[eduction]

I’ve watched Google through its entire “journey” and I have to say it’s revealing how quickly they jettisoned their rhetoric about having, attracting, and retaining what they claimed were the best engineers in the world at the slightest whiff of economic headwinds.

Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is sure notable how quickly they are throwing their employees under the bus.

While I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes a ton of money working two hours a day, I have even less sympathy for executives who created, championed, and perpetuated the thinking that encouraged that to happen and now try to shift blame for their own philosophy onto the people they proactively lured into their firm.

Google execs thought they would continue to make tons of money by treating certain engineers like gods. The second they suspected that might not be the case they demoted these gods to lazy slacker deadweight. Don’t fall for it. The real deadweight is running the company. The real blame lies with the decision makers. They have been blowing hot air about what enlightened managers they are for 20 years and suddenly realize they might be revealed as frauds. Step 1, blame the victims of your incompetence, the people you will soon lay off. Smear them, with no honor or decency, hurting their chances of recovering from the very situation you put them in.

What a company.

[glimshe]

Completely agree. If they are going to remove deadweight, Google's leaders must be the first to go. My friends have been telling me about these inefficiencies for years and they have done nothing about it. Google has one of the greatest concentrations of talented engineers of any business in history. What did Google's leadership position these engineers to build?

When you look at Sundar Pichai, what exactly has he brought to the table? Which unique insights and strategic decisions from the CEO have made Google richer? It's not enough to point at the profit growth; Google owns a historical money-making machine in its Ads business and any half decent administrator could have increased its profits over the past years.

[riku_iki]

> What a company.

I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.

[matrix_overload]

They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. Unless the management deliberately pilots the company into the ground, their cash cow will outshine the competition out of sheer inertia.

The quality of decision making is seen when the rules of the game change and the companies are forced to adapt. This may or may not happen this cycle, depending on what happens to interest rates.

[riku_iki]

> They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide.

that's not true, there are plenty of competition, meta, tiktok, reddit, display exchanges, amazon, apple. If they will deliver better ROI from ads, advertisers will be happy to switch budgets from google.

[indecisive_user]

You can compete with Facebook by creating another social media site, as TikTok and Snapchat have demonstrated.

Google search has 92% market share. It is an ad monopoly in the areas it controls.

[riku_iki]

> Google search has 92% market share.

its generic search, when you go to vertical searches, say Amazon may beat google for shopping searches. Reddit can build good search one day, and many people including me will switch to searching inside reddit, instead of adding "reddit" to google search query.

You are right, google is currently generic search monopoly, but we were talking about ads, and there are plenty of other ads verticals.

[yakak]

I think the discussion was any monopoly that serves as a cash cow to enable poor management.

For comparison, AT&T had a monopoly only on long distance, so people could choose drastically different behavior if they wanted to defund AT&T. I.e. you didn't need to move out of the region where most of your relations lived but it was a better deal to pay AT&T's tax (and regional monopolies charged more than true long distance on many regional calls). Potentially making a lot more money and having an entirely different life out weighed higher than market phone rates that made AT&T a successful cash cow.

[Arnt]

I think that's true. But I think you may be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.

Google has a number of advertising businesses, largely distinct. I think Youtube, adwords and adsense are the names of the three big ones. Adwords is a monopoly (that is, only Google sells advertising on www.google.com) and Youtube is too. But you didn't mean to to say that Google has a monopoly on selling ads on google.com and youtube.com, did you?

I think you had the third business in mind. That's the one that serves ads on third-party web sites. And what does Google's 92% market share for search have to do with its market share for that business? Or, put differently, how does Google's 92% market share help sell that product to more web site owners?

[dzhiurgis]

Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.

Can anyone put serve ads on Google SERPs? No, only Google. We don't even have any transparency how it works.

Google is turning into utility and should be regulated as such. At the very least we should regulate how their support is done.

[riku_iki]

> Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.

I though cloudfare has some way to onboard other bots too.

[indecisive_user]

Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary, yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over).

The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.

Google makes themselves out to be an innovative company that hires the best engineers in the world, but I'm struggling to think of anything notable they've created over the past decade.

[riku_iki]

> Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary

I think current google salary can even be below market average.

> yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over).

ads is just way of monetization, actual product portfolio is very diverse.

> The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.

My understanding is that they switched from idea of building tons of lower quality products some of which survived to full focus on fewer areas. Current focus is AI and cloud, where there is enough space for innovation.

[stingraycharles]

Depends; these would seem like the kind of decisions that affect the long term a lot more than the short term.

In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent.

They spent decades building the image of “one of the best” employers for skilled software engineers, and they could potentially throw that away with just a few bad decisions.

It’s precisely because they’re still making boatloads of money that this makes even less sense.

[riku_iki]

> In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent.

it could be opposite, talents usually interested in challenging work with appropriate rewards, while current message is about cutting mediocre employees.

[effingwewt]

Every comment I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and then watching you squander it.

No engineer worth their salt is going to work for these companies after this. The 'mediocre employees' as you put it are exactly what GP was talking about.

It's victim blaming at its finest. Remember- google only hires the very best.

You are shilling so hard you've now entered complete fallacy territory. You are not just making stuff up to fit your narrative, you are actively ignoring the truth and that's destructive to the conversation.

And I'm saying all this as someone who for years warned people about what was coming. Still, they are not to be blamed as all this started with the C-suite and management all going on hiring sprees for no better reason than to deprive the competition of workers.

They infantilized their workforce and made them as dependent as possible.

They attached golden handcuffs which started the whole rest and vest situation.

They are to blame, not the workers all about to be put on PIPs.

Tell google PR to come up with something better, or at least something that doesn't fly in the face of the facts everyone can see with their own eyes.

The sky is not purple. The emperor is wearing no clothes.

[riku_iki]

I guess you are the one who received pip.

[effingwewt]

Sick burn, man you really destroyed my argument with that one sentence.

I'd have to work for a bigco to get put on a pip.

I can see now you are just trolling in bad faith, come back when you have an actual thought to elucidate.