes a ton of sense that some OSS folks got fired, because OSS doesn't generate revenue. Managed services generate revenue.
Big companies typically execute layoffs in a way that minimizes the risk of discrimination litigation.
That usually means laying off a mass of people without consideration for their individual attributes.
Layoffs are literally never personal… at least in theory.
I was under impression that in America you have at-will employment.
Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?
I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability.
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.
What law in California provides the difference between a normal firing and a layoff, with employee performance being a distinctive factor?
I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go.
From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter.
Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up.
I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.
The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.
The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
Yesterday I searched "apache kafka" on my phone because I can never remember if it's apache.kafka.org or kafka.apache.org (it's the latter, the former is registered by an Italian developer), and I had to scroll past five or six "sponsored" results from managed Kafka vendors to get the actual result.
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
How do you even view the web especially on mobile without an ad blocker?
I have an ad blocker, but it's not aggressive enough to remove sponsored search results.
Which one do you have? 1Blocker for iOS removed an ad for Confluent when I did your same search before I disabled it.
Opera's built-in one.
maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back
I’m no expert, but the “eco” routes don’t usually pass the smell test with me. I’ll be routed away from a thoroughfare that’s mostly flat/downhill to take a slightly-shorter side street that’s a steep incline. It just seems like half-baked greenwashing.
In vacations on Mediterranean islands it took us through barely usable "roads" in the middle of a forest trail, thankfully nothing bad came out of it.
Beats me how it was supposed to be a fuel saving road, other than doing that by virtue of destroying the car.
I’m convinced that Google Maps occasionally routes people through detours to gather data about the detour’s current road conditions and traffic speeds.
In the Canary Islands it took us down a utility road that was literally being used as a mountain mike trail. We were in an Opel Corso. Fortunately a beater, and my friend’s superior driving skill got us out, but just barely. We were resigned to abandoning the car… and Google had treated it just like a regular paved road.
Probably best to avoid the Connie Sue Highway and other roads of the Len Beadell desert network then.
TIL... for someone like me who's never been to Australia and doesn't know much about its geography, that's a pretty crazy story!
And it turns out Connie Sue is still out there, running desert tours except not now because of lingering Covid restrictions.
> Connie's work background started with 10 years of general nursing and midwifery, 14 years as a violinist in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and has studied Computer Systems Engineering at TAFE part-time.
Interesting people!
http://www.beadelltours.com.au/interest.html
Long before I wrote earth scale digital mapping software in 1990s (yes, before google Maps .. and even Keyhole) I was taught how to use a theodolite by Len Beadall (I was ~ 12 or so at the time and pretty keen).
If you're interested in the landscape those roads pass through, here's a 13 minute intro:
Good roads until 6:00 minutes in .. and then they take the David Carnegie Rd.
Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL44EAyz8Qc
The net altitude change is the same for all routes between two points.
Even with a car with regenerative breaking, going up then down is less efficient than staying flat/just down
In the extreme case, one route might take no fuel at all vs one that climbs a mountain before dropping
The routing can be pretty silly. I'm not going to journey down some backroad for a projected 3% fuel saving.
Google Maps keeps thinking that road repair that lowers 4 lane highway to 2 lanes means that the road is closed.
While you are driving on the "closed" road Maps keeps insisting on turning back and suggesting silly alternate routes.
Had guests who trusted Google and took the Google alternate route losing 30 minutes in the process .
Just checked my maps app and I do not have this option, but have recently been dealing with Maps picking utterly non-sensical routes (random small streets rather than main roads).
It feels like the sensitivity to traffic is turned up way too high.
Waze has been consistently better, especially for traffic rerouting. It's also way better at letting you know about road events, like accidents, than Google Maps. Maps is better to search stuff on a map, but for navigation, it is so barebones (and not even in a good minimalist way). I'm not sure how GMaps can still lag so far behind when Waze is also owned by Google.
They run them as separate teams and don’t necessarily collaborate. Marking Police traps had been on Waze for years and Google Maps just got it last year.
Waze isn't a separate team anymore - it got merged into Maps[0], which means that its probably going to join the Google Graveyard in the next cost-cutting round[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903016 [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
The Maps/Waze teams merge has been underway since 2022 Dec 9.
see https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/tech/google-waze-maps-merge/i...
Which is still insane to me.
> Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label.
This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.
Maps decline has been a real annoyance for me. I’ve dropped all of Google products: mail, years ago for Fastmail; search, I pay for Kagi; youtube, I pay netflix and spotify; docs, I use it at work but still looking for alternatives; voice, Skype does well. I’m almost off the Google bandwagon. I think if there is a good map system out-there, I’d finally have no dependency on the whole Google stack.
A week or so ago I was freaked out when some Google app nudged me with a link to email that said I needed to return a defective heatsink/fan by a certain date to avoid being charged for it. I looked, and found the email saying they'd gotten it; I had already sent it. If it's going to look for things like that, it should look for evidence that it's already been taken care of.
I don't know about the recent decline. Google has sometimes seemingly switched to an "I feel like going for a country drive" mode for years. Which is particularly annoying in areas where it snows and narrow country roads are often not in great shape even if the main streets are pretty well cleared.
I've noticed the maps issue too. I like their reporting in terms of traffic but allowing it to decide where I drive is just a no go at this point.
> ...search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android
Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents).
This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day?
As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
People really don't seem to understand. Google doesn't make most of its money by making "stuff" it's value is in it's ad monopoly. Who is most responsible for maintaining this monopoly? It's Pichai. Larry and Sergei brought in the passion and innovation which has led to Google's AI lead and numerous money sink X projects. The trio need to get back together to make AI monopoly happen.
And the desktop hardly matters anymore and they still end up paying Apple almost $20B a year to be the default search engine on iOS.
Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.
Too bad about all the sexual harassment, but he was good people.
Wrong Amit. You are thinking about the google search Amit. That’s a different google exec.
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Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.
You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.
Someone can still win a race to the bottom. Look at Walmart a generation ago in retail.
Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...
That is based on huge assumptions, and it is unclear how the internal billing works (i.e is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening). Is the AWS Revenue just from external customers using the services.
> is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening
AWS bills Amazon an internal rate. It’s a closely held secret that few employees know but supposedly it’s better than at-cost.
It is not secret. There is an internal spreadsheet that documents all the prices.
Everyone has access! Everyone I worked with at Amazon knew the prices they were spending for the different services they were using or thinking of using.
How could that work? Don't managers have budgets? Do they get drugged and blindfolded while their departments' AWS costs are deducted every month?
> While Amazon did not disclose the operating income generated from their ad business, it is almost certainly bigger than the income generated by AWS
Not exactly making a strong case.
heres a sankey diagram of q3 FY 2022 for Amazon...https://imgur.com/a/OupE8ES. (from https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/amazon-day-1)
Ads + Twitch = 9.5B, AWS = 20.5B
Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival.
Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
AWS was built from the ground up on new infrastructure. There was no reuse of existing Amazon infrastructure except tooling.
The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.
Miscapitalized url, should be [0]. However, the page is mostly metadata pointing at a 2 hour youtube video [1].
[0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk
Thanks for fixing! Mobile autocorrect fail.
It's a podcast first and foremost so the URL is still good for the direct links in various podcast players.
That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.
It does if Google can double their footprint. They announced reduced profitability recently in part due to capex for data centers.
Last year google started warning some internal teams that they had to limit usage. It’s possible they’re running out of compute.
Google has been internally chopping budgets since decades. Is how they keep utilization up. Look up “steamroller” or “ucp” if you don’t know those.
IMO it makes perfect sense for Google to be in cloud. Cloud infrastructure services are a race to the bottom—storage, compute, etc. You get people into your ecosystem and upsell them on SaaS offerings that integrate with your IaaS offerings. You have to be able to scale without growing staff linearly, which is already Google’s model (although Apple and Amazon are better at it).
Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.
Google doesn't have the ability to speak with a customer at ALL. If there is a problem, basically the only recourse you have is to flail about on HN, Reddit or Twitter and hope that you are noticed by a random Google employee who feels sympathy for your plight and decides to try and help you.
The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only.
This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support.
I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.
When Google released Anthos, we were in the market for something along those lines for Kubernetes on our own hardware (policy requirements). Talked to our reps, asked for some quotes … nothing. Tried again. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. This left everyone wondering what it'd be like if we (as an existing GCP customer) needed support for any reason.
The only company I've ever dealt with which was worse at taking your money was IBM. In both cases, it was eerily similar: you could get a room full of people to do a demo but the salespeople seemed to assume their reputation meant success was inevitable and they didn't have to actually do anything like … eeew … work to close deals. In neither case were we the biggest deal in town but also far from the smallest, and in both cases the experience meant they missed out on larger sales later.
I think you may be misreading the situation. When Anthos was announced, it didn't exist yet. They didn't have anything to sell you and you weren't important enough to be trusted with that knowledge. In this regard, your comparison was probably apt (especially if you were inquiring about Watson).
Released, not announced - they actually contacted us about it and then ghosted when we asked for a quote. At the very least I’d have expected a simple “we’ll get back to you”.
IBM was similar: we were trying to buy Opteron servers, let our rep know, had a bunch of people show up, ended with them saying they’d send us a quote, no reply to multiple requests. Maybe they weren’t interested in mere 6 figure purchases but they could have said so.
(And, sure, we aren’t the biggest customer but you don’t get large deals if you can’t handle medium size deals. AWS shows up & they get considerably more business.)
Once I had an issue with a Google App Store (I paid for some app expensive subscription but did not get access) payment and got a pretty quick and efficient customer support. They were very polite, checked the issue, explained what happened, and offered some solution. Perharps they provide better support in my country due to customer protection laws or I just got lucky.
Google Ads has full fledged customer service. I’m tempted to mention everyone’s favorite saying here, but won’t :)
Scale up staff? That’s not the cloud business at all. It’s scale up infrastructure and services independently of staff, 100%. Source: I was there
Nope. Major accounts require tons of dedicated technical resources and hand holding. You might not have been directly involved, but the people side of Cloud is scaling out of control right now - even during "hiring freeze" and layoffs.
It’s a bit of both.
Culturally it didn’t get enterprise, e.g. “ditch oracle and move to spanner”.
Technology wise it was not setup for enterprise.
Staff wise it was paying way too high of a total-comp for non revenue roles. TAMs making 400k/year on accounts spending < 5M/year.
However it could have addressed all those. There were people inside advocating for those changes. Eng and Product leadership refused to listen. And the CEO refused to reward business success and instead rewarded product launches od multiple un-successful messaging apps.
Those are all marginally profitable staff billed through post sales. Consulting business sides of tech companies shouldn’t be considered part of the core footprint as they’re profit centers based on staff scale. The core product itself is designed to scale independently of people, because the marginal person doesn’t increase profits while the marginal unit of infrastructure. Sources, I was directly involved.
Edit: my experience is with aws not gcp. Gcp is a bit of a non entity in enterprise cloud.
What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?
This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure.
What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity?
Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.
AWS was re-built from the ground up. Based on systems Amazon knew it already had and how to do better.
S3 was built from the old image hosting designs, but better.
StepFunctions and SWF before it are re-designed based on the 5 internal workflow engines that existed (and still do exist).
SQS is a re-do of AMP.
DynamoDB is a re-do of Sable.
Redshift is a re-do of their internal partitioning and querying of Oracle databases but on non-Oracle databases. Their new iteration of Redshift is designed to replicate Andes + Dryad/Cradle.
I am aware of the history.
The people responsible for writing and maintaining AWS Services are my coworkers…
> This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure.
Your comment above doesn’t seem to reflect that history, so I just wanted to make sure it was stated.
AWS is also entirely built on Amazons builder tools like Apollo and Pipelines. So it’s really unfair to say “AWS was built from the ground up”
How we saying anything different? Of course AWS was built based on what Amazon learned from operating at scale.
But that doesn’t mean they just took a few extra computers they had to spare and start hosting external customers on the same metal used by Amazon retail.
The only product that I know of in recent history that came from Amazon to AWS without many changes (and without any API or automation story) is Amazon Connect.
built on vs built with.
You wouldn't say something is built "on" Github.
Your continuous deployment and continuous delivery toolset isn't really what's running a multi-tenant cloud environment.
> Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.
They’re the same CPUs they just use an internal API to provision and not AWS APIs. I’m pretty sure the internal APIs also just wrap ec2 et al at this point (for backwards compatibility)
I guess I should disclose that I work at AWS. But it’s publicly well documented how the infrastructure of AWS came to be.
Much of the Amazon infrastructure predates AWS and was built on homegrown systems. A lot of wasn’t ported over.
If you want to see what it looks like to have an Amazon product made available to AWS and that wasn’t designed specifically for AWS, look no further than Amazon Connect. There were no publicly available APIS for years to automate anything. Every AWS native service is API first.
That just does not describe google. If you look at their published systems papers, particularly the borg traces and the B4 SDN, their hardware runs essentially flat out 24x7. They don’t need to backfill diurnal or annual capacity
> Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting.
Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.
Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners.
I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
> Microsoft didn't miss mobile
They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.
As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.
For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...
> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.
I had a succession of Windows CE devices (iPaq 3600, 3800, 4500, whatever the monochromatic one was, plus some Toshiba (?) that used an SH4, and 3 or 4 more that I could maybe pick out of a lineup but no longer remember). If memory serves, the Toshiba and the later iPaqs weren’t nearly so destructive on updates.
Whoa, you were a much more dedicated user than I ever was. Thanks for providing historical context that they learned from feedback and/or mistakes.
To be fair, I think, in retrospect, the iPod and iTunes sync process and system gave Apple a multi-year headstart with building and developing a consumer-friendly backup and sync process.
Internally at Microsoft, the flops were obvious. Employees made fun of the zune, there was a lot of embarrassment that staff were preferring iphones to free company-provided alternatives, etc. Leadership was putting $ in (remember the Nokia acquisition disaster?) and individual teams were doing neato things, but leadership was feudal & by-the-numbers with many tiny product owners, and not led by a good overall product person.
My introduction to Microsoft's problems came about 20 years ago. I was talking to a developer that worked there who kept emphasizing that Microsoft was such a boring place to work compared to companies like Google. Open source was the enemy, and they were supposed to give their all to further the Windows and Office monopolies - proprietary, corporate software. Meanwhile he was watching what was happening in the Linux world and elsewhere. There was a plan, it's just that it was to maximize next quarter's revenue.
> Microsoft didn't miss mobile
> They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat
So...they missed mobile.
Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target.
Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
Nah, Blackberry, ohsa, Nokia dominance, etc. were way more relevant to the markets than Windows Mobile (not really CE as CE is more relevant for embedded and tablet like verticals).
The iPAQ H3600 came out in 2000, and the O2 XDA in 2003 - pocket-sized, touchscreen, keyboardless, ARM-based devices with web browsers - with Microsoft providing the OSes for them.
So in a sense they had a lot of the parts of the winning recipe. They just didn't have capacitive touchscreens. Or decent batteries. Or affordable flash memory. Or gorilla glass. Or an on-screen keyboard you could usefully use without a stylus. And mobile data was slow and very expensive.
The rest of the phone market, at the time, was off doing weird things like WAP.
Microsoft missed the market in the sense they weren't on the flight when it took off - but they didn't miss it, in the sense they were at the right departure gate hours before any of the other passengers.
Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs).
Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.
YouTube hardly mattered on mobile at the time we're talking about, iPhone 1 didn't even do 3G. Gmail isn't a monopoly and never has been. iPhone came out just a few years after Gmail did, whilst Microsoft had Outlook/Exchange in the enterprise which practically was a monopoly.
The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.
This is a very weird take. Complaining that Google is monopolistic compared to Microsoft, of all companies.
Microsoft never came close to the level of intersecting monopolies Google has. Also, Google learned from Microsoft's mistake: It spread political money early and often to ensure it wouldn't get regulated nearly as quickly. Google aggressively paid off Democrats and Republicans alike, and despite bipartisan support for dealing with them, regulation work is still slow and ineffective.
Now that's not to say Microsoft doesn't hold any monopolistic positions or engage in monopolistic behavior, most large companies eventually do and Microsoft still does where opportunity presents.
But if you think Microsoft is a monopoly and Google isn't, you have a view of the industry that is two decades out of date.
I think the most monopolistic portion of Google besides search would be their hold on the ad tech industry (and even then you have other online giants Meta, Tiktok, Amazon, etc.) but I don't necessarily understand how you can say they have a monopoly on consumer products large enough to drive adoption of Android especially 15 years ago.
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome and Android either have direct competitors in other ecosystem or are open source. YouTube and search are the only ones I can think of without direct competition. And the competition for these products come from Apple and Microsoft who are more/just as entrenched in owning and growing their entire platform.
Something like 70% of email is controlled by Google, and you cannot operate an email service if you do not meet Google's demands. If your business isn't listed in Google Maps, it doesn't matter what industry you are in, Google has killed you. Chrome and Android aren't open source (at least, not the version running on 99.9% of their respective install bases), and both operate as near complete monopolies. Chrome has used its position to reshape the very standards of the web to meet Google's business need and try to block competitors. Android has no competition at all, as I explained above: For manufacturers building devices it's the only OS in town.
While ignoring all these huge monopolies, you claim search has no competition. Ironically, about a third of global search queries are serviced by Bing! I would go so far as to say the monopolies above are as powerful, or moreso, than Google's grip on search.
Yeah I truly don't understand how you can look at email and maps and say Apple and Microsoft aren't also competing in those spaces.
Chromium and AOSP also aren't trivial contributions to open source and having the ability to fork those projects is much preferable to me than a proprietary solution that's more democratic once it achieves market dominance. Manufacturers building their own devices having nowhere to go was a problem pre-Android and a reason they'd rather license Google's OS rather than compete against Apple. And I think the decision of web standards has grown to be a bigger issue beyond what W3C or Google should be handling at this point, we treat the internet as public utility with the promise of standards without actual regulations and our browsers are an extension of that mess currently (not to say government is actually equipped to solve the issue).
I wasn't ignoring those other services I was doubting their monopolies unless we're changing the definition. I'd say the majority of dominant tech products have a large market share with few competitors but which are monopolies? I'd agree Android/Chrome was a monopoly if iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Safari, Windows, Azure, AWS and I guess bing all start getting a look at for markets with seemingly only one/two other competitors, especially when you look at the fact they contribute little to nothing back for public benefit.
Gmail has a 23% market share
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients
And “email is for old people”. How much important personal communication even goes over email?
That statistic does not mean what you think it means, it's about clients. That ignores the fact that people open their Gmail with Samsung, Apple, and Windows mail apps. 66% of folks are not running around with icloud.com addresses.
“Windows Mobile lost to Android because of Gmail and YouTube” is an absolutely wild take.
I’d say the key mistake they made was accepting carrier and OEM intermediation. Apple figured out how to get the carriers out of the way (trading off support down to a single carrier!) while also owning the hardware, and Android OEMs piggybacked on this model.
Microsoft recognized that GUIs were important enough to their future to make what were arguably the best mice available. If they had “caught” mobile, they would have done the same for phones.
I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.
Apple didn't write an OS from scratch either. iOS was really a fork of OS X, and followed on the experience Apple & NeXT had in porting NeXTstep around various architectures. Something that MS also had a lot of experience with, with NT.
Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius.
With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their OS to multiple 3rd party vendors, trying to create a commodity marketplace for their OS on other people's devices.
Apple won on vertical integration, created a focus product, and profited off the experiences and reputation they had with iPod in order to make a winner.
But people also forget that at this point in Apple's history, it was kind of... make or break. The iPod and then iPhone were huge gambles, that paid off in spades. If they had failed Apple would have continued to be a minority PC producer with poor profit margins and a reputation for being "weird" and "niche." Even after the success of the iMac in the late 90s, they were still in quite a bit of $$ risk.
The intense vertical integration and the product focus in the iPhone could also have failed. It was risky but it paid off for them. MS (and others) had a lot more to lose, and was more conservative.
If that was the case android would also be in the sinking same boat. Vertical integration isn’t what made iPhone and android.
Apple had giant profit margins on Macs even back in the iPhone days.
I like this hypothesis better than mine.
I believe WinCE was a "new" (or at least different) OS. it sort of had Win32 like APIs on top of it, but the core was fundamentally different than NT. They only sort of got things moving in the right direction (only to then abandon it) when they had their mobile platform on top of the "normal" (pared down) NT stack.
I read recently that the Xbox team maintained Ballmer’s support for their project by leading him to believe the Xbox would run Windows, while they were actually writing a dedicated console OS.
They likely had to promise that it would run Office as well.
Isn't it more that nurturing more than one unicorn is vanishingly unlikely? All these companies can do is to wield their enormous power for as long as they can until the inevitable happens and they become an also ran.
I mostly agree, but to be a little fair to Pichai: He didn't get a company that was really in a dominant (or at least not already rapidly declining) market position. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet might have been inherited from Gates, but Google not missing but still absolutely fucking up social networking, immediately prior to Pichai taking the role, is all on former leadership.
Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
I don’t think given all the shit Facebook is getting now, and Twitter in shambles, Google is crying that hard about missing social networks.
And they still own YouTube, don’t forget.
They could have done literally nothing and ended up in a preferable position to today. It blew immeasurable goodwill and burned whole teams of developers.
(And by some stories I heard, “literally nothing” might even have been Pichai’s approach had it been his choice.)
Pichai didn't completely inherit the cash cow? He led Chrome to quiet dominance, on the basis of a better product, in the face of entrenched and better funded competitors. That is quite different from Ballmer.
One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
This doesn't quite line up for me. Ballmer, for his lack of technical foresight, managed an incredibly profitable business. People act like anybody could have just stepped in to milk Windows and Office for all they were worth, but the focus and execution are easy to scoff at in hindsight. If MS had focused on mobile, who's to say they would have succeeded? And perhaps in the process of losing, also ceded dominance to an upstart in the office software space.
Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
I worked at Microsoft during the Ballmer era. Profits and revenue continued to increase under his watch.
They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
> Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
The new app platform happened maybe a couple years before the Nokia acquisition. I don’t remember the whole timeline but don’t forget Steven Elop (who had been the business head of Office) left Microsoft to become the Nokia CEO, had the company dump their own mobile platform for Windows Phone, then when that failed closed to deal for Microsoft to buy their cratered mobile business.
In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
Culturally my impression is Microsoft was never happy about digital distribution or really grokked it: even today, things like the System File Checker will ask for original installation media rather then just downloading whatever they need from Microsoft when a problem is found.
Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).
Ballmer succeeded in spite of tripping over his own feet repeatedly, not because of it.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
Search has particularly gone south last 3-4 months. Quotes and exact phrasing is now a necessity and I find myself rather use ChatGPT.
What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
Before 2018ish Android was steadily 3~4 years ahead of iOS feature wise.
That is no longer the case.
"Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer"
alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard.
No magic here.
What do you mean? Is there a board?
I agree, Pichai should have been fired a long time ago.
I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does.
And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.
I've known Cat Allman (one of the other folks laid off) since we worked together 23 years ago. She's one of the kindest, most thoughtful people, and exceptional at her job. This is a huge loss for both Google and the Open Source community.
Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.
I only worked with Chris on a few occasions, and those interactions had been very pleasant -- he was in a relatively high ranking position and definitely had a lot of responsibilities, but he still communicated plainly and treated everyone like a peer. I wish him the best.
Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons:
The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t.
I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play.
Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff.
- Your Average Xoogler
Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years.
That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.
> he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party
I'm really curious as to the motivation and background to this. How much can you tell us without revealing your identity?
As a small person, I have zero desire to invite recrimination from anyone. This is not a comment about the person the thread concerns. It is a small world and industry.
My only intention was to provide a little bit more nuanced depth to the original conversation. It’s not just puppies and rainbows. People and organizations are complex and operate in shades of gray.
Many moons ago, Chris wanted to recruit me to work on video compression/streaming (this was I think before they acquired Youtube). He found out I was a big Pythonista, an up-and-coming language at the time.
Chris then invited me to meet at a playground where our kids could play and we could talk tech. He also brought along his colleague, Guido Van Rossum! We had a fun chat but in the end I decided bigco was not for me.
No regrets.
It’s such a unfathomably stupid decision that I thought I was misunderstanding what had happened when I saw it.
This is 100% truth. Chris does rock! Unfathomable.
Alternative take: when I was there he was tyrannical and constantly blocking employees from open sourcing code developed on their own weekends and evenings, purely on a personal whim. People had to fight internal battles to get like little video games and stuff put up on github. You'd think head of OSPO would do whatever it took to get code open sourced but no far from it. Loads of grumbling about how he was just an ex-Slashdot editor who couldn't even code, on a power trip abusing contract ip clauses.
That couldn’t be further from my experience of working with Chris on open source at google for the last 13 years.
They let him go??? That's... Words fail.
Google was supposed to have the capacity to stick to a long-term vision because the founders retained preferred stock with (IIRC) 10x voting rights.
By that same token, there is no one to blame but the founders now that Google has turned into another mediocre big corporation without vision.
Like Apple, they have a vision for $$$
Every for profit cares about money. The issue is that Google has struggled to try to come up with a new product that convinced people to give it money.
I remember him from The Screensavers as a teenager!
This is pretty much the only comment I'm going to reply to (I'm technically a google employee until march 31st) and just say how pleased I am to see this. The Screensavers was so much fun to do, Leo, Morgan and the crew were just terrific, and made it very easy for me to look like I knew what I was doing.
Thanks for watching!
And you and all those guys are what made a lot of us feel like there was a community out there for us— so thanks very much as well!
I reported to Chris, can confirm gg.
Linus Tovard know more than him ?
It will be interesting to see amazing talent leave Google and build new companies and institutions now that it’s slowly being mismanaged to death.
My observation is that this has already been happening for a long time. I’ve worked with a lot of ex Google people in startups, especially more established ones. They pretty much all found it unsatisfying working there. Too slow. Too little impact. Maybe the layoffs will be a kick in the pants for others too, but they won’t be the first or alone in moving in that direction.
How much impact do you expect to have at a company the size of Google?
Apparently about anyone can make a brand new chat app from scratch there and get the prior one removed.
Not saying you're wrong, but your sample group is pretty biased.
It would be amazing to see but I am not sure we will see it happening. Google is the one that taught the whole generation that amazing products and services should be free. It will be very hard to compete against google and other big tech companies that are essentially using predatory pricing to kill any competition.
I hope at some point to see legislation passed that will break up Google's advertising aspects into multiple businesses.
They own the front, middle, and back of the whole thing, and strangle (even if they have to acquire) any other business that tries to break in and get a better deal for publishers, or advertisers both.
Take a read through this, it's a good read: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/downl...
(It was especially disheartening/confirming to see them outright admit (in quotes the DOJ acquired) that they bought my former employer (AdMeld) explicitly to make it disappear from the "competitive landscape." When I worked at Google, I seem to recall having to take yearly training courses on how I should say stuff like that, but these people... felt free)
I wonder. Google is known for being cushy. Building new companies is hard work.
Yes, our smartest people, who were once making people click ads, are now fired.
The people on the revenue making teams aren't usually the ones who are let go.
The algorithms work. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
That statement, right there, should be the epitaph of every former great that found themselves disrupted.
The algorithms need a lot of maintenance these days.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” — Jeffery Hammerbacher
(I seem to recall that was about Facebook at the time, not Google, but same same.)
This can only happen with funding. Is this available lately?
Well, just look at the interest rates, from next to zero in the last 3 years to 4%. free money is over.
Exactly my point.
Many there were there long time and well paid (base salary and stock) they could fund a lot themselves, if they have a good idea they care about.
Self funding doesn't work. It might work to make a demo, but then you need real funding.
It's not exactly an open tap, but there's definitely still funding to be found.
Funding is absolutely available. In fact it is easy to raise in a down economy if you are the right people. A very significant fraction of successful companies were founded at or around down economies. Everything is easier and cheaper and you don’t need to rush.
TCI / Chris Hon are only doing this because his fund is mainly invested in Microsoft and Alphabet[1]. Guess what, his fund recently lost a bit of money for the first time: TCI[2]
Its ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING that MS and Alphabet are being pushed into laying off collectively over 20K people so this billionaire can recover a bit. Like, could this not be a national security issue? This man is able to have Google trash their open source initiatives on a whim, making the company weaker. It should be very very illegal.
1: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4567705-chris-hohn-tci-fund... 2: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fun...
I really wouldn't assume Chris Hon has this much pull or that these decisions are due to investor pressure. Maybe a flimsy rationale but if he did have that kind of influence I kinda doubt he'd be speaking publicly – seems more like a personal branding effort.
There are definitely billionaires profiting from the layoffs, but if you look at who owns shares of Google stock it isn't people who own a paltry <1% of shares
Huh? He doesn’t have control of Alphabet, for sure.
This is broad and across the industry.
Yes that is correct, but specifically this person is the activist investor publicly pushing for this. Maybe that had no effect, but certainly it seems like this man might be a bit responsible.
The man with basically no voting shares can scream into the wind all he wants, it does not impact Google leadership one way or the other.
He's a convenient scapegoat for the people who actually made the decisions, the execs that are paid primarily in stock and have perverse incentives for maximizing short term gains.
> It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm.
It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem.
Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer stories of gmail accounts getting shut off for no reason after 15 years with no recourse.
Ah, a man can dream.
The definition of algorithm is:
> a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
So yeah, I would hope that an algorithm was used. As opposed to what? "I like that guy more than the other guy".
You seem to have the interpretation that some guy in finance wrote a script, it output some employee IDs, and then no one checked the output before laying them all off, as if slaves to the machine. Do you really believe that?
First off, you know that "used an algorithm" in modern parlance means "was done by AI without human intervention".
And based on that, absolutely I think Google did that. They run everything with data and statistics without humans. That's how they are so efficient.
This is backed up by the fact that the managers who work there were simply told who they were losing and had no input into the process, and aren't even aware of who has been let go yet.
I’ve worked at Google for a long time and I assure you the chances of some AI being involved in the selection process for these layoffs is very close to zero. Don’t be so confident in something you apparently know so little about.
What kind of tools do you think the people analytics team builds? [0]
I know some people who used to be on the team. Given that they built analytics to automatically sort resumes, automatically identify retention risks, and automatically set salaries, it wouldn't surprise me that they had developed a system to determine layoffs.
Google isn't the only company that does it. It's not like it's unique to Google or anything. But yes, I absolutely believe that Google used an AI to determine the layoffs, at least to inform them if nothing else.
[0] https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/people-anal...
In the post I replied to you said “without human intervention” and now you’re saying “at least to inform”. Can’t even stay consistent within this thread? Again you are basing your assumptions on pretty much nothing. (Fwiw the page you linked has nothing to do with AI.)
I think this is a ridiculous take. Just because Google uses algorithms to handle millions of queries without human intervention does not mean they use algorithm in HR. Do you also believe Google's hiring process is devoid of human intervention?
Managers were not informed because there are so many of them at Google that it would have leaked long before the process was over. The process was conducted manually by 750 directors and VPs.
> Do you also believe Google's hiring process is devoid of human intervention?
No, of course not. But that doesn't say anything about their firing process. Also they brag about their people analytics team and how they manage their people with the same automation that they manage other parts of the business. So it's not that ridiculous of a take. Especially when you consider how much automation they use in the parts of their business that should use humans, like customer service.
I'm a part of a medium-sized team working on a popular infrastructure open-source project. There was no impact on our team, so it is not like Google hates open-source now.
I feel like a good explanation for all this is that tech giants saw this as an opportunity to collaborate to reduce wage inflation. I feel like that explanation squares better with the fact that, during many of these layoffs, employee performance has often appeared to not factor in as strongly. In fact, the opposite seems to be true in many cases.
If the sector believes that it can do just as well with 10% fewer employees, I'm not sure if that's the same as collusion to suppress wages. Surly some greedy player would be saying "no, I can make more incremental revenue by hiring these people." The story that tech overhired during the pandemic makes more sense.
Then why wouldn't they simply lay off the new hires instead of company veterans?
A new hire is expected to be an average employee in a year. A veteran might have a track record of being a below-average employee for several years.
That could often be the case. Although the Google veterans mentioned in the article seem to be examples of top performers that weren't just resting on their laurels. But I suppose there could have been other reasons they were let go that were not public, like company politics, etc.
So the problem with Google's earnings was that its exorbitant profit did not stay or grow at the same rate. During a pandemic followed by a global crisis prompted by a war. And they are laying off people. To make hedge funds and shareholders happy.
...
What a destructive 'growth at all costs' economic culture. I guess those hedge funds and shareholders will pick up the slack in those open source projects...
It's always about the money. So nothing new here under the sun.
What is a business supposed to be about?
> its exorbitant profit did not stay or grow at the same rate
I think their profit margin reduced, so company became less healthy and balanced.
However you look, their exorbitant, humongous profits have declined a slight bit !during a recession caused by a war!. This should not be a concern for any sane investor but the ones who want growth at all costs.
Really curious about the Flutter/Dart team. It looks like great tech but its by google so its always at risk of abandonment.
I share the same sentiment on Meta's Docusaurus project. I hope that authors and maintainers of the project who were employed by Meta are ok.
Well maybe it'll be a renaissance for many different and new projects. With Google hoardning all this talent and cushioning them on non-strategic, prestige tasks the ecosystem became desolate (thus enhancing Google's role as beacoun of OSS).
It sucks for those fired but let's be honest, just a bit. They're household names in their respective industries, and they'll be welcomed in no time onto new projects.
It's like a fire sweeping in a forest, clearing the undergrowth and making space for a new growth frenzy.
There's no story here beyond well-known people on the open source team getting laid off and botching the layoffs with people learning their badges don't work. One is a valid strategic decision, the other is sloppy, neither is evil, or even all that interesting.
I would take it a step further and deny that the layoffs were botched. How are you supposed to broadcast this information such that everyone learns at the same time and in the right way?
Of course badges stop working when you're let go. What possible good can come of leaving the badges on? All it takes is one in 12000 disgruntled ex-employees to make it not worth it.
Yeah, I hate the way they were conducted but can't think of a better way that wouldn't open the company up to a lot of risk.
I'm not convinced that announcing them in advance is actually better anyways. We have partner teams in Europe who get to spend a month or more after the announcement worrying about whether or not they still have a job. Morale on the teams in the US took a noticeable hit, but the teams in EU have seemed utterly miserable for the last week.
I was laid off in the EU (not from Google, and not in this wave) — and yeah, productivity completely tanked for months while we waited for the relevant information to seep through HR’s stonewalling.
I think it’s better to have some warning, but it would have been great if they could have said “your job ends in three months, here are your options” instead of leaving people hanging while they figured out the details on the corporate side. Or even, if paranoid about disgruntled employees, to say “welcome to your garden leave, here are your options.”
"What is Google doing with its open source teams?"
Laying them off? It is quite sad to see.
Really? The open source teams have the best of the best in terms of reputation and quality output often delivering more value and goodwill compared to the traditional marketing department. They should move some of those folks into search..
The problem is corporation are blinded by short term revenue over long term investments.
What long term revenue stems from open source? I’m not talking about a million her or there. I’m talking about billions of dollars.
IBM-style “consulting”?
> They should move some of those folks into search
Given the choice, I know a lot of people deeply involved in the OSS community who would rather leave for another OSS-friendly role at another company rather than get pulled into something that pulls their time and attention away from their OSS activities.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.
That’s good for us that they were let go. Google sucked them up and nailed their feet to the floor with amazing comp.
Now they’ll innovate elsewhere.
This article feels like it was written by a friend of someone who is named as let go. Google let a lot of good people go last week. Some more and some less deserving than those in the OSPO.
Google has never had a particularly coherent open source strategy (look at how many repos are on the github.com/google org) and I don’t think this latest layoff says much about what the future of the strategy holds either.
With Firebase and the rest of GCP, there's absolutely no reason why those products are as hard to use as they are.
Supabase, Vercel, etc. all stepped in to fill that massive void that Google could have taken care of so long ago. IMO that's a massive miss and failure on Google's part.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.
At the hands of Google, open source is just a weapon of the complement commoditization. So no wonder they are letting those people go now. In this way, they are trying to lower the antimonopoly pressure against them. The second benefit is preserving all those money that would go to the salaries of those fired people.
I doubt this will change the trajectory of accusations. But it gives some momentum in terms of reaping the peak monetary benefits to shareholders before a possible company division through legislation.
I would think that such senior guys with so much experience will find it easy to find new jobs.
(Unless they demand to work on only open-source software then it may take a bit longer)
Still: IBM/RedHat should hire right?
(Putting this note under here instead of at root level…)
FTA:
> It has been widely reported that … those fired included staffers who had just received high performance reviews … with annual compensation packages of $500,000 to $1 million. … Many … were the best of the best in Google's open source program office (OSPO) and other open source efforts.
FWIW, we are actively hiring a handful of engineers in this competency+range, into a well funded (founder funded, not VC backed) startup. We are doing interesting things and intend to release generally useful patterns as open source. It's also an entrepreneurial change of pace for builders/makers after an enterprise, even an SV enterprise.
My username at the freemail owned by the company in the article.
> For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google's OSPO 18 years ago, was let go.
Sibling comment excepted, there aren't many companies hiring for this. 18+ years also makes it challenging because for the last two decades, you've only known Google, and it's not clear if you can operate in another environment.
I'm not saying this is the case, but if this is the case, it's really his own fault and not Google's. What is Google supposed to do, fire everyone after 10 years so they don't grow too complacent?
"never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"
step one: shift the focus from free software (liberty minded software) on to "open source" software. i.e. software which you can look but not touch.
step two: profit
step one: promote BSD and MIT licenses over more copyleft licenses such as GPL
step two: profit from people willing to code for enterprises for free
There has to be some reason that Google released PyTorch under BSD-3 by Meta and TensorFlow being released under Apache by Google.
Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any usage of a library is a derivative work and infects. This is always going to be poisonous to any commercial use, and PyTorch and Tensorflow only gained the traction they have because they could be used commercially - they wouldn't have been successful if GPL'd.
Even LGPL is super challenging here due to requiring dynamic linking. This is fine in Java (unless you use Graal AOT compilation) and Python, impossible in Go, and at best discouraged in other compiled languages like Rust and C++.
I think there's likely a copyleft middle ground - something like the Mozilla public license seems about right, where it copylefts improvements without infecting users. I don't know why Google chose Apache 2.0 over MPL or the like - for something like Android it makes sense, for something like Guava it's not clearcut. But, when people talk copyleft, they're rarely, rarely talking MPL.
I think it's unlikely that Google opensourced Tensorflow with a view to getting some free dev hours, they're doing it to push their OSS agenda, to wield influence over how everyone else does work.
This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small.
Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourced, the world reinvented in Hadoop and the progress started happening there instead of in MR) and wanted to avoid becoming the bit player in a space they pioneered in. It's a reasonable strategy. (The risk is that you're giving away something that could be a competitive advantage.)
(worked on tensorflow at Google for four years.)
K8s another example. Kind of amazing that Google effectively owns the now-standard deployment solution off of 'we don't really use K8s but want you to build your applications like us and K8s is a bit like something we do use'. At least Tensorflow's actually what Google runs internally (to best of my knowledge)!
And what about Fuchsia? The primary value I see for it is that it looks like the un-Linux, especially in the license space.
Google really hates copyleft and the GPL.
I mean if Fuchsia ever starts getting used for production at some point by anyone, anywhere. Seems like more of a way to do systems research by Google than something designed for real world use.
If that was the case (an academic exercise in systems research, nothing for the real world), then arguably a strong copyleft license such as GPL would have been even better.
Nice to see MPL mentioned. I always find it strange MPL isn't used more, it's such a reasonable middle ground between AGPL and MIT/BSD.
You forgot step 1.5: make contributing to open-source an unwritten rule to getting a job in the industry
Full disclosure: I got my current job before I had contributed anything to open source but I was asked a lot about it while applying to companies like it's expected that you work in your free time
I think in my entire time working I haven't met anyone who has significantly contributed to open source (aside from "let me fix some bug that's annoying me in a library"), so I'm not sure how required it really is
It varies on focus area. Most big OSS projects are infrastructural in nature, and so if you're working in that space there's actually a lot of engineers who you meet with OSS experience beyond fixing random bugs. Even then, for every OSS engineer doing big OSS contributions, there are many who never do, it's just the nature of the business. I know of just one hiring decision (out of hundreds and hundreds) that was made because of OSS contributions, and I know no interviewers who routinely checked OSS contributions beyond surface level.
open-source using permissive licenses + pressure to contribute = unpaid labor
No wonder Microsoft loves it.
Enterprises are (slower than I’d hoped) learning the value of contributing to the open source projects they use. More companies are establishing Open Source Program Offices and I expect the rate of contribution to go up. Most contribution from companies will go to software licensed under MIT/BSD/Apache.
US government policy is that software developed with public funding is a public good. Current policy encourages government software to released under the most permissive license possible (ideally Public Domain, but practically permissive licenses like MIT/BSD). GPL is farther from the Public Domain than licenses like MIT/BSD. To enter the rabbit hole of material on this topic start at https://code.gov/about/overview/introduction/.
Side note… the most interesting thing I learned today is that DoD (and probably other agencies) consider “Open Source Software” to be “Commercial Software”. This is a great development and likely means it will be much simpler to include OSS in make/buy trade studies. See “Is Open Source Software Commercial Software”, https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#q-is-os...
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> "open source" software. i.e. software which you can look but not touch
That's not remotely consistent with the way that term is used in practice...
> software which you can look but not touch.
This is "source available".
Open source software and free software are philosophically different but refer to mostly the set of programs (with two different but equivalent definitions [1,2]).
[1] https://opensource.org/definition
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en#fs-definition
> step one: shift the focus from free software (liberty minded software) on to "open source" software. i.e. software which you can look but not touch
I’m pretty sure when you say “look but not touch,” you’re talking about project governance, where outside contributors have limited input into the direction of the project. If that’s the case, I don’t like this conflation of governance and “freedom”. Google’s open source software is free software by all definitions (including FSF).
For a project to be open source or free software, users need to have the “four essential freedoms”. The ability to get your changes merged upstream is not one of those freedoms.
It is totally valid to criticize the corporate governance model of open source software. But it’s best not to confuse our already overloaded definitions by saying that corporate software with a free license isn’t really “free.”
>Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be Evil"? I do. Even though Google dumped that phrase from its code of conduct in 2018
Except it didn't. It's still there.
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
Remember when SV was the center of innovation - 'disruptive innovation' - in everything, which included management, and included valuing employees in order to bring out the most innovation possible.
Where is the innovation here? How are these moves cutting edge? It's the opposite - reactionary, megalomaniacal, short-term greed drives. That is not a culture that will produce innovation.
If you're as well known and beloved (and well-compensated) as Chris DiBona you are probably better-equipped to handle a layoff.
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.
And why is this in Google’s best interest?
> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire.
I'm being facetious here but this is in line with what I would expect from an organisation that continually reaches for automation over human interaction
Probably laying them off, the cheap paperwork-free, confrontation-free way, by simply revoking their access rights and door passes and "letting things work themselves out naturally" as the Bobs might say.
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> Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be Evil"?
Because it's impossible to be evil if it's in your motto not to be evil. Right?
crazy to see people with 15-20 year tenures hit in layoffs
Is there something about a tenure of that duration which precludes someone from underperformance? Lots of middling engineers in the 15-20 year range are likely to be coasting and over-compensated relative to their output.
But those with a longer tenure did get a more generous severance package (more than a year's salary for a 20 year Googler), so they weren't treated with disrespect. They now have an entire year to figure out what to do next --- although someone who was there for Google's IPO is likely to be in a position to retire if they so choose.
Is it? Sure, they know the system, but they don't bring an outside perspective, and they're more likely to be complacent.
[dead]
Google no longer paying developers of code that we all use for free is obviously not good (for us or those developers), but this article is otherwise really quite bogus because it suggests that "open source developer" is a thing, when it...isn't. The article implies that Google is cutting off its own nose because the prime OSS devs they fired could just as well be writing OSS AI code. That's not how this stuff works.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Isn’t it true that someone experienced + respected in the OSS community would be the very best kind of person to transfer to e.g. the TensorFlow team?